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All English 4U · Reading Skill Drill

True / False / Not Given

The question type that decides band 7 vs band 8. Read one short passage and judge eight statements – then see exactly why each one is True, False or Not Given.

❓ 8 statements⏱ ~10 min🎯 Aim for 7/8 or better✍️ Original AE4U passage

How to decide – use only what the passage says

  • TRUEThe statement agrees with information that is clearly in the passage.
  • FALSEThe passage says the opposite – it directly contradicts the statement.
  • NOT GIVENThe passage neither confirms nor contradicts it. If you have to guess or use your own knowledge, it is Not Given.

Reading Passage

The Waggle Dance of Honeybees

When a honeybee discovers a rich source of nectar, it faces a problem: how to tell the rest of the hive where the food is, in the dark of the hive, without being able to lead the others there directly. Its solution is one of the most remarkable forms of communication in the animal world – a movement known as the “waggle dance.”

Back at the hive, the returning bee performs the dance on the vertical surface of the honeycomb, surrounded by other workers. The dance traces a figure-of-eight. The crucial part is the straight run through the middle, during which the bee waggles its body rapidly from side to side. The angle of this straight run, measured against the vertical, tells the other bees the direction of the food relative to the sun. The length of the run indicates how far away the food is: the longer the waggle, the greater the distance.

The dance was first decoded in the 1940s by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, whose research later earned him a share of a Nobel Prize. For many years, some researchers doubted that the other bees actually used the information in the dance, suggesting that they might simply follow the scent of the flowers instead. The argument was only settled decades later, when scientists built tiny robotic bees that could perform the dance artificially. When the robots “danced,” real bees flew to the locations the robots had indicated, proving that the dance itself carries the message.

Honeybees are not born able to dance perfectly. Young bees make mistakes, and their earliest dances are less accurate. They improve partly by following experienced dancers before performing on their own.

Questions 1–8

Do the following statements agree with the information in the passage? Choose TRUE, FALSE, or NOT GIVEN.

1. The waggle dance allows a bee to tell the hive where food can be found.
2. The dance is performed on a flat, horizontal surface.
3. The length of the straight run tells other bees how far away the food is.
4. The speed of the bee’s waggle shows how good the nectar is.
5. The waggle dance is used by every species of bee.
6. Some researchers once believed bees found food by following the flowers’ scent rather than the dance.
7. Von Frisch received the Nobel Prize before he decoded the dance.
8. Young honeybees improve their dancing partly by following experienced dancers.
0/8
Answer key & explanations
Q Answer Why
Next: try a full passage – Practice Passage 1 → or see all Reading practice →
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