Academic Reading test- section 1 practice test

This is the first section of your IELTS Reading test. You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–
13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

A bar at the folies (Un bar aux folies)

A. One of the most critically renowned paintings of the 19th-century modernist movement is the French
painter Edouard Manet’s masterwork, A Bar at the Folies. Originally belonging to the composer
Emmanuel Chabrier, it is now in the possession of The Courtauld Gallery in London, where it has also
become a favourite with the crowds.

B. The painting is set late at night in a nineteenth-century Parisian nightclub. A barmaid stands alone
behind her bar, fitted out in a black bodice that has a frilly white neckline, and with a spray of flowers
sitting across her décolletage. She rests her hands on the bar and gazes out forlornly at a point just
below the viewer, not quite making eye contact. Also on the bar are some bottles of liquor and a bowl of
oranges, but much of the activity in the room takes place in the reflection of a mirror behind the barmaid.
Through this mirror we see an auditorium, bustling with blurred figures and faces: men in top hats, a
woman examining the scene below her through binoculars, another in long gloves, even the feet of a
trapeze artist demonstrating acrobatic feats above his adoring crowd. In the foreground of the reflection
a man with a thick moustache is talking with the barmaid.

C. Although the Folies (-Bergère) was an actual establishment in late nineteenth-century Paris, and the
subject of the painting was a real barmaid who worked there, Manet did not attempt to recapture every
detail of the bar in his rendition. The painting was largely completed in a private studio belonging to the
painter, where the barmaid posed with a number of bottles, and this was then integrated with quick
sketches the artist made at the Folies itself.

D. Even more confounding than Manet’s relaxed attention to detail, however, is the relationship in the
painting between the activity in the mirrored reflection and that which we see in the unreflected
foreground. In a similar vein to Diego Velazquez’ much earlier work Las Meninas, Manet uses the mirror
to toy with our ideas about which details are true to life and which are not. In the foreground, for
example, the barmaid is positioned upright, her face betraying an expression of lonely detachment, yet
in the mirrored reflection she appears to be leaning forward and to the side, apparently engaging in
conversation with her moustachioed customer. As a result of this, the customer’s stance is also altered.
In the mirror, he should be blocked from view as a result of where the barmaid is standing, yet Manet has
re-positioned him to the side. The overall impact on the viewer is one of a dreamlike disjuncture between
reality and illusion.

E. Why would Manet engage in such deceit? Perhaps for that very reason: to depict two different states
of mind or emotion. Manet seems to be conveying his understanding of the modern workplace, a place –
from his perspective – of alienation, where workers felt torn from their ‘true’ selves and forced to assume
an artificial working identity. What we see in the mirrored reflection is the barmaid’s working self, busy
serving a customer. The front-on view, however, bears witness to how the barmaid truly feels at work:
hopeless, adrift, and alone.

F. Ever since its debut at the Paris Salon of 1882, art historians have produced reams of books and
journal articles disputing the positioning of the barmaid and patron in A Bar at the Folies. Some have
even conducted staged representations of the painting in order to ascertain whether Manet’s seemingly
distorted point of view might have been possible after all. Yet while academics are understandably drawn
to the compositional enigma of the painting, the layperson is always likely to see the much simpler, more
human story beneath. No doubt this is the way Manet would have wanted it.
Questions 1–5
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet.

1. a description of how Manet created the painting

2. aspects of the painting that scholars are most interested in

3. the writer’s view of the idea that Manet wants to communicate

4. examples to show why the bar scene is unrealistic

5. a statement about the popularity of the painting

Questions 6–10
Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6–10 on your answer sheet.

6. Who was the first owner of A Bar at the Folies?

7. What is the barmaid wearing?

8. Which room is seen at the back of the painting?

9. Who is performing for the audience?

10. Where did most of the work on the painting take place?

Questions 11–13 Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–F, below.

Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 11–13 on your answer sheet.

11. Manet misrepresents the images in the mirror because he

12. Manet felt modern workers were alienated because they

13. Academics have re-constructed the painting in real life because they

A. wanted to find out if the painting’s perspective was realistic

B. felt they had to work very hard at boring and difficult jobs

C. wanted to understand the lives of ordinary people at the time

D. felt like they had to become different people

E. wanted to manipulate our sense of reality

F. wanted to focus on the detail in the painting

Remember, you have 60 minutes to complete the Reading test! You should spend about 20
minutes on each of the three sections.
 Time Travel
Time travel took a small step away from science fiction and toward science recently when physicists
discovered that sub-atomic particles known as neutrinos – progeny of the sun’s radioactive debris – can
exceed the speed of light. The unassuming particle – it is electrically neutral, small but with a “non-zero
mass” and able to penetrate the human form undetected – is on its way to becoming a rock star of the
scientific world.

Researchers from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva sent the neutrinos
hurtling through an underground corridor toward their colleagues at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-
Tracing Apparatus (OPERA) team 730 kilometres away in Gran Sasso, Italy. The neutrinos arrived
promptly – so promptly, in fact, that they triggered what scientists are calling the unthinkable – that
everything they have learnt, known or taught stemming from the last one hundred years of the physics
discipline may need to be reconsidered.

The issue at stake is a tiny segment of time – precisely sixty nanoseconds (which is sixty billionths of a
second). This is how much faster than the speed of light the neutrinos managed to go in their
underground travels and at a consistent rate (15,000 neutrinos were sent over three years). Even
allowing for a margin of error of ten billionths of a second, this stands as proof that it is possible to race
against light and win. The duration of the experiment also accounted for and ruled out any possible lunar
effects or tidal bulges in the earth’s crust.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of reason to remain sceptical. According to Harvard University science
historian Peter Galison, Einstein’s relativity theory has been “pushed harder than any theory in the
history of the physical sciences”. Yet each prior challenge has come to no avail, and relativity has so far
refused to buckle.

So is time travel just around the corner? The prospect has certainly been wrenched much closer to the
realm of possibility now that a major physical hurdle – the speed of light – has been cleared. If particles
can travel faster than light, in theory travelling back in time is possible. How anyone harnesses that to
some kind of helpful end is far beyond the scope of any modern technologies, however, and will be left to
future generations to explore.

Certainly, any prospective time travellers may have to overcome more physical and logical hurdles than
merely overtaking the speed of light. One such problem, posited by René Barjavel in his 1943 text Le
Voyageur Imprudent is the so-called grandfather paradox. Barjavel theorised that, if it were possible to
go back in time, a time traveller could potentially kill his own grandfather. If this were to happen,
however, the time traveller himself would not be born, which is already known to be true. In other words,
there is a paradox in circumventing an already known future; time travel is able to facilitate past actions
that mean time travel itself cannot occur.

Other possible routes have been offered, though. For Igor Novikov, astrophysicist behind the 1980s’
theorem known as the self-consistency principle, time travel is possible within certain boundaries.
Novikov argued that any event causing a paradox would have zero probability. It would be possible,
however, to “affect” rather than “change” historical outcomes if travellers avoided all inconsistencies.
Averting the sinking of the Titanic, for example, would revoke any future imperative to stop it from
sinking – it would be impossible. Saving selected passengers from the water and replacing them with
realistic corpses would not be impossible, however, as the historical record would not be altered in any
way.

A further possibility is that of parallel universes. Popularised by Bryce Seligman DeWitt in the 1960s
(from the seminal formulation of Hugh Everett), the many-worlds interpretation holds that an alternative
pathway for every conceivable occurrence actually exists. If we were to send someone back in time, we
might therefore expect never to see him again – any alterations would divert that person down a new
historical trajectory.

A final hypothesis, one of unidentified provenance, reroutes itself quite efficiently around the grandfather
paradox. Non-existence theory suggests exactly that – a person would quite simply never exist if they
altered their ancestry in ways that obstructed their own birth. They would still exist in person upon
returning to the present, but any chain reactions associated with their actions would not be registered.
Their “historical identity” would be gone.
So, will humans one day step across the same boundary that the neutrinos have? World-renowned
astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes that once spaceships can exceed the speed of light, humans
could feasibly travel millions of years into the future in order to repopulate earth in the event of a
forthcoming apocalypse. This is because, as the spaceships accelerate into the future, time would slow
down around them (Hawking concedes that bygone eras are off limits – this would violate the
fundamental rule that cause comes before effect).

Hawking is therefore reserved yet optimistic. “Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I
used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. These days I’m not so cautious.”

Academic Reading - section 3 practice test

This is the third section of your IELTS Academic Reading test. You should spend about 20 minutes on
Questions 28–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Questions 28–33
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 28–33 on your answer sheet, write

True - if the statement agrees with the information False - if the statement contradicts the information
Not Given - if there is no information on this

28. It is unclear where neutrinos come from.

29. Neutrinos can pass through a person’s body without causing harm.

30. It took scientists between 50-70 nanoseconds to send the neutrinos from Geneva to Italy.

31. Researchers accounted for effects the moon might have had on the experiment.

32. The theory of relativity has often been called into question unsuccessfully.

33. This experiment could soon lead to some practical uses for time travel

Questions 34–39. Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 34–39 on your answer sheet.

Original Theorist Theory Principle

René Barjavel Grandfather paradox Time travel would allow for 34

…………… that would actually
make time travel impossible
Igor Novikov Self-consistency principle It is only possible to alter history
in ways that result in no 35
………………… .
36 ……………… Many-worlds interpretation Each possible event has an 37
…………………, so a time
traveller changing the past
would simply end up in a
different branch of history than
the one he left.
Unknown 38 ……………… If a time traveller changed the
past to prevent his future life, he
would not have a 39
………………… as the person
never existed.

Question 40. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

Stephen Hawking has stated that

A. Human time travel is theoretically possible, but is unlikely to ever actually occur.

B. Human time travel might be possible, but only moving backward in time.

C. Human time travel might be possible, but only moving forward in time.

D. All time travel is impossible.

Remember, you have 60 minutes to complete the Reading test! You should spend about 20 minutes on
each of the three sections.