Table of Contents
BEST IELTS General Reading Test 220
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST 220 – PASSAGE – 1
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST – 220
READING PASSAGE – 1
The Summer Garden
The Summer Garden is a historic public garden that occupies an eponymous island between the Neva, Fontanka, Moika, and the Swan Canal in downtown Saint Petersburg, Russia and shares its name with the adjacent Summer Palace of Peter the Great. Its inception dates back to early 18th century when Russia took these lands from Sweden in the Great Northern War. Being a monument of landscape architecture featuring original and copied sculptures of classical mythology characters, a former royal palace and a monument to the fable author Ivan Krylov, the garden is now a branch of the Saint Petersburg-based national art treasury Russian Museum.
The Park was personally designed by Tsar Peter in 1704, supposedly, with the succour of the Dutch gardener and physician Nicolaas Bidloo. Starting from 1712, the planting of the Summer Garden was further elaborated by the Dutch gardener Jan Roosen, who was the chief gardener of the park till 1726. The well-known French architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1716, added to the park the flavour of a Garden à la française. The Summer Garden was largely completed in 1719. The walks were lined with a hundred allegorical marble sculptures, executed by Francesco Penso, Pietro Baratta, Marino Gropelli, Alvise Tagliapietra, Bartolomeo Modulo and other Venetian sculptors that were acquired by Sava Vladislavich.
IELTS General Reading Test
In the late 20th century, 90 surviving statues were moved indoors, while modern replicas took their place in the park. The sequence of patterned parterres, originally more formal than the current landscape, were the site of Imperial assemblies, or lavish parties which often included balls, feasts, and fireworks. Apart from the statuary, a major park attraction were the fountains, the oldest in Russia, representing scenes from Aesop’s fables.
Some of these fell out of use and were demolished after the 1777 inundation which destroyed the fountain machinery acquired by Peter the Great in Britain. A delicate iron-cast railing, separating the park from the public walk of the Palace Embankment, was installed between 1771 and 1784 to a design by Georg von Veldten. The grille is suspended between 36 granite columns crowned with urns and vases. The poet Anna Akhmatova, among others, considered the grille to be a pinnacle of art-casting and one of the symbols of St Petersburg.
IELTS General Reading Test
In the 1820s, a grotto pavilion, attributed to Andreas Schlüter and Georg Johann Mattarnovy, was rebuilt into a coffee house. On the bank of the Carp Pond, a magnificent porphyry vase, a gift of Charles XIV of Sweden to the was installed in 1839. Fifteen years later, a famous monument to the children’s writer Ivan Krylov was opened in the park. A sign of the progress of Romanticism in Russian official culture, it was the first monument to a poet erected in Eastern Europe.
On 4 April 1866 Dmitry Karakozov made the first attempt to assassinate the tsar when he walked out of the Summer Garden. As the attempt proved abortive, the ponderous Summergrille memorial chapel in a Russian Revival style was built over the gate. This rattachment was demolished by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. The Park was chosen by Alexander Pushkin as a setting for childhood walks of the fictional character Eugene Onegin.
IELTS General Reading Test
Questions 1 – 6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?’
TRUE – If the statement agrees with the information
FALSE – If the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this.
1. Summer Garden was inducted in 1800s.
2. The Summer Garden features sculptures of classical mythology characters from a Royal Palace of Britain.
3. The design of the summer garden was discretely planned by a Dutch horticulturist.
4. At the dawn of 20th century, 90 remaining figurines were moved inside.
5. A gentle iron-cast barrier was mounted splitting the park from the public walk of the Palace Embankment.
6. A glorious porphyry urn was set up in 1839 on the edge of Card Pond.
IELTS General Reading Test
Read the text below and answer Questions 7 – 14.
Pesticides
Pesticides are substances that are meant to control pests. The term pesticide includes all of the following: herbicide, insecticides which may include insect growth regulators, termiticides, etc. nematicide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, antimicrobial, and fungicide.
The most common of these are herbicides which account for approximately 80% of all pesticide use today. Most pesticides are intended to serve as plant protection products (also known as crop protection products), which in general, protect plants from weeds, fungi, or insects. As an example, the fungus Alternaria solani is used to combat the aquatic weed Salvinia.
IELTS General Reading Test
In general, a pesticide is a chemical (such as carbamate) or biological agent (such as a virus, bacterium, or fungus) that deters, incapacitates, kills, or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, virus, yellow fever, and malaria. They can weeds, molluscs, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, or spread disease, or are disease vectors.
Along with these benefits, pesticides also have drawbacks, such as possible toxicity to humans and other species. Pesticides are used to control organisms that are considered to be harmful, or pernicious to their surroundings.
IELTS General Reading Test
For example, they are used to kill mosquitoes that can transmit potentially deadly diseases like West Nile virus, yellow fever, and malaria. They can also kill bees, wasps or ants that can cause allergic reactions. Insecticides can protect animals from infections that can be caused by parasites such as fleas. Pesticides can prevent sickness in humans that could be caused by mouldy food or diseased produce. Herbicides can be used to clear roadside weeds, trees, and brush. They can also kill invasive weeds that may cause environmental damage.
Herbicides are commonly applied in ponds and lakes to control algae and plants such as water grasses that can interfere with activities like swimming and fishing and cause the water to look or smell unpleasant. Uncontrolled pests such as termites and mould can damage structures such as houses. Pesticides are used in grocery stores and food storage facilities to manage rodents and insects that infest food such as grain. Each use of a pesticide carries some associated risk. Proper pesticide use decreases these associated risks to a level deemed acceptable by pesticide regulatory agencies such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) of Canada.
IELTS General Reading Test
DDT, sprayed on the walls of houses, is an organochlorine that has been used to fight malaria since the 1950s. Recent policy statements by the World Health Organization have given stronger support to this approach. However, DDT and other organochlorine pesticides have been banned in most countries worldwide because of their persistence in the environment and human toxicity. DDT use is not always effective, as resistance to DDT was identified in Africa as early as 1955, and by 1972 nineteen species of mosquito worldwide were resistant to DDT.
In 2006 and 2007, the world used approximately 2.4 megatons (5.3×10⁹ lb) of pesticides, with herbicides constituting the biggest part of the world pesticide use at 40%, followed by insecticides (17%) and fungicides (10%) . In 2006 and 2007 the U.S. used approximately 0.5 megatons (1.1×109 lb) of pesticides, accounting for 22% of the world total, including 857 million pounds (389 kt) of conventional pesticides, which are used in the agricultural sector (80% of conventional pesticide use) as well as the industrial, commercial, governmental, and home and garden sectors.
IELTS General Reading Test
The state of California alone used 117 million pounds. Pesticides are also found in majority of U.S. households with 88 million out of the 121.1 million households indicating that they use some form of pesticide in 2012. As of 2007, there were more than 1,055 active ingredients registered as pesticides, which yield over 20,000 pesticide products that are marketed in the United States.
The US used some 1 kg (2.2 pounds) per hectare of arable land compared with: 4.7 kg in China, 1.3 kg in the UK, 0.1 kg in Cameroon, 5.9 kg in Japan and 2.5 kg in Italy. Insecticide use in the US has declined by more than half since 1980 (.6%/year), mostly due to the near phase-out of organophosphates. In corn fields, the decline was even steeper, due to the switchover to transgenic Bt corn. For the global market of crop protection products, market analysts forecast revenues of over 52 billion US$ in 2019.
IELTS General Reading Test
Questions 7 – 14
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR NUMBERS for each answer.
7. Mostly, ………………. insect killer is in practice at the moment.
8. Universally, an insecticide is a ………………. that kills pests.
9. Pesticides are potential venomousness to ………………. and other creatures.
10. Pesticides can shield ………………. from ailments that can be triggered by vermin such as fleas.
IELTS General Reading Test
11. Weed killer can destroy hostile weeds that could be a reason for ……………… .
12. Respective practice of an insect killing brings some accompanying ………………. .
13. The non-effectiveness of DDT on certain pests was first acknowledged in ………………. .
14. There was an abrupt deterioration in the use of insecticides in………………. farms.
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWERS ARE BELOW
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWERS
1. FALSE
2. NOT GIVEN
3. FALSE
4. FALSE
5. TRUE
6. TRUE
7. HERBICIDES
8. CHEMICAL / BIOLOGICAL
AGENT
9. HUMANS
10. ANIMALS
11. ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
12. RISK
13. AFRICA
14. CORN
IELTS General Reading Test