Designed To Last IELTS Reading Answers

Searching for ‘Designed to last’ IELTS Reading answers? In this article, I have mentioned the sample answers to this commonly asked passage along with important tips on how to improve your IELTS Reading scores.  

This IELTS Reading passage has different types of questions, such as choosing the correct answer, summary completion, and Yes/ No/ Not Given. After reading the passage, test takers often find it difficult to understand which is the right answer among the pool of options provided.

The sample answers listed in this article will help you enhance your comprehension skills so that you can ace this section.

Tips to Improve IELTS Reading Score 

You must master time management skills to perform well in the IELTS Reading section. You have 60 minutes to answer 40 questions, during which you must identify the main ideas of the passages and understand opinions, attitudes & their purpose. To achieve a good score in IELTS, you must consistently practice by reading newspapers, books, journals, magazines, etc . and building an eye for detail. 

Here are some tips to help you manage your time and score well in the IELTS Reading section. 

1. Read the passage well to understand its gist. To do so, you can skim through headings, sub-headings, and main points of the passage instead of focusing on unnecessary details. 
2. Improve your reading speed through word chunking, which is a process in which you read three to five words at a time and extract the needed information.
3. Skim through the introduction and conclusion thoroughly because the author's point of view is generally expressed in these paragraphs. This would help you to answer accurately.
4. Take a quick look at the questions first, then start reading the passage. While reading the passage, identify or underline the keywords. This way, you will figure out the answers easily.
5. While preparing for the test, make sure to expand your vocabulary to eliminate the barriers you might face in comprehension. 
6. Make sure to answer every question, as the test has no negative marking.
7. Remember to keep at least 20 minutes in hand to check and review all your answers before submitting.   

IELTS Reading Passage

Could better design cure our throwaway culture?

1 Jonathan Chapman, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK, is one of a new breed of “sustainable designers’. Like many of us, they are concerned about the huge waste associated with Western consumer culture and the damage this does to the environment. 

Some, like Chapman, aim to create objects we will want to keep rather than discard. Others are working to create more efficient or durable consumer goods or goods designed with recycling in mind. The waste entailed in our fleeting relationships with consumer durables is colossal

2 Domestic power tools, such as electric drills, are a typical example of such waste. However much DIY the purchaser plans to do, the truth is that these things are thrown away having been used, on average, for just ten minutes. Most will serve conscience time, gathering dust on a shelf in the garage; people are reluctant to admit that they have wasted their money. 

However, the end is inevitable for thousands of years in landfill waste sites. In its design, manufacture, packaging, transportation, and disposal, a power tool consumes many times its own weight in resources, all for a shorter active lifespan than that of the average small insect.

3 To understand why we have become so wasteful, we should look to the underlying motivation of consumers. ‘People own things to give expression to who they are and to show what group of people they feel they belong to’ Chapman says. In a world of mass production, however, that symbolism has lost much of its potency. 

For most of human history, people had an intimate relationship with objects they used or treasured. Often they made the objects themselves, or family members passed them on. For more specialist objects, people relied on expert manufacturers living close by, whom they probably knew personally. Chapman points out that all these factors gave objects a history – a narrative – and an emotional connection that today’s mass production cannot match. 

Without these personal connections, consumerist culture instead idolizes novelty. We know we can’t buy happiness, but the chance to remake ourselves with glossy, box-fresh products seems irresistible. When the novelty fades we simply renew the excitement by buying more new stuff: what John Thackara of Doors of Perception, a network for sharing ideas about the future of design, calls the “schlock of the new”.

4 As a sustainable designer, Chapman’s solution is what he calls “emotionally durable design”. Think about your favourite old jeans. They just don’t have the right feel until they have been worn and washed a hundred times, do they? It is like they are sharing your life story. You can fake that look, but it isn’t the same. Chapman says the gradual unfolding of a relationship like this transforms our interactions with objects into something richer than simple utility. 

Swiss industrial analyst Walter Stahel ,a visiting professor at the University of Surrey, calls it the “teddy-bear factor”. No matter how ragged and worn a favorite teddy becomes, we don’t rush out and buy another one. As adults, our teddy bear connects us to our childhoods, and this protects it from obsolescence. Stahel says this is what sustainable design needs to do.

5 It is not simply about making durable items that people want to keep. Sustainable design is a matter of properly costing the whole process of production, energy use, and disposal. “It is about the design of systems, the design of culture,” says Tim Cooper from the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in Britain. He thinks sustainable design has been “surprisingly slow to take off” but says looming environmental crises and resource depletion are pushing it to the top of the agenda.

6 Thackara agrees. For him, the roots of impending environmental collapse can be summarized in two words: weight and speed. We are making more stuff than the planet can sustain and using vast amounts of energy moving more and more of it around ever faster. The Information Age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our impact on the environment, but the reverse seems to be happening. We have simply added information technology to the industrial era and hastened the developed world’s metabolism, Thackara argues.