IELTS Academic – Complete 4-Skills Course
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Let’s now move to the final skill that will allow you to easily remember the structure of the academic passage & use it for quick navigation, summary & paraphrases.
Please watch the following part of Lesson 1 & learn about typical Academic Passage Structures.
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IELTS Academic 4-Skills Course (Practice-based)
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This is the end of Lesson 1.
Please move on to the next session and complete a short quiz to evaluate how well you have understood the concepts covered in this part of the lesson. After the Quiz there is a Useful Break for you to relax and get inspired.
Let me know if you have any questions at this point!
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Question 1 of 2
1.Question
Task 1: Identify the logical structure of the following academic passage. To do so, follow the steps suggested here:
- Carefully read the introduction & identify the thesis statement.
- From the thesis statement: define the focus of the topic & predict logical development of the main body
- Skim the topic sentences of the main body & confirm your prediction of their logical structure.
Light Pollution
For billions of years the Earth followed dark-light patterns created solely from the Sun, Moon and the stars. However, the ever-increasing use of artificial lights at night has created imbalances in the natural day-night patterns across the biological world. Excessive presence of artificial light in the night environment is called light pollution. Light pollution has become a major threat to human health.
Continuous urbanization and industrialization have made light pollution a problem of a global scale. Overlighting comes from a growing number of building exterior and interior lights, advertisement billboards, street lights, sporting venues and industrial facilities. According to the satellite data, Earth’s artificially lit outdoor surface at night grew by 2 percent annually in brightness and area from 2012 to 2016. The rate of growth observed in the developing world was much faster than in developed countries. As a result, according to 2016 World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, nearly 80 percent of the global population already lives under skyglow and never experiences a natural night. The rate of growth of light pollution is only expected to increase.
Scientists have linked artificial light at night (ALAN) to a wide range of human health problems. Exposure to artificial bright light during the nighttime suppresses melatonin secretion, a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. Moreover, exposure to shorter wavelengths of light, such as blue light, disturb melatonin secretion and cause circadian phase shifts, even if the light is not bright. Consequently, it increases sleep onset latency, which is the length of time it takes one to accomplish the transition from full wakefulness to sleep. Chronic exposure to ALAN results in inappropriately timed sleep and wake called circadian misalignment. This may have negative effects on the psychological, cardiovascular and metabolic function.
The association between high levels of ALAN and cancer incidence, is one of the most discussed health issues in industrialized civilization. Recent studies suggest that ALAN-induced cancer risks are associated with the suppression of nocturnal melatonin production. Temporal disruptions from ALAN have been suggested to increase breast cancer risk among women in response to shift work and sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, the specific genetic mechanism linking exposure to ALAN and the development of disease is still to be understood.
A growing concern about the devastating consequences of light pollution on human health has pushed scientists, environmentalists, homeowners, civic groups, architects and designers to search for ways to restore natural light. Advances in light technology have created lighting solutions that are meant to support human circadian rhythms. For example, some lamp designs now include blue light that aligns circadian cycles during the day and warmer shades at night. Building designers also incorporate greater flexibility in the control of the lighting systems. One such solution is transparent surfaces that allow more natural light during the winter and limit the amount of sun during the summer. Households have been promoted to use blackout curtains to control the amount of light at night.
Fortunately, unlike environmental pollution, light pollution is reversible. However, that would require unified efforts from different stakeholders including medical research to better understand the mechanisms behind exposure to ALAN and cancer, measures that limit commercial use of lights at night and educational programs that raise people’s awareness about the negative impact of lights at night and the importance to maintain balanced wake-sleep patterns.
Evgeniya Efremova © Copyright
References:
Haim, A., & Zubidat, A. E. (2015). Artificial light at night: melatonin as a mediator between the environment and the epigenome. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1667), 20140121.CorrectIncorrect -
Question 2 of 2
2.Question
Task 2: Identify the logical structure of the following academic passage. To do so, follow the steps suggested here:
- Carefully read the introduction & identify the thesis statement.
- From the thesis statement: define the focus of the topic & predict logical development of the main body
- Skim the topic sentences of the main body & confirm your prediction of their logical structure.
The World Language
A. India has about a billion people and a dozen major languages of its own. One language, and only one, is understood-by an elite-across the country: that of the foreigners who ruled it for less than 200 years and left 52 years ago. After 1947, English had to share its official status with north India’s Hindi and was due to lose it in 1965. It did not happen: Southern India said no. Today, India. Tomorrow, unofficially, the world. [The spread of English] is well under way; at first, because the British not only built a global empire but settled America, and now because the world (and notably America) has acquired its first truly global-and interactive-medium, the Internet.
B. David Crystal, a British expert, estimates that some 350 million people speak English as their first language. Maybe 250-350 million do or can use it as a second language; in ex-colonial countries, notably, or in English-majority ones, like 30 million recent immigrants to the United States or Canada’s 6 million francophone Quebeckers. And elsewhere? That is a heroic guess: 100 million to 1 billion is Mr. Crystal’s, depending how you define “can.” Let us be bold: In all, 20-25 percent of Earth’s 6 billion people can use English; not the English of England, let alone of Dr. Johnson, but English.
C. The number is soaring as each year brings new pupils to school and carries off monolingual oldies-and now as the Internet spreads. And the process is self-reinforcing. As business spreads across frontiers, the company that wants to move its executives around and to promote the best of them, regardless of nationality, encourages the use of English. So the executive who wants to be in the frame or to move to another employer learns to use it. English has long dominated learned journals: German, Russian or French (depending on the field) may be useful to their expert readers, but English is essential. So, if you want your own work published-and widely read by your peers-then English is the language of choice.
D. The growth of the cinema, and still more so of television, has spread the dominant language. Foreign movies or sitcoms may be dubbed into major languages, but for smaller audiences they are usually subtitled. Result: A Dutch or Danish or even Arab family has an audiovisual learning aid in its living room, and usually the language spoken on screen is English.
E. The birth of the computer and its American operating systems gave English a nudge ahead; that of the Internet has given it a huge push. Any Web-linked household today has a library of information available at the click Of a mouse. And, unlike the books on its own shelves or in the public library, maybe four-fifths is written in English. That proportion may lessen, as more non-English sites spring up. But English will surely dominate.
F. The Web of course works both ways. An American has far better access today than ever before to texts in German or Polish or Gaelic. But the average American has no great incentive to profit from it. That is not true the other way round. The Web may even save some minilanguages. But the big winner will be English.
“The World Language.” The Economist. Millennium Issue 31 Dec. 1999: 85
CorrectIncorrect
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