3 passages · Questions 1–40 · Approx. 60 minutes
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13.
Long before wheat and rice came to dominate the world’s fields, the peoples of West Africa were cultivating a cereal that most of the world has never heard of. Fonio is a tiny grain, each seed smaller than a grain of sand, grown for thousands of years across the dry savannahs south of the Sahara. In some communities it is regarded as the oldest of all the region’s crops, and it appears in stories, proverbs and ceremonies as a symbol of good fortune. Yet for much of the twentieth century fonio was dismissed by planners and agricultural officials as a crop of the past, and its cultivation shrank as farmers were encouraged to grow imported grains instead. Today, that judgement is being reconsidered, and fonio is attracting attention far beyond the fields where it has always grown.
What makes fonio so valuable is how well it copes with conditions in which little else will grow. It is extraordinarily tolerant of drought, ripening in as few as six or seven weeks – faster than almost any other cereal – which allows it to be harvested before the short rains of the region come to an end. It thrives in poor, sandy soil that would defeat most other crops, and it needs no expensive fertiliser to produce a reasonable yield. For farmers on the edge of the desert, where the rains are unreliable and the ground is thin, these qualities are not a curiosity but a lifeline. Fonio ripens in the ‘hungry season’, the difficult weeks before the main crops are ready, and for generations it has been the food that carried families through until the harvest.
The grain is nutritious as well as hardy. It is rich in certain amino acids that are scarce in wheat and rice, and it does not contain gluten, which has made it interesting to consumers in wealthier countries looking for alternatives to conventional grains. Cooked, it has a light, nutty flavour and can be used much as one would use couscous or rice.
For all these virtues, fonio has one great drawback, and it is the reason the crop fell out of favour. Once harvested, the tiny grains are enclosed in a tough, inedible husk that clings tightly to them, and removing it is exhausting work. Traditionally the task fell to women, who would spend hours pounding the grain by hand in wooden mortars and then tossing it in the wind to separate the husk from the seed – a slow, tiring process that had to be repeated for every meal. So laborious was this processing that, whatever the grain’s merits in the field, it could never compete with cereals that were easier to prepare. As cheap imported rice became available in the markets, many families simply stopped growing fonio altogether.
It is this bottleneck that recent efforts have set out to break. Engineers, some of them from the region itself, have designed machines that can husk and clean the grain in minutes rather than hours, freeing the women who once did the work by hand and making it possible to prepare fonio in the quantities that a commercial market requires. With the processing problem eased, small companies have begun to buy the grain from farmers, package it, and sell it in the cities and, increasingly, for export.
The revival is still fragile. Yields remain low compared with the major cereals, and much of the crop is still grown on a small scale by farmers with few resources. But for a grain that was written off as a relic, the change in fortune is striking. A crop perfectly suited to a hot, dry and increasingly unpredictable climate, and long overlooked precisely because it was old, is beginning to look less like the past than the future.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26.
For nearly half a century, one of the busiest roads in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, ran along the course of a stream. The stream itself had long since vanished from view. As the city grew rapidly in the decades after the war, the waterway that had once run through its centre became an open sewer, choked with waste, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was covered over with concrete and turned into a road. Later, an elevated motorway was built directly above it, carried on concrete pillars. By the end of the century the buried stream was forgotten beneath one of the most congested corridors in the city, and the motorway overhead was ageing and in need of costly repair.
In 2003 the city took a decision that astonished many observers. Rather than repair the motorway, it would tear the whole structure down, remove the road beneath, and bring the hidden stream back to the surface. The project was enormously controversial. Shopkeepers along the route feared that removing a major road would ruin their trade, and drivers warned that the traffic the road carried would simply overwhelm the streets nearby, producing gridlock across the centre of the city. Critics argued that the vast sum involved could be better spent elsewhere.
The work went ahead nonetheless, and it was completed with remarkable speed. The elevated motorway was demolished, the concrete lid was lifted, and the channel beneath was reopened and landscaped. Because the original stream had by then almost no natural flow of its own, water had to be pumped in and treated to keep the restored river clean and running – a feature that critics were quick to point out, since it meant the ‘natural’ river depended on a continuous supply of electricity. Along the banks, planners created a long ribbon of parkland, with walkways, stepping stones and greenery threading through the heart of the city.
The results confounded many of the predictions. The feared traffic chaos largely failed to materialise; a significant number of drivers, deprived of the fast route through the centre, simply chose not to drive at all, switching instead to the city’s buses and subway – an outcome that transport researchers had suggested was likely but that few members of the public had believed. The restored corridor quickly became one of the most popular public spaces in Seoul, drawing residents seeking relief from the surrounding streets and large numbers of tourists. It brought measurable environmental benefits too: the strip of water and greenery lowered temperatures noticeably along its length, offering a cool refuge during the fierce heat of the city’s summers, and wildlife that had not been seen in the area for decades – fish, birds and insects – began to return.
The project has not been without its critics, even in success. Some environmentalists object that a stream which must be fed with pumped and treated water is closer to a very long fountain than a truly restored river, and that the money spent created an attractive amenity rather than a genuine ecosystem. Others point out that rising land values along the banks pushed up rents, so that some of the very people who had lived and worked in the area were gradually priced out. And the ongoing cost of pumping and maintenance falls, year after year, on the public purse.
Whatever its imperfections, the transformation has proved deeply influential. City planners from around the world have travelled to see it, and the idea it embodies – that removing a road can improve a city rather than paralyse it, and that space long surrendered to traffic can be given back to people and to water – has encouraged similar schemes elsewhere. A structure built to move cars as quickly as possible was replaced by a place designed for people to linger, and the city, by most accounts, was the better for it.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40.
We live in the age of the expert. In almost every field, we assume that serious work is the preserve of the qualified professional, and that the enthusiastic amateur, however keen, is at best a harmless hobbyist and at worst a nuisance getting in the way of those who know what they are doing. The very word ‘amateur’ has come to carry a faint sneer, a suggestion of clumsiness and incompetence. This is a curious development, and, the writer will argue, a mistaken one, for much of what we know about the world was discovered not by professionals at all, but by amateurs.
The word itself tells a different story from the one we now attach to it. It comes from the Latin for ‘lover’, and an amateur, properly understood, is not someone who does a thing badly but someone who does it for love – for the sake of the thing itself, rather than for payment or advancement. For most of history this was simply how knowledge was pursued. The idea of the salaried, credentialed professional scientist is surprisingly recent; before it took hold, the study of nature was largely the work of clergymen, landowners, doctors and others who investigated the world in their spare time and at their own expense, driven by nothing but curiosity.
Their contribution was immense. The foundations of modern biology, geology and astronomy were laid in large part by such people, working alone or in loose networks of correspondents, with no institution behind them. One of the most important theories in all of science was developed by a man who held no university post and who worked, for decades, as a private gentleman in his own home. What these amateurs lacked in formal training they often made up for in freedom: unbound by the demands of an employer or the fashions of a discipline, they could follow a question wherever it led, however unpromising or unfashionable it appeared.
It would be comfortable to suppose that this was a feature of an earlier, simpler age, and that in our own time, with its complex instruments and specialised knowledge, the amateur has been left behind. Yet the opposite is closer to the truth. In several fields, amateurs remain not merely useful but essential. Astronomy is the clearest example. The sky is vast and the professionals are few, and much of it can only be watched by an army of dedicated observers scattered across the globe, many of whom have no formal training whatsoever. Comets are still routinely discovered by amateurs, and it is often amateur watchers, rather than professional observatories, who first notice a distant star suddenly flaring into brightness, alerting the professionals in time to turn their instruments upon it.
Something similar is happening in the study of the natural world closer to home. Vast projects now depend on ordinary members of the public to record the birds in their gardens, the butterflies in a meadow or the first frog-spawn of the year. No team of salaried researchers could ever gather observations on such a scale, across so many places and over so many years; only a great crowd of volunteers can do it. The data these amateurs supply has become the raw material for serious research into how wildlife is responding to a changing climate – research that would otherwise be impossible.
None of this is to deny the value of professional expertise, which has achieved things no amateur could. The point is rather that the two are not rivals but partners, and that in setting them against each other we impoverish ourselves. It is worth remembering, too, that the boundary between the two is far less solid than it looks: many a professional began as a child sweeping the night sky with a cheap telescope, and much serious work still depends on a first spark of unpaid enthusiasm that no salary could buy. When we treat knowledge as the exclusive property of the credentialed few, we discourage the very curiosity on which all knowledge ultimately depends, and we shut out a source of discovery that has never stopped being fruitful. The amateur, far from being a relic, may turn out to be one of the more valuable figures of the century to come – if only we can shed the reflex that makes us look down on the word.
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Write TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? Write TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN.
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–F, below.
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? Write YES / NO / NOT GIVEN.
Scroll up to see the correct answer shown next to each question.
IELTS Academic Reading Score Board
| Correct Answers | Band Scores |
|---|---|
| 40–39 | 9 |
| 38–37 | 8.5 |
| 36–35 | 8 |
| 34–33 | 7.5 |
| 32–30 | 7 |
| 29–27 | 6.5 |
| 26–23 | 6 |
| 22–19 | 5.5 |
| 18–15 | 5 |
| 14–13 | 4.5 |
| 12–10 | 4 |
| 9–8 | 3.5 |
| 7–6 | 3 |
| 5–4 | 2.5 |
| 3–0 | 2 |
Connecting to live comments…