BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 585

Table of Contents

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 585 – READING PASSAGE – 1

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 585

READING PASSAGE – 1

The Story of the Battery

When people consider today how indispensable the Internet is, they often overlook that without electricity, it would not function. Living without the Internet would be a significant inconvenience today, but without electricity, life as we know now it would collapse. Since we started using electricity, which was in the middle of the nineteenth century, we have worked on ways to move and store it easily and efficiently and one of the most common ways of storing electricity has been the battery. A battery does not actually store electricity.

A battery, which is actually an electric cell, is a device that produces electricity from a chemical reaction. The story of the battery is one of people trying to create different compounds to create an electric current. The two goals on improving batteries have always been to create ones that can produce an electric current for a long time and to make them smaller and smaller

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST

Alessandro Volta is credited with creating in 1800 the first battery and the first practical method of generating electricity. Luigi Galvani, another Italian scientist and contemporary of Volta, almost made the discovery, but misinterpreted his research results. Using a frog’s leg in an experiment, Galvani concluded that the electric current was ‘animal electricity’ and did not come from the apparatus he had set up. Volta’s battery was made by piling up layers of silver and paper or cloth, soaked in salt, and zinc. These layers were assembled, without paper or cloth between the zinc and silver, until the current was created. Volta’s battery was not good for delivering currents for any significant duration.

This restriction was overcome in the Daniell Cell in 1820. Using different chemicals, John Daniell used a copper pot, copper sulphate, sulphuric acid and mercury to produce his electric current. Although we now know better than to put mercury into batteries, this battery, which produced about 1.1 volts, was used to power telegraphs, telephones, and even to ring doorbells in homes for over 100 years.

Although many other chemical combinations were used in batteries over the years, the lead acid battery is one that stands out. First made in 1859, it was further improved in 1881 and this design even now forms the basis of the modern lead acid battery found in cars. One very common battery used today is the lithium-ion battery, which was developed by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a part of their efforts during the Cold War.

The idea surrounding the lithium-ion battery was to create a power source that could provide a longduration, high-density energy supply in a small package. In the early 1960’s, both the private and public sectors were experimenting with creating batteries using lithium, but the breakthrough in the chemistry was achieved by adding the ion into the equation.

Not long after its invention, the CIA shared the lithium-ion battery concept with the public and a company working on an exploratory project developed and created the first patent for the lithium-ion battery for commercial use in 1968. Used for a variety of different applications, the first lithium-ion battery was a game-changer in the medical industry, where it is used as the power source in heart pacemakers.

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST

Today, the lithium-ion battery is the most common type of battery used in pacemakers, because of its reliability and life span. Most lithium-ion batteries can last 10 years or longer in a cardiac pacemaker. What makes lithium-ion batteries even more valuable in cardiac pacemakers is that, when the battery nears the end of its life, the voltage begins to decrease. Because of the battery’s decreasing voltage, electrical designers can design an indicator for the pacemaker that allows the device to inform the doctor a new battery is needed.

The battery can then be changed safely before it completely discharges. Lithium-ion batteries can also be used for other medical applications, including neurostimulation and insulin pumps for diabetics. Whilst people consider the mid-nineteenth century to have been when civilisation started using electricity, there has been a discovery of what could be a battery that seems to indicate that electricity was used long ago. What has become known as the Parthian Battery was found on a railway construction site in 1936. Dating back 2,000 years, the ‘battery’ would have comprised a clay jar filled with a vinegar solution.

An iron rod was put into the middle of the jar and encircled with copper wire. Tests have shown that this ‘battery’ could produce 2 volts of electricity. It would have not been used for electricity as we generally use it today, but it has been theorised it could have been used for electroplating objects with metals, such as gold or silver. Most scientists reject these theories nowadays and hypothesise that the ‘battery’ was more likely to have been used for the storage of scrolls.

Although battery research is proceeding at a steady pace, with an average annual gain in capacity of six per cent, what scientists are hoping for is that a battery will be developed that can last even longer and be lighter and smaller. One completely different technology that is being explored is to create a battery that can power a house; size would not be such an issue, but its generating capacity and length of life would have to be something totally different from what we have yet experienced.

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST

Questions 1 – 5

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.