Cambridge IELTS Academic 13 Reading Test 4 Answers with Explanation / IELTS Academic Reading: Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time , SAVING THE SOIL , Book Review

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1.

Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time

Question Number	Answer	Keywords	Location	Text
1	FALSE	originally intended, used as passenger ships	Paragraph 2, Lines 1-2	"The fastest commercial sailing vessels of all time were the clippers, three-masted ships built to transport goods around the world, although some also took passengers."
2	FALSE	given, name, character in a poem	Paragraph 3, Lines 1-3	"Cutty Sark’s unusual name comes from the poem Tam O’Shanter by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Tam, a farmer, is chased by a witch called Nannie, who is wearing a ‘cutty sark’ – an old Scottish name for a short nightdress."
3	TRUE	contract, John Willis and Scott & Linton, favoured	Paragraph A, Lines 2-3	"To carry out construction, Willis chose a new shipbuilding firm, Scott & Linton, and ensured that the contract with them put him in a very strong position."
4	TRUE	wanted, to be the fastest tea clipper, between the UK and China	Paragraph 5, Lines 1-2	"Willis’s company was active in the tea trade between China and Britain, where speed could bring ship owners both profits and prestige, Cutty Sark was designed to make the journey more quickly than any other ship…"
5	FALSE	despite storm damage, beat, Thermopylae	Paragraph 5, Line 10	"Cutty Sark reached London a week after Thermopylae."
6	TRUE	opening, Suez Canal, steam ships, travel, faster than clippers	Paragraph 6, Lines 2-6	"...Steam ships reduced the journey time between Britain and China by approximately two months."
7	NOT GIVEN	sometimes used, ocean route, to travel, London and China	-	No information provided in the passage.
8	TRUE	Woodget, put, at risk, hitting, iceberg	Paragraph 8, Lines 3-4	"And Woodget took her further south than any previous captain, bringing her dangerously close to icebergs off the southern tip of South America."
9	wool	after 1880, carried, main cargo, successful time	Paragraph 8, Lines 4-6	"This marked a turnaround and the beginning of the most successful period in Cutty Sark’s working life, transporting wool from Australia to Britain."
10	navigator	captain and, Woodget, very skilled	Paragraph 8, Line 1	"The ship’s next captain, Richard Woodget, was an excellent navigator."
11	gale	Ferreira, went, Falmouth, repair damage, had caused	Paragraph 10, Line 1	"Badly damaged in a gale in 1922, she was put into Falmouth harbor in southwest England, for repairs."
12	training	Between 1923 and 1954, used for	Paragraph 11, Line 1	"Dowman used Cutty Sark as a training ship..."
13	fire	twice been damaged, 21st century	Paragraph 11, Lines 3-4	"The ship suffered from fire in 2007, and again, less seriously, in 2014…"

 

 

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 .

SAVING THE SOIL

Question	Answer	Keywords	Location	Text
14	minerals	bacteria, microorganisms, plant remains	Paragraph B, lines 4-6	"A single gram of healthy soil might contain 100 million bacteria, as well as other microorganisms such as viruses and fungi, living amid decomposing plants and various minerals."
15	carbon	food, antibiotics, storing, effect on the climate	Paragraph B, lines 9-11	"Soil is also an ally against climate change: as microorganisms within soil digest dead animals and plants, they lock in their carbon content, holding three times the amount of carbon as does the entire atmosphere."
16	water	prevent damage, property, infrastructure, holds	Paragraph B, lines 11-13	"Soils also store water, preventing flood damage: in the UK, damage to buildings, roads and bridges from floods caused by soil degradation costs £233 million every year."
17	agriculture	main factor, soil degradation, carried out by humans	Paragraph C, lines 5-9	"Agriculture is by far the biggest problem …. Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile."
18	C	nutrients, unused parts of harvested crops	Paragraph C, lines 7-8	"Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile."
19	E	Synthetic fertilizers, produced, Haber-Bosch process	Paragraph D, lines 3, 6-9	"Chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the rain, releasing nitrogen into rivers. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate use of fertilisers hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty, and degrading the soil they are supposed to nourish."
20	A	mixture developed by Pius Floris	Paragraph E, lines 1, 7-10	"One of the people looking for a solution to this problem is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the Netherlands, and now advises some of the world’s top soil scientists. When they applied Floris’s mix to the desert-like test plots, a good crop of plants emerged that were not just healthy at the surface, but had roots strong enough to pierce dirt as hard as rock."
21	D	idea of zero net soil degradation	Paragraph G, lines 1-7	"We need ways of presenting the problem that bring it home to governments and the wider public... Chasek and her colleagues have proposed a goal of ‘zero net land degradation...'"
22	E	one person’s motivation for a soil-improvement project	Paragraph E, lines 1-3	"One of the people looking for a solution to this problem is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the Netherlands, and now advises some of the world’s top soil scientists."
23	C	explanation of how soil stayed healthy before the development of farming	Paragraph C, lines 1-3, 7-8	"In the wild, when plants grow they remove nutrients from the soil, but then when the plants die and decay these nutrients are returned directly to the soil... Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile."
24	F	examples of different ways of collecting information on soil degradation	Paragraph F, lines 6-8	"Researchers from nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that can

 

Question	Answer	Keywords	Location	Text
24	F	different ways of collecting information, soil degradation	Paragraph F, lines 6-8	"Researchers from nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that can be fed measurements from field surveys, drone surveys, satellite imagery, lab analyses and so on to provide real-time data on the state of the soil."
25	G	suggestion, keeping, some types of soil, safe, near future	Paragraph G, lines 2-4	"Chasek and her colleagues have proposed a goal of 'zero net land degradation.'"
26	F	difficult, provide an overview, soil degradation	Paragraph F, lines 2-4	"To assess our options on a global scale we first need an accurate picture of what types of soil are out there, and the problems they face. That’s not easy. For one thing, there is no agreed international system for classifying soil."

  

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 .

Book Review

Question	Answer	Keywords	Location	Text
27	D	reviewer’s attitude, advocates of positive psychology	Paragraph 2, line 12	"Those who think in this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to their attention."
28	A	Aristotle	Paragraph 2, lines 6-10	"For Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction."
29	B	Davies, Bentham’s suggestion, linking, price of goods	Paragraph 4, last few lines	"By associating money so closely to inner experience, Davies writes, Bentham ‘set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century’."

Question	Answer	Keywords	Location	Text
35	YES	The Happiness Industry, discussion, relationship, psychology, economics	Paragraph 5, first few lines	"The Happiness Industry describes how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined and treated as psychological maladies."
36	NOT GIVEN	difficult to measure, some emotions	N/A	N/A
37	NO	Watson’s ideas, behaviuorism, supported, research, humans, before 1915	Paragraph 5, lines 7-9	"When he became president of the American Psychological Association in 1915, he had never even studied a single human being: his research had been confined to experiments on white rats."
38	NOT GIVEN	Watson’s ideas, most influential, governments outside America	N/A	N/A
39	YES	need for happiness, linked, industrialisation	Paragraph 6, opening sentence	"Modern industrial societies appear to need the possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours."
40	NO	main aim, government, increase, happiness of the population	Paragraph 6, lines 2-3	“But whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.”