Reading IELTS articles is hard because there are a lot of complex or unusual phrases.
1. Read the article once. Look at the highlighted words phrases in yellow. Try to match them with the choices under each paragraph. Note: the word form may be different! This is a close meaning to help your reading comprehension.
2. Read the article again. This time try to answer the comprehension questions the end.
3. Exploit the article. Don’t just do the questions and move on! There is a lot of language in an article you can use to develop. Notice how these phrases were used. Write them out again in your own sentences in a summary of the article.
You can print the original article
here.
Thaliaceans and the carbon cycle
The jelly cycle
May 21st 2009
From The Economist print edition
A hitherto unknown way of burying carbon at the bottom of the sea
Swim or sink
A
IN 2006 Mario Lebrato and Daniel Jones of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, were using a remotely operated deep-sea vehicle to study the sea floor near an oil pipeline off Côte d’Ivoire. What they found surprised them. It was a thaliacean graveyard. And its discovery
throws into question1
the received wisdom about2 one important aspect of climate change, namely how much carbon from the atmosphere ends up at the bottom of the sea.
1.
A) challenges
B) criticizes
C) changes
2.
A) what people are told
B) what most people believe
C) what wise people think
B
Despite their unfamiliarity to most people, thaliaceans (a colony of which is pictured) are abundant creatures in many parts of the ocean. Their bodies
are transparent and gelatinous3, like those of jellyfish. They are not jellyfish, though. They are actually chordates—in other words, part of the same group of animals as humans, even though they do not have backbones. The thaliacean graveyard off Côte d’Ivoire came as a surprise because not much was known at the time about what happens to animals with gelatinous bodies, whether chordates or jellyfish, after they have died. And it
set Mr Lebrato and Dr Jones
thinking4, because if thaliaceans are falling to the bottom of the sea in large numbers, they might be
taking a lot of carbon with them5.
3.
A) solid and rigid
B) milky and firm
C) clear and squishy
4.
A) started … thinking
B) encouraged … to think
C) stopped … from thinking
5.
A) encouraging carbon to move to the sea floor
B) carrying the carbon in their dead bodies to the sea floor
C) preventing the carbon from reaching the sea floor
C
Until then gelatinous animals had largely been ignored by researchers studying the carbon cycle (the way that element moves through land, sea, air and living creatures) because gelatinous bodies were thought to
contain a lot of water and thus relatively little carbon6. However, as Mr Lebrato and Dr Jones report in Limnology and Oceanography, when they analysed thaliacean
tissues7 they found that the creatures were one-third carbon by weight. That was much more than they expected. Jellyfish, by comparison, are 10% carbon, and diatoms (single-celled algae that are common in plankton) 20%. It also helps explain why thaliaceans are so
dense8—and thus sink so quickly after they die.
6.
A) very little carbon
B) a similar amount of carbon as water
C) not much carbon compared to the amount of water
7.
A) bones
B) the liquids in the body
C) skin, flesh etc.
8.
A) heavy
B) firm
C) common
D
Hitherto9 it was assumed that the main way carbon gets from the top to the bottom of the ocean was as part of dead planktonic algae sinking to the seabed. But the discovery of just how
carbon-rich10 and
prone to11 sinking thaliaceans are may change that assumption. Because they gather by the billion in feeding swarms around the world (they eat single-celled algae), the amount of carbon thaliaceans are taking to the bottom of the sea is
by no means trivial12, according to Mr Lebrato. He admits it is difficult to make accurate comparisons, because the research is still
in its infancy13. But he estimates that the “jelly pump”, as he refers to it, sinks almost twice as much carbon as algae do.
9.
A) Before this
B) Recently
C) A long time ago
10.
A) no carbon
B) some carbon
C) lots of carbon
11.
A) rarely
B) sometimes
C) tends to
12.
A) it is small
B) it is significant
C) it is large
13.
A) beginning
B) mature
C) old news
E
The question is, does that carbon stay down once it has arrived? That is unclear.
The one sure way14 of keeping carbon on the seabed is in the form of calcium carbonate, the main ingredient of most animal shells. But thaliaceans have no shells. Nevertheless, some thaliaceans get buried before they have completely decomposed, and other researchers have found evidence that dead jellyfish sometimes
accumulate15 in trenches without much decomposition, so perhaps thaliaceans do, too.
14.
A) One of several methods
B) We can’t be sure which method
C) There is only one 100% method
15.
A) fall apart
B) grow in amount
C) stay in one piece
F
Even if the carbon is not permanently buried,
the lack of mixing16 between deep and shallow water in the ocean means that it is likely to stay down there for a long time—something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works. The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle, and become even more complicated to understand than it was.
16.
A) it never combines
B) it often mixes
C) it is mostly separate
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Comprehension Questions
Note: These are not IELTS style questions. They are just to check your understanding of each paragraph. Answers are below.
Paragraph A
Q1. How has the discovery changed scientists’ theories on climate change?
Paragraph B
Q2. How are thaliaceans different from Jellyfish?
Q3. Before the discovery of the graveyard, what did scientists probably believe about the numbers of thaliaceans?
Paragraph C
Q4. Why hadn’t climate change scientists previously thought about thaliaceans?
Paragraph D
Q5. How did scientists used to believe carbon was transported to the bottom of the sea?
Q6. Compared to algae, to what extent do thaliaceans affect the carbon cycle?
Paragraph E
Q7. Is there evidence that the carbon from thaliaceans remains on the sea floor?
Paragraph F
Q8. Why is it clear that more carbon is stored in the ocean than previously thought?
Q9. After this discovery, what do scientists know about the carbon cycle?
Vocabulary Guessing Answers
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 A
5 B
6 C
7 C
8 A
9 A
10 C
11 C
12 B
13 A
14 C
15 B
16 C
Reading comprehension answers
1 They have to re-calculate how much carbon from the atmosphere is stored on the sea floor.
2 They have backbones.
3 That their numbers were small.
4 That their bodies contained mainly water and very little carbon.
5 That it was carried down to the sea floor by the bodies of dead planktonic algae.
6 They affect it twice as much because they carry twice as much carbon to the bottom of the sea.
7 No. But scientists guess that it does because they have found the buried bodies of jellyfish, which still haven’t decomposed.
8 Because even if the bodes of thaliaceans do decompose in the water. Deep water usually stays separate from shallow water, and therefore it is not released into the atmosphere.
9 It is more than they previously thought.
I hope this helps!
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