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25 September 2021 Real Exam Reading Multitasking Debate Can you do them at the same time? A.Talking on the phone while driving isn’t the only situation where we’re worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking, are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time. B.The problem, according to Rene Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index fing...

  THE PEARL A The pearl has always had a special status in the rich and powerful all through the history. For instance, women from ancient Rome went to bed with pearls on them, so that they could remind themselves how wealthy they were after waking up. Pearls used to have more commercial value than diamonds until jewellers learnt to cut gems. In the eastern countries like Persia, ground pearl powders could be used as a medicine to cure anything including heart diseases and epilepsy. B Pearls can generally be divided into three categories: natural, cultured and imitation. When an irritant (such as a grain of sand) gets. inside a certain type of oyster, mussel, or clam, the mollusc will secrete a fluid as a means of defence to coat the irritant. Gradually, layers are accumulated around the irritant until a lustrous natural pearl is formed. C A cultured pearl undergoes the same process. There is only one difference between cultured pearls and natural ones: in cultured pearls, the irri...

11 September 2021 Actual Exam Reading passage Can We Hold Back the Flood? A LAST winter’s floods on the rivers of central Europe were among the worst since the Middle Ages, and as winter storms return, the spectre of floods is returning too. Just weeks ago, the river Rhône is south-east France burst its banks, driving 15,000 people from their homes, and worse could be on the way. Traditionally, river engineers have gone for Plan A: get rid of the water fast, draining it off the land and down to the sea in tall-sides rivers re-engineered as high-performance drains. But however big they dig city drains, however wide and straight they make the rivers, and however high they build the banks, the floods keep coming back to haunt them, from the Mississippi to the Danube. And when the floods come, they seem to be worse than ever. B No wonder engineers are turning to Plan B: sap the water’s destructive strength by dispersing it into fields, forgotten lakes, flood plains and aquifers. Back in th...

11 September Ielts Exam Reading passage The Climate Changers The romantic notion that early humans lived in harmony with their environment has taken quite a battering lately. Modem humans may have started eliminating other species right from the start; our ancestors stand accused of wiping out mega fauna – from giant flightless birds in Australia to mammoths in Asia and the ground sloth of North America – as they spread across the planet. Even so, by around 6,000 years ago there were only about 12 million people on earth – less than a quarter of the current population of Great Britain. That’s a far cry from today’s 6.6 billion, many of us guzzling fossil fuels, churning out greenhouse gases and messing with our planet’s climate like there’s no tomorrow. So it may seem far-fetched to suggest that  humans have been causing global warming ever since our ancestors started burning and cutting forests to make way for fields at least 7,000 years ago. Yet that’s the view of retired climate...