BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 49

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ACADEMIC READING TEST 49 – PASSAGE – 3

ACADEMIC READING TEST 49

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3.

Ocean Plant life in decline

A. Scientists have discovered plant life covering the surface of the world’s oceans is disappearing at a dangerous rate. This plant life called phytoplankton is a vital resource that helps absorb the worst of the ‘greenhouse gases’ involved in global warming. Satellites and ships at sea have confirmed the diminishing productivity of the microscopic plants, which oceanographers say is most striking in the waters of the North Pacific – ranging as far up as the high Arctic. “Whether the lost productivity of the phytoplankton is directly due to increased ocean temperatures that have been recorded for at least the past 20 years remains part of an extremely complex puzzle”, says Watson W. Gregg, a NASA biologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the USA, but it surely offers a fresh clue to the controversy over climate change. According to Gregg, the greatest loss of phytoplankton has occurred where ocean temperatures have risen most significantly between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. In the North Atlantic summertime, sea surface temperatures rose about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit during that period, while in the North Pacific the ocean’s surface temperatures rose about 0.7 of a degree.

B. While the link between ocean temperatures and the productivity of plankton is striking, other factors can also affect the health of the plants. They need iron as nourishment, for example, and much of it reaches them via powerful winds that sweep iron-containing dust across the oceans from continental deserts. When those winds diminish or fail, plankton can suffer. According to Gregg and his colleagues, there have been small but measurable decreases in the amount of iron deposited over the oceans in recent years.

C. The significant decline in plankton productivity has a direct effect on the world’s carbon cycle. Normally, the ocean plants take up about half of all the carbon dioxide in the world’s environment because they use the carbon, along with sunlight, for growth, and release oxygen into the atmosphere in a process known as photosynthesis. Primary production of plankton in the North Pacific has decreased by more than 9 per cent during the past 20 years, and by nearly 7 per cent in the North Atlantic, Gregg and his colleagues determined from their satellite observations and shipboard surveys. Studies’ combining all the major ocean basins of the world has revealed the decline in plankton productivity to be more than 6 per cent.

D. The plankton of the seas is the major way in which the extra carbon dioxide emitted in the combustion of fossil fuels is eliminated. Whether caused by currently rising global temperatures or not, the loss of natural plankton productivity in the oceans also means the loss of an important factor in removing much of the principal greenhouse gas that has caused the world’s climate to warm for the past century or more. “Our combined research shows that ocean primary productivity is declining, and it may be the result of climate changes such as increased temperatures and decreased iron deposits into parts of the oceans. This has major implications for the global carbon cycle” said Gregg.

E. At the same time, Stanford University scientists using two other NASA satellites and one flown by the Defense Department have observed dramatic new changes in the vast ice sheets along the west coast of Antarctica. These changes, in turn, are having a major impact on phytoplankton there. They report that a monster chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf – an iceberg almost 20 miles wide and 124 miles long – has broken off the west face of the shelf and is burying a vast ocean area of phytoplankton that is the base of the food web in an area exceptionally rich in plant and animal marine life.

F. Although sea surface temperatures around Western Antarctica are remaining stable, the loss of plankton is proving catastrophic to all the higher life forms that depend on the plant masses, say Stanford biological oceanographers Arrigo and van Dijken. Icebergs in Antarctica are designated by letters and numbers for aerial surveys across millions of square miles of the southern ocean, and this berg is known as C-19. “We estimate from satellite observations that C-19 in the Ross Sea has covered 90 per cent of all the phytoplankton there,” said Arrigo.

G. Huge as it is, the C-19 iceberg is only the second-largest recorded in the Ross Sea region. An even larger one, dubbed B-15, broke off, or ‘calved’ in 2001. Although it also blotted out a large area of floating phytoplankton on the sea surface, it only wiped out about 40 per cent of the microscopic plants. Approximately 25 per cent of the world’s populations of emperor penguins and 30 per cent of the Adelie penguins nest in colonies in this area. This amounts to hundreds of thousands of Adelie and emperor penguins all endangered by the huge iceberg, which has been stuck against the coast ever since it broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf last year. Whales, seals and the millions of shrimp-like sea creatures called krill are also threatened by the loss of many square miles of phytoplankton.

Question 28-32

The passage has seven paragraphs labelled A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

28. The role of plankton in dealing with carbon dioxide from vehicles

29. The effect on land and marine creatures when icebergs break off

30. The impact of higher temperatures upon the ocean

31. The system used in naming icebergs

32. The importance of phytoplankton in the food chain

Question 33-36

Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage 3.

Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

33. Much needed iron for plant life is transported to the ocean by…………………… .

34. An increase in greenhouse gases is due to a decrease in…………………… .

35. Phytoplankton forms the………………………..of the food web.

36. The technical term used when a piece of ice detached from the main block is…………………… .

Question 37-40

Complete the summary of paragraphs A-C below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

A decline in the plant life located in the world’s oceans has been validated by (37)……………………. The most obvious decline in plant life has been in the North Pacific. A rise in ocean temperatures in the early 1980s and late 1990s led to a decline in (38)……………………….. In addition to higher ocean temperatures, deficiencies in (39)…………………can also lead to a decline in plankton numbers. This, in turn, impacts upon the world’s (40)…………………………….

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