IELTS Academic Reading Test 8 with Answers

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

The armoured anteater

The pangolin is one of the most unusual mammals alive, and one of the least known. About the size of a domestic cat, it is the only mammal in the world whose body is covered from head to tail in hard, overlapping scales, giving it the appearance of a walking pine cone or a small, living suit of armour. There are eight species, spread across the forests and grasslands of Africa and Asia, and all of them share the same strange way of life – and, unhappily, the same grim fate, for the pangolin is now among the most heavily trafficked wild animals on the planet.

Its body is beautifully suited to its diet, which consists almost entirely of ants and termites. To reach them, the pangolin has developed an enormously long, sticky tongue – in the larger species longer than the animal’s own body – which it flicks deep into a nest to gather up its prey. It has no teeth at all, and does not chew; instead its powerful front claws tear open the hard mounds that ants and termites build. When it is threatened, the pangolin does not run or bite. It simply rolls itself into a tight ball, tucking its soft underside safely away and presenting a predator with nothing but a sphere of sharp, impenetrable scales, against which even a lion or a tiger can make little headway.

These same scales, so effective against natural enemies, are the reason the pangolin is disappearing. The scales are made of keratin, the same material as human fingernails, and have no proven medical value whatsoever; yet they are prized in some traditional medicines, and the demand for them has driven a vast and ruthless illegal trade. Pangolins are also hunted for their meat, which is eaten as a luxury in some countries. Because the animal’s only defence is to curl up, it is pitifully easy to catch: a hunter has merely to pick up the motionless ball and carry it away. Over a single recent decade, well over a million pangolins are thought to have been taken from the wild.

The animal’s biology makes this loss especially hard to recover from. Pangolins are difficult, often impossible, to keep alive in captivity, where they tend to sicken and refuse the specialised food they need, so the species cannot easily be bred to replace the animals lost to the trade. They also reproduce very slowly, a female usually giving birth to just a single young each year. A population reduced by hunting therefore recovers only with painful slowness, if it recovers at all.

Efforts to protect the pangolin have gathered pace. International agreements now ban the trade in all eight species, and enforcement officers regularly seize huge shipments of scales concealed in cargo. Yet a ban is only as strong as the effort put into upholding it, and as long as the animals fetch high prices the smuggling continues. Some of the most promising work is being done quietly, closer to the ground, by teams who care for animals rescued from traffickers and return the survivors to protected forest, and by conservationists working to persuade communities that a living pangolin is worth more than a dead one.

For now, the outlook remains uncertain. The pangolin is shy, largely nocturnal and hard to count, so no one knows exactly how many are left, and much about its life in the wild is still a mystery. What is clear is that an animal which survived for tens of millions of years, protected by its extraordinary armour, is now at serious risk of vanishing – brought to the edge by the very scales that had always kept it safe.

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

The return of the airship

For a few short years in the early twentieth century, the airship seemed to be the future of travel. Vast and silent, these giants of the sky carried passengers across oceans in comfort long before aeroplanes could manage the journey. Then, in a series of terrible accidents, several of the largest burst into flame, and public confidence collapsed almost overnight. The airship was abandoned, and for the better part of a century it survived only as a curiosity. Now, driven by an urgent need to cut the pollution caused by transport, engineers are giving the airship a second look.

A modern airship shares little with its doomed ancestors but the basic principle. It is lifted not by hot air or by engines but by a lighter-than-air gas held within its body, so that it floats upward much as a cork floats in water. Crucially, the dangerous, highly flammable hydrogen that caused the disasters of the past has been replaced by helium, which cannot catch fire. Because the craft is held aloft by the gas rather than by forward motion, it burns only a fraction of the fuel that an aeroplane of similar size would need, which is the quality that most interests the modern engineer. An airship can also take off and land vertically, needing no runway, which means it can reach remote places – a mine deep in a forest, a village cut off by mountains – that no ordinary aircraft could ever serve. And it can lift very heavy and awkward loads that would not fit inside a conventional plane.

These qualities have persuaded a number of companies that the airship’s time has come again, this time chiefly as a carrier of cargo rather than of people. Prototypes are being built and tested, and their backers imagine fleets of them moving goods quietly and cleanly to corners of the world that roads and airports do not reach. Some picture them delivering supplies after natural disasters, when roads have been washed away and airfields destroyed; others see them carrying wind-turbine blades and other outsized loads that are a nightmare to move by road or by sea.

The obstacles, however, are considerable. The greatest is speed: an airship is slow, drifting along far more gently than a jet, so it can never compete where goods must arrive quickly. It is also acutely vulnerable to the weather, for its very size makes it hard to handle in strong wind, and a sudden storm can force it to wait on the ground or take a long way round. Helium presents a further difficulty, being scarce, expensive and steadily rising in price. Handling the craft on the ground is awkward too: a huge, light vessel is difficult to hold steady while it is loaded and unloaded, and it usually requires a sizeable crew to manage it safely. Finally, the cost of designing and building these new airships is enormous, and much of the money must be spent long before a single paying load is ever carried.

Whether the airship can overcome these problems remains to be seen, and past predictions of its return have all come to nothing. But the pressures pushing it forward are stronger now than ever before. As the world looks for ways to move goods without burning ever more fuel, a slow, clean giant that can float a heavy load into the middle of nowhere, using almost no energy to stay up, no longer seems quite so absurd. The airship may, at last, be an idea whose time has genuinely arrived – not as the luxurious ocean-liner of the sky it once tried to be, but as a humble and patient workhorse, carrying freight where speed does not matter and cleanliness does.

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

The trouble with rankings

We live surrounded by rankings. Universities are ranked, hospitals are ranked, countries are ranked for happiness and cities for the quality of their coffee. A ranking promises something we badly want: to take a tangled, complicated reality and reduce it to a simple, orderly list, from best at the top to worst at the bottom. It feels objective, even scientific. And yet, the writer will argue, the very thing that makes a ranking so appealing – its neat simplicity – is also what makes it so often misleading, and sometimes downright harmful.

The first problem lies in how a ranking is made. To place a hospital or a school on a single line from best to worst, one must somehow combine many different things – for a university, say, the quality of its teaching, its research, its facilities, the earnings of its graduates – into one number. But there is no natural way to do this. Someone must decide how much each factor counts, and those decisions, buried out of sight in the method, quietly shape the result. Change the weighting even slightly, and the order can be transformed. The tidy list that looks like a plain fact is in truth the product of a string of hidden choices, any of which might reasonably have been made differently.

A second, deeper problem appears once a ranking becomes important. As soon as people care where they sit on a list, they begin to change their behaviour in order to climb it – and not always in ways that do any good. If a university is judged partly on the exam results of the students it admits, it has an incentive to turn away weaker applicants who might have benefited most from a place. If a hospital is ranked on how many patients survive an operation, some surgeons may avoid the sickest and most difficult cases, precisely the patients who most need help, for fear of spoiling their figures. The measure, which was meant merely to describe the world, begins instead to distort it. In each case the list rewards not the best behaviour but the behaviour that best flatters the list, and the two can pull in opposite directions.

This tendency is so common that it has been given a name. Once a measure becomes a target, the saying goes, it stops being a good measure – because people optimise for the number rather than for the thing the number was supposed to stand for. A school judged by attendance can improve its attendance figures without teaching a single child any better, and a police force judged by the number of crimes it records can lower that number simply by recording fewer of them. Effort flows toward whatever is being counted, and away from everything that is not, however important the neglected things may be.

None of this means that measuring is pointless or that all rankings should be thrown away. Used carefully, and treated as one rough source of information among many, a ranking can genuinely help – a patient choosing a hospital, or a student choosing a course, is surely better off with some comparison than with none at all. The danger comes when we forget how crude the tool is: when we treat a single number as the final truth, mistake what is easy to count for what actually matters, and allow the list to make our decisions for us.

Perhaps the wisest response is a kind of informed suspicion. We should ask who built a ranking and what they chose to measure; we should notice what has been left out, since the things hardest to count – kindness in a hospital, inspiration in a classroom – are often the things that matter most; and we should remember that behind every neat position on a list lies a messy reality that no single number can ever fully capture. None of this requires any special expertise, only a habit of mind. A ranking is a map, not the territory; it flattens hills, erases whatever the mapmaker judged unimportant, and shows only what someone chose to draw. It is useful only for as long as we do not mistake the one for the other.