18
v
19
i
20
NOT GIVEN
page 14
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21
TRUE
22
NOT GIVEN
23
biological phenomena
24
DNA microarrays
25
(myriad) conditions
26
their expression levels
27
P
28
H
29
F
30
G
31
N
32
J
33
C
34
TRUE
35
FALSE
36
FALSE
37
NOT GIVEN
38
TRUE
39
FALSE
40
D
page 15
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page 16
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IELTS Mock Test 2023
February
Reading Practice Test 4
HOW TO USE
You have 2 ways to access the test
1. Open this URL
http://link.intergreat.com/d9EbC
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 1-13
Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage
1 below.
page 1
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Light pollution
{A} If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go into
darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal
species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s
light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as
diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals, or Earthlings. Yet
it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by
filling it with light.
{B} This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with
consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to
study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to
shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it
downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically
alters the light levels and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have
adapted.
{C} Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of
scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories.
Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of
Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet squid fishermen during their
prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos
Aires or Rio de Janeiro.
{D} We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country when nothing could be further
from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is
a powerful biological force, and in many species, it acts as a magnet, a process being studied
by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-
based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and
seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil
platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt
to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer
page 2
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disproportionately.
{E} Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding at those insect clusters is now
ingrained in the lives of many bat species. In some Swiss valleys, the European lesser
horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys
were suddenly filled with light-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other nocturnal mammals—including
desert rodents, fruit bats, opossums, and badgers-forage more cautiously under the permanent
full moon of light pollution because they’ve become easier targets for predators.
{F} Some birds—blackbirds and nightingales, among others—sing at unnatural hours in the
presence of artificial light. Scientists have determined that long artificial days— and artificially
short nights induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows
for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. One population of Bewick’s swans
wintering in England put on fat more rapidly than usual, priming them to begin their Siberian
migration early. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird
behaviour, is a precisely timed biological behaviour. Leaving early may mean arriving too soon
for nesting conditions to be right
{G} Nesting sea turtles, which show a natural predisposition for dark beaches, find fewer and
fewer of them to nest on. Their hatchlings, which gravitate toward the brighter, more reflective
sea horizon, find themselves confused by artificial lighting behind the beach. In Florida alone,
hatchling losses number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Frogs and toads living near
brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter
than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behaviour out of joint, including their
nighttime breeding choruses.
{H} Of all the pollution we face, light pollution is perhaps the most easily remedied. Simple
changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilt
into the atmosphere and, often, immediate energy savings.
{I} It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the
night sky in all its glorious clarity. And, in fact, some of the earliest civic efforts to control light
pollution—in Flagstaff, Arizona, half a century ago—were made to protect the view from
Lowell Observatory, which sits high above that city. Flagstaff has tightened its regulations
since then, and in 2001 it was declared the first International Dark Sky City. By now the effort
to control light pollution has spread around the globe. More and more cities and even entire
countries, such as the Czech Republic, have committed themselves to reducing unwanted glare.
{J} Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our
work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our
biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and
sleep in our lives, one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of
the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that
altering them is like altering gravity.
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