IELTS Prediction Premium 01

Write down your answer of question 1 - 10 in your paper

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below:

Affordable Art

Art prices have fallen drastically. The art market is being flooded with good material, much of it from big-name artists, including Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Many pieces sell for less than you might expect, with items that would have made £20,000 two years ago fetching only £5,000 to £10,000 this autumn, according to Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the Fine Art Fund. Here, we round up what is looking cheap now, with a focus on works in the range of £500 to £10,000.

     Picasso is one of the most iconic names in art, yet some of his ceramics and lithographs fetched less than £1,000 each at Bonhams on Thursday. The low prices are because he produced so many of them. However, their value has increased steadily and his works will only become scarcer as examples are lost.

     Nic McElhatton, the chairman of Christie's South Kensington, says that the biggest 'affordable' category for top artists is 'multiples' - prints such as screenprints or lithographs in limited editions. In a Christie's sale this month, examples by Picasso, Matisse, Miró and Steinlen sold for less than £5,000 each. Alexandra Gill, the head of prints at the auction house, says that some prints are heavily hand-worked, or often coloured, by the artist, making them personalised. 'Howard Hodgkins’ are a good example,' she says. "There's still prejudice against prints, but for the artist it was another, equal, medium.

     Mr Hoffman believes that these types of works are currently about as 'cheap as they can get' and will hold their value in the long run - though he admits that their sheer number means prices are unlikely to rise any time soon.

     It can be smarter to buy really good one-offs from lesser-known artists, he adds. A limited budget will not run to the blockbuster names you can obtain with multiples, but it will buy you work by Royal Academicians (RAS) and others whose pieces are held in national collections and who are given long write-ups in the art history books. For example, the Christie's sale of art from the Lehman Brothers collection on Wednesday will include Valley with cornflowers in oil by Anthony Gross (22 of whose works are held by the Tate), at £1,000 to £1,500. There is no reserve on items with estimates of £1,000 or less, and William Porter, who is in charge of the sale, expects some lots to go for 'very little'. The sale also has oils by the popular Mary Fedden (whose works are often reproduced on greetings cards), including Spanish House and The White Hyacinth, at £7,000 to £10,000 each.

     Large works by important Victorian painters are available in this sort of price range, too. These are affordable because their style has come to be considered uncool, but they please a large traditionalist following nonetheless. For example, the sale of 19th-century paintings at Bonhams on Wednesday has a Hampstead landscape by Frederick William Watts at £6,000 to £8,000 and a study of three Spanish girls by John Bagnold Burgess at £4,000 to £6,000. There are proto-social realist works depicting poverty, too, such as Uncared For by Augustus Edwin Mulready, at £10,000 to £15,000.

     Smaller auction houses offer a mix of periods and media. Tuesday's sale at Chiswick Auctions in West London includes a 1968 screenprint of Campbell's Tomato Soup by Andy Warhol, at £6,000 to £8,000, and 44 sketches by Augustus John, at £200 to £800 each. The latter have been restored after the artist tore them up. Meanwhile, the paintings and furniture sale at Duke's of Dorchester on Thursday has a coloured block print of Acrobats at Play by Marc Chagall, at £100 to £200, and a lithograph of a mother and child by Henry Moore, at £500 to £700. A group of five watercolour landscape studies by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot is up at £1,500 to £3,000.

     Affordable works from lesser-known artists and younger markets are less safe, but they have the potential to offer greater rewards if you catch an emerging trend. Speculating on such trends is high-risk, so is worthwhile only if you like what you buy lyou get something beautiful to keep, whatever happens), can afford to lose the capital and enjoy the necessary research

     A trend could be based on a country or region. China has rocketed, but other Asian and Middle Eastern markets have yet to really emerge. Mr Horwich mentions some 1970s Iraqi paintings that he sold this year in Dubai. 'They are part of a sophisticated scene that remains little-known.' Mr Hoffman tips Turkey and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art sale in New York features a 1962 oil by the Vietnamese Vu Cao Dam, a graduate of Hanoi's École des Beaux Arts de l'Indochine and friend of Chagall, at $8,000 to $12,000 (£5,088 to £7,632). The painting shows two girls boating in traditional ao dai dresses.

     A further way of making money is to try to spot talent in younger artists. The annual Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park provides a chance to buy from 170 contemporary galleries. Or you could gamble on the future fame trajectory of an established artist's subject. For example, a Gerald Laing screenprint of The Kiss (2007) showing Amy Winehouse and her ex-husband is up for £4,700 at the Multiplied fair.

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below:

A

The race to reach 33 miners entombed for 64 days 700m (2,300ft) below the bare brown mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile could be completed as early as tonight. The chief engineer said this afternoon that within 24 hours the chamber will have been reached. He added that bringing the miners out could begin in three days' time. Three giant drills were boring rescue shafts down through the layers of rock, Laurence Golborne, the Mining Minister, had announced yesterday. How quickly the miners can be extracted once the shafts have reached the men depends on a careful inspection of the shaft, 70cm (28in) wide, by video cameras. If the rock walls are deemed stable the miners could be brought out, one by one, within another two or three days. It is estimated that it will take between 36 and 48 hours to bring them all out.

B

The miners have been trapped underground since August 5, more than twice'as long as any other known survivor of a mining accident. A stream of rescue vehicles, satellite television trucks and vehicles carrying journalists from around the world are heading up to the shallow bowl in this lunar landscape that will be a centre of attention over the next few days. In the past 48 hours a specially trained 16-man rescue team, three slim metal rescue capsules, a giant crane, winches and much other equipment have been delivered to Camp Esperanza, as the makeshift settlement is known.

C

Once the shaft is safe, two volunteers, a mining expert from Codelco, the state-owned mining conglomerate, and Sergeant Roberto Rios Seguel, 34, a naval medic and commando, will act as human guinea pigs, descending to where the miners are in the Phoenix - a steel capsule specially made by the Chilean Navy and designed by them together with NASA engineers. It has been painted in the red, white, and blue colours of the Chilean flag. The Phoenix is named for the mythical bird that rose from its ashes, and is the biggest of three custom-built capsules that will be used. It weighs 420 kg. Its interior height is 6 feet, 4 inches (1.9 metres). The miners have been restricted to a diet of 2,000 calories a day to ensure that they can fit into the capsule, which is 53cm wide. The capsule has oxygen tanks in the bottom part. It also has a camera, its own lighting system and a sound system. It has two sets of retractable wheels around it, one near the top and one near the bottom, to help it travel up and down the rescue shaft. The roof of the capsule contains LED lights. If something goes wrong during the rescue, the top part of the capsule can be released and the bottom two thirds of the capsule would then be lowered back down. Should the capsule become jammed, the occupant can open the escape hatch in the base and go back down the shaft.

D

The capsule will be lowered by a large crane at a speed of up to 3ft (91cm) per second. The miners will be wearing a suit with a harness over it, which will allow them to be strapped to the centre of the cylinder in an upright position for the estimated twentyminute journey to the surface. They will also wear an oxygen mask, a pair of dark glasses to protect their eyes from exposure to the desert sunlight, and a helmet which is specially adapted with a microphone and a wired headset to enable them to communicate with the surface. Doctors will monitor the miners' vital signs using information gathered from a biometric belt. They will conduct a preliminary assessment of the miners' mental and physical health. The miners will then be divided into three groups. The strongest will be the first to make the hazardous ascent to freedom, in case the capsule hits problems, then the weakest. They will be winched up one by one in the slender capsule, rising at just under a metre a second, meaning that each ascent will take about 15 minutes. The entire rescue is expected to take 30 to 40 hours.

E

As each man finally emerges, he will be taken to the nearby field hospital wearing Californian-made sunglasses that filter out all UV rays to protect his eyes. There the men will be given a thorough check-up and, if strong enough, they will be allowed to meet three relatives designated in advance. The miners will then be flown by helicopter to the hospital in Copiapó, where a whole floor has been set aside for them. They are expected to remain there for at least two days.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below:

High-tech crime-fighting tools

A

Crime-fighting technology is getting more sophisticated and rightly so. The police need to be equipped for the 21st century. In Britain we've already got the world's biggest DNA database. By next year the state will have access to the genetic data of 4.25m people: one British-based person in 14. Hundreds of thousands of those on the database will never have been charged with a crime.

B

Britain is also reported to have more than £4 million CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras. There is a continuing debate about the effectiveness of CCTV. Some evidence suggests that it is helpful in reducing shoplifting and car crime. It has also been used to successfully identify terrorists and murderers. However, many claim that better lighting is just as effective to prevent crime and that cameras could displace crime. An internal police report said that only one crime was solved for every 1,000 cameras in London in 2007. In short, there is conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of cameras, so it is likely that the debate will continue.

C

Professor Mike Press, who has spent the past decade studying how design can contribute to crime reduction, said that, in order for CCTV to have any effect, it must be used in a targeted way. For example, a scheme in Manchester records every licence plate at the entrance of a shopping complex and alerts police when one is found to belong to an untaxed or stolen car. This is an effective example of monitoring, he said. Most schemes that simply record city centres continually - often not being watched - do not produce results. CCTV can also have the opposite effect of that intended, by giving citizens a false sense of security and encouraging them to be careless with property and personal safety. Professor Press said: All the evidence suggests that CCTV alone makes no positive impact on crime reduction and prevention at all. The weight of evidence would suggest the investment is more or less a waste of money unless you have lots of other things in place.' He believes that much of the increase is driven by the marketing efforts of security companies who promote the crime-reducing benefits of their products. He described it as a 'lazy approach to crime prevention' and said that authorities should instead be focusing on how to alter the environment to reduce crime.

D

But in reality, this is not what is happening. Instead, police are considering using more technology. Police forces have recently begun experimenting with cameras in their helmets. The footage will be stored on police computers, along with the footage from thousands of CCTV cameras and millions of pictures from numberplate recognition cameras used increasingly to check up on motorists.

E

And now another type of technology is being introduced. It's called the Microdrone and it's a toy-sized remote-control craft that hovers above streets or crowds to film what's going on beneath. The Microdrone has already been used to monitor rock festivals, but its supplier has also been in discussions to supply it to the Metropolitan Police, and Soca, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The drones are small enough to be unnoticed by people on the ground when they are flying at 350ft. They contain highresolution video surveillance equipment and an infrared night vision capability, so even in darkness they give their operators a bird's-eye view of locations while remaining virtually undetectable.

F

The worrying thing is, who will get access to this technology? Merseyside police are already employing two of the devices as part of a pilot scheme to watch football crowds and city parks looking for antisocial behaviour. It is not just about crime detection West Midlands fire brigade is about to lease a drone, for example, to get a better view of fire and flood scenes and aid rescue attempts; the Environment Agency is considering their use for monitoring of illegal fly tipping and oil spills. The company that makes the drone says it has no plans to license the equipment to individuals or private companies, which hopefully will prevent private security firms from getting their hands on them. But what about local authorities? In theory, this technology could be used against motorists. And where will the surveillance society end? Already there are plans to introduce 'smart water' containing a unique DNA code identifier that when sprayed on a suspect will cling to their clothes and skin and allow officers to identify them later. As long as high-tech tools are being used in the fight against crime and terrorism, fine. But if it's another weapon to be used to invade our privacy then we don't want it.