Đề thi thử IELTS Academic số 5: IELTS Academic Mock Test 5

Listening (30 phút)

Part 1

Questions 1-10. Complete the form below. Write ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer. CITYWHEELS BIKE SHARE: NEW MEMBER FORM

Phần nghe phát trong phòng thi.

1. Name: Tomasz ____
2. Address: 14 ____ Road, Eastfield
3. Type of membership: ____
4. Saving compared with paying monthly: about ____ %
5. Electric bikes: extra ____ pence per ride
6. Main use: getting to the ____
7. Recommended docking point: outside the ____ on Garner Street
8. Each trip is free for the first ____ minutes
9. Membership card: will arrive by ____
10. Employer discount code: ____

Part 2

Questions 11-15: Choose the correct letter, A, B or C. Questions 16-20: Label the plan of the market hall. Choose the correct letter, A-F, for each place.

Phần nghe phát trong phòng thi.

1. Why was the market hall closed for nearly three years?
   • a fire in one part of the building
   • the condition of the roof
   • a fall in the number of traders
2. What does the speaker say about stall rents?
   • They are lower for new businesses in their first year.
   • They have increased since the hall reopened.
   • They are now the same for every trader.
3. What change has been made to the opening hours?
   • The hall now opens on Sundays.
   • It opens earlier on Saturdays.
   • It closes later on one day of the week.
4. What happened to the clock above the entrance?
   • It was replaced with a modern copy.
   • It was repaired by a local volunteer.
   • It was moved to a museum.
5. What are visitors asked to do?
   • leave their bicycles outside the hall
   • use the car park for no more than one hour
   • collect a list of stalls before entering
6. Information point
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
7. Fish stalls
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
8. Cookery school
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
9. Children's play area
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
10. Bike repair stall
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F

Part 3

Questions 21-25: Choose the correct letter, A, B or C. Questions 26-30: Complete the notes below. Write ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer. YAWNING STUDY: PROJECT PLAN

Phần nghe phát trong phòng thi.

1. Why did the students choose contagious yawning for their project?
   • No one in their department has studied it.
   • It does not require special equipment.
   • Owen had read an article about it.
2. What was the main problem with the pilot test?
   • The participants guessed the purpose of the study.
   • The videos did not play properly.
   • The room was uncomfortable.
3. What does Dr Clarke suggest the students should do?
   • hide the camera from participants
   • test participants in small groups
   • give participants a different reason for the study
4. What do the students say about the brain cooling theory?
   • Owen thinks it explains why yawning is contagious.
   • Leila finds it more convincing than Owen does.
   • Both students think it should be left out of the project.
5. What does Dr Clarke say about the link between yawning and empathy?
   • Larger studies have not been able to confirm it.
   • It is supported by most recent research.
   • It explains why older people yawn more.
6. Yawning clips will be mixed with clips of people ____.
7. A second person will count yawns to improve the ____ of the data.
8. Before the videos, participants fill in a ____ about their sleep.
9. Number of participants to aim for: at least ____
10. In the presentation, show the results as a ____.

Part 4

Questions 31-40. Complete the notes below. Write ONE WORD ONLY for each answer. DESALINATION: HISTORY, METHODS AND ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Phần nghe phát trong phòng thi.

1. Ancient sailors hung ____ above boiling seawater to collect the steam.
2. The first large plants were built in places with cheap ____.
3. Thermal plants are often built beside a ____ station to use its waste heat.
4. Reverse osmosis: water is pushed through a ____ that holds back the salt.
5. Pre-treatment removes sand and ____.
6. Energy recovery devices reuse the ____ of the leftover water.
7. Brine is about twice as ____ as ordinary seawater.
8. Brine sinks and spreads across the sea ____.
9. Fish ____ are small enough to pass through intake screens.
10. Companies are trying to extract ____ from brine to sell.

Reading (60 phút)

Passage 1

Read the passage and answer Questions 1-13. Questions 1-7: Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Choose TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this. Questions 8-13: Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. PROTECTING AND JOINING BAMBOO

BUILDING WITH BAMBOO

For thousands of years, people in tropical and subtropical regions have built with bamboo. Across southern and eastern Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa, it has been used for houses, bridges, water pipes and furniture, and in parts of southern China bamboo scaffolding has been a common sight on construction sites for generations. Yet in most industrialised countries, bamboo has rarely been taken seriously as a structural material. In recent decades that attitude has begun to change, as architects and engineers look for alternatives to materials such as concrete and steel, whose production releases large quantities of carbon dioxide.

Despite its height and woody stems, bamboo is not a tree at all but a member of the grass family. This botanical fact explains much of its appeal. Some species are among the fastest-growing plants on Earth, adding close to a metre in a single day at the peak of the growing season. A stem, known as a culm, reaches its full height within a few months, and although it then needs three to five years to harden enough for construction, this is still far quicker than the decades required by most timber trees. Moreover, harvesting a culm does not kill the plant. New shoots continue to rise from the network of underground stems, or rhizomes, so that a well-managed bamboo forest can be cut selectively every year without being replanted.

The structure of a culm is well suited to resisting certain forces. It is a hollow tube, divided at intervals by solid walls at the nodes, which help to prevent it from buckling. The fibres run along its length and are concentrated towards the outer surface, where they are most effective. As a result, bamboo performs particularly well in tension: weight for weight, its resistance to being pulled apart compares favourably with that of steel. For engineers, however, this strength comes with a complication. The properties of bamboo vary considerably between species, between culms of different ages, and even between the base and the top of a single culm. A designer working with steel can look up its strength in a table; one working with bamboo must allow for a much wider range.

A more serious weakness is durability. Bamboo contains sugars and starch, which make it attractive to beetles and to fungi. An untreated pole left in contact with damp ground may last only two or three years. Traditional builders developed several ways of reducing this risk. Culms were often cut during the dry season, when the starch content is lower. They might then be left standing in running water for several weeks, which gradually washes out much of the starch, or they were exposed to smoke over a fire, which leaves a protective coating on the surface. Today, the most widely used treatment involves forcing a solution of boron salts through the culm, either by long soaking or under pressure. Bamboo that has been treated in this way and is protected from rain and rising damp can remain sound for several decades.

Joining bamboo poles presents a further challenge. Because the culms are round, hollow, tapered and rarely perfectly straight, the methods used for sawn timber do not transfer easily. Driving a nail into a culm is likely to make it split along the line of its fibres. For this reason, traditional joints were usually tied with rope or with thin strips of bamboo. Modern structures more often rely on steel bolts, but these too can crush the thin wall of the tube when they are tightened. A common solution is to fill the hollow section around the bolt with mortar, so that the force is spread across a solid core.

One way of avoiding many of these difficulties altogether is to turn the culms into engineered products. The bamboo is cut into thin strips, which are dried, treated and then glued together under pressure to form boards, panels and beams of standard sizes. Such products behave far more predictably than whole culms and can be worked with ordinary woodworking tools. Critics point out, however, that the adhesives and the energy needed to manufacture them reduce the environmental advantage that made bamboo attractive in the first place.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle has been the absence of rules. Engineers are understandably reluctant to use a material for which there are no agreed methods of calculation, and insurers and planning authorities share their caution. An international standard for the design of bamboo structures was first published in 2004 and has since been revised, and several countries have introduced codes of their own. Even so, in some regions bamboo still carries the image of a material for people who cannot afford anything better. Whether a growing number of striking new buildings can change that image remains to be seen.

1. Bamboo is classified by botanists as a type of tree.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
2. A bamboo plant can be harvested more than once without being replanted.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
3. All parts of a single bamboo culm have the same mechanical properties.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
4. Concern about carbon emissions has contributed to a new interest in bamboo.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
5. Smoking bamboo protects it better than leaving it in running water.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
6. Nails are the preferred method of joining bamboo in modern buildings.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
7. Engineered bamboo products cost less to make than similar timber products.
   • TRUE
   • FALSE
   • NOT GIVEN
8. Because of the sugar and starch it contains, bamboo is attacked by beetles and ____.
9. Traditionally, culms were cut in the ____ season, when they contain less starch.
10. The most common modern treatment forces a solution of ____ salts through the culm.
11. Nails are avoided because they can make a culm ____.
12. The hollow section around a bolt can be filled with ____ so that the tube is not crushed.
13. In engineered products, thin strips of bamboo are ____ together under pressure.

Passage 2

Read the passage and answer Questions 14-26. Questions 14-18: The passage has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Choose the correct letter, A-F. Questions 19-22: Match each statement with the correct researcher. You may choose any researcher more than once. Questions 23-26: Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

THE CITY FOX

A. Few wild animals have adapted to urban life as successfully as the red fox. In many cities across Europe, North America and Australia, foxes are now seen in parks, railway cuttings and back gardens, and some have been filmed walking calmly along shopping streets in daylight. It was not always so. Until the early twentieth century, the fox was regarded as a creature of farmland and woodland. Its move into towns appears to have begun when cities expanded outwards in the years between the two world wars. Large areas of low-density suburban housing were built, each house with its own garden, and these quiet, green neighbourhoods offered foxes much of what they needed. From the suburbs, they gradually spread inwards towards city centres.

B. What makes cities so attractive? Food is the obvious answer, but shelter matters too. Urban foxes commonly dig their dens underneath sheds in gardens, beneath the floors of buildings or in overgrown embankments, places where they are rarely disturbed. There are few natural predators, and cities are slightly warmer than the surrounding countryside, which helps young cubs to survive. Because resources are so concentrated, an urban fox family can live in a remarkably small area. Tomas Reyes, who has fitted foxes with GPS collars in several cities, has recorded territories of less than half a square kilometre, compared with rural territories that may extend over ten square kilometres or more where food is scarce.

C. It is often assumed that urban foxes live mainly by raiding bins and eating takeaway leftovers. Miriam Calder, who analysed the stomach contents and droppings of several hundred foxes, found a more varied picture. Food that had come from people, whether scavenged or deliberately put out, made up only around a third of the diet. The rest consisted of earthworms, insects, birds, small mammals such as rats and mice, and fallen fruit. The balance also changed with the seasons, with far more fruit and insects eaten in late summer and autumn, when they were easy to find. Calder points out that foxes may therefore help to control some pests. She is, however, concerned about the growing number of residents who feed foxes regularly, since animals that associate people with food may lose their natural fear and begin to approach them too closely.

D. A popular idea is that city foxes have become bold, even fearless. To test this, Jonas Weller placed unfamiliar objects, such as plastic boxes and children's toys, near feeding sites in both urban and rural areas and filmed how the foxes responded. If urban foxes were simply braver, they would be expected to investigate the objects sooner. In fact, the opposite was true: city foxes generally took longer to approach. Weller suggests that in a busy environment, where something unknown may signal danger, caution is rewarded. Urban foxes, in his view, are not fearless at all, but they have become highly tolerant of the people they have learned to ignore.

E. City life is not without risks. Road traffic is the main cause of death for urban foxes, and many live for only one or two years. Disease can be even more devastating. Ines Laurent studied an outbreak of mange, a skin disease caused by a tiny mite, which spread through the fox population of one city in the 1990s. The mite passes easily between animals when they live at high densities and share dens. Within about two years, numbers fell by more than 90 percent. According to Laurent, the recovery took much longer than anyone had expected: even after two decades, the population had not returned to its previous level, possibly because foxes from the surrounding areas were slow to move in.

F. Relations between foxes and people are mixed. Complaints include torn rubbish bags, noise during the breeding season and damage to lawns, and there are rare but widely reported cases of foxes entering homes. Some residents demand that foxes be removed from their area. Experience suggests that this rarely works. When a fox is trapped or killed, its territory does not stay empty for long: young foxes searching for a home of their own move in within weeks. Wildlife groups argue that the most effective measures are much simpler. Using lockable bins, blocking gaps under sheds and not leaving food out all make an area less attractive to foxes. Some local councils now publish simple guidance on these steps, and a few offer advice visits to households that report repeated problems. Surveys in several cities suggest that most residents, in any case, enjoy seeing foxes and would not want them to disappear.

1. a reason why removing foxes from an area is rarely successful
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
2. a comparison of the amount of space foxes need in different environments
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
3. a description of a sharp fall in a fox population
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
4. a finding that went against a common belief about how urban foxes behave
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
5. an explanation of how foxes first came to live in towns
   • A
   • B
   • C
   • D
   • E
   • F
6. Urban foxes rely less on food from humans than many people believe.
   • Tomas Reyes
   • Miriam Calder
   • Jonas Weller
   • Ines Laurent
7. City foxes are more cautious than country foxes when they meet something unfamiliar.
   • Tomas Reyes
   • Miriam Calder
   • Jonas Weller
   • Ines Laurent
8. A fox population may need many years to recover from a disease.
   • Tomas Reyes
   • Miriam Calder
   • Jonas Weller
   • Ines Laurent
9. Giving food to foxes may make them less afraid of people.
   • Tomas Reyes
   • Miriam Calder
   • Jonas Weller
   • Ines Laurent
10. In gardens, urban foxes often dig their dens underneath ____.
11. Mange is a skin disease caused by a tiny ____.
12. When a fox is removed, ____ soon move into its empty territory.
13. Residents can make an area less attractive to foxes by using ____ bins.

Passage 3

Read the passage and answer Questions 27-40. Questions 27-31: The passage has six paragraphs, A-F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-F from the list of headings. One heading is not needed. Questions 32-33: Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Questions 34-37: Complete the flow-chart: analysing the dye in a museum textile. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Questions 38-40: Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Choose 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.

READING THE COLOURS OF THE PAST

A. Visitors to a museum textile gallery rarely see the colours that the makers intended. A tapestry that now appears in soft browns and greens may once have been crimson and bright blue, and a tunic preserved in a desert tomb for two thousand years has spent most of that time reacting slowly with light, air and moisture. For historians, the original colours matter because dyes were among the most valuable goods of the ancient and medieval worlds. Knowing which dye was used on a fragment of cloth can reveal where it was made, how skilled its makers were, which trade routes connected them to distant suppliers, and sometimes how wealthy its owner was.

B. Unfortunately, colour alone is a poor guide to its source. A deep red could have been produced from the roots of the madder plant, from tiny insects harvested from oak trees or cactus plants, or from a combination of these, and to the naked eye the results can be almost indistinguishable. Fading complicates matters further, because different dyes fade in different ways: a purple may turn grey or brown, while a green made by layering yellow over blue may lose its yellow and survive only as blue. Many museum catalogues compiled before the 1980s describe dyes on the basis of appearance alone, and later laboratory work has shown that a considerable proportion of these identifications were mistaken.

C. To understand how dyes are analysed, it helps to know how they work. Most natural dyes do not attach firmly to fibres on their own. The cloth or yarn must first be treated with a mordant, usually a metal salt such as alum, which forms a bridge between the fibre and the dye molecule. The choice of mordant can change the final shade considerably, so that the same madder root might give orange, red or purple. Indigo, the source of most historical blues, behaves quite differently. It does not dissolve in water, so the dyer must first convert it chemically into a soluble form in an alkaline bath. The cloth comes out of this bath a yellowish green and turns blue only as it reacts with oxygen in the air.

D. Since the 1980s, the standard laboratory technique for identifying dyes has been liquid chromatography, which separates the different molecules in a sample so that each can be identified. The method is powerful but destructive: a thread a few millimetres long must be removed and the dye dissolved out of it. For many years this was done with a strong solution of hydrochloric acid, which extracted the colour efficiently but also broke apart some of the more fragile molecules, in particular those bound to sugars. Unfortunately, it is often these sugar-bound molecules that distinguish one plant species from another. Gentler extraction methods developed over the last two decades preserve them, allowing researchers to tell apart, for instance, two closely related yellow plants that earlier analyses could not separate. It follows that some older results, while not necessarily wrong, may be less complete than they appear.

E. Curators are understandably reluctant to allow any sampling of rare objects, and this has encouraged the development of techniques that require no sample at all. In one common approach, a probe connected by optical fibres is held just above the surface of the textile, and the light reflected from it is analysed. Such measurements can be repeated at dozens of points across an object without causing any harm. Their limitation is precision: they can usually identify the general class of a dye, such as an indigo-type blue or an insect red, but rarely the exact species, and they struggle with mixtures. In practice, therefore, they are most often used first, to survey an object and decide where a single small sample will be most informative. Once that sample has been analysed, the results are compared with a database of reference dyes prepared from known plants and insects.

F. The results of such work can be striking. Insect reds found in textiles far from the regions where those insects lived provide evidence of long-distance trade that no written record mentions. Analysis can also expose forgeries. The first synthetic dye, mauve, was produced in 1856, and within a few decades artificial colours had largely replaced natural ones, so a supposedly medieval textile that contains a synthetic dye cannot be what it claims to be. In my view, however, the greatest value of dye analysis lies in collaboration. A chemist can name the molecule, but only a historian can explain why it mattered. I do not expect non-invasive techniques to make sampling unnecessary in the foreseeable future, but the combination of the two has already transformed what we can learn from a single faded thread.

1. Paragraph B
   • Methods that leave the object untouched
   • How colour is fixed to a fibre
   • Evidence of trade and deception
   • Recreating historical recipes in modern workshops
   • Why appearance is an unreliable guide
   • Weighing information against damage
2. Paragraph C
   • Methods that leave the object untouched
   • How colour is fixed to a fibre
   • Evidence of trade and deception
   • Recreating historical recipes in modern workshops
   • Why appearance is an unreliable guide
   • Weighing information against damage
3. Paragraph D
   • Methods that leave the object untouched
   • How colour is fixed to a fibre
   • Evidence of trade and deception
   • Recreating historical recipes in modern workshops
   • Why appearance is an unreliable guide
   • Weighing information against damage
4. Paragraph E
   • Methods that leave the object untouched
   • How colour is fixed to a fibre
   • Evidence of trade and deception
   • Recreating historical recipes in modern workshops
   • Why appearance is an unreliable guide
   • Weighing information against damage
5. Paragraph F
   • Methods that leave the object untouched
   • How colour is fixed to a fibre
   • Evidence of trade and deception
   • Recreating historical recipes in modern workshops
   • Why appearance is an unreliable guide
   • Weighing information against damage
6. What does the writer say about indigo?
   • It needs a stronger mordant than other natural dyes.
   • Its shade depends mainly on the metal salt used.
   • It must be made soluble before it can be used.
   • It is already blue when the cloth leaves the dye bath.
7. What point does the writer make about the hydrochloric acid method?
   • It could not remove enough colour from a thread.
   • It destroyed molecules that help to identify plant species.
   • It has been shown to give incorrect results.
   • It required larger samples than modern methods.
8. Step 1: survey the object with a ____ held just above its surface.
9. Step 2: remove one thread a few ____ long from the chosen point.
10. Step 3: extract the dye gently, so that molecules bound to ____ are preserved.
11. Step 4: compare the results with a ____ of reference dyes.
12. Descriptions of dyes in older museum catalogues are often unreliable.
    • YES
    • NO
    • NOT GIVEN
13. Non-invasive techniques will soon make taking samples unnecessary.
    • YES
    • NO
    • NOT GIVEN
14. Synthetic dyes were more expensive than natural dyes when they were first introduced.
    • YES
    • NO
    • NOT GIVEN

Writing (60 phút)

Task 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. Write at least 150 words.

1. The table below is based on two maps. It shows the harbour area of the town of Kestrel Bay in 1990 and in 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

   Tối thiểu 150 từ.

Task 2

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write at least 250 words.

1. Several private companies now sell short flights into space to members of the public, at prices that only a very small number of people can afford. Why do some people want to pay for this experience? Is this a positive or negative development? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

   Tối thiểu 250 từ.