IELTS Reading Placement Test

Read the text and answer questions 1–3.

The life and work of Marie Curie

Marie Curie is probably the most famous woman scientist who has ever lived. Born Maria Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, she is famous for her work on radioactivity, and was twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, and was then sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

From childhood, Marie was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education. Because her father lost his savings through bad investment, she then had to take work as a teacher. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronia’s medical studies in Paris, on the understanding that Bronia would, in turn, later help her to get an education.

In 1891 this promise was fulfilled and Marie went to Paris and began to study at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris). She often worked far into the night and lived on little more than bread and butter and tea. She came first in the examination in the physical sciences in 1893, and in 1894 was placed second in the examination in mathematical sciences. It was not until the spring of that year that she was introduced to Pierre Curie.

Questions 1–3

Choose TRUE if the statement agrees with the information given in the text, choose FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or choose NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

Read the text and answer questions 4-6.

Science in 16th-century London

The Jewel House, a new book by historical researcher and author Deborah Harkness.

Deborah Harkness devotes her elegant and erudite new book, The Jewel House, to the scientific community in 16th-century London. She (rightly) argues that it is thanks to the imaginative collective efforts of the urban scientists that London became the melting pot in which a new mathematical and experimental culture crystallized.

Harkness is known for her ingenuity as a researcher and her historical empathy. In The Jewel House, Harkness turns her skills on the city of London as a whole with surprising and fascinating results. She began her research by asking herself a new question: not what caused scientific revolution but what the names science and scientist meant in 16th-century London. Then she collected a vast range of sources, from printed books to scientific instruments and notebooks, and recorded, in a relational database, information on the men and women who produced them.

Every chapter of The Jewel House charts the activities of a particular community. Harkness leads us through the streets of London, showing us, neighborhood by neighborhood, where the major forms of natural knowledge found homes. For example, apothecaries settled in Lime Street, in what is now the City, where they created a dense network of shops and gardens. Clockmakers, both native craftsmen and many from overseas, clustered in several parishes near St Paul’s Cathedral. The once wealthy merchant, Clement Draper, even managed to transform the King’s Bench prison in Southwark, where he served time as a debtor, into a center of research and discussion. By the end of the book Harkness has mapped London’s scientific communities with astonishing precision.

Moreover, when Harkness reconstructs these groups, she provides not traditional, static accounts of their theories, but dynamic analyses of their practices as these developed over time. In many cases, she makes clear, the alchemists of Elizabethan London already understood that knowledge of nature had to rest not on authority but on familiarity through practice.

In one crucial respect, Harkness argues, many of the 16th-century London scientists differed from the later ones of the 17th century. They saw themselves less as individuals out to gain fame, than as members of larger textual communities bent on exchanging and compiling information. The passages in which Harkness analyzes the 16th-century practices of note-taking and communication are among the most novel and informative in this fine book. She shows that they adopted the textual information processing methods of humanist scholarship to radically new ends.

In this book, Harkness has charted the local and cosmopolitan worlds of science in Elizabethan London with a learning, precision and intelligence that compel admiration. Moreover, she has crafted a complex and effective new analytical mechanism which may transform the practices of historians of early modern science.

Questions 4-6

Complete each sentence with the correct ending. Choose the correct answer and move it into the gap.

Read the text and answer questions 7-10.

Clearly, when older people do heavy physical work, their age may affect their productivity. But other skills may increase with age, including many that are crucial for good management, such as an ability to handle people diplomatically, to run a meeting or to spot a problem before it blows up. Peter Hicks, who co-ordinates OECD* work on the policy implications of ageing, says that plenty of research suggests older people are paid more because they are worth more.

And the virtues of the young may be exaggerated. ‘The few companies that have kept on older workers find they have good judgement and their productivity is good,’ says Peter Peterson, author of a recent book on the impact of ageing. ‘Besides, their education standards are much better than those of today’s young high-school graduates.’ Companies may say that older workers are not worth training because they are reaching the end of their working lives; in fact, young people tend to switch jobs so frequently that they offer the worst returns on training. The median age for employer-driven training is the late 40s and early 50s, and this training goes mainly to managers.

*OECD: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Questions 7-10

Choose TWO correct answers.

The list below gives some of the advantages of employing older workers.

The list below gives some of the disadvantages of employing younger workers.

Which TWO disadvantages are mentioned by the writer of the text?

Read the text and answer questions 11–14.

The general assumption is that older workers are paid more in spite of, rather than because of, their productivity. That might partly explain why, when employers are under pressure to cut costs, they persuade a 55-year old to take early retirement. Take away seniority-based pay scales, and older workers may become a much more attractive employment proposition. But most employers and many workers are uncomfortable with the idea of reducing someone’s pay in later life – although manual workers on piece-rates often earn less as they get older. So retaining the services of older workers may mean employing them in different ways.

One innovation was devised by IBM Belgium. Faced with the need to cut staff costs, and having decided to concentrate cuts on 55 to 60-year olds, IBM set up a separate company called Skill Team, which re-employed any of the early retired who wanted to go on working up to the age of 60. An employee who joined Skill Team at the age of 55 on a five-year contract would work for 58% of his time, over the full period, for 88% of his last IBM salary. The company offered services to IBM, thus allowing it to retain access to some of the intellectual capital it would otherwise have lost.

The best way to tempt the old to go on working may be to build on such ‘bridge’ jobs: part-time or temporary employment that creates a more gradual transition from full-time work to retirement. Studies have found that, in the United States, nearly half of all men and women who had been in full-time jobs in middle age moved into such ‘bridge’ jobs at the end of their working lives. In general, it is the best-paid and worst-paid who carry on working. There seem to be two very different types of bridge job-holder – those who continue working because they have to and those who continue working because they want to, even though they could afford to retire.

If the job market grows more flexible, the old may find more jobs that suit them. Often, they will be self-employed. Sometimes, they may start their own businesses: a study by David Storey of Warwick University found that in Britain 70% of businesses started by people over 55 survived, compared with an overall national average of only 19%. But whatever pattern of employment they choose, in the coming years the skills of these ‘grey workers’ will have to be increasingly acknowledged and rewarded.

Questions 11–14

Read the text and answer questions 15–20.

The marriage of Pierre and Marie Curie in 1895 marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery in 1896 of a new phenomenon, which Marie later called ‘radioactivity’, Marie Curie decided to find out if the radioactivity discovered in uranium was to be found in other elements. She discovered that this was true for thorium.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose radioactivity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem, and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state. This was achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. Based on the results of this research, Marie Curie received her Doctorate of Science, and in 1903 Marie and Pierre shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The births of Marie’s two daughters, Irène and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 failed to interrupt her scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres, France (1900), and introduced a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

The sudden death of her husband in 1906 was a bitter blow to Marie Curie, but was also a turning point in her career: henceforth she was to devote all her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken. On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband’s death, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the isolation of a pure form of radium.

During World War I, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irène, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography, including the mobile units which came to be known as ‘Little Curies’, used for the treatment of wounded soldiers. In 1918 the Radium Institute, whose staff Irène had joined, began to operate in earnest, and became a centre for nuclear physics and chemistry. Marie Curie, now at the highest point of her fame and, from 1922, a member of the Academy of Medicine, researched the chemistry of radioactive substances and their medical applications.

In 1921, accompanied by her two daughters, Marie Curie made a triumphant journey to the United States to raise funds for research on radium. Women there presented her with a gram of radium for her campaign. Marie also gave lectures in Belgium, Brazil, Spain and Czechoslovakia and, in addition, had the satisfaction of seeing the development of the Curie Foundation in Paris, and the inauguration in 1932 in Warsaw of the Radium Institute, where her sister Bronia became director.

One of Marie Curie’s outstanding achievements was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only to treat illness but also to maintain an abundant supply for research. The existence in Paris at the Radium Institute of a stock of 1.5 grams of radium made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments undertaken in the years around 1930. This work prepared the way for the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick and, above all, for the discovery in 1934 by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie of artificial radioactivity. A few months after this discovery, Marie Curie died as a result of leukaemia caused by exposure to radiation. She had often carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket, remarking on the pretty blue-green light they gave off.

Her contribution to physics had been immense, not only in her own work, the importance of which had been demonstrated by her two Nobel Prizes, but because of her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists.

Questions 15–20

Read the text and answer questions 21–25.

The origins of birds

The science of evolutionary relationships has undergone a major change in recent decades. It used to be the case that all the features of organisms were important in working out their family tree. But following the work of German entomologist Willi Hennig, many evolutionary scientists now believe that the only features which carry any useful information are the evolutionary 'novelties' shared between organisms. Mice, lizards and fish, for example, all have backbones – so the feature 'backbone' tells us nothing about their evolutionary relationship. But the feature 'four legs' is useful because it's an evolutionary novelty – a characteristic shared only between the lizard and the mouse. This would suggest that the lizard and mouse are more closely related to each other than either is to the fish. This revolutionary approach is called cladistics, and it has been central to the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

The 'birds are dinosaurs' theory was first developed by English palaeontologist Thomas Huxley (1825–1895). According to some accounts, one evening Huxley went to dinner still thinking about a mystery dinosaur bone in his lab. He knew he was dealing with the lower leg bone (tibia) of a meat-eating, two-legged dinosaur belonging to the classification known as theropods, but attached to the tibia was an unidentified extra bone. On the menu that evening was quail, a small bird similar to a pheasant, and Huxley noticed the same strange bone, attached to the quail tibia on his plate. He later realised that it was in fact the bird's anklebone. More importantly, Huxley concluded that its forms in both dinosaur and bird skeletons were so similar that they must be closely related.

Huxley's idea fell out of favour for fifty years following the 1916 publication of The Origin of Birds by the Danish doctor Gerhard Heilmann. During this time, Heilmann’s theory was widely accepted. Heilmann had noted that two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs lacked collarbones. In later evolutionary stages these bones fuse together to form the distinctive 'Y'-shaped bone in a bird's neck, known as the furcula. Heilmann proposed the notion that such a feature could not be lost and then re-evolve at a later date, so dinosaurs could not be the ancestors of birds.

Then, in the late 1960s, John Ostrom from Yale University in the USA, noted 22 features in the skeletons of meat-eating dinosaurs that were also found in birds and nowhere else. This reset the thinking on bird ancestry and once again Huxley’s ideas caught the attention of the scientific community. Subsequent work has found up to 85 characteristics that tie dinosaurs and birds together. But what of Heilmann's missing bones? It turns out that not only did many dinosaurs have collarbones, these were also fused together into a furcula. Unfortunately for Heilmann, the fossil evidence was somewhat lacking in his day, and the few furculae that had been found were misidentified, usually as belly ribs.

US ornithologist Alan Feduccia and palaeontologist Larry Martin are two vocal opponents of the dinosaur theory. They contend that birds evolved from some unknown reptile at a time long before dinosaurs. Their reasoning is that flight is most likely to have started from a tree-climbing ancestor, yet all the proposed dinosaurian ancestors were ground-dwellers. But the dino-bird supporters contend that an unknown dinosaurian bird-ancestor could have been tree-dwelling, or that birds evolved flight from the ground up by chasing and leaping after insects. Most of Feduccia and Martin's case against the 'birds-are-dinosaurs' hypothesis is based on differences between birds and dinosaurs. Supporters of cladistics, however, maintain that differences between organisms do not matter, as it is the similarities between them that count. Evolution dictates that organisms will change through time, so it is only the features which persist that carry useful information about their origins.

Most people on either side of the debate do accept, however, that the ancient winged creature known as Archaeopteryx is an ancestor of today’s birds. This is in spite of the fact that its form is distinctly non-bird-like, with a long bony tail, and teeth instead of a beak. The 'birds-are-dinosaurs' supporters contend that, if clearly-preserved feathers had not been found alongside two of the seven Archaeopteryx specimens, it would probably have been identified as a small dinosaur. However, Archaeopteryx does have some bird-like features, such as a furcula and bird-like feet, that suggest that it is too bird-like to be considered a dinosaur.

Over the last few decades several dinosaurs with bird-like features and primitive birds with dinosaur-like features have been found in several countries, connecting Archaeopteryx back to dinosaurs, and forwards to modern birds. Sinosauropteryx, excavated from 130-million-year-old rocks in northeast China, is one example. It has a dinosaur skeleton surrounded by a halo of fuzz, thought to be primitive feathers. And a reassessment of other dinosaurs reveals such bird-like features as hollow bones and a foot with three functional toes, characteristics that appeared over 50 million years before Archaeopteryx took to the air. And Rahonavis, a primitive bird from Madagascar is more bird-like than Archaeopteryx, yet retains some distinctive dinosaur features, including a long and vicious claw at the end of its wing. Over a century since Huxley's discovery, it seems that cladistics may have finally settled the 'dino-bird' debate.

Questions 21–25

Read the text and answer questions 26–29.

This Marvellous Invention

Of all mankind’s manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other inventions – the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread – may have transformed our material existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over nature itself. 

But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool of extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: ‘this marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul’. This was how, in 1660, the renowned French grammarians of the Port-Royal abbey near Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated more eloquently the magnitude of its achievement. Even so, there is just one flaw in all these hymns of praise, for the homage to language’s unique accomplishment conceals a simple yet critical incongruity. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our fascination with language, and it holds many of its secrets.

Questions 26-29

Complete the summary using the list of words. Choose the correct answer and move it into the gap

Read the text and answer questions 30-34.

The instructions accompanying do-it-yourself products are regularly cited as a source of unnecessary expense or frustration.  Few companies seem to test their instructions by having them followed by a first-time user. Often, essential information is omitted, steps in the construction process are taken for granted, and some degree of special knowledge is assumed.  This is especially worrying in any fields where failure to follow correct procedures can be dangerous.

Objections to material in plain English have come mainly from the legal profession. Lawyers point to the risk of ambiguity inherent in the use of everyday language for legal or official documents, and draw attention to the need for confidence in legal formulations, which can come only from using language that has been tested in courts over the course of centuries.  The campaigners point out that there has been no sudden increase in litigation as a consequence of the increase in plain English materials.

Similarly, professionals in several different fields have defended their use of technical and complex language as being the most precise means of expressing technical or complex ideas.  This is undoubtedly true: scientists, doctors, bankers and others need their jargon in order to communicate with each other succinctly and unambiguously.  But when it comes to addressing the non-specialist consumer, the campaigners argue, different criteria must apply.

Part 9

Read the text and answer questions 35-40.

For Rent

A

B

C

D

E

F

Questions 35–40

Look at the six rental notices, A–F. For which rental unit are the following statements true?

You may choose any letter more than once.