A Buzz in the World of Chemistry – IELTS Reading Answers

Raajdeep Saha

13 min read

Updated On Oct 11, 2023

Reading Passage
A Buzz in the World of Chemistry Reading Answers Explanation

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The Academic passage, ‘A Buzz in the World of Chemistry Reading Answers’, is a reading passage that consists of 15 questions.

The Reading Module can be the top-scoring category for IELTS aspirants, with diligent practice. To score well, you must understand how to approach and answer the different question types in the Reading Module.

Ideally, you should not spend more than 20 minutes on a passage. You must scan the material for important terms, comprehend the subject, and then respond in accordance with the instructions. Also, read the IELTS reading passage, pick out significant words, and recognize synonyms in order to provide a one-word response.

So, let’s see how easy this passage is for you and if you’re able to make it in 20 minutes. If not, try more IELTS reading practice tests.

The four question types found in this passage are:

Summary Completion (Q. 1-6)
Flow chart Completion (Q. 7-11)
Matching Information (Q. 12-14)
Multiple Choice Question (Q. 15)

In case you want to find out how to solve Flow Chart Completion questions, check out the video below.

IELTS Reading Flow Chart Completion Practice Questions & Answers

Reading Passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-15, which are based on the Reading Passage below.

A Buzz in the World of Chemistry

A For the past few years, one of the buzz terms in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and biotechnology industries has been ‘combinatorial chemistry’. Surf the net and find thousands of references to it. Read any of the general science weeklies, such as Nature or New Scientist, and every few issues, another worthy author is going to save the 21st century from everything nasty with this miraculous technology. Some of the more specialist journals have even devoted whole issues to reviewing combinatorial chemistry.

B These reviews all have the same format. First, there is the section from the research and development director of a major chemical company, a person who has not worked at the bench for years, if not decades. This is filled with business speak; the jargon keeps the shareholder happy and makes them proud to own a bit of something at the forefront of science. Section two is from a director of a venture capital-funded synthetic chemistry company located on a green field site, probably in a protacabin, or, perhaps, in a new business park, rent-free for the first five years from the local authority of a small town no one has heard of. He discusses the molecular modeling packages that they are using to build ‘virtual’ libraries containing millions of compounds. The third section is by someone who, in fact, practices combinatorial chemistry and who developed an automated system to do the syntheses and assay the products. They can probably synthesize a few thousand compounds per week.

C We know that organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon, biochemistry is the chemistry of life, and physical chemistry is the application of physics to chemical behavior. What then is combinatorial chemistry?

D Combinatorial chemistry is the branch of synthetic organic chemistry. We all remember mathematics classes at school just before the end of the term when we were given silly sums to do: How many waves can five differently colored beads be arranged on a string? (120). Math teachers call these permutation and combination problems; hence, combinatorial chemistry.

E After the development of solid-phase peptide synthesis in the 1960s by Merrifield, synthetic peptide chemists were also doing permutation and combination sums. There are 20 naturally occurring amino acids, the building blocks of peptides and proteins, the workhouse molecules of life. How many ways can these be arranged, or chemically bonded, to synthesize novel peptides which might be put to any number of uses in the pharmacy? If we take just one molecule of each of the 20 amino acids and join them together to form a peptide, we find that we can arrange these in 20! Or 2.432902008177*1018 ways. Nature knows no such restraint; it can use multiple copies of each amino acid, and so can synthesize 2020 or 1.048576*1020 twenty amino acid peptides. Proteins contain hundreds of amino acids. The number of possible sequences is truly innumerable!

F They become even more so when one considers the other polymeric molecules of life: the lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids.

Classically trained synthetic chemists strive for purity. One remembers twelve years ago chemist synthesizing a 20-residue peptide. He went off the lab and was ever so busy, producing a different high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) trace every few days to show his biologist customers how the reactions were progressing. A few months after the request was placed, the biologists were given a few milligrams of their desired peptide and half a rainforest worth of HPLC printout!

G That was fine when only one product was sought. Now the demand is for thousands of products to satisfy the automated high-throughput screening system employed by the major pharmaceutical companies. How can this be achieved?

H Let us consider solid-phase synthesis strategies. In these, the compound of interest is synthesized on a solid support, a resin bead. These beads are typically 100 microns in diameter and made from cross-linked polyvinyl; benzene or polyethylene glycol polymers.

I Using the Tea-bag method, developed by Houghten in the 1980s, typically about 100 mg of the 100-micron beads are put into polypropylene mesh sacs which have a 75-micron mesh size. These are thermally sealed and the synthesis takes place on the resin beads with the sac. During the synthesis reaction cycles, the sacs are transferred from reagent pot to pot in sequence, and at the end of the synthesis, the product is cleaved off the bead, characterized, and purified as needed. Using this strategy, one needs to use a separate sac for each compound to be synthesized, and automated systems have now been developed for multiple sac manipulation.

J The sensitivity of compound analytical techniques has developed apace with the technology, and whereas, in the 1980s, one required several millimoles of product to characterize, now this can be done with femtomoles or in some cases attomoles (10-18 moles)! Therefore, one need only recover product from 1 bead, about 2-3 picomoles. Automated systems are now being developed to synthesize on single magnetic beads using only 2-3 nanoliters of reagent per cycle. When the ‘classical’ Tea-bag strategy was developed, 100 milliliters per cycle was considered to be a phenomenal solvent cost-cutting exercise.

K The development of high-the-put automated screening has demanded from synthetic chemistry large arrays or libraries of compounds to satisfy the investment made in installing these systems. Will combinatorial chemistry be able to meet this demand? Are the synthesizers well enough developed to meet this? Peptide and oligonucleotide solid phase strategies have been well enough developed over the past 30 years. Will solution methods and other novel chemistries be able to keep pace? Can ‘virtual’ chemicals be used to remedy ‘real’ problems? After all, we are living in the real world.

Questions 1-6

Complete the text below, which is a summary of paragraph A-E.

Choose your answers from the word list and write them in boxes.

There are more words than spaces, so you will not be able to use them all.

You may use each word only once.

Example: There is a wealth of ………….(answer)….to combinatorial chemistry on the internet.

Answer: reference

How combinatorial chemistry began

Combinatorial chemistry as an…… 1……..of synthetic organic chemistry has been very much….. 2…… in recent years, ……3…..in a plethora of articles written by experts in the field. Moreover, all the reviews in specialist publications….. 4…….the same formula. But what about the origin of combinatorial chemistry? It comes from permutation and combination problems in mathematics…… 5…..solid phase peptide synthesis was developed, synthetic peptide chemists started doing similar calculations as well. The 20 naturally occurring amino acids provided them with… 6…possibilities.

Word List

known	in vogue	appearing	limitless	in the air
once	offspring	until	doubled	usually follow
offshoot	limited	as	follow religiously	references

Questions 7-11

Look at paragraphs I and J which describe the Tea-bag method.

Using the information in the passage, complete the flowchart below.

Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet.

Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

A Buzz in the World of Chemistry: Tea Bag Method

Note: The questions mentioned in the image above are from (21-25), which should actually be numbered as (7-11). So, solve the questions accordingly.

Questions 12-14

Below is a list of the regular types of contributors to chemistry reviews.

Which three contributors are described by the writer?

Write your answers A-F in the order they occur in the text in boxes 12-14 on the answer sheet.

A A director of technology Business Park.

B Someone who is from a major company and is involved directly in research.

C Someone who is involved in the new technology of combinatorial chemistry.

D An amateur chemist who synthesizes thousands of compounds per week.

E The director of a small obscurely located and investment-funded operation.

F An out-of-practice director of some major chemical enterprise.

12……………………………..

13………………………………

14………………………………

Question 15

Choose the appropriate letter (A-D) and write it in boxes on your answer sheet.

15 Physical chemistry……

A deals with the way physics is applied to chemical behavior.

B is closely connected with organic chemistry.

C deals with the way chemistry is applied to physical behavior.

D led to the development of combinatorial chemistry.