IELTS PRACTICE TEST: READING

ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN

A. Twenty-five years ago, children in London walked to school and played in parks and playing fields after school and
at the weekend. Today they are usually driven to school by parents anxious about safety and spend hours glued to
television screens or computer games. Meanwhile, community playing fields are being sold off to property developers
at an alarming rate. 'This change in lifestyle has, sadly, meant greater restrictions on children,' says Neil Armstrong,
Professor of Health and Exercise Sciences at the University of Exeter. 'If children continue to be this inactive, they'll be
storing up big problems for the future.'
B. In 1985, Professor Armstrong headed a five-year research project into children's fitness. The results, published in
1990, were alarming. The survey, which monitored 700 11-16-year-olds, found that 48 per cent of girls and 41 per
cent of boys already exceeded safe cholesterol levels set for children by the American Heart Foundation. Armstrong
adds, "heart is a muscle and need exercise, or it loses its strength.” It also found that 13 per cent of boys and 10 per
cent of girls were overweight. More disturbingly, the survey found that over a four-day period, half the girls and one-
third of the boys did less exercise than the equivalent of a brisk 10-minute walk. High levels of cholesterol, excess
body fat and inactivity are believed to increase the risk of coronary heart disease.
C. Physical education is under pressure in the UK – most schools devote little more than 100 minutes a week to it in
curriculum time, which is less than many other European countries. Three European countries are giving children a
head start in PE, France, Austria and Switzerland - offer at least two hours in primary and secondary schools. These
findings, from the European Union of Physical Education Associations, prompted specialists in children's physiology to
call on European governments to give youngsters a daily PE programme. The survey shows that the UK ranks 13th
out of the 25 countries, with Ireland bottom, averaging under an hour a week for PE. From age six to 18 ， British
children received, on average, 106 minutes of PE a week. Professor Armstrong, who presented the findings at the
meeting, noted that since the introduction of the national curriculum there had been a marked fall in the time devoted
to PE in UK schools, with only a minority of pupils getting two hours a week.
D. As a former junior football international, Professor Armstrong is a passionate advocate for sport. Although the
Government has poured millions into beefing up sport in the community, there is less commitment to it as part of the
crammed school curriculum. This means that many children never acquire the necessary skills to thrive in team
games. If they are no good at them, they lose interest and establish an inactive pattern of behaviour. When this is
coupled with a poor diet, it will lead inevitably to weight gain. Seventy per cent of British children give up all sport when
they leave school, compared with only 20 per cent of French teenagers. Professor Armstrong believes that there is far
too great an emphasis on team games at school. "We need to look at the time devoted to PE and balance it between
individual and pair activities, such as aerobics and badminton, as well as team sports. "He added that children need to
have the opportunity to take part in a wide variety of individual, partner and team sports.
E. The good news, however, is that a few small companies and children's activity groups have reacted positively and
creatively to the problem. Take That, shouts Gloria Thomas, striking a disco pose astride her mini-spacehopper. Take
That, echo a flock of toddlers, adopting outrageous postures astride their space hoppers. 'Michael Jackson, she
shouts, and they all do a spoof fan-crazed shriek. During the wild and chaotic hopper race across the studio floor,
commands like this are issued and responded to with untrammelled glee. The sight of 15 bouncing seven-year-olds
who seem about to launch into orbit at every bounce brings tears to the eyes. Uncoordinated, loud, excited and
emotional, children provide raw comedy.
F. Any cardiovascular exercise is a good option, and it doesn't necessarily have to be high intensity. It can be anything
that gets your heart rate up: such as walking the dog, swimming, miming, skipping, hiking. "Even walking through the
grocery store can be exercise," Samis-Smith said. What they don't know is that they're at a Fit Kids class, and that the
fun is a disguise for the serious exercise plan they're covertly being taken through. Fit Kids trains parents to run fitness
classes for children. 'Ninety per cent of children don't like team sports,' says company director, Gillian Gale.
G. A prevention survey found that children whose parents keep in shape are much more likely to have healthy body
weights themselves. "There's nothing worse than telling a child what he needs to do and not doing it yourself," says
Elizabeth Ward, R.D., a Boston nutritional consultant and author of Healthy Foods, Healthy Kids. "Set a good example
and get your nutritional house in order first." In the 1930s and '40s, kids expended 800 calories a day just walking,
carrying water, and doing other chores, notes Fima Lifshitz, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist in Santa Barbara. "Now,
kids in obese families are expending only 200 calories a day in physical activity," says Lifshitz, "incorporate more
movement in your family's lifepark farther away from the stores at the mall, take stairs instead of the elevator, and
walk to nearby friends' houses instead of driving."
For questions 1-4, there are seven paragraphs marked A-G. In which paragraphs is the following mentioned?
Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes provided.
1. Health and living condition of children.
2. Health organization monitored physical activity.
3. Comparison of exercise time between UK and other countries.
4. Wrong approach for school activity.
Your answers:
1. 2. 3. 4.
For questions 5-8, decide whether the following statements are True (T), False (F) or Not Given (NG) taken
from the passage. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes provided.
5. According to American Heart Foundation, cholesterol levels of boys are higher than girls'.
6. British children generally do less exercise than some other European countries.
7. Skipping becomes more and more popular in schools of UK.
8. According to Healthy Kids, the first task is for parents to encourage their children to keep the same healthy body
weight.
Your answers:
5. 6. 7. 8.
For questions 9-13, choose the correct answer A, B, C or D taken from the text. Write your answers in the
corresponding numbered boxes provided.
9. According to paragraph A, what does Professor Neil Armstrong concern about?
A. Spending more time on TV affect academic level. B. Parents have less time stay with their children.
C. Future health of British children. D. Increasing speed of property's development.
10. What does Armstrong indicate in Paragraph B?
A. We need to take a 10 minute walk everyday. B. We should do more activity to exercise heart.
C. Girls' situation is better than boys. D. Exercise can cure manydisease.
11. What is aim of First Kids' trainning?
A. Make profit by running several sessions.
B. Only concentrate on one activity for each child.
C. To guide parents how to organize activities for children.
D. Spread the idea that team sport is better.
12. What did Lifshitz suggest in the end of this passage?
A. Create opportunities to exercise your body.
B. Taking elevator saves your time.
C. Kids should spend more than 200 calories each day.
D. We should never drive but walk.
13. What is main idea of this passage?
A. Health of the children who are overweight is at risk in the future.
B. Children in UK need proper exercises.
C. Government mistaken approach for children.
D. Parents play the most important role in children's activity.
Your answers:
9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
IN PRAISE OF FAST FOOD
The media and a multitude of cookbook writers would have us believe that modern, fast, processed food is a
disaster, and that it is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and sliced white bread while yearning for
stone-ground flour and a brick oven. Perhaps, we should call those scorn industrialised food, culinary Luddites, after
the 19th-century English workers who rebelled against the machines that destroyed their way of life. Instead of
technology, what these Luddites abhor is commercial sauces and any synthetic aid to flavouring our food.
Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilised, the poor, and the
starving resorted to it. The ancient Greeks regarded the consumption of greens and root vegetables as a sign of bad
times, and many succeeding civilizations believed the same. Happiness was not a verdant garden abounding in fresh
fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.
What about the idea that the best food is handmade in the country? That food comes from the country goes
without saying. However, the idea that country people eat better than city dwellers is preposterous. Very few of our
ancestors working the land were independent peasants baking their own bread and salting down their own pig. Most
were burdened with heavy taxes and rent, often paid directly by the food they produced. Many were ultimately serfs or
slaves, who subsisted on what was left over; on watery soup and gritty flatbread.
The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane,
aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of
Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul.
Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.
Preparing home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people 365 days a year was servitude.
Churning butter or skinning and cleaning rabbits, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something
went wrong, was unremitting, unforgiving toil. Not long ago, in Mexico, most women could expect to spend five hours
a day kneeling at the grindstone preparing the dough for the family's tortillas.
In the first half of the 20th century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second
half, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep a little longer instead of getting up to
make rice. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe, people rejoiced at the convenience of readymade goods.
Culinary modernism had proved what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast,
the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, people grew taller and
stronger and lived longer.
So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed and their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale.
So what? Certainly no one would deny that an industrialised food supply has its own problems. Perhaps we should eat
more fresh, natural, locally sourced, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right? It matters quite a bit, I
believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food,
we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices. If we urge the farmer to stay at
his olive press and the housewife to remain at her stove, all so that we may eat traditionally pressed olive oil and
home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. If we fail to understand how scant and
monotonous most traditional diets were, we fail to appreciate the 'ethnic foods' we encounter.
 Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and
we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they've done us all a service by teaching us how to use the
bounty delivered to us by the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the
clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen, and many of us would be starving.