BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 513

BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 513

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 513 – PASSAGE – 1

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 513

READING PASSAGE – 1

The Amazing Tuna Fish

Long prized as a food item, tuna is now being relentlessly overfished

Once regarded as a lowly sandwich filling, tuna fish has gone upmarket as a food item in the last sixty years, with an annual global market value of around $5.5 billion. One of the more popular varieties of tuna worldwide, the skipjack, has experienced the biggest rise in global annual catch over the last 50 years. A cheap plentiful fish, fishermen haul in 2.5 million tons of skipjack annually, much of which is canned. This is closely followed by the yellowfin with 1.5 million tons caught per year, followed by the bigeye at 0.5 million tons. The meat of these two varieties is often eaten raw, with the latter being particularly popular in Japan.

With its mild flavor and firm white meat, the albacore is another popular canned tuna fish, with 0.25 million tons caught annually. Overfishing is a problem for tuna, and the conservation status of the main varieties range from ‘vulnerable’ in the case of the bigeye to ‘near vulnerable’ for the yellowfin and albacore. Additionally, there are three varieties of bluefin tuna–the Pacific, Atlantic and Southern.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

These are not extensively caught and are much less common, with the Pacific variety the only bluefin to escape the ‘endangered’ category. They, in common with the skipjack tuna, are put in the ‘least concern’ category. Of the three bluefins, the Southern bluefin is both the least numerous and least caught because it is regarded as a ‘critically endangered’ species.

Tunas are supercharged fish, streamlined to perfection and jammed with state-of-the-art biological gear. The characteristics that distinguish them include great size, great range, efficient swimming stroke, warm bodies, large gills and clever physiology of the heart. All of these reach their apogee in the bluefin. The three species of bluefin- the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern– have divided the world’s oceans among themselves, and they roam all regions except the polar.

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A bluefin tuna swims with its mouth open, forcing water past the gills in a process called ram ventilation. Its gills have up to thirty times more surface area than those of other fish, and they extract nearly half of the oxygen dissolved in the water. If a bluefin ever stops swimming it suffocates.

Tuna are unique amongst bony fish in their ability to keep key parts of their body warm. Rather than lose heat to cold water from the gills like most fish, tuna have heat exchange systems– a network of tightly packed parallel blood vessels that allow the transfer of heat between warm and cool blood moving in opposite directions. As a result, heat is retained in the body tissues rather than being lost through the gills.

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The bluefin is one of the fastest fish in the ocean, thanks to a combination of specialized physical characteristics. Its large tail and the tapered shape of its body give optimum streamlining, as does the fact that some of the fins retract or fold into a depression in the body. Tuna have a greater proportion of red muscle fiber than do other fish, favoring long-distance swimming over short bursts. And while most fish swim by undulating along their entire length, a tuna’s body remains relatively rigid with only its tail whipping back and forth.

Bluefin tuna are highly migratory fish, crossing seas around the world in yearly cycles of spawning and feeding. At least two groups share the Atlantic–one spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Mediterranean. The groups mingle in the center of the ocean. Some fish even spend years on the opposite side of the ocean from where they spawn.

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In evolutionary terms, the bluefin is a relatively modern fish, yet its relationship with humanity is ancient. Japanese fishermen have caught Pacific bluefin for more than 5,000 years. The Haida people of the Pacific Northwest region of North America have hunted the same species for at least as long, based on the evidence of discarded bluefin bones in their settlements. Stone Age people painted Atlantic bluefin tuna on the walls of Sicilian caves. Iron Age fishermen– Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Moroccan, Turkish watched from promontories for the arrival of Bluefin schools at their Mediterranean spawning grounds.

‘Bluefin helped build Western civilization’ Stanford University professor Barbara Block, an eminent historian, said. ‘Across all the Mediterranean, everybody netted giant tuna. The bluefin have annual migrations through the Strait of Gibraltar, and everyone knew when they came. In the Bosphorus there were thirty different words for bluefin, and everyone put out nets that had different names in the different countries. Netting created cash.’ Bluefin meat was traded and the coins of the Ancient Greeks and Celts had giant bluefin on them.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

Questions 1-7

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

IELTS Academic Reading Test

Questions 8-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Next to each statement, write

TRUE – if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE – if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this

8. Only one species of bluefin tuna is found in the polar regions.

9. A bluefin tuna fish has to keep moving in order to survive.

10. The tail of a bluefin tuna tends to remain rigid.

11. Atlantic bluefin tuna generally spawn in the middle of the ocean.

12. Artistic representations of bluefin tuna date back to prehistoric times.

13. The practice of netting bluefin tuna originated in the western Mediterranean.

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ANSWERS

1. 2.5

2. LEAST CONCERN

3. YELLOWFIN

4. VULNERABLE

5. 0.25

6. PACIFIC

7. ENDANGERED

8. FALSE

9. TRUE

10. FALSE

11. FALSE

12. TRUE

13. NOT GIVEN

IELTS Academic Reading Test