IELTS ACADEMIC READING 2

THE RISE OF DINOSAURS

• Everybody knows that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Something big hit the earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice, if ironic, symmetry in the idea that a similar impact brought about the dinosaurs’ rise. That is the thesis proposed by Paul Olsen, of Columbia University, and his colleagues in this week’s Science.

• Dinosaurs first appear in the fossil record 230m years ago, dining the Triassic period. But they were mostly small, and they shared the earth with lots of other sorts of reptile. It was in the subsequent Jurassic, which began 202million years ago, that they overran the planet and turned into the monsters depicted in the book and movie “Jurassic Park”. (Actually, though, the dinosaurs that appeared on screen were from the still more recent Cretaceous period.) Dr Olsen and his colleagues are not the first to suggest that the dinosaurs inherited the earth as the result of an asteroid strike. But they are the first to show that the takeover did, indeed, happen in a geological eyeblink.

• Dinosaur skeletons are rare. Dinosaur footprints are, however, surprisingly abundant. And the sizes of the prints are as good an indication of the sizes of the beasts as are the skeletons themselves. Dr Olsen and his colleagues therefore concentrated on prints, not bones.

• The prints in question were made in eastern North America, a part of the world then full of rift valleys similar to those in East Africa today. Like the modern African rift valleys, the Triassic /Jurassic American ones contained lakes, and these lakes grew and shrank at regular intervals because of climatic changes caused by periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit. (A similar phenomenon is responsible for modern ice ages.) That regularity, combined with reversals in the earth’s magnetic field, which are detectable in the tiny fields of certain magnetic minerals, means that rocks from this place and period can be dated to within a few thousand years. As a bonus, squish lake-edge sediments are just the things for recording the tracks of passing animals. By dividing the labour between themselves, the ten authors of the paper were able to study such tracks at 80 sites.

• The researchers looked at 18 so-called ichnotaxa. These are recognizable types of footprint that cannot be matched precisely with the species of animal that left them. But they can be matched with a general sort of animal, and thus act as an indicator of the fate of that group, even when there are no bones to tell the story. Five of the ichnotaxa disappear before the end of the Triassic, and four march confidently across the boundary into the Jurassic. Six, however, vanish at the boundary, or only just splutter across it; and three appear from nowhere, almost as soon as the Jurassic begins.

• That boundary itself is suggestive. The first geological indication of the impact that killed the dinosaurs was an unusually high level of iridium in rocks at the end of the Cretaceous, when the beasts disappear from the fossil record. Iridium is normally rare at the earth’s surface, but it is more abundant in meteorites. When people began to believe the impact theory, they started looking for other Cretaceous-end anomalies. One that turned up was a surprising abundance of fern spores in rocks just above the boundary layer—a phenomenon known as a “fern spike”

• That matched the theory nicely. Many modern ferns are opportunists. They cannot compete against plants with leaves, but if a piece of land is cleared by, say, a volcanic emption, they are often the first things to set up shop there. An asteroid strike would have scoured much of the earth of its vegetable cover and provided a paradise for ferns. A fem spike in the rocks is thus a good indication that southing terrible has happened.

• Both an iridium anomaly and a fem spike appear in rocks at the end of the Triassic, too. That accounts for the disappearing ichnotaxa: the creatures that made them did not survive the holocaust. The surprise is how rapidly the new ichnotaxa appear.

• Dr Olsen and his colleagues suggest that the explanation for this rapid increase in size may be a phenomenon called ecological release. This is seen today when reptiles (which, in modern times, tend to be small creatures) reach islands where they face no competitors. The most spectacular example is on the Indonesian island of Komodo, where local lizards have grown so large that they are often referred to as dragons. The dinosaurs, in other words, could flourish only when the competition had been knocked out.

• That leaves the question of where the impact happened. No large hole in the earth’s crust seems to be 202m years old. It may, of course, have been overlooked. Old craters are eroded and buried, and not always easy to find. Alternatively, it may have vanished. Although continental crust is more or less permanent, the ocean floor is constantly recycled by the tectonic processes that bring about continental drift. There is no ocean floor left that is more than 200m years old, so a crater that formed in the ocean would have been swallowed up by now.

• There is a third possibility, however. This is that the crater is known, but has been misdated. The Manicouagan “structure”, a crater in Quebec, is thought to be 214m years old. It is huge—some 100km across—and seems to be the largest of between three and five craters that formed within a few hours of each other as the lumps of a disintegrated comet hit the earth one by one.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

YES                               if the statement agrees with the information

NO                               if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN                   if there is no information on this

1. Dr Paul Olsen and his colleagues believe that asteroid knock may also have lead to dinosaurs’ boom.
2. Books and movie like Jurassic Park often exaggerate the size of the dinosaurs.
3. Dinosaur footprints are more abundant than dinosaur skeletons.
4. The prints were chosen by Dr Olsen to study because they are more detectable than earth magnetic field to track the date of geological period precise within thousands years.
5. Ichnotaxa showed that footprints of dinosaurs offer exact information of the trace left by an individual species.
6. We can find more Iridium in the earth’s surface than in meteorites.

Questions 7-13

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Dr Olsen and his colleagues applied a phenomenon named 7)……….. to explain the large size of the Eubrontes, which is a similar case to that nowadays reptiles invade a place where there are no 8)………….; for example, on an island called Komodo, indigenous huge lizards grow so big that people even regarding them as 9)……. However, there were no old impact trace being found. The answer may be that we have 10)……….. the evidence. Old craters are difficult to spot or it probably 11)…………due to the effect of the earth moving. Even a crater formed in Ocean would have been 12)………… under the impact of crust movement. Beside the third hypothesis is that the potential evidences — some craters may be 13)…………

 SECTION 2

EVOLUTION OF BRITISH ARCHITECTURE

• Architecture is about evolution, not revolution. It used to be thought that once the Romans pulled out of Britain in the fifth century, their elegant villas, carefully planned towns and engineering marvels like Hadrian’s Wall simply fell into decay as British culture was plunged into the Dark Ages. It took the Norman Conquest of 1066 to bring back the light, and the gothic cathedral-builders of the Middle Ages played an important part in the revival of British culture. However, the truth is not as simple as that. Romano-British culture – and that included architecture along with language, religion, political organization and the arts – survived long after the Roman withdrawal. And although the Anglo-Saxons had a sophisticated building style of their own, little survives to bear witness to their achievements as the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon buildings were made of wood.

• Even so, the period between the Norman landing at Pevensey in 1066 and the day in 1485 when Richard III lost his horse and his head at Bosworth, ushering in the Tudors and the Early Modern period, marks a rare flowering of British building. And it is all the more remarkable because the underlying ethos of medieval architecture was ‘fitness for purpose’. The great cathedrals and parish churches that lifted up their towers to heaven were not only acts of devotion in stone; they were also fiercely functional buildings. Castles served their particular purpose and their battlements and turrets were for use rather than ornament. In a sense, the buildings of the 16th century were also governed by fitness for purpose – only now, the purpose was very different. In domestic architecture, in particular, buildings were used to display status and wealth.

• This stately and curious workmanship showed itself in various ways. A greater sense of security led to more outward-looking buildings, as opposed to the medieval arrangement where the need for defense, created houses that faced inward onto a courtyard or series of courtyards. This allowed far much more in the way of exterior ornament. The rooms themselves tended to be bigger and lighter – as an expensive commodity, the use of great expanses of glass was in itself a statement of wealth. There was also a general move towards balanced and symmetrical exteriors with central entrances.

• With the exception of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), whose confident handling of classical detail and proportion set him apart from all other architects of the period, most early 17th century buildings tended to take the innocent exuberance of late Tudor work one step further. But during the 1640s and 50s the Civil War and its aftermath sent many gentlemen and nobles to the Continent either to escape the fighting or, when the war was lost, to follow Charles II into exile. There they came into contact with French, Dutch and Italian architecture and, with Charles’s restoration in 1660, there was a flurry of building activity as royalists reclaimed their property and built themselves houses reflecting the latest European trends. The British Baroque was a reassertion of authority, an expression of absolutist ideology by men who remembered a world turned upside down during the Civil War. The style is heavy and rich, sometimes overblown and melodramatic. The politics which underpin it are questionable, but its products are breathtaking.

• The huge glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, shows another strand to 19th century architecture – one which embraced new industrial processes. But it wasn’t long before even this confidence in progress came to be regarded with suspicion. Mass production resulted in buildings and furnishings that were too perfect, as the individual craftsman no longer had a major role in their creation. Railing against the de-humanising effects of industrialisation, reformers like John Ruskin and William Morris made a concerted effort to return to hand-crafted, pre-industrial manufacturing techniques. Morris’s influence grew from the production of furniture and textiles, until by the 1880s a generation of principled young architects was following his call for good, honest construction.

• The most important trends in early 20th century architecture simply passed Britain by. Whilst Gropius was working on cold, hard expanses of glass, and Le Corbusier was experimenting with the use of reinforced concrete frames, we had staid establishment architects like Edwin Lutyens producing Neo-Georgian and Renaissance country houses for an outmoded landed class. In addition, there were slightly batty architect craftsmen, the heirs of William Morris, still trying to turn the clock back to before the Industrial Revolution by making chairs and spurning new technology. Only a handful of Modern Movement buildings of any real merit were produced here during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of these were the work of foreign architects such as Serge Chermayeff, Berthold Lubetkin and Erno Goldfinger who had settled in this country.

• After the Second World War the situation began to change. The Modern Movement’s belief in progress and the future struck a chord with the mood of post-war Britain and, as reconstruction began under Attlee’s Labour government in 1945, there was a desperate need for cheap housing which could be produced quickly. The use of prefabricated elements, metal frames, concrete cladding and the absence of decoration – all of which had been embraced by Modernists abroad and viewed with suspicion by the British, were adopted to varying degrees for housing developments and schools. Local authorities, charged with the task of rebuilding city center, became important patrons of architecture. This represented a shift away from the private individuals who had dominated the architectural scene for centuries.

• Since the War it has been corporate bodies like these local authorities, together with national and multinational companies, and large educational institutions, which have dominated British architecture. By the late 1980s the Modern Movement, unfairly blamed for the social experiments implicit in high rise housing, had lost out to irony and spectacle in the shape of post-modernism, with its cheerful borrowings from anywhere and any period. But now, in the new Millennium, even post-modernism is showing signs of age. What comes next? Post-post-modernism?

Questions 14-20

Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

14. The Anglo-Saxon architecture failed to last because the buildings were constructed in……..
15. Different from the medieval architecture, the buildings of the 16th century represent ………..
16. The costly glass was applied widely as a…………..in those years
17. Inigo Jones was skilled at handling……..style.
18. William Morris favored the production of ……… made in pre-industrial manufacturing techniques.
19. The architects such as………..provided the landlord with conservative houses.
20. After World War Two, the architect commission shifted from individual to…………..

Questions 21-26

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

21. The feature of medieval architecture was

A. immense

B. useful

C. decorative

D. bizarre

22. What contributes to the outward-looking buildings in the 16th century?

A. safety

B. beauty

C. quality

D. technology

23. Why were the buildings in the 1660s influenced by the latest European

trends?

A. Because the war was lost.

B. Because the craftsman came from all over the Europe,

C. Because the property belongs to the gentlemen and nobles.

D. Because the monarch came back from the continent.

24. What kind of sense did the British Baroque imply?

A. tough

B. steady

C. mild

D. conservative

25. The individual craftsman was no more the key to creation due to the coming of

A. Crystal Palace

B. preindustrial manufacturing return

C. industrial process in scale

D. ornament

26. The building style changed after World War Two as a result of

A. abundant materials

B. local authority

C. shortage of cheap housing

D. conservative views

SECTION 3

CAN THE PAST PROVIDE USEFUL LESSONS?

• Many past societies collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that the poet Shelley imagined in his sonnet, Ozymandias. By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern US, the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Norse Greenland, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

• The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience them at first hand. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders. Yet these builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing?

• It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide (ecocide) has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased impact of people.

• Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between the course of human societies and the course of individual human lives – to talk of a society’s birth, growth, peak, old age and eventual death. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies: they declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. Obviously, too, this trajectory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies did not collapse at all.

• Today many people feel that environmental problems overshadow all the other threats to global civilisation. These environmental problems include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, build up of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilisation of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigorously debated.

• Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they underestimated? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g. wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (e.g. plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn’t the rate of human population growth declining, such that we’re already on course for the world’s population to level off at some manageable number of people?

• Questions like this illustrate why those famous collapses of past civilisations have taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems. We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e. its beneficial effects), globalisation, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: again, our potent technology (i.e. its unintended destructive effects), globalisation (such that now a problem in one part of the world affects all the rest), the dependence of millions of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons. 

Questions 27-29

Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D.

27. When the writer describes the impact of monumental ruins today, he emphasises

A. the income they generate from tourism.

B. the area of land they occupy.

C. their archaeological value.

D. their romantic appeal.

28. Recent findings concerning vanished civilisations

A. have overturned long-held beliefs.

B. caused controversy amongst scientists.

C. come from a variety of disciplines.

D. identified one main cause of environmental damage.

29. What does the writer say about ways in which former societies collapsed?

A. The pace of decline was usually similar.

B. The likelihood of collapse would have been foreseeable.

C. Deterioration invariably led to total collapse.

D. Individual citizens could sometimes influence the course of events.

Questions 30-34

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage? Write

YES                               if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO                               if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN                   if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

30. It is widely believed that environmental problems represent the main danger faced by the modern world.
31. The accumulation of poisonous substances is a relatively modern problem.
32. There is general agreement that the threats posed by environmental problems are very serious.
33. Some past societies resembled present-day societies more closely than others.
34. We should be careful when drawing comparisons between past and present.

Questions 35-39

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below. Write the correct letter, A-F.

35. Evidence of the greatness of some former civilisations
36. The parallel between an individual’s life and the life of a society
37. The number of environmental problems that societies face
38. The power of technology
39. A consideration of historical events and trends

A.)is not necessarily valid.

B.)provides grounds for an optimistic outlook,

C.)exists in the form of physical structures.

D.)is potentially both positive and negative.

E.)will not provide direct solution for present problems.

F.)is greater now than in the past

Question 40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, c or D

40. What is the main argument of Reading Passage 3?

A.) We can learn from the past but only after carefully analyzing the lessons.

B.) More should be done to preserve the physical remains of earlier civilisations.

C.) Some historical accounts of great civilisations are inaccurate.

D.) Modern societies are dependent on each other for their continuing survival.