Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

 
 

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 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
49 
Example:
Here is part of a text about an art installation (or sculpture). 
At first glance, Cornelia Parker’s 1991 installation Cold Dark Matter: An exploded 
View would seem to be the outcome of a destructive drive in the artist’s 
personality. On the contrary, she is fascinated by the way that change, even 
change of a violent nature, is a new beginning, an opportunity for something 
very difficult to emerge. Cold Dark Matter consists of a garden shed which 
Parker filled with objects, then asked the army to blow up. She suspended the 
resulting fragments in a room and lit them with a single bulb, throwing sinister 
shadows on the walls. The title is central to understanding the work, alluding to 
the cold dark matter which, in one version of the ‘big bang’ theory, led to the 
creation of the universe. 
Question: 
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer? 
1. The impulse for the work is the artist’s psychological need to destroy. 
2. The way in which the shed was destroyed adds to the meaning of the 
work.
 
 

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 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
50 
Identifying Information and 
Identifying Writer’s Views/Claims Activity 
Sample Task 
The Risks of Cigarette Smoke 
 
Discovered in the early 1800s and named ‘nicotianine’, the oily essence now called 
nicotine is the main active ingredient of tobacco. Nicotine, however, is only a small 
component of cigarette smoke, which contains more than 4,700 chemical compounds, 
including 43 cancer-causing substances. In recent times, scientific research has been 
providing evidence that years of cigarette smoking vastly increases the risk of 
developing fatal medical conditions. 
 
In addition to being responsible for more than 85 per cent of lung cancers, smoking is 
associated with cancers of, amongst others, the mouth, stomach and kidneys, and is 
thought to cause about 14 per cent of leukaemia and cervical cancers. In 1990, 
smoking caused more than 84,000 deaths, mainly resulting from such problems as 
pneumonia, bronchitis and influenza. Smoking, it is believed, is responsible for 30 per 
cent of all deaths from cancer and clearly represents the most important preventable 
cause of cancer in countries like the United States today. 
 
Passive smoking, the breathing in of the side-stream smoke from the burning of 
tobacco between puffs or of the smoke exhaled by a smoker, also causes a serious 
health risk. A report published in 1992 by the US Environmental Protection Agency 
(EPA) emphasized the health dangers, especially from side-stream smoke. This type of 
smoke contains more smaller particles and is therefore more likely to be deposited 
deep in the lungs. On the basis of this report, the EPA has classified environmental 
tobacco smoke in the highest risk category for causing cancer. 
 
As an illustration of the health risks, in the case of a married couple where one partner 
is a smoker and one a nonsmoker, the latter is believed to have a 30 per cent higher 
risk of death from heart disease because of passive smoking. The risk of lung cancer 
also increases over the years of exposure and the figure jumps to 80 per cent if the 
spouse has been smoking four packs a day for 20 years. It has been calculated that 17 
per cent of cases of lung cancer can be attributed to high levels of exposure to 
secondhand tobacco smoke during childhood and adolescence. 
A more recent study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco 
(UCSF) has shown that second-hand cigarette smoke does more harm to non-smokers 
than to smokers. Leaving aside the philosophical question of whether anyone should 

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