Reading Lab

IELTS Academic Reading Practice Pack 27

A rebuilt Academic Reading set on colour perception, global food systems, and the neural basis of judgement, expanded to full release standard.

Question count

Time allowed

60 min

Passages

academicreadingfull mockperceptionfood systemsdecision scienceqa candidate

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Passage 1

Seeing Colour: The Science Of Visual Perception

Why colour is a neural construction, how physiology and language shape what people see, and why perceptual constancy depends on sophisticated interpretation rather than passive reception.

A.A Colour is not a property of the physical world. It is a construction of the brain. What exists in the external world are electromagnetic waves of different frequencies; what we experience as colour is the product of a complex chain of neural processes that interpret those frequencies in ways that are useful for survival but bear no necessary resemblance to the waves themselves. This insight, which dates to Newton's observation that white light could be split by a prism into a spectrum of colours, has been progressively deepened by neuroscience, and its implications remain surprising even to those who know the basic facts.

B.B The human eye contains two types of photoreceptors: rods, which are sensitive to low light levels but do not distinguish colour, and cones, which require brighter conditions and provide the basis for colour discrimination. Most humans have three types of cone, each most sensitive to a different range of wavelengths corresponding roughly to red, green, and blue. Colour vision begins in the retina, where signals from the three cone types are processed into opponent channels: a red-green channel, a blue-yellow channel, and a light-dark channel. These channels are transmitted through the optic nerve to the visual cortex, where the experience of colour is ultimately constructed.

C.C The existence of three cone types explains why virtually all colours visible to humans can be reproduced by mixing three primary colours in appropriate proportions -- the principle underlying colour printing, television screens, and digital displays. It also explains colour blindness, the most common form of which results from an absent or non-functional gene for either the red-sensitive or the green-sensitive cone. Because the genes for these two cone types are located on the X chromosome, colour blindness affects approximately eight per cent of men but under one per cent of women. A small proportion of women carry four distinct cone types through a genetic variant and may be capable of discriminating between colours that appear identical to standard trichromats -- a condition known as tetrachromacy, which remains difficult to assess empirically because it requires visual stimuli calibrated to wavelength ranges outside normal display technology.

D.D The degree to which colour perception is culturally variable has been a productive area of research in cognitive anthropology. The Pirahã people of the Amazon, who lack dedicated colour terms in their language beyond words for light and dark, and the Himba people of northern Namibia, who use a colour vocabulary that groups blue and green together but distinguishes between shades of green that English speakers treat as identical, have both been studied extensively in relation to the hypothesis that linguistic categories shape colour perception. The results are nuanced: Himba speakers are faster at discriminating between green shades that fall into different linguistic categories than between shades that fall within the same category, even when the physical difference is equivalent. This effect -- faster discrimination across a linguistic category boundary than within one -- has become a standard finding in the study of categorical perception.

E.E Beyond trichromacy and cultural variation, colour perception is substantially shaped by context and expectation. The phenomenon known as simultaneous contrast causes the same grey square to appear lighter on a dark background than on a light background. Colour constancy -- the ability to perceive an object as having the same colour under different illumination conditions -- involves sophisticated neural computation that compensates for changes in the spectral content of ambient light, ensuring that a red apple looks red in sunlight, in shade, and under artificial lighting even though the wavelengths it reflects differ substantially across these conditions. The failures of colour constancy are most dramatically illustrated by viral internet phenomena in which photographs of objects of genuinely ambiguous spectral content are perceived as different colours by different viewers, an experience that has proved useful for educating the general public about the constructive nature of perceptual experience. This helps explain why visual perception is studied not only in biology, but also in design, safety engineering, interface research, and the philosophy of mind. What looks immediate and obvious in perception is often the result of elaborate hidden processing. The science of colour therefore reveals something wider: perception is useful because it is interpretive, not because it passively mirrors the world.

True/False/Not Given

Questions 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage?

In boxes 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

1. The idea that colour is a mental construction rather than a physical property was first established by Isaac Newton.

2. Rods are capable of detecting colour under conditions of bright light.

3. Colour blindness is more common in women than in men because the relevant genes are on the X chromosome.

4. Tetrachromacy in humans has been definitively confirmed using standard display screen technology.

5. The Himba people are faster at distinguishing between certain green shades than English speakers are, even when the physical colour difference is the same.

Matching Headings

Questions 6-9

The passage has paragraphs labelled A–E.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list below.

Write the correct number in the boxes on your answer sheet.

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

6. Paragraph B

7. Paragraph C

8. Paragraph D

9. Paragraph E

Sentence Completion

Questions 10-13

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

10. Most humans have three types of __________ in the eye.

11. Retinal signals are organised into opponent __________ before being sent onward.

12. A woman with four distinct cone types may display __________.

13. Faster discrimination across linguistic category boundaries is a standard finding in categorical __________.

Passage 2

Feeding The World: The Political Economy Of Global Food Systems

Why food systems are political as well as technical, and why subsidy structures, market concentration, and ecological trade-offs shape who is fed and on what terms.

A.Food systems -- the interconnected networks of production, processing, distribution, retail, consumption, and waste that bring food from farm to plate -- are among the most consequential and least well-understood structures in the global economy. They determine not only what people eat but who eats, at what cost, and at what ecological price. The global food system has achieved remarkable things: global caloric availability per capita has increased substantially since the mid-twentieth century, and the proportion of the world's population classified as undernourished has declined from approximately thirty per cent in 1970 to around eight per cent today. These achievements sit alongside deep failures: more than 700 million people experience severe food insecurity; obesity and diet-related chronic disease have become the leading cause of premature death in most high-income countries; and the food system is responsible for approximately a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

B.The paradox of simultaneous overnutrition and undernutrition within and between countries is sometimes attributed to failures of distribution -- the idea that the world produces more than enough food and that hunger is purely a political problem of access rather than a technical problem of supply. This framing is partially correct but misleading. The global food system does produce sufficient calories for the current population, but calories are not nutrition: deficiencies of micronutrients including iron, iodine, zinc, and vitamin A affect more than two billion people globally, largely independently of overall caloric sufficiency. More importantly, the idea that hunger is simply a distribution problem obscures the extent to which patterns of production, pricing, and market access are themselves political constructions that systematically disadvantage certain regions and populations.

C.Agricultural subsidies in high-income countries represent perhaps the starkest example of politically constructed market distortion. The OECD countries collectively provided approximately seven hundred billion dollars in agricultural support in 2020, a figure that dwarfs total official development assistance globally. This support takes several forms: direct income payments to farmers, price support mechanisms, tariffs on imported agricultural goods, and preferential financing. The cumulative effect is to lower the cost of agricultural commodities from subsidised producers below the cost of production in developing countries, where equivalent subsidies do not exist. West African cotton farmers, for example, cannot compete with price-supported American cotton on world markets regardless of their comparative efficiency; the same dynamic applies across multiple commodity chains, from rice and maize to sugar and dairy.

D.The concentration of power in global food supply chains has intensified significantly over recent decades. Four companies -- Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, often referred to as the ABCD companies -- control an estimated seventy to ninety per cent of global grain trade. Similar concentration exists in seed markets, where the 2017 mergers that created ChemChina-Syngenta and Bayer-Monsanto, combined with the existing DowDupont merger, resulted in three companies controlling over fifty per cent of commercial seed sales globally. In retail, the rise of supermarket chains in both high-income and middle-income countries has shifted market power dramatically from food producers to purchasers: the top five supermarket chains in the United Kingdom control over seventy per cent of food retail, and their buyer power allows them to impose cost, quality, and scheduling requirements on suppliers that the latter have limited capacity to resist.

E.The ecological consequences of the current food system are equally contested. Industrial agriculture has produced the yield increases that have sustained growing populations but at the cost of topsoil degradation, aquifer depletion, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen pollution. The dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea -- areas of oxygen-depleted water caused by agricultural runoff -- are among the most visible consequences of fertiliser-intensive production. The food system's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions comes from multiple sources: land clearance for agriculture (particularly tropical deforestation), methane from livestock and rice cultivation, nitrous oxide from fertilised soils, and the fuel consumption of processing and transport chains. Livestock systems are particularly emissions-intensive: producing a kilogram of beef protein requires approximately six times the land and generates approximately six times the greenhouse gas emissions of producing an equivalent amount of protein from legumes.

F.Reform proposals span a wide spectrum. At one end, advocates of precision fermentation and cellular agriculture argue that the ecological consequences of conventional food production can be largely circumvented by producing proteins through microbial or cell-culture processes that require a fraction of the land and water. At the other end, advocates of agroecology and food sovereignty argue that the problem is not one of production technology but of power relations, and that the solution lies in rebuilding local food systems controlled by communities and small-scale producers rather than by transnational corporations. Between these positions, mainstream development organisations advocate for sustainable intensification -- using advanced seed varieties, precision application of inputs, and improved soil management to increase yields while reducing ecological footprints -- as the most practically scalable path.

Yes/No/Not Given

Questions 14-18

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

In boxes 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

14. The writer argues that reducing the proportion of people experiencing undernourishment proves that the global food system is fundamentally successful.

15. According to the writer, the distribution argument for solving hunger ignores the political nature of food production systems.

16. The ABCD companies control a larger share of global grain trade than any other sector of the food supply chain.

17. The writer believes that precision fermentation is more likely to succeed than agroecology in reforming the food system.

18. Livestock produce more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of protein than legumes do.

Summary Completion

Questions 19-24

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in the boxes on your answer sheet.

Agricultural Subsidies and Market Distortion

19. ________ dollars in agricultural support. This is substantially more than total global

20. ________ assistance. Support mechanisms include direct payments,

21. ________ on imported goods, and price support. The result is that producers in subsidised countries can sell at prices below the

22. ________ of producers in developing countries. A specific example is

23. ________ farmers, who cannot compete with subsidised American exports regardless of their efficiency. The same pattern applies to commodities including rice, maize,

24. ________ and dairy. PASSAGE

True/False/Not Given

Questions 25-27

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 25-27, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

25. Agricultural subsidies in high-income countries can push commodity prices below the cost of production faced by farmers in developing countries.

26. The passage says the ABCD companies control more than half of the world's commercial seed sales.

27. Advocates of agroecology argue that the food system problem is fundamentally about power relations rather than technology alone.

Passage 3

Choosing And Deciding: The Neural Basis Of Human Judgement

How behavioural economics and neuroscience reworked the theory of human judgement, and why the policy implications of neuroeconomics remain contested.

A.A For most of the twentieth century, the dominant model of human decision-making was rational choice theory: the view that people select options by calculating expected utility, weighting outcomes by their probability and subjective value, and choosing the option that maximises the result. This framework was analytically powerful and mathematically tractable, but it made predictions about human behaviour that were systematically wrong. The behavioural economics programme initiated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s documented a catalogue of predictable departures from rational choice -- framing effects, loss aversion, anchoring, the availability heuristic -- that demonstrated that human judgement is governed by processes quite different from the expected utility calculations that rational choice theory assumed.

B.B The neural investigation of decision-making has added mechanistic depth to these behavioural findings. A central insight of neuroeconomics -- the field that applies neuroscientific methods to economic decision problems -- is that the brain does not possess a single decision system but multiple partially independent systems whose outputs can conflict and whose relative influence determines behaviour. The most influential framework distinguishes a valuation system centred on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum, which compute the expected value of options in a manner roughly consistent with economic utility theory, and a cognitive control system centred on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, which monitors for conflict between valuations and can override prepotent responses when deliberate processing is engaged.

C.C Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex produces a distinctive decision-making impairment that illuminates the relationship between emotion and reason. Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, developed through the study of patients with such damage, proposed that the normal process of evaluating options involves the generation of somatic states -- bodily signals that function as markers encoding the emotional significance of anticipated outcomes. When the relevant cortical structures are damaged, patients lose access to these somatic signals and make decisions that appear superficially logical but are in practice disastrously poor, particularly in situations requiring rapid assessment of complex social and emotional contingencies. The somatic marker hypothesis challenged the Cartesian intuition that good decision-making requires the suppression of emotion, arguing instead that emotion is constitutive of adaptive decision-making rather than an obstacle to it.

D.D The temporal dimension of decision-making -- how people trade off immediate against delayed rewards -- has generated a large body of experimental and neural evidence. Intertemporal choice experiments consistently find that humans weight immediate rewards more heavily than equivalent delayed rewards by a degree that is inconsistent with the constant discounting assumed by standard economic models. The neural basis of this temporal preference involves a tension between limbic and paralimbic systems that respond strongly to immediate reward options and lateral prefrontal systems that are selectively engaged by choices involving future rewards. This dual-system architecture helps explain patterns of behaviour that rational choice theory struggles with: why people make committed plans they subsequently fail to follow; why addiction involves both a genuine preference change and something that feels like compulsion; and why policies that change the default option can have larger effects on behaviour than those that change available choices.

E.E Social decision-making introduces additional complexity. Humans routinely make choices in contexts where their decisions affect others and where others' reactions to their choices affect the outcome. The ultimatum game -- a canonical experimental paradigm in which one player proposes a division of money and the other player accepts or rejects it, with rejection leaving both players with nothing -- demonstrates that people reliably reject proposals they consider unfair even at material cost to themselves. Neural imaging of ultimatum game responses has found that unfair offers activate the anterior insula -- a region associated with disgust and negative affect -- in proportion to the degree of perceived unfairness, and that rejection decisions involve a competition between this affective response and the rational calculation that any positive offer is better than nothing. The degree to which cultural variation moderates these responses -- whether they are universal or calibrated to local norms of fairness -- remains an active area of investigation.

F.F The practical implications of neuroeconomics for policy have generated both enthusiasm and scepticism. The nudge framework, developed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, applies insights about default effects, present bias, and social norms to the design of choice architectures that guide people toward better decisions without restricting their freedom to choose otherwise. Pension enrolment, organ donation, and energy consumption have all been targeted with nudge-based interventions showing modest but replicable effects. Critics have argued that nudge policies treat symptoms rather than causes, that their effects are small relative to the scale of problems they address, and that they can function as a substitute for structural reforms that would more directly address the material conditions driving poor outcomes. Whether the neural and behavioural science of decision-making can ultimately provide the basis for more effective social policy or merely a more sophisticated account of why existing policies fail remains contested.

Multiple Choice

Questions 28-33

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in the box on your answer sheet.

28. According to Paragraph A, rational choice theory was abandoned by researchers because: A it was too mathematically complex to apply. B its predictions about human behaviour were consistently inaccurate. C it failed to account for cultural differences in decision-making. D it could not be tested using neuroscientific methods.

29. The somatic marker hypothesis argues that emotion in decision-making is: A an obstacle to rational judgement. B relevant only in social situations. C a necessary component of effective decision-making. D absent in patients with frontal lobe damage.

30. The dual-system architecture described in Paragraph D explains why: A people never follow through on decisions made under emotional pressure. B present rewards are always more highly valued than future rewards. C people can simultaneously prefer immediate rewards and plan for the future. D addiction is caused by damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex.

31. In the ultimatum game, participants who reject unfair offers are demonstrating that: A they prioritise social norms over personal financial gain. B they cannot calculate the value of different offers accurately. C they are influenced by cultural norms that vary between societies. D the anterior insula overrides all other brain regions in financial decisions.

32. The writer suggests that nudge policies have been criticised for: A reducing individual freedom of choice. B producing results that cannot be replicated experimentally. C addressing surface behaviours rather than underlying structural causes. D being too expensive to implement at scale.

33. The writer's overall assessment of neuroeconomics as a basis for social policy can best be described as: A optimistic: neuroscience will revolutionise policy within a decade. B pessimistic: the field has produced no useful policy insights. C uncertain: the potential is real but the question is unresolved. D dismissive: nudge policies are ineffective regardless of their neural basis.

Short-answer Questions

Questions 34-36

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in the boxes on your answer sheet.

34. What term describes the brain region associated with computing the expected value of options?

35. What is the name of the experimental paradigm used to study social fairness in decision-making?

36. What name do Thaler and Sunstein give to the framework of designing environments that guide people toward better decisions?

Matching Information

Questions 37-40

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, B-F, in boxes 37-40.

37. a description of a control system that can override automatic responses

38. evidence that emotion can be necessary for adaptive judgement

39. an explanation for why default settings influence future-oriented choices

40. a criticism that behavioural interventions may distract from structural reform