IELTS Academic Reading Test 2 with Answers

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

The return of the beaver

The Eurasian beaver is the largest rodent in Europe and one of nature’s most skilful engineers. Once found in rivers and wetlands right across the continent, it was driven almost to extinction, and for several centuries it vanished from many of the countries where it had once been common. In recent decades, however, the beaver has been making a remarkable return, and it is now spreading once more through the waterways of Europe.

Few animals are so well equipped for life in and around water. The beaver’s dense, oily coat is almost completely waterproof, and this layer of fur traps a blanket of warm air that allows the animal to spend hours in cold rivers without losing heat. Its most famous tools are its four large front teeth, which are coated in hard orange enamel and never stop growing; with them the beaver can fell trees many times its own height. It is even able to gnaw while submerged, because it can draw its lips shut behind these teeth to keep the water out. And to find its way beneath the surface, a transparent inner eyelid slides across each eye, acting like a pair of built-in goggles.

The beaver shapes the world around it more than almost any other wild animal. Using branches, stones and mud, it builds dams across streams, and the ponds that form behind them create rich wetlands where countless other species thrive. These same ponds slow the flow of water after heavy rain, so that areas downstream are less likely to flood. The beaver is a strict vegetarian, feeding on bark, leaves and water plants rather than on fish or other animals.

For all these talents, the beaver had no defence against human beings. For hundreds of years it was trapped in enormous numbers for its warm fur, which was made into hats and coats. It was hunted, too, for castoreum, a strong-smelling substance produced by the animal and prized for use in perfume and medicine. As farming spread, the draining of wetlands for fields removed much of the habitat the beaver needed to survive. Worse still, where beavers flooded farmland with their dams, they were treated as a pest and destroyed, and the woodland along the rivers was steadily felled for timber. By the early twentieth century only a few small populations survived, hidden away in remote corners of the continent.

The recovery of the beaver is the result of deliberate human effort. Beginning in the twentieth century, conservationists captured animals from the surviving populations and released them into rivers where the species had long been absent. These reintroductions were often controversial, and some farmers and landowners objected strongly, fearing damage to their land. Yet as the beavers established themselves, attitudes began to change.

Today the beaver is widely valued for the benefits it brings. The wetlands it creates support fish, birds and insects, store water in times of drought and help to control flooding – services that would cost a great deal to provide by other means. From perhaps a thousand animals a century ago, the European population now numbers well over a million, and beavers have returned to rivers that had not seen them for generations. The engineer of the waterways is back at work.

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

The comeback of the night train

For much of the twentieth century, the sleeper train was one of the great pleasures of European travel. Passengers could board in one city in the evening, climb into a bunk, and wake the next morning in another country hundreds of kilometres away. Yet as cheap flights spread across the continent and high-speed daytime lines were built, the night train fell out of favour. One by one the services were withdrawn, until by the 2010s only a handful remained and the sleeper seemed destined to disappear altogether.

In the last few years, however, the night train has staged an unexpected comeback. New routes have opened, old carriages have been brought back into service, and tickets for popular departures now sell out weeks in advance. A number of railway companies have announced ambitious plans to link dozens of European cities by sleeper once again.

The appeal is not hard to see. Because the journey takes place overnight, passengers can sleep as they travel and step off rested and ready for the day, saving both a night in a hotel and the hours a daytime trip would consume. Unlike airports, which usually lie far outside town, railway stations sit in the middle of things, so a night train carries travellers directly from one city centre to another. And for a growing number of people the strongest attraction is environmental: a night train produces far less carbon than the equivalent flight, and concern about the climate has persuaded many travellers to give up short-haul air travel in its favour.

The revival has been driven in part by this shift in attitudes. As awareness of the environmental cost of flying has grown, some travellers have deliberately turned to the railways, and the night train has come to stand for a slower, cleaner way of getting around. Governments and railway operators, sensing an opportunity, have begun to invest in new equipment and new connections.

The night train is far from a perfect solution, however. Because sleeper services run on ordinary tracks and stop at many stations, they travel at a relatively low speed, and a journey that takes two hours by plane may take twelve or more by train. The fares, too, can be a problem: a bed on a night train is often surprisingly expensive, and travellers on a tight budget may still find flying the cheaper option. Space is limited as well, for the number of berths on each train is small, and popular routes are quickly booked up. Much of the equipment is ageing – many of the carriages still in use were built decades ago and are increasingly costly to maintain. And because a single route may pass through several nations, services that cross national borders require complicated agreements between different railway systems, which can make new lines slow and difficult to establish.

Despite these obstacles, the mood among supporters of the sleeper is optimistic. If the promised investment arrives and the practical problems can be solved, the night train may once again become a normal way of crossing the continent – and a journey that begins with dinner in one capital and ends with breakfast in another may no longer be a thing of the past.

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

In praise of boredom

Boredom has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as an empty, unpleasant state, a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. Parents dread the child who announces that there is ‘nothing to do’; employers worry about staff whose attention drifts. For most of us, boredom is simply something to be avoided. Yet a growing number of psychologists argue that this restless, uncomfortable feeling is not the enemy we imagine, and that in trying to banish it altogether we may be losing something of real value.

It has never been easier to keep boredom at bay. A generation ago, a wait at a bus stop or a dull half-hour in a queue was simply time to be endured. Today, the smartphone in our pocket offers an endless supply of games, messages and videos, and the smallest gap in the day can be filled in an instant. We reach for our phones without thinking, and the result is that many of us now go through entire days without ever being truly bored. This may sound like progress, but the writer suspects that something has been quietly lost along the way.

Just how uncomfortable people find boredom was shown by a striking experiment carried out in 2014. Volunteers were left alone in a bare room for a short time with nothing to do but think, though they were given the option of pressing a button that delivered a mild electric shock. Astonishingly, many chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts – some of them repeatedly. It seems that, for a great many people, doing nothing at all is close to unbearable.

And yet boredom may be far more useful than it feels. In another study, people were asked to carry out an extremely dull task – copying numbers from a telephone directory – before being set a test of creativity. Those who had first been bored went on to produce noticeably more original ideas than those who had not. Boredom, it appears, is not the opposite of creativity but sometimes its source: a mind with nothing to occupy it will begin, restlessly, to invent.

Part of the explanation lies in what happens inside the head when we have nothing to do. Freed from any particular task, the mind begins to drift, moving without direction from memories to plans to half-formed ideas. This ‘mind-wandering’, in which thoughts roam freely from one subject to another, is now thought to play an important role in problem-solving and imagination. When we fill every spare moment with a screen, we leave the mind no room to wander – and no room, perhaps, to make the unexpected connections on which original thinking depends.

Boredom shapes our behaviour in other ways too. A survey of employees published in 2019 found that those who described their work as boring were markedly more likely to be looking for a different job, which suggests that the feeling can act as a useful signal, telling us when something needs to change. Research into the way children play points in a similar direction: children given long stretches of free, unstructured time – with no toys, screens or activities laid on for them – tend to become more inventive, dreaming up games and stories of their own.

None of this means that boredom is always pleasant, or that we should seek it out for its own sake. But it does suggest that our habit of stamping it out the moment it appears may be a mistake. The discomfort we feel when we have nothing to do is not a fault to be corrected but an invitation – to daydream, to reflect, to notice what we truly want. Rather than reaching for a distraction the instant we feel restless, we might do better to leave a little space in our days, and simply let ourselves be bored.