Author: theieltsbridge

Review Of Research On The Effects Of Food Promotion To Children

This review was commissioned by the Food Standards Agency to examine the current research evidence on:

• the extent and nature of food promotion to children

• the effect, if any, that this promotion has on their food knowledge, preferences and behaviour.

A Children’s food promotion is dominated by television advertising, and the great majority of this promotes the so-called ‘Big Four’ of pre-sugared breakfast cereals, soft-drinks, confectionary and savoury snacks. In the last ten years advertising for fast food outlets has rapidly increased. There is some evidence that the dominance of television has recently begun to wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for multi-faceted communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point of sale activity. The advertised diet contrasts sharply with that recommended by public health advisors, and themes of fun and fantasy or taste, rather than health and nutrition, are used to promote it to children. Meanwhile, the recommended diet gets little promotional support.

B There is plenty of evidence that children notice and enjoy food promotion. However, establishing whether this actually influences them is a complex problem. The review tackled it by looking at studies that had examined possible effects on what children know about food, their food preferences, their actual food behaviour (both buying and eating), and their health outcomes (eg. obesity or cholesterol levels). The majority of studies examined food advertising, but a few examined other forms of food promotion. In terms of nutritional knowledge, food advertising seems to have little influence on children’s general perceptions of what constitutes a healthy diet, but, in certain contexts, it does have an effect on more specific types of nutritional knowledge. For example, seeing soft drink and cereal adverts reduced primary aged children’s ability to determine correctly whether or not certain products contained real fruit.

C The review also found evidence that food promotion influences children’s food preferences and their purchase behaviour. A study of primary school children, for instance, found that exposure to advertising influenced which foods they claimed to like; and another showed that labelling and signage on a vending machine had an effect on what was bought by secondary school pupils. A number of studies have also shown that food advertising can influence what children eat. One, for example, showed that advertising influenced a primary class’s choice of daily snack at playtime.

D The next step, of trying to establish whether or not a link exists between food promotion and diet or obesity, is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real world settings. A number of studies have attempted this by using amount of television viewing as a proxy for exposure to television advertising. They have established a clear link between television viewing and diet, obesity, and cholesterol levels. It is impossible to say, however, whether this effect is caused by the advertising, the sedentary nature of television viewing or snacking that might take place whilst viewing. One study resolved this problem by taking a detailed diary of children’s viewing habits. This showed that the more food adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories they consumed.

E Thus the literature does suggest food promotion is influencing children’s diet in a number of ways. This does not amount to proof; as noted above with this kind of research, incontrovertible proof simply isn’t attainable. Nor do all studies point to this conclusion; several have not found an effect. In addition, very few studies have attempted to measure how strong these effects are relative to other factors influencing children’s food choices. Nonetheless, many studies have found clear effects and they have used sophisticated methodologies that make it possible to determine that i) these effects are not just due to chance; ii) they are independent of other factors that may influence diet, such as parents’ eating habits or attitudes; and iii) they occur at a brand and category level.

F Furthermore, two factors suggest that these findings actually downplay the effect that food promotion has on children. First, the literature focuses principally on television advertising; the cumulative effect of this combined with other forms of promotion and marketing is likely to be significantly greater. Second, the studies have looked at direct effects on individual children, and understate indirect influences. For example, promotion for fast food outlets may not only influence the child, but also encourage parents to take them for meals and reinforce the idea that this is a normal and desirable behaviour.

G This does not amount to proof of an effect, but in our view does provide sufficient evidence to conclude that an effect exists. The debate should now shift to what action is needed, and specifically to how the power of commercial marketing can be used to bring about improvements in young people’s eating.

Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i General points of agreements and disagreements of researchers
ii How much children really know about food
iii Need to take action
iv Advertising effects of the “Big Four”
v Connection of advertising and children’s weight problems
vi Evidence that advertising affects what children buy to eat
vii How parents influence children’s eating habits
viii Advertising’s focus on unhealthy options
ix Children often buy what they want
x Underestimating the effects advertising has on children

1. Paragraph A
2. paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph D
5. Paragraph E
6. Paragraph F
7. Paragraph G

Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 8-13 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

8. There is little difference between the number of healthy food advertisements and the number of unhealthy food advertisements.
9. TV advertising has successfully taught children nutritional knowledge about vitamins and others.
10. It is hard to decide which aspect of TV viewing has caused weight problems of children.
11. The preference of food for children is affected by their age and gender.
12. Wealthy parents tend to buy more “sensible food” for their children.
13. There is a lack of investigation on food promotion methods other than TV advertising.

The Bridge That Swayed

When the London Millennium footbridge was opened in June 2000, it swayed alarmingly. This generated huge public interest and the bridge became known as London’s “wobbly bridge.”

The Millennium Bridge is the first new bridge across the river Thames in London since Tower Bridge opened in 1894, and it is the first ever designed for pedestrians only. The bridge links the City of London near St Paul’s Cathedral with the Tate Modern art gallery on Bankside.

The bridge opened initially on Saturday 10th June 2000. For the opening ceremony, a crowd of over 1,000 people had assembled on the south half of the bridge with a band in front. When they started to walk across with the band playing, there was immediately an unexpectedly pronounced lateral movement of the bridge deck. “It was a fine day and the bridge was on the route of a major charity walk,” one of the pedestrians recounted what ho saw that day. “At first, it was still. Then if began to sway sideways, just slightly. Then, almost from one moment to the next, when large groups of people were crossing, the wobble intensified. Everyone had to stop walking to retain balance and sometimes to hold onto the hand rails for support.” Immediately it was decided to limit the number of people on the bridge, and the bridge was dubbed the ‘wobbly’ bridge by the media who declared it another high-profile British Millennium Project failure. In older to fully investigate and resolve the issue the decision was taken to close the bridge on 12th June 2000.

Arup, the leading member of the committee in charge of the construction of the bridge, decided to tackle the issue head on. They immediately undertook a fast-track research project to seek the cause and the cure. The embarrassed engineers found the videotape that day which showed the center span swaying about 3 inches sideways every second and the south span 2 inches every 1.25 seconds. Because there was a significant wind blowing on the opening days (force 3-4) and the bridge had been decorated with large flags, the engineers first thought that winds might be exerting excessive force on the many large flags and banners, but it was rapidly concluded that wind buffeting had not contributed significantly to vibration of the bridge. But after measurements were made in university laboratories of the effects of people? walking on swaying platforms and after large-scale experiments with crowds of pedestrians were conducted on the bridge itself, a new understanding and a new theory were developed.

The unexpected motion was the result of a natural human reaction to small lateral movements. It is well known that a suspension bridge has tendency to sway when troops march over it in lockstep, which is why troops are required to break step when crossing such a bridge. “If we walk on a swaying surface we tend to compensate and stabilise ourselves by spreading our legs further apart but this increases the lateral push”. Pat Dallard, the engineer at Arup, says that you change the way you walk to match what the bridge is doing. It is an unconscious tendency for pedestrians to match their footsteps to the sway, thereby exacerbating it even more. “It’s rather like walking on a rolling ship deck you move one way and then the other to compensate for the roll.” The way people walk doesn’t have to match exactly the natural frequency of the bridge as in resonance the interaction is more subtle. As the bridge moves, people adjust the way they walk in their own manner. The problem is that when there are enough people on the bridge the total sideways push can overcome the bridge’s ability to absorb it. The movement becomes excessive and continues to increase until people begin to have difficulty in walking they may even have to hold on to the rails.

Professor Fujino Yozo of Tokyo University, who studied the earth-resistant Toda Bridge in Japan, believes the horizontal forces caused by walking, running or jumping could also in turn cause excessive dynamic vibration in the lateral direction in the bridge. He explains that as the structure began moving, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the same lateral rhythm as the bridge; the adjusted footsteps magnified the motion just like when four people all stand up in small boat at the same time. As more pedestrians locked into the same rhythm, the increasing oscillation led to the dramatic swaying captured on film until people stopped walking altogether, because they could not even keep upright. In order to design a method of reducing the movements, an immediate research program was launched by the bridge’s engineering designer Arup. It was decided that the force exerted by the pedestrians had to be quantified and related to the motion of the bridge. Although there are some descriptions of this phenomenon in existing literature, none of these actually quantifies the force. So there was no quantitative analytical way to design the bridge against this effect. The efforts to solve the problem quickly got supported by a number of universities and research organisations.

The tests at the University of Southampton involved a person walking on the spot on a small shake table. The tests at Imperial College involved persons walking along a specially built, 7.2m-long platform, which could be driven laterally at different frequencies and amplitudes. These tests have their own limitations. While the Imperial College test platform was too short that only seven or eight steps could be measured at one time, the “walking on the spot” test did not accurately replicate forward walking, although many footsteps could be observed using this method. Neither test could investigate any influence of other people in a crowd on the behavior of the individual tested.

The results of the laboratory tests provided information which enabled the initial design of a retrofit to be progressed. However, unless the usage of the bridge was to be greatly restricted, only two generic options to improve its performance were considered feasible. The first was to increase the stiffness of the bridge to move all its lateral natural frequencies out of the range that could be excited by the lateral footfall forces, and the second was to increase the damping of the bridge to reduce the resonant response.

Questions 14-17
Choose FOUR letters, A-I.

Which FOUR of the following could be seen on the day when the bridge opened to the public?

A the bridge moved vertically
B the bridge swayed from side to side
C the bridge swayed violently throughout the opening ceremony
D it was hard to keep balance on the bridge
E pedestrians walked in synchronized steps
F pedestrians lengthened their footsteps
G a music band marched across the bridge
H the swaying rhythm varied to the portions of the bridge
I flags and banners kept still on the bridge

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

To understand why the Millennium Bridge swayed, engineers of Arup studied the videotape taken on the day of the opening ceremony. In the beginning they thought the forces of (18)……………………might have caused the movement because there were many flags and banners on the bridge that day. But quickly new understandings arose after series of tests were conducted on how people walk on (19)……………………..floors. The tests showed people would place their leg (20)……………………….to keep balance when the floor is shaking. Pat Dallard even believes pedestrians may unknowingly adjust their (21)………………….to match the sway of the bridge. Professor Fujino Yozo’s study found that the vibration of a bridge could be caused by the (22)…………………..of people walking, running and jumping on it because the lateral rhythm of the sway could make pedestrians adjust their walk and reach the same step until it is impossible to stand (23)……………………

Questions 24-26
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Test conducted by	Problems of the test
(24)……………………	not enough data collection
(25)…………………….	not long enough
(26)……………………	not like the real walking experience

Internal Market: Selling The Inside

When you think of marketing, you more than likely think of marketing to your customers: How can you persuade more people to buy what you sell? But another “market” is just as important: your employees, the very people who can make the brand come alive for your customers. Yet in our work helping executives develop and carry out branding campaigns, my colleagues and I have found that companies very often ignore this critical constituency.

Why is internal marketing so important? First, because it’s the best way to help employees make a powerful emotional connection to the products and services you sell. Without that connection, employees are likely to undermine the expectations set by your advertising. In some cases, this is because they simply don’t understand what you have promised the public, so they end up working at cross-purposes. In other cases, it may be they don’t actually believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. We’ve found that when people care about and believe in the brand, they’re motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company increases. Employees are united and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity.

Unfortunately, in most companies, internal marketing is done poorly, if at all. While executives recognise the need to keep people informed about the company’s strategy and direction, few understand the need to convince employees of the brand’s power—they take it as a given.

Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace. At most companies, however, internal and external communications are often mismatched. This can be very confusing, and it threatens employees’ perceptions of the company’s integrity: They are told one thing by management but observe that a different message is being sent to the public. One health insurance company, for instance, advertised that the welfare of patients was the company’s number one priority, while employees were told that their main goal was to increase the value of their stock options through cost reductions. And one major financial services institution told customers that it was making a major shift in focus from being a financial retailer to a financial adviser, but, a year later, research showed that the customer experience with the company had not changed. It turned out that company leaders had not made an effort to sell the change internally, so employees were still churning out transactions and hadn’t changed their behavior to match their new adviser role.

Enabling employees to deliver on customer expectations is important, of course, but it’s not the only reason a company needs to match internal and external messages. Another reason is to help push the company to achieve goals that might otherwise be out of reach. In 1997, when IBM launched its e-business campaign (which is widely credited for turning around the company’s image), it chose to ignore research that suggested consumers were unpre-pared to embrace IBM as a leader in e-business. Although to the outside world this looked like an external marketing effort, IBM was also using the campaign to align employees around the idea of the Internet as the future of technology. The internal campaign changed the way employees thought about everything they did, from how they named products to how they organised staff to how they approached selling. The campaign was successful largely because it gave employees a sense of direction and purpose, which in turn restored their confidence in IBM’s ability to predict the future and lead the technology industry. Today, research shows that people are four times more likely to associate the term “e-business” with IBM than with its nearest competitor.

Perhaps even more important, by taking employees into account, a company can avoid creating a message that doesn’t resonate with staff or, worse, one that builds resentment. In 1996, United Airlines shelved its “Come Fly the Friendly Skies” slogan when presented with a survey that revealed the depth of customer resentment toward the airline industry. In an effort to own up to the industry’s shortcomings, United launched a new campaign, “Rising,” in which it sought to differentiate itself by acknowledging poor service and promising incremental improvements such as better meals. While this was a logical premise for the campaign given the tenor of the times, a campaign focusing on customers’ distaste for flying was deeply discouraging to the staff. Employee resentment, ultimately made it impossible for United to deliver the improvements it was promising, which in turn undermined the “Rising” pledge. Three years later, United decided employee opposition was under-mining its success and pulled the campaign. It has since moved to a more inclusive brand message with the line “United,” which both audiences can embrace. Here, a fundamental principle of advertising—find and address a customer concern—failed United because it did not consider the internal market.

When it comes to execution, the most common and effective way to link internal and external marketing campaigns is to create external advertising that targets both audiences. IBM used this tactic very effectively when it launched its e-business campaign, It took out an eight-page ad in the Wall Street Journal declaring its new vision, a message directed at both customers and internal stakeholders. This is an expensive way to capture attention, but if used sparingly, it is the most powerful form of communication; in fact, you need do it only once for everyone in the company to read it. There’s a symbolic advantage as well. Such a tactic signals that the company is taking its pledge very seriously; it also signals transparency—the same message going out to both audiences.

Advertising isn’t the only way to link internal and external marketing. At Nike, a number of senior executives now hold the additional title of “Corporate Storyteller.” They deliberately avoid stories of financial successes and concentrate on parables of “just doing it,” reflecting and reinforcing the company’s ad campaigns. One tale, for example, recalls how legendary coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, in an effort to build a better shoe for his team, poured rubber into the family waffle iron, giving birth to the prototype of Nike’s famous Waffle Sole. By talking about such inventive moves, the company hopes to keep the spirit of innovation that characterises its ad campaigns alive and well within the company.

But while their messages must be aligned, companies must also keep external promises a little ahead of internal realities. Such promises provide incentives for employees and give them something to live up to. In the 1980s, Ford turned “Quality Is Job 1” from an internal rallying cry into a consumer slogan in response to the threat from cheaper, more reliable Japanese cars. It did so before the claim was fully justified, but by placing it in the public arena, it gave employees an incentive to match the Japanese. If the promise is pushed too far ahead, however, it loses credibility. When a beleaguered British Rail launched a campaign announcing service improvements under the banner “We’re Getting There,” it did so prematurely. By drawing attention to the gap between the promise and the reality, it prompted destructive press coverage. This, in turn, demoralised staff, who had been legitimately proud of the service advances they had made.

Questions 27-32
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet. NB You can use any letter more than once.

27. A health company
28. A financial institution
29. A computer company
30. An airline
31. A sport shoe company
32. A railway company

A alienated its employees by its apologetic branding campaign.
B attracted negative publicity through its advertising campaign.
C produced conflicting image between its employees and the general public.
D successfully used an advertising campaign to inspire employees
E draws on the legends of the company spirit.

Questions 33-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 33-40 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

33. A strong conviction in the brand can contribute to higher job performance.
34. It is common for companies to overlook the necessity for internal communication.
35. Consumers were ready to view IBM as a leader in e-business before the advertising campaign.
36. United Airlines’ failure in its branding campaign was due to the bad advice of an advertisement agency.
37. United Airlines eventually abolished its campaign to boost image as the result of a market research.
38. It is an expensive mistake for IBM to launch its new e-business campaign.
39. Nike employees claimed that they were inspired by their company tales.
40. A slight difference between internal and external promises can create a sense of purpose.

Computer games for Preschoolers Nintendo’s Research and Design Process

Designing computer games for young children is a daunting task for game producers, who, for a long time, have concentrated on more “hard core” game fans. This article chronicles the design process and research involved in creating Nintendo DS for preschool gamers.

After speaking with our producers who have a keen interest in designing for the DS, we finally agreed on three key goals for our project. First, to understand the range of physical and cognitive abilities of preschoolers in the context of handheld system game play; second, to understand how preschool gamers interact with the DS, specifically how they control the different forms of play and game mechanics offered by the games presently on the market for this platform; third, to understand the expectation of preschooler’s parents concerning the handheld systems as well as the purchase and play contexts within which game play occurs. The team of research decided that in-home ethnographies with preschoolers and their families would yield comprehensive database with which to give our producers more information and insights, so we start by conducting 26 in-home ethnographies in three markets across the United States: an East coast urban/suburban area, a West coast urban/suburban area, and a Midwest suburban/rural area.

The subject is this study included 15 girls and 11 boys ranging from 3 years and 3 months old to 5 years and 11 months old. Also, because previous research had shown the effects of older siblings on game play (demonstrated, for example, by more advanced motor coordination when using a computer mouse), households were employed to have a combination of preschoolers with and without elder peers. In order to understand both “experienced” and “new” preschool users of the platform, we divided the sample so that 13 families owned at least one Nintendo DS and the others did not. For those households that did not own a DS, one was brought to the interview for the kid to play. This allowed us to see both the instinctive and intuitive movements of the new players (and of the more experienced players when playing new games), as well as the learned movements of the more experienced players. Each of those interviews took about 60 to 120 minutes and included the preschooler, at least one parent, and often siblings and another caregiver.

Three kinds of information were collected after each interview. From any older siblings and the parents that were available, we gathered data about: the buying decisions surrounding game systems in the household, the family’s typical game play patterns, levels of parental moderation with regard to computer gaming, and the most favorite games play by family members. We could also understand the ideology of gaming in these homes because of these in-home interviews: what types of spaces were used for game play, how the system were installed, where the handheld play occurred in the house (as well as on-the-go play), and the number and type of games and game systems owned. The most important is, we gathered the game-playing information for every single kid.

Before carrying out the interviews, the research team had closely discussed with the in-house game producers to create a list of game mechanics and problems tied to preschoolers’ motor and cognitive capabilities that were critical for them to understand prior to writing the games. These ranged from general dexterity issues related to game controllers to the effectiveness of in-game instructions to specific mechanics in current games that the producers were interested in implementing for future preschool titles. During the interviews, the moderator gave specific guidance to the preschooler through a series of games, so that he or she could observe the interaction and probe both the preschooler and his or her parents on feelings, attitudes, and frustrations that arose in the different circumstances.

If the subject in the experiment had previous exposure to the DS system, he or she was first asked to play his or her favorite game on the machine. This gave the researchers information about current level of gaming skill related to the complexity of the chosen one, allowing them to see the child playing a game with mechanics he or she was already familiar with. Across the 26 preschoolers, the Nintendo DS selections scope were very broad, including New Super Mario Bros, Sonic Rush, Nintendogs, and Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. The interview observed the child play, noting preferences for game mechanic and motor interactions with device as well as the complexity level each game mechanic was for the tested subject. The researchers asked all of the preschoolers to play with a specific game in consultation with our producers, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure. The game was chosen for two major reasons. First, it was one of the few games on the market with characters that appeal to this young age group. Second, it incorporated a large variety of mechanics that highlighted the uniqueness of the DS platform, including using the microphone for blowing or singing.

The findings from this initial experiment were extensive. After reviewing the outcomes and discussing the implications for the game design with our internal game production team, we then outlined the designing needs and presented the findings to a firm specializing in game design. We worked closely with those experts to set the game design for the two preschool-targeted DS games under development on what we had gathered.

As the two DS games went into the development process, a formative research course of action was set up. Whenever we developed new game mechanics, we brought preschoolers into our in-house utility lab to test the mechanics and to evaluate both their simplicity, and whether they were engaging. We tested either alpha or beta versions of different elements of the game, in addition to looking at overarching game structure. Once a full version of the DS game was ready, we went back into the field test with a dozen preschoolers and their parents to make sure that each of the game elements worked for the children, and that the overall objective of the game was understandable and the process was enjoyable for players. We also collected parent’s feedback on whether they thought the game is appropriate, engaging, and worth the purchase.

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

Exploratory Research Project

Main Objectives:
Determine the relevant (1)……………….in the context
Observe how preschoolers manage playing
Investigate attitudes of (2)…………………towards games

Subjects:
26 children from different US (3)…………………
Age range: 3 years and 3 months to 5 years and 11 months
Some children have older (4)……………………
Equal number of new and (5)……………..players
Some households have Nintendo DS and some don’t

Length of Interview: 1-2 hours

Questions 6-9
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 6-9 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. One area of research is how far mothers and fathers controlled children’s playing after school.
7. The researchers are allowed a free access to the subjects’ houses.
8. The researchers regarded The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure as likely appeal to preschoolers.
9. The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure is operated entirely by hand controls.

Questions 10-13
Complete the flow-chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

• Using the results of the study
• Presentation of design requirements to a specialist (10)………………….
• Testing the mechanics of two new games in the Nintendo lab (assess (11)…………….and interest)
• A (12)………………………..of the games trailed be twelve children
• Collection of (13)………………….from parents

The History of Pencil

The beginning of the story of pencils started with a lightning. Graphite, the main material for producing pencil, was discovered in 1564 in Borrowdale in England when a lightning struck a local tree during a thunder. Local people found out that the black substance spotted at the root of the unlucky tree was different from burning ash of wood. It was soft, thus left marks everywhere. Chemistry was barely out of its infancy at the time, so people mistook it for lead, equally black but much heavier. It was soon put to use by locals in marking their sheep for ownership and calculation.

Britain turns out to be major country where mines of graphite can be detected and developed. Even so, the first pencil was invented elsewhere. As graphite is soft, it requires some form of encasement. In Italy, graphite sticks were initially wrapped in string or sheepskin for stability, becoming perhaps the very first pencil in the world. Then around 1560, an Italian couple made what are likely the first blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil. Their version was a flat, oval, more compact type of pencil. Their concept involved the hollowing out of a stick of juniper wood. Shortly thereafter in 1662, a superior technique was discovered by German people: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the halves then glued together – essentially the same method in use to this day. The news of the usefulness of these early pencils spread far and wide, attracting the attention of artists all over the known world.

Although graphite core in pencils is still referred to as lead, modern pencils do not contain lead as the “lead” of the pencil is actually a mix of finely ground graphite and clay powders. This mixture is important because the amount of clay content added to the graphite depends on the intended pencil hardness, and the amount of time spent on grinding the mixture determines the quality of the lead. The more clay you put in, the higher hardness the core has. Many pencils across the world, and almost all in Europe, are graded on the European system. This system of naming used B for black and H for hard; a pencil’s grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as BB and BBB for successively softer leads, and HH and HHH for successively harder ones. Then the standard writing pencil is graded HB.

In England, pencils continue to be made from whole sawn graphite. But with the mass production of pencils, they are getting drastically more popular in many countries with each passing decade. As demands rise, appetite for graphite soars.

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), world production of natural graphite in 2012 was 1,100,000 tonnes, of which the following major exporters are: China, India, Brazil, North Korea and Canada. However, much in contrast with its intellectual application in producing pencils, graphite was also widely used in the military. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Borrowdale graphite was used as a refractory material to line moulds for cannonballs, resulting in rounder, smoother balls that could be fired farther, contributing to the strength of the English navy. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and soft, and could easily be broken into sticks. Because of its military importance, this unique mine and its production were strictly controlled by the Crown.

That the United States did not use pencils in the outer space till they spent $1000 to make a pencil to use in zero gravity conditions is in fact a fiction. It is widely known that astronauts in Russia used grease pencils, which don’t have breakage problem. But it is also a fact that their counterparts in the United States used pencils in the outer space before real zero gravity pencil was invented. They preferred mechanical pencils, which produced fine line, much clearer than the smudgy lines left by the grease pencils that Russians favored. But the lead tips of these mechanical pencils broke often. That bit of graphite floating around the space capsule could get into someone’s eye, or even find its way into machinery or electronics, causing an electrical short or other problems. But despite the fact that the Americans did invent zero gravity pencils later, they stuck to mechanical pencils for many years.

Against the backcloth of a digitalized world, the prospect of pencils seems bleak. In reality, it does not. The application of pencils has by now become so widespread that they can be seen everywhere, such as classrooms, meeting rooms and art rooms, etc. A spectrum of users are likely to continue to use it into the future: students to do math works, artists to draw on sketch pads, waiters or waitresses to mark on order boards, make-up professionals to apply to faces, and architects to produce blue prints. The possibilities seem limitless.

Questions 14-20
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Graphite was found under a (14)………………….in Borrowdale, it was dirty to use because it was (15)………………

Ancient people used graphite to sign (16)……………………….People found graphite (17)…………………..in Britain.

The first pencil was graphite wrapped in (18)……………………or animal skin.

Since graphite was too smooth, (19)…………………..was added to make it harder.

Russian astronauts preferred (20)…………………….pencils to write in the outer space.

Question 21-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 21-26 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

21. Italy is probably the first country of the whole world to make pencils.
22. Germany used various kinds of wood to make pencils.
23. Graphite makes a pencil harder and sharper.
24. In Britain, pencils are not produced any more.
25. American astronauts did not use pencil in outer space.
26. Pencils are unlikely to be used in the future.

Motivating Drives

Scientists have been researching the way to get employees motivated for many years. This research in a relational study which builds the fundamental and comprehensive model for study. This is especially true when the business goal is to turn unmotivated teams into productive ones. But their researchers have limitations. It is like studying the movements of car without taking out the engine.

Motivation is what drives people to succeed and plays a vital role in enhancing an organizational development. It is important to study the motivation of employees because it is related to the emotion and behavior of employees. Recent studies show there are four drives for motivation. They are the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to comprehend and the drive to defend.

The Drive to Acquire
The drive to acquire must be met to optimize the acquire aspect as well as the achievement element. Thus the way that outstanding performance is recognized, the type of perks that is provided to polish the career path. But sometimes a written letter of appreciation generates more motivation than a thousand dollar check, which can serve as the invisible power to boost business engagement. Successful organizations and leaders not only need to focus on the optimization of physical reward but also on moving other levers within the organization that can drive motivation.

The Drive to Bond
The drive to bond is also key to driving motivation. There are many kinds of bonds between people, like friendship, family. In company, employees also want to be an essential part of company. They want to belong to the company. Employees will be motivated if they find personal belonging to the company. In the meantime, the most commitment will be achieved by the employee on condition that the force of motivation within the employee affects the direction, intensity and persistence of decision and behavior in company.

The Drive to Comprehend
The drive to comprehend motivates many employees to higher performance. For years, it has been known that setting stretch goals can greatly impact performance. Organizations need to ensure that the various job roles provide employees with simulation that challenges them or allow them to grow. Employees don’t want to do meaningless things or monotonous job. If the job didn’t provide them with personal meaning and fulfillment, they will leave the company.

The Drive to Defend
The drive to defend is often the hardest lever to pull. This drive manifests itself as a quest to create and promote justice, fairness, and the ability to express ourselves freely. The organizational lever for this basic human motivator is resource allocation. This drive is also met through an employee feeling connection to a company. If their companies are merged with another, they will show worries.

Two studies have been done to find the relations between the four drives and motivation. The article based on two studies was finally published in Harvard Business Review. Most authors’ arguments have laid emphasis on four-drive theory and actual investigations. Using the results of the surveys which executed with employees from Fortune 500 companies and other two global businesses (P company and H company), the article mentions about how independent drives influence employees’ behavior and how organizational levers boost employee motivation.

The studies show that the drive to bond is most related to fulfilling commitment, while the drive to comprehend is most related to how much effort employees spend on works. The drive to acquire can be satisfied by a rewarding system which ties rewards to performances, and gives the best people opportunities for advancement. For drive to defend, a study on the merging of P company and H company shows that employees in former company show an unusual cooperating attitude. The key to successfully motivate employees is to meet all drives. Each of these drives is important if we are to understand employee motivation. These four drives, while not necessarily the only human drives, are the ones that are central to unified understanding of modern human life.

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

27. According to the passage, what are we told about the study of motivation?
A The theory of motivating employees is starting to catch attention in organizations in recent years.
B It is very important for managers to know how to motivate their subordinates because it is related to the salary of employees.
C Researchers have tended to be too theoretical to their study.
D The goal of employee motivation is to increase the profit of organizations

28. What can be inferred from the passage about the study of people’s drives?
A Satisfying employees’ drives can positively lead to the change of behavior.
B Satisfying employees’ drives will negatively affect their emotions.
C Satisfying employees’ drives can increase companies’ productions.
D Satisfying employees’ drives will result in employees’ outstanding performance.

29. According to paragraph three, in order to optimize employees’ performance, are needed.
A Drive to acquire and achievement element
B Outstanding performance and recognition
C Career fulfillment and a thousand dollar check
D Financial incentive and recognition

30. According to paragraph five, how does “the drive to comprehend” help employees perform better?
A It can help employees better understand the development of their organizations.
B It can help employees feel their task in meaningful to their companies.
C It can help employees set higher goals.
D It can provide employees with repetitive tasks.

31. According to paragraph six, which of following is true about “drive to defend”?
A Organizational resource is the most difficult to allocate.
B It is as difficult to implement as the drive to comprehend.
C Employees think it is very important to voice their own opinions.
D Employees think it is very important to connect with a merged corporation.

Questions 32-34
Choose THREE letters, A-F.

Which THREE of the following statements are true of study of drives?
A Employees will be motivated if they feel belonged to the company
B If employees get an opportunity of training and development program their motivation will be enhanced
C If employees’ working goals are compiled with organizational objectives their motivation will be reinforced
D If employees’ motivation is very low companies should find a way to increase their salary as their first priority
E If employees find their work lacking challenge they will leave the company
F Employees will worry if their company is sold

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

35. Increasing pay can lead to the high work motivation.
36. Local companies benefit more from global companies through the study.
37. Employees achieve the most commitment if their drive to comprehend is met.
38. The employees in former company presented unusual attitude toward the merging of two companies.
39. The two studies are done to analyze the relationship between the natural drives and the attitude of employees.
40. Rewarding system cause the company to lose profit.

Ants Could Teach Ants

The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a tabletop foraging for food -and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that along the route, presumably to memorize land- marks. Once a follower got its bearings, it tapped the leader with its antennae, prompting the lesson to literally proceed to the next step. The ants were only looking for food but the researchers said the careful way the leaders led followers -thereby turning them into leaders in their own right -marked the Temnothorax albipennis ant as the very first example of a non-human animal exhibiting teaching behavior.

“Tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil,” remarks Nigel Franks, professor of animal behavior and ecology, whose paper on the ant educators was published last week in the journal Nature.

No sooner was the paper published, of course, than another educator questioned it. Marc Hauser, a psychologist and biologist and one of the scientists who came up with the definition of teaching, said it was unclear whether the ants had learned a new skill or merely acquired new information.

Later, Franks took a further study and found that there were even races between leaders. With the guidance of leaders, ants could find food faster. But the help comes at a cost for the leader, who normally would have reached the food about four times faster if not hampered by a follower. This means the hypothesis that the leaders deliberately slowed down in order to pass the skills on to the followers seems potentially valid. His ideas were advocated by the students who carried out the video project with him.

Opposing views still arose, however. Hauser noted that mere communication of information is commonplace in the animal world. Consider a species, for example, that uses alarm calls to warn fellow members about the presence of a predator. Sounding the alarm can be costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. But it allows others to flee to safety. “Would you call this teaching?” wrote Hauser. “The caller incurs a cost. The naive animals gain a benefit and new knowledge that better enables them to learn about the predator’s location than if the caller had not called. This happens throughout the animal kingdom, but we don’t call it teaching, even though it is clearly transfer of information.”

Tim Caro, a zoologist, presented two cases of animal communication. He found that cheetah mothers that take their cubs along on hunts gradually allow their cubs to do more of the hunting -going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat to merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off. At one level, such behavior might be called teaching -except the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but merely facilitating various stages of learning. In another instance, birds watching other birds using a stick to locate food such as insects and so on, are observed to do the same thing themselves while finding food later.

Psychologists study animal behavior in part to understand the evolutionary roots of human behavior, Hauser said. The challenge in understanding whether other animals truly teach one another, he added, is that human teaching involves a “theory of mind” -teachers are aware that students don’t know something. He questioned whether Franks’s leader ants really knew that the follower ants were ignorant. Could they simply have been following an instinctive rule to proceed when the followers tapped them on the legs or abdomen? And did leaders that led the way to food -only to find that it had been removed by the experimenter -incur the wrath of followers? That, Hauser said, would suggest that the follower ant actually knew the leader was more knowledgeable and not merely following an instinctive routine itself.

The controversy went on, and for a good reason. The occurrence of teaching in ants, if proven to be true, indicates that teaching can evolve in animals with tiny brains. It is probably the value of information in social animals that determines when teaching will evolve rather than the constraints of brain size. Bennett Galef Jr., a psychologist who studies animal behavior and social learning at McMaster University in Canada, maintained that ants were unlikely to have a “theory of mind” -meaning that leader and followers may well have been following instinctive routines that were not based on an understanding of what was happening in another ant’s brain. He warned that scientists may be barking up the wrong tree when they look not only for examples of human like behavior among other animals but human like thinking that underlies such behavior. Animals may behave in ways similar to humans without a similar cognitive system, he said, so the behavior is not necessarily a good guide into how humans came to think the way they do.

Questions 1-5
Look at the following statements (Questions 1-5) and the list of people in the box below. Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Animals could use objects to locate food.
2. Ants show two-way, interactive teaching behaviors.
3. It is risky to say ants can teach other ants like human beings do.
4. Ant leadership makes finding food faster.
5. Communication between ants is not entirely teaching.

A Nigel Franks
B Marc Hauser
C Tim Caro
D Bennett Galef Jr.

Questions 6-9
Choose FOUR letters, A-H

Which FOUR of the following behaviors of animals are mentioned in the passage?

A touch each other with antenna
B alert others when there is danger
C escape from predators
D protect the young
E hunt food for the young
F fight with each other
G use tools like twigs
H feed on a variety of foods

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 10-13 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

10. Ants’ tandem running involves only one-way communication.
11. Franks’s theory got many supporters immediately after publicity.
12. Ants’ teaching behavior is the same as that of human.
13. Cheetah share hunting gains to younger ones.

The Development Of Plastics

When rubber was first commercially produced in Europe during the nineteenth century, it rapidly became a very important commodity, particularly in the fields of transportation and electricity. However, during the twentieth century a number of new synthetic materials, called plastics, superseded natural rubber in all but a few applications.

Rubber is a polymer—a compound containing large molecules that are formed by the bonding of many smaller, simpler units, repeated over and over again. The same bonding principle—polymerization—underlies the creation of a huge range of plastics by the chemical industry.

The first plastic was developed as a result of a competition in the USA. In the 1860s, $10,000 was offered to anybody who could replace ivory—supplies of which were declining—with something equally good as a material for making billiard balls. The prize was won by John Wesley Hyatt with a material called celluloid. Celluloid was made by dissolving cellulose, a carbohydrate derived from plants, in a solution of camphor dissolved in ethanol. This new material rapidly found uses in the manufacture of products such as knife handles, detachable collars and cuffs, spectacle frames and photographic film. Without celluloid, the film industry could never have got off the ground at the end of the 19th century.

Celluloid can be repeatedly softened and reshaped by heat, and is known as a thermoplastic. In 1907, Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist working in the USA, invented a different kind of plastic, by causing phenol and formaldehyde to react together. Baekeland called the material Bakelite, and it was the first of the thermosets—plastics that can be cast and moulded while hot, but cannot be softened by heat and reshaped once they have set. Bakelite was a good insulator, and was resistant to water, acids and moderate heat. With these properties it was soon being used in the manufacture of switches, household items such as knife handles, and electrical components for cars.

Soon chemists began looking for other small molecules that could be strung together to make polymers. In the 1930s British chemists discovered that the gas ethylene would polymerize under heat and pressure to form a thermoplastic they called polythene. Polypropylene followed in the 1950s. Both were used to make bottles, pipes and plastic bags. A small change in the starting material—replacing a hydrogen atom in ethylene with a chlorine atom—produced PVC (polyvinyl chloride), a hard, fireproof plastic suitable for drains and gutters. And by adding certain chemicals, a soft form of PVC could be produced, suitable as a substitute for rubber in items such as waterproof clothing. A closely related plastic was Teflon, or PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). This had a very low coefficient of friction, making it ideal for bearings, rollers, and non-stick frying pans. Polystyrene, developed during the 1930s in Germany, was a clear, glass-like material, used in food containers, domestic appliances and toys. Expanded polystyrene—a white, rigid foam—was widely used in packaging and insulation. Polyurethanes, also developed in Germany, found uses as adhesives, coatings, and—in the form of rigid foams—as insulation materials. They are all produced from chemicals derived from crude oil, which contains exactly the same elements—carbon and hydrogen—as many plastics.

The first of the man-made fibres, nylon, was also created in the 1930s. Its inventor was a chemist called Wallace Carothers, who worked for the Du Pont company in the USA. He found that under the right conditions, two chemicals— hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid—would form a polymer that could be pumped out through holes and then stretched to form long glossy threads that could be woven like silk. Its first use was to make parachutes for the US armed forces in World War H. In the post-war years nylon completely replaced silk in the manufacture of stockings. Subsequently many other synthetic fibres joined nylon, including Orion, Acrilan and Terylene. Today most garments are made of a blend of natural fibres, such as cotton and wool, and man-made fibres that make fabrics easier to look after.

The great strength of plastic is its indestructibility. However, this quality is also something of a drawback: beaches all over the world, even on the remotest islands, are littered with plastic bottles that nothing can destroy. Nor is it very easy to recycle plastics, as different types of plastic are often used in the same items and call for different treatments. Plastics can be made biodegradable by incorporating into their structure a material such as starch, which is attacked by bacteria and causes the plastic to fall apart. Other materials can be incorporated that gradually decay in sunlight—although bottles made of such materials have to be stored in the dark, to ensure that they do not disintegrate before they have been used.

Questions 14-20
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passages for each answer.

Name of plastic	Date of invention	Original person	Property	Common use
Celluloid	1860s	US		(14)………………
(15)……………..	1907	US	can be cast and molded but cannot be softened by heat	(16)……………., household items and car parts
Polyethene	1930	(17)………………		bottles
Rigid PVC			(18)…………………….
Polystyrene	1930s	Germany	(19)…………………..	food container
Polyurethanes		Germany	(20)……………..foams	adhesives, coatings and insulation

Questions 21-26
Do the following statements agree with the information in Reading Passage? In boxes 21-26 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

21. The chemical structure of plastic is very different from that of rubber.
22. John Wesley was a famous chemist.
23. Celluloid and Bakelite react to heat in the same way.
24. The mix of different varieties of plastic can make the recycling more difficult.
25. Adding starch into plastic can make plastic more durable.
26. Some plastic containers have to be preserved in special conditions.

Global Warming In New Zealand

For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting warmer. As the nearest country of South Polar Region, New Zealand has maintained an upward trend in its average temperature in the past few years. However, the temperature in New Zealand will go up 4oC in the next century while the polar region will go up more than 6oC. The different pictures of temperature stem from its surrounding ocean which acts like the air conditioner. Thus New Zealand is comparatively fortunate.

Scientifically speaking, this temperature phenomenon in New Zealand originated from what researchers call “SAM” (Southern Annular Mode), which refers to the wind belt that circles the Southern Oceans including New Zealand and Antarctica. Yet recent work has revealed that changes in SAM in New Zealand have resulted in a weakening of moisture during the summer, and more rainfall in other seasons. A bigger problem may turn out to be heavier droughts for agricultural activities because of more water loss from soil, resulting in poorer harvest before winter when the rainfall arrive too late to rescue.

Among all the calamities posed be drought, moisture deficit ranks the first. Moisture deficit is the gap between the water plants need during the growing season and the water the earth can offer. Measures of moisture deficit were at their highest since the 1970s in New Zealand. Meanwhile, ecological analyses clearly show moisture deficit is imposed at different growth stage of crops. If moisture deficit occurs around a crucial growth stage, it will cause about 22% reduction in grain yield as opposed to moisture deficit at vegetative phase.

Global warming is not only affecting agriculture production. When scientists say the country’s snow pack and glaciers are melting at an alarming rate due to global warming, the climate is putting another strain on the local places. For example, when the development of global warming is accompanied by the falling snow line, the local skiing industry comes into a crisis. The snow line may move up as the temperature goes up, and then the snow at the bottom will melt earlier. Fortunately, it is going to be favorable for the local skiing industry to tide over tough periods since the quantities of snowfall in some areas are more likely to increase.

What is the reaction of glacier region? The climate change can be reflected in the glacier region in southern New Zealand or land covered by ice and snow. The reaction of a glacier to a climatic change involves a complex chain of processes. Over time periods of years to several decades, cumulative changes in mass balance cause volume and thickness changes, which will affect the flow of ice via altered internal deformation and basal sliding. This dynamic reaction finally leads to glacier length changes, the advance or retreat of glacier tongues. Undoubtedly, glacier mass balance is a more direct signal of annual atmospheric conditions.

The latest research result of National Institute of Water and Atmospheric (NIWA) Research shows that glaciers line keeps moving up because of the impacts of global warming. Further losses of ice can be reflected in Mt. Cook Region. By 1996, a 14 km long sector of the glacier had melted down forming a melt lake (Hooker Lake) with a volume. Melting of the glacier front at a rate of 40 m/yr will cause the glacier to retreat at a rather uniform rate. Therefore, the lake will continue to grow until it reaches the glacier bed.

A direct result of the melting glaciers is the change of high tides the serves the main factor for sea level rise. The trend of sea level rise will bring a threat to the groundwater system for its hyper-saline groundwater and then pose a possibility to decrease the agricultural production. Many experts believe that the best way to counter this trend is to give a longer-term view of sea level change in New Zealand. Indeed, the coastal boundaries need to be upgraded and redefined.

There is no doubt that global warming has affected New Zealand in many aspects. The emphasis on the global warming should be based on the joints efforts of local people and experts who conquer the tough period. For instance, farmers are taking a long term, multi-generational approach to adjust the breeds and species according to the temperature. Agriculturists also find ways to tackle the problems that may bring to the soil. In broad terms, going forward, the systemic resilience that’s been going on a long time in the ecosystem will continue.

How about animals’ reaction? Experts have surprisingly realized that animals have unconventional adaptation to global warming. A study has looked at sea turtles on a few northern beaches in New Zealand and it is very interesting to find that sea turtles can become male or female according to the temperature. Further researches will try to find out how rising temperatures would affect the ratio of sex reversal in their growth. Clearly, the temperature of the nest plays a vital role in the sexes of the baby turtles.

Tackling the problems of global warming is never easy in New Zealand, because records show the slow process of global warming may have a different impact on various regions. For New Zealand, the emission of carbon dioxide only accounts for 0.5% of the world’s total, which has met the governmental standard.

However, New Zealand’s effort counts only a tip of the iceberg. So far, global warming has been a world issue that still hangs in an ambiguous future.

Questions 27-32
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

27. What is the main idea of the first paragraph?
A The temperature in the polar region will increase less than that in New Zealand in the next century.
B The weather and climate of New Zealand is very important to its people because of its close location to the polar region.
C The air condition in New Zealand will maintain a high quality because of the ocean.
D The temperature of New Zealand will increase less than that of other region in the next 100 years because it is surrounded by sea

28. What is one effect of the wind belt that circles the Southern Oceans?
A New Zealand will have more moisture in winds in summer.
B New Zealand needs to face droughts more often in hotter months in a year.
C Soil water will increase as a result of weakening moisture in the winds
D Agricultural production will be reduced as a result of more rainfall in other seasons

29. What does “moisture deficit” mean to the grain and crops?
A The growing condition will be very tough for crops.
B The growing season of some plants can hardly be determined.
C There will be a huge gap between the water plants needed and the water the earth can offer.
D The soil of the grain and crops in New Zealand reached its lowest production since 1970s.

30. What changes will happen to skiing industry due to the global warming phenomenon?
A The skiing station may lower the altitude of skiing
B Part of the skiing station needs to move to the north.
C The snowfall may increase in part of skiing station.
D The local skiing station may likely to make a profit because of the snowfall increase.

31. Cumulative changes over a long period of time in mass balance will lead to
A Alterations is the volume and thickness of glaciers.
B Faster changes in internal deformation and basal sliding.
C Larger length of glaciers.
D Retreat of glacier tongues as a result of change in annual atmospheric conditions.

32. Why does the writer mention NIWA in the sixth paragraph?
A To use a particular example to explain the effects brought by glacier melting.
B To emphasize the severance of the further loss of ice in Mt. Cook Region.
C To alarm the reader of melting speed of glaciers at a uniform rate.
D To note the lake in the region will be disappear when it reach the glacier bed.

Questions 33-35
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Research date shows that sea level has a closely relation with the change of climate. The major reason for the increase in sea level is connected with (33)…………………..The increase in sea level is also said to have a threat to the underground water system, the destruction of which caused by rise of sea level will lead to a high probability of reduction in (34)……………………….In the long run, New Zealand may have to improve the (35)……………….if they want to diminish the effect change in sea levels.

Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 36-40 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. Farmers are less responsive to climate change than agriculturists.
37. Agricultural sector is too conservative and resistant to deal with climate change.
38. Turtle is vulnerable to climate change.
39. The global warming is going slowly, and it may have different effects on different areas in New Zealand.
40. New Zealand must cut carbon dioxide emission if they want to solve the problem of global warming.

T-Rex: Hunter or Scavenger?

Jack Homer is an unlikely academic: his dyslexia is so bad that he has trouble reading a book. But he can read the imprint of life in sandstone or muddy shale across a distance of l00 years, and it is this gift that has made him curator of palaeontology at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies, the leader of a multi-million dollar scientific project to expose a complete slice of life 68 million years ago, and a consultant to Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood figures.

His father had a sand and gravel quarry in Montana, and the young Horner was a collector of stones and bones, complete with notes about when and where he found them. “My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana,” he says. “He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones. So when I was eight years old he took me back to the area that had been his ranch, to where he had seen these big old bones. I picked up one. I am pretty sure it was the upper arm bone of a duckbilled dinosaur: it probably wasn’t a duckbilled dinosaur but closely related to that. I catalogued it, and took good care of it, and then later when I was in high school; excavated my first dinosaur skeleton. It obviously started earlier than eight and I literally have been driven ever since. I feel like I was born this way.”

Horner spent seven years at university, but never graduated. “I have a learning disability, I would call it a learning difference – dyslexia, they call it – and I just had a terrible time with English and foreign languages and things like that. For a degree in geology or biology they required two years of a foreign language. There was no way in the world I could do that. In fact, I didn’t really pass English. So I couldn’t get a degree, I just wasn’t capable of it. But I took all of the courses required and I wrote a thesis and I did all sorts of things. So I have the education, I just don’t have the piece of paper,” he says.

“We definitely know we are working on a very broad coastal plain with the streams and rivers bordered by conifers and hardwood plants, and the areas in between these rivers were probably fern-covered. There were no grasses at all: just ferns and bushes -an unusual landscape, kind of taking the south-eastern United States – Georgia, Florida – and mixing it with the moors of England and flattening it out,” he says. “Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous, they are everywhere. Duckbilled dinosaurs are relatively common but not as common as triceratops and T-rex, for a meat-eating dinosaur, is very common. What we would consider the predator-prey ratio seems really off the scale. What is interesting is the little dromaeosaurs, the ones we know for sure were good predators, are haven’t been found.”

That is why he sees T-rex not as the lion of the Cretaceous savannah but its vulture. “Look at the wildebeest that migrate in the Serengeti of Africa, a million individuals lose about 200,000 individuals in that annual migration. There is a tremendous carrion base there. And so you have hyenas, you have tremendous numbers of vultures that are scavenging, you don’t have all that many animals that are good predators. If T-rex was a top predator, especially considering how big it is, you’d expect it to be extremely rare, much rarer than the little dromaeosaurs, and yet they are everywhere, they are a dime a dozen,” he says. A 12-tonne T-rex is a lot of vulture, but he doesn’t see the monster as clumsy. He insisted his theory and finding, dedicated to further research upon it, of course, he would like to reevaluate if there is any case that additional evidence found or explanation raised by others in the future.

He examined the leg bones of the T-rex, and compared the length of the thigh bone (upper leg), to the shin bone (lower leg). He found that the thigh bone was equal in length or slightly longer than the shin bone, and much thicker and heavier, which proves that the animal was built to be a slow walker rather than fast running. On the other hand, the fossils of fast hunting dinosaurs always showed that the shin bone was longer than the thigh bone. This same truth can be observed in many animals of today which are designed to run fast: the ostrich, cheetah, etc.

He also studied the fossil teeth of the T-rex, and compared them with the teeth of the Velociraptor, and put the nail in the coffin of the “hunter T-rex theory”. The Velociraptor’s teeth which like stake knives: sharp, razor-edged, and capable of tearing through flesh with ease. The T-rex’s teeth were huge, sharp at their tip, but blunt, propelled by enormous jaw muscles, which enabled them to only crush bones.

With the evidence presented in his documentary, Horner was able to prove that the idea of the T-rex as being a hunting and ruthless killing machine is probably just a myth. In light of the scientific clues he was able to unearth, the T-rex was a slow, sluggish animal which had poor vision, an extraordinary sense of smell, that often reached its “prey” after the real hunters were done feeding, and sometimes it had to scare the hunters away from a corpse. In order to do that, the T-rex had to have been ugly, nasty-looking, and stinky. This is actually true of nearly all scavenger animals. They are usually vile and nasty looking.

Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? 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. Jack Horner knew exactly the bone picked up in his father’s ranch belonged to a certain dinosaur when he was at the age of 8.
2. Jack Horner achieved a distinctive degree in university when he graduated.
3. Jack Horner believes that the number of prey should be more than that of predators.
4. T-rex’s number is equivalent to the number of vulture in the Serengeti.
5. The hypothesis that T-rex is top predator conflicts with the fact of predator-prey ratio which Jack found.
6. Jack Horner refused to accept any other viewpoints about T-rex’s theory.
7. Jack Horner is the first man that discovered T-rex’s bones in the world.

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. Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

Jack Horner found that T-rex’s (8)…………………….is shorter than the thigh bone which demonstrated that it was actually a (9)………………………….unlike other swift animals such as ostrich or (10)…………………….that was built to (11)………………………..Another explanation support his idea is that T-rex’s teeth were rather (12)…………………… which only allowed T-rex to (13)…………………………hard bones instead of tearing flesh like Velociraptor.

Leaf-Cutting Ants and Fungus

A The ants and their agriculture have been extensively studied over the years but the recent research has uncovered intriguing new findings about the fungus they cultivate, how they domesticated it and how they cultivate it and preserve it from pathogens. For example, the fungus farms, which the ants were thought to keep free of pathogens, turn out to be vulnerable to a devastating mold, found nowhere else but in ants’ nests. To keep the mold in check, the ants long ago made a discovery that would do credit to any pharmaceutical laboratory.

B Leaf-cutting ants and their fungus farms are a marvel of nature and perhaps the best known example of symbiosis, the mutual dependence of two species. The ants ’achievement is remarkable –the biologist Edward O. Wilson has called it “one of the major breakthroughs in animal evolution”–because it allows them to eat, courtesy of their mushroom’s digestive powers, the otherwise poisoned harvest of tropical forests whose leaves are laden with terpenoids, alkaloids and other chemicals designed to sicken browsers.

C Fungus growing seems to have originated only once in evolution, because all gardening ants belong to a single tribe, the descendants of the first fungus farmer. There are more than 200 known species of the attine ant tribe, divided into 12 groups, or genera. The leaf-cutters use fresh vegetation; the other groups, known as the lower attines because their nests are smaller and their techniques more primitive, feed their gardens with detritus like dead leaves, insects and feces.

D The leaf-cutters’ fungus was indeed descended from a single strain, propagated clonally, or just by budding, for at least 23 million years. But the lower attine ants used different varieties of the fungus, and in one case a quite separate species, the four biologists discovered. The pure strain of fungus grown by the leaf-cutters, it seemed to Mr. Currie, resembled the monocultures of various human crops, that are very productive for a while and then succumb to some disastrous pathogen, such as the Irish potato blight. Monocultures, which lack the genetic diversity to respond to changing environmental threats, are sitting ducks for parasites. Mr. Currie felt there had to be a parasite in the anitfungus system. But a century of ant research offered no support for the idea. Textbooks describe how leaf-cutter ants scrupulously weed their gardens of all foreign organisms. “People kept telling me, ‘You know the ants keep their gardens free of parasites, don’t you?’ “Mr. Currie said of his efforts to find a hidden interloper.

E But after three years of sifting through attine ant gardens, Mr. Currie discovered they are far from free of infections. In last month’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and two colleagues, Dr. Mueller and David Mairoch, isolated several alien organisms, particularly a family of parasitic molds called Escovopsis.

F Escovopsis turns out to be a highly virulent pathogen that can devastate a fungus garden in a couple of days. It blooms like a white cloud, with the garden dimly visible underneath. In a day or two the whole garden is enveloped. “Other ants won’t go near it and the ants associated with the garden just starve to death, ”Dr. Rehner said. “They just seem to give up, except for those that have rescued their larvae. ”The deadly mold then turns greenishbrown as it enters its spore-forming stage.

G Evidently the ants usually manage to keep Escovopsis and other parasites under control. But with any lapse in control, or if the ants are removed, Escovopsis will quickly burst forth. Although new leaf-cutter gardens start off free of Escovopsis, within two years some 60 percent become infected. The discovery of Escovopsis’s role brings a new level of understanding to the evolution of the attine ants. “In the last decade, evolutionary biologists have been increasingly aware of the role of parasites as driving forces in evolution, ”Dr. Schultz said. There is now a possible reason to explain why the lower attine species keep changing the variety of fungus in their mushroom gardens, and occasionally domesticating new ones—to stay one step ahead of the relentless Escovopsis.

H Interestingly, Mr. Currie found that the leaf-cutters had in general fewer alien molds in their gardens than the lower attines, yet they had more Escovopsis infections. It seems that the price they pay for cultivating a pure variety of fungus is a higher risk from Escovopsis. But the leaf-cutters may have little alternative: they cultivate a special variety of fungus which, unlike those grown by the lower attines, produces nutritious swollen tips for the ants to eat.

I Discovery of a third partner in the ant-fungus symbiosis raises the question of how the attine ants, especially the leaf-cutters, keep this dangerous interloper under control. Amazingly enough, Mr. Currie has again provided the answer. “People have known for a hundred years that ants have a whitish growth on the cuticle,” said Dr. Mueller, referring to the insects’ body surface. “People would say this is like a cuticular wax. But Cameron was the first one in a hundred years to put these things under a microscope. He saw it was not inertwax. It is alive.”Mr. Currie discovered a specialized patch on the ants’ cuticle that harbors a particular kind of bacterium, one well known to the pharmaceutical industry, because it is the source of half the antibiotics used in medicine. From each of 22 species of attine ant studied, Mr. Cameron and colleagues isolated a species of Streptomyces bacterium, they reported in Nature in April. The Streptomyces does not have much effect on ordinary laboratory funguses. But it is a potent poisoner of Escovopsis, inhibiting its growth and suppressing spore formation. It also stimulates growth of the ants’ mushroom fungus. The bacterium is carried by virgin queens when they leave to establish new nests, but is not found on male ants, playboys who take no responsibility in nest-making or gardening.

J Because both the leaf-cutters and the lower attines use Streptomyces, the bacterium may have been part of their symbiosis for almost as long as the Escovopsis mold. If so, some Alexander Fleming of an ant discovered antibiotics millions of years before people did. Even now, the ants are accomplishing two feats beyond the powers of human technology. The leafcutters are growing a monocultural crop year after year without disaster, and they are using an antibiotic apparently so wisely and prudently that, unlike people, they are not provoking antibiotic resistance in the target pathogen.

Questions 14-19
Use the information in the passage to match the options (listed A-C) with activities or features of ants below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet. NB you may use any letter more than once

A Leaf-cutting ants
B Lower attines
C Both leaft-cutting ants and lower attine ants

14. can use toxic leaves to feed fungus
15. build small nests and live with different foreign fungus
16. use dead vegetation to feed fungus
17. raise a single fungus which do not live with other variety of foreigners
18. normally keep a highly dangerous parasite under control
19. use special strategies to fight against Escovopsis

Questions 20-24
The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information?

20. Dangerous outcome of Escovopsis.
21. Risk of growing single fungus.
22. Comparison of features of two different nests for feeding gardens.
23. Discovery of significant achievements made by ants earlier than human.
24. Advantage of growing new breed of fungus in the ant farm.

Questions 25-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

25. How does the author think of Currie’s opinion on the saying “ants keep their gardens free of parasites”?
A his viewpoint was verified later.
B his earlier study has sufficient evidence immediately.
C there is no details mentioned in the article.
D his opinion was proved to be wrong later on.

26. What did scientists find on the skin of ants under microscope?
A some white cloud mold embed in their skin
B that wax is all over their skin
C a substance which is useful to humans
D a substance which suppresses growth of fungus.

Stealth Forces in weight Loss

The field of weight loss is like the ancient fable about the blind men and the elephant. Each man investigates a different part of the animal and reports back, only to discover their findings are bafflingly incompatible.

A The various findings by public-health experts, physicians, psychologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and nutritionists are about as similar as an elephant’s tusk is to its tail. Some say obesity is largely predetermined by our genes and biology; others attribute it to an overabundance of fries, soda, and screensucking; still others think we’re fat because of viral infection, insulin, or the metabolic conditions we encountered in the womb. “Everyone subscribes to their own little theory,” says Robert Berkowitz, medical director of the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. We’re programmed to hang onto the fat we have, and some people are predisposed to create and carry more fat than others. Diet and exercise help, but in the end the solution will inevitably be more complicated than pushing away the plate and going for a walk. “It’s not as simple as ‘You’re fat because you’re lazy,’” says Nikhil Dhurandhar, an associate professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. “Willpower is not a prerogative of thin people. It’s distributed equally.”

B Science may still be years away from giving us a miracle formula for fat-loss. Hormone leptin is a crucial player in the brain’s weight-management circuitry. Some people produce too little leptin; others become desensitized to it. And when obese people lose weight, their leptin levels plummet along with their metabolism. The body becomes more efficient at using fuel and conserving fat, which makes it tough to keep the weight off. Obese dieters’ bodies go into a state of chronic hunger, a feeling Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, compares to thirst. “Some people might be able to tolerate chronic thirst, but the majority couldn’t stand it,” says Leibel. “Is that a behavioral problem – a lack of willpower? I don’t think so.”

C The government has long espoused moderate daily exercise – of the evening-walk or take-the-stairs variety – but that may not do much to budge the needle on the scale. A 150-pound person burns only 150 calories on a half-hour walk, the equivalent of two apples. It’s good for the heart, less so for the gut. “Radical changes are necessary,” says Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Waistland. “People don’t lose weight by choosing the small fries or taking a little walk every other day.” Barrett suggests taking a cue from the members of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), a self-selected group of more than 5,000 successful weight-losers who have shed an average of 66 pounds and kept it off 5.5 years. Some registry members lost weight using low-carb diets; some went low-fat; others eliminated refined foods. Some did it on their own; others relied on counseling. That said, not everyone can lose 66 pounds and not everyone needs to. The goal shouldn’t be getting thin, but getting healthy. It’s enough to whittle your weight down to the low end of your set range, says Jeffrey Friedman, a geneticist at New York’s Rockefeller University. Losing even 10 pounds vastly decreases your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. The point is to not give up just because you don’t look like a swimsuit model.

D The negotiation between your genes and the environment begins on day one. Your optimal weight, writ by genes, appears to get edited early on by conditions even before birth, inside the womb. If a woman has high blood-sugar levels while she’s pregnant, her children are more likely to be overweight or obese, according to a study of almost 10,000 mother-child pairs. Maternal diabetes may influence a child’s obesity risk through a process called metabolic imprinting, says Teresa Hillier, an endocrinologist with Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research and the study’s lead author. The implication is clear: Weight may be established very early on, and obesity largely passed from mother to child. Numerous studies in both animals and humans have shown that a mother’s obesity directly increases her child’s risk for weight gain. The best advice for moms-to-be: Get fit before you get pregnant. You’ll reduce your risk of complications during pregnancy and increase your chances of having a normal-weight child.

E It’s the $64,000 question: Which diets work? It got people wondering: Isn’t there a better way to diet? A study seemed to offer an answer. The paper compared two groups of adults: those who, after eating, secreted high levels of insulin, a hormone that sweeps blood sugar out of the bloodstream and promotes its storage as fat, and those who secreted less. Within each group, half were put on a low-fat diet and half on a low-glycemic-load diet. On average, the low-insulin- secreting group fared the same on both diets, losing nearly 10 pounds in the first six months – but they gained about half of it back by the end of the 18-month study. The high-insulin group didn’t do as well on the low-fat plan, losing about 4.5 pounds, and gaining back more than half by the end. But the most successful were the high- insulin-secretors on the low-glycemic-load diet. They lost nearly 13 pounds and kept it off.

F What if your fat is caused not by diet or genes, but by germs – say, a virus? It sounds like a sci-fi horror movie, but new research suggests some dimension of the obesity epidemic may be attributable to infection by common viruses, says Dhurandhar. The idea of “infectobesity” came to him 20 years ago when he was a young doctor treating obesity in Bombay. He discovered that a local avian virus, SMAM-1, caused chickens to die, sickened with organ damage but also, strangely, with lots of abdominal fat. In experiments, Dhurandhar found that SMAM-1-infected chickens became obese on the same diet as uninfected ones, which stayed svelte.

G He later moved to the U.S. and onto a bona fide human virus, adenovirus 36 (AD-36). In the lab, every species of animal Dhurandhar infected with the virus became obese – chickens got fat, mice got fat, even rhesus monkeys at the zoo that picked up the virus from the environment suddenly gained 15 percent of their body weight upon exposure. In his latest studies, Dhurandhar has isolated a gene that, when blocked from expressing itself, seems to turn off the virus’s fattening power. Stem cells extracted from fat cells and then exposed to AD-36 reliably blossom into fat cells – but when stem cells are exposed to an AD-36 virus with the key gene inhibited, the stems cells don’t differentiate. The gene appears to be necessary and sufficient to trigger AD-36-related obesity, and the goal is to use the research to create a sort of obesity vaccine.

Questions 27-31
Reading Passage has seven sections, A-G. Which section contains the following information?

27. evaluation on the effect of weight loss on different kind of diets
28. an example of research which includes the relatives of the participants
29. an example of a group of people who did not regain weight immediately after weight loss
30. long term hunger may appear to be acceptable to most of the participants during the period of losing weight program
31. a continuous experiment may lead to a practical application besides diet or hereditary resort

Questions 32-36
Look at the following researchers and the list of findings below. Match each researcher with the correct finding.

A Robert Berkowitz
B Rudolph Leibel
C Nikhil Dhurandhar
D Deirdre Barrett
E Jeffrey Friedman
F Teresa Hillier

32. A person’s weight is predetermined by the interaction of his/her DNA and the environment
33. Pregnant mothers who are overweight may risk their fetus in gaining weight.
34. The aim of losing weight should be keeping healthy rather than being attractive.
35. Small changes in lifestyle will not help in reducing much weight.
36. Researchers should be divided into different groups with their own point of view about weight loss.

Questions 37-40
Complete the summery below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

In Bombay Clinic, a young doctor who came up with the concept ‘infectobesity’ believed that the obesity is caused by a kind of virus. For years, he conducted experiments on (37)………………….Finally, later as he moved to America, he identified a new virus named (38)…………………..which proved to be a significant breakthrough inducing more weight. Although there seems no way to eliminate the virus still now, a kind of (39)………………..can be separated as to block the effectiveness of the virus. In the future, the doctor future is aiming at developing a new (40)…………………………which might effectively combat against the virus.

Voyage of Going: beyond the blue line 2

A One feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he “discovered” Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: “How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?”

B Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of Efate, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window into the shadowy world of those early voyagers. At the same time, other pieces of this human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data gleaned from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from sediments in alpine lakes in South America may help explain how, more than a thousand years later, a second wave of seafarers beat their way across the entire Pacific.

C “What we have is a first- or second-generation site containing the graves of some of the Pacific’s first explorers,” says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the Australian National University and co-leader of an international team excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator, digging up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a grave – the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old. It is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the 1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the sea not just as explorers but also as pioneers, bringing along everything they would need to build new lives – their families and livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools.

D Within the span of a few centuries the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world from the jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral outliers of Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the way they explored millions of square miles of unknown sea, discovering and colonizing scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes: Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.

E What little is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language – variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific – came from Taiwan. And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines. With the discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Efate, the volume of data available to researchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at least 62 individuals have been uncovered so far – including old men, young women, even babies – and more skeletons are known to be in the ground. Archaeologists were also thrilled to discover six complete Lapita pots; before this, only four had ever been found. Other discoveries included a burial urn with modeled birds arranged on the rim as though peering down at the human bones sealed inside. It’s an important find, Spriggs says, for it conclusively identifies the remains as Lapita. “It would be hard for anyone to argue that these aren’t Lapita when you have human bones enshrined inside what is unmistakably a Lapita urn.”

F Several lines of evidence also undergird Spriggs’s conclusion that this was a community of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania. For one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them early in the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the obsidian flakes littering the site indicates that the rock wasn’t local; instead it was imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago, the springboard for the Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the teeth of several skeletons. DNA teased from these ancient bones may also help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did all Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one outward migration from a single point in Asia, or several from different points? “This represents the best opportunity we’ve had yet,” says Spriggs, “to find out who the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who their closest descendants are today.”

G There is one stubborn question for which archaeology has yet to provide any answers: How did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which could reveal how the canoes were sailed. Nor do the oral histories and traditions of later Polynesians offer any insights, for they segue into myth long before they reach as far back in time as the Lapita. “All we can say for certain is that the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean voyages, and they had the ability to sail them,” says Geoff Irwin, a professor of archaeology at the University of Auckland and an avid yachtsman. Those sailing skills, he says, were developed and passed down over thousands of years by earlier mariners who worked their way through the archipelagoes of the western Pacific making short crossings to islands within sight of each other. Reaching Fiji, as they did a century or so later, meant crossing more than 500 miles of ocean, pressing on day after day into the great blue void of the Pacific. What gave them the courage to launch out on such a risky voyage?

H The Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade winds, Irwin notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key to their success. “They could sail out for days into the unknown and reconnoiter, secure in the knowledge that if they didn’t find anything, they could turn about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It’s what made the whole thing work.” Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried out to sea by the tides, and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon that often betokens an island in the distance. Some islands may have broadcast their presence with far less subtlety than a cloud bank. Some of the most violent eruptions anywhere on the planet during the past 10,000 years occurred in Melanesia, which sits nervously in one of the most explosive volcanic regions on Earth. Even less spectacular eruptions would have sent plumes of smoke billowing into the stratosphere and rained ash for hundreds of miles. It’s possible that the Lapita saw these signs of distant islands and later sailed off in their direction, knowing they would find land. For returning explorers, successful or not, the geography of their own archipelagoes provided a safety net to keep them from overshooting their home ports and sailing off into eternity.

I However they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific, then called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of islands – more than 300 in Fiji alone. Still, more than a millennium would pass before the Lapita’s descendants, a people we now call the Polynesians, struck out in search of new territory.

Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 1-7 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

1. Captain cook once expected the Hawaii might speak another language of people from other pacific islands.
2. Captain cook depicted number of cultural aspects of Polynesians in his journal.
3. Professor Spriggs and his research team went to the Efate to try to find the site of ancient cemetery.
4. The Lapita completed a journey of around 2,000 miles in a period less than a centenary.
5. The Lapita were the first inhabitants in many pacific islands.
6. The unknown pots discovered in Efate had once been used for cooking.
7. The urn buried in Efate site was plain as it was without any decoration.

Questions 8-10
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Scientific Evident found in Efate site

Tests show the human remains and the charcoal found in the buried um are from the start of the Lapita period. Yet the (8)………………..covering many of the Efate site did not come from that area. Then examinations carried out on the (9)………………….discovered at Efate site reveal that not everyone buried there was a native living in the area. In fact, DNA could identify the Lapita’s nearest present-days (10)……………….

Questions 11-13
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

11. What did the Lapita travel in when they crossed the oceans?
12. In Irwins’s view, what would the Latipa have relied on to bring them fast back to the base?
13. Which sea creatures would have been an indication to the Lapita of where to find land?

Does An IQ Test Prove Creativity?

Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process-and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.

A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary but not sufficient to make someone creative.

B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the “creative personality” tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. “Creatives” have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.

C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.

D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.

E But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. “It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,” says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. “Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.” Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.

F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right-hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.

G And creativity need not always be a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant .In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.

H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.

Questions 14-17
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 14-17 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

14. High IQ guarantees better creative ability in one person than that who achieves an average score in an IQ test.
15. In a competitive society, individuals’ language proficiency is more important than other abilities.
16. A wider range of resources and knowledge can be integrated by more creative people into bringing about creative approaches.
17. A creative person not necessarily suffers more mental illness.

Questions 18-22
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.

A Jamison
B Jordan Peterson
C Guy Claxton
D Howard-Jone
E Teresa Amabile
F Vera John-Steiner

18. Instead of producing the negative mood, a shift of mood state might be the one important factor of inducing a creative thinking.
19. Where the more positive moods individuals achieve, there is higher creativity in organizations.
20. Good interpersonal relationship and trust contribute to a person with more creativity.
21. Creativity demands an ability that can easily change among different kinds of thinking.
22. Certain creative mind can be upgraded if we are put into more practice in assessing and processing ideas.

Questions 23-26
Complete the summary paragraph described below. In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet, write the correct answer with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS.

But what of the creative act itself? In 1978, Colin Martindale made records of pattern of brain waves as people made up stories by applying a system constituted of many (23)…………………….The two phrases of creativity, such as (24)………………………….were found. While people were still planning their stories, their brains shows little active sign and the mental activity was showed a very relaxed state as the same sort of brain activity as in sleep, dreaming or rest. However, experiment proved the signal of (25)………………………..went down and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, when these people who were in a laidback state were required to produce their stories. Strikingly, it was found the person who was perceived to have the greatest (26)……………………….in brain activity between two stages, produced storylines with highest level of creativity.

Monkeys and Forests

AS AN EAST WIND blasts through a gap in the Cordillera de Tilaran, a rugged mountain range that splits northern Costa Rica in half, a female mantled howler monkey moves through the swaying trees of the forest canopy.

A Ken Glander, a primatologist from Duke University, gazes into the canopy, tracking the female’s movements. Holding a dart gun, he waits with infinite patience for the right moment to shoot. With great care, Glander aims and fires. Hit in the rump, the monkey wobbles. This howler belongs to a population that has lived for decades at Hacienda La Pacifica, a working cattle ranch in Guanacaste province. Other native primates -white-faced capuchin monkeys and spider monkeys – once were common in this area, too, but vanished after the Pan-American Highway was built nearby in the 1950s. Most of the surrounding land was clear-cut for pasture.

B Howlers persist at La Pacifica, Glander explains, because they are leaf- eaters. They eat fruit, when it’s available but, unlike capuchin and spider monkeys, do not depend on large areas of fruiting trees. “Howlers can survive anyplace you have half a dozen trees, because their eating habits are so flexible,” he says. In forests, life is an arms race between trees and the myriad creatures that feed on leaves. Plants have evolved a variety of chemical defenses, ranging from bad-tasting tannins, which bind with plant-produced nutrients, rendering them indigestible, to deadly poisons, such as alkaloids and cyanide.

C All primates, including humans, have some ability to handle plant toxins. “We can detoxify a dangerous poison known as caffeine, which is deadly to a lot of animals:” Glander says. For leaf-eaters, long-term exposure to a specific plant toxin can increase their ability to defuse the poison and absorb the leaf nutrients. The leaves that grow in regenerating forests, like those at La Pacifica, are actually more howler friendly than those produced by the undisturbed, centuries-old trees that survive farther south, in the Amazon Basin. In younger forests, trees put most of their limited energy into growing wood, leaves and fruit, so they produce much lower levels of toxin than do well-established, old-growth trees.

D The value of maturing forests to primates is a subject of study at Santa Rosa National Park, about 35 miles northwest of Hacienda La Pacifica. The park hosts populations not only of mantled howlers but also of white-faced capuchins and spider monkeys. Yet the forests there are young, most of them less than 50 years old. Capuchins were the first to begin using the reborn forests, when the trees were as young as 14 years. Howlers, larger and heavier than capuchins, need somewhat older trees, with limbs that can support their greater body weight. A working ranch at Hacienda La Pacifica also explain their population boom in Santa Rosa. “Howlers are more resilient than capuchins and spider monkeys for several reasons,” Fedigan explains. “They can live within a small home range, as long as the trees have the right food for them. Spider monkeys, on the other hand, occupy a huge home range, so they can’t make it in fragmented habitat.”

E Howlers also reproduce faster than do other monkey species in the area. Capuchins don’t bear their first young until about 7 years old, and spider monkeys do so even later, but howlers give birth for the first time at about 3.5 years of age. Also, while a female spider monkey will have a baby about once every four years, well-fed howlers can produce an infant every two years.

F The leaves howlers eat hold plenty of water, so the monkeys can survive away from open streams and water holes. This ability gives them a real advantage over capuchin and spider monkeys, which have suffered during the long, ongoing drought in Guanacaste.

G Growing human population pressures in Central and South America have led to persistent destruction of forests. During the 1990s, about 1.1 million acres of Central American forest were felled yearly. Alejandro Estrada, an ecologist at Estacion de Biologia Los Tuxtlas in Veracruz, Mexico, has been exploring how monkeys survive in a landscape increasingly shaped by humans. He and his colleagues recently studied the ecology of a group of mantled howler monkeys that thrive in a habitat completely altered by humans: a cacao plantation in Tabasco, Mexico. Like many varieties of coffee, cacao plants need shade to grow, so 40 years ago the landowners planted fig, monkey pod and other tall trees to form a protective canopy over their crop. The howlers moved in about 25 years ago after nearby forests were cut. This strange habitat, a hodgepodge of cultivated native and exotic plants, seems to support about as many monkeys as would a same-sized patch of wild forest. The howlers eat the leaves and fruit of the shade trees, leaving the valuable cacao pods alone, so the farmers tolerate them.

H Estrada believes the monkeys bring underappreciated benefits to such farms, dispersing the seeds of fig and other shade trees and fertilizing the soil with feces. He points out that howler monkeys live in shade coffee and cacao plantations in Nicaragua and Costa Rica as well as in Mexico. Spider monkeys also forage in such plantations, though they need nearby areas of forest to survive in the long term. He hopes that farmers will begin to see the advantages of associating with wild monkeys, which includes potential ecotourism projects.

“Conservation is usually viewed as a conflict between agricultural practices and the need to preserve nature,” Estrada says. “We ’re moving away from that vision and beginning to consider ways in which agricultural activities may become a tool for the conservation ofprimates in human-modified landscapes.”

Questions 27-32
The 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.

27. A reference of rate of reduction in forest habitats
28. An area where only one species of monkey survived while other two species vanished
29. A reason for howler monkey of choose new leaves as food over old ones
30. Mention to howler monkey’s diet and eating habits
31. A reference of asking farmers’ changing attitude toward wildlife
32. The advantage for howler monkey’s flexibility living in a segmented habitat

Questions 33-35
Look at the following places and the list of descriptions below. Match each description with the correct place, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-35 on your answer sheet.

A Hacienda La Pacifica
B Santa Rosa National Park
C A cacao plantation in Tabasco, Mexico
D Estacion de Biologia Los Tuxtlas in Veracruz, Mexico
E Amazon Basin

33. A place where howler monkeys benefit to the local region’s agriculture
34. A place where it is the original home for all three native monkeys
35. A place where capuchins monkey comes for a better habitat

Questions 36-40
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The reasons why howler monkeys survive better in local region than other two species

Howlers live between in La Pacifica since they can feed themselves with leaves when (36)………………….is not easily found. Howlers have better ability to alleviate the (37)…………………… which old and young trees used to protect themselves. When compared to that of spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys, the (38)………………….rate of howlers is relatively faster (round for just every 2 years). The monkeys can survive away from open streams and water holes as the leaves howlers eat hold high content of (39)…………………….which helps them to resist the continuous (40)…………………….in Guanacaste.