IELTS READING

Time: 1 hr
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1.
Ensuring our future food supply
Climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties of seeds we depend on for
food. Luckily, we still have many of the seeds used in the past-but we must take steps to
save them.
Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa in the USA, an 890-acre stretch of rolling
fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed. Everything about
Heritage Farm is in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of intensively farmed fields of
corn and soybean that are typical of modern agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted to
collecting rather than growing seeds. It is home to the Seed Savers Exchange, one of the
largest non-government-owned seed banks in the United States.
In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy was given the seedlings of two plant varieties that her great
grandfather had brought to America from Bavaria in 1870: Grandpa Ott’s morning glory
and his German Pink tomato. Wanting to preserve similar traditional varieties, known as
heirloom plants, Diane and her husband, Kent, decided to establish a place where the
seeds of the past could be kept and traded. The exchange now has more than 13,000
members, and the many thousands of heirloom varieties they have donated are kept in its
walk-in coolers, freezers, and root cellars the seeds of many thousands of heirloom
varieties and, as you walk around an old red barn that is covered in Grandpa Ott’s beautiful
morning glory blossoms, you come across the different vegetables, herbs, and flowers they
have planted there.
"Each year our members list their seeds in this, “Diane Ott Whealy says, handing over a
copy of the Seed Savers Exchange 2010 Yearbook. It is as thick as a big-city telephone
directory, with page after page of exotic beans, garlic, potatoes, peppers, apples, pears,
and plums-each with its own name and personal history. For example, there’s an Estonian
Yellow Cherry tomato, which was brought to the seed bank by “an elderly Russian lady”
who lived in Tallinn, and a Persian Star garlic from “a bazaar in Samarkand. There’s also a
bean donated by archaeologists searching for pygmy elephant fossils in New Mexico.
Heirloom vegetables have become fashionable in the United States and Europe over the
past decade, prized by a food movement that emphasizes eating locally and preserving the
flavor and uniqueness of heirloom varieties. Found mostly in farmers' markets and
boutique groceries, heirloom varieties have been squeezed out of supermarkets in favor of
modern single-variety fruits and vegetables bred to ship well and have a uniform

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appearance, not to enhance flavor. But the movement to preserve heirloom varieties goes
way beyond the current interest in North America and Europe in tasty, locally grown food.
It’s also a campaign to protect the world’s future food supply. Most people in the well-fed
world give little thought to where their food comes from or how it’s grown. They wander
through well-stocked supermarkets without realizing that there may be problem ahead.
We’ve been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rainforests. Very
little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel decline in the diversity of the
foods we eat.
Food variety extinction is happening all over the world - and it's happening fast. In the
United States an estimated 90 percent of historic fruit and vegetable varieties are no longer
grown. Of the 7,000 different apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a
hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only
about a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just
a hundred years ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that in total we have lost more
than 50 percent of the world's food varieties over the past century.
Why is this a problem? Because if disease or future climate change affects one of the
handful of plants, we've come to depend on to feed our growing planet, we might
desperately need one of those varieties we've let become extinct. The loss of the world's
cereal diversity is a particular cause for concern. A fungus called Ug99, which was first
identified in Uganda in 1999, is spreading across the world's wheat crops. From Uganda it
moved to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. By 2007 it had jumped the Persian Gulf
into Iran. Scientists predict that the fungus will soon make its way into India and Pakistan,
then spread to Russia and China, and eventually the USA.
Roughly 90 percent of the world's wheat has no defense against this particular fungus. If it
reached the USA, an estimated one billion dollars' worth of crops would be at risk.
Scientists believe that in Asia and Africa alone, the portion currently in danger could leave
one billion people without their primary food source. A famine with significant humanitarian
consequences could follow, according to Rick Ward of Cornell University.
The population of the world is expected to reach nine billion by 2045. Some experts say
we’ll need to double our food production to keep up with this growth. Given the added
challenge of climate change and disease, it is becoming ever more urgent to find ways to
increase food yield. The world has become increasingly dependent upon a technology-
driven, one-size-fits-all approach to food supply. Yet the best hope for securing our food's
future may depend on our ability to preserve the locally cultivated foods of the past.

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Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write.
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1. Heritage Farm is different from most other nearby farms.

2. Most nongovernment-owned seed banks are bigger than Seed Savers Exchange.
3. Diane Ott Whealy's grandfather taught her a lot about seed varieties.
4. The seeds people give to the Seed Savers Exchange are stored outdoors.
5. Diane and her husband choose which heirloom seeds to grow on Heritage Farm.
6. The seeds are listed in alphabetical order in The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook.
7. The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook describes how each seed was obtained.

Questions 8-13
Complete the notes below.
Write ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage 1 for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

The food we grow and eat

Supermarkets

 sell fruit and vegetables that transport well.

 want fruit and vegetables to be standard in their 8………………………….

Public awareness

 while people know about plants disappearing from 9…………………………. very few
know about the decline in fruit and vegetable varieties.

Extinction of food varieties

 less than 100 of the types of 10…………………………. once available in the USA
are still grown.
 over 11…………………………. of food varieties around the world have disappeared
in the last 100 years.

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Current problems in food production

 a particular fungus is attacking wheat in various countries.

 Rick Ward believes the threat to food supplies in Asia and Africa might lead to
a 12………………………….

Food production in the future

 climate change and disease may put pressure on food production.

 twice the amount of food may be needed because of
an increase in 13………………………….

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 on the following pages.

The rise of the agribots

The use of robots and automation in the farming industry.
The next time you stand at the supermarket checkout, spare a thought for the farmers who
helped fill your shopping basket as life is hard for them right now. This, in turn, inevitably
means bigger grocery bills for consumers, and greater hardship for the millions in countries
where food shortages are a matter of life and death. Worse, studies suggest that the world
will need twice as much food by 2050. Yet while farmers must squeeze more out of the
land, they must also address the necessity of reducing their impact on the soil, waterways
and atmosphere. All this means rethinking how agriculture is practiced, and taking
automation to a whole new level. On the new model farms of the future, precision will be
key. Why does a whole field with chemicals if you can spray only where they are needed?
Each plant could get exactly the right amount of everything, no more or less, an approach
that could slash chemical use and improve yields in one move. But this is easier said than
done; the largest farms in Europe and the U.S. can cover thousands of acres. That’s why
automation is key to precision farming. Specifically, say agricultural engineers, precision
farming needs robot farmers. One day, we might see fields with ‘agribots’ (agricultural
robots) that can identify individual seedlings and encourage them along with drops of
fertilizer. Other machines would distinguish problem weeds from crops and eliminate them
with shots from high-power lasers or a microdot of pesticide. These machines will also be

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able to identify and harvest all kinds of vegetables. More than a century of mechanization
has already turned farming into an industrial-scale activity in much of the world, with farms
that grow cereals being the most heavily automated. But a variety of other crops, including
oranges and tomatoes destined to become processed foods, are also picked mechanically,
albeit to a slightly lesser extent. Yet the next wave of autonomous farm machinery is
already at work. You probably haven’t even noticed, for these robots are disguised as
tractors. Many are self-steering, use GPS to cross a field, and can even ‘talk’ to their
implements – a plough or sprayer, for example. And the implements can talk back, telling
the tractor that it’s going too fast or needs to move to the left. This kind of communication
is also being developed in other farm vehicles. A new system allows a combine harvester,
say, to send a call over to a tractor- trailer so the driver can unload the grain as and when
necessary. However, when fully autonomous systems take to the field, they’ll look nothing
like tractors. With their enormous size and weight, today’s farm machines have significant
downsides: they compact the soil, reducing porosity and killing beneficial life, meaning
crops don’t grow so well. Simon Blackmore, who researches agricultural technology at
Harper Adams University College in England believes that fleets of lightweight autonomous
robots have the potential to solve this problem and that replacing brute force with precision
is key. ‘A seed only needs one cubic centimeter of soil to grow. If we cultivate just that we
only put tiny amounts of energy in and the plants still grow nicely.’ There is another reason
why automation may be the way forward according to Eldert van Henten, a robotics
researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. ‘While the population is growing
and needs to be fed, a rapidly shrinking number of people are willing to work in agriculture,’
he points out. Other researchers such as Linda Calvin, an economist at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, and Philip Martin at the University of California, Davis, have
studied trends in mechanization to predict how US farms might fare. Calvin and Martin
have observed how rising employment costs have led to the adoption of labour-saving
farm technology in the past, citing the raisin industry as an example. In 2000, a bumper
harvest crashed prices and, with profits squeezed, farmers looked for a solution. With
labour one of their biggest costs – 42 percent of production expenses on U.S. farms, on
average – they started using a mechanical harvester adapted from a machine used by
wine makers. By 2007, almost half of California’s raisins were mechanically harvested and
a labour force once numbering 50,000 had shrunk to 30,000. As well as having an impact

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on the job market, the widespread adoption of agribots might bring changes at the
supermarket. Lewis Holloway, who studies agriculture at the University of Hull, UK, says
that robotic milking is likely to influence the genetics of dairy herds as farmers opt for
‘robot-friendly’ cows, with udder shape, and even attitudes, suited to automated milking.
Similarly, he says, it’s conceivable that agribots could influence what fruit or vegetable
varieties get to the shops, since farmers may prefer to grow those with, say, leaf shapes
that are easier for their robots to discriminate from weeds. Almost inevitably, these
machines will eventually alter the landscape, too. The real tipping point for robot agriculture
will come when farms are being designed with agribots in mind, says Salah Sukkarieh, a
robotics researcher at the Australian Center for Field Robotics, Sydney. This could mean a
return to smaller fields, with crops planted in grids rather than rows and fruit trees pruned
into two-dimensional shapes to make harvesting easier. This alien terrain tended by robots
is still a while away, he says ‘but it will happen.’

Questions 14-17
Do the following statements agree with the claims the writer in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet write.
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if the is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

14. Governments should do more to ensure that food is generally affordable.

15. Farmers need to reduce the harm they do to the environment.
16. In the future, farmers are likely to increase their dependency on chemicals.
17. Farms in Europe and the US may find it hard to adapt to precision farming.

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Questions 18-21
Complete the sentences below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage 2 for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.

18. In the future, agribots will provide …………………………. to young plants.

19. Some machines will use chemicals or ……………………………... to get rid of
unwanted plants.
20. It is the production of………………………………which currently uses most machinery
on farms.
21. ………………………………. between machines such as tractors is making farming
more efficient.

Questions 22-26
Look at the following researchers (Questions 22-26) and the list of statements below.

Match each researcher with the correct statement A-H.

Write the correct letter, A-H in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.

List of Findings
A. The use of automation might impact on the development of particular animal and plant species.
B. We need to consider the effect on employment that increased automation will have.
C. We need machines of the future to be exact, not more powerful.
D. As farming becomes more automated the appearance of farmland will change.
E. New machinery may require more investment than certain farmers can afford.
F. There is a shortage of employees in the farming industry.
G. There are limits to the environmental benefits of automation.
H. Economic factors are often the driving force behind the development of machinery.

22. Simon Blackmore……………………………

23. Eldert van Henten……………………………
24. Linda Calvin and Philip Martin………………
25. Lewis Holloway……………………………….
26. Salah Sukkarieh………………………………

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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

IS PHOTOGRAPHY ART?
This may seem a pointless question today. Surrounded as we are by thousands of
photographs, most of us take for granted that, in addition to supplying information and
seducing customers, camera images also serve as decoration, afford spiritual enrichment,
and provide significant insights into the passing scene. But in the decades following the
discovery of photography, this question reflected the search for ways to fit the mechanical
medium into the traditional schemes of artistic expression.
The much-publicized pronouncement by painter Paul Delaroche that the daguerreotype*
signalled the end of painting is perplexing because this clever artist also forecast the
usefulness of the medium for graphic artists in a letter written in 1839. Nevertheless, it is
symptomatic of the swing between the outright rejection and qualified acceptance of the
medium that was fairly typical of the artistic establishment. Discussion of the role of
photography in art was especially spirited in France, where the internal policies of the time
had created a large pool of artists, but it was also taken up by important voices in England.
In both countries, public interest in this topic was a reflection of the belief that national
stature and achievement in the arts were related.
From the maze of conflicting statements and heated articles on the subject, three main
positions about the potential of camera art emerged. The simplest, entertained by many
painters and a section of the public, was that photographs should not be considered ‘art’
because they were made with a mechanical device and by physical and chemical
phenomena instead of by human hand and spirit; to some, camera images seemed to
have more in common with fabric produced by machinery in a mill than with handmade
creations fired by inspiration. The second widely held view, shared by painters, some
photographers, and some critics, was that photographs would be useful to art but should
not be considered equal in creativeness to drawing and painting. Lastly, by assuming that
the process was comparable to other techniques such as etching and lithography, a fair
number of individuals realized that camera images were or could be as significant as
handmade works of art and that they might have a positive influence on the arts and on
culture in general.
Artists reacted to photography in various ways. Many portrait painters - miniaturists in
particular - who realized that photography represented the ‘handwriting on the wall’
became involved with daguerreotyping or paper photography in an effort to save their
careers; some incorporated it with painting, while others renounced painting altogether.
Still other painters, the most prominent among them the French painter, Jean- Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, began almost immediately to use photography to make a record of their

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own output and also to provide themselves with source material for poses and
backgrounds, vigorously denying at the same time its influence on their vision or its claims
as art.
The view that photographs might be worthwhile to artists was enunciated in considerable
detail by Lacan and Francis Wey. The latter, an art and literary critic, who eventually
recognised that camera images could be inspired as well as informative, suggested that
they would lead to greater naturalness in the graphic depiction of anatomy, clothing,
likeness, expression, and landscape. By studying photographs, true artists, he claimed,
would be relieved of menial tasks and become free to devote themselves to the more
important spiritual aspects of their work.
Wey left unstated what the incompetent artist might do as an alternative, but according to
the influential French critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in response to an
exhibition of photography in 1859, lazy and untalented painters would become
photographers. Fired by a belief in art as an imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas
and dreams, Baudelaire regarded photography as ‘a very humble servant of art and
science’; a medium largely unable to transcend ‘external reality’. For this critic,
photography was linked with ‘the great industrial madness’ of the time, which in his eyes
exercised disastrous consequences on the spiritual qualities of life and art.
Eugene Delacroix was the most prominent of the French artists who welcomed
photography as help-mate but recognized its limitations. Regretting that ‘such a wonderful
invention’ had arrived so late in his lifetime, he still took lessons in daguerreotyping, and
both commissioned and collected photographs. Delacroix’s enthusiasm for the medium
can be sensed in a journal entry noting that if photographs were used as they should be,
an artist might ‘raise himself to heights that we do not yet know’.
The question of whether the photograph was document or art aroused interest in England
also. The most important statement on this matter was an unsigned article that concluded
that while photography had a role to play, it should not be ‘constrained’ into ‘competition’
with art; a more stringent viewpoint led critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton to dismiss camera
images as ‘narrow in range, emphatic in assertion, telling one truth for ten falsehoods.
These writers reflected the opposition of a section of the cultural elite in England and
France to the ‘cheapening of art’ which the growing acceptance and purchase of camera
pictures by the middle class represented. Technology made photographic images a
common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street and Piccadilly in London and the
commercial boulevards of Paris. In London, for example, there were at the time some 130
commercial establishments where portraits, landscapes, and photographic reproductions
of works of art could be bought. This appeal to the middle class convinced the elite that
photographs would foster a desire for realism instead of idealism, even though some critics
recognized that the work of individual photographers might display an uplifting style and
substance that was consistent with the defining characteristics of art.
These writers reflected the opposition of a section of the cultural elite in England and
France to the ‘cheapening of art’ which the growing acceptance and purchase of camera

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pictures by the middle class represented. Technology made photographic images a
common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street and Piccadilly in London and the
commercial boulevards of Paris. In London, for example, there were at the time some 130
commercial establishments where portraits, landscapes, and photographic reproductions
of works of art could be bought. This appeal to the middle class convinced the elite that
photographs would foster a desire for realism instead of idealism, even though some critics
recognized that the work of individual photographers might display an uplifting style and
substance that was consistent with the defining characteristics of art.

Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D
Write your answers (A, B, C or D) in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

27. What is the writer’s main point in the first paragraph?

A Photography is used for many different purposes.

.
B Photographers and artists have the same principal aims.
.
C Photography has not always been a readily accepted art form.
.
D Photographers today are more creative than those of the past.
.
28. What public view about artists was shared by the French and the English?

A. that only artists could reflect a culture’s true values

B. that only artists were qualified to judge photography
C. that artists could lose work as a result of photography
D. that artist success raised a country’s international profile

29. What does the writer mean by “the handwriting on the wall” in paragraph 4?

A. an example of poor talent

B. a message that cannot be trusted
C. an advertisement for something new
D. a signal that something bad will happen

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30. What was the result of the widespread availability of photographs to the middle
classes?

A. The most educated worried about its impact on public taste.

B. It helped artists appreciate the merits of photography.
C. Improvements were made in photographic methods.
D. It led to a reduction in the price of photographs.

Questions 31-34

Complete the summary of Paragraph 3 using the list of words, A-G, below.

Write your answers (A-G) in boxes 31-34 on your answer sheet.

Camera art
In the early days of photography, opinions on its future were 31 ............................, but
three clear views emerged. A large number of artists and ordinary people saw
photographs as 32 ............................ to paintings because of the way they were
produced. Another popular view was that photographs could have a role to play in the art
world, despite the photographer being less 33............................... Finally, a smaller
number of people suspected that the impact of photography on art and society could be
34...........................

A. inventive C. beneficial E. mixed G. inferior

B. similar D. next F. justified

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Questions 35-40

Look at the following statements and the list of people, A-E, below.

Match each statement with the correct person.

Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.

35. He claimed that photography would make paintings more realistic.

36. He highlighted the limitations and deceptions of the camera.

37. He documented his production of artwork by photographing his works.

38. He noted the potential for photography to enrich artistic talent.

39. He based some of the scenes in his paintings on photographs.

40. He felt photography was part of the trend towards greater mechanization.

A. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
B. Francis Wey
C. Charles Baudelaire
D. Eugene Delacroix
E. Philip Gilbert Hamerton

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