VOL-9 Test 1 パッセージ 2 — IELTS リーディング練習

Few people pay much attention to coins; we take them for granted. Since the advent of paper currency and the abandonment of a monetary system based on intrinsic of actual value, they have been demoted to the status of change: what is left when you have paid for something with 'paper' money. There is even a belief that they will one day be obsolete, as will paper or plastic notes, and money will at last have achieved the pure status of a mathematical formulation, a system of electronic credits and debits.

In the modern media environment, the sheer number of visual images is overwhelming, but it makes one stop to think that coins are among the most durable of our artefacts, and future archaeologists will scrutinise coins in order to learn about their distant ancestors. This is exactly the way ancient coins have informed us for over four millennia. There are thousands of different coins, each designed to carry meaning as well as value, tiny but rich sources of documentary evidence about events and cultural attitudes, frequently produced with exquisite craftsmanship.

Coins in Europe date from 2,500 to 2,700 years ago, and seem to have originated in the ancient kingdom of Lydia, in what is now Turkey. Before coins, trade was based on barter: the direct trade of commodities. Barter required the physical presence of both commodities that were being traded. Metal coins were far more portable, and not subject to the same spoilage on long sea journeys as a commodity like grain might be if it became wet. However, they could also be accumulated, and these hoards could be stolen. Coins were therefore a temptation to criminals. The Greeks, however, were the first to realise the full potential of the new invention. They were a trading people of seafarers. Their civilisation, which was composed of dozens of city-states, was highly decentralised. Despite the potential for theft, the Greeks realised that they could benefit enormously from a system that used coins, because it meant that they no longer had to carry goods with them to barter.

The value of coins was generally based on the intrinsic value of the metal they were made of. At first this was mostly silver, and this meant that the discovery of silver mines on Greek territory actually increased the quantity of money they could produce. Had the Greek mining been on a larger scale, it could have caused problems similar to those faced by the Spanish centuries later, when so much gold from the New World was brought into their economy that it resulted in serious inflation. One advantage of intrinsic value was that coins could be weighed to determine the amount of metal they contained, so that the only thing an issuing state had to guarantee was the purity of the metal to prevent accusations of fraud and cheating, which could cause fighting and unrest. This was quite difficult to do, especially with coins made of gold, until Archimedes realised that different metals have different weight-volume ratios, and that by measuring the amount of displacement when coins were immersed in water, it was possible to establish whether gold was alloyed with silver.

All ancient coins were made by hand using engraved metal moulds. Many hundreds of coins were made, and as a result the moulds often cracked and new ones had to be engraved. This explains the endless variety encountered in coins with the same designs because the moulds had to be remade repeatedly, by many different artisans. One of the distinctive features of coins, in fact, is that they are the work of anonymous craftsmen, and yet each coin is an intimate reflection of the character of its city of origin. It was the Greeks who realised that coins could have a double function, as a unit of value and as a symbol of the identity of the city that issued them. The Greek view of life was deeply motivated by a spirit of competition, and coins, which circulated around the trading world, were a way of advertising the qualities of each particular city-state.

Interestingly, Greek coins from the city of Athens, which was the home of the greatest sculptors of the classical period, seem to have been completely disconnected from the high sculptural tradition. The beautiful features of the city's patron, Athena (with her owl on the reverse of the coin), seem to have been repeated virtually unaltered for many years. Perhaps this was because the Athenian currency had grown increasingly to be the international standard and, like the US dollar today, a uniform design implied integrity.

サンプル問題

Question 1: Multiple choice — choose the best description of the main argument.
Question 2: True / False / Not Given — decide if the statement matches the text.
Question 3: Gap-fill — complete the summary using words from the passage.

この練習について

Cambridge IELTSリーディングテストは、世界中の数百万人の受験者が使用する信頼性の高いIELTS準備教材です。各テストには、空欄補充・多肢選択・見出し照合・True/False/Not Givenなど多様な問題形式を含む3つのアカデミックな読み物が含まれています。Cambridgeの本物の教材で定期的に練習することで、試験形式に慣れ、読解速度を上げ、効果的な情報検索戦略を身につけることができます。IELTS MateはIELTS学習者コミュニティとともに学べるインタラクティブな練習環境を提供しています。100以上のCambridgeテストセットで、目標バンドスコアに合わせたパーソナライズされた練習ができます。毎日少しずつ練習を続けることで、着実にIELTSの目標スコアへ近づけます。

FAQ

Cambridge IELTSリーディングの問題形式は何種類ありますか？

True/False/Not Given、空欄補充、多肢選択、見出し照合など14種類の問題形式があります。各タイプに異なる解答戦略が必要です。

Cambridgeリーディングはどのくらい練習すべきですか？

週3〜4回を目標にしましょう。テスト後は間違えた問題を丁寧に分析し、次回同じミスを繰り返さないようにしましょう。

初心者向けのCambridge Volumeはどれですか？

Volumes 7〜10は難易度が適切で初心者に推奨します。Volumes 11〜19はバンド6.0以上の受験者向けです。