Table of Contents
BEST IELTS General Reading Test 338
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST 338 – PASSAGE – 1
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST – 338
READING PASSAGE – 1
IELTS General Reading Test
Young Turks’ appetite for politics
Long overshadowed by mainstream media and national level parliamentary politics, youth involvement in politics in Nepal has only recently become a matter of heated discussion. The reasons behind youth politics having a backstage minuscule role in bringing policy-level changes may be blamed partly to failure of youths to recognize potential of growth and opportunities here in Nepal and raise their voices and actions or their undying obsession to take a chance with third-world-dreams rooting out of different foreign ideologies.
Or a failure in part of respective authorities to carve out elite manpower dedicated to bringing socioeconomic changes through ground-level local politics.
Stats show the literacy rate of youths between the age group of 15-24 in Nepal is about 87 percent (UNESCO). And economically inactive population in the age group 16-25 stands at 94 percent in males and 61 percent in female youths (MoYS). They are engaged in academia but with less social and civic involvement. It can be very well argued that Nepal does have an untapped potential of youths who if aware about their roles and opportunities can play a big part in transforming the country which has long been sacrificing innovators, change-bringers and genuine politicians in the form of brain drain.
IELTS General Reading Test
Fascinatingly, there exists a generation of youths in politics though small in figures but with ample courage and leadership qualities. They are concerned youths motivated by their own will and conscience dedicated to serving society and their friends not because for attention or power but for love of their homeland.
Following in the footsteps of acclaimed CPN-UML leader late Madan Bhandari, 22-year-old Sushant Sharma Banjara of Eastern Region Campus based in Dharan is a youth leader of All Nepal National Free Student Union (ANNFSU) affiliated to CPN-UML and who has already completed his term of party’s campus secretary of at an age of 20.
IELTS General Reading Test
Every leader must be able to hold a vision if nothing else; vis-a-vis that an enthusiastic student of agricultural engineering, Banjara has prioritized investment in agriculture as the only way to upscale nation’s wealth. With an ideological tilt towards reformed Marxism initiated in Nepal by late communist Leader Madan Bhandari, Banjara believes that politics is a powerful medium to institutionalize change by utilizing it as a platform which encourages innovative breakthroughs.
He holds a belief that, “To wait for someone to initiate changes that matter is an extremely unwise move.” This particular belief helped Banjara to kick start his political career and made him bat eyes on issues concerning community and campus. As a youth politician his duty is to play a role of a moderator when it comes to uniting community by promoting coherence and mutual understanding through inter-cultural programs based at campus level.
IELTS General Reading Test
Banjara’s typical day starts with newspapers and ends in party level meetings focused on improving overall quality measures of the campus and addressing student issues. During his tenure at the campus, Banjara and his union brought innovative reforms to address concerns of students. For instance, they introduced an Electronic Attendance System to monitor lecturers’ presence.
Many government-run campuses around our country have a common plight i.e. disinterest among teachers to run classes on a regular basis. After implementation of an attendance monitoring system, lecturers were forced to undertake designated responsibility. Not only that Banjara and his friends made authorities install a high quality WIFI service which serves as an important infrastructure particularly in engineering institutions.
IELTS General Reading Test
When asked about what he would like to change, Banjara says, “Wrong ideologies and wrong leaders have hindered our community from reaching any targeted benchmark. If the intention of a leader is transformed positively, a community can be driven to prosperity and that is where I would like to start.”
However, many a time youths have been blamed for unwanted nuisances and disturbances in classes around campuses raising questions on benefits of youth involvement in party politics. As for Banjara, ineffective results are a product of high level influence and conflict of interest. If the ambitions or vested interest of a particular group is against common welfare then, according to Banjara, youths would be better off without any involvement in party politics.
Out of a long list Banjara remembers educational awareness projects, library campaigns, blood donation programs and forestation program as being most effective program in the community.
IELTS General Reading Test
Sanjay Chaudhary, 20, is a college student and President of Biratnagar ward no 4 committee of Youth Association Nepal. His fascination towards leadership began all the way back during his school days when Nepal was undergoing a major political overhaul after King Gyanendra was forced to abdicate following the people’s movement of 2006.
He found politics intriguing, interesting and potentially powerful. He works to promote youths and their agendas on the fabrics of mainstream politics. His work as ward president is to reach out to youths and spread awareness about how politics works in the fringes, how politics is shaping up the present and future. He holds regular seminar sessions giving youths an insight into the fray of the modern world.
IELTS General Reading Test
He organizes sporting events like football and cricket to give young eager and effervescent people a platform to showcase and manifest their talent. He organizes blood donation programs as a campaign to promote and articulate the knowledge of giving blood for the needy.
When queried about the credibility of a party-based involvement of youths, he answered gracefully, “A youth has the liberty to choose, to choose willingly. A youth is not a wasted one who marches on the roads and alleys holding and waving flags. It is a core misconception ruling the conscience of the society. He expands himself, explores the multi-dimension politics has in stake. A youth who keeps himself away from politics is the one to blame for when adversity strikes and people howl for the lack of young people in the political spectrum.”
One of these youths could very well be in top leadership position in the future. Watch this space!
IELTS General Reading Test
Questions 1-5
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
1. An overwhelming proportion of men between the ages of 16 and 25 in Nepal are ………………. dormant.
2. Sushant Sharma Banjara has served as the ………………. of his college’s student union.
3. According to Banjara, a country cannot become affluent unless it increases funding in ………………. .
4. Electronic Attendance System has been adopted by Eastern Region Campus to check whether ………………. are present in classrooms.
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5. Due to political transformations in his country, Sanjay Chaudhary first became interested in politics when he was in ………………. .
IELTS General Reading Test
Read the text below and answer Questions 6-14.
The real risks of artificial intelligence
If you believe some AI-watchers, we are racing towards the Singularity – a point at which artificial intelligence outstrips our own and machines go on to improve themselves at an exponential rate. If that happens – and it’s a big if – what will become of us?
In the last few years, several high-profile voices, from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk and Bill Gates have warned that we should be more concerned about possible dangerous outcomes of supersmart AI. And they’ve put their money where their mouth is: Musk is among several billionaire backers of OpenAI, an orgnisation dedicated to developing AI that will benefit humanity.
IELTS General Reading Test
But for many, such fears are overblown. As Andrew Ng at Stanford University, who is also chief scientist at Chinese internet giant Baidu, puts it: fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.
That’s not to say our increasing reliance on AI does not carry real risks, however. In fact, those risks are already here. As smart systems become involved in ever more decisions in arenas ranging from healthcare to finance to criminal justice, there is a danger that important parts of our lives are being made without sufficient scrutiny. What’s more, AIs could have knock-on effects that we have not prepared for, such as changing our relationship with doctors to the way our neighbourhoods are policed.
IELTS General Reading Test
What exactly is AI? Very simply, it’s machines doing things that are considered to require intelligence when humans do them: understanding natural language, recognising faces in photos, driving a car, or guessing what other books we might like based on what we have previously enjoyed reading. It’s the difference between a mechanical arm on a factory production line programmed to repeat the same basic task over and over again, and an arm that learns through trial and error how to handle different tasks by itself.
How is AI helping us? The leading approach to AI right now is machine learning, in which programs are trained to pick out and respond to patterns in large amounts of data, such as identifying a face in an image or choosing a winning move in the board game Go. This technique can be applied to all sorts of problems, such as getting computers to spot patterns in medical images, for example.
IELTS General Reading Test
Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind are collaborating with the UK’s National Health Service in a handful of projects, including ones in which their software is being taught to diagnose cancer and eye disease from patient scans. Others are using machine learning to catch early signs of conditions such as heart disease and Alzheimers.
Artificial intelligence is also being used to analyse vast amounts of molecular information looking for potential new drug candidates – a process that would take humans too long to be worth doing. Indeed, machine learning could soon be indispensable to healthcare.
IELTS General Reading Test
Artificial intelligence can also help us manage highly complex systems such as global shipping networks. For example, the system at the heart of the Port Botany container terminal in Sydney manages the movement of thousands of shipping containers in and out of the port, controlling a fleet of automated, driverless straddle-carriers in a completely human-free zone. Similarly, in the mining industry, optimisation engines are increasingly being used to plan and coordinate the movement of a resource, such as iron ore, from initial transport on huge driverless mine trucks, to the freight trains that take the ore to port.
AIs are at work wherever you look, in industries from finance to transportation, monitoring the share market for suspicious trading activity or assisting with ground and air traffic control. They even help to keep spam out of your inbox. And this is just the beginning for artificial intelligence. As the technology advances, so too does the number of applications.
IELTS General Reading Test
So what’s the problem? Rather than worrying about a future AI takeover, the real risk is that we can put too much trust in the smart systems we are building. Recall that machine learning works by training software to spot patterns in data. Once trained, it is then put to work analysing fresh, unseen data. But when the computer spits out an answer, we are typically unable to see how it got there.
There are obvious problems here. A system is only as good as the data it learns from. Take a system trained to learn which patients with pneumonia had a higher risk of death, so that they might be admitted to hospital. It inadvertently classified patients with asthma as being at lower risk. This was because in normal situations, people with pneumonia and a history of asthma go straight to intensive care and therefore get the kind of treatment that significantly reduces their risk of dying. The machine learning took this to mean that asthma + pneumonia = lower risk of death.
IELTS General Reading Test
As AIs are rolled out to assess everything from your credit rating to suitability for a job you are applying for to criminals’ chance of reoffending, the risks that they will sometimes get it wrong – without us necessarily knowing – get worse.
Since so much of the data that we feed AIs is imperfect, we should not expect perfect answers all the time. Recognising that is the first step in managing the risk. Decision-making processes built on top of AIs need to be made more open to scrutiny. Since we are building artificial intelligence in our own image, it is likely to be both as brilliant and as flawed as we are.
IELTS General Reading Test
Questions 6-14
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 6-14 on your answer sheet.
6. Singularity is the point, where AI…………… our own machines.
7. Many people, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates warned us about possible…………… of supersmart AI.
8. According to Andrew Ng, fearing a rise of…………… is similar to worrying about overpopulation on Mars.
9. There is a danger that many important parts of our lives, like healthcar, finance and…………… will be without sufficient scrutiny.
IELTS General Reading Test
10. Simply put, AI is machines doing things that are considered to require…………… when humans do them.
11. Nowadays, the main approach to AI is…………….
12. DeepMind in collaboration with the UK’s National Health Service works on many projects, including the one where software learns how to…………… and eye disease.
13. In the nearest future machine learning could be…………… to healthcare.
14. AI might also help in managing…………… networks.
IELTS General Reading Test
IELTS General Reading Test
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWERS
1. ECONOMICALLY
2. CAMPUS SECRETARY
3. AGRICULTURE
4. TEACHERS/LECTURERS
5. SCHOOL
6. OUTSTRIPS
7. DANGEROUS OUTCOMES
8. KILLER ROBOTS
9. CRIMINAL JUSTICE
10. INTELLIGENCE
11. MACHINE LEARNING
12. DIAGNOSE CANCER
13. INDISPENSABLE
14. GLOBAL SHIPPING
IELTS General Reading Test