Month: May 2024

Biodiversity

A It seems biodiversity has become a buzzword beloved of politicians, conservationists, protesters and scientists alike. But what exactly is it? The Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement to conserve and share the planet’s biological riches, provides a good working definition: biodiversity comprises every form of life, from the smallest microbe to the largest animal or plant, the genes that give them their specific characteristics and the ecosystems of which they are apart.

B In October, the World Conservation Union (also known as the IUCN) published its updated Red List of Threatened Species, a roll call of 11,167 creatures facing extinction – 121 more than when the list was last published in 2000. But the new figures almost certainly underestimate the crisis. Some 1.2 million species of animal and 270,000 species of plant have been classified, but the well-being of only a fraction has been assessed. The resources are simply not available. The IUCN reports that 5714 plants are threatened, for example, but admits that only 4 per cent of known plants has been assessed. And, of course, there are thousands of species that we have yet to discover. Many of these could also be facing extinction.

C It is important to develop a picture of the diversity of life on Earth now so that comparisons can be made in the future and trends identified. But it isn’t necessary to observe every single type of organism in an area to get a snapshot of the health of the ecosystem. In many habitats, there are species that are particularly susceptible to shifting conditions, and these can be used as indicator species.

D In the media, it is usually large, charismatic animals such as pandas, elephants, tigers and whales that get all the attention when a loss of biodiversity is discussed. However, animals or plants far lower down the food chain are often the ones vital for preserving habitats – in the process saving the skins of those more glamorous species. There are known as keystone species.

E By studying the complex feeding relationships within habitats, species can be identified that have a particularly important impact on the environment. For example, the members of the fig family are the staple food for hundreds of different species in many different countries, so important that scientists sometimes call figs “jungle burgers”. A whole range of animals, from tiny insects to birds and large mammals, feed on everything from the tree’s bark and leaves to its flowers and fruits. Many fig species have very specific pollinators. There are several dozen species of the fig tree in Costa Rica, and a different type of wasp has evolved to pollinate each one. Chris Lyle of the Natural History Museum in London – who is also involved in the Global Taxonomy Initiative of the Convention on Biological Diversity – points out that if fig trees are affected by global warming, pollution, disease or any other catastrophe, the loss of biodiversity will be enormous.

F Similarly, sea otters play a major role in the survival of giant kelp forests along the coasts of California and Alaska. These “marine rainforests” provide a home for a wide range of other species. The kelp itself is the main food of purple and red sea urchins and in turn, the urchins are eaten by predators, particularly sea otters. They detach an urchin from the seabed then float to the surface and lie on their backs with the urchin shell on their tummy, smashing it open with a stone before eating the contents. Urchins that are not eaten tend to spend their time in rock crevices to avoid the predators. This allows the kelp to grow – and it can grow many centimetres in a day. As the forests form, bits of kelp break off and fall to the bottom to provide food for the urchins in their crevices. The sea otters thrive hunting for sea urchins in the kelp, and many other fish and invertebrates live among the fronds. The problems start when the sea otter population declines. As large predators they are vulnerable – their numbers are relatively small to disease or human hunters can wipe them out. The result is that the sea urchin population grows unchecked and they roam the seafloor eating young kelp fronds. This tends to keep the kelp very short and stops forests developing, which has a huge impact on biodiversity.

G Conversely, keystone species can also make dangerous alien species: they can wreak havoc if they end up in the wrong ecosystem. The cactus moth, whose caterpillar is a voracious eater of prickly pear was introduced to Australia to control the rampant cacti. It was so successful that someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce it to Caribbean islands that had the same problem. It solved the cactus menace, but unfortunately, some of the moths have now reached the US mainland – borne on winds and in tourists’ luggage – where they are devastating the native cactus populations of Florida.

H Organisations like the Convention on Biological Diversity work with groups such as the UN and with governments and scientists to raise awareness and fund research. A number of major international meetings – including the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg this year – have set targets for governments around the world to slow the loss of biodiversity. And the CITES meeting in Santiago last month added several more names to its list of endangered species for which trade is controlled. Of course, these agreements will prove of limited value if some countries refuse to implement them.

I There is cause for optimism, however. There seems to be a growing understanding of the need for sustainable agriculture and sustainable tourism to conserve biodiversity. Problems such as illegal logging are being tackled through sustainable forestry programmes, with the emphasis on minimising the use of rainforest hardwoods in the developed world and on rigorous replanting of whatever trees are harvested. CITES is playing its part by controlling trade in wood from endangered tree species. In the same way, sustainable farming techniques that minimise environmental damage and avoid monoculture.

J Action at a national level often means investing in public education and awareness. Getting people like you and me involved can be very effective. Australia and many European countries are becoming increasingly efficient at recycling much of their domestic waste, for example, preserving natural resources and reducing the use of fossil fuels. This, in turn, has a direct effect on biodiversity by minimising pollution, and an indirect effect by reducing the number of greenhouse gases emitted from incinerators and landfill sites. Preserving ecosystems intact for future generations to enjoy is obviously important, but biodiversity is not some kind of optional extra. Variety may be “the spice of life”, but biological variety is also our life-support system.

Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 1-7 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. The term “biodiversity” consists of living creatures and the environment that they live in.
2. There are species that have not been researched because it’s unnecessary to study all creatures.
3. It is not necessary to investigate all creatures in a certain place.
4. The press more often than not focuses on animals well-known.
5. There is a successful case that cactus moth plays a positive role in the US.
6. Usage of hardwoods is forbidden in some European countries.
7. Agriculture experts advise farmers to plant single crops in the field in terms of sustainable farming.

Questions 8-13
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Because of the ignorance brought by media, people tend to neglect significant creatures called (8) …………… Every creature has diet connections with others, such as (9) ……………….., which provide a majority of foods for other species. In some states of America, the decline in a number of sea otters leads to the boom of (10) ………………. An impressing case is that imported (11) ……………….. successfully tackles the plant cacti in (12) ………………….. However, the operation is needed for the government to increase its financial support in (13) …………………..

What are you laughing at?

A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of wordplay. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions 14-19
Look at the following research findings (questions 14-19) and the list of people below. Match each finding with the correct person A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

A Tom Flamson
B Elke Zimmerman
C Robert Provine
D Jaak Panksepp

14. Babies and chimps produce similar sounds of laughter.
15. Primates are not the only animals who produce laughter Pan.
16. Laughter also suggests that we feel safe and easy with others.
17. Laughter is a response to a polite situation instead of humour.
18. Animal laughter evolved before human laughter
19. Laughter is a social activity.

Questions 20-23
Complete the summary using NOT MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage.

Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common (20) ………….. that lived perhaps 8 million years ago. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who (21) ……………….. the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This (22) ……………. starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the (23) …………….. of another individual, and laughing is a signal that we laughter is what makes it a reliable signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angels.

Questions 24-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 24-26 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

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

The reconstruction of community in Talbot Park, Auckland

A. An architecture of disguise is almost complete at Talbot Park in the heart of Auckland’s Glen Innes. The place was once described as a state housing ghetto, rife with crime, vandalism and other social problems. But today after a $48 million urban renewal makeover, the site is home to 700 residents — 200 more than before — and has people regularly inquiring whether they can buy or rent there. “It doesn’t look like social housing,” Housing New Zealand housing services manager Dene Busby says of the tidy brick and weatherboard apartments and townhouses which would look just as much at home in “there is no reason why public housing should look cheap in my view,” says Design Group architect Neil of the eight three-bedroom terrace houses his firm designed.

B. Talbot Park is a triangle of government-owned land bounded by Apirana Ave, Pilkington Rd and Point England Rd. In the early 1960s it was developed for state housing built around a linear park that ran through the middle. Initially, there was a strong sense of a family-friendly community. Former residents recall how the Talbot Park reserve played a big part in their childhoods — a place where the kids in the block came together to play softball, cricket, tiggy, leapfrog and bullrush. Sometimes they’d play “Maoris against Pakehas” but without any animosity. “It was all just good fun”, says Georgie Thompson in Ben Schrader’s We Call it Home: A History of State Housing in New Zealand. “We had respect for our neighbours and addressed them by title Mr. and Mrs. soand-so,” she recalls.

C. Quite what went wrong with Talbot Park is not clear. We call it Home Records that the community began to change in the late 1970s as more Pacific Islanders and Europeans moved in. The new arrivals didn’t readily integrate with the community, a “them and us” mentality developed, and residents interacted with their neighbours less. What was clear was the buildings were deteriorating and becoming dilapidated, petty crime was on the rise and the reserve — focus of fond childhood memories — had become a wasteland and was considered unsafe.

D. But it wasn’t until 2002 that Housing New Zealand decided the properties needed upgrading. The master renewal plan didn’t take advantage of the maximum accommodation density allowable (one unit per 100 sq metres ) but did increase density to one emit per 180 sq m by refurbishing all 108 star flat units, removing the multis and building 111 new home. The Talbot strategy can be summed up as mix, match and manage. Mix up the housing with variety plans from a mix of architects, match house styles to what7 s built by the private sector, match tenants to the mix, and manage their occupancy. Inevitably cost comes into the equation.” If you’re going to build low cost homes, you’ve got to keep them simple and you can’t afford a fancy bit on them. ” says Michael Thompson of Architectus which designed the innovative three level Atrium apartments lining two sides of a covered courtyard. At $300,000 per two bedroom unit, the building is more expensive but provides for independent disabled accommodation as well as offering solar hot water heating and rainwater collection for toilet cisterns and outside taps.

E. The renewal project budget at $1.5 million which will provide park pathways, planting, playgrounds, drinking fountains, seating, skateboard rails, a half-size basketball hard court, and a pavilion. But if there was any doubt this is a low socio-economic area, the demographics for the surrounding Tamaki area are sobering. Of the 5000 households there, 55 percent are state houses, 28 per cent privately owned (compared to about 65 percent nationally) and 17 percent are private rental. The area has a high concentration of households with incomes in the $5000 to $15,000 range and very few with an income over $70,000. That’s in sharp contrast to the more affluent suburbs like Kohimarama and St John’s that surround the area.

F. “The design is for people with different culture background,” says architect James Lunday of Common Ground which designed the 21 large family homes. “Architecturally we decided to be relatively conservative — nice house in its own garden with a bit of space and good indoor outdoor flow.” There’s a slight reflection of the whare and a Pacific fale, but not overplayed “The private sector is way behind in urban design and sustainable futures,” says Bracey. “Redesigning sheets and parks is a big deal and very difficult to do. The private sector won’t do it, because It’s so hard.”

G. There’s no doubt good urban design and good architecture play a significant part in the scheme. But probably more important is a new standard of social control. Housing New Zealand calls it “intensive tenancy management”. Others view it as social engineering. “It’s a model that we are looking at going forward,” according to Housing New Zealand’s central Auckland regional manager Graham Bodman.1 The focus is on frequent inspections, helping tenants to get to know each other and trying to create an environment of respect for neighbours, ” says Bodman. That includes some strict rules — no loud parties after 10 pm, no dogs, no cats in the apartments, no washing hung over balcony rails and a requirement to mow lawns and keep the property tidy. Housing New Zealand has also been active in organising morning teas and sheet barbecues for residents to meet their neighbours. “IVs all based on the intensification,” says Community Renewal project manager Stuart Bracey. “We acknowledge if you are going to put more people living closer together, you have to actually help them to live closer together because it creates tension — especially for people that aren’t used to it.”

Questions 27-33
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs, A-G from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Financial hardship of community
ii A good tendency of strengthening the supervision
iii Details of plans for the community’s makeover and upgrade
iv Architecture suits families of various ethnic origins
v Problems arise then the mentality of alienation developed later
vi Introduction of a social housing community with unexpected high standard
vii A practical design and need assist and cooperate in future
viii closer relationship among neighbors in original site
ix different need from a makeup of a low financial background should be considered
x How to make the community feel safe
xi a plan with details for house structure

27. Paragraph A
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph C
30. Paragraph D
31. Paragraph E
32. Paragraph F
33. Paragraph G

Questions 34-36
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-E) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters, A-E, in boxes 34-36 on your answer sheet.

34. Design should meet the need of mix-raced cultural background
35. for better living environment, regulations and social control should be imperative
36. organising more community’s activities helps strengthening relationship in community

A Michael Thompson
B Graham Bodman
C Stuart Bracey
D James Lunday
E Dene Busby

Questions 37-40
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

In the year 2002, the Talbot decided to raise housing standard, yet the plan was to build homes go much beyond the accommodation limit and people complain about the high living (37) ……………. And as the variety plans were complemented under the designs of many (38) …………….. together, made house styles go with the part designed by individuals, matched tenants from different culture. As for the finance, reconstruction program’s major concern is to build a house within low (39) ……………. finally, just as expert predicted residents will agree on building a relatively conventional house in its own (40) ……………… which provides considerable space to move around.

The problem of climate change

A. The climate of the Earth is always changing. In the past it has altered as a result of nat­ural causes. Nowadays, however, the term ‘climate change’ is generally used when referring to changes in our climate which have been identified since the early part of the twentieth century. The changes we’ve seen over recent years and those which are predicted to occur over the next 100 years are thought by many to be largely a result of human behavior rather than due to natural changes in the atmosphere. And this is what is so significant about current climactic trends; never before has man played such a significant role in determining long-term weather patterns – we are entering the unknown and there is no precedent for what might happen next.

B The greenhouse effect is very important when we talk about climate change as it relates to the gases which keep the Earth warm. Although the greenhouse effect is a naturally occurring phenomenon, it is believed that the effect could be intensified by human activity and the emission of gases into the atmosphere. It is the extra green­house gases which humans have released which are thought to pose the strongest threat. Certain researchers, such as Dr Michael Crawley, argue: ‘even though this nat­ural phenomenon does exist it is without a doubt human activity that has worsened its effect; this is evident when comparing data regarding the earth’s temperature in the last one hundred years with the one hundred years prior to that.’ Some scientists, however, dispute this as Dr Ray Ellis suggests: ‘human activity may be contributing a small amount to climate change but this increase in temperature is an unavoidable fact based on the research data we have compiled.

C Scientists around the globe are look­ing at all the evidence surrounding climate change and using advanced technology have come up with pre­dictions for our future environment and weather. The next stage of that work, which is just as important, is looking at the knock-on effects of potential changes. For example, are we likely to see an increase in precip­itation and sea levels? Does this mean there will be an increase in flooding and what can we do to protect ourselves from that? How will our health be affected by climate change, how will agricultural practices change and how will wildlife cope? What will the effects on coral be? Professor Max Leonard has suggested, ‘while it may be controversial some would argue that climate change could bring with it positive effects as well as negative ones’.

D There are many institutions around the world whose sole priority is to take action against these environmental problems. Green Peace is the organisation that is probably the most well-known. It is an international organisation that campaigns in favour of researching and promoting solutions to climate change, exposes the companies and governments that are blocking action, lobbies to change national and international policy, and bears witness to the impacts of unnecessary destruction and detrimental human activity.

E The problem of climate change is without a doubt something that this generation and the generations to come need to deal with. Fortunately, the use of renewable energy is becoming increasingly popular, which means that less energy is consumed as renewable energy is generated from natural resources—such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geo­thermal heat—which can be naturally replenished. Another way to help the environment, in terms of climate change, is by travelling light. Walking or riding a bike instead of driv­ing a car uses fewer fossil fuels which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In addi­tion, using products that are made from recycled paper, glass, metal and plastic reduces carbon emissions because they use less energy to manufacture than products made from completely new materials. Recycling paper also saves trees and lets them continue to limit climate change naturally as they remain in the forest, where they remove carbon from the atmosphere. Professor Mark Halton, who has completed various studies in this field, has stated: ‘with all this information and the possible action that we can take, it isn’t too late to save our planet from over-heating and the even worse side-effects of our own activity.

Questions 1–5
Reading Passage 1 has 5 paragraphs, A – E. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A – E in the boxes below. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. A natural phenomenon that could also affect climate change.
2. Steps we can take to help reverse the situation.
3. An explanation of what climate change is.
4. Organisations that want to help.
5. Possible effects of climate change.

Questions 6-9
Look at the following people (Questions 6 -9) and the list of statements below. Match each person with the correct statement, A – F.

6. Professor Max Leonard
7. Dr Michael Crawley
8. Professor Mark Halton
9. Dr Ray Ellis

A We have the ability to change the situation
B Climate Change is Inevitable
C Humans have made the situation much worse
D Climate Change might not be all bad
E Human activity and natural weather phenomena
F While we may not be too late to save our planet, there are bound to be some extreme side-effects of past human activity one way or the other

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In spaces 10-13 below, write

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

10. Man is not entirely responsible for global warming.
11. Scientists have come up with new evidence about the negative effects of carbon-free sources of energy such as nuclear power
12. One of the purposes of Green Peace is to find out which companies and governments are doing things which don’t help the actions of environmentalists.
13. Most people aren’t willing to start using renewable energy.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Most countries’ education systems have had what you might call educational disasters, but, sadly, in many areas of certain countries these ‘disasters’ are still evident today. The English education system is unique due to the fact that there are still dozens of schools which are known as private schools and they perpetuate privilege and social division. Most countries have some private schools for the children of the wealthy; England is able to more than triple the average number globally. England has around 3,000 private schools and just under half a million children are educated at them whilst some nine million children are educated at state schools. The over­whelming majority of students at private schools also come from middle-class families.

The result of this system is evident and it has much English history embedded within it. The facts seem to speak for themselves. In the private system almost half the students go on to University, whilst in the state sys­tem only about eight per cent make it to further educa­tion. However, statistics such as these can be deceptive due to the fact that middle-class children do better at examinations than working class ones, and most of them stay on at school after 16. Private schools therefore have the advantage over state schools as they are entirely ‘middle class’, and this creates an environment of success where students work harder and apply them­selves more diligently to their school work.

Private schools are extortionately expensive, being as much as £18,000 a year at somewhere such as Harrow or Eton, where Princes William and Harry attended, and at least £8,000 a year almost everywhere else. There are many parents who are not wealthy or even comfortably off but are willing to sacrifice a great deal in the cause of their children’s schooling. It baffles many people as to why they need to spend such vast amounts when there are perfectly acceptable state schools that don’t cost a penny. One father gave his reasoning for sending his son to a private school, ‘If my son gets a five-percent-better chance of going to University then that may be the dif­ference between success and failure.” It would seem to the average person that a £50,000 minimum total cost of second level educa­tion is a lot to pay for a five-percent-better chance. Most children, given the choice, would take the money and spend it on more enjoyable things rather than shelling it out on a school that is too posh for its own good

However, some say that the real reason that parents fork out the cash is prejudice: they don’t want their little kids mixing with the “workers”, or picking up an undesirable accent. In addition to this, it wouldn’t do if at the next din­ner party all the guests were boasting about sending their kids to the same place where the son of the third cousin of Prince Charles is going, and you say your kid is going to the state school down the road, even if you could pocket the money for yourself instead, and, as a result, be able to serve the best Champagne with the smoked salmon and duck.

It is a fact, however, that at many of the best private schools, your money buys you something. One school, with 500 pupils, has 11 science laboratories; another school with 800 pupils, has 30 music practice rooms; another has 16 squash courts, and yet another has its own beach. Private schools spend £300 per pupil a year on invest­ment in buildings and facilities; the state system spends less than £50. On books, the ratio is 3 to 1.

One of the things that your money buys which is difficult to quantify is the appearance of the school, the way it looks. Most private schools that you will find are set in beautiful, well-kept country houses, with extensive grounds and gardens. In comparison with the state schools, they tend to look like castles, with the worst of the state schools looking like public lavatories, perhaps even tiled or covered in graffiti. Many may even have an architectural design that is just about on the level of an industrial shed.

Questions 14–20
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

14. The English educational system differs from the other ones because
A it tries to make state and private equal.
B more students are educated at private schools than state schools
C it contributes to creating a class system within society.
D it is more expensive to run

15. There are more private school children who go to university because
A the lessons and teachers at the private schools are much better.
B their parents often send their children to private schools
C they have more teaching hours
D the school create a successful environment.

16. A lot of parents often send their children to private schools
A because they are not well-informed.
B to show how much money they have to their friends
C to increase their chances of succeeding in the university exams.
D because of the better sports facilities.

17. It is suggested that some parents of children at private schools are
A prejudiced and superficial.
B more intelligent that those with children at state schools.
C well-brought-up and cultivated.
D overly protective.

18. Private schools
A always have their own beaches.
B teach sports that state schools do not.
C spend more money per student than state schools.
D spend more money on hiring good teachers.

19. writer thinks that private-school buildings
A are very attractive and luxurious.
B generally do not look very nice.
C are too big for the amount of students who attend the school.
D are not built to suit student’s needs

20. In general, what do you think the writer’s opinion of private schools is?
A It isn’t fair that those without money can’t attend them.
B They divide social classes but they offer better facilities and a more creative environment.
C There is little difference between private and state schools.
D They have the best teachers.

Questions 21–26
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The fact that there are so many private schools in England, in comparison to other countries, makes the English educational system (21) ……………… Most students in these schools are from (22) …………….. families. These students seem to do better at exams although statistics can be (23) ……………… One of the advantages of private schools is that they seem to provide students with a better, more positive environment that encourages them to (24) ……………… themselves to their school work with more enthusiasm. A lot of not very well-off parents make huge sacrifices for their children’s (25) …………………. to help them go to respectable universities. Unfortunately, many state school buildings sometimes have the appearance of an industrial (26) ……………………

Martin Luther King

A Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He had an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams King. Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He skipped ninth and twelfth grade, and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school. From the time that Martin was born, he knew that black people and white people had different rights in certain parts of America. If a black family wanted to eat at a restaurant, they had to sit in a separate section of the restaurant. They had to sit at the back of the cinema, and even use separate toilets. Worse, and perhaps even more humiliating still, in many southern states, if a black man was on a bus and all the seats were taken, he would have to endure the indignity of relinquishing his own seat to a white man. King could never understand the terrible injustice of this.

In 1948, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. Later, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy on June 5, 1955. King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953 and they had four children.

B Returning to the South to become pastor of a Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, King first achieved national renown when he helped mobilise the black boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955. This was organised after Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man – in the segregated south, black people could only sit at the back of the bus. The 382-day boycott led the bus company to change its regulations, and the Supreme Court declared such segrega­tion unconstitutional.

C In 1957 King was active in the organisation of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SCLC), formed to co-ordinate protests against discrimination. He advocated non-violent direct action based on the methods of Gandhi, who led protests against British rule in India culminating in India’s independence in 1947. In 1963, King led mass protests against dis­criminatory practices in Birmingham, Alabama, where the white population were violently resisting desegregation. The city was dubbed ‘Bombingham’ as attacks against civil rights protesters increased, and King was arrested and jailed for his part in the protests.

D After his release, King participated in the enormous civil rights march, in Washington, in August 1963, and delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, predicting a day when the promise of freedom and equality for all would become a reality in America. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, he led a campaign to register blacks to vote. The same year the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act out­lawing the discriminatory practices that had barred blacks from voting in the south.

E As the civil rights movement became increasingly radicalised, King found that his message of peaceful protest was not shared by many in the younger generation. King began to protest against the Vietnam War and poverty levels in the US. On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treat­ment. In one incident, black street repair­men had received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weath­er, but white employees had been paid for the full day. King could not bear to stand by and let such patent acts of racism go unno­ticed. He moved to unite his people, and all the peoples of America on the receiving end of discriminatory practices, to protest for their rights, peacefully but steadfastly.

F On his trip to Memphis, King was booked into room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, owned by Walter Bailey. King was shot at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968 while he was standing on the motel’s second-floor balcony. King was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where doc­tors opened his chest and performed manu­al heart massage. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. King’s autopsy revealed that although he was only 39 years old, he had the heart of a 60-year-old man.

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

27. From a young age Martin Luther King
A wanted to protest for the rights of black people.
B could not understand why black people were treated differently.
C was not allowed to go to the cinema or to restaurants.
D was aware that black people were being humiliated in many northern states.

28. What initially made Martin Luther King famous?
A the black boycott of the Montgomery bus system
B becoming a pastor at a Baptist Church
C when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus
D when he persuaded Rosa Parks not to give up her bus seat to a white man

29. What influenced Martin Luther King regarding non-violence?
A India’s independence in 1947
B Christianity
C the Southern Leadership Christian Conference
D the methods of Gandhi

30. What did Martin Luther King fight for in 1965?
A the right of black people to vote
B the actions of the US Congress
C the right to win the Nobel Peace Prize
D the right of black people to travel abroad

31. How did Martin Luther King feel about the civil rights movement?
A It was helping the war in Vietnam.
B It brought the younger generation together.
C It had been exploited by politicians who wanted to get more votes.
D The protesters sometimes behaved too violently.

Questions 32-34
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In spaces 32 – 34 below, write

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

32. The black boycott of the Montgomery bus system was a success.
33. In 1963 the white people in Alabama wanted desegregation.
34. Martin Luther King achieved a lot in his protest against the Vietnam War.

Questions 35-40
Reading Passage 3 has 6 paragraphs. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph A – F, from the list of headings. Write the correct number, i – viii, in spaces 35 – 40 below.

List of Headings
i the memorable speech
ii Unhappy about violence
iii A tragic incident
iv Protests and action
v The background of an iconic man
vi Making his mark internationally
vii Difficult childhood
viii Black street repairmen

35. Paragraph A
36. Paragraph B
37. Paragraph C
38. Paragraph D
39. Paragraph E
40. Paragraph F

Maori Fish Hooks

A. Maori fish hooks, made from wood, bone, stone and flax, are intended to have the best possible design and function. The hooks are designed to target specific species with precision. In the industry of commercial long-line fishing, there are some Maori hook designs which are making a splash.

B. When Polynesians first came New Zealand sometime within the years 1100-1300 AD, they didn’t have the technology necessary to heat and manipulate metal out of rocks. Meanwhile, fish was the settlers’ main food source at the time, so fishermen made their hooks and fishing gear out of wood, bone, stone and shells. Other plants native to the island of New Zealand, like as flax (harakeke), cabbage tree (ti) and astelia (kiekie) gave the necessary fibrous material to make fishing lines and nets of greater or equal strength to the jute, which was being used by the Europeans at the time. However, as a material, metal is more malleable, and can be changed into any shape, while natural materials are limited in the shapes they can take on. The Maori fish hooks needed to be more innovative in the ways that they dealt with these limitations.

C. Early accounts of Europeans who settled and explored New Zealand claimed that Maori hooks, known as matau, were “odd”, “of doubtful efficacy”, “very clumsy affairs” or “impossible looking.” Archaeologists from more recent times have also mentioned the round hook appearing as odd, with comments such as, “shaped in a manner which makes it very difficult to imagine could ever be effective in catching a fish.” William Anderson, who was aboard the Resolution during Cook’s third voyage in 1777 as the ship’s surgeon, commented that the Maori “live chiefly by fishing, making use…of wooden fish hooks pointed with bone, but so oddly made that a stranger is at a loss to know how they can answer such a purpose.”

D. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa did their own recent study on Maori fish hooks two hundred and thirty years later, and were able to demonstrate that the unique hook design was a matter of function. The hook’s design allowed it to catch fish by spinning away from the direction of the point and catching their jaws, instead of poking a hole through the fish or by being used as a lever, which some archaeologists also suggested. It seems that the design of the Maori fish hook is, perhaps, the world’s most efficiently and masterfully designed fish hook, likely superior to any modern metal fish hook of today.

E. To make larger hooks, Maori used shanks made of strong wood, with stout points made of bone or shell. They tied tree branches and saplings together to grow them into the ideal shapes for building, then harvested the plants when they grew to the appropriate size. They hardened wood by carefully drying it and burying underground with fires lit above it. Human bone was often used for bone points, which they lashed securely to a groove at the end of the shank with pre-made flax materials (muka). When they wanted to catch larger species like sharks, groper and ling, they used composite hook. However, average the traditional hook was usually not longer than a three finger breadth (128 mm length).

F. To capture seabirds for food and feathers, like albatross, the islanders used slender hooks which can be differentiated from other hooks intended to catch fish by their lighter build and lack of an inturned point. Many of these hooks were collected by early explorers, suggesting that the taking of seabirds with hook and line was an important source of food and feathers for Maori. (105 mm length). Slender hooks with wide gapes were used to capture albatross and other seabirds for food and feathers, and can be distinguished from hooks intended to catch fish by the lighter construction and lack of an inturned point. Early explorers collected many of these hooks which could indicated that catching seabirds with a hook and line provided significant amounts of food and feathers for the Maori. (105 mm length)

G. Maori adopted new materials quickly once they became available with European explorers, sealers and whalers who began to arrive towards the end of the 1700s. At this point, the Maori were still making their fish hooks, but now using metals and imported materials. Wooden and flax parts of old, abandoned fish hooks decomposed quickly as traditional hooks were cast away in favor of new ones. Tools made of luxury materials such as ivory or greenstone may have been kept around as decorations items, with stylized Maori fish hooks seen today as a symbol of cultural revitalization.

H. The Maori kept recreating traditional designs even as new materials poured in, preferring hook shapes which were introduced by Pakeha into the 1800s. By following the tradition of the rotating hook design, they remained connected with a part of their traditional culture. In the end, though, it was only a matter of time before the amount of mass-produced metal European hooks finally overwhelmed the area, highlighting the difficulty of making hooks from nails, horseshoes and other metal objects, and finally the use of the traditional designs fell out of favor.

I. By the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, tourists and collectors’ demands for Maori artifacts had grown, leading manufacturers to produce large quantities of forged hooks. These replicas were then traded with both Maoris and Europeans to use as forgeries of the real thing, sometimes directly commissioned by artifact dealers themselves. Fake hooks can be spotted by their cheap construction, inconsistent materials, rudimentary lashings, odd or over-elaborate decorative carvings, and finally, by the lack of in-turned points or angled grooves used to actually attach the fishing line.

J. The ways that matau have changed throughout their history is somewhat symbolic of how Maori have adapted to use European tools, materials and technology to their purposes over time, as well as the ways that European influence and technology contributed to, rather overtook, generally compatible Maori skills, and traditional materials were replaced or complemented by metals and, more recently, artificial materials. Commercial longline fishermen everywhere have begun using the circle hook design today, one that is nearly the same as the traditional matau in both its appearance and functionality. It seems that the advantages and improved catch rates of this Maori technology have been recognized once more.

Questions 1-8
The reading passage has ten paragraphs labelled A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Instruction on how to recognise authentic Maori hooks from counterfeit ones
2. A description of a different type of hooks that are not used to catch fish
3. An acknowledgement that Maori design and craftsmanship are still relevant in the modern world
4. An investigation into how the hooks functioned so effectively
5. A description of how modern technology began to dominate and eventually took over from traditional hook construction
6. A list of raw materials used to construct hooks
7. An outline of how different styles of hooks and types of materials were employed to catch larger fish
8. An account of how the Maori employed new technology and adapted it

Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage? In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

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

9. The early European settlers quickly understood how the Maori fish hook worked
10. The hook works by making a hole and embedding itself in the mouth of the fish
11. The Maoris catch seabirds by their feet
12. There used to be a demand for Maori fish hooks and many counterfeit ones were produced
13. Today European style hooks have completely replaced the traditional styles used by the Maoris

Fossil Files “The Paleobiology Database”

A. Are we now living through the sixth extinction as our own activities destroy ecosystems and wipe out diversity? That’s the doomsday scenario painted by many ecologists, and they may well be right. The trouble is we don’t know for sure because we don’t have a clear picture of how life changes between extinction events or what has happened in previous episodes. We don’t even know how many species are alive today, let alone the rate at which they are becoming extinct. A new project aims to fill some of the gaps. The Paleobiology Database aspires to be an online repository of information about every fossil ever dug up. It is a huge undertaking that has been described as biodiversity’s equivalent of the Human Genome Project. Its organizers hope that by recording the history of biodiversity they will gain an insight into how environmental changes have shaped life on Earth in the past and how they might do so in the future. The database may even indicate whether life can rebound no matter what we throw at it, or whether a human induced extinction could be without parallel, changing the rules that have applied throughout the rest of the planet’s history.

B. But already the project is attracting harsh criticism. Some experts believe it to be seriously flawed. They point out that a database is only as good as the data fed into it, and that even if all the current fossil finds were catalogued, they would provide an incomplete inventory of life because we are far from discovering every fossilised species. They say that researchers should get up from their computers and get back into the dirt to dig up new fossils. Others are more sceptical still, arguing that we can never get the full picture because the fossil record is riddled with holes and biases.

C. Fans of the Paleobiology Database acknowledge that the fossil record will always be incomplete. But they see value in looking for global patterns that show relative changes in biodiversity. “The fossil record is the best tool we have for understanding how diversity and extinction work in normal times,” says John Alroy from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. “Having a background extinction estimate gives US a benchmark for understanding the mass extinction that’s currently under way. It allows us to say just how bad it is in relative terms.”

D. To this end, the Paleobiology Database aims to be the most thorough attempt yet to come up with good global diversity curves. Every day between 10 and 15 scientists around the world add information about fossil finds to the database. Since it got up and running in 1998, scientists have entered almost 340,000 specimens, ranging from plants to whales to insects to dinosaurs to sea urchins. Overall totals are updated hourly at www.paleodb.org. Anyone can download data from the public part of the site and play with the numbers to their heart’s content. Already, the database has thrown up some surprising results. Looking at the big picture, Alroy and his colleagues believe they have found evidence that biodiversity reached a plateau long ago, contrary to the received wisdom that species numbers have increased continuously between extinction events. “The traditional view is that diversity has gone up and up and up,” he says. “Our research is showing that diversity limits were approached many tens of millions of years before the dinosaurs evolved, much less suffered extinction.” This suggests that only a certain number of species can live on Earth at a time, filling a prescribed number of niches like spaces in a multi-storey car park. Once it’s full, no more new species can squeeze in, until extinctions free up new spaces or something rare and catastrophic adds a new floor to the car park.

E. Alroy has also used the database to reassess the accuracy of species names. His findings suggest that irregularities in classification inflate the overall number of species in the fossil record by between 32 and 44 per cent. Single species often end up with several names, he says, due to misidentification or poor communication between taxonomists in different countries. Repetition like this can distort diversity curves. “If you have really bad taxonomy in one short interval, it will look like a diversity spike—a big diversification followed by a big extinction-when all that has happened is a change in the quality of names,” says Alroy. For example, his statistical analysis indicates that of the 4861 North American fossil mammal species catalogued in the database, between 24 and 31 per cent will eventually prove to be duplicates.

F. Of course, the fossil record is undeniably patchy. Some places and times have left behind more fossil-filled rocks than others. Some have been sampled more thoroughly. And certain kinds of creatures—those with hard parts that lived in oceans, for example–are more likely to leave a record behind, while others, like jellyfish, will always remain a mystery. Alroy has also tried to account for this. He estimates, for example, that only 41 per cent of North American mammals that have ever lived are known from fossils, and he suspects that a similar proportion of fossils are missing from other groups, such as fungi and insects.

G. Not everyone is impressed with such mathematical wizardry. Jonathan Adrain from the University of Iowa in Iowa City points out that statistical wrangling has been known to create mass extinctions where none occurred. It is easy to misinterpret data. For example, changes in sea level or inconsistent sampling methods can mimic major changes in biodiversity. Indeed, a recent and thorough examination of the literature on marine bivalve fossils has convinced David Jablonsky from the University of Chicago and his colleagues that their diversity has increased steadily over the past 5 million years.

H. With an inventory of all living species, ecologists could start to put the current biodiversity crisis in historical perspective. Although creating such a list would be a task to rival even the Palaeobiology Database, it is exactly what the San Francisco-based ALL Species Foundation hopes to achieve in the next 25 years. The effort is essential, says Harvard biologist Edward o. Wilson, who is alarmed by current rates of extinction. “There is a crisis. We’ve begun to measure it, and it’s very high,” Wilson says. “We need this kind of information in much more detail to protect all of biodiversity, not just the ones we know well.” Let the counting continue.

Questions 14-19
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Potential error exists in the database
ii Supporter of database recleared its value
iii The purpose of this paleobiology data
iv Reason why some certain species were not included in it
v Duplication of breed but with different names
vi Achievement of Paleobiology Databasesince
vii Criticism on the project which is waste of fund

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

Questions 20-22
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-D) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-D in boxes 20-22 on your answer sheet.

A Jonathan Adrain
B John Alroy
C David Jablonsky
D Edward O. Wilson

20. Creating the Database would help scientist to identify connections of all species
21. Believed in contribution of detailed statistics should cover beyond the known species
22. Reached a contradictory finding to the tremendous species die-out

Questions 23-24
Choose the TWO correct letter following. Write your answers in boxes 10-11 on your answer sheet.

Please choose TWO CORRECT descriptions about the The Paleobiology Database in this passage:

A almost all the experts welcome this project
B intrigues both positive and negative opinions from various experts
C all different creature in the database have unique name
D aims to embrace all fossil information globally
E get more information from record rather than the field

Question 25-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.

25.According to the passage, jellyfish belongs to which category of The Paleobiology Database?
A repetition breed
B untraceable species
C specifically detailed species
D currently living creature

26. What is the author’s suggestion according to the end of passage?
A continue to complete counting the number of species in the Paleobiology Database
B stop contributing The Paleobiology Database
C try to create a database of living creature
D study more in the field rather than in the book

Decision, Decision !

Research explores when we can make a vital decision quickly and we need to proceed more deliberately

A A widely recognised legend tells us that in Gordium (in what is now Turkey) in the fourth century BC an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot. It was said that the first person to untie it would become the king of Asia. Unfortunately, the knot proved impossible to untie. The story continues that when confronted with this problem, rather than deliberating on how to untie the Gordian knot. Alexander, the famous ruler of the Greeks in the ancient world, simply took out his sword and cut it in two – then went on to conquer Asia. Ever since the notion of a ‘Gordian solution’ has referred to the attractiveness of a simple answer to an otherwise intractable problem.

B Among researchers in the psychology of decision making, however, such solutions have traditionally held little appeal. In particular, the ‘conflict model’ of decision making proposed by psychologists Irving Janis and Leon Mann in their 1977 book, Decision Making, argued that a complex decision-making process is essential for guarding individuals and groups from the peril of ‘group-think’. Decisions made without thorough canvassing, surveying, weighing, examining and reexamining relevant information and options would be suboptimal and often disastrous. One foreign affair decision made by a well-known US political leader in the 1960s is typically held us as an example of the perils of inadequate thought, whereas his successful handling of a water crisis is cited as an example of the advantages of careful deliberation. However, examination of these historical events by Peter Suedfield, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and Roderick Kramer, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found little difference in the two decision-making processes; both crises required and received complex consideration by the political administration, but later only the second one was deemed to be the effective.

C In general, however, organizational and political science offers little evidence that complex decisions fare better than simpler ones. In fact, a growing body of work suggests that in many situations simply ‘snap’ decisions with being routinely superior to more complex ones – an idea that gained widespread public appeal with Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink (2005).

D An article by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues, Making the Right Choice: the Deliberation-without-attention Effect’, runs very much in the spirit of Gladwell’s influential text. Its core argument is that to be effective, conscious (deliberative) decision making requires cognitive resources. Because increasingly complex decisions place increasing strain on those resources, the quality of our decisions declines as their complexity increases. In short, complex decisions overrun our cognitive powers. On the other hand, unconscious decision making (what the author refer to as ‘deliberation without attention’) requires no cognitive resources, so task complexity does not Effectiveness. The seemingly counterintuitive conclusion is that although conscious thought enhances simple decisions, the opposite holds true for more complex decisions.

E Dijksterhuis reports four Simple but elegant studies supporting this argument. In one, participants assessed the quality of four hypothetical cars by considering either four attributes (a simple task) or 12 attributes (a complex task). Among participants who considered four attributes, those who were allowed to engage in undistracted deliberative thought did better at discriminating between the best and worst cars. Those who were distracted and thus unable to deliberate had to rely on their unconscious thinking and did less well. The opposite pattern emerged when people considered 12 criteria. In this case, conscious deliberation led to inferior discrimination and poor decisions.

F In other studies, Dijksterhuis surveyed people shopping for clothes (‘simple’ products) and furniture (‘complex’ products). Compared with those who said they had deliberated long and hard, shoppers who bought with little conscious deliberation felt less happy with their simple clothing purchase but happier with the complex furniture purchases. Deliberation without attention actually produced better results as the decisions became more complex.

G From there, however, the researchers take a big leap. They write: There is no reason to assume that the deliberation-without-attention effect does not generalize to other types of choices – political, managerial or otherwise. In such cases, it should benefit the individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complicated matters to the unconscious.

H This radical inference contradicts standard political and managerial theory but doubtless comforts those in politics and management who always find the simple solution to the complex problem an attractive proposition. Indeed, one suspects many of our political leaders already embrace this wisdom.

I Still, it is there, in the realms of society and its governance, that the more problematic implications of deliberation without attention begin to surface. Variables that can be neatly circumscribed in decisions about shopping lose clarity in a world of group dynamics, social interaction, history and politics. Two pertinent questions arise. First, what counts as a complex decision? And second, what counts as a good outcome?

J As social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) noted, a ‘good’ decision that nobody respects is actually bad, his classic studies of decision making showed that participating in deliberative processes makes people more likely to abide by the results. The issue here is that when political decision-makers make mistakes, it is their politics, or the relationship between their politics and our own, rather than psychology which is at fault.

K Gladwell’s book and Dijksterhuis’s paper are invaluable in pointing out the limitations of the conventional wisdom that decision quality rises with decision-making complexity. But this work still tempts us to believe that decision making is simply a matter of psychology, rather than also a question of politics, ideology and group membership. Avoiding social considerations in a search for general appeal rather than toward it.

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

27. The legend of the Gordian knot is used to illustrate the idea that
A anyone can solve a difficult problem
B difficult problems can have easy solutions
C the solution to any problem requires a lot of thought
D people who can solve complex problems make good leaders

28. The ‘conflict model’ of decision making proposed by Janis and Mann requires that
A opposing political parties be involved
B all-important facts be considered
C people be encouraged to have different ideas
D previous similar situations be thoroughly examined

29. According to recent thinking reinforced by Malcolm Gladwell, the best decisions
A involve consultation
B involve complex thought
C are made very quickly
D are the most attractive option

30. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues claim in their article that
A our cognitive resources improve as tasks become more complex
B conscious decision making is negatively affected by task complexity
C unconscious decision making is a popular approach
D deliberation without attention defines the way we make decisions

31. Dijksterhuis’s car study found that, in simple tasks, participants
A were involved in lengthy discussions
B found it impossible to make decisions quickly
C were unable to differentiate between the options
D could make a better choice when allowed to concentrate

Questions 32-35
Complete the summary using the list of words A-I below. Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.

Dijksterhuis’s shopping study and its conclusions

Using clothing and furniture as examples of different types of purchases, Dijksterhuis questioned shoppers on their satisfaction with what they had bought. People who spent (32) …………… time buying simple clothing items were more satisfied than those who had not. However, when buying furniture, shoppers made (33) …………….. purchasing decisions if they didn’t think too hard. From this, the researchers concluded that in other choices, perhaps more important than shopping. (34) ………………… decisions are best made by the unconscious. The writer comments that Dijksterhuis’s finding is apparently (35) ……………….. but nonetheless true.

A more
B counterintuitive
C simple
D better
E conscious
F obvious
G complex
H less
I worse

Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage? In boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet, write

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

36. Dijksterhuis’s findings agree with existing political and management theories.
37. Some political leaders seem to use deliberation without attention when making complex decisions.
38. All political decisions are complex ones.
39. We judge political errors according to our own political beliefs.
40. Social considerations must be taken into account for any examination of decision making to prove useful.

Multitasking Debate

A Talking on the phone while driving isn’t the only situation where we’re worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.

B The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.

C The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

D There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we’re looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the “attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you’re watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble to respond to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

E A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos – say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other – and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

F A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she’s thinking of leaving your dad – also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.

G But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn’t buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like “Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown that with enough practice – at least 2000 tries – some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what’s more, he thinks it used discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

H Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits to execute a task – rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads – effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.

I It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.

J It’s not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from the practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, but brain scans also showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it’s clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. “We have this impression of an almighty complex brain,” says Marois, “and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven’t evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.

Questions 1-5
The Reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

1. A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction
2. Different age group responds to important things differently
3. Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously
4. An experiment designed to demonstrates the critical part of the brain for multitasking
5. A viewpoint favors the optimistic side of multitasking performance

Questions 6-8
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

6. Which one is correct about the experiment conducted by René Marois?
A participants performed poorly on the listening task solely
B volunteers press a different key on different color
C participants need to use different fingers on the different colored object
D they did a better fob on Mixed image and sound information

7. Which statement is correct about the first limitation of Marois’s experiment?
A “attentional blink” takes about ten seconds
B lag occurs if we concentrate on one object while the second one appears
C we always have trouble in reaching the second one
D first limitation can be avoided by certain measures

8. Which one is NOT correct about Meyer’s experiments and statements?
A just after failure in several attempts can people execute dual-task
B Practice can overcome dual-task interference
C Meyer holds a different opinion on Marois’s theory
D an existing processor decides whether to delay another task or not

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

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

9. The longer gap between two presenting tasks means shorter delay toward the second one.
10. Incapable of human memory cause people to sometimes miss the differences when presented two similar images.
11. Marois has a different opinion on the claim that training removes the bottleneck effect.
12. Art Kramer proved there is a correlation between multitasking performance and genders
13. The author doesn’t believe that the effect of practice could bring any variation.

A decibel Hell (The Effects of Living in a Noisy World)

Section A decibel Hell:

It’s not difficult for a person to encounter sound at levels that can cause adverse health effects. During a single day, people living in a typical urban environment can experience a wide range of sounds in many locations, even once-quiet locales have become polluted with noise. In fact, it’s difficult today to escape sound completely. In its 1999 Guidelines for Community Noise, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, “Worldwide, noise-induced hearing impairment is the most prevalent irreversible occupational hazard, and it is estimated that 120 million people worldwide have disabling hearing difficulties.” Growing evidence also points to many other health effects of too much volume.

Mark Stephenson, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based senior research audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says his agency’s definition of hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the time-weighted average of 85 dBA, meaning the average noise exposure measured over a typical eight-hour workday. Other measures and definitions are used for other purposes.

Section B Growing Volume

In the United States, about 30 million workers are exposed to hazardous sound levels on the job, according to NIOSH. Industries having a high number of workers exposed to loud sounds include construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and the military.

Noise in U.S. industry is an extremely difficult problem to monitor, acknowledges Craig Moulton, a senior industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “Still,” he says, “OSHA does require that any employer with workers overexposed to noise provide protection for those employees against the harmful effects of noise. Additionally, employers must implement a continuing, effective hearing conservation program as outlined in OSHA’s Noise Standard.”

Section C Scary Sound Effects

Numerous scientific studies over the years have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of sound can damage hearing. Prolonged exposure can actually change the structure of the hair cells in the inner ear, resulting in hearing loss. It can also cause tinnitus, a ringing, roaring, buzzing, or clicking on the ears.

NIOSH studies from the mid to late 1990s show that 90% of coal miners have hearing impairment by age 52 – compared to 9% of the general population – and 70% of male metal/nonmetal miners will experience hearing impairment by age 60 (Stephenson notes that from adolescence onward, females tend to have better hearing than males). Neitzel says nearly half of all construction workers have some degree of hearing loss. “NIOSH research also reveals that by age twenty-five, the average carpenter’s hearing is equivalent to an otherwise healthy fifty-year-old male who hasn’t been exposed to noise,” he says.

William Luxford, medical director of the House Ear Clinic of St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, points out one piece of good news: “It’s true that continuous noise exposure will lead to the continuation of hearing loss, but as soon as the exposure is stopped, the hearing loss stops. So a change in environment can improve a person’s hearing health.”

Research is catching up with this anecdotal evidence. In the July 2001 issue of Pediatrics, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, based on audiometric testing of 5,249 children as part of the Third National Health and Nutrition, Examination Survey, an estimated 12.5% of American children have noise-induced hearing threshold shifts – or dulled hearing – in one or both ears. Most children with noise-induced hearing threshold shifts have only limited hearing damage, but continued exposure to excessive noise can lead to difficulties with high-frequency sound discrimination. The report listed stereos, music concerts, toys (such as toy telephones and certain rattles), lawnmowers, and fireworks as producing potentially harmful sounds.

Section D Beyond the Ears

The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears. Nonauditory effects of noise exposure are those effects that don’t cause hearing loss but still can be measured, such as elevated blood pressure, loss of sleep, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing, and changes in brain chemistry.

The nonauditory effects of noise were noted as early as 1930 in a study published by E.L. Smith and D.L. Laird in volume 2 of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The results showed that exposure to noise caused stomach contractions in healthy human beings. Reports on noise’s nonauditory effects published since that pioneering study have been both contradictory and controversial in some areas.

Bronzaft and the school principal persuaded the school board to have acoustical tile installed in the classrooms adjacent to the tracks. The Transit Authority also treated the tracks near the school to make them less noisy. A follow-up study published in the September 1981 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that children’s reading scores improved after these interventions were put in place.

Section E Fighting for Quiet

Anti-noise activists say that Europe and several countries in Asia are more advanced than the United States in terms of combating noise. “Population pressure has prompted Europe to move more quickly on the noise issue that the United States has,” Hume says. In the European Union, countries with cities of at least 250,000 people are creating noise maps of those cities to help leaders determine noise pollution policies. Paris has already prepared its first noise maps. The map data, which must be finished by 2007, will be fed into computer models that will help test the sound impact of street designs or new buildings before construction begins.

Activists in other countries say they too want the United States to play a more leading role on the noise issue. But as in other areas of environmental health, merely having a more powerful government agency in place that can set more regulations is not the ultimate answer, according to other experts. Bronzaft stresses that governments worldwide need to increase funding for noise research and do a better job coordinating their noise pollution efforts so they can establish health and environmental policies based on solid scientific research. “Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens by curbing noise pollution,” she says.

Questions 14-18
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Nowadays it seems difficult for people to avoid the effects of living in a noisy world. Noise is the sound beyond the average of (14) …………………. referring to the agency’s definition. Scientific studies over the years from the mid to late 1990s have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of sound can cause damage (15) ………………….. on certain senior age. From the testing of 5,249 children, those who are constantly exposed to excessive noise may have trouble in (16) ………………. sound discrimination. The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears, exposure to noise may lead to the unease of (17) ………………… a in healthy people. Europe has taken steps on the noise issue, big cities of over 250,000 people are creating (18) …………………. to help to create noise pollution policies.

Questions 19-23
Look at the following researchers and the list of findings below. Match each researcher with the correct finding. Write the correct letter in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.

A WHO
B William Luxford (the House Ear Clinic)
C Craig Moulton (OSHA)
D Arline Bronzaft
E Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

19. People can change the environment to improve hearing health.
20. The government should continue the research on anti-noise researches with the fund.
21. companies should be required to protect the employees to avoid noise
22. Noise has posed an effect on American children’s hearing ability
23. noise has seriously affected human being where they live worldwide

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

24. The board of schools built close to the tracks are convinced to
A moved the classrooms away from the noisy track
B regulated the track usage to a less extent
C utilised a special material into classroom buildings lessening the effect of outside noise
D organised a team for a follow-up study

25. In European countries, the big cities’ research on noise focuses on
A How to record pollution details of the city on maps
B the impact of noise on population shift in the European cities
C how wide can a city be to avoid noise pollution
D helping the authorities better make a decision on management of the city

26. What is the best title in paragraph 1?
A How people cope with noise pollutions
B the fight against the noise with the powerful technology
C The Effects of Living in a Noisy World
D The Effects of noise on children’s learning

Is Graffiti Art or Crime

A The term graffiti derives from the Italian graffito meaning ‘scratching’ and can be defined as uninvited marking or writing scratched or applied to objects, built structures and natural features. It is not a new phenomenon: examples can be found on ancient structures around the world, in some cases predating the Greeks and Romans. In such circumstances it has acquired invaluable historical and archaeological significance, providing a social history of life and events at that time. Graffiti is now a problem that has become pervasive, as a result of the availability of cheap and quick means of mark-making.

B It is usually considered a priority to remove graffiti as quickly as possible after it appears. This is for several reasons. The first is to prevent ‘copy-cat’ emulation which can occur rapidly once a clean surface is defaced. It may also be of a racist or otherwise offensive nature and many companies and councils have a policy of removing this type of graffiti within an hour or two of it being reported. Also, as paints, glues and inks dry out over time they can become increasingly difficult to remove and are usually best dealt with as soon as possible after the incident. Graffiti can also lead to move serious forms of vandalism and, ultimately, the deterioration of an area, contributing to social decline.

C Although graffiti may be regarded as an eyesore, any proposal to remove it from sensitive historic surfaces should be carefully considered: techniques designed for more robust or utilitarian surfaces may result in considerable damage. In the event of graffiti incidents, it is important that the owners of buildings or other structures and their consultants are aware of the approach they should take in dealing with the problem. The police should be informed as there may be other related attacks occurring locally. An incidence pattern can identify possible culprits, as can stylised signatures or nicknames, known as ‘tags’, which may already be familiar to local police. Photographs are useful to record graffiti incidents and may assist the police in bringing a prosecution. Such images are also required for insurance claims and can be helpful in cleaning operatives, allowing them to see the problem area before arriving on site.

D There are a variety of methods that are used to remove graffiti. Broadly these divide between chemical and mechanical systems. Chemical preparations are based on dissolving the media; these solvents can range from water to potentially hazardous chemical ‘cocktails’. Mechanical systems such as wire-brushing and grit-blasting attempt to abrade or chip the media from the surface. Care should be taken to comply with health and safety legislation with regard to the protection of both passers-by and any person carrying out the cleaning. Operatives should follow product guidelines in terms of application and removal, and wear the appropriate protective equipment. Measures must be taken to ensure that run-off, aerial mists, drips and splashes do not threaten unprotected members of the public. When examining a graffiti incident it is important to assess the ability of the substrate to withstand the prescribed treatment. If there is any doubt regarding this, then small trial areas should be undertaken to assess the impact of more extensive treatment.

E A variety of preventive strategies can be adopted to combat a recurring problem of graffiti at a given site. As no two sites are the same, no one set of protection measures will be suitable for all situations. Each site must be looked at individually. Surveillance systems such as closed-circuit television may also help. In cities and towns around the country, prominently placed cameras have been shown to reduce anti-social behavior of all types including graffiti. Security patrols will also act as a deterrent to prevent recurring attacks. However, the cost of this may be too high for most situations. A physical barriers such as a wall, railings, doors or gates can be introduced to discourage unauthorized access to a vulnerable site. However, consideration has to be given to the impact measures have on the structure being protected. In the worst cases, they can be almost as damaging to the quality of the environment as the graffiti they prevent. In others, they might simply provide a new surface for graffiti.

F One of the most significant problems associated with graffiti removal is the need to remove it from surfaces that are repeatedly attacked. Under these circumstances, the repeated removal of graffiti using even the most gentle methods will ultimately cause damage to the surface material. There may be situations where the preventive strategies mentioned above do not work or are not a viable proposition at a given site. Anti-graffiti coatings are usually applied by brush or spray leaving a thin veneer that essentially serves to isolate the graffiti from the surface.

G Removal of graffiti from a surface that has been treated in this way is much easier, usually using low-pressure water which reduces the possibility of damage. Depending on the type of barrier selected it may be necessary to reapply the coating after each graffiti removal exercise.

Questions 27-32
Reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

27. why chemically cleaning graffiti may cause damage
28. the benefit of a precautionary strategy on the gentle removal
29. the damaging and accumulative impact of graffiti on the community
30. the need for different preventive measures being taken to cope with graffiti
31. a legal proposal made to the owner of building against graffiti
32. the reasons for removing graffiti as soon as possible.

Questions 33-34
Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write your answers in boxes 33-34 on your answer sheet.

Which two statements are true concerning the removal of graffiti
A cocktail removal can be safer than water treatment
B small patch trial before applying large scale of removing
C chemical treatments are the most expensive way of removing
D there are risks for both chemical and medication method
E mechanical removals are much more applicable than chemical treatments

Questions 35-36
Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write your answers in boxes 35-36 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following preventive measures against graffiti are mentioned effectively in the passage?
A organise more anti-graffiti movement in city communities
B increase police patrols on street
C build a new building with material repelling to water
D installing more visible security cameras
E provide a whole new surface with chemical coat

Questions 37-40
Complete the Summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage. Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Ancient graffiti is of significance and records the (37) ………………… of details life for that period.
The police can recognize newly committed incidents of graffiti by the signature which is called (38) ………………. that they are familiar with Operatives ought to comply with relevant rules during the operation, and put on the suitable (39) ………………….. Removal of graffiti from a new type of coating surface can be much convenient of using (40) …………………

Traditional Farming System in Africa

A. By tradition land in Luapula is not owned by individuals, but as in many other parts of Africa is allocated by the headman or headwoman of a village to people of either sex, according to need. Since land is generally prepared by hand, one ulupwa cannot take on a very large area; in this sense land has not been a limiting resource over large parts of the province. The situation has already changed near the main townships, and there has long been a scarcity of land for cultivation in the Valley. In these areas registered ownership patterns are becoming prevalent.

B. Most of the traditional cropping in Luapula, as in the Bemba area to the east, is based on citemene, a system whereby crops are grown on the ashes of tree branches. As a rule, entire trees are not felled, but are pollarded so that they can regenerate. Branches are cut over an area of varying size early in the dry season, and stacked to dry over a rough circle about a fifth to a tenth of the pollarded area. The wood is fired before the rains and in the first year planted with the African cereal finger millet (Eleusine coracana).

C. During the second season, and possibly for a few seasons more the area is planted to variously mixed combinations of annuals such as maize, pumpkins (Telfiria occidentalis) and other cucurbits, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, Phaseolus beans and various leafy vegetables, grown with a certain amount of rotation. The diverse sequence ends with vegetable cassava, which is often planted into the developing last-but-one crop as a relay.

D. Richards (1969) observed that the practice of citemene entails a definite division of labour between men and women. A man stakes out a plot in an unobtrusive manner, since it is considered provocative towards one’s neighbours to mark boundaries in an explicit way. The dangerous work of felling branches is the men’s province, and involves much pride. Branches are stacke by the women, and fired by the men. Formerly women and men cooperated in the planting work, but the harvesting was always done by the women. At the beginning of the cycle little weeding is necessary, since the firing of the branches effectively destroys weeds. As the cycle progresses weeds increase and nutrients eventually become depleted to a point where further effort with annual crops is judged to be not worthwhile: at this point the cassava is planted, since it can produce a crop on nearly exhausted soil. Thereafter the plot is abandoned, and a new area pollarded for the next citemene cycle.

E. When forest is not available – this is increasingly the case nowadays – various ridging systems (ibala) are built on small areas, to be planted with combinations of maize, beans, groundnuts and sweet potatoes, usually relayed with cassava. These plots are usually tended by women, and provide subsistence. Where their roots have year-round access to water tables mango, guava and oil-palm trees often grow around houses, forming a traditional agroforestry system. In season some of the fruit is sold by the roadside or in local markets.

F. The margins of dambos are sometimes planted to local varieties of rice during the rainy season, and areas adjacent to vegetables irrigated with water from the dambo during the dry season. The extent of cultivation is very limited, no doubt because the growing of crops under dambo conditions calls for a great deal of skill. Near towns some of the vegetable produce is sold in local markets.

G. Fishing has long provided a much needed protein supplement to the diet of Luapulans, as well as being the one substantial source of cash. Much fish is dried for sale to areas away from the main waterways. The Mweru and Bangweulu Lake Basins are the main areas of year-round fishing, but the Luapula River is also exploited during the latter part of the dry season. Several previously abundant and desirable species, such as the Luapula salmon or mpumbu (Labeo altivelis) and pale (Sarotherodon machochir) have all but disappeared from Lake Mweru, apparently due to mismanagement.

H. Fishing has always been a far more remunerative activity in Luapula that crop husbandry. A fisherman may earn more in a week than a bean or maize grower in a whole season. I sometimes heard claims that the relatively high earnings to be obtained from fishing induced an ‘easy come, easy go’ outlook among Luapulan men. On the other hand, someone who secures good but erratic earnings may feel that their investment in an economically productive activity is not worthwhile because Luapulans fail to cooperate well in such activities. Besides, a fisherman with spare cash will find little in the way of working equipment to spend his money on. Better spend one’s money in the bars and have a good time!

I. Only small numbers of cattle or oxen are kept in the province owing to the prevalence of the tse-tse fly. For the few herds, the dambos provide subsistence grazing during the dry season. The absence of animal draft power greatly limits peoples’ ability to plough and cultivate land: a married couple can rarely manage to prepare by hand-hoeing. Most people keep freely roaming chickens and goats. These act as a reserve for bartering, but may also be occasionally slaughtered for ceremonies or for entertaining important visitors. These animals are not a regular part of most peoples’ diet.

J. Citemene has been an ingenious system for providing people with seasonal production of high quality cereals and vegetables in regions of acid, heavily leached soils. Nutritionally, the most serious deficiency was that of protein. This could at times be alleviated when fish was available, provided that cultivators lived near the Valley and could find the means of bartering for dried fish. The citemene/fishing system was well adapted to the ecology of the miombo regions and sustainable for long periods, but only as long as human population densities stayed at low levels. Although population densities are still much lower than in several countries of South-East Asia, neither the fisheries nor the forests and woodlands of Luapula are capable, with unmodified traditional practices, of supporting the people in a sustainable manner.

Overall, people must learn to intensify and diversify their productive systems while yet ensuring that these systems will remain productive in the future, when even more people will need food. Increasing overall production offood, though a vast challenge in itself, will not be enough, however. At the same time storage and distribution systems must allow everyone access to at least a moderate share of the total.

Questions 1-4
Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

In Luapula land allocation is in accordance with (1) ………………… The citemene system provides the land with (2) ……………….. where crops are planted. During the second season, the last planted crop is (3) ………………. Under suitable conditions, fruit trees are planted near (4) ……………..

Questions 5-8
Classify the following items with the correct description. Write your answers in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet

A fish
B oxen
C goats

5. be used in some unusual occasions, such as celebrations
6. cannot thrive for being affected by the pests
7. be the largest part of creating profit
8. be sold beyond the local area

Questions 9-12
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 9-12 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. People rarely use animals to cultivate land
10. When it is a busy time, children usually took part in the labor force
11. The local residents eat goats on a regular time
12. Though citemene has been a sophisticated system, it could not provide enough protein

Question 13
Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in the box 13 on your answer sheet.

13. What is the writer’s opinion about the traditional ways of practices?
A They can supply the nutrition that people need
B They are not capable of providing adequate support to the population
C They are productive systems that need no more
D They will be easily modified in the future

Psychology of new product adoption

A In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, companies that successfully introduce new products are more likely to flourish than those that don’t. businesses spend billions of dollars making better “mousetraps” only to find consumers roundly rejecting them. Studies show that new products fail at the stunning rate of between 40% and 90%, depending on the category, and the odds haven’t changed much in the past 25 years. In the U.S. packaged goods industry, for instance, companies introduce 30,000 products every year, but 70% to 90% of them don’t stay on store shelves for more than 12 months. Most innovative products – those that create new product categories or revolutionize old ones – are also unsuccessful. According to one study, 47% of first movers have failed, meaning that approximately half the companies that pioneered new product categories later pulled out of those businesses.

B After the fact, experts and novices alike tend to dismiss unsuccessful innovations as bad ideas that were destined to fail. Why do consumers fail to buy innovative products even when they offer distinct improvements over existing ones? Why do companies invariably have more faith in new products than is warranted? Few would question the objective advantages of many innovations over existing alternatives, but that’s often not enough for them to succeed. To understand why new products fail to live up to companies’ expectations, we must delve into the psychology of behavior change.

C New products often require consumers to change their behavior. As companies know, those behavior changes entail costs. Consumers costs, such as the activation fees they have to pay when they switch from one cellular service provider to another. They also bear learning costs, such as when they shift from manual to automatic automobile transmissions. People sustain obsolescence costs, too. For example, when they switch from VCRs to DVD players, their videotape collections become useless. All of these are economic switching costs that most companies routinely anticipate.

D What businesses don’t take into account, however, are the psychological costs associated with behavior change. Many products fail because of a universal, but largely ignored, psychological bias: People irrationally overvalue benefits they currently possess relative to those they don’t. The bias leads consumers to value the advantages of products they own more than the benefits of new ones. It also leads executives to value the benefits of innovations they’ve developed over the advantages of incumbent products.

E Companies have long assumed that people will adopt new products that deliver more value or utility than existing ones. Thus, businesses need only to develop innovations that are objectively superior to incumbent products, and consumers will have sufficient incentive to purchase them. In the 1960s, communications scholar Everett Rogers called the concept “relative advantage” and identified it as the most critical driver of new-product adoption. This argument assumes that companies make unbiased assessments of innovations and of consumers, likelihood of adopting them. Although compelling, the theory has one major flaw: It fails to capture the psychological biases that affect decision making.

F In 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for a body of work that explores why and when individuals deviate from rational economic behavior. One of the cornerstones of that research, developed with psychologist Amos Tversky, is how individuals value prospects, or choices, in the marketplace. Kahneman and Tversky showed, and others have confirmed, that human beings’ responses to the alternatives before they have four distinct characteristics.

G First, people evaluate the attractiveness of an alternative based not on its objective, or actual, value but on its subjective, or perceived value. Second, consumers evaluate new products or investments relative to a reference point, usually the products they already own or consume. Third, people view any improvements relative to this reference point as gains and treat all shortcomings as losses. Fourth, and most important, losses have a far greater impact on people than similarly sized gains, a phenomenon that Kahneman and Tversky called “loss aversion.” For instance, studies show that most people will not accept a bet in which there is a 50% chance of winning $100 and a 50% chance of losing $100. The gains from the wager must outweigh the losses by a factor of between two and three before most people find such a bet attractive. Similarly, a survey of 1,500 customers of Pacific Gas and Electric revealed that consumers demand three to four times more compensation to endure a power outage – and suffer a loss – than they are willing to pay to avoid the problem, a potential gain. As Kahneman and Tversky wrote, “losses loom larger than gains.”

H Loss aversion leads people to value products that they already possess – those that are part of their endowment – more than those they don’t have. According to behavioral economist Richard Thaler, consumers value what they own, but many have to give up, much more than they value what they don’t own but could obtain. Thaler called that bias the “endowment effect.”

I In a 1990 paper, Thaler and his colleagues describe a series of experiments they conducted to measure the magnitude of the endowment effect. In one such experiment, they gave coffee mugs to a group of people, the Sellers, and asked at what price point – from 25 cents to $9.25 – the Sellers would be willing to part with those mugs. They asked another group – the Choosers – to whom they didn’t give coffee mugs, to indicate whether they would choose the mug or the money at each price point. In objective terms, all the Sellers and Choosers were in the same situation: They were choosing between a mug and a sum of money. In one trial of this experiment, the Sellers priced the mug at $7.12, on average, but the Choosers were willing to pay only $3.12. In another trial, the Sellers and the Choosers valued the mug at $7.00 and $3.50, respectively. Overall, the Sellers always demanded at least twice as much to give up the mugs as the Choosers would pay to obtain them.

J Kahneman and Tversky’s research also explains why people tend to stick with what they have even if a better alternative exists. In a 1989 paper, economist Jack Knetsch provided a compelling demonstration of what economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser called the “status quo bias.” Knetsch asked one group of students to choose between an attractive coffee mug and a large bar of Swiss chocolate. He gave a second group of students the coffee mugs but a short time later allowed each student to exchange his or her mug for a chocolate bar. Finally, Knetsch gave chocolate bars to a third group of students but much later allowed each student to exchange his or her bar for a mug. Of the students given a choice at the outset, 56% chose the mug, and 44% chose the chocolate bar, indicating a near even split in preferences between the two products. Logically, therefore, about half of the students to whom Knetsch gave the coffee mug should have traded for the chocolate bar and vice versa. That didn’t happen. Only 11% of the students who had been given the mugs and 10% of those who had been given the chocolate bars wanted to exchange their products. To approximately 90% of the students, giving up what they already had seemed like a painful loss and shrank their desire to trade.

K Interestingly, most people seem oblivious to the existence of the behaviors implicit in the endowment effect and the status quo bias. In study after study, when researchers presented people with evidence that they had irrationally overvalued the status quo, they were shocked, skeptical, and more than a bit defensive. These behavioral tendencies are universal, but awareness of them is not.

Questions 14-17
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

A Richard Thaler
B Everett Rogers
C Kahneman and Tversky

14. stated a theory which bears potential fault in the application
15. decided the consumers’ several behavior features when they face other options
16. generalised that customers value more of their possession they are going to abandon for a purpose than alternative they are going to swap in
17. answered the reason why people don’t replace existing products

Questions 18-22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? 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. The products of innovations which beat existing alternatives can guarantee a successful market share.
19. The fact that most companies recognised the benefits of switching to new products guarantees a successful innovation
20. Gender affects the loss and gain outcome in the real market place.
21. Endowment-effect experiment showed there was a huge gap between the seller’s anticipation and the chooser’s offer.
22. Customers accept the fact peacefully when they are revealed the status quo bias.

Questions 23-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

23. What does paragraph A illustrated in the business creative venture?
A above 70% of products stored in the warehouse
B only US packaged goods industry affected
C roughly half of new product business failed
D new products have a long life span.

24. What do specialists and freshers tend to think how a product sold well:
A as more products stored on a shelf
B being creative and innovative enough
C having more chain stores
D learning from a famous company like Webvan

25. According to this passage, a number of products fail because of the following reason:
A they ignore the fact that people tend to overvalue the product they own.
B they are not confident with their products
C they are familiar with people’s psychology state
D they forget to mention the advantages of products

26. What does the experiment of “status quo bias” suggest which conducted by Nobel prize winner Kahneman and Tversky:
A about half of them are willing to change
B student is always to welcome new items
C 90% of both owners in a neutral position
D only 10% of chocolate bar owner is willing to swap

Memory Decoding

Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner.

A In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes,” as some of them like to be called, is closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.

B Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the memory contestant and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

C It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards – the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said, “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of clubs.

D How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.

E The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the loci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably, our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method became popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art of memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

F The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S.V. Shereshevski, who could recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studies Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.

G K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F., an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn’t exist at all. When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques – sometimes without realizing it – and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. “If we look at some of these memory tasks, they’re the kind of thing most people don’t even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a “person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s any compelling evidence that there are such people.”

Questions 27-31
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

27. The reason why the competence of super memory is significant in academic settings
28. Mention of a contest for extraordinary memory held in consecutive years
29. A demonstrative example of extraordinary person did an unusual recalling game
30. A belief that extraordinary memory can be gained through enough practice
31. A depiction of the rare ability which assists the extraordinary memory reactions

Questions 32-36
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage. Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Using visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers are investigated and explained. A man called Ed Cooke in a pub, spoke a string of odd words when he held 7 of the spades (the first one of any cards group) was remembered as he encoded it to a (32) …………….. and the card deck to memory are set to be one time of an order of (33) ……………….. ; When it comes time to recall, Cooke took a (34) …………………. along his way and interpreted the imaginary scene into cards. This superior memory skill can be traced back to Ancient Greece, the strategy was called (35) ……………. which had been a major subject was in ancient (36) …………..

Questions 37-38
Choose TWO correct letters, A-E. Write your answers in boxes 37-38 on your answer sheet.

According to World Memory Championships, what activities need good memory?
A order for a large group of each digit
B recall people’s face
C resemble a long Greek poem
D match name with pictures
E match name with features

Questions 39-40
Choose TWO correct letters, A-E. Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.

What is the result of Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding’s MRI Scan experiment find out?
A the champions’ brains are different in some from common people
B difference in the brains of champions’ scam image to control subjects are shown when memorizing sequences of 3 digit numbers
C champions did much worse when they are asked to remember photographs
D the memory champs activated more brain regions than control subjects
E there is some part in the brain coping with visual and spatial memory

The Beautiful Game

A Every nation has a sport to represent it. In the U.S., there is baseball; in New Zealand, rugby. In the UK, football is the national sporting obsession. While many UK teams have gained international recognition, Manchester United is among those most well-known on a global scale. Yet while most people, regardless of the sporting preference or nationality, have some passing knowledge of Manchester United, fewer can claim knowledge of the origins of the team. Manchester United came into being in 1902 as a result of bankruptcy of the team formerly known as Newton Heath. Newton Heath began life as Newton Heath LYR (Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway) club and as the name suggests, the original team was comprised of railway workers. Despite turning professional in 1885 and becoming the founding member of the Football Lions in 1889, Newton Heath – nicknamed the ‘Heathens’ – was constantly troubled by financial difficulties.

B Salvation came in the form of local brewer, John Henry Davis, who agreed to invest in the team on condition of being given some interest in running it. After consideration of the alternatives titles of Manchester Central and Manchester Celtic, the club was christened Manchester United in April 1902. United’s first manager, though officially titled Secretary, was Ernest Mangnall, who was appointed in September 1903, but it was not until the season of 1905/1906, that United experienced its first taste of success. His side reached the quarterfinals of the F.A, Cup and were runners up in the second division.

C In 1907, United claimed the championship for the first time and won the first ever Charity Shield trophy in 1908. In the following year, United claimed the F.A. Cup trophy after beating Bristol City. Manchester United moved to its new stadium, Old Trafford, in early 1910. The move to the stadium, owned by the John Henry Davis brewery (a Manchester beer-making company), was proven to be fortunate as on the 17th of February, 1910, two days before the team’s first scheduled game, the previous stadium Banks Street was destroyed in a fire. The new stadium had a capacity for a crowd of 80,000 spectators and despite losing to their first visiting team Liverpool, Manchester United were once again league champions at the end of the first full season playing from Old Trafford.

D The following years were to be less of a success. From 1912 to the onset of the First World War, no significant victories were achieved. During the war the football league was suspended and only regional competitions took place. 1919 saw the return of Manchester United to league football with only two of the original members in the team.

E Although Britain has a long and proud history of football adoration, contemporary football supporters from the UK have gained a negative reputation for outbursts of violence against rival supporters, earning the label ‘football hooligan’. The football hooliganism phenomenon has attracted the attention of a number of researchers and psychologists who have offered theories relating to its causes. It is generally agreed that a combination of factors may initiate this type of anti-social behaviour and that it is unrealistic to contend that all such behaviour stems from a particular psychological make-up or belongs to a specific age or class. Experts do however believe that rampaging hooligan behaviour can instil a sense of belonging and ‘community’ in participants who feel that they can strongly identify with their group, regardless of the fact that the group’s behaviour is negative.

F Analysts also argue that the motivations for outbursts of violence experienced in an international setting are even more complex. Whilst alcohol and xenophobia no doubt play a part they say, some psychologists hold that policing tactics, to a large degree, dictate the level of disturbance likely to occur. Evidence supports the view that confrontational policing is much more likely to escalate than calm any incidences of trouble. The media’s actions have also been criticised due to the belief by some that messages given in newspaper reporting may also exacerbate the existing problem of football hooliganism.

G Critics say that certain headlines used by tabloid newspapers may glorify acts of violence and at least, the prolific news reports which are published in the UK about this issue cause perpetrators to receive undue attention and acknowledgement for their actions. Whilst few disagree that football hooliganism is a significant social problem, many researchers hold that sensationalist media reporting may also be creating undue panic since the problem is often presented as much more widespread than is the reality. Extreme cases of hooliganism from British fans has reduced significantly over recent years, and while it may take some considerable time for the negative reputation they have earned to subside, it is also true that a large proportion of supporters have no involvement in violence and simply share a love of the game.

Questions 1-3
Choose THREE letters A-G. Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet. NB Your answers may be given in any order.

Which THREE of the following statements are true of Newton Heath?
A Newton Health Football Club was established in 1902
B It was the only Lancashire based club at the time
C It developed from a club with a similar name
D It ceased being an amateur team in 1885
E It was the most famous British football club of the period
F The club experienced economic hitches
G Its name changed one more time before becoming Manchester United

Questions 4-7
Complete the summary with the list of words A-K below. Write the correct letter A-K in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet.

According to expert opinion, there is little (4) ……………….. that football hooliganism occurs as a result of a number of issues and does not necessarily correlate with age, psychological profile or (5) ………………….. . External triggers such as newspaper reports and antagonistic (6) ………………… can be attributed to escalation of the problem in certain situations. Some psychologists believe that such behaviour and membership of trouble-making groups can give certain individuals a sense of (7) …………………………. that may otherwise be missing in their lives.

A isolation
B policing
C anger
D occupation
E belief
F proof
G class
H intelligence
I excitement
J unity
K doubt

Questions 8-12
Reading Passage 1 has 7 paragraphs A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 8-12 on your answer sheet. NB Each paragraph may be used more than once

8. details about stipulations made to offer financial assistance to the club
9. reasons for disruption of national competitions
10. information about why the problem of violence at football matches may be perceived by the general public to be larger than it is.
11. deliberations about the Manchester United name
12. a reference to a new competition

CAN WE BELIEVE OUR OWN EYES?

A. An optical illusion refers to a visually perceived image that is deceptive or misleading in that information transmitted from the eye to the brain is processed in a way that the related assumption or deduction does not represent the true physical reality. Our perceptions of what we think we see can be influenced by a number of external factors; ‘illusions’ can be classified into two main categories these being ‘physiological illusions’ and ‘cognitive’ illusions, the latter category can then be divided again into four sub-types.

B. Physiological illusions occur as a result of excessive stimulation of the eyes and brain which leads to a temporary state of confusion and mixed messages. For example, after exposure to extremely vivid lights, the eyes may need time to adapt and immediately after the stimulus, we may see things that would not be the norm. In the same way a contingent perceptual after-effect may be experienced after staring at a particular colour and the receptors in the brain may process subsequent colours inaccurately until overload has passed.

C. Cognitive illusions, on the other hand, are said to arise not as a result of neurone activity as with the aforementioned category, but due to assumptions we may consciously make based on our knowledge and experience of the world. The four categories of cognitive illusion are ‘ambiguous’ illusions, ‘distorting’ illusions ‘paradox’ illusions and ‘fictional’ illusions. Inclusion of ‘fictional’ illusions into the cognitive group is somewhat misleading; however, as this type of illusion is unique in that it is only seen by an individual in a given situation and exists in no tangible form. A fictional illusion is in reality a hallucination which arises as a result of drug use or a brain condition such as schizophrenia.

D. Ambiguous illusions are pictures or objects which are structured in such a way that alternative perceptions of their structure are possible. Different individuals may instantly perceive the object or picture in a different way than another and, in fact, the same individual is often able to see and interpret the image or object in more than one form. A classic example of an ambiguous illusion is the Necker cube. This cube is a standard line drawing which our visual senses generally interpret as a three dimensional box. Wien the lines of the box cross, the picture intentionally does not define which is in front and which is behind. However, when individuals view the box, it is the automatic response of the mind to interpret what is seen. Generally our thought process patterns work in the way that we view objects from above; for this reason, when most people look at the Necker Cube they will interpret the lower left face as being the front of the box, the base of the front face being parallel to the floor as their thought processes convert the image to three dimensions. However, it is also possible to interpret the image differently in that the front of the box could also be seen to be in a different position.

E. The Necker Cube made contributions to researchers’ understanding of the human visual system, providing evidence that the brain is a neural network with two distinct and interchangeable states. It has also been used in epistemology – the study of knowledge – as evidence to disprove the theory upheld by ‘direct realism’ that the way the human mind perceives the world is the way the world actually is. To illustrate, with the՜ Necker cube we are generally able to see one or both versions of a three dimensional cube, when in fact only a two dimensional drawing comprised of 12 lines exists.

F. Distorting illusions affect an individual’s ability to judge size, length, or curvature; the Muller-Lyer illusion which consists of three lines with arrow-like endings is a prime example. In this illusion the middle arrow has both arrow ends pointing out, while the line above it has arrow’ ends pointing in and the third and final line possesses one inward pointing and one outward pointing arrow’ end. ¿Most respondents from certain backgrounds generally respond that the middle arrow is the longest (though all are in fact the same). However, cultural backgrounds affect perceptions related to this illusion; international research having shown that non-Western subjects, particularly those generally not exposed to rectangular shaped buildings and door frames in their day to day life, are less likely to misinterpret the true length of the three drawings.

G. Paradox illusions encourage the mind to believe that we are seeing something we know to be impossible. The Penrose Stairs and the Penrose Triangle, developed by Lionel Penrose are examples of models created to illustrate this phenomenon. Many naturally occurring optical illusions also exist. Throughout the world there a number of locations where objects can be perceived to roll uphill; our cognitive and pre-learned knowledge inform us that this is impossible; however information received by the visual senses of observers creates conflict. These areas are often known as ‘gravity hills or ‘magnetic’ hills and are often popular with tourists; the mystical properties of the area often promoted vigorously to add mystique or claimed to arise as a result of the special properties and magnetic influence of the area’s land.

H. The scientific explanation for such phenomenon is that such areas are set on slightly sloping ground without a visible horizon against which to establish perspective. In addition, surrounding points of reference we would generally expect to be perpendicular, such as trees, are in fact on a slope. The interpretation of what observers believe they are experiencing is therefore confused, downward slopes may be perceived to be horizontal or tilting upwards and cars with hand brakes released on such ground appear to roll upwards when in fact they a rolling, as gravity dictates, in a downhill direction. While our innate sense of balance under normal situations helps us determine the inclination of the ground, interference from the visual stimuli as outlined above and lack of reference from points on the horizon can override this ability in such situations, especially if the gradient is gentle.

Questions 13-15
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

13. What type of illusion is a result of interference with neurone activity?
14. Which two factors influence the way we process information on a cognitive level?
15. Which theory holds that individuals see only the true reality of a situation?

Questions 16-20
According to the information in Reading Passage 2, classify the following as relating to

A Fictional illusions
B Paradox illusions
C Distorting illusions
D Ambiguous illusions

Write the correct letter A-D in boxes 16-20 on your answer sheet.

16. may be perceived differently by individuals of diverse ethnic origin
17. may override our natural ability to make rational judgement
18. may be interpreted differently even by the same subject
19. may result due to chemical stimulation
20. has been used to question the validity of arguments in a different field

Questions 21-25
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

21. Fictional illusions
A may eventually lead to schizophrenia.
B are the only type which are completely subjective.
C are very similar to paradox illusions.
D are typical of cognitive illusions.

22. According to ambiguous illusion theory, which face of the Necker Cube is interpreted to be the front of the box due to the general tendency to view objects from above?

23. Which diagram represents the Muller-Lyer illusion?

24. The Penrose Stairs are an example of a model which
A can persuade the viewer they are seeing something infeasible.
B has disproven established theories on knowledge.
C is a naturally occurring paradox illusion.
D can be seen in a number of international locations.

25. Occurrences on ‘gravity’ or ‘magnetic’ hills result due to
A the mineral content of soil in the area.
B factors currently unexplained from a scientific perspective.
C misleading natural points of reference.
D rising slopes being misinterpreted as on a decline.

GRAVITY

A. Without forces of gravitation, Earth and other planets would be unable to stay in their orbits around the Sun. the Moon would be unable to orbit the Earth, tidal waves would not occur and the rising of hot air or water convection would be impossible. Gravitation is a phenomenon winch allows objects to attract other matter; the physics behind it have been explained in The Theory of Relativity and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation; though attempts to explain gravity hail back to ancient times. In 4th Century B.C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle developed the hypothesis that all objects were drawn into their correct position by crystalline spheres and that a physical mass would fall towards the earth in direct proportion to its weight.

B. In the late 16th century Galileo deduced that while gravitation propels all objects to the ground at the same rate, air resistance resulted in heavier objects appearing to fall more quickly; his theories contradicting earlier belief systems put in place by Aristotle and others; so paving the way for formulation of the modern theories of today. Though the two terms are now used interchangeably in layman use, strictly by scientific definition, there are distinct differences between ‘gravitation’ and ‘gravity’. The first relates to the influence exerted by different objects which allow them to attract other objects, whereas ‘gravity’ refers specifically to the force possessed by such objects which facilitates gravitation. Certain scientific theories hold that gravitation may be initiated by a combination of factors and not simply the existence of gravity alone; though doubts have been raised regarding some of these theories.

C. Gravity is directly proportional to mass; a smaller object possessing less gravity. To illustrate, the Moon is a quarter of the Earth’s size and possesses only 1/6 of its gravity. The mass of the Earth itself is not spread out proportionally, being flatter at the poles than the equator as a result of its rotation; gravity and gravitational pull in different locations throughout the world also vary. In the 1960s, as a result of research into the worldwide gravity fields, it was discovered that inexplicably areas around and including the Hudson Bay area of Canada appeared to possess significantly lower levels of gravity than other parts of the globe; the reasons for this dissimilarity have since been extensively investigated resulting in two explanations.

D. The original theory presented attributed this anomaly to activity which occurs 100-200 kilometres below the Earth’s surface within the layer known as the ‘mantle’. The mantle is comprised of hot molten rock known as magma which flows under the earth’s surface causing convection currents. These convection currents can result in the lowering of the continental plates which make up the Earth’s surface, as a result when this occurs, the mass in that area and its gravity is also reduced. Research findings indicated that such activity had occurred in the Hudson Bay region.

E. More recently a second conjecture suggested that, in fact, lower levels of gravity in the area are a result of occurrences during the Ice Age. The Laurentidelce sheet, which covered most of Canada and the northern tip of the USA until it melted 10,000 years ago, is thought to have been 3.2 kms thick in most parts and 3.7 kms thick over two areas of Hudson Bay. The sheer weight of the ice layer weighed down the surface of the earth below, leaving a deep indentation once it had melted, having caused the area around Hudson Bay to become thinner as the earth’s surface was pushed to the edges of the icesheet.

F. Extensive investigation has since been carried out by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics using data collected by satellites during the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) between 2002 and 2006. The satellites are placed 220kms apart and orbit 500kms above Earth. Being extremely sensitive to even minor differences in gravitational pull of the areas of earth they pass over, as the first satellite enters an area with decreased gravity it moves slightly away from the earth as the gravitational pull is reduced and also moves slightly further away from the sister satellite that follows, such activity allowing scientists to create maps of gravitational fields. The GRACE findings also allowed scientists to estimate the appearance of Hudson Bay over 10,000 years ago, prior to the great thaw. The areas possessing the lowest gravity today correlate with the areas covered in the thickest layers of ice at that time.

G. Researchers now believe that both theories regarding reduced gravity levels in the Hudson Bay region are accurate and that the area’s characteristics are a result of both magma activity and the impact of the Laurentidelce sheet. It has been estimated that the former has resulted in 55-75% of gravity reduction and that pressure resulting from the latter accounts for 25-45%.

H. The effects of the Laurentidelce sheet are reversible due to the earth layer’s capability to ‘rebound’ in response to removal of the weight which once restricted it. Return to the original position, however, is an extremely slow process; it is estimated that the area around Hudson Bay will take a further 5,000 years to recover the altitude it once possessed prior to the Laurentidelce sheet. The rebound activity in the area is also measurable through observation of sea levels; unlike the rest of the world, sea levels are not rising in the area as a result of melting icecaps, but are dropping as the land recovers its previous form

I. Research conducted into the Laurentidelce sheet has significant implications on a global scale. The increased knowledge of how that particular area has changed over time and the long-term implications activity in the Ice Age had, pave the way to a better understanding of how current changes elsewhere will manifest themselves over the long term.

Questions 26-31
Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs A-I. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C and E-H from the list of headings below. Write the correct number i-x in boxes 26-31 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Return to previous form
ii Substantiating a hypothesis
iii Historic theories
iv The general rule of gravity and an exception
v The initial explanation
vi How proximity to the poles affected Hudson Bay
vii Scientific definition and contemporary views
viii Relevance to our future
ix An alternative view point
x Consolidating theories

26. Paragraph B
27. Paragraph C
28. Paragraph E
29. Paragraph F
30. Paragraph G
31. Paragraph H

Questions 32-36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 1-5 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

32. Differentiation between gravity and gravitational pull is generally only made by academics in the field.
33. Gravity levels in areas around the equator are significantly higher than around the poles.
34. It was first believed that lower gravity levels in Hudson Bay could be attributed to its location between the poles and the equator.
35. Molten rock activity within the magma layer has had less of an impact on gravity levels in the Hudson Bay area than the Laurentidelce sheet.
36. The GRACE project’s main focus was areas of Canada and North America once thought to be covered by the Laurentidelce sheet.

Questions 37-40
Complete the sentences below with words from the box below. Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 37- 40 on your answer sheet.

The impact of (37) ………………… on objects falling to the ground was not considered by Aristotle. Investigations of (38) ………………… first led to the discovery of the unusual levels in Hudson Bay. The earth’s surface has been observed to sink as a direct result of (39) ……………….. The largest proportion of the Laurentideice sheet was (40) ………………
in depth.

A crystalline spheres
B mass
C 3.2kms
D continental plates
E gravity fields
F warming
G 3.5kms
H mantle layers
I convection currents
J air resistance

Bats To The Rescue

There are few places in the world where relations between agriculture and conservation are more strained. Madagascar’s forests are being converted to agricultural land at a rate of one percent every year. Much of this destruction is fuelled by the cultivation of the country’s main staple crop: rice. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields. The result is devastating habitat and biodiversity lo^ on the island, but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike.

Enter University of Cambridge zoologist Ricardo Rocha. He’s passionate about conservation, and bats. More specifically, he’s interested in bats are responding to human activity and deforestation in particular. Rocha’s new s’udy shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields. Bats comprise roughly one-fifth of all mammal species in Madagascar and thirty-six recorded bat species are native to the island, making it one of the most important regions for conservation of this animal group anywhere in the world.

Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of indigenous bats are taking advantage of habitat modification to hunt insects swarming above the country’s rice fields. They include the Malagasy mouse-eared bat, Major’s long-fingered bat, the Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat and Peters’ wrinkle-lipped bat. ‘These winner species are providing a valuable free service to Madagascar as biological pest suppressors,’ says Rocha. ‘We found that six species of bat are preying on rice pests, including the paddy swarming caterpillar and grass webworm. The damage which these insects cause puts the island’s farmers under huge financial pressure and that encourages deforestation.’

The study, now published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, set out to investigate the feeding activity of insectivorous bats in the farmland bordering the Ranomafana National Park in the southeast of the country. Rocha and his team used state-of-the-art ultrasonic recorders to record over a thousand bat ‘feeding buzzes’ (echolocation sequences used by bats to target their prey) at 54 sites, in order to identify the favourite feeding spots of the bats. They next used DNA barcoding techniques to analyse droppings collected from bats at the different sites.

The recordings revealed that bat activity over rice fields was much higher than it was in continuous forest – seven times higher over rice fields which were on flat ground, and sixteen times higher over fields on the sides of hills – leaving no doubt that the animals are preferentially foraging in these man-made ecosystems. The researchers suggest that the bats favour these fields because lack of water and nutrient run-off make these crops more susceptible to insect pest infestations. DNA analysis showed that all six species of bat had fed on economically important insect pests. While the findings indicated that rice farming benefits most from the bats, the scientists also found indications that the bats were consuming pests of other crops, including the black twig borer (which infests coffee plants), the sugarcane cicada, the macadamia nut-borer, and the sober tabby (a pest of citrus fruits). ‘The effectiveness of bats as pest controllers has already been proven in the USA and Catalonia,’ said co-author James Kemp, from the University of Lisbon. ‘But our study is the first to show this happening in Madagascar, where the stakes for both farmers and conservationists are so high.’

Local people may have a further reason to be grateful to their bats. While the animal is often associated with spreading disease, Rocha and his team found evidence that Malagasy bats feed not just on crop pests but also on mosquitoes – carriers of malaria, Rift Valley fever virus and elephantiasis – as well as blackflies, which spread river blindness. Rocha points out that the relationship is complicated. When food is scarce, bats become a crucial source of protein for local people. Even the children will hunt them. And as well as roosting in trees, the bats sometimes roost in buildings, but are not welcomed there because they make them unclean. At the same time, however, they are associated with sacred caves and the ancestors, so they can be viewed as beings between worlds, which makes them very significant in the culture of the people. And one potential problem is that while these bats are benefiting from farming, at the same time deforestation is reducing the places where they can roost, which could have long-term effects on their Lumbers. Rocha says, ‘With the right help, we hope that farmers can promote this mutually beneficial relationship by installing bat houses.’

Rocha and his colleagues believe that maximising bat populations can help to boost crop yields and promote sustainable livelihoods. The team is now calling for further research to quantify this contribution. ‘I’m very optimistic,’ says Rocha. ‘If we give nature a hand, we can speed up the process of regeneration.’

Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? 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. Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects.
2. Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar.
3. Ricardo Rocha has carried out studies of bats in different parts of the world.
4. Habitat modification has resulted in indigenous bats in Madagascar becoming useful to farmers.
5. The Malagasy mouse-eared bat is more common than other indigenous bat species in Madagascar.
6. Bats may feed on paddy swarming caterpillars and grass webworms.

Questions 7-13
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The Study Carried Out By Rocha’s Team

Aim	– To investigate the feeding habits of bats in farmland near the Ronamafana National Park
Method	– Ultrasonic recording to identify favorite feeding spots – DNA analysis of bat (7)……………………
Findings	The bats – were most active in rice fields located on hills – ate pests of rice (8)………………..sugarcane, nuts and fruit – prevent the spread of disease by eating (9)…………..and blackflies Local attitudes to bats are mixed – they provide food rich in (10)……………… – the buildings where they roost become (11)……………… – they plan an important role in local (12)…………………
Recommendation	– Farmers should provide special (13)………………to support the bat population

Does Education Fuel Economic Growth?

A Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer t a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy g -ew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, German and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tods reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education- related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds) that stifled industry. Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmullerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed md now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, fie says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theor.es of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence. ‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 14-18
Reading Passage has six sections, A-F. Which section contains the following information?

14. an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income
15. examples of the sources the database has been compiled from
16. an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order
17. a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into tie link between education and economic growth
18. examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19-22
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their (19) ……………….. , over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmullerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a (20) ……………… There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a (21) …………………. Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent (22) ………………. and stop skilled people from working.

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 statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?
A Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.
B Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.
C There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.
D England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.
E Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

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 the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?
A They helped young people to learn a skill.
B They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.
C They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.
D They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.
E They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

Timur Gareyev – Blindfold Chess Champion

A Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

B But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished players,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

C Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

D To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

E Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising it. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

F The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman.

G It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual netwik is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

H For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

Questions 27-32
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs, A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

27. a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess
28. an outline of what blindfold chess involves
29. a claim that Gareyev’s skill is limited to chess
30. why Gareyev’s skill is of interest to scientists
31. an outline of Gareyev’s priorities
32. a reason why the last part of a game may

Questions 33-36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there s no information about this

33. In the forthcoming games, all the participants will be blindfolded.
34. Gareyev has won competitions in BASE jumping.
35. UCLA is the first university to carry out research into blindfold chess players.
36. Good chess players are likely to be able to play blindfold chess.

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.

How the research was carried out

The researchers started by testing Gareyev’s (37) ……………………. ; for example, he was required to recall a string of (38) ……………………. in order and also in reverse order. Although his performance was normal, scans showed an unusual amount of (39) …………………. within the areas of Gareyev’s brain that are concerned with
directing attention. In addition, the scans raised the possibility of unusual strength in the parts of his brain that deal with (40) …………………….. input.

The thylacine

The extinct thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a marsupial that bore a superficial resemblance to a dog. Its most distinguishing feature was the 13-19 dark brown stripes over its back, beginning at the rear of the body and extending onto the tail. The thylacine’s average nose- to-tail length for adult males was 162.6 cm, compared to 153.7 cm for females.

The thylacine appeared to occupy most types of terrain except dense rainforest, with open eucalyptus forest thought to be its prime habitat. In terms of feeding, it was exclusively carnivorous, and its stomach was muscular with an ability to distend so that it could eat large amounts of food at one time, probably an adaptation to compensate for long periods when hunting was unsuccessful and food scarce. The thylacine was not a fast runner and probably caught its prey by exhausting it during a long pursuit. During long-distance chases, thylacines were likely to have relied more on scent than any other sense. They emerged to hunt during the evening, night and early morning and tended to retreat to the hills and forest for shelter during the day. Despite the common name ‘tiger’, the thylacine had a shy, nervous temperament. Although mainly nocturnal, it was sighted moving during the day and some individuals were even recorded basking in the sun.

The thylacine had an extended breeding season from winter to spring, with indications that some breeding took place throughout the year. The thylacine, like all marsupials, was tiny and hairless when born. New-borns crawled into the pouch on the belly of their mother, and attached themselves to one of the four teats, remaining there for up to three months. When old enough to leave the pouch, the young stayed in a lair such as a deep rocky cave, well-hidden nest or hollow log, whilst the mother hunted.

Approximately 4,000 years ago, the thylacine was widespread throughout New Guinea and most of mainland Australia, as well as the island of Tasmania. The most recent, well-dated occurrence of a thylacine on the mainland is a carbon-dated fossil from Murray Cave in Western Australia, which is around 3,100 years old. Its extinction coincided closely with the arrival of wild dogs called dingoes in Australia and a similar predator in New Guinea. Dingoes never reached Tasmania, and most scientists see this as the main reason for the thylacine’s survival there.

The dramatic decline of the thylacine in Tasmania, which began in the 1830s and continued for a century, is generally attributed to the relentless efforts of sheep farmers and bounty hunters with shotguns. While this determined campaign undoubtedly played a large part, it is likely that various other factors also contributed to the decline and eventual extinction of the species. These include competition with wild dogs introduced by European settlers, loss of habitat along with the disappearance of prey species, and a distemper-like disease which may also have affected the thylacine.

There was only one successful attempt to breed a thylacine in captivity, at Melbourne Zoo in 1899. This was despite the large numbers that went through some zoos, particularly London Zoo and Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo. The famous naturalist John Gould foresaw the thylacine’s demise when he published his Mammals of Australia between 1848 and 1863, writing, ‘The numbers of this singular animal will speedily diminish, extermination will have its full . way, and it will then, like the wolf of England and Scotland, be recorded as an animal of the past.’

However, there seems to have been little public pressure to preserve the thylacine, nor was much concern expressed by scientists at the decline of this species in the decades that followed. A notable exception was T.T. Flynn, Professor of Biology at the University of Tasmania. In 1914, he was sufficiently concerned about the scarcity of the thylacine to suggest that some should be captured and placed on a small island. But it was not until 1929, with the species on the very edge of extinction, that Tasmania’s Animals and Birds Protection Board passed a motion protecting thylacines only for the month of December, which was thought to be their prime breeding season. The last known wild thylacine to be killed was shot by a farmer in the north-east of Tasmania in 1930, leaving just captive specimens. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced in July 193′, 59 days before the last known individual died in Hobart Zoo on 7th September, 1936.

There have been numerous expeditions and searches for the thylacine over the years, none of which has produced definitive evidence that thylacines still exist. The species was declared extinct by the Tasmanian government in 1986.

Questions 1-5
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The thylacine

Appearance and behaviour
• Looked rather like a dog
• Had a series of stripes along its body and tail
• Ate an entirely (1) ……………… diet
• Probably depended mainly on (2) ………………. when hunting
• Young spent first months of life inside its mother’s (3) …………………..

Decline and extinction
• Last evidence in mainland Australia is a 3100 year old (4) ………………
• Probably went extinct in mainland Australia due to animals knows as dingoes
• Reduction in (5) ………………. and available sources of food were partly responsible for decline in Tasmania

Questions 6-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 6-13 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

6. Significant numbers of thylacines were killed by humans from the 1830s onwards.
7. Several thylacines were born in zoos during the late 1800s.
8. John Gould’s prediction about the thylacine surprised some biologists.
9. In the early 1900s, many scientists became worried about the possible extinction of the thylacine.
10. T. T. Flynn’s proposal to rehome captive thylacines on an island proved to be impractical.
11. There were still reasonable numbers of thylacines in existence when a piece of legislation protecting the species during their breeding season was passed.
12. From 1930 to 1936, the only known living thylacines were all in captivity.
13. Attempts to find living thylacine’ are now rarely made.

Palm oil

A Palm oil is an edible oil derived from the fruit of the African oil palm tree, and is currently the most consumed vegetable oil in the world. It’s almost certainly in the soap we wash with in the morning, the sandwich we have for lunch, and the biscuits we snack on during the day. Why is palm oil so attractive for manufacturers? Primarily because its unique properties – such as remaining solid at room temperature – make it an ideal ingredient for long-term preservation, allowing many packaged foods on supermarket shelves to have ‘best before’ dates of months, even years, into the future.

B Many farmers have seized the opportunity to maximise the planting of oil palm trees. Between 1990 and 2012, the global land area devoted to growing oil palm trees grew from 6 to 17 million hectares, now accounting for around ten percent of total cropland in the entire world. From a mere two million tonnes of palm Nil being produced annually globally 50 years ago, there are now around 60 million tonnes produced every single year, a figure looking likely to double or even triple by the middle of the century.

C However, there are multiple reasons why conservationists cite the rapid spread of oil palm plantations as a major concern. There are countless news stories of deforestation, habitat destruction and dwindling species populations, all as a direct result of land clearing to establish oil palm tree monoculture on an industrial scale, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia. Endangered species – most famously the Sumatran orangutan, but also rhinos, elephants, tigers, and numerous other fauna – have suffered from the unstoppable spread of oil palm plantations.

D ‘Palm oil is surely one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity,’ declares Dr Farnon Ellwood of the University of the West of England, Bristol. ‘Palm oil is replacing rainforest, and rainforest is where all the species are. That’s a problem.’ This has led to some radical questions among environmentalists, such as whether consumers should try to boycott palm oil entirely. Meanwhile Bhavani Shankar, Professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, argues, ‘It’s easy to say that palm oil is the enemy and we should be against it. It makes for a more dramatic story, and it’s very intuitive. But given the complexity of the argument, I think a much more nuanced story is closer to the truth.’

E One response to the boycott movement has been the argument for the vital role palm oil plays in lifting many millions of people in the developing world out of poverty. Is it desirable to have palm oil boycotted, replaced, eliminated from the global supply chain, given how many low-income people in developing countries depend on it for their livelihoods? How best to strike a utilitarian balance between these competing factors has become a serious bone of contention.

F Even the deforestation argument isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Oil palm plantations produce at least four and potentially up to ten times more oil per hectare than soybean, rapeseed, sunflower or other competing oils. That immensely high yield – which is predominantly what makes it so profitable – is potentially also an ecological benefit. If ten times more palm oil can be produced from a patch of land than any competing oil, then ten times more land would need to be cleared in order to produce the same volume of oil from that competitor. As for the question of carbon emissions, the issue really depends on what oil palm trees are replacing. Crops vary in the degree to which they sequester carbon – in other words, the amount of carbon they capture from the atmosphere and store within the plant. The more carbon a plant sequesters, the more it reduces the effect of climate change. As Shankar explains: ‘[Palm oil production] actually sequester- more carbon in some ways than other alternatives. […] Of course, if you’re cutting down virgin forest it’s terrible – that’s what’s happening in Indonesia and Malaysia, it’s been flowed to get out of hand. But if it’s replacing rice, for example, it might actually sequester more carbon.’

G The industry is now regulated by a group called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), consisting of palm growers, retailers, product manufacturers, and other interested parties. Over the past decade or so, an agreement has gradually been reached regarding standards that producers of palm oil have to meet in order for their product to be regarded as officially ‘sustainable’. The RSPO insists upon no virgin forest clearing, transparency and regular assessment of carbon stocks, among other criteria. Only once these requirements are fully satisfied is the oil allowed to be sold as certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO). Recent figures show that the RSPO now certifies around 12 million tonnes of palm oil annually, equivalent to roughly 21 percent of the world’s total palm oil production.

H There is even hope that oil palm plantations might not need to be such sterile monocultures, or ‘green deserts’, as Ellwood describes them. New research at Ellwood’s lab hints at one plant which might make all the difference. The bird’s nest fern (Asplenium nidus) grows on trees in an epiphytic fashion (meaning it’s dependent on the tree only for support, not for nutrients), and is native to many tropical regions, where as a keystone species it performs a vital ecological role. Ellwood believes that reintroducing the bird’s nest fern into oil palm plantations could potentially allow these areas to recover their biodiversity, providing a home for all manner of species, from fungi and bacteria, to invertebrates such as insects, amphibians, reptiles and even mammals.

Questions 14-20
Reading Passage has eight sections, A-H. Which section contains the following information?

14. examples of a range of potential environmental advantages of oil palm tree cultivation
15. description of an organisation which controls the environmental impact of palm oil production
16. examples of the widespread global use of palm oil
17. reference to a particular species which could benefit the ecosystem of oil palm plantations
18. figures illustrating the rapid expansion of the palm oil industry
19. an economic justification for not opposing the palm oil industry
20. examples of creatures badly affected by the establishment of oil palm plantations

Questions 21 and 22
Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Which TWO statements are made about the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)?
A Its membership has grown steadily over the course of the last decade.
B It demands that certified producers be open and honest about their practices.
C It took several years to establish its set of criteria for sustainable palm oil certification.
D Its regulations regarding sustainability are stricter than those governing other industries.
E It was formed at the request of environmentalists concerned about the loss of virgin forests.

Questions 23-26
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

23. One advantage of palm oil for manufacturers is that it stays ………………………. Even when not refrigerated.
24. The …………………….. is the best known of the animals suffering habitat loss as a result of the spread of oil palm plantations.
25. As one of its criteria for the certification of sustainable palm oil, the RSPO insists that growers check ………………… on a routine basis.
26. Ellwood and his researchers are looking into whether the bird’s nest fern could restore ……………….. in areas where oil palm trees are grown.

Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers

In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr takes the reader through a detailed history of New York City. The book combines geology, history, economics, and a lot of data to explain why business clusters developed where they did and how the early decisions of workers and firms shaped the skyline we see today. Building the Skyline is organized into two distinct parts. The first is primarily historical and addresses New York’s settlement and growth from 1609 to 1900; the second deals primarily with the 20th century and is a compilation of chapters commenting on different aspects of New York’s urban development. The tone and organization of the book changes somewhat between the first and second parts, as the latter chapters incorporate aspects of Barr’s related research papers.

Barr begins chapter one by taking the reader on a ‘helicopter time-machine’ ride – giving a fascinating account of how the New York landscape in 1609 might have looked from the sky. He then moves on to a subterranean walking – our of the city, indicating the location of rock and water below the subsoil, before taking the reader back to the surface. His love of the city comes through as he describes various fun facts about the location of the New York residence of early 19th-century vice-president Aaron Burr a.- well as a number of legends about the city.

Chapters two and three take the reader up to the Civil War (1861-1865), with chapter two focusing on the early development of land and the implementation of a grid system in 1811. Chapter three focuses on land use before the Civil War. Both chapters are informative and well researched and set the stage for the economic analysis that comes later in the book. I would have liked Barr to expand upon his claim that existing tenements prevented skyscrapers in certain neighbourhoods because ‘likely no skyscraper developer was interested in performing the necessary “slum clearance”’. Later in the book, Barr makes the claim that the depth of bedrock was not a limiting factor for developers, as foundation costs were a small fraction of the cost of development. At first glance, it is not obvious why slum clearance would be limiting, while more expensive foundations would not.

Chapter four focuses on immigration and the location of neighborhoods and tenements in the late 19th century. Barr identifies four primary immigrant enclaves and analyzes their locations in terms of the amenities available in the area. Most of these enclaves were located on the least valuable land, between the industries located on the waterfront and the wealthy neighborhoods bordering Central Park.

Part two of the book begins with a discussion of the economics of skyscraper height. In chapter five, Barr distinguishes between engineering height, economic height, and developer height — where engineering height is the tallest building that can be safely made at a given time, economic height is the height that is most efficient from society’s point of view, and developer height is the actual height chosen by the developer, who is attempting to maximize return on investment.

Chapter five also has an interesting discussion of the technological advances that led to the construction of skyscrapers. For example, the introduction of iron and steel skeletal frames made thick, load-bearing walls unnecessary, expanding the usable square footage of buildings and increasing the use of windows and availability of natural light. Chapter six then presents data on building height throughout the 20th century and uses regression analysis to ‘predict’ building construction. While less technical than the research paper on which the chapter is based, it is probably more technical than would be preferred by a general audience.

Chapter seven tackles the ‘bedrock myth’, the assumption that the absence of bedrock close to the surface between Downtown and Midtown New York is the reason for skyscrapers not being built between the two urban centers. Rather, Barr argues that while deeper bedrock does increase foundation costs, these costs were neither prohibitively high nor were they large compared to the overall cost of building a skyscraper. What I enjoyed the most about this chapter was Barr’s discussion of how foundations are actually built. He descries the use of caissons, which enable workers to dig down for considerable distances, often below the water table, until they reach bedrock. Barr’s thorough technological history discusses not only how caissons work, but also the dangers involved. While this chapter references empirical research papers, it is a relatively easy read.

Chapters eight and nine focus on the birth of Midtown and the building boom of the 1920s. Chapter eight contains lengthy discussions of urban economic theory that may serve as a distraction to reader ’ primarily interested in New York. However, they would be well-suited for undergraduates learning about the economics of cities. In the next chapter, Barr considers two of the primary explanations for the building boom of the 1920s — the first being exuberance, and the second being financing. He uses data to assess the viability of these two explanations and finds that supply and demand factors explain much of the development of the 1920s; though it enabled the boom, cheap credit was not, he argues, the primary cause.

In the final chapter (chapter 10), Barr discusses another of his empirical papers that estimates Manhattan land values from the mid-19th century to the present day. The data work that went into these estimations is particularly impressive. Toward the end of the chapter, Barr assesses ‘whether skyscrapers are a cause or an effect of high land values’. He finds that changes in land values predict future building height, but the reverse is not true. The book ends with an epilogue, in which Barr discusses the impact of climate change on the city and makes policy suggestions for New York going forward.

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

27. What point does Shester make about Barr’s book in the first paragraph?
A It gives a highly original explanation for urban development.
B Elements of Barr’s research papers are incorporated throughout the book.
C Other books that are available on the subject have taken a different approach.
D It covers a range of factors that affected the development of New York.

28. How does Shester respond to the information in the book about tenements?
A She describes the reasons for Barr’s interest.
B She indicates a potential problem with Barr’s analysis.
C She compares Barr’s conclusion with that of other wipers.
D She provides details about the sources Barr used for his research.

29. What does Shester say about chapter six of the book?
A It contains conflicting data.
B It focuses too much on possible trends.
C It is too specialised for most readers.
D It draws on research that is out of date.

30. What does Shester suggest about the chapters focusing on the 1920s building boom?
A The information should have been organised differently.
B More facts are needed about the way construction was financed.
C The explanation / a is given for the building boom is unlikely.
D Some parts will have limited appeal to certain people.

31. What impresses Shester the most about the chapter on land values?
A the broad time period that is covered
B the interesting questions that Barr asks
C the nature of the research into the topic
D the recommendations Barr makes for the future

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

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

32. The description in the first chapter of how New York probably looked from the air in the early 1600s lacks interest.
33. Chapters two and three prepare the reader well for material yet to come.
34. The biggest problem for many nineteenth-century New York immigrant neighbourhoods was a lack of amenities.
35. In the nineteenth century, New York’s immigrant neighbourhoods tended to concentrate around the harbour.

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

The bedrock myth

In chapter seven, Barr indicates how the lack of bedrock close to the surface does not explain why skyscrapers are absent from (36) ………………… He points out that although the cost of foundations increases when bedrock is deep below the surface, this cannot be regarded as (37) …………………. Especially when compared to (38)………………. A particular enjoyable part of the chapter was Barr’s account of how foundations are built. He describes not only how (39) ………………. are made possible by the use of caissons, but he also discusses their (40) ………… The chapter is well researched but relatively easy to understand.

A development plans
B deep excavations
C great distance
D excessive expense
E impossible tasks
F associated risks
G water level
H specific areas
I total expenditure
J construction guidelines

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In late 1946 or early 1947, three Bedouin teenagers were tending their goats and sheep near the ancient settlement of Qumran, located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in what is now known as the West Bank. One of these young shepherds tossed a rock into an opening on the side of a cliff and was surprised to hear a shattering sound. He and his companions later entered the cave and stumbled across a collection of large clay jars, seven of which contained scrolls with writing on them. The teenagers took the seven scrolls to a nearby town where they were sold for a small sum to a local antiquities dealer. Word of the find spread, and Bedouins and archaeologists eventually unearthed tens of thousands of additional scroll fragments from 10 nearby caves; together they make up between 800 and 900 manuscripts. It soon became clear that this was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made.

The origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written around 2,000 years ago between 150 BCE and 70 CE, is still the subject of scholarly debate even today. According to the prevailing theory, they are the work of a population that inhabited the area until Roman troops destroyed the settlement around 70 CE. The area was known as Judea at that time, and the people are thought to have belonged to a group called the Essenes, a devout Jewish sect.

The majority of the texts on the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew, with some fragments written in an ancient version of its alphabet thought to have fallen out of use in the fifth century BCE. Bu’ there are other languages as well. Some scrolls are in Aramaic, the language spoken by many inhabitants of the region from the sixth century BCE to the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In addition, several texts feature translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

The Dead Sea Scrolls include fragments from every book of the Old Testament of the Bible except for the Book of Esther. The only entire book of the Hebrew Bible preserved among the manuscripts from Qumran is Isaiah; this copy, dated to the first century BCE, is considered the earliest biblical manuscript still in existence. Along with biblical texts, the scrolls include documents about sectarian regulations and religious writings that do not appear in the Old Testament.

The writing on the Dead Sea Scrolls is mostly in black or occasionally red ink, and the scrolls themselves are nearly all made of either parchment (animal skin) or an early form of paper called ‘papyrus’. The only exception is the scroll numbered 3Q15, which was created out of a combination of copper and tin. Known as the Copper Scroll, this curious document features letters chiselled onto metal – perhaps, as some have theorized, to better withstand the passage of time. One of the most intriguing manuscripts from Qumran, this is a sort of ancient treasure map that lists dozens of gold and silver caches. Using an unconventional vocabulary and odd spelling, it describes 64 underground hiding places that supposedly contain riches buried for safekeeping. None of these hoards have been recovered, possibly because the Romans pillaged Judea during the first century CE. According to various hypotheses, the treasure belonged to local people, or was rescued from the Second Temple before its destruction or never existed to begin with.

Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been on interesting journeys. In 1948, a Syrian Orthodox archbishop known as Mar Samuel acquired four of the original seven scrolls from a Jerusalem shoemaker and part-time antiquity dealer, paying less than $100 for them. He then travelled to the United States and unsuccessfully offered them to a number of universities, including Yale. Finally, in 19M, he placed an advertisement in the business newspaper The Wall Street Journal’ – under the category ‘Miscellaneous Items for Sale’ – that read: ‘Biblical Manuscripts : dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.’ Fortunately, Israeli archaeologist and statesman Yigael Yadin negotiated their purchase and brought the scrolls back to Jerusalem, where they remain to this day.

In 2017, researchers from the University of Haifa restored and deciphered one of the last untranslated scrolls. The university’s Eshbal Ratson and Jonathan Ben-Dov spent one year reassembling the 60 fragments that make up the scroll. Deciphered from a band of coded text on parchment, the find provides insight into the community of people who wrote it and the 364-day calendar they would have used. The scroll names celebrations that indicate shifts in seasons and details two yearly religious events known from another Dead Sea Scroll. Only one more known scroll remains untranslated.

Questions 1-5
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The Dead Sea Scrolls
Discovery
Qumran, 1946/7
• three Bedouin shepherds in their teens were near an opening on side of cliff
• heard a noise of breaking when one teenager threw a (1) …………………….
• teenagers went into the (2) …………………. and found a number of containers made of (3) ………………..

The scrolls
• date from between 150 BCE and 70 CE
• thought to have been written by group of people known as the (4) ………………….
• written mainly in the (5) …………………. language
• most are on religious topics, written using ink on parchment or papyrus

Questions 6-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 6-13 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

6. The Bedouin teenagers who found the scrolls were disappointed by how little money they received for them.
7. There is agreement among academics about the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
8. Most of the books of the Bible written on the scrolls are incomplete.
9. The information on the Copper Scroll is written in an unusual way.
10. Mar Samuel was given some of the scrolls as a gift.
11. In the early 1950s, a number of educational establishments in the US were keen to buy scrolls from Mar Samuel.12. The scroll that was pieced together in 2017 contains information about annual occasions in the Qumran area 2.000 yea-s ago.
13. Academics at the University of Haifa are currently researching how to decipher the final scroll.

A second attempt at domesticating the tomato

A It took at least 3,000 years for humans to learn how to domesticate the wild tomato and cultivate it for food. Now two separate teams in Brazil and China have done it all over again in less than three years. And they have done it better in some ways, as the re-domesticated tomatoes are more nutritious than the ones we eat at present. This approach relies on the revolutionary CRISPR genome editing technique, in which changes are deliberately made to the DNA of a living cell, allowing genetic material to be added, removed or altered. The technique could not only improve existing crops, but could also be used to turn thousands of wild plants into useful and appealing foods. In fact, a third team in the US has already begun to do this with a relative of the tomato called the groundcherry.

This fast-track domestication could help make the world’s food supply healthier and far more resistant to diseases, such as the ‘us fungus devastating wheat crops. ‘This could transform what we eat,’ says Jo-g Kudla at the University of Munster in Germany, a member of the Brazilian team. ‘There are 50,000 edible plants in the world, but 90 percent of our energy comes from just 15 crops.’ ‘We can now mimic the known domestication course of major crops like rice, maize, sorghum or others,’ says Caixia Gao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. ‘Then we might try to domesticate plants that have never been domesticated.’

B Wild tomatoes, which, are native to the Andes region in South America, produce pea-sized fruits. many generations, peoples such as the Aztecs and Incas transformed the pint by selecting and breeding plants with mutations in their genetic structure, which resulted in desirable traits such as larger fruit. But every time a single plant with a mutation is taken from a larger population for breeding, much genetic diversity is lost. And sometimes the desirable mutations come with less desirable traits. For instance, the tomato strains grown for supermarkets have lost much of their flavour. By comparing the genomes of modern plants to those of their wild relatives, biologists have been working out what genetic changes occurred as plants were domesticated. The teams in Brazil and China have now used this knowledge to reintroduce these changes from scratch while maintaining or even enhancing the desirable traits of wild strains.

C Kudla’s team made six changes altogether. For instance, they tripled the size of fruit by editing a gene called FRUIT WEIGHT, and increased the number of tomatoes per truss by editing another called MULTIFLORA. While the historical domestication of tomatoes reduced levels of the red pigment lycopene – thought to have potential health benefits – the team in Brazil managed to boost it instead. The wild tomato has twice as much lycopene as cultivated ones; the newly domesticated one has five times as much. ‘They are quite tasty,’ says Kudla. ‘A little bit strong. And very aromatic.’ The team in China re-domesticated several strains of wild tomatoes with desirable traits lost in domesticated tomatoes. In this way they managed to create a strain resistant to a common disease called bacterial spot race, which can devastate yields. They also created another strain that is more salt tolerant – and has higher levels of vitamin C.

D Meanwhile, Joyce Van Eck at the Boyce Thompson Institute in New York state decided to use the same approach to domesticate the groundcherry or goldenberry (Physalis pruinosa) for the first time. This fruit looks similar to the closely related Cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana). Groundcherries are already sold to a limited extent in the US but they are hard to produce because the plant has a sprawling growth habit and the small fruits fall off the branches when ripe. Van Ecks team has edited the plants to increase fruit size, make their growth more compact and to stop fruits dropping. ‘There’s potential for this to be a commercial e^,’ says Van Eck. But she adds that taking the work further would be expensive because of the need to pay for a licence for the CRISPR technology and get regulatory approval.

E This approach could boost the use of many obscure plants, says Jonathan Jones of the Sainsbury Lab in the UK. But it will be hard for new foods to grow so popular with farmers and consumers that they become new staple crops, he thinks. The three teams already have their eye on other plants that could be ‘catapulted into the mainstream’, including foxtail, oat-grass and cowpea. By choosing wild plants that are drought or heat tolerant, says Gao, we could create crops that will thrive even as the planet warms. But Kudla didn’t want to reveal which species were in his team’s sights, because CRISPR has made the process so easy. ‘Any one with the right skills could go to their lab and do this.’

Questions 14-18
Reading Passage has five sections, A-E. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14. a reference to a type of tomato that can resist a dangerous infection
15. an explanation of how problems can arise from focusing only on a certain type of tomato plant.
16. a number of examples of plants that are not cultivated at present but could be useful as food sources
17. a comparison between the early domestication of the tomato and more recent research
18. a personal reaction to the flavour of a tomato that has been genetically edited

Questions 19-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-D. Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

19. Domestication of certain plants could allow them to adapt to future environmental challenges.
20. The idea of growing and eating unusual plants may not be accepted on a large scale.
21. It is not advisable for the future direction of certain research to be made public.
22. Present efforts to domesticate one wild fruit are limited by the costs involved.
23. Humans only make use of a small proportion of the plant food available on Earth.

List of Researchers
A Jorg Kudla
B Caixia Gao
C Joyce Van Eck
D Jonathan Jones

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

24. An undesirable trait such as loss of …………………. may be caused by a mutation in a tomato gene.
25. By modifying one gene in a tomato plant, researchers made the tomato three times its original ……………
26. A type of tomato which was not badly affected by …………………… and was rich in vitamin C, was produced by a team of researchers in China.

Insight or evolution?

Two scientists consider the origins of discoveries and other innovative behavior Scientific discovery is popularly believed to result from the sheer genius of such intellectual stars as naturalist Charles Darwin and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Our view of such unique contributions to science often disregards the person’s prior experience and the efforts of their lesser-known predecessors. Conventional wisdom also places great weight on insight in promoting breakthrough scientific achievements, as if ideas spontaneously pop into someone’s head – fully formed and functional.

There may be some limited truth to this view. However, we believe that it largely misrepresents the real nature of scientific discovery, as well as that of creativity and innovation in many other realms of human endeavor. Setting aside such greats as Darwin and Einstein – whose monumental contributions are duly celebrated – we suggest that innovation is more a process of trial and error, where two steps forward may sometimes come with one step back, as well as one or more steps to the right or left. This evolutionary view of human innovation undermines the notion of creative genius and recognizes the cumulative nature of scientific progress.

Consider one unheralded scientist John Nicholson, a mathematical physicist working in the 1910s who postulated the existence of ‘proto-elements’ in outer space. By combining different numbers of weights of these proto-elements’ atoms, Nicholson could recover the weights of all the elements in the then-known periodic table. These successes are all the more noteworthy given the fact that Nicholson was wrong about the presence of proto-elements: they do not actually exist. Yet, amid his often fanciful theories and wild speculations, Nicholson also proposed a novel theory about the structure of atoms. Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning father of modern atomic theory, jumped off from this interesting idea to conceive his now-famous model of the atom.

What are we to make of this story? One might simply conclude that science is a collective and cumulative enterprise. That may be true, but there may be a deeper insight to be gleaned. We propose that science is constantly evolving, much as species of animals do. In biological systems, organisms may display new characteristics that result from random genetic mutations. In the same way, random, arbitrary or accidental mutations of ideas may help pave the way for advances in science. If mutations prove beneficial, then the animal or the scientific theory will continue to thrive and perhaps reproduce.

Support for this evolutionary view of behavioral innovation comes from many domains. Consider one example of an influential innovation in US horseracing. The so-called ‘acey-deucy’ stirrup placement, in which the rider’s foot in his left stirrup is placed as much as 25 centimeters lower than the right, is believed to confer important speed advantages when turning on oval tracks. It was developed by a relatively unknown jockey named Jackie Westrope. Had Westrope conducted methodical investigations or examined extensive film records in a shrewd plan to outrun his rivals? Had he foreseen the speed advantage that would be conferred by riding acey-deucy? No. He suffered a leg injury, which left him unable to fully bend his left knee. His modification just happened to coincide with enhanced left-hand turning performance. This led to the rapid and widespread adoption of riding acey-deucy by many riders, a racing style which continues in today’s thoroughbred racing.

Plenty of other stories show that fresh advances can arise from error, misadventure, and also pure serendipity – a happy accident. For example, in the early 1970s, two employees of the company 3M each had a problem: Spencer Silver had a product – a glut which was only slightly sticky – and no use for it, while his colleague Art Fry was trying to figure out how to affix temporary bookmarks in his hymn book without damaging its pages. The solution to both these problems was the invention of the brilliantly simple yet phenomenally successful Post-It note. Such examples give lie to the claim that ingenious, designing minds are responsible for human creativity and invention. Far more banal and mechanical forces may be at work; forces that are fundamentally connected to the laws of science.

The notions of insight, creativity and genius are often invoked, but they remain vague and of doubtful scientific utility, especially when one considers the diverse and enduring contributions of individuals such as Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Curie, Pasteur and Edison. These notions merely label rather than explain the evolution of human innovations. We need another approach, and there is a promising candidate.

The Law of Effect was advanced by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1898, some 40 years after Charles Darwin published his ground breaking work on biological evolution, On the Origin of Species. This simple law holds that organisms tend to repeat successful behaviors and to refrain from performing unsuccessful ones. Just like Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection, the Law of Effect involves a entirely mechanical process of variation and selection, without any end objective in sight.

Of course, the origin of human innovation demands much further study. In particular, the provenance of the raw material on which the Law of Effect operates is not as clearly known as that of the genetic mutations on which the Law of Natural Selection operates. The generation of novel ideas and behaviors may not be entirely random, but constrained by prior successes and failures – of the current individual (such as Bohr) or of predecessors (such as Nicholson). The time seems right for abandoning the naive notions of intelligent design and genius, and for scientifically exploring the true origins of creative behavior.

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

27. The purpose of the first paragraph is to
A defend particular ideas.
B compare certain beliefs.
C disprove a widely held view.
D outline a common assumption.

28 What are the writers doing in the second
A criticising an opinion
B justifying a standpoint
C explaining an approach
D supporting an argument

29. In the third paragraph, what do the writers suggest about Darwin and Einstein?
A They represent an exception to a general rule.
B Their way of working has been misunderstood.
C They are an ideal which others should aspire to.
D Their achievements deserve greater recognition.

30. John Nicholson is an example of a person whose idea
A established his reputation as an influential scientist.
B was only fully understood at a later point in history.
C laid the foundation for someone else’s breakthrough.
D initially met with scepticism from the scientific community.

31. What is the key point of interest about the ‘acey-deucy’ stirrup placement?
A the simple reason why it was invented
B the enthusiasm with which it was adopted
C the research that went into its development
D the cleverness of the person who first used it

Questions 32-36
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage? 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. Acknowledging people such as Plato or da Vinci as geniuses will help us understand the process by which great minds create new ideas.
33. The Law of Effect was discovered at a time when psychologies were seeking a scientific reason why creativity occurs.
34. The Law of Effect states that no planning is involved in the behaviour of organisms.
35. The Law of Effect sets out clear explanations about sources of new ideas and behaviours.
36. Many scientists are now turning away from the notion of intelligent design and genius.

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

The origins of creative behaviour

The traditional view of scientific discovery is that breakthroughs happen when a single great mind has sudden (37) ………………….. Although this can occur, it is not often the case. Advances are more likely to be the result of a longer process. In some cases, this process involves (38) ………………… , such as Nicholson’s theory about proto-elements. In others, simple necessity may provoke innovation, as with Westrope’s decision to modify the position of his riding stirrups. There is also often an element of (39) …………………….. , for example, the coincidence of ideas that led to the invention of the Post-It note. With both the Law of Natural Selection and the Law of Effect, there may be no clear (40) …………………….. involved, but merely a process of variation and selection.

A invention
B goals
C compromise
D mistakes
E luck
F inspiration
G experiments

The development of the London underground railway

In the first half of the 1800s, London’s population grew at an astonishing rate, and the central area became increasingly congested. In addition, the expansion of the overground railway network resulted in more and more passengers arriving in the capital. However, in 1846, a Royal Commission decided that the railways should not be allowed to enter the City, the capital’s historic and business centre. The result was that the overground railway stations formed a ring around the City. The area within consisted of poorly built, overcrowded slums and the streets were full of horse-drawn traffic. Crossing the City became a nightmare. It could take an hour and a half to travel 8 km by horse-drawn carriage or bus. Numerous schemes were proposed to resolve these problems, but few succeeded.

Amongst the most vocal advocates for a solution t0 London’s traffic problems was Charles Pearson, who worked as a solicitor for the City of London. He saw both social and economic advantages in building an underground railway that would link the overground railway stations together and clear London slums at the same time. His idea was to relocate the poor workers who lived in the inner-city slums to newly constructed suburbs, and to provide cheap rail travel for them to get to work. Pearson’s ideas gained support amongst some businessmen and in 1851 he submitted a plan to Parliament. It was rejected, but coincided with a proposal from another group for an underground connecting line, which Parliament passed.

The two groups merged and established the Metropolitan Railway Company in August 1854. The company’s plan was to construct an underground railway line from the Great Western Railway’s (GWR) station at Paddington to the edge of the City at Farringdon Street – a distance of almost 5 km. The organisation had difficulty in raising the funding for such a radical and expensive scheme, not least because of the critical articles printed by the press. Objectors argued that the tunnels would collapse under the weight of traffic overhead, buildings would be shaken and passengers would be poisoned by the emissions from the train engines. However, Pearson and his partners persisted.

The GWR, aware that the new line would finally enable them to run trains into the heart of the City, invested almost £250,000 in the scheme. Eventually, over a five-year period, £1m was raised. The chosen route ran beneath existing main roads to minimise the expense of demolishing buildings. Originally scheduled to be completed in 21 months, the construction of the underground line took three years. It was built just below street level using a technique known as ‘cut and cover’. A trench about ten metres wide and six metres deep was dug, and the sides temporarily held up with timber beams. Brick walls were then constructed, and finally a brick arch was added to create a tunnel. A two-metre-deep layer of soil was laid on top of the tunnel and the road above rebuilt.

The Metropolitan line, which opened on 10 January 1863, was the world’s first underground railway. On its first day, almost 40,000 passengers were carried between Paddington and Farringdon, the journey taking about 18 minutes. By the end of the Metropolitan’s first year of operation, 9.5 million journeys had been made. Even as the Metropolitan began operation, the first extensions to the line wen being authorised; these were built over the next five years, reaching Moorgate in the east of London and Hammersmith in the west. The original plan was to pull the trains with steam locomotives, using firebricks in the boilers to provide steam, but these engines were never introduced. Instead, the line used specially designed locomotives that were fitted with water tanks in which steam could be condensed. However, smoke and fumes remained a problem, even though ventilation shafts were added to the tunnels.

Despite the extension of the underground railway, by the 1880s, congestion on London’s streets had become worse. The problem was partly that the exiting underground lines formed a circuit around the centre of London and extended *o tie suburbs, but did not cross the capital’s centre. The ‘cut and cover’ method of construction; not an option in this part of the capital. The only alternative was to tunnel deep underground. Although the technology to create these tunnels existed, steam locomotives could not be used in such a confined space. It wasn’t until the development of a reliable electric motor, and a means of transferring power from the generator to a moving train, that the world’s first deep-level electric railway, the City & South London, became possible. The line opened in 1890, and ran from the City to Stockwell, south of the River Thames. The trains were made up of three carriages and driven by electric engines. The carriages were narrow and had tiny windows just below the roof because it was thought that passengers would not want to look out at the tunnel walls. The line was not without its problems, mainly caused by an unreliable power supply. Although the City & South London Railway was a great technical achievement, it did not make a profit. Then, in 1900, the Central London Railway, known as the ‘Tuppenny Tube’, began operation using new electric locomotives. It was very popular and soon afterwards new railways and extensions were added to the growing tube network. By 1907, the heart of today’s Underground system was in place.

Questions 1-6
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The London underground railway
The problem
• The (1) ………………… of London increased rapidly between 1800 and 1850
• The streets were full of horse-drawn vehicles

The proposed solution
• Charles Pearson, a solicitor, suggested building an underground railway
• Building the railway would make it possible to move people to better housing in the (2) ……………….
• A number of (3) …………………. agreed with Pearson’s idea
• The company initially had problems getting the (4) …………………. needed for the project
• Negative articles about the project appeared in the 5

The construction
• The chosen route did not require many buildings to be pulled down
• The ‘cut and cover’ method was used to construct the tunnels
• With the completion of the brick arch, the tunnel was covered with (6) ………………….

Questions 7-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 7-13 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

7. Other countries had built underground railways before the Metropolitan line opened.
8. More people than predicted travelled on the Metropolitan line on ‘he first day.
9. The use of ventilation shafts failed to prevent pollution in the tunnels.
10. A different approach from the ‘cut and cover’ technique was required in London’s central area.
11. The windows on City & South London trains were at eye level.
12. The City & South London Railway was a financial success.
13. Trains on the ‘Tuppenny Tube’ nearly always ran on time.

Stadiums: past, present and future

A Stadiums are among the oldest forms of urban architecture: vast stadiums where the public could watch sporting events were at the centre of western city life as far back as the ancient Greek and Roman Empires, well before the construction of the great medieval cathedrals and the grand 19th- and 20th-century railway stations which dominated urban skylines in later eras. Today, however, stadiums are regarded with growing scepticism. Construction costs can soar above £1 billion, and stadiums finished for major events such as the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup have notably fallen into disuse and disrepair. But this need not be the case. History shows that stadiums can drive urban development and adapt to the culture of every age. Even today, architects and planners are finding new ways to adapt the mono-functional sports arenas which became emblematic of modernisation during the 20th century.

B The amphitheatre of Arles in southwest France, with a capacity of 25,000 spectators, is perhaps the best example of just how versatile stadiums can be. Built by the Romans in 90 AD, it became a fortress with four towers after the fifth century, and was then transformed into a village containing more than 200 houses. With the growing interest in conservation during the 19th century, it was converted back into an arena for the staging of bullfights, thereby returning the structure to its original use as a venue for public spectacles. Another example is the imposing arena of Verona in northern Italy, with space for 30,000 spectators, which was built 60 years before the Arles amphitheatre and 40 years before Rome’s famous Colosseum. It has endured the centuries and is currently considered one of the world’s prime sites for opera, thanks to its outstanding acoustics.

C The area in the centre of the Italian town of Lucca, known as the Piazza dell’ Anfiteatro, is yet another impressive example of an amphitheatre becoming absorbed into the fabric of the city. The site evolved in a similar way to Arles and was progressively filled with buildings from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, variously used as houses, a salt depot and a prison. But rather than reverting to an arena, it became a market square, designed by Romanticist architect Lorenzo Nottolini. Today, the ruins of the amphitheatre remain embedded in the various shops and residences surrounding the public square.

D There are many similarities between modern stadiums and the ancient amphitheatres intended for games. But some of the flexibility was lost at the beginning of the 20th century, as stadiums were developed using new products such as steel and reinforced concrete, and made use of bright lights for night-time matches. Many such stadiums are situated in suburban areas, designed for sporting use only and surrounded by parking lots. These factors mean that they may not be as accessible to the general public, require more energy to run and contribute to urban heat.

E But many of today’s most innovative architects see scope for the stadium to help improve the city. Among the current strategies, two seem to be having particular success: the stadium as an urban hub, and as a power plant.
There’s a growing trend for stadiums to be equipped with public spaces and services that serve a function beyond sport, such as hotels, retail outlets, conference centres, restaurants and bars, children’s playgrounds and green space. Creating mixed-use developments such as this reinforces compactness and multi-functionality, making more efficient use of land and helping to regenerate urban spaces. This opens the space up to families and a wider cross-section of society, instead of catering only to sportspeople and supporters. There have been many examples of this in the UK: the mixed-use facilities at Wembley and Old Trafford have become a blueprint for many other stadiums in the world.

F The phenomenon of stadiums as power stations has arisen from the idea that energy problems can be overcome by integrating interconnected buildings by means of a smart grid, which is an electricity supply network that uses digital communications technology to detect and react to local changes in usage, without significant energy losses. Stadiums are ideal for these purposes, because their canopies have a large surface area for fitting photovoltaic panels and rise high enough (more than 4) metres) to make use of micro wind turbines. Freiburg Mage Solar Stadium in Germany is the first of a new wave of stadiums as power plants, which also includes the Amsterdam Arena and the Kaohsiung Stadium. The latter, inaugurated in 2009, has 8,844 photovoltaic panels producing up to 1.14 GWh of electricity annually. This reduces the annual output of carbon dioxide by 660 tons and supplies up to 80 percent of the surrounding area when the stadium is not in use. This is proof that a stadium can serve its city, and have a decidedly positive impact in terms of reduction of CO2 emissions.

G Sporting arenas have always been central to the life and culture of cities. In every era, the stadium has acquired new value and uses: from military fortress to residential village, public space to theatre and most recently a field for experimentation in advanced engineering. The stadium of today now brings together multiple functions, thus helping cities to create a sustainable future.

Questions 14-17
Reading Passage has seven sections, A-G. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14. a mention of negative attitudes towards stadium building projects
15. figures demonstrating the environmental benefits of a certain stadium
16. examples of the wide range of facilities available at some new stadiums
17. reference to the disadvantages of the stadiums built during a certain era

Questions 18-22
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.

Roman amphitheatres
The Roman stadiums o’1 Europe have proved very versatile. The amphitheatre of Arles, for example, was converted first into a (18) …………………. , then into a residential area and finally into an arena where spectators could watch (19) …………………… Meanwhile, the arena in Verona, one of the oldest Roman amphitheatres, is famous today as a venue where (20) ………………. is performed. The site of Lucca’s amphitheatre has also been used for many purposes over the centuries, including the storage of (21) ………………….. It is now a market square with (22) …………………….. and homes incorporated into the remains of the Roman amphitheatre.

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

When comparing twentieth-century stadiums to ancient amphitheatres in Section D, which TWO negative features does the writer mention?
A They are less imaginatively designed.
B They are less spacious.
C They are in less convenient locations.
D They are less versatile.
E They are made of less durable materials.

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

Which TWO advantages of modern stadium design does the writer mention?
A offering improved amenities for the enjoyment of sports events
B bringing community life back into the city environment
C facilitating research into solar and wind energy solutions
D enabling local residents to reduce their consumption of electricity
E providing a suitable site for the installation of renewable power generators

To catch a king

Charles Spencer’s latest book, To Catch a King, tells us the story of the hunt for King Charles II in the six weeks after his resounding defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. And what a story it is. After his father was executed by the Parliamentarians in 1649, the young Charles II sacrificed one of the very principles his father had died for and did a deal with the Scots, thereby accepting Presbyterianism as the national religion in return for being crowned King of Scots. His arrival in Edinburgh prompted the English Parliamentary army to invade Scotland in a pre-emptive strike. This was followed by a Scottish invasion of England. The two sides finally faced one another at Worcester in the west of England in 1651. After being comprehensively defeated on the meadows outside the city by the Parliamentarian army, the 21-year-old king found himself the subject of a national manhunt, with a huge sum offered for his capture. Over the following six weeks he managed, through a series of heart-poundingly close escapes, to evade the Parliamentarians before seeking refuge in France. For the next nine years, the penniless and defeated Charles wandered around Europe with only a small group of loyal supporters.

Years later, after his restoration as king, the 50-year-old Charles II requested a meeting with the writer and diarist Samuel Pepys. His intention when asking Pepys to commit his story to paper was to ensure that this most extraordinary episode was never forgotten. Over two three-hour sittings, the king related to him in great detail his personal recollections of the six weeks he had spent as a fugitive. As the king and secretary settled down (a scene that is surely a gift for a future scriptwriter), Charles commenced his story: ‘After the battle was so absolutely lost as to be beyond hope of recovery, I began to think of the best way of saving myself.’

One of the joys of Spencer’s book, a result not least of its use of Charles II’s own narrative as well as those of his supporters, is just how close the reader gets to the action. The day-by-day retelling of the fugitives’ doings provides delicious details: the cutting of the king’s long hair with agricultural shears, the use of walnut leaves to dye his pale skin, and the day Charles spent lying on a branch of the great oak tree in Boscobel Wood as the Parliamentary soldiers scoured the forest floor below. Spencer draws out both the humour – such as the preposterous refusal of Charles’s friend Henry Wilmot to adopt disguise on the grounds that it was beneath his dignity – and the emotional tension when the secret of king’s presence was cautiously revealed to his supporters.

Charles’s adventures after losing the Battle of Worcester hide the uncomfortable truth that whilst almost everyone in England had been appalled by the execution of his father, they had not welcomed the arrival of his son with the Scots army, but had instead firmly bolted their doors. This was partly because he rode at the head of what looked like a foreign invasion force and partly because, after almost a decade of civil war, people were desperate to avoid it beginning again. This makes it all the more interesting that Charles II himself loved the story so much ever after. As well as retelling it to anyone who would listen, causing eye-rolling among courtiers, he set in train a series of initiatives to memorialise it. There was to be a new order of chivalry, the Knights of the Royal Oak. A series of enormous oil paintings depicting the episode were produced, including a two-metre-wide canvas of Boscobel Wood and a set of six similarly enormous paintings of the king on the run. In 1660, Charles II commissioned the artist John Michael Wright to paint a flying squadron of cherubs carrying an oak tree to the heavens on the ceiling of his bedchamber. It is hard to imagine many other kings marking the lowest point in their life so enthusiastically, or indeed pulling off such an escape in the first place.

Charles Spencer is the perfect person to pass the story on to a new generation. His pacey, readable prose steers deftly clear of modern idioms and elegantly brings to life the details of the great tale. He has even-handed sympathy for both the fugitive king and the fierce republican regime that hunted him, and he succeeds in his desire to explore far more of the background of the story than previous books on the subject have done. Indeed, the opening third of the book is about how Charles II found himself at Worcester in the first place, which for some will be reason alone to read To Catch a King.

The tantalising question left, in the end, is that of what it all meant. Would Charles II have been a different king had these six weeks never happened? The days and nights spent in hiding must have affected him in some way. Did the need to assume disguises, to survive on wit and charm alone, to use trickery and subterfuge to escape from tight corners help form him? This is the one area where the book doesn’t quite hit the mark. Instead its depiction of Charles II in his final years as an ineffective, pleasure-loving monarch doesn’t do justice to the man (neither is it accurate), or to the complexity of his character. But this one niggle aside, To Catch a King is an excellent read, and those who come to it knowing little of the famous tale will find they have a treat in store.

Questions 27-31
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-J, below. Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

The story behind the hunt for Charles II

Charles II’s father was executed by the Parliamentarian forces in 1649. Charles II then formed a (27) …………………. with the Scots, and in order to become King of Scots, he abandoned an important (28) …………………… that was held by his father and had contributed to his father’s death. The opposing sides then met outside Worcester in 1651. The battle led to a (29) ……………….. for the Parliamentarians and Charles had to flee for his life. A (30) …………………. was offered for Charles’s capture, but after six weeks spent in hiding, he eventually managed to reach the (31) ……………………. of continental Europe.

A military innovation
B large reward
C widespread conspiracy
D relative safety
E new government
F decisive victory
G political debate
H strategic alliance
I popular solution
J religious conviction

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

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

32. Charles chose Pepys for the task because he considered him to be trustworthy.
33. Charles’s personal recollection of the escape lacked sufficient detail.
34. Charles indicated to Pepys that he had planned his escape before the battle.
35. The inclusion of Charles’s account is a positive aspect of the book.

Questions 36-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

36. What is the reviewer’s main purpose in the first paragraph?
A to describe what happened during the Battle of Worcester
B to give an account of the circumstances leading to Charles II’s escape
C to provide details of the Parliamentarians’ political views
D to compare Charles Il’s beliefs with those of his father

37. Why does the reviewer include examples of the fugitives’ behaviour in the third paragraph?
A to explain how close Charles II came to losing his life
B to suggest that Charles II’s supporters were badly prepared
C to illustrate how the events of the six weeks are brought to life
D to argue that certain aspects are not as well known as they should be

38. What point does the reviewer make about Charles II in the fourth paragraph?
A He chose to celebrate what was essentially a defeat.
B He misunderstood the motives of his opponents.
C He aimed to restore people’s faith in the monarchy.
D He was driven by a desire to be popular.

39. What does the reviewer say about Charles Spencer in the fifth paragraph?
A His decision to write the book comes as a surprise.
B He takes an unbiased approach to the subject matter.
C His descriptions of events would be better if they included more detail.
D He chooses language that is suitable for a twenty-first-century audience.

40. When the reviewer says the book ‘doesn’t quite hit the mark’, she is making the point that
A it overlooks the impact of events on ordinary people.
B it lacks an analysis of prevalent views on monarchy.
C it omits any references to the deceit practised by Charles II during his time in hiding.
D it fails to address whether Charles II’s experiences had a lasting influence on him.