IELTS Prediction Test B – Reading

Homes made of mud

Mud is a very traditional building material and even today, around 5 0 per cent of the world’s population lives in traditional dwellings made of the material. Only recently, however, has ‘rammed earth’, as the building material is called, appeared on the curricula of modern architecture and engineering schools. Although few lay people in the West think of it as a building material at all, mud is now being used to create some of the most advanced and sustainable homes.

Martin Rauch, an architect who is championing the use of earth for sustainable construction, explains why: ‘With industrialisation and the growth of the railways from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it became easier to transport mass-produced building materials in many parts of the world, so it wasn’t necessary to build with earth anymore’. He says, ‘It became a poor man’s material and the image is hard to shake off: But in the past fifteen years, interest in rammed earth construction has re-emerged alongside concerns about human and environmental health. Rauch has used the material to build a range of structures including a cinema and his own family home in Austria. The materials he used were local, so minimal energy was needed for their production and transportation. The fact that as much as 47 per cent of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions are attributable to the construction industry in a country like the UK means that such alternative methods are worth considering. What’s more, the ability of earth to moderate humidity and temperature is another advantage, as it reduces the need for costly and energy-hungry central heating and air conditioning.

Not everybody accepts that the future lies in rammed earth construction, however. A central concern of sceptics is durability. The fear is that exposure to rain and moisture will cause walls to slump. However, strong foundations and an overhanging roof to protect walls seem to provide an answer. Indeed, Raud1 designs for ‘calculated erosion’. Every few layers, he inserts stone blocks into the surface of earth’s walls. These protrude as the earth erodes around them, acting as a buffer against rain running down the surface of the building.

Research conducted by the Scottish government in 2001 highlights another key issue, however. The longevity of earth buildings in the past was due, in part, to the regular maintenance regimes that were integral to traditional practice. A change of attitude would be necessary for modern earth buildings to survive equally well in a world where ‘maintenance-free’ products such as cement renders and masonry paints characterise the construction industry.

So how does rammed earth construction work? The construction process is not dissimilar to building a sandcastle. Earth is collected, its consistency checked, and organic matter that will decompose is removed. Next, a frame is brought in. The earth is then quite literally rammed into this, layer by layer, either manually or mechanically, using pneumatic rammers. The earth begins to harden and ‘cure’ straightaway and continues to do so for months or years, depending on the local climate.

This process leaves relatively little room for med1anisation. Anna Heringer, a Royal Institute of British Architects award­ winner who has extensive experience with rammed earth in the developing world, views the labour-intensive nature of this form of construction as a bonus. ‘We often think of sustainability in terms of high-tech solutions and it isn’t possible for everyone in the world to have these. Building with earth, you can have a lot of people involved – it’s about community spirit too: And those communities have choices. Depending on the earth selected, the colour of a building can be varied, the ramming process can be designed to produce layering effects and the frame can be moulded so patterns are en1bossed in the walls.

Rauch is aware of the limits of the material, however. Certain parts of structures, such as the ceilings, aren’t possible in earth. So he suggests using appropriate local materials, together with mud. In the western world, most earth constructions are actually stabilised rammed earth, where cen1ent is added to the mud. ‘This is the wrong way to do things; says Rauch. ‘If there is cement in the mix, then it’s not real earth. We’ve built for 10.000 years with pure earth’. He feels that the climatic and environmental qualities of the material are lost with such contamination.

Heringer adds that when cement is mixed with earth, ‘You can’t recycle it. We aren’t building for eternity, some day it will all return to the ground and then there’s the question of environmental impact.’ Having used earth in construction around the world, in the monsoons of Bangladesh and dry summers of Morocco, Heringer has proved that cement is not required with innovative, context-specific design.

Questions 1-8: Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1 ?

Next to each statement, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1. Rammed-earth construction methods are now being studied more widely.
2. Some people still regard earth as a low status building material.
3. Rammed-earth construction is actively encouraged in Austria.
4. The temperature inside earth houses can be difficult to regulate.
5. Some people think that buildings made of earth are unlikely to last very long.
6.  Rauch refuses to use materials other than mud in the walls he builds.
7. Rauch accepts that buildings made of rammed earth need more maintenance.
8. Rammed-earth construction sometimes makes some use of specialised equipment.

Questions 9-13: Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Views of Rauch and Heringer

• Heringer: the fact that the process is 9. , is a positive aspect– it promotes a sense of 10.
• Rauch: some parts of buildings, e.g. 11.   cannot be made of earth – local materials should be used instead
• Rauch: mixing of concrete and mud is a form of 12.
• Heringer: the presence of concrete makes mud impossible to 13. 

The Science of Colour

A | The body of scientific research into colour is growing, and it all points to one thing: our perception of colour really does affect our minds and our bodies. In a series of tests administered in the 1 970s, it was established that red pills are more effective as stimulants than blue pills, and that blue pills appeared to be more effective in curing insomnia than orange ones. Meanwhile, green, white or blue pills, aren’t as effective as red ones as painkillers. But in the experiments, the pills used were all placebos – in other words, fake pills – there was no painkiller, there was no stimulant. Meanwhile, in other experiments, it was found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells and that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours.

B | And yet, while its effects on us may be profound, colour ‘doesn’t really exist in the world’, say D r Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at University College London. Blue isn’t a property of denim, or skies, or oceans, but of how our eyes interpret a particular set of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, which we call visible light. Red isn’t a property of blood or football shirts. but how our eyes interpret another, longer set of wavelengths. ‘Human vision is trichromatic,’ says Prof Andrew Stockman, a UCL colleague of Dr Lotto, ‘like a colour television.’ We have three different colour receptors, cones, in our eyes, each designed to pick up different wavelengths of light. They are red, green and blue. Most other mammals have two, meaning they can only detect green and blue wavelengths. If we had only one receptor. we’d see the world in something like black and white.

C | This is the product of billions of years of evolution. ‘The whole point of colour vision is not to inspire poets, but to allow contrast detection,’ says Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford. ‘You’ve got a much better chance of detecting an object against a background if you have colour vision.’ The wavelength of the light around us has affected us since the dawn of life, and it still does. Foster, who researches the effect of light on sleep, says that our biological clock is profoundly affected not just by the brightness of the light we’re exposed to, but also its colour. He was behind the discovery of a previously un known cell in the optic nerve which acts as a sort of photon counter, keeping track of how much light has hit it in the last few minutes. It is especially sensitive to blue light – specifically, the blue of a blue sky. If you’re exposed to the light of this colour, it will make you more alert. ‘Blue light keeps us awake far more effectively than red light,’ he says. ‘There are apps on the market now, that change your lighting before you go to bed, to get you ready for sleep.’

D | But as Lotto says, context is everything; red can be friendly when it’s associated with a ketchup bottle, less so when associated with blood. Lotto spends much of his time creating optical illusions to demonstrate how humans see and perceive colour, and the impact of context upon it. ‘I can make you see blue or yellow, depending on what surrounds it,’ he says. ‘When I change your perception of it, what I’m changing is the meaning of the information, I’m not changing the physics of the information itself.’

E | There’s even some indication that the words we use to describe colour affect our ability to see it. Benjamin Whorf, a linguistic theorist, claimed that our language limits our perception: if our language lacks a word for something, we find it harder to think about that thing. The Whorfian hypothesis has been largely discredited – after all, if we really couldn’t think about things we didn’t have a word for, we wouldn’t need to come up with new words. Nevertheless, experiments have shown that societies such as the Tarahumara tribe in Northern Mexico, which lacks different words for ‘blue’ and ‘green’, find it harder to find the odd one out in a group of greenish-blue squares. Meanwhile, the fact that we distinguish indigo and violet as separate colours is largely down to the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who named and split up the colours of the rainbow completely arbitrarily.

F | The cultural contexts and meaning of colours have been picked up, of course. by marketers. Purple is status, pink is femininity, and, of course. blue suggests competence while red is exciting. Using these colours in your branding or logo, apparently, will subtly instil those messages in potential customers’ minds. In her paper on the subject, Zena O’Connor questions the validity of many of these highly specific claims, as the title ‘Colour psychology and colour therapy: Caveat emptor makes clear. As O’Connor says: ‘The information available is often presented in an authoritative manner. exhorting the reader to believe a range of claims, such as red is physically stimulating and arousing and blue is calming and healing. However. evidence is rarely cited and when it is. it’s often in reference to findings that are outdated’. But even after the dubious claims have been weeded out. colour clearly still has a profound impact on our mental life.

Questions 14-20: Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, next to the information. You may use any letter more than once.

14. The view that the ideas o f one researcher are n o longer taken very seriously.
15. An assertion that there may be no scientific basis for the distinctions drawn between certain colours.
16. A suggestion that the colour of their clothing may affect how well certain people perform.
17. A description of a recently introduced product that reflects research into the way colour affects human behaviour.
18. An explanation of the main reason why human beings developed the ability to perceive colour.
19. A description of how the perception of colour can be manipulated without people realising it.
20. An explanation of how human perception of colour contrasts with that of many other species.

Questions 21 and 22: Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet

Which TWO of the following statements are true of the 1970s research into the colour of pills?
Answer:  and

A. White pills worked best for people who needed relief from pain.
B. Blue pills worked best for people who were having problems sleeping.
C. Red pills generally failed to help any patients.
D. Pills in certain colours worked better with male patients. E None of the pills used contained any active ingredients.

Questions 23-26: Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

It is apparent from the 23. of Zena O’Connor’s paper on the subject that she has little faith in the claims made by 24. regarding the effect of colour on clients’ perceptions of products. She says that whilst such claims may appear 25.  in the way they are put forward, they often cite research which is 26.  unsupported by sufficient evidence.

Ways of Reading

Choosing how to read books is getting harder now there’s a choice of on paper, tablet, e-reader, or smartphone – and people have strong opinions on which medium is best. But is there more to the decision than expense and convenience? The answer suggested by numerous studies into the neuroscience and psychology of reading in different formats is emphatical that there is.

There’s no shortage of people warning of the risks attendant on the rise of ‘screen culture’, as the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield calls it. She has repeatedly expressed concern that, as technology takes us into unknown territory, ‘the brain may be adapting in unprecedented ways. Though she tends to stress that these changes might be good or bad, her more negative speculations have been picked up in the media and amplified in far more strident terms.

E-reading certainly took off quickly. The Pew Research Centre reports that. as recently as 2010, hardly anyone in the USA had an e-reader or tablet. By 2014 half did, with 1 7 per cent reading at least one e-book in that year. But was that a cause for concern? There is some evidence that reading on screen can result in less comprehension and even affect sleep patterns. But the research here is complex and inconclusive and, in any case, it is actually doing something far more interesting than telling us which medium is superior. It’s making us think more about what it means to read.

As researchers examine the differences between reading in different media, they are also having to distinguish carefully between different things we do when we read. For instance, the difference between ‘deep reading’, when you really get immersed in a text, and ‘active learning’, when you make notes in the margins or put down the book to cross-reference with something else. When Anne Campbell of the Open University in Scotland compared how young people used very basic e-readers and paper books, she found that the electronic devices promoted more deep reading and less active learning. This appeared to be a direct result of design. ‘They were less distracted using an e-reader; she told me. ‘They were almost being forced to focus on it because of the very lack of ability to do things like flick forward and flick back:

Another related, widely replicated finding is that people read more slowly on screens than on paper. Sara Margolin of the State University of New York has also conducted research in this area. She says that ‘slowing down may actually allow us to spend more time consolidating what we’ve read into a more cohesive mental representation of the text’; furthermore, ‘not skipping around during reading’ could be a good thing in that it forces the reader to process the text in order, and preserves the organisational structure the author wanted us to follow: However, it also discourages re-reading, which is known to help with ‘meta-comprehension’ -readers’ ability to recognise whether or not they’ve understood what they just read.

This example alone shows how debates over whether print beats screen are hopelessly simplistic, not least because reading on a computer, with endless distractions a click away, is very different from reading on a dedicated e-reader. Much depends on what you’re reading and why. In a Taiwanese study led by Szu-Yuan Sun, the results suggested that reading linear texts in the manner of traditional paper books is better for ‘literal text comprehension’ but reading on computers with hyperlinks ‘is beneficial to inferential text comprehension. In other words, the joined-up environment of the web encourages people to make connections and work things out for themselves, while straightforward reading encourages them to take in and believe what’s on the page in front of them. Hence the prevalence of hyperlinks and multiple windows on computers could be seen as creating either unwelcome distractions or more opportunities for active learning.

Where research has suggested that comprehension is diminished by screen reading, it is hard to know if this results from the particular piece of technology and people’s ability to use it easily. ‘Having a device that requires a lot of attention to operate could essentially steal working memory resources; says Anne Mangen, from the University of Stavanger in Norway. This is a nice example of how hard it is to know whether the preferences we have for one type of reading device over another are rooted in the essentials of cognition or are simply cultural. It’s equally important not to make hasty unsubstantiated claims about either forrTl of reading. For example, Margolin says that one of the biggest problems with screen reading is that back-lit screens used by early tablets lead to eye fatigue and, if done at night, made sleeping difficult. Newer screens have overcome these problems, so earlier· assumptions about the effects of screen reading on sleep need to be re-examined.

A whole other area of research concerns motivation. One of the recurrent concerns of the internet age is that teenagers are reading less. But there is some evidence that, used wisely, e-readers could encourage more reading. Campbell, for instance, found that teens read more when using e-readers than paper books. She thinks the main reason for this is that the device is small, light and portable, and you can pull it out at odd moments, such as ‘when waiting for the bus to arrive. E-readers also have the advantage that, from the outside, it’s impossible to see whether someone is reading the latest teen vampire romance or a primer on differential calculus. ‘You could study surreptitiously; says Campbell, giving examples of people using their readers while getting their hair cut or even at work.

Overall, there doesn’t seem to be any convincing evidence that reading on screen or paper is better per se. ‘If the cognitive component is strong; suggests Benedetto, ‘the cultural one is even stronger: For Margolin, ‘the preference for reading on paper or a screen seems to be just that: a preference: And, increasingly, younger people are opting for digital. A large National Literary Trust survey in 2013 found that 52 per cent of 8 to 16-year-olds preferred reading on screen, with just 32 per cent preferring print. Mangen suggests that we need more longitudinal studies, conducted over decades before we can figure out which effects of different reading media are due to familiarity or lack of it, and which are related to more innate aspects of human cognition.

Questions 27-34: Do the following statements agree with the views/claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

Next to the statement, write
YES – if the statement agrees with the views of the writer.
NO – if the statement contradicts the views of the writer.
NOT GIVEN – if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.

27. Convenience is the main thing that guides people’s choice of whether to read on paper or on screen.
28. The media has generally exaggerated Greenfield’s analysis of the risks of screen culture.
29. The Pew Research Centre’s findings should not be taken too seriously.
30. Research aimed at deciding whether reading paper books is better than reading on screen
has largely been a waste of time.
31. The distinction between ‘deep reading’ and ‘active learning’ is a false one.
32. Campbell found that simple e-readers were not good for developing ‘deep reading’ skills.
33. There is little evidence to back up Margolin’s finding that people read an e-reader more slowly than a paper book.
34. An e-reader may help people to read in the way the original writer intended.

Questions 35-37: type the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

35. Szu-Yuan Sun’s research established that when people read in a linear way, they
A. find i t harder to concentrate on what they’re reading.
B. are easily distracted by the need to look up references.
C. are more likely to be convinced by arguments they read.
D. will probably be more open to the idea of active learning.

36. What does Mangen’s research suggest about electronic devices?
A. Some are better for the purposes of reading than others.
B. Some readers may be more adept at using them than others.
C. It’s difficult to know why people read less effectively on them.
D. More sophisticated ones allow people to read in different ways.

37. What does Margolin’s example of back-lit screens demonstrate?
A. how quickly the technology is changing
B. how unwise it can be to jump to conclusions
C. how quickly the industry responds to complaints
D. how new features can make e-readers more attractive

Questions 38-40: Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E below.

38. Campbell thinks that teenagers are encouraged to read using e-readers because
39. Margolin thinks that some people would rather read on e-readers because
40. Mangen thinks that some people use e-readers because

A. they may just be accustomed to the format.
B. they like the level of privacy one offers.
C. they are merely exercising a personal choice.
D. they are attracted by the content on offer.
E. they find them portable and convenient.