BEST IELTS General Reading Test 407

Table of Contents

IELTS GENERAL READING TEST 407 – PASSAGE – 2

IELTS GENERAL READING TEST – 407

READING PASSAGE – 2

Rap Music

Rap music is a famous music genre created in the late 1970s by disc jockeys and urban blacks. It’s a musical kind of singing style that combines “rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular,” and is frequently sung or chanted over a backbeat or musical background. Rap is different from spoken-word poems in that it is frequently done to the beat of an instrumental recording. Rap is frequently connected with hip-hop music and is a key component of it, however, the trend predates hip-hop culture.

IELTS General Reading Test

Raps are occasionally presented in a melodic style. Egyptian Lover, a West Coast rapper, was the first well-known MC to perform “sing-raps.” Some rappers, like 50 Cent and Ja Rule, add a slight melody to their otherwise solely percussive raps, but others, like Cee-Lo Green, can harmonise their raps with the beat. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, a Midwestern group, was one of the first to gain national attention for its use of fast-paced, melodic, and harmonic raps, which are also used by Do or Die another Midwestern group.

IELTS General Reading Test

Questions 15 – 20

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBERS from the passage for each answer.

15. In the late __________ Rap music has been created by disk jockeys and urban blacks.

16. Rap is vary from _______________ poetry in that it is frequently done to the beat of an instrumental recording.

17. Rap is often performed over a beat, produced by a _____________, turntablist, or Beatboxer, or performed a cappella without support.

18. The peculiarity of a rapper’s _________ on the recording is referred to as vocal presence.

19. ______________, or the ability to take in air without disrupting one’s performance, is a crucial talent for any rapper to perfect, and a must for every Rapper.

20. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, a Midwestern group, was one of the first to gain national attention for its use of fast-paced, melodic, and harmonic raps, which are also used by Do or Die another ________________.

IELTS General Reading Test

Read the text below and answer Questions 21-25.

Carbon credits of 700 million dollars for sea otters

Do you want to reduce global warming? Save a sea otter. According to Chris Wilmers of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the animals remove at least 0.18 kg of carbon from the atmosphere for every square metre of populated coastal waters. That means that if healthy populations of sea otters were restored along North American coasts, they might lock up a massive 1010 kg of carbon. On the European carbon-trading market, this is estimated to be worth more than $700 million. Wilmers spoke about this at the Society for Conservation Biology’s annual meeting in Edmonton, Canada, earlier this month.

The figures are part of a wider understanding that predators play an important ecological role in supporting vegetation development by limiting herbivore numbers. Sea otters benefit trees and shrubs by eating sea urchins, the same as wolves support trees and shrubs by eliminating deer.

IELTS General Reading Test

To calculate the minimum amount of the carbon sink that sea otters might provide in North America, Wilmers and his coworkers calculated the total available kelp habitat – rocky reefs in up to 20 metres of water – and combined the quantity of carbon that would be locked away in kelp either if no otters were available or if otters were available in huge numbers to handle sea-urchin numbers.

According to Wilmers, the actual volume of the sink is likely to be more than the estimated 1010 kg, because some carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by kelp forests may make its way into the deep ocean and be buried for extended periods of time.

IELTS General Reading Test