IELTS READING – The Secret Of Staying Young S21AT1

Pheidole dentata, a native ant of the south-eastern U.S., isn’t immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn’t seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can do everything just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. ‘We get a picture that these ants really don’t decline,’ says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University.

Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. _Q9 Naked mole rats can live for almost 30 years and stay fit for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate with age just like people do. Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organised colonies. ‘It’s this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people,’ says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms, or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives.

In the lab, P. dentata worker ants typically live for around 140 days. Giraldo focused on ants at _Q1 four age ranges: 20 to 22 days, 45 to 47 days, 95 to 97 days, and 120 to 122 days. _Q10 Unlike all previous studies, which only estimated how old the ants were, her work tracked the ants from the time the pupae became adults, so she knew their exact ages. Then she put them through a range of tests.

Giraldo watched how well the ants took care of the _Q2 young of the colony, recording how often each ant attended to, carried, and fed them. She compared how well 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants followed the telltale scent that the insects usually leave to mark a trail to _Q3 food. She tested how ants responded to _Q4 light and also measured how active they were by counting how often ants in a small dish walked across a line. And she experimented with how ants react to live prey: a tethered fruit fly. Giraldo expected the older ants to perform poorly in all these tasks. But the elderly insects were all good caretakers and trail-followers—the 95-day-old ants could track the scent even longer than their younger counterparts. They all responded to light well, and the older ants were more active. And when it came to reacting to prey, the older ants attacked the poor fruit fly just as _Q5 aggressively as the young ones did, flaring their mandibles or pulling at the fly’s legs.

Then Giraldo compared the brains of 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants, identifying any cells that were close to death. She saw no major differences with age, nor was there any difference in the _Q6 location of the dying cells, showing that age didn’t seem to affect specific brain functions. Ants and other insects have structures in their brains called mushroom bodies, which are important for processing information, learning, and memory. _Q11 She also wanted to see if aging affects the density of synaptic complexes within these structures—regions where _Q7 neurons come together. Again, the answer was no. What was more, the old ants didn’t experience any drop in the levels of either serotonin or dopamine—brain _Q8 chemicals whose decline often coincides with aging. In humans, for example, a decrease in serotonin has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

‘This is the first time anyone has looked at both behavioral and neural changes in these ants so thoroughly,’ says Giraldo, _Q12 who recently published the findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists have looked at some similar aspects in bees, but the results of recent bee studies were mixed—some studies showed age-related declines, which biologists call senescence, and others didn’t.’For now, the study raises more questions than it answers,’ Giraldo says, ‘including how P. dentata stays in such good shape.’

Also, if the ants don’t deteriorate with age, why do they die at all? _Q13 Out in the wild, the ants probably don’t live for a full 140 days thanks to predators, disease and just being in an environment that’s much harsher than the comforts of the lab. ‘The lucky ants that do live into old age may suffer a steep decline just before dying,’ Giraldo says, but she can’t say for sure because her study wasn’t designed to follow an ant’s final moments.

‘It will be important to extend these findings to other species of social insects,’ says Gene E. Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This ant might be unique, or it might represent a broader pattern among other social bugs with possible clues to the science of aging in larger animals. Either way, it seems that for these ants, age really doesn’t matter.

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IELTS READING – Back to the future of skyscraper design S19AT2

IELTS READING Back to the future of skyscraper design reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Environmental Design & Engineering subject..

Answers to the problem of excessive electricity use by skyscrapers and large public buildings can be found in ingenious but forgotten architectural designs of the 19th and early 20th centuries

A. The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years of research and award-

winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The crisis in building design is already here,’ said Short. ‘Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.’

B. Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public buildings are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the ‘life support’ system of vast air conditioning units. Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, _Q18 before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems, which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively marketed’ by their inventors.

C. Short points out that to make most contemporary buildings habitable, they have to be sealed and air-conditioned. The energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and largely unnecessary. Buildings in the West account for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions, and the rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate. _Q15 Short regards glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers as symbols of status, rather than practical ways of meeting our requirements.

D. Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier-20th centuries, including the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built to the _Q19 designs of John Shaw Billings, including the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US city of Baltimore (1873-1889). _Q17 ‘We spent three years digitally modelling Billings’ final designs,’ says Short. ‘We put _Q20 pathogens in the airstreams, modelled for someone with _Q21 tuberculosis (TB) coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept other patients safe from harm.

E. _Q16 ’We discovered that 19th-century hospital _Q22 wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour – that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles now. Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. _Q23 Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.’ Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air.

F. _Q14 Much of the ingenuity present in 19th-century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked _Q24 public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the lethal threat of _Q25 miasmas – toxic air that spread disease. Miasmas were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages right through to the _Q26 cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Foul air, rather than germs, was believed to be the main driver of ‘hospital fever’, leading to disease and frequent death. The prosperous steered clear of hospitals. While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last 30 years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

G. Today, huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are given over to air conditioning. ‘But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens. To go forward into our new low-energy, low-carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy, high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned.’

H. Successful examples of Short’s approach include the Queen’s Building at De Montfort University in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria, each seating more than 150 people. The award-winning building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK. Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next 20 or 30 years if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected.

I. He is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate. He and his team have worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn. Short looks at how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.

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IELTS READING – The power of play S20AT3

_Q32 Virtually every child, the world over, plays. The drive to play is so intense that children will do so in any circumstances, for instance when they have no real toys, or when parents do not actively encourage the behavior. In the eyes of a young child, running, pretending, and building is fun.

Researchers and educators know that these playful activities benefit the development of the whole child across social, cognitive, physical, and emotional domains. Indeed, play is such an instrumental component to healthy child development that the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (1989) recognized play as a fundamental right of every child.

Yet, while experts continue to expound a powerful argument for the importance of play in children’s lives, the actual time children spend playing continues to decrease. Today, children play eight hours less each week than their counterparts did two decades ago (Elkind 2008). Under pressure of rising academic standards, play is being replaced by test preparation in kindergartens and grade schools, and parents who aim to give their preschoolers a leg up are led to believe that flashcards and educational ‘toys’ are the path to success. _Q33 Our society has created a false dichotomy between play and learning.

Through play, children learn to regulate their behavior, lay the foundations for later learning in science and mathematics, figure out the complex negotiations of social relationships, build a repertoire of creative problem-solving skills, and so much more. There is also an important role for adults in guiding children through playful learning opportunities.

_Q35 Full consensus on a formal definition of play continues to elude the researchers and theorists who study it. _{Q34 Q27} Definitions range from discrete descriptions of various types of play such as physical, construction, language, or symbolic play (Miller & Almon 2009), to lists of broad criteria, based on observations and attitudes, that are meant to capture the essence of all play behaviors (e.g. Rubin  1983).

A majority of the contemporary definitions of play focus on several key criteria. The founder of the National Institute for Play, Stuart Brown, has described play as ‘anything that spontaneously is done for its own sake’. More specifically, he says it ‘appears purposeless, produces pleasure and joy, [and] leads one to the next stage of mastery’ (as quoted in Tippett 2008). Similarly, Miller and Almon (2009) say that play includes ‘activities that are freely chosen and directed by children and arise from intrinsic motivation’. _Q31 Often, play is defined along a continuum as more or less playful using the following set of behavioral and dispositional criteria (e.g. Rubin et al. 1983):

Play is pleasurable: Children must enjoy the activity or it is not play. It is intrinsically motivated: Children engage in play simply for the satisfaction the behavior itself brings. It has no extrinsically motivated function or goal. Play is process oriented: When children play, the means are more important than the ends. It is freely chosen, spontaneous and voluntary. If a child is pressured, they will likely not think of the activity as play. Play is actively engaged: Players must be physically and/or mentally involved in the activity. Play is non-literal. It involves make-believe.

According to this view, children’s playful behaviors can range in degree from 0% to 100% playful. _Q30 Rubin and colleagues did not assign greater weight to any one dimension in determining playfulness; however, other researchers have suggested that process orientation and a lack of obvious functional purpose may be the most important aspects of play (e.g. Pellegrini 2009).

From the perspective of a continuum, play can thus blend with other motives and attitudes that are less playful, such as work. _Q36 Unlike play, work is typically not viewed as enjoyable and it is extrinsically motivated (i.e. it is goal-oriented). _Q29 Researcher Joan Goodman (1994) suggested that hybrid forms of work and play are not a detriment to learning; rather, they can provide optimal contexts for learning. For example, a child may be engaged in a difficult, goal-directed activity set up by their teacher, but they may still be actively engaged and intrinsically motivated. At this mid-point between play and work, the child’s motivation, coupled with guidance from an adult, can create robust opportunities for playful learning.

Critically, recent research supports the idea that adults can facilitate children’s learning while maintaining a playful approach in interactions known as ‘guided play’ (Fisher et al. 2011). _Q28 The adult’s role in play varies as a function of their educational goals and the child’s developmental level (Hirsch-Pasek et al. 2009).

Guided play takes two forms. At a very basic level, adults can enrich the child’s environment by providing objects or experiences that promote aspects of a curriculum. In the more direct form of guided play, parents or other adults can support children’s play by joining in the fun as a co-player, raising thoughtful questions, commenting on children’s discoveries, or _Q37 encouraging further exploration or new facets to the child’s activity. Although playful learning can be somewhat structured, it must also be child-centered (Nicolopolou et al. 2006). Play should stem from the child’s own _Q38 desire.

Both free and guided play are essential elements in a child-centered approach to playful learning. Intrinsically motivated free play provides the child with true _Q39 autonomy, while guided play is an avenue through which parents and educators can provide more _Q40 targeted learning experiences. In either case, play should be actively engaged, it should be predominantly child-directed, and it must be fun.

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IELTS READING – Saving bugs to find new drugs S20AT2

Zoologist Ross Piper looks at the potential of insects in pharmaceutical research

A. More drugs than you might think are derived from, or inspired by, compounds found in living things. Looking to nature for the soothing and curing of our ailments is nothing new – we have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. You only have to look at other primates

– such as the _Q16 capuchin monkeys who rub themselves with toxin-oozing millipedes to deter mosquitoes, or the chimpanzees who use noxious forest plants to rid themselves of intestinal parasites – to realise that our ancient ancestors too probably had a basic grasp of medicine.

B. Pharmaceutical science and chemistry built on these ancient foundations and perfected the extraction, characterisation, modification, and testing of these natural products. _Q19 Then, for a while, modern pharmaceutical science moved its focus away from nature and into the laboratory, designing chemical compounds from scratch. The main cause of this shift is that although there are plenty of promising chemical compounds in nature, finding them is far from easy. Securing sufficient numbers of the organism in question, isolating and characterising the compounds of interest, and producing large quantities of these compounds are all significant hurdles.

C. Laboratory-based drug discovery has achieved varying levels of success, something which has now prompted the development of new approaches focusing once again on natural products. With the ability to mine genomes for useful compounds, it is now evident that we have barely scratched the surface of nature’s molecular diversity. _Q14 This realisation, together with several looming health crises, such as antibiotic resistance, has put bioprospecting – the search for useful compounds in nature – firmly back on the map.

D. Insects are the undisputed masters of the terrestrial domain, where they occupy every possible niche. Consequently, they have a bewildering array of interactions with other organisms, something which has driven the evolution of an enormous range of very interesting compounds for defensive and offensive purposes. Their remarkable diversity exceeds that of every other group of animals on the planet combined. Yet even though insects are far and away the most diverse animals in existence, their potential as sources of therapeutic compounds is yet to be realised.

E. From the tiny proportion of insects that have been investigated, several promising compounds have been identified. _Q20 For example, alloferon, an antimicrobial compound produced by blow fly larvae, is used as an antiviral and antitumor agent in South Korea and Russia. The larvae of a few other insect species are being investigated for the potent antimicrobial compounds they produce. Meanwhile, a compound from the venom of the wasp Polybia paulista has potential in cancer treatment.

F. _Q17 Why is it that insects have received relatively little attention in bioprospecting? Firstly, there are so many insects that, without some manner of targeted approach, investigating this huge variety of species is a daunting task. Secondly, insects are generally very small, and the glands inside them that secrete potentially useful compounds are smaller still. This can make it difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of the compound for subsequent testing. Thirdly, although we consider insects to be everywhere, the reality of this ubiquity is vast numbers of a few extremely common species. Many insect species are infrequently encountered and very difficult to rear in captivity, which, again, can leave us with insufficient material to work with.

G. My colleagues and I at Aberystwyth University in the UK have developed an approach in which we use our knowledge of _Q23 ecology as a guide to target our efforts. _{Q21 &22} The creatures that particularly interest us are the many insects that secrete powerful poison for subduing _Q24 prey and keeping it fresh for future consumption. There are even more insects that are masters of exploiting filthy _Q25 habitats, such as faeces and carcasses, where they are regularly challenged by thousands of micro¬organisms. These insects have many antimicrobial compounds for dealing with pathogenic bacteria and fungi, suggesting that there is certainly potential to find many compounds that can serve as or inspire new _Q26 antibiotics.

H. Although natural history knowledge points us in the right direction, it doesn’t solve the problems associated with obtaining useful compounds from insects. _{Q21&22 Q15} Fortunately, it is now possible to snip out the stretches of the insect’s DNA that carry the codes for the interesting compounds and insert them into cell lines that allow larger quantities to be produced. And although the road from isolating and characterising compounds with desirable qualities to developing a commercial product is very long and full of pitfalls, the variety of successful animal-derived pharmaceuticals on the market demonstrates there is a precedent here that is worth exploring.

I. With every bit of wilderness that disappears, we deprive ourselves of potential medicines. As much as I’d love to help develop a groundbreaking insect-derived medicine, my main motivation for looking at insects in this way is conservation. _Q18 I sincerely believe that all species, however small and seemingly insignificant, have a right to exist for their own sake. If we can shine a light on the darker recesses of nature’s medicine cabinet, exploring the useful chemistry of the most diverse animals on the planet, I believe we can make people think differently about the value of nature.

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