Reading Lab

IELTS Academic Reading Practice Pack 12

A premium Academic Reading set on the history of glass, the architecture of trust, and the genetics of domestication.

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60 min

Passages

academicreadingfull mockmaterialstrustdomesticationtfngynngqa candidate

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Passage 1

Transparent History: The Making And Meaning Of Glass

How glass moved from ancient craft to modern infrastructure, and why its history matters across science, architecture, and culture.

A.Glass is so commonplace in modern life that its remarkable properties are easily overlooked. Yet for most of human history, a perfectly transparent, solid material through which light could pass undistorted was considered extraordinary — even miraculous. Understanding how glass has been made, refined, and understood across cultures reveals as much about the societies that produced it as it does about the material itself.

B.The earliest manufactured glass objects date to around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, where craftspeople discovered that heating silica — the compound found in sand — together with soda ash and limestone produced a glassy residue. These early glasses were typically coloured rather than transparent, produced as decorative beads and vessels by winding molten threads of glass around clay cores. The technology spread slowly across the ancient world, reaching the eastern Mediterranean by about 1500 BCE, where it was used primarily to produce luxury goods for royal and religious contexts. The remarkable stability of glass — its resistance to chemical interaction with most substances it contacts — made it particularly prized for storing valuable aromatic oils and perfumes.

C.The transformation that made glass widely available came with the invention of glassblowing in the region of present-day Syria around the first century BCE. Using a hollow iron pipe, craftspeople could gather a blob of molten glass and inflate it with a controlled breath into a thin-walled vessel of almost any shape. Blowing reduced production time dramatically and allowed forms of far greater delicacy and size than had been achievable by any earlier technique. Within a century of its invention, glassblowing had spread across the Roman Empire, and glass vessels that had once been luxury items became affordable to ordinary households. The Romans also discovered that adding manganese dioxide to the melt produced clearer, less tinted glass — a discovery with profound implications for the subsequent development of the material.

D.Flat glass — essential for windows — presented a different technical challenge that was solved through two distinct methods. The crown glass method involved gathering molten glass on a pipe, blowing a bubble, removing the pipe, and spinning the flattened disc rapidly so that centrifugal force spread the glass into a circular sheet. The centre of the disc, where the pipe had been attached, retained a thick knob called the bull's-eye, which could be cut away or used decoratively. A later technique, cylinder glass, involved blowing a cylindrical bubble, cutting it along its length, and flattening it while still soft. Both methods produced glass with natural variations in thickness and slight optical distortions that are today considered aesthetically desirable in restoration projects but were regarded as defects by medieval craftspeople who used them for reasons of necessity rather than preference.

E.The optical clarity of glass found its most consequential application in the development of lenses. Ground and polished glass lenses were used in spectacles from at least the late thirteenth century, transforming the productive lives of scholars and craftspeople whose close vision had deteriorated with age. By the early seventeenth century, lens-grinders in the Netherlands had combined lenses to produce the first telescopes and compound microscopes, instruments that expanded human perception in opposite directions — outward to the moons of Jupiter and inward to the microorganisms that cause infectious disease. Without glass, neither the astronomical revolution associated with Galileo nor the biological revolution that began with van Leeuwenhoek would have been possible.

F.Modern industrial glass production was transformed by the float glass process developed by Sir Alastair Pilkington in 1959. In this method, molten glass is poured continuously onto a bath of molten tin. Because glass is less dense than tin, it floats on the surface and spreads naturally to a uniform thickness, producing flat sheets of exceptional optical quality without mechanical polishing. The process also allows the thickness to be controlled by adjusting the speed at which the glass ribbon is drawn forward. Float glass now accounts for the overwhelming majority of flat glass produced globally and makes possible the large-scale architectural glazing that defines much contemporary urban architecture.

G.Current research in glass science focuses on materials whose properties extend far beyond traditional transparency. Electrochromic glass can switch between transparent and opaque states in response to electrical current, enabling buildings to regulate solar gain without physical blinds. Aerogel-filled glazing units achieve thermal insulation levels approaching those of solid walls while remaining translucent. Bioactive glasses, developed for medical applications, can bond directly to bone and gradually dissolve as tissue regenerates around them. The material that ancient craftspeople shaped from sand and ash continues to evolve in ways they could not have imagined, yet the essential chemistry of silica, soda, and lime that they discovered more than five thousand years ago remains at the heart of almost all glass production today.

Table Completion

Questions 1-7

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Passage 1 for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Era / Invention

Key Feature / Innovation

Answer

c.3500 BCE (earliest)

Glass coloured, not transparent. Objects were:

1. c.3500 BCE (earliest) Glass coloured, not transparent. Objects were: ______

2. 1st century BCE Invention of glassblowing. Origin region: ______

3. Roman period Clearer glass produced. Additive used: ______

4. Flat glass: Crown method Distinctive central waste piece called: ______

5. Flat glass: Cylinder method Step after cutting: the glass was then ______

6. 13th century onwards Lenses used in spectacles. Beneficiaries: scholars and ______

7. 1959 (Float glass) Glass floats on molten: ______

Matching Headings

Questions 8-13

Passage 1 has seven paragraphs labelled A-G.

Paragraph A has been matched as an example.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-G from the list below.

Write the correct number (i-ix) in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use all of them.

8. Paragraph B

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

9. Paragraph C

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

10. Paragraph D

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

11. Paragraph E

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

12. Paragraph F

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

13. Paragraph G

i A slow-spreading luxury trade transformed by a single technique
ii The irreplaceable role of glass in two scientific revolutions
iii Why historical production methods are now valued differently than they once were
iv The early discovery and exclusive uses of a new material
v A continuous manufacturing process that changed architecture
vi New forms of glass engineered for specialised applications
vii The chemical origins of glass and its earliest known forms
viii An additive that improved a fundamental property of glass
ix Two techniques for producing flat sheets with characteristic imperfections

True/False/Not Given

Questions 14-18

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

In boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet, write:

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage

14. The earliest glass objects were produced for wealthy or powerful members of society.

15. The Romans were the first people to produce colourless glass.

16. Medieval glaziers preferred the optical distortions in crown and cylinder glass.

17. The float glass process requires the glass surface to be polished mechanically after it solidifies.

18. Bioactive glass can be used to replace bone tissue permanently.

Passage 2

The Architecture Of Trust: Why Societies Depend On What They Cannot Verify

Why trust reduces social complexity, why institutions depend on it, and why mistrust can sometimes be rational rather than pathological.

A.Trust is among the most studied and least understood concepts in the social sciences. Philosophers have debated its moral dimensions, economists have modelled its effects on market efficiency, and sociologists have traced its erosion in contemporary societies. What unites these perspectives is the recognition that trust — the willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations of another's behaviour — is not a luxury that functioning societies can afford to dispense with. It is, rather, a structural necessity without which cooperative life at scale becomes impossible.

B.The distinction between personal trust and systemic trust is foundational to understanding how modern societies operate. Personal trust develops through repeated interaction: the neighbour who returns borrowed tools, the colleague who meets deadlines, the friend who keeps confidences. This interpersonal form of trust is calibrated against direct experience and updated incrementally as new evidence accumulates. Systemic trust, by contrast, refers to confidence in institutions, roles, and abstract systems rather than in specific individuals. When a patient submits to surgery, she does not personally trust the surgeon as an individual — she may never have met him before. She trusts the system of medical education, licensure, peer review, and liability that the surgeon represents. This distinction matters enormously because systemic trust can operate across anonymity and scale in ways that personal trust cannot.

C.The sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the primary function of trust is to reduce complexity. In a world of radical uncertainty, we cannot verify the intentions or competencies of every actor with whom we interact. Trust allows us to proceed on the assumption of benign intent and adequate capability, suspending the demand for verification that would otherwise paralyse interaction. This suspension is not irrational — it is calibrated. Societies develop elaborate institutional frameworks precisely to make trust warranted: professional licensing, financial auditing, judicial oversight, and democratic accountability all exist to create the conditions under which trusting strangers is a reasonable rather than a reckless act.

D.The philosopher Onora O'Neill has argued that the contemporary discourse around trust is systematically confused. Policy debates focus on increasing trust — in governments, in media, in financial institutions — when what they should be focusing on is increasing trustworthiness. Trust, O'Neill points out, is not a virtue in itself: it is an attitude whose appropriateness depends entirely on whether its object deserves it. A society in which citizens blindly trust untrustworthy institutions has not achieved anything admirable; it has simply become credulous. The real goal should be to create and sustain institutions whose conduct genuinely merits the trust placed in them, and simultaneously to equip citizens with the tools to make intelligent discriminations between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy.

E.The empirical study of trust was dramatically advanced by Robert Putnam's research into social capital — the networks of relationships and norms of reciprocity that facilitate collective action. Putnam's influential comparison of Italian regional governments in his 1993 work Making Democracy Work demonstrated that regions with higher levels of civic engagement and interpersonal trust had dramatically more effective government performance, lower crime, better public health outcomes, and stronger economic development. Crucially, Putnam found that trust was not simply a byproduct of effective institutions — it was also a precondition for them. High-trust communities were better able to solve collective action problems, maintain public goods, and hold governments accountable because members were willing to participate in civic life on the reasonable expectation that others would do the same.

F.Trust, however, is not uniformly distributed within or across societies. Extensive research has documented systematic differences in trust levels along lines of class, ethnicity, and prior experience with institutions. Communities that have experienced repeated betrayal by state institutions — through discriminatory enforcement of laws, corrupt administration of welfare, or broken promises on infrastructure investment — rationally extend lower trust to those institutions. This rational mistrust is sometimes misread by policymakers as a cultural deficit requiring behavioural intervention, when it more accurately reflects a historically grounded assessment of institutional performance. Restoring trust in such contexts requires not communication campaigns but demonstrated changes in institutional behaviour over sustained periods.

G.The digital transformation of social life has introduced new dimensions to the trust problem that existing theoretical frameworks address only partially. Algorithmic systems now make decisions that affect employment, creditworthiness, and access to services, yet their internal logic is typically opaque to those affected. Platform economies require users to trust corporations with personal data in exchanges whose terms they cannot meaningfully evaluate. Online information environments have fragmented shared epistemic foundations in ways that complicate the very possibility of the calibrated trust that Luhmann described. Whether the institutions of trust developed over centuries of face-to-face social life can be adapted to these conditions — or whether new frameworks must be developed from the ground up — is one of the defining questions of contemporary social organisation.

Matching Features

Questions 19-24

Look at the following descriptions (Questions 19-24).

Match each description with the correct thinker or researcher, A-D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 19-24 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Thinkers and Researchers

19. Argued that the primary purpose of trust is to manage uncertainty in complex social environments.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

20. Conducted research demonstrating that civic participation and effective governance are mutually reinforcing.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

21. Suggested that policymakers focus on the wrong goal when they try to increase public trust.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

22. Proposed that trust allows people to act without requiring proof of others' intentions or abilities.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

23. Found evidence that communities with high trust levels deal more effectively with shared problems.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

24. Argued that genuine trust requires the trusting party to make intelligent judgements rather than accept everything uncritically.

A Niklas Luhmann
B Onora O'Neill
C Robert Putnam
D None of the above / not attributed to a named individual

Yes/No/Not Given

Questions 25-31

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Passage 2?

In boxes 25-31 on your answer sheet, write:

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

25. Personal trust and systemic trust rely on different types of evidence to function.

26. Systemic trust is inherently less reliable than personal trust because it is based on assumption.

27. Luhmann believed that the decision to trust was fundamentally irrational.

28. O'Neill's view implies that a society where people distrust corrupt institutions is behaving more wisely than one that trusts them.

29. Putnam's research showed that trust always develops before effective institutions in any society.

30. The writer suggests that communities which distrust state institutions are behaving irrationally.

31. The writer is optimistic that existing trust frameworks will successfully adapt to the digital environment.

Passage 3

The Genetics Of Domestication: What Taming Animals Reveals About Human Evolution

What domestication reveals about animal genetics, neural crest biology, and the evolutionary debate over human self-domestication.

A.Domestication — the process by which wild animals are brought under human control and selectively bred over generations — is one of the most consequential biological transformations in the history of the planet. The approximately fifteen species that have been fully domesticated, including cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, and cats, now collectively outweigh all remaining wild land mammals by a substantial margin. Understanding the genetic and behavioural mechanisms of domestication has implications not only for animal biology but for our understanding of human prehistory, social organisation, and, increasingly, the biology of our own species.

B.The classical model of domestication proposed a linear sequence: humans identified useful wild animals, captured specimens, bred the tamest individuals, and repeated this selection across generations until a domesticated population emerged. This model is now regarded as inadequate on several grounds. Genetic studies of dog domestication — the earliest and most thoroughly examined case — have repeatedly failed to identify a single origin point or a narrow founding population consistent with deliberate human selection. The divergence between modern dogs and wolves is now estimated to have occurred between fifteen and forty thousand years ago, substantially before the earliest evidence of settled agriculture, suggesting that the initial stages of dog domestication may have been driven not by human initiative but by wolf behaviour — specifically, the self-selection of less fearful individuals into the ecological niche created by human encampments and their associated food refuse.

C.This revisionist account draws on what evolutionary biologist Dmitri Belyaev demonstrated through his remarkable long-term experiment at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, beginning in 1959. Belyaev began selectively breeding silver foxes for a single trait: reduced fear response to humans. Within ten generations — an evolutionarily negligible timescale — foxes that had been selected solely for tameness began displaying a constellation of physical and behavioural changes that collectively parallel the domestication syndrome observed across multiple species. These changes included floppy ears, curly tails, piebald colouration, shortened snouts, reduced skull size, and extended juvenile behavioural traits into adulthood — a phenomenon known as neoteny. Crucially, Belyaev had not selected for any of these traits directly. They emerged as correlated consequences of selection for reduced adrenal reactivity.

D.The proposed biological mechanism links adrenal function to neural crest cells — a population of stem cells that migrate during embryonic development and give rise to a remarkably diverse range of tissues, including adrenal gland cells, pigment cells, certain cartilage and bone components, and elements of the peripheral nervous system. Selecting for reduced stress reactivity, the argument goes, creates developmental conditions in which neural crest cells migrate less extensively or proliferate less vigorously. This single developmental change then ramifies across all the tissue types that neural crest cells produce, generating the varied anatomical and behavioural features of the domestication syndrome simultaneously. The neural crest hypothesis, advanced formally by Adam Wilkins, Richard Wrangham, and W. Tecumseh Fitch in 2014, provides an elegant mechanistic explanation for why such disparate changes consistently co-occur across domesticated species.

E.The implications of this framework extend in an unexpected direction. Several researchers, including Wrangham himself, have proposed that human evolution over the past hundred thousand years shows signs of a comparable self-domestication process. Anatomically modern humans are less robust than archaic Homo sapiens or Neanderthals: our brow ridges are reduced, our skulls more rounded, our teeth smaller, our bodies more gracile. These changes parallel the morphological shifts seen in domesticated animals relative to their wild ancestors. Behaviourally, modern humans show elevated capacities for cooperation with non-kin, reduced reactive aggression — the impulsive violence associated with threat response — and extended periods of juvenile sociability. The neural crest hypothesis would predict exactly these patterns as consequences of selection for reduced reactive aggression in social groups — a selection pressure that could have operated through the social sanctioning or exclusion of individuals with excessively aggressive dispositions.

F.If the self-domestication hypothesis is correct, it reframes some of the central questions in human evolutionary anthropology. The expansion of anatomically modern humans across the globe and their apparent displacement of other hominid lineages may have been facilitated not primarily by superior tool technology or cognitive capacity — the conventional explanations — but by superior capacity for large-scale cooperation rooted in domestication-like changes in social behaviour and emotional regulation. This is a speculative but genuinely testable proposition: genomic studies can now compare the distribution of neural crest-associated gene variants between modern humans, Neanderthals, and other archaic populations with sufficient resolution to assess whether selection on these loci occurred at the predicted times and in the predicted directions.

G.The study of domestication thus loops back, unexpectedly, onto the study of ourselves. The same processes that produced the docile cattle in a field and the dog sleeping beside a hearth may have shaped the neural architecture that allows humans to build cities, negotiate treaties, and sustain the elaborate cooperative structures that are our species' most distinctive achievement. Whether this reading of human evolution is ultimately vindicated or refined, it illustrates the capacity of genetics to reframe questions that were previously the exclusive territory of archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy.

Flow-chart Completion

Questions 32-36

Complete the flow-chart below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Passage 3 for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet.

32. Selection for reduced ______ in animals

33. Neural crest cells migrate less or ______ less vigorously

34. Behavioural change: extended ______ traits into adulthood

35. Physical change: reduced ______

36. This helps explain the ______ observed across domesticated species

Short-answer Questions

Questions 37-40

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Passage 3 for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37. What term does the passage use to describe the persistence of juvenile behaviours into adulthood in domesticated animals?

38. What type of cells are proposed as the mechanism linking tameness selection to the diverse physical changes of domestication?

39. What does the self-domestication hypothesis suggest was reduced in modern human populations compared with their archaic ancestors?

40. What evidence could be used to test whether self-domestication occurred in human evolution?