Table of Contents
BEST IELTS General Reading Test 235
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST 235 – PASSAGE – 1
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST
PASSAGE – 1
PEST
A pest is any animal or plant harmful to humans or human concerns. The term is particularly used for creatures that damage crops, livestock, and forestry or cause a nuisance to people, especially in their homes. Humans have modified the environment for their own purposes and are bigoted of other creatures occupying the same space when their activities impact adversely on human objectives. Thus, an elephant is unobjectionable in its natural habitat but a pest when it tramples crops. Some animals are disliked because they bite or sting; snakes, wasps, ants, bed bugs, fleas and ticks belong in this category. Others enter the home; these include houseflies, which land on and contaminate food, beetles, which tunnel into the woodwork, and other animals that scuttle about on the floor at night, like cockroaches, which are often associated with unsanitary conditions.
IELTS General Reading Test
Agricultural and horticultural crops are attacked by a wide variety of pests, the most important being insects, mites, nematodes, and gastropod molluscs. The damage they do results both from the fungal, the direct injury they cause to the plants and from the indirect consequences bacterial, or viral infections they transmit. Plants have their own defences against these attacks, but these may be overwhelmed, especially in habitats where the plants are already stressed, or where the pests have been accidentally introduced and may have no natural enemies.
The pests affecting trees are predominantly insects, and many of these have also been introduced inadvertently and lack natural enemies, and some have transmitted novel fungal diseases with devastating results. Humans have traditionally performed pest control in agriculture and forestry by the use of pesticides; however, other methods exist such as mechanical control, and recently developed biological controls.
IELTS General Reading Test
Animals are considered pests or vermin when they injure people or damage crops, forestry, or buildings. Elephants are regarded as pests by the farmers whose crops they raid and trample. Mosquitoes and ticks are vectors that can transmit ailments but are also pests because of the distress caused by their bites. Grasshoppers are usually solitary herbivores of little economic importance until the conditions are met for them to enter a swarming phase, become locusts, and cause enormous damage. All birds are a risk at airfields where they can be sucked into aircraft engines. Woodpeckers sometimes excavate holes in buildings, fencing and utility poles, causing structural damage; they also drum on various reverberatory structures on buildings such as gutters, down-spouts, chimneys, vents, and aluminum sheeting. Jellyfish can form vast swarms which may be responsible for damage to fishing gear, and sometimes clog the cooling systems of power and desalination plants which draw their water from the sea.
IELTS General Reading Test
Many of the animals that we regard as pests live in our homes. Before humans-built dwellings, these creatures lived in the wider environment, but co-evolved with humans, adapting to the warm, sheltered conditions that a house provides, the wooden timbers, the furnishings, the food supplies, and the rubbish dumps. Many no longer exist as free-living organisms in the outside world and can therefore be considered to be domesticated.
IELTS General Reading Test
QUESTION 1 – 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
YES – If the statement agrees with the claims of the writer.
NO – If the statement contradicts the claims of the writer.
NOT GIVEN – If it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.
1. Humans are lenient of other organisms inhabiting the similar space where humans exist.
2. Cockroaches are generally linked with unhygienic surroundings.
3. Plants do not have built-in fighting system against pests.
4. Elephants are the most lethal pests of all.
5. The locusts are a transmuted form of grasshoppers.
6. Woodpeckers can harm the mechanical construction of a structure.
7. Many pests have tailored to the environments that a house provides
IELTS General Reading Test
READ THE TEXT BELOW AND QUESTION 8 – 13
Carbon Fibre
Carbon fibres are fibres about 5 to 10 micrometres of carbon atoms. Carbon fibres have several advantages including high stiffness, high tensile strength, low weight to strength ratio, high chemical resistance, high temperature tolerance and low thermal expansion. These properties have made carbon fibre very popular in aerospace, civil engineering, military, and motorsports, along with other competition sports.
However, they are relatively expensive when compared with similar fibres, such as glass fibre, basalt fibres, or plastic fibres. To produce a carbon fibre, the carbon atoms are bonded together in crystals that are more or less aligned parallel to the long axis of the fibre as the crystal alignment gives the fibre high strength-to-volume ratio in other words; it is strong for its size. Several thousand carbon fibres are bundled together to form a tow, which may be used by itself or woven into a fabric.
IELTS General Reading Test
Carbon fibres are usually combined with other materials to form a composite. When permeated with a plastic resin and baked, it forms carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer which has a very high strength-to-weight ratio and is extremely rigid although somewhat brittle. Carbon fibres are also composited with other materials, such as graphite, to form reinforced carbon- carbon composites, which have a very high heat tolerance. Carbon fibre is frequently supplied in the form of a continuous tow wound onto a reel.
The tow is a bundle of thousands of continuous individual carbon filaments held together and protected by an organic coating, or size, such as polyethylene oxide (PEO) or polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). The tow can be conveniently unwound from the reel for use. Each carbon filament in the tow is a continuous cylinder with a diameter of 5-10 micrometres and consists almost exclusively of carbon. The earliest generation had diameters of 16-22 micrometres.
IELTS General Reading Test
Later fibres have diameters that are approximately 5 micrometres. The atomic structure of carbon fibre is similar to that of graphite, consisting of sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern, the difference being in the way these sheets interlock. Graphite is a crystalline material in which the sheets are stacked parallel to one another in regular fashion. The intermolecular forces between the sheets are relatively weak Vander Waals forces, giving graphite its soft and brittle characteristics. Depending upon the precursor to make the fibre, carbon fibre may be turbo-static or graphitic, or have a hybrid structure with both graphitic and turbo-static parts present. In turbo-static carbon fibre the sheets of carbon atoms are haphazardly folded, or crumpled, together.
Carbon fibres derived from polyacrylonitrile are turbo-static, whereas carbon fibres derived from mesophase pitch are graphitic after heat treatment at temperatures exceeding 2200 °C. Turbo-static carbon fibres tend to have high tensile strength, whereas heat-treated mesophase-pitch-derived carbon fibres have high Young’s modulus (i.e., high stiffness or resistance to extension under load) and high thermal conductivity. Carbon fibre is most notably used to reinforce composite materials, particularly the class of materials known as carbon fibre or graphite reinforced polymers.
IELTS General Reading Test
Non-polymer materials can also be used as the matrix for carbon fibres. Due to the formation of metal carbides and corrosion considerations, carbon has seen limited success in metal matrix composite applications. Reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) consists of carbon fibrereinforced graphite and is used structurally in high-temperature applications. The fibre also finduse in filtration of high-temperature gases, as an electrode with high surface area and fibres significantly improves fire resistance because a dense, compact layer of carbon fibres impeccable corrosion resistance, and as an anti-static component. Melding a thin layer of carbon efficiently reflects heat.
IELTS General Reading Test
QUESTION 8 – 13
Complete the fill ups below.
Write no more than THREE WORDS and/or numbers for each answer.
8. The unique characteristics of carbon fibre has made it fields …….. in different
9. Carbon fibres are ………… than plastic fibres.
10. Carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer is exceptionally stiff but slightly …………..
11. The sheets of the carbon atom are carbon fibres that are assembled in a steady ……………. arrangement.
12. Turbo-static carbon fibres are likely to have elevated ……………….
13. Blending a slender layer of carbon fibres substantially enhances ………………….
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWERS ARE BELOW
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWER
1. NO
2. YES
3. NO
4. NOT GIVEN
5. YES
6. YES
7. YES
8. VERY POPULAR
9. RELATIVELY EXPENSIVE
10. BRITTLE
11. HEXAGONAL
12. TENSILE STRENGTH
13. FIRE RESISTENCE
IELTS General Reading Test