2024年雅思考试试题

　　在平时的学习、工作中，只要有考核要求，就会有试题，通过试题可以检测参试者所掌握的知识和技能。那么一般好的试题都具备什么特点呢？以下是小编收集整理的2024年雅思考试试题，供大家参考借鉴，希望可以帮助到有需要的朋友。

2024年雅思考试试题

　　雅思考试试题 1

　　Animal minds: Parrot Alex

　　In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”

　　When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they have thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking – that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated – she at her desk, he on top of his cage – in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team – and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

　　Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

　　Thirty years after the Alex studies began; Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one – as small as it was – had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store where she let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d particularly chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile.

　　“Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.” Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak. Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for various foods, although he calls an apple a “banerry.” “Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.

　　It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and observing Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds. “He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”

　　In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye. “What’s same?” she asked. Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Co-lor.” “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked. “Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character.

　　Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words – and what can only be called the thoughts – were entirely his.

　　For the next 20 minutes, Alex can through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as accounting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues. And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching talked with wrong pronunciation. “Talk clearly!” “Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenager; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”

　　Questions 1-6

　　Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

　　In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

　　TRUE if the statement is true

　　FALSE if the statement is false

　　NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

　　1. Firstly, Alex has grasped quite a lot of vocabulary.ieltsxpress

　　2. At the beginning of the study, Alex felt frightened in the presence of humans.

　　3. Previously, many scientists realized that the animal possesses the ability of thinking.

　　4. It has taken a long time before people get to know cognition existing in animals.

　　5. As Alex could approximately imitate the sounds of English words, he was capable of roughly answering Irene’s questions regarding the world.

　　6. By breaking in other parrots as well as producing the incorrect answers, he tried to be focused.

　　Questions 7-10

　　Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

　　Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

　　Write your answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

　　After the training of Irene, Parrot Alex can use his vocal tract to pronounce more than 7_________, while other scientists believe that animals have no this advanced ability of thinking, they would rather teach 8_________, Pepperberg clarified that she wanted to conduct a study concerning 9_________, but not to teach him to talk. The store’s assistant picked out a bird at random for her for the sake of avoiding other scientists saying that the bird is 10_________, afterwards.

　　Questions 11-13

　　Answer the questions 11-13 below.

　　Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

　　11. What did Alex reply regarding the similarity of the subjects showed to him?

　　12. What is the problem of the young parrots except for Alex?

　　13. To some extent, through the way, he behaved what we can call him?

　　参考答案

　　1. NOT GIVEN

　　2. NOT GIVEN

　　3. FALSE

　　4. TRUE

　　5. TRUE

　　6. FALSE

　　7. 100 English words

　　8. chimpanzees

　　9. avian cognition

　　10. particularly chosen

　　11. color

　　12. wrong pronunciation

　　13. teenager

　　雅思考试试题 2

　　Deforestation in the 21st century

　　When it comes to cutting down trees, satellite data reveals a shift from the patterns of the past

　　Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest are destroyed each year. Such deforestation has long been driven by farmers desperate to earn a living or by loggers building new roads into pristine forest. But now new data appears to show that big, block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than these smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land. Geographer Ruth DeFries of Columbia University and her colleagues used satellite images to analyse tree-clearing in countries ringing the tropics, representing 98 per cent of all remaining tropical forest. Instead of the usual ‘fish bone signature of deforestation from small-scale operations, large, chunky blocks of cleared land reveal a new motive for cutting down woods.

　　In fact, a statistical analysis of 41 countries showed that forest loss rates were most closely linked with urban population growth and agricultural exports in the early part of the 21st century - even overall population growth was not as strong an influence. ‘In previous decades, deforestation was associated with planned colonisation, resettlement schemes in local areas and farmers clearing land to grow food for subsistence, DeFries says. ‘What we’re seeing now is a shift from small-scale farmers driving deforestation to distant demands from urban growth, agricultural trade and exports being more important drivers.’

　　In other words, the increasing urbanisation of the developing world, as populations leave rural areas to concentrate in booming cities, is driving deforestation, rather than containing it. Coupled with this there is an ongoing increase in consumption in the developed world of products that have an impact on forests, whether furniture, shoe leather or chicken feed. ‘One of the really striking characteristics of this century is urbanisation and rapid urban growth in the developing world,’ DeFries says, ‘People in cities need to eat.’ ‘There’s no surprise there,’ observes Scott Poynton, executive director of the Tropical Forest Trust, a Switzerland-based organisation that helps businesses implement and manage sustainable forestry in countries such as Brazil, Congo and Indonesia. ‘It’s not about people chopping down trees. Its all the people in New York, Europe and elsewhere who want cheap products, primarily food.’

　　Dearies argues that in order to help sustain this increasing urban and global demand, agricultural productivity will need to be increased on lands that have already been cleared. This means that better crop varieties or better management techniques will need to be used on the many degraded and abandoned lands in the tropics. And the Tropical Forest Trust is building management systems to keep illegally harvested wood from ending up in, for example, deck chairs, as well as expanding its efforts to look at how to reduce the ‘forest footprint’ of agricultural products such as palm oil. Poynton says, ‘The point is to give forests value as forests, to keep them as forests and give them a use as forests. They’re not going to be locked away as national parks. That’s not going to happen.’

　　But it is not all bad news. Halts in tropical deforestation have resulted in forest regrowth in some areas where tropical lands were previously cleared. And forest clearing in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, dropped from roughly 1.9 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 1.6 million hectares a year over the last decade, according to the Brazilian government. We know that deforestation has slowed down in at least the Brazilian Amazon,’ DeFries says. ‘Every place is different. Every country has its own particular situation, circumstances and driving forces.’

　　Regardless of this, deforestation continues, and cutting down forests is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity - a double blow that both eliminates a biological system to suck up C02 and creates a new source of greenhouse gases in the form of decaying plants. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that slowing such deforestation could reduce some 50 billion metric tons of C02, or more than a year of global emissions. Indeed, international climate negotiations continue to attempt to set up a system to encourage this, known as the UN Development Programme’s fund for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD). If policies [like REDD] are to be effective, we need to understand what the driving forces are behind deforestation, DeFries argues. This is particularly important in the light of new pressures that are on the horizon: the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and find alternative power sources, particularly for private cars, is forcing governments to make products such as biofuels more readily accessible. This will only exacerbate the pressures on tropical forests.

　　But millions of hectares of pristine forest remain to protect, according to this new analysis from Columbia University. Approximately 60 percent of the remaining tropical forests are in countries or areas that currently have little agricultural trade or urban growth. The amount of forest area in places like central Africa, Guyana and Suriname, DeFries notes, is huge. ‘There’s a lot of forest that has not yet faced these pressures.’

　　Questions 1-6

　　Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

　　Which paragraph contains the following information?

　　NB: You may use any letter more than once.

　　1 two ways that farming activity might be improved in the future

　　2 reference to a fall in the rate of deforestation in one area

　　3 the amount of forest cut down annually

　　4 how future transport requirements may increase deforestation levels

　　5 a reference to the typical shape of early deforested areas

　　6 key reasons why forests in some areas have not been cut down

　　Questions 7-8

　　Choose TWO letters, A-E.

　　Which TWO of these reasons do experts give for current patterns of deforestation?

　　A to provide jobs

　　B to create transport routes

　　C to feed city dwellers

　　D to manufacture low-budget consumer items

　　E to meet government targets

　　Questions 9-10

　　Choose TWO letters, A-E.

　　The list below gives some of the impacts of tropical deforestation.

　　Which TWO of these results are mentioned by the writer of the text?

　　A local food supplies fall

　　B soil becomes less fertile

　　C some areas have new forest growth

　　D some regions become uninhabitable

　　E local economies suffer

　　Questions 11-13

　　Complete the sentences below.

　　Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

　　11 The expression ‘a __________ ’ is used to assess the amount of wood used in certain types of production.

　　12 Greenhouse gases result from the __________ that remain after trees have been cut down.

　　13 About __________ of the world’s tropical forests have not experienced deforestation yet.

　　参考答案

　　1. D

　　2. E

　　3. A

　　4. F

　　5. A

　　6. G

　　7. C

　　8. D

　　9. B

　　10. C

　　11. forest footprint

　　12. decaying plants

　　13. 60 percent

　　雅思考试试题 3

　　Memory Decoding

　　Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner.

　　In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes,” as some of them like to be called, is closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.

　　Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the memory contestant and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

　　It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards – the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said, “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of clubs.

　　How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.

　　The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the loci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably, our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method became popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art of memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

　　The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S.V. Shereshevski, who could recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studies Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.

　　K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F., an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn’t exist at all. When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques – sometimes without realizing it – and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. “If we look at some of these memory tasks, they’re the kind of thing most people don’t even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a “person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s any compelling evidence that there are such people.”

　　Questions 1-5

　　The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.

　　Which paragraph contains the following information?

　　Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

　　1 The reason why the competence of super memory is significant in academic settings

　　2 Mention of a contest for extraordinary memory held in consecutive years

　　3 A demonstrative example of extraordinary person did an unusual recalling game

　　4 A belief that extraordinary memory can be gained through enough practice

　　5 A depiction of the rare ability which assists the extraordinary memory reactions

　　Questions 6-10

　　Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

　　Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

　　Write your answers in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

　　Using visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers are investigated and explained. A man called Ed Cooke in a pub, spoke a string of odd words when he held 7 of the spades (the first one of any cards group) was remembered as he encoded it to a 6 __________ and the card deck to memory are set to be one time of an order of 7 __________ ; When it comes time to recall, Cooke took a 8 __________ along his way and interpreted the imaginary scene into cards. This superior memory skill can be traced back to Ancient Greece, the strategy was called 9 __________ which had been a major subject was in ancient 10 __________.

　　Questions 11-12

　　Choose TWO correct letters, A-E.

　　Write your answers in boxes 11-12 on your answer sheet.

　　According to World Memory Championships, what activities need good memory?

　　A order for a large group of each digit

　　B recall people’s face

　　C resemble a long Greek poem

　　D match name with pictures and features

　　E recall what people ate and did yesterday

　　Questions 13-14

　　Choose TWO correct letters, A-E.

　　Write your answers in boxes 13-14 on your answer sheet.