IELTS Mock Test 2023

January
Reading Practice Test 3

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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage
1.

Paul Nash
A

Paul Nash, the elder son of William Nash and his first wife, Caroline Jackson, was born in

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London on 11th May 1889. His father was a successful lawyer who became the Recorder of
Abingdon. According to Ronald Blythe: “In 1901 the family returned to its native
Buckinghamshire, where the garden of Wood Lane House at Iver Heath, and the countryside of
the Chiltern Hills, with its sculptural beeches and chalky contours, were early influences on the
development of the three children. Their lives were overshadowed by their mother’s mental
illness and Nash himself was greatly helped by his nurse who, with some elderly neighbors,
introduced him to the universe of plants.”

Nash was educated at St. Paul’s School and the Slade School of Art, where he met Dora
Carrington. Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade School, Nash remained untouched
by the two post-impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Instead,
he was influenced by the work of William Blake. He also became a close friend of Gordon
Bottomley, who took a keen interest in his career.

Nash had his first one-man show, of ink and wash drawings, at the Carfax Gallery in 1912. The
following year he shared an exhibition at the Dorian Leigh Gallery with his brother, John Nash.
Myfanwy Piper has added: “Nash had a noteworthy sense of order and of the niceties of
presentation; his pictures were beautifully framed, drawings mounted, his studio precisely and
decoratively tidy, and oddments which he collected were worked up into compositions.”

Paul Nash was strongly attracted to Dora Carrington: He later recalled: “Carrington… was the
dominating personality, I got an introduction to her and eventually won her regard by lending
her my braces for a fancy-dress party. We were on the top of a bus and she wanted them then
and there.”

On the outbreak Nash considered the possibility of joining the British Army. He told a friend: “I
am not keen to rush off and be a soldier. The whole damnable war is too horrible of course and I
am all against killing anybody, speaking off-hand, but besides all that I believe both Jack and I
might be more useful as ambulance and red cross men, and to that end we are training. Nash
enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. He told Gordon Bottomley: “I have joined the Artists’ London
Regiment of Territorials, the old Corps which started with Rossetti, Leighton, and Millais as
members in 1860. Every man must do his bit in this horrible business so I have given up
painting. There are many nice creatures in my company and I enjoy the burst of exercise –
marching, drilling all day in the open air about the pleasant parts of Regents Park and
Hampstead Heath.”

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In March 1917 he was sent to the Western Front Nash, who took part in the offensive at Ypres,
had reached the rank of lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment by 1916. Whenever possible,
Nash made sketches of life in the trenches. In May 1917 he was invalided home after a non-
military accident. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his sketches to produce a
series of war paintings. This work was well-received when exhibited later that year. As a result
of this exhibition, Charles Masterman, head of the government’s War Propaganda Bureau
(WPB), and the advice of Edward Marsh and William Rothenstein, it was decided to recruit
Nash as a war artist. In November 1917 in the immediate aftermath of the battle of
Passchendaele Nash returned to France.

Nash was unhappy with his work as a member of the War Propaganda Bureau. He wrote at
the time: “I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men
who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my
message, but it will have a bitter truth and may burn their lousy souls.” However, as Myfanwy
Piper has pointed out: “The drawings he made then, of shorn trees in ruined and flooded
landscapes, were the works that made Nash’s reputation. They were shown at the Leicester
Galleries in 1918 together with his first efforts at oil painting, in which he was self-taught and
quickly successful, though his drawings made in the field had a more immediate public impact.

In 1919 Nash moved to Dymchurch in Kent, beginning his well-known series of pictures of the
sea, the breakwaters, and the long wall that prevents the sea from flooding Romney Marsh.
This included the Winter Sea and Dymchurch Steps. Nash also painted the landscapes of the
Chiltern Hills. In 1924 and 1928 he had successful exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries.
Despite this popular acclaim in 1929, his work became more abstract. In 1933 Nash founded
Unit One, the group of experimental painters, sculptors, and architects.

During the Second World War Nash was employed by the Ministry of Information and the Air
Ministry and paintings produced by him during this period include the Battle of Britain and
Totes Meer. His biographer, Myfanwy Piper, has argued: “This war disturbed Nash but did not
change his art as the last one had. His style and his habits were formed, and in the new war, he
treated his new subjects as he had treated those he had been thinking about for so long. His
late paintings, both oils, and watercolors are alternately brilliant and somber in color with the
light of setting suns and rising moons spreading over wooded and hilly landscapes. “Paul Nash
died at 35 Boscombe Spa Road, Bournemouth, on 11th July 1946.

Questions 1-4
Choose the correct letter, A-G?

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Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

What four statements are correct concerning Nash’s story?

A He did not make an effort after becoming a high-ranking official in the

army.

B He had a dream since his childhood.

C He once temporarily ceased his painting career for some reason.

D He was not affected by certain shows attractive to his other peers.

E He had cooperation in art with his relative.

F Some of his paintings were presented in a chaotic way.

G His achievement after being enlisted in the army did not as much
attention as his previous works.

Questions 5-10
The reading Passage has eleven paragraphs A-I.

Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

NB You may use any letter more than once.

A A

B B

C C

D D

E E

F F

G G

H H

I I

5 a charming lady in Nash’s eyes

6 Nash’s passion for following particularly appreciated artists

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7 Nash’s works with contrast elements

8 the true cause for Nash to join the military service

9 the noticeable impact on Nash’s growth exerted from the rearing

environment

10
high praise for Nash’s unique taste of presenting his works

Questions 11-13
Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer.

Because of a popular display of Nash’s works created in the army, what did his
leader designate him as?

11

How did Nash learn oil painting?

12

What change took place for Nash’s painting style in the late second decade of the
twentieth century?

13

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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage
2.

Tool for ancient writing

A

With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These
symbols represented words and sentences but were easier and faster to draw and universally
recognized for meaning. The discovery of clay made portable records possible (you can’t carry a
cave wall around with you). Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the
quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8,500 B.C. With the
high volume and the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and slowly lost
their picture detail. They became abstract figures representing sounds in spoken
communication. The alphabet replaced pictographs between 1700 and 1500 B.C. in the
Sinaitic world. The current Hebrew alphabet and writing became popular around 600 B.C.
About 400 B.C. the Greek alphabet was developed. Greek was the first script written from left
to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and the Roman (later Latin) writings. In the
beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, when the writing instruments were
refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 A.D.)

The earliest means of writing that approached pen and paper as we know them today was
developed by the Greeks. They employed a writing stylus, made of metal, bone, or ivory, to
placemarks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets are made in hinged pairs, closed to protect
the scribe’s notes. The first examples of handwriting (purely text messages made by hand)
originated in Greece. The Grecian scholar, Cadmus invented the written letter – text messages
on paper sent from one individual to another.

Writing was advancing beyond chiselling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet
clay. The Chinese invented and perfected ‘Indian Ink’. Originally designed for blacking the
surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke
and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by the Chinese
philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C. Other cultures
developed inks using natural dyes and colours derived from berries, plants, and minerals. In
early writings, different coloured inks had ritual meanings attached to each colour.

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The invention of inks paralleled the introduction of the paper. The early Egyptians, Romans,
Greeks, and Hebrews, used papyrus and parchment papers. One of the oldest pieces of writing
on papyrus known to us today is the Egyptian “Prisse Papyrus” which dates back to 2000 B.C.
The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink, from the hollow tubular stems
of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into
a primitive form of a fountain pen. They cut one end into the form of a pen nib or point. A
writing fluid or ink filled the stem, squeezing the reed forced fluid to the nib

By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron salts, nutgalls, and gum, the
basic formula, which was to remain in use for centuries. Its colour when first applied to paper
was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black and then over the years fading to the
familiar dull brown colour commonly seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in
China in 105 A.D. but it only became known about (due to Chinese secrecy) in Japan around
700 A.D. and was brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. Paper was not widely used
throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century

The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history (over one thousand
years) was the quill pen. Introduced around 700 A.D., the quill is a pen made from a bird
feather. The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five outer
left wing feathers. The left wing was favoured because the feathers curved outward and away
when used by a right-handed writer. Goose feathers were most common; swan feathers were
of a premium grade being scarcer and more expensive. For making fine lines, crow feathers
were the best, and then came the feathers of the eagle, owl, hawk, and turkey.

There were also disadvantages associated with the use of quill pens, including a lengthy
preparation time. The early European writing parchments made from animal skins required
much scraping and cleaning. A lead and a ruler made margins. To sharpen the quill, the writer
needed a special knife (origins of the term “pen-knife”.) Beneath the writer’s high-top desk was
a coal stove, used to dry the ink as fast as possible.

Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after another dramatic invention took
place: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal
letters in 1436. Simpler kinds of printing e.g. stamps with names used much earlier in China, did
not find their way to Europe. During the centuries, many newer printing technologies were
developed based on Gutenberg’s printing machine e.g. offset printing.

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Articles written by hand had resembled printed letters until scholars began to change the form
of writing, using capitals and small letters, writing with more of a slant and connecting letters.
Gradually writing became more suitable to the speed the new writing instruments permitted.
The credit of inventing Italian ‘running hand’ or cursive handwriting with its Roman capitals and
small letters, goes to Aldus Manutius of Venice, who departed from the old set forms in 1495
A.D. By the end of the 16th century, the old Roman capitals and Greek letterforms transformed
into the twenty-six alphabet letters we know today, both for upper and lower-case letters.
When writers had both better inks and paper, and handwriting had developed into both an art
form and an everyday occurrence, man’s inventive nature once again turned to improving the
writing instrument, leading to the development of the modern fountain pens

Questions 14-15
What two features do record retention possess in nature?

A Easier and faster

B Capaciousness

C portable

D convenient

E Iterance

Question 16
3 What hurts the technique of producing wooden paper from popularity for a long
time?

A Scarcity

B Complexity

C Confidentiality by the inventors

D High cost

Questions 17-23
The reading Passage has eleven paragraphs A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 17-23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

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 A A

B B

C C

D D

E E

F F

G G

H H

I I

17
the working principle of the primitive pens made of plant stems

18
a writing tool commonly implemented for the longest time

19
liquid for writing firstly devised by Chinese

20
majuscule scripts as the unique written form originally

21
the original invention of today’s correspondences

22
the mention of two basic writing instruments being invented
coordinately

23
a design to safeguard the written content

Questions 24-26
Answer the s below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer.

What makes it not so convenient to use the quill pens?

24

When did one more breakthrough occur following the popularity of paper of plant
fibres?

25

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What inventions were the results of human’s creative instinct of developing writing
tools?

26

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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage
3.

The Bite That Heat

Scientists are unlocking the medical potential of venom.

Michael decided to go for a swim. He was on vacation with his family in Guerrero, Mexico, and
it was hotter than blazes. He grabbed his swimming trunks from where they’d been drying on a
chair, slid them on, and jumped into the pool. Instead of cool relief, a burning pain ripped
through the back of his thigh. Tearing off his trunks, he leaped naked from the pool, his leg on
fire. Behind him a small, ugly, yellow creature was treading water. He scooped it into a
Tupperware container, and the caretaker of the house rushed him to the local Red Cross facility,
where doctors immediately identified his attacker: a bark scorpion, Centruroides sculpturatus,
one of the most venomous species in North America. The fierce pain from a sting is typically
followed by what feels like electric shocks racking the body. Occasionally victims die.

Luckily for Michael (who asked me not to give his Ml name), the bark scorpion is common in the
area, and antivenom was readily available. He had an injection and was released a few hours
later. In about 30 hours the pain was gone. What happened next could not have been
predicted. For eight years Michael had endured a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, a
chronic autoimmune disease of the skeleton, a sort of spinal arthritis. No one knows what
triggers it. In the worst cases the spine may fuse, leaving the patient forever stooped and in
anguish. “My back hurt every morning, and during bad flare-ups it was so horrible I couldn’t
even walk,” he says.

But days after the the scorpion sting, the pain went away, and now, two years later, he remains
essentially pain free and off most of his medications. As a doctor himself, Michael is cautious
about overstating the role of the scorpion’s venom in his remission. Still, he says, “if my pain
came back, I’d let that scorpion sting me again.” Venom-the stuff that drips from the fangs and
stingers of creatures lurking on the hiking trail or hiding in the cellar or under the woodpile—is
nature’s most efficient killer. Venom is exquisitely honed to stop a body in its tracks. The
complex soup swirls with toxic proteins and peptides——short strings of amino acids similar to
proteins. The molecules may have different targets and effects, but they work synergistically for
the mightiest punch. Some go for the nervous system, paralyzing by blocking messages

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between nerves and muscle. Some eat away at molecules so that cells and tissues collapse.
Venom can kill by clotting blood and stopping the heart or by preventing clotting and triggering
a killer bleed.

All venom is multifaceted and multitasking. (The difference between venom and poison is that
venom is injected, or dibbled, into victims by way of specialized body parts, and poison is
ingested.) Dozens, even hundreds, of toxins can be delivered in a single bite, some with
redundant jobs and others with unique ones. In the evolutionary arms race between predator
and prey, weapons and defenses are constantly tweaked. Drastically potent concoctions can
result: Imagine administering poison to an adversary, then jabbing him with a knife, then
finishing him off with a bullet to the head. That’s venom at work.

Ironically, the properties that make venom deadly are also what make it so valuable for
medicine. Many venom toxins target the same molecules that need to be controlled to treat
diseases. Venom works fast and is highly specific. Its active components—those peptides and
proteins, working as toxins diabetes have been derived from venom. New treatments for
autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pain could be available within a decade.

“We aren’t talking just a few novel drugs but entire classes of drugs,” says National Geographic
Society Emerging Explorer Zoltan Takacs, a toxinologist and herpetologist. So far, fewer than a
thousand toxins have been scrutinized for medicinal value, and a dozen or so major drugs have
made it to market. “There could be upwards of 20 million venom toxins out there waiting to be
screened,” Takacs says. “It’s huge. Venom has opened up whole new avenues of
pharmacology.” Toxins from venom and poison sources are also giving us a clearer picture of
how proteins that control many of the body’s crucial cellular functions work. Studies of the
deadly poison tetrodotoxin (TTX) from puffer fish, for instance, have revealed intricate details
about the way nerve cells communicate.

“We ’re motivated to look for new compounds to lessen human suffering,” Angel Yanagihara of
the University of Hawaii told me. “But while doing that, you may uncover things you don’t
expect.” Driven in part out of revenge for a box jellyfish sting she endured 15 years ago,
Yanagihara discovered a potential wound-healing agent within the tubules that contain jellyfish
venom. “It had nothing to do with the venom itself,” she said. “By getting intimate with a
noxious animal, I’ve been informed way beyond my expectations.”

More than 100,000 animals have evolved to produce venom, along with the glands to house it
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and the apparatuses to expel it: snakes, scorpions, spiders, a few lizards, bees, sea creatures
such as octopuses, numerous species of fish, and cone snails. The male duck-billed platypus,
which carries venom inside ankle spurs, is one of the few venomous mammals. Venom and its
components emerged independently, again and again, in different animal groups. The
composition of the venom of a single snake species varies from place to place and between
adults and their young. An individual snake’s venom may even change with its diet.

Although evolution has been fine-tuning these compounds for more than a hundred million
years, venom’s molecular architecture has been in place much longer. Nature repurposes key
molecules from around the body—the blood, brain, digestive tract, and elsewhere—to serve
animals for predation or protection. “It makes sense for nature to steal the scaffolds already in
place,” Takacs says. “To make a toxin to wreck the nervous system, it’s most efficient to take a
template from the brain that already works in that system, make some tiny changes, and there
you have it: Now it’s a toxin.” Not all venom kills, of course—bees have it as a nonlethal
defense, and the male platypus uses it to show rival males who’s boss during mating season.
But mostly it’s for killing, or at least immobilizing, an animal’s next meal. Humans are often
accidental victims. The World Health Organization estimates that every year some five million
bites kill 100,000 people, although the actual number is presumed to be much higher. In rural
areas of developing countries, where most bites occur, victims may not be able to get treatment
or may instead choose traditional therapies and are therefore not counted.

Questions 27-35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage

In boxes 27-35 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

27
Michael was unluckily hit by electric shocks and nearly lost his
life during his vacation.

28
The disease Michael had suffered from for eight years was
caused by an accident

29
Michael is grateful for the bark scorpion bite because it helped
him recover from the ankylosing spondylitis.

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30
No venom is just responsible for one job.

31
There is no difference between venom and poison.

32
Venom can kill while it can also be used as medicine to save.

33
New treatments for cancer are now available in the market.

34
So far 20 million venom toxins have been checked for medical
use.

35
The majority of mammals carry venom inside their bodies.

Questions 36-40
Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each
answer.

Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

The way how venom works is compared to that of .

36

A venom source such as has helped to present complex facts about how nerve cells
convey information to each other.

37

Tens of thousands of animals have developed and which are respectively

responsible for storing and letting out venom.

38

The makeup of venom of a snake may change with places, ages and .

39

Some animal uses venom to warn of its exclusive power during the mating season.

40

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 Solution:

1-2 B,E 3 C

5 D 6 B

7 I 8 E

9 A 10 C

11 a war artist 12 self-taught

13 more abstract 17 D

18 F 19 C

20 A 21 B

22 D 23 B

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 24 lengthy preparation time 25 in 1436

26 modern fountain pens 27 FALSE

28 NOT GIVEN 29 TRUE

30 TRUE 31 FALSE

32 TRUE 33 FALSE

34 FALSE 35 FALSE

36 medicines 37 puffer fish

38 glands, apparatuses 39 diet

40 rival males

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