IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2025 - Q1 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2025 - Q1 Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách Forcast Test 2025 - Q1 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2025 - Q1 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Choose
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1
In the 1930s, the Coast and Fiordland had populations of a similar size.
2
Most settlers on the Coast were migrants from oversea
3
The coast's geographical features made moving around the region difficult
4
The first bridges to be built on the Coast were swept away by floods
5
Maurice Buckley flew his Avro biplane to the Coast in 1923
6
Coasters were unwilling to fly at first
Question 7 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Bert Mercer and aviation on the Coast
Early Years
Mercer set up Air Travel (NZ) in 1934
The Fox Moth was noted for its compared to other planes
In 1934 Mercer's company started to transport and passengers
From 1935 planes landed on to pick up fresh produce
World War II
The airline expanded at first because it got a from the state
There was a shortage of by 1942
Final Years
There were disputes at the airline about the quantity of in each plane
1950s: became popular and the airline suffered
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H
14
A description of a barrier designed to stop dingoes, which also divides two kinds of non-native animals.
15
How dingoes ensure that rival species do not dominate.
16
A reference to a widespread non-native species that other animals feed on.
17
A mention of the dingo’s arrival in Australia.
18
Research which has proved that dingoes have resorted to eating young livestock.
19
A description of a method used to kill dingoes.
20
The way that the structure of dingo groups affects how quickly their numbers grow.
Question 21 - 23
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Stuart McKechnie
B
Chris Johnson
C
Lee Allen
D
Mark Clifford
21
Dingoes tend to hunt native animals rather than hunting other non-native predators.
22
The presence of dingoes puts the income of some people at risk.
23
Dingoes have had little impact on the dying out of animal species in Australia.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
24
The dingo replaced the
as the main predatory animal in Australia.
25
Foxes and cats are more likely to hunt native animals when there are fewer
.
26
Australian animals reproduce at a slow rate as a natural way of avoiding
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27
The title of the debate is not unbiased.
28
All the scientists invited to the debate were from the field of medicine.
29
The message those scientists who conducted the survey were sending was people shouldn't take risks.
30
All the 40 listed technologies are riskier than other technologies.
31
It was worth taking the risks to invent antibiotics.
32
All the other inventions on the list were also judged by the precautionary principle.
Question 33 - 39
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
When applying the precautionary principle to decide whether to invent a new technology, people should also consider the , along with the usual consideration of . For example, though risky and dangerous enough, people still enjoy for the excitement it provides. On the other hand, experts believe that future population desperately needs in spite of their undefined benefits. However, the research conducted so far has not been directed towards increasing the yield of , but to reduce the cost of and to bring more profit out of it. In the end, such selfish use of the precautionary principle for business and political gain has often led people to science for they believe scientists are not to be trusted.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
40
What is the main theme of the passage?
A
People have the right to doubt science and technologies.
B
The precautionary principle could have prevented the development of science and technology.
C
There are not enough people who truly understand the precautionary principle.
D
The precautionary principle bids us to take risks at all costs.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Flying the Coast
The development of an air service on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island
Cut off from the rest of the country by a range of mountains, the west coast of New zealand's South Island - or the "Coast as it is commonly known -was the country's"wild west frontier.
But unlike Fiordland to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich. Settlers hunted and fished, logged, milled and mined. They farmed where they managed to clear the forest and drain the swamps. It was pure survival at times. The isolation was inescapable, not so much because of the great distances that travellers had to cover, but rather due to the topography of the place -the mountains, gorges, glaciers, rivers and headlands-which necessitated long detours and careful timing with regard to weather and tides.
Bridges were few and far between in the early years, and even ferry crossings were often impossible after heavy rains. Each river had its attendant ferryman or woman whose attention a traveller would attract with a rifle shot. It was the kind of country where one would greatly benefit from a pair of wings.
Maurice Buckley, a World War I pilot, was the first to give Coasters, as the residents of the region were called, such wings, by establishing the Arrow Aviation Company in 1923. That year he bought an Avro biplane on the east coast, which he transported across the country by rail, wings off, before reassembling it in a local garage. When he opened for business the following year, the colourful Avro was an instant crowd-pleaser and Coasters queued up for joyrides. For the first major flight, Buckley invited Dr Teichelmann, a local mountaineer, to join him. They flew over the Franz Josef Glacier and landed at Okarito. Afterwards, Teichelmann wrote about how extraordinary it was to look at the world from the air, " like taking the roof off the house and watching the performances from above.
Next came an aviator named Bert Mercer, who made a reconnaissance flight to the Coast in August 1933 and started Air Travel (NZ) the following year, Mercers aircraft of choice was a DH83 Fox Moth. By comparison with the regular, open-air aircraft of the day, the Fox Moth was a plane that offered considerable luxury, housing four passengers in an enclosed forward area fully protected from the weather. Mercer opened for business in December 1934, picking up the airlines first passengers and, on the last day of that year, commenced a regular delivery of mail, carrying 73k9 to Haast and Okuru. From that day on, the Fox Moth became a much-anticipated sight on the coast.
Mercer got on with everyone and won their respect by anticipating, then meeting their needs. One of those was setting up the first aerial shipping route to help transport a kind of small fish known as whitebait Starting in 1935 Mercer would put the plane down where there was no airstrip, instead using remote beaches such as the one at the mouth of the Paringa River, collect the whitebait and whisk them offto the night train and waiting city markets in perfectly fresh condition, Mercer relied on his senses -what he could see and hear - to navigate, flying around the weather and contours of the land. Although often warned to do so by aviation authorities, he refused to develop the skills necessary to navigate the plane "blind, using just its instruments on the console in front of him. The old habits were too hard to change.
With the outbreak of World war II, Mercer's aircraft were considered so essential to the remote Coast that they were not militarised. In fact, the business continued to grow in the early years, thanks in large part to a government-issued subsidy, which allowed him to expand into neighbouring areas. Despite the war in far-off lands, life on the Coast was business as usual. The settlers were always in need of mail and transportation. In time, though, this presented Mercer with a pressing issue: with so many now joining the Air Force, he no longer had enough pilots. In 1942 he wrote in his diary, I am back to where I started eight years ago - on my own.
The only solution to keep the airline going was to pack as much into every plane as possible and make every flight count. But some of mercer's newly formed team objected to the amount of cargo they had to carry, which for a small rural airline was a fact of life. One man, Norm Suttle, left the airline after a few months in protest about carrying more than was appropriate for the aircraft. This marked another decline in the airline's fortunes, When Bert Mercer died in 1944, the airline was taken over by Fred Lucas, a man who shared mercer's pioneering spirit. Under Lucas s leadership the newly formed West Coast Airways saw Another decade of profitable returns. But in the following decade, times changed fast. Helicopters were soon found to be ideal machines for the Coast terrain, and quickly took over the vast majority of the local air transport business.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
False
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài True / False / Not Given
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)
Simplified: The Coast and Fiordland had populations of a similar size
Main idea: So sánh dân số hai khu vực – cho rằng trong thập niên 1930, Coast và Fiordlandcó quy mô dân số tương tự nhau.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “Fiordland”, “the Coast”, “1930s”, “population", "a similar size”
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên → Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 2.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “But unlike Fiordland to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich.” (Đoạn 2)
Simplified:
Fiordland was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness>< the Coast was habitable and potentially rich
Main idea: Không giống như Fiordland ở phía nam, nơi từng là và vẫn là vùng hoang dã không thể ở được – Coast thì có người ở và giàu tiềm năng.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc:Fiordland là vùng hoang vu, không có người sinh sống; Coast thì có thể sinh sống và giàu tiềm năng.
Trong câu hỏi: Cho rằng Fiordland và Coast có quy mô dân số tương tự nhau.
⇒ ✅ Chọn: FALSE
-------
Lưu ý chung:
Nếu đáp án là TRUE: Câu hỏi phải nói rằng Fiordland không có dân cư còn Coast thì có — nhưng hiện tại câu hỏi nói “tương tự nhau”, nên sai.
Nếu đáp án là NOT GIVEN: Sẽ đúng nếu bài đọc không nói gì về việc có dân cư hay không, nhưng ở đây đã nói rõ Fiordland “uninhabitable”, nên thông tin là given.
Graziers see them as pests, and poisoning is common, but some biologists think Australia's dingoes are the best weapon in a war against imported cats and foxes.
A
A. A plane flies a slow pattern over Carlton Hill station, a 3,600 square kilometre ranch in the Kimberley region in northwest Australia. As the plane circles, those aboard drop 1,000 small pieces of meat, one by one, onto the scrubland below, each piece laced with poison; this practice is known as baiting. Besides 50,000 head of cattle, Carlton Hill is home to the dingo, Australia’s largest mammalian predator and the bane of a grazier's (cattle farmer's) life. Stuart McKechnie, manager of Carlton Hill, complains that graziers’ livelihoods are threatened when dingoes prey on cattle. But one man wants the baiting to end, and for dingoes to once again roam Australia’s wide-open spaces. According to Chris Johnson of James Cook University, ‘Australia needs more dingoes to protect our biodiversity.’
B
About 4,000 years ago, Asian sailors introduced dingoes to Australia. Throughout the ensuing millennia, these descendants of the wolf spread across the continent and, as the Tasmanian tiger disappeared completely from Australia, dingoes became Australia's top predators. As agricultural development took place, the European settler found that they could not safely keep their livestock where dingoes roamed. So began one of the most sustained efforts at pest control in Australia's history. Over the last 150 years, dingoes have been shot and poisoned, and fences have been used in attempts to keep them away from livestock. But at the same time, as the European settlers tried to eliminate one native pest from Australia, they introduced more of their own.
C
In 1860, the rabbit was unleashed on Australia by a wealthy landowner, and by 1980, rabbits had covered most of the mainland. Rabbits provided a huge prey base for two other introduced species: the feral (wild) cat and red fox. The interaction between foxes, cats and rabbits is a huge problem for native mammals. In good years, rabbit numbers increase dramatically, and fox and cat populations grow quickly in response to the abundance of this prey. When bad seasons follow, rabbit numbers are significantly reduced - and the dwindling but still large fox and cat populations are left with little to eat besides native mammals.
D
Australian mammals generally reproduce much more slowly than rabbits, cats and foxes - an adaptation to prevent overpopulation in the arid environment, where food can be scarce and unreliable - and populations decline because they can't grow fast enough to replace animals killed by the predators. Johnson says dingoes are the solution to this problem because they keep cat and fox populations under control. Besides regularly eating the smaller predators, dingoes will kill them simply to lessen competition. Dingo packs live in large, stable territories and generally have only one fertile female, which limits their rate of increase. In the 4,000 years that dingoes have been in Australia, they have contributed to few, if any, extinctions, Johnson says.
E
Reaching out from a desolate spot where three states meet, for 2,500 km in either direction, is the world's longest fence, two metres high and stretching from the coast in Queensland to the Great Australian Bight in South Australia; it is there to keep dingoes out of southeast Australia. Though it has been only partly successful in excluding dingoes from the southeast, the fence separates the main types of livestock found in Australia. To the northwest of the fence, cattle predominate; to the southeast, sheep fill the landscape. In fact, Australia is a land dominated by these animals - 25 million cattle, 100 million sheep and just over 20 million people.
F
While there is no argument that dingoes will prey on sheep if given the chance, they don't hunt cattle once the calves are much past two or three weeks old, according to McKechnie. And a study in Queensland suggests that dingoes don't even prey heavily on the newborn calves unless their staple prey disappears due to deteriorating conditions like drought. This study, co-authored by Lee Allen of the Robert Wicks Research Centre in Queensland, suggests that the aggressive baiting programs used against dingoes may actually be counterproductive for graziers. When dingoes are removed from an area by baiting, the area is recolonised by younger, more solitary dingoes. These animals aren't capable of going after large prey like kangaroos, so they turn to calves. In their study, some of the highest rates of calf predation occurred in areas that had been baited.
G
Mark Clifford, general manager of a firm that manages over 200,000 head of cattle, is not convinced by Allen's assertion. Clifford says, "It's obvious if we drop or loosen control on dingoes, we are going to lose more calves." He doesn't believe that dingoes will go after kangaroos when calves are around. Nor is he persuaded of dingoes' supposed ecological benefits, saying he is not convinced that they manage to catch foxes or cats that often, believing they are more likely to catch small native animals instead.
H
McKechnie agrees that dingoes kill wallabies (small native animals) that compete with his cattle for od, but points out that in parts of Western Australia, there are no foxes, and not very many cats. He doesn't see how relaxing controls on dingoes in his area will improve the ecological balance. Johnson sees a need for a change in philosophy on the part of graziers. "There might be a number of different ways of thinking through dingo management in cattle country," he says. "At the moment, though, that hasn't got through to graziers. There's still just one prescription, and that is to bait as widely as possible."
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
E
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Information
📌 Dạng Matching Information chúng ta nên làm cuối cùng, sau khi đã làm các dạng câu hỏi khác nhé DOLBIES, bởi vì lúc này mình đã đọc và hiểu nội dung của bài rồi, cộng thêm nghệ thuật Specify của Linearthinking → sẽ nhanh chóng tìm được vị trí đáp án hơn!!
-------
Step 01: Read the question to predict
Hiểu câu hỏi: A description of a barrierstops dingoes & divides two kinds of non-native animals
Specify & Predict: Đoạn văn sẽ đưa thông tin chi tiết hơn về mục đích của hàng rào (ngăn dingoes) và hai loại vật nuôi khác nhau ở hai phía của hàng rào. Ví dụ: Một bên hàng rào nuôi bò, bên còn lại nuôi cừu, ...
-------
Step 02: Khoanh vùng đoạn văn
🔍 Từ khóa: “description", "barrier", "stop dingoes", "divides two kinds", "non-native animals"
-> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, có thể khoanh vùng được đoạn E vì nó mô tả rất kỹ về "the world's longest fence" (hàng rào dài nhất thế giới - mô tả barrier): cao 2m & kéo dài từ Queensland -> South Australia. Đoạn cũng nói rõ chức năng của hàng rào là "keep dingoes out" (chặn chó dingo) và chia cắt 2 loại gia súc: "cattle" (bò) ở phía tây bắc và "sheep" (cừu) ở phía đông nam.
-> Đây là mô tả cụ thể cho "a barrier designed to stop dingoes & divides two kinds of non-native animals".
A. As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate on scientific progress, “Panic attack: interrogating our obsession with risk” did not bode well. Held last week at the Royal Institution in London, the event brought together scientists from across the world to ask why society is so obsessed with risk and to call for a “more rational” approach. “We seem to be organising society around the grandmotherly maxim of ‘better safe than sorry’,” exclaimed Spiked, the online publication that organised the event. “What are the consequences of this overbearing concern with risks?”
B
B.
The debate was preceded by a survey of 40 scientists who were invited to describe how awful our lives would be if the “precautionary principle” had been allowed to prevail in the past. Their response was: no heart surgery or antibiotics, and hardly any drugs at all; no aeroplanes, bicycles or high-voltage power grids; no pasteurisation, pesticides or biotechnology; no quantum mechanics; no wheel; no “discovery” of America. In short, their message was: no risk, no gain.
C
They have absolutely missed the point. The precautionary principle is a subtle idea. It has various forms, but all of them generally include some notion of cost-effectiveness. Thus the point is not simply to ban things that are not known to be absolutely safe. Rather, it says: “Of course you can make no progress without risk. But if there is no obvious gain from taking the risk, then don’t take it.”
D
Clearly, all the technologies listed by the 40 well-chosen savants were innately risky at their inception, as all technologies are. But all of them would have received the green light under the precautionary principle because they all had the potential to offer tremendous benefits – the solutions to very big problems – if only the snags could be overcome.
E
If the precautionary principle had been in place, the scientists tell us, we would not have antibiotics. But of course, we would – if the version of the principle that sensible people now understand had been applied. When penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, infective bacteria were laying waste to the world. Children died from diphtheria and whooping cough, every open-drain brought the threat of typhoid, and any wound could lead to septicaemia and even gangrene.
F
Penicillin was turned into a practical drug during the Second World War when the many pestilences that result from were threatened to kill more people than the bombs. Of course antibiotics were a priority. Of course, the risks, such as they could be perceived, were worth taking.
G
And so with the other items on the scientists’ list: electric light bulbs, blood transfusions. CAT scans, knives, the measles vaccine – the precautionary principle would have prevented all of them, they tell us. But this is just plain wrong. If the precautionary principle had been applied properly, all these creations would have passed muster, because all offered incomparable advantages compared to the risks perceived at the time.
H
Another issue is at stake here. Statistics are not the only concept people use when weighing up risk. Human beings, subtle and evolved creatures that we are, do not survive to three-score years and ten simply by thinking like pocket calculators. A crucial issue is the consumer’s choice. In deciding whether to pursue the development of new technology, the consumer’s right to choose should be considered alongside considerations of risk and benefit. Clearly, skiing is more dangerous than genetically modified tomatoes. But people who ski choose to do so; they do not have skiing thrust upon them by portentous experts of the kind who now feel they have the right to reconstruct our crops. Even with skiing, there is the matter of cost-effectiveness to consider: skiing, I am told, is exhilarating. Where is the exhilaration in GM soya?
I
Indeed, in contrast to all the other items on Spiked’s list, GM crops stand out as an example of a technology whose benefits are far from clear. Some of the risks can at least be defined. But in the present economic climate, the benefits that might accrue from them seem dubious. Promoters of GM crops believe that the future population of the world cannot be fed without them. That is untrue. The crops that really matter are wheat and rice, and there is no GM research in the pipeline that will seriously affect the yield of either. GM is used to make production cheaper and hence more profitable, which is an extremely questionable ambition.
J
The precautionary principle provides the world with a very important safeguard. If it had been in place in the past it might, for example, have prevented insouciant miners from polluting major rivers with mercury. We have come to a sorry pass when scientists, who should above all be dispassionate scholars, feel they should misrepresent such a principle for the purposes of commercial and political propaganda. People at large continue to mistrust science and the high technologies it produces partly because they doubt the wisdom of scientists. On such evidence as this, these doubts are fully justified.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
True
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài True / False / Not Given
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)
Simplified: The title of the debate is not unbiased
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “title”, “debate”, “unbiased”.
-> Dựa vào từ khoá ở trên, tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn A.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate on scientific progress, ‘Panic attack: interrogating our obsession with risk’ did not bode well.” (Đoạn A)
Simplified: As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate , itdid not bode well.
Main idea: Cuộc tranh luận được cho là không thiên vị ("supposedly unprejudiced") -> Nhưng tiêu đề lại gây cảm giác xấu, không đem lại tín hiệu tốt ("but it did not bode well") -> Ngụ ý nó thiên vị.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Tiêu đề của buổi tranh luận “did not bode well” cho một cuộc tranh luận “supposedly unprejudiced” → ngụ ý rằng nó thiên vị và không trung lập.
Trong câu hỏi: Tiêu đề của buổi tranh luận không khách quan (not unbiased).
⇒ ✅ Chọn: TRUE
-------
Lưu ý:
Nếu đáp án là False: bài đọc phải nói rằng tiêu đề hoàn toàn khách quan, không có thiên kiến nào.
Nếu đáp án là Not Given: bài đọc phải không đề cập đến mức độ khách quan hay thiên vị của tiêu đề buổi tranh luận.
Cut off from the rest of the country by a range of mountains, the west coast of New zealand's South Island - or the "Coast as it is commonly known -was the country's"wild west frontier.
But unlike Fiordland to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich. Settlers hunted and fished, logged, milled and mined. They farmed where they managed to clear the forest and drain the swamps. It was pure survival at times. The isolation was inescapable, not so much because of the great distances that travellers had to cover, but rather due to the topography of the place -the mountains, gorges, glaciers, rivers and headlands-which necessitated long detours and careful timing with regard to weather and tides.
Bridges were few and far between in the early years, and even ferry crossings were often impossible after heavy rains. Each river had its attendant ferryman or woman whose attention a traveller would attract with a rifle shot. It was the kind of country where one would greatly benefit from a pair of wings.
Maurice Buckley, a World War I pilot, was the first to give Coasters, as the residents of the region were called, such wings, by establishing the Arrow Aviation Company in 1923. That year he bought an Avro biplane on the east coast, which he transported across the country by rail, wings off, before reassembling it in a local garage. When he opened for business the following year, the colourful Avro was an instant crowd-pleaser and Coasters queued up for joyrides. For the first major flight, Buckley invited Dr Teichelmann, a local mountaineer, to join him. They flew over the Franz Josef Glacier and landed at Okarito. Afterwards, Teichelmann wrote about how extraordinary it was to look at the world from the air, " like taking the roof off the house and watching the performances from above.
Next came an aviator named Bert Mercer, who made a reconnaissance flight to the Coast in August 1933 and started Air Travel (NZ) the following year, Mercers aircraft of choice was a DH83 Fox Moth. By comparison with the regular, open-air aircraft of the day, the Fox Moth was a plane that offered considerable luxury, housing four passengers in an enclosed forward area fully protected from the weather. Mercer opened for business in December 1934, picking up the airlines first passengers and, on the last day of that year, commenced a regular delivery of mail, carrying 73k9 to Haast and Okuru. From that day on, the Fox Moth became a much-anticipated sight on the coast.
Mercer got on with everyone and won their respect by anticipating, then meeting their needs. One of those was setting up the first aerial shipping route to help transport a kind of small fish known as whitebait Starting in 1935 Mercer would put the plane down where there was no airstrip, instead using remote beaches such as the one at the mouth of the Paringa River, collect the whitebait and whisk them offto the night train and waiting city markets in perfectly fresh condition, Mercer relied on his senses -what he could see and hear - to navigate, flying around the weather and contours of the land. Although often warned to do so by aviation authorities, he refused to develop the skills necessary to navigate the plane "blind, using just its instruments on the console in front of him. The old habits were too hard to change.
With the outbreak of World war II, Mercer's aircraft were considered so essential to the remote Coast that they were not militarised. In fact, the business continued to grow in the early years, thanks in large part to a government-issued subsidy, which allowed him to expand into neighbouring areas. Despite the war in far-off lands, life on the Coast was business as usual. The settlers were always in need of mail and transportation. In time, though, this presented Mercer with a pressing issue: with so many now joining the Air Force, he no longer had enough pilots. In 1942 he wrote in his diary, I am back to where I started eight years ago - on my own.
The only solution to keep the airline going was to pack as much into every plane as possible and make every flight count. But some of mercer's newly formed team objected to the amount of cargo they had to carry, which for a small rural airline was a fact of life. One man, Norm Suttle, left the airline after a few months in protest about carrying more than was appropriate for the aircraft. This marked another decline in the airline's fortunes, When Bert Mercer died in 1944, the airline was taken over by Fred Lucas, a man who shared mercer's pioneering spirit. Under Lucas s leadership the newly formed West Coast Airways saw Another decade of profitable returns. But in the following decade, times changed fast. Helicopters were soon found to be ideal machines for the Coast terrain, and quickly took over the vast majority of the local air transport business.
habitable and potentially rich
B. About 4,000 years ago, Asian sailors introduced dingoes to Australia. Throughout the ensuing millennia, these descendants of the wolf spread across the continent and, as the Tasmanian tiger disappeared completely from Australia, dingoes became Australia's top predators. As agricultural development took place, the European settler found that they could not safely keep their livestock where dingoes roamed. So began one of the most sustained efforts at pest control in Australia's history. Over the last 150 years, dingoes have been shot and poisoned, and fences have been used in attempts to keep them away from livestock. But at the same time, as the European settlers tried to eliminate one native pest from Australia, they introduced more of their own.
C. In 1860, the rabbit was unleashed on Australia by a wealthy landowner, and by 1980, rabbits had covered most of the mainland. Rabbits provided a huge prey base for two other introduced species: the feral (wild) cat and red fox. The interaction between foxes, cats and rabbits is a huge problem for native mammals. In good years, rabbit numbers increase dramatically, and fox and cat populations grow quickly in response to the abundance of this prey. When bad seasons follow, rabbit numbers are significantly reduced - and the dwindling but still large fox and cat populations are left with little to eat besides native mammals.
D. Australian mammals generally reproduce much more slowly than rabbits, cats and foxes - an adaptation to prevent overpopulation in the arid environment, where food can be scarce and unreliable - and populations decline because they can't grow fast enough to replace animals killed by the predators. Johnson says dingoes are the solution to this problem because they keep cat and fox populations under control. Besides regularly eating the smaller predators, dingoes will kill them simply to lessen competition. Dingo packs live in large, stable territories and generally have only one fertile female, which limits their rate of increase. In the 4,000 years that dingoes have been in Australia, they have contributed to few, if any, extinctions, Johnson says.
E. Reaching out from a desolate spot where three states meet, for 2,500 km in either direction, is the world's longest fence, two metres high and stretching from the coast in Queensland to the Great Australian Bight in South Australia; it is there to keep dingoes out of southeast Australia. Though it has been only partly successful in excluding dingoes from the southeast, the fence separates the main types of livestock found in Australia. To the northwest of the fence, cattle predominate; to the southeast, sheep fill the landscape. In fact, Australia is a land dominated by these animals - 25 million cattle, 100 million sheep and just over 20 million people.
F. While there is no argument that dingoes will prey on sheep if given the chance, they don't hunt cattle once the calves are much past two or three weeks old, according to McKechnie. And a study in Queensland suggests that dingoes don't even prey heavily on the newborn calves unless their staple prey disappears due to deteriorating conditions like drought. This study, co-authored by Lee Allen of the Robert Wicks Research Centre in Queensland, suggests that the aggressive baiting programs used against dingoes may actually be counterproductive for graziers. When dingoes are removed from an area by baiting, the area is recolonised by younger, more solitary dingoes. These animals aren't capable of going after large prey like kangaroos, so they turn to calves. In their study, some of the highest rates of calf predation occurred in areas that had been baited.
G. Mark Clifford, general manager of a firm that manages over 200,000 head of cattle, is not convinced by Allen's assertion. Clifford says, "It's obvious if we drop or loosen control on dingoes, we are going to lose more calves." He doesn't believe that dingoes will go after kangaroos when calves are around. Nor is he persuaded of dingoes' supposed ecological benefits, saying he is not convinced that they manage to catch foxes or cats that often, believing they are more likely to catch small native animals instead.
H. McKechnie agrees that dingoes kill wallabies (small native animals) that compete with his cattle for od, but points out that in parts of Western Australia, there are no foxes, and not very many cats. He doesn't see how relaxing controls on dingoes in his area will improve the ecological balance. Johnson sees a need for a change in philosophy on the part of graziers. "There might be a number of different ways of thinking through dingo management in cattle country," he says. "At the moment, though, that hasn't got through to graziers. There's still just one prescription, and that is to bait as widely as possible."
The debate was preceded by a survey of 40 scientists who were invited to describe how awful our lives would be if the “precautionary principle” had been allowed to prevail in the past. Their response was: no heart surgery or antibiotics, and hardly any drugs at all; no aeroplanes, bicycles or high-voltage power grids; no pasteurisation, pesticides or biotechnology; no quantum mechanics; no wheel; no “discovery” of America. In short, their message was: no risk, no gain.
C. They have absolutely missed the point. The precautionary principle is a subtle idea. It has various forms, but all of them generally include some notion of cost-effectiveness. Thus the point is not simply to ban things that are not known to be absolutely safe. Rather, it says: “Of course you can make no progress without risk. But if there is no obvious gain from taking the risk, then don’t take it.”
D. Clearly, all the technologies listed by the 40 well-chosen savants were innately risky at their inception, as all technologies are. But all of them would have received the green light under the precautionary principle because they all had the potential to offer tremendous benefits – the solutions to very big problems – if only the snags could be overcome.
E. If the precautionary principle had been in place, the scientists tell us, we would not have antibiotics. But of course, we would – if the version of the principle that sensible people now understand had been applied. When penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, infective bacteria were laying waste to the world. Children died from diphtheria and whooping cough, every open-drain brought the threat of typhoid, and any wound could lead to septicaemia and even gangrene.
F. Penicillin was turned into a practical drug during the Second World War when the many pestilences that result from were threatened to kill more people than the bombs. Of course antibiotics were a priority. Of course, the risks, such as they could be perceived, were worth taking.
G. And so with the other items on the scientists’ list: electric light bulbs, blood transfusions. CAT scans, knives, the measles vaccine – the precautionary principle would have prevented all of them, they tell us. But this is just plain wrong. If the precautionary principle had been applied properly, all these creations would have passed muster, because all offered incomparable advantages compared to the risks perceived at the time.
H. Another issue is at stake here. Statistics are not the only concept people use when weighing up risk. Human beings, subtle and evolved creatures that we are, do not survive to three-score years and ten simply by thinking like pocket calculators. A crucial issue is the consumer’s choice. In deciding whether to pursue the development of new technology, the consumer’s right to choose should be considered alongside considerations of risk and benefit. Clearly, skiing is more dangerous than genetically modified tomatoes. But people who ski choose to do so; they do not have skiing thrust upon them by portentous experts of the kind who now feel they have the right to reconstruct our crops. Even with skiing, there is the matter of cost-effectiveness to consider: skiing, I am told, is exhilarating. Where is the exhilaration in GM soya?
I. Indeed, in contrast to all the other items on Spiked’s list, GM crops stand out as an example of a technology whose benefits are far from clear. Some of the risks can at least be defined. But in the present economic climate, the benefits that might accrue from them seem dubious. Promoters of GM crops believe that the future population of the world cannot be fed without them. That is untrue. The crops that really matter are wheat and rice, and there is no GM research in the pipeline that will seriously affect the yield of either. GM is used to make production cheaper and hence more profitable, which is an extremely questionable ambition.
J. The precautionary principle provides the world with a very important safeguard. If it had been in place in the past it might, for example, have prevented insouciant miners from polluting major rivers with mercury. We have come to a sorry pass when scientists, who should above all be dispassionate scholars, feel they should misrepresent such a principle for the purposes of commercial and political propaganda. People at large continue to mistrust science and the high technologies it produces partly because they doubt the wisdom of scientists. On such evidence as this, these doubts are fully justified.
