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IELTS READING – Obtaining Linguistic Data S27AT3

IELTS Reading Obtaining Linguistic Data reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to 🗣️ Linguistics & Language Research subject..

A. Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one’s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.

B. In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data – an informant Informants are (ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgements on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, Q32 linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist’s personal judgements are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgements of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants.

The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on Q33 foreign languages, or child speech.

C. Many factors must be considered when selecting informants – whether one is working with single speakers (a common situation when languages have not been described before), two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. Q29 The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting (e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants (e.g. their fluency and consistency). For larger studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.

D. Q27 Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist’s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate (‘difficult’ pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. Q27 People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and Q34 sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimise the ‘observer’s paradox’ (how to observe the way people behave when they are not being observed). Q30 Some recordings are made without the speakers being aware of the fact – a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique G is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style (e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).

E. Q28 An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist’s problems, however. Speech is often unclear and ambiguous. Where possible, therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer’s written comments on the Q35 non-verbal behaviour of the participants, and about the context in general, A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Q36 Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations (the camera cannot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.

F. Q31 Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviours. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques (‘How do you say table in your language?’). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just a single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used: a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame (e.g. I_see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus for correction (‘Is it possible to say / no can see?’).

G. A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about Q37 frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text; others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a Q38 particular linguistic feature. The Q39 size of the corpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data: it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the Q40 intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

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IELTS READING – Volcanoes-earth-shattering news S27AT2

 IELTS Reading Volcanoes-earth-shattering news reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Earth Science & Natural Disasters subject..

When Mount Pinatubo suddenly erupted on 9 June 1991, the power of volcanoes past and present again hit the headlines

A. Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top few kilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurl rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away.

But the classic eruption – cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lava – is only a tiny part of a global story. Q14 Vulcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt.

 

Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s first stable atmosphere and provided all Q22 the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.

What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need.

B. Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack – like an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much hotter.

Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’ like thick treacle. Q15 The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.

C. These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Q16 Every eruption is different, but put at its simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350°C, will start to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and rise more swiftly.

Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of Q19 magma – Q23 molten rock from the mantle – inch towards the surface, cooling slowly, to snow through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England). Sometimes – as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa – the magma rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally onto the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan plateau in Q24 western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometres of lava, some of it 2,400 metres thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.

Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges upwards. Q26 The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat, it begins to froth, and it Q25 explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, vulcanologists can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.

The biggest eruptions are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimetres a year. Look at maps of volcanoes, earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines of what are called Q18 tectonic plates – the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The most dramatic of these is the Pacific Q20 ‘ring of fire‘ where there have been the most violent explosions – Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichon in Mexico about a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.

D. Q17 But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time. During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge, hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the pressure below becomes irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took Q21 600 years.

Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont Pelee in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived. In 1 815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 metres of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, cancelling the following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvests failed, after snow in June and frosts in August. Volcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet ones.

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IELTS READING – Micro-Enterprise Credit for Street Youth S27AT1

IELTS Reading Micro-Enterprise Credit for Street Youth reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to 💼 Economics & Social Development subject..

“I am from a large, poor family, and for many years we have done without breakfast. Q1 Ever since I joined the Street Kids International program I have been able to buy my family sugar and buns for breakfast. I have also bought myself decent second-hand clothes and shoes.”

Doreen Soko

‘We’ve had business experience. Now I’m confident to expand what we’ve been doing.

I’ve learnt cash management, and the way of keeping money so we save for re-investment. Now business is a part of our lives. As well, we didn’t know each other before – now we’ve made new friends.’

Fan Kaoma

Participants in the Youth Skills Enterprise Initiative Program, Zambia

Introduction

Although small-scale business training and credit programs have become more common throughout the world, relatively little attention has been paid to the need to direct such opportunities to young people. Even less attention has been paid to children living on the street or in difficult circumstances.

Over the past nine years, Street Kids International (S.K.I.) has been working with partner organisations in Africa, Latin America, and Q5 India to support the economic lives of street children, The purpose of this paper is to share some of the lessons S.K.I. and our partners have learned.

Background

Typically, Q3 children do not end up on the streets due to a single cause, but to a combination of factors: a dearth of adequately funded schools, the demand for income at home, family breakdown and violence. The street may be attractive to children as a place to find adventurous play and money. However, It is also a place where some children are exposed, with little or no protection, to exploitative employment, urban crime, and abuse.

Children who work on the streets are generally involved in unskilled, labour-intensive tasks which require long hours, such as shining shoes, carrying goods, guarding or washing cars, and informal trading. Some may also earn income through begging, or through theft and other illegal activities. At the same time, there are street children who take pride In supporting themselves and their families and who often enjoy their work. Q4 Many children may choose entrepreneurship because it allows them a degree of independence, is less exploitative than many forms of paid employment, and is flexible enough to allow them to participate in other activities such as education and domestic tasks.

Street Business Partnerships

Q2 S.K.I. has worked with partner organisations in Latin America, Africa, and India to develop innovative opportunities for street children to earn income.

• The S.K.I. Bicycle Courier Service first started in the Q5 Sudan. Participants in this enterprise were supplied with Q6 bicycles, which they used to deliver parcels and messages, and which they were required to pay for gradually from their wages. A similar program was taken up in Bangalore, India.

• Another successful project, The Q7 Shoe Shine Collective, was a partnership program with the Y.W.C.A. in the Dominican Republic. In this project, participants were lent money to purchase shoe shine boxes. They were also given a safe place to store their equipment, and facilities for individual savings plans.

• The Youth Skills Enterprise Initiative in Zambia is a joint program with the Red Cross Society and the Y.W.C.A. Street youths are supported to start their own small business through business training, Q8 life skills training, and access to credit.

Lessons learned

The following lessons have emerged from the programs that S.K.I. and partner organisations have created.

• Q9 Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, nor for every street child. Ideally, potential participants will have been involved in the organisation’s programs for at least six months, and trust and relationship building will have already been established.

• The involvement of the participants has been essential to the development of relevant programs. When children have had a major role in determining procedures, they are more likely to abide by and enforce them.

• It is critical for all loans to be linked to training programs that include the development of basic business and life skills.

• There are tremendous advantages to involving parents or guardians in the program, where such relationships exist. Home visits allow staff the opportunity to know where the participants live, and to understand more about each individual’s situation.

• Q11 Small loans are provided initially for purchasing fixed assets such as bicycles, shoe shine kits, and basic building materials for a market stall. As the entrepreneurs gain experience, the enterprises can be gradually expanded and consideration can be given to increasing loan amounts, The loan amounts in S.K.I. programs have generally ranged from US$30-$100.

• Q12 All S.K.I. programs have charged interest on the loans, primarily to get the entrepreneurs used to the concept of paying interest on borrowed money. Generally, the rates have been modest (lower than bank rates).

Conclusion

There is a need to recognise the importance of access to credit for impoverished young people seeking to fulfill economic needs. The provision of small loans to support the entrepreneurial dreams and ambitions of youth can be an effective means to help them change their lives. However, Q13 we believe that credit must be extended in association with other types of support that help participants develop critical life skills as well as productive businesses.

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IELTS READING – Play is a serious business S26AT3

IELTS SIMULATOR ACADEMIC READING – Play is a serious business S26AT3 FREE COMPUTER DELIVERED ONLINE IELTS SIMULATION
IELTS Reading Play is a serious business reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to 🧠 Child Psychology & Education subject..

Does play help develop bigger, better brains?

Bryant Furlow investigates

A. Playing is a serious business. Children engrossed in a make-believe world, fox cubs play-fighting or kittens teasing a ball of string aren’t just having fun. Play may look like a carefree and exuberant way to pass the time before the hard work of adulthood comes along, but there’s much more to it than that. Q29 For a start, play can even cost animals their lives. Eighty per cent of deaths among juvenile fur seals occur because playing pups fail to spot predators approaching. It is also extremely expensive in terms of energy.

Q29 Playful young animals use around two or three per cent of their energy cavorting, and in children that figure can be closer to fifteen per cent. ‘Even two or three per cent is huge,’ says John Byers of Idaho University. ‘You just don’t find animals wasting energy like that,’ he adds. There must be a reason.

B. But if play is not simply a developmental hiccup, as biologists once thought, why did it evolve? Q33 The latest idea suggests that play has evolved to build big brains. In other words, playing makes you intelligent. Q32 Playfulness, it seems, is common only among mammals, although a few of the larger-brained birds also indulge. Animals at play often use unique signs – tail-wagging in dogs, for example – to indicate that activity superficially resembling adult behaviour is not really in earnest. Q34 A popular explanation of play has been that it helps juveniles develop the skills they will need to hunt, mate and socialise as adults. Q35 Another has been that it allows young animals to get in shape for adult life by improving their respiratory endurance. Both these ideas have been questioned in recent years.

C. Take the exercise theory. If play evolved to build muscle or as a kind of endurance training, then you would expect to see permanent benefits. But Byers points out that the benefits of increased exercise disappear rapidly after training stops, so any improvement in endurance resulting from juvenile play would be lost by adulthood. Q38 ‘If the function of play was to get into shape,’ says Byers, ‘the optimum time for playing would depend on when it was most advantageous for the young of a particular species to do so. But it doesn’t work like that.’ Across species, play tends to peak about halfway through the suckling stage and then decline.

D. Then there’s the skills-training hypothesis. At first glance, playing animals do appear to be practising the complex manoeuvres they will need in adulthood. But a closer inspection reveals this interpretation as too simplistic. In one study, behavioural ecologist Tim Caro, from the University of California, looked at the predatory play of kittens and their predatory behaviour when they reached adulthood. He found that the way the cats played had no significant effect on their hunting prowess in later life.

E. Q39 Earlier this year, Sergio Pellis of Lethbridge University, Canada, reported that there is a strong positive link between brain size and playfulness among mammals in general. Comparing measurements for fifteen orders of mammal, he and his team found larger brains (for a given body size) are linked to greater playfulness. The converse was also found to be true. Q36 Robert Barton of Durham University believes that, because large brains are more sensitive to developmental stimuli than smaller brains, they require more play to help mould them for adulthood. ‘I concluded it’s to do with learning, and with the importance of environmental data to the brain during development,’ he says.

F. Q28 According to Byers, the timing of the playful stage in young animals provides an important clue to what’s going on. If you plot the amount of time a juvenile devotes to play each day over the course of its development, you discover a pattern typically associated with a ‘sensitive period’ – a brief development window during which the brain can actually be modified in ways that are not possible earlier or later in life. Think of the relative ease with which young children – but not infants or adults – absorb language. Other researchers have found that play in cats, rats and mice is at its most intense just as this ‘window of opportunity’ reaches its peak.

G. ‘People have not paid enough attention to the amount of the brain activated by play,’ says Marc Bekoff from Colorado University. Bekoff studied coyote pups at play and found that the kind of behaviour involved was markedly more variable and unpredictable than that of adults. Such behaviour activates many different parts of the brain, he reasons. Q37 Bekoff likens it to a behavioural kaleidoscope, with animals at play jumping rapidly between activities. ‘They use behaviour from a lot of different contexts – predation, aggression, reproduction,’ he says. ‘Their developing brain is getting all sorts of stimulation.’

H. Q30 Not only is more of the brain involved in play than was suspected, but it also seems to activate higher cognitive processes. ‘There’s enormous cognitive involvement in play,’ says Bekoff. He points out that play often involves complex assessments of playmates, ideas of reciprocity and the use of specialised signals and rules. He believes that play creates a brain that has greater behavioural flexibility and improved potential for learning later in life. The idea is backed up by the work of Stephen Q27&40 Siviy of Gettysburg College. studied how bouts of play affected the brain’s levels of a particular chemical associated with the stimulation and growth of nerve cells. He was surprised by the extent of the activation. ‘Play just lights everything up,’ he says. By allowing link-ups between brain areas that might not normally communicate with each other, play may enhance creativity. 

I. What might further experimentation suggest about the way children are raised in many societies today? We already know that rat pups denied the chance to play grow smaller brain components and fail to develop the ability to apply social rules when they interact with their peers. With schooling beginning earlier and becoming increasingly exam-orientated, play is likely to get even less of a look-in. Who knows what the result of that will be?

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