Table of Contents
BEST IELTS General Reading Test 237
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST – PASSAGE – 3
IELTS GENERAL READING TEST
READING PASSAGE – 3
Electricity
A. Electricity is the set of physical phenomena allied with the occurrence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In initial days, electricity was considered as being distinct to magnetism. Later, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell’s equations showed that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism. Various common phenomena are connected to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges, and many others.
B. Long before any knowledge of electricity occurred, people were conscious of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE denoted to these fish as the “Thunder of the Nile” and labelled them as the “protectors” of all other fish. Electric fish were again stated millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists, and physicians. Numerous ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the shocking effect of electric shocks brought by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects. Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were focused to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them. Possibly the earliest and nearest approach to the discovery of the identity of lightning, and electricity from any other basis, is to be attributed to the Arabs, who before the 15th century had the Arabic word for lightning ra’ad applied to the electric ray.
IELTS General Reading Test
C. Ancient cultures round the Mediterranean knew that cetain objects, such as rods of amber, could be scrubbed with cat’s fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a sequence of explanations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he supposed that friction extracted amber magnetic, in disparity to minerals such as magnetite, which required no rubbing. Thales was inappropriate in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would demonstrate a connection between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had information of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which look like a galvanic cell, though it is indefinite whether the artifact was electrical in nature.
D. Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual interest for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a cautious study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity formed by rubbing amber. This association gave rise to the English words “electric” and “electricity”, which made their first attendance in print in Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemic of 1646.
IELTS General Reading Test
E. Additional work was directed in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay. Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin directed widespread research in electricity, marketing his Delongings to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky. A series Of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand exhibited that lightning was certainly electrical in nature. He also clarified the seemingly inconsistent behaviour of the Leyden jar as a device for storage of large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity entailing both positive and negative charges.
F. In 1791, Luigi Galvani printed his discovery of bioelectromagnetic, signifying that Electricity muscles. Alessandro Volta’s battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from discontinuous layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more consistent source of electrical energy to the than the electrostatic machines formerly used. The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Orsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819-1820. Michael Faraday designed the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analyzed the electrical circuit in 1827. Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in precise in his “On Physical Lines of Force” in 1861 and 1862.
IELTS General Reading Test
G. While the early 19th century had seen swift growth in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the utmost advancement in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bel, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Anyos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into a vital tool for modern life.
H. In 1887, Heinrich Hertz revealed that electrodes lluminated with ultraviolet ight generate electric sparks more effortlessly. In 1905, Albert Einstein printed a paper that described experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the consequence of light energy being caried in distinct quantized packets, energising electrons. This encounter led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was presented the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for “his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”. The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels, and this is often used to make electricity commercially.
I. The first solid-state device was the “cat’s-whisker detector first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is located lightly in connection witha solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to sense a radio signal by the contact junction effect. In a solid-state component, the current is restricted to solid elements and compounds engineered precisely to switch and amplity it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.
IELTS General Reading Test
QUESTION 27-35
Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB you may use any letter more than once
27. Electricity becoming a dynamic means for contemporary life and not merely a scientific interest.
28. A detector originally used in radio devices that mimics the name of an animal.
29. Different phenomena connected with electricity.
30. Primeval experimentations to entice minor substances.
31. Electricity produced by an aquatic animal.
IELTS General Reading Test
32. Investigation of electricity by means of a flying object.
33. A researcher designating electricity by stroking a substance.
34. The ultimate recognition of electricity and magnetism.
35. A researcher winning laurels in physics.
IELTS General Reading Test
QUESTION 36-40
Complete the fill ups below.
Write no more than THREE WORDS or NUMBERS for each answer
36. “Thunder of the Nile” was nominated to………….. by ancient Egyptians.
37. Ancient cultures in the Mediterranean used rods of amber and scoored it with ……………………. to appeal light substances.
38. Benjamin Franklin glided ………….. in the storm.
39. Photocells are largely constituted in ……………………. which are used to harvest saleable electricity.
40. Cat’s-whisker gauge was primarily used in ………………………
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWERS ARE BELOW
IELTS General Reading Test
ANSWER
27. G
28. I
29. A
30. C
31. B
32. E
33. D
34. F
35. H
36. ELECTRIC FISH
37. CAT’S FUR
38. KITE
39. SOLAR PANEL
40. RADIO RECEIVERS
IELTS General Reading Test