IELTS Academic Reading Test 7 with Answers

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

The forest between land and sea

Twice a day, along thousands of kilometres of tropical coastline, the sea rolls in and floods a forest. When the tide falls again, the trees are left standing in glistening mud, their strange, arching roots exposed to the air. These are mangroves – the only trees on Earth able to grow in salt water – and the tangled forests they form, where the land dissolves into the sea, are among the most valuable and most threatened habitats in the world.

Living where they do, mangroves face problems that would kill an ordinary tree. The mud they root in is waterlogged and starved of oxygen, so many mangroves grow special roots that rise upward out of the mud into the open, taking in the air that the buried roots cannot reach. The water around them is salt, which would poison most plants, so mangroves have evolved ways of coping: some block the salt at their roots, while others draw it up and then get rid of the excess salt through their leaves. Even reproduction is unusual. Rather than dropping seeds that might be swept away or drowned before they could take hold, many mangroves let their seeds begin to grow while still hanging from the parent tree; only when a young seedling has formed does it fall, ready to anchor itself in the mud below or to float away on the tide to some distant shore.

This forest between land and sea does a remarkable amount of work. Its dense, submerged roots form a sheltered nursery in which countless fish, crabs and prawns spend the early part of their lives, so that coastal fisheries far beyond the forest itself depend upon it. The same wall of roots and trunks absorbs the force of storm waves and holds the shoreline together, shielding the coast from erosion and protecting the people who live behind it. And mangroves lock away carbon in their waterlogged soils in very large amounts, making them a quiet but powerful ally against a warming climate.

Despite all this, mangroves are being destroyed at an alarming rate. In many countries, huge areas have been cleared to make ponds for farming shrimp, a valuable export; yet once the trees are gone, the ponds themselves often last only a few years before the ground is exhausted and abandoned. Mangroves are also cut for timber and for charcoal, which burns hot and sells well in local markets. As coastlines are opened up for tourism and housing, the forests are drained and filled in to make room, and coastal development of this kind has swallowed vast stretches of them. Pollution washing down from the land – sewage, farm chemicals and plastic waste – poisons much of what remains. In some regions, more than half of the mangroves that once existed have already been lost.

The good news is that, in places, the tide is beginning to turn. Governments and coastal communities have started to protect the forests that survive and to replant those that were lost, discovering in the process that a restored mangrove often costs far less than the concrete sea wall that would be needed to replace its protection. Restoration is slow and delicate work, and not every planting takes; young trees put in the wrong place, or without the involvement of the people who live nearby, frequently fail.

Yet the effort is spreading, driven by a growing recognition of how much these forests are worth. For centuries the mangrove was dismissed as useless swamp – muddy, impassable and full of mosquitoes – and was drained or cleared without a second thought. It is now, at last, being understood for what it is: one of the hardest-working and most generous landscapes on the planet, and one worth far more standing than cleared.

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

Warmth from waste

Every day, in every city, vast quantities of heat are produced and then simply thrown away. Factories and power stations pour it into the sky through cooling towers; sewers carry it off in warm waste water; and a newer source, the data centre, generates so much heat from its banks of humming computers that keeping them cool is one of its largest costs. Meanwhile, in those same cities, millions of homes burn gas to keep warm. A growing number of engineers have begun to ask an obvious question: why not use the one to solve the other?

The answer is a technology that is not new but is being put to a new use: district heating. Instead of each building making its own heat, a central source warms water and sends it out through a network of insulated pipes buried beneath the streets, delivering hot water to homes, offices and schools across a whole district, which draw off the warmth and return the cooled water to be heated again. The clever part of the newer schemes lies in where that heat comes from. Rather than burning fuel specially to produce it, they capture waste heat that would otherwise be lost – from a factory, a power station or a data centre – and put it to use. Because no fuel is burned in the home itself, and because heat that was simply going to be wasted is used instead, the carbon saved can be considerable. And a single source can warm thousands of buildings at once.

The appeal is easy to see. In a cold country trying to reduce its use of gas, a system that heats homes with warmth nobody wanted, and burns nothing in the process, comes close to ideal. Several cities have already built such networks, drawing their heat from sources as varied as steelworks, rubbish incinerators and the servers that run the internet.

Yet waste-heat district heating is far from simple to build. The greatest obstacle is the cost of laying the pipes: digging up the streets of an existing city to bury a whole network is slow, disruptive and hugely expensive. Distance is a difficulty too, because hot water loses warmth as it travels, so the source and the buildings it serves must lie fairly close together, and a perfect heat source too far from any homes is of no use at all. There is also a question of security of supply. If the factory or data centre that provides the heat closes down or moves away, the homes that came to depend on it are left cold, so a network tied to a single source can be dangerously vulnerable. For the whole thing to make financial sense, enough buildings must connect to the network to share the heavy cost of building it – and persuading them all to sign up takes time. During construction, meanwhile, residents must put up with months of disruption as the streets around them are dug open.

None of these problems is impossible to overcome, and in cities built at the right density, close to a steady source of waste heat, the case for such a scheme can be compelling. As countries search for ways to warm their buildings without burning fossil fuels, the heat pouring unused from the world’s factories, power stations and computers is beginning to look less like a nuisance to be got rid of and more like a resource waiting to be used. The warmth was always there. The only genuinely new idea is to stop throwing it away.

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

The trouble with open-plan

Walk into almost any modern office and you will see the same thing: rows of desks in a single large room, without walls or partitions, everyone in full view of everyone else. The open-plan office has become so nearly universal that we scarcely think to question it. It arrived promising a brighter, more modern and more collaborative way of working, in which ideas would flow freely across a room no longer divided into private cells. It is worth asking whether it has actually delivered what it promised – because a good deal of evidence suggests that it has not.

Two arguments drove the spread of the open-plan office, one spoken aloud and one kept rather quieter. The spoken argument was about collaboration: tear down the walls, it was said, and colleagues once shut away in separate rooms will talk, share ideas and spark one another’s creativity. The quieter argument was about money. Desks packed onto an open floor take up far less space than a warren of private offices, and a company can fit many more people into the same costly floor area. Whatever was said in public about creativity, this saving did much to make the open-plan office so attractive to the businesses that paid the rent.

The reality of working in one, however, is often very different from the promise. An open floor is a noisy place. Every conversation, every phone call, every ringing device carries clear across the room, and there is nowhere to escape it. For work that demands real concentration, this is close to disastrous: the mind, tugged this way and that by noise and movement and the constant possibility of interruption, struggles to settle on anything for long. Far from freeing people to think, the open office can make sustained thought almost impossible.

More surprising is what the open plan does to the very thing it was meant to encourage. When researchers studied a company that had moved from private offices to a single open floor, they found that face-to-face conversation between staff, rather than rising, actually fell – and fell sharply. Deprived of any privacy, and unable to hold a quiet word without being overheard, people withdrew. They put on headphones, they kept their heads down, and, tellingly, they turned to email and instant messaging to say the very things they might once have said in person. The wall that had been taken away was quietly rebuilt in another form.

These headphones and screens are what one might call digital walls – the private barriers that people, denied real ones, construct for themselves. They are a poor substitute. A worker sealed inside a bubble of music and messages is not the open, available colleague the open plan imagined; he is someone hiding in plain sight, present in body but shut off as firmly as if a door had been closed. The room is open; the people inside it are not.

Other findings add to the picture. Surveys of office workers regularly find that most would prefer more privacy and quiet than their workplace allows them. Studies of health have found that people in open-plan offices take more days off sick than those in smaller, more enclosed spaces – perhaps because illness spreads more easily in a shared room, perhaps because the daily stress of the environment slowly wears them down. Satisfaction with the workplace, by most measures, tends to be lower, not higher, once the walls come down. Taken together, these results paint a picture almost the reverse of the one that was promised: less privacy, less concentration, less genuine contact, and, in the end, employees who are neither happier nor demonstrably more productive than they were before.

None of this means that every office should be broken back up into private rooms. Some work genuinely benefits from the easy contact an open space allows, and constant isolation carries costs of its own. The real mistake is to imagine that any single design can suit every kind of work. What people need is a choice: open areas for the tasks that thrive on contact, and quiet, enclosed spaces for those that demand concentration. A good office should offer both – and let the work, rather than the fashion of the moment, decide which is used.