Solution:
1
iv
2
vii
3
iii
4
ii
5
ix
6
F
7
B
8
D
9
A
10
FALSE
11
NOT GIVEN
12
TRUE
13
TRUE
14
C
15
C
16
A
17
B
18
A
19
YES
20
NO
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21
NO
22
NOT GIVEN
23
YES
24
NOT GIVEN
25
YES
26
A
27
TRUE
28
NOT GIVEN
29
FALSE
30
TRUE
31
FALSE
32
air gun
33
sound energy/ sound wave
34
cable
35
hydrophones/ underwater
microphones
36
shipping container
37
seismic reflection profiling
38
laboratory
39
three-dimensional
40
fishing nets
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IELTS Mock Test 2023 March
IELTS Mock Test 2023
March
Reading Practice Test 1
HOW TO USE
You have 2 ways to access the test
1. Open this URL
http://link.intergreat.com/E8kqi
on your computer
2. Use your mobile device to scan the QR code attached
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14
Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage
1.
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Father of modern management
A
Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years.
He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to
persuade the world that management matters. “Management is an organ of institutions … the
organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.” Did he
succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky
management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the
private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.
B
His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942)
– had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging
so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention
with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic
purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has
remained in print ever since.
C
The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do
with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with
“empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as
costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the
manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and
partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument
had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an
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“economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an
industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound
implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs
in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to
realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any
advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge
workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses”
nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing
their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their
own careers, including their pension plans.
D
However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of
the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”.
In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the
importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then
translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should
have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group
of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the
soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on
empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you
sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their
employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a
global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a
management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining
organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.
E
There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big
organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a
fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial
production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it
cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated
business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for
management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow
ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the
organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a
maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field.
There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F
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There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The
Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by
objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge
workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it
ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He
produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas
can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that
so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of
his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may
sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in
the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s.
Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the
management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.
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