BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 518

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IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 518 – PASSAGE – 2

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 518

READING PASSAGE – 2

ANCIENT MAPS ARE MIRRORS FOR THE ANCIENT PSYCHE

The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences, and Marvels for the Eyes, an eleventh-century Arabic geography, is still a wonder.

A. Maps from the distant past look nothing like the world as we imagine it today. They guide us not through space but through time. A world map from the eleventh century promised people alive in the eleventh century the chance to peer into distant, exotic lands; looking at the same map today affords a glimpse into a distant time, a chance to see through the eyes of people who lived and died more than 900 years ago.

Take The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences, and Marvels for the Eyes, an eleventh-century Arabic geography compiled by an anonymous scribe. Despite the wear of centuries, the book is still a wonder. Its illustrations are designed to excite the senses as well as the intellect. Waters painted with silver to make them shimmer; comets that blaze with flakes of gold; gemstone-like lapis lazuli deepening the ocean’s blue. In those days, paper was an expensive commodity, such that the book’s wide margins were a show of lavish excess.

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B. Its exquisite world map, one of the first of its kind, looks bizarre to a modern eye. At first glance, the land masses seem like formless blobs. But flipped upside down, reversing north and south, the wiggly blobs at the bottom resolve themselves into the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. England is shrunken to a faint speck, while Sicily is swollen and plump. Africa has been twisted into the shape of a sickle, and the frilly coastlines of Russia and China have been sanded down to a smooth arc. A band of indigo ocean encircles the continents.

C. There is a philosophy underlying the geography. It pins abstract concepts to points in space, placing civilisation and order at the centre and wilderness and chaos at the edges. The medieval Arab world inherited the Greek conception of geography—in particular, that of Ptolemy, who separated the world into seven climates. The concentric arcs marked on the map represent these climates. The world is mapped as a circle with a centre and a periphery; the regions grow hotter to the south and colder to the north, buffeted by different kinds of winds on the eastern and western sides.

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D. The world map prefaces the section entitled “On the Cities of the Remote Regions,” signalling the reader outward, away from the familiar and into the exotic. The westernmost edge of the map is marked by northwest Africa. There, according to The Book of Curiosities, fabulous wealth is matched by grave danger; gold lies uncovered in the sand, but guarded by ferocious inhabitants. The air is so thick and hot that the light of dawn filters through as if through a dirty window. Strange creatures proliferate: monstrous humanoids that speak in whistles.

The beings that inhabit the remote regions are monsters because they are hybrids, transgressions of the border between human and animal. There are strange unclassifiable creatures who dress in leaves and speak in chirps, mermaids whose language is laughter, fish with human faces that fly above the water, men who graze like cattle, and people with faces in their chests or ears big enough to spread on the ground like carpets.

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E. At the furthest edges, even the boundaries between human and vegetable begin to dissolve: On a distant island in the Indian Ocean grow the Waq-Waq trees, which bear fruits in the shape of plump, women who constantly scream “waq waq!” These distant lands are not just strange but also dangerous. Nightmares lurk at the edges of the map.

On the easternmost border, a wall marks the separation between the outermost edges of human civilisation and the wilderness of demonic creatures known as Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog have grey skin, scraggly hair, and fingernails like knives. Every day Gog and Magog scratch the wall down to a sliver, and every night God rebuilds it. In this way, the end of the world becomes not just a temporal but also a geographical reality, something that can be marked on a map. The apocalypse sits at the edge of the world, waiting for its day to come.

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F. The map of The Book of Curiosities presages a much more famous one: the map designed in 1138 by master cartographer al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily. Every known river and route, every island, every twist of the coastline was inscribed on a gleaming silver disk more than six feet wide, a shining circle on which the world was laid bare. Looking at the map, you would see simultaneously your own reflection and the geography of your world. The map is at once a mirror and a screen. It reveals both the world around it and the face of its creators.

All these ancient maps beg the question that when future historians look at our maps and our accounts of the world centuries from now, what will our reflections look like?

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Questions 14 – 19

Reading Section 2 has six sections, A–F. Which section contains the following information?

Choose the correct letter (A – F).

You may choose any letter more than once.

14. description of strange beings that are both humans and animals

15. explanation of how the Arabs viewed the doomsday

16. reference to a much detailed map that was based on another map

17. a reference to acquisition of Greek philosophy in geography

18. a reference to how to correctly read the ancient map

19. explanation of how different items used provide colour in the ancient map

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Questions 20 – 21

Which TWO distinct features of northwest Africa are represented in The Book of Curiosities as mentioned by the writer?

A. The windows of its building are dirty.

B. It has dangerous uncovered terrain.

C. Its gold is protected but is out in the open.

D. Its people are a hybrid of humans and plants.

E. The region has a hot climate and dense air.

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Questions 22 – 23

Which TWO of the following statements are related to the creatures of the easternmost border?

A. They are grey skinned with sharp fingernails.

B. They are fruit bearing trees that keep chanting “waq waq”.

C. They are birds and animals that chirp.

D. They try to break down the walls separating them from the world.

E. They communicate using laughter as a language.

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Questions 24 – 26

Write ONE WORD ONLY from the text in each gap.

At first look, the land masses seem like formless blobs. But (24)…………. upside down, reversing north and south, the wiggly blobs at the bottom resolve themselves into the Italian and Iberian peninsulas.

The philosophy behind the map places order at the centre while wilderness and (25)…………. are pushed towards the edges.

In the Arabic map, the regions become hotter as one moves south and colder as one moves (26)………….

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