Month: May 2024

Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time

The nineteenth century was a period of great technological development in Britain, and for shipping the major changes were from wind to steam power, and from wood to iron and steel.

The fastest commercial sailing vessels of all time were clippers, three-masted ships built to transport goods around the world, although some also took passengers. From the l 840s until 1869, when the Suez Canal opened and steam propulsion was replacing sail, clippers dominated world trade. Although many were built, only one has survived more or less intact: Cutty Sark, now on display in Greenwich, southeast London.

Cutty Sark’s unusual name comes from the poem Tam O’Shanter by the Scottish poet Robert Bums. Tam, a farmer, is chased by a witch called Nannie, who is wearing a ‘cutty sark’ – an old Scottish name for a short nightdress. The witch is depicted in Cutty Sark’s figurehead – the carving of a woman typically at the front of old sailing ships. In legend, and in Burn’s poem, witches cannot cross water, so this was a rather strange choice of name for a ship.

Cutty Sark was built in Dumbarton. Scotland, in 1869, for a shipping company owned by John Willis. To carry out construction. Willis chose a new shipbuilding firm. Scott & Linton, and ensured that the contract with them put him in a very strong position. In the end, the firm was forced out of business, and the ship was finished by a competitor.

Willis’s company was active in the lea trade between China and Britain, where speed could bring shipowners both profits and prestige, so Cutty Sark was designed to make the journey more quickly than any other ship. On her maiden voyage, in 1870, she set sail from London, carrying large amounts of goods to China. She returned laden with tea, making the journey back to London in four months. However, Cutty Sark never lived up to the high expectations of her owner, as a result of bad winds and various misfortunes. On one occasion, in 1872, the ship and a rival clipper. Thermopylae, left port in China on the same day. Crossing the Indian Ocean, Cutty Sark gained a lead of over 400 miles, hut then her rudder was severely damaged in stormy seas, making her impossible to steer. The ship’s crew had the daunting task of repairing the rudder at sea, and only succeeded at the second attempt. Cutty Sark reached London a w eek after Thermopylae.

Steam ships posed a growing threat to clippers, as their speed and cargo capacity increased. In addition, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the same year that Cutty Sark was launched, had a serious impact. While steam ships could make use of the quick, direct route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, the canal was of no use to sailing ships, which needed the much stronger winds of the oceans, and so had to sail a far greater distance. Steam ships reduced the journey time between Britain and China by approximately two months.

By 1878, tea traders weren’t interested in Cutty Sark, and instead, she look on the much less prestigious work of carrying any cargo between any two ports in the world. In 1880, violence aboard the ship led ultimately to the replacement of the captain with an incompetent drunkard who stole the crew’s wages. He was suspended from service, and a new captain appointed. This marked a turnaround and the beginning of the most successful period in Cult} Sark’s working life, transporting wool from Australia to Britain. One such journey took just under 12 weeks, beating every other ship sailing that year by around a month.

The ship’s next captain, Richard Woodget. was an excellent navigator, who got the best out of both his ship and his crew. As a sailing ship. Cutty Sark depended on the strong trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and Woodget look her further south than any previous captain, bringing her dangerously close to icebergs off the southern tip of South America. I lis gamble paid off, though, and the ship was the fastest vessel in the wool trade for ten years.

As competition from steam ships increased in the 1890s, and Cutty Sark approached the end of her life expectancy, she became less profitable. She was sold to a Portuguese firm, which renamed her Ferreira. For the next 25 years, she again carried miscellaneous cargoes around the world.

Badly damaged in a gale in 1922, she was put into Falmouth harbour in southwest England, for repairs. Wilfred Dowman, a retired sea captain who owned a training vessel, recognised her and tried to buy her, but without success. She returned to Portugal and was sold to another Portuguese company. Dowman was determined, however, and offered a high price: this was accepted, and the ship returned to Falmouth the following year and had her original name restored.

Dowman used Cutty Sark as a training ship, and she continued in this role after his death. When she was no longer required, in 1954, she was transferred to dry dock at Greenw ich to go on public display. The ship suffered from fire in 2007, and again, less seriously, in 2014, but now Cutty Sark attracts a quarter of a million visitors a year.

Questions 1-8
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 Clippers were originally intended to be used as passenger ships.
2 Cutty Sark was given the name of a character in a poem.
3 The contract between John Willis and Scott & Linton favoured Willis.
4 John Willis wanted Cutty Sark to be the fastest tea clipper travelling between the UK and China.
5 Despite storm damage, Cutty Sark beat Thermopylae back to London.
6 The opening of the Suez Canal meant that steam ships could travel between Britain and China faster than clippers
7 Steam ships sometimes used the ocean route to travel between London and China.
8 Captain Woodget put Cutty Sark at risk of hitting an iceberg

Question 9-13
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

9 After 1880, Cutty Sark carried……………………………..as its main cargo during its most successful time
10 As a captain and……………………….Woodget was very skilled.
11 Ferreira went to Falmouth to repair damage that a………………………….had caused.
12 Between 1923 and 1954, Cutty Sark was used for…………………….
13 Cutty Sark has twice been damaged by………………………….in the 21st century.

Saving the soil

A More than a third of the world’s soil is endangered, according to a recent UN report. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Since soil grows 95% of our food, and sustains human life in other more surprising ways, that is a huge problem.

B Peter Groffman, from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, points out that soil scientists have been warning about the degradation of the world’s soil for decades. At the same time, our understanding of its importance to humans has grown. A single gram of healthy soil might contain 100 million bacteria, as well as other microorganisms such as viruses and fungi, living amid decomposing plants and various minerals.

That means soils do not just grow our food, but are the source of nearly all our existing antibiotics, and could be our best hope in the fight against antibiotic- resistant bacteria. Soil is also an ally against climate change: as microorganisms within soil digest dead animals and plants, they lock in their carbon content, holding three times the amount of carbon as does the entire atmosphere. Soils also store water, preventing flood damage: in the UK, damage to buildings, roads and bridges from floods caused by soil degradation costs £233 million every year.

C If the soil loses its ability to perform these functions, the human race could be in big trouble. The danger is not that the soil will disappear completely, but that the microorganisms that give it its special properties will be lost. And once this has happened, it may take the soil thousands of years to recover.

Agriculture is by far the biggest problem. In the wild, when plants grow they remove nutrients from the soil, but then when the plants die and decay these nutrients are returned directly to the soil, Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile. In the past we developed strategies to get around the problem, such as regularly varying the types of crops grown, or leaving fields uncultivated for a season.

D But these practices became inconvenient as populations grew and agriculture had to be run on more commercial lines. A solution came in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing ammonium nitrate. Farmers have been putting this synthetic fertiliser on their fields ever since.

But over the past few decades, it has become clear this was not such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the rain, releasing nitrogen into rivers. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate use of fertilisers hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty, and degrading the soil they are supposed to nourish.

E One of the people looking for a solution to this problem is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the Netherlands and now advises some of the world’s top soil scientists. He came to realise that the best way to ensure his trees flourished was to take care of the soil, and has developed a cocktail of beneficial bacteria, fungi and humus to do this. Researchers at the University of Valladolid in Spain recently used this cocktail on soils destroyed by years of fertiliser overuse. When they applied Floris’s mix to the desert-like test plots, a good crop of plants emerged that were not just healthy at the surface, but had roots strong enough to pierce dirt as hard as rock. The few plants that grew in the control plots, fed with traditional fertilisers, were small and weak.

F However, measures like this are not enough to solve the global soil degradation problem. To assess our options on a global scale we first need an accurate picture of what types of soil are out there, and the problems they face. That’s not easy. For one thing, there is no agreed international system for classifying soil. In an attempt to unify the different approaches, the UN has created the Global Soil Map project. Researchers from nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that can be fed measurements from field surveys, drone surveys, satellite imagery, lab analyses and so on to provide real-time data on the state of the soil. Within the next four years, they aim to have mapped soils worldwide to a depth of 100 metres, with the results freely accessible to all.

G But this is only a first step. We need ways of presenting the problem that bring it home to governments and the wider public, says Pamela Chasek at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, in Winnipeg, Canada. ‘Most scientists don’t speak language that policy-makers can understand and vice versa.’ Chasek and her colleagues have proposed a goal of ‘zero net land degradation’. Like the idea of carbon neutrality it is an easily understood target that can help shape expectations and encourage action.

For soils on the brink, that may be too late. Several researchers are agitating for the immediate creation of protected zones for endangered soils. One difficulty here is defining what these areas should conserve: areas where the greatest soil diversity is present? Or areas of unspoilt soils that could act as a future benchmark of quality?

Whatever, we do, if we want our soils to survive, we need to take action now.

Questions 14-17
Complete the summary below. Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Why soil degradation could be a disaster for humans
Healthy soil contains a large variety of bacteria and other microorganisms, as well as plant remains and (14)………………….., It provides us with food and also with antibiotics, and its function in storing (15)…………………………..has a significant effect on the climate. In addition, it prevents damage to property and infrastructure because it holds (16)…………………………..

If these microorganisms are lost, soil may lose its special properties. The main factor contributing to soil degradation is the (17)…………………………carried out by humans.

Questions 18-21
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F below. Write the correct letter. A-F. in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.

18 Nutrients contained in the unused parts of harvested crops
19 Synthetic fertilisers produced with the Haber-Bosch process
20 Addition of a mixture developed by Pius Floris to the soil
21 The idea of zero net soil degradation

A may improve the number and quality of plants growing there.
B may contain data from up to nine countries.
C may not be put back into the soil.
D may help governments to be more aware of soil-related issues.
E may cause damage to different aspects of the environment.
F may be better for use at a global level.

Questions 22-26
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which section contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

22 a reference to one person’s motivation for a soil-improvement project
23 an explanation of how soil stayed healthy before the development of farming
24 examples of different ways of collecting information on soil degradation
25 a suggestion for a way of keeping some types of soil safe in the near future
26 a reason why it is difficult to provide an overview of soil degradation

Book review

‘Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ This pronouncement by Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of ‘positive psychology’, summarises the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, it is obvious that the purpose of government is to promote a state of collective well-being. The only question is how to achieve it, and here positive psychology – a supposed science that not only identifies what makes people happy but also allows their happiness to be measured – can show the way. Equipped with this science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they never could in the past.

It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way of thinking, and for that very reason increasingly popular. Those who think in this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to their attention. It was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) who was more than anyone else responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Without knowing anything much of him or the school of moral theory he established – since they are by education and intellectual conviction illiterate in the history of ideas – our advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks in rejecting as outmoded and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human happiness to date.

But as William Davies notes in his recent book The Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich, lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a well-defined historical framework. Rightly, Davies begins his story with Bentham, noting that he was far more than a philosopher. Davies writes, ‘Bentham’s activities were those which we might now associate with a public sector management consultant’. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting that the departments of government be linked together through a set of ‘conversation tubes’, and to the Bank of England with a design for a printing device that could produce unforgeable bank notes. He drew up plans for a ‘frigidarium’ to keep provisions such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables fresh. His celebrated design for a prison to be known as ‘Panopticon’ in which prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while being visible at all times to the guards, was very nearly adopted. (Surprisingly Davies does not discuss the fact that Bentham meant his Panopticon not just as a model prison but also as an instrument of control that could be applied to schools and factories).

Bentham was also a pioneer of the ‘science of happiness’. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it has to be measured and Bentham suggested two ways in which this might be done. Viewing happiness as a complex of pleasurable sensations he suggest that it might be quantified by measuring the human pulse rate. Alternatively, money could be used as the standard for quantification: if two different goods have the same price, it can be claimed that they produce the same quantity of pleasure in the consumer, Bentham was more attracted by the latter measure. By associating money so closely to inner experience Davies writes, Bentham ‘set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the 20th century.

The Happiness Industry describes how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined and treated as psychological maladies. In addition, Davies shows how the belief that inner states of pleasure and displeasure can be objectively measured has informed management studies and advertising. The tendency of thinkers such as J B Watson, the founder of behaviourism, was that human beings could be shaped, or manipulated, by policymakers and managers. Watson had no factual basis for his view of human action. When he became president of the American Psychological Association in 1915, he ’had never even studied a single human being’: his research had been confined to experiments on white rats. Yet Watson’s reductive model is now widely applied, with ‘behaviour change’ becoming the goal of governments: in Britain, a ‘Behaviour Insights Team’ has been established by the government to study how people can be encouraged, at minimum cost to the public purse, to live in what are considered to be socially desirable ways.

Modern industrial societies appear to need the possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours. But whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.

Questions 27-29
Choose the correct letter, A. B, C or D

27 What is the reviewer’s attitude to advocates of positive psychology?
A They are wrong to reject the ideas of Bentham.
B They are over-influenced by their study of Bentham’s theories.
C They have a fresh new approach to ideas on human happiness.
D They are ignorant about the ideas they should be considering.

28 The reviewer refers to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in order to suggest that happiness
A may not be just pleasure and the absence of pain.
B should not be the main goal of humans.
C is not something that should be fought for.
b is not just an abstract concept.

29 According to Davies, Bentham’s suggestion for linking the price of goods to happiness was significant because
A it was the first successful way of assessing happiness.
B it established a connection between work and psychology
C it was the first successful example of psychological research.
D it involved consideration of the rights of consumers.

Questions 30-34
Complete the summary using the list of words A-G below.

Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was active in other areas besides philosophy. In the 1790s he suggested a type of technology to improve (30)…………………………… for different Government departments. He developed a new way of printing banknotes to increase (31)……………………………….and also designed a method for the (32)…………………………….of food. He also drew up plans for a prison which allowed the (33)…………………………………of prisoners at all times, and believed the same design could be used for other institutions as well. When researching happiness, he investigated possibilities for its (34)……………………………. and suggested some methods of doing this.

A measurement
B security
C implementation
E observation
F communication
G preservation

Questions 35-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

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

35 One strength of The Happiness Industry is its discussion of the relationship between psychology and economics.
36 It is more difficult to measure some emotions than others.
37 Watson’s ideas on behaviourism were supported by research on humans he carried out before 1915.
38 Watson’s ideas have been most influential on governments outside America.
39 The need for happiness is linked to industrialisation.
40 A main aim of government should be to increase the happiness of the population.

The Coconut Palm

For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in South Asia in the late 13th century, and among the mid-14th-century travel writings of Sir John Mandeville there is mention of ‘great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India). Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are cliches in the west to sell holidays, chocolate bars fizzy drinks and even romance.

Typically, we envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs that, when opened, provide sweet white flesh. But we see only part of the fruit and none of the plant from which they come. The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an important source of timber for building houses, and is increasingly being used as a replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long. The leaves have hard veins in their centres which, in many parts of the world, are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away. Immature coconut flowers are tightly clustered together among the leaves at the top of the trunk. The flower stems may be tapped for their sap to produce a drink, and the sap can also be reduced by boiling to produce a type of sugar used for cooking.

Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard, inner layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut fibre, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes. The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely used in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel. When broken in half, the shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.

Inside the shell are the nutrients (endosperm) needed by the developing seed. Initially, the endosperm is a sweetish liquid, coconut water, which is enjoyed as a drink, but also provides the hormones which encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields. As the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually solidifies to form the brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the world, as well as in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, acquired strategic importance in a quite different sphere, as Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

Their biology would appear to make coconuts the great maritime voyagers and coastal colonizers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits are able to float in water and tolerate salt, but cannot remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest after about 110 days at sea they are no longer able to germinate. Literally cast onto desert island shores, with little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun, coconut seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut seedling as it starts to grow.

There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americas before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. 16th century trade and human migration patterns reveal that Arab traders and European sailors are likely to have moved coconuts from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to the east coast of America. But the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th century sailors has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two diametrically opposed origins have been proposed: that they came from Asia, or that they were native to America. Both suggestions have problems. In Asia, there is a large degree of coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human use – but there are no relatives growing in the wild. In America, there are close coconut relatives, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous. These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.

Questions 1-8
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The Coconut Palm

Part	Description	Uses
Trunk	up to 30 meters	timber for houses and the making of (1)…………………..
Leaves	up to 6 meters long	to make brushes
Flowers	at the top of the trunk	stems provide sap, used as a drink or a source of (2)…………….
Fruits	– outer layer – middle layer (coir) – inner layer (shell) – coconut water – coconut flesh	– used for (3)………………..etc – a source of (4)………………(when halved) for (5)……………….. – a drink and a source of (6)…………………for other plants – oil and milk for cooking and (7)………………glycerine (an ingredient in (8)…………………)

Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. Write

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

9. Coconut seeds need shade in order to germinate.
10. Coconuts were probably transported to Asia from America in the 16th century.
11. Coconuts found on the west coast of America were a different type from those found on the east coast.
12. All the coconuts found in Asia are cultivated varieties.
13. Coconuts are cultivated in different ways in America and the Pacific.

How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains A Boost

A The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how ‘baby talk’ impacts on learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.

B Early language exposure seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the sweet if sometimes absurd sound of infant- directed speech influence a baby’s development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.

C Fathers don’t use baby talk as often or in the same ways as mothers – and that’s perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark Van Dam of Washington State University at Spokane and colleagues equipped parents with recording devices and speech-recognition software to study the way they interacted with their youngsters during a normal day. ‘We found that moms do exactly what you’d expect and what’s been described many times over,’ VanDam explains. ‘But we found that dads aren’t doing the same thing. Dads didn’t raise their pitch or fundamental frequency when they talked to kids.’ Their role may be rooted in what is called the bridge hypothesis, which dates back to 1975. It suggests that fathers use less familial language to provide their children with a bridge to the kind of speech they’ll hear in public. The idea is that a kid gets to practice a certain kind of speech with mom and another kind of speech with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practice,’ says VanDam.

D Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard speech,’ says Nairan Ramirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. ‘We also found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context,’ she adds. The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.’

E Another study suggests that parents might want to pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind. Researchers from McGill University and Universite du Quebec a Montreal found that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults – which may be why baby talk is such a universal tool among parents. They played repeating vowel sounds made by a special synthesizing device that mimicked sounds made by either an adult woman or another baby. This way, only the impact of the auditory cues was observed. The team then measured how long each type of sound held the infants’ attention. They found that the ‘infant’ sounds held babies’ attention nearly 40 percent longer. The baby noises also induced more reactions in the listening infants, like smiling or lip moving, which approximates sound making. The team theorizes that this attraction to other infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech. It may be some property of the sound that is just drawing their attention,’ says study co-author Linda Polka. ‘Or maybe they are really interested in that particular type of sound because they are starting to focus on their own ability to make sounds. We are speculating here but it might catch their attention because they recognize it as a sound they could possibly make.’

F In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a total of 57 babies from two slightly different age groups – seven months and eleven and a half months – were played a number of syllables from both their native language (English) and a non-native tongue (Spanish). The infants were placed in a brain- activation scanner that recorded activity in a brain region known to guide the motor movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk prompts infant brains to start practicing their language skills. Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start, and suggests that seven-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words,’ says co-author Patricia Kuhl. Another interesting finding was that while the seven-month-olds responded to all speech sounds regardless of language, the brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of non-native sounds compared to native sounds. The study may have also uncovered a process by which babies recognize differences between their native language and other tongues.

Questions 14-17
Look at the following ideas (Questions 14-17) and the list of researchers below. Match each idea with the correct researcher, A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 the importance of adults giving babies individual attention when talking to them
15 the connection between what babies hear and their own efforts to create speech
16 the advantage for the baby of having two parents each speaking in a different way
17 the connection between the amount of baby talk babies hear and how much vocalising they do themselves

List of researchers
A Mark VanDam
B Nairan Ramirez-Esparza
C Patricia Kuhl

Questions 18-23
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Research into how parents talk to babies
Researchers at Washington State University used (18)……………………………., together with specialised computer programs, to analyse how parents interacted with their babies during a normal day. The study revealed that (19)………………………..tended not to modify their ordinary speech patterns when interacting with their babies. According to an idea known as the (20)……………………………, they may use a more adult type of speech to prepare infants for the language they will hear outside the family home. According to the researchers, hearing baby talk from one parent and ‘normal’ language from the other expands the baby’s (21)………………………..of types of speech which they can practise.

Meanwhile, another study carried out by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut recorded speech and sound using special (22)…………………………that the babies were equipped with. When they studied the babies again at age two, they found that those who had heard a lot of baby talk in infancy had a much larger (23)………………………..than those who had not.

Questions 24-26
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

24 a reference to a change which occurs in babies’ brain activity before the end of their first year
25 an example of what some parents do for their baby’s benefit before birth
26 a mention of babies’ preference for the sounds that other babies make

Whatever Happened To The Harappan Civilisation?

A The Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were abandoned. The Harappan Civilisation was a sophisticated Bronze Age society who built ‘megacities’ and traded internationally in luxury craft products, and yet seemed to have left almost no depictions of themselves. But their lack of self-imagery – at a time when the Egyptians were carving and painting representations of themselves all over their temples – is only part of the mystery.

B ‘There is plenty of archaeological evidence to tell us about the rise of the Harappan Civilisation, but relatively little about its fall,’ explains archaeologist Dr Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge. ‘As populations increased, cities were built that had great baths, craft workshops, palaces and halls laid out in distinct sectors. Houses were arranged in blocks, with wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own wells and drainage systems. It was very much a “thriving civilisation.’ Then around 2100 BC, a transformation began. Streets went uncleaned, buildings started to be abandoned, and ritual structures fell out of use. After their final demise, a millennium passed before really large-scale cities appeared once more in South Asia.

C Some have claimed that major glacier-fed rivers changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply and agriculture; or that the cities could not cope with an increasing population, they exhausted their resource base, the trading economy broke down or they succumbed to invasion and conflict; and yet others that climate change caused an environmental change that affected food and water provision. ‘It is unlikely that there was a single cause for the decline of the civilisation. But the fact is, until now, we have had little solid evidence from the area for most of the key elements,’ said Petrie. ‘A lot of the archaeological debate has really only been well- argued speculation.’

D A research team led by Petrie, together with Dr Ravindanath Singh of Banaras Hindu University in India, found early in their investigations that many of the archaeological sites were not where they were supposed to be, completely altering understanding of the way that this region was inhabited in the past. When they carried out a survey of how the larger area was settled in relation to sources of water, they found inaccuracies in the published geographic locations of ancient settlements ranging from several hundred metres to many kilometres. They realised that any attempts to use the existing data were likely to be fundamentally flawed. Over the course of several seasons of fieldwork they carried out new surveys, finding an astonishing 198 settlement sites that were previously unknown.

E Now, research published by Dr Yama Dixit and Professor David Hodell, both from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, has provided the first definitive evidence for climate change affecting the plains of north-western India, where hundreds of Harappan sites are known to have been situated. The researchers gathered shells of Melanoides tuberculata snails from the sediments of an ancient lake and used geochemical analysis as a means of tracing the climate history of the region. ’As today, the major source of water into the lake is likely to have been the summer monsoon,’ says Dixit. ‘But we have observed that there was an abrupt change about 4,100 years ago, when the amount of evaporation from the lake exceeded the rainfall – indicative of a drought.’ Hodell adds: ‘We estimate that the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon climate lasted about 200 years before recovering to the previous conditions, which we still see today.’

F It has long been thought that other great Bronze Age civilisations also declined at a similar time, with a global-scale climate event being seen as the cause. While it is possible that these local-scale processes were linked, the real archaeological interest lies in understanding the impact of these larger-scale events on different environments and different populations. ‘Considering the vast area of the Harappan Civilisation with its variable weather systems,’ explains Singh, ‘it is essential that we obtain more climate data from areas close to the two great cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and also from the Indian Punjab.’

G Petrie and Singh’s team is now examining archaeological records and trying to understand details of how people led their lives in the region five millennia ago. They are analysing grains cultivated at the time, and trying to work out whether they were grown under extreme conditions of water stress, and whether they were adjusting the combinations of crops they were growing for different weather systems. They are also looking at whether the types of pottery used, and other aspects of their material culture, were distinctive to specific regions or were more similar across larger areas. This gives us insight into the types of interactive networks that the population was involved in, and whether those changed.

H Petrie believes that archaeologists are in a unique position to investigate how past societies responded to environmental and climatic change. ’By investigating responses to environmental pressures and threats, we can learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant governmental and administrative bodies, to be more proactive in issues such as the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and rural development, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the future.’

Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.

27 proposed explanations for the decline of the Harappan Civilisation
28 reference to a present-day application of some archaeological research findings
29 a difference between the Harappan Civilisation and another culture of the same period
30 a description of some features of Harappan urban design
31 reference to the discovery of errors made by previous archaeologists

Questions 32-36
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for answer.

Looking at evidence of climate change
Yama Dixit and David Hodell have found the first definitive evidence of climate change affecting the plains of north-western India thousands of years ago. By collecting the (32)……………………………of snails and analysing them, they discovered evidence of a change in water levels in a (33)……………………….in the region. This occurred when there was less (34)…………………………… than evaporation, and suggests that there was an extended period of drought.

Petrie and Singh’s team are using archaeological records to look at (35)…………………………….. from five millennia ago, in order to know whether people had adapted their agricultural practices to changing climatic conditions. They are also examining objects including (36)……………………………., so as to find out about links between inhabitants of different parts of the region and whether these changed over time.

Questions 37-40
Look at the following statements (Questions 37-40) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A. B. C or D.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

37 Finding further information about changes to environmental conditions in the region is vital.
38 Examining previous patterns of behaviour may have long-term benefits.
39 Rough calculations indicate the approximate length of a period of water shortage.
40 Information about the decline of the Harappan Civilisation has been lacking.

List of researchers 

A Cameron Petrie
B Ravindanath Singh
C Yama Dixit
D David Hodell

Bringing Cinnamon to Europe

Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent. It was known in biblical times, and is mentioned in several books of the Bible, both as an ingredient that was mixed with oils for anointing people’s bodies, and also as a token indicating friendship among lovers and friends. In ancient Rome, mourners attending funerals burnt cinnamon to create a pleasant scent. Most often, however, the spice found its primary use as an additive to food and drink. In the Middle Ages, Europeans who could afford the spice used it to flavour food, particularly meat, and to impress those around them with their ability to purchase an expensive condiment from the exotic’ East. At a banquet, a host would offer guests a plate with various spices piled upon it as a sign of the wealth at his or her disposal. Cinnamon was also reported to have health benefits, and was thought to cure various ailments, such as indigestion.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the European middle classes began to desire the lifestyle of the elite, including their consumption of spices. This led to a growth in demand for cinnamon and other spices. At that time, cinnamon was transported by Arab merchants, who closely guarded the secret of the source of the spice from potential rivals. They took it from India, where it was grown, on camels via an overland route to the Mediterranean. Their journey ended when they reached Alexandria. European traders sailed there to purchase their supply of cinnamon, then brought it back to Venice. The spice then travelled from that great trading city to markets all around Europe. Because the overland trade route allowed for only small quantities of the spice to reach Europe, and because Venice had a virtual monopoly of the trade, the Venetians could set the price of cinnamon exorbitantly high. These prices, coupled with the increasing demand, spurred the search for new routes to Asia by Europeans eager to take part in the spice trade.

Seeking the high profits promised by the cinnamon market, Portuguese traders arrived on the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean toward the end of the 15th century. Before Europeans arrived on the island, the state had organized the cultivation of cinnamon. People belonging to the ethnic group called the Salagama would peel the bark off young shoots of the cinnamon plant in the rainy season, when the wet bark was more pliable. During the peeling process, they curled the bark into the ‘stick’ shape still associated with the spice today. The Salagama then gave the finished product to the king as a form of tribute. When the Portuguese arrived, they needed to increase production significantly, and so enslaved many other members of the Ceylonese native population, forcing them to work in cinnamon harvesting. In 1518, the Portuguese built a fort on Ceylon, which enabled them to protect the island, so helping them to develop a monopoly in the cinnamon trade and generate very high profits. In the late 16th century, for example, they enjoyed a tenfold profit when shipping cinnamon over a journey of eight days from Ceylon to India.

When the Dutch arrived off the coast of southern Asia at the very beginning of the 17th century, they set their sights on displacing the Portuguese as kings of cinnamon. The Dutch allied themselves with Kandy, an inland kingdom on Ceylon. In return for payments of elephants and cinnamon, they protected the native king from the Portuguese. By 1640, the Dutch broke the 150-year Portuguese monopoly when they overran and occupied their factories. By 1658, they had permanently expelled the Portuguese from the island, thereby gaining control of the lucrative cinnamon trade.

In order to protect their hold on the market, the Dutch, like the Portuguese before them, treated the native inhabitants harshly Because of the need to boost production and satisfy Europe’s ever-increasing appetite for cinnamon, the Dutch began to alter the harvesting practices of the Ceylonese. Over time, the supply of cinnamon trees on the island became nearly exhausted, due to systematic stripping of the bark. Eventually, the Dutch began cultivating their own cinnamon trees to supplement the diminishing number of wild trees available for use.
Then, in 1796, the English arrived on Ceylon, thereby displacing the Dutch from their control of the cinnamon monopoly. By the middle of the 19th century, production of cinnamon reached 1.000 tons a year, after a lower grade quality of the spice became acceptable to European tastes By that time, cinnamon was being grown in other parts of the Indian Ocean region and in the West Indies, Brazil, and Guyana. Not only was a monopoly of cinnamon becoming impossible, but the spice trade overall was diminishing in economic potential, and was eventually superseded by the rise of trade in coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar.

Questions 1-9
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The early history of Cinnamon

Biblical times: added to (1)…………..
Used to show (2)……………………between people

Ancient Rome: used for its sweet smell at (3)………………….
Was an indication of a person’s (4)…………………….
Known as a treatment for (5)……………………………..and other health problems
Grown in (6)…………………………
Merchants used (7)……………………………to bring it to the Mediterranean
Arrived in the Mediterranean at (8)………………………
Traders took it to (9)………………………and sold it to destinations around Europe

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. 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

10. The Portuguese had control over the cinnamon trade in Ceylon throughout the 16th century.
11. The Dutch took over the cinnamon trade from the Portuguese as soon as they arrived in Ceylon.
12. The trees planted by the Dutch produced larger quantities of cinnamon than the wild trees.
13. The spice trade maintained its economic importance during the 19th century.

Oxytocin

A Oxytocin is a chemical, a hormone produced in the pituitary gland in the brain. It was through various studies focusing on animals that scientists first became aware of the influence of oxytocin. They discovered that it helps reinforce the bonds between prairie voles, which mate for life, and triggers the motherly behaviour that sheep show towards their newborn lambs. It is also released by women in childbirth, strengthening the attachment between mother and baby. Few chemicals have as positive a reputation as oxytocin, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘love hormone’. One sniff of it can, it is claimed, make a person more trusting, empathetic, generous and cooperative. It is time, however, to revise this wholly optimistic view. A new wave of studies has shown that its effects vary greatly depending on the person and the circumstances, and it can impact on our social interactions for worse as well as for better.

B Oxytocin’s role in human behaviour first emerged in 2005. In a groundbreaking experiment, Markus Heinrichs and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg, Germany, asked volunteers to do an activity in which they could invest money with an anonymous person who was not guaranteed to be honest. The team found that participants who had sniffed oxytocin via a nasal spray beforehand invested more money than those who received a placebo instead. The study was the start of research into the effects of oxytocin on human interactions. ‘For eight years, it was quite a lonesome field,’ Heinrichs recalls. ‘Now, everyone is interested.’ These follow-up studies have shown that after a sniff of the hormone, people become more charitable, better at reading emotions on others’ faces and at communicating constructively in arguments. Together, the results fuelled the view that oxytocin universally enhanced the positive aspects of our social nature.

C Then, after a few years, contrasting findings began to emerge. Simone Shamay- Tsoory at the University of Haifa, Israel, found that when volunteers played a competitive game, those who inhaled the hormone showed more pleasure when they beat other players, and felt more envy when others won. What’s more, administering oxytocin also has sharply contrasting outcomes depending on a person’s disposition. Jennifer Bartz from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, found that it improves people’s ability to read emotions, but only if they are not very socially adept to begin with. Her research also shows that oxytocin in fact reduces cooperation in subjects who are particularly anxious or sensitive to rejection.

D Another discovery is that oxytocin’s effects vary depending on who we are interacting with. Studies conducted by Carolyn DeClerck of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, revealed that people who had received a dose of oxytocin actually became less cooperative when dealing with complete strangers. Meanwhile, Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands discovered that volunteers given oxytocin showed favouritism: Dutch men became quicker to associate positive words with Dutch names than with foreign ones, for example. According to De Dreu, oxytocin drives people to care for those in their social circles and defend them from outside dangers. So, it appears that oxytocin strengthens biases, rather than promoting general goodwill, as was previously thought.

E There were signs of these subtleties from the start. Bartz has recently shown that in almost half of the existing research results, oxytocin influenced only certain individuals or in certain circumstances. Where once researchers took no notice of such findings, now a more nuanced understanding of oxytocin’s effects is propelling investigations down new lines. To Bartz, the key to understanding what the hormone does lies in pinpointing its core function rather than in cataloguing its seemingly endless effects. There are several hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive. Oxytocin could help to reduce anxiety and fear. Or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections. She believes that oxytocin acts as a chemical spotlight that shines on social clues – a shift in posture, a flicker of the eyes, a dip in the voice – making people more attuned to their social environment. This would explain why it makes us more likely to look others in the eye and improves our ability to identify emotions. But it could also make things worse for people who are overly sensitive or prone to interpreting social cues in the worst light.

F Perhaps we should not be surprised that the oxytocin story has become more perplexing. The hormone is found in everything from octopuses to sheep, and its evolutionary roots stretch back half a billion years. ‘It’s a very simple and ancient molecule that has been co-opted for many different functions,’ says Sue Carter at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. ‘It affects primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala, so it’s going to have many effects on just about everything.’ Bartz agrees. ‘Oxytocin probably does some very basic things, but once you add our higher-order thinking and social situations, these basic processes could manifest in different ways depending on individual differences and context.’

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.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 reference to research showing the beneficial effects of oxytocin on people
15 reasons why the effects of oxytocin are complex
16 mention of a period in which oxytocin attracted little scientific attention
17 reference to people ignoring certain aspects of their research data

Questions 18-20
Look at the following research findings (Questions 18-20) and the list of researchers below.
Match each research finding with the correct researcher, A-F Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.

18 People are more trusting when affected by oxytocin.
19 Oxytocin increases people’s feelings of jealousy.
20 The effect of oxytocin varies from one type of person to another.

List of researchers
A Markus Heinrichs
B Simone Shamay-Tsoory
C Jennifer Bartz
D Carolyn DeClerck
E Carsten De Dreu
F Sue Carter

Questions 21-26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

Oxytocin research

The earliest findings about oxytocin and bonding came from research involving (21)……………………….. it was also discovered that humans produce oxytocin during (22)………………………. An experiment in 2005, in which participants were given either oxytocin or a (23)………………………….reinforced the belief that the hormone had a
positive effect.

However, later research suggests that this is not always the case. A study at the University of Haifa where participants took part in a (24)………………………..revealed the negative emotions which oxytocin can trigger. A study at the University of Antwerp showed people’s lack of willingness to help (25)……………………….while under the influence of oxytocin. Meanwhile, research at the University of Amsterdam revealed that people who have been given oxytocin consider (26)…………………………..that are familiar to them in their own country to have more positive associations than those from other cultures.

Making the most of trends

Most managers can identify the major trends of the day. But in the course of conducting research in a number of industries and working directly with companies, we have discovered that managers often fail to recognize the less obvious but profound ways these trends are influencing consumers’ aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. This is especially true of trends that managers view as peripheral to their core markets.

Mam ignore trends in their innovation strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach and let competitors take the lead. At a minimum, such responses mean missed profit opportunities. At the extreme, they can jeopardize a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry. The purpose of this article is twofold: to spur managers to think more expansively about how trends could engender new value propositions in their core markets, and to provide some high-level advice on how’ to make market research and product development personnel more adept at analyzing and exploiting trends.

One strategy, known as ‘infuse and augment’, is to design a product or service that retains most of the attributes and functions of existing products in the category but adds others that address the needs and desires unleashed by a major trend. A case in point is the Poppy range of handbags, which the firm Coach created in response to the economic downturn of 2008. The Coach brand had been a symbol of opulence and luxury for nearly 70 years, and the most obvious reaction to the downturn would have been to lower prices. However, that would have risked cheapening the brand’s image. Instead, they initiated a consumer-research project which revealed that customers were eager to lift themselves and the country out of tough limes. Using these insights. Coach launched the lower-priced Poppy handbags, which were in vibrant colors, and looked more youthful and playful than conventional Coach products. Creating the sub-brand allowed Coach to avert an across-the-board price cut. In contrast to the many companies that responded to the recession by cutting prices. Coach saw the new consumer mindset as an opportunity for innovation and renewal.

A further example of this strategy was supermarket Tesco’s response to consumers’ growing concerns about the environment. With that in mind. Tesco, one of the world’s top five retailers, introduced its Greener Living program, which demonstrates the company’s commitment to protecting the environment by involving consumers in ways that produce tangible results. For example. Tesco customers can accumulate points for such activities as reusing bags, recycling cans and printer cartridges, and buying home-insulation materials. Like points earned on regular purchases, these green points can be redeemed for cash. Tesco has not abandoned its traditional retail offerings but augmented its business with these innovations, thereby infusing its value proposition with a green streak.

A more radical strategy is ‘combine and transcend’. This entails combining aspects of the product s existing value proposition with attributes addressing changes arising from a trend, to create a novel experience – one that may land the company in an entirely new market space. At first glance, spending resources to incorporate elements of a seemingly irrelevant trend into one’s core offerings sounds like it’s hardly worthwhile. But consider Nike’s move to integrate the digital revolution into its reputation for high-performance athletic footwear. In 2006, they teamed up with technology company Apple to launch Nike-f. a digital sports kit comprising a sensor that attaches to the running shoe and a wireless receiver that connects to the user’s iPod, By combining Nike’s original value proposition for amateur athletes with one for digital consumers, the Nike • sports kit and web interface moved the company from a focus on athletic apparel to a new plane of engagement with its customers.

A third approach, known as ‘counteract and reaffirm’, involves developing products or services that stress the values traditionally associated with the category in ways that allow consumers to oppose or at least temporarily escape from the aspects of trends they view as undesirable. A product that accomplished this is the ME2, a video game created by Canada’s iToys. By reaffirming the toy category’s association with physical play, the ME2 counteracted some of the widely perceived negative impacts of digital gaming devices. Like other handheld games, the device featured a host of exciting interactive games, a lull-color LCD screen, and advanced 3D graphics. What set it apart was that it incorporated the traditional physical component of children’s play: it contained a pedometer, which tracked and awarded points for physical activity (walking, running, biking, skateboarding, climbing stairs). The child could use the points to enhance various virtual skills needed for the video game. The ME2, introduced in mid- 2008, catered to kids’ huge desire to play video games while countering the negatives, such as associations with lack of exercise and obesity.

Once you have gained perspective on how trend-related changes in consumer opinions and behaviors impact on your category, you can determine which of our three innovation strategies to pursue. When your category’s basic value proposition continues to be meaningful for consumers influenced by the trend, the infuse-and-augment strategy will allow you to reinvigorate the category. If analysis reveals an increasing disparity between y our category and consumers’ new focus, your innovations need to transcend the category to integrate the two worlds. Finally, if aspects of the category clash with undesired outcomes of a trend, such as associations with unhealthy lifestyles, there is an opportunity to counteract those changes by reaffirming the core values of your category.

Trends – technological, economic, environmental, social, or political – that affect how people perceive the world around them and shape what they expect from products and services present firms with unique opportunities for growth.

Questions 27-31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

27 In the first paragraph, the writer says that most managers
A fail to spot the key consumer trends of the moment.
B make the mistake of focusing only on the principal consumer trends.
C misinterpret market research data relating to current consumer trends.
D are unaware of the significant impact that trends have on consumers’ lives.

28 According to the third paragraph, Coach was anxious to
A follow what some of its competitors were doing.
B maintain its prices throughout its range.
C safeguard its reputation as a manufacturer of luxury goods.
D modify the entire look of its brand to suit the economic climate.

29 What point is made about Tesco’s Greener Living programme?
A It did not require Tesco to modify its core business activities.
B It succeeded in attracting a more eco-conscious clientele.
C Its main aim was to raise consumers’ awareness of environmental issues.
D It was not the first time that Tesco had implemented such an initiative.

30 What does the writer suggest about Nike’s strategy?
A It was an extremely risky strategy at the time.
B It was a strategy that only a major company could afford to follow.
C It was the type of strategy that would not have been possible in the past.
D It was the kind of strategy which might appear to have few obvious benefits.

31 What was original about the ME2?
A It contained technology that had been developed for the sports industry.
B It appealed to young people who were keen to improve their physical fitness.
C It took advantage of a current trend for video games with colourful 3D graphics.
D It was a handheld game that addressed people’s concerns about unhealthy lifestyles

Questions 32-37
Look at the following statements and the list of companies below. Match each statement with the correct company A, B, C or D.

32. It turned the notion that its products could have harmful effects to its own advantage.
33. It extended its offering by collaborating with another manufacturer.
34. It implemented an incentive scheme to demonstrate its corporate social responsibility.
35. It discovered that customers had a positive attitude towards dealing with difficult circumstances.
36. It responded to a growing lifestyle trend in an unrelated product sector.
37. It successfully avoided having to charge its customers less for its core products.

List of companies
A Coach
B Tesco
C Nike
D iToys

Questions 38-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending. A, B, C or D below.

38 If there are any trend-related changes impacting on your category, you should
39 If a current trend highlights a negative aspect of your category, you should
40 If the consumers’ new focus has an increasing lack of connection with your offering, you should

A employ a combination of strategies to maintain your consumer base.
B identify the most appropriate innovation strategy to use.
C emphasise your brand’s traditional values with the counteract-and- affirm strategy.
D use the combine-and-transcend strategy to integrate the two worlds.

Case Study: Tourism New Zealand Website

New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country’s gross domestic product, and is the country’s largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas, tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself – the people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on New Zealand’s scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture, and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world.

A key feature of the campaign was the website www.newzealand.com, which provided potential visitors to New Zealand with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer. The heart of the website was a database of tourism services operators, both those based in New Zealand and those based abroad which offered tourism services to the country. Any tourism-related business could be listed by filling in a simple form. This meant that even the smallest bed and breakfast address or specialist activity provider could gain a web presence with access to an audience of long-haul visitors. In addition, because participating businesses were able to update the details they gave on a regular basis, the information provided remained accurate. And to maintain and improve standards, Tourism New Zealand organised a scheme whereby organisations appearing on the website underwent an independent evaluation against a set of agreed national standards of quality. As part of this, the effect of each business on the environment was considered.

To communicate the New Zealand experience, the site also carried features relating to famous people and places. One of the most popular was an interview with former New Zealand All Blacks rugby captain Tana Umaga. Another feature that attracted a lot of attention was an interactive journey through a number of the locations chosen for blockbuster films which had made use of New Zealand’s stunning scenery as a backdrop. As the site developed, additional features were added to help independent travellers devise their own customised itineraries. To make it easier to plan motoring holidays, the site catalogued the most popular driving routes in the country, highlighting different routes according to the season and indicating distances and times.

Later a Travel Planner feature was added, which allowed visitors to click and ‘bookmark’ : paces or attractions they were interested in, and then view the results on a map. The Travel Planner offered suggested routes and public transport options between the chosen locations. There were also links to accommodation in the area. By registering with the website, users could save their Travel Plan and return to it later, or print it out take on the visit. The website also had a ‘Your Words’ section where anyone could submit a blog of their New Zealand travels for possible inclusion on the website.

The Tourism New Zealand website won two Webby awards for online achievement and innovation. More importantly perhaps, the growth of tourism to New Zealand was impressive. Overall tourism expenditure increased by an average of 6.9% per year between 1999 and 2004. From Britain, visits to New Zealand grew at an average annual rate of 13% between 2002 and 2006, compared to a rate of 4% overall for British visits abroad.

The website was set up to allow both individuals and travel organisations to create itineraries and travel packages to suit their own needs and interests. On the website, visitors can search for activities not solely by geographical location, but also by the particular nature of the activity. This is important as research shows that activities are the key driver of visitor satisfaction, contributing 74% to visitor satisfaction, while transport and accommodation account for the remaining 26%. The more activities that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. It has also been found that visitors enjoy cultural activities most when they are interactive, such as visiting a marae (meeting ground) to learn about traditional Maori life. Many long-haul travellers enjoy such earning experiences, which provide them with stories to take home to their friends and family. In addition, it appears that visitors to New Zealand don’t want to be ‘one of the crowd’ and find activities that involve only a few people more special and meaningful.

It could be argued that New Zealand is not a typical destination. New Zealand is a small country with a visitor economy composed mainly of small businesses. It is generally perceived as a safe English-speaking country with a reliable transport infrastructure. Because of the long-haul flight, most visitors stay for longer (average 20 days) and want to see as much of the country as possible on what is often seen as a once-in-a-lifetime visit. However, the underlying lessons apply anywhere-the effectiveness of a strong brand, a strategy based on unique experiences and a comprehensive and user-friendly website.

Questions 1-7
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Section of website	Comments
Database of tourism	– easy for tourism-related businesses to get on the list – allowed businesses to (1)………………………information regularly – provided a country-wide evaluation of businesses including their impact on the (2)……………..
Special features on local topics	– e.g. an interview with a former a sports (3)………………..and an interactive tour of various locations used in (4)………………….
Information on driving routes	– varied depending on the (5)……………….
Travel planner	– included a map showing selected places, details of public transport and local (6)……………..
Your Words	– travellers could send a link to their (7)………………….

Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 8-13 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

8. The website www.newzealand.com aimed to provide ready-made itineraries and packages for travel companies and individual tourists.
9. It was found that most visitors started searching on the website by geographical location.
10. According to research, 26% of visitor satisfaction is related to their accommodation.
11. Visitors to New Zealand like to become involved in the local culture.
12. Visitors like staying in small hotels in New Zealand rather than in larger ones.
13. Many visitors feel it is unlikely that they will return to New Zealand after their visit.

A We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether Boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

B By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

C Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

D Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada isn’t convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.

E Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill -it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

F Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i The productive outcomes that may result from boredom
ii What teachers can do to prevent boredom
iii A new explanation and a new cure for boredom
iv Problems with a scientific approach to boredom
v A potential danger arising from boredom
vi Creating a system of classification for feelings of boredom
vii Age groups most affected by boredom
viii Identifying those most affected by boredom

14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph E
19. Paragraph F

Questions 20-23
Look at the following people (Questions 20-23) and the list of ideas below.
Match each person with the correct idea, A-E. Choose the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.

20. Peter Toohey
21. Thomas Goetz
22. John Eastwood
23. Francoise Wemelsfelder

List of Ideas
A The way we live today may encourage boredom.
B One sort of boredom is worse than all the others.
C Levels of boredom may fall in the future.
D Trying to cope with boredom can increase its negative effects.
E Boredom may encourage us to avoid an unpleasant experience.

Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Responses to boredom
For John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot (24)………………………………, due to a failure in what he calls the ‘attention system’, and as a result they become frustrated and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom (25) …………………………………….is an important aim in life may have problems in coping with boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic of 26………….. generally cope with it.

Artificial Artists

The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score. Artworks painted by a robot have sold for thousands of dollars and been hung in prestigious galleries. And software has been built which creates art that could not have been imagined by the programmer.

Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? This is a question at the very core of humanity,’ says Geraint Wiggins, a computational creativity researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. ‘It scares a lot of people. They are worried that it is taking something special away from what it means to be human.’

To some extent, we are all familiar with computerised art. The question is: where does the work of the artist stop and the creativity of the computer begin? Consider one of the oldest machine artists, Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in London’s Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron can pick up a paintbrush and paint on canvas on its own. Impressive perhaps, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer’s own creative ideas.

Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to make sure his creation doesn’t attract the same criticism. Unlike earlier ‘artists’ such as Aaron, the Painting Fool only needs minimal direction and can come up with its own concepts by going online for material. The software runs its own web searches and trawls through social media sites. It is now beginning to display a kind of imagination too, creating pictures from scratch. One of its original works is a series of fuzzy landscapes, depicting trees and sky. While some might say they have a mechanical look, Colton argues that such reactions arise from people’s double standards towards software-produced and human-produced art. After all, he says, consider that the Painting Fool painted the landscapes without referring to a photo. ‘If a child painted a new scene from its head, you’d say it has a certain level of imagination,’ he points out. The same should be true of a machine.’ Software bugs can also lead to unexpected results. Some of the Painting Fool’s paintings of a chair came out in black and white, thanks to a technical glitch. This gives the work an eerie, ghostlike quality. Human artists like the renowned Ellsworth Kelly are lauded for limiting their colour palette – so why should computers be any different?

Researchers like Colton don’t believe it is right to measure machine creativity directly to that of humans who have had millennia to develop our skills’. Others, though, are fascinated by the prospect that a computer might create something as original and subtle as our best artists So far, only one has come close. Composer David Cope invented a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI, Not only did EMI create compositions in Cope s style, but also that of the most revered classical composers, including Bach, Chopin and Mozart. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts into thinking they were hearing genuine Bach. Not everyone was impressed however. Some, such as Wiggins, have blasted Cope’s work as pseudoscience, and condemned him for his deliberately vague explanation of how the software worked. Meanwhile. Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University said EMI created replicas which still rely completely on the original artist’s creative impulses, When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged with Cope, and one music lover even tried to punch him. Amid such controversy, Cope destroyed EMI’s vital databases.

But why did so many people love the music, yet recoil when they discovered how it was composed? A study by computer scientist David Moffat of Glasgow Caledonian University provides a clue. He asked both expert musicians and non-experts to assess six compositions. The participants weren’t told beforehand whether the tunes were composed by humans or computers, but were asked to guess, and then rate how much they liked each one. People who thought the composer was a computer tended to dislike the piece more than those who believed it was human. This was true even among the experts, who might have been expected to be more objective in their analyses.

Where does this prejudice come from? Paul Bloom of Yale University has a suggestion: he reckons part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind the work. This can give it an ‘irresistible essence’, says Bloom. Meanwhile, experiments by Justin Kruger of New York University have shown that people s enjoyment of an artwork increases if they think more time and effort was needed to create it. Similarly, Colton thinks that when people experience art, they wonder what the artist might have been thinking or what the artist is trying to tell them. It seems obvious, therefore, that with computers producing art, this speculation is cut short – there’s nothing to explore. But as technology becomes increasingly complex, finding those greater depths in computer art could become possible. This is precisely why Colton asks the Painting Fool to tap into online social networks for its inspiration: hopefully this way it will choose themes that will already be meaningful to us.

Questions 27-31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D

27. What is the writer suggesting about computer-produced works in the first paragraph?
A People’s acceptance of them can vary considerably.
B A great deal of progress has already been attained in this field.
C They have had more success in some artistic genres than in others.
D The advances are not as significant as the public believes them to be.

28. According to Geraint Wiggins, why are many people worried by computer art?
A It is aesthetically inferior to human art.
B It may ultimately supersede human art.
C It undermines a fundamental human quality.
D It will lead to a deterioration in human ability.

29. What is a key difference between Aaron and the Painting Fool?
A its programmer’s background
B public response to its work
C the source of its subject matter
D the technical standard of its output

30. What point does Simon Colton make in the fourth paragraph?
A Software-produced art is often dismissed as childish and simplistic.
B The same concepts of creativity should not be applied to all forms of art.
C It is unreasonable to expect a machine to be as imaginative as a human being.
D People tend to judge computer art and human art according to different criteria.

31. The writer refers to the paintings of a chair as an example of computer art which
A achieves a particularly striking effect.
B exhibits a certain level of genuine artistic skill.
C closely resembles that of a well-known artist.
D highlights the technical limitations of the software.

Questions 32-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G below. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 32-37 on your answer sheet.

32. Simon Colton says it is important to consider the long-term view when
33. David Cope’s EMI software surprised people by
34. Geraint Wiggins criticised Cope for not
35. Douglas Hofstadter claimed that EMI was
36. Audiences who had listened to EMI’s music became angry after
37. The participants in David Moffat’s study had to assess music without

List of Ideas
A generating work that was virtually indistinguishable from that of humans.
B knowing whether it was the work of humans or software.
C producing work entirely dependent on the imagination of its creator.
D comparing the artistic achievements of humans and computers.
E revealing the technical details of his program.
F persuading the public to appreciate computer art.
G discovering that it was the product of a computer program.

Questions 38-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 38-40 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

38. Moffat’s research may help explain people’s reactions to EMI.
39. The non-experts in Moffat’s study all responded in a predictable way.
40. Justin Kruger s findings cast doubt on Paul Bloom’s theory about people’s prejudice towards computer art.

SECTION 1: Questions 1-14
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-8.

The best travel wallets

Keep all your bank cards, documents, passports and ID in one of these convenient carriers, which have been selected by Becca Meier.

A Kipling Travel Doc Travel Document Holder
This zip-around wallet comes in five different patterns and is made of nylon. It also has a space where users can put a pen, pockets for cards, an ID window and a pocket for change.

B Lifeventure Mini Travel Document Wallet
This is a waterproof wallet, which uses anti-RFID (radio frequency identification) material so your financial details will be safe. It is black with smart sky-blue finishing touches and has a small internal compartment, a smartphone pocket and an external pocket, It can fit two passports.

C Cath Kidston Breton Stripe
A wallet so slim it could easily pass for a small notebook. The inside compartment labels identifying each separate section all have silver lettering on them. The wallet has a special coating which makes it easy to wipe anything like sand off.

D Ted Baker Voyager’s Travel Wallet
This wallet comes in smooth black leather, and is no bigger than a passport, but roomy enough for any insurance documents or flight tickets. A small navy-blue pen is supplied inside.

E Radley Abbey Travel Wallet
This plain travel wallet opens up to reveal pockets in various colours labelled ‘cards’, ‘passport’ and ‘tickets’, as well as others left blank for extras. It comes in a handy drawstring bag.

F Gotravel Organiser
The black wallet features seven slip-in card compartments, two small interior zip pockets and a load of other slip-in compartments, it can fit at least four passports.

G Gotravel Glo Travel Wallet
This is a simple, very reasonably priced wallet. It is made of PVC plastic and will suit those who like a wallet that is easy to spot. It comes in a range of bright colours with a white holiday-related design on the front. It has five compartments that can fit a passport with other cards/tickets.

Questions 1-8
Look at the seven reviews of travel wallets, A-G, on page 84.
For which travel wallet are the following statements true?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. This wallet will suit people who prefer natural materials.
2. Users of this wallet do not need to worry about taking it out in the rain.
3. Parts of the inside of this wallet have categories printed on them in one colour.
4. This wallet would suit someone who needs to keep several passports together.
5. Something is provided for writing.
6. This will suit people who want to be able to find their document wallet easily in their luggage.
7. Something to keep this wallet in is provided.
8. This wallet has been specially made to prevent people detecting the numbers on any bank cards, etc. inside it.

Read the text below and answer Questions 9-14.

UK rail services – how do l claim for my delayed train?

Generally, if you have been delayed on a train journey, you may be able to claim compensation, but train companies all have different rules, so it can be confusing to work out what you’re entitled to. The type of delay you can claim for depends on whether the train company runs a Delay Repay scheme or a less generous, older-style scheme.

Delay Repay is a train operator scheme to compensate passengers when trains are late, and the train company will pay out even if it was not responsible for the delay. The scheme varies between companies, but up to 2016 most paid 50 percent of the single ticket cost for 30 minutes’ delay and 100 percent for an hour. On the London Underground, you get a full refund for 15-minute delays.

Companies that do not use Delay Repay and still use the older scheme will not usually pay compensation if the problem is considered to be out of their control. But it is still worth asking them for compensation, as some may pay out. You are unlikely to get compensation for a delay if any of the following occur:
• Accidents involving people getting onto the line illegally
• Gas leaks or fires in buildings next to the line which were not caused by a train company
• Line closures at the request of the emergency services
• Exceptionally severe weather conditions
• Strike action

National Rail Conditions of Travel state that you are entitled to compensation in the same form that you paid for the ticket. Some train companies are still paying using rail vouchers, which they are allowed to do if you do not ask for a cash refund.

Since 2016, rail passengers have acquired further rights for compensation through the Consumer Rights Act. This means that passengers could now be eligible for compensation due to: a severely overcrowded train with too few carriages available; a consistently late running service; and a service that is delayed for less than the time limit that applied under existing compensation schemes.

However, in order to exercise their rights beyond the existing compensation schemes, for instance Delay Repay, and where the train operating company refuses to compensate despite letters threatening court action, passengers may need to bring their claims to a court of law.

Questions 9-14
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on page 86?
In boxes 9-14 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. The system for claiming compensation varies from one company to another.
10. Under Delay Repay, a train company will only provide compensation if it caused the delay.
11. Under Delay Repay, underground and other train companies give exactly the same amounts of money in compensation.
12. An increasing number of train companies are willing to pay compensation for problems they are not responsible for.
13. It is doubtful whether companies using the older scheme will provide compensation if a delay is caused by a strike.
14. Passengers may receive compensation in the form of a train voucher if they forget to request cash.

SECTION 2: Questions 15-27
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-19.

Vacancy for food preparation assistant

Durrant House pic runs restaurants and cafes as concessions in airports, train stations and other busy environments around the country. We currently have a vacancy for a food preparation assistant in our restaurant at Locksley Stadium, serving football fans and concert-goers before, during and after events. In addition, we cater for private parties several times a week. If you have relevant experience and a passion for preparing food to a very high standard, we’ll be delighted to hear from you. You must be able to multitask and to work in a fast-paced environment. It goes without saying that working as an effective and supportive member of a team is essential so you need to be happy in this type of work.

The role includes the usual responsibilities, such as treating hygiene as your number one priority, cleaning work areas, and doing whatever is required to provide food of excellent quality. The person appointed will carry out a range of tasks, including ensuring all raw food items are fresh, preparing vegetables to be cooked, making sure frozen food products are used in rotation, and throwing away any food products that are near or have passed their expiry date. He or she will be required to familiarise themselves with the storage system, so as to put food product supplies in the proper place and retrieve them in the right order. In particular; we are looking for someone with skill at baking, to play a large role in the production of pies and cakes.

Given the nature of the venue, working hours vary from week to week, depending on the events being held, and will often involve starting early in the morning or finishing late at night. You can expect to work an average of around 18 hours a week, although this cannot be guaranteed. You will also have the opportunity to work in another of our sites for one or two days a week, or for longer periods, and will be paid for ten days of holidays a year, Training will be provided in food safety.

If this sounds like the job for you, please contact Jo Simmons at simmons.j@durrant-house.com.

Questions 15-19
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 15-19 on your answer sheet,

Vacancy for food preparation assistant
Location of restaurant: in a (15)……………………

Requirements:
• relevant experience
• ability to multitask
• must enjoy working in a (16)…………………..

Responsibilities include:
• maintaining high standards of (17)…………………….
• checking the freshness of raw food
• ensuring no food is used after its expiry date
• learning the procedure for the (18)……………………….
• doing a considerable amount of the baking

Conditions:
• working hours are not (19)……………………..
• payment is made for holidays

Read the text below and answer Questions 20-27

Setting up a business partnership in the UK

Two or more people can go into business together by setting up either a limited company or a partnership. A partnership is the easier way to get started, and simply links two or more people together in a simple business structure. Unlike a limited company, a partnership doesn’t have a separate legal status. The partners are usually self-employed individuals, although a limited company counts as a ‘legal person’ and can also be a partner.

In a partnership, you and your partner or partners personally share responsibility for your business. This means, among other things, that if your business cannot afford to pay its debts, you must pay them yourselves. Again, this is not the case with a limited company. Partners share the business’s profits, and each partner pays tax on their share.

When you set up a business partnership you need to choose a name. You can trade under your own names, for example, ‘Smith and Jones’, or you can choose another name for your business. You don’t need to register your name. However, you should register your name as a trademark if you want to stop people from trading under your business name.

Business partnership names must not include ‘limited’, ‘Ltd’, ‘limited liability partnership’, ‘LLP’, ‘public limited company’ or ‘pic’, be offensive, or be the same as an existing trademark. Your name also can’t suggest a connection with government or local authorities, unless you get permission. There is no central database of partnership names in the UK, so to avoid using the same name as another business, it is advisable to search on the internet for the name you are considering.

You must include all the partners’ names and the business name (if you have one) on official paperwork, for example invoices. You must choose a ‘nominated partner’ who is responsible for registering your partnership with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the government department responsible for the collection of taxes. This person is responsible for managing the partnership’s tax returns and keeping business records. Alternatively, you can appoint an agent to deal with HMRC on your behalf.

All partners need to register with HMRC separately and send their own tax returns as individuals. You must register by 5 October in your business’s second tax year, or you could be charged a penalty. You must also register for VAT if your VAT taxable turnover is more than £85,000. You can choose to register if it’s below this, for example to reclaim VAT on business supplies.

Questions 20-27
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 20-27 on your answer sheet.

20. A partnership is different from a limited company in not having its own…………………as a legal body.
21. The partners are personally responsible for paying all the partnership’s……………………….
22. The partnership’s…………………………..are divided between the partners.
23. Registering the partnership’s name prevents others from using that name when……………………….
24. The best way to find out if a name is already in use is to use the…………………………
25. The names of the partners and the partnership must appear on…………………and other documents.
26. You must have a nominated partner, or someone to act as your……………….for all contact with HIVIRC.
27. You will have to pay a………………………if you miss the deadline for registering the partnership

SECTION 3: Questions 28-46
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

THE ROLE OF THE SWISS POSTBUS

The Swiss PostBus Limited is the largest of the country’s 78 coach companies. Administered by the Motor Services Department of the Post Office, it carries over 120 million passengers each year and is carefully integrated with other public transport services: trains, boats and mountain cableways. The Swiss transportation system resembles a tree, with the larger branches representing federal and private railways, the smaller branches being the coaches, and the twigs being the urban transit operators running trams, city buses, boats, chairlifts and so on. But the trunk that holds the tree together is the vast postbus network, without which the whole network would not function.

There isn’t an inhabited place in Switzerland that cannot be reached by some sort of public transport. Federal law and the Swiss Constitution stipulate that every village with a population greater than 40 is entitled to regular bus services. The frequency of these services is directly related to population density. Timetables are put together four years in advance, and seldom change. If a new route is to be introduced, the population of the area affected is invited to vote in a referendum.

At times, postbuses are the main — sometimes the only — links between settlements. These coaches, often with a trailer in tow to increase their capacity, are a common sight in high-altitude regions, and their signature sound — part of Rossini’s William Tell Overturn, played by the drivers on three-tone post horns with electrical compressors at every road turn — is one of the most familiar Swiss sounds.

The three-tone horns can still be used to ‘talk’ to post offices (and each other) from a distance. By altering the combination of the tones, a driver can announce ‘departure of post1, ‘arrival of post’, ‘arrival of special post’, and so on – so much more romantic and often more reliable than radio or mobile phones. This musical ‘language’ started in the mid-nineteenth century, when the coach drivers could also blow their horns a certain number of times on approaching the station to indicate the number of horses needing to be fed, giving the stationmaster time to prepare the fodder.

The postbus history goes back to 1849, when the Swiss postal service was made a monopoly. The role of today’s modern yellow buses was, back then, played by horse-drawn carriages (or in winter by sleighs, in order to travel on snow), which were the same colour. By 1914, eight years after the first motor coaches were introduced, there were still 2,500 horses, 2,231 coaches (or carriages) and 1,059 sleighs in service.

After the First World War, Swiss Post bought a fleet of decommissioned military trucks which were converted into postbuses, but it was not until 1961 that the last horse-drawn coach was replaced with a motorised version.

Today, the Swiss Post Office boasts one of the worlds most advanced coach fleets, including fuel-cell models and the world’s first driverless bus. This was launched in 2015 in the town of Sion, the capital of the canton of Valais, one of the 26 cantons, or administrative regions, that make up the country.

Postbuses often go to places that other means of transport cannot reach. Most of the drivers therefore see themselves as educators and tour guides. Although it’s not in their job description, they’re likely to point out the sights — waterfalls, gorges, and so on — and are always ready to pull over for a photo opportunity.

Switzerland’s longest postbus journey, and one of the highest, crosses four mountain passes – an eight-hour trip undertaken by a single postbus. The route goes through several cantons; two languages (German and Italian); all four seasons – from burning sunshine to showers and heavy snowfalls; and countless places of interest, One of the passes, the Gotthard, is often described as ‘the People’s Road’, probably because it connects the German-speaking canton of Uri with Italian-speaking Ticino. Like Switzerland itself, postbuses ‘speak’ all four state languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh – and by law, their automated intercom announcements are given in the language of whichever canton the bus is currently passing through.

Irrespective of their previous driving experience, drivers undergo lots of training. During the first year, they have, to drive postbuses under the supervision of a more experienced driver. Only after two years of safe driving in the valleys can they be pronounced ready for a mountain bus.

Some routes are not at all busy, with the bus often carrying just two or three passengers at a time. But for most people living in small mountain villages, the postbus is of the utmost importance. It not only carries the villagers to town and back, it takes village children to and from school, delivers mail, transports milk from the village farms down to the valley, collects rubbish from the village (Swiss laws do not allow dumping anywhere in the mountains), and brings building materials to households. It takes elderly villagers to shops and carries their shopping up the hill to their homes. More a friend than just a means of transportation, for the dwellers of mountain villages the postbus is an essential part of life.

Questions 28-32
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

28. When comparing the Swiss transportation system to a tree, the writer emphasises
A the size of the postbus system.
B how competitive the postbus system is.
C how important the postbus system is.
D the threat to the postbus system.

29. What is said about bus services in the second paragraph?
A Villages have the chance to request more buses every four years.
B New routes are often introduced to reflect an increase in population.
C Bus timetables tend to change every four years.
D The number of buses that call at a village depends on how many people live there,

30. According to the fourth paragraph, what were three-tone horns first used to indicate?
A how many coach horses required food
B how long the bus would stay at the station
C how many passengers wanted a meal
D how soon the bus would arrive at the station

31. What point does the writer make about the postbus drivers?
A Many choose to give passengers information about the surroundings.
B Most are proud of driving buses to places without other forms of transport.
C They are required to inform passengers about the sights seen from the bus.
D They are not allowed to stop for passengers to take photographs.

32. What is said about the buses’ automated announcements?
A They are given in the language of the bus’s starting point.
B The language they are given in depends on where the bus is at the time.
C They are always given in all the four languages of Switzerland.
D The language they are given in depends on the bus’s destination.

Questions 33-40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on pages 92 and 93?
in boxes 33-40 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

33. Some postbuses after the First World War were originally army vehicles.
34. The number of driverless buses has increased steadily since 2015.
35. On the longest postbus route in Switzerland, passengers have to change buses.
36. The weather on the longest postbus route is likely to include extreme weather conditions.
37. There is a widely used nickname for part of the longest route used by postbuses.
38. Bus drivers’ training can be shortened if they have driven buses before joining Postbus.
39. In some villages most passengers are school children.
40. Buses carry only rubbish that can be recycled.

SECTION 1: Questions 1-14
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-7.

Your Guide To Entertainment In Westhaven

A. TRAX INDOOR KARTING CENTRE Experience the fun and thrills of indoor racing driving in our mini open-topped karts. No experience necessary. Individuals and groups welcome. Refreshments available in new burger bar. Spectators welcome. All drivers must meet the minimum height requirement of 5 feet (1.52 m) and participate at their own risk. Open: all year daily 10 am to 6 pm (later times by appointment) except Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day Charges: from £ 11 per person	B. WESTHAVEN LIFEBOAT MUSEUM The Westhaven Lifeboat Museum is an exciting display illustrating over 150 years of courage – photos with texts of epic rescues, models of lifeboats and video displays. Try our hands-on-simulator – take charge of a daring rescue on a stormy sea. Ideal for school groups. A must for all ages. Souvenir shop. No charge for admission but donations welcome. Open: 25th March to 26th October, 10 am to 5 pm 27th October to 2nd January, 10 am to 4 pm
C. STAR LEISURE CENTRE Exciting leisure complex with four pools, wave machine, two thrilling flumes, bubble pool, fitness suite, special programme for under-fives, organized holiday activities and much, much more! Open: all year daily Charges: check our website at www.starleisure.co.uk for current rates	D. LLOYD’S LANES 20 fully computerized ten-pin bowling lanes, amusement area, fast food area, large screen Sky TV – Lloyd’s Lanes is ideal for a whole fun day out. Open: ten-pin bowling daily, 10 am till late – 7 days a week Charges: Monday to Friday 10 am to 6 pm, non-members £ 3.50, members £ 2.50 Other times: non-members £ 4.50, members £ 3.75, appropriate footgear essential to protect bowling surfaces shoe hire £ 1.00 at all times
E. WESTHAVEN GOLF CLUB Beautiful lakeside course, a pleasant, manageable walk through nine challenging holes 24-bay driving range, suitable in rain, wind or sun, three golf professionals can give affordable coaching. Restaurant good food served all day. Visitors welcome. Open: all year from 7.30 am to 10 pm Charges: 9 holes £ 10; 18 holes £ 15

Questions 1-7
The text on pages above has five advertisements labelled A-E. Which advertisement contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-E in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Payment at this venue is optional.
2. Expert instructors are available for lessons.
3. There is a restriction on what you can wear.
4. Some basic information is published in another place.
5. This has particular provision for very young children.6. It has a feature especially recommended for educational parties.
7. They will open at unscheduled times if you make an arrangement.

Read the text below and answer Questions 8-14.

Do You Have A Music Project In Mind That Might Benefit From Funding?

Music is wonderfully therapeutic! This is recognised by The Dosoco Foundation, which supports local projects that use music for social good.

The next round of Dosoco grant funding will shortly be open for applications. Grants are available from £700 to £1,000 (for organisations) and up to £300 (for individuals) in the areas of music education (e.g. working with a talented music student with either physical, social or learning disabilities), music access (e.g. a music club for groups that might struggle to start something on their own), music innovation (e.g. using an electronic device such as Raspberry Pi to help disabled people make music) and music therapy (e.g. an idea for using music to support positive mental health).

Case study
Dosoco recently awarded a grant to Alexia Sioame, a young composer with sight loss, to enable her to attend the sound-and-music summer-school composition course at the Purcell School. Alexia has since gained a place as a composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain – the first blind composer to be appointed – and has also been awarded the title of Young Composer of the Year. She was the first female composer ever to receive this honour in its ten-year history.

Organisations, families and individuals can apply by completing a simple form. Dosoco can contribute up to 50% towards project costs. Projects must be locally based and must be new ideas for using music to make a positive impact on people’s lives where help is really needed.

For more information please visit www.thedosocofoundation.org

Questions 8-14
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on page 63?
In boxes 8-14 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

8. You can apply to Dosoco now for grant funding.
9. You can apply for a grant that will help to educate a musician.
10. Alexia Sloane lost her sight after attending a summer-school composition course
11. Alexia now plays several instruments with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.
12. Alexia has received an award for her work in music.
13. Applications can be made by filling in an online form.
14. In some cases Dosoco will cover the full cost of the project.

SECTION 2: Questions 15-27
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-21.

Guide To Employees On Workplace Monitoring

What is workplace monitoring?
Employers have the right to monitor your activities in many situations at work. For example, your activities may be recorded on CCTV cameras, and your letters may be opened and read. In addition, your employer may use an automated software programme to check the emails you receive at work. Phone calls may be listened to and recorded, and the log of websites you use may be checked.

All of these forms of monitoring are covered by data protection law. Data protection law doesn’t prevent monitoring in the workplace. However, it does set down rules about the circumstances and the way in which monitoring should be carried out.

Before deciding whether to introduce monitoring, your employer should identify any negative effects the monitoring may have on staff. This is called impact assessment.

Monitoring electronic communications at work
Your employer can legally monitor your use of electronic communications in the workplace if the monitoring relates to the business and the equipment being monitored is provided partly or wholly for work.

Except in extremely limited circumstances, employers must take reasonable steps to let staff know that monitoring is happening, what is being monitored and why it is necessary.

As long as your employer sticks to these rules, they don’t need to get your consent before they monitor your electronic communications, but only if the monitoring is for specific reasons. These may be to establish facts which are relevant to the business or to check standards, for example, listening in to phone calls to assess the quality of your work. Monitoring is also allowed if its purpose is to prevent or detect crime. It may be necessary to make sure electronic systems are operating effectively, for example, to prevent computer viruses entering the system. Your employer is also allowed to listen in to any calls you make to confidential helplines, but in this case he or she is not allowed to record these calls.

Questions 15-21
Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 15-21 on your answer sheet.

Guide to employees on workplace monitoring
Your employer may monitor you at work by checking
• recordings of your activities
• your letters and (15)……………………..
• your phone calls and which websites you have visited
Rules for monitoring are established by data protection law. This states that employers must carry out a procedure that is known as (16)……………………..before introducing monitoring,

In general, monitoring is legal if
• it relates to the business
• you are using (17)…………………..intended for work
• the worker has been informed

Monitoring may be used
• to evaluate the (18)…………………….of your work
• to stop of find out about (19)…………………….
• to stop the possibility of (20)………………………affecting systems
• to check calls to (21)……………………….(these cannot be recorded)

Read the text below and answer Questions 22-27.

International Experience Canada: Application Process

If you want to travel and work temporarily in Canada as part of International Experience Canada (IEC), your first step is to become a candidate in one or more IEC pools. There are three categories of pool: International Co-op (Internship), Working Holiday and Young Professionals.

To apply, first use our questionnaire to see if you meet the criteria to get into the IEC pools. This should take you about ten minutes. You can find it at www.cic.gc.ca/ctc-vac/ cometocanada.asp. After completing this, if you are eligible you will be sent a personal reference code, which you should use to create your online account. At the same time, you should fill in any remaining fields in your profile with the required information, including which IEC pools you want to be in. (Some parts will already have been completed for you.)

If you are sent an invitation to proceed with your application, you will have 10 days to decide whether to accept this or not. If you accept, click the ‘Start Application’ button. You then have 20 days to complete your application.

For International Co-op and Young Professionals categories, your employer in Canada must pay the compliance fee and inform you of your offer of employment number. (This does not apply to the Working Holiday pool.)

Once you have received this, you should then upload copies of police and medical certificates, if required. If you do not have these, you should upload proof that you have applied for them. You should then pay your participation fee of C$126 online by credit card. (There is an additional payment of C$100 if you are applying for the Working Holiday category.)

Your application will then be assessed. You can apply to withdraw at this stage and will be given a refund if you do this within 56 days. If your application is successful, you will receive a letter of introduction which you can show to Immigration when you enter Canada.

Questions 22-27
Complete the flow-chart below. Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 22-27 on your answer sheet.

Applying To International Experience Canada

Fill in the online (22)………………..to get a personal reference code

Create your (23)…………………and provide the necessary information for the profile in your application

If sent an invitation, you must accept this within (24)………………….. you then have a limited time to (25)…………………..the application

Your (26)…………………….is required to send you an offer of employment number

Upload copies of any necessary certificates or proof of application

Make the payment for participation online. You may receive a (27)………………..later if you change your mind

If successful you will receive a letter of introduction to be shown at immigration

SECTION 3: Questions 23-40
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

Research On Improving Agricultural Yields In Africa

Three programmes are investigating ways of improving agricultural productivity in Africa.

More than, half of the global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to occur in Africa, and more people means a requirement for more food.

Ethiopia, for example, has the largest livestock population in Africa but with a growing population even its 53 million cattle are not enough. And now efforts to develop fanning there are bringing a significant health concern. Professor James Wood from the University of Cambridge explains that new breeds that are being introduced are more vulnerable to bovine TB (tuberculosis) than the zebu cattle which were previously reared there. ‘This may have health implications for those who work with and live alongside infected cattle, and also raises concerns about transmission to areas which previously had low levels of TB,’ he warns.

Wood leads a research programme which is looking at the feasibility of control strategies, including cattle vaccination. The programme brings together veterinary scientists, epidemiologists, geneticists, immunologists and social scientists in eight Ethiopian and UK institutions. ‘We need this mix because we are not only asking how effective strategies will be, but also whether farmers will accept them, and what the consequences are for prosperity and wellbeing,’ says Wood.

The impact that increasing productivity can have on farmers’ livelihoods is not lost on an insect expert at the University of Ghana, Dr Ken Fening, who is working on another food-related research project. Cabbages are not indigenous to Africa but have become a major cash crop for Ghanaian farmers and an important source of income for traders from markets and hotels. ‘A good crop can bring in money to buy fertilisers and farm equipment, and also help to pay for healthcare and education for the family,’ he says. Recently, however, fields of stunted, yellowing cabbages, their leaves curled and dotted with mould, have become a familiar and devastating sight for the farmers of Ghana.

From his field station base in Kpong, Ghana, Fening works closely with smallholder farmers on pest-control strategies. Two years ago they started reporting that a new disease was attacking their crops. ‘It seemed to be associated with massive infestations of pink and green aphids,’ says Fening, ‘and from my studies of the way insects interact with many different vegetables, I’m familial* with the types of damage they can cause.’

But farmers were typically seeing the total loss of their crops, and he realised that the devastation couldn’t just be caused by sap-sucking insects. Despite no previous reports of viral diseases affecting cabbage crops in Ghana, the symptoms suggested a viral pathogen.

Together with Cambridge plant biologist Dr John Carr, Fening collected samples of cabbage plants in Ghana showing signs of disease, and also aphids on the diseased plants. Back in Cambridge, Fening used screening techniques including a type of DNA ‘fingerprinting’ to identify the aphid species, and sophisticated molecular biology methods to try to identify the offending virus.

‘Aphids are a common carrier of plant-infecting viruses,’ explains Carr. ‘The “usual suspects” are turnip mosaic virus and cauliflower mosaic virus, which affect cabbages in Europe and the US.’

‘We found that two different species of aphids, pink and green, were generally found on the diseased cabbages,’ says Fening. ‘It turned out this was the first record of the green aphid species ever being seen in Ghana.’ The pink aphid was identified as Myzus persicae (Sulzer).

What’s more, the virus was not what they expected, and work is now ongoing to identify the culprit. The sooner it can be characterised, the sooner sustainable crop protection strategies can be developed to prevent further spread of the disease not only in Ghana, but also in other countries in the region. Another researcher who hopes that eradication strategies will be the outcome of her research project is Dr Theresa Manful. Like Fening, she is a researcher at the University of Ghana. She has been working with Cambridge biochemist Professor Mark Carrington on a disease known as trypanosomiasis.

‘This is a major constraint to cattle fearing in Africa,’ she explains. ‘Although trypanosomiasis is also a disease of humans, the number of cases is low, and the more serious concerns about the disease relate to the economic impact on agricultural production.’

The parasite that causes the disease is carried by the tsetse fly, which colonises vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa. Carrington says that a lot is now known about the parasite’s molecular mechanisms, in particular the way it evades the immune system of the animal acting as its host by altering the proteins in its coat so as to remain ‘invisible’. ‘But then when you look at the effect on large animals, you realise that there is almost nothing known about the dynamics of an infection, and even whether an infection acquired at an early age persists for its lifetime,’ he says. So Manful and Carrington set about testing cattle in Ghana. They discovered that nearly all were infected most of the time.

For Manful, one of the important gains has been the ability to expand the research in Ghana: ‘I now have a fully functional lab and can do DNA extraction and analysis in Ghana -1 don’t have to bring samples to Cambridge. We are teaching students from five Ghanaian institutions the diagnostic methods.’

‘Agriculture faces increasing challenges,’ adds Carr. ‘Bioscience is playing a crucial part in developing ways to mitigate pest impact and reduce the spread of parasites. We want to ensure not only that every harvest is successful, but also that it’s maximally successful.’

Questions 28-32
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

28. What is the main problem faced by cattle farmers in Ethiopia, according to Professor Wood?
A TB is being transmitted from people to cattle.
B New breeds of cattle have led to an increase in TB.
C The traditional breeds of cattle are being affected by TB.
D TB has spread into places where it was previously unknown.

29. When discussing the cultivation of cabbages in Ghana, the writer says that this crop
A was introduced from outside Africa.
B is not eaten much by local people.
C is not grown correctly by many farmers.
D requires the use of fertiliser and special equipment.

30. Fening believed that the new disease destroying cabbages was
A caused by overuse of pesticides.
B also affecting other locally grown vegetables.
C linked to insect attacks on these vegetables.
D connected with the development of new insect breeds.

31. Fening first suspected that the cabbage disease was caused by a virus because
A evidence of viral disease could be seen on the cabbage leaves.
B pink and green aphids did not commonly attack cabbages.
C viral diseases affecting vegetables had occurred elsewhere in Africa.
D aphids would not have caused so much damage to the crops.

32. When doing further research in Cambridge, Fening and Carr discovered that
A the virus was unfamiliar to them.
B two different viruses were present.
C the aphids’ DNA was more complex than expected.
D one aphid was more harmful than the other.

Questions 33-36
Look at the following statements (Questions 33-36) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

33. A particular crop may make an important contribution to the local economy in one African country.
34. Tests will be carried out by local people in the country where the research is focused.
35. Different specialists must work together to ensure the success of a programme.
36. One type of insect attacking plants in Ghana was previously unknown there.

List of Researchers
A James Wood
B Ken Fening
C John Carr
D Theresa Manful
E Mark Carrington

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

Trypanosomiasis

Trypanosomiasis is a disease caused by a parasite which is spread by an insect called the (37)…………………….The parasite can remain unaffected by the host’s (38) …………………… because it is able to change the (39)……………………. on its outer covering. It is uncommon among humans but has been found to affect most (40)…………………………….in Ghana.

SECTION 1: Questions 1-14
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-7.

Five reviews of the Wellington Hotel

A My husband and I first stayed at the Wellington a few years ago, and we’ve returned every year since then. When we arrive and check in, we’re always treated like old friends by the staff, so we very much feel at home. Our one disappointment during our last visit was that our room overlooked the car park, but that didn’t spoil our stay.

B The hotel hardly seems to have changed in the last hundred years, and we prefer that to many modern hotels, which tend to look the same as each other. The Wellington has character! Our room was very comfortable and quite spacious. We can strongly recommend the breakfast, though we had to wait for a table as the hotel was so full. That was a bit annoying, and there was also nowhere to sit in the lounge.

C We made our reservation by phone without problem, but when we arrived the receptionist couldn’t see it on the computer system. Luckily there was a room available. It wasn’t quite what we would have chosen, but it was a pleasure to sit in it with a cup of tea, and look out at the swimmers and surfers in the sea.

D We’d be happy to stay at the Wellington again. Although there’s nothing special about the rooms, the view from the lounge is lovely, and the restaurant staff were friendly and efficient. Breakfast was a highlight – there was so much on offer we could hardly decide what to eat. We’d stay another time just for that!

E The staff all did their jobs efficiently, and were very helpful when we asked for information about the area. The only difficulty we had was making our reservation online – it wasn’t clear whether payment for our deposit went through or not, and I had to call the hotel to find out. Still, once we’d arrived, everything went very smoothly, and we had a delicious dinner in the restaurant.

Questions 1-7
Look at the five online reviews of the Wellington Hotel, A-E, above. Which review mentions the following?
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. liking the view from the bedroom window
2. finding the receptionists welcoming
3. being pleased with the bedroom
4. becoming confused when booking a room
5. being impressed by the wide choice of food
6. staying in the hotel regularly
7. finding it inconvenient that the hotel was crowded

Read the text below and answer Questions 8-14.

Come and play walking football or walking netball

Walking football and netball have become increasingly popular in recent years, but do you know you can take part in this area? The names make it clear what they are – two of the country’s favourite sports where, instead of running, the players walk. It’s as simple as that.

Walking football was invented in the UK in 2011, but it was a 2014 TV commercial for a bank, showing it providing financial support to someone who wanted to set up a website for the game, that brought it to people’s attention. Since then, tens of thousands of people — mostly, though not only, over the age of 50 — have started playing, and there are more than 800 walking football clubs. Both men and women play walking football, but at the moment the netball teams consist only of women. However, men are beginning to show an interest in playing.

The two games are designed to help people to be active or get fit, whatever their age and level of fitness. In particular, they were invented to encourage older men and women to get more exercise, and to give them a chance to meet other people. Regular physical activity helps to maintain energy, strength and flexibility. You can start gently and do a little more each session. The benefits include lower heart rate and blood pressure, greater mobility, less fat and more muscle.

Many players have given up a sport – either through age or injury – and can now take it up again. They’re great ways for people to enjoy a sport they used to play and love, and keep active at the same time, though people who have never played the standard game before are also very welcome.

The local councils Active Lifestyles Team runs sessions at all the council’s leisure centres. Come alone or with a friend, and enjoy a friendly game on Monday or Saturday afternoons, or Tuesday or Thursday evenings. Each session costs £3 per person, and you don’t have to come regularly or at the same time each week. Our aim is to set up netball and football clubs as soon as there are enough regular players.

Questions 8-14
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on page 41?
In boxes 8-14 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

8. Walking football became well-known when a club featured in a TV programme about the sport.
9. The majority of walking netball players are men.
10. Most clubs arrange social activities for their members,
11. Players are tested regularly to measure changes in their fitness.
12. People who have never played football are encouraged to play walking football.
13. People can take part in the Active Lifestyles Team’s sessions whenever they wish
14. The Active Lifestyles Team intends to start clubs in the future.

SECTION 2: Questions 15-27
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-20.

Dress regulations at work

Your contract may state that you need to dress in a certain manner or wear a uniform. Your contract might also state that you need to dress ‘smartly’, rather than specifying any particular garments. As you might well have conflicting ideas of what counts as smart’, you should ask your employer for clarification. Many employers that have a strict dress code choose to provide clothing or a discount on clothing. However, this is not necessarily compulsory for the employer and is a factor you need to consider when taking a job.

Protective clothing and equipment
Your employer can tell you to put on protective clothing and equipment (such as gloves, a visor, boots, etc.). If you don’t, your employer is entitled to take disciplinary action, which can include excluding you from the workplace.
You are required to:
• co-operate with your employer on health and safety
• correctly use work items provided by your employer, including protective equipment, in accordance with instructions
• not interfere with or misuse anything provided for your health and safety or welfare.

Of course, any protective gear has to fit and be appropriate for the situation. It shouldn’t cause you pain. If it does, you should negotiate alternative equipment or arrangements. Don’t be put off. Sometimes employers can, out of caution, interpret health and safety rules unnecessarily rigidly. And of course you shouldn’t be required to pay for any protective equipment or clothing that you need. However, if your employer buys the gear, they are entitled to keep it when you leave.

The obligation to maintain protective clothing lies with the employer. The employer is also required to provide an appropriate storage space to keep the protective equipment in when it is not being used. And finally, the employer must provide the equipment and service free of charge to the employee.

Jewellery
Banning employees from wearing jewellery and loose clothing may be justified to prevent a potential hygiene hazard if you work in areas of food production or areas which need to be kept sterile.

Likewise, your employer can judge that loose jewellery may constitute a snagging hazard if you operate machinery. If you think restrictions are not justified by health and safety concerns, talk to your workplace union rep if you have one, as they may know of solutions to the problem which other employees have used before.

Questions 15-20
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 15-20 on your answer sheet.

15. If employees are unsure what their company wishes them to wear for work, they should request…………
16. Some companies offer their employees a…………when they buy items to wear for work.
17. Employees who fail to wear protective clothing when required could be subject to…………procedures.
18. Employees ought not to be in……………because of protective clothing or equipment.
19. It is the company’s responsibility to ensure that there is a suitable place for the……………of protective equipment.
20. Employees who work with certain types of…………………may have to remove jewellery to avoid potential injuries.

Read the text below and answer Questions 21-27.

How to achieve a better work—life balance

As more and more employees work from home full time and everyone has 24/7 access to email, balancing work and family may not seem like an easily attainable goal. So how can you juggle the demands of both worlds? Below are some tips to help you get started.

It’s easy to get sucked into habits that, make us less efficient without realizing it — like keeping your social media page open at work so you don’t miss something ‘important’. Draw up a list with all the activities that don’t enhance your life or career. Then minimize the time you spend on them.

It’s hard to say no’, especially to a supervisor or loved one, but sometimes that powerful little word is essential. Learn to use ‘no’ judiciously and it will become a powerful tool in balancing work and family.

Research shows that exercise helps you remain alert. Finding time to hit the gym may be hard, but it will ultimately help you get more things done because exercise really boosts energy and improves your ability to concentrate.

Study after study shows that significant sleep deprivation affects your health and well-being. Exposure to electronics can significantly negatively impact your sleep, so try to unplug an hour before you go to sleep.

What would you do if you had a whole day to yourself with no demands on your time? While most people don’t have the luxury of a whole day dedicated to relaxation, constantly putting off that downtime and putting everyone’s needs before yours will wear you down. Pick a time to do something just for you. Even just a few minutes of ‘me time’ a day will help to recharge your batteries.

Don’t assume your family and manager are aware of your concerns. If you feel you have to adjust your schedule to discover a better work—life balance, then voice that requirement. If that means asking your boss for permission to leave a few minutes early once a week so you can hit that yoga class on the way home, do it.

All new habits require time to build, so if you find yourself sneaking your smartphone to bed, that’s okay. Leave your phone downstairs tomorrow night. Tiny steps are the key to finding that balance, so start small, and go from there. Most of all, know your limitations and what works best for you; then decide what really matters, what advice you want to follow, and prioritize.

Questions 21-27
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in Boxes 21-27 on your answer sheet.

Achieving a better work-life balance
How to begin
• Make a complete (21)……………of things that are not helpful and reduce involvement in them
• Refuse some requests as this can be a useful (22)……………in gaining a better work-life balance
Things that cars help
• Regular exercise
o can increase (23)………………significantly
• Sleep
o insufficient sleep can make people ill
o avoid focusing on (24)………………in the lead-up to bedtime
Issues that require attention
• Those who see other people’s (25)……………as more important than their own will suffer
• If the working day is too long, get (26)…………to shorten it occasionally
• People should learn to recognise their own (27)…………

SECTION 3: Questions 23-40
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

San Francisco’s Golden Gale Bridge

A For several decades in the nineteenth century, there were calls to connect the rapidly growing metropolis of San Francisco to its neighbours across the mile-wide Golden Gate Strait, where San Francisco Bay opens onto the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, in 1919, officials asked the city engineer, Michael O’Shaughnessy, to explore the possibility of building a bridge. He began to consult engineers across the USA about the feasibility of doing so, and the cost. Most doubted whether a bridge could be built at all, or estimated that it would cost $100 million. However, a Chicago-based engineer named Joseph Strauss believed he could complete the project for a modest $25 to $30 million. After his proposal was accepted, Strauss set about convincing the communities on the northern end of the strait that the bridge would be to their benefit, as well as to that of San Francisco. With population centres growing fast, there was severe traffic congestion at the ferry docks, and motor vehicle travel by ferry was fast exceeding capacity.

B The bridge could not be constructed without the agreement of the US War Department, which owned the land on each side of the Strait and had the power to prevent any harbour construction that might affect shipping traffic. In 1924, San Francisco and Marin counties applied for a permit to build a bridge, and after hearing overwhelming arguments in favour of the project, the Secretary of War agreed. Despite the economic benefits promised by its supporters, the project met fierce resistance from a number of businesses – particularly ferry companies – and civic leaders. Not only would the bridge be an obstacle to shipping and spoil the bay’s natural beauty, they argued, it wouldn’t survive the sort of earthquake that had devastated the city in 1906. Eight years of legal actions followed as opponents tried to prevent it from being built.

C Meanwhile, Strauss’s team scrapped their original plans in favour of a suspension span capable of moving more than two feet to each side: this would withstand strong wind far better than a rigid structure. They also planned the two towers, and decided on a paint colour they called ‘international orange’.

D O’Shaughnessy, Strauss and the Secretary to the Mayor of San Francisco believed a special district needed to be created, with responsibility for planning, designing and financing construction. The formation of this district would enable all the counties affected by the bridge to have a say in the proceedings. This happened in 1928, when the California legislature passed an act to establish the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, consisting of six counties. In 1930, residents voted on the question of whether to put up their homes, their farms and their business properties as security for a $35 million bond issue to finance construction. The outcome was a large majority in favour.

However, the District struggled to find a financial backer amid the difficulties of the Great Depression, a problem made worse by years of expensive legal proceedings. Now desperate, Strauss personally sought help from the President of Bank of America, who provided a crucial boost by agreeing to buy $6 million in bonds in 1932.

E Construction began in January 1933, with the excavation of a vast amount of rock to establish the bridge’s two anchorages – the structures in the ground that would take the tension from the suspension cables. The crew consisted of virtually anyone capable of withstanding the physical rigours of the job, as out-of-work cab drivers, farmers and clerks lined up for the chance to earn steady wages as ironworkers and cement mixers.

The attempt to build what would be the first bridge support in the open ocean proved an immense challenge. Working from a long framework built out from the San Francisco side, divers plunged to depths of 90 feet through strong currents to blast away rock and remove the debris. The framework was damaged when it was struck by a ship in August 1933 and again during a powerful storm later in the year, setting construction back five months.

F The two towers were completed in June 1935, and a New Jersey-based company was appointed to handle the on-site construction of the suspension cables. Its engineers had mastered a technique in which individual steel wires were banded together in spools and carried across the length of the bridge on spinning wheels. Given a year to complete the task, they instead finished in just over six months, having spun more than 25,000 individual wires into each massive cable.

The roadway was completed in April 1937, and the bridge officially opened to pedestrians the following month. The next day, President Roosevelt announced its opening via White House telegraph.

G The Golden Gate has endured as a marvel of modern engineering; its main span was the longest in the world for a suspension bridge until 1981, while its towers made it the tallest bridge of any type until 1993. It withstood a destructive earthquake in 1989 and was closed to traffic only three times in its first 75 years due to weather conditions. Believed to be the most, photographed bridge in the world, this landmark was named one of the seven civil engineering wonders of the United States by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1994.

Questions 28-35
The text above has seven sections, A-G.
Which section mentions the following?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 28-35 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

28. why it was easy to recruit workers to build the bridge
29. a change in the design of the bridge
30. opposition to building the bridge
31. why a bridge was desirable
32. problems with raising funding for the bridge
33. permission being given to build the bridge
34. which records the bridge broke
35. the idea that building a bridge might be impossible

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

38. Building the bridge required a……………issued by the Secretary of War.
37. One objection to building the bridge was that another………………would destroy it.
38. Construction was delayed when the framework was damaged by a ship and again by a………
39. The last part of the bridge to be constructed was the………………
40. The bridge was first used by………………in May 1937.

SECTION 1: Questions 1-14
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-6.

TRANSITION CAKE FOR THE ELOEHLY

What is transition care?
Transition care is for older people who have been receiving medical treatment, but need more help to recover, and time to make a decision about the best place for them to live in the longer term. You can only access transition care directly from hospital.

Transition care is focused on individual goals and therapies and is given for a limited time only. It offers access to a package of services that may include:
• low-intensity therapy such as physiotherapy (exercise, mobility, strength and balance) and podiatry (foot care)
• access to a social worker
• nursing support for clinical care such as wound care
• personal care

Who provides transition care services?
Transition care is often provided by non-government organisations and is subsidised by the government. If your circumstances allow, it is expected you’ll contribute to the cost of your care.

Daily care fees are set by the organisation that provides your transition care services (your service provider). They should explain these fees to you, and the amount charged should form part of the agreement between you and the service provider. The fee is calculated on a daily basis.

Where do I receive transition care?
Transition care is provided in your own home or in a ‘live-in’ setting. This setting can be part of an existing aged-care home or health facility such as a separate wing of a hospital.

What if I’m already receiving services through a different programme?
If you’re already receiving subsidised residential care in an aged-care home, but you need to go somewhere else for transition care, your place in the aged-care home will be held until you return.

Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on page 16?
In boxes 1-6 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. Only hospital patients can go on to have transition care.
2. Transition care may be long term or short term.
3. Everyone receiving transition care must contribute to the cost.
4. Transition care at home is only available for patients who live alone.
5.Transition care may be given on a hospital site.
6. You may lose your place in a care home if you have to leave it to receive transition care.

Read the text below and answer Questions 7-14.

CABIN BAGS FOR AIR TRAVEL

If you want a small bag with wheels that you can take onto the plane with you, there’s a wide choice. Here are some of the best.

A The Flyer B3 is an ultra-lightweight cabin bag which can withstand some pretty harsh treatment, its nylon and polyester sides won’t rip or burst open if it’s dropped or thrown whilst in transit. However, the trolley handle feels quite thin and flimsy. The top carrying handle is hard and flat, and the side handle isn’t easy to grip.

B The Lightglide has two external pockets, both of which are zipped and lockable, but the inside pocket does not zip. In tests, we found the contents remain dry when given a good soaking, even around the zips. The trolley handle has a choice of two heights and the plastic hand grip doesn’t have any sharp ridges that’ll make your hands sore. For carrying there are fabric handles at the top and side.

C The Foxton is easy to control across most surfaces. However, the zips don’t always run smoothly especially around the corners, so you may have to give them a good tug, especially if the case is very full. This is definitely one to avoid if you’re going somewhere rainy as it lets loads of water in, and documents in the pockets will also get pretty wet unless they’re in plastic folders.

D The Skybag has a single external zipped pocket and another located inside the lid. Your clothes are kept in place by two adjustable straps. The zips, are easy to grip and they run smoothly around the case. However, this cabin bag felt a little heavy to pull on all but smooth floors, and it was hard to steer compared with some of the other suitcases.

E The Travelsure 35 is available in a huge range of fabric designs including leopard print or lipstick kisses. The retractable trolley handle is comfortable but can’t be adjusted to suit users of different heights. There’s no internal divider, but there are two handy zipped pockets in the lid. We test each bag by letting it fall onto a hard . floor – and our results show that you’ll have to treat this bag with great care if you want it to last. The fabric tore so badly at one of the corners that it was unusable.

Questions 7-14
The text above has five paragraphs, A-E.
Which paragraph mentions the following?

Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 7-14 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

7. The zips on this cabin bag may be difficult to use.
8. This cabin bag may be badly damaged if it is dropped.
9. The handles of this cabin bag have a number of different problems.
10. This cabin bag is very resistant to water.
11. There’s a good choice of patterns for the fabric of this cabin bag.
12. This cabin bag isn’t very easy to move around.
13. This cabin bag has just one internal zipped pocket.
14. The trolley handle of this cabin bag is adjustable.

SECTION 2: Questions 15-27
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-20

College car parking policy – staff

Parking permits and tickets
Staff permits are required to park a motor vehicle (other than a motorcycle parked in the cycle bays) on campus between 8.30 am and 4.30 pm, Monday to Friday, during term time. Annual permits can be purchased from the Hospitality Department. Application forms can be downloaded from the College website. All permits/tickets must be clearly displayed in the windscreen of vehicles during the dates of term time, as published in the academic calendar. Please inform the Services Administrator of any changes to registration details on telephone ext. 406. Annual car parking permits can be purchased from 20th September and are valid for one academic year from 1st October to 30th June. The annual charges for car parking are displayed on the application form.

Enforcement
The nominated contractor will issue fixed Penalty Charge Notices (see below) on vehicles that fail to display a valid permit and/or parking ticket, or vehicles that are parked on yellow lines or in disabled parking bays without displaying a blue disabled-parking permit. Reductions of parking space availability may arise in order to accommodate College recruitment activities and/or estate development/maintenance projects. Vehicles that are in breach of the policy will be issued with a Penalty Charge Notice.

Penalty Charge Notice (PCM)
The PCN is £30, increasing to £60 seven days after issue. The nominated contractor is responsible for the collection of unpaid PCNs and may use legal action where necessary to recover unpaid PCNs. If issued with a PCN, appeals must be taken up directly with the parking enforcement company (details included on the notice) not the college.

Disabled parking
The college has designated car parking spaces for disabled car drivers. The college will make all reasonable efforts to ensure these parking spaces are used only by drivers who display their blue disabled-parking permits, and a valid pay-and-display or annual permit, as appropriate.

If issues arise concerning the availability of the parking spaces, those concerned should raise the matter with the Domestic Services Department in order to effect a temporary solution.

Visitors
The College welcomes visitors and provides parking arrangements through pre-arranged permits, which must be displayed in the vehicle. Please contact the Hospitality Department for further information, On Open Days, sections of car parking on campus may be reserved for visitors.

Short-term drop-off/pick-up provision
There will be two short-term drop-off/pick-up spaces for users of the nursery, with a maximum often minutes’ waiting time allowed. These are located outside Concorde Building. The nursery staff bays may not be used under any circumstances.

Questions 15-20
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the text for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 15-20 on your answer sheet

15. Where can you buy parking permits at the college?
16. Which document shows the dates of term time?
17. What is the start date of annual parking permits?
18. Who is responsible for giving out parking fines if you park in the wrong place?
19. What do visitors need to show when parking?
20. Where can the nursery pick-up point be found?

Read the text below and answer Questions 21-27.

Maternity benefits

If you are expecting a baby, there are a number of benefit schemes that could help you financially. However, eligibility differs for each individual scheme.

Statutory Maternity Pay (SSVSP)
You may be entitled to Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) from your employer. This is a weekly payment, to help make it easier for you to take time off, both before and after the birth of your baby. SMP can be paid for up to 39 weeks.

You are entitled to SMP if you have been employed by the same company for at least 26 weeks by the end of the 15th week before your baby is due. You must also be earning an average of at least £87 per week (before tax). The amount you get depends on how much you earn. For 6 weeks, you will receive 90% of your average weekly earnings. Then you will receive £112.75 per week for the remaining 33 weeks.

Maternity Allowance (MA)
Maternity Allowance (MA) is available to those who are employed or self-employed but not eligible for Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP). You may be entitled to Maternity Allowance if you have been employed or self-employed for at least 26 weeks in the 66 weeks before you are due to give birth. You don’t have to work for the same employer for those 26 weeks. You also don’t have to work full weeks (as a part week counts as a full week) during the same period. Maternity Allowance can be paid for up to 39 weeks, and is either paid at the same standard rate as SMP or 90% of your average weekly earnings. You’ll receive whichever amount is the lower. You can find Maternity Allowance forms at antenatal clinics throughout the country.

Child Tax Credit
If you’re on a low income, over 16, and are responsible for at least one child, you may also be entitled to Child Tax Credit. The amount you get will depend on your personal circumstances and income. When your income is being assessed, any child benefit, maintenance payments or Maternity Allowance payments will not be classed as income. This means that it will not be taken into account when calculating your Child Tax Credit.

Sure Start Maternity Payments
If you get benefits or Child Tax Credit because you’re on a low income, then you may be entitled to Sure Start Maternity Payments. These are individual grants to help towards the cost of a new baby.

Questions 21-27
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 21-27 on your answer sheet.

21. What is the minimum period you must have worked for an employer in order to be eligible for SMP?
22. For how long is SMP payable every week as a percentage of your average weekly earnings?
23. What sum is payable every week as the second part of SMP entitlement?
24. What is the maximum length of time MA is payable?
25. Where can MA forms be obtained?
26. Apart from income, what else is considered when assessing how much Child Tax Credit is paid?
27. What are Sure Start Maternity Payments?

SECTION 3 Questions 28-40
Questions 28-32
The text below has five sections, A-E.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-viii in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Solving the puzzle of a papyrus document
ii The importance of written records and different ways of recording them
iii The use of papyrus for a range of purposes
iv Suggestions for future possibilities for papyrus
v How papyrus was cultivated and different manufacturing methods
vi The decline of papyrus use
vii The preservation and destruction of papyrus documents
viii The process of papyrus production

28. Section A
29. Section B
30. Section C
31. Section D
32. Section E

PAPYRUS
Used by the ancient Egyptians to make paper, the papyrus plant has
helped to shape the world we live in

A Libraries and archives are cultural crossroads of knowledge exchange, where the past transmits information to the present, and where the present has the opportunity to inform the future. Bureaucracies have become the backbone of civilizations, as governments try to keep track of populations, business transactions and taxes. At a personal level, our lives are governed by the documents we possess; we are certified on paper literally from birth to death. And written documentation carries enormous cultural importance: consider the consequences of signing the Foundation Document of the United Nations or the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Documentation requires a writing tool and a surface upon which to record the information permanently. About 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians started to use reeds or sticks to make marks on mud blocks which were then baked, but despite being fireproof, these were difficult to store. Other cultures used more flexible but less permanent surfaces, including animal skins and wood strips. In western culture, the adoption of papyrus was to have a great impact. Sheets of papyrus not only provide an invaluable record of people’s daily lives, they can also be dated using carbon-dating techniques, giving precise information about the age of the text written on them.

B Papyrus is strongly associated with Egyptian culture, although all the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean used it. The papyrus sedge is a tall grass-like plant. It was harvested from shallow water and swamplands on the banks of the River Nile. Manufacturing sheets of papyrus from papyrus sedge was a complex, messy process. Pith from inside the plant’s stem was cut into long strips that were laid side by side. These were then covered with a second layer of strips which were laid at right angles to the first, then soaked in water and hammered together. The sheet was then crushed to extract the water, dried and then polished to produce a high-quality writing surface, individual sheets could be glued together and rolled up to make scrolls or folded and bound to form books.

C In moist climates the cellulose-rich sheets of papyrus would readily decay, becoming covered by mould or full of holes from attacks by insects. But in dry climates, such as the Middle East, papyrus is a stable, rot-resistant writing surface. The earliest known roll of papyrus scroll was found in the tomb of an official called Hemeka near Memphis, which was then the capital city of Egypt, and is around five thousand years old. in 79CE, nearly 2,000 papyrus scrolls in the library of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were protected at Herculaneum by ash from the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. However, the most famous discoveries of papyrus have come from the rubbish dumps of the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, some 160km south-west of Cairo, in the desert to the west of the Nile. Oxyrhynchus was a regional administrative capital and for a thousand years generated vast amounts of administrative documentation, including accounts, tax returns and correspondence, which was periodically discarded to make room for more. Over time, a thick layer of sand covered these dumps, andthey were forgotten. But the documents were protected by the sand, creating a time capsule that allowed astonishing glimpses into the lives of the town’s inhabitants over hundreds of years.

Collections of documents that record information and ideas have frequently been viewed as potentially dangerous. For thousands of years, governments, despots and conquerors have resorted to burning libraries and books to rid themselves of inconvenient evidence or obliterate cultures and ideas that they found politically, morally or religiously unacceptable. One such calamity, the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, and the papyrus scrolls and books it contained, has been mythologized and has come to symbolize the global loss of cultural knowledge.

D Besides their use in record-keeping, papyrus stems were used in many other aspects of Mediterranean life, such as for boat construction and making ropes, sails and baskets, as well as being a source of food. In 1969 the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl attempted to cross the Atlantic from Morocco in the boat Ra, to show that it was possible for mariners in ancient times to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Ra was made from bundles of papyrus stems and modelled on ancient Egyptian craft. As a marshland plant, papyrus sedge stabilizes soils and reduces erosion, while some investigations show that it has potential for water purification and sewage treatment.

E True paper was probably invented in China in the first century CE. Like papyrus, it was constructed from a meshwork of plant fibres, but the Chinese used fibres from the white mulberry tree, which yielded a tough, flexible material that could be folded, stretched, and compressed. The adoption of this paper by western cultures soon rendered papyrus obsolete.

Despite dreams of paper-free societies, western cultures still use enormous quantities of paper, often in ways that it would be inconceivable to use papyrus for. As a paper substitute, the role of the papyrus sedge in western cultures has been superseded; papyrus is little more than a niche product for the tourist market. What makes papyrus noteworthy for western societies nowadays is its use as the surface upon which our ancient ancestors recorded their lives, their art and their science. In the words of the ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, it is ‘the material on which the immortality of human beings depends’.

Questions 33-37
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.

33. What was the problem with using animal skins and wood strips for writing on?
A They did not last for a long time.
B They were not easy to store.
C They were insufficiently flexible.
D They could be destroyed by fire.

34. Why did papyrus manufacturers hammer the papyrus?
A to remove water from the pith strips
B to join the layers of pith strips together
C to allow the pith strips to be easily cut
D to position the layers of pith strips at the correct angle

35. When referring to burning libraries and books, the writer is suggesting that
A information can be used for harm as well as for good.
B new ways must be found to ensure information is not lost.
C cultural knowledge depends on more than written texts.
D those in power may Wish to keep others in ignorance.

36. The writer refers to Thor Heyerdahl to illustrate the point that
A papyrus could be used as a food on long sea voyages.
B the ancient Egyptians already had advanced navigation skills.
C papyrus could be used to build boats for long sea journeys.
D the ancient Egyptians knew of the environmental benefits of papyrus

37. What does the writer conclude about papyrus today?
A It is better for the environment than using paper.
B Its significance is restricted to its role in the past.
C It is still the best writing surface for some purposes.
D More efforts need to be made to ensure it stays in use.

Questions 38-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

How papyrus documents have survived

Papyrus is rich in cellulose and in some conditions will be destroyed by fungal growths or be consumed by (38)…………………….However, it can survive for long periods in an environment that is dry. It has been found in a 5,000-year-old (39)………………………..in Egypt, and in Herculaneum many papyrus documents were preserved following a huge (40)………………………….in 79 CE. in the town of Oxyrhynchus, unwanted administrative documents were left on rubbish dumps which were covered with sand, preserving them for many years.

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 .