BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 508

BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 508

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 508 – PASSAGE – 3

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 508

READING PASSAGE – 3

When Tablet Turns Teacher

I remember the day, years ago, when I took an iPad home for the first time. It was a humbling experience. Within minutes, my two young daughters had seized on the device, and were handling it with far more dexterity than me. So much so, in fact, that after that, whenever I felt flummoxed by a phone or computer, I’d give it straight to my kids to sort out. And if we were ever trapped in a car, train or anything else, I was apt to hand over whatever device I was using at the time, and let them explore its functions – something people of my generation never seem to have the skill or patience to do.

But does their dexterity arise because my children are ‘digital natives’ – kids who have grown up in a world surrounded by mobile phones and keypads? Or is the ability to decode an electronic gadget innate to all young human brains, irrespective of where they live? These are the fascinating questions which a group of researchers from Boston in the USA have been exploring in the unlikely setting of Ethiopia.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

A few years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founded a group known as One Laptop per Child, which has been successfully distributing ultra-cheap computers to the world’s poor as part of an educational campaign. But now Negroponte and Matt Keller, a fellow researcher who previously worked with the World Food Programme, have launched an experiment so bold it might be science fiction.

Six months ago, they dropped dozens of boxed iPads into two extremely remote villages in Ethiopia, where the population was completely unable to read and write and had no prior exposure to electronics. No instructions were left with the packages, aside from telling the village elders that the iPads were designed for kids aged four to eleven. They also showed one adult how to charge the iPads with a solar-powered device. Then the researchers vanished and monitored what happened next by making occasional visits and tracking the behaviour of the children via SIM cards, USB sticks and cameras installed in the iPads.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

The results were thought-provoking, particularly for anyone involved in the education business. Within minutes of the iPads landing, they’d unpacked the boxes and worked out how to turn them on. Then, in both villages, activity coalesced around a couple of child leaders, who made the mental leap to explore those tablets – and taught the others what to do. In one village, this leader turned out to be a partly disabled child: although he had never been a dominant personality before, he was a natural explorer, so became the teacher.

The discovery process then became intense. When the children used the iPads, however, they didn’t sit with a machine each on their laps in isolation as western kids might be expected to do. Instead they huddled together, touching and watching each other’s machines, constantly swapping knowledge. Within days, they were using the pre-installed apps, with games, movies and educational lessons.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

After a couple of months, some were singing the ‘alphabet song’ in English and recognising letters – at the request of the Ethiopian government, the machines were all in English. More startling still, one group of kids even worked out how to disable a block that the Boston-based researchers had installed into the machines, which was supposed to stop them taking pictures of themselves. And all of this apparently happened without any adult supervision and without anyone in that community having handled text on screen before.

This experiment still has much further to run, and has not been independently audited. But the researchers have already drawn three tentative conclusions. The first is that, ‘no matter how remote children are, or how illiterate their community, they have the ability to figure out sophisticated technology,’ as Keller says. Secondly, and leading from that first point, technology can potentially be a potent self-learning tool.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

And thirdly – and more controversially- Keller concludes that ‘getting kids access to technology may be much more important than giving them schools.’ In other words, instead of pouring money into shiny buildings and teacher training, aid groups might do better just to distribute mobile phones and laptops with those self-teaching games.

Many people would dispute that. After all, the technology world is full of hype; and some economists and development experts such as C.K. Prahalad have questioned whether poor communities can truly derive the benefits of modern technology without help. Singing an ‘alphabet song’ is one thing; reading calculus is quite another. But at the very least. Negroponte and Keller’s experiments raise two further questions in my mind. Firstly, what is all this technology doing to our kids’ neural networks and the way future societies will conceive of the world?

IELTS Academic Reading Test

Secondly, and more practically, could these lessons about self-learning be applied to the West? Should someone who worries about the failures of the US education system to reach the American poor, for example, be looking to iPads for a possible solution? The answers aren’t clear. But the next time my kids grab my own devices. I may not feel quite so much parental guilt. Those devices may now be unleashing an evolutionary leap -with consequences that my tech-challenged generation cannot imagine.

Questions 27-33

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet, write

YES – if the statement agrees with the views/claims of the writer

NO – if the statement contradicts the views/claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN – if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

27. The writer accepts that young people are more adept at using electronic devices.

28. The writer is surprised that the Boston researchers chose Ethiopia for their research project.

29. The writer regards the project in Ethiopia as very ambitious.

30. The villagers in Ethiopia were unaware that the gadgets were intended for children.

31. The behaviour of the Ethiopian children was similar to that observed in western children.

32. The researchers would have preferred the textual content on the laptops to have been in the local language.

33. The researchers predicted that the children would learn how to enable the laptops’ camera function.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

Questions 34-37

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-N, below.

Although the research project is 34……………. , it is possible to identify some preliminary findings. Firstly, the ability to 35……………. the workings of digital hardware and software seems not to depend on levels of 36……………. nor on experience of using technology. What’s more, faced with the challenge presented by the computers, the village children behaved in a highly 37……………. way, with leaders emerging who took on the role of teacher to the benefit of the whole community.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

IELTS Academic Reading Test

Questions 38-40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

38. What do the preliminary findings suggest to Matt Keller?

A. Current educational policies may be misguided.

B. Certain teaching methods are counter-productive.

C. Technology is not as hard to understand as was thought.

D. Formal instruction may make technical subjects harder to grasp.

39. In the final paragraph the writer suggests that the project

A. has revealed dangers that young people using technology might face.

B. has overstated the case for how much can be self-taught about technology.

C. has the potential to provide a model for dealing with education elsewhere.

D. has made her re-evaluate her own attitude towards the misuse of technology.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

40. In the passage as a whole, the writer’s main aim is to

A. criticise the way some teachers make use of technology.

B. question the findings of one study into children’s use of technology.

C. compare the effects of technology on children in various parts of the world.

D. explore the idea that young people have a natural ability to engage with technology.

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IELTS Academic Reading Test

ANSWERS

27. YES

28. YES

29. YES

30. NO

31. NO

32. NOT GIVEN

33. NO

34. J

35. M

36. C

37. I

38. A

39. C

40. D

IELTS Academic Reading Test