The Accidental Rainforest IELTS Reading Answers

The IELTS Reading Section is a big challenge in cracking the IELTS exam and many students struggle with it. However, the test can be much easier to attempt with proper preparation. These “The accidental rainforest” reading answers are meant to help you understand the question types and difficulty levels. 

The Accidental Rainforest Reading Passage

When PeterOsbeck. a Swedish priest, stopped off at the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension in 1752 on his way home from China, he wrote of ‘a heap of ruinous rocks’ with a bare, white mountain in the middle. All it boasted was a couple of dozen species of plant, most of them ferns and some of them unique to the island.

And so it might have remained. But in 1843 British plant collector Joseph Hooker made a brief call on his return from Antarctica. Surveying the bare earth, he concluded that the island had suffered some natural calamity that had denuded it of vegetation and triggered a decline in rainfall that was turning the place into a desert. The British Navy, which by then maintained a garrison on the island, was keen to improve the place and asked Hooker's advice. He suggested an ambitious scheme for planting trees and shrubs that would revive rainfall and stimulate a wider ecological recovery. And, perhaps lacking anything else to do, the sailors set to with a will.

In 1845, a naval transport ship from Argentina delivered a batch of seedlings. In the following years, more than 200 species of plant arrived from South Africa, from England came 700 packets of seeds, including those of two species that especially liked the place: bamboo and prickly pear. With sailors planting several thousand trees a year, the bare white mountain was soon cloaked in green and renamed Green Mountain, and by the early twentieth century the mountain's slopes were covered with a variety of trees and shrubs from all over the world.

Modern ecologists throw up their hands in horror at what they see as Hookers environmental anarchy. The exotic species wrecked the indigenous ecosystem, squeezing out the islands endemic plants. In fact. Hooker knew well enough what might happen. However, he saw greater benefit in improving rainfall and encouraging more prolific vegetation on the island.

But there is a much deeper issue here than the relative benefits of sparse endemic species versus luxuriant imported ones. And as botanist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK pointed out after a recent visit to the island, it goes to the heart of some of the most dearly held tenets of ecology. Conservationists' understandable concern for the fate of Ascension’s handful of unique species has, he says, blinded them to something quite astonishing the fact that the introduced species have been a roaring success.

Today's Green Mountain, says Wilkinson, is ‘a fully functioning man-made tropical cloud forest' that has grown from scratch from a ragbag of species collected more or less at random from all over the planet. But how could it have happened? Conventional ecological theory says that complex ecosystems such as cloud forests can emerge only through evolutionary processes in which each organism develops in concert with others to fill particular niches. Plants eo-evolve with their pollinators and seed dispersers, while microbes in the soil evolve to deal with the leaf litter.

But that’s not what happened on Green Mountain. And the experience suggests that perhaps natural rainforests are constructed far more by chance than by evolution. Species, say some ecologists, don’t so much evolve to create ecosystems as make the best of what they have. ‘The Green Mountain system is a man-made system that has produced a tropical rainforest without any co-evolution between its constituent species,’ says Wilkinson.

Not everyone agrees. Alan Gray, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. argues that the surviving endemic species on Green Mountain, though small in number, may still form the framework of the new' ecosystem. The new arrivals may just be an adornment, with little structural importance for the ecosystem.

But to Wilkinson this sounds like clutching at straws. And the idea of the instant formation of rainforests sounds increasingly plausible as research reveals that supposedly pristine tropical rainforests from the Amazon to south-east Asia may in places be little more titan the overgrown gardens of past rainforest civilisations.

The most surprising thing of all is that no ecologists have thought to conduct proper research into this human-made rainforest ecosystem. A survey of the island’s flora conducted six years ago by the University of Edinburgh was concerned only with endemic species. They characterised everything else as a threat. And the Ascension authorities are currently turning Green Mountain into a national park where introduced species, at least the invasive ones, are earmarked for culling rather than conservation.

Conservationists have understandable concerns, Wilkinson says. At least four endemic species have gone extinct on Ascension since the exotics started arriving. But in their urgency to protect endemics, ecologists are missing out on the study of a great enigma.

‘As you walk through the forest, you see lots of leaves that have had chunks taken out of them by various insects. There are caterpillars and beetles around.' says Wilkinson. ‘But where did they come from? Are they endemic or alien? If alien, did they come with the plant on which they feed or discover it on arrival?’ Such questions go to the heart of how- rainforests happen.

The Green Mountain forest holds many secrets. And the irony is that the most artificial rainforest in the world could tell us more about rainforest ecology than any number of natural forests.

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The Accidental Rainforest Reading Answers

Questions 1-5

Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-G from the box below.

Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

Guidelines/ Tip to Answer these kinds of questions: 

Questions 1-5 ask the candidates to choose the correct response from a list of options in the drop-down boxes next to them. Each letter (A-G) represents half of an idea and is mentioned in the box below the questions. Candidates must go through the passage and find the correct sentence fragment that completes the one in the question. 

1. The reason for modern conservationists’ concern over Hooker's tree planting programme is that

Answer: B

Explanation: 

The answer to the above question can be found in the first three lines of the 4th paragraph. It mentions how the attempt by Hooker to restore the rainforest created an “environmental anarchy” by wrecking the existing ecosystem of the forest. Thus, it is evident why modern conservationists were against this gesture.

2. David Wilkinson says the creation of the rainforest in Ascension is important because it shows that

Answer: F

Explanation: 

The answer to this can be found in two separate passages. The last line of paragraph 5 mentions how Wilkinson believed the Ascension tree planting program was a “roaring success.” However, the answer to the above question is mentioned in the 5th line of the 6th paragraph. There, it says the co-evolving of various organisms in a complex ecosystem. 

3. Wilkinson says the existence of Ascension’s rainforest challenges the theory that

Answer: D

Explanation: 

The answer to this segment is provided in the 6th and 7th paragraphs. In the 4th line of the 6th paragraph, the conventional ecological theory of “complex ecosystems” is mentioned. However, this theory is challenged in the 1st line of the 7th paragraph. The following line states that rainforests are instead constructed than developed due to evolution, making D the right option.

4. Alan Gray questions Wilkinson’s theory, claiming that

Answer: G

Explanation: 

Alan Gray is mentioned in the 1st line of the 8th paragraph. The claims by the ecologist at Edinburgh University are further elaborated in the following lines. The mention of an argument challenging the previous statements by Wilkinson is in coherence with the idea in option G, making it the correct choice. 

5. Additional support for Wilkinson's theory comes from findings that

Answer: A

Explanation: 

Other than option A, all other options are exhausted now, making it the obvious choice. However, even without that conclusion, the idea can be seen mentioned in the last sentence of the 5th paragraph. The ecologists are said to remain “blinded” to the fact that the Ascension’s unique specie was a success. A further argument is exhibited in the 1st line of the 6th paragraph, stating most tropical cloud forests are man-made. In the 3rd and 4th lines of the same section, the conventional theories of ecological significance have been dismissed by Wilkinson. 

Questions 6-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D

Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

Guidelines/ Tip to Answer these kinds of questions: 

To answer the accidental rainforest reading questions 6-8, candidates must read the entire passage and comprehend its concepts. Afterwards, they need to choose the correct option that completes the idea of the question. This is similar to questions 1-5. The only difference here is that instead of giving a bunch of common answers to select form, each segment here comes with its own separate set of options. However, candidates must understand that answering these sections requires a higher level of comprehensive ability. 

6    Wilkinson suggests that conservationists' concern about the island is misguided because

1.  it is based on economic rather than environmental principles.
2. it is not focusing on the most important question.
3. it is encouraging the destruction of endemic species.
4. it is not supported by the local authorities.

Answer: B

Explanation: 

The accidental rainforest reading answer to the above statement is B since Wilkinson’s theory has been shown to dismiss that of the conservationists throughout the passage. This can be seen in paragraph 5, where Wilkinson is quoted as calling the conservationists “blinded” by their ideas. In the 6th paragraph, further arguments have been established in favor of Wilkinson’s justification. All of this indicates that the conservationists are not looking at the bigger picture, making B the correct answer. 

7    According to Wilkinson, studies of insects on the island could demonstrate

1.   the possibility of new ecological relationships.
2. a future threat to the ecosystem of the island.
3. the existence of previously unknown species.
4. a chance for the survival of rainforest ecology.

Answer: A

Explanation: 

The correct answer to the accidental rainforest reading question no. 7 is A, as can be seen in the 12th paragraph. Insects are mentioned in the 2nd line of the 12th paragraph. The entire section questions the conventional theories of conservationists. This is a continuation of the previous paragraph in which the possibilities of the “great enigma” is explained. 

8    Overall, what feature of the Ascension rainforest does the writer stress?

1. the conflict of natural and artificial systems
2. the unusual nature of its ecological structure
3. the harm done by interfering with nature
4. the speed and success of its development

Answer: D

Explanation: 

Deriving the answer to this question can be challenging. Nowhere in the accidental rainforest reading passage are the words “speed” and “success” mentioned. To make things more confusing, all the other statements may seem to correlate with the main idea. However, the passage focuses on the coexistence of natural and artificial systems instead of the conflict. According to the passage, the “harm done by interfering with nature” is a false statement. But options B and D both can be correct in this case. D is the right answer here only because it establishes the entire theme of the passage rather than focusing on the paragraphs separately.