Ielts reading question-type based tests true false not given matching headings

Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons 
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS 
FunEnglishwithme [phone] 
features a 1962 oil by the Vietnamese Vu Cao Dam, a graduate of Hanoi's Ecole des Beaux Arts de 
l’Indochine and friend of Chagall, at $8,000 to $12,000 (£5,088 to £7,632]. The painting shows two girls 
boating in traditional 
ao dai
dresses. 
A further way of making money is to try to spot talent in younger artists. The annual Frieze Art Fair 
in Regent's Park provides a chance to buy from 170 contemporary galleries. Or you could gamble on the 
future fame trajectory of an established artist's subject. For example, a Gerald Laing screenprint of The Kiss 
[2007] showing Amy Winehouse and her ex-husband is up for £4,700 at the Multiplied fair. 
Questions 1-5 
Complete the table below. 
Choose 
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS 
from the passage for each answer. 
Example of artist 
Name of work / Type of art form 
Reason for low price 
Q1. ________________ 
Ceramics and lithographs 
He produced many 
Q2. ________________ 
Valley with cornflowers 
Q3. ________________ 
John Bagnold Burgess 
Vu Cao Dam 
A study of three Spanish girls
Q5. ________________ 
Q4. ________________ 
Asian region (except China) is 
not popular at the moment 

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Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons 
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS 
FunEnglishwithme [phone] 
TEST 7 – An Ordinary Miracle 
Bigger harvests, without pesticides or genetically modified Crops?
Farmers can make it happen by letting weeds do the work. 
Across East Africa, thousands of farmers are planting weeds in their maize fields. Bizarre as it 
sounds, their technique is actually raising yields by giving the insect pests something else to chew on besides 
maize. "It’s better than pesticides, and a lot cheaper," said Ziadin Khan, whose idea it is, as he showed me 
round his demonstration plots at the Mbita Point research station on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. 
"And it has raised farm yields round here by 60 to 70 per cent.” 
His novel way of fighting pests is one of a host of low-tech innovations boosting production by 100 
per cent or more on millions of poor Third World farms in the past decade. This “sustainable agriculture" 
just happens to be the biggest movement in Third World farming today dwarfing the tentative forays into 
genetic manipulation. 
In East Africa, maize fields face two major pests, and Khan has a solution to both. The first is an 
insect called the stem borer, whose larvae eat their way through a third of the region s maize most years. But 
Khan discovered that the borer is even fonder of a local weed, napier grass. By planting napier grass in their 
fields, farmers can lure the stem borer away from the maize and into a honey trap. For the grass produces a 
sticky substance that traps and kills stem borer larvae. The second pest is Striga, a parasitic plant that wrecks 
$10 billion worth of maize crops every year, threatening the livelihoods of 100 million Africans. "Weeding 
Striga is one of the most time-consuming activities for millions of African women farmers," says Khan. But 
he has an antidote: another weed called Desmodium. "lt seems to release another sort of chemical that Striga 
doesn’t like. At any rate, where farmers plant Desmodium between rows of maize, Striga won’t grow.” 
"The success of sustainable agriculture is dispelling the myth that modern techno-farming is the most 
productive method," says Miguel Altieri of the University of California, Berkeley. "In Mexico, it takes 1.73 
hectares of land planted with maize to produce as much food as one hectare planted with a mixture of maize, 
squash and beans. The difference," he says, "comes from the reduction of losses due to weeds, insects and 
diseases and a more efficient use of the available resources of water, light and nutrients. Monocultures breed 
pests and waste resources,” he says. 
Researchers from the Association Tefy Saina, a Madagascan group working for local farmers, were 
looking for ways to boost rice yields on small farms. They decided to make the best use of existing strains 
rather than track down a new breed of super-rice. Through trial and error, a new system was developed that 
raises typical rice yields from three to twelve tonnes per hectare. The trick is to transplant seedlings earlier 
and in smaller numbers so that more survive; to keep paddles unflooded for much of the growing period; and 
to help the plants grow using compost rather than chemical fertilisers. The idea has grown like wildfire, and 
20,000 have adopted the idea in Madagascar alone. 
Few countries have switched wholesale to sustainable agriculture. But Cuba has. The collapse of the 
Soviet Union in 1990 cut off cheap supplies of grain, tractors and agrochemicals. Pesticide use halved 
overnight, as did the calorie intake of its citizens. The cash-strapped country was forced to embrace Low-
input farming or starve. "Today," says Fernando Funes of the Country’s Pasture and Fodder Research 
institute, "teams of oxen replace the tractors, and farmers have adopted organic methods, mixing maize with 
beans and cassava and doubling yields in the process, helping average calorie intake per person rise back to 
pre-1990 levels.” 
Worldwide, one of the most widely adopted sustainable techniques has been to throw away the 
plough, the ultimate symbol of the farmer. Ploughing aerates the soil, helping rot weeds and crop residues. 
But it can also damage soil fertility and increase erosion. Now millions of Latin American farmers have 
decided it isn’t worth the effort. A third of Argentina’s farms no longer use the plough. instead, they fight 
weeds by planting winter crops, such as black oats, or by spraying a biodegradable herbicide such as 
glyphosate. The farmers saw results in a short time - reduced costs, richer soils, bigger grain yields and 

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