IELTS Teacher Training Online Workshop (1)
IELTS Reading Flow chart/table completion
1. Work with a partner and come up with a strategy for tackling flow chart completion
questions in IELTS Reading test.
1 _______________________________________________________________________
2 _______________________________________________________________________
3 _______________________________________________________________________
4 _______________________________________________________________________
5 _______________________________________________________________________
6 _______________________________________________________________________
7 Write the answer.
2. Work with a partner and use the strategy to complete the flow chart.
The history of the tortoise
If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history,
enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even
to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids.
In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us, other groups that
have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land carbs,
millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without
whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened.
Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and
reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around,
abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only
gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to
extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call dolphins)
and dugongs, with their close relatives the manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and
reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed.
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IELTS Teacher Training Online Workshop (1)
They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their
earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago and, like all vertebrate
returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the
water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches.
There is evidence that all modern turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor which lived before
most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils called Proganochelys quenstedti and Palaeochersis
talampayensis dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all
modern turtles and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived on land
or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it’s obvious. Ichthyosaurs were reptilian
contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins and
they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a little less obvious. One way to tell is by
measuring the bones of their forelimbs.
Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three measurements in these
particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph
paper to plot the three measurements against one another. All of the land tortoise species formed a
tight cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle; all the water turtles cluster in the lower part of
the triangular graph. There was no overlap, except when they added some species that spend time
both in water and on land. Sure enough, these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph
approximately half way between the ‘wet cluster’ of sea turtles and the ‘dry cluster’ of land tortoises.
The next step was to determine where the fossils fell. The bones of P. quenstedti and P.
talampayensis leave us in no doubt. Their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster.
Both these fossils were land tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the
water.
You might think, therefore, that modern land tortoises have probably stayed on land ever since those
early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of them went back to the sea. But apparently
not. If you draw out the family tree of all modern turtles and tortoises, nearly all the branches are
aquatic. Today’s land tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested among branches consisting
of aquatic turtles. This suggests that modern land tortoises have not stayed on land continuously
since the time of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis. Rather, their ancestors were among those who
went back to the water, and they then re-emerged back onto the land in (relatively) more recent times.
Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return. In common with all mammals, reptiles and
birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and before that various more or less worm-like
creatures stretching back, still in the sea, to the primeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and
stayed there for a very large number of generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the water
and became sea turtles. And finally they returned yet again to the land as tortoises, some of which
live in the driest of deserts.
(Excerpt from Cambridge IELTS 9, Test 1, Passage 3)
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IELTS Teacher Training Online Workshop (1)
three measurements
triangular graph
tight cluster
amphibious
half way
land tortoises
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IELTS Teacher Training Online Workshop (1)
Now work on your own. Use the strategy to complete the flow chart below:
Robots at work
A The newspaper production process has come a long way from the old days when the paper was
written, edited, typeset and ultimately printed in one building with the journalists working on the upper
floors and the printing presses going on the ground floor. These days the editor, subeditors and
journalists who put the paper together are likely to find themselves in a totally different building or maybe
even in a different city. This is the situation which now prevails in Sydney. The daily paper is compiled at
the editorial headquarters, known as the prepress centre, in the heart of the city, but printed far away in
the suburbs at the printing centre. Here human beings are in the minority as much of the work is done by
automated machines controlled by computers.
B Once the finished newspaper has been created for the next morning’s edition, all the pages are
transmitted electronically from the prepress centre to the printing centre. The system of transmission is
an update on the sophisticated page facsimile system already in use on many other newspapers. An
imagesetter at the printing centre delivers the pages as film. Each page takes less than a minute to
produce, although for colour pages four versions, once each for black, cyan, magenta and yellow are
sent. The pages are then processed into photographic negatives and the film is used to produce
aluminium printing plates ready for the presses.
C A procession of automated vehicles is busy at the new printing centre where the Sydney Morning
Herald is printed each day. With lights flashing and warning horns honking, the robots (to give them their
correct name, the LGVs or laser guided vehicles) look for all the world like enthusiastic machines from a
science fiction movie, as they follow their own random paths around the plant busily getting on with their
jobs. Automation of this kind is now standard in all modern newspaper plants. The robots can detect
unauthorised personnel and alert security staff immediately if they find an “intruder”; not surprisingly, tall
tales are already being told about the machines starting to take on personalities of their own.
D The robots’ principal job, however, is to shift the newsprint (the printing paper) that arrives at the plant
in huge reels and emerges at the other end some time later as newspapers. Once the size of theday’s
paper and the publishing order are determined at head office, the information is punched into the
computer and the LGVs are programmed to go about their work. The LGVs collect the appropriate size
paper reels and take them where they have to go. When the press needs another reel its computer alerts
the LGV system. The Sydney LGVs move busily around the press room fulfilling their two key functions
to collect reels of newsprint either from the reel stripping stations, or from the racked supplies in the
newsprint storage area. At the stripping station the tough wrapping that helps to protect a reel of paper
from rough handling is removed. Any damaged paper is peeled off and the reel is then weighed.
E Then one of the four paster robots moves in. Specifically designed for the job, it trims the paper neatly
and prepares the reel for the press. If required the reel can be loaded directly onto the press; if not
needed immediately, an LGV takes it to the storage area. When the press computer calls for a reel, an
LGV takes it to the reel loading area of the presses. It lifts the reel into the loading position and places it
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IELTS Teacher Training Online Workshop (1)
in the correct spot with complete accuracy. As each reel is used up, the press drops the heavy
cardboard core into a waste bin. When the bin is full, another LGV collects it and deposits the cores into
a shredder for recycling.
F The LGVs move at walking speed. Should anyone step in front of one or get too close, sensors stop
the vehicle until the path is clear. The company has chosen a laserguide function system for the vehicles
because, as the project development manager says “The beauty of it is that if you want to change the
routes, you can work out a new route on your computer and lay it down for them to follow”. When an
LGV’s batteries run low, it will take itself off line and go to the nearest battery maintenance point for
replacement batteries. And all this is achieved with absolute minimum human input and a much-reduced
risk of injury to people working in the printing centres.
G The question newspaper workers must now ask, however is, “how long will it be before the robots are
writing the newspapers as well as running the printing centre, churning out the latest edition every
morning?”
transmitted electronically
photographic negatives
Aluminium printing plates
programmed
tough wrapping
weighed
paster robot.
storage area
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