IELTS Mock Test Vol 12 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

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IELTS Mock Test Vol 12 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 1

Cork
The material we call cork is simply the thick outer bark of the cork oak, Quercus velaris. Light and springy, it repels water, resists heat and flame, and serves an enormous variety of uses. People have relied on it for thousands of years: Phoenician traders pressed slabs of it into their storage jars to keep the contents dry, while later Mediterranean peoples shaped it into everything from net floats to shoe soles.

The tree that yields it is no less extraordinary. A cork oak's bark can reach thirty centimetres in depth, and, wrapping the trunk and branches like a heavy coat, it holds the interior at a steady eighteen degrees Celsius whatever the season. This protective layer most likely evolved to shield the tree from forest fires, and it owes its qualities to an unusual cellular make-up – close to sixty million tiny cells in every cubic centimetre – that no laboratory has so far managed to reproduce. Each of those cells is packed with gas rather than liquid, which lets cork float so readily. The same structure lends it a springiness: crush a piece, release it, and it recovers its original shape at once.

A scattering of warm-climate countries is home to the cork oak – among them Algeria, Tunisia, Sardinia, southern France and parts of Anatolia. What the tree asks for is a mild, sunny setting whose yearly rainfall runs to at least five hundred millimetres yet stays below nine hundred. Poor ground suits it well; much as grape vines do, it drives its roots deep in the hunt for water and nourishment. Because every one of these conditions is met in the Sendra highlands of southern Sardinia, that district had become the world's foremost source of cork by the 1920s, and even now supplies close to forty-five percent of the global total.

The cork forests tend to stay in family hands, and a good many of these enterprises – like a good many of the trees – have stood for well over a century and a half. If anything is learned from cork-growing, it is patience. Thirty years will pass before a newly planted sapling gives its first harvest, and, once a tree is in production, no fewer than nine years must separate one stripping from the next. Cork of the very highest grade asks longer still – another two decades or so. Even the choice of day matters: should the bark be taken when the weather has turned cold, or when the air hangs damp, the tree is left the worse for it.

Harvesting is skilled work of a very particular sort. Because no machine has ever been devised for stripping the bark, the task falls to teams of seasoned labourers. Small, sharp axes in hand, they cut downward through the bark and then prise it off in the largest pieces they can lift; the ablest of them can free a single curved slab that runs the whole length of the trunk, from close to the ground up to the lowest branches. For roughly six months the bark is left to dry in the open, after which it travels to the factories to be boiled – a step that kills off any insects still lodged within. Around seventy percent of what emerges becomes the familiar bottle stopper, while most of the rest is claimed by the building trade, serving as board and tiles that deaden heat and noise, or granules stirred into concrete.

Cork's near-total grip on the bottle-stopper market has slipped in recent times, the worry being what it can do to whatever a bottle holds. Behind the trouble lies a compound the trade calls trichlorocresyl ether, which appears when plant phenols, chlorine and mould react with one another. Quantities almost too small to picture – no more than five parts in a trillion – are already enough to ruin the flavour of the drink inside. Little by little, then, producers have shifted first to plastic stoppers and, more lately, to aluminium screw caps. Alternatives of this kind are inexpensive to manufacture, and a screw cap, at least, is a good deal simpler for the buyer to use.

For all that, a great deal can still be said for the classic cork stopper. Its familiar look sits easily alongside the reputation of the premium products it has long been tied to. More telling still, cork is a renewable material, one that can be reused without the slightest trouble. The forests, besides, are an asset in themselves: they sustain the local wildlife and hold erosion in check across the districts where they grow. And so, with public attention now fixed firmly on the environment, the prospects for this age-old material look bright once more.

❓ Câu hỏi passage 1

In ancient times, cork was used to protect stored goods from damp.

Scientists have produced a man-made material that copies the way cork's cells are arranged.

Cork oaks require more rainfall than vines do.

Bark should be removed from the tree only in dry weather.

The bark of cork oaks is now stripped by machine.

Comparison of aluminium screw caps and cork bottle stoppers

Advantages of aluminium screw caps
• leave the 
6.
            
﻿
 of the bottled drink unchanged
• are 7.
            
﻿
 to manufacture
• are 8.
            
﻿
 for the user to handle
﻿
Advantages of cork bottle stoppers
• suit the 
9.
            
﻿
 of high-quality products
• made from a 10.
            
﻿
 material
• can be 11.
            
﻿
 with ease
• cork forests support local 12.
            
﻿

• cork forests help prevent 13.
            
﻿
﻿

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1

True

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Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 2

COLLECTING AS A HOBBY
Few human pursuits are as diverse as collecting, and few so fascinate those of us who study the mind. A surprising number have acquired their own technical label: the numismatist gathers coins, the phillumenist saves matchbox labels, and the tegestologist accumulates beer mats. Building up hundreds, even thousands, of such objects — old keys, bus tickets, whatever they are — consumes time, energy and money that could, on the face of it, be far better spent. Yet collectors number in the millions worldwide. What lies behind the habit?

For some, the point of collecting is profit, a motivation we might call instrumental — the collection is a means towards an end rather than an end in itself. Such collectors hunt out, say, pieces of furniture that can be picked up cheaply and later resold at a healthy margin. Yet a psychological factor is often present too, since paying little and selling for much can give the collector a genuine feeling of pride. Because online marketplaces have made selling so straightforward, the ranks of these collectors keep swelling.

Others take up collecting largely for the sociable side of it, going along to gatherings of fellow enthusiasts where they swap knowledge about particular items. In much the same way that signing up for a choir or a sports club does, this puts them in regular companionship with people who share their enthusiasm.

A further driving force is the wish to find something out of the ordinary — a specific treasure such as a first edition of a particular novel. For some, the whole of a lifetime may be devoted to a single quest of this kind. In psychological terms, chasing it can lend purpose to an existence that would otherwise strike the person as meaningless. The risk, though, is that should they finally find the very thing chased for so long, the moment brings not elation but a strange hollowness, the driving goal having suddenly vanished.

Take the collecting of coins: a further motive for it — or possibly a consequence — lies in how instructive it can be. A coin cabinet is a doorway onto foreign lands, and onto the rulers, emblems and creatures depicted on the currency of each. In a comparable way, nineteenth-century naturalists gathered shells, insects and minerals from every corner of the world, and the collections they assembled yielded an enormous store of understanding about the natural world. Strip those away and our understanding today would be far poorer.

One pastime hugely popular in earlier decades, and still practised today if less widely, is planespotting, which has always drawn men and boys in particular. The planespotter sets out to observe every aircraft of a given type, working from published registers that list each one and marking it off the moment it is spotted. Sightings are traded among enthusiasts, nowadays usually through a phone app, so they can plan where to catch a particular machine. One side effect is that many end up remarkably well informed about airline operations and the technical details separating one model of aircraft from another.

In much the same fashion, those who collect model soldiers often move past the mere expansion of their collection to become intrigued by how such figures are manufactured, and from what. The materials have shifted over time: the carved wood of early modern Europe gave way to the tin and lead of subsequent centuries, and these in turn to the moulded plastics from which today's figures are made. Some collectors are drawn, too, into examining what these miniatures reveal about the things children were thought to enjoy, or were supposed to enjoy.

Learning from the hobby is not, though, every collector's aim, which points to what we might term a psychological driver: the craving for a sense of control, quite possibly a means of managing one's own insecurity. Coin collectors, for instance, lay out their pieces in trays with great care, ordering them by familiar conventions — by country of issue, say, or by what each design portrays, whether monarchs, birds or landmarks.

A further reason, whether the collector is aware of it or not, has to do with asserting one's individuality. A person who settles on something as improbable as barbed wire may in effect be signalling a conviction that they themselves are out of the ordinary. However unlikely it sounds, at least one museum devoted entirely to barbed wire exists, and it began as a single enthusiast's private hoard.

Every hobby, naturally, brings enjoyment, but what sets collecting apart is usually passion — to call it mere pleasure would understate it considerably. Collecting can absorb a person more completely than almost any other pastime, and it can deliver a powerful sense of personal fulfilment. Those who do not collect may regard it as odd, though quite harmless; seen in the right light, however, it has much to recommend it.

❓ Câu hỏi passage 2

﻿

According to the writer, 
            
﻿
 is one type of item that people collect in order to sell on at a profit.

﻿

Someone who buys low and sells high may feel a degree of 
            
﻿
 as a result.

﻿

Clubs give members the chance to pass on 
            
﻿
 concerning the items they collect.

﻿

A club can supply the collector with 
            
﻿
, linking them to others of like mind.

﻿

For some people, hunting for a single special object turns into the 
            
﻿
 of an entire life.

﻿

Pursuing a specific object can stop a person's life from seeming utterly 
            
﻿
 to them.

﻿

Because it teaches people about various nations, collecting coins can be 
            
﻿
.

﻿

            
﻿
 is a pursuit followed mainly by males.

The earliest European model soldiers were typically made from metal.

The materials used for model soldiers were more expensive in the past than they are now.

For some people, keeping a collection in careful order helps them cope with feelings of insecurity.

A person who collects strange objects may want to be regarded as unusual themselves.

For most collectors, the strongest feeling involved is simply enjoyment.

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2

furniture

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Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 3

What's the purpose of gaining knowledge?
A
A. 'Let this college open its doors to anyone who wishes to study whatever subject they choose.' Those words, attributed to Bartholomew Vance, founder of Aldermoor College, could just as easily describe the very different American university where I now teach philosophy. Here a young person can train for a career in hotel management, civil engineering, landscape design, bookkeeping, jazz performance, policing — the list goes on. And yet what would Vance, or my own institution's founders, have made of a class we genuinely offer, listed in the catalogue as 'Hacking for Profit'? Undergraduates who meet the entry requirements are free to enrol in it through our degree in cybersecurity.
B
B. The class is meant, of course, for would-be security analysts, who master every trick of the trade so as to work out whether a network was breached on purpose, pin down who did it, and build the chain of proof a court needs before it can hand down a conviction. Yet wouldn't the same class suit an aspiring criminal hacker just as well? I say this not to attack degree programmes in cybersecurity, which I regard as thoroughly welcome — a sign that this occupation, like many others, is steadily becoming more professional. Even so, the very person paid to defend a system is sometimes the one who attacks it. Dishonesty and crime, aided rather than hindered by a university education, can work their way into every corner of public and commercial life.
C
C. This came home to me again when a colleague asked me to address her marketing students — marketing being yet another of the degrees on offer here — because, as a philosopher, I could offer the ethical angle she valued. I might have tackled the invitation in any number of ways, but the course's own name, 'Principles of Marketing', gave me my opening, and I put a question to the room: is marketing actually principled? A discipline, after all, can be governed by principles in the narrow sense — a settled body of rules, as chess or football is — while being nothing of the sort in the moral sense. To most of the students the answer looked self-evident, and it was no: one need only consider the shameless ways in which every product imaginable gets sold to see that marketing is hardly conducted on ethical lines.
D
D. But is it really so self-evident? I floated a proposal that, in light of all the evidence, may sound faintly absurd: that marketing is, by definition, principled. It came from the philosopher Viktor Halstrom, who held that every branch of knowledge is made up of two things — an end, meaning its purpose, and a means of reaching it.
E
E. Take those two ideas, means and end, and hold them up against marketing. Students enrol on the course so as to learn to market well — but with what purpose in view? Two broad answers tend to surface. The first treats the matter as plain: marketing exists to sell goods and to generate money. The second shrugs the question off as immaterial, on the grounds that everyone arrives with private aims of their own, aims that may have nothing to do with marketing expertise in itself. My own view — and, I suspect, Halstrom's — is that both answers miss just how tightly the end bears on the means. Any discipline, any professional calling, is constituted by its means together with its end, so that the two alike call for examination. It is not enough for students to learn how to bring about some goal X; they must also ask what X is.
F
F. Here is where 'Hacking for Profit' comes fully into its own. The course, on the face of it, deals only in means — the techniques for uncovering and prosecuting wrongdoing — and the end is simply presumed to be good, ethically speaking. Whenever I press cybersecurity students to spell out that end, the purpose behind their field, they arrive sooner or later at some phrase like 'keeping society safe and secure', which seems fair enough. And yet, as we have seen, an identical command of the means can be turned to a far less honourable end — private gain won through damaging, dangerous, reckless acts. That we decline to call security work; we keep a different word for it: cracking. In the same way, to deploy the 'principles of marketing' without principle is not to be marketing at all; here too a separate word waits: fraud. Halstrom offers the case of a healer and a poisoner who draw on one and the same knowledge to opposite ends: the first, we say, practises medicine; the second, murder.

❓ Câu hỏi passage 3

List of Headings

Programmes that demand serious dedication

Separate words for contrasting results

III

A course name that can be read two ways

How a course might draw unsuitable applicants

An unexpected name for a course

Why two elements matter equally

VII

Using an idea in a surprising setting

VIII

How study can pay off financially

Paragraph A

Paragraph B

Paragraph C

Paragraph D

Paragraph E

Paragraph F

The 'Hacking for Profit' course

This course is aimed at undergraduates whose field of study is ﻿. Those who take it are expected to go on to work as ﻿ dealing with network attacks. It trains them to recognise when hacking has occurred and to track down ﻿ that a crime was intended, paving the way for a ﻿ once the case reaches court.

The writer approves of the way fields such as cybersecurity are maturing into recognised professions.

A person hoping to carry out illegal intrusions would gain nothing useful from the course.

The writer believes that philosophy ought to be a compulsory component of every degree.

When asked, the students gave a precise and detailed account of what their field is ultimately for.

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3

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