Table of Contents
BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 291
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST
READING PASSAGE – 2
The Federal Institute of Technology
A. Whilst the world watched in excitement as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, planetary scientists were focused on something else. For them, the value of the mission was is the cargo they brought back to earth. By the time Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into the lunar module for the last time, they had gathered 22 kilograms of moon rocks, completely filling a small suitcase. Over five Apollo crews brought back a total collection of 382 kilograms of material containing 2,200 samples.
B. The rocks were known at the time as a scientific treasure and they did not disappoint. Paul Spudis, a geologist of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, said, “Our ideas about planetary formation and evolution must be rewritten after the discoveries made by the Apollo crews.” Harold Urey, a Nobel prizewinner, and one of the advocates of lunar exploration had predicted that the moon was composed of primitive meteoritic material. But his conclusion was wrong. Some of the rocks looked just like the rocks on earth.
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C. Many clues that the lunar rocks contained have taken a couple of years to effectively analyse. Also, some of the conclusions are still debated. A big surprise was the evidence that the early moon was covered by a lot of molten rock. The moon’s mountainous regions are made of anorthosite, a rare rock on earth that forms when light, aluminum-rich minerals float to the top of lave.
D. Nowadays, the smart money is on the idea that the moon was created as a result of something that occurred around 50 million years after the solar system was created when the Earth was in its infancy. From his hypothesis, the earliest Earth ran into a planet that was a similar size to Mars and debris from the collision went into orbit around the Earth which rapidly came together to form the moon.
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E. The “giant impact” scenario led to a radical re-evaluation of the history of the early solar system. Before Apollo, planetary scientists watched the collection of objects orbiting the sun like a clockwork mechanism in which collisions were rare and trivial. Now, it is accepted as being a far more active environment, shuffling, colliding or ejecting. This history of all the inner planets has been shaped by collisions and nowhere is that history more visible than the moon.
F. Another surprise was the rocks from the moon’s largest impact craters indicate that all craters are roughly the same age, between 3.8 and 4 billion years old. It never coincided. The moon and, by extension, the Earth must have been caused by a devastating barrage half a billion years after the solar system formed. To cause this process, something big must have been going back to the outer solar system, but what? Surprisingly, this episode in the history of the solar system has come to be known as the last heavy bombardment and ended at roughly the same time as the first signs of life on earth.
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G. These key discoveries about our planet’s history may never have been made without the samples taken from the moon for chemical analysis and isotopic dating. So, do the Apollo rocks hide any more secrets? All 2,200 samples have been researched, and Randy Korotev, a lunar geochemist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says that it is unlikely that there will be anything groundbreaking left to find from them. However, they may yet keep some more delicate secrets. Korotev says, “We are steadily developing better tools and asking better questions.” Especially, the instruments for dating mineral samples have been more delicate, enabling researchers to study the age of ever smaller samples, like tiny mineral grains within a rock.
H. These techniques have stimulated a rethink of some key dates in lunar history in the past two years. A team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology dated the formation of the moon’s magma oceans. Also, by inference, the creation of the moon itself is estimated to have happened between 20 and 30 million years later than we originally thought, at approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Alexander Nemchin with five colleagues in the Cutin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia also estimated that a lunar zircon was around 4.417 billion years old when the last of the magma oceans solidified.
I. The Apollo rock samples are not finished answering some of the bigger picture questions. What will we discover on the opposite side of the moon’s surface that we are unable to see from the Earth? Can we put together a detailed history of the lava flows that formed the basalts of the lunar seas? Can we discover any samples from deep inside the moon? These are all seen as very good reasons for coming back to the moon.
The big picture needs more samples, more data and more contexts. According to Gary Lofgren, a curator of NASA’s lunar rock collection at Johnson Space Centre in Houston, “There’s no lack of target and scientific questions. It’s not just about the moon but about the solar system’s history. This is the lesson that we have learned from Apollo.”
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Questions 14-20
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-I from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. The scientific value of the rocks
ii. The craters of the moon
iii. The mission to collect material on the moon
iv. The impact of the rocks discovered
v. The surprising evidence about the moon
vi. The history of the early solar system
vii. The unknown questions left for future
viii. NASA’s lunar rock collection
ix. Study of lunar history
14. Paragraph B
15. Paragraph C
16. Paragraph E
17. Paragraph F
18. Paragraph G
19. Paragraph H
20. Paragraph I
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Questions 21-22
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
21. The scenario “giant impact” is mainly concerned with
- ways of finding the history of the early solar system.
- the history of the early solar craters.
- the origin of the earth.
- ways of learning about orbiting the sun.
22. The samples were taken from the moon help
- planetary scientists to make tools for dating mineral.
- geochemists to study some craters.
- planetary scientists to make key discoveries about the earth’s history.
- geologists to predict the moon’s primitive material.
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Questions 23-27
Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
TRUE – if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE – if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this
23. The rocks which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected were more valuable than those of Russian astronauts.
24. The lunar rocks taken are critical to beginning to understand history.
25. All craters on the moon are of a similar age, up to 5 billion years old.
26. The main clues for discovering the earthquake are given by the samples taken from the moon.
27. The half of the moon’s surface that we can never see is related to the solar system’s history.
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ANSWERS ARE BELOW
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ANSWERS
14. i
15. v
16. vi
17. ii
18. iv
19. ix
20. vii
21. A
22. C
23. NOT GIVEN
24. YES
25. NO
26. NOT GIVEN
27. NOT GIVEN
IELTS Academic Reading Test