# Does education fuel economic growth?: answers and explanations

Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 4, Reading Passage 2

Source: Passage, questions and answer key from Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 4, Reading Passage 2. © Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Used for educational practice. Explanations and evidence notes are written by Testmigo.

## Answer key

| Q | Answer | Proof |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 14 | E | One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to 'hold wealth constant'. |
| 15 | A | It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists |
| 16 | D | When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members |
| 17 | F | German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth |
| 18 | C | From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices |
| 19 | descendants | "We can follow the same people - and their descendants - across 300 years of educational and economic change," she says. |
| 20 | sermon | who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. |
| 21 | fine | she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant's annual wage. |
| 22 | innovation | but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation. |
| 23 | B, E | During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates |
| 24 | B, E | even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education |
| 25 | B, D | guilds blocked labour migration |
| 26 | B, D | legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies |

## Why these answers are right

**14. E.** Section E explains that one way to test whether education causes growth is to "hold wealth constant" by following different people with the same level of wealth over time. Studying people whose wealth stays the same matches individuals with a fairly consistent income, so the answer is E.

**15. A.** Section A lists what the database is made from: court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and 9,000 handwritten inventories. These are the sources the database was compiled from, so the answer is A.

**16. D.** Section D says Juliana Schweickherdt was reprimanded by the weavers' guild and then "continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members", so she was fined. Carrying on after being told to stop is refusing to obey an order, which places this in section D.

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