It s Oxbridge season again, and thousands of applicants are anxiously waiting to be called to interview. Independent schools will be putting the final polish on candidates who may well have already had a year’s intensive preparation. Candidates, if they are lucky, might get a five-minute mock interview with one of their teachers. At the …
Can You Charm Your Way into Oxbridge? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A Gabriele Dionisi, a ’38-year-old Italian computer wizard living in London, is a true individualist when it comes to food. He has been known to live for days on dry toast and mashed potato. He’s also very fond of tinned mackerel with biscuits, washed down with, say, an apple-and-tomato milkshake. For some unfathomable reason, he sometimes …
Fix it with Flavour – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
How we spend our money is changing. In the new “experience economy”, we pay to do things, not have things. Trevor Beattie, the advertising supremo, has earned millions by devising original and controversial publicity campaigns. His agency assembled the arresting logo for French Connection. However, he doesn’t believe in amassing expensive emblems of success, instead …
Are You Experienced? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A Pity the poor British professor. Once upon a time in the halcyon 1960s, his students were a privileged few, an academic elite drawn from the top four per cent of the population. New university arrivals were literate and numerate; crimes against grammar were the exception rather than the rule. According to a new comprehensive survey …
British Universities Seek Quantity and Quality – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A Three striking facts highlight the dramatic shift in recent years in the relative economic balance of “first-world” and “third-world” economies. Last year, according to our estimates, emerging economies produced slightly more than half of world output measured at purchasing-power parity. Second, they also accounted for more than half of the increase in global GDP in …
The world’s factory, it turns out, has a sizeable canteen attached, not to mention an office block and shopping mall. Last month’s official revision of China’s gross domestic product revealed an economy worth 16 trillion yuan (＄1.9 trillion) in 2004, 17% more than previously thought. Some ＄265 billion of the increase – 93% of it …
Are You Being Served? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A It’s hard to imagine that only a decade or so ago many of the nation’s canals were little more than the last resting place for abandoned shopping trolleys. There’s still work to be done, but their transformation has been remarkable. Projects such as Castlefield in Manchester and Brindley Place in Birmingham have transformed city-centre canals …
Britain’s canals – the solution to overcrowded roads? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada’s Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal …
Climate Change: Instant Expert – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A Carl Sagan once said, ‘Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort.’ Yes, hard science, proven facts, and indisputable logic are often not sufficiently consoling, and thus routinely eliminated from the equation. Never, though, has this been more distressing than with the so-called ‘anti-vaccination’ movement. The end result has been …
The Immunisation Controversy – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
If one were asked to name the greatest writer in the English language, few would hesitate in answering, ‘William Shakespeare’. Although he dabbled in poetry, his central claim to fame is his plays, almost 40 of them. Extensively studied, constantly performed, adapted, and reinterpreted into modern contexts, Shakespeare’s plays remain as popular as ever. But …
Shakespeare: The Authorship Question – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
