Practice Cambridge IELTS 16 Reading Test 04

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Roman tunnels
The Romans, who once controlled areas of Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor, adopted
the construction techniques of other civilizations to build tunnels in their territories

The Persians, who lived in present-day Iran, were one of the first civilizations to build
tunnels that provided a reliable supply of water to human settlements in dry areas. In
the early first millennium BCE, they introduced the qanat  method of tunnel
construction, which consisted of placing posts over a hill in a straight line, to ensure
that the tunnel kept to its route, and then digging vertical shafts down into the ground
at regular intervals. Underground, workers removed the earth from between the ends
of the shafts, creating a tunnel. The excavated soil was taken up to the surface using
the shafts, which also provided ventilation during the work. Once the tunnel was
completed, it allowed water to flow from the top of a hillside down towards a canal,
which supplied water for human use. Remarkably, some qanats  built by the Persians
2,700 years ago are still in use today.

They later passed on their knowledge to the Romans, who also used the qanat method
to construct water-supply tunnels for agriculture. Roma qanat  tunnels were
constructed with vertical shafts dug at intervals of between 30 and 60 meters. The
shafts were equipped with handholds and footholds to help those climbing in and out
of them and were covered with a wooden or stone lid. To ensure that the shafts were
vertical, Romans hung a plumb line from a rod placed across the top of each shaft and
made sure that the weight at the end of it hung in the center of the shaft. Plumb lines
were also used to measure the depth of the shaft and to determine the slope of the
tunnel. The 5.6-kilometer-long Claudius tunnel, built in 41 CE to drain the Fucine Lake
in central Italy, had shafts that were up to 122 meters deep, took 11 years to build and
involved approximately 30,000 workers.

By the 6th century BCE, a second method of tunnel construction appeared called
the counter-excavation  method, in which the tunnel was constructed from both ends.
It was used to cut through high mountains when the qanat  method was not a practical
alternative. This method required greater planning and advanced knowledge of
surveying, mathematics and geometry as both ends of a tunnel had to meet correctly
at the center of the mountain. Adjustments to the direction of the tunnel also had to be
made whenever builders encountered geological problems or when it deviated from
its set path. They constantly checked the tunnel’s advancing direction, for example, by
looking back at the light that penetrated through the tunnel mouth, and made
corrections whenever necessary. Large deviations could happen, and they could result
in one end of the tunnel not being usable. An inscription written on the side of a 428-
meter tunnel, built by the Romans as part of the Saldae aqueduct system in modern-
day Algeria, describes how the two teams of builders missed each other in the
mountain and how the later construction of a lateral link between both corridors
corrected the initial error.

The Romans dug tunnels for their roads using the counter-excavation method,
whenever they encountered obstacles such as hills or mountains that were too high
for roads to pass over. An example is the 37-meter-long, 6-meter-high, Furlo Pass
Tunnel built in Italy in 69-79 CE. Remarkably, a modern road still uses this tunnel
today. Tunnels were also built for mineral extraction. Miners would locate a mineral
vein and then pursue it with shafts and tunnels underground. Traces of such tunnels
used to mine gold can still be found at the Dolaucothi mines in Wales. When the sole
purpose of a tunnel was mineral extraction, construction required less planning, as the
tunnel route was determined by the mineral vein.

Roman tunnel projects were carefully planned and carried out. The length of time it
took to construct a tunnel depended on the method being used and the type of rock
being excavated. The qanat  construction method was usually faster than the counter-
excavation method as it was more straightforward. This was because the mountain
could be excavated not only from the tunnel mouths but also from shafts. The type of
rock could also influence construction times. When the rock was hard, the Romans
employed a technique called fire quenching which consisted of heating the rock with
fire, and then suddenly cooling it with cold water so that it would crack. Progress
through hard rock could be very slow, and it was not uncommon for tunnels to take
years, if not decades, to be built. Construction marks left on a Roman tunnel in Bologna
show that the rate of advance through solid rock was 30 centimeters per day. In
contrast, the rate of advance of the Claudius tunnel can be calculated at 1.4 meters per
day. Most tunnels had inscriptions showing the names of patrons who ordered
construction and sometimes the name of the architect. For example, the 1.4-kilometer
Çevlik tunnel in Turkey, built to divert the floodwater threatening the harbor of the
ancient city of Seleuceia Pieria, had inscriptions on the entrance, still visible today,
that also indicate that the tunnel was started in 69 CE and was completed in 81 CE.

Questions 1-6
Label the diagrams below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes  1-6 on your answer sheet.
Questions 7-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 7-10  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
7   The counter-excavation method completely replaced the qanat method in the 6th
century BCE.
8   Only experienced builders were employed to construct a tunnel using the counter-
excavation method.
9   The information about a problem that occurred during the construction of the
Saldae aqueduct system was found in an ancient book.
10   The mistake made by the builders of the Saldae aqueduct system was that the two
parts of the tunnel failed to meet.
Questions 11-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
11   What type of mineral were the Dolaucothi mines in Wales built to extract?
12   In addition to the patron, whose name might be carved onto a tunnel?
13   What part of Seleuceia Pieria was the Çevlik tunnel built to protect?

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below. 
Changes in reading habits
What are the implications of the way we read today?
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and
toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older kids don’t
read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on tablets
or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknown to most of us, an invisible,
game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that
underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing and this has
implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new

circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a
very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in
one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how
the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important
intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and
inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of
insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these
essential ‘deep reading’ processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based
modes of reading.
This is not a simple, binary issue of print versus digital reading and technological
innovations. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when
we innovate but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating. In this
hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is
diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not
developing, and what we can do about it.

We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through
a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop.
Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements – from different writing
systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium
advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large
volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As
UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time
will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes.

Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the
humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson
describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th
and 20th centuries in favour of something simpler as they no longer have the patience
to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’
‘cognitive impatience’, however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of
large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to
comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts.

Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing a variety of troubling
downstream effects on reading comprehension in older high school and college
students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne Mangen and colleagues studied
how high school students comprehend the same material in different mediums.
Mangen’s group asked subjects questions about a short story whose plot had universal
student appeal; half of the students read the story on a tablet, the other half in
paperback. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their
comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail
and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

Ziming Liu from San Jose State University has conducted a series of studies which
indicate that the ‘new norm’ in reading is skimming, involving word-spotting and
browsing through the text. Many readers now use a pattern when reading in which
they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the
reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In
other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings,
to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.

The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could
become the unintended ‘collateral damage’ of our digital culture is not a
straightforward binary issue about print versus digital reading. It is about how we all
have begun to read o various mediums and how that changes not only what we read,
but also the purposes for which we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle
atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all equally. It affects our ability to
navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most
familiar stores of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis,
leaving us susceptible to false information and irrational ideas.
There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a
very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it
implies choice. The story of the changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess
both the science and the technology to identify and redress the changes in how we
read before they become entrenched. If we work to understand exactly what we will
lose, alongside the extraordinary new capacities that the digital world has brought us,
there is as much reason for excitement as caution.
Questions 14-17
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
14   What is the writer’s main point in the first paragraph?
A   Our use of technology is having a hidden effect on us.
B   Technology can be used to help youngsters to read.
C   Travellers should be encouraged to use technology on planes.
D   Playing games is a more popular use of technology than reading.
15   What main point does Sherry Turkle make about innovation?
A   Technological innovation has led to a reduction in print reading.
B   We should pay attention to what might be lost when innovation occurs.
C   We should encourage more young people to become involved in innovation.
D   There is a difference between developing products and developing ideas.
16   What point is the writer making in the fourth paragraph?
A   Humans have an inborn ability to read and write.
B   Reading can be done using many different mediums.
C   Writing systems make unexpected demands on the brain.
D   Some brain circuits adjust to whatever is required of them.
17   According to Mark Edmundson, the attitude of college students
A   has changed the way he teaches.
B   has influenced what they select to read.
C   does not worry him as much as it does others.
D   does not match the views of the general public.
Questions 18-22
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-H, below.
Write the correct letter,  A-H, in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.
Studies on digital screen use
There have been many studies on digital screen use, showing some 18 …………………
trends. Psychologist Anne Mangen gave high-school students a short story to read, half
using digital and half using print mediums. Her team then used a question-and-answer
technique to find out how 19 ………………… each group’s understanding of the plot was.
The findings showed a clear pattern in the responses, with those who read screens
finding the order of information 20 ………………… to recall.
Studies by Ziming Liu show that students are tending to read 21 ………………… words
and phrases in a text to save time. This approach, she says, gives the reader a
superficial understanding of the 22 ………………… content of material, leaving no time
for thought.
A     fast           B     isolated                C     emotional            D     worrying
E     many        F     hard                      G     combined            H     thorough
Questions 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 23-26  on your answer sheet, write
TRUE               if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
FALSE              if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN    if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
23   The medium we use to read can affect our choice of reading content.
24   Some age groups are more likely to lose their complex reading skills than others.
25   False information has become more widespread in today’s digital era.
26   We still have opportunities to rectify the problems that technology is presenting.

READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
Attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence
A
Artificial intelligence (AI) can already predict the future. Police forces are using it to
map when and where crime is likely to occur. Doctors can use it to predict when a
patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying to
give AI imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences.
Many decisions in our lives require a good forecast, and AI is almost always better at
forecasting than we are. Yet for all these technological advances, we still seem to
deeply lack confidence in AI predictions. Recent cases show that people don’t like
relying on AI and prefer to trust human experts, even if these experts are wrong.
If we want AI to really benefit people, we need to find a way to get people to trust it. To
do that, we need to understand why people are so reluctant to trust AI in the first
place.
B
Take the case of Watson for Oncology, one of technology giant IBM’s supercomputer
programs. Their attempt to promote this program to cancer doctors was a PR disaster.
The AI promised to deliver top-quality recommendations on the treatment of 12
cancers that accounted for 80% of the world’s cases. But when doctors first interacted
with Watson, they found themselves in a rather difficult situation. On the one hand, if
Watson provided guidance about a treatment that coincided with their own opinions,
physicians did not see much point in Watson’s recommendations. The supercomputer
was simply telling them what they already knew, and these recommendations did not
change the actual treatment.
On the other hand, if Watson generated a recommendation that contradicted the
experts’ opinion, doctors would typically conclude that Watson wasn’t competent. And
the machine wouldn’t be able to explain why its treatment was plausible because its
machine-learning algorithms were simply too complex to be fully understood by
humans. Consequently, this has caused even more suspicion and disbelief, leading
many doctors to ignore the seemingly outlandish AI recommendations and stick to
their own expertise.
C
This is just one example of people’s lack of confidence in AI and their reluctance to
accept what AI has to offer. Trust in other people is often based on our understanding
of how others think and having experience of their reliability. This helps create a
psychological feeling of safety. AI, on the other hand, is still fairly new and unfamiliar
to most people. Even if it can be technically explained (and that’s not always the case),
AI’s decision-making process is usually too difficult for most people to comprehend.
And interacting with something we don’t understand can cause anxiety and give us a
sense that we’re losing control.
Many people are also simply not familiar with many instances of AI actually working,
because it often happens in the background. Instead, they are acutely aware of
instances where AI goes wrong. Embarrassing AI failures receive a disproportionate
amount of media attention, emphasising the message that we cannot rely on
technology. Machine learning is not foolproof, in part because the humans who design
it aren’t.
D
Feelings about AI run deep. In a recent experiment, people from a range of
backgrounds were given various sci-fi films about AI to watch and then asked
questions about automation in everyday life. It was found that, regardless of whether
the film they watched depicted AI in a positive or negative light, simply watching a
cinematic vision of our technological future polarised the participants’ attitudes.
Optimists became more extreme in their enthusiasm for AI and sceptics became even
more guarded.
This suggests people use relevant evidence about AI in a biased manner to support
their existing attitudes, a deep-rooted human tendency known as “confirmation bias”.
As AI is represented more and more in media and entertainment, it could lead to a
society split between those who benefit from AI and those who reject it. More
pertinently, refusing to accept the advantages offered by AI could place a large group
of people at a serious disadvantage.
E
Fortunately, we already have some ideas about how to improve trust in AI. Simply
having previous experience with AI can significantly improve people’s opinions about
the technology, as was found in the study mentioned above. Evidence also suggests the
more you use other technologies such as the internet, the more you trust them.
Another solution may be to reveal more about the algorithms which AI uses and the
purposes they serve. Several high-profile social media companies and online
marketplaces already release transparency reports about government requests and
surveillance disclosures. A similar practice for AI could help people have a better
understanding of the way algorithmic decisions are made.
F
Research suggests that allowing people some control over AI decision-making could
also improve trust and enable AI to learn from human experience. For example, one
study showed that when people were allowed the freedom to slightly modify an
algorithm, they felt more satisfied with its decisions, more likely to believe it was
superior and more likely to use it in the future.
We don’t need to understand the intricate inner workings of AI systems, but if people
are given a degree of responsibility for how they are implemented, they will be more
willing to accept AI into their lives.
Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has six sections, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i       An increasing divergence of attitudes towards AI
ii      Reasons why we have more faith in human judgement than in AI
iii     The superiority of AI projections over those made by humans
iv     The process by which AI can help us make good decisions
v      The advantages of involving users in AI processes
vi     Widespread distrust of an AI innovation
vii    Encouraging openness about how AI functions
viii   A surprisingly successful AI application
27   Section A
28   Section B
29   Section C
30   Section D
31   Section E
32   Section F
Question 33-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 33-35  on your answer sheet.
33   What is the writer doing in Section A?
A   providing a solution to a concern
B   justifying an opinion about an issue
C   highlighting the existence of a problem
D   explaining the reasons for a phenomenon
34   According to Section C, why might some people be reluctant to accept AI?
A   They are afraid it will replace humans in decision-making jobs.
B   Its complexity makes them feel that they are at a disadvantage.
C   They would rather wait for the technology to be tested over a period of time.
 D   Misunderstandings about how it works make it seem more challenging than it
is.
35   What does the writer say about the media in Section C of the text?
A   It leads the public to be mistrustful of AI.
B   It devotes an excessive amount of attention to AI.
C   Its reports of incidents involving AI are often inaccurate.
D   It gives the impression that AI failures are due to designer error.
Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 36-40  on your answer sheet, write
YES                  if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO                   if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN    if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
36   Subjective depictions of AI in sci-fi films make people change their opinions about
automation.
37   Portrayals of AI in media and entertainment are likely to become more positive.
38   Rejection of the possibilities of AI may have a negative effect on many people’s
lives.
39   Familiarity with AI has very little impact on people’s attitudes to the technology.
40   AI applications which users are able to modify are more likely to gain consumer
approval.