IELTS Academic Reading Test 1 with Answers

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13.

The comeback of the kākāpō

The kākāpō is a large, flightless parrot found only in New Zealand. Once one of the most widespread birds in the country’s forests, it is today among the rarest, surviving on a handful of small, carefully guarded islands. Heavy-bodied and unable to fly, the kākāpō is also unusual for being active only at night. For much of the year the males gather at traditional display sites, where each produces a deep booming call to attract a mate – a sound that can carry for several kilometres across the valleys.

The bird is remarkably well suited to life on the forest floor. Its soft plumage is patterned in shades of green and brown, providing camouflage that allows it to freeze and disappear against the moss and leaf litter whenever danger is near. Unlike most birds, the kākāpō relies heavily on its sense of smell to find the fruit, seeds and leaves it feeds on in the darkness. In years when food is plentiful it lays down large reserves of fat, which enable it to survive the lean months when little is available.

These adaptations served the kākāpō well for millions of years, during which it faced no ground-dwelling enemies. That changed with the arrival of humans. Early settlers hunted the bird for its meat and used its feathers to make cloaks. Far more damaging, however, were the animals that people brought with them. Cats, rats and stoats – predators against which the kākāpō had no defence – spread rapidly and preyed on the eggs, chicks and adults alike. At the same time, the clearing of forest for farming steadily reduced the habitat on which the species depended. Because the kākāpō has an exceptionally slow rate of breeding, producing chicks only in years when certain trees fruit heavily, the population had no way of recovering from these losses.

By the middle of the twentieth century the kākāpō was widely believed to be extinct. Then, in 1977, a previously unknown population of around 200 birds was discovered on Stewart Island, off the southern tip of the country. The find was both a cause for celebration and a source of alarm, for feral cats were already killing the birds at an alarming rate. A decision was taken to move every surviving kākāpō to islands that were entirely free of predators.

This relocation formed the basis of an intensive recovery programme that continues to this day. Every individual bird is named and monitored, and each is fitted with a small transmitter so that its movements and health can be tracked. During the breeding season, staff supplement the birds’ diet, guard the nests around the clock and, where necessary, raise weak chicks by hand. Advances in veterinary care and even genetic analysis have been used to manage the tiny population and to reduce the risks that come with such a limited gene pool.

The results have been slow but encouraging. From a low of fewer than 60 birds in the mid-1990s, the population has climbed to over 250. The most productive breeding season on record occurred only a few years ago, when dozens of chicks survived to adulthood. The kākāpō remains critically endangered, and its future still depends entirely on human protection, but for the first time in generations the number of these extraordinary parrots is rising.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26.

Riding above the traffic: Medellín’s cable cars

Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, sits in a narrow valley ringed by steep mountains. For decades, as the population grew, poorer families settled on the slopes above the centre, building informal neighbourhoods known as comunas. These hillside communities were home to hundreds of thousands of people, yet they were among the most isolated places in the city. The roads that wound up the mountainsides were narrow and congested, and a journey to a job in the valley below could swallow up two hours or more in each direction.

In the early 2000s the city adopted an unusual solution. Rather than building more roads or an expensive underground railway, it chose to send its passengers into the air. The Metrocable, opened in 2004, was the first system in the world to use aerial cable cars as a form of everyday public transport rather than as a tourist attraction. Small cabins, each carrying up to ten people, hang from a continuously moving cable strung between tall towers, gliding silently over the rooftops of the comunas far below.

The appeal of the system is easy to understand. Because the cabins travel above the streets, they are unaffected by the traffic that clogs the roads, and a trip that once took an hour can now be completed in minutes. Passengers buy their tickets and pass through the barriers before boarding, so there are no delays while fares are collected on board. The stations are designed without steps, and the cabins pause just long enough at each one for passengers to step in and out, which means that people using wheelchairs or travelling with young children can use the service without difficulty. Crucially, the Metrocable was built as an extension of the city’s existing metro, so a single ticket allows a resident of the highest comuna to travel all the way into the heart of the city without paying again.

The effect on the hillside communities has been striking. Journey times have collapsed, and residents who once spent a large share of their day simply getting to and from work now have that time returned to them. The arrival of the stations also drew investment: libraries, parks and schools were built around them, and businesses opened nearby. Other cities took notice, and versions of the idea have since appeared in La Paz, Mexico City and elsewhere.

The system is not without its difficulties, however. The cabins are light, and in bad weather services must sometimes be slowed or halted altogether when strong winds make the crossing unsafe. The whole network depends on electricity, so power cuts can bring it to a standstill, leaving passengers suspended until supplies are restored. At the busiest times of day the stations near the bottom of the line become extremely crowded, and passengers may wait a considerable time to board. Keeping the cables, towers and cabins in safe working order is also demanding, and the cost of maintenance is high – a burden that falls on the public purse. Finally, the cabins have no air conditioning, and on hot afternoons the lack of ventilation can make the ride uncomfortable.

Despite these drawbacks, the Metrocable is widely regarded as a success, and as a model that other rapidly growing cities in the developing world might follow. For a fraction of the cost of a metro or a network of new roads, it has connected some of the poorest districts of Medellín to the opportunities of the city below.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40.

The myth of the lone genius

Ask most people to picture a scientific discovery and the same scene tends to appear: a solitary thinker, struck by a sudden flash of insight. Isaac Newton watches an apple fall and grasps the law of gravity; Archimedes leaps from his bath crying ‘Eureka!’. These stories are told and retold because they are irresistible. They are also, for the most part, misleading. They are not so much false as incomplete: something did happen under that apple tree, but the tidy legend leaves out almost everything that mattered. The reality of how knowledge advances looks very different from the story of the brilliant individual working alone.

It is worth asking why the myth is so persistent. Part of the answer lies in the way we like our stories told. A single hero, wrestling with a problem and finally triumphing, is far easier to celebrate – and to remember – than a slow, untidy process involving dozens of people over many years. Prizes and headlines reinforce the pattern, since both must attach a name to an achievement. The result is that the crowd of contributors standing behind any discovery is quietly edited out, leaving a single figure in the spotlight.

Yet the closer historians look at the great episodes of science, the harder it becomes to find a genius who truly worked alone. Consider the letters of Charles Darwin. The study of his enormous correspondence has revealed that he relied on a vast network of gardeners, breeders, diplomats and fellow naturalists scattered across the globe, who supplied him with the observations on which his theory rested. Darwin’s brilliance was real, but it was brilliance in gathering, sifting and interpreting the work of countless others.

The pattern repeats itself elsewhere. One of the most telling sources is the record of patents. Evidence from patent records suggests that inventions we associate with a single name were frequently arrived at by several people, working separately, within a remarkably short space of time. The telephone is the classic case: two applications were filed on the very same day. Historians have a name for this phenomenon – ‘multiple discovery’ – and it is far more common than the lone-genius story would lead us to expect. When the moment is ripe, it seems, an idea occurs not to one mind but to many.

Sometimes the hidden hands behind a discovery are closer still. Analysis of a celebrated breakthrough in radio astronomy indicates that the crucial observations were in fact made by a research student, whose name was left off the announcement and who received no share of the honour that followed. Such cases are uncomfortable, but they are not rare. Behind many a famous figure stand assistants, students and technicians whose labour was essential and whose names have been forgotten.

If collaboration has always mattered, it matters more than ever today. A survey of research papers published in 2019 shows that the average number of authors listed on each has risen steadily over the decades; papers carrying the names of ten, twenty or even a hundred researchers are now unremarkable. The problems that science tackles have grown too large and too complex for any one person, and the work is increasingly shared across laboratories, disciplines and continents. The solitary thinker, if she ever existed, has been replaced by the team.

None of this means that individual talent counts for nothing. Someone must ask the right question, notice the odd result, or make the leap that others missed. But talent operates within a community, drawing on what has come before and passing on what it produces. The danger of the lone-genius myth is not simply that it is inaccurate. By teaching us – in classrooms, museums and textbooks – to look for heroes, it obscures how discovery actually happens, and it risks discouraging the many whose patient, shared effort is the real engine of progress. Recognising that could change not only the stories we tell, but the way we choose to support and reward science itself.