Month: April 2024

The Origins Of Laughter

While joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, laugh. The fact that they laugh suggests that laughter has been around for a lot longer than we have.

There is no doubt that laughing typically involves groups of people. “Laughter evolved as a signal to others — it almost disappears when we are alone,” says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as “see you later”, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.

To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behavior — they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But after removing the context, the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.

These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary- When we laugh the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter? New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of; their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalizations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman believes the closeness of baby laughter to chimp laughter supports the idea that laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.

Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps 8 million years ago, but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals can do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.

All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained the most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is what makes it a reliable signal of trust, according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angels. “Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,” says Flamson. “These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.”

We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quite serious, we owe human laughter and our language- based humor to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech — and no jokes to endure.

Questions 1-6
Look at the following research findings (Questions 1-6) and the list of people below. Match each finding with the correct person, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Babies and some animals produce laughter which sounds similar.
2. Primates are not the only animals who produce laughter.
3. Laughter can be used to show that we feel safe and secure with others.
4. Most human laughter is not a response to a humorous situation.
5. Animal laughter evolved before human laughter.
6. Laughter is a social activity.

List of people
A Provine
B Zimmerman
C Panksepp
D Flamson

Questions 7-10
Complete the summary using the list of words A-K. Write the correct letter A-K.

A combat
B chirps
C pitch
D origins
E play
F rats
G primates
H confidence
I fear
J babies
K tickling

Some scientists believe that laughter first developed out of (7)……………Research has revealed that human and chimp laughter may have the same (8)…………..Scientists have long been aware that (9)…………….laugh, but it now appears that laughter might be more widespread than once thought. Although the reasons why humans started to laugh are still unknown, it seems that laughter may result from the (10)…………..we feel with another person.

Questions 11-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE If the statement agrees with the information
FALSE If the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

11. Both men and women laugh more when they are with members of the same sex
12. Primates lack sufficient breath control to be able to produce laughs the way humans do.
13. Chimpanzees produce laughter in a wider range of situations than rats do.

The Lost City

Thanks to modern remote-sensing techniques, a ruined city in Turkey is slowly revealing itself as one of the greatest and most mysterious cities of the ancient world. Sally Palmer uncovers more.

A The low granite mountain, known as Kerkenes Dag, juts from the northern edge of the Cappadocian plain in Turkey. Sprawled over the mountainside are the ruins of an enormous city, contained by crumbling defensive walls seven kilometers long. Many respected archaeologists believe these are the remains of the fabled city of Pteria, the sixth-century BC stronghold of the Medes that the Greek historian Herodotus described in his famous work The Histories. The short-lived city came under Median control and only fifty years later was sacked, burned and its strong stone walls destroyed.

B British archaeologist Dr Geoffrey Summers has spent ten years studying the site. Excavating the ruins is a challenge because of the vast area they cover. The 7 km perimeter walls run around a site covering 271 hectares. Dr Summers quickly realised it would take far too long to excavate the site using traditional techniques alone. So he decided to use modern technology as well to map the entire site, both above and beneath the surface, to locate the most interesting areas and priorities to start digging.

C In 1993, Dr Summers hired a special hand-held balloon with a remote-controlled camera attached. He walked over the entire site holding the balloon and taking photos. Then one afternoon, he rented a hot-air balloon and floated over the site, taking yet more pictures. By the end of the 1994 season, Dr Summers and his team had a jigsaw of aerial photographs of the whole site. The next stage was to use remote sensing, which would let them work out what lay below the intriguing outlines and ruined walls. “Archaeology is a discipline that lends itself very well to remote sensing because it revolves around space,” says Scott Branting, an associated director of the project. He started working with Dr Summers in 1995.

D The project used two main remote-sensing techniques. The first is magnetometry, which works on the principle that magnetic fields at the surface of the Earth are influenced by what is buried beneath. It measures localised variations in the direction and intensity of this magnetic field. “The Earth s magnetic field can vary from place to place, depending on what happened there in the past says Brantmg. “If something containing iron oxide was heavily burnt, by natural or human actions, the iron particles in it can be permanently reoriented, like a compass needle, to align with the Earth’s magnetic field present at that point in time and space.” The magnetometer detects differences in the orientations and intensities of these iron particles from the present-day magnetic field and uses them to produce an image of what lies below ground.

E Kerkenes Dag lends itself particularly well to magnetometry because it was all burnt once in a savage fire. In places the heat was sufficient to turn sandstone to glass and to melt granite. The fire was so hot that there were strong magnetic signatures set to the Earth’s magnetic field from the time – around 547 BC – resulting in extremely clear pictures. Furthermore, the city was never rebuilt. “If you have multiple layers, it can confuse pictures, because you have different walls from different periods giving signatures that all go in different directions,” says Branting. “We only have one going down about 1.5 meters, so we can get a good picture of this fairly short-lived city.”

F The other main sub-surface mapping technique, which is still being used at the site, is resistivity. This technique measures the way electrical pulses are conducted through sub¬surface soil. It’s done by shooting pulses into the ground through a thin metal probe. Different materials have different electrical conductivity. For example, stone and mudbrick are poor conductors, but looser, damp soil conducts very well. By walking around the site and taking about four readings per metre, it is possible to get a detailed idea of what is where beneath the surface. The teams then build up pictures of walls, hearths and other remains. “It helps a lot if it has rained, because the electrical pulse can get through more easily,” says Branting. “Then if something is more resistant, it really shows up.” This is one of the reasons that the project has a spring season, when most of the resistivity work is done. Unfortunately, testing resistivity is a lot slower than magnetometry. “If we did resistivity over the whole site it would take about 100 years,” says Branting. Consequently, the team is concentrating on areas where they want to clarify pictures from the magnetometry.

G Remote sensing does not reveal everything about Kerkenes Dag, but it shows the most interesting sub-surface areas of the site. The archaeologists can then excavate these using traditional techniques. One surprise came when they dug out one of the gates in the defensive walls. “Our observations in early seasons led us to assume that we were looking at a stone base from a mudbrick city wall, such as would be found at most other cities in the Ancient Near East,” says Dr Summers. “When we started to excavate we were staggered to discover that the walls were made entirely from stone and that the gate would have stood at least ten metres high. After ten years of study, Pteria is gradually giving up its secrets.”

Questions 14-17
Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

14. The reason for the deployment of a variety of investigative methods
15. An example of an unexpected find
16. How the surface of the site was surveyed from above
17. The reason why experts are interested in the site

Questions 18-25
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 18-25 on your answer sheet.

Exploring the ancient city of Pteria

Archaeologists began working ten years ago. They started by taking photographs of the site from the ground and then from a distance in a (18)………………..They focused on what lay below the surface using a magnetometer, which identifies variations in the magnetic field. These variations occur when the (19)…………….in buried structures have changed direction as a result of great heat. They line up with the surrounding magnetic field just as a (20)………………..would do. The other remote-sensing technique employed was resistivity. This uses a (21)……………….to fire electrical pulses into the earth. The principle is that building materials like (22)……………….and stone do not conduct electricity well, while (23)………….does this much more effectively. This technique is mainly employed during the (24)……………., when conditions are more favourable. Resistivity is mainly being used to (25)………….some images generated by the magnetometer.

Question 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 26 on your answer sheet.

26. How do modern remote-sensing techniques help at the Pteria site?
A They detect minute buried objects for the archaeologists to dig up.
B They pinpoint key areas, which would be worth investigating closely.
C They remove the need for archaeologists to excavate any part of the site.
D They extend the research periods as they can be used at any time of year.

Designed to Last

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.

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

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 specialised 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-produced goods cannot possibly match. Without these personal connections, consumerist culture idolizes novelty instead. People know that they cannot buy happiness, but the chance to remake themselves with glossy, box-fresh products seems irresistible. When the novelty fades, they simply renew the excitement by buying more.

Chapman’s solution is what he calls ’emotionally durable design’. He says the challenge for designers is to create things we want to keep. This may sound like a tall order but it can be surprisingly straightforward. A favorite pair of old jeans, for example, just do not have the right feel until they have been worn and washed a hundred times. It is as if they are sharing the wearer’s life story. The look can be faked, but it is simply not the same. Walter Stahel, visiting professor at the University of Surrey, UK, calls this ‘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 childhood and this protects it from obsolescence. Stahel argues that this is what sustainable design needs to do with more products.

The information age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our impact on the environment, but, in fact, the reverse seems to be happening. We have simply added information technology to the industrial era and speeded up the developed world’s metabolism. The cure is hardly rocket science: minimise waste, stop moving things around so much and use people more. So what will post-throwaway consumerism look like? It might be as simple as installing energy-saving light bulbs, more efficient washing machines or choosing locally produced groceries with less packaging. In general, we will spend less on goods and more on services. Instead of buying a second car, for example, we might buy into a car-sharing network. Rather than following our current wasteful practices, we will buy less and rent a lot more; why own things such as tools that you use infrequently, especially things are likely to be updated all the time?

Consumer durables will increasingly be sold with plans for their disposal. Electronic goods such as mobile phones will be designed to be recyclable, with the extra cost added into the retail price. Following Chapman’s notion of emotionally durable design, there will be a move away from mass production and towards tailor-made articles and products designed and manufactured with greater craftsmanship, products which will be repaired rather than replaced, in the same way as was done in our grandparents’ time. Companies will replace profit from bulk sales by servicing and repairing products chosen because we want them to last.

Chapman acknowledges that it will be a challenge to persuade people to buy fewer goods, and ones that they intend to keep. At the moment, price competition between retailers makes it cheaper for consumers to replace rather than repair.

Products designed to be durable and emotionally satisfying are likely to be more expensive, so how will we be persuaded to choose sustainability? Tim Cooper, from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, points out that many people are already happy to pay a premium for quality, and that they also tend to value and care more for expensive goods. Chapman is also positive: “People are ready to keep things for longer,” he says, “The problem is that a lot of industries don’t know how to do that.” Chapman believes that sustainable design is here to stay. “The days when large corporations were in a position to choose whether to jump on the sustainability band-wagon or not are coming to an end,” he says. Whether this is also the beginning of the end of the throwaway society remains to be seen.

Questions 27-31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

27. In the second paragraph, the expression ‘conscience time’ refers to the fact that the owners
A. wish they had not bought the power tool.
B. want to make sure the tool is stored safely.
C. feel that the tool will increase in value in the future.
D. would feel guilty if they threw the tool away immediately.

28. Jonathan Chapman uses the word ‘narrative’ in the third paragraph to refer to the fact that the owner
A. told a story about how the item was bought.
B. was aware of how the item had come into being.
C. felt that the item became more useful over time.
D. was told that the item had been used for a long time.

29. In the third paragraph, the writer suggests that mass-produced goods are
A. inferior in quality.
B. less likely to be kept for a long time.
C. attractive because of their lower prices.
D. less tempting than goods which are traditionally produced.

30. Lack of personal connection to goods is described as producing
A. a belief that older goods are superior.
B. an attraction to well-designed packaging.
C. a desire to demonstrate status through belongings.
D. a desire to purchase a constant stream of new items.

31. Jeans and teddy bears are given as examples of goods which
A. have been very well designed.
B. take a long time to show wear.
C. are valued more as they grow older.
D. are used by the majority of the population.

Questions 32-35
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
FALSE if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32. People often buy goods that they make little use of.
33. Understanding the reasons for buying goods will help to explain why waste occurs.
34. People already rent more goods than they buy.
35. Companies will charge less to repair goods in the future.

Questions 36-40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

A cure for our wasteful habits

The writer believes that the recipe for reducing our impact on the environment is a simple one. He states that we should use less energy for things such as lighting or (36)…………….., and buy (37)…………….. that will not need to be moved across long distances.

Some expensive items such as (38)…………..could be shared, and others which may be less expensive but which are not needed often, such as (39)……………., could be rented instead of being purchased. He believes that manufacturers will need to design high-technology items such as (40)…………..so that they can be recycled more easily.

A mobile phones
B clothing
C tools
D laundry
E computers
F food
G heating
H cars
I teddy bears

Man or Machine

A During July 2003, the Museum of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts exhibited what Honda calls ‘the world’s most advanced humanoid robot’, ASIMO (the Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility). Honda’s brainchild is on tour in North America and delighting audiences wherever it goes. After 17 years in the making, ASIMO stands at four feet tall, weighs around 115 pounds and bob like a child in an astronaut’s suit. Though it is difficult to see ASIMO’s face at a distance, on closer inspection it has a smile and two large ‘eyes’ that conceal cameras. The robot cannot work autonomously — its actions are ‘remote controlled’ by scientists through the computer in its backpack. Yet watching ASMIO perform at a show in Massachusetts it seemed uncannily human. The audience cheered as ASIMO walked forwards and backwards, side to side and up and downstairs. It can even dance to the Hawaiian Hula.

B While the Japanese have made huge strides in solving some of the engineering problems of human kinetics and bipedal movements, for the past 10 years scientists at MIT’s former Artificial Intelligence (Al) lab (recently renamed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL) have been making robots that can behave like humans and interact with humans. One of MIT’s robots, Kismet, is an anthropomorphic head and has two eyes (complete with eyelids), ears, a mouth, and eyebrows. It has several facial expressions, including happy, sad, frightened and disgusted. Human interlocutors are able to read some of the robot’s facial expressions, and often change their behaviour towards the machine as a result – for example, playing with it when it appears ‘sad’. Kismet is now in MIT’s museum, but the ideas developed here continue to be explored in new robots.

C Cog (short for Cognition) is another pioneering project from MIT’s former Al lab. Cog has a head, eyes, two arms, hands and a torso — and its proportions were originally measured from the body of a researcher in the lab. The work on Cog has been used to test theories of embodiment and developmental robotics, particularly getting a robot to develop intelligence by responding to its environment via sensors, and to learn through these types of interactions. This approach to Al was thought up and developed by a team of students and researchers led by the head of MIT’s former Al lab, Rodney Brooks (now head of CSAIL), and represented a completely new development.

D This work at MIT is getting furthest down the road to creating human-like and interactive robots. Some scientists argue that ASIMO is a great engineering feat but not an intelligent machine — because it is unable to interact autonomously with unpredictabilities in its environment in meaningful ways, and learn from experience. Robots like Cog and Kismet and new robots at MIT’s CSAIL and media lab, however, are beginning to do this.

E These are exciting developments. Creating a machine that can walk, make gestures and learn from its environment is an amazing achievement. And watch this space: these achievements are likely rapidly to be improved upon. Humanoid robots could have a plethora of uses in society, helping to free people from everyday tasks. In Japan, for example, there is an aim to create robots that can do the tasks similar to an average human, and also act in more sophisticated situations as firefighters, astronauts or medical assistants to the elderly in the workplace and in homes — partly in order to counterbalance the effects of an ageing population.

F So in addition to these potentially creative plans there lies a certain dehumanisation. The idea that companions can be replaced with machines, for example, suggests a mechanical and degraded notion of human relationships. On one hand, these developments express human creativity — our ability to invent, experiment, and to extend our control over the world. On the other hand, the aim to create a robot like a human being is spurred on by dehumanised ideas — by the sense that human companionship can be substituted by machines; that humans lose their humanity when they interact with technology; or that we are little more than surface and ritual behaviours, that can be simulated with metal and electrical circuits.

G The tension between the dehumanised and creative aspects of robots has long been explored in culture. In Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 19 2 1 play in which the term ‘robot’ was first coined, although Capek’s robots had human-like appearance and behaviour, the dramatist never thought these robots were human. For Capek, being human was about much more than appearing to be human. In part, it was about challenging a dehumanising system, and struggling to become recognised and given the dignity of more than a machine. A similar spirit would guide us well through twenty-first century experiments in robotics.

Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

1. The different uses of robots in society
2. How robot is used in the artistic work
3. A robot that was modelled on an adult
4. A comparison between two different types of robots
5. A criticism of the negative effects of humanoid robots on the society
6. A reference to the first use of the word “robot”
7. People feel humanity may be replaced by robots

Questions 8-13
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

It took Honda (8)………………..years to make ASIMO, a human-looking robot that attracted broad interests from audiences. Unlike ASIMO, which has to be controls through a computer installed in the (9)……………, MIT’s scientists aimed to make robot that can imitate human behavior and (10)……………with humans. One of such particular inventions can express its own feelings through (11)…………….. Another innovative project is a robot called (12)…………… which is expected to learn from its environment to gain some (13)………..

California’s Age of Megafires

There’s a reason fire squads now battling more than a dozen blazes in southern California are having such difficulty containing the flames, despite better preparedness than ever and decades of experience fighting fires fanned by the notorious Santa Ana winds. The wildfires themselves, experts say, generally are hotter, move faster, and spread more erratically than in the past.

Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more — 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.

The short-term explanation is that the region, which usually has dry summers, has had nine inches less rainfall than normal this year. Longer term, climate change across the West is leading to hotter days on average and longer fire seasons. The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.

Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas. “We are increasingly building our homes … in fireprone ecosystems,” says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”

In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas. “What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity,” says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. “With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job.”

That said, many experts give California high marks for making progress on preparedness since 2003, when the largest fires in state history scorched 750,000 acres, burned 3,640 homes, and killed 2 2 people. Stung then by criticism of bungling that allowed fires to spread when they might have been contained, personnel are meeting the peculiar challenges of neighborhood and canyon-hopping fires better than in recent years, observers say.

State promises to provide newer engines, planes, and helicopters have been fulfilled. Firefighters unions that then complained of dilapidated equipment, old fire engines, and insufficient blueprints for fire safety are now praising the state’s commitment, noting that funding for firefighting has increased despite huge cuts in many other programs. We are pleased that the Schwarzenegger administration has been very proactive in its support of us and come through with budgetary support of the infrastructure needs we have long sought,” says Mr. McHale with the firefighters union.

Besides providing money to upgrade the fire engines that must traverse the mammoth state and wind along serpentine canyon roads, the state has invested in better command-and-control facilities as well as the strategies to run them. “In the fire sieges of earlier years, we found out that we had the willingness of mutual-aid help from other jurisdictions and states, but we were not able to communicate adequately with them,” says Kim Zagaris, chief of the state’s Office of Emergency Services, fire and rescue branch. After a 2004 blue-ribbon commission examined and revamped those procedures, the statewide response “has become far more professional and responsive,” he says.

Besides ordering the California National Guard on Monday to make 1,500 guardsmen available for firefighting efforts, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the Pentagon to send all available Modular Airborne Fighting Systems to the area. The military Lockheed C-130 cargo/utility aircraft carry a pressurized 3,000-gallon tank that can eject fire retardant or water in fewer than five seconds through two tubes at the rear of the plane. This load can cover an area 1/4-mile long and 60 feet wide to create a fire barrier. Governor Schwarzenegger also directed 2,300 inmate firefighters and 170 custody staff from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to work hand in hand with state and local firefighters.

Residents and government officials alike are noting the improvements with gratitude, even amid the loss of homes, churches, businesses, and farms. Despite such losses there is a sense that the speed, dedication, and coordination of firefighters from several states and jurisdictions are resulting in greater efficiency than in past “siege situations.

“I am extraordinarily impressed by the improvements we have witnessed between last big fire and this,” says Ross Simmons, a San Diego-based lawyer who ha evacuate both his home and business on Monday, taking up residence at a Hampton Inn 30 miles south of his home in Rancho Bernardo. After fires consumed 172,000 acres there in 2003, the San Diego region turned community wide soul-searching into improved building codes, evacuation procedures, and procurement of new technology. Mr. Simmons and neighbors began receiving automated phone calls at 3:30 a.m. Monday morning telling them to evacuate. “Notwithstanding all the damage that will be caused by this, we will not come close to the loss of life because of what we have … put in place since then,” he says.

Questions 14-18
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Fighting Californian wildfires is still not an easy task because the fires the fire-fighters now face (14)………………in more unpredictable manner in addition to the raging heat and faster speed than ever. Megafires, as they are called, are often (15)…………….bigger than average forest fire. The reasons for this include (16)…………….below the average and the extended (17)………………due to climate change. And according to experts, the government policy has also contributed to this by accidentally making the underbrush the (18)……………….for megafires.

Questions 19-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? Write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

19. Open space has been disappearing in the past 10 years.
20. The equipment firefighters use today is better than before.
21. The state recruited new firefighters.
22. In the early years, no other states wished to help California to fight the fire.
23. The 2004 blue-ribbon commission did not make any achievements.

Questions 24-26
Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24. Why does the author mention Governor Schwarzenegger, California National Guard, Pentagon and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation?
A. To show the active involvement of the Schwarzenegger’s administration
B. To illustrate the cross-state and cross-jurisdiction cooperation in fire¬fighting
C. To demonstrate how the military is more effective at fighting fire than others
D. To give an example of how resources should be mobilised to fight fires

25. How do the locals feel about the improvements made by the state government?
A. glad
B. unsatisfied
C. unconcerned
D. bitter

26. According to Ross Simmons, which of the following statements is true?
A. It’s harder to evacuate people in daytime.
B. People refuse to improve their house in fire resisting ability.
C. People can hardly believe the magnitude of damage today.
D. People are less likely to die in fires now

Alfred Nobel

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all corners of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize.

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father Immanuel Nobel was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm. In connection with his construction work Immanuel Nobel also experimented with different techniques for blasting rocks. Successful in his industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his family to St. Petersburg. There, his sons were given a first class education by private teachers. The train included natural sciences, languages and literature. By the age of 17 Alfred Nobel was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German. His primary interests were in English literature and poetry as well as in chemistry and physics. Alfred’s father, who wanted his sons to join his enterprise as engineers, disliked Alfred’s interest in poetry and found his son rather introverted.

In order to widen Alfred’s horizons his father sent him abroad for further training in chemical engineering. During a two year period Alfred Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. In Paris, the city he came to like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T. J. Pclouze, a famous chemist. There he met the young Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who, three years earlier, had invented nitroglycerine, a highly explosive liquid. But it was considered too dangerous to be of any practical use. Although its explosive power greatly exceeded that of gunpowder, the liquid would explode in a very unpredictable manner if subjected to heat and pressure. Alfred Nobel became very interested in nitroglycerine and how it could be put to practical use in construction work. He also realized that the safety problems had to be solved and a method had to be developed for the controlled detonation of nitroglycerine.

After his return to Sweden in 1863, Alfred Nobel concentrated on developing nitroglycerine as an explosive. Several explosions, including one (1864) in which his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous. They forbade further experimentation with nitroglycerine within the Stockholm city limits and Alfred Nobel had to move his experimentation to a barge anchored on Lake Malaren. Alfred was not discouraged and in 1864 he was able to start mass production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer Alfred Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with kieselguhr would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In 1867 he patented this material under the name of dynamite. To be able to detonate the dynamite rods he also invented a detonator (blasting cap) which could be ignited by lighting a fuse. These inventions were made at the same time as the pneumatic drill came into general use. Together these inventions drastically reduced the cost of blasting rock, drilling tunnels, building canals and many other forms of construction work.

The market for dynamite and detonating caps grew very rapidly and Alfred Nobel also proved himself to be a very skillful entrepreneur and businessman. Over the years he founded factories and laboratories in some 90 different places in more than 20 countries. Although he lived in Paris much of his life he was constantly traveling. When he was not traveling or engaging in business activities Nobel himself worked intensively in his various laboratories, first in Stockholm and later in other places. I le focused on the development of explosives technology as well as other chemical inventions including such materials as synthetic rubber and leather, artificial silk, etc. By the time of his death in 1896 he had 355 patents.

Intensive work and travel did not leave much time for a private life. At the age of 43 he was feeling like an old man. At this time he advertised in a newspaper “wealthy, highly-educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household.” The most qualified applicant turned out to be an Austrian woman, Countess Bertha Kinsky. After working a very short time for Nobel she decided to return to Austria to marry Count Arthur von Suttner. In spite of this Alfred Nobel and Bertha von Suttner remained friends and kept writing letters to each other for decades. Over the years Bertha von Suttner became increasingly critical of the arms race. She wrote a famous book, Lay Down Your Arms and became a prominent figure in the peace movement. No doubt this influenced Alfred Nobel when he wrote his final will which was to include a Prize for persons or organizations who promoted peace. Several years after the death of Alfred Nobel, the Norwegian Storting (Parliament) decided to award the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize to Bertha von Suttner.

Alfred Nobel died in San Remo, Italy, on December 10, 1896. When his will was opened it came as a surprise that his fortune was to be used for Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The executors of his will were two young engineers, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist. They set about forming the Nobel Foundation as an organization to take care of the financial assets left by Nobel for this purpose and to coordinate the work of the Prize-Awarding Institutions. This was not without its difficulties since the will was contested by relatives and questioned by authorities in various countries.

Alfred Nobel’s greatness lay in his ability to combine the penetrating mind of the scientist and inventor with the forward-looking dynamism of the industrialist. Nobel was very interested in social and peace-related issues and held what were considered radical views in his era. He had a great interest in literature and wrote his own poetry and dramatic works. The Nobel Prizes became an extension and a fulfillment of his lifetime interests.

Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

27. The first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1895.
28. Nobel’s father wanted his son to have better education than what he had had.
29. Nobel was an unsuccessful businessman.
30. Bertha von Suttner was selected by Nobel himself for the first peace prize.
31. The Nobel Foundation was established after the death of Nobel
32. Nobel’s social involvement was uncommon in the 1800’s.

Questions 33-39
Complete the notes below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Education:
Having accumulated a great fortune in his business, Nobel’s father determined to give his son the best education and sent him abroad to be trained in (33)……………during Nobel’s study in Paris, he worked in a private laboratory, where he came in contact with a young engineer (34)……………..and his invention nitroglycerine, a more powerful explosive than (35)……………..

Benefits in construction works:
Nobel became really interested in this new explosive and experimented on it. But nitroglycerine was too dangerous and was banned for experiments within the city of (36)…………….. So Nobel had to move his experiments to a lake. To make nitroglycerine easily usable, Nobel invented dynamite along with (37)………….while in the meantime (38)……………….became popular, all of which dramatically lowered the (39)…………..of construction works.

Health In The Wild

Many animals seem able to treat their illnesses themselves. Humans may have a thing or two to learn from them. For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain’s Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behaviour in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. In a talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this month, she explained that the idea that animals can treat themselves has been regarded with some scepticism by her colleagues in the past. But a growing number of animal behaviourists now think that wild animals can and do deal with their own medical needs.

One example of self-medication was discovered in 1987. Michael Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu, working in the Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, noticed that local chimpanzees suffering from intestinal worms would dose themselves with the pith of a plant called Veronia. This plant produces poisonous chemicals called terpenes. Its pith contains a strong enough concentration to kill gut parasites, but not so strong as to kill chimps (nor people, for that matter; locals use the pith for the same purpose). Given that the plant is known locally as “goat- killer”, however, it seems that not all animals are as smart as chimps and humans. Some consume it indiscriminately, and succumb.

Since the Veronia-eating chimps were discovered, more evidence has emerged suggesting that animals often eat things for medical rather than nutritional reasons. Many species, for example, consume dirt—a behaviour known as geophagy. Historically, the preferred explanation was that soil supplies minerals such as salt. But geophagy occurs in areas where the earth is not a useful source of minerals, and also in places where minerals can be more easily obtained from certain plants that are known to be rich in them. Clearly, the animals must be getting something else out of eating earth.

The current belief is that soil—and particularly the clay in it—helps to detoxify the defensive poisons that some plants produce in an attempt to prevent themselves from being eaten. Evidence for the detoxifying nature of clay came in 1999, from an experiment carried out on macaws by James Gilardi and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis. Macaws eat seeds containing alkaloids, a group of chemicals that has some notoriously toxic members, such as strychnine. In the wild, the birds are frequently seen perched on eroding riverbanks eating clay. Dr Gilardi fed one group of macaws a mixture of harmless alkaloid and clay, and a second group just the alkaloid. Several hours later, the macaws that had eaten the clay had 60% less alkaloid in their bloodstreams than those that had not, suggesting that the hypothesis is correct.

Other observations also support the idea that clay is detoxifying. Towards the tropics the amount of toxic compounds in plants increases-and so does the amount of earth eaten by herbivores. Elephants lick clay from mud holes all year round, except in September when they are bingeing on fruit which, because it has evolved to be eaten, is not toxic. And the addition of clay to the diets of domestic cattle increases the amount of nutrients that they can absorb from their food by 10-20%.

A third instance of animal self-medication is the use of mechanical scours to get rid of gut parasites, in 1972 Richard Wrangham, a researcher at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, noticed that chimpanzees were eating the leaves of a tree called Aspilia. The chimps chose the leaves carefully by testing them in their mouths. Having chosen a leaf, a chimp would fold it into a fan and swallow it. Some of the chimps were noticed wrinkling their noses as they swallowed these leaves, suggesting the experience was unpleasant. Later, undigested leaves were found on the forest floor.

Dr Wrangham rightly guessed that the leaves had a medicinal purpose—this was, indeed, one of the earliest interpretations of a behaviour pattern as self-medication. However, he guessed wrong about what the mechanism was. His (and everybody else’s) assumption was that Aspilia contained a drug, and this sparked more than two decades of phytochemical research to try to find out what chemical the chimps were after. But by the 1990s, chimps across Africa had been seen swallowing the leaves of 19 different species that seemed to have few suitable chemicals in common. The drug hypothesis was looking more and more dubious.

It was Dr Huffman who got to the bottom of the problem. He did so by watching what came out of the chimps, rather than concentrating on what went in. He found that the egested leaves were full of intestinal worms. The factor common to all 19 species of leaves swallowed by the chimps was that they were covered with microscopic hooks. These caught the worms and dragged them from their lodgings.

Following that observation, Dr Engel is now particularly excited about how knowledge of the way that animals look after themselves could be used to improve the health of live-stock. People might also be able to learn a thing or two, and may, indeed, already have done so. Geophagy, for example, is a common behaviour in many parts of the world The medical stalls in African markets frequently sell tablets made of different sorts of clays, appropriate to different medical conditions.

Africans brought to the Americas as slaves continued this tradition, which gave their owners one more excuse to affect to despise them. Yet, as Dr Engel points out, Rwandan mountain gorillas eat a type of clay rather similar to kaolinite – the main ingredient of many patent medicines sold over the counter in the West for digestive complaints. Dirt can sometimes be good for you, and to be “as sick as a parrot” may, after all, be a state to be desired.

Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1. Dr. Engel has been working on animal self-medication research for 10 years.
2. Animals often walk a considerable distance to find plants for medication.
3. Birds, like Macaw, often eat clay because it is part of their natural diet.
4. According to Dr. Engel, research into animal self-medication ca new painkillers.

Questions 5-9
Complete the notes below using NO MORE THAN ONE WORD OR NUMBER from the passage.

Date	Name	Animal	Food	Mechanism
1987	Michael Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu	chimpanzee	(5)……………..of Veronia	(6)…………….that can kill parasites
1999	James Gilardi and his colleagues	mascaw	seeds (contain (7)……………) and clay	clay can (8)………………the poisonous contents in food
1972	Richard Wrangham	chimpanzee	leaves with tiny (9)……………on surface	such leaves can catch and expel worms from intestines

Questions 10-13
Complete the summary below using words from the box. Write your answers, A-H, in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

Though often doubted, the self-medicating behavior of animals has been supported by an increasing amount of evidence. One piece of evidence particularly deals with (10)………….., a soil-consuming behavior commonly found across animals species, because earth, often clay, can neutralize the (11)…………content of their diet. Such behavior can also be found among humans in Africa, where people purchase (12)………….at market stalls as a kind of medication to their illnesses. Another example of this is found in chimps eating leaves of often (13)…………..taste but with no apparent medicinal value until its unique structure came into light.

A. mineral
B. plants
C. unpleasant
D. toxic
E. clay tablets
F. nutritional
G. geophagy
H. harmless

The Conquest Of Malaria In Italy

A. Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was produced by “miasma” or “poisoning of the air”. Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequences of these theories were that little was done to combat the disease before the end of the century. Things became so bad that 11m Italians (from a total population of 25m) were “permanently at risk”. In malarial zones the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. Those who escaped death were weakened or suffered from splenomegaly — a “painful enlargement of the spleen” and “a lifeless stare”. The economic impact of the disease was immense. Epidemics were blamed on southern Italians, given the widespread belief that malaria was hereditary. In the 1880s, such theories began to collapse as the dreaded mosquito was identified as the real culprit.

B. Italian scientists, drawing on the pioneering work of French doctor Alphonse Laveran, were able to predict the cycles of fever but it was in Rome that further key discoveries were made. Giovanni Battista Grassi, a naturalist, found that a particular type of mosquito was the carrier of malaria. By experimenting on healthy volunteers (mosquitoes were released into rooms where they drank the blood of the human guinea pigs), Grassi was able to make the direct link between the insects (all females of a certain kind) and the disease. Soon, doctors and scientists made another startling discovery: the mosquitoes themselves were also infected and not mere carriers. Every year, during the mosquito season, malarial blood was moved around the population by the insects. Definitive proof of these new theories was obtained after an extraordinary series of experiments in Italy, where healthy people were introduced into malarial zones but kept free of mosquito bites — and remained well. The new Italian state had the necessary information to tackle the disease.

C. A complicated approach was adopted, which made use of quinine – a drug obtained from tree bark which had long been used to combat fever, but was now seen as a crucial part of the war on malaria. Italy introduced a quinine law and a quinine tax in 1904, and the drug was administered to large numbers of rural workers. Despite its often terrible side-effects (the headaches produced were known as the “quinine-buzz”) the drug was successful in limiting the spread of the disease, and in breaking cycles of infection. In addition, Italy set up rural health centres and invested heavily in education programmes. Malaria, as Snowden shows, was not just a medical problem but a social and regional issue, and could only be defeated through multi-layered strategies. Politics was itself transformed by the anti malarial campaigns. It was originally decided to give quinine to all those in certain regions – even healthy people; peasants were often suspicious of medicine being forced upon them. Doctors were sometimes met with hostility and refusal, and many were dubbed “poisoners”.

D. Despite these problems, the strategy was hugely successful. Deaths from malaria fell by some 80% in the first decade of the 20th century and some areas escaped altogether from the scourge of the disease. War, from 1915-18, delayed the campaign. Funds were diverted to the battlefields and the fight against malaria became a military issue, laying the way for the fascist approach to the problem. Mussolini’s policies in the 20s and 30s are subjected to a serious cross-examination by Snowden. He shows how much of the regime’s claims to have “eradicated” malaria through massive land reclamation, forced population removals and authoritarian clean-ups were pure propaganda. Mass draining was instituted — often at a great cost as Mussolini waged war not on the disease itself, but on the mosquitoes that carried it. The cleansing of Italy was also ethnic, as “carefully selected” Italians were chosen to inhabit the gleaming new towns of the former marshlands around Rome. The “successes” under fascism were extremely vulnerable, based as they were on a top-down concept of eradication. As war swept through the drained lands in the 40s, the disease returned with a vengeance.

E. In the most shocking part of the book, Snowden describes — passionately, but with the skill of a great historian — how the retreating Nazi armies in Italy in 1943-44 deliberately caused a massive malaria epidemic in Lazio. It was “the only known example of biological warfare in 20th-century Europe”. Shamefully, the Italian malaria expert Alberto Missiroli had a role to play in the disaster: he did not distribute quinine, despite being well aware of the epidemic to come. Snowden claims that Missiroli was already preparing a new strategy — with the support of the US Rockefeller Foundation — using a new pesticide, DDT Missiroli allowed the epidemic to spread, in order to create the ideal conditions for a massive, and lucrative, human experiment. Fifty-five thousand cases of malaria were recorded in the province of Littoria alone in 1944. It is estimated that more than a third of those in the affected area contracted the disease. Thousands, nobody knows how many, died. With the war over, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation were free to experiment. DDT was sprayed from the air and 3m Italians had their bodies covered with the chemical. The effects were dramatic, and nobody really cared about the toxic effects of the chemical.

F. By 1962, malaria was more or less gone from the whole peninsula. The last cases were noted in a poor region of Sicily. One of the final victims to die of the disease in Italy was the popular cyclist, Fausto Coppi. He had contracted malaria in Africa in 1960, and the failure of doctors in the north of Italy to spot the disease was a sign of the times. A few decades earlier they would have immediately noticed the tell-tale signs; it was later claimed that a small dose of quinine would have saved his life. As there are still more than 1m deaths every year from malaria worldwide, Snowden’s book also has contemporary relevance. This is a disease that affects every level of the societies where it is rampant. It also provides us with “a message of hope for a world struggling with the great present-day medical emergency”.

Questions 14-18
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Before the link between malaria and (14)…………was established, there were many popular theories circulating among the public, one of which points to (15)………….., the unclean air. The lack of proper treatment affected the country so badly that rural people in malaria infested places had extremely short (16)…………..The disease spread so quickly, especially in the south of Italy, thus giving rise to the idea that the disease was (17)……………People believed in these theories until mosquito was found to be the (18)…………in the 1880s.

Questions 19-21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? Write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

19. The volunteers of the Italian experiments that provided assuring evidence were from all over Italy.
20. It’s possible to come out of malarial zones alive.
21. The government successfully managed to give all people quinine medication.

Questions 22-26
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.

22. A breakthrough in the theory of the cause of malaria
23. A story for today’s readers
24. A description of an expert who didn’t do anything to restrict the spread disease
25. A setback in the battle against malaria due to government policies
26. A description of how malaria affects the human body

Sunset For The Oil Business

The world is about to run out of oil. Or perhaps not. It depends whom you believe… Members of Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) recently met in London and presented technical data that support their grim forecast that the world is perilously dose to running out of oil. Leading lights of this movement, including Colin Campbell, rejected rival views presented by American Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency (IEA) that contradicted their views. Dr Campbell even decried the “amazing display of ignorance, deliberate ignorance, denial and obfuscation” by governments, industry and academics on this topic.

So is the oil really running out? The answer is easy: Yes. Nobody seriously disputes the notion that oil is, for all practical purposes, a non-renewable resource that will run out some day, be that years or decades away. The harder question is determining when precisely oil will begin to get scarce. And answering that question involves scaling Hubbert’s peak.

M. King Hubbert, a Shell geologist of legendary status among depletion experts, forecast in 1956 that oil production in the United States would peak in the early 1970s and then slowly decline, in something resembling a bell-shaped curve. At the time, his forecast was controversial, and many rubbished it. After 1970, however, empirical evidence proved him correct: oil production in America did indeed peak and has been in decline ever since.

Dr Hubbert’s analysis drew on the observation that oil production in a new area typically rises quickly at first, as the easiest and cheapest reserves are tapped. Over time, reservoirs age and go into decline, and so lifting oil becomes more expensive. Oil from that area then becomes less competitive in relation to other sources of fuel. As a result, production slows down and usually tapers off and declines. That, he argued, made for a bell-shaped curve.

His successful prediction has emboldened a new generation of geologists to apply his methodology on a global scale. Chief among them are the experts at ODAC, who worry that the global peak in production will come in the next decade. Dr Campbell used to argue that the peak should have come already; he now thinks it is just round the corner. A heavyweight has now joined this gloomy chorus. Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University argues in a that global oil production could peak within the next few years.

That sharply contradicts mainstream thinking. America’s Geological Survey prepared an exhaustive study of oil depletion last year that put the peak of production some decades off. The IEA has just weighed in with its new “World Energy Outlook” which foresees enough oil to comfortably meet demand to 2020 from remaining reserves. Rene Dahan, one of ExxonMobil’s top managers, goes further: with an assurance characteristic of the world’s largest energy company, he insists: that the world will be awash in oil for another 70 years. Who is right? In making sense of these wildly opposing views, it is useful to look back at the pitiful history of oil forecasting. Doomsters have been predicting dry wells since the 1970s, but so far the oil is still gushing Nearly all the predictions for 2000 made after the 1970s oil shocks were far too pessimistic.

Michael Lynch of DRI-WEFA, an economic consultancy, is one of the few oil forecasters who has got things generally right. In a new paper, Dr Lynch analyses those historical forecasts. He finds evidence of both bias and recurring errors, which suggests that methodological mistakes (rather than just poor data) were the problem. In particular, he criticized forecasters who used Hubbert-style analysis for relying on fixed estimates of how much “ultimately recoverable” oil there really is below ground. That figure, he insists, is actually a dynamic one, as improvements in infrastructure, knowledge and technology raise the amount of oil which is recoverable.

That points to what will probably determine whether the pessimists or the optimists are right: technological innovation. The first camp tends to be dismissive of claims of forthcoming technological revolutions in such areas as deep-water drilling and enhanced recovery. Dr Deffeyes captures this end-of- technology mindset well. He argues that because the industry has already spent billions on technology development, it makes it difficult to ask today for new technology, as most of the wheels have already been invented.

Yet techno-optimists argue that the technological revolution in oil has only just begun. Average recovery rates (how much of the known oil in a reservoir can actually be brought to the surface) are still only around 30-35%. Industry optimists believe that new techniques on the drawing board today could lift th figure to 50-60% within a decade.

Given the industry’s astonishing track record of innovation, it may be foolish to bet against it. That is the result of adversity: the oil crisis of the 1970s forced Big Oil to develop reserves in expensive, inaccessible places such as the North and Alaska, undermining Dr Hubbert’s assumption that cheap reserves are developed first. The resulting upstream investments have driven down the cost of finding and developing wells over the last two decades from over $20 a barrel to around $6 a barrel. The cost of producing oil has fallen by half, to under $4 a barrel.

Such miracles will not come cheap, however, since much of the world’s oil is now produced in ageing fields that are rapidly declining. The IEA concludes that global oil production need not peak in the next two decades if the necessary investments are made. So how much is necessary? If oil companies are to replace the output lost at those ageing fields and meet the worlds ever-rising demand for oil, the agency reckons they must invest $1 trillion in l non-OPEC countries over the next decade alone. Ouch.

Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

27. Hubbert has a high-profile reputation amongst ODAC members.
28. Oil is likely to last longer than some other energy sources.
29. The majority of geologists believe that oil will start to run out some time this decade.
30. Over 50 percent of the oil we know about is currently being recovered.
31. History has shown that some of Hubbert’s principles were mistaken.

Questions 32-35
Complete the sentences below using NO MORE THAN ONE WORD OR NUMBER from the passage. Write your answers in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.

Many people believed Hubbert’s theory was (32)……………..when it was originally presented.

Questions 36-40
Look at the following statements (Questions 36-40) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet. ‘

36. has found fault in geological research procedure.
37. has provided the longest-range forecast regarding oil supply.
38. has convinced others that oil production will follow a particular model.
39. has accused fellow scientists of refusing to see the truth.
40. has expressed doubt over whether improved methods of extracting oil are possible

A. Colin Campbell
B. M. King Hubbert
C. Kenneth Deffeyes
D. Rene Dahan
E. Michael Lynch

The World Is Our Oyster

A Independent travel is on the increase and while package holidays which offer an all inclusive price for transport, accommodation and often even food are financially attractive to many, according to tourism analyst Thomas Cooper, an increasing number of people now prefer a less-tailored holiday and the freedom to make spur of the moment decisions and changes to their intended plan.

B Internet based information sites about backpacking destinations are prolific and publications aimed at independent travellers on a budget exist for almost every destination imaginable. Some people, particularly first-time backpackers, may elect to travel with a friend or acquaintance; however, a large percentage of backpackers travel alone, assured by the knowledge that they are likely to meet, with ease, a number of like-minded individuals throughout their journey and staying in their backpacker accommodation. Alan Park, who has travelled extensively through Europe, Australasia and several other parts of the globe, says most accommodation establishments aimed at the backpacker market are designed with communal kitchens, dormitories and entertainment areas which lend themselves to allowing residents to socialize with ease and quickly breakdown barriers with strangers that may usually exist in day to day life.

C Many backpackers of European origin are attracted to the Southern Hemisphere, Australia being a major destination of choice. Cooper attributes this high level of interest to the possibilities of legal working holiday visas for many nationalities and consequent short-term work opportunities making extended travel financially feasible, in addition to the attractive climate and outback appeal. Australia also has the reputation of being a relatively safe destination, with a warm and jovial population and its size and contrast between locations is alluring to many. University student Rebecca Thompson, who has just returned from a twelve month overseas trip, says that the cosmopolitan and modern nature of Australian cities such as Sydney and Melbourne contrasted with the rugged outback appeal of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, or the marine paradise of the Great Barrier Reef offer sufficient variation to attract a wide base of visitors. Sydney based travel consultant Brad Connor advises that it is also possible to obtain bargain deals on internal flights within this massive island when purchasing an international ticket, highly recommended, he says, for those who do not have the luxury of a long length of time, in order to ensure that key spots can be visited.

D Equal in popularity to Australia, for the backpacking market is South East Asia and Rebecca Thompson says that, in her experience, the majority of travellers on extended trips to Australasia also include a visit to one or more South East Asia destinations in their itinerary. Thailand, in particular, has a long tourism history and well-established service industry. It is often considered one of the more accessible Asian destinations for the novice European backpacker due to its reasonable prices, large volume of Western visitors and well established backpacker trails. Brian Johnson, who is currently employed by the British Consulate in Bangkok, believes that the welcoming nature and level of English spoken by Thais involved in the tourism industry has also impacted positively on the destination’s overseas image. Thai food is delicious and now fairly familiar to those outside the country and while precautions such as drinking bottled water and washing of fruit and vegetables should be practiced, generally standards of accommodation and restaurants are high. Thomas Cooper says Thailand’s attractions are wide ranging, encompassing idyllic beaches, an insight into Buddhist culture and impressive ancient temples, mountain trekking, a vibrant nightlife and for bargain hunters bustling night markets and bazaars.

E South East Asia neighbour, Vietnam, alongside its rapidly developing economy has also over recent years established a solid tourism industry, the majority of visitors entering and exiting by plane via its urban centres Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) in the south and Hanoi in the north. Vietnam offers incredible vistas and contrasts of rugged mountain areas, lush green rice paddies, crystal clear waters and dense forest areas. Alan Park, who spent a month travelling independently around the country, says bus and rail networks allow visitors to travel from centre to centre relatively inexpensively, though he does not recommend these forms of transport to visitors on a short time-frame as the pace is unhurried.

F The list of potentially safe and enjoyable backpacking destinations is endless. Technology and transport developments over recent time have resulted in more areas of the world becoming increasingly accessible, it is now possible to keep in regular contact with friends and family back home via email or even mobile phone, providing added reassurance to those concerned about travelling and their worried parents. Brian Johnson says friends, family and acquaintances who have previously travelled to the destination of choice are a useful source of first-hand advice and information and Simon Hartwell of the Backpackers Association adds travellers are advised to ensure that they are aware of visa requirements for their destination and are urged to seek medical advice regarding any necessary vaccinations or medical precautions. It is always wise to be as well informed as possible prior to embarking on a trip.

G The youth of today are undoubtedly becoming more adventurous, which Hartwell ascribes to higher disposable income in the developed world than were available to previous generations and also the fact that we can more easily familiarise ourselves with the unknown via the internet and other communication methods. Many travellers, particularly experienced backpackers, are keen to experience more obscure destinations well off the well-trodden
backpacker trail.

Questions 1-4
Match each statement with the correct person. Write the correct answer A-D in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet
1. Opportunities to fund expenses through casual work increase the volume of visitors to a particular destination.
2. Attitude to the tourism industry of the local people has had a positive impact on visitor numbers
3. Diverse attractions mean a destination is able to appeal to a wider range of people
4. Motivations for different approaches to travel by different generations

List of People
A. Simon Hartwell
B. Brian Johnson
C. Thomas Cooper
D. Rebecca Thompson

Questions 5-8
Do the following statements agree with the views given in Reading Passage. Write

YES if the statement agrees with the views given
NO if the statement contradicts the views given
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say

5. Interaction with others is generally more difficult when travelling alone than in normal life situations.
6. Travelling by plane to other domestic destinations in Australia is cheaper than other forms of transport.
7. Train travel in Vietnam can be too time-consuming for short visits.
8. Experienced backpackers rarely travel to destinations such as Australia.

Questions 9-11
Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-11 on your answer sheet.

Vietnam – tourism industry growing as is its (9) ___________.
Thailand – certain (10) ______________ are advisable – e.g. wash fruit
Australia – Great Barrier Reef can be described as a (11) ___________

An Aviation Wonder And Its Creator

A The Supermarine Spitfire was a single-seater fighter plane used by the British Royal Airforce and pilots from a number of the country’s allies during the Second World War. The first flight of a Spitfire prototype was on 5 March 1936 and usage of the plane continued until the 1950s. It was said to be one of the most effective fighter planes available during that period and was produced by Vickers-Armstrongs, a British engineering corporation which was formed in 1927 as a result of the merger of Vickers Limited and Sir W G Armstrong Whitworth & Company.

B The Spitfire was designed by aeronautical engineer Reginald Joseph Mitchell. His career began when he joined a locomotives engineering company in 1911 at the age of 16. However, in 1917 he moved from his home town to join the Supermarine Aviation works in Southampton and was promoted to Chief Designer within his first year of employment. By the time the company was taken over by Vickers-Armstrongs in 1928, Mitchell had held the post of Technical Director for a year; and his capabilities and contributions were deemed so significant Vickers-Armstrong made his continual employment for a five year period a condition of the purchase of the company.

C In the fifteen years prior to 1936 Mitchell designed 24 aircraft of differing categories including fighter planes, bombers and seaplanes. The first predecessor of the Spitfire in the fighter plane category to gain him national acclaim was the Supermarine S.B for which he won the Schneider Trophy (a cup and monetary award for technical advances in aviation which came to focus mainly on speed) in 1931. Despite withdrawal of financial support from the British Government that year, the Supermarine S.B. was able to compete for the Schneider Trophy as a result of a private donation of 100,000 pounds. Mitchell’s team won outright on September 13th their aircraft achieving a new world speed record of 606 km/h; within days the Supermarine S.B. went on to break its own newly achieved record when on the 29th of the same month it became the first aircraft ever to achieve speeds of over 400 miles per hour (640 kilometres) when it reached 407.5 mph (640 kilometres per hour).

D Reginald Joseph Mitchell was awarded a CBE in 1932 for his contributions to high speed flight. CBEs being awarded by the British Monarch and reserved to recognise individuals who have ‘fulfilled a conspicuous leading role in regional affairs, through achievement or service to the community, or making a highly distinguished, innovative contribution in his or her area of activity’. Mitchell’s achievements with the Supermarine S.B. also prompted the Air Ministry to contract his company for design of a new fighter aircraft, despite the organisation’s reputation being built predominantly on sea-plane and not fighter plane manufacturing.

E The first type, the 224, was to prove unsuccessful and it was eventually rejected by the Royal Air Force due to unsatisfactory performance; however, private sponsorship enabled research, development and modifications which led to the creation of the Type 300 which would eventually become the Spitfire. Soon after the first flight of the Spitfire prototype (trial version) and prior to completion of all stages of its official trials, convinced by its potential, the British Royal Air Force ordered 310 models. With its smooth lines, load-bearing metal shell, and heavy eight-machine gun armament, the Spitfire was considered revolutionary. In 1938, the aircraft was first put into official service; however, Mitchell, who died from cancer in 1937 at the age of 42, was not to witness this or the extensive impact and longevity of use the aircraft would have. In total 20,351 spitfires of different versions were produced making it the most produced British aircraft of the Second World War.

F After Mitchell’s death, his former Chief Draughtsman Joe Smith took over the position of Technical Director and led the subsequent development of the Spitfire which would keep it at the forefront of aircraft technology while many other designs quickly became obsolete; 24 models of spitfire were designed along with many sub-variants containing different engine types and possessing different wing configurations; the most widely used being the Spitfire Mark V, of which 6,479 were built. The original version first used for active service in 1938 had a top speed of approximately 580 km per hour; while one of the last models used in the later stages of the Second World War – the Spitfire XIV – had a top speed capability of 710 km per hour. Spitfires were used continually by the Royal Air Force, later purely as surveillance planes (to monitor activity overhead though carrying no armament), until 1954 when the last model was retired.

G In his home town, Reginald Joseph Mitchell C.B.E. is today remembered in a number of ways. A combined theatre and education centre ‘The Mitchell Memorial Theatre’ bears his name, and the city museum, at the entrance of which stands a bronze statue of Mitchell, displays an authentic and complete Spitfire as part of its collection. In addition, a local high school is named after him; as is a major roadway and he is locally recognised as one of the most significant historical sons of the town.

Questions 12-17
Complete the flowchart below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 12 and 17 on your answer sheet.

Step 1: Development of the (12)……… first established Mitchell as fighter plane engineer

Step 2: The (13)……………………… developed but deemed inadequate

Step 3: The 300 developed – financed by (14)………………………..

Step 4: Prototype spitfire flown in 1936

Step 5: First used by the RAF in (15)………………………………

Step 6: Smith and his team developed many variations of the original spitfire

Step 7: During the second world war (16)…………………. Spitfires of different models and types produced altogether

Step 8: Use continued for (17)………….. purposes until 1954

Questions 18-20
According to the information in the passage, classify the following information as relating to:
A the Supermarine SB
B the Spitfire
C neither the Supermarine SB or the Spitfire
D both the Supermarine SB and the Spitfire

Write the correct letter, A, B or C in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet
18. Its development was commissioned by the Air Ministry
19. Mitchell was awarded the CBE due to its development.
20. It was innovative for its time

Questions 21-25
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 21-25 on your answer sheet.NB You may use any letter more than once.

21. Where the Royal Air Force showed faith in Mitchell’s engineering capability without complete evidence.
22. Where Mitchell’s involvement influenced a business purchase
23 How Mitchell has been honoured since his death.
24. details of specific differences between spitfire models
25. details of what differentiated the Spitfire from other alternatives.

Nature’s Most Violent Wind

A Tornados have been observed in every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica. Hurricanes differ from tornadoes, in that the former develop in warm, tropical oceans whereas tornados develop on land and are more aggressive and potentially destructive. The majority of tornados are initiated by thunderstorms. Tornados are relatively common occurrences at differing magnitudes throughout the world. The geographical features of the U.S.A. lend themselves to high incidence of tornado activity. In that country the highest proportion of tornados occur in the southern states in spring from March to May and in the northern states from late spring extending into summer. Generally tornados travel from southwest to northeast, though neither time of year nor direction they will take is completely predictable.

B Several factors cause the U.S.A. to experience a high incidence of tornado formation. While the continent reaches from arctic areas in the north to a tropical climate in the south there is no barrier protection from significant mountain ranges in the east or west; however, the Rocky Mountains in the middle latitudes of the country obstruct atmospheric flow and moisture. In addition, drier air from the southwest deserts and low level moisture from the Gulf of Mexico meet in the area, many collisions of warm and cool air occur and optimum conditions for tornado formation are created. Tornados in this central part of the U.S.A. are so prolific that the area has been named Tornado Alley, the site of the highest number of powerful tornados in the country and throughout the world. In the USA alone, in an average year 1200 tornados occur causing 70 fatalities and 1500 injuries and in addition extensive
damage to property and natural vegetation.

C Connected between a cloud base above (usually cumulonimbus) and the earth below, a tornado is a rapidly rotating column of air; they can be as much as 20 kilometres in height. The majority are less than 75 metres in diameter reaching wind speeds of less than 177kms per hour and travel less than 10 kilometres before dissipating; however, some of the larger and rarer of this type of weather phenomenon may reach wind speeds of more than 480kms/hour traveling more than 100 kilometers before cessation. The inside of a tornado is made up of descending air and this is surrounded by a spiraling upward current which has the ability to carry with it and destroy even substantial obstacles such as tress, cars and houses in its path. Scientific research and eyewitness accounts indicate that most tornados also possess a calm centre in their core, surrounded by the layers of the downward and upward currents of air; this core has been likened to the peaceful central ‘eye’ at the centre of a tropical cyclone or hurricane.

D A tornado itself is not necessarily visible; though the intense low pressure it causes often results in condensation of water vapour which forms into a noticeable condensation funnel. Colours of tornados are also dictated by the environment in which they form. The force of the swirling air causes them to pick up dirt as they travel across the landscape; those with minimal debris remaining grey or white turning darker blue the more they collect, while others in areas such the Great Plains in the USA turn red in colour due to the red soil they collect and carry with them. Background lighting in which a tornado presents itself also affects the naked eye’s ability to identify its form as it appears on the horizon. When viewing a tornado with the sun behind it, it will appear to be dark in colour; however, when viewed without the sun in the background, the same tornado appears to be grey or white. On the rare occasions that tornados occur after dark, they pose an increased level of danger as darkness can make them invisible and only radar warnings or possibly sound can warn those in their path that a tornado is on its way.

E Tornados are classified into three levels of intensity; these being weak, strong and violent. 88% of tornados occurring in the USA are classified into the first category making them the most common; they account for less than 5% of fatalities resulting from tornado activity, generally reach wind speeds of less than 177kms/hour and have a duration of between 1 and 10 minutes before cessation. In contrast, ‘violent’ tornados exceed 330 kilometres per hour, can continue for over an hour and while they account for only 1% of incidence of tornados they result in approximately 70% of resultant deaths. The greatest devastation to date, inflicted on the USA by a violent tornado was on March 18th, 1925. The tornado was the longest, fastest and widest tornado known to have formed in North America and resulted in 695 deaths, an additional 2279 being injured. Now known as the Tri-state Tornado, it travelled over 350 kilometres affecting 13 counties in the three different states of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Around 11% of tornados are classified as ‘strong’ tornados. These tornados account for slightly more than 25% of tornado-related fatal accidents and reach mid-range speeds of between 177 and 330 kilometres per hour with an average duration of around 20 minutes.

F Today in the USA, early warning systems, which cannot necessarily protect property in the path of a tornado, can allow people time to leave the area and therefore significantly reduce death tolls. However in countries such as Bangladesh, fatalities caused by tornado impact remain extremely high. The rural, central region of the country also experiences a high frequency of strong tornados and the danger is exacerbated due to its densely populated areas, lack of warning systems and vulnerability of building structures. Between 1967 and 1996 the Bangladesh Observer and Pakistan Observer reported 5,373 tornado related deaths: an average of 179.1 per year. The Manikganj Tornado which occurred in 1989 is thought to have caused as a many as 1300 deaths and is known as the deadliest tornado to have occurred anywhere in the world. Many projects delivered by organizations such as the Asian Disaster Reduction Centre (ADRC) have been established with the aim of minimising devastation and death rates caused by tornados in such areas.

Questions 26-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answer in boxes 26-30 on your answer sheet.

26. Hurricanes are described as
A. more hostile than tornados and occurring in the sea
B. occurring on land and less harmful than tornados
C. less damaging than tornados and occurring in marine environments
D. only occurring in certain oceans with a fiercer effect than a tornado

27. Tornados in the USA
A. occur only in spring and summer
B. continually travel from southwest to northeast
C. are less prevalent in winter
D. are experienced exclusively by the southern and northern states

28. Tornados are common in the USA because
A. the Rocky Mountains inhibit cold air from the north and warm air from the south making contact
B. because warm, humid air which builds up meets cooler air without interference
C. of the high incidence of thunderstorms which are experienced in central USA
D. warm air from the tropics allows optimum conditions to develop

29. Tornados may be very light in colour if
A. the observer stands with their back to the sun
B. they occur at night
C. they occur in the Great Plains of the USA
D. they pick up substantial dirt on their journey

30. Tornados in Bangladesh
A. are of greater intensity than in USA
B. can now be effectively predicted
C. occur mainly in urban areas
D. cause extensive damage due to sociological factors

Questions 31-35
Label the diagram below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet.

Questions 36-40
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

Classification	Weak	Strong	Violent
Incidence	make up (36)……………….of tornados in the USA	make up about (37)………………of tornados in the USA	make up the smallest minority of tornados in the USA
Wind speed	less than 177 k/hr	between 177 and 330 k/hr	more than 330 k/hr
Lifespan	1-10 minutes	20 minutes	can last for (38)………………..
Impact	cause less than 5% of tornado related deaths	cause just over (39)……………..of tornado related deaths	the most violent example in the USA was the (40)………………….

The secret of staying young

Pheidole dentata, a native ant of the south-eastern U.S., isn’t immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn’t seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can do everything just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. ‘We get a picture that these ants really don’t decline,’ says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University.

Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. Naked mole rats can live for almost 30 years and stay fit for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate with age just like people do. Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organised colonies. ‘It’s this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people,’ says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives.

In the lab, P. dentata worker ants typically live for around 140 days. Giraldo focused on ants at four age ranges: 20 to 22 days, 45 to 47 days, 95 to 97 days and 120 to 122 days. Unlike all previous studies, which only estimated how old the ants were, her work tracked the ants from the time the pupae became adults, so she knew their exact ages. Then she put them through a range of tests.

Giraldo watched how well the ants took care of the young of the colony, recording how often each ant attended to, carried and fed them. She compared how well 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants followed the telltale scent that the insects usually leave to mark a trail to food. She tested how ants responded to light and also measured how active they were by counting how often ants in a small dish walked across a line. And she experimented with how ants react to live prey: a tethered fruit fly. Giraldo expected the older ants to perform poorly in all these tasks. But the elderly insects were all good caretakers and trail-followers—the 95-day-old ants could track the scent even longer than their younger counterparts. They all responded to light well, and the older ants were more active. And when it came to reacting to prey, the older ants attacked the poor fruit fly just as aggressively as the young ones did, flaring their mandibles or pulling at the fly’s legs.

Then Giraldo compared the brains of 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants, identifying any cells that were close to death. She saw no major differences with age, nor was there any difference in the location of the dying cells, showing that age didn’t seem to affect specific brain functions. Ants and other insects have structures in their brains called mushroom bodies, which are important for processing information, learning and memory. She also wanted to see if aging affects the density of synaptic complexes within these structures—regions where neurons come together. Again, the answer was no. What was more, the old ants didn’t experience any drop in the levels of either serotonin or dopamine—brain chemicals whose decline often coincides with aging. In humans, for example, a decrease in serotonin has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

‘This is the first time anyone has looked at both behavioral and neural changes in these ants so thoroughly,’ says Giraldo, who recently published the findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists have looked at some similar aspects in bees, but the results of recent bee studies were mixed—some studies showed age-related declines, which biologists call senescence, and others didn’t. ‘For now, the study raises more questions than it answers,’ Giraldo says, ‘including how P. dentata stays in such good shape.’

Also, if the ants don’t deteriorate with age, why do they die at all? Out in the wild, the ants probably don’t live for a full 140 days thanks to predators, disease and just being in an environment that’s much harsher than the comforts of the lab. ‘The lucky ants that do live into old age may suffer a steep decline just before dying,’ Giraldo says, but she can’t say for sure because her study wasn’t designed to follow an ant’s final moments.

‘It will be important to extend these findings to other species of social insects,’ says Gene E. Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This ant might be unique, or it might represent a broader pattern among other social bugs with possible clues to the science of aging in larger animals. Either way, it seems that for these ants, age really doesn’t matter.

Questions 1 – 8
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answer in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

Ysabel Giraldo’s research

Focused on a total of (1)………………different age groups of ants, analysing

Behaviour:
• how well ants looked after their (2)………………
• their ability to locate (3)……………..using a scent trail
• the effect that (4)………….had on them
• how (5)………………they attacked prey

Brains:
• comparison between age and the (6)……………….of dying cells in the brains of ants
• condition of synaptic complexes (areas in which (7)……………….meet) in the brain’s ‘mushroom bodies’
• level of two (8)…………….in the brain associated with ageing

Questions 9 – 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                        if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                      if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN           if there is no information on this

9 Pheidole dentata ants are the only known animals which remain active for almost their whole lives.
10 Ysabel Giraldo was the first person to study Pheidole dentata ants using precise data about the insects’ ages.
11 The ants in Giraldo’s experiments behaved as she had predicted that they would.
12 The recent studies of bees used different methods of measuring age- related decline.
13 Pheidole dentata ants kept in laboratory conditions tend to live longer lives.

Why zoos are good

A In my view, it is perfectly possible for many species of animals living in zoos or wildlife parks to have a quality of life as high as, or higher than, in the wild. Animals in good zoos get a varied and high-quality diet with all the supplements required, and any illnesses they might have will be treated. Their movement might be somewhat restricted, but they have a safe environment in which to live, and they are spared bullying and social ostracism by others of their kind. They do not suffer from the threat or stress of predators, or the irritation and pain of parasites or injuries. The average captive animal will have a greater life expectancy compared with its wild counterpart, and will not die of drought, of starvation or in the jaws of a predator. A lot of very nasty things happen to truly ‘wild’ animals that simply don’t happen in good zoos, and to view a life that is ‘free’ as one that is automatically ‘good’ is, I think, an error. Furthermore, zoos serve several key purposes.

B Firstly, zoos aid conservation. Colossal numbers of species are becoming extinct across the world, and many more are increasingly threatened and therefore risk extinction. Moreover, some of these collapses have been sudden, dramatic and unexpected, or were simply discovered very late in the day. A species protected in captivity can be bred up to provide a reservoir population against a population crash or extinction in the wild. A good number of species only exist in captivity, with many of these living in zoos. Still more only exist in the wild because they have been reintroduced from zoos, or have wild populations that have been boosted by captive bred animals. Without these efforts there would be fewer species alive today. Although reintroduction successes are few and far between, the numbers are increasing, and the very fact that species have been saved or reintroduced as a result of captive breeding proves the value of such initiatives.

C Zoos also provide education. Many children and adults, especially those in cities, will never see a wild animal beyond a fox or pigeon. While it is true that television documentaries are becoming ever more detailed and impressive, and many natural history specimens are on display in museums, there really is nothing to compare with seeing a living creature in the flesh, hearing it, smelling it, watching what it does and having the time to absorb details. That alone will bring a greater understanding and perspective to many, and hopefully give them a greater appreciation for wildlife, conservation efforts and how they can contribute.

D In addition to this, there is also the education that can take place in zoos through signs, talks and presentations which directly communicate information to visitors about the animals they are seeing and their place in the world. This was an area where zoos used to be lacking, but they are now increasingly sophisticated in their communication and outreach work. Many zoos also work directly to educate conservation workers in other countries, or send their animal keepers abroad to contribute their knowledge and skills to those working in zoos and reserves, thereby helping to improve conditions and reintroductions all over the world.

E Zoos also play a key role in research. If we are to save wild species and restore and repair ecosystems we need to know about how key species live, act and react. Being able to undertake research on animals in zoos where there is less risk and fewer variables means real changes can be effected on wild populations. Finding out about, for example, the oestrus cycle of an animal or its breeding rate helps us manage wild populations. Procedures such as capturing and moving at-risk or dangerous individuals are bolstered by knowledge gained in zoos about doses for anaesthetics, and by experience in handling and transporting animals. This can make a real difference to conservation efforts and to the reduction of human-animal conflicts, and can provide a knowledge base for helping with the increasing threats of habitat destruction and other problems.

F In conclusion, considering the many ongoing global threats to the environment, it is hard for me to see zoos as anything other than essential to the long-term survival of numerous species. They are vital not just in terms of protecting animals, but as a means of learning about them to aid those still in the wild, as well as educating and informing the general population about these animals and their world so that they can assist or at least accept the need to be more environmentally conscious. Without them, the world would be, and would increasingly become, a much poorer place.

Questions 14 – 17
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

14 a reference to how quickly animal species can die out
15 reasons why it is preferable to study animals in captivity rather than in the wild
16 mention of two ways of learning about animals other than visiting them in zoos
17 reasons why animals in zoos may be healthier than those in the wild

Questions 18 – 22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                           if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                         if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN              if there is no information on this

18 An animal is likely to live longer in a zoo than in the wild.
19 There are some species in zoos which can no longer be found in the wild.
20 Improvements in the quality of TV wildlife documentaries have resulted in increased numbers of zoo visitors.
21 Zoos have always excelled at transmitting information about animals to the public.
22 Studying animals in zoos is less stressful for the animals than studying them in the wild.

Questions 23 and 24
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are stated about zoo staff in the text?
A Some take part in television documentaries about animals.
B Some travel to overseas locations to join teams in zoos.
C Some get experience with species in the wild before taking up zoo jobs.
D Some teach people who are involved with conservation projects.
E Some specialise in caring for species which are under threat.

Questions 25 and 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of these beliefs about zoos does the writer mention in the text?
A They can help children overcome their fears of wild animals.
B They can increase public awareness of environmental issues.
C They can provide employment for a range of professional people.
D They can generate income to support wildlife conservation projects.
E They can raise animals which can later be released into the wild.

READING PASSAGE 3

Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are things just very, very bad?

Rochman is a member of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis’s marine-debris working group, a collection of scientists who study, among other things, the growing problem of marine debris, also known as ocean trash. Plenty of studies have sounded alarm bells about the state of marine debris; in a recent paper published in the journal Ecology, Rochman and her colleagues set out to determine how many of those perceived risks are real.

Often, Rochman says, scientists will end a paper by speculating about the broader impacts of what they’ve found. For example, a study could show that certain seabirds eat plastic bags, and go on to warn that whole bird populations are at risk of dying out. ‘But the truth was that nobody had yet tested those perceived threats,’ Rochman says. ‘There wasn’t a lot of information.’

Rochman and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris that were published through 2013. Within each paper, they asked what threats scientists had studied – 366 perceived threats in all – and what they’d actually found.

In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of ocean trash were proven true. In the remaining cases, the working group found the studies had weaknesses in design and content which affected the validity of their conclusions – they lacked a control group, for example, or used faulty statistics.

Strikingly, Rochman says, only one well-designed study failed to find the effect it was looking for, an investigation of mussels ingesting microscopic plastic bits. The plastic moved from the mussels’ stomachs to their bloodstreams, scientists found, and stayed there for weeks – but didn’t seem to stress out the shellfish.

While mussels may be fine eating trash, though, the analysis also gave a clearer picture of the many ways that ocean debris is bothersome.

Within the studies they looked at, most of the proven threats came from plastic debris, rather than other materials like metal or wood. Most of the dangers also involved large pieces of debris – animals getting entangled in trash, for example, or eating it and severely injuring themselves.

But a lot of ocean debris is ‘microplastic’, or pieces smaller than five millimeters. These may be ingredients used in cosmetics and toiletries, fibers shed by synthetic clothing in the wash, or eroded remnants of larger debris. Compared to the number of studies investigating large-scale debris, Rochman’s group found little research on the effects of these tiny bits. ‘There are a lot of open questions still for microplastic,’ Rochman says, though she notes that more papers on the subject have been published since 2013, the cutoff point for the group’s analysis.

There are also, she adds, a lot of open questions about the ways that ocean debris can lead to sea-creature death. Many studies have looked at how plastic affects an individual animal, or that animal’s tissues or cells, rather than whole populations. And in the lab, scientists often use higher concentrations of plastic than what’s really in the ocean. None of that tells us how many birds or fish or sea turtles could die from plastic pollution – or how deaths in one species could affect that animal’s predators, or the rest of the ecosystem.

‘We need to be asking more ecologically relevant questions,’ Rochman says. Usually, scientists don’t know exactly how disasters such as a tanker accidentally spilling its whole cargo of oil and polluting huge areas of the ocean will affect the environment until after they’ve happened. ‘We don’t ask the right questions early enough,’ she says. But if ecologists can understand how the slow-moving effect of ocean trash is damaging ecosystems, they might be able to prevent things from getting worse.

Asking the right questions can help policy makers, and the public, figure out where to focus their attention. The problems that look or sound most dramatic may not be the best places to start. For example, the name of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ – a collection of marine debris in the northern Pacific Ocean – might conjure up a vast, floating trash island. In reality though, much of the debris is tiny or below the surface; a person could sail through the area without seeing any trash at all. A Dutch group called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ is currently working on plans to put mechanical devices in the Pacific Garbage Patch and similar areas to suck up plastic. But a recent paper used simulations to show that strategically positioning the cleanup devices closer to shore would more effectively reduce pollution over the long term.

‘I think clearing up some of these misperceptions is really important,’ Rochman says. Among scientists as well as in the media, she says, ‘A lot of the images about strandings and entanglement and all of that cause the perception that plastic debris is killing everything in the ocean.’ Interrogating the existing scientific literature can help ecologists figure out which problems really need addressing, and which ones they’d be better off- like the mussels – absorbing and ignoring.

Questions 27 – 33
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                       if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                     if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN          if there is no information on this

27 Rochman and her colleagues were the first people to research the problem of marine debris.
28 The creatures most in danger from ocean trash are certain seabirds.
29 The studies Rochman has reviewed have already proved that populations of some birds will soon become extinct.
30 Rochman analysed papers on the different kinds of danger caused by ocean trash.
31 Most of the research analysed by Rochman and her colleagues was badly designed.
32 One study examined by Rochman was expecting to find that mussels were harmed by eating plastic.
33 Some mussels choose to eat plastic in preference to their natural diet.

Questions 34 – 39
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.

Findings related to marine debris

Studies of marine debris found the biggest threats were
• plastic (not metal or wood)
• bits of debris that were (34)……………..(harmful to animals)

There was little research into (35)……………….e.g. from synthetic fibres.

Drawbacks of the studies examined
• most of them focused on individual animals, not entire 36
• the (37)…………………….of plastic used in the lab did not always reflect those in the ocean
• there was insufficient information on
– numbers of animals which could be affected
– the impact of a reduction in numbers on the (38)……………….of that species
– the impact on the ecosystem

Rochman says more information is needed on the possible impact of future (39)………….(e.g. involving oil).

Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

40 What would be the best title for this passage?
A Assessing the threat of marine debris
B Marine debris: who is to blame?
C A new solution to the problem of marine debris
D Marine debris: the need for international action

The concept of intelligence

A Looked at in one way, everyone knows what intelligence is; looked at in another way, no one does. In other words, people all have unconscious notions – known as ‘implicit theories’ – of intelligence, but no one knows for certain what it actually is. This chapter addresses how people conceptualize intelligence, whatever it may actually be. But why should we even care what people think intelligence is, as opposed only to valuing whatever it actually is? There are at least four reasons people’s conceptions of intelligence matter.

B First, implicit theories of intelligence drive the way in which people perceive and evaluate their own intelligence and that of others. To better understand the judgments people make about their own and others’ abilities, it is useful to learn about people’s implicit theories. For example, parents’ implicit theories of their children’s language development will determine at what ages they will be willing to make various corrections in their children’s speech. More generally, parents’ implicit theories of intelligence will determine at what ages they believe their children are ready to perform various cognitive tasks. Job interviewers will make hiring decisions on the basis of their implicit theories of intelligence. People will decide who to be friends with on the basis of such theories. In sum, knowledge about implicit theories of intelligence is important because this knowledge is so often used by people to make judgments in the course of their everyday lives.

C Second, the implicit theories of scientific investigators ultimately give rise to their explicit theories. Thus it is useful to find out what these implicit theories are. Implicit theories provide a framework that is useful in defining the general scope of a phenomenon – especially a not-well-understood phenomenon. These implicit theories can suggest what aspects of the phenomenon have been more or less attended to in previous investigations.

D Third, implicit theories can be useful when an investigator suspects that existing explicit theories are wrong or misleading. If an investigation of implicit theories reveals little correspondence between the extant implicit and explicit theories, the implicit theories may be wrong. But the possibility also needs to be taken into account that the explicit theories are wrong and in need of correction or supplementation. For example, some implicit theories of intelligence suggest the need for expansion of some of our explicit theories of the construct.

E Finally, understanding implicit theories of intelligence can help elucidate developmental and cross-cultural differences. As mentioned earlier, people have expectations for intellectual performances that differ for children of different ages. How these expectations differ is in part a function of culture. For example, expectations for children who participate in Western-style schooling are almost certain to be different from those for children who do not participate in such schooling.

F I have suggested that there are three major implicit theories of how intelligence relates to society as a whole (Sternberg, 1997). These might be called Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. These views are not based strictly, but rather, loosely, on the philosophies of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, three great statesmen in the history of the United States.

G The Hamiltonian view, which is similar to the Platonic view, is that people are born with different levels of intelligence and that those who are less intelligent need the good offices of the more intelligent to keep them in line, whether they are called government officials or, in Plato’s term, philosopher-kings. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) seem to have shared this belief when they wrote about the emergence of a cognitive (high-IQ) elite, which eventually would have to take responsibility for the largely irresponsible masses of non-elite (low-IQ) people who cannot take care of themselves. Left to themselves, the unintelligent would create, as they always have created, a kind of chaos.

H The Jeffersonian view is that people should have equal opportunities, but they do not necessarily avail themselves equally of these opportunities and are not necessarily equally rewarded for their accomplishments. People are rewarded for what they accomplish, if given equal opportunity. Low achievers are not rewarded to the same extent as high achievers. In the Jeffersonian view, the goal of education is not to favor or foster an elite, as in the Hamiltonian tradition, but rather to allow children the opportunities to make full use of the skills they have. My own views are similar to these (Sternberg, 1997).

I The Jacksonian view is that all people are equal, not only as human beings but in terms of their competencies – that one person would serve as well as another in government or on a jury or in almost any position of responsibility. In this view of democracy, people are essentially intersubstitutable except for specialized skills, all of which can be learned. In this view, we do not need or want any institutions that might lead to favoring one group over another.

J Implicit theories of intelligence and of the relationship of intelligence to society perhaps need to be considered more carefully than they have been because they often serve as underlying presuppositions for explicit theories and even experimental designs that are then taken as scientific contributions. Until scholars are able to discuss their implicit theories and thus their assumptions, they are likely to miss the point of what others are saying when discussing their explicit theories and their data.

Questions 1 – 3
Reading Passage 1 has ten sections, A-J.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

1 information about how non-scientists’ assumptions about intelligence influence their behaviour towards others
2 a reference to lack of clarity over the definition of intelligence
3 the point that a researcher’s implicit and explicit theories may be very different

Questions 4 – 6
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 4-6 on your answer sheet, write

YES                          if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO                            if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN         if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

4 Slow language development in children is likely to prove disappointing to their parents.
5 People’s expectations of what children should gain from education are universal.
6 Scholars may discuss theories without fully understanding each other.

Questions 7 – 13
Look at the following statements (Questions 7-13) and the list of theories below. Match each statement with the correct theory, A, B, or C.
Write the correct letter, A, B, or C, in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

7 It is desirable for the same possibilities to be open to everyone.
8 No section of society should have preferential treatment at the expense of another.
9 People should only gain benefits on the basis of what they actually achieve.
10 Variation in intelligence begins at birth.
11 The more intelligent people should be in positions of power.
12 Everyone can develop the same abilities.
13 People of low intelligence are likely to lead uncontrolled lives.

List of Theories
A Hamiltonian
B Jeffersonian
C Jacksonian

Saving bugs to find new drugs

A More drugs than you might think are derived from, or inspired by, compounds found in living things. Looking to nature for the soothing and curing of our ailments is nothing new – we have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. You only have to look at other primates – such as the capuchin monkeys who rub themselves with toxin-oozing millipedes to deter mosquitoes, or the chimpanzees who use noxious forest plants to rid themselves of intestinal parasites – to realise that our ancient ancestors too probably had a basic grasp of medicine.

B Pharmaceutical science and chemistry built on these ancient foundations and perfected the extraction, characterisation, modification and testing of these natural products. Then, for a while, modern pharmaceutical science moved its focus away from nature and into the laboratory, designing chemical compounds from scratch. The main cause of this shift is that although there are plenty of promising chemical compounds in nature, finding them is far from easy. Securing sufficient numbers of the organism in question, isolating and characterising the compounds of interest, and producing large quantities of these compounds are all significant hurdles.

C Laboratory-based drug discovery has achieved varying levels of success, something which has now prompted the development of new approaches focusing once again on natural products. With the ability to mine genomes for useful compounds, it is now evident that we have barely scratched the surface of nature’s molecular diversity. This realisation, together with several looming health crises, such as antibiotic resistance, has put bioprospecting – the search for useful compounds in nature – firmly back on the map.

D Insects are the undisputed masters of the terrestrial domain, where they occupy every possible niche. Consequently, they have a bewildering array of interactions with other organisms, something which has driven the evolution of an enormous range of very interesting compounds for defensive and offensive purposes. Their remarkable diversity exceeds that of every other group of animals on the planet combined. Yet even though insects are far and away the most diverse animals in existence, their potential as sources of therapeutic compounds is yet to be realised.

E From the tiny proportion of insects that have been investigated, several promising compounds have been identified. For example, alloferon, an antimicrobial compound produced by blow fly larvae, is used as an antiviral and antitumor agent in South Korea and Russia. The larvae of a few other insect species are being investigated for the potent antimicrobial compounds they produce. Meanwhile, a compound from the venom of the wasp Polybia paulista has potential in cancer treatment.

F Why is it that insects have received relatively little attention in bioprospecting? Firstly, there are so many insects that, without some manner of targeted approach, investigating this huge variety of species is a daunting task. Secondly, insects are generally very small, and the glands inside them that secrete potentially useful compounds are smaller still. This can make it difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of the compound for subsequent testing. Thirdly, although we consider insects to be everywhere, the reality of this ubiquity is vast numbers of a few extremely common species. Many insect species are infrequently encountered and very difficult to rear in captivity, which, again, can leave us with insufficient material to work with.

G My colleagues and I at Aberystwyth University in the UK have developed an approach in which we use our knowledge of ecology as a guide to target our efforts. The creatures that particularly interest us are the many insects that secrete powerful poison for subduing prey and keeping it fresh for future consumption. There are even more insects that are masters of exploiting filthy habitats, such as faeces and carcasses, where they are regularly challenged by thousands of micro¬organisms. These insects have many antimicrobial compounds for dealing with pathogenic bacteria and fungi, suggesting that there is certainly potential to find many compounds that can serve as or inspire new antibiotics.

H Although natural history knowledge points us in the right direction, it doesn’t solve the problems associated with obtaining useful compounds from insects. Fortunately, it is now possible to snip out the stretches of the insect’s DNAthat carry the codes for the interesting compounds and insert them into cell lines that allow larger quantities to be produced. And although the road from isolating and characterising compounds with desirable qualities to developing a commercial product is very long and full of pitfalls, the variety of successful animal-derived pharmaceuticals on the market demonstrates there is a precedent here that is worth exploring.

I With every bit of wilderness that disappears, we deprive ourselves of potential medicines. As much as I’d love to help develop a groundbreaking insect-derived medicine, my main motivation for looking at insects in this way is conservation. I sincerely believe that all species, however small and seemingly insignificant, have a right to exist for their own sake. If we can shine a light on the darker recesses of nature’s medicine cabinet, exploring the useful chemistry of the most diverse animals on the planet, I believe we can make people think differently about the value of nature.

Questions 14 – 20
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-l.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

14 mention of factors driving a renewed interest in natural medicinal compounds
15 how recent technological advances have made insect research easier
16 examples of animals which use medicinal substances from nature
17 reasons why it is challenging to use insects in drug research
18 reference to how interest in drug research may benefit wildlife
19 a reason why nature-based medicines fell out of favour for a period
20 an example of an insect-derived medicine in use at the moment

Questions 21 and 22

Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following make insects interesting for drug research?
A the huge number of individual insects in the world
B the variety of substances insects have developed to protect themselves
C the potential to extract and make use of insects’ genetic codes
D the similarities between different species of insect
E the manageable size of most insects

Questions 23 – 26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

Research at Aberystwyth University

Ross Piper and fellow zoologists at Aberystwyth University are using their expertise in (23)……………..when undertaking bioprospecting with insects. They are especially interested in the compounds that insects produce to overpower and preserve their (24)…………………They are also interested in compounds which insects use to protect themselves from pathogenic bacteria and fungi found in their (25)………………Piper hopes that these substances will be useful in the development of drugs such as (26)………………

The power of play

Virtually every child, the world over, plays. The drive to play is so intense that children will do so in any circumstances, for instance when they have no real toys, or when parents do not actively encourage the behavior. In the eyes of a young child, running, pretending, and building are fun. Researchers and educators know that these playful activities benefit the development of the whole child across social, cognitive, physical, and emotional domains. Indeed, play is such an instrumental component to healthy child development that the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (1989) recognized play as a fundamental right of every child.

Yet, while experts continue to expound a powerful argument for the importance of play in children’s lives, the actual time children spend playing continues to decrease. Today, children play eight hours less each week than their counterparts did two decades ago (Elkind 2008). Under pressure of rising academic standards, play is being replaced by test preparation in kindergartens and grade schools, and parents who aim to give their preschoolers a leg up are led to believe that flashcards and educational ‘toys’ are the path to success. Our society has created a false dichotomy between play and learning.

Through play, children learn to regulate their behavior, lay the foundations for later learning in science and mathematics, figure out the complex negotiations of social relationships, build a repertoire of creative problem-solving skills, and so much more. There is also an important role for adults in guiding children through playful learning opportunities.

Full consensus on a formal definition of play continues to elude the researchers and theorists who study it. Definitions range from discrete descriptions of various types of play such as physical, construction, language, or symbolic play (Miller & Almon 2009), to lists of broad criteria, based on observations and attitudes, that are meant to capture the essence of all play behaviors (e.g. Rubin et al. 1983).

A majority of the contemporary definitions of play focus on several key criteria. The founder of the National Institute for Play, Stuart Brown, has described play as ‘anything that spontaneously is done for its own sake’. More specifically, he says it ‘appears purposeless, produces pleasure and joy, [and] leads one to the next stage of mastery’ (as quoted in Tippett 2008). Similarly, Miller and Almon (2009) say that play includes ‘activities that are freely chosen and directed by children and arise from intrinsic motivation’. Often, play is defined along a continuum as more or less playful using the following set of behavioral and dispositional criteria (e.g. Rubin et al. 1983):

Play is pleasurable: Children must enjoy the activity or it is not play. It is intrinsically motivated: Children engage in play simply for the satisfaction the behavior itself brings. It has no extrinsically motivated function or goal. Play is process oriented: When children play, the means are more important than the ends. It is freely chosen, spontaneous and voluntary. If a child is pressured, they will likely not think of the activity as play. Play is actively engaged: Players must be physically and/or mentally involved in the activity. Play is non-literal. It involves make-believe.

According to this view, children’s playful behaviors can range in degree from 0% to 100% playful. Rubin and colleagues did not assign greater weight to any one dimension in determining playfulness; however, other researchers have suggested that process orientation and a lack of obvious functional purpose may be the most important aspects of play (e.g. Pellegrini 2009).

From the perspective of a continuum, play can thus blend with other motives and attitudes that are less playful, such as work. Unlike play, work is typically not viewed as enjoyable and it is extrinsically motivated (i.e. it is goal oriented). Researcher Joan Goodman (1994) suggested that hybrid forms of work and play are not a detriment to learning; rather, they can provide optimal contexts for learning. For example, a child may be engaged in a difficult, goal-directed activity set up by their teacher, but they may still be actively engaged and intrinsically motivated. At this mid-point between play and work, the child’s motivation, coupled with guidance from an adult, can create robust opportunities for playful learning.

Critically, recent research supports the idea that adults can facilitate children’s learning while maintaining a playful approach in interactions known as ‘guided play’ (Fisher et al. 2011). The adult’s role in play varies as a function of their educational goals and the child’s developmental level (Hirsch-Pasek et al. 2009).

Guided play takes two forms. At a very basic level, adults can enrich the child’s environment by providing objects or experiences that promote aspects of a curriculum. In the more direct form of guided play, parents or other adults can support children’s play by joining in the fun as a co-player, raising thoughtful questions, commenting on children’s discoveries, or encouraging further exploration or new facets to the child’s activity. Although playful learning can be somewhat structured, it must also be child-centered (Nicolopolou et al. 2006). Play should stem from the child’s own desire.

Both free and guided play are essential elements in a child-centered approach to playful learning. Intrinsically motivated free play provides the child with true autonomy, while guided play is an avenue through which parents and educators can provide more targeted learning experiences. In either case, play should be actively engaged, it should be predominantly child-directed, and it must be fun.

Questions 27 – 31
Look at the following statements (Questions 27-31) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-G.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

27 Play can be divided into a number of separate categories.
28 Adults’ intended goals affect how they play with children.
29 Combining work with play may be the best way for children to learn.
30 Certain elements of play are more significant than others.
31 Activities can be classified on a scale of playfulness.

List of Researchers
A Elkind
B Miller &Almon
C Rubin et al.
D Stuart Brown
E Pellegrini
F Joan Goodman
G Hirsch-Pasek et al.

Questions 32 – 36
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet, write

YES                       if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO                         if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN      if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32 Children need toys in order to play.
33 It is a mistake to treat play and learning as separate types of activities.
34 Play helps children to develop their artistic talents.
35 Researchers have agreed on a definition of play.
36 Work and play differ in terms of whether or not they have a target.

Questions 37 – 40
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

Guided play

In the simplest form of guided play, an adult contributes to the environment in which the child is playing. Alternatively, an adult can play with a child and develop the play, for instance by (37)…………….the child to investigate different aspects of their game. Adults can help children to learn through play, and may make the activity rather structured, but it should still be based on the child’s (38)………………..to play. Play without the intervention of adults gives children real (39)…………………..; with adults, play can be (40)…………………at particular goals. However, all forms of play should be an opportunity for children to have fun.

Alexander Henderson

Alexander Henderson was born in Scotland in 1831 and was the son of a successful merchant. His grandfather, also called Alexander, had founded the family business, and later became the first chairman of the National Bank of Scotland. The family had extensive landholdings in Scotland. Besides its residence in Edinburgh, it owned Press Estate, 650 acres of farmland about 35 miles southeast of the city. The family often stayed at Press Castle, the large mansion on the northern edge of the property, and Alexander spent much of his childhood in the area, playing on the beach near Eyemouth or fishing in the streams nearby.

Even after he went to school at Murcheston Academy on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Henderson returned to Press at weekends. In 1849 he began a three-year apprenticeship to become an accountant. Although he never liked the prospect of a business career, he stayed with it to please his family. In October 1855, however, he emigrated to Canada with his wife Agnes Elder Robertson and they settled in Montreal.

Henderson learned photography in Montreal around the year 1857 and quickly took it up as a serious amateur. He became a personal friend and colleague of the Scottish-Canadian photographer William Notman. The two men made a photographic excursion to Niagara Falls in 1860 and they cooperated on experiments with magnesium flares as a source of artificial light in 1865. They belonged to the same societies and were among the founding members of the Art Association of Montreal. Henderson acted as chairman of the association’s first meeting, which was held in Notman’s studio on 11 January 1860.

In spite of their friendship, their styles of photography were quite different. While Notman’s landscapes were noted for their bold realism, Henderson for the first 20 years of his career produced romantic images, showing the strong influence of the British landscape tradition. His artistic and technical progress was rapid and in 1865 he published his first major collection of landscape photographs. The publication had limited circulation (only seven copies have ever been found), and was called Canadian Views and Studies. The contents of each copy vary significantly and have proved a useful source for evaluating Henderson’s early work.

In 1866, he gave up his business to open a photographic studio, advertising himself as a portrait and landscape photographer. From about 1870 he dropped portraiture to specialize in landscape photography and other views. His numerous photographs of city life revealed in street scenes, houses, and markets are alive with human activity, and although his favourite subject was landscape he usually composed his scenes around such human pursuits as farming the land, cutting ice on a river, or sailing down a woodland stream. There was sufficient demand for these types of scenes and others he took depicting the lumber trade, steamboats and waterfalls to enable him to make a living. There was little competing hobby or amateur photography before the late 1880s because of the time-consuming techniques involved and the weight of the equipment. People wanted to buy photographs as souvenirs of a trip or as gifts, and catering to this market, Henderson had stock photographs on display at his studio for mounting, framing, or inclusion in albums.

Henderson frequently exhibited his photographs in Montreal and abroad, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York, and Philadelphia. He met with greater success in 1877 and 1878 in New York when he won first prizes in the exhibition held by E and H T Anthony and Company for landscapes using the Lambertype process. In 1878 his work won second prize at the world exhibition in Paris.

In the 1870s and 1880s Henderson travelled widely throughout Quebec and Ontario, in Canada, documenting the major cities of the two provinces and many of the villages in Quebec. He was especially fond of the wilderness and often travelled by canoe on the Blanche, du Lievre, and other noted eastern rivers. He went on several occasions to the Maritimes and in 1872 he sailed by yacht along the lower north shore of the St Lawrence River. That same year, while in the lower St Lawrence River region, he took some photographs of the construction of the Intercolonial Railway. This undertaking led in 1875 to a commission from the railway to record the principal structures along the almost-completed line connecting Montreal to Halifax. Commissions from other railways followed. In 1876 he photographed bridges on the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway between Montreal and Ottawa. In 1885 he went west along the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) as far as Rogers Pass in British Columbia, where he took photographs of the mountains and the progress of construction.

In 1892 Henderson accepted a full-time position with the CPR as manager of a photographic department which he was to set up and administer. His duties included spending four months in the field each year. That summer he made his second trip west, photographing extensively along the railway line as far as Victoria. He continued in this post until 1897, when he retired completely from photography.

When Henderson died in 1913, his huge collection of glass negatives was stored in the basement of his house. Today collections of his work are held at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, and the McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal.

Questions 1 – 8
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                      if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                    if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN         if there is no information on this

1 Henderson rarely visited the area around Press estate when he was younger.
2 Henderson pursued a business career because it was what his family wanted.
3 Henderson and Notman were surprised by the results of their 1865 experiment.
4 There were many similarities between Henderson’s early landscapes and those of Notman.
5 The studio that Henderson opened in 1866 was close to his home.
6 Henderson gave up portraiture so that he could focus on taking photographs of scenery.
7 When Henderson began work for the Intercolonial Railway, the Montreal to Halifax line had been finished.
8 Henderson’s last work as a photographer was with the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Questions 9 – 13
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

Alexander Henderson

Early life
• was born in Scotland in 1831 – father was a (9)…………….
• trained as an accountant, emigrated to Canada in 1855

Start of a photographic career
• opened up a photographic studio in 1866
• took photos of city life, but preferred landscape photography
• people bought Henderson’s photos because photography took up considerable time and the (10)…………… was heavy
• the photographs Hederson sold were (11)……………….or souvenirs

Travelling as a professional photographer
• travelled widely in Quebec and Ontario in 1870s and 1880s
• took many trips along eastern rivers in a (12)……………..
• worked for Canadian railways between 1875 and 1897
• worked for CPR in 1885 and photographed the (13)…………….and the railway at Rogers Pass

Back to the future of skyscraper design

A The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years of research and award-winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The crisis in building design is already here,’ said Short. ‘Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.’

B Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public buildings are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the ‘life support’ system of vast air conditioning units. Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems, which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively marketed’ by their inventors.

C Short points out that to make most contemporary buildings habitable, they have to be sealed and air conditioned. The energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and largely unnecessary. Buildings in the West account for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions, and the rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate. Short regards glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers as symbols of status, rather than practical ways of meeting our requirements.

D Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier-20th centuries, including the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built to the designs of John Shaw Billings, including the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US city of Baltimore (1873-1889). ‘We spent three years digitally modelling Billings’ final designs,’ says Short. ‘We put pathogens in the airstreams, modelled for someone with tuberculosis (TB) coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept other patients safe from harm.

E ‘We discovered that 19th-century hospital wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour – that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles now. Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.’ Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air.

F Much of the ingenuity present in 19th-century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the lethal threat of miasmas – toxic air that spread disease. Miasmas were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages right through to the cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Foul air, rather than germs, was believed to be the main driver of ‘hospital fever’, leading to disease and frequent death. The prosperous steered clear of hospitals. While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last 30 years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

G Today, huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are given over to air conditioning. ‘But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens. To go forward into our new low-energy, low-carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy, high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned.’

H Successful examples of Short’s approach include the Queen’s Building at De Montfort University in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria, each seating more than 150 people. The award-winning building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK. Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next 20 or 30 years if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected.

I He is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate. He and his team have worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn. Short looks at how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.

Questions 14 – 18
Reading Passage 2 has nine sections, A-l.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14 why some people avoided hospitals in the 19th century
15 a suggestion that the popularity of tall buildings is linked to prestige
16 a comparison between the circulation of air in a 19th-century building and modern standards
17 how Short tested the circulation of air in a 19th-century building
18 an implication that advertising led to the large increase in the use of air conditioning

Questions 19 – 26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19-26 on your answer sheet.

Ventilation in 19th-century hospital wards

Professor Alan Short examined the work of John Shaw Billings, who influenced the architectural (19)…………….. of hospitals to ensure they had good ventilation. He calculated that (20)……………in the air coming from patients suffering from (21)……………..would not have harmed other patients. He also found that the air in (22)…………………in hospitals could change as often as in a modern operating theatre. He suggests that energy use could be reduced by locating more patients in (23)……………..areas. A major reason for improving ventilation in 19th-century hospitals was the demand from the (24)……………for protection against bad air, known as (25)………………..These were blamed for the spread of disease for hundreds of years, including epidemics of (26)……………..in London and Paris in the middle of the 19th century.

Why companies should welcome disorder

A Organisation is big business. Whether it is of our lives – all those inboxes and calendars – or how companies are structured, a multi-billion dollar industry helps to meet this need. We have more strategies for time management, project management and self-organisation than at any other time in human history. We are told that we ought to organise our company, our home life, our week, our day and even our sleep, all as a means to becoming more productive. Every week, countless seminars and workshops take place around the world to tell a paying public that they ought to structure their lives in order to achieve this. This rhetoric has also crept into the thinking of business leaders and entrepreneurs, much to the delight of self-proclaimed perfectionists with the need to get everything right. The number of business schools and graduates has massively increased over the past 50 years, essentially teaching people how to organise well.

B Ironically, however, the number of businesses that fail has also steadily increased. Work-related stress has increased. A large proportion of workers from all demographics claim to be dissatisfied with the way their work is structured and the way they are managed. This begs the question: what has gone wrong? Why is it that on paper the drive for organisation seems a sure shot for increasing productivity, but in reality falls well short of what is expected?

C This has been a problem for a while now. Frederick Taylor was one of the forefathers of scientific management. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, he designed a number of principles to improve the efficiency of the work process, which have since become widespread in modern companies. So the approach has been around for a while.

D New research suggests that this obsession with efficiency is misguided. The problem is not necessarily the management theories or strategies we use to organise our work; it’s the basic assumptions we hold in approaching how we work. Here it’s the assumption that order is a necessary condition for productivity. This assumption has also fostered the idea that disorder must be detrimental to organisational productivity. The result is that businesses and people spend time and money organising themselves for the sake of organising, rather than actually looking at the end goal and usefulness of such an effort.

E What’s more, recent studies show that order actually has diminishing returns. Order does increase productivity to a certain extent, but eventually the usefulness of the process of organisation, and the benefit it yields, reduce until the point where any further increase in order reduces productivity. Some argue that in a business, if the cost of formally structuring something outweighs the benefit of doing it, then that thing ought not to be formally structured. Instead, the resources involved can be better used elsewhere.

F In fact, research shows that, when innovating, the best approach is to create an environment devoid of structure and hierarchy and enable everyone involved to engage as one organic group. These environments can lead to new solutions that, under conventionally structured environments (filled with bottlenecks in terms of information flow, power structures, rules, and routines) would never be reached.

G In recent times companies have slowly started to embrace this disorganisation. Many of them embrace it in terms of perception (embracing the idea of disorder, as opposed to fearing it) and in terms of process (putting mechanisms in place to reduce structure). For example, Oticon, a large Danish manufacturer of hearing aids, used what it called a ‘spaghetti’ structure in order to reduce the organisation’s rigid hierarchies. This involved scrapping formal job titles and giving staff huge amounts of ownership over their own time and projects. This approach proved to be highly successful initially, with clear improvements in worker productivity in all facets of the business. In similar fashion, the former chairman of General Electric embraced disorganisation, putting forward the idea of the ‘boundaryless’ organisation. Again, it involves breaking down the barriers between different parts of a company and encouraging virtual collaboration and flexible working. Google and a number of other tech companies have embraced (at least in part) these kinds of flexible structures, facilitated by technology and strong company values which glue people together.

H A word of warning to others thinking of jumping on this bandwagon: the evidence so far suggests disorder, much like order, also seems to have diminishing utility, and can also have detrimental effects on performance if overused. Like order, disorder should be embraced only so far as it is useful. But we should not fear it – nor venerate one over the other. This research also shows that we should continually question whether or not our existing assumptions work.

Questions 27 – 34
Reading Passage 3 has eight sections, A-H.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Complaints about the impact of a certain approach
ii Fundamental beliefs that are in fact incorrect
iii Early recommendations concerning business activities
iv Organisations that put a new approach into practice
v Companies that have suffered from changing their approach
vi What people are increasingly expected to do
vii How to achieve outcomes that are currently impossible
viii Neither approach guarantees continuous improvement
ix Evidence that a certain approach can have more disadvantages than advantages

27 Section A
28 Section B
29 Section C
30 Section D
31 Section E
32 Section F
33 Section G
34 Section H

Questions 35 – 37
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 35-37 on your answer sheet.

35 Numerous training sessions are aimed at people who feel they are not…………….enough.
36 Being organised appeals to people who regard themselves as………………
37 Many people feel…………….with aspects of their work.

Questions 38 – 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                       if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                     if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN          if there is no information on this

38 Both businesses and people aim at order without really considering its value.
39 Innovation is most successful if the people involved have distinct roles.
40 Google was inspired to adopt flexibility by the success of General Electric.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILDREN’S PLAY

Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes, she’s creating an enchanting world. Although she isn’t aware of it, this fantasy is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for creativity and so it will have important repercussions in her adult life.

Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools with her younger brother. When she bosses him around as his ‘teacher’, she’s practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. Later on, when they tire of this and settle down with a board game, she’s learning about the need to follow rules and take turns with a partner.

‘Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,’ says Dr David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. ‘It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.’

Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the 19th century.

But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play, pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. ‘The opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce,’ he says. Outdoor play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, as well as parents’ increased wish to protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis on ‘earlier is better’ which is leading to greater competition in academic learning and schools.

International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop policies concerned with children’s right to play, and to consider implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.

‘The type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable – but, as soon as you ask a five-year-old “to play”, then you as the researcher have intervened,’ explains Dr Sara Baker. ‘And we want to know what the long-term impact of play is. It’s a real challenge.’

Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little data on the impact it has on the child’s later life.

Now, thanks to the university’s new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.

‘A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children’s self-control,’ explains Baker. ‘This is our ability to develop awareness of our own thinking processes – it influences how effectively we go about undertaking challenging activities.’

In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she found that children with greater self-control solved problems more quickly when exploring an unfamiliar set-up requiring scientific reasoning. ‘This sort of evidence makes us think that giving children the chance to play will make them more successful problem-solvers in the long run.’

If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the researchers, it could be extremely significant for educational practices, because the ability to self-regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.

Gibson adds: ‘Playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional development. In my previous research, I investigated how observing children at play can give us important clues about their well-being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.’

Whitebread’s recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting children’s writing. ‘Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.’ Children wrote longer and better-structured stories when they first played with dolls representing characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with Lego , with similar results. ‘Many teachers commented that they had always previously had children saying they didn’t know what to write about. With the Lego building, however, not a single child said this through the whole year of the project.’

Whitebread, who directs PEDAL, trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1970s, when, as he describes, ‘the teaching of young children was largely a quiet backwater, untroubled by any serious intellectual debate or controversy.’ Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly debated topics such as school starting age.

‘Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It’s regarded as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with “work”. Let’s not lose sight of its benefits, and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology. Let’s make sure children have a rich diet of play experiences.’

Questions 1 – 8
Complete the notes below. Choose ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Children’s Play

Uses of children’s play
– building a magical kingdom may help develop (1)………………..
– board games involve (2)…………….and turn-taking

Recent changes affecting children’s play
– populations of (3)…………….have grown
– opportunities for free play are limited due to
– fear of (4)……………
– fear of (5)……………
– increased (6)………………in schools

International policies on children’s play
– it is difficult to find (7)…………….to support new policies
– research needs to study the impact of play on the rest of the child’s (8)……………..

Questions 9 – 13

Do the following statements agree with the following information given in the Reading Passage?

In the boxes 9-13 write

TRUE                        if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                      if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN           if there is no information on this

9. Children with good self-control are known to be likely to do well at school later on.
10. The way a child plays may provide information about possible medical problems.
11. Playing with dolls was found to benefit girls’ writing more than boys’ writing.
12. Children had problems thinking up ideas when they first created the story with Lego.
13. People nowadays regard children’s play as less significant than they did in the past.

The growth of bike-sharing schemes around the world

A The original idea for an urban bike-sharing scheme dates back to a summer’s day in Amsterdam in 1965. Provo, the organisation that came up with the idea, was a group of Dutch activists who wanted to change society. They believed the scheme, which was known as the Witte Fietsenplan, was an answer to the perceived threats of air pollution and consumerism. In the centre of Amsterdam, they painted a small number of used bikes white. They also distributed leaflets describing the dangers of cars and inviting people to use the white bikes. The bikes were then left unlocked at various locations around the city, to be used by anyone in need of transport.

B Luud Schimmelpennink, a Dutch industrial engineer who still lives and cycles in Amsterdam, was heavily involved in the original scheme. He recalls how the scheme succeeded in attracting a great deal of attention – particularly when it came to publicising Provo’s aims – but struggled to get off the ground. The police were opposed to Provo’s initiatives and almost as soon as the white bikes were distributed around the city, they removed them. However, for Schimmelpennink and for bike-sharing schemes in general, this was just the beginning. The first Witte Fietsenplan was just a symbolic thing,’ he says. ‘We painted a few bikes white, that was all. Things got more serious when I became a member of the Amsterdam city council two years later.’

C Schimmelpennink seized this opportunity to present a more elaborate Witte Fietsenplan to the city council. ‘My idea was that the municipality of Amsterdam would distribute 10,000 white bikes over the city, for everyone to use,’ he explains. ‘I made serious calculations. It turned out that a white bicycle – per person, per kilometre – would cost the municipality only 10% of what it contributed to public transport per person per kilometre.’ Nevertheless, the council unanimously rejected the plan. They said that the bicycle belongs to the past. They saw a glorious future for the car,’ says Schimmelpennink. But he was not in the least discouraged.

D Schimmelpennink never stopped believing in bike-sharing, and in the mid-90s, two Danes asked for his help to set up a system in Copenhagen. The result was the world’s first large-scale bike-share programme. It worked on a deposit: ‘You dropped a coin in the bike and when you returned it, you got your money back.’ After setting up the Danish system, Schimmelpennink decided to try his luck again in the Netherlands – and this time he succeeded in arousing the interest of the Dutch Ministry of Transport. Times had changed,’ he recalls. ‘People had become more environmentally conscious, and the Danish experiment had proved that bike-sharing was a real possibility.’A new Witte Fietsenplan was launched in 1999 in Amsterdam. However, riding a white bike was no longer free; it cost one guilder per trip and payment was made with a chip card developed by the Dutch bank Postbank. Schimmelpennink designed conspicuous, sturdy white bikes locked in special racks which could be opened with the chip card – the plan started with 250 bikes, distributed over five stations.

E Theo Molenaar, who was a system designer for the project, worked alongside Schimmelpennink. ‘I remember when we were testing the bike racks, he announced that he had already designed better ones. But of course, we had to go through with the ones we had.’ The system, however, was prone to vandalism and theft. ‘After every weekend there would always be a couple of bikes missing,’ Molenaar says. ‘I really have no idea what people did with them, because they could instantly be recognised as white bikes.’ But the biggest blow came when Postbank decided to abolish the chip card, because it wasn’t profitable. That chip card was pivotal to the system,’ Molenaar says. To continue the project we would have needed to set up another system, but the business partner had lost interest.’

F Schimmelpennink was disappointed, but – characteristically – not for long. In 2002 he got a call from the French advertising corporation JC Decaux, who wanted to set up his bike-sharing scheme in Vienna. That went really well. After Vienna, they set up a system in Lyon. Then in 2007, Paris followed. That was a decisive moment in the history of bike-sharing.’ The huge and unexpected success of the Parisian bike-sharing programme, which now boasts more than 20,000 bicycles, inspired cities all over the world to set up their own schemes, all modelled on Schimmelpennink’s. ‘It’s wonderful that this happened,’ he says. ‘But financially I didn’t really benefit from it, because I never filed for a patent.’

G In Amsterdam today, 38% of all trips are made by bike and, along with Copenhagen, it is regarded as one of the two most cycle-friendly capitals in the world – but the city never got another Witte Fietsenplan. Molenaar believes this may be because everybody in Amsterdam already has a bike. Schimmelpennink, however, cannot see that this changes Amsterdam’s need for a bike-sharing scheme. ‘People who travel on the underground don’t carry their bikes around. But often they need additional transport to reach their final destination.’Although he thinks it is strange that a city like Amsterdam does not have a successful bike¬sharing scheme, he is optimistic about the future. ‘In the ’60s we didn’t stand a chance because people were prepared to give their lives to keep cars in the city. But that mentality has totally changed. Today everybody longs for cities that are not dominated by cars.’

Questions 14 – 18
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 a description of how people misused a bike-sharing scheme
15 an explanation of why a proposed bike-sharing scheme was turned down
16 a reference to a person being unable to profit from their work
17 an explanation of the potential savings a bike-sharing scheme would bring
18 a reference to the problems a bike-sharing scheme was intended to solve

Questions 19 and 20

Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 19 and 20 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about the Amsterdam bike-sharing scheme of 1999?
A It was initially opposed by a government department.
B It failed when a partner in the scheme withdrew support.
C It aimed to be more successful than the Copenhagen scheme.
D It was made possible by a change in people’s attitudes.
E It attracted interest from a range of bike designers.

Questions 21 and 22
Choose TWO letters, A-E
Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about Amsterdam today?
A The majority of residents would like to prevent all cars from entering the city.
B There is little likelihood of the city having another bike-sharing scheme.
C More trips in the city are made by bike than by any other form of transport.
D A bike-sharing scheme would benefit residents who use public transport.
E The city has a reputation as a place that welcomes cyclists.

Questions 23 – 26
Complete the summary below.Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

The first urban bike-sharing scheme

The first bike-sharing scheme was the idea of the Dutch group Provo. The people who belonged to this group were (23)……………….They were concerned about damage to the environment and about (24)…………………, and believed that the bike-sharing scheme would draw attention to these issues. As well as painting some bikes white, they handed out (25)………………….that condemned the use of cars. However, the scheme was not a great success: almost as quickly as Provo left the bikes around the city, the (26)………………..took them away. According to Schimmelpennink, the scheme was intended to be symbolic. The idea was to get people thinking about the issues.

Motivational factors and the hospitality industry

A critical ingredient in the success of hotels is developing and maintaining superior performance from their employees. How is that accomplished? What Human Resource Management (HRM) practices should organizations invest in to acquire and retain great employees?

Some hotels aim to provide superior working conditions for their employees. The idea originated from workplaces – usually in the non-service sector – that emphasized fun and enjoyment as part of work-life balance. By contrast, the service sector, and more specifically hotels, has traditionally not extended these practices to address basic employee needs, such as good working conditions.

Pfeffer (1994) emphasizes that in order to succeed in a global business environment, organizations must make investment in Human Resource Management (HRM) to allow them to acquire employees who possess better skills and capabilities than their competitors. This investment will be to their competitive advantage. Despite this recognition of the importance of employee development, the hospitality industry has historically been dominated by underdeveloped HR practices (Lucas, 2002).

Lucas also points out that ‘the substance of HRM practices does not appear to be designed to foster constructive relations with employees or to represent a managerial approach that enables developing and drawing out the full potential of people, even though employees may be broadly satisfied with many aspects of their work’ (Lucas, 2002). In addition, or maybe as a result, high employee turnover has been a recurring problem throughout the hospitality industry. Among the many cited reasons are low compensation, inadequate benefits, poor working conditions and compromised employee morale and attitudes (Maroudas et al., 2008).

Ng and Sorensen (2008) demonstrated that when managers provide recognition to employees, motivate employees to work together, and remove obstacles preventing effective performance, employees feel more obligated to stay with the company. This was succinctly summarized by Michel et al. (2013): ‘[Providing support to employees gives them the confidence to perform their jobs better and the motivation to stay with the organization.’ Hospitality organizations can therefore enhance employee motivation and retention through the development and improvement of their working conditions. These conditions are inherently linked to the working environment.

While it seems likely that employees’ reactions to their job characteristics could be affected by a predisposition to view their work environment negatively, no evidence exists to support this hypothesis (Spector et al., 2000). However, given the opportunity, many people will find something to complain about in relation to their workplace (Poulston, 2009). There is a strong link between the perceptions of employees and particular factors of their work environment that are separate from the work itself, including company policies, salary and vacations.

Such conditions are particularly troubling for the luxury hotel market, where high-quality service, requiring a sophisticated approach to HRM, is recognized as a critical source of competitive advantage (Maroudas et al., 2008). In a real sense, the services of hotel employees represent their industry (Schneider and Bowen, 1993). This representation has commonly been limited to guest experiences. This suggests that there has been a dichotomy between the guest environment provided in luxury hotels and the working conditions of their employees.

It is therefore essential for hotel management to develop HRM practices that enable them to inspire and retain competent employees. This requires an understanding of what motivates employees at different levels of management and different stages of their careers (Enz and Siguaw, 2000). This implies that it is beneficial for hotel managers to understand what practices are most favorable to increase employee satisfaction and retention.

Herzberg (1966) proposes that people have two major types of needs, the first being extrinsic motivation factors relating to the context in which work is performed, rather than the work itself. These include working conditions and job security. When these factors are unfavorable, job dissatisfaction may result. Significantly, though, just fulfilling these needs does not result in satisfaction, but only in the reduction of dissatisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008).

Employees also have intrinsic motivation needs or motivators, which include such factors as achievement and recognition. Unlike extrinsic factors, motivator factors may ideally result in job satisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008). Herzberg’s (1966) theory discusses the need for a ‘balance’ of these two types of needs.

The impact of fun as a motivating factor at work has also been explored. For example, Tews, Michel and Stafford (2013) conducted a study focusing on staff from a chain of themed restaurants in the United States. It was found that fun activities had a favorable impact on performance and manager support for fun had a favorable impact in reducing turnover. Their findings support the view that fun may indeed have a beneficial effect, but the framing of that fun must be carefully aligned with both organizational goals and employee characteristics. ‘Managers must learn how to achieve the delicate balance of allowing employees the freedom to enjoy themselves at work while simultaneously maintaining high levels of performance’ (Tews et al., 2013).

Deery (2008) has recommended several actions that can be adopted at the organizational level to retain good staff as well as assist in balancing work and family life. Those particularly appropriate to the hospitality industry include allowing adequate breaks during the working day, staff functions that involve families, and providing health and well-being opportunities.

Questions 27 – 31
Look at the following statements (Questions 27-31) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-F.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

27 Hotel managers need to know what would encourage good staff to remain.
28 The actions of managers may make staff feel they shouldn’t move to a different employer.
29 Little is done in the hospitality industry to help workers improve their skills.
30 Staff are less likely to change jobs if cooperation is encouraged.
31 Dissatisfaction with pay is not the only reason why hospitality workers change jobs.

List of Researchers
A Pfeffer
B Lucas
C Maroudas et al.
D Ng and Sorensen
E Enz and Siguaw
F Deery

Questions 32 – 35
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write

YES                           if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO                             if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN          if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32 One reason for high staff turnover in the hospitality industry is poor morale.
33 Research has shown that staff have a tendency to dislike their workplace.
34 An improvement in working conditions and job security makes staff satisfied with their jobs.
35 Staff should be allowed to choose when they take breaks during the working day.

Questions 36 – 40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

Fun at work

Tews, Michel and Stafford carried out research on staff in an American chain of (36)……………….They discovered that activities designed for staff to have fun improved their (37)………………., and that management involvement led to lower staff (38)……………….They also found that the activities needed to fit with both the company’s (39)……………….and the (40)………………..of the staff. A balance was required between a degree of freedom and maintaining work standards.

FINDING THE LOST FREEDOM

1. The private car is assumed to have widened our horizons and increased our mobility. When we consider our children’s mobility, they can be driven to more places (and more distant places) than they could visit without access to a motor vehicle. However, allowing our cities to be dominated by cars has progressively eroded children’s independent mobility. Children have lost much of their freedom to explore their own neighbourhood or city without adult supervision. In recent surveys, when parents in some cities were asked about their own childhood experiences, the majority remembered having more, or far more, opportunities for going out on their own, compared with their own children today. They had more freedom to explore their own environment.

2. Children’s independent access to their local streets may be important for their own personal, mental and psychological development. Allowing them to get to know their own neighbourhood and community gives them a ‘sense of place’. This depends on active exploration’, which is not provided for when children are passengers in cars. (Such children may see more, but they learn less.) Not only is it important that children be able to get to local play areas by themselves, but walking and cycling journeys to school and to other destinations provide genuine play activities in themselves.

3. There are very significant time and money costs for parents associated with transporting their children to school, sport and to other locations. Research in the United Kingdom estimated that this cost, in 1990, was between 10 billion and 20 billion pounds.

4. The reduction in children’s freedom may also contribute to a weakening of the sense of local community. As fewer children and adults use the streets as pedestrians, these streets become less sociable places. There is less opportunity for children and adults to have the spontaneous of the community. This in itself may exacerbate fears associated with assault and molestation of children, because there are fewer adults available who know their neighbours’ children, and who can look out for their safety.

5. The extra traffic involved in transporting children results in increased traffic congestion, pollution and accident risk. As our roads become more dangerous, more parents drive their children to more places, thus contributing to increased levels of danger for the remaining pedestrians. Anyone who has experienced either the reduced volume of traffic in peak hour during school holidays, or the traffic jams near schools at the end of a school day, will not need convincing about these points. Thus, there are also important environmental implications of children’s loss of freedom.

6. As individuals, parents strive to provide the best upbringing they can for their children. However, in doing so, (e.g. by driving their children to sport, school or recreation) parents may be contributing to a more dangerous environment for children generally. The idea that ‘streets are for cars and backyards and playgrounds are for children’ is a strongly held belief, and parents have little choice as individuals but to keep their children off the streets if they want to protect their safety.

7. In many parts of Dutch cities, and some traffic calmed precincts in Germany, residential streets are now places where cars must give way to pedestrians. In these areas, residents are accepting the view that the function of streets is not solely to provide mobility for cars. Streets may also be for social interaction, walking, cycling and playing. One of the most important aspects of these European cities, in terms of giving cities back to children, has been a range of ‘traffic calming’ initiatives, aimed at reducing the volume and speed of traffic. These initiatives have had complex interactive effects, leading to a sense that children have been able to ‘recapture’ their local neighbourhood, and more importantly, that they have been able to do this in safety. Recent research has demonstrated that children in many German cities have significantly higher levels of freedom to travel to places in their own neighbourhood or city than children in other cities in the world.

8. Modifying cities in order to enhance children’s freedom will not only benefit children. Such cities will become more environmentally sustainable, as well as more sociable and more livable for all city residents. Perhaps it will be our concern for our children’s welfare that convinces us that we need to challenge the dominance of the car in our cities.

Questions 1 – 5
Read statements 1-5 which relate to Paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 of the reading passage. Write
TRUE                        if the statement is true
FALSE                     if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN           if there is no information given in the passage.

1. The private car has helped children have more opportunities to learn.
2. Children are more independent today than they used to be.
3. Walking and cycling to school allows children to learn more.
4. Children usually walk or cycle to school.
5. Parents save time and money by driving children to school.

Questions 6 – 9
In Paragraphs 4 and 5, there are FOUR problems stated. These problems, numbered as questions 6-9, are listed below.
Each of these problems has a cause, listed A – G.

Find the correct cause for each of the problems.

Write the corresponding letter A -G, in the spaces numbered 6 – 9 on the answer sheet.

One has been done for you as an example.

There are more causes than problems so you will not use all of them and you may use any cause more than once

Problem

Example: low sense of community feeling

6. streets become less sociable
7. fewer chances for meeting friends
8. fears of danger for children
9. higher accident risk

Causes

Answer: F

A few adults know local children
B fewer people use the streets
C increased pollution
D streets are less friendly
E less traffic in school holidays
F reduced freedom for children
G more children driven to school

Questions 10 – 14
Questions 10 -14 are statement beginnings which represent information given in Paragraphs 6, 7 and 8.
In the box below, there are some statement endings numbered i-x.
Choose the correct ending for each statement.

Write your answers i – x, in the spaces numbered 10 – 14 on the answer sheet.
One has been done for you as an example.
There are more statement endings than you will need.

Example: By driving their children to school, parents help create … Answer: i

10. Children should play …
11. In some German towns, pedestrians have right of way …
12. Streets should also be used for …
13. Reducing the amount of traffic and the speed is …
14. All people who live in the city will benefit if cities are …

List of statement endings

i … a dangerous environment.
ii … modified.
iii …on residential streets.
iv … modifying cities.
v … neighbourhoods.
vi … socialising.
vii …in backyards.
viii …for cars.
ix … traffic calming.
x … residential

Investigating Children’s Language

A For over 200 years, there has been an interest in the way children learn to speak and understand their first language. Scholars carried out several small-scale studies, especially towards the end of the 19th century, using data they recorded in parental diaries. But detailed, systematic investigation did not begin until the middle decades of the 20th century when the tape recorder came into routine use. This made it possible to keep a permanent record of samples of child speech so that analysts could listen repeatedly to obscure extracts, and thus produce a detailed and accurate description. Since then, the subject has attracted enormous multi-disciplinary interest, notably from linguists and psychologists, who have used a variety of observational and experimental techniques to study the process of language acquisition in depth.

B Central to the success of this rapidly emerging field lies the ability of researchers to devise satisfactory methods for eliciting linguistic data from children. The problems that have to be faced are quite different from those encountered when working with adults. Many of the linguist’s routine techniques of enquiry cannot be used with children. It is not possible to carry out certain kinds of experiments, because aspects of children’s cognitive development – such as their ability to pay attention or to remember instructions – may not be sufficiently advanced. Nor is it easy to get children to make systematic judgments about language, a task that is virtually impossible below the age of three. And anyone who has tried to obtain even the most basic kind of data – a tape recording of a representative sample of a child’s speech – knows how frustrating this can be. Some children, it seems, are innately programmed to switch off as soon as they notice a tape recorder being switched on.

C Since the 1960s, however, several sophisticated recording techniques and experimental designs have been devised. Children can be observed and recorded through one-way-vision windows or using radio microphones so that the effects of having an investigator in the same room as the child can be eliminated. Large-scale sampling programmes have been carried out, with children sometimes being recorded for several years. Particular attention has been paid to devising experimental techniques that fall well within a child’s intellectual level and social experience. Even pre-linguistic infants have been brought into the research: acoustic techniques are used to analyse their vocalisations, and their ability to perceive the world around them is monitored using special recording equipment. The result has been a growing body of reliable data on the stages of language acquisition from birth until puberty.

D There is no single way of studying children’s language. Linguistics and psychology have each brought their own approach to the subject, and many variations have been introduced to cope with the variety of activities in which children engage, and the great age range that they present. Two main research paradigms are found.

E One of these is known as ‘naturalistic sampling’. A sample of a child’s spontaneous use of language is recorded in familiar and comfortable surroundings. One of the best places to make the recording is in the child’s own home, but it is not always easy to maintain good acoustic quality, and the presence of the researcher or the recording equipment can be a distraction (especially if the proceedings are being filmed). Alternatively, the recording can be made in a research centre, where the child is allowed to play freely with toys while talking to parents or other children, and the observers and their equipment are unobtrusive.

F A good quality, representative, naturalistic sample is generally considered an ideal datum for child language study. However, the method has several limitations. These samples are informative about speech production, but they give little guidance about children’s comprehension of what they hear around them. Moreover, samples cannot contain everything, and they can easily miss some important features of a child’s linguistic ability. They may also not provide enough instances of a developing feature to enable the analyst to make a decision about the way the child is learning. For such reasons, the description of samples of child speech has to be supplemented by other methods.

G The other main approach is through experimentation, and the methods of experimental psychology have been widely applied to child language research. The investigator formulates a specific hypothesis about children’s ability to use or understand an aspect of language and devises a relevant task for a group of subjects to undertake. A statistical analysis is made of the subjects’ behaviour, and the results provide evidence that supports or falsifies the original hypothesis.

H Using this approach, as well as other methods of controlled observation, researchers have come up with many detailed findings about the production and comprehension of groups of children. However, it is not easy to generalise the findings of these studies. What may obtain in a carefully controlled setting may not apply in the rush of daily interaction. Different kinds of subjects, experimental situations, and statistical procedures may produce different results or interpretations. Experimental research is, therefore, a slow, painstaking business; it may take years before researchers are convinced that all variables have been considered and a finding is genuine.

Questions 15 – 19
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraphs contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

NB. You may use any letter more than once.

15 the possibility of carrying out research on children before they start talking
16 the difficulties in deducing theories from systematic experiments
17 the differences between analysing children’s and adults’ language
18 the ability to record children without them seeing the researcher
19 the drawbacks of recording children in an environment they know

Questions 20 – 23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                         if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                       if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN           if there is no information on this

20 In the 19th century, researchers studied their own children’s language.
21 Attempts to elicit very young children’s opinions about language are likely to fail.
22 Radio microphones are used because they enable researchers to communicate with a number of children in different rooms.
23 Many children enjoy the interaction with the researcher.

Question 24 – 28
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-28 on your answer sheet.

Ways of investigating children’s language
One method of carrying out research is to record children’s spontaneous language use. This can be done in their homes, where, however, it may be difficult to ensure that the recording is of acceptable 24………………… Another venue which is often used is a 25……………….., where the researcher can avoid distracting the child. A drawback of this method is that it does not allow children to demonstrate their comprehension. An alternative approach is to use methodology from the field of 26………………… In this case, a number of children are asked to carry out a 27 ……………….., and the results are subjected to a 28…………………

An Era of Abundance

Our knowledge of the complex pathways underlying digestive processes is rapidly expanding, although there is still a great deal we do not fully understand. On the one hand, digestion, like any other major human biological system, is astonishing in its intricacy and cleverness. Our bodies manage to extract the complex resources needed to survive, despite sharply varying conditions, while at the same time, filtering out a multiplicity of toxins.

On the other hand, our bodies evolved in a very different era. Our digestive processes, in particular, are optimized for a situation that is dramatically dissimilar to the one we find ourselves in. For most of our biological heritage, there was a high likelihood that the next foraging or hunting season (and for a brief, relatively recent period, the next planting season) might be catastrophically lean. So it made sense for our bodies to hold on to every possible calorie. Today, this biological strategy is extremely counterproductive. Our outdated metabolic programming underlies our contemporary epidemic of obesity and fuels pathological processes of degenerative disease such as coronary artery disease, and type II diabetes.

Up until recently (on an evolutionary time scale), it was not in the interest of the species for old people like myself (I was born in 1948) to use up the limited resources of the clan. Evolution favored a short life span – life expectancy was 37 years only two centuries ago – so these restricted reserves could be devoted to the young, those caring for them, and laborers strong enough to perform intense physical work.

We now live in an era of great material abundance. Most work requires mental effort rather than physical exertion. A century ago, 30 percent of the U.S. workforce worked on farms, with another 30 percent deployed in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent. The significant majority of today’s job categories, ranging from airline flight attendant to web designer, simply didn’t exist a century ago.

Our species has already augmented the “natural” order of our life cycle through our technology: drugs, supplements, replacement parts for virtually all bodily systems, and many other interventions. We already have devices to replace our hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists, jaws, teeth, skin, arteries, veins, heart valves, arms, legs, feet, fingers, and toes. Systems to replace more complex organs (for example, our hearts) are beginning to work. As we’re learning the principles of operation of the human body and the brain, we will soon be in a position to design vastly superior systems that will be more enjoyable, last longer, and perform better, without susceptibility to breakdown, disease, and aging.

In a famous scene from the movie, The Graduate, Benjamin’s mentor gives him career advice in a single word: “plastics.” Today, that word might be “software,” or “biotechnology,” but in another couple of decades, the word is likely to be “nanobots.” Nanobots – blood-cell-sized robots – will provide the means to radically redesign our digestive systems, and, incidentally, just about everything else.

In an intermediate phase, nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, call for needed additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local area network, and send the rest of the food we eat on its way to be passed through for elimination.

If this seems futuristic, keep in mind that intelligent machines are already making their way into our blood stream. There are dozens of projects underway to create blood -stream-based “biological microelectromechanical systems” (bioMEMS) with a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications. BioMEMS devices are being designed to intelligently scout out pathogens and deliver medications in very precise ways.

For example, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago has created a tiny capsule with pores measuring only seven nanometers. The pores let insulin out in a controlled manner but prevent antibodies from invading the pancreatic Islet cells inside the capsule. These nanoengineered devices have cured rats with type I diabetes, and there is no reason that the same methodology would fail to work in humans. Similar systems could precisely deliver dopamine to the brain for Parkinson’s patients, provide blood – clotting factors for patients with hemophilia, and deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor sites. A new design provides up to 20 substance- containing reservoirs that can release their cargo at programmed times and locations in the body. A new world is on the horizon and you will be part of it.

Questions 29 – 36
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

In the past it was essential to hoard our calories for as long as possible because our food source was mainly restricted to 29 __________ and 30__________ which brought in irregular supplies. However, these reserves were intended for 31__________ because they had the power and energy to work hard. Nowadays, the focus has moved away from jobs on 32__________ and in 33__________ to jobs that weren’t available 34__________ . Through technology, it has now become possible to replace many body 35__________ and as techniques improve we will be able to develop better 36__________ .

Questions 37 – 40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below.

In the future, a nanobot’s ability to redesign our digestive system will be 37__________ . One function is the intelligent 38__________ of the exact nutritional requirements needed. If this all seems to be fantasy, consider a tiny machine already developed that has now been used in the treatment of 39__________ However, this has not been tried on 40__________

A Parkinson’s
B haemophilia
C diabetes
D humans
E radical
F rats
G extract
H radically
I extraction
J cells

Wind Power

The power of the wind has been used for centuries to directly drive various machines to perform such tasks as grinding wheat or pumping water. Recently, however, the wind has joined other natural forces such as water and steam as a viable method of generating electricity.

Traditional means of electricity generation using coal or oil-fueled plants have two major drawbacks; they pollute the environment and the fuels they use are inefficient and non-renewable. In response to growing environmental awareness, there have been calls for a greener alternative. Nuclear power, while more efficient and less polluting, is seen by many people as unacceptable, because of the danger of accidents such as those that happened at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Wind power, however, is clean, renewable and, with modern advances, surprisingly efficient.

In the 1970s Britain was in the forefront of research into wind power. The interest in wind diminished in the 1980s due to cheap North Sea oil, a strong pro-nuclear lobby and pricing structures that made it uneconomical to set up wind farms. Britain, the windiest country in Europe, had to wait until 1991 for its first wind farm. Located at Delabole in Cornwall, the farm was originally the idea of locals who opposed the construction of a nuclear power plant nearby and decided to set up a private company to generate power for the area using the wind. They had to fight opposition from local government and other local residents, who thought the turbines would be noisy and might interfere with television signals, but eventually, after showing local officials working wind farms in Denmark, they won and now there are 10 huge white wind turbines on the Delabole hills.

It is in Germany and Denmark that the greatest advances in wind power have come. Germany alone produces half of the wind generated electricity in Europe. Every year Germany adds 400 Megawatts (Mw) of capacity. In 2000 alone capacity expanded by 1669 Mw. Denmark now produces 30% of its electricity from wind power and this is predicted to rise to 50% by 2010. Both countries have encouraged this growth by “fixed feed tariffs” which guarantee a good price for private wind power operators.

The UK is catching up and the government has set a target 10% of all electricity to come from renewable sources by 2010, half of this to be from wind power. The 900 wind turbines in operation generate 400Mw of electricity and to meet the target roughly 400Mw will need to be added each year. With the advances in technology, this is technically possible. Each turbine can now produce 400 Kilowatts (KW) compared to only 70 KW at the start of the 1980s. It will, however, need help from the government. This is being done by offering financial support and giving private power companies targets to meet.

Because many people feel wind farms spoil the view and, also, because the wind is stronger at sea, many wind farms are now being built offshore. They are usually built a few kilometres off the coast in shallow water. The construction and maintenance costs are higher, but electricity output is higher. The first in Britain was built in 2000 at Blyth, north of Newcastle, and was the largest in the world until May 2001, when a 20 turbine farm was opened at Middelgruden off Copenhagen. There are plans to construct up to 18 more in the UK by 2010. Together they will produce 800 Mw of electricity annually.

The use of wind power is far less advanced in the USA. Only .5% of America’s power comes from the wind, although it is estimated that this could be increased to as high as 12% with no changes to the power grid. However, there is an increased interest in wind power. There are plans to build a huge offshore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod on the North East seaboard. The farm will take up over 25 square miles, have 170 turbines and produce 420Mw at a cost of $600m. If constructed, it will be the world’s second biggest wind farm, after the 520Mw farm planned in Ireland.

Questions 1 – 2
Choose the best answer to the questions below.

1. People do not like coal and oil powered power production because …
A it damages the environment.
B it is wasteful.
C eventually it will run out.
D all of the above.

2. Wind power …
A has only been used recently.
B promotes environmental awareness.
C cleans the environment.
D is not wasteful.

Questions 3 – 7
Complete the following summary of the third paragraph from the above reading passage using ONE OR TWO WORDS from the reading texts.

British Wind Power.
While there was a great deal of interest in wind power in the 1970s, it (3) _______________ in the 1980s. This was mainly due to intense support for (4) _______________ power and little help in making wind power affordable. So, even though Britain has some of the best winds in Europe, the first wind farm was only built in 1991. The farm at Delabole came out of opposition by (5) _______________ to a nuclear power plant. Initially, they were opposed by local officials due to fears about noise and possible obstruction to (6) ________________ . This opposition was eventually overcome only after they were shown successful examples from (7) _______________.

Questions 8 – 13
Match the country or countries below to the statements taken from the passage.

BR______ Britain
G_______ Germany
D_______ Denmark
US______ The United States
IRE______ Ireland
N________ None of the countries

8. Plans to produce 5% of its power using wind power.
9. Produces 50% of its power from wind.
10. Produces very little of its power using wind.
11. Will have the world’s largest wind farm.
12. Has ambitious plans in developing its wind power capacity.
13. Was the leader in the early development of wind power.

Air Rage

A The first recorded case of an airline passenger turning seriously violent during a flight, a phenomenon now widely known as “air rage”, happened in 1947 on a flight from Havana to Miami. A drunk man assaulted another passenger and bit a flight attendant. However, the man escaped punishment because it was not then clear under whose legal control a crime committed on plane was, the country where the plane was registered or the country where the crime was committed. In 1963, at the Tokyo convention, it was decided that the laws of the country where the plane is registered take precedence.

B The frequency of air rage has expanded out of proportion to the growth of air travel. Until recently few statistic were gathered about air rage, but those that have been indicate that passengers are increasingly likely to cause trouble or engage in violent acts. For example, in 1998 there were 266 air rage incidents out of approximately four million passengers, a 400% increase from 1995. In the same period American Airlines showed a 200% rise. Air travel is predicted to rise by 5% internationally by 2010 leading to increased airport congestion. This, coupled with the flying public’s increased aggression, means that air rage may become a major issue in coming years.

C Aside from discomfort and disruption, air rage poses some very real dangers to flying. The most extreme of these is when out of control passengers enter the cockpit. This has actually happened on a number of occasions, the worst of which have resulted in the death and injury of pilots or the intruder taking control of the plane, almost resulting in crashes. In addition, berserk passengers sometimes attempt to open the emergency doors while in flight, putting the whole aircraft in danger. These are extreme examples and cases of air rage more commonly result in physical assaults on fellow passengers and crew such as throwing objects, punching, stabbing or scalding with hot coffee.

D The causes of air rage are not known for certain, but it is generally thought that factors include: passenger behavior and personality, the physical environment and changes in society. A recent study has identified the issues that start the incidents to be as follows.

Alcohol 25%
Seating 16%
Smoking 10%
Carry on luggage 9%
Flight attendants 8%
Food 5%

E One of the major causes seems to be the passenger’s behavior or their personality. Fear of flying and the feeling of powerlessness associated with flying can lead to irritable or aggressive passengers. Also, alcohol consumed on a plane pressurized to 8000ft affects the drinker more quickly and the effects are stronger. Many people do not take account of this and drinking may increase any negative reaction to the flying environment they have, which, combined with the lowering of their inhibitions, may cause air rage. Smoking withdrawal, which some liken in severity to opiate withdrawal, is another major cause of air rage incidents. Passengers caught smoking in the toilets occasionally assault flight attendants and have been known to start fires. When conflicts occur in these conditions, they can escalate into major incidents if the passenger has a violent personality or a fear of flying and because of the enclosed nature of a plane offers no option of retreat as would be natural in a “fight or flight” reaction.

F Some people feel that the physical environment of a plane can lead to air rage. Seats on most airlines have become smaller in recent years as airlines try to increase profits. This leads to uncomfortable and irritated passengers. Also, space for carry on luggage is often very small. Because up to 8% of checked in luggage is lost, misdirected or stolen, passengers have been trying to fit larger carry on items into these small storage areas and this can lead to disputes that can escalate into air rage. Airlines could also be to blame by raising passengers’ expectations too high with their marketing and advertising. Many air rage incidents start when disappointed passengers demand to be reseated. Finally, there is some evidence to show that low oxygen levels can raise aggression level and make people feel more desperate. Airlines have lowered oxygen levels to save money. Now the level of oxygen in the air that the pilots breathe is ten times higher than in cabin class.

G Another reason that has been suggested is that society is getting ruder and less patient. The increased congestion at airports, longer queues and increased delays have only added to this. In addition, some air rage incidents have been linked to the demanding nature of high achieving business people, who do not like people telling them what to do and resent the power that the cabin staff have over them. For them, a flight attendant is a waiter or waitress who should do what the passenger wants.

H The strongest calls for action to control air rage have come from pilots and aircrew. The International Transport Workers’ Federation argues that there are too many loopholes that let people escape punishment and that the penalties are too light. They want to notify all passengers of the penalties for air rage before taking off, rather than after the passenger begins to cause serious problems, when it may be too late. The Civil Aviation Organisation has been organizing international cooperation and penalties have increased in recent years. The most severe punishment so far has been a 51 month jail sentence, a fine to pay for the jet fuel used and 200 hours community service for a man who attempted to enter the cockpit and to open the emergency door of a domestic US flight.

I Various other measures are being used to control air rage. Aircrews are getting training on how to calm passengers and how to predict where incidents might result in air rage and take action to prevent this. Other measures include strengthening doors to stop people entering the cockpit, training crew in the use of plastic restraints to tie down unruly passengers and having pilots divert their planes if passengers cause problems. Banning passengers who are guilty of air rage from flying has also been tried to a lesser extent.

Questions 14 – 21
The reading passage has nine paragraphs A – I.
From the list below choose the most suitable headings for B – I.

Write the appropriate number (i – xiv) beside in boxes 14 – 21 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you do not have to use them all.

List of headings

i The traveler’s character.
ii Disproportionate growth.
iii Pilots and aircrew.
iv Additional action.
v Smaller seats.
vi Uncomfortable aeroplanes
vii Origins.
viii A major threat.
ix Demands for change.
x Business people.
xi The roots of the problem.
xii The pace of life.
xiii Links to the surroundings.
xiv Personal experience.

Example: Paragraph A     Answer: vii

14. Paragraph B
15. Paragraph C
16. Paragraph D
17. Paragraph E
18. Paragraph F
19. Paragraph G
20. Paragraph H
21. Paragraph I

Questions 22 – 27
Do the following statements agree with the information in the above reading sample text?
Mark them as follows:

TRUE                             if the statement agrees with the information in the text.
FALSE                           if the statement does not agree with the information in the text.
NOT GIVEN                if there is no information on this in the text.

22. In the first case of air rage, the man was not punished because the plane was not registered.
23. The statistics on air rage were collected by private monitoring groups.
24. The second most common catalyst for incidents is problems with seating.
25. The environment in a plane makes disagreements more likely to become serious problems.
26. Airlines have been encouraging passengers to bring more items onboard as carry-on luggage.
27. It has been impossible to ban passengers with histories of air-rage.

Antarctic Penguins

Though penguins are assumed to be native to the South Pole, only four of the seventeen species have evolved the survival adaptations necessary to live and breed in the Antarctic year round. The physical features of the Adelie, Chinstrap, Gentoo, and Emperor penguins equip them to withstand the harshest living conditions in the world. Besides these four species, there are a number of others, including the yellow feathered Macaroni penguin and the King penguin that visit the Antarctic regularly but migrate to warmer waters to breed. Penguins that live in Antarctica year round have a thermoregulation system and a survival sense that allows them to live comfortably both on the ice and in the water.

In the dark days of winter, when the Antarctic sees virtually no sunlight, the penguins that remain on the ice sheet sleep most of the day. To retain heat, penguins huddle in communities of up to 6,000 of their own species. When it’s time to create a nest, most penguins build up a pile of rocks on top of the ice to place their eggs. The Emperor penguin, however, doesn’t bother with a nest at all. The female Emperor lays just one egg and gives it to the male to protect while she goes off for weeks to feed. The male balances the egg on top of his feet, covering it with a small fold of skin called a brood patch. In the huddle, the male penguins rotate regularly so that none of the penguins have to stay on the outside of the circle exposed to the wind and cold for long periods of time. When it’s time to take a turn on the outer edge of the pack, the penguins tuck their feathers in and shiver. The movement provides enough warmth until they can head back into the inner core and rest in the warmth. In order to reduce the cold of the ice, penguins often put their weight on their heels and tails. Antarctic penguins also have complex nasal passages that prevent 80 percent of their heat from leaving the body. When the sun is out, the black dorsal plumage attracts its rays and penguins can stay warm enough to waddle or slide about alone.

Antarctic penguins spend about 75 percent of their lives in the water. A number of survival adaptations allow them to swim through water as cold as -2 degrees Celsius. In order to stay warm in these temperatures, penguins have to keep moving. Though penguins don’t fly in the air, they are often said to fly through water. Instead of stopping each time they come up for air, they use a technique called “porpoising,” in which they leap up for a quick breath while swiftly moving forward: Unlike most birds that have hollow bones for flight, penguins have evolved hard solid bones that keep them low in the water. Antarctic penguins also have unique feathers that work similarly to a waterproof diving suit. Tufts of down trap a layer of air within the feathers, preventing the water from penetrating the penguin’s skin. The pres¬sure of a deep dive releases this air, and a penguin has to rearrange the feathers through a process called “preening.” Penguins also have an amazing circulatory system, which in extremely cold waters diverts blood from the flippers and legs to the heart.

While the harsh climate of the Antarctic doesn’t threaten the survival of Antarctic penguins, overheating can be a concern, and therefore, global warming is a threat to them. Temperate species have certain physical features such as fewer feathers and less blubber to keep them cool on a hot day. African penguins have bald patches on their legs and face where excess heat can be released. The blood vessels in the penguin’s skin dilate when the body begins to overheat, and the heat rises to the surface of the body. Penguins who are built for cold winters of the Antarctic have other survival techniques for a warm day, such as moving to shaded areas or holding their fins out away from their bodies.

Questions 28 – 32
Classify the following facts as applying to:

A Antarctic penguins
B Temperature-area penguins

Write the appropriate letter, A or B, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

28 stand in large groups to keep warm
29 spend about three quarters of its time in the water
30 have feathers that keep cold water away from its skin
31 have areas of skin without feathers
32 have less blubber.

Questions 33 – 36
Complete each of the following sentences with information from the reading passage.
Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your Answer Sheet. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

33. Most penguins use ………………………… to build their nests.
34. While the male emperor penguin takes care of the egg, the female goes away to ………………………… .
35. A ……………………….. is a piece of skin that the male emperor penguin uses to protect the egg.
36. Penguins protect their feet from the cold of the ice by standing on their …………………………

Questions 37 – 40
The article mentions many facts about penguins.
Which four of the following features are things that enable them to survive in very cold water?
Write the appropriate letters A-H in boxes 37 – 40 on your Answer Sheet.

A They move through the water very quickly.
B They hold their flippers away from their bodies.
C They choose shady areas.
D When necessary, their blood moves away from the flippers and toward the heart.
E They breathe while still moving.
F The blood vessels in their skin dilate.
G They waddle and slide.
H Their feathers hold in a layer of air near the skin.