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READING PASSAGE 1
Aphantasia: A
life without mental images
Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing
over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?
Most people can readily conjure
images inside their head – known as their mind’s eye. But this year scientists
have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to
visualise mental images.
Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has
always had a blind mind’s eye. He knew he was different even in childhood. “My
stepfather, when I couldn’t sleep, told me to count sheep, and he explained
what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t see any
sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count.”
Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a
wedding or first day at school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his
memory are “terrible”, but he is very good at remembering facts. And, like others
with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces. Yet he does not see
aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life.
Mind’s eye blind
Ironically, Niel now works in a bookshop, although he largely
sticks to the non-fiction aisles. His condition begs the question what is going
on inside his picture-less mind. I asked him what happens when he tries to
picture his fiancee. “This is the hardest thing to describe, what happens in my
head when I think about things,” he says. “When I think about my fiancee there
is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has her
hair up at the back, she’s brunette. But I’m not describing an image I am
looking at, I’m remembering features about her, that’s the strangest thing and
maybe that is a source of some regret.”
The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: “You’re
weird.” But while Niel is very relaxed about his inability to picture things,
it is often a cause of distress for others. One person who took part in a study
into aphantasia said he had started to feel “isolated” and “alone” after
discovering that other people could see images in their heads. Being unable to
reminisce about his mother years after her death led to him being “extremely
distraught”.
The super-visualiser
At the other end of the spectrum is children’s book illustrator,
Lauren Beard, whose work on the Fairytale Hairdresser series will be familiar
to many six-year-olds. Her career relies on the vivid images that leap into her
mind’s eye when she reads text from her author. When I met her in her box-room
studio in Manchester, she was working on a dramatic scene in the next book. The
text describes a baby perilously climbing onto a chandelier.
“Straightaway I can visualise this grand glass chandelier in
some sort of French kind of ballroom, and the little baby just swinging off it
and really heavy thick curtains,” she says. “I think I have a strong
imagination, so I can create the world and then keep adding to it so it gets
sort of bigger and bigger in my mind and the characters too they sort of
evolve. I couldn’t really imagine what it’s like to not imagine, I think it
must be a bit of a shame really.”
Not many people have mental imagery as vibrant as Lauren or as
blank as Niel. They are the two extremes of visualisation. Adam Zeman, a
professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives
and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite
hyperphantasia. His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term
aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex.
Prof Zeman tells the BBC: “People who have contacted us say they
are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name,
because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this
oddity that they find hard to convey to others.” How we imagine is clearly very
subjective – one person’s vivid scene could be another’s grainy picture. But
Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able
to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the
ability to think in images after a brain injury.
He is adamant that aphantasia is “not a disorder” and says it
may affect up to one in 50 people. But he adds: “I think it makes quite an
important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our
lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind’s eye which we inspect from
time to time, it’s a variability of human experience.”Top of Form
Questions 1–5
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
In boxes 1-5 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
1. Aphantasia is a condition, which describes people, for whom it is hard to visualise mental images.
2. Niel Kenmuir was unable to count sheep in his head.
3. People with aphantasia struggle to remember personal traits and clothes of different people.
4. Niel regrets that he cannot portray an image of his fiancee in his mind.
5. Inability to picture things in someone’s head is often a cause of distress for a person.
6. All people with aphantasia start to feel ‘isolated’ or ‘alone’ at some point of their lives.
7. Lauren Beard’s career depends on her imagination
8. The author met Lauren Beard when she was working on a comedy scene in her next book.
Questions 9–13
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from
the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.
9.
Only a small fraction of people have imagination
as_________ as Lauren does.
10.
Hyperphantasia is __________ to aphantasia.
11.
11.There
are a lot of subjectivity in comparing people’s imagination – somebody’s vivid
scene could be another person’s __________ .
12.
Prof Zeman is _________ that aphantasia is not an illness.
13.
Many people spend their lives with _________ somewhere in the
mind’s eye.
READING
PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
Life
lessons from villains, crooks and gangsters
(A) A
notorious Mexican drug baron’s audacious escape from prison in July doesn’t, at
first, appear to have much to teach corporate boards. But some in the
business world suggest otherwise. Beyond the morally reprehensible side of
criminals’ work, some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer
hackers, pirates and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate
corporations a thing or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.
(B) Far
from encouraging illegality, these gurus argue that – in the same way big
corporations sometimes emulate start-ups – business leaders could learn from
the underworld about flexibility, innovation and the ability to pivot quickly.
“There is a nimbleness to criminal organisations that legacy corporations [with
large, complex layers of management] don’t have,” said Marc Goodman, head of the
Future Crimes Institute and global cyber-crime advisor. While traditional
businesses focus on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent
them. “For criminals, the sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to
think much, much bigger.”
(C) Joaquin Guzman, the head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, for instance, slipped out of his prison cell through a tiny hole in his shower that led to a mile-long tunnel fitted with lights and ventilation. Making a break for it required creative thinking, long-term planning and perseverance – essential skills similar to those needed to achieve success in big business.
(D) While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as to how criminal groups endure. Some cartels stay in business despite multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes there’s a lesson in longevity here. One strategy he underlined was how the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.
(E) By contrast, many legitimate businesses fail because they hesitate to adapt quickly to changing market winds. One high-profile example is movie and game rental company Blockbuster, which didn’t keep up with the market and lost business to mail order video rentals and streaming technologies. The brand has all but faded from view. Liddell argues the difference between the two groups is that criminal organisations often have improvisation encoded into their daily behaviour, while larger companies think of innovation as a set process. “This is a leadership challenge,” said Liddell. “How well companies innovate and organise is a reflection of leadership.”
(C) Joaquin Guzman, the head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, for instance, slipped out of his prison cell through a tiny hole in his shower that led to a mile-long tunnel fitted with lights and ventilation. Making a break for it required creative thinking, long-term planning and perseverance – essential skills similar to those needed to achieve success in big business.
(D) While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as to how criminal groups endure. Some cartels stay in business despite multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes there’s a lesson in longevity here. One strategy he underlined was how the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.
(E) By contrast, many legitimate businesses fail because they hesitate to adapt quickly to changing market winds. One high-profile example is movie and game rental company Blockbuster, which didn’t keep up with the market and lost business to mail order video rentals and streaming technologies. The brand has all but faded from view. Liddell argues the difference between the two groups is that criminal organisations often have improvisation encoded into their daily behaviour, while larger companies think of innovation as a set process. “This is a leadership challenge,” said Liddell. “How well companies innovate and organise is a reflection of leadership.”
Left-field thinking
(F) Cash-strapped
start-ups also use unorthodox strategies to problem solve and build their
businesses up from scratch. This creativity and innovation is often borne out
of necessity, such as tight budgets. Both criminals and start-up founders
“question authority, act outside the system and see new and clever ways of
doing things,” said Goodman. “Either they become Elon Musk or El Chapo.” And,
some entrepreneurs aren’t even afraid to operate in legal grey areas in their
effort to disrupt the marketplace. The co-founders of music streaming service
Napster, for example, knowingly broke music copyright rules with their first
online file sharing service, but their technology paved the way for legal
innovation as regulators caught up.
(G) Goodman
and others believe thinking hard about problem solving before worrying about
restrictions could prevent established companies falling victim to rivals less
constrained by tradition. In their book The Misfit Economy, Alexa Clay and Kyra
Maya Phillips examine how individuals can apply that mindset to become more
innovative and entrepreneurial within corporate structures. They studied not
just violent criminals like Somali pirates, but others who break the rules in
order to find creative solutions to their business problems, such as people
living in the slums of Mumbai or computer hackers. They picked out five common
traits among this group: the ability to hustle, pivot, provoke, hack and
copycat.
(H) Clay
gives a Saudi entrepreneur named Walid Abdul-Wahab as a prime example.
Abdul-Wahab worked with Amish farmers to bring camel milk to American consumers
even before US regulators approved it. Through perseverance, he eventually
found a network of Amish camel milk farmers and started selling the product via
social media. Now his company, Desert Farms, sells to giant mainstream
retailers like Whole Foods Market. Those on the fringe don’t always have the
option of traditional, corporate jobs and that forces them to think more
creatively about how to make a living, Clay said. They must develop grit and
resilience in order to last outside the cushy confines of cubicle life. “In
many cases scarcity is the mother of invention,” Clay said.
Questions 14-21
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs A-H. Match the headings below with the paragraphs. Write the
correct letter, A-H, in
boxes 14-21 on
your answer sheet.
14.
Jailbreak with creative thinking ____________
15.
Five common traits among rule-breakers ____________
16.
Comparison between criminals and traditional businessmen ___________
17.
Can drug baron’s espace teach legitimate corporations?
___________
18.
Great entrepreneur ___________ .
19.
How criminal groups deceive the law ___________.
20.
The difference between legal and illegal organizations
___________ .
21.
Similarity between criminals and start-up founders __________ .
Questions 22–25
Complete the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from
the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 22–25 on your answer sheet.
22.
To escape from a prison, Joaquin Guzman had to use such traits
as creative thinking, long-term planning and __________.
23.
The Sinaloa cartel built a grand underground tunnel and even
used a __________ to avoid the fence.
24.
The main difference between two groups is that criminals, unlike
large corporations, often have _________ ncoded into their daily life.
25.
Due to being persuasive, Walid Abdul-Wahab found a
________ of Amish camel milk farmers.
Question 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
26.
The main goal of this article is to:
27.
Show different ways of illegal activity
28.
Give an overview of various criminals and their gangs
29.
Draw a comparison between legal and illegal business, providing
examples
30.
Justify criminals with creative thinkingBottom of Form
READING
PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28–40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
As More
Tech Start-Ups Stay Private, So Does the Money
Not long ago, if you were
a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering start-up idea, there was a
good chance you spent much of your waking life working toward a single business
milestone: taking your company public.
Though luminaries of the
tech industry have always expressed skepticism and even hostility toward the
finance industry, tech’s dirty secret was that it looked to Wall Street and the
ritual of a public offering for affirmation — not to mention wealth.
But something strange has
happened in the last couple of years: The initial public offering of stock has
become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their employees across Silicon
Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main goal. Instead, many
founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as
possible because it comes with more problems than benefits.
“If you can get $200
million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my company under the
scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my business,” said
Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up that organizes
and sells information about the start-up market. “That’s actually terrifying to
me.
Silicon Valley’s sudden
distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall Street’s skepticism of new
tech stocks — may be the single most important psychological shift underlying
the current tech boom. Staying private affords start-up executives the luxury
of not worrying what outsiders think and helps them avoid the quarterly
earnings treadmill.
It also means Wall Street
is doing what
it failed to do in the last tech boom: using traditional metrics like growth
and profitability to price companies. Investors have been tough on Twitter, for
example, because its user growth has slowed. They have been tough on Box, the
cloud-storage company that went public last year, because it remains
unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily, which went public last year,
was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for future sales.
Scott Kupor, the managing
partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his colleagues
said in a recent report that despite all the attention start-ups have received
in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually high valuations. In fact,
their share of the overall market has remained stable for 14 years, and far off
the peak of the late 1990s.
That unwillingness to cut
much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular investors. If the
bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are, aren’t as likely to
get washed out.
Private investors, on the
other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns — the Silicon Valley
jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a billion dollars. If many of
those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape unharmed, because losses will
be confined to venture capitalists and hedge funds that have begun to buy into
tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and their employees.
The reluctance — and
sometimes inability — to go public is spurring the unicorns. By relying on
private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get more runway to
figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance into the public
markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and several
other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some cases
billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public
offering.
“These companies are
going public, just in the private market,” Dan Levitan, the managing partner of
the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He means that in many
cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would have bought shares in
these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into late-stage private rounds.
There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of obtaining private money in
place of a public offering: It’s called a “private I.P.O.”
The delay in I.P.O.s has
altered how some venture capital firms do business. Rather than waiting for an
initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells its stake in a
start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made about 100 times
its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was only possible
after an I.P.O.
But there is also a
downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the unicorns do
eventually go public and begin to soar — or whatever it is that fantastical
horned beasts tend to do when they’re healthy — the biggest winners will be the
private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.
It used to be that public
investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial offering could earn
historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its I.P.O. in 1997, you
would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000 in Microsoft in
1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors today are
unlikely to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the time tech
companies come to the market, the biggest gains have already been extracted by
private backers.
Just 53 technology
companies went public in 2014, which is around the median since 1980, but far
fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when hundreds of tech
companies went public annually, according to statistics maintained by Jay
Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. Today’s companies
are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company hitting the markets
was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years for tech I.P.O.s
since 1980.
Over the last few weeks,
I’ve asked several founders and investors why they’re waiting; few were willing
to speak on the record about their own companies, but their answers all
amounted to “What’s the point?”
Initial public offerings
were also ways to compensate employees and founders who owned lots of stock, but
there are now novel mechanisms — such as selling shares on a secondary market —
for insiders to cash in on some of their shares in private companies. Still,
some observers cautioned that the new trend may be a bad deal for employees who
aren’t given much information about the company’s performance.
“One thing employees may
be confused about is when companies tell them, ‘We’re basically doing a private
I.P.O.,’ it might make them feel like there’s less risk than there really is,”
said Ms. Morrill of Mattermark. But she said it was hard to persuade people
that their paper gains may never materialize. “The Kool-Aid is really strong,”
she said.
If the delay in I.P.O.s
becomes a normal condition for Silicon Valley, some observers say tech
companies may need to consider new forms of compensation for workers. “We
probably need to fundamentally rethink how do private companies compensate
employees, because that’s going to be an issue,” said Mr. Kupor, of Andreessen
Horowitz.
During a recent
presentation for Andreessen Horowitz’s limited partners — the institutions that
give money to the venture firm — Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, told
the journalist Dan Primack that he had never seen a sharper divergence in how
investors treat public- and private-company chief executives. “They tell the
public C.E.O., ‘Give us the money back this quarter,’ and they tell the private
C.E.O., ‘No problem, go for 10 years,’ ” Mr. Andreessen said.
At some point this
tension will be resolved. “Private valuations will not forever be higher than
public valuations,” said Mr. Levitan, of Maveron. “So the question is, Will
private markets capitulate and go down or will public markets go up?”
If the private investors
are wrong, employees, founders and a lot of hedge funds could be in for a
reckoning. But if they’re right, it will be you and me wearing the frown — the
public investors who missed out on the next big thing.
Questions 28–31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 28–31 on your answer sheet.
28.
How much funds would you gain by now, if you had invested 1000$
in the Amazon in 1997?
29.
250,000$
30.
close to 500,000$
31.
It is not stated in the text
32.
No funds
33.
Nowadays founders talk about going public as a:
34.
necessity
35.
benefit
36.
possibility
37.
profit
38.
In which time period was the biggest number of companies going
public?
39.
early 1990s
40.
late 1900s and 2000s
41.
1980s
42.
late 1990s
43.
According to the text, which of the following is true?
44.
Private valuations may be forever higher than public ones.
45.
Public valuations eventually will become even less valuable.
46.
The main question is whether the public market increase or the
private market decrease.
47.
The pressure might last for a long time.
Questions 32–36
Complete the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from
the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32.
Skepticism was always expected by the ___________of tech
industry.
33.
The new aversion to initial offerings has its ___________.
34.
Selling shares on a secondary market is considered a ___________. mechanism.
35.
Workers’ compensation might be an ___________.
36.
The public investors who failed to participate in the next big
thing might be the ones wearing the ___________.
Questions 37–40
Do the following statements agree with the information in the
IELTS reading text?
In boxes 37–40 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
37. Private investors are bearing most of the risk.
38. Not many investors were willing to speak on the record.
39. The typical tech company hitting the markets in 1990s was 5
years old.
40. Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, expressed amazement
with divergency in how investors treat public.
Trên
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