IELTS READING – The Risks of Cigarette Smoke S49AT2

IELTS READING S49AT2

The Risks of Cigarette Smoke

Discovered in the early 1800s and named nicotianine, the oily essence now called nicotine is the main active ingredient of tobacco. Nicotine, however, is only a small component of cigarette smoke, which contains more than 4,700 chemical compounds, including 43 cancer-causing substances. In recent times, scientific research has been providing evidence that years of cigarette smoking vastly increases the risk of developing fatal medical conditions.

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IELTS READING – THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD S49AT3

IELTS READING S49AT3

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

A. ’Hypotheses,’ said Medawar in 1964, ‘are imaginative and inspirational in character’ they are ‘adventures of the mind’. He was arguing in favour of the position taken by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1972, 3rd edition) that the Q36 nature of scientific method is hypothetico-deductive and not, as is generally believed, inductive.

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IELTS READING – A Remarkable Beetle S50AT1

IELTS READING S50AT1

A Remarkable Beetle

Some of the most remarkable beetles are the dung beetles, which spend almost their whole lives eating and breeding in dung.

More than 4,000 species of these remarkable creatures have evolved and adapted to the world’s different climates and the dung of its many animals. Australia’s native dung beetles are scrub and woodland dwellers, specialising in coarse marsupial droppings and avoiding the soft cattle dung in which bush flies and buffalo flies breed.

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IELTS READING – THE ROCKET FROM EAST TO WEST S49AT1

IELTS READING S49AT1

THE ROCKET FROM EAST TO WEST

A. The concept of the rocket, or rather the mechanism behind the idea of propelling an object into the air, has been around for well over two thousand years. However, it wasn’t until the discovery of the reaction principle, Q5 which was the key to space travel and so represents one of the great milestones in the history of scientific thought, that rocket technology was able to develop. Not only did it solve a problem that had intrigued man for ages, but, more importantly, it literally opened the door to the exploration of the universe.

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