[VOL 2] IELTS Reading Test 2

READING PASSAGE 1

Read the text and answer questions 1-13.

BONDI

Bondi is Australia’s most famous beach, but how did this come about?

Australians have not always valued Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Beaches attracted little attention in the first century of British colonial settlement, when it was the country’s desert interior that stirred the settlers’ imagination. The visual image of Australia was based on stories of explorers searching in the dry red centre for an inland sea, of men driving cattle vast distances, or shearing sheep in hot dusty sheds. It was a cultural landscape developed in hardship and tragedy.

Before the British settlement, there had been a strong traditional connection to the coast among Aboriginal people, the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, and evidence of this connection can still be seen. In 1788 Governor Phillip, who established the first British settlement on the eastern coast of Australia, estimated that there were approximately 1500 Aboriginal people living within a 10-mile radius of Sydney Harbour. But by the 1820s the local Aboriginal population had largely disappeared as a result of contact with the diseases brought by the settlers. In the minds of the new settlers, Aboriginal culture would come to be predominantly associated with the inland desert. The cultural associations that formed around Australia’s beach landscape would, in turn, be almost entirely European in nature. Compared with the 'ancient' and bicultural mythology of Australia’s interior, its beach culture would be depicted as being wholly modern and Western.

At the end of the 19th century, the beach emerged in art and literature as an alternative cultural landscape to the mythology of the interior. The two settings were similar in that they shared an idea of purity because of their association with nature, but otherwise they represented vastly different qualities. The interior of the country represented hard work and suffering, while the coast evoked images of health, leisure and egalitarianism.

In Britain, the association of beaches with health received royal blessing in 1783 when a prominent member of the royal family attended the health spas at Brighton Beach on the English coast, and built a pavilion there. With its entertainment, hotels and weekend villas, Brighton became the model for beaches throughout Britain’s colonies. Reflecting the English resort’s influence, seven Sydney beach suburbs still have a Brighton Street. Sydney’s beach suburbs, rising to prominence in the late 19th century, shared Brighton’s association with health. The perception of the city’s beaches as places of purity and wellbeing was strengthened by contrast with the increasingly polluted city centre.

By the end of the 19th century, Sydney’s beaches had begun to differ in their socio-economic characteristics. The beach in the suburb of Coogee was the first ocean beach to become accessible by tram from the city. Promoted as a garden suburb, Coogee became a recreational meeting place for the city’s middle class. The suburb of Manly, with its beach and esplanade, copied the British resort model, and attracted the city’s wealthy class living in the northern suburbs as well as holiday-makers from farms in the countryside.

The suburb of Bondi was developed after Coogee and Manly and took on a character distinct from the city’s other beach suburbs. With the extension of the tramline to Bondi in the 1890s, a number of substantial properties were built there. Property developers, expecting continued middle-class development, subdivided the area into house-sized plots. However, a sudden demand for housing in the first decade of the 20th century saw the plans for houses put aside, and investors built blocks of flats instead. A treeless plain of red-roofed apartments began to spread its way across Bondi. Built with cheap local bricks, the size and quality of the apartments were generally more modest than those in neighbouring suburbs, and quickly attracted a population of rent-paying, working-class tenants.

With tram access extended all the way to the beach, Bondi also became the most accessible ocean beach to people living in the inner city, who were mostly working class. The pleasures of the sun, sea and surf were not only for the wealthy, but free to all. The Australian notion of beaches as places of social equality became established, and Bondi exemplified this precisely.

Bondi’s identity as a largely working-class suburb began to change in the 1950s. The suburb and its beach first came to international attention in 1954 when Queen Elizabeth of England and her husband Prince Philip attended a surf carnival there. Since then, Bondi has become one of Sydney’s most used sites for large-scale public events. The film industry quickly built on the fame that Bondi beach acquired as a result of the surf carnival, and since then it has been the location of many Australian films. With the expanding use of Bondi as a media setting, the suburb became home to a community of artists as well as film and television workers. Since the 1970s Bondi has become the almost inevitable backdrop for any artistic or commercial project in Sydney that requires a beach setting. Bondi is now famous simply for being famous.

In the preparations for the 2000 Olympic Games, Bondi was nominated to host the 10,000-seat beach volleyball stadium. Some people in the Bondi community did not support the proposal because of concerns for the environment, but the opposition was dismissed by the Olympics Organising Committee. There were good practical reasons for the Committee to support Bondi’s hosting of the event, but the main reason the Committee insisted the stadium be built there was the international expectation that Bondi, as Australia’s best known beach, would be the stadium’s scenic backdrop.

READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

THE ECONOMIC EFFECT OF CLIMATE

Latitude is crucial to a nation’s strength, says Anjana Ahuja

Paragraph A

Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when an idea struck him. ‘There was this anecdote about the yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793,’ Masters recalls. ‘This epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came.’ The sub-zero temperatures froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover. If weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the historical fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring economic mysteries of all – why are almost all the wealthy, industrialised nations to be found where the climate is cooler?

Paragraph B

After two years of research, he thinks that he has found a piece of the puzzle. Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in Indiana, and Margaret McMillan at Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are among the factors that distinguish rich nations from poor ones. Their study is published this month in the Journal of Economic Growth. The pair speculate that cold snaps have two main benefits - they freeze pests that would otherwise destroy crops, and also freeze organisms, such as those carried by mosquitoes, that carry disease. The result is agricultural abundance and a big workforce.

Paragraph C

The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for countries, the second was climate data provided by the University of East Anglia. They found a curious tally between the sets. Countries having five or more frosty days in the winter months are uniformly rich; those with fewer than five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day figure is important: it could be the minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. To illustrate this, Masters notes: ‘Finland is a small country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a small country that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps climate has something to do with that.’

Paragraph D

Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations, citing anthropological, climatic and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the most affluent. Jared Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in his book Guns, Germs and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa and the Americas are aligned north-south. So in Europe crops could move quickly across latitudes because climates are similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, extended quickly from the Middle East into Europe; it took twice as long for it to get from Mexico to what is now the eastern United States. This easy movement along similar latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant a faster dissemination of other technologies, such as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates.

Paragraph E

There are exceptions to the ‘cold equals rich’ argument. There are well-heeled tropical countries such as Singapore, a result of its superior trading position. Likewise, not all European countries are moneyed. Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor - the wealth of nations is too complicated to be attributable to just one factor. Climate, he feels, somehow combines with other factors - such as the presence of institutions, including governments, and access to trading routes - to determine whether a country will do well.

Paragraph F

In the past, Masters says, economists thought that institutions had the biggest effect on the economy, because they brought order to a country in the form of, for example, laws and property rights. With order, so the thinking went, came affluence. ‘But there are some problems that even countries with institutions have not been able to get around,’ he says. ‘My feeling is that, as countries get richer, they get better institutions. And the accumulation of wealth and improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a favourable environment, including climate.’

Paragraph G

This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and destined to remain penniless. Instead of aid being geared towards improving administrative systems, it should be spent on technology to improve agriculture and to combat disease. Masters cites one example: 'There are regions in India that have been provided with irrigation - agricultural productivity has gone up and there has been an improvement in health.’ Supplying vaccines against tropical diseases and developing crop varieties that can grow in the tropics would break the poverty cycle.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

A CLOSER EXAMINATION OF A STUDY ON VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL MESSAGES

A study of non-verbal communication carried out in 1967 continues to be widely quoted today. David Lapakko looks at limitations in the original study.

Description of the Study

The findings of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages in communication by Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues at UCLA* in 1967 have been quoted so frequently that they are now often regarded as a self-evident truth.

In the first experiment, subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the word ‘maybe’ in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking. The subjects were then shown photos of female faces expressing the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voice and the photos. It was found that the photos got more accurate responses than the voices. In the second experiment, subjects listened to nine recorded words spoken in different tones of voice. Three words had positive meanings (e.g. honey), three were neutral (e.g. oh) and three were negative (e.g. terrible). Again, the subjects had to guess the speaker's emotions. It was found that tone of voice carried more meaning than the individual words. From these experiments the researchers concluded that 7% of our feeling towards a speaker is based on the actual words they use, 38% on their tone of voice, and 55% on their body language (e.g. facial expression).

Methodological Issues

However, a closer look at the study reveals several limitations. The first is that the entire study involved only 62 subjects. Of these, 25 were used to select the word for the first experiment, while the key issue - comparing verbal and non-verbal communication - was determined by only the 37 remaining subjects. All were female undergraduates who participated as part of their introductory psychology course, and their ages and academic qualifications seem remarkably uniform. Thus, the findings may simply be a product of the nature of the sample.

Critics have also pointed out that the 7-38-55 formula is flawed since it was pieced together from two different experiments, neither of which involved all three channels (verbal, vocal, and facial). In addition, in the first experiment the single word maybe was used throughout so it was impossible for the effects of changes in verbal input to be assessed. The researchers intentionally used a ‘neutral’ word so naturally the subjects found little meaning there. Clearly, such a methodology lacks validity. In the real world, people communicate in a particular context and speak in phrases and full-blown sentences, making extensive use of the multi-faceted vehicle of language.

My concern is that interpretations of this study have gained such prominence in our pedagogical literature. This 7-38-55 formula appears in many basic texts, used for training in public speaking, interpersonal communication and organizational communication.

Lessons to consider

Clearly, one appealing aspect of the Mehrabian study is its numerical precision. Communication is a complex phenomenon, but it seems less so when we can rely on these three magical numbers. In contrast to the ambiguities of language, numbers seem to possess exactness. And the popular appeal of the study has given the 7-38-55 formula enormous credibility. There is a certain mystique about non-verbal communication, and the continued references to this research sustain it, encouraging people to believe in the overwhelming importance of the non-verbal message compared with the verbal one. Yet we know that even one ill-chosen word to a colleague or friend can make or break a communicative effort. 'Words do matter,' Bradley (1991), one of the few textbook writers to criticize the Mehrabian study, makes the same point when he observes, ‘If we could communicate 93% of information and attitudes with vocal and facial cues, it would be wasteful to spend time learning a language.’

Mehrabian himself believes his research should not be interpreted to devalue the role of language in communication, saying:

Please remember that alt my findings … dealt with communications of feelings and attitudes … it is absurd to imply or suggest that the verbal portion of all communication constitutes only 7% of the message … anytime we communicate abstract relationships (e.g. x=y – the square of z) clearly 100% of the entire communication is verbal. (Mehrabian, 1995)

To be fair, many textbook writers attempt to be faithful to the context of Mehrabian’s research. For example, Stewart and D’Angelo (1988) write: ‘Mehrabian argues that when we are uncertain about what someone’s feeling, or about how much we like him or her, we rely … only 7% on the words that are spoken.’ Others try to play down the specific percentages, saying that an understanding of the general importance of non-verbal cues is more important. Nonetheless, ether textbook authors simply use the numbers without placing any limits on their meaning.

Conclusion

Since this relatively small study was first published it has achieved an influence far beyond its intended scope. We need to put it into its proper perspective and learn some important lessons from it regarding social science research, communication pedagogy, and the forces which have created widespread misunderstanding about communication.

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UCLA*: University of California at Los Angeles

i. Levels of wealth affected by several other influences besides climate	v. The best use of financial assistance
ii. The failure of vaccination programmes	vi. The inspiration for Masters’s research
iii. The problems experienced by small countries	vii. The advantages of cold weather to people and agriculture
iv. The role of governments in creating wealth	viii. Positive correlations between climate and economy
ix. Reflecting on the traditional view	x. Crop spread in Europe and other continents

A facial expressions	E word meanings
B purposes	F gender differences
C printed words	G feelings
D effects	H characteristics

Notepad

Part 1

Questions 1-6

Questions 7-13

Part 2

Questions 14-20

Questions 21-26

Part 3

Questions 27-30

Questions 31-35

Questions 36-40