IELTS Academic Reading Test 10 with Answers

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

The great journey of the monarch

Each autumn, across the eastern half of North America, millions of orange-and-black butterflies take to the air and begin one of the most astonishing journeys in the natural world. These are monarch butterflies, and they are heading south, some of them travelling as much as four thousand kilometres to reach a small patch of forest in the mountains of central Mexico. There, in a handful of valleys, they gather in such numbers that the trees turn orange and their branches bend under the weight. That so fragile a creature should complete so vast a journey is remarkable enough; that it should find, with great precision, a place it has never been makes the feat almost beyond belief.

What makes the monarch’s migration truly strange is that no single butterfly makes the round trip. The insects that fly south in the autumn spend the winter resting in the Mexican forests, and in spring they begin the journey north again – but they do not get far. They stop to breed and then die, and it is their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, that continue northward over several short-lived generations. The butterflies that arrive back in the north in summer are the great-grandchildren of those that left. How each new generation knows the way, and how the one autumn generation manages to live far longer than the rest and to navigate the entire distance south, remain among the great puzzles of biology.

The monarch owes its survival to a single, humble plant. The female lays her eggs only on milkweed, and the caterpillars that hatch will eat nothing else. The milkweed is poisonous to most animals, but the monarch caterpillar not only tolerates the poison but stores it in its body, so that it remains distasteful, and even dangerous, to predators for the rest of its life. Its bright colours are a warning, advertising to any bird that a monarch will make an unpleasant meal. It is a neat arrangement, but a fragile one, for it ties the fate of the entire species to the fortunes of one kind of plant: where the milkweed disappears, the monarch cannot follow.

In recent years, however, the number of monarchs reaching Mexico has fallen sharply, and the causes are not hard to find. The milkweed on which the whole life cycle depends has been disappearing from vast areas of farmland, cleared away as an unwanted weed, so that the butterflies have fewer places to breed. In the Mexican forests where they spend the winter, illegal logging has thinned the very trees that shelter them from cold and rain. And the widespread use of pesticides kills many butterflies outright. Changes in the climate add a further danger, disrupting the delicate timing on which the migration depends.

Efforts to help the monarch have begun to spread, and many of them are within the reach of ordinary people. Across North America, gardeners, schools and roadside authorities have been planting milkweed once again, creating a scattered network of feeding stations along the butterflies’ route. In Mexico, there are growing efforts to protect the overwintering forests and to give local people a reason to guard the trees rather than fell them, chiefly through tourism, as visitors travel from around the world to witness the spectacle of the massed butterflies. Because so much of the effort depends on the actions of countless ordinary people, the monarch has become, in a sense, a shared responsibility spread across a continent.

Whether all this will be enough is not yet clear, for a migration on such a scale is vulnerable in a way that a single population in a single place is not: harm done anywhere along the route is felt everywhere. The great journey of the monarch has been made for countless thousands of years. It would be a poor reflection on our own age if it were allowed to end on our watch.

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

The return of the sail

For thousands of years, ships crossed the world’s oceans powered by nothing but the wind. Then, within a few decades, the sail was swept aside: coal and then oil gave ships engines that would drive them in a straight line regardless of the weather, and the great sailing vessels vanished from the seas. Today, the ships that carry almost everything we buy burn enormous quantities of dirty fuel, and the shipping industry has become a significant source of the world’s pollution. In response, a surprising idea is gaining ground: bringing back the sail.

The new sails look nothing like the canvas of old. Some are tall, rigid wings of metal and composite that rise from the deck like aircraft wings stood on end; others are giant kites, flown high above the ship where the wind is stronger, hauling the vessel along like a sledge. What they share is a purpose: to capture the free power of the wind and so reduce the amount of fuel the ship must burn. The great attraction is that they need not replace the engine at all. Fitted to an ordinary cargo ship, the sails simply assist it, so that the engine can be eased back whenever the wind is favourable, cutting fuel use and pollution without any loss of reliability. Better still, many of these devices can be added to existing ships, rather than requiring a new vessel to be built from scratch, and modern versions are largely automatic, adjusting themselves to the wind with little need for a larger crew.

Early trials have been encouraging, with some ships reporting worthwhile savings in fuel over the course of a voyage, and a number of shipping companies are now watching the technology closely. The savings, its supporters stress, cost nothing once the equipment is in place, since the wind, unlike oil, is free and will never run out.

Yet the return of the sail faces real difficulties. The most basic is that wind is unpredictable: it does not always blow, and it does not always blow the right way, so the savings a sail delivers vary from voyage to voyage and cannot be relied upon. There is the matter of space, too. The great wings and their machinery take up room on deck and can get in the way of the cranes that load and unload a ship, which for some vessels is a serious drawback. The equipment is expensive to buy and fit, and a shipowner must weigh that cost against fuel savings that may take years to repay it. And to gain the most benefit, a captain may need to steer along the route where the winds are best rather than the shortest way, adding time to the voyage – a hard thing to accept in an industry built on tight schedules.

Still, the pressures driving the change are powerful and growing, as governments move to force the industry to cut its pollution and the price of fuel climbs. None of the obstacles is fatal, and for the right ship on the right route the case is already a strong one. It would be a fine irony if the oldest technology in seafaring turned out to be part of the answer to one of its most modern problems, and if the wind, having powered our ships for most of history, were called upon to do so once again. The sail may never again drive a ship by itself, as it did for centuries; but as a quiet partner to the engine, it may yet earn a place on the vessels of the future.

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

The tyranny of choice

It is one of the unquestioned assumptions of modern life that more choice is always better. A shop with fifty kinds of bread is thought superior to one with five; a life with endless options is thought richer than one with few. Freedom, we tend to feel, means having as many possibilities open to us as possible. And yet a growing body of evidence suggests that this comfortable assumption is, beyond a certain point, simply wrong – and that an abundance of choice, far from setting us free, can leave us anxious, dissatisfied and worse off than before.

The most famous demonstration of this involved something as ordinary as jam. In a supermarket, researchers set out a display of jams for shoppers to taste. Sometimes the display offered a small selection; at other times it offered a much larger one. The large display attracted more interest, as one might expect. But when it came to actually buying, the result was the reverse of what common sense would predict: far more people made a purchase when the choice on offer was small than when it was large. Faced with too many options, most people bought nothing at all.

Why should this be? Part of the answer is that choosing takes effort, and each additional option adds to the burden. With a handful of possibilities, we can weigh them and decide; with dozens, the task of comparing them all becomes overwhelming, and the easiest course is to give up and walk away. A choice that was meant to be a pleasure becomes a chore, and then a source of paralysis. Each option must be held in mind, compared against the others and judged, and the mind, faced with too much of this work at once, simply rebels and refuses to decide at all.

There is a subtler cost as well, one that appears after the decision has been made. When we choose from a vast array, we cannot help being aware of all the possibilities we passed over, and it becomes easy to imagine that one of them might have been better. The result is a nagging regret that undermines whatever satisfaction the choice itself might have brought. The person who buys the only coat in their size comes home content; the person who selects one coat from a hundred is left wondering about the ninety-nine they did not buy. More options can mean, paradoxically, less happiness with whatever we settle on. The very richness that was supposed to satisfy us instead feeds a suspicion that we have somehow chosen wrongly, and that satisfaction lies always in the option we let slip.

This does not mean, of course, that choice is a bad thing, or that we should wish to return to a world in which there was nothing to choose. Some choice is plainly better than none; the misery of having no options at all is real, and no one would prefer it. The argument is rather that choice is subject to the same law as most good things: there is an amount that serves us well, beyond which more begins to do harm. Food, rest and warmth are all good, yet all can be had in excess; there is no reason to suppose that choice alone should escape this rule, and every reason to think it does not. We have arranged our world as though that point did not exist, piling up options in the belief that we can never have too many.

The practical lesson is not to reject choice but to hold it in proportion. As individuals, we can learn to be satisfied with an option that is good enough, rather than searching exhaustively for the very best. And those who design the systems we all use – the shops, the websites, the pension schemes on which our futures depend – might consider that offering people a sensible, limited range of options is often a greater kindness than burying them beneath everything that could conceivably be provided. A little less choice, carefully offered, may leave people freer and happier than a great deal of it thrown at them without thought. In choice, as in so much else, more is not the same as better.