Author: theieltsbridge

Nushu – A Secret Language

A. It is sometimes said that men and women communicate in different languages. For hundreds of years in the Jiangyong County of Hunan Province, China, this was quite literally the case. Sometime between 400 and 1,000 years ago, women defied the patriarchal norms of the time that forbade them to read or write and conceived of Nu shu — literally, ‘ women’s language ’ — a secretive script and language of their own. Through building informal networks of ‘sworn sisters’ who committed themselves to teaching the language only to other women, and by using it artistically in ways that could be passed off as artwork (such as writing characters on a decorative fan), Nushu was able to grow and spread without attracting too much suspicion.

B. Nushu has many orthographical distinctions from the standard Chinese script. Whereas standard Chinese has large, bold strokes that look as if they might have been shaped with a thick permanent marker pen, Nushu characters are thin, slanted and have a slightly ‘scratchy’ appearance that bears more similarity to calligraphy. Whereas standard Chinese is logographic, with characters that represent words and meanings, Nushu is completely phonetic — each character represents a sound; the meaning must be acquired from the context of what is being said. Users of Nushu developed coded meanings for various words and phrases, but it is likely that only a tiny fraction of these will ever be known. Many secrets of Nushu have gone to the grave.

C. Nushu was developed as a way to allow women to communicate with one another in confidence. To some extent, this demand came from a desire for privacy, and Nushu allowed women a forum for personal written communication in a society that was dominated by a male-orientated social culture. There was also a practical element to the rise of Nushu, however: until the mid 20th century, women were rarely encouraged to become literate in the standard Chinese script. Nushu provided a practical and easy-to-learn alternative. Women who were separated from their families and friends by marriage could, therefore, send ‘letters’ to each other. Unlike traditional correspondence, however, Nushu characters were painted or embroidered onto everyday items like fans, pillowcases, and handkerchiefs and embodied in ‘artwork’ in order to avoid making men suspicious.

D. After the Chinese Revolution, more women were encouraged to become literate in the standard Chinese script, and much of the need for a special form of women’s communication was dampened. When the Red Guard discovered the script in the 1960s, they thought it to be a code used for espionage. Upon learning that it was a secret women’s language, they were suspicious and fearful. Numerous letters, weavings, embroideries, and other artefacts were destroyed, and women were forbidden to practise Nushu customs. As a consequence, the generational chains of linguistic transmission were broken up, and the language ceased being passed down through sworn sisters. There is no longer anyone alive who has learnt Nushu in this traditional manner; Yang Huanyi, the last proficient user of the language, died on September 20, 2004, in her late 90s.

E. In recent years, however, popular and scholarly interest in Nushu has blossomed. The Ford Foundation granted US$209,000 to build a Nushu Museum that houses artefacts such as audio recordings, manuscripts, and articles, some of which date back over 100 years. The investment from Hong Kong SAR is also being used to build infrastructure at potential tourist sites in Hunan, and some schools in the area have begun instruction in the language. Incidentally, the use of Nushu is also a theme in Lisa See’s historical novel. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which has since been adapted for film.

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has five sections, A-E. Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

1 Section A
2 Section B
3 Section C
4 Section D
5 Section E

List of headings
i Financial costs
ii Decline and disuse
iii Birth and development
iv Political uses of Nushu
v The social role of Nushu
vi Last of the Nushu speakers
vii Characteristics of written Nushu
viii Revival and contemporary interest

Questions 6-7
Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write your answers in boxes 6-7 on your answer sheet.

Why was there a need for Nushu? Which TWO reasons are given in the text?

A It provided new artistic opportunities for female artisans.
B It was a way for uneducated women to read and write.
C Not enough women were taking an interest in literature.
D It was a way for women to correspond without men knowing.
E It helped women believe in themselves and their abilities.

Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                               if the statement is true
FALSE                             if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN                  if the information is not given in the passage

8 The post-Revolution government did not want women to read or write in any language.
9 At first, the Red Guard thought Nushu might be a tool for spies.
10 Women could be punished with the death penalty for using Nushu.
11 The customary way of learning Nushu has died out
12 There is a lot of money to be made out of public interest in Nushu.
13 Nushu is now being openly taught.

Venus Flytrap

A. From indigenous myths to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and the off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, the idea of cerebral, carnivorous flora has spooked audiences and readers for centuries. While shrubs and shoots have yet to uproot themselves or show any interest in human beings, however, for some of earth’s smaller inhabitants – arachnids and insects – the risk of being trapped and ingested by a plant can be a threat to their daily existence. Easily, the most famous of these predators is the Venus Flytrap, one of only two types of ‘snap traps’ in the world. Though rarely found growing wild, the Flytrap has captured popular imagination and can be purchased in florists and plant retailers around the world.

B. Part of the Venus Flytrap’s mysterious aura begins with the tide itself. While it is fairly clear that the second half of the epithet has been given for its insect-trapping ability, the origin of ‘Venus’ is somewhat more ambiguous. According to the International Carnivorous Plant Society, the plant was first studied in the 17th and 18th centuries, when puritanical mores ruled Western societies and obsession was rife with forbidden human impulses and urges, women were often portrayed in these times as seductresses and temptresses, and botanists are believed to have seen a parallel between the behaviour of the plant in luring and devouring insects and the imagined behaviour of women in luring and ‘trapping’ witless men. The plant was thus named after the pagan goddess of love and money – Venus.

C. The Venus Flytrap is a small plant with six to seven leaves growing out of a bulb-like stem. At the end of each leaf is a trap, which is an opened pod with cilia around the edges like stiff eyelashes. The pod is lined with anthocyanin pigments and sweet-smelling sap to attract flies and other insects. When they fly in, trigger hairs inside the pod sense the intruder’s movement, and the pod snaps shut. The trigger mechanism is so sophisticated that the plant can differentiate between living creatures and non-edible debris by requiring two trigger hairs to be touched within twenty seconds of each other, or one hair to be touched in quick succession. The plant has no nervous system, and researchers can only hypothesise as to how the rapid shutting movement works. This uncertainty adds to the Venus Flytrap’s allure.

D. The pod shuts quickly but does not seal entirely at first; scientists have found that tins mechanism allows miniscule insects to escape, as they will not be a source of useful nourishment for the plant. If the creature is large enough, however, the plant’s flaps will eventually meet to form an airtight compress, and at this point, the digestive process begins. A Venus Flytrap’s digestive system is remarkably similar to how a human stomach works. For somewhere between five and twelve days, the trap secretes acidic digestive juices that dissolve the soft tissue and cell membranes of the insect. These juices also kill any bacteria that have entered with the food, ensuring the plant maintains its hygiene so that it does not begin to rot. Enzymes in the acid help with the digestion of DNA, amino acids, and cell molecules so that every fleshy part of the animal can be consumed. Once the plant has reabsorbed the digestive fluid – this time with the added nourishment, the trap reopens and the exoskeleton blows away in the wind.

E. Although transplanted to other locations around the world, the Venus Flytrap is only found natively in an area around Wilmington, North Carolina in the United States. It thrives in bogs, marshes, and wetlands and grows in wet sand and peaty soils. Because these environments are so depleted in nitrogen, they asphyxiate other flora, but the Flytrap overcomes this nutritional poverty by sourcing protein from its insect prey. One of the plant’s curious features is resilience to flame. It is speculated that the Flytrap evolved this to endure through periodic blazes and to act as a means of survival that its competition lacks.

F. While the Venus Flytrap will not become extinct any time soon (an estimated 3-6 million plants are presently in cultivation), its natural existence is uncertain. In the last survey, only 35,800 Flytraps were found remaining in the wild, and some prominent conservationists have suggested the plant be given the status of ‘vulnerable’. Since this research is considerably dated, having taken place in 1992, the present number is considerably lower. The draining and destruction of natural wetlands where the Flytrap lives is considered to be the biggest threat to its existence, as well as people removing the plants from their natural habitat. Punitive measures have been introduced to prevent people from doing this. Ironically, while cultural depictions of perennial killers may persist, the bigger threat is not what meat-eating plants might do to us but what we may do to them.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

14 An overview of how the Flytrap eats its prey
15 A comparison between human and plant behaviour
16 A measure designed to preserve Flytraps in their native environment
17 An example of a cultural and artistic portrayal of meat-eating plants
18 A characteristic of the Venus Flytrap that is exceptional in the botanical world
19 A reference to an aspect of the Venus Flytrap’s biology that is not fully understood

Questions 20-22
Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage 2. Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

If they are too small to provide (20)…………………………………., the closing pod allows insects to get out.

Only the (21)………………………………is left after the Flytrap has finished digesting an insect.

Many plants cannot survive in bogs and wetlands owing to the lack of (22)……………………………

Questions 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 23—26 on your answer sheet write

TRUE                             if the statement is true
FALSE                           if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN                if the information is not given in the passage

23 The Venus Flytrap can withstand some exposure to fire.
24 Many botanists would like the Venus Flytrap to be officially recognised as an endangered plant species.
25 Only 35,800 Venus Flytraps now survive in their natural habitats.
26 Human interference is a major factor in the decline of wild Venus Flytraps.

Growth Model

Shortly after World War II, ‘development’ as we now understand it was set in motion. Western governments and donors poured money into new agencies that set about trying to stimulate the economies of underdeveloped countries. Because of this emphasis, it is now widely regarded as the Growth Model. Although we might expect poverty reduction to be the central objective, planners at this stage were primarily concerned with industrial development. It was hoped that the benefits of this would trickle down to poor people through raising incomes and providing employment opportunities, thereby indirectly lifting them above the ascribed poverty threshold of a dollar a day. The weaknesses of these assumptions were revealed, however, when poverty rates and economic growth were found to rise simultaneously in many countries.

During the 1970s, a new trend took over – trickle-up development. Instead of focusing on macro-economic policy and large-scale industrial projects, planners shifted attention to the core living requirements of individuals and communities. This became known as the Basic Needs Approach to development. It was hoped that through the provision of services such as community sanitation and literacy programmes, poverty could be eliminated from below. Economic growth was desirable but superfluous – Basic Needs redefined poverty from involving a lack of money to lacking the capability to attain full human potential. The trouble with Basic Needs programmes, however, was their expensive, resource-intensive nature that entailed continuous management and funding

Since the 1980s, development planners have moved towards the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, which emphasises good livelihoods (materially and socially) that, most importantly, are independent and sustainable. ‘Sustainable’ in this sense means that people are able to recover from the shocks and stresses of daily life, absolving agencies of the need to persistently monitor their lives. This approach emphasises a view of poverty that comes not from the rich but from the impoverished themselves, who are considered to be most suitably positioned to determine the poverty indicators that contribute to the multiple facets of their own deprivation. Although the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach has been criticised for lacking an environmental platform strong enough to respond to climate change, and for disassociating aspects of power and societal status from being a contestable part of development, it is currently the preferred model for development projects.

Though there is some linearity to the trajectory of development practice, with paradigms shifting in and out of fashion, vigorous scholarly debate persists around all approaches. The Growth Model, for example, is still defended by many theorists, particularly economists. Those who believe in the Growth Model insist that nothing trumps economic development as a tool for poverty alleviation for the developing countries (although there is often less enthusiasm for its applicability to the postindustrial West). Many countries that have focused explicitly on growth have managed to make considerable inroads into reducing poverty, even in the absence of a development programme; Japan and Germany followed this route after World War II, as has China from the 1970s. On the other hand, some countries with massive inflows of funding for aid-based ‘development projects’ – particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa – have struggled to progress with meeting poverty reduction targets.

There is a good reason to be sceptical about the Growth Model, however, as is evidenced by the numerous societies that have partly imploded as a consequence of prioritising economic growth above the work of human development. The experiences of many eastern European countries with health and employment crises in the early 1990s are particularly traumatic examples of this. ‘The Growth Model also suffers from an undemocratic, and ‘technocratic’, if not autocratic, method underdeveloped countries frequently make policy decisions based on consultation with Western economists and institutions on how to generate growth. This dissolves the autonomy of communities to make their own decisions about what matters to them, and what kind of society they would like to build. The move to the Sustainable livelihoods Approach is a positive move in tills regard, because by operating on a principle that decisions should be made by those who are affected by them, it introduces a role for localised decision-making.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, for any country in the near future to ignore economic growth as a development indicator while continuing to meet development targets. It is important, however, that we move away from seeing this type of growth as the prime objective for development. Development is ultimately about people, and human development must be placed at the forefront; economic growth is simply one tool out of many that can help us along the way. We also need to recognise that foreign advisers, whatever qualifications and knowledge they may possess, can sometimes be a hindrance; local autonomy must be respected for real development to occur. The Growth Model may have failed, but this does not render economic growth irrelevant. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach offers helpful and realistic alternatives. But it is folly to commit ourselves to a strictly defined, systematic programme – less constrictive mindsets will help us break the development fashion cycle.

Questions 27-33
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Growth model	Basic needs approach	Sustainable livelihoods approach
(27)………………was the main goal	typified by small scale aid such as health and (28)……………. projects	tries to encourage ways of living that are most self sufficient
Poverty described as living on less than a dollar a day	poverty seen as an inability to reach (29)……………	poor people identify their own (30)…………….
It was discovered that poverty could increase in step with (31)……………………	projects costly and (32)……………… requiring ongoing involvement	the problem of (33)…………………not adequately addressed; ignores issues of social dominance and authority

Questions 34-38
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 34-38 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

34 The most favoured method of development is the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach.
35 While institutions often follow development trends, academic disputes are more timeless.
36 The Growth Model is more popular with Third World scholars than Western scholars.
37 It is not possible to reduce poverty without an explicit development policy.
38 The Growth Model takes some authority away from local forms of organisation.

Questions 39-40
Choose TWO letters, A—E.

Which TWO of the following statements form part of the author’s conclusion?

A Economic growth is the primary development goal, but there are other factors to consider.
B It is preferable not to think about development in rigid, structured terms.
C Development projects are likely to fail in the absence of highly educated experts.
D The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach is more effective than the Growth Model.
E Economic growth should only be considered as a means for development, not an end point.

Bioluminescence

A. In the pitch-black waters of the ocean’s aphotic zone – depths from 1,000m to the sea floor – Rood eyesight does not count for very much on its own. Caves, in addition, frequently present a similar problem: the complete absence of natural light at any time of the day. This has not stopped some organisms from turning these inhospitable environments into their homes, and in the process many have created their own forms of light by developing one of the stunning visual marvels of the biological universe – bioluminescence.

B. Many people will encounter bioluminescence at some point in their life, typically in some form of glowworm, which is found on most continents. North and South America are home to the “firefly”, a glowing beetle which is known as a glow-worm during its larvae stage. Flightless glowing beetles and worms are also found in Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Less common flies, centipedes, molluscs, and snails have bioluminescent qualities as well, as do some mushrooms. The most dramatic examples of bioluminescence. However, are found deep below the ocean’s surface, where no sunlight can penetrate at all. Here, anglerfish, cookie-cutter sharks, flashlight fish, lantern fish, gulper eels, viperfish, and many other species have developed bioluminescence in unique and creative ways to facilitate their lives.

C. The natural uses of bioluminescence vary widely, and organisms have learnt to be very creative with its use. Fireflies employ bioluminescence primarily for reproductive means – their flashing patterns advertise a firefly’s readiness to breed. Some fish use it as a handy spotlight to help them locate prey. Others use it as a lure; the anglerfish, for example, dangles a luminescent flare that draws in gullible, smaller fishes which get snapped up by the anglerfish in an automated reflex. Sometimes, bioluminescence is used to resist predators. Vampire squids eject a thick cloud of glowing liquid from the tip of its arms when threatened, which can be disorientating. Other species use a single, bright flash to temporarily blind their attacker, with an effect similar to that of an oncoming car which has not dipped its headlights.

D. Humans have captured and utilized bioluminescence by developing, over the last decade, a technology known as Bioluminescence Imaging (BLI). BU involves the extraction of a DNA protein from a bioluminescent organism, and then the integration of this protein into a laboratory animal through trans- geneticism. Researchers have been able to use luminized pathogens and cancer cell lines to track the respective spread of infections and cancers. Through BLI, cancers and infections can be observed without intervening in a way that affects their independent development. In other words, while an ultra-sensitive camera and bioluminescent proteins add a visual element, they do not disrupt or mutate the natural processes. As a result, when testing drugs and treatments, researchers are permitted a single perspective of a therapy’s progression.

E. Once scientists learn how to engineer bioluminescence and keep it stable in large quantities, a number of other human uses for it will become available. Glowing trees have been proposed as replacements for electric lighting along busy roads, for example, which would reduce our dependence on non-renewable energy sources. The same technology used in Christmas trees for the family home would also eliminate the fire danger from electrical fairy lights. It may also be possible for crops and plants to luminesce when they require watering, and for meat and dairy products to “tell us” when they have become contaminated by bacteria. In a similar way, forensic investigators could detect bacterial species on corpses through bioluminescence. Finally, there is the element of pure novelty. Children’s toys and stickers are often made with glow-in-the dark qualities, and a biological form would allow rabbits, mice, fish, and other pets to glow as well.

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has five sections, A-E. Choose the correct headings for sections A-E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i Mushrooms that glow in the dark
ii Bright creatures on land and in the sea
iii Evolution’s solution
iv Cave-dwelling organisms
v Future opportunities in biological engineering
vi Nature’s gift to medicine
vii Bioluminescence in humans
viii Purposes of bioluminescence in the wild
ix Luminescent pets

1 Section A
2 Section B
3 Section C
4 Section D
5 Section E

Questions 6-9
Choose FOUR letters. A—G. Write the correct letters in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

Which FOUR uses are listed for bioluminescence in nature?

A ways of attracting food
B tracing the spread of diseases
C mating signals
D growing trees for street lighting
E drug trials
F defensive tactics
G a torch to identify food

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

The luminescent fluid that a vampire squid emits has a (10)…………………………….effect on its predator.

In order to use bioluminescence in a trans-genetic environment, (11)…………………………….must first be removed from a bioluminescent creature.

One advantage of BLI is that it could allow researchers to see how a treatment is working without altering or disturbing (12)………………………………….

In the future, (13)……………………………..may be able to use bioluminescence to identify evidence on dead bodies.

CHANGES IN MALE BODY IMAGE

A. The pressures on women to look slender, youthful, and attractive have been extensively documented, but changing expectations for women’s bodies have varied widely. From voluptuous and curvy in the days of Marilyn Monroe to slender and androgynous when Twiggy hit the London scene in the mid-1960s, and then on to the towering Amazonian models of the 1980s and the “heroin chic” and size-zero obsession of today, it is not just clothes that go in and out of fashion for women. The prevailing notion of the perfect body for men, however, has remained remarkably static: broad shoulders, a big chest and arms, and rippling, visible abdominal muscles and powerful legs have long been the staple ingredients of a desirable male physique.

B. A growing body of evidence suggests this is changing, however. Rootsteins, a mannequin design company in Britain, has released its newest male model – the homme nouveau – with a cinched-in 27-inch waist. “To put that into perspective,” says one female fashion reporter, “I had a 27-inch waist when I was thirteen _ and I was really skinny.” The company suggests that the homme nouveau “redresses the prevailing ‘beefcake’ figure by carving out a far more streamlined, sinuous silhouette to match the edgier attitude of a new generation”.

C. Elsewhere in the fashion industry, the label American Apparel is releasing a line of trousers in sizes no larger than a 30-inch waist, which squeezes out most of the younger male market who have an average waistline over five inches larger. Slender young men are naturally starting to dominate the catwalks and magazine pages as well: “No one wanted the big guys,” model David Gandy has said, describing how his muscled physique was losing him jobs. “It was all the skinny, androgynous look. People would look at me very, very strangely when I went to castings.”

D. Achieving such a physique can be unattainable for those without the natural genetic make-up. “I don’t know that anyone would consider my body archetypal or as an exemplar to work towards,” notes model Davo McConville. “You couldn’t aim for this; it’s defined by a vacuum of flesh, by what it’s not.” Nevertheless, statistics suggest it is not just an obsession of models, celebrities, and the media – more and more ordinary men are prepared to go to great lengths for a slender body. One indication is the growing number of men who are discovering surgical reconstruction. Male breast-reduction has become especially popular, in 2009, the year-on-year growth rate for this procedure rose to 44 per cent in the United Kingdom. Liposuction also remains popular in the market for male body reconstructive surgery, with 35,000 such procedures being performed on men every year.

E. Additionally, more men now have eating disorders than ever before. These are characterized by normal eating habits, typically either the consumption of insufficient or excessive amounts of food. Eating disorders are detrimental to the physical and mental condition of people who suffer from them, and the desire to achieve unrealistic physiques has been implicated as a cause. In 1990, only 10% of people suffering from anorexia or bulimia were believed to be male, but this figure has climbed steadily to around one quarter today. Around two in five binge eaters are men. Women still make up the majority of those afflicted by eating disorders, but the perception of it being a “girly” problem has contributed to men being less likely to pursue treatment. In 2008, male eating disorders were thrust into the spotlight when former British Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, admitted to habitually gorging on junk food and then inducing himself to vomit while in office. “I never admitted to this out of the shame and embarrassment,” he said. “I found it difficult as a man like me to admit that I suffered from bulimia.”

F. In some respects, the slim male silhouette seems to be complementing, rather than displacing, the G. I. Joe physique. Men’s Health, one of the only titles to weather the floundering magazine market with sales increasing to a quarter of a million per issue, has a staple diet of bulky men on the cover who entice readers with the promise of big, powerful muscles. Advertising executives and fashion editors suggest that in times of recession and political uncertainty, the more robust male body image once again becomes desirable. Academic research supports this claim, indicating that more “feminine” features are desirable for men in comfortable and secure societies, while “masculine” physical traits are more attractive where survival comes back to the individual. A University of Aberdeen study, conducted using 4,500 women from over 30 countries, found a pronounced correlation between levels of public healthcare and the amount of effeminacy women preferred in their men. In Sweden, the country considered to have the best healthcare, 68 per cent of women preferred the men who were shown with feminine facial features. In Brazil, the country with the worst healthcare in the study, only 45 per cent of women were so inclined. “The results suggest that as healthcare improves, more masculine men fall out of favour,” the researchers concluded.

G. Ultimately, columnist Polly Vernon has written, we are left with two polarized ideals of masculine beauty. One is the sleek, slender silhouette that exudes cutting-edge style and a wealthy, comfortable lifestyle. The other is the “strong, muscular, austerity-resistant” form that suggests a man can look after himself with his own bare hands. These ideals co-exist by pulling men in different directions and encouraging them to believe they must always be chasing physical perfection, while simultaneously destabilizing any firm notions of what physical perfection requires.

H. As a result, attaining the ideal body becomes an ever more futile and time-consuming task. Vernon concludes that this means less time for the more important things in life, and both sexes should resist the compulsive obsession with beauty.

Questions 14-20
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 an opinion on whether body image changes have positive or negative effects
15 a historical comparison of gendered body images
16 a humiliating confession of overeating by a public figure
17 a cosmetic operation that has become increasingly popular
18 a health condition afflicting increasing numbers of men
19 the effect of changing body ideals on a male model
20 an explanation of how living standards affect the desirability of male physiques

Questions 21-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

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

21 A thin body is achievable for men regardless of their genes.
22 Male liposuction is more popular than male breast-reduction.
23 Rating disorders harm the mind and body.
24 Women seek help for eating disorders more often than men.
25 Men’s Health has suffered from a downturn in magazine sales.
26 As public healthcare improves, men become more feminine.

EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES A Book Review

The title of Fats, Shoots and Leaves refers to a famously misplaced comma in a wildlife manual that ended up suggesting a panda rather violently “eats, shoots and leaves” instead of eating shoots and leaves. The author of this book, journalist Lynne Truss, is something akin to a militant linguist, dedicating this “zero tolerance” manifesto on grammar to the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in demanding the same remuneration for punctuation as they received for letters, ended up setting in motion the first Russian Revolution.

Some of the book involves humorous attacks on erroneous punctuation. There is the confused Shakespearian thespian who inadvertently turns a frantic plea: “Go, get him surgeons!” into the cheerful encouragement of “Go get him, surgeons!” Street and shop signs have a ubiquitous presence. A bakery declares “FRESH DONUT’S SOLD HERE” and a florist curiously announces that “Pansy’s here!” (Is she?). The shameless title of a Hollywood film Two Weeks Notice is reeled in for criticism – “Would they similarly call it One Weeks Notice?’’, Truss enquires – and sometimes, as in the case of signs promoting “ANTIQUE’S” and “Potatoe’s” – one questions whether we are bearing witness to new depths of grammar ignorance, or a postmodern caricature of atrocious punctuation.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is not just a piece of comedy and ridicule, however, and Truss has plenty to offer on the question of proper grammar usage. If you have ever wondered whether it is acceptable to simply use an “em dash”1 in place of a comma – the verdict from Truss is that you can. “The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive,” she suggests. “It enhances conversational tone; and … it is capable of quite subtle effects.” The author concludes, with characteristic wry condescension, that the em dash’s popularity largely rests on people knowing it is almost impossible to use incorrectly. Truss is a personal champion of the semicolon, a historically contentious punctuation mark elsewhere maligned by novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., as a “transvestite hermaphrodite representing absolutely nothing”. Coming to the semicolon’s defence, Truss suggests that while it can certainly be Overused, she refers to the dying words of one 20th century writer: “I should have used fewer semicolons, the semicolon can perform the role of a kind of Special Policeman in the event of comma fights.”

Truss has come under criticism on two broad points. The first argument criticises the legitimacy of her authority as a punctuation autocrat. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, details Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ numerous grammatical and punctuation sins: a comma-free non-restrictive clause; a superfluous ellipsis; a misplaced apostrophe; a misused parenthesis; two misused semicolons; an erroneous hyphen in the word “abuzz”, and so on. In fact, as Menand notes, half the semicolons in the Truss book are spuriously deployed because they stem from the author’s open flouting of the rule that semicolons must only connect two independent clauses. “Why would a person not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?” Menand inquires. Ultimately, he holds Truss accused of producing a book that pleases those who “just need to vent” and concludes that Eats, Shoots and Leaves is actually a tirade against the decline of language and print that disguises itself, thinly and poorly, as some kind of a style manual.

Linguist David Chrystal has criticised what he describes as a “linguistic purism” coursing through Truss’ book. Linguistic purism is the notion that one variety of language is somehow more pure than others, with this sense of purity often based on an idealised historical point in the language’s development, but sometimes simply in reference to an abstract ideal. In The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left, Chrystal – a former colleague of Truss – condemns the no-holds-barred approach to punctuation and grammar. “Zero tolerance does not allow for flexibility,” he argues. “It is prescriptivism taken to extremes. It suggests that language is in a state where all the rules are established with 100 per cent certainty. The suggestion is false. We do not know what all the rules of punctuation are. And no rule of punctuation is followed by all of the people all of the time.”

Other detractors of Truss’ “prescriptivism” are careful to disassociate needless purism from robust and sensible criticism, an oppositional stance they call descriptivism. “Don’t ever imagine,” Geoffrey K. Pullum on the Language Log emphasises, “that I think all honest attempts at using English are just as good as any others. Bad writing needs to be fixed. But let’s make sure we fix the right things.” In other words, we do not require a dogmatic approach to clean up misused language. Charles Gaulke concurs, noting that his opposition to “prescriptivism” does not require contending with the existence of standards themselves, but questioning whether our standards should determine what works, or whether what works should determine our standards.

Ultimately, it is unlikely the purists and pedagogues will ever make absolute peace with those who see language as a fluid, creative process within which everyone has a role to play. Both sides can learn to live in a sort of contentious harmony, however. Creativity typically involves extending, adapting and critiquing the status quo, and revising and reviving old traditions while constructing new ones. Rules must exist in order for this process to take place, if only for them to be broken. On the flip side, rules have an important role to play in guiding our language into forms that can be accessed by people across all manner of differences, so it is vital to acknowledge the extent to which they can be democratic, rather than merely autocratic in function. Nevertheless, all the regulations in the world cannot stem the natural spring of language, which bursts through rivets and snakes around the dams that linguistic authorities may try to put in place. We should celebrate rather than curse these inevitable tensions.

Questions 27-32
Look as the following statements (Questions 27-32) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person A-E. NB You may use any letter more than once.

27 Mistakes should be corrected on the basis of common sense.
28 No one has legitimacy as an ultimate authority on punctuation use.
29 Eats, Shoots and Leaves is not the type of book it claims to be.
30 The idea that some forms of language can be better than others is wrong.
31 The semicolon has no real purpose.
32 We can ask whether rules are helpful without undermining the need for rules.

List of people
A Kurt Vonnegut Jr
B Louis Menand
C David Chrystal
D Geoffrey K. Pullum
E Charles Gaulke

Questions 33-37
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a book on punctuation by journalist Lynne Truss, who could be described as a (33)………………………..She dedicates the book to the Bolshevik printers who started the (34)…………………………..by protesting for better pay conditions. The book is partly a humorous criticism of incorrect punctuation. Some of the examples are so bad it is possible that they are actually a (35)……………………………….Truss also guides the reader on correct punctuation usage. She likes them dash because it is not as (36)……………………….as the semicolon, for example, but remains a (37)………………………………of the latter due to its ability to discipline areas of text that are crowded with commas.

Questions 38-40
Choose THREE letters, A—G. Write the correct letters in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

Which THREE of the following statements form part of the author’s conclusion?

A Rules prevent the creation of new things.
B A centralised point of control can effectively guide the flow of language.
C Both the descriptivists and prescriptivists have important roles to play in language evolution.
D Disputes over matters of language rules need not be condemned.
E Prescriptivists and descriptivists are both wrong.
F Rules help everyone use language and do not merely prescribe usage.
G An essential part of creativity is the rejection of that which has come before.

“Freebie” Marketing

A. In the late 1890s, while travelling as an itinerant salesperson for the Crown Cork and Seal Company, King C.Gillette observed how his corked bottle caps were discarded immediately after opening. Nevertheless, his company turned a healthy profit and there was immense business value. Gillette soon came to realise, in a product that was used only a few times. Gillette had his own personal breakthrough while struggling with a straight-bladed razor – a slow, fiddly, and potentially dangerous instrument that required sharpening on a regular basis. A simple, disposable blade that could be thrown away when it dulled would meet a real need and generate strong profits, he correctly reasoned. After founding the American Safety Razor Company in 1901, his sales leapt from 168 blades in 1,903 to 123,648 blades only a year later.

B. What King C. Gillette pioneered is far more than a convenient and affordable way for men to shave, however, it is the business practice now known as “freebie marketing” that has inspired many more companies over the years. Gillette’s approach was contrary to the received wisdom of his era, which held that a single, durable, high-quality and relatively expensive consumer item with a high profit margin was the best foundation for a business. Freebie marketing involves two sets of items: a master product that is purchased once, and a consumable product that is frequently disposed of and repurchased on an ongoing basis. In this instance, the master product is often sold with little to no profit margin and is sometimes oven dispensed at a loss. As the consumables are purchased over months and years, however, this can yield a much greater overall profit.

C. Freebie marketing only works if the producer of the master item is also able to maintain control over the creation and distribution of the consumables. If this does not happen, then cheaper versions of the consumable items may be produced, leaving the original company without a source of profit. The video game company Atari, for example, initially sold its Atari 2600 consoles at cost price while relying on game sales for profit. Several programmers left Atari, however, and began a new company called Activision which produced cheaper games of a similar quality. Suddenly, Atari was left with no way to make money. Lawsuits to block Activision failed, and Atari survived only by adding licensing measures to its subsequent 5200 and 7800 consoles.

D. In other instances, consumers sometimes find that uses for a master product circumvent the need to purchase consumables. This phenomenon is well known to have afflicted the producers of CueCat barcode readers. These were given away free through Wired magazine with the intention that they would be used by customers to scan barcodes next to advertisements in the publication and thus generate new revenue flows. Users discovered, however, that the machines could be easily modified and used for other purposes, such as building a personal database of book and CD collections. As no licensing agreement was ever reached between Wired and its magazine subscribers, CueCat were powerless to intervene, and after company liquidation, the barcode readers soon became available in quantities over 500.000 for as little as US$0.30 each.

E. Not all forms of freebie marketing are legal. One notable example of this is the use of freebie marketing to “push” habit-forming goods in areas where there is otherwise no market. For illegal substances, this is already restricted on the basis of the product’s illegality, but the use of freebie marketing to promote legal goods such as tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals is also outlawed because the short-term gain to a small number of commercial outlets is not deemed worth the social cost of widespread substance abuse.

F. Another practice that is prohibited under antitrust laws Is a form of freebie marketing known as “tying”. This is when a seller makes the sale of one good conditional on the acquisition of a second good. In these instances, the first good is typically important and highly desirable, while the second is inferior and undesirable. A music distributor who has the rights to an album that it is in high demand, for example, might only allow stores to purchase copies of this album if they also buy unpopular stock that does not sell very easily. Because this typically relies on the manipulation of a natural monopoly on the part of the distributor, such practices are widely understood to constitute anti-competitive behaviour.

Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has six sections A-F. Choose the correct headings for sections A-F from the list of headings below.

List of headings
i No giveaways for addictive products
ii Sales of razor blades increase astronomically
iii Monopoly of consumables is vital for success
iv Video gaming – a risky business
v A novel method of dual marketing ruled out
vi Freebie marketing restricted to legal goods
vii Buyer ingenuity may lead to bankruptcy
viii A marketing innovation
ix A product innovation
x More money to be made from high – quality products

1 Section A
2 Section B
3 Section C
4 Section D
5 Section E
6 Section F

Questions 7-9
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

The new tactic of freebie marketing ran against the (7)…………………………..of Gillette’s time.

Occasionally, people who buy a master product find ways of using it that get around the necessity of buying more (8)…………………………………

Wired never had a (9)…………………………….with its customers about the use of the barcode readers.

Questions 10-13
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

Freebie marketing is not permitted by law for either illegal or legal (10)…………………………….products. This type of promotion of goods such as tobacco and alcohol is not considered worth the (11)………………………….and has consequently been outlawed. “Tying” is also prohibited. This is when the sale of an attractive product is (12)…………………………on the purchase of another. It tends to occur when the seller takes advantage of a natural monopoly and is generally considered to be (13)………………………

Tacoma Narrows Bridge – Disaster Strikes

When the Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened for traffic on 1 July 1940, it was celebrated as a major engineering achievement. Even before construction was completed, however, flaws in the design were apparent; workers sucked on lemon slices to avoid motion sickness as the structure swayed in the relatively mild winds. Engineers tried three different revisions during construction to address the vibration problem. Initially, tie-down cables were anchored to fifty-tonne bulkheads on the river banks. These were ineffective, as the cables soon detached. Then, a pair of inclined cable locks was introduced to connect die main cables to the bridge deck at mid-span. These stayed throughout the bridge’s lifespan, but did nothing to reduce vibration. A further measure – the installation of hydraulic dampers between the towers and the floor system – was nullified because die dampers were compromised when the bridge was sandblasted before painting.

Shortly after opening, the bridge quickly acquired the fond nickname of “Galloping Gertie” because of the way it would roll in either side-to-side or lengthways movements – known in physics terms as the longitudinal and transverse modes of vibration respectively. These movements did not compromise the core integrity of the structure, but did make the crossing a somewhat white-knuckle affair. Many driven reported seeing cars ahead disappear from sight several times as they sank into troughs from transverse vibrations (imagine the ripple across a packed stadium during a Mexican wave). The experience of a longitudinal wave is closely analogous, but more accurately associated with the waves one would encounter in the ocean. On a suspension bridge though, these waves arc a unique experience – some daredevils were happy to pay the 75c toll just for the thrill.

Four months later, however, a never-before-seen type of vibration began afflicting the bridge in what were still fairly gentle winds (about 40 kmph). Rather than the simple “wave” morion that characterizes longitudinal and transverse vibration, the left side of the bridge would rise while the right side fell, but the centre line of the road would remain completely level. This was proved when two men walked along the centre of the bridge completely unaffected by the rocking motions around them. Visually, the bridge’s movements seemed to be more like a butterfly flapping its wings than a simple rolling motion. Engineers now understand this to be the torsional mode of vibration, and it is extremely hard to detect. In aeroplane design, for example, even minute shifts of die aircraft’s mass distribution and an alteration in one component can affect a component with which it has no logical connection. In its milder forms, this can cause a light buzzing noise, similar to that which a wasp or a bumble bee makes, but when allowed to develop unchecked, it can eventually cause the total destruction of an aeroplane.

The torsional mode of vibration is die consequence of a set of actions known as aerostatic flutter. This involves several different elements of a structure oscillating from the effect of wind, with each cycle of fluttering building more energy into the bridge’s movements and neutralizing any structural damping effects. Because the wind pumps in more energy than the structure can dissipate, and the oscillations feed off each other to become progressively stronger, the aerostatic flutter and torsional vibrations were all but assured to destroy the Tacoma Bridge on the morning of 7 November. At 11:00 a.m., the fluttering had increased to such amplitude that the suspender cables were placed under excessive strain. When these budded, the weight of the deck transferred to the adjacent cables which in turn were unable to support the weight. These cables buckled, leaving nothing to stop the central deck breaking off into the Tacoma River.

It was at around 10:15 a.m. on 7 November that torsional vibration began afflicting the bridge. This made driving treacherous, and newspaper editor Leonard Coatsworth’s car was jammed against the curb in the centre of the bridge as he attempted to cross. Coatsworth tried to rescue his daughter’s cocker spaniel from the back seat but was unsuccessful, and fearing for his life, crawled and staggered to safety on his own. At this point, an engineering professor named Beit Farquhatson proceeded onto the bridge in an attempt to save the frightened animal. Farqulunoii had been video-recording from the bonks of die river and had just returned from purchasing more rolls of film. As an avowed dog lover, he felt obliged to attempt a rescue. Unfortunately, the professor too was bitten and retreated empty handed, walking off just moments before the cables snapped and the giant concrete mass of the central deck caved inwards and disappeared into the river.

Questions 14-16
Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Engineers used various techniques while building the bridge to reduce wobble:
• they attached (14)…………………………… to heavy blocks on the shoreline
• they fastened main cables to the middle of the (15)…………………………….
• (16)……………………………….were placed between the tallest parts of the structure and the deck.

Questions 17-19
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Mode of vibration	Description
(17)…………………….	moving repeatedly to the left and right
(18)…………………	up and down motion; like a wave
Torsional	resembling motions of a (19)……………………

Questions 20-24
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

(20)……………………………..is a series of actions leading to torsional oscillation. Various components move back and forth from the force of the (21)……………………………..Eventually, the structure absorbs more (22)…………………………than it is able to disperse and the (23)………………………………..increase gradually in intensity until the structure collapses under the (24)……………………………

Questions 25-26
Choose TWO letters. A—E.

Which TWO of the following were on the bridge at the time of the collapse?

A filming equipment
B a small dog
C Leonard Coatsworth’s daughter
D a vehicle
E Professor Farquharson

Ebonics

Ebonics – also known by a host of other names such as African American Venacular English, Black English, Black Vernacular, and so on — is an African-American language that has its roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as African captives devised the means to communicate with each other and with their captors. In the South of the United States, these Pan-African languages co-mingled with Standard English and the Southern dialect. Many uniquely African American components have arisen over the last two centuries, and all of these influences have forged what is now known as Ebonics.

In 1996, debates around the nature of “Ebonics’’ in the United States came to a head. That year, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in California enacted Resolution 597-003, which officially recognized that African-American students “as part of their culture and history as African people possess and utilize a language”. Alternatively referred to as Ebonics (literally “black sounds”), African Communication Behaviours, and African Language Systems, this language was declared to be “genetically-based” rather than a dialect of Standard English.

Within the profession of language research and pedagogy, a strong consensus formed behind the OUSD’s decision to recognise Ebonics. Linguistics professor John Rickford noted that Ebonics was not simply characterised by erroneous grammar and a large slang vocabulary, but that underlying this language was a structured form and process of grammar and phonology that made English learning for Ebonics speakers far more complex a task than simply dropping bad habits. English teachers, Rickford counselled, must therefore accept and embrace these complexities.

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) concurred with Rickford, adding that whether or not Ebonics should be defined as a dialect or a language does not matter in terms of its “validity”. While linguists studying Ebonics typically restrain from prescribing edicts in favour of tracking changes in form and style, the LSA did point to the fact that speakers of Sweden and Norwegian can typically understand each other while conversing in different “languages”, whereas Mandarin and Cantonese speakers cannot understand each other’s “dialects” to conclude that spatial and social tensions, rather than strict linguistic criteria, were the crucial factors in defining these terms.

For many others, however, the OUSD’s decision was tantamount to endorsing lazy, vulgar, and “broken” English — the equivalent, perhaps, of acknowledging “txt-speak” or Internet slang as a valid form of expression. Recognizing and fostering the use of informal, culturally-specific spoken language, say those detractors, traps users in a kind of linguistic ghetto in which they can interact with other disenfranchised and excluded citizens, but cannot engage within the public sphere in a meaningful way. Because of the dominance of Standard English in the United States, Ebonics-only speakers are essentially unable to go to university and work in high-valued professions, and they are unlikely to be electable to any kind of public office (even in areas with a high density of black residents, those who lose their Ebonics-tinged speech patterns tend to be more trusted).

Psychology professor Ladonna Lewis Rush has noted, however, that the OUSD’s resolution did not promote Ebonics instruction as an alternative to Standard English in an either-or approach but was intended to provide a better springboard for black achievement in English education. The systematic devaluation of Ebonics in American society parallels. Rush has argued, the devaluation of African-Americans in general While a demeaning attitude can lead to social exclusion, teachers are suggested to think infusively and encourage Ebonics speakers to use and celebrate their way of speaking while understanding that the language of the workplace, and of academics, is Standard English. Nobel Prize-winning journalist Toni Morrison has also found a reciprocal, mutually enriching use for both Ebonics and Standard English. “There are certain ideas and ways of thinking I cannot say without recourse to my Ebonics, language … I know the Standard English. I want to use it to restore the other language, the lingua franca.”

In the media, the Ebonics controversy has mostly been portrayed as a revival of black-versus-white confrontation — this time over linguistic differences — but journalist Joan Walsh thinks there are bask elements inherent in the dispute that people do not want to openly discuss. She considers that there is increasing resentment by black parents and teachers who see enormous amounts of federal and state support going into Asian and Latino bilingual programmes. As immigration continues to increase, a greater proportion of the school budget is going into these programmes. The question has to be raised: why should immigrant children get English-language assistance as well as reinforcement of their own language and culture while native-born African-Americans get no such resources? Walsh maintains inner-city black children are more isolated than in the past and have less social interaction with those fluent in Standard English. For this reason, they need help by trained teachers to translate the native tongue they hear at home into the English of the classroom.

Ebonics should be treated as a black contribution to culture in the way that jazz and rock-and-roll has been welcomed — the new vocabulary and imagery has added to the American language rather than devalued it. In Walsh’s eyes, there has always been “white mistrust of how black people handle their business” but “in the public realm, white disdain yields block intransigence more reliably than ‘P comes before e’”.

Questions 27-30
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text for each answer.

Ebonics originated from the (27)…………………………..The prisoners found a way to talk to other enslaved Africans as well as to (28)……………………………….In southern USA, several African languages mixed with English and the local (29)………………………………Over time, many distinctive (30)…………………………have been added to produce the Ebonics language of today.

Questions 31-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-K below. Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 31 —37 on your answer sheet.

31 In 1996, the Oakland Unified School District passed a measure
32 According to John Rickford, it is a good idea when teaching Standard English
33 Linguists studying Black speech patterns are only able
34 The LSA nilcd that definitions of “dialect” and “language” are generally a way
35 Critics of vernacular alternatives to Standard English tend
36 Ladonna Lewis Rush argues that it is important for educators
37 Toni Morrison finds it necessary

A to use Ebonies in order to express specific concepts
B to recognise the genetic differences between African-American students and others
C to acknowledge the systematic differences that Ebonics speakers must learn to overcome
D to consider Ebonics as lazy English rather than a unique form of expression
E to admit Ebonics users to university to gain more knowledge
F to make a statement about particular geo-societal relationships
G to compare Scandinavian languages and Chinese dialects
H to declare Ebonics an independent language, not a variation on English
I to honour positive aspects of Ebonies, while emphasising the necessity of Standard English for formal use
J to approve the language of text messaging as a legitimate mode of communication
K to describe how Ebonics has developed without dictating rules for proper usage

Questions 38-40
Choose THREE letters A-G. Write the correct letters in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

Which THREE statements below represent the views of Joan Walsh?

A Linguistic issues are impeding black academic success rather than social issues.
B Ebonics deserves to be considered as nothing less than a gift to American society.
C Children of non-English-speaking immigrants should be denied access to limited educational resources.
D Ebonics is a debate that reflects rising multi-minority tensions and frustration over funding issues.
E Ebonics is just another hostile encounter between black and white opponents.
F Many urban African-American children do not have the same exposure to accepted norms of English that they used to.
G Blacks need more flexibility in their dealings with the white public.

A Disaster Of Titanic Proportions

At 11:39 p.m. on the evening of Sunday, 14 April 1912, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee on the forward mast of the Titanic sighted an eerie, black mass coming into view directly in front of the ship. Fleet picked up the phone to the helm, waited for Sixth Officer Moody to answer, and yelled “Iceberg, right ahead!” The greatest disaster in maritime history was about to be set in motion.

Thirty-seven seconds later, despite the efforts of officers in the bridge and engine room to steer around the iceberg, the Titanic struck a piece of submerged ice, bursting rivets in the ship’s hull and flooding the first five watertight compartments. The ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, carried out a visual inspection of the ship’s damage and informed Captain Smith at midnight that the ship would sink in less than two hours. By 1 2:30 a.m., the lifeboats were being filled with women and children, after Smith had given the command for them to be uncovered and swung out 15 minutes earlier. The first lifeboat was successfully lowered 15 minutes later, with only 28 of its 65 seats occupied. By 1:15 a.m., the waterline was beginning to reach the Titanic’s name on the ship’s bow, and over the next hour, every lifeboat would be released as officers struggled to maintain order amongst the growing panic on board.

The dosing moments of the Titanic’s sinking began shortly after 2 a.m., as the last lifeboat was lowered and the ship’s propellers lifted out of the water, leaving the 1,500 passengers still on board to surge towards the stern. At 2:17 a.m., Harold Bride and Jack Philips tapped out their last wireless message after being relieved of duty as the ship’s wireless operators, and the ship’s band stopped playing. Less than a minute later, occupants of the lifeboats witnessed the ship’s lights flash once, then go black, and a huge roar signalled the Titanic’s contents plunging towards the bow, causing the front half of the ship to break off and go under. The Titanic’s stem bobbed up momentarily, and at 2:20 a.m., the ship finally disappeared beneath the frigid waters.

What or who was responsible for the scale of this catastrophe? Explanations abound, some that focus on very small details. Due to a last-minute change in the ship’s officer line-up, iceberg lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee were making do without a pair of binoculars that an officer transferred off the ship in Southampton had left in a cupboard onboard, unbeknownst to any of the ship’s crew. Fleet, who survived the sinking, insisted at a subsequent inquiry that he could have identified the iceberg in time to avert disaster if he had been in possession of the binoculars.

Less than an hour before the Titanic struck the iceberg, wireless operator Cyril Evans on the California, located just 20 miles to the north, tried to contact operator Jack Philips on the Titanic to warn him of pack ice in the area. “Shut up, shut up, you’re jamming my signal,” Philips replied. “I’m busy.” The Titanic’s wireless system had broken down for several hours earlier that day, and Philips was clearing a backlog of personal messages that passengers had requested to be sent to family and friends in the USA. Nevertheless, Captain Smith had maintained the ship’s speed of 22 knots despite multiple earlier warnings of ice ahead. It has been suggested that Smith was under pressure to make headlines by arriving early in New York, but maritime historians such as Richard Howell have countered this perception, noting that Smith was simply following common procedure at the time, and not behaving recklessly.

One of the strongest explanations for the severe loss of life has been the fact that the Titanic did not carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Maritime regulations at the time tied lifeboat capacity to the ship size, not to the number of passengers on board. This meant that the Titanic, with room for 1,178 of its 2,222 passengers, actually surpassed the Board of Trade’s requirement that it carry lifeboats for 1,060 of its passengers. Nevertheless, with lifeboats being lowered less than half full in many cases, and only 71 2 passengers surviving despite a two-and-a-half-hour window of opportunity, more lifeboats would not have guaranteed more survivors in the absence of better training and preparation. Many passengers were confused about where to go after the order to launch lifeboats was given; a lifeboat drill scheduled for earlier on the same day that the Titanic struck the iceberg was cancelled by Captain Smith in order to allow passengers to attend church.

Questions 1-6
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1—6 on your answer sheet.

Time	Person	Position	Action
11.39 pm	(1)………………..	(2)……………….	reported sighting of iceberg
(3)……………….	Andrews	ship’s designer	reported how long the Titanic could stay afloat
12.15 am	Smith	captain	ordered (4)……………………to be released
2.17 am	Bride &Philips	(5)………………..	relayed final (6)…………………

Questions 7-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 7—13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                         if the statement is true
FALSE                       if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN           if the information is not given in the passage

7 The binoculars for the men on watch had been left in a crew locker in Southampton.
8 The missing binoculars were the major factor leading to the collision with the iceberg.
9 Philips missed notification about the ice from Evans because the Titanic’s wireless system was not functioning at the time.
10 Captain Smith knew there was ice in the area.
11 Howell believed the captain’s failure to reduce speed was an irresponsible action.
12 The Titanic was able to seat more passengers in lifeboats than the Board of Trade required.
13 A lifeboat drill would have saved more lives.

Three – Dimensional Films

A. In the theatre of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, on the evening of 27 September 1922, a new form of film-making made its commercial debut: 3-D. The film. The Power of Love, was then shown in New York City to exhibitors and press, but was subsequently not picked up for distribution and is now believed to be lost. The following three decades were a period of quiet experimentation for 3-D pioneers, as they adapted to new technologies and steadily improved the viewing experience. In 1952, the “golden era” of 3-D is considered to have begun with the release of Bwana Devil, and over the next several years, audiences met with a string of films that used the technology. Over the following decades, it waxed and waned within film- making circles, peaking in the 1970s and again in the 1990s when IMAX gained traction, but it is only in the last few years that 3-D appears to have firmly entered mainstream production.

B. Released worldwide in December 2009, die fantasy film Avatar quickly became the highest-grossing film ever made, knocking Titanic from the top slot. Avatar, set in 2154 on a planet in a distant solar system, went on to become the only film to have earned US$2 billion worldwide, and is now approaching the $3 billion mark. The main reason for its runaway popularity appears to be its visual splendour; though most critics praised the film, it was mostly on account of its ground-breaking special effects. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised Avatar’s “powerful” visual accomplishments, but suggested the dialogue was “flat” and the characterizations “obvious”. A film analyst at Exhibitor Relations has agreed, noting that Avatarhas cemented die use of 3-D as a production and promotional tool for blockbuster films, rather than as a mere niche or novelty experiment. “This is why all these 3-D venues were built,” he said. “This is the one. The behemoth… The holy grail of 3-D has finally arrived.”

C. Those who embrace 3-D. note that it spices up a trip to the cinema by adding a more active “embodied” layer of experience instead of the viewer passively receiving die film through eyes and cars only. A blogger on Animation Ideas writes, “…when 3~D is done well, like in the flying scenes in Up, How to Train Your Dragon, and Avatar, there is an added feeling of vertigo. If you have any fear of heights, the 3-D really adds to this element…” Kevin Carr argues that the backlash against 3-D is similar to that which occurred against CGI several years ago, and points out that CGI is now widely regarded as part of the film-maker’s artistic toolkit. He also notes that new technology is frequently seen to be a “gimmick” in its early days, pointing out that many commentators slapped the first “talkie” films of the early 1920s with this same label.

D. But not everyone greets the rise of 3~D with open arms. Some ophthalmologists point out that 3-D can have unsettling physical effects for many viewers. Dr. Michael Rosenberg, a professor at Northwestern University, has pointed out that many people go through life with minor eye disturbances – a slight muscular imbalance, for example – that does not interrupt day-to-day activities. In the experience of a 3-D movie, however, this problem can be exacerbated through the viewer trying to concentrate on unusual visual phenomena. Dr. Deborah Friedman, from the University of Rochester Medical Center, notes that the perception of depth conjured through three dimensions docs not complement die angles from which we take in the world. Eyestrains, headaches and nausea are, therefore, a problem for around 15% of a 3-D film audience.

E. Film critic Roger Ebert warns that 3-D is detrimental to good film-making. Firstly, he argues, the technology is simply unnecessary; 2~D movies are “already” 3-D, as far as our minds are concerned. Adding die extra dimension with technology, instead of letting our minds do the work, can actually be counter- purposeful and make the overall effect seem clumsy and contrived. Ebert also points out dial the special glasses dim the effect by soaking up light from the screen, making 3-D films a slightly duller experience than they might otherwise be. Finally, Ebeit suggests that 3-D encourages film-makers to undercut drama and narrative in favour of simply piling on more gimmicks and special effects.“ Hollywood is racing headlong toward the kiddie market,” he says, pointing to Disney’s announcement that it will no longer make traditional films in favour of animation, franchises, and superheroes.

F. Whether or not 3-D becomes a powerful force for the film-maker’s vision and the film-going experience, or goes down in history as an over-hyped, expensive novelty, the technology certainly shows no signs of fading in the popularity stakes at the moment. Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland, and How to Train Your Dragon have all recently benefited at the box office due to the added sales that 3-D provides, and with Avatar’s record set to last some time as a totem of 3-D’s commercial possibilities, studios are not prepared to back down.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-F. Choose the correct headings for sections A-F from the list of headings below. Write the correct number i-x in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet

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

List of Headings
i Construction of special cinemas for 3-D
ii Good returns forecast for immediate future
iii The greatest 3-D film of all time
iv End of traditional movies for children
v Early developments
vi New technology diminishes the art
vii The golden age of movies
viii In defence of 3-D
ix 3-D is here to stay
x Undesirable visual effects

Questions 20-26
Look at the following statements (Questions 20—26) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A-G. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 20-26 on your answer sheet. NB. You may use any letter more than once.

20 3-D conflicts with our mental construct of our surroundings.
21 3-D encourages an over-emphasis on quick visual thrills.
22 Effective use of 3-D technology may increase our sensation of elevation.
23 3-D viewing can worsen an existing visual disorder.
24 Avatar is the most powerful example of 3-D yet to arrive in cinemas.
25 Avatar’s strength is found in its visual splendour, not in aspects of story.
26 People already have the mental capacity to see ordinary movies in three dimensions.

List of people
A Kenneth Turan
B Exhibition Relations’ analyst
C Animation Ideas’ blogger
D Kevin Carr
E Dr. Michael Rosenberg
F Dr. Deborah Friedman
G Roger Elbert

Does Water Have Memory?

The practice of homoeopathy was first developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. During research in the 1790s, Hahnemann began experimenting with quinine, an alkaloid derived from cinchona bark that was well known at the time to have a positive effect on fever. Hahnemann started dosing himself with quinine while in a state of good health and reported in his journals that his extremities went cold, he experienced palpitations, an “infinite anxiety”, a trembling and weakening of the limbs, reddening cheeks and thirst. “In short,” he concluded, “all the symptoms of relapsing fever presented themselves successively…” Hahnemann’s main observation was that things which create problems for healthy people cure those problems in sick people, and this became his first principle of homoeopathy: simila similibus (with help from the same). While diverging from the principle of apothecary practice at the time, which was contraria contrariis (with help from the opposite), the efficacy of simila similibus was reaffirmed by subsequent developments in the field of vaccinations.

Hahnemann’s second principle was minimal dosing – treatments should be taken in the most diluted form at which they remain effective. It has negated any possible toxic effects of simila similibus.

In 1988, the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste took minimal dosing to new extremes when he published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in which he suggested that very high dilutions of the anti-lgE antibody could affect human basophil granulocytes, the least common of the granulocytes that make up about 0.01% to 0.3% of white blood cells. The point of controversy, however, was that the water in Benveniste’s test had been so diluted that any molecular evidence of the antibodies no longer existed. Water molecules, the researcher concluded, had a biologically active component that a journalist later termed “water memory”. A number of efforts from scientists in Britain, France and the Netherlands to duplicate Benveniste’s research were unsuccessful, however, and to this day, no peer-reviewed study under broadly accepted conditions has been able to confirm the validity of “water memory”.

The third principle of homoeopathy is “the single remedy”. Exponents of this principle believe that it would be too difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the potential effects of multiple homoeopathic remedies delivered simultaneously. If it did work, they suggest, one could not know quite why it worked, turning homoeopathy into an ambiguous guessing game. If it did not work, neither patient nor practitioner would know whether the ingredients were all ineffective, or whether they were only ineffective in combination with one another. Combination remedies are gaining in popularity, but classical homoeopaths who rely on the single remedy approach warn these are not more potent, nor do they provide more treatment options. The availability of combination remedies, these homoeopaths suggest, has been led by consumers wanting more options, not from homoeopathic research indicating their efficacy.

Homoeopathy is an extremely contentious form of medicine, with strong assertions coming from both critics and supporters of the practice. “Homoeopathy: There’s nothing in it” announces the tag line to 10:23, a major British anti-homoeopathy campaign. At 10:23 am on 30 January 2010, over 400 supporters of the 10:23 stood outside Boots pharmacies and swallowed an entire bottle of homoeopathic pills in an attempt to raise awareness about the fact that these remedies are made of sugar and water, with no active components. This, defenders of homoeopathy say, is entirely the point. Homoeopathic products do not rely on ingredients that become toxic at high doses, because the water retains the “memory” that allows the original treatment to function.

Critics also point out the fact that homoeopathic preparations have no systematic design to them, making it hard to monitor whether or not a particular treatment has been efficacious. Homoeopaths embrace this uncertainty. While results may be less certain, they argue, the non-toxic nature of homoeopathy means that practitioner and patient can experiment until they find something that works without concern for side effects. Traditional medicine, they argue, assaults the body with a cocktail of drugs that only tackles the symptoms of disease, while homoeopathy has its sights aimed on the causes. Homoeopaths suggest this approach leads to kinder, gentler, more effective treatment.

Finally, critics allege that when homoeopathy has produced good results, these are exceedingly dependent on the placebo effect, and cannot justify the resources, time and expense that the homoeopathic tradition absorbs. The placebo effect is a term that describes beneficial outcomes from a treatment that can be attributed to the patient’s expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself. Basically, the patient “thinks” himself into feeling better. Defenders suggest that homoeopathy can go beyond this psychological level. They point to the successful results of homoeopathy on patients who are unconscious at the time of treatment, as well as on animals.

Questions 27-32
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-K, below. Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

27 In the late 18th century, Hahnemann discovered that quinine was able to
28 The effectiveness of vaccinations also helps to
29 Benveniste argued in the journal Nature that water molecules possess the ability to
30 Attempts to verify Benveniste’s findings were unable to
31 The purpose of the single remedy is to
32 Classical homoeopaths suggest combination remedies have been created to

A avoid the unpredictable outcome of combining many remedies at once
B explain the success of 18th century apothecary, medicine.
C produce fever-like symptoms in a healthy person.
D keep antibody molecules active in parts as low as 0.01%.
E support the notion of simila simibus.
F offer more remedial choice.
G produce a less effective dose.
H recreate the original results.
I retain qualities of an antibody to which they were previously exposed.
J satisfy the demand of hovers.
K treat effectively someone with a fever.

Questions 33-40
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

Arguments against homeopathy	Arguments for homeopathy
Has no (33)…………………ingredients	does not become (34)………………when taken in large qauntities
Lack of a (35)………………makes success or failure of treatments difficult to (36)…………………	remedies can be trialed with no risk of (37)……………….treatments
Too much reliance on the (39)……………….	tackles causes and not just (38)………………..
Works psychologically but not physically	proven to work on people who are (40)…………….

Reading Passage One

The way in which information is taught can vary greatly across cultures and time periods. Entering a British primary school classroom from the early 1900s, for example, one gains a sense of austerity, discipline, and a rigid way of teaching. Desks are typically seated apart from one another, with straight-backed wooden chairs that face directly to the teacher and the chalkboard. In the present day, British classrooms look very different. Desks are often grouped together so that students face each other rather than the teacher, and a large floor area is typically set aside for the class to come together for group discussion and learning.

Traditionally, it was felt that teachers should be in firm control of the learning process, and that the teacher’s task was to prepare and present material for students to understand. Within this approach, the relationship students have with their teachers is not considered important, nor is the relationship students have with each other in the classroom. A student’s participation in class is likely to be minimal, aside from asking questions directed at the teacher, or responding to questions that the teacher has directed at the student. This style encourages students to develop respect for positions of power as a source of control and discipline. It is frequently described as the “formal authority” model of teaching.

A less rigid form of teacher-centred education is the “demonstrator” model. This maintains the formal authority model’s notion of the teacher as a “flashlight” who illuminates the material for his or her class to learn, but emphasises a more individualized approach to form. The demonstrator acts as both a role model and a guide, demonstrating skills and processes and then helping students develop and apply these independently. Instructors who are drawn to the demonstrator style are generally confident that their own way of performing a task represents a good base model, but they are sensitive to differing learning styles and expect to provide students with help on an individual basis.

Many education researchers argue for student-centred learning instead, and suggest that the learning process is more successful when students are in control. Within the student-centred paradigm, the “delegator” style is popular. The delegator teacher maintains general authority, but they delegate much of the responsibility for learning to the class as a way for students to become independent thinkers who take pride in their own work. Students are often encouraged to work on their own or in groups, and if the delegator style is implemented successfully, they will build not only a working knowledge of course specific topics, but also self-discipline and the ability to co-ordinate group work and interpersonal roles.

Another style that emphasises student-centred education is the “facilitator” mode of learning. Here, while a set of specific curriculum demands is already in place, students are encouraged to take the initiative for creating ways to meet these learning requirements together. The teacher typically designs activities that encourage active learning, group collaboration, and problem solving, and students are encouraged to process and apply the course content in creative and original ways. Whereas the delegator style emphasises content and the responsibility students can have for generating and directing their own knowledge base, the facilitator style emphasises form and the fluid and diverse possibilities that are available in the process of learning.

Until the 1960s, formal authority was common in almost all Western schools and universities. As a professor would enter a university lecture theatre, a student would be expected to rush up, take his bag to the desk, and pull out the chair for the professor to sit down on. This style has become outmoded over time. Now at university, students and professors typically have more relaxed, collegiate relationships, address each other on a first name basis, and acknowledge that students have much to contribute in class. Teacher-centred education has a lingering appeal in the form of the demonstrator style, however, which remains useful in subjects where skills must be demonstrated to an external standard and the learning process remains fixed in the earlier years of education. A student of mathematics, sewing or metalwork will likely be familiar with the demonstrator style. At the highest levels of education, however, the demonstrator approach must be abandoned in all fields as students are required to produce innovative work that makes unique contributions to knowledge. Thesis and doctoral students lead their own research in facilitation with supervisors.

The delegator style is valuable when the course is likely to lead students to careers that require group projects. Often, someone who has a high level of expertise in a particular field does not make for the best employee because they have not learnt to apply their abilities in a co-ordinated manner. The delegator style confronts this problem by recognizing that interpersonal communication is not just a means to learning but an important skill set in itself. The facilitator model is probably the most creative model, and is, therefore, not suited to subjects where the practical component necessitates a careful and highly disciplined manner, such as training to be a medical practitioner. It may, however, suit more experimental and theoretical fields ranging from English, music, and the social sciences to science and medical research that takes place in research labs. In these areas, “mistakes” in form are important and valuable aspects of the learning and development process.

Overall, a clear evolution has taken place in the West from a rigid, dogmatic, and teacher- dominated way of learning to a flexible, creative, and student-centred approach. Nevertheless, different subjects, ages, and skill levels suit different styles of teaching, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one recommended approach for everyone.

Questions 1-8
Look at the following statements (Questions 1-8) and the styles of teaching below. Match each statement with the correct teaching style, A -D. Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. The emphasis is on students directing the learning process.
2. The teacher shows the class how to do something, then students try it on their own.
3. Student-teacher interaction and student-student interaction is limited.
4. The emphasis is on the process of solving problems together.
5. Students are expected to adjust to the teacher’s way of presenting information.
6. The teacher designs group activities that encourage constructive interaction.
7. Time is set aside for one-on-one instruction between teacher and student.
8. Group and individual work is encouraged independently of the teacher.

List of teaching styles
A Formal authority
B Demonstrator
C Delegator
D Facilitator

Questions 9-12
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                     if the statement is true
FALSE                   if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN        if the information is not given in the passage

9 The formal authority model remains popular in educational institutions of the West
10 The demonstrator model is never used at tertiary level.
11 Graduates of delegator style teaching are good communicators.
12 The facilitator style is not appropriate in the field of medicine.

Question 13
Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D.

13 What is the best title for Reading Passage 1?
A Teaching styles and their application
B Teaching: then and now
C When students become teachers
D Why student-centred learning is best

The Flavour Industry

A. Read through the nutritional information on the food in your freezer, refrigerator or kitchen pantry, and you are likely to find a simple, innocuous-looking ingredient recurring on a number of products: “natural flavour”. The story of what natural flavour is, how it got into your food, and where it came from is the result of more complex processes than you might imagine.

B. During the 1980s, health watchdogs and nutritionists began turning their attention to cholesterol, a waxy steroid metabolite that we mainly consume from animal-sourced products such as cheese, egg yolks, beef, poultry, shrimp, and pork. Nutritionists blamed cholesterol for contributing to the growing rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and several cancers in Western societies. As extensive recognition of the matter grew amongst the common people, McDonalds stopped cooking their french fries in a mixture of cottonseed oil and beef tallow, and in 1990, the restaurant chain began using 100% vegetable oil instead.

C. This substantially lowered the amount of cholesterol in McDonalds’ fries, but it created a new dilemma The beef tallow and cottonseed oil mixture gave the French fries high cholesterol content, but it also gifted them with a rich aroma and “mouth-feel” that even James Beard, an American food critic, admitted he enjoyed. Pure vegetable oil is bland in comparison. Looking at the current ingredients’ list of McDonalds’ French fries, however, it is easy to see how they overcame this predicament Aside from a few preservatives, there are essentially three main ingredients: potato, soybean oil, and the mysterious component of “natural flavour”.

D. Natural flavour also entered our diet through the rise in processed foods, which now make up over 90% (and growing) of the American diet, as well as representing a burgeoning industry in developing countries such as China and India. Processed foods are essentially any foods that have been boxed, bagged, canned or packaged, and have a list of ingredients on the label. Sometimes, the processing involves adding a little sodium or sugar, and a few preservatives. Often, however, it is coloured, bleached, stabilized, emulsified, dehydrated, odour-concealed, and sweetened. This process typically saps any original flavour out of the product, and so, of course, flavour must be added back in as well.

E. Often this is “natural flavour”, but while the term may bring to mind images of fresh barley, hand-ground spices, and dried herbs being traded in a bustling street market, most of these natural sources are, in fact, engineered to culinary perfection in a set of factories and plants off the New Jersey Turnpike outside of New York. Here, firms such as International Flavors & Fragrances, Harmen & Keimer, Flavor Dynamics, Frutarom and Elan Chemical isolate and manufacture the tastes that are incorporated in much of what we eat and drink. The sweet, summery burst of naturally squeezed orange juice, the wood-smoked aroma in barbeque sauces, and the creamy, buttery, fresh taste in many dairy products do not come from sundrenched meadows or backyard grills but are formed in the labs and test tubes of these flavour industry giants.

F. The scientists – dubbed “flavourists” who create the potent chemicals that set our olfactory senses to overdrive use a mix of techniques that have been refined over many years. Part of it is dense, intricate chemistry: spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and headspace-vapour analysers can break down components of a flavour in amounts as minute as one part per billion. Not to be outdone, however, the human nose can isolate aromas down to three parts per trillion. Flavourists, therefore, consider their work as much an art as a science, and flavourism requires a nose “trained” with a delicate and poetic sense of balance.

G. Should we be wary of the industrialisation of natural flavour? On its own, the trend may not present any clear reason for alarm. Nutritionists widely agree that the real assault on health in the last few decades stems from an “unholy trinity” of sugar, fat, and sodium in processed foods. Natural flavour on its own is not a health risk. It does play a role, however, in helping these processed foods to taste fresh and nutritious, even when they are not. So, while the natural flavour industry should not be considered the culprit, we might think of it as a willing accomplice.

Questions 14-21
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter. A-G, in boxes 14-21 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 examples of companies that create natural flavours
15 an instance of a multinational franchise responding to public pressure
16 a statement on the health effects of natural flavours
17 an instance where a solution turns into a problem
18 a place in the home where one may encounter the term “natural flavour”
19 details about die transformation that takes place in processed grocery items
20 a comparison of personal and technological abilities in flavour detection
21 examples of diet-related health conditions

Questions 22-25
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                     if the statement is true
FALSE                   if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN          if the information is not given in the passage

22 On their own, vegetable oils do not have a strong flavour.
23 Soybean oil is lower in cholesterol than cottonseed oil.
24 Processed foods are becoming more popular in some Asian countries.
25 All food processing maintains the natural flavours of the products.

Question 26
Choose the correct letter. A, B.C, or D.

26 The writer of Reading Passage 2 concludes that natural flavours …………………..
A are the major cause of dietary health problems.
B are unhealthy, but not as bad as sugar, fat, and sodium.
C have health benefits that other ingredients tend to cancel out.
D help make unhealthy foods taste better.

Britain needs strong TV industry

Comedy writer Armando Iannucci has called for an industry-wide defence of the BBC and British programme-makers. “The Thick of It” creator made his remarks in the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

“It’s more important than ever that we have more strong, popular channels… that act as beacons, drawing audiences to the best content,” he said. Speaking earlier, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale rejected suggestions that he wanted to dismantle the BBC.

‘Champion supporters’

Iannucci co-wrote “I’m Alan Partridge”, wrote the movie “In the Loop” and created and wrote the hit “HBO” and “Sky Atlantic show Veep”. He delivered the 40th annual MacTaggart Lecture, which has previously been given by Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, former BBC director general Greg Dyke, Jeremy Paxman and Rupert Murdoch. Iannucci said: “Faced with a global audience, British television needs its champion supporters.”

He continued his praise for British programming by saying the global success of American TV shows had come about because they were emulating British television. “The best US shows are modelling themselves on what used to make British TV so world-beating,” he said. “US prime-time schedules are now littered with those quirky formats from the UK – the “Who Do You Think You Are”‘s and the variants on “Strictly Come Dancing” – as well as the single-camera non-audience sitcom, which we brought into the mainstream first. We have changed international viewing for the better.”

With the renewal of the BBC’s royal charter approaching, Iannucci also praised the corporation. He said: “If public service broadcasting – one of the best things we’ve ever done creatively as a country – if it was a car industry, our ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs that would bring.” In July, the government issued a green paper setting out issues that will be explored during negotiations over the future of the BBC, including the broadcaster’s size, its funding and governance.

Primarily Mr Whittingdale wanted to appoint a panel of five people, but finally he invited two more people to advise on the channer renewal, namely former Channel 4 boss Dawn Airey and journalism professor Stewart Purvis, a former editor-in-chief of ITN. Iannucci bemoaned the lack of “creatives” involved in the discussions.

“When the media, communications and information industries make up nearly 8% our GDP, larger than the car and oil and gas industries put together, we need to be heard, as those industries are heard. But when I see the panel of experts who’ve been asked by the culture secretary to take a root and branch look at the BBC, I don’t see anyone who is a part of that cast and crew list. I see executives, media owners, industry gurus, all talented people – but not a single person who’s made a classic and enduring television show.”

‘Don’t be modest’

Iannucci suggested one way of easing the strain on the licence fee was “by pushing ourselves more commercially abroad”.

“Use the BBC’s name, one of the most recognised brands in the world,” he said. “And use the reputation of British television across all networks, to capitalise financially oversees. Be more aggressive in selling our shows, through advertising, through proper international subscription channels, freeing up BBC Worldwide to be fully commercial, whatever it takes.

“Frankly, don’t be icky and modest about making money, let’s monetise the bezeesus Mary and Joseph out of our programmes abroad so that money can come back, take some pressure off the licence fee at home and be invested in even more ambitious quality shows, that can only add to our value.”

Mr Whittingdale, who was interviewed by ITV News’ Alastair Stewart at the festival, said he wanted an open debate about whether the corporation should do everything it has done in the past. He said he had a slight sense that people who rushed to defend the BBC were “trying to have an argument that’s never been started”.

“Whatever my view is, I don’t determine what programmes the BBC should show,” he added. “That’s the job of the BBC.” Mr Whittingdale said any speculation that the Conservative Party had always wanted to change the BBC due to issues such as its editorial line was “absolute nonsense”.

Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text? In boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                        if the statement is true
FALSE                      if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN           if the information is not given in the passage

27 Armando Iannucci expressed a need of having more popular channels.
28 John Whittingdale wanted to dismantle the BBC.
29 Iannucci delivered the 30th annual MacTaggart Lecture.
30 Ianucci believes that British television has contributed to the success of American TV-shows.
31 There have been negotiations over the future of the BBC in July.

Questions 32–35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

32 Ianucci praised everything EXCEPT
A US shows
B British shows
C Corporation
D British programming

33 To advise on the charter renewal Mr Whittingdale appointed a panel of
A five people
B two people
C seven people
D four people

34 Who of these people was NOT invited to the discussion concerning BBC renewal?
A Armando Iannucci
B Dawn Airey
C John Whittingdale
D Stewart Purvis

35 There panel of experts lacks:
A media owners
B people who make enduring TV-shows
C gurus of Television industry
D top executives

Questions 36–40
Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Easing the strain on the licence fees

Iannucci recommended increasing BBC’s profit by pushing ourselves more (36)………………………………He suggests being more aggressive in selling British shows, through advertising and proper international (37)…………………………… Also, he invokes producers to stop being (38)………………………………and modest about making money and invest into even (39)…………………………………….quality shows. However, Mr Whittingdale denied any (40)………………………………that the Conservative Party had always wanted to change the BBC because of its editorial line.

Foot pedal irrigation

A Until now, governments and development agencies have tried to tackle the problem through large-scale projects: gigantic dams, sprawling, irrigation canals and vast new fields of high-yield crops introduced during the Green Revolution, the famous campaign to increase grain harvests in developing nations. Traditional irrigation, however, has degraded the soil in many areas, and the reservoirs behind dams can quickly fill up with silt, reducing their storage capacity and depriving downstream farmers of fertile sediments. Furthermore, although the Green Revolution has greatly expanded worldwide farm production since 1950, poverty stubbornly persists in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Continued improvements in the productivity of large farms may play the main role in boosting food supply, but local efforts to provide cheap, individual irrigation systems to small farms may offer a better way to lift people out of poverty.

B The Green Revolution was designed to increase the overall food supply, not to raise the incomes of the rural poor, so it should be no surprise that it did not eradicate poverty or hunger. India, for example, has been self-sufficient in food for 15 years, and its granaries are full, but more than 200 million Indians – one fifth of the country’s population – are malnourished because they cannot afford the food they need and because the country’s safety nets are deficient. In 2000, 189 nations committed to the Millennium Development Goals, which called for cutting world poverty in half by 2015. With business as usual, however, we have little hope of achieving most of the Millennium goals, no matter how much money rich countries contribute to poor ones.

C The supply-driven strategies of the Green Revolution, however, may not help subsistence farmers, who must play to their strengths to compete in the global marketplace. The average size of a family farm is less than four acres in India, 1.8 acres in Bangladesh and about half an acre in China. Combines and other modern farming tools are too expensive to be used on such small areas. An Indian farmer selling surplus wheat grown on his one-acre plot could not possibly compete with the highly efficient and subsidized Canadian wheat farms that typically stretch over thousands of acres. Instead subsistence farmers should exploit the fact that their labor costs are the lowest in the world, giving them a comparative advantage in growing and selling high-value, intensely farmed crops.

D Paul Polak saw firsthand the need for a small-scale strategy in 1981 when he met Abdul Rahman, a farmer in the Noakhali district of Bangladesh. From his three quarter-acre plots of rain-fed rice fields, Abdul could grow only 700 kilograms of rice each year – 300 kilograms less than what he needed to feed his family. During the three months before the October rice harvest came in, Abdul and his wife had to watch silently while their three children survived on one meal a day or less. As Polak walked with him through the scattered fields he had inherited from his father, Polak asked what he needed to move out of poverty. “Control of water for my crops,” he said, “at a price I can afford.”

E Soon Polak learned about a simple device that could help Abdul achieve his goal: the treadle pump. Developed in the late 1970s by Norwegian engineer Gunnar Barnes, the pump is operated by a person walking in place on a pair of treadles and two handle arms made of bamboo. Properly adjusted and maintained, it can be operated several hours a day without tiring the users. Each treadle pump has two cylinders which are made of engineering plastic. The diameter of a cylinder is 100.5mm and the height is 280mm. The pump is capable of working up to a maximum depth of 7 meters. Operation beyond 7 meters is not recommended to preserve the integrity of the rubber components. The pump mechanism has piston and foot valve assemblies. The treadle action creates alternate strokes in the two pistons that lift the water in pulses.

F The human-powered pump can irrigate half an acre of vegetables and costs only $25 (including the expense of drilling a tube well down to the groundwater). Abdul heard about the treadle pump from a cousin and was one of the first farmers in Bangladesh to buy one. He borrowed the $25 from an uncle and easily repaid the loan four months later. During the five-month dry season, when Bangladeshis typically farm very little, Abdul used the treadle pump to grow a quarter-acre of chili peppers, tomatoes, cabbage and eggplants. He also improved the yield of one of his rice plots by irrigating it. His family ate some of the vegetables and sold the rest at the village market, earning a net profit of $100. With his new income, Abdul was able to buy rice for his family to eat, keep his two sons in school until they were 16 and set aside a little money for his daughter’s dowry. When Polak visited him again in 1984, he had doubled the size of his vegetable plot and replaced the thatched roof on his house with corrugated tin. His family was raising a calf and some chickens. He told me that the treadle pump was a gift from God.

G Bangladesh is particularly well suited for the treadle pump because a huge reservoir of groundwater lies just a few meters below the farmers’ feet. In the early 1980s IDE initiated a campaign to market the pump, encouraging 75 small private-sector companies to manufacture the devices and several thousand village dealers and tube-well drillers to sell and install them. Over the next 12 years one and a half million farm families purchased treadle pumps, which increased the farmers’ net income by a total of $150 million a year. The cost of IDE’s market-creation activities was only $12 million, leveraged by the investment of $37.5 million from the farmers themselves. In contrast, the expense of building a conventional dam and canal system to irrigate an equivalent area of farmland would be in the range of $2,000 per acre, or $1.5 billion.

Questions 1 – 6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

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

1 It is more effective to resolve poverty or food problem in large scale rather than in small scale.
2 Construction of gigantic dams costs more time in developing countries.
3 Green revolution foiled to increase global crop production from the mid of 20th century.
4 Agricultural production in Bangladesh declined in last decade.
5 Farmer Abdul Rahman knew how to increase production himself.
6 Small pump spread into big project in Bangladesh in the past decade.

Questions 7 – 10
Filling the blanks in diagram of treadle pump’s each parts. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

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

11 How large area can a treadle pump irrigate the field at a low level of expense?
12 What is Abdul’s new roof made of?
13 How much did Bangladesh farmers invest by IDE’s stimulation?

Learning By Examples

A Learning theory is rooted in the work of Ivan Pavlov, the famous scientist who discover and documented the principles governing how animals (humans included) learn in the 1900s. Two basic kinds of learning or conditioning occur, one of which is famously known as the classical condition. Classical conditioning happens when an animal learns to associate a neutral stimulus (signal) with a stimulus that has intrinsic meaning based on how closely in time the two stimuli are presented. The classic example of classical conditioning is a dog’s ability to associate the sound of a bell (something that originally has no meaning to the dog) with the presentation of food (something that has a lot of meaning for the dog) a few moments later. Dogs are able to learn the association between bell and food, and will salivate immediately after hearing the bell once this connection has been made. Years of learning research have led to the creation of a highly precise learning theory that can be used to understand and predict how and under what circumstances most any animal will learn, including human beings, and eventually help people figure out how to change their behaviors.

B Role models are a popular notion for guiding child development, but in recent years very interesting research has been done on learning by example in other animals. If the subject of animal learning is taught very much in terms of classical or operant conditioning, it places too much emphasis on how we allow animals to learn and not enough on how they are equipped to learn. To teach a course of mine I have been dipping profitably into a very interesting and accessible compilation of papers on social learning in mammals, including chimps and human children, edited by Heyes and Galef.

C The research reported in one paper started with a school field trip to Israel to a pine forest where many pine cones were discovered, stripped to the central core. So the investigation started with no weighty theoretical intent, but was directed at finding out what was eating the nutritious pine seeds and how they managed to get them out of the cones. The culprit proved to be the versatile and athletic black rat (Rattus) and the technique was to bite each cone scale off at its base, in sequence from base to tip following the spiral growth pattern of the cone.

D Urban black rats were found to lack the skill and were unable to learn it even if housed with experiences cone strippers. However, infants of urban mothers cross fostered to stripper mothers acquired the skill, whereas infants of stripper mothers fostered by an urban mother could not. Clearly the skill had to be learned from the mother. Further elegant experiments showed that naive adults could develop the skill if they were provided with cones from which the first complete spiral of scales had been removed, rather like our new photocopier which you can word out how to use once someone has shown you how to switch it on. In case of rats, the youngsters take cones away from the mother when she is still feeding on them, allowing them to acquire the complete stripping skill.

E A good example of adaptive bearing we might conclude, but let’s see the economies. This was determined by measuring oxygen uptake of a rat stripping a cone in a metabolic chamber to calculate energetic cost and comparing it with the benefit of the pine seeds measured by calorimeter. The cost proved to be less than 10% of the energetic value of the cone. An acceptable profit margin.

F A paper in 1996 Animal Behavior by Bednekoff and Balda provides a different view of the adaptiveness of social learning. It concerns the seed catching behavior of Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga Columbiana) and the Mexican jay (Aphelocoma ultramarine). The former is a specialist, catching 30,000 or so seeds in scattered locations that it will recover over the months of winter, the Mexican jay will also cache food but is much less dependent upon this than the nutcracker. The two species also differ in their social structure, the nutcracker being rather solitary while the jay forages in social groups.

G The experiment is to discover not just whether a bird can remember where it hid a seed but also if it can remember where it saw another bird hide a seed. The design is slightly comical with a cacher bird wandering about a room with lots of holes in the floor hiding food in some of the holes, while watched by an observer bird perched in a cage. Two days later cachers and observers are tested for their discovery rate against an estimated random performance. In the role of cacher, not only nutcracker but also the less specialized jay performed above chance; more surprisingly, however, jay observers were as successful as jay cachers whereas nutcracker observers did no better than chance. It seems that, whereas the nutcracker is highly adapted at remembering where it hid its own seeds, the social living Mexican jay is more adept at remembering, and so exploiting, the caches of others.

Questions 14 – 17
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A – G. Which paragraph contains the following information?

14 a comparison between rats learning and human learning
15 a reference to the earliest study in animal learning
16 the discovery of who stripped the pine cone
17 a description of a cost-effectiveness experiment

Questions 18 – 21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

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

18 The field trip to Israel was to investigate how black rats learn to strip pine cones.
19 The pine cones were stripped from bottom to top by black rats.
20 It can be learned from other relevant experiences to use a photocopier.
21 Stripping the pine cones is an instinct of the black rats.

Questions 22 – 26
Complete the summary below using words from the box.

While the Nutcracker is more able to cache see, the Jay relies (22)……………………on caching food and is thus less specialized in this ability, but more (23)……………………. To study their behavior of caching and finding their caches, an experiment was designed and carried out to test these two birds for their ability to remember where they hid the seeds.

In the experiment, the cacher bird hid seeds in the ground while the other (24)……………………. As a result, the Nutcracker and the Mexican Jay showed different performance in the role of (25)…………………… at finding the seeds—the observing (26)…………………… didn’t do as well as its counterpart.

A less                       B more                  C solitary                  D social                     E cacher

F observer             G remembered      H watched                I Jay                        J nutcracker

Eco-Resort Management

A Ecotourism is often regarded as a form of nature-based tourism and has become an important alternative source of tourists. In addition to providing the traditional resort-leisure product, it has been argued that ecotourism resort management should have a particular focus on best-practice environmental management, an educational and interpretive component, and direct and indirect contributions to the conservation of the natural and cultural environment (Ayala, 1996).

B Couran Cove Island Resort is a large integrated ecotourism-based resort located south of Brisbane on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanised, the demand for tourist attractions which are environmentally friendly, serene and offer amenities of a unique nature, has grown rapidly. Couran Cove Resort, which is one such tourist attractions, is located on South Stradbroke Island, occupying approximately 150 hectares of the island. South Stradbroke Island is separated from the mainland by the Broadwater, a stretch of sea 3 kilometers wide. More than a century ago, there was only one Stradbroke Island, and there were at least four aboriginal tribes living and hunting on the island. Regrettably, most of the original island dwellers were eventually killed by diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox and influenza by the end of the 19th The second ship wreak on the island in 1894, and the subsequent destruction of the ship (the Cambus Wallace) because it contained dynamite, caused a large crater in the sandhills on Stradbroke Island. Eventually, the ocean broke through the weakened land form and Stradbroke became two islands. Couran Cove Island Resort is built on one of the world’s few naturally-occurring sand lands, which is home to a wide range of plant communities and one of the largest remaining remnants of the rare livistona rainforest left on the Gold Coast. Many mangrove and rainforest areas, and Malaleuca Wetlands on South Stradbroke Island (and in Queensland), have been cleared, drained or filled for residential, industrial, agricultural or urban development in the first half of the 20th century. Farmer and graziers finally abandoned South Stradbroke Island in 1939 because the vegetation and the soil conditions there were not suitable for agricultural activities.

SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES OF COURAN COVE RESORT

Being located on an offshore island, the resort is only accessible by means of water transportation. The resort provides hourly ferry service from the marina on the mainland to and from the island. Within the resort, transport modes include walking trails, bicycle tracks and the beach train. The reception area is the counter of the shop which has not changed in 8 years at least. The accommodation is an octagonal “Bure”. These are large rooms that are clean but! The equipment is tired and in some cases just working. Our ceiling fan only worked on high speed for example. Beds are hard but clean, there is television, radio, an old air conditioner and a small fridge. These “Bures” are right on top of each other and night noises do carry so be careful what you say and do. The only thing is the mosquitos but if you forget to bring mosquito repellant they sell some on the island. As an ecotourism-based resort, most of the planning and development of the attraction has been concentrated on the need to co-exist with the fragile natural environment of South Stradbroke Island to achieve sustainable development.

WATER AND ENERGY MANAGEMENT

C South Stradbroke Island has groundwater at the centre of the island, which has a maximum height of 3 metres above sea level. The water supply is recharged by rainfall and is commonly known as an unconfined freshwater aquifer. Couran Cove Island Resort obtains its water supply by tapping into this aquifer and extracting it via a bore system. Some of the problems which have threatened the island’s freshwater supply include pollution, contamination and over-consumption. In order to minimise some of these problems, all laundry activities are carried out on the mainland. The resort considers washing machines as onerous to the island’s freshwater supply, and that the detergents contain a high level of phosphates which are a major source of water pollution. The resort uses LPG-power generation rather than a diesel-powered plant for its energy supply, supplemented by wind turbine, which has reduced greenhouse emissions by 70% of diesel-equivalent generation methods. Excess heat recovered from the generator is used to heat the swimming pool. Hot water in the eco-cabins and for some of the resort’s vehicles are solar-powered. Water efficient fittings are also installed in showers and toilets. However, not all the appliances used by the resort are energy efficient, such as refrigerators. Visitors who stay at the resort are encouraged to monitor their water and energy usage via the in-house television system, and are rewarded with prizes (such as a free return trip to the resort) accordingly if their usage level is low.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

D We examined a case study of good management practice and a pro-active sustainable tourism stance of an eco-resort. In three years of operation, Couran Cove Island Resort has won 23 international and national awards, including the 2001 Australian Tourism Award in the 4-Star Accommodation category. The resort has embraced and has effectively implemented contemporary environmental management practices. It has been argued that the successful implementation of the principles of sustainability should promote long-term social, economic and environmental benefits, while ensuring and enhancing the prospects of continued viability for the tourism enterprise. Couran Cove Island Resort does not conform to the characteristics of the ResortDevelopmentSpectrum, as proposed by Prideaux (2000). According to Prideaux, the resort should be at least at Phase 3 of the model (the National tourism phase), which describes an integrated resort providing 3-4 star hotel-type accommodation. The primary tourist market in Phase 3 of the model consists mainly of interstate visitors. However, the number of interstate and international tourists visiting the resort is small, with the principal visitor markets comprising locals and residents from nearby towns and the Gold Coast region. The carrying capacity of Couran Cove does not seem to be of any concern to the Resort management. Given that it is a private commercial ecotourist enterprise, regulating the number of visitors to the resort to minimize damage done to the natural environment on South Stradbroke Island is not a binding constraint. However, the Resort’s growth will eventually be constrained by its carrying capacity, and quantity control should be incorporated in the management strategy of the resort.

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

27 The Stradbroke became two islands
A by an intended destruction of the ship of the Cambus Wallace
B by an explosion of dynamite on a ship and following nature erosion
C by the movement sandhills on Stradbroke Island
D by the volcanic eruption on island

28 Why are laundry activities for the resort carried out on the mainland
A In order to obtain its water supply via a bore system
B In order to preserve the water and anti-pollution
C In order to save the cost of installing onerous washing machines
D In order to reduce the level of phosphates in water around

29 What is the major water supplier in South Stradbroke Island is by
A desalinizing the sea water
B collecting the rainfall
C transporting from the mainland
D boring ground water

30 What is applied for heating water on Couran Cove Island Resort
A the LPG-power
B a diesel-powered plant
C the wind power
D the solar-power

31 What does, as the managers of resorts believe, the prospective future focus on
A more awards of for resort’s accommodation
B sustainable administration and development in a long run
C Economic and environmental benefits for the tourism enterprise
D successful implementation the Resort Development Spectrum

Questions 32-36
Complete the following summary of the Reading Passage, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Being located away from the mainland, tourists can attain the resort only by (32)…………………… in a regular service. Within the resort, transports include trails for walking or tracks for both (33)…………………… and the beach train. The on-island equipment is old-fashioned which is barely working such as the (34)…………………… overhead. There is television, radio, an old (35)…………………… and a small fridge. And you can buy the repellant for (36)…………………… if you forget to bring some.

Questions 37-39
Choose THREE correct letters among, A-E.

What is true as to the contemporary situation of Couran Cove Island in the last paragraph
A Couran Cove Island Resort goes for more eco-friendly practices.
B The accommodation standard only conforms to the Resort Development Spectrum of Phase 3.
C Couran Cove Island Resort should raise the accommodation standard and build more facilities.
D The principal group visiting the resort is international tourists.
E Its carrying capacity will restrict the future business’ expansion.

Mammoth Kill 2

A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus, proboscideans commonly equipped with A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus, proboscideans commonly equipped withand, in northern species, a covering of long hair. They lived from the Pliocene epoch (from around 5 million years ago) into the Holocene at about 4,500 years ago, and were members of the family Elephantidae, which contains, along with mammoths, the two genera of modern elephants and their ancestors.

A Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest known species reached heights in the region of 4 m at the shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes, while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes. However, most species of mammoth were only about as large as a modern Asian elephant. Both sexes bore tusks. A first, small set appeared at about the age of six months, and these were replaced at about 18 months by the permanent set. Growth of the permanent set was at a rate of about 2.5 to 15.2 cm per year. Based on studies of their close relatives, the modern elephants, mammoths probably had a gestation period of 22 months, resulting in a single calf being born. Their social structure was probably the same as that of African and Asian elephants, with females living in herds headed by a matriarch, whilst bulls lived solitary lives or formed loose groups after sexual maturity.

B MEXICO CITY – Although it’s hard to imagine in this age of urban sprawl and automobiles, North America once belonged to mammoths, camels, ground sloths as large as cows, bear-size beavers and other formidable beasts. Some 11,000 years ago, however, these large-bodied mammals and others – about 70 species in all – disappeared. Their demise coincided roughly with the arrival of humans in the New World and dramatic climatic change – factors that have inspired several theories about the die-off. Yet despite decades of scientific investigation, the exact cause remains a mystery. Now new findings offer support to one of these controversial hypotheses: that human hunting drove this megafaunal menagerie to extinction. The overkill model emerged in the 1960s, when it was put forth by Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona. Since then, critics have charged that no evidence exists to support the idea that the first Americans hunted to the extent necessary to cause these extinctions. But at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Mexico City last October, paleoecologist John Alroy of the University of California at Santa Barbara argued that, in fact, hunting-driven extinction is not only plausible, it was unavoidable. He has determined, using a computer simulation, that even a very modest amount of hunting would have wiped these animals out.

C Assuming an initial human population of 100 people that grew no more than 2 percent annually, Alroy determined that if each band of, say, 50 people killed 15 to 20 large mammals a year, humans could have eliminated the animal populations within 1,000 years. Large mammals in particular would have been vulnerable to the pressure because they have longer gestation periods than smaller mammals and their young require extended care.

D Not everyone agrees with Alroy’s assessment. For one, the results depend in part on population-size estimates for the extinct animals – figures that are not necessarily reliable. But a more specific criticism comes from mammalogist Ross D. E. MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who points out that the relevant archaeological record contains barely a dozen examples of stone points embedded in mammoth bones (and none, it should be noted, are known from other megafaunal remains) – hardly what one might expect if hunting drove these animals to extinction. Furthermore, some of these species had huge ranges – the giant Jefferson’s ground sloth, for example, lived as far north as the Yukon and as far south as Mexico – which would have made slaughtering them in numbers sufficient to cause their extinction rather implausible, he says.

E MacPhee agrees that humans most likely brought about these extinctions (as well as others around the world that coincided with human arrival), but not directly. Rather he suggests that people may have introduced hyperlethal disease, perhaps through their dogs or hitchhiking vermin, which then spread wildly among the immunologically naive species of the New World. As in the overkill model, populations of large mammals would have a harder time recovering. Repeated outbreaks of a hyperdisease could thus quickly drive them to the point of no return. So far MacPhee does not have empirical evidence for the hyperdisease hypothesis, and it won’t be easy to come by: hyperlethal disease would kill far too quickly to leave its signature on the bones themselves. But he hopes that analyses of tissue and DNA from the last mammoths to perish will eventually reveal murderous microbes.

F The third explanation for what brought on this North American extinction does not involve human beings. Instead its proponents blame the loss on the weather. The Pleistocene epoch witnessed considerable climatic instability, explains paleontologist Russell W. Graham of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. As a result, certain habitats disappeared, and species that had once formed communities split apart. For some animals, this change brought opportunity. For much of the megafauna, however, the increasingly homogeneous environment left them with shrinking geographical ranges – a death sentence for large animals, which need large ranges. Although these creatures managed to maintain viable populations through most of the Pleistocene, the final major fluctuation – the so-called Younger Dryas event – pushed them over the edge, Graham says. For his part, Alroy is convinced that human hunters demolished the titans of the Ice Age. The overkill model explains everything the disease and climate scenarios explain, he asserts, and makes accurate predictions about which species would eventually go extinct. “Personally, I’m a vegetarian,” he remarks, “and I find all of this kind of gross – but believable.”

Questions 1-7
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

The reason why had big size mammals become extinct 11,000 years ago is under hot debate. First explanation is that (1)…………………… of human made it happen. This so called (2)…………………… began from 1960s suggested by an expert, who however received criticism of lack of further information. Another assumption promoted by MacPhee is that deadly (3)…………………… from human causes their demises. However his hypothesis required more (4)…………………… to testify its validity. Graham proposed a third hypothesis that (5)…………………… in Pleistocene epoch drove some species disappear, reduced (6)…………………… posed a dangerous signal to these giants, and (7)…………………… finally wiped them out.

Questions 8-13
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

A John Alroy
B Ross D.E. MacPhee
C Russell W. Graham

8 Human hunting well explained which species would finally disappear.
9 Further grounded proof needed to explain human’s indirect impact on mammals
10 Over hunting situation has caused die-out of large mammals.
11 Illness rather than hunting caused extensive extinction.
12 Doubt raised through the study of several fossil records.
13 Climate shift is the main reason of extinction.

Stress of Workplace

A How busy is too busy? For some it means having to miss the occasional long lunch; for others it means missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a “sickie” once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, and frantic is the tempo of their lives. For most senior executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. The vice-president of the management consultancy AT Kearney and its head of telecommunications for the Asia-Pacific region, Neil Plumridge, says his work weeks vary from a “manageable” 45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.

B Three warning signs alert Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling and family. He knows he has too much on when he gets less than six hours of sleep for three consecutive nights; when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments; “and the third one is on the family side”, says Plumridge, the father of a three-year-old daughter, and expecting a second child in October. “If I happen to miss a birthday or anniversary, I know things are out of control.” Being “too busy” is highly subjective. But for any individual, the perception of being too busy over a prolonged period can start showing up as stress: disturbed sleep, and declining mental and physical health. National workers’ compensation figures show stress causes the most lost time of any workplace injury. Employees suffering stress are off work an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive. Comcare, the Federal Government insurer, reports that in 2003-04, claims for psychological injury accounted for 7% of claims but almost 27% of claim costs. Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief – a game of golf or a massage – but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priority to work out what has to change; that might mean allocating extra resources to a job, allowing more time or changing expectations. The decision may take several days. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying his peers coach each other with business problems. “Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help,” he says.

C Executive stress is not confined to big organisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising and public relations business for seven years, specialising in work for financial and professional services firms. Evolution Media has grown so fast that it debuted on the BRW Fast 100 list of fastest-growing small enterprises last year – just after Stoykov had her first child. Stoykov thrives on the mental stimulation of running her own business. “Like everyone, I have the occasional day when I think my head’s going to blow off,” she says. Because of the growth phase the business is in, Stoykov has to concentrate on short-term stress relief – weekends in the mountains, the occasional “mental health” day – rather than delegating more work. She says: “We’re hiring more people, but you need to train them, teach them about the culture and the clients, so it’s actually more work rather than less.”

D Identify the causes: Jan Elsnera, Melbourne psychologist who specialises in executive coaching, says thriving on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives and other high-potential business people. She says there is no one-size-fits-all approach to stress: some people work best with high-adrenalin periods followed by quieter patches, while others thrive under sustained pressure. “We could take urine and blood hormonal measures and pass a judgment of whether someone’s physiologically stressed or not,” she says. “But that’s not going to give us an indicator of what their experience of stress is, and what the emotional and cognitive impacts of stress are going to be.”

E Eisner’s practice is informed by a movement known as positive psychology, a school of thought that argues “positive” experiences – feeling engaged, challenged, and that one is making a contribution to something meaningful – do not balance out negative ones such as stress; instead, they help people increase their resilience over time. Good stress, or positive experiences of being challenged and rewarded, is thus cumulative in the same way as bad stress. Elsner says many of the senior business people she coaches are relying more on regulating bad stress through methods such as meditation and yoga. She points to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of the brain and actually help people “retrain” the way their brains and bodies react to stress. “Meditation and yoga enable you to shift the way that your brain reacts, so if you get proficient at it you’re in control.”

F The Australian vice-president of AT Kearney, Neil Plumridge, says: “Often stress is caused by our setting unrealistic expectations of ourselves. I’ll promise a client I’ll do something tomorrow, and then promise another client the same thing, when I really know it’s not going to happen. I’ve put stress on myself when I could have said to the clients: ‘Why don’t I give that to you in 48 hours?’ The client doesn’t care.” Over-committing is something people experience as an individual problem. We explain it as the result of procrastination or Parkinson’s law: that work expands to fill the time available. New research indicates that people may be hard-wired to do it.

G A study in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that people always believe they will be less busy in the future than now. This is a misapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Professor Gal Zauberman, of the University of North Carolina, and Professor John Lynch, of Duke University. “On average, an individual will be just as busy two weeks or a month from now as he or she is today. But that is not how it appears to be in everyday life,” they wrote. “People often make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediate action. That is, they discount future time investments relatively steeply.” Why do we perceive a greater “surplus” of time in the future than in the present? The researchers suggest that people underestimate completion times for tasks stretching into the future, and that they are bad at imagining future competition for their time.

Question 14-18
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-D) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-D in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

A Jan Elsnera
B Vanessa Stoykov
C Gal Zauberman
D Neil Plumridge

14 Work stress usually happens in the high level of a business.
15 More people’s ideas involved would be beneficial for stress relief.
16 Temporary holiday sometimes doesn’t mean less work.
17 Stress leads to a wrong direction when trying to satisfy customers.
18 It is not correct that stress in the future will be eased more than now.

Question 19-21
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

19 Which of the following workplace stress is NOT mentioned according to Plumridge in the following options
A Not enough time spend on family
B Unable to concentrate on work
C Inadequate time of sleep
D Alteration of appointment

20 Which of the following solution is NOT mentioned in helping reduce the work pressure according toPlumridge
A Allocate more personnel
B Increase more time
C Lower expectation
D Do sports and massage

21 What is point of view of Jan Elsnera towards work stress
A Medical test can only reveal part of the data needed to cope with stress
B Index somebody samples will be abnormal in a stressful experience
C Emotional and cognitive affection is superior to physical one
D One well designed solution can release all stress

Question 22 – 27
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Statistics from National worker’s compensation indicate stress plays the most important role in (22)…………………… which cause the time losses. Staffs take about (23)…………………… for absence from work caused by stress. Not just time is our main concern but great expenses generated consequently. An official insurer wrote sometime that about (24)…………………… of all claims were mental issues whereas nearly 27% costs in all claims, Sports Such as (25)…………………… as well as (26)…………………… could be a treatment to release stress; However, specialists recommended another practical way out, analyse (27)…………………… once again.

Unexpected Benefits to Human Brain

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played his first video game years ago when his six-year-old son Sam was playing Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. He wanted to play the game so he could support Sam’s problem solving. Though Pajama Sam is not an “educational game”, it is replete with the types of problems psychologists study when they study thinking and learning. When he saw how well the game held Sam’s attention, he wondered what sort of beast a more mature video game might be.

Video and computer games, like many other popular, entertaining and addicting kid’s activities, are looked down upon by many parents as time-wasters, and worse, parents think that these games rot the brain. Violent video games are readily blamed by the media and some experts as the reason why some youth become violent or commit extreme anti-social behavior. Recent content analyses of video games show that as many as 89% of games contain some violent content, but there is no form of aggressive content for 70% of popular games. Many scientists and psychologists, like James Paul Gee, find that video games actually have many benefits – the main one being making kids smart. Video games may actually teach kids high-level thinking skills that they will need in the future.

“Video games change your brain,” according to University of Wisconsin psychologist Shawn Green. Video games change the brain’s physical structure the same way as do learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating using a map. Much like exercise can build muscle, the powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which strengthens neural circuits, can build the player’s brain.

Video games give your child’s brain a real workout. In many video games, the skills required to win involve abstract and high level thinking. These skills are not even taught at school. Some of the mental skills trained by video games include: following instructions, problem solving, logic, hand-eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills. Research also suggests that people can learn iconic, spatial, and visual attention skills from video games. There have been even studies with adults showing that experience with video games is related to better surgical skills. Jacob Benjamin, doctor from Beth Israel Medical Center NY, found a direct link between skill at video gaming and skill at keyhole or laparoscopic surgery. Also, a reason given by experts as to why fighter pilots of today are more skillful is that this generation’s pilots are being weaned on video games.

The players learn to manage resources that are limited, and decide the best use of resources, the same way as in real life. In strategy games, for instance, while developing a city, an unexpected surprise like an enemy might emerge. This forces the player to be flexible and quickly change tactics. Sometimes the player does this almost every second of the game giving the brain a real workout. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist, games simulating stressful events such as those found in battle or action games could be a training tool for real-world situations. The study suggests that playing action video games primes the brain to make quick decisions. Video games can be used to train soldiers and surgeons, according to the study. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture, says gamers must deal with immediate problems while keeping their long-term goals on their horizon. Young gamers force themselves to read to get instructions, follow storylines of games, and get information from the game texts.

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that playing a video game is similar to working through a science problem Like students in a laboratory, gamers must come up with a hypothesis. For example, players in some games constantly try out combinations of weapons and powers to use to defeat an enemy. If one does not work, they change hypothesis and try the next one. Video games are goal-driven experiences, says Gee, which are fundamental to learning. Also, using math skills is important to win in many games that involve quantitative analysis like managing resources. In higher levels of a game, players usually fail the first time around, but they keep on trying until they succeed and move on to the next level.

Many games are played online and involve cooperation with other online players in order to win. Video and computer games also help children gain self-confidence and many games are based on history, city building, and governance and so on. Such games indirectly teach children about aspects of life on earth.

In an upcoming study in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations. The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the fast-paced action video games “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game “The Sims 2.” After this training period, all of the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The action game players were up to 25 percent faster at coming to a conclusion and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy game playing peers.

Questions 28-31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

28 What is the main purpose of paragraph one
A Introduction of professor James Paul Gee.
B Introduction of the video game: Pajamas Sam.
C Introduction of types of video games.
D Introduction of the background of this passage.

29 What does the author want to express in the second paragraph
A Video games are widely considered harmful for children’s brain.
B Most violent video games are the direct reason of juvenile delinquency.
C Even there is a certain proportion of violence in most video games; scientists and psychologists see its benefits of children’s intellectual abilities.
D Many parents regard video games as time-wasters, which rot children’s brain.

30 What is correctly mentioned in paragraph four
A Some schools use video games to teach students abstract and high level thinking.
B Video games improves the brain ability in various aspects.
C Some surgeons have better skills because they play more video games.
D Skillful fighter pilots in this generation love to play video games.

31 What is the expectation of the experiment the three researchers did
A Gamers have to make the best use of the limited resource.
B Gamers with better math skills will win in the end.
C Strategy game players have better ability to make quick decisions.
D Video games help increase the speed of players’ reaction effectively.

Questions 32-35
Do the following statement with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                            if the statement is true
FALSE                          if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN               if the information is not given in the passage

32 Most video games are popular because of their violent content.
33 The action game players minimized the percentage of making mistakes in the experiment.
34 It would be a good idea for schools to apply video games in their classrooms.
35 Those People who are addicted to video games have lots of dopamine in their brains.

Questions 36-40
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 36-40 on your answer sheet.

A The writer’s opinion
B James Paul Gee
C Shawn Green
D Daphne Bavelier
E Steven Johnson
F Jacob Benjamin

36 Video games as other daily life skills alter the brain’s physical structure.
37 Brain is ready to make decisions without hesitation when players are immersed in playing stressful games.
38 The purpose-motivated experience that video games offer plays an essential role in studying.
39 Players are good at tackling prompt issues with future intensions.
40 It helps children broaden their horizon in many aspects and gain self-confidence.

Dirty river but clean water

Floods can occur in rivers when the flow rate exceeds the capacity of the river channel, particularly at bends or meanders in the waterway. Floods often cause damage to homes and businesses if they are in the natural flood plains of rivers. While riverine flood damage can be eliminated by moving away from rivers and other bodies of water, people have traditionally lived and worked by rivers because the land is usually flat and fertile and because rivers provide easy travel and access to commerce and industry.

A Fire and flood are two of humanity’s worst nightmares. People have, therefore, always sought to control them. Forest fires are snuffed out quickly. The flow of rivers is regulated by weirs and dams. At least, that is how it used to be. But foresters have learned that forests need fires to clear out the brash and even to get seeds to germinate. And a similar revelation is now – dawning on hydrologists. Rivers – and the ecosystems they support – need floods. That is why a man-made torrent has been surging down the Grand Canyon. By Thursday March 6th it was running at full throttle, which was expected to be sustained for 60 hours.

B Floods once raged through the canyon every year. Spring Snow from as far away as Wyoming would melt and swell the Colorado river to a flow that averaged around 1,500 cubic metres (50,000 cubic feet) a second. Every eight years or so, that figure rose to almost 3,000 cubic metres. These floods infused the river with sediment, carved its beaches and built its sandbars.

C However, in the four decades since the building of the Glen Canyon dam, just upstream of the Grand Canyon, the only sediment that it has collected has come from tiny, undammed tributaries. Even that has not been much use as those tributaries are not powerful enough to distribute the sediment in an ecologically valuable way.

D This lack of flooding has harmed local wildlife. The humpback chub, for example, thrived in the rust-redwaters of the Colorado. Recently, though, its population has crashed. At first sight, it looked as if the reason was that the chub were being eaten by trout introduced for sport fishing in the mid-20th century. But trout and chub co-existed until the Glen Canyon dam was built, so something else is going on. Steve Gloss, of the United States’ Geological Survey (USGS), reckons that the chub’s decline is the result of their losing their most valuable natural defense, the Colorado’s rusty sediment. The chub were well adapted to the poor visibility created by the thick, red water which gave the river its name,and depended on it to hide from predators. Without the cloudy water the chub became vulnerable.

E And the chub are not alone. In the years since the Glen Canyon dam was built, several species have vanished altogether. These include the Colorado pike-minnow, the razorback sucker and the round-tail chub. Meanwhile, aliens including fathead minnows, channel catfish and common carp, which would have been hard, put to survive in the savage waters of the undammed canyon, have move din.

F So flooding is the obvious answer. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Floods were sent down the Grand Canyon in 1996 and 2004 and the results were mixed. In 1996 the flood was allowed to go on too long. To start with,all seemed well. The floodwaters built up sandbanks and infused the river with sediment. Eventually, however, the continued flow washed most of the sediment out of the canyon. This problem was avoided in 2004, but unfortunately, on that occasion, the volume of sand available behind the dam was too low to rebuild the sandbanks. This time, the USGS is convinced that things will be better. The amount of sediment available is three times greater than it was in 2004. So if a flood is going to do some good, this is the time to unleash one.

G Even so, it may turn out to be an empty gesture. At less than 1,200 cubic metres a second, this flood is smaller than even an average spring flood, let alone one of the mightier deluges of the past. Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of sediment through the Grand Canyon,wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess of silt and muck that would make modern river rafters cringe.

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

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 Damage caused by fire is worse than that caused by flood.
2 The flood peaks at almost 1500 cubic meters every eight years.
3 Contribution of sediments delivered by tributaries has little impact.
4 Decreasing number of chubs is always caused by introducing of trout since mid 20th century.
5 It seemed that the artificial flood in 1996 had achieved success partly at the very beginning.
6 In fact, the yield of artificial flood water is smaller than an average natural flood at present.
7 Mighty floods drove fast moving flows with clean and high quality water.

Questions 8-13
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The eco-impact of the Canyon Dam

Floods are people’s nightmare. In the past, canyon was raged by flood every year. The snow from far Wyoming would melt in the season of (8)…………………… and caused a flood flow peak in Colorado river. In the four decades after people built the Glen Canyon dam, it only could gather (9)…………………… together from tiny, undammed tributaries.

Humpback chub population on reduced, why?

Then, several species disappeared including Colorado pike-minnow, (10)…………………… and the round-tail chub. Meanwhile, some moved in such as fathead minnows, channel catfish and (11)…………………… . The non-stopped flow leaded to the washing away of the sediment out of the canyon, which poses great threat to the chubs because it has poor (12)…………………… away from predators. In addition, the volume of (13)…………………… available behind the dam was too low to rebuild the bars and flooding became more serious.

Going Bananas

A The world’s favourite fruit could disappear forever in 10 years’ time. The banana is among the world’s oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible banana was discovered around ten thousand years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last ice age. Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb called Musa acuminata, contains a mass of hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter-gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seedless, edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and pollen from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some scientists believe the world’s most popular fruit could be doomed. It lacks the genetic diversity to fight off pests and diseases that are invading the banana plantations of Central America and the small-holdings of Africa and Asia alike.

B In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought famine to Ireland a century and a half ago. But “it holds a lesson for other crops, too”, says Emile Frison, top banana at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France. “The state of the banana”, Frison warns, “can teach a broader lesson: the increasing standardisation of food crops round the world is threatening their ability to adapt and survive.”

C The first Stone Age plant breeders cultivated these sterile freaks by replanting cuttings from their stems. And the descendants of those original cuttings are the bananas we still eat today. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity makes it ripe for disease like no other crop on Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually reproducing crops have always had a much broader genetic base, and the genes will recombine in new arrangements in each generation. This gives them much greater flexibility in evolving responses to disease – and far more genetic resources to draw on in the face of an attack. But that advantage is fading fast, as growers increasingly plant the same few, high-yielding varieties. Plant breeders work feverishly to maintain resistance in these standardized crops. Should these efforts falter, yields of even the most productive crop could swiftly crash. “When some pest or disease comes along, severe epidemics can occur,” says Geoff Hawtin, director of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute.

D The banana is an excellent case in point. Until the 1950s, one variety, the Gros Michel, dominated the world’s commercial banana business. Found by French botanists in Asian the 1820s, the Gros Michel was by all accounts a fine banana, richer and sweeter than today’s standard banana and without the latte’s bitter aftertaste when green. But it was vulnerable to a soil fungus that produced a wilt known as Panama disease. “Once the fungus gets into the soil it remains there for many years. There is nothing farmers can do. Even chemical spraying won’t get rid of it,” says Rodomiro Ortiz, director of the Inter-national Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria. So plantation owners played a running game, abandoning infested fields and moving to “clean” land – until they ran out of clean land in the 1950s and had to abandon the Gros Michel. Its successor, and still the reigning commercial king, is the Cavendish banana, a 19th-century British discovery from southern China. The Cavendish is resistant to Panama disease and, as a result, it literally saved the international banana industry. During the 1960s, it replaced the Gros Michel on supermarket shelves. If you buy a banana today, it is almost certainly a Cavendish. But even so, it is a minority in the world’s banana crop.

E Half a billion people in Asia and Africa depend on bananas. Bananas provide the largest source of calories and are eaten daily. Its name is synonymous with food. But the day of reckoning may be coming for the Cavendish and its indigenous kin. Another fungal disease, black Sigatoka, has become a global epidemic since its first appearance in Fiji in 1963. Left to itself, black Sigatoka which causes brown wounds on leaves and premature fruit ripening – cuts fruit yields by 50 to 70 per cent and reduces the productive lifetime of banana plants from 30 years to as little as 2 or 3. Commercial growers keep Sigatoka at bay by a massive chemical assault. Forty sprayings of fungicide a year is typical. But despite the fungicides, diseases such as black Sigatoka are getting more and more difficult to control. “As soon as you bring in a new fungicide, they develop resistance,” says Frison. “One thing we can be sure of is that the Sigatoka won’t lose in this battle.” Poor farmers, who cannot afford chemicals, have it even worse. They can do little more than watch their plants die. “Most of the banana fields in Amazonia have already been destroyed by the disease,” says Luadir Gasparotto, Brazil’s leading banana pathologist with the government research agency EMBRAPA. Production is likely to fall by 70 percent as the disease spreads, he predicts. The only option will be to find a new variety.

F But how? Almost all edible varieties are susceptible to the diseases, so growers cannot simply change to a different banana. With most crops, such a threat would unleash an army of breeders, scouring the world for resistant relatives whose traits they can breed into commercial varieties. Not so with the banana. Because all edible varieties are sterile, bringing in new genetic traits to help cope with pests and diseases is nearly impossible. Nearly, but not totally. Very rarely, a sterile banana will experience a genetic accident that allows an almost normal seed to develop, giving breeders a tiny window for improvement. Breeders at the Honduran Foundation of Agricultural Research have tried to exploit this to create disease-resistant varieties. Further backcrossing with wild bananas yielded a new seedless banana resistant to both black Sigatoka and Panama disease.

G Neither Western supermarket consumers nor peasant growers like the new hybrid. Some accuse it of tasting more like an apple than a banana. Not surprisingly, the majority of plant breeders have till now turned their backs on the banana and got to work on easier plants. And commercial banana companies are now washing their hands of the whole breeding effort, preferring to fund a search for new fungicides instead. “We supported a breeding programme for 40 years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back,” says Ronald Romero, head of research at Chiquita, one of the Big Three companies that dominate the international banana trade.

H Last year, a global consortium of scientists led by Frison announced plans to sequence the banana genome within five years. It would be the first edible fruit to be sequenced. Well, almost edible. The group will actually be sequencing inedible wild bananas from East Asia because many of these are resistant to black Sigatoka. If they can pinpoint the genes that help these wild varieties to resist black Sigatoka, the protective genes could be introduced into laboratory tissue cultures of cells from edible varieties. These could then be propagated into new, resistant plants and passed on to farmers.

I It sounds promising, but the big banana companies have, until now, refused to get involved in GM research for fear of alienating their customers. “Biotechnology is extremely expensive and there are serious questions about consumer acceptance,” says David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs. With scant funding from the companies, the banana genome researchers are focusing on the other end of the spectrum. Even if they can identify the crucial genes, they will be a long way from developing new varieties that smallholders will find suitable and affordable. But whatever biotechnology’s academic interest, it is the only hope for the banana. Without banana production worldwide will head into a tailspin. We may even see the extinction of the banana as both a lifesaver for hungry and impoverished Africans and as the most popular product on the world’s supermarket shelves.

Question 14-16
Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage.

• Banana was first eaten as a fruit by humans almost (14)…………………… years ago.
• Banana was first planted in (15)…………………… .
• Wild banana’s taste is adversely affected by its (16)……………………

Question 17-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 17-23) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A-F. NB You may use any letter more than once.

17 A Pest invasion may seriously damage banana industry.
18 The effect of fungal infection in soil is often long-lasting.
19 A commercial manufacturer gave up on breeding bananas for disease resistant species.
20 Banana disease may develop resistance to chemical sprays.
21 A banana disease has destroyed a large number of banana plantations.
22 Consumers would not accept genetically altered crop.
23 Lessons can be learned from bananas for other crops.

List of people
A Rodomiro
B David Mclaughlin
C Emile Frison
D Ronald Romero
E Luadir Gasparotto
F Geoff Hawtin

Question 24-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet, write

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

24 Banana is the oldest known fruit.
25 Gros Michel is still being used as a commercial product.
26 Banana is a main food in some countries.

Blue-footed Boobies 2

A Boobies are a small group of seabirds native to tropical and subtropical oceans throughout the world. Their diet consists mainly of fish. They are specialized fish eaters feeding on small school fish like sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and flying fish. When their prey is in sight, they fold their long wings back around their streamlined bodies and plunge into the water from as high as 80 feet, so streamlined they barely make a splash. They travel in parties of about 12 to areas of water with large schools of small fish. When the lead bird sees a fish shoal in the water, it will signal the rest of the group and they will all dive together. Surprisingly, individuals do not eat with the hunting group, preferring to eat on their own, usually in the early morning or late afternoon.

B There are three varieties on the Galapagos: the blue-footed, red-footed, and masked boobies. They are all members of the same family, and are not only different in appearance but also in behaviours. The blue-footed and red-footed boobies mate throughout the year, while the masked boobies have an annual mating cycle that differs from island to island. All catch fish in a similar manner, but in different areas: the blue-footed booby does its fishing close to shore, while the masked booby goes slightly farther out, and the red-footed booby fishes at the farthest distances from shore.

C Although it is unknown where the name “Booby” emanates from, some conjecture it may come from the Spanish word for clown, “bobo”, meaning “stupid”. Its name was probably inspired by the bird’s clumsiness on land and apparently unwarranted bravery. The blue footed booby is extremely vulnerable to human visitors because it does not appear to fear them. Therefore these birds received such name for their clumsiness on land in which they were easily, captured, killed, and eaten by humans.

D The blue-footed booby’s characteristic feet play a significant part in their famous courtship ceremony, the ‘booby dance’. The male walks around the female, raising his bright blue feet straight up in the air, while bringing his ‘shoulders’ towards the ground and crossing the bottom tips of his wings high above the ground. Plus he’ll raise his bill up towards the sky to try to win his mate over. The female may also partake in these activities – lifting her feet, sky pointing, and of course squawking at her mate. After mating, another ritual occurs – the nest-building which ironically is never used because they nest on the bare ground. When the female is ready to lay her eggs, they scrape the existing nest away so she can nest on exposed ground. Sun-baked islands form the booby’s breeding grounds. When ready the female Blue Footed Booby lays one to three eggs.

E After mating, two or three eggs are laid in a shallow depression on flat or gently sloping ground. Both male and female take turns incubating the eggs. Unlike most birds, booby doesn’t develop brood patches (areas of bare skin on the breast) to warm the eggs during incubation. Instead, it uses its broad webbed feet, which have large numbers of prominent blood vessels, to transmit heat essential for incubation. The eggs are thick-shelled so they can withstand the full weight of an incubating bird.

F After hatching, the male plays a major role in bringing fish home. He can bring back a constant supply of small fish for the chicks, which must be fed continuously. The reason is that the male has a longer tail than the female in relation to his body size, which makes him able to execute shallower dives and to feed closer to shore. Then the female takes a greater part as time proceeds. Sooner or later, the need to feed the young becomes greater than the need to protect them and both adults must fish to provide enough.

G When times are good, the parents may successfully fledge all three chicks, but, in harder times, they may still lay as many eggs yet only obtain enough food to raise one. The problem is usually solved by the somewhat callous-sounding system of “opportunistic sibling murder.” The first-born chick is larger and stronger than its nest mate(s) as a result of hatching a few days earlier and also because the parents feed the larger chick. If food is scarce, the first born will get more food than its nest mate(s) and will outcompete them, causing them to starve. The above system optimizes the reproductive capacity of the blue-foot in an unpredictable environment. The system ensures that, if possible, at least one chick will survive a period of shortage rather than all three dying of starvation under a more ‘humane’ system.

Questions 27-32
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A–G. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A–G from the list below. Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Unusual way of hatching the chicks
ii Feeding habit of the red-footed booby
iii Folding wings for purpose
iv Rearing the young
v Classification of boobies
vi Diving for seafood
vii Surviving mechanism during the food shortage period
viii Mating and breeding
ix Origin of the booby’s name

Paragraph C        ix

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

Questions 33-35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 33 – 35 on your answer sheet, write

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

33 Boobies are afraid of human approaching.
34 Female boobies eat more than the male ones.
35 When there is not sufficient food, the larger chicks will be fed at the expense of the survival of its smaller mates.

Questions 36 – 39
Complete the summary below, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

The courtship of the Blue-footed Booby consists of the male flaunting his blue feet and dancing to impress the female. During the dance, the male will spread his wings and stamp his feet on the ground with his bills (36)…………………… . After mating, the booby’s unusual demeanor continues with ritual (37) …………………… that really serves no purpose. When the female Booby lays eggs, the parental boobies incubate the eggs beneath their (38) …………………… which contain (39) …………………… to transmit the heat, because of the lack of brood patches.

Tickling and Laughter

A. The fingers of an outstretched aim are nearing your body; you bend away folding your torso, bending your head to your shoulder in hopes that you don’t get tickled; but the inevitable occurs: yon arc tickled and in hysterics you chuckle, titter, and burst into uncontrollable laughter. Why do we laugh when we are tickled?

B. Tickling is caused by a light sensation across our skin. At times the light sensation can cause itching; however, most of the time it causes giggling. If a feather is gently moved across the surface of the skin, it can also cause tickling and giggling. Heavy laughter is caused by someone or something placing repeated pressure on a person and tickling a particular area. The spots tickled often are feet, toes, sides, underarms, and neck which cause a great deal of laughter. Yngve Zotterman from Karolinksk Institute has found that tickling sensations involve signals from nerve fibers. These nerve fibers are associated with pain and touch. Also, Zotterman has discovered tickling sensations to be associated not only with nerve fibers but also with sense of touch because people who have lost pain sensations still laugh when tickled. But really, why do we laugh? Why are we not able to tickle ourselves? What part of the brain is responsible for laughter and humor? Why do we say some people have no sense of humor?

C. Research has shown that laugher is more than just a person’s voice and movement and that it requires the coordination of many muscles throughout the body. Laughter also increases blood pressure and heart rate, changes breathing, reduces levels of certain neurochemicals (catecholamines, hormones) and provides a boost to die immune system. Can laughter improve health? It may be a good way for people to relax because muscle tension is reduced after laughing. Human tests have found some evidence that humorous videos and tapes can reduce feelings of pain, prevent negative stress reactions and boost the brain’s biological battle against infection.

D. Researchers believe we process humor and laughter through a complex pathway of brain activity that encompasses three main brain components. In one new study, researchers used imaging equipment to photograph die brain activity of healthy volunteers while they underwent a sidesplitting assignment of reading written jokes, viewing cartoons from The New Yorker magazine as well as “The Far Side” and listening to digital recordings of laughter. Preliminary results indicate that the humor-processing pathway includes parts of the frontal lobe brain area, important for cognitive processing the supplementary motor area, important for movement; and the nucleus accumbens, associated with pleasure. Investigations support the notion that parts of the frontal lobe are involved in humor. Subjects’ brains were imaged while they were listening to jokes. An area of the frontal lobe was activated only when they thought a joke was funny. In a study that compared healthy individuals with people who had damage to their frontal lobes, the subjects with damaged frontal lobes were more likely to choose wrong punch lines to written jokes and didn’t laugh or smile as much at funny cartoons or jokes.

E. Even though we may know more about what parts of the brain are responsible for humor, it is still hard to explain why we don’t laugh or giggle when we tickle ourselves. Darwin theorized within “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals” that there was a link between tickling and laughter because of the anticipation of pleasure. Because we cannot tickle ourselves and have caused laughter, Darwin speculated surprise from another person touching a sensitive spot must have caused laughter. Some scientists believe that laughing caused by tickling is a built-in reflex even babies have. If we tickle ourselves in the same spot as our friend tickled us, we do not laugh as we did previously. The information sent to our spinal cord and brain should be exactly the same. Apparently for tickling to work, the brain needs tension and surprise. When we tickle ourself, we know exactly what will happen…there is no tension or surprise. How the brain uses this information about tension and surprise is still a mystery, but there is some evidence that the cerebellum may be involved. Because one part of the brain tells another: “It’s just you. Don’t get excited”. Investigations suggest that during self-tickling, the cerebellum tells an area called the somatosensory cortex what sensation to expect, and that dampens the tickling sensation. It looks as if the killjoy is found in the cerebellum. Further explorations to understand tickling and laughter were conducted by Christenfeld and Harris. Within ‘The Mystery of Ticklish Laughter and “Can a Machine Tickleyn they explained that people laughed equally whether tickled by a machine or by a person. The participants were not aware that who or what was tickling them. However, the laughter was equally resounded. It is suggested that tickling response is a reflex, which, like Darwin suggested earlier, is dependent on the element of surprise.

F. Damage to any one part of the brain may affect one’s overall ability to process humor. Peter Derks, a professor of psychology, conducted his research with a group of scientists at NASA-Langley in Hampton. Using a sophisticated electroencephalogram (EEG), they measured the brain activity of 10 people exposed to humorous stimuli. How quickly our brain recognizes the incongruity that deals with most humor and attaches an abstract meaning to it determines whether we laugh. However, different people find different jokes funny. That can be due to a number of factors, including differences in personality, intelligence, mental state and probably mood. But according to Derks, the majority of people recognize when a situation is meant to be humorous. In a series of experiments, he noticed that several patients recovering from brain injuries could not distinguish between something funny and something not.

G. Dr. Shibata of the University of Rochester School of Medicine said our neurons get tickled when we hear a joke. The brain’s ‘Tunny bone” is located at the right frontal lobe just above the right eye and appears critical to our ability to recognize a joke. Dr. Shibata gave his patients MRI scans to measure brain activity, trying to find out what part of the brain is particularly active while telling the punch line of a joke as opposed to the rest of the joke and funny cartoons in comparison to parts of the cartoons that arc not funny. The jokes “tickled” the frontal lobes. The scans also showed activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is likely related to our feeling of mirth after hearing a good joke and our “addiction” to humor. While his research was about humor, the results could help lead to answers and solutions to depression. Parts of the brain that are active during humor are actually abnormal in patients with depression. Eventually brain scans might be used to assess patients with depression and other mood disorders. The research may also explain why some stroke victims lose their sense of humor or suffer from other personality changes. The same part of the brain is also associated with social and emotional judgment and planning.

Question 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has 7 paragraphs A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB you may use any letter more than once

1. Location of a brain section essential to the recognition of jokes
2. Laughter enhances immunity
3. Individual differences and the appreciation of humour
4. Parts of the brain responsible for tickling reflex
5. Neuropsychological mechanisms by which humor and laughter work
6. The connection between tickling and nerve fibers
7. Patients with emotional disorders

Questions 8-11
Look at the following researchers (listed 8-11) and findings (listed A-F). Match each researcher with the correct finding(s).

A The surprise factor, combined with the anticipation of pleasure, cause laughter when tickled.
B Laughing caused by tickling is a built-in reflex even babies have.
C People also laugh when tickled by a machine if they are not aware of it.
D People have different tastes for jokes and humour.
E Jokes and funny cartoons activates the frontal lobes.
F Tickling sensations involve more than nerve fibers.

8. Darwin
9. Christenfeld and Harris
10. Ygve Zotterman
11. Peter Derks

Questions 12-14

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each blank.

Write your answers in boxes 12-14 on your answer sheet.

Researchers believe three brain components to be involved in the processing of humor and laughter Results from one study using brain (12)……………………indicate that parts of the brain responsible for (13)……………..…… movement and pleasure are involved through a sophisticated pathway. Test subjects who suffered from frontal lobes damages had greater chances of picking (14)…………..……..of jokes or did not respond to funny cartoons or jokes.

The Farmer! parade of history

A. History of Farmer trading company: In 1909 Robert Laidlaw establishes mail-order company Laidlaw Leeds in Fort Street, Auckland. Then, Branch expansion: purchase of Green and Colebrook chain store; further provincial stores in Auckland and Waikato to follow. Opening of first furniture and boot factory. In 1920, Company now has 29 branches; Whangarei store purchased. Doors open at Hobson Street for direct selling to public. Firm establishes London and New York buying offices. With permission from the Harbour Board, the large FARMERS electric sign on the Wyndham Street frontage is erected.

B. In 1935, if the merchandise has changed, the language of the catalogues hasn’t Robert Laidlaw, the Scottish immigrant who established the century-old business, might have been scripting a modern-day television commercial when he told his earliest customers: Satisfaction, or your money back. “It was the first money back guarantee ever offered in New Zealand by any firm,” says Ian Hunter, business historian. “And his mission statement was, potentially, only the second one ever found in the world.” Laidlaw’s stated aims were simple to build the greatest business in New Zealand, to simplify every transaction, to eliminate all delays, to only sell goods it would pay the customer to buy.

C. This year, the company that began as a mail-order business and now employs 3500 staff across 58 stores turns 100. Its centenary will be celebrated with the release of a book and major community fundraising projects, to be announced next week. Hunter, who is writing the centenary history, says “coming to a Farmers store once a week was a part of the New Zealand way of life”. By 1960, one in every 10 people had an account with the company. It was the place where teenage girls shopped for their first bra, where newlyweds purchased their first dinner sets, where first pay cheques were used to pay off hire purchase furniture, where Santa paraded every Christmas.

D. Gary Blumenthal’s mother shopped there, and so does he. The fondest memory for the Rotorua resident? “We were on holiday in Auckland … I decided that up on the lookout tower on top of the Farmers building would be a unique place to fit the ring on my new fiancee’s finger.” The lovebirds, who had to wait for “an annoying youth” to leave the tower before they could enjoy their engagement kiss, celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in June.

E. Farmers, says Hunter, has always had a heart. This, from a 1993 North & South interview with a former board chairman, Rawdon Busfield: “One day I was in the Hobson Street shop and I saw a woman with two small children. They were clean and tidily dressed, but poor, you could tell. That week we had a special on a big bar of chocolate for one shilling. I heard the woman say to her boy, ‘no, your penny won’t buy that’. He wasn’t wearing shoes. So I went up to the boy said,’ Son, have you got your penny? ‘He handed it to me. It was hot he’d had it in his hand for hours. I took the penny and gave him the chocolate.”

F. Farmers was once the home of genteel tearooms, children’s playgrounds and an annual sale of celebration for birthday of Hector the Parrot (the store mascot died, aged 131, in the 1970s his stuffed remains still occupy pride of place at the company’s head office). You could buy houses from Farmers. Its saddle factory supplied the armed forces, and its upright grand overstrung pianos offered “the acme of value” according to those early catalogues hand-drawn by Robert Laidlaw himself. Walk through a Farmers store today and get hit by bright lights and big brands. Its Albany branch houses 16 international cosmetics companies. It buys from approximately 500 suppliers, and about 30% of those are locally owned.

G. “Eight, 10 years ago,” says current chief executive Rod McDermott, “lots of brands wouldn’t partner with us. The stores were quite distressed. We were first price point focused, we weren’t fashion focused. “Remove the rose-tinted nostalgia, and Farmers is, quite simply, a business, doing business in hard times. Dancing with the Stars presenter Candy Lane launches a clothing line? “We put a trial on, and we thought it was really lovely, but the uptake wasn’t what we thought it would be. It’s got to be what the customer wants,” says McDermott.

H. He acknowledges retailers suffer in a recession: “We’re celebrating 100 years because we can and because we should.” Farmers almost didn’t pull through one economic crisis. By the mid 1980s, it had stores across the country. It had acquired the South Island’s Calder Mackay chain of stores and bought out Haywrights. Then, with sales topping $375 million, it was taken over by Chase Corporation. Lincoln Laidlaw, now aged 88, and the son of the company’s founder, remembers the dark days following the stock market crash and the collapse of Chase. “I think, once, Farmers was like a big family and all of the people who worked for it felt they were building something which would ultimately be to their benefit and to the benefit of New Zealand… then the business was being divided up and so that kind of family situation was dispelled and it hasn’t been recovered.” For a turbulent few years, the stores were controlled, first by a consortium of Australian banks and later Deka, the Maori Development Corporation and Foodland Associated Ltd. In 2003, it went back to “family” ownership, with the purchase by the James Pascoe Group, owned by David and Anne Norman the latter being the great-granddaughter of James Pascoe, whose first business interest was jewellery.

I. “Sheer power of the brand,” says McDermott, “pulled Farmers through and now we’re becoming the brand it used to be again.” Farmers was the company that, during World War n, topped up the wages of any staff member disadvantaged by overseas service. Robert Laidlaw a committed Christian who came to his faith at a 1902 evangelistic service in Dunedin concluded his original mission statement with the words, “all at it, always at it, wins success”. Next week, 58 Farmers stores across the country will announce the local charities they will raise funds for in their centenary celebration everything from guide dog services to hospices to volunteer fire brigades will benefit. Every dollar raised by the community will be matched by the company. “It’s like the rebirth of an icon,” says McDermott.

Questions 15-18

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information?

15. Innovation of offer made by the head of company.
16. Fashion was not its strong point.
17. A romantic event on the roof of farmers.
18. Farmers was sold to a private owned company.

Questions 19-23
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 19-23 on your answer sheet.

19. Farmers was first founded as a____________in Auckland by Mr. Laidlaw.
20. Farmers developed fast and bought one____________then.
21. During oversea expansion, Farmers set up____________in cities such as London.
22. Farmers held a______________once a year for the well-known parrot.
23. In the opinion of Lincoln Laidlaw, Farmers is like a ______for employees, not just for themselves but for the whole country.

Questions 24-26
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet. NB you may use any letter more than once

A Lincoln Laidlaw
B Rod McDermott
C Ian Hunter

24 Product became worse as wrong aspect focused.
25 An unprecedented statement made by Farmers in New Zealand.
26 Character of the company was changed.

John Franklin: “the discovery of the slowness”

A. John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out. he turned his attention to, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent. The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic was an arduous overland journey from Hudson Bay to the shores of the so-called Polar Ocean east of the Coppermine River. Between 1819 and 1822. Franklin and his twenty-strong team covered 5550 miles on foot. Their expedition was a triumph of surveying – they managed to chart hundreds of miles of previously unknown coastline.

B. There followed a career as a travel writer and salon-goer (the man who ate his boots’ was Franklin’s tag-line), a second long Arctic expedition, and a controversial spell as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Then, in May 1845, Franklin set off with two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and 129 men on the voyage that would kill him. In July, the convoy was seen by two whalers, entering Lancaster Sound. Nothing more would be heard of it for 14 years. Had the ships sunk or been iced in? Were the men dead, or in need of rescue? Or had they broken through to the legendary open polar sea, beyond the ‘ice barrier’?

C. In his personal correspondence and in his published memoirs. Franklin comes across as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with a defining character trait for which there is no historical evidence: (‘slowness’, or ‘calmness’).

D. Slowness influences not only Franklin’s behaviour, but also his vision, his thought and his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness (The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny) – depicts Franklin as a young boy. playing catch badly because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with ‘their way of doing things’. For Nadolny. Franklin’s fated fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment suited to his peculiar slowness.

E. He describes Fremklin as a boy dreaming of the ‘open water euid the time without hours and days’ which exist in the far north, and of finding in the Arctic a place ‘where nobody would find him too slow’. Ice is a slow mover. Ice demands a corresponding patience from those who venture onto it. The explorers who have thrived at high latitude and at high altitudes haven’t usually been men of great speed. They have tended instead to demonstrate unusual self-possession, a considerable capacity for boredom, and a talent for what the Scots call ‘tholing’, the uncomplaining endurance of suffering.

F. These were all qualities which the historical Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny’s concentration and exaggeration of them isn’t unreasonable. Even as an adult, his slowness of thought means that he is unable to speak fluently, so he memorises ‘entire fleets of words and batteries of response’, and speaks a languid, bric-a-brac language. In the Navy, his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way. and gradually earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up his report of an engagement, he replies: ‘When I tell something, sir. I use my own rhythm.’ A lieutenant says approvingly of him: ’Because Franklin is so slow, he never loses time.’

G. Since it was first published in Germany in 1983. The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 13 languages. It has been named as one of German literature’s twenty ‘contemporary classics’, and it has been as a manual and by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes as diverse as sustainable development, the Protestant Church, management science, motoring policy and pacifiam.

H. The various groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the high-speed culture of Postmodernity. Nadolny’s Franklin appeals to them because he is immune to ‘the compulsion to be constantly occupied’, and to the idea that ‘someone was better if he could do the same thing fast.’ Several German churches have used him in their and focus groups as an example of peacefulness, piety and self-confidence. A centre scheme (a ‘march of slowness’ or ‘of the slow’), inspired by the novel. Nadolny has appeared as a guest speaker for RIO. a Lucerne-based organisation which aims to reconcile management principles with ideas of environmental sustainability. The novel has even become involved in the debate about speed limits on German roads. Drive down an autobahn today, and you will see large road-side signs proclaiming ‘unhurriedness’ a slogan which deliberately plays off the title of the novel.

I. A management journal in the US described The Discovery of Slowness as a ‘major event not only for connoisseurs of fine historical fiction, but also for those of us who concern themselves with leadership, communication and systems-thinking, issues’. It’s easy to see where the attraction lies for the management crowd. The novel is crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctiliousness and profitability: ‘As a rule, there are always three points in time: the right one. the lost one and the premature one’. ‘What did too late mean? They hadn’t waited for it long enough, that’s what it meant.’

Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

27. What was Sir John Franklin’s occupation before he went on career of the arctic exploration?
28. A story John Franklin reacted strangely when he met bullies by other children.
29. Reason of popularity for the book The Discovery of Slowness
30. A depiction that Sten Nadolny’s biography on John Franklin is not much based on facts.
31. The particular career Sir John Franklin took after his expedition unmatched before.
32. What is the central scheme and environment conveyed by the book The Discovery of Slowness

Questions 33-36
Complete the Summary paragraph described below. In boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet, write the correct answer with one word chosen from the box below

In his personal correspondence to and in his published memoirs by Sten Nadolny, John Franklin was depicted as a man dedicated to the exploration, and the word of “slowness” was used to define his (33)………………..…….when Franklin was in his childhood, his determination to the (34)…………………..………of the schoolboys was too slow for him to fall into step. And Franklin was said to be a boy dreaming finding in a place he could enjoy the (35)………………………in the Arctic. Later in 20th, His biography of discovery of slowness has been adopted as a (36)………………………. as for the movement such as sustainable development, or management science, motoring policy.

A exploration
B blandness
C personality
D policy
E pressure
F guidebook
G management
H timelessness
I sports
J bully
K evidence

Questions 37-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

37. Why does the author mention “the ice is a slow in the geological arctic, to demonstrate the idea
A. of the difficulties Franklin conquered
B. that Franklin had a dream since his childhood
C. of fascination with the Arctic exploration
D. that explorer like Franklin should possess the quality of being patient

38. When Franklin was on board with sailors, how did he speak to his follow sailors
A. he spoke in a way mocking his followers
B. he spoke a bric-a-brac language to show his languish attitude
C. he spoke in the words and phrases he previously memorized
D. he spoke in a rhythmical tune to save chatting time

39. His effort to overcome his slowness in marine time life had finally won the
A. understanding of his personality better
B. capacity for coping with boredom
C. respect for him as he insisted to overcome his difficulties
D. valuable time he can use to finish a report

40. why is the book The Discovery of Slowness sold more than a million copies
A. it contains aspects of the life people would like to enjoy
B. it contains the information for the flag language applied in ships
C. it induces a debate about speed limits German
D. it contains the technique for symposia German churches

Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the soil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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