Iii Cambridge Practice Tests for ielts

READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-41 which are based on Reading Passage
3 below.
T O U R I S M
A Tourism, holidaymaking and travel are these
days more significant social phenomena
than most commentators have considered
On the face of it there could not be a more
trivial subject for a book And indeed since
social scientists have had considerable
difficulty explaining weightier topics such as
work or politics it might be thought that they
would have great difficulties in accounting
for more trivial phenomena such as
holidaymakmg However there are
interesting parallels with the study of
deviance This involves the investigation of
bizarre and idiosyncratic social practices
which happen to be defined as deviant in
some societies but not necessarily in others
The assumption is that the investigation of
deviance can reveal interesting and
significant aspects of normal societies It
could be said that a similar analysis can be
applied to tourism
B Tourism is a leisure activity which
presupposes its opposite namely regulated
and organised work It is one manifestation
of how work and leisure are organised as
separate and regulated spheres of social
practice in modern societies Indeed acting
as a tourist is one of the defining
characteristics of being modern’ and the
popular concept of tourism is that it is
organised within particular places and
occurs for regularised periods of time Tourist
relationships arise from a movement of
people to and their stay in various
destinations This necessarily involves some
movement that is the journey and a period
of stay in a new place or places The journey
and the stay are by definition outside the
normal places of residence and work and
are of a short term and temporary nature
and there is a clear intention to return
“home within a relatively short period of time
C A substantial proportion of the population of
modern societies engages in such tourist
practices new socialised forms of provision
have developed in order to cope with the
mass character of the gazes of tourists as
opposed to the individual character of
travel Places are chosen to be visited and
be gazed upon because there is an
anticipation especially through
daydreaming and fantasy of intense
pleasures, either on a different scale or
involving different senses from those
customarily encountered Such anticipation
is constructed and sustained through a
variety of non-tourist practices such as
films TV literature, magazines records and
videos which construct and reinforce this
daydreaming
D Tourists tend to visit features of landscape
and townscape which separate them off
from everyday experience Such aspects
are viewed because they are taken to be in
some sense out of the ordinary The
viewing of these tourist sights often
involves different forms of social patterning
with a much greater sensitivity to visual
elements of landscape or townscape than
is normally found in everyday life People
linger over these sights in a way that they
would not normally do in their home
environment and the vision is objectified or
captured through photographs postcards
films and so on which enable the memory
to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured
E
One of the earliest dissertations on the
subject of tourism is Boorstins analysis of
the pseudo event (1964) where he argues
that contemporary Americans cannot
experience reality’ directly but thrive on
“pseudo events Isolated from the host
environment and the local people the
mass tourist travels in guided groups and
finds pleasure in inauthentic contrived
attractions gullibly enjoying the pseudo
events and disregarding the real world
outside Over time the images generated
of different tourist sights come to
constitute a closed selfperpetuating
system of illusions which provide the
tourist with the basis for selecting and

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49
Reading
evaluating potential places to visit Such
visits are made says Boorstin, within the
“environmental bubble of the familiar
American style hotel which insulates the
tourist from the strangeness of the host
environment
F
To service the burgeoning tourist industry,
an array of professionals has developed
who attempt to reproduce evernew objects
for the tourist to look at These objects or
places are located in a complex and
changing hierarchy This depends upon the
interplay between, on the one hand,
competition between interests involved in
the provision of such objects and, on the
other hand changing class, gender, and
generational distinctions of taste within the
potential population of visitors It has been
said that to be a tourist is one of the
characteristics of the “modern experience
Not to go away is like not possessing a car
or a nice house Travel is a marker of status
in modern societies and is also thought to
be necessary for good health The role of
the professional, therefore, is to cater for
the needs and tastes of the tourists in
accordance with their class and overall
expectations
Questions 28-32
Raiding Passage 3 has 6 paragraphs (A-F) Choose the most suitable heading for each
paragraph from the list of headings below Write the appropriate numbers (i-ix) in boxes 28
32 on your answer sheet Paragraph D has been done for you as an example.