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BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 498
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 498 – PASSAGE – 3

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 498
READING PASSAGE – 3
Cruise ships
More harm than they are worth?
The number of people taking cruises has almost doubled in the last decade, with 30 million people taking a cruise in 2019. It’s not a new activity. The Peninsular Steam Navigation Company (now P&O Cruises) started running cruises for passengers in 1884. These cruises were the first to be solely dedicated to the pleasure of cruising rather than port to port transport. The first trips were to the Mediterranean, but they soon expanded to include Asia, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Sea travel was considered healthy as well as a form of tourism, so some wealthy passengers booked cruises to recover from illnesses such as tuberculosis.
Cruise ships became symbols of sophistication and glamour and were built to resemble five star hotels. When in 1911 the White Star line launched the Titanic, it was, at the time, the largest and most luxurious cruise ship in the world, and cruising was at its peak in popularity. Though that ship’s sinking was not the direct cause, the industry did fall into decline as a result of the Great Depression and two world wars.
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Then with the arrival of air travel and the first transatlantic commercial flight in 1958, it seemed like a final blow to the cruise ship industry had been struck, and that should have signified its end. But this did not happen. Many cruise lines did fold, but the survivors started marketing themselves in a whole new way. Cruise lines re-emerged in the mid-1960s with ships fitted out with modern forms of relaxation and entertainment, marketing themselves to the general public, rather than as luxury travel.
You can find a cruise ship to take you anywhere these days. From the comfort of a cabin you can travel across every ocean, eat breakfast on your private balcony and enjoy wonderful views of the ocean and the coast. You can criss-cross the Mediterranean, visiting ports in France, Italy and Greece, travel down the German Rhine, sail into the Norwegian fjords or go from beach to beach in the Caribbean, Pacific or in South East Asia. You spend just a few hours in each place, but you do not even need to get off the ship. If you do, you join hordes of tourists scrambling to see the sites.
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Cruise ships are getting bigger and carry increasingly more passengers to these destinations every day. The cruise industry is booming. This makes the ports busier, more polluted and residents are getting angrier. Silvia Martini, founder of the group Venice Now, which represents its citizens, says that bringing cruise ships so close to the city is not only environmentally damaging, but makes life unbearable for permanent residents. She says that when people come off the ships, the local people can hardly walk around their town, the streets are so crowded. She no longer recognizes the beautiful city she knew as a child.
A spokesman for one of the major cruise lines, Leo Bartholemew, defends cruising, saying that though it is growing in popularity, it really is a very small part of the tourist industry. He says that tourists coming off ships in the ports of European cities make up less than 6 per cent of tourists, and that if cruise ships were banned from any of these ports, it would have little impact on the number of tourists in the streets.
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He also adds that cruise ships bring a great deal of money to the ports they visit by paying docking fees to the port itself. Andrea Marcazzan who works at the port in Venice, says that cruise ships create thousands of jobs for people who live in Venice and their removal would mean massive job losses, including his own.
For many people like Silvia Martini, it is not just a question of how much money is brought to a port city by cruise ships, but the environmental impact they have and how the people of that city are affected by overcrowding. And it’s not just the residents, the people on the cruises themselves also have to cope with overcrowding and sometimes hostility from the local people. At the times cruise visitors enter a city, it is unclear how much money they really inject into the local economy, but cruise ships certainly do add a lot of pollution.
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One cruise operator alone emits ten times more sulphur oxides around the Mediterranean than all of Europe’s 260 million cars, according to sustainable travel group Transport & Environment. Cruising may only be a small part of tourism as a whole, but it does add to the concentration of tourism around the world. About a third of the world’s tourist trips are to visit just 300 cities. When the whole contents of a cruise ship disembark at once, it is a much bigger impact than the more even flow of visitors that come to a city in other ways.
Perhaps there is some hope of more eco-friendly vessels being built in the future – though the trend is for larger and larger vessels – and for cruise companies to somehow rethink how their passengers disembark in ways that have less impact. The cruise industry is certainly interested in how they can better communicate with communities and manage the flow of people, but there is still work to be done. Prompt action needs to be taken if the cruise industry wishes to sustain its business model and still have destinations that are viable for cruises in the future. It is at a critical point.
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Questions 27-29
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
27. What does the writer state about the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company in the first paragraph?
A. It specialized in taking immigrants to the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
B. It was the first steam ship that took passengers.
C. It was behind the start of the cruise industry.
D. The majority of its customers were travelling for medical reasons.
28. The writer refers to the Titanic in order to
A. state that its sinking was why people stopped taking cruises.
B. underline it is still the biggest cruise ship ever built.
C. infer it was the cause of the enthusiasm for cruise ships.
D. show that demand for cruising was at its height.
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29. What are we told about the arrival of commercial air travel?
A. It started in the mid-60s after wars and depression.
B. It brought an end to cruise ships.
C. It forced cruise ships to find new customers.
D. It had no effect on the cruise industry.
Questions 30-35
Look at the following opinions (Questions 30-35) and the list of people below.
Match each opinion with the correct person, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
30. Cities charge cruise companies a lot of money to enter their ports.
31. Cruise ships create enormous chemical damage to the atmosphere.
32. Citizens find it impossible to go about their daily life.
33. The cruise industry cannot be blamed for all the problems with tourists.
34. Bringing cruise ships to the city provides work for citizens.
35. It is difficult to know much cities actually make from cruise ships.
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List of people
A. The writer
B. Silvia Martini
C. Leo Bartholemew
D. Andrea Marcazzan
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Questions 36-40
Complete the summary using the lists of words, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J.
Finding a solution
The writer states that in terms of world tourism, the cruise industry is a 36…………….. player. However, it does still have an impact because a lot of cruising is focused on the small number of cities that most tourists visit.
As the 37…………….. passengers from a ship are all getting off at the same place at the same time, it has a 38…………….. effect when compared with that of other types of tourists.
The cruise industry wants to cooperate with cities and their populations, but they need to make this a 39…………….. process so that it will be 40…………….. to continue to visit ports.
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A. competitive
B. considerable
C. fast
D. feasible
E. hard
F. interested
G. minor
H. numerous
I. safe
J. suitable
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ANSWERS
27. C
28. D
29. C
30. C
31. A
32. B
33. C
34. D
35. A
36. G
37. H
38. B
39. C
40. D
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