IELTS General Reading Test 7 – with Answers

On June 14^th a competition will take place in the New Malden Town Hall for all up-and-coming bands that want to take part.

– Call Karen on 555 4318 if you want to enter your band in the competition.

– Entry into the competition costs £5 but there is a £100 prize for the winner.

– Bands will be playing their own music to attendees of the festival.

INTERNATIONAL MUSIC CONCERT

A concert will be held every night of the international festival week with music ranging from classical music to rock and pop. Orchestras and bands will perform during the week from countries such as Spain, Italy, France and even Morocco, India, and South America.

MUSIC AUCTION – SATURDAY JUNE 13^TH

DON’T MISS THE AUCTION OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND OTHER PARAPHERNALIA FROM VARIOUS FAMOUS MUSICAL ARTISTS.

Festival Week Programme

Friday, June 12^th – Come and have a browse through the ‘music market’ which will have CDs and old records from all genres, from classical music to pop and house music.

Saturday, June 13^th – Come and see Burlington Primary School perform their renditions of some of the hit songs from ‘Grease’. The performance promises to be electrifying!

Sunday, June 14^th – Music workshops will be taking place in the Town Hall before the band competition starts. Come along and play some different musical instruments. The workshops will be finished off with a Karaoke session!

Monday, June 15^th – Italian and Spanish Day. Some well-known music artists from Italy and Spain will come to perform from 5 pm to 11 pm. Singing and dancing will take place and the audience can participate.

Tuesday, June 16^th – A closing gala will take place with all different acts taking part. There will be food and drink available.

Aims of the survey

The aim of the survey was to find out which animals people most like to keep as pets and how many in every one hundred people have a pet. The survey also aimed to find out people’s opinion about the positive and negative aspects of having a pet in the house.

Results of the survey

The survey showed that fifty in every hundred people have a dog and sixty have a cat. The number was lower for animals such as fish or rabbits, with only twenty five people in one hundred owning fish and twenty owning a rabbit.

Positive aspects of having a pet

People claimed that owning a pet, such as a dog or a cat, can be extremely beneficial as they have a therapeutic effect on people. People are able to form bonds with living things other than humans and they are also given a sense of responsibility when having to care for the animals, which has a positive effect. Children can be taught that animals are very important and they must be looked after with care.

Negative aspects of having a pet

When asked, people stated that pets can be extremely expensive and can be too difficult to look after. When going on holiday it is always a problem to find reliable people to look after pets, such as cats and dogs, and it is expensive to leave animals in a ‘pet home’ whilst on holiday. People also feel that leaving animals in a home-like this is unfair on the animals.

A…………………………The word Kangaroo has come to mean any member of the family of kangaroos and wallabies. The belief that it means “I don’t understand” or “I don’t know” is a popular myth that is also applied to many other Aboriginal-sounding Australian words. Male kangaroos are called bucks, boomers or jacks; females are does, flyers, or jills and the young ones are joeys. The collective noun for kangaroos is a mob, troop or court.

B…………………………..Kangaroos have been regarded as strange animals for many years. Some explorers have described them as creatures with similar heads to deer but without antlers, animals that stood upright like men and hopped like frogs. The hind legs of kangaroos are large and powerful and they have large feet adapted for leaping, a long muscular tail for balance, and a small head. Like all marsupials, kangaroos have a pouch in which their young develop and grow after birth.

С……………………………Kangaroos are herbivores; they feed on grass and roots and chew the cud. All species are nocturnal and during the day they usually relax quietly whilst during the cool evenings, nights, and mornings they move about and feed usually in groups.

D………………………….Dingoes and other species like foxes and feral cats pose a threat to the kangaroo population, as they do to most populations of native animals. Like wallabies, kangaroos are able swimmers and enjoy immersing themselves in water if presented with the option. If pursued into the water, a large kangaroo may use its forepaws to hold the predator underwater to drown it. Another defensive tactic described by witnesses is catching the predator with the forepaws and killing it with the hind legs.

E………………………….A dominant male in a group of kangaroos is called a boomer. This is based on his size and age. A boomer has temporary exclusive access to females for mating. A boomer may find himself wandering in and out of the group of kangaroos – checking out the females and intimidating the other males who try to mate with the females.

F…………………………..Kangaroos have developed in a number of ways to survive in a dry, infertile continent and a highly variable climate. As with all marsupials, the young are born at a very early stage of development after a gestation of 31-36 days. At this stage, only the forelimbs are somewhat developed, to allow the newborn to climb to the pouch and attach to a teat. A human embryo at a similar stage of development would be about 7 weeks old and premature babies born at less than 23 weeks are usually not mature enough to survive. The joey (baby kangaroo) will usually stay in the pouch for about 9 months or (for the Western Grey) 180 to 320 days before starting to leave the pouch for small periods of time. It is usually fed by its mother until the age of 18 months.

G………………………..Before the whites came to Australia, the kangaroo was a very important animal for Australian Aborigines, both for its meat, its hide, its bones, and its sinews. There were also important dreaming stories and ceremonies involving the kangaroo. Aherrenge is a current kangaroo dreaming site in the Northern Territory. The game of Marn grook was played using a ball made from a kangaroo by the Kurnai people.

A. The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, technically classified as a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drum head or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player’s body, or with some sort of implement such as a drumstick, to produce sound. Other techniques have been used to cause drums to make sound, such as the Thumb roll’.

B. Drums are the world’s oldest and most ubiquitous musical instruments and the basic design has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. Most drums are considered ‘untuned instruments’, however many modern musicians are beginning to tune drums to songs. A few, such as timpani are always tuned to a certain pitch. Often, several drums are arranged together to create a drum kit that can be played by one musician with all four limbs.

C. Several factors determine the sound a drum produces, including the type, shape and construction of the drum shell, the type of drum heads it has and the tension of these drum heads. Different drum sounds have different uses in music. A jazz drummer may want drums that sound crisp, clean and a little on the soft side, whereas a rock and roll drummer may prefer drums that sound loud and deep. Since these drummers want different sounds, their drums will be constructed a little differently.

D. Drums are usually played by the hands or by one or two sticks. In many traditional cultures, drums have a symbolic function and are often used in religious ceremonies. Drums are often used in music therapy, especially hand drums, because of their tactile nature and easy use by a wide variety of people. Within the realm of popular music and jazz, ‘drums’ usually refers to a drum kit or a set of drums (with some cymbals) and drummer’ to the actual band member or person who plays them.

The Evolution of Long-Distance Communication

A. Long-distance signaling was used as far back as the time of ancient civilizations in China, Egypt, and Greece. Primitive as the methods may sound today. Signaling took the form of messages communicated through smoke or drumbeats. Bad weather, however, would have often interrupted the line of sight between receptor points, making such signaling methods ineffective.

B. Even centuries later, the more sophisticated long-distance signaling method known as semaphore, proved susceptible to weather and other factors stopping visibility. Developed in the early 1790s, the semaphore consisted of a series of hilltop stations that each had large movable arms to signal letters and numbers and two telescopes with which to see the other stations. However, during bad weather, signaling would prove impossible. Clearly, a different method of transmitting information was required to make regular and reliable long-distance communication workable.

C. The beginning of the nineteenth century was to herald the invention of two major technological advances that would lay the groundwork for more effective long-distance communication. In 1800, Italian scientist Alessandro Volta invented the battery and in 1820 Dutch physicist Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism. Volta’s invention permitted electric currents to be stored and later used under controlled conditions, whilst Oersted’s discovery showed how a magnetic needle could be deflected by electric currents.

D. In the mid-nineteenth century Volta’s invention and Oersted’s discovery were brought together to create a major communications breakthrough: the telegraph. In its early stages, the telegraph system comprised five magnetic needles that could be pointed around a panel of letters and numbers by using an electric current.

E. Later, Samuel Morse, in scientific collaboration with a group of other inventors, would take the invention a stage further. Building on the telegraph system, Morse and his associates created a device capable of transmitting electrical impulses over a wire between stations. Morse then created a code of dots and dashes, relating to each letter of the English alphabet. The transcription of electrical impulses into letters was thereby created, permitting complex messages to be sent across telegraph lines and thereby allowing long-distance communication with a device known as the telegraph.

F. In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland. A deeply religious man, he ensured that the wording delivered a suitable message: ‘What God hath wrought!’ Just over two decades later, in 1866, the first telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic from the US to Europe.

F. The electric telegraph transformed how wars were fought and won and how journalists and newspapers did business. Rather than taking weeks to be delivered by horse-and-carriage mail carts, pieces of news could be exchanged between telegraph stations almost instantly. The telegraph also had a big economic effect, allowing money to be ‘wired’ across great distances.

G. With the beginning of the 20^th century, the telegraph had become almost obsolete, replaced by faster and more effective means of communication such as the telephone, the fax machine, and, more recently, the internet. These inventions though would not have been possible without the telegraph first paving the way for such technological breakthroughs. Morse is still remembered in the code that bears his name, and the world-famous emergency S.O.S code that is based on the Morse code.