IELTS Reading Subtest

Part I

Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

Questions 1-6

Reaidng Passage 1 has seven sections A-G

Choose the most suitable headings for sections A-D and F-G from the the list of headings below .

Write the appropriate numbers i-x in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

i The possible application of artifical lateral lines in the future

ii The two tests on the artifical version of a fishy sense organ

iii The features of artificial lateral-line system in Dr. Liu’s tests

iv The origin of human inspration for inventions from the nature

v The importance of series of flow sensors for survival of fish

vi The impact of natural lateral line system on modern society

vii The great invention of artificial lateral-line system in biology

viii Advantage of hair sensors over heating filaments in the test

ix Superiority of natural lateral-line system to the artifical one

x The direction-guiding function of natural lateral-line system

1 Section A

2 Seciton B

3 Seciton C

4 Seciton D

Example Answer

Section E ii

5 Section F

6 Section G

Lateral Thinking

Section A

Inventors have long tried to copy nature. Most, though, have looked to the skies and the land, rather than the sea, for inspiration. And even when they have attempted to imitate marine life, they have tended to consider it through mammalian eyes. Submarines, for example, use the familiar human senses of sight and sound to build images of their surroundings.

Section B

But that is not the way that fish do it. Although fish can see and hear, they also rely a lot on a series of flow sensors strung along the sides of their bodies. These sensors are known as the lateral-line system. To navigate like a fish, it would help to sense like one. And, in research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Chang Liu, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues describe the first attempts to do so.

Section C

A natural lateral-line system consists of about 100 sense cells that run from the gills to the tail on each side of the fish. The cells detect subtle water movements, and from the different times that the individual cells are stimulated by these movements the fish‘s brain is able to reconstruct an image of what caused them in the first place. Blind a shoaling fish such as a herring and it can still follow its mates. Cut its lateral lines and it rapidly gets lost.

Section D

Dr Liu‘s artificial lateral line was somewhat shorter than a natural one. It consisted of 16 tiny flow sensors, rather than 100. The sensors themselves contained heated filaments and worked by recording how quickly the heat was lost. The faster that water moved past a filament, the quicker the filament lost heat. The output from the sensors was fed into a computer that had been programmed to try to work out what was going on in a simplified version of the way that a fish brain would.