Author: theieltsbridge

Andrea Palladio: Italian Architect

Vicenza is a pleasant, prosperous city in the Veneto, 60 km west of Venice. Its grand families settled and farmed the area from the 16th century. But its principal claim to fame is Andrea Palladio, who is such an influential architect that a neoclassical style is known as Palladian. The city is a permanent exhibition of some of his finest buildings, and as he was born — in Padua, to be precise — 500 years ago, the International Centre for the Study of Palladio’s Architecture has an excellent excuse for mounting la grande mostra, the big show.

The exhibition has the special advantage of being held in one of Palladio’s buildings, Palazzo Barbaran da Porto. Its bold facade is a mixture of rustication and decoration set between two rows of elegant columns. On the second floor the pediments arc alternately curved or pointed, a Palladian trademark. The harmonious proportions of the atrium at the entrance lead through to a dramatic interior of fine fireplaces and painted ceilings. Palladio’s design is simple, clear and not over-crowded. The show has been organised on the same principles, according to Howard Bums, the architectural historian who co-curated it.

Palladio’s father was a miller who settled in Vicenza, where the young Andrea was apprenticed to a skilled stonemason. How did a humble miller’s son become a world renowned architect? The answer in the exhibition is that, as a young man, Palladio excelled at carving decorative stonework on columns, doorways and fireplaces. He was plainly intelligent, and lucky enough to come across a rich patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino, a landowner and scholar, who organised his education, taking him to Rome in the 1540s, where he studied the masterpieces of classical Roman and Greek architecture and the work of other influential architects of the time, such as Donato Bramante and Raphael.

Burns argues that social mobility was also important. Entrepreneurs, prosperous from agriculture in the Veneto, commissioned the promising local architect to design their country villas and their urban mansions. In Venice the aristocracy were anxious to co-opt talented artists, and Palladio was given the chance to design the buildings that have made him famous – the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, both easy to admire because the can be seen from the city’s historical centre across a stretch of water.

He tried his hand at bridges — his unbuilt version of the Rialto Bridge was decorated with the large pediment and columns of a temple — and, after a fire at the Ducal Palace, he offered an alternative design which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Banqueting House in Whitehall in London. Since it was designed by Inigo Jones, Palladio’s first foreign disciple, this is not as surprising as it sounds.

Jones, who visited Italy in 1614, bought a trunk full of the master’s architectural drawings; they passed through the hands of the Dukes of Burlington and Devonshire before settling at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1894. Many are now on display at Palazzo Barbaran. What they show is how Palladio drew on the buildings of ancient Rome as models. The major theme of both his rural and urban building was temple architecture, with a strong pointed pediment supported by columns and approached by wide steps.

Palladio s work for rich landowner alienates unreconstructed critics on the Italian left but among the papers in the show are designs for cheap housing in Venice. In the wider world, Palladio’s reputation has been nurtured by a text he wrote and illustrated, “Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura”. His influence spread to St Petersburg and to Charlottesville in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson commissioned a Palladian villa he called Monticello.

Vicenza’s show contains detailed models of the major buildings and is leavened by portraits of Palladio’s teachers and clients by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto; the paintings of his Venetia buildings are all by Canaletto, no less. This is an uncompromising exhibition; many of the drawings are small and faint, and there are no sideshows for children, but the impact of harmonious lines and satisfying proportions is to impart in a viewer a feeling of benevolent calm. Palladio is history’s most therapeutic architect.

“Palladio, 500 Anni: La Grande Mostra” is at Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, Vicenza, until January 6th 2009. The exhibition continues at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from January 31st to April 13th, and travels afterwards to Barcelona and Madrid.

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

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

1. The building where the exhibition is staged has been newly renovated.
2. Palazzo Barbaran da Porto typically represents the Palladio’s design.
3. Palladio’s father worked as an architect.
4. Palladio’s family refused to pay for his architectural studies.
5. Palladio’s alternative design for the Ducal Palace in Venice was based on an English building.
6. Palladio designed for both wealthy and poor people.
7. The exhibition includes paintings of people by famous artists.

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

8. What job was Palladio training for before he became an architect?
9. Who arranged Palladio’s architectural studies?
10. Who was the first non-Italian architect influenced by Palladio?
11. What type of Ancient Roman buildings most heavily influenced Palladio’s work?
12. What did Palladio write that strengthened his reputation?
13. In the writer’s opinion, what feeling will visitors to the exhibition experience?

Corporate Social Responsibility

Broadly speaking, proponents of CSR have used four arguments to make their case: moral obligation, sustainability, license to operate, and reputation. The moral appeal – arguing that companies have a duty to be good citizens and to “do the right thing” – is prominent in the goal of Business for Social Responsibility, the leading nonprofit CSR business association in the United States. It asks that its members “achieve commercial success in ways that honour ethical values and respect people, communities, and the natural environment. “Sustainability emphasises environmental and community stewardship.

A An excellent definition was developed in the 1980s by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlen Brundtland and used by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development: “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Nowadays, governments and companies need to account for the social consequences of their actions. As a result, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a priority for business leaders around the world. When a well-run business applies its vast resources and expertise to social problems that it understands and in which it has a stake, it can have a greater impact than any other organization. The notion of license to operate derives from the fact that every company needs tacit or explicit permission from governments, communities, and numerous other stakeholders to justify CSR initiatives to improve a company’s image, strengthen its brand, enliven morale and even raise the value of its stock.

B To advance CSR we must root it in a broad understanding of the interrelationship between a corporation and society. Successful corporations need a healthy society. Education, health care, and equal opportunity are essential lo a productive workforce. Safe products and working conditions not only attract customers but lower the internal costs of accidents. Efficient utilization of land, water, energy, and other natural resources makes business more productive. Good government, the rule of law, and property rights are essential for efficiency and innovation. Strong regulatory standards protect both consumers and competitive companies from exploitation. Ultimately, a healthy society creates expanding demand for business, as more human needs are met and aspirations grow. Any business that pursues its ends at the expense of the society in which it operates will find its success to be illusory and ultimately temporary. At the same time, a healthy society needs successful companies. No social program can rival the business sector when it comes lo creating the jobs, wealth, and innovation that improve standards of living and social conditions over time.

C A company’s impact on society also changes over time, as social standards evolve and science progresses. Asbestos, now understood as a serious health risk was thought to be safe in the early 1900s, given the scientific knowledge then available. Evidence of its risks gradually mounted for more than 50 years before any company was held liable for the harms it can cause. Many firms that failed to anticipated the consequences of this evolving body of research have been bankrupted by the results. No longer can companies be content to monitor only the obvious social impacts of today. Without a careful process for identifying evolving social effects of tomorrow, firms may risk their very survival.

D No business can solve all of society’s problems or bear the cost of doing so. Instead, each company must select issues that intersect with its particular business. Other social agendas are best left to those companies in other industries, NGOs, or government institutions that are better positioned to address them. The essential test that should guide CSR is not whether a cause is worthy but whether it presents an opportunity to create shared value – that is, a meaningful benefit for society that is also valuable to the business. Each company can identify the particular set of societal problems that it is best equipped to help resolve and from which it can gain the greatest competitive benefit.

E The best corporate citizenship initiatives involve far more than writing a check: They specify clear, measurable goals and track results over time. A good example is General Electronics’s program to adopt underperforming public high schools near several of its major U.S. facilities. The company contributes between $250,000 and $1 million over a five-year period to each school and makes in-kind donations as well. GE managers and employees take an active role by working with school administrators to assess needs and mentor or tutor students. In an independent study of Ion schools in the program between 1989 and 1999, nearly all showed significant improvement, while the graduation rate in four of the five worst performing schools doubled from an average of 30% to 60%. Effective corporate citizenship initiatives such as this one create goodwill and improve relations with local governments and other important constituencies. What’s more, GE’s employees feel great pride in their participation. Their effect is inherently limited, however. No matter how beneficial (he program is, it remains incidental to the company’s business, and the direct effect on GE’s recruiting and retention is modest.

F Microsoft’s Working Connections partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) is a good example of a shared-value opportunity arising from investments in context. The shortage of information technology workers is a significant constraint on Microsoft’s growth; currently, there are more than 450,000 unfilled IT positions in the United States alone. Community colleges, with an enrollment of 11.6 million students, representing 45% of all U.S. undergraduates, could be a major solution. Microsoft recognizes, however, that community colleges face special challenges: IT curricula are not standardized, technology used in classrooms is often outdated, and there are no systematic professional development programs to keep faculty up to date. Microsoft’s $50 million five-year initiative was aimed at all three problems. In addition to contributing money and products, Microsoft sent employee volunteers to colleges to assess needs, contribute to curriculum development, and create faculty development institutes. Microsoft has achieved results that have benefited many communities while having a direct-and potentially significant-impact on the company.

G At the heart of any strategy is a unique value proposition: a set of needs a company can meet for its chosen customers that others cannot. The most strategic CSR occurs when a company adds a social dimension to its value proposition, making social impact integral to the overall strategy. Consider Whole Foods Market, whose value proposition is to sell organic, natural, and healthy food products to customers who are passionate about food and the environment. The company’s sourcing emphasises purchases from local farmers through each store’s procurement process. Buyers screen out foods containing any of nearly 100 common ingredients that the company considers unhealthy or environmentally damaging. The same standards apply to products made internally. Whole Foods’ commitment to natural and environmentally friendly operating practices extends well beyond sourcing. Stores are constructed using a minimum of virgin raw materials. Recently, the company purchased renewable wind energy credits equal to 100% of its electricity use in all of its stores and facilities, the only Fortune 500 company to offset its electricity consumption entirely. Spoiled produce and biodegradable waste are trucked to regional centers for composting. Whole Foods’ vehicles are being converted to run on biofuels. Even the cleaning products used in its stores are environmentally friendly. And through its philanthropy, the company has created the Animal Compassion Foundation to develop more natural and humane ways of raising farm animals. In short, nearly every aspect of the company’s value chain reinforces the social dimensions of its value proposition, distinguishing Whole Foods from its competitors.

Questions 14-20
Reading passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A–G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of heading below.

List of Headings
i How CSR may help one business to expand
ii CSR in many aspects of a company’s business
iii A CSR initiative without a financial gain
iv Lack of action by the state of social issues
v Drives or pressures motivate companies to address CSR
vi The past illustrates business are responsible for future outcomes
vii Companies applying CSR should be selective
viii Reasons that business and society benefit each other

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

Questions 21-22
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage of each answer.

The implement of CSR, HOW?

Promotion of CSR requires the understanding of interdependence between business and society. Corporations workers’ productivity generally needs health care, education, and given (21)……………….Restrictions imposed by government and companies both protect consumers from being treated unfairly. Improvement of the safety standard can reduce the (22)………………………….of accidents in the workplace. Similarly society becomes a pool of more human needs and aspirations.

Questions 23-26
Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 23-26) and the list of companies below. Match each opinion or deed with the correct company, A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once

23. The disposable waste
24. The way company purchases as goods
25. Helping the undeveloped
26. Ensuring the people have the latest information

A General Electronics
B Microsoft
C Whole Foods Market

The Significant Role of Mother Tongue in Education

One consequence of population mobility is an increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not the usual language of communication. Schools in Europe and North America have experienced this diversity for years, and educational policies and practices vary widely between countries and even within countries. Some political parties and groups search for ways to solve the problem of diverse communities and their integration in schools and society. However, they see few positive consequences for the host society and worry that this diversity threatens the identity of the host society. Consequently, they promote unfortunate educational policies that will make the “problem” disappear. If students retain their culture and language, they are viewed as less capable of identifying with the mainstream culture and learning the mainstream language of the society.

The challenge for educator and policy-makers is to shape the evolution of national identity in such a way that rights of all citizens (including school children) are respected, and the cultural linguistic, and economic resources of the nation are maximised. To waste the resources of the nation by discouraging children from developing their mother tongues is quite simply unintelligent from the point of view of national self-interest. A first step in providing an appropriate education for culturally and linguistically diverse children is to examine what the existing research says about the role of children’s mother tongues in their educational development.

In fact, the research is very clear. When children continue to develop their abilities in two or more languages throughout their primary school, they gain a deeper understanding of language and how to use it effectively. They have more practice in processing language, especially when they develop literacy in both. More than 150 research studies conducted during the past 25 years strongly support what Goethe, the famous eighteenth-century German philosopher, once said: the person who knows only one language dose not truly know that language. Research suggests that bilingual children may also develop more flexibility in their thinking as a result of processing information through two different languages.

The level of development of children’s mother tongue is a strong predictor of their second language development. Children who come to school with a solid foundation in their mother tongue develop stronger literacy abilities in the school language. When parents and other caregivers (e.g. grandparents) are able to spend time with their children and tell stories or discuss issues with them in a way that develops their mother tongue, children come to school well-prepared to learn the school language and succeed educationally. Children’s knowledge and skills transfer across languages from the mother tongue to the school language. Transfer across languages can be two-way: both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children access to both languages.

Some educators and parents are suspicious of mother tongue-based teaching programs because they worry that they take time away from the majority language. For example, in a bilingual program when 50% of the time is spent teaching through children’s home language and 50% through the majority language, surely children won’t progress as far in the latter? One of the most strongly established findings of educational research, however, is that well-implemented bilingual programs can promote literacy and subject-matter knowledge in a minority language without any negative effects on children’s development in the majority language. Within Europe, the Foyer program in Belgium, which develops children’s speaking and literacy abilities in three languages (their mother tongue, Dutch and French), most clearly illustrates the benefits of bilingual and trilingual education (see Cummins, 2000).

It is easy to understand how this happens. When children are learning through a minority language, they are learning concepts and intellectual skills too. Pupils who know how to tell the time in their mother tongue understand the concept of telling time. In order to tell time in the majority language, they do not need to re-learn the concept. Similarly, at more advanced stages, there, is transfer across languages in other skills such as knowing how to distinguish the main idea from the supporting details of a written passage or story, and distinguishing fact from opinion. Studies of secondary school pupils are providing interesting findings in this area, and it would be worth extending this research.

Many people marvel at how quickly bilingual children seem to “pick up” conversational skills in the majority language at school (although it takes much longer for them to catch up with native speakers in academic language skills). However, educators are often much less aware of how quickly children can lose their ability to use their mother tongue, even in the home context. The extent and rapidity of language loss will vary according to the concentration of families from a particular linguistic group in the neighborhood. Where the mother tongue is used extensively in the community, then language loss among young children will be less. However, where language communities are not concentrated in particular neighborhoods, children can lose their ability to communicate in their mother tongue within 2-3 years of starting school. They may retain receptive skills in the language but they will use the majority language, in speaking with their peers and siblings and in responding to their parents. By the time children become adolescents, the linguistic division between parents and children has become an emotional chasm. Pupils frequently become alienated from the cultures of both home and school with predictable results.

Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

27. What point did the writer make in the second paragraph?
A Some present studies on children’s mother tongues are misleading/
B A culturally rich education programme benefits some children more than others.
C Bilingual children can make a valuable contribution to the wealth of a country.
D The law on mother tongue use at school should be strengthened

28. Why does the writer refer to something that Goethe said?
A to lend weight to his argument
B to contradict some research
C to introduce a new concept
D to update current thinking

29. The writer believes that when young children have a firm grasp of their mother tongue
A they can teach older family members what they learnt at school
B they go on to do much better throughout their time at school.
C they can read stories about their cultural background.
b they develop stronger relationships with their family than with their peers

30. Why are some people suspicious about mother tongue-based teaching programmes?
A They worry that children will be slow to learn to read in either language.
B They think that children will confuse words in the two languages.
C They believe that the programmes will make children less interested in their lessons.
D They fear that the programmes will use up valuable time in the school day.

Questions 31-35
Complete the summary using the list of word, A-J, below

Bilingual Children

It was often recorded that bilingual children acquire the (31)…………………to converse in the majority language remarkable quickly. The fact that the mother tongue can disappear at a similar (32)……………..is less well understood. This phenomenon depends, to a certain extent, on the proposition of people with the same linguistic background that have settled in a particular (33)………………If this is limited, children are likely to lose the active use of their mother tongue. And thus no longer employ it even with (34)………………….., although they may still understand it. It follows that teenager children in these circumstances experience a sense of (35)………………….in relation to all aspects of their lives.

A teachers
B schools
C dislocation
D rate
E time
F family
G communication
H type
I ability
J area

Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write

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

36. Less than half of the children who attend kindergarten in Toronto have English as their mother tongue.
37. Research proves that learning the host country language at school can have an adverse effect on a child’s mother tongue.
38. The Foyer program is accepted by the French education system.
39. Bilingual children are taught to tell the time earlier than monolingual children.
40. Bilingual children can apply reading comprehension strategies acquired in one language when reading in the other.

Ancient Chinese Chariots

A The Shang Dynasty or Yin Dynasty, according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium. Archaeological work at the Ruins of Yin (near modern-day Anyang), which has been identified as the last Shang capital, uncovered eleven major Yin royal tombs and the foundations of palaces and ritual sites, containing weapons of war and remains from both animal and human sacrifices.

B The Tomb of Fu Hao is an archaeological site at Yinxu, the ruins of the ancient Shang Dynasty capital Yin, within the modem city of Anyang in Henan Province, China. Discovered in 1976，it was identified as the final resting place of the queen and military general Fu Hao. The artifacts unearthed within the grave included jade objects, bone objects, bronze objects etc. These grave goods are confirmed by the oracle texts, which constitute almost all of the first hand written record we possess of the Shang Dynasty. Below the corpse was a small pit holding the remains of six sacrificial dogs and along the edge lay the skeletons of human slaves, evidence of human sacrifice.

C The Terracotta Army was discovered on 29 March 1974 to the east of Xian in Shaanxi. The terracotta soldiers were accidentally discovered when a group of local farmers was digging a well during a drought around 1.6 km (1 mile) east of the Qin Emperors tomb around at Mount Li (Lishan), a region riddled with underground springs and watercourses. Experts currently place the entire number of soldiers at 8,000 — with 130 chariots (130 cm long), 530 horses and 150 cavalry horses helping to ward of any dangers in the afterlife. In contrast, the burial of Tutank Hamun yielded six complete but dismantled chariots of unparalleled richness and sophistication. Each was designed for two people (90 cm long) and had its axle sawn through to enable it to be brought along the narrow corridor into the tomb.

D Excavation of ancient Chinese chariots has confirmed the descriptions of them in the earliest texts. Wheels were constructed from a variety of woods: elm provided the hub, rose-wood the spokes and oak the felloes. The hub was drilled through to form an empty space into which the tampering axle was fitted, the whole being covered with leather to retain lubricating oil. Though the number of spokes varied, a wheel by the fourth century BC usually had eighteen to thirty-two of them. Records show how elaborate was the testing of each completed wheel: flotation and weighing were regarded as the best measures of balance, but even the empty spaces in the assembly were checked with millet grains. One outstanding constructional asset of the ancient Chinese wheel was dishing. Dishing refers to the dish-like shape of an advanced wooden wheel, which looks rather like a flat cone. On occasion they chose to strengthen a dished wheel with a pair of struts running from rim to rim on each of the hub. As these extra supports were inserted separately into the felloes, they would have added even greater strength to the wheel. Leather wrapped up the edge of the wheel aimed to retain bronze.

E Within a millennium, however, Chinese chariot-makers had developed a vehicle with shafts, the precursor of the true carriage or cart. This design did not make its appearance in Europe until the end of the Roman Empire. Because the shafts curved upwards, and the harness pressed against a horse’s shoulders, not his neck, the shaft chariot was incredibly efficient. The halberd was also part of chariot standard weaponry. This halberd usually measured well over 3 metres in length, which meant that a chariot warrior wielding it sideways could strike down the charioteer in a passing chariot. The speed of chariot which was tested on the sand was quite fast. At speed these passes were very dangerous for the crews of both chariots.

F The advantages offered by the new chariots were not entirely missed. They could see how there were literally the warring states, whose conflicts lasted down the Qin unification of China. Qin Shi Huang was buried in the most opulent tomb complex ever constructed in China, a sprawling, city-size collection of underground caverns containing everything the emperor would need for the afterlife. Even a collection of terracotta armies called Terra- Cotta Warriors was buried in it. The ancient Chinese, along with many cultures including ancient Egyptians, believed that items and even people buried with a person could be taken with him to the afterlife.

Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-4 on you answer sheet, write

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

1. When discovered, the written records of the grave goods proved to be accurate.
2. Human skeletons in Anyang tomb were identified as soldiers who were killed in the war.
3. The Terracotta Army was discovered by people lived who lived nearby, by chance.
4. The size of the King Tutankhamen’s tomb is bigger than that of in Qin Emperors’ tomb.

Questions 5-10
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

The hub is made of wood from the tree of (5)……………………

The room through the hub was to put tempering axle in which is wrapped up by leather aiming to retain (6)………………….

The number of spokes varied from 18 to (7)…………………….

The shape of wheel resembles a (8)………………………

Two (9)…………………………..was used to strengthen the wheel

Leather wrapped up the edge of the wheel aimed to remain (10)……………………

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

11. What body part of horse was released the pressure from to the shoulder?
12. What kind road surface did the researchers measure the speed of the chariot?
13. What part of his afterlife palace was the Emperor Qin Shi Huang buried in?

Saving the British Bitterns

A Breeding bitterns became extinct in the UK by 1886 but, following re-colonisation early last century, numbers rose to a peak of about 70 booming (singing) males in the 1950s, falling to fewer than 20 by the 1990s. In the late 1980s it was clear that the bittern was in trouble, but there was little information on which to base recovery actions.

B Bitterns have cryptic plumage and a shy nature, usually remaining hidden within the cover of reed bed vegetation. Our first challenge was to develop standard methods to monitor their numbers. The boom of the male bittern is its most distinctive feature during the breeding season, and we developed a method to count them using the sound patterns unique to each individual. This not only allows us to be much more certain of the number of booming males in the UK, but also enables us to estimate local survival of males from one year to the next

C Our first direct understanding of the habitat needs of breeding bitterns came from comparisons of reed bed sites that had lost their booming birds with those that retained them. This research showed that bitterns had been retained in reed beds where the natural process of succession, or drying out, had been slowed through management. Based on this work, broad recommendations on how to manage and rehabilitate reed beds for bitterns were made, and funding was provided through the EU LIFE Fund to manage 13 sites within the core breeding range. This project, though led by the RSPB, involved many other organisations.

D To refine these recommendations and provide fine-scale, quantitative habitat prescriptions on the bitterns preferred feeding habitat, we radio-tracked male bitterns on the RSPB’s Minsmere and Leighton Moss reserves. This showed clear preferences for feeding in the wetter reed bed margins, particularly within the reed bed next to larger open pools. The average home range sizes of the male bitterns we followed (about 20 hectares) provided a good indication of the area of reed bed needed when managing or creating habitat for this species. Female bitterns undertake all the incubation and care of the young, so it was important to understand their needs as well. Over the course of our research, we located 87 bittern nests and found that female bitterns preferred to nest in areas of continuous vegetation, well into the reed bed, but where water was still present during the driest part of the breeding season.

E The success of the habitat prescriptions developed from this research has been spectacular. For instance, at Minsmere, booming bittern numbers gradually increased from one to 10 following reed bed lowering, a management technique designed to halt the drying out process. After a low point of 11 booming males in 1997, bittern numbers in Britain responded to all the habitat management work and started to increase for the first time since the 1950s.

F The final phase of research involved understanding the diet, survival and dispersal of bittern chicks. To do this we fitted small radio tags to young bittern chicks in the nest, to determine their fate through to fledging and beyond. Many chicks did not survive to fledging and starvation was found to be the most likely reason for their demise. The fish prey fed to chicks was dominated by those species penetrating into the reed edge. So, an important element of recent studies (including a PhD with the University of Hull) has been the development of recommendations on habitat and water conditions to promote healthy native fish populations

G Once independent, radio-tagged young bitterns were found to seek out new sites during their first winter; a proportion of these would remain on new sites to breed if the conditions were suitable. A second EU LIFE funded project aims to provide these suitable sites in new areas. A network of 19 sites developed through this partnership project will secure a more sustainable UK bittern population with successful breeding outside of the core area, less vulnerable to chance events and sea level rise.

H By 2004, the number of booming male bitterns in the UK had increased to 55, with almost all of the increase being on those sites undertaking management based on advice derived from our research. Although science has been at the core of the bittern story, success has only been achieved through the trust, hard work and dedication of all the managers, owners and wardens of sites that have implemented, in some cases very drastic, management to secure the future of this wetland species in the UK. The constructed bunds and five major sluices now control the water level over 82 ha, with a further 50 ha coming under control in the winter of 2005/06. Reed establishment has principally used natural regeneration or planted seedlings to provide small core areas that will in time expand to create a bigger reed area. To date nearly 275,000 seedlings have been planted and reed cover is extensive. Over 3 km of new ditches have been formed, 3.7 km of existing ditch have been re-profiled and 2.2 km of old meander (former estuarine features) has been cleaned out.

I Bitterns now regularly winter on the site some indication that they are staying longer into the spring. No breeding has yet occurred but a booming male was present in the spring of 2004. A range of wildfowl breed, as well as a good number of reed bed passerines including reed bunting, reed, sedge and grasshopper warblers. Numbers of wintering shoveler have increased so that the site now holds a UK important wintering population. Malltraeth Reserve now forms part of the UK network of key sites for water vole (a UK priority species) and 12 monitoring transects has been established. Otter and brown-hare occur on the site as does the rare plant. Pillwort.

Questions 14-20
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-H. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list below.

List of Headings
i research findings into habitats and decisions made
ii fluctuation in bittern number
iii protect the young bittern
iv international cooperation works
v Began in calculation of the number
vi importance of food
vii Research has been successful.
viii research into the reedbed
ix reserve established holding bittern in winter

14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph F
19. Paragraph G
20. Paragraph H

Questions 21-26
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

21. When did the birth of bitten reach its peak of number?
22. What does the author describe the bittern’s character?
23. What is the main cause for the chick bittern’s death?
24. What is the main food for chick bittern?
25. What system does it secure the stability for bittern’s population?
26. Besides bittern and rare vegetation, what mammals does the plan benefit?

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

27. What is the main purpose of this passage?
A Main characteristic of a bird called bittern.
B Cooperation can protect an endangered species.
C The difficulty of access information of bittern’s habitat and diet.
D To save wetland and reedbed in UK.

E-training

A E-learning is the unifying term to describe the fields of online learning, web-based training, and technology-delivered instruction, which can be a great benefit to corporate e-learning. IBM, for instance, claims that the institution of its e-training program, Basic Blue, whose purpose is to train new managers, saved the company in the range of $200 million in 1999. Cutting the travel expenses required to bring employees and instructors to a central classroom accounts for the lion’s share of the savings. With an online course, employees can learn from any Internet-connected PC, anywhere in the world. Ernst and Young reduced training costs by 35 percent while improving consistency and scalability.

B In addition to generally positive economic benefits, other advantages such as convenience, standardized delivery, self-paced learning, and variety of available content have made e-learning a high priority for many corporations. E-learning is widely believed to offer flexible “any time, any place” learning. The claim for “any place” is valid in principle and is a great development. Many people can engage with rich learning materials that simply were not possible in a paper or broadcast distance learning era. For teaching specific information and skills, e-training holds great promise. It can be especially effective at helping employees prepare for IT certification programs. E-learning also seems to effectively address topics such as sexual harassment education,5 safety training and management training — all areas where a clear set of objectives can be identified. Ultimately, training experts recommend a “blended” approach that combines both online and in-person training as the instruction requires. E-learning is not an end-all solution. But if it helps decrease costs and windowless classrooms filled with snoring students, it definitely has its advantages.

C Much of the discussion about implementing e-learning has focused on the technology, but as Driscoll and others have reminded us, e-learning is not just about the technology, but also many human factors. As any capable manager knows, teaching employees new skills is critical to a smoothly run business. Having said that, however, the traditional route of classroom instruction runs the risk of being expensive, slow and, often times, ineffective. Perhaps the classroom’s greatest disadvantage is the fact that it takes employees out of their jobs. Every minute an employee is sitting in a classroom training session is a minute they’re not out on the floor working. It now looks as if there is a way to circumvent these traditional training drawbacks. E-training promises more effective teaching techniques by integrating audio, video, animation, text and interactive materials with the intent of teaching each student at his or her own pace. In addition to higher performance results, there are other immediate benefits to students such as increased time on task, higher levels of motivation, and reduced test anxiety for many learners. A California State University Northridge study reported that e-learners performed 20 percent better than traditional learners. Nelson reported a significant difference between the mean grades of 406 university students earned in traditional and distance education classes, where the distance learners outperformed the traditional learners.

D On the other hand, nobody said E-training technology would be cheap. E-training service providers, on the average, charge from $10,000 to $60,000 to develop one hour of online instruction. This price varies depending on the complexity of the training topic and the media used. HTML pages are a little cheaper to develop while streaming-video (presentations or flash animations cost more. Course content is just the starting place for cost. A complete e-learning solution also includes the technology platform (the computers, applications and network connections that are used to deliver the courses). This technology platform, known as a learning management system (LMS), can either be installed on site or outsourced. Add to that cost the necessary investments in network bandwidth to deliver multimedia courses, and you’re left holding one heck of a bill. For the LMS infrastructure and a dozen or so online courses, costs can top $500,000 in the first year. These kinds of costs mean that custom e-training is, for the time being, an option only for large organizations. For those companies that have a large enough staff, the e-training concept pays for itself. Aware of this fact, large companies are investing heavily in online training. Today, over half of the 400-plus courses that Rockwell Collins offers are delivered instantly to its clients in an e-learning format, a change that has reduced its annual (training costs by 40%. Many other success stories exist.

E E-learning isn’t expected to replace the classroom entirely. For one thing, bandwidth limitations are still an issue in presenting multimedia over the Internet. Furthermore, e-training isn,t suited to every mode of instruction or topic. For instance, it’s rather ineffective imparting cultural values or building teams. If your company has a unique corporate culture it would be difficult to convey that to first time employees through a computer monitor. Group training sessions are more ideal for these purposes. In addition, there is a perceived loss of research time because of the work involved in developing and teaching online classes. Professor Wallin estimated that it required between 500 and 1,000 person-hours, that is, Wallin-hours, to keep the course at the appropriate level of currency and usefulness. (Distance learning instructors often need technical skills, no matter how advanced the courseware system.) That amounts to between a quarter and half of a person-year. Finally, teaching materials require computer literacy and access to equipment. Any e-Learning system involves basic equipment and a minimum level of computer knowledge in order to perform the tasks required by the system. A student that does not possess these skills, or have access to these tools, cannot succeed in an e-Learning program.

F While few people debate the obvious advantages of e-learning, systematic research is needed to confirm that learners are actually acquiring and using the skills that are being taught online, and that e-learning is the best way to achieve the outcomes in a corporate environment. Nowadays, a go-between style of the Blended learning, which refers to a mixing of different learning environments, is gaining popularity. It combines traditional face-to-face classroom methods with more modem computer-mediated activities. According to its proponents, the strategy creates a more integrated approach for both instructors and learners. Formerly, technology-based materials played a supporting role to face-to-face instruction. Through a blended learning approach, technology will be more important.

Questions 28-33
The reading passage has seven paragraph，A-F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list below.

List of Headings
i overview of the benefits for the application of E-training
ii IBM’s successful choice of training
iii Future direction and a new style of teaching
iv learners achievement and advanced teaching materials
v limitations when E-training compares with traditional class
vi multimedia over the Internet can be a solution
vii technology can be a huge financial burden
viii the distance learners outperformed the traditional university learners in worldwide
ix other advantages besides economic consideration
x Training offered to help people learn using computer

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

Questions 34-37
The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information?

34. Projected Basic Blue in IBM achieved a great success.
35. E-learning wins as a priority for many corporations as its flexibility.
36. The combination of the traditional and e-training environments may prevail.
37. Example of a fast electronic delivery for a company’s products to its customers.

Questions 38-40
Choose THREE correct letters, among A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

Which according to the passage are true?
A Technical facilities are hardly obtained
B Presenting multimedia over the internet is restricted due to the bandwidth limit
C It is ineffective impairing a unique corporate value to fresh employees
D Employees need block a long time leaving their positing attending training
E More presentation time is needed to keep the course at the suitable level

History of Refrigeration

Refrigeration is a process of removing heat, which means cooling an area or a substance below the environmental temperature. Mechanical refrigeration makes use of (he evaporation of a liquid refrigerant, which goes through a cycle so that it can be reused. The main cycles include vapour-compression, absorption steam-jet or steam-ejector, and airing. The term ‘refrigerator’ was first introduced by a Maryland farmer Thomas Moore in 1803, but it is in the 20th century that the appliance we know today first appeared

People used to find various ways to preserve their food before the advent of mechanical refrigeration systems. Some preferred using cooling systems of ice or snow, which meant that diets would have consisted of very little fresh food or fruits and vegetables, but mostly of bread, cheese and salted meals. For milk and cheeses, it was very difficult to keep them fresh, so such foods were usually stored in a cellar or window box. In spite of those measures, they could not survive rapid spoilage. Later on, people discovered that adding such chemical as sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate to water could lead to a lower temperature. In 1550 when this technique was first recorded, people used it to cool wine, as was the term ‘to refrigerate’. Cooling drinks grew very popular in Europe by 1600, particularly in Spain, France, and Italy. Instead of cooling water at night, people used a new technique: rotating long-necked bottles of water which held dissolved saltpeter. The solution was intended to create very low temperatures and even to make ice. By the end of the 17th century, iced drink including frozen juices and liquors tad become extremely fashionable in France.

People’s demand for ice soon became strong. Consumers’ soaring requirement for fresh food, especially for green vegetables, resulted in reform in people’s dieting habits between 1830 and the American Civil War, accelerated by a drastic expansion of the urban areas arid the rapid amelioration in an economy of the populace. With the growth of the cities and towns, he distance between the consumer and the source of food was enlarged. In 1799s as a commercial product, ice was first transported out of Canal Street in New York City to Charleston, South Carolina. Unfortunately, this transportation was not successful because when the ship reached the destination, little ice left. Frederick Tudor and Nathaniel Wyeth, two New England’ businessmen, grasped the great potential opportunities for ice business and managed to improve the storage method of ice in the process of shipment. The acknowledged ‘Ice King’ in that time, Tudor concentrated his efforts on bringing he ice to the tropica1 areas. In order to achieve his goal and guarantee the ice to arrive at the destination safely he tried many insulating materials in an experiment and successfully constructed the ice containers, which reduce the ice loss from 66 per cent to less than 8 per cent at drastically. Wyeth invented an economical and speedy method to cut the ice into uniform blocks, which had a tremendous positive influence on the ice industry. Also, he improved the processing techniques for storing, transporting and distributing ice with less waste.

When people realised that the ice transported from the distance was not as clean as previously thought and gradually caused many health problems, it was more demanding to seek the clean natural sources of ice. To make it worse, by the 1890s water pollution and sewage dumping made clean ice even more unavailable. The adverse effect first appeared in the blowing industry, and then seriously spread to such sectors as meat packing and dairy industries. As a result, the clean, mechanical refrigeration was considerately in need.

Many inventors with creative ideas took part in the process of inventing refrigeration, and each version was built on the previous discoveries. Dr William Cullen initiated to study the evaporation of liquid under the vacuum conditions in 1720. He soon invented the first man-made refrigerator at the University of Glasgow in 1748 with the employment of ethyl ether boiling into a partial vacuum. American inventor Oliver Evans designed the refrigerator firstly using vapour rather than liquid in 1805. Although his conception was not put into practice in the end the mechanism was adopted by an American physician John Gorrie, who made one cooling machine similar to Evans’ in 1842 with the purpose of reducing the temperature of the patient with yellow fever in a Florida hospital. Until 1851, Evans obtained the first patent for mechanical refrigeration in the USA. In 1820, Michael Faraday, a Londoner, first liquefied ammonia to cause cooling. In 1859, Ferdinand Carre from France invented the first version of the ammonia water cooling machine. In 1873, Carl von Linde designed the first practical and portable compressor refrigerator in Munich, and in 1876 he abandoned the methyl ether system and began using ammonia cycle. Linde later created a new method (‘Linde technique’) for liquefying large amounts of air in 1894. Nearly a decade later, this mechanical refrigerating method was adopted subsequently by the meat packing industry in Chicago.

Since 1840, cars with the refrigerating system had been utilised to deliver and distribute milk and butter. Until 1860, most seafood and dairy products were transported with cold-chain logistics. In 1867, refrigerated, railroad cars are patented to J.B, Sutherland from Detroit, Michigan, who invented insulated cars by installing the ice bunkers at the end of the cars: air came in from the top, passed through the bunkers, circulated through the cars by gravity and controlled by different quantities of hanging flaps which caused different air temperatures. Depending on the cargo (such as meat, fruits etc.) transported by the cars, different car designs came into existence. In 1867, the first refrigerated car to carry fresh fruit was manufactured by Parker Earle of Illinois, who shipped strawberries on the Illinois Central Railroad. Each chest was freighted with 100 pounds of ice and 200 quarts of strawberries. Until 1949, the trucking industry began to be equipped with the refrigeration system with a roof-mounted cooling device, invented by Fred Jones.

From the late 1800s to 1929, the refrigerators employed toxic gases – methyl chloride, ammonia, and sulfur dioxide – as refrigerants. But in the 1920s, a great number of lethal accidents took place due to the leakage of methyl chloride out of refrigerators. Therefore, some American companies started to seek some secure methods of refrigeration. Frigidaire detected a new class of synthetic, refrigerants called halocarbons or CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in 1928. this research led to the discovery of chlorofluorocarbons (Freon), which quickly became the prevailing material in compressor refrigerators. Freon was safer for the people in the vicinity, but in 1973 it was discovered to have detrimental effects on the ozone layer. After that, new improvements were made, and Hydrofluorocarbons, with no known harmful effects, was used in the cooling system. Simultaneously, nowadays, Chlorofluorocarbons (CFS) are no longer used; they are announced illegal in several places, making the refrigeration far safer than before.

Questions 1-5
Look at the following events (Questions 1-5) and the list of dates below. Match each event with the correct date, A-F.

List of Dates
A 1550
B 1799
C 1803
D 1840
E 1949
F 1973

1. Vehicles with refrigerator were used to transport on the road.
2. Ice was sold around the United States for the first time.
3. Some kind of chemical refrigerant was found harmful to the atmosphere.
4. The term ‘refrigerator’ was firstly introduced.
5. Some chemicals were added to refrigerate wine.

Questions 6-10
Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 6-10) and the list of people below. Match each opinion or deed with the correct person, A-G.

List of People
A Thomas Moore
B Frederick Tudor
C Carl Von Linde
D Nathaniel Wyeth
E J.B. Sutherland
F Fred Jones
G Parker Earle

6. patented the idea that refrigerating system can be installed on tramcars
7. invented an ice-cutting technical method that could save money and time
8. enabled the cold storage technology to be applied in fruit
9. invented a cooling device applied into the trucking industry
10. created a new technique to liquefy the air

Questions 11-14
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.

A new developments, such as the application of Hydrofluorocarbons.
B consumers ’ demand for fresh food, especially for vegetables.
C the discovery of chlorofluorocarbons (Freon).
D regional transportation system for refrigeration for a long distance.
E extensive spread of the refrigeration method.

11. A healthy dietary change between 1830 and the American Civil War was greatly associated with
12. The development of urbanisation was likely to cause
13. Problems due to water treatment contributed to
14. The risk of the environmental devastation from the refrigeration led to

Ancient People in Sahara

On Oct. 13, 2000, Paul Sereno, a professor from the University of Chicago, guided a team of palaeontologists to climb out of three broken Land Rovers, contented their water bottles and walked across the toffee-coloured desert called Tenere Desert. Tenere, one of the most barren areas on the Earth, is located on the southern flank of Sahara. According to the turbaned nomads Tuareg who have ruled this infertile domain for a few centuries, this California-size ocean of sand and rock is a ‘desert within a desert’. In the Tenere Desert, massive dunes might stretch a hundred miles, as far as the eyes can reach. In addition, 120-degree heat waves and inexorable winds can take almost all the water from a human body in less than a day.

Mike Hettwer, a photographer in the team, was attracted by the amazing scenes and walked to several dunes to take photos of the amazing landscape. When reaching the first slope of the dune, he was shocked by the fact that the dunes were scattered with many bones. He photographed these bones with his digital camera and went to the Land Rover in a hurry. ‘I found some bones,’ Hettwer said to other group members, ‘to my great surprise, they do not belong to the dinosaurs. They are human bones.’

One day in the spring of 2005, Paul Sereno got in touch with Elena Garcea, a prestigious archaeologist at the University of Cassino in Italy, asking her to return to the site with him together. After spending 30 years in researching the history of Nile in Sudan and of the mountains in the Libyan Desert, Garcea got well acquainted with the life of the ancient people in Sahara. But she did not know Sereno before this exploration, whose claim of having found so many skeletons in Tenere desert was unreliable to some archaeologists, among whom one person considered Sereno just as a ‘moonlighting palaeontologist’. However, Garcea was so obsessive with his perspective as to accept his invitation willingly.

In the following three weeks, Sereno and Garcea (along with five excavators, five Tuareg guides, and five soldiers from Niger’s army) sketched a detailed map of the destined site, which was dubbed Gobero after the Tuareg name for the area, a place the ancient Kiffian and Tuareg nomads used to roam. After that, they excavated eight tombs and found twenty pieces of artefacts for the above mentioned two civilisations. From these artefacts, it is evidently seen that Kiffian fishermen caught not only the small fish, but also some huge ones: the remains of Nile perch, a fierce fish weighing about 300 pounds, along with those of the alligators and hippos, were left in the vicinity of dunes.

Sereno went back with some essential bones and artefacts, and planned for the next trip to the Sahara area. Meanwhile, he pulled out the teeth of skeletons carefully and sent them to a researching laboratory for radiocarbon dating. The results indicated that while the smaller ‘sleeping’ bones might date back to 6,000 years ago (well within the Tenerian period), the bigger compactly tied artefacts were approximately 9,000 years old, just in the heyday of Kiffian era. The scientists now can distinguish one culture from the other.

In the fall of 2006, for the purpose of exhuming another 80 burials, these people had another trip to Gobero, taking more crew members and six extra scientists specialising in different areas. Even at the site, Chris Stojanowski, bio-archaeologist in Arizona State University, found some clues by matching the pieces. Judged from the bones, the Kiffian could be a people of peace and hardworking. ‘No injuries in heads or forearms indicate that they did not fight too much,’ he said. ‘And they had strong bodies.’ He pointed at a long narrow femur and continued, ‘From this muscle attachment, we could infer the huge leg muscles, which means this individual lived a strenuous lifestyle and ate much protein. Both of these two inferences coincide with the lifestyle of the people living on fishing.’ To create a striking contrast, he displayed a femur of a Tenerian male. This ridge was scarcely seen. ‘This individual had a less laborious lifestyle, which you might expect of the herder.’

Stojanowski concluded that the Tenerian were herders, which was consistent with the other scholars’ dominant view of the lifestyle in Sahara area 6,000 years ago, when the dry climate favoured herding rather than hunting. But Sereno proposed some confusing points: if the Tenerian was herders, where were the herds? Despite thousands of animal bones excavated in Gobero, only three cow skeletons were found, and none of goats or sheep found. ‘It is common for the herding people not to kill the cattle, particularly in a cemetery.’ Elena Garcea remarked, ‘Even the modem pastoralists such as Niger’s Wodaabe are reluctant to slaughter the animals in their herd.’ Sereno suggested, ‘Perhaps the Tenerian in Gobero were a transitional group that had still relied greatly on hunting and fishing and not adopted herding completely.’

Questions 15-18
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 15-18 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

15. The pictures of rock engravings found in. Green Sahara is similar to those in other places.
16. Tenere Desert was quite a fertile area in Sahara Desert.
17. Hettwer found human remains in the desert by chance.
18. Sereno and Garcea have cooperated in some archaeological activities before studying ancient Sahara people.

Questions 19-21
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

19. What did Sereno and Garcea produce in the initial weeks before digging work?
20. What did Sereno send to the research centre?
21. How old were the bigger tightly bundled burials having been identified estimated to be?

Questions 22-27
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

A comparative study of two ancient cultures
the Kiffian
—They seemed to be peaceful and industrious since the reseacher did not find (22)……………………on their heads and forearms.

—Their lifestyle was (23)………………………

—Through the observation on the huge leg muscles, it could be inferred that their diet had plenty of (24)………………

the Tenerian
—Stojanowski presumed that the Tenerian preferred herding to (25)……………………….

—But only the bones of individual animals such as (26)……………………..were found.

—Sereno supposed the Tenerian in Gobero lived in a (27)………………………group at that time

Texting the Television

A Once upon a time, if a television show with any self-respect wanted to target a young audience, it needed to have an e-mail address. However, in Europe’s TV shows, such addresses are gradually substituted by telephone numbers so that audiences can text the show from their mobile phones. Therefore, it comes as no shock that according to Gartner’s research, texting has recently surpassed Internet usage across Europe. Besides, among the many uses of text messaging, one of the fastest-growing uses is to interact with television. The statistics provided by Gartner can display that 20% of French teenagers, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have responded to TV programmes by sending a text message.

B This phenomenon can be largely attributed to the rapid growth of reality TV shows such as ‘Big Brother’, where viewers get to decide the result through voting. The majority of reality shows are now open to text-message voting, and in some shows like the latest series of Norway’s ‘Big Brother’, most votes are collected in this manner. But TV-texting isn’t just about voting. News shows encourage viewers to, comment by texting messages; game shows enable the audience to be part of the competition; music shows answer requests by taking text messages; and broadcasters set up on-screen chatrooms. TV audiences tend to sit on the sofa with their mobile phones right by their sides, and ‘it’s a supernatural way to interact.’ says Adam Daum of Gartner.

C Mobile service providers charge appreciable rates for messages to certain numbers, which is why TV-texting can bring in a lot of cash. Take the latest British series of ‘Big Brother’ as an example. It brought about 5.4m text-message votes and £1.35m ($2,1m) of profit. In Germany, MTV’s ‘Videoclash’ encourages the audience to vote for one of two rival videos, and induces up to 40,000 texts per hour, and each one of those texts costs €0.30 ($0.29), according to a consultancy based in Amsterdam. The Belgian quiz show ‘1 Against 100’ had an eight-round texting match on the side, which brought in 110,000 participants in one month, and each of them paid €0.50 for each question. In Spain, a cryptic-crossword clue invites the audience to send their answers through text at the expense of €1, so that they can be enrolled in the poll to win a €300 prize. Normally, 6,000 viewers would participate within one day.

At the moment, TV-related text messaging takes up a considerable proportion of mobile service providers’ data revenues. In July, Mm02 (a British operator) reported an unexpectedly satisfactory result, which could be attributed to the massive text waves created by ‘Big Brother’. Providers usually own 40%-50% of the profits from each text, and the rest is divided among the broadcaster, the programme producer and the company which supplies the message-processing technology. So far, revenues generated from text messages have been an indispensable part of the business model for various shows. Obviously, there has been grumbling that the providers take too much of the share. Endemol, the Netherlands-based production firm that is responsible for many reality TV, shows including ‘Big Brother’, has begun constructing its own database for mobile-phone users. It plans to set up a direct billing system with the users and bypass the providers.

D How come the joining forces of television and text message turn out to be this successful? One crucial aspect is the emergence of one-of-a-kind four-, five- or six-digit numbers known as ‘short codes’. Every provider has control over its own short codes, but not until recently have they come to realise that it would make much more sense to work together to offer short codes compatible with all networks. The emergence of this universal short codes was a game-changer, because short codes are much easier to remember on the screen, according to Lars Becker of Flytxt, a mobile-marketing company.

E Operators’ co-operation on enlarging the market is by a larger trend, observes Katrina Bond of Analysys, a consultancy. When challenged by the dilemma between holding on tight to their margins and permitting the emergence of a new medium, no provider has ever chosen the latter WAP, a technology for mobile-phone users to read cut-down web pages on their screens, failed because of service providers’ reluctance towards revenue sharing with content providers. Now that they’ve learnt their lesson, they are altering the way of operating. Orange, a French operator, has come such a long way as to launch a rate card for sharing revenue of text messages, a new level of transparency that used to be unimaginable.

F At a recent conference, Han Weegink of CMG, a company that offers the television market text-message infrastructure, pointed out that the television industry is changing in a subtle yet fundamental way. Instead of the traditional one-way presentation, more and more TV shows are now getting viewers’ reactions involved.

Certainly, engaging the audiences more has always been the promise of interactive TV. An interactive TV was originally designed to work with exquisite set-top devices, which could be directly plugged into the TV. However, as Mr Daum points out, that method was flawed in many ways. Developing and testing software for multiple and incompatible types of set-top box could be costly, not to mention that the 40% (or lower) market penetration is below that of mobile phones (around 85%). What’s more, it’s quicker to develop and set up apps for mobile phones. ‘You can approach the market quicker, and you don’t have to go through as many greedy middlemen,’ Mr Daum says. Providers of set-top box technology are now adding texting function to the design of their products.

G The triumph of TV-related texting reminds everyone in the business of how easily a fancy technology can all of a sudden be replaced by a less complicated, lower-tech method. That being said, the old-fashioned approach to interactive TV is not necessarily over; at least it proves that strong demands for interactive services still exist. It appears that the viewers would sincerely like to do more than simply staring at the TV screen. After all, couch potatoes would love some thumb exercises.

Questions 28-32
Reading Passage 3 has seven sections, A-G. Choose the correct heading for sections B-E and G from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i An application of short codes on the TV screen
ii An overview of a fast-growing business
iii The trend that profitable games are gaining more concerns
iv Why Netherlands takes the leading role
v A new perspective towards sharing the business opportunities
vi Factors relevant to the rapid increase in interactive TV
vii The revenue gains and bonus share
viii The possibility of the complex technology replaced by the simpler ones
ix The mind change of set-top box providers

Example Section A ii

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

Example Section F ix

32. Section G

Questions 33-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 33-35 on your answer sheet.

33. In Europe, a research hints that young audiences spend more money on
A thumbing text messages.
B writing e-mails.
C watching TV programmes.
D talking through mobile phones.

34. What would happen when reality TV shows invite the audience to vote?
A Viewers would get attractive bonus.
B They would be part of the competition.
C Their questions would be replied.
D Their participation could change the result.

35. Interactive TV will change from concentrating on set-top devices to
A increasing their share in the market.
B setting up a modified set-top box.
C building an embedded message platform.
D marching into the European market.

Questions 36-40
Look at the following descriptions (Questions 36-40) and the list of companies below. Match each description with the correct company, A-F.

List of Companies
A Flytxt
B Analysys
C Endemol
D CMG
E Mm02
F Gartner

36. offered mobile phone message technology
37. earned considerable amount of money through a famous programme
38. expressed the view that short codes are convenient to remember when turning up
39. built their own mobile phone operating applications
40. indicated that it is easy for people to send message in an interactive TV

The Pearl

A The pearl has always had a special status in the rich and powerful all through the history. For instance, women from ancient Rome went to bed with pearls on them, so that they could remind themselves how wealthy they were after waking up. Pearls used to have more commercial value than diamonds until jewellers learnt to cut gems. In the eastern countries like Persia, ground pearl powders could be used as a medicine to cure anything including heart diseases and epilepsy.

B Pearls can generally be divided into three categories: natural, cultured and imitation. When an irritant (such as a grain of sand) gets. inside a certain type of oyster, mussel, or clam, the mollusc will secrete a fluid as a means of defence to coat the irritant. Gradually, layers are accumulated around the irritant until a lustrous natural pearl is formed.

C A cultured pearl undergoes the same process. There is only one difference between cultured pearls and natural ones: in cultured pearls, the irritant is a head called ‘mother of pearl’ and is placed in the oyster through surgical implantation. This results in much larger cores in cultivated pearls than those in natural pearls. As long as there are enough layers of nacre (the secreted fluid covering the irritant) to create a gorgeous, gem-quality pearl; the size of the nucleus wouldn’t make a difference to beauty or durability.

D Pearls can come from both salt and freshwater sources. Typically, pearls from salt water usually have high quality, although several freshwater pearls are considered high in quality, too. In addition, freshwater pearls often have irregular shapes, with a puffed rice appearance. Nevertheless, it is the individual merits that determine the pearl’s value more than the sources of pearls. Saltwater pearl oysters are usually cultivated in protected lagoons or volcanic atolls, while most freshwater cultured pearls sold today come from China. There are a number of options for producing cultured pearls: use fresh water or sea water shells, transplant the graft into the mantle or into the gonad, add a spherical bead or do it nonbeaded.

E No matter which method is used to get pearls, the process usually takes several years. Mussels must reach a mature age, which may take up almost three years, and then be transplanted an irritant. When the irritant is put in place, it takes approximately another three years for a pearl to reach its full size. Sometimes, the irritant may be rejected. As a result, the pearl may be seriously deformed, or the oyster may directly die from such numerous complications as diseases. At the end of a 5- to 10-year circle, only half of the oysters may have made it through. Among the pearls that are actually produced in the end, only about 5% of them will be high-quality enough for the jewellery makers.

F Imitation pearls are of another different story. The Island of Mallorca in Spain is renowned for its imitation pearl industry. In most cases, a bead is dipped into a solution made from fish scales. But this coating is quite thin and often wears off. One way to distinguish the imitation pearls is to have a bite on it. Fake pearls glide through your teeth, while the layers of nacre on the real pearls feel gritty.

G Several factors are taken into account to evaluate a pearl: size, shape, Colour, the quality of surface and luster. Generally, the three types of pearls come in such order (with the value decreasing): natural pearls, cultured pearls and imitation pearls (which basically are worthless). For jewellers, one way to tell whether a pearl is natural or cultured is to send it to a gem lab and perform an X-ray on it. High-quality natural pearls are extremely rare. Japan’s Akoya pearls are one of the glossiest pearls out there, while the’ south sea water of Australia is a cradle to bigger pearls.

H Historically, the pearls with the highest quality around the globe are found in the Persian Gulf, particularly around Bahrain. These pearls have to be hand-harvested by divers with no advanced equipment. Unfortunately, when the large reserve of oil was discovered in the early 1930s, Persian Gulf’s natural pearl industry came to a sudden end because the contaminated water destroyed the once pristine pearls. In the present days, India probably has the largest stock of natural pearls. However, it is quite an irony that a large part of India’s slock of natural pearls are originally from Bahrain.

Questions 1-4
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?

1. ancient stories around pearls and its customers
2. difficulties in cultivating process
3. factors which decide the value of natural pearls
4. a growth mechanism that distinguishes cultured pearls from natural ones

Questions 5-10
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

In history, pearls have had great importance within the men of wealth and power, which were treated as gems for women in (5)……………………..Also, pearls were even used as a medicine for people in (6)……………………… There are essentially three types of pearls: natural, cultured and imitation. Most freshwater cultured pearls sold today come from China while (7)……………………….Island is famous for its imitation pearl industry. Good-quality natural pearls are exceedingly unusual. (8)……………………….often manufactures some of the glitteriest pearls while (9)………………………produces larger size ones due to the favourable environment along the coastline. In the past, (10)…………………………in Persian Gulf produced the world’s best pearls. Nowadays, the major remaining suppliers of natural pearls belong to India.

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

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

11. Generally speaking, the centre of cultured pearl is significantly larger than that of a natural pearl.
12. Sometimes, fake pearls can be more expensive.
13. The size of the pearls produced in Japan is usually smaller than those in Australia.

Reading Passage 2

The start of the automobile’s history went all the way back to 1769 when automobiles running on the steam engine were invented as carriers for human transport. In 1806, the first batch of cars powered by an internal combustion engine came into being, which pioneered the introduction of the widespread modem petrol-fueled internal combustion engine in 1885.

It is generally acknowledged that the first practical automobiles equipped with petrol/gasoline-powered internal combustion engines were invented almost at the same time by different German inventors who were Working on their own. Karl Benz first built the automobile in 1885 in Mannheim. Benz attained a patent for his invention on 29 January 1886, and in 1888, he started to produce automobiles in a company that later became the renowned Mercedes-Benz.

As this century began, the automobile industry marched into the transportation market for the wealth. Drivers at that time were an adventurous bunch; they would go out regardless of the weather condition even if they weren’t even protected by an enclosed body or a convertible top. Everybody in the community knew who owned what car, and cars immediately became a symbol of identity and status. Later, cars became more popular among the public since it allowed people to travel whenever and wherever they wanted. Thus, the price of automobiles in Europe and North America kept dropping, and more people from the middle class could afford them. This was especially attributed to Henry Ford who did two crucial things. First, he set the price as reasonable as possible for his cars; second, he paid his employees enough salaries so that they could afford the cars made by their very own hands.

The trend of interchangeable parts and mass production in an assembly line style had been led by America, and from 1914, this concept was significantly reinforced by Henry Ford. This large-scale, production-line manufacture of affordable automobiles was debuted. A Ford car would come off all assembled from the line every 15 minutes, an interval shorter than any of the former methods. Not only did it raise productivity, but also cut down on the requirement for manpower. Ford significantly lowered the chance of injury by carrying out complicated safety procedures in production—particularly assigning workers to specific locations rather than giving them the freedom to wander around. This mixture of high wages and high efficiency was known as Fordism, which provided a valuable lesson for most major industries.

The first Jeep automobile that came out as the prototype Bantam BRC was the primary light 4-wheel-drive automobile of the U.S. Army and Allies, and during World War II and the postwar period, its sale skyrocketed. Since then, plenty of Jeep derivatives with similar military and civilian functions have been created and kept upgraded in terms of overall performance in other nations.

Through all the 1950s, engine power and automobile rates grew higher, designs evolved into a more integrated and artful form, and cars were spreading globally. In the 1960s, the landscape changed as Detroit was confronted with foreign competition. The European manufacturers, used the latest technology, and Japan came into the picture as a dedicated car-making country. General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford dabbled with radical tiny cars such as the GM A-bodies with little success. As joint ventures such as the British Motor Corporation unified the market, captive imports and badge imports swept all over the US and the UK. BMC first launched a revolutionary space-friendly Mini in 1959, which turned out to harvest large global sales. Previously remaining under the Austin and Morris names, Mini later became an individual marque in 1969. The trend of corporate consolidation landed in Italy when niche makers such as Maserati, Ferrari, and Lancia were bought by larger enterprises. By the end of the 20th century, there had been a sharp fall in the number of automobile marques.

In the US, car performance dominated marketing, justified by the typical cases of pony cars and muscle cars. However, in the 1970s, everything changed as the American automobile industry suffered from the 1973 oil crisis, competition with Japanese and European imports, automobile emission-control regulations* and moribund innovation. The irony in all this was that full-size sedans such as Cadillac and Lincoln scored a huge comeback between the years of economic crisis.

In terms of technology, the most mentionable developments that postwar era had seen were the widespread use of independent suspensions, broader application of fuel injection, and a growing emphasis on safety in automobile design. Mazda achieved many triumphs with its engine firstly installed in the fore-wheel, though it gained itself a reputation as a gas-guzzler.

The modem era also has witnessed a sharp elevation of fuel power in the modem engine management system with the. help of the computer. Nowadays, most automobiles in use are powered by an internal combustion engine, fueled by gasoline or diesel. Toxic gas from both fuels is known to pollute the air and is responsible for climate change as well as global warming.

Questions 14-19
Look at the following descriptions (Questions 14-19) and the list of automobile brands below. Match each description with the correct automobile brand, A-G.

List of Automobile Brands
A Ford
B the BMC Mini
C Cadillac and Lincoln
D Mercedes Benz
E Mazda
F Jeep
G Maserati, Ferrari, and Lancia

14. began producing the first automobiles
15. produced the industrialised cars that common consumers could afford
16. improved the utilisation rate of automobile space
17. upgraded the overall performance of the car continuously
18. maintained leading growth even during an economic recession
19. installed its engine on the front wheel for the first time

Questions 20-26
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

20. What is the important feature owned by the modem engine since the 19th century?
21. What did a car symbolise to the rich at the very beginning of this century?
22. How long did Ford assembly line take to produce a car?
23. What is the major historical event that led American cars to suffer when competing with Japanese imported cars?
24. What do people call the Mazda car which was designed under the front-wheel engine?
25. What has greatly increased with the computerised engine management systems in modem society?
26. What factor is blamed for contributing to pollution, climate change and global warming?

Question 27
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 27 on your answer sheet.

27. What is the main idea of the passage?
A The influence of the cars on the environment
B The historical development and innovation in car designs
C The beginning of the modem designed gasoline engines
D The history of human and the Auto industry

Elephant Communication

O’ Connell-Rodwell, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has travelled to Namibia’s first-ever wildlife reserve to explore the mystical and complicated realm of elephant communication. She, along with her colleagues, is part of a scientific revolution that started almost 20 years ago. This revolution has made a stunning revelation: elephants are capable of communicating with each other over long distances with low-frequency sounds, also known as infrasounds, which are too deep for humans to hear.

As might be expected, African elephants able to detect seismic sound may have something to do with their ears. The hammer bone in an elephant’s inner ear is proportionally huge for a mammal, but it is rather normal for animals that use vibrational signals. Thus, it may be a sign that suggests elephants can use seismic sounds to communicate.

Other aspects of elephant anatomy also support that ability. First, their massive bodies, which enable them to give out low-frequency sounds almost as powerful as the sound a jet makes during takeoff, serve as ideal frames for receiving ground vibrations and transmitting them to the inner ear. Second, the elephant’s toe bones are set on a fatty pad, which might be of help when focusing vibrations from the ground into the bone. Finally, the elephant has an enormous brain that sits in the cranial cavity behind the eyes in line with the auditory canal. The front of the skull is riddled with sinus cavities, which might function as resonating chambers for ground vibrations.

It remains unclear how the elephants detect such vibrations, but O’ Connell-Rodwell raises a point that the pachyderms are ‘listening’ with their trunks and feet instead of their ears. The elephant trunk may just be the most versatile appendage in nature. Its utilization encompasses drinking, bathing, smelling, feeding and scratching. Both trunk and feet contain two types of nerve endings that are sensitive to pressure – one detects infrasonic vibration, and another responds to vibrations higher in frequencies. As O’ Connell-Rodwell sees, this research has a boundless and unpredictable future. ‘Our work is really interfaced of geophysics, neurophysiology and ecology,’ she says. ‘We’re raising questions that have never even been considered before.’

It has been well-known to scientists that seismic communication is widely observed among small animals, such as spiders, scorpions, insects and quite a lot of vertebrate species like white-lipped frogs, blind mole rats, kangaroo rats and golden moles. Nevertheless, O’Connell-Rodwell first argued that a giant land animal is also sending and receiving seismic signals. ‘I used to lay a male planthopper on a stem and replay the calling sound of a female, and then the male one would exhibit the same kind of behaviour that happens in elephants—he would freeze, then press down on his legs, move forward a little, then stay still again. I find it so fascinating, and it got me thinking that perhaps auditory communication is not the only thing that is going on.’

Scientists have confirmed that an elephant’s capacity to communicate over long distance is essential for survival, especially in places like Etosha, where more than 2,400 savanna elephants range over a land bigger than New Jersey. It is already difficult for an elephant to find a mate in such a vast wild land, and the elephant reproductive biology only complicates it. Breeding herds also adopt low-frequency sounds to send alerts regarding predators. Even though grown-up elephants have no enemies else than human beings, baby elephants are vulnerable and are susceptible to lions and hyenas attack. At the sight of a predator, older ones in the herd will clump together to form protection before running away.

We now know that elephants can respond to warning calls in the air, but can they detect signals transmitted solely through the ground? To look into that matter, the research team designed an experiment in 2002, which used electronic devices that enabled them to give out signals through the ground at Mushara. ‘The outcomes of our 2002 study revealed that elephants could indeed sense warning signals through the ground,’ O’Connell-Rodwell observes.

Last year, an experiment was set up in the hope of solving that problem. It used three different recordings—the 1994 warning call from Mushara, an anti-predator call recorded by scientist Joyce Poole in Kenya and a made-up warble tone. ‘The data I’ve observed to this point implies that the elephants were responding the way I always expected. However, the fascinating finding is that the anti-predator call from Kenya, which is unfamiliar to them, caused them to gather around, tense up and rumble aggressively as well—but they didn’t always flee. I didn’t expect the results to be that clear-cut.’

Questions 28-31
Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 32-38
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

How the elephants sense these sound vibrations is still unknown, but O’Connell-Rodwell, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, proposes that elephants are ‘listening’ with their (32)………………………by two kinds of nerve endings that respond to vibrations with both (33)……………………….frequency and slightly higher frequencies. O’Connell-Rodwell’s work is at the combination of geophysics, neurophysiology and (34)………………………..It was known that seismic communication existed extensively within small animals, but O’Connell-Rodwell was the first person to indicate that a large land animal would send and receive (35)……………………too. Also, he noticed the freezing behaviour by putting a male planthopper on a stem and play back a female call, which might prove the existence of other communicative approaches besides (36)…………………… Scientists have determined that an elephant’s ability to communicate over long distances is essential, especially, when elephant herds are finding a (37)………………., or are warning of predators. Finally, the results of our 2002 study showed us that elephants could detect warning calls through the (38)………………

Questions 39-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.

39. According to the passage, it is determined that an elephant needs to communicate over long distances for its survival
A when a threatening predator appears.
B when young elephants meet humans.
C when older members of the herd want to flee from the group.
D when a male elephant is in estrus.

40. What is the author’s attitude toward the experiment by using three different recordings in the last paragraph?
A The outcome is definitely out of the original expectation.
B The data cannot be very clearly obtained.
C The result can be somewhat undecided or inaccurate.
D The result can be unfamiliar to the public.

Education Philosophy

A Although we lack accurate statistics about child mortality in the pre-industrial period, we do have evidence that in the 1660s, the mortality rate for children who died within 14 days of birth was as much as 30 per cent. Nearly all families suffered some premature death. Since all parents expected to bury some of their children, they found it difficult to invest in their newborn children. Moreover, to protect themselves from the emotional consequences of children’s death, parents avoided making any emotional commitment to an infant. It is no wonder that we find mothers leaving their babies in gutters or referring to the death in the same paragraph as a reference to pickles.

B The 18th century witnessed the transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial one – one of the vital social changes taking place in the Western world. An increasing number of people moved from their villages and small towns to big cities where life was quite different. Social supports which had previously existed in smaller communities were replaced by ruthless problems such as poverty, crime, substandard housing and disease. Due to the need for additional income to support the family, young children from the poorest families were forced into early employment and thus their childhood became painfully short. Children as young as 7 might be required to work full-time, subjected to unpleasant and unhealthy circumstances, from factories to prostitution. Although such a role has disappeared in most wealthy countries, the practice of childhood employment still remains a staple in underdeveloped countries and has rarely disappeared entirely.

C The lives of children underwent a drastic change during the 1800s in the United States. Previously, children from both rural and urban families were expected to participate in everyday labour due to the bulk of manual hard work. Nevertheless, thanks to the technological advances of the mid-1800s, coupled with the rise of the middle class and redefinition of roles of family members, work and home became less synonymous over time. People began to purchase toys and books for their children. When the country depended more upon machines, children in rural and urban areas were less likely to be required to work at home. Beginning from the Industrial Revolution and rising slowly over the course of the 19th century, this trend increased exponentially after the Civil War. John Locke, one of the most influential writers of his period, created the first clear and comprehensive statement of the ‘environmental position’ that family education determines a child’s life, and via this, he became the father of modern learning theory. During the colonial period, his teachings about child care gained a lot of recognition in America.

D According to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who lived in an era of the American and French Revolution, people were ‘noble savages’ in the original state of nature, meaning they were innocent, free and uncorrupted. In 1762, Rousseau wrote a famous novel – Emile – to convey his educational philosophy through a story of a boy’s education from infancy to adulthood. This work was based on his extensive observation of children and adolescents, their individuality, his developmental theory and on the memories of his own childhood. He contrasted children with adults and described their age-specific characteristics in terms of historical perspective and developmental psychology. Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, living during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, sought to develop schools to nurture children’s all-round development. He agreed with Rousseau that humans were naturally good but were spoiled by a corrupt society. His approach to teaching consisted of both general and specific methods, and his theory was based upon establishing an emotionally healthy and homelike learning environment, which had to be in place before more specific instruction occurred.

E One of the best-documented cases of Pestalozzi’s theory concerned a so-called feral child named Victor, who was captured in a small town in the south of France in 1800. Prepubescent, mute, naked, and perhaps 11 or 12 years old, Victor had been seen foraging for food in the gardens of the locals in the area, and sometimes accepted people’s direct offers of food before his final capture. Eventually, he was brought to Paris and expected to answer some profound questions about the nature of humanity, but that goal was quashed very soon. A young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, was optimistic about the future of Victor and initiated a five-year education plan to civilise him and teach him to speak. With a subsidy from the government, Itard recruited a local woman called Madame Guerin to assist him to provide a semblance of a home for Victor, and he spent an enormous amount of time and effort working with Victor. Itard’s goal to teach Victor the basics of speech could never be fully achieved, but Victor had learnt some elementary forms of communication.

F Although other educators were beginning to recognise the simple truth embedded in Rousseau’s philosophy, it is not enough to identify the stages of children’s development alone. There must be specific education geared towards those stages. One of the early examples was the invention of kindergarten, which was a word and a movement created by a German-born educator, Friedrich Froebel, in 1840. Froebel placed a high value on the importance of play in children’s learning. His invention would spread around the world eventually in a variety of forms. Froebel’s ideas were inspired through his cooperation with Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Froebel didn’t introduce the notion of kindergarten until he was 58 years old, and he had been a teacher for four decades. The notion was a haven and a preparation for children who were about to enter the regimented educational system. The use of guided or structured play was a cornerstone of his kindergarten education because he believed that play was the most significant aspect of development at this time of life. Play served as a mechanism for a child to grow emotionally and to achieve a sense of self-worth. Meanwhile, teachers served to organise materials and a structured environment in which each child, as an individual, could achieve these goals. When Froebel died in 1852, dozens of kindergartens had been created in Germany. Kindergartens began to increase in Europe, and the movement eventually reached and flourished in the United States in the 20th century.

Questions 1-4
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C-E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i The evolution and development of educational concepts of different thinkers
ii Why children had to work to alleviate the burden on family
iii Why children are not highly valued
iv An explanation for children dying in hospital at an early age
v The first appearance of modern educational philosophy
vi The application of a creative learning method on a wild child
vii The emergence and spread of the notion of kindergarten

1. Paragraph A

Example Answer Paragraphs B ii

2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E

Questions 5-8
Look at the following events (Questions 5-8) and the list of dates below. Match each event with the correct date, A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Dates
A the 18th century (1700-1799)
B the 19th century (1800-1899)
C the 20th century (1900-1999)

5. the need for children to work
6. the rise of the middle class
7. the emergence of a kindergarten
8. the spread of kindergartens around the U.S.

Questions 9-13
Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 9-13) and the list of people below. Match each opinion or deed with the correct person, A, B, C or D. NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of People
A Jean Jacques Rousseau
B Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi
C Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
D Friedrich Froebel

9. was not successful in proving a theory
10. observed children’s records
11. suggested a setting for study which prioritized emotional comfort
12. proposed that corruption was not a characteristic of people’s nature
13. was responsible for an increase in the number of a type of school

How are deserts formed?

A A desert refers to a barren section of land, mainly in arid and semi-arid areas, where there is almost no precipitation, and the environment is hostile for any creature to inhabit. Deserts have been classified in a number of ways, generally combining total precipitation, how many days the rainfall occurs, temperature, humidity, and sometimes additional factors. In some places, deserts have clear boundaries marked by rivers, mountains or other landforms, while in other places, there are no clear-cut borders between desert and other landscape features.

B In arid areas where there is not any covering of vegetation protecting the land, sand and dust storms will frequently take place. This phenomenon often occurs along the desert margins instead of within the deserts, where there are already no finer materials left. When a steady wind starts to blow, fine particles on the open ground will begin vibrating. As the wind picks up, some of the particles are lifted into the air. When they fall onto the ground, they hit other particles which will then be jerked into the air in their turn, initiating a chain reaction.

C There has been a tremendous deal of publicity on how severe desertification can be, but the academic circle has never agreed on the causes of desertification. A common misunderstanding is that a shortage of precipitation causes the desertification—even the land in some barren areas will soon recover after the rain falls. In fact, more often than not, human activities are responsible for desertification. It might be true that the explosion in world population, especially in developing countries, is the primary cause of soil degradation and desertification. Since the population has become denser, the cultivation of crops has gone into progressively drier areas. It’s especially possible for these regions to go through periods of severe drought, which explains why crop failures are common. The raising of most crops requires the natural vegetation cover to be removed first; when crop failures occur, extensive tracts of land are devoid of a plant cover and thus susceptible to wind and water erosion. All through the 1990s, dryland areas went through a population growth of 18.5 per cent, mostly in severely impoverished developing countries.

D Livestock farming in semi-arid areas accelerates the erosion of soil and becomes one of the reasons for advancing desertification. In such areas where the vegetation is dominated by grasses, the breeding of livestock is a major economic activity. Grasses are necessary for anchoring barren topsoil in a dryland area. When a specific field is used to graze an excessive herd, it will experience a loss in vegetation coverage, and the soil will be trampled as well as be pulverised, leaving the topsoil exposed to destructive erosion elements such as winds and unexpected thunderstorms. For centuries, nomads have grazed their flocks and herds to any place where pasture can be found, and oases have offered chances for a more settled way of living. For some nomads, wherever they move to, the desert follows.

E Trees are of great importance when it comes to maintaining topsoil and slowing down the wind speed. In many Asian countries, firewood is the chief fuel used for cooking and heating, which has caused uncontrolled clear-cutting of forests in dryland ecosystems. When too many trees are cut down, windstorms and dust storms tend to occur.

F What’s worse, even political conflicts and wars can also contribute to desertification. To escape from the invading enemies, the refugees will move altogether into some of the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet. They bring along their cultivation traditions, which might not be the right kind of practice for their new settlement.

G In the 20th century, one of the states of America had a large section of farmland that had turned into desert. Since then, actions have been enforced so that such a phenomenon of desertification will not happen again. To avoid the reoccurence of desertification, people are encouraged to find other livelihoods which do not rely on traditional land uses, that are not as demanding on local land and natural resources, but can still generate viable income. Such livelihoods include but are not limited to dryland aquaculture for the raising of fish, crustaceans, and industrial compounds derived from microalgae, greenhouse agriculture, and activities that are related to tourism. Another way to prevent the reoccurrence of desertification is improving the economic prospects of life in city centres and places outside of drylands. Changing the general economic and institutional structures that generate new chances for people to support themselves would alleviate the current pressures accompanying the desertification processes.

H In society nowadays, new technologies are serving as a method to resolve the problems brought by desertification. Satellites have been utilised to investigate the influence that people and livestock have on our planet Earth. Nevertheless, this does not mean that alternative technologies are not needed to help with the problems and process of desertification.

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. a reference to the irregular movement of particles
15. mention of a productive land turning into a desert in the 20th century
16. types of deserts
17. mention of technical methods used to tackle the problems of deserts
18. the influence of a traditional way of feeding animals on desertification
19. A lack of agreement among scientists about the causes of desertification
20. a description of the adverse effects of growing food crops

Questions 21-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet, write

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

21. It is difficult to ascertain where the deserts end in some areas.
22. The media is uninterested in the problems of desertification.
23. The most common cause of desertification is the lack of rainfall.
24. Farming animals in semi-arid areas will increase soil erosion.
25. People in Asian countries no longer use firewood as the chief fuel.
26. Technology studying the relationship of people, livestock and desertification has not yet been invented.

The Olympic Torch

Since 776 B.C., when the Greek people held their first-ever Olympic Games, the Games were hosted every four years at the city of Olympia. Back then, a long journey for the Olympic torch was made before the opening ceremony of each Olympic Games. The Greek people would light a cauldron of flames on the altar, a ritual devoted to Hera, the Greek Goddess of birth and marriage.

The reintroduction of flame to the Olympics occurred at the Amsterdam 1928 Games, for which a cauldron was lit yet without a torch relay. The 1936 Berlin Summer Games held the first Olympic torch relay, which was not resumed in the Winter Olympics until 1952. However, in that year the torch was lit not in Olympia, Greece, but in Norway, which was considered as the birthplace of skiing. Until the Innsbruck 1964 Winter Olympics in Austria, the Olympic flame was reignited at Olympia.

The torch is originally an abstract concept of a designer or groups of designers. A couple of design groups hand in their drafts to the Olympic Committee in the hope of getting the chance to create the torch. The group that wins the competition will come up with a design for a torch that has both aesthetic and practical value. After the torch is completed, it has to succeed in going through all sorts of severe weather conditions. The appearance of the modem Olympic torch is attributed to a Disney artist John Hench, who designed the torch for the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. His design laid a solid foundation for all the torches in the future.

The long trip to the Olympic area is not completed by one single torch, but by thousands of them, so the torch has to be replicated many times. Approximately 10,000 to 15,000 torches are built to fit thousands of runners who take the torches through every section of the Olympic relay. Every single runner can choose to buy his or her torch as a treasurable souvenir when he or she finishes his or her part of the relay.

The first torch in the modem Olympics (the 1936 Berlin Games) was made from a slender steel rod with a circular platform at the top and a circular hole in the middle to jet flames.

The name of the runner was also inscribed on the platform as a token of thanks. In the earlier days, torches used everything from gunpowder to olive oil as fuels. Some torches adopted a combination of hexamine and naphthalene with a flammable fluid. However, these materials weren’t exactly the ideal fuel sources, and they could be quite hazardous sometimes. In the 1956 Olympics, the torch in the final relay was ignited by magnesium and aluminium, but some flaming pieces fell off and seared the runner’s arms.

To improve safety, liquid fuels made their first appearance at the 1972 Munich Games. Since then, torches have been using fuels which are pressurised into the form of a liquid. When the fuels are burnt, they turn into gas to produce a flame. Liquid fuel is safer for the runner and can be stored in a light container. The torch at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics is equipped with an aluminium base that accommodates a tiny fuel tank. As the fuel ascends through the modified handle, it is squeezed through a brass valve that has thousands of little openings. As the fuel passes through the tiny openings, it accumulates pressure. Once it makes its way through the openings, the pressure decreases and the liquid becomes gas so it can bum up.

The torch in 1996 was fuelled by propylene, a type of substance that could give out a bright flame. However, since propylene was loaded with carbon, it would produce plenty of smoke which was detrimental to the environment. In 2000, the designers of the Sydney Olympic torch proposed a lighter and cheaper design, which was harmless to the environment. For the fuel, they decided to go with a combination of 35 per cent propane (a gas that is used for cooking and heating) and 65 per cent butane (a gas that is obtained from petroleum), thus creating a powerful flame without generating much smoke.

Both the 1996 and 2000 torches adopted a double flame burning system, enabling the flames to stay lit even in severe weather conditions. The exterior flame bums at a slower rate and at a lower temperature. It can be perceived easily with its big orange flame, but it is unstable. On the other hand, the interior flame bums faster and hotter, generating a small blue flame with great stability, due to the internal site offering protection from the wind. Accordingly, the interior flame would serve as a pilot light, which could relight the external flame if it should go out.

As for the torch of 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the top section was made of glass in which the flame burned, for the purpose of echoing the theme of ‘Light the Fire Within’ of that Olympics. This torch was of great significance for the designs of following torches.

Questions 27-29
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The Olympic torch, as requested by the Olympic Committee, will be carefully designed so that it is capable of withstanding all kinds of (27)……………………Generally, the design of the modern Olympic torch has both (28)…………………value. The torch must be copied, and thousands of torches are constructed to accommodate thousands of runners who will carry them through each leg of the Olympic relay. Each runner has an opportunity to purchase the torch as a(n) (29)…………………….at the end of his or her leg of the relay.

Questions 30-35
Look at the following statements (Questions 30-35) and the list of Olympic torches below. Match each statement with the correct Olympic torch, A-H.

List of Olympic Torches
A ancient Greek Olympic flames
B Berlin Games torch (1936)
C 1952 Winter Games flame
D 1956 Games torch
E Munich Games torch (1972)
F 1996 torch (Atlanta)
G 2000 torch (Sydney)
H 2002 torch (Salt Lake City)

30. first liquid fuel
31. not environmentally friendly
32. beginning to record the runners’ name
33. potentially risky as it burnt the runner’s arms
34. specially designed for a theme of ‘Light’
35. not lit in Greece

Questions 36-40
Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Timekeeper: Invention of Marine Chronometer

A Up to the middle of the 18th century, the navigators were still unable to exactly identify the position at sea, so they might face a great number of risks such as the shipwreck or running out of supplies before arriving at the destination. Knowing one’s position on the earth requires two simple but essential coordinates, one of which is the longitude.

B The longitude is a term that can be used to measure the distance that one has covered from one’s home to another place around the world without the limitations of naturally occurring baseline like the equator. To determine longitude, navigators had no choice but to measure the angle with the naval sextant between Moon centre and a specific star— lunar distance—along with the height of both heavenly bodies. Together with the nautical almanac, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was determined, which could be adopted to calculate longitude because one hour in GMT means 15-degree longitude. Unfortunately, this approach laid great reliance on the weather conditions, which brought great inconvenience to the crew members. Therefore, another method was proposed, that is, the time difference between the home time and the local time served for the measurement. Theoretically, knowing the longitude position was quite simple, even for the people in the middle of the sea with no land in sight. The key element for calculating the distance travelled was to know, at the very moment, the accurate home time. But the greatest problem is: how can a sailor know the home time at sea?

C The simple and again obvious answer is that one takes an accurate clock with him, which he sets to the home time before leaving. A comparison with the local time (easily identified by checking the position of the Sun) would indicate the time difference between the home time and the local time, and thus the distance from home was obtained. The truth was that nobody in the 18th century had ever managed to create a clock that could endure the violent shaking of a ship and the fluctuating temperature while still maintaining the accuracy of time for navigation.

D After 1714, as an attempt to find a solution to the problem, the British government offered a tremendous amount of £20,000, which were to be managed by the magnificently named ‘Board of Longitude’. If timekeeper was the answer (and there could be other proposed solutions, since the money wasn’t only offered for timekeeper), then the error of the required timekeeping for achieving this goal needed to be within 2.8 seconds a day, which was considered impossible for any clock or watch at sea, even when they were in their finest conditions.

E This award, worth about £2 million today, inspired the self-taught Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison to attempt a design for a practical marine clock. In the later stage of his early career, he worked alongside his younger brother James. The first big project of theirs was to build a turret clock for the stables at Brockelsby Park, which was revolutionary because it required no lubrication. Harrison designed a marine clock in 1730, and he travelled to London in seek of financial aid. He explained his ideas to Edmond Halley, the Astronomer Royal, who then introduced him to George Graham, Britain’s first-class clockmaker. Graham provided him with financial aid for his early-stage work on sea clocks. It took Harrison five years to build Harrison Number One or HI. Later, he sought the improvement from alternate design and produced H4 with the giant clock appearance. Remarkable as it was, the Board of Longitude wouldn’t grant him the prize for some time until it was adequately satisfied.

F Harrison had a principal contestant for the tempting prize at that time, an English mathematician called John Hadley, who developed the sextant. The sextant is the tool that people adopt to measure angles, such as the one between the Sun and the horizon, for a calculation of the location of ships or planes. In addition, his invention is significant since it can help determine longitude.

G Most chronometer forerunners of that particular generation were English, but that doesn’t mean every achievement was made by them. One wonderful figure in the history is the Lancastrian Thomas Earnshaw, who created the ultimate form of chronometer escapement—the spring detent escapement—and made the final decision on format and productions system for the marine chronometer, which turns it into a genuine modem commercial product, as well as a safe and pragmatic way of navigation at sea over the next century and half.

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. a description of Harrison’s background
2. problems caused by poor ocean navigation
3. the person who gave financial support to Harrison
4. an analysis of the long-term importance of sea clock invention
5. the practical usage of longitude

Questions 6-8
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet, write

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

6. In theory, sailors can easily calculate their longitude position at sea.
7. To determine longitude, the measurement of the distance from the Moon to a given star is essential.
8. Greenwich Mean Time was set up by the English navigators.

Questions 9-14
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Sailors were able to use the position of the Sun to calculate (9)……………………..

An invention that could win the competition would lose no more than (10)………………………..every day.

John and James Harrison’s clock worked accurately without (11)……………………

Harrison’s main competitor’s invention was known as (12)………………………

Hadley’s instrument can use (13)……………………………to make a calculation of location of ships or planes.

The modem version of Harrison’s invention is called the (14)……………………….

The Evolutionary Mystery: Crocodile Survives

A Even though crocodiles have existed for 200 million years, they’re anything but primitive. As crocodiles’ ancestors, crocodilia came to adapt to an aquatic lifestyle. When most of the other contemporary reptiles went extinct, crocodiles were able to make it because their bodies changed and they adapted better to the climate. They witnessed the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, which once ruled the planet, and even the 65 million years of alleged mammalian dominance didn’t wipe them off. Nowadays, the crocodiles and alligators are not that different from their prehistoric ancestors, which proves that they were (and still are) incredibly adaptive.

B The first crocodile-like ancestors came into existence approximately 230 million years ago, and they had many of the features which make crocodiles natural and perfect stealth hunters: streamlined body, long tail, protective armour and long jaws. They are born with four short, webbed legs, but this does not mean that their capacity to move on the ground should ever be underestimated. When they move, they are so fast that you won’t even have any chance to try making the same mistake again by getting too close, especially when they’re hunting.

C Like other reptiles, crocodiles are poikilothermal animals (commonly known as coldblooded, whose body temperature changes with that of the surroundings) and consequently, require exposure to sunlight regularly to raise body temperature. When it is too hot, they would rather stay in water or shade. Compared with mammals and birds, crocodiles have a slower metabolism, which makes them less vulnerable to food shortage. In the most extreme case, a crocodile can slow its metabolism down even further, to the point that it would survive without food for a whole year, enabling them to outlive mammals in relatively volatile environments.

D Crocodiles have a highly efficient way to catch prey. The prey rarely realises there might be a crocodile under the water because the crocodile makes a move without any noise or great vibration when spotting its prey. It only keeps its eyes above the water level. As soon as it feels close enough to the victim, it jerks out of the water with its wide open jaws. Crocodiles are successful because they are capable of switching feeding methods. It chases after fish and snatches birds at the water surface, hides in the waterside bushes in anticipation of a gazelle, and when the chance to ambush presents itself, the crocodile dashes forward, knocks the animal out with its powerful tail and then drags the prey into the water to drown.

E In many crocodilian habitats, the hot season brings drought that dries up their hunting grounds, leaving it harder for them to regulate body temperatures. This actually allowed reptiles to rule. For instance, many crocodiles can protect themselves by digging holes and covering themselves in mud, waiting for months without consuming any food or water until the rains finally return. They transform into a quiescent state called aestivation.

F The majority of crocodilia are thought to go into aestivation during the dry season. In a six-year study by Kennett and Christian, the King Crocodiles, a species of Australian freshwater crocodiles, spent nearly four months a year underground without access to water resources. Doubly labelled water was applied to detect field metabolic rates and water flux, and during some years, plasma fluid samples were taken once a month to keep track of the effects of aestivation regarding the accumulation of nitrogenous wastes and electrolyte concentrations.

G The study discovered that the crocodiles’ metabolic engines function slowly, creating waste and exhausting water and fat reserves. Waste is stored in the urine, becoming more and more concentrated. Nevertheless, the concentration of waste products in blood doesn’t fluctuate much, allowing the crocodiles to carry on their normal functions. Besides, even though the crocodiles lost water reserves and body weight when underground, the losses were proportional; upon emerging, the aestivating animals had no dehydration and displayed no other harmful effects such as a slowed-down growth rate. The two researchers reckon that this capacity of crocodiles to get themselves through the harsh times and the long starvation periods is sure to be the answer to the crocodilian line’s survival throughout history.

Questions 15-21
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i The positive impact of drought
ii Research findings into crocodile survival
iii The slow metabolism which makes the crocodile a unique animal
iv The perfectly designed body for a great land roamer
v Shifting eating habits and food intake
vi A project on a special mechanism
vii Regulating body temperature by the surrounding environment
viii Body structure offers underwater aid to a successful predator
ix A history of the supreme survivors
x What makes the crocodile the fastest running animal on land
xi Competition between crocodiles and other animals

15. Paragraph A
16. Paragraph B
17. Paragraph C
18. Paragraph D
19. Paragraph E
20. Paragraph F
21. Paragraph G

Questions 22-27
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Aestivation
In many places inhabited by crocodilians, most types of crocodiles have evolved a successful scheme to survive in the drought brought by a (22)……………………………. According to Kennett and Christian’s six-year study of Australian freshwater crocodiles’ aestivation, they found aestivating crocodiles spent around (23)……………………… of the year underground and had no access to (24)………………………..The amount of water in the body declined proportionately with (25)…………………………; thus there is no sign of (26)………………………..and other health-damaging impact on the crocodiles even after an aestivation period. This super capacity helps crocodiles endure the tough drought without slowing their speed of (27)………………………….

Company Innovation

A In a shabby office in downtown Manhattan, a group of 30 AI (artificial intelligence) programmers from Umagic are attempting to mimic the brains of a famous sexologist, a celebrated dietitian, a popular fitness coach and a bunch of other specialists, Umagic Systems is an up-and-coming firm, which sets up websites that enable their clients to seek advice from the virtual versions of those figures. The users put in all the information regarding themselves and their objectives; then it’s Umagic’s job to give advice, that a star expert would give. Even though the neuroses of American consumers have always been a marketing focus, the future of Umagic is difficult to predict (who knows what it’ll be like in ten years? Asking a computer about your sex life might be either normal or crazy). However, companies such as Umagic are starting to intimidate major American firms, because these young companies regard the half-crazy ‘creative’ ideas as the portal to their triumph in the future.

B Innovation has established itself as the catchword of American business management. Enterprises have realised that they are running out of things that can be outsourced or re-engineered (worryingly, by their competitors too). Winners of today’s American business tend to be companies with innovative powers such as Dell, Amazon and Wal-Mart, which have come up with concepts or goods that have reshaped their industries.

C According to a new book by two consultants from Arthur D. Little, during the last 15 years, the top 20% of firms in Fortune magazine’s annual innovation survey have attained twice as much the shareholder returns as their peers. The desperate search for new ideas is the stimulus for a large part of today’s merger boom. The same goes for the money spent on licensing and purchasing others’ intellectual property. Based on the statistics from Pasadena-based Patent & Licence Exchange, trade volume in intangible assets in America has gone up from $15 billion in 1990 to $100 billion in 1998, with small firms and individuals taking up an increasing share of the rewards.

D And that terrifies big companies: it appears that innovative work is incompatible with them. Some major famous companies that are always known for ‘innovative ideas’, such as 3M, Procter & Gamble, and Rubbermaid, have recently had dry spells. Peter Chernin, who runs the Fox TV and film empire for News Corporation, points out that ‘In the management of creativity, size is your enemy.’ It’s impossible for someone who’s managing 20 movies to be as involved as someone doing 5. Therefore, he has tried to divide the studio into smaller parts, disregarding the risk of higher expenses.

E Nowadays, ideas are more likely to prosper outside big companies. In the old days, when a brilliant scientist came up with an idea and wanted to make money out of it, he would take it to a big company first. But now, with all this cheap venture capital around, he would probably want to commercialise it by himself. So far, Umagic has already raised $5m and is on its way to another $25m. Even in the case of capital-intensive businesses like pharmaceuticals, entrepreneurs have the option to conduct early-stage research and sell out to the big firms when they’re faced with costly, risky clinical trials. Approximately 1/3 of drug firms’ total revenue is now from licensed-in technology.

F Some of the major enterprises such as General Electric and Cisco have been impressively triumphant when it comes to snatching and incorporating small companies’ scores. However, other grants are concerned about the money they have to spend and the way to keep those geniuses who generated the idea. It is the dream of everyone to develop more ideas within their organisations. Proctor & Gamble is currently switching their entire business focus from countries to products; one of the goals is to get the whole company to accept the innovations. In other places, the craving for innovation has caused ‘a frenzy for entrepreneurship’, transferring power by establishing internal idea-workshops and tracking inventory so that the talent will stay.

G Some people don’t believe that this kind of restructuring is sufficient. Clayton Christensen argues in their new book that big firms’ many advantages, such as taking care of their existing customers, can get in the way of the innovative behaviour that is necessary for handling disruptive technologies. That’s why there’s been the trend of cannibalisation, which brings about businesses that will confront and jeopardise the existing ones. For example, Bank One has set up Wingspan, which is an online bank that in fact competes with its actual branches.

H There’s no denying that innovation is a big deal. However, do major firms have to be this pessimistic? According to a recent survey of the top 50 innovations in America by Industry Week, ideas are equally likely to come from both big and small companies. Big companies can adopt new ideas when they are mature enough and the risks and rewards have become more quantifiable.

Questions 28-33
Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs, A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

28. an approach to retaining the best employees
29. increasing spending on attaining innovative ideas
30. a certain counter-effect produced by integrating outside firms
31. an example of three famous innovative American companies
32. an example of a company changing its focus
33. an example of a company resolving financial difficulties itself

Questions 34-37
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 34-37 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

34. Umagic is the most successful innovative company in this new field.
35. Amazon and Wal-Mart exchanged their innovation experience.
36. In the past, the originators of new ideas took them to small companies
37. IBM failed to understand Umagic’s proposal of a new idea.

Questions 38-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

38. What is the author’s opinion on innovation in paragraph C?
A It only works for big companies.
B Fortune magazine has a globally huge influence.
C It is becoming increasingly important.
D Its effects on American companies are more evident.

39. What is Peter Chemin’s point of view on innovation?
A Small companies are more innovative than big ones.
B Film industry needs more innovation than other industries.
C We need to cut the cost when risks occur.
D New ideas are more likely to go to big companies.

40. What is the author’s opinion on innovation at the end of this passage?
A Umagic’s success lies in the accidental ‘virtual expert’.
B Innovation is easy and straightforward.
C IBM sets a good example on innovation.
D The author’s attitude is uncertain on innovation.

The Innovation of Grocery Stores

A At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American grocery stores offered comprehensive services: the customers would ask help from the people behind the counters (called clerks) for the items they liked, and then the clerks would wrap the items up. For the purpose of saving time, customers had to ask delivery boys or go in person to send the lists of what they intended to buy to the stores in advance and then went to pay for the goods later. Generally speaking, these grocery stores sold only one brand for each item. Such early chain stores as A&P stores, although containing full services, were very time-consuming and inefficient for the purchase.

B Born in Virginia, Clarence Saunders left school at the age of 14 in 1895 to work first as a clerk in a grocery store. During his working in the store, he found that it was very inefficient for people to buy things there. Without the assistance of computers at that time, shopping was performed in a quite backward way. Having noticed that this inconvenient shopping mode could lead to tremendous consumption of time and money, Saunders, with great enthusiasm and innovation, proposed an unprecedented solution—let the consumers do self-service in the process of shopping—which might bring a thorough revolution to the whole industry.

C In 1902, Saunders moved to Memphis to put his perspective into practice, that is, to establish a grocery wholesale cooperative. In his newly designed grocery store, he divided the store into three different areas: A ‘front lobby’ served as an entrance, an exit, and included checkouts at the front. ‘A sales department’ was deliberately designed to allow customers to wander around the aisle and select their needed groceries. In this way, the clerks would not do the unnecessary work but arrange more delicate aisle and shelves to display the goods and enable the customers to browse through all the items. In the gallery above the sales department, supervisors can monitor the customers without disturbing them. ‘Stockroom’, where large fridges were placed to maintain fresh products, is another section of his grocery store only for the staff to enter. Also, this new shopping design and layout could accommodate more customers to go shopping simultaneously and even lead to some unimaginable phenomena: impulse buying and later supermarket.

D On September 6, 1916, Saunders performed the self-service revolution in the USA by opening the first Piggly Wiggly featured by the turnstile at the entrance store at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Quite distinct from those in other grocery stores, customers in Piggly Wiggly chose the goods on the shelves and paid the items all by themselves. Inside the Piggly Wiggly, shoppers were not at the mercy of staff. They were free to roam the store, check out the products and get what they needed by their own hands. There, the items were clearly priced, and no one forced customers to buy the things they did not need. As a matter of fact, the biggest benefit that the Piggly Wiggly brought to customers was the money-saving effect. Self-service was optimistic for the improvement. ‘It is good for both the consumer and retailer because it cuts costs,’ noted George T. Haley, a professor at the University of New Haven and director of the Centre for International Industry Competitiveness, ‘if you look at the way in which grocery stores (previous to Piggly Wiggly and Alpha Beta) were operated, what you can find is that there are a great number of workers involved, and labour is a major expense.’ Fortunately, the chain stores such as Piggly Wiggly cut the fat.

E Piggly Wiggly and this kind of self-service stores soared at that time. In the first year, Saunders opened nine branches in Memphis. Meanwhile, Saunders immediately applied a patent for the self-service concept and began franchising Piggly Wiggly stores. Thanks to the employment of self-service and franchising, the number of Piggly Wiggly had increased to nearly 1,300 by 1923. Piggly Wiggly sold $100 million (worth $1.3 billion today) in groceries, which made it the third-biggest grocery retailer in the nation. After that, this chain store experienced company listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with the stocks doubling from late 1922 to March 1923. Saunders contributed significantly to the perfect design and layout of grocery stores. In order to keep the flow rate smooth, Saunders even invented the turnstile to replace the common entrance mode.

F Clarence Saunders died in 1953, leaving abundant legacies mainly symbolised by Piggly Wiggly, the pattern of which spread extensively and lasted permanently.

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. layout of Clarence Saunders’ store
2. a reference to a reduction by chain stores in labour costs
3. how Clarence Saunders’ idea had been carried out
4. how people used to shop before Clarence Saunders’ stores opened
5. a description of economic success brought by Clarence Saunders’s stores

Questions 6-10
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Clarence Saunders’ first job was as (6)…………………………in a grocery store. In Clarence Saunders’ store, people should pay for goods in the (7)……………………….Customers would be under surveillance when shopping in the (8)…………………………..Another area in his store was called (9)……………………….., which was only accessible to the internal staff. In Clarence Saunders’ shopping design, much work was done by the (10)………………………

Questions 11-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.

11. Why did Clarence Saunders want to propel the improvement of grocery stores at his age?
A He wanted to transfer business to retailing.
B He thought it was profitable.
C He thought this could enable customers’ life to be more convenient.
D He wanted to create a new shop by himself.

12. The Piggly Wiggly store was
A located in Virginia.
B mainly featured self-service.
C initially very unpopular with customers.
D developed with a pessimistic future.

13. Today, the main thing associated with Clarence Saunders is that
A a fully automatic store system opened soon near his first store.
B his Piggly Wiggly store was very popular at that time.
C his name was usually connected with Piggly Wiggly stores.
D his name was printed together with that of his famous store.

The Study of Chimpanzee Culture

A After studying the similarities between chimpanzees and humans for years, researchers have recognised these resemblances run much deeper than anyone first thought in the latest decade. For instance, the nut cracking observed in the Tai Forest is not a simple chimpanzee behaviour, but a separate adaptation found only in that particular part of Africa, as well as a trait which is considered to be an expression of chimpanzee culture by biologists. These researchers frequently quote the word ‘culture’ to describe elementary animal behaviours, like the regional dialects of different species of songbirds, but it turns out that the rich and varied cultural traditions chimpanzees enjoyed rank secondly in complexity only to human traditions.

B During the past two years, the major research group which studies chimpanzees collaborated unprecedentedly and documented some distinct cultural patterns, ranging from animals’ use of tools to their forms of communication and social customs. This emerging picture of chimpanzees affects how human beings ponder upon these amazing creatures. Also, it alters our conception of human uniqueness and shows us the extraordinary ability of our ancient ancestors to create cultures.

C Although we know that Homo sapiens and Pan Troglodytes have coexisted for hundreds of millennia and their genetic similarities surpass 98 per cent, we still knew next to nothing about chimpanzee behaviour in the wild until 40 years ago. All this began to change in the 1960s when Toshisada Nishida of Kyoto University in Japan and renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall launched their studies of wild chimpanzees at two field sites in Tanzania. (Goodall’s research station at Gombe—the first of its kind—is more famous, but Nishida’s site at Mahale is the second oldest chimpanzee research site in the world.)

D During these primary studies, as the chimpanzees became more and more accustomed to close observation, the remarkable discoveries emerged. Researchers witnessed a variety of unexpected behaviours, ranging from fashioning and using tools, hunting, meat eating, food sharing to lethal fights between members of neighbouring communities.

E In 1973, 13 forms of tool use and 8 social activities which appeared to differ between the Gombe chimpanzees and chimpanzee species elsewhere were recorded by Goodall. She speculated that some variations shared what she referred to as a ‘cultural origin’. But what exactly did Goodall mean by ‘culture’? According to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, culture is defined as ‘the customs. . .and achievements of a particular time or people.’ The diversity of human cultures extends from technological variations to marriage rituals, from culinary habits to myths and legends. Of course, animals do not have myths and legends, but they do share the capacity to pass on behavioural traits from one generation to another, not through their genes but via learning. From biologists’ view, this is the fundamental criterion for a cultural trait—something can be learnt by observing the established skills of others and then passed on to following generations.

F What are the implications for chimpanzees themselves? We must place a high value upon the tragic loss of chimpanzees, who are decimated just when finally we are coming to appreciate these astonishing animals more completely. The population of chimpanzees has plummeted and continued to fall due to illegal trapping, logging and, most recently, the bushmeat trade within the past century. The latter is particularly alarming because logging has driven roadways, which are now used to ship wild animal meat—including chimpanzee meat to consumers as far afield as Europe, into forests. Such destruction threatens not only the animals themselves but also a host of fascinatingly different ape cultures.

G However, the cultural richness of the ape may contribute to its salvation. For example, the conservation efforts have already altered the attitudes of some local people. After several organisations showed videotapes illustrating the cognitive prowess of chimpanzees, one Zairian viewer was heard to exclaim, ‘Ah, this ape is so like me, I can no longer eat him.’

H How did an international team of chimpanzee experts perform the most comprehensive survey of the animals ever attempted? Although scientists have been delving into chimpanzee culture for several decades, sometimes their studies contained a fatal defect. So far, most attempts to document cultural diversity among chimpanzees have solely relied upon officially published accounts of the behaviours reported at each research site. But this approach probably neglects a good deal of cultural variation for three reasons.

I First, scientists normally don’t publish an extensive list of all the activities they do not see at a particular location. Yet this is the very information we need to know—which behaviours were and were not observed at each site. Second, there are many reports describing chimpanzee behaviours without expressing how common they are; without this information, we can’t determine whether a particular action was a transient phenomenon or a routine event that should be considered part of its culture. Finally, researchers’ description of potentially significant chimpanzee behaviours often lacks sufficient detail, which makes it difficult for scientists from other spots to report the presence or absence of the activities.

J To tackle these problems, my colleague and I determined to take a new approach. We asked field researchers at each site to list all the behaviours which they suspected were local traditions. With this information, we assembled a comprehensive list of 65 candidates for cultural behaviours.

K Then we distributed our list to team leaders at each site. They consulted with their colleagues and classified each behaviour regarding its occurrence or absence in the chimpanzee community. The major brackets contained customary behaviour (occurs in most or all of the able-bodied members of at least one age or sex class, such as all adult males), habitual (less common than customary but occurs repeatedly in several individuals), present (observed at the site but not habitual), absent (never seen), and unknown.

Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has eleven paragraphs, A-K. Which paragraph contains the following information?

14. an approach to research on chimpanzees’ culture that is only based on official sources
15. mention of a new system designed by two scientists who aim to solve the problem
16. reasons why previous research on ape culture is problematic
17. new classification of data observed or collected
18. an example showing that the cultural traits of chimpanzees can lead to a change in local people’s attitude towards their preservation

Questions 19-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet, write

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

19. The research found that scientists can make chimpanzees possess the same complex culture as human beings.
20. Humans and apes lived together long time ago and shared most of their genetic substance.
21. Even Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall’s beginning studies observed many surprising features of civilised behaviours among chimpanzees.
22. Chimpanzees, like humans, have the ability to deliver cultural behaviours mostly from genetic inheritance.
23. For decades, researchers have investigated chimpanzees by data obtained from both unobserved and observed approaches.

Questions 24-27
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

24. When did the unexpected discoveries of chimpanzee behaviour start?
25. Which country is the researching site of Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall?
26. What did the chimpanzee have to get used to in the initial study?
27. What term did Jane Goodall suggest to describe chimpanzees in different regions using different tools in 1973?

Quantitative Research in Education

Many education researchers used to work on the assumption that children experience different phases of development, and that they cannot execute the most advanced level of cognitive operation until they have reached the most advanced forms of cognitive process. For example, one researcher Piaget had a well-known experiment in which he asked the children to compare the amount of liquid in containers with different shapes. Those containers had the same capacity, but even when the young children were demonstrated that the same amount of fluid could be poured between the containers, many of them still believed one was larger than the other. Piaget concluded that the children were incapable of performing the logical task in figuring out that the two containers were the same size even though they had different shapes, because their cognitive development had not reached the necessary phase. Critics on his work, such as Donaldson, have questioned this interpretation. They point out the possibility that the children were just unwilling to play the experimenter’s game, or that they did not quite understand the question asked by the experimenter. These criticisms surely do state the facts, but more importantly, it suggests that experiments are social situations where interpersonal interactions take place. The implication here is that Piaget’s investigation and his attempts to replicate it are not solely about measuring the children’s capabilities of logical thinking, but also the degree to which they could understand the directions for them, their willingness to comply with these requirements, how well the experimenters did in communicating the requirements and in motivating those children, etc.

The same kinds of criticisms have been targeted to psychological and educational tests. For instance, Mehan argues that the subjects might interpret the test questions in a way different from that meant by the experimenter. In a language development test, researchers show children a picture of a medieval fortress, complete with moat, drawbridge, parapets and three initial consonants in it: D, C, and G. The children are required to circle the correct initial consonant for ‘castle’. The answer is C, but many kids choose D. When asked what the name of the building was, the children responded ‘Disneyland’. They adopted the reasoning line expected by the experimenter but got to the wrong substantive answer. The score sheet with the wrong answers does not include in it a child’s lack of reasoning capacity; it only records that the children gave a different answer rather than the one the tester expected.

Here we are constantly getting questions about how valid the measures are where the findings of the quantitative research are usually based. Some scholars such as Donaldson consider these as technical issues, which can be resolved through more rigorous experimentation. In contrast, others like Mehan reckon that the problems are not merely with particular experiments or tests, but they might legitimately jeopardise the validity of all researches of this type.

Meanwhile, there are also questions regarding the assumption in the logic of quantitative educational research that causes can be identified through physical and/or statistical manipulation of the variables. Critics argue that this does not take into consideration the nature of human social life by assuming it to be made up of static, mechanical causal relationships, while in reality, it includes complicated procedures of interpretation and negotiation, which do not come with determinate results. From this perspective, it is not clear that we can understand the pattern and mechanism behind people’s behaviours simply in terms of the casual relationships, which are the focuses of quantitative research. It is implied that social life is much more contextually variable and complex.

Such criticisms of quantitative educational research have also inspired more and more educational researchers to adopt qualitative methodologies during the last three or four decades. These researchers have steered away from measuring and manipulating variables experimentally or statistically. There are many forms of qualitative research, which is loosely illustrated by terms like ‘ethnography’, ‘case study’, ‘participant observation’, ‘life history’, ‘unstructured interviewing’, ‘discourse analysis’ and so on. Generally speaking, though, it has characteristics as follows:

Qualitative researches have an intensive focus on exploring the nature of certain phenomena in the field of education, instead of setting out to test hypotheses about them. It also inclines to deal with ‘unstructured data’, which refers to the kind of data that have not been coded during the collection process regarding a closed set of analytical categories. As a result, when engaging in observation, qualitative researchers use audio or video devices to record what happens or write in detail open-ended field-notes, instead of coding behaviour concerning a pre-determined set of categories, which is what quantitative researchers typically would do when conducting ‘systematic observation’. Similarly, in an interview, interviewers will ask open-ended questions instead of ones that require specific predefined answers of the kind typical, like in a postal questionnaire. Actually, qualitative interviews are often designed to resemble casual conversations.

The primary forms of data analysis include verbal description and explanations and involve explicit interpretations of both the meanings and functions of human behaviours. At most, quantification and statistical analysis only play a subordinate role. The sociology of education and evaluation studies were the two areas of educational research where-criticism of quantitative research and the development of qualitative methodologies initially emerged in the most intense way. A series of studies conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert in a boys’ grammar school, a boys’ secondary modem school, and a girls’ grammar school in Britain in the 1960s marked the beginning of the trend towards qualitative research in the sociology of education. Researchers employed an ethnographic or participant observation approach, although they did also collect some quantitative data, for instance on friendship patterns among the students. These researchers observed lessons, interviewed both the teachers and the students, and made the most of school records. They studied the schools for a considerable amount of time and spent plenty of months gathering data and tracking changes over all these years.

Questions 28-32
Look at the following statements or descriptions (Questions 28-32) and the list of people below. Match each statement or description with the correct person or people, A, B, C or D. NB You may use any letter more than once.

Lists of People
A Piaget
B Mehan
C Donaldson
D Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert

28. A wrong answer indicates more of a child’s different perspective than incompetence in reasoning.
29. Logical reasoning involving in the experiment is beyond children’s cognitive development.
30. Children’s reluctance to comply with the game rules or miscommunication may be another explanation.
31. There is evidence of a scientific observation approach to research.
32. There is a flawed detail in experiments on children’s language development.

Questions 33-36
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

In Piaget’s experiment, he asked the children to distinguish the amount of (33)………………..in different containers.

In response to Mehan’s question, subjects are more inclined to answer with the wrong answer ‘‘(34)…………………..’’ instead of the correct answer C.

Some people criticised the result of Piaget experiment, but Donaldson thought the flaw could be rectified by (35)…………………………….

Most qualitative research conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert was done in a (36)…………………………

Questions 37-39
Choose THREE letters, A-F.

The list below includes characteristics of the ‘qualitative research’.

Which THREE are mentioned by the writer of the passage?

A Coding behaviour in terms of a predefined set of categories
B Designing an interview as an essay conversation
C Working with well organised data in a closed set of analytical categories
D Full of details instead of loads of data in questionnaires
E Asking to give open ended answers in questionnaires
F Recording the researching situation and applying note taking

Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

40. What is the main idea of the passage?
A to prove that quantitative research is most applicable to children’s education
B to illustrate the society lacks of deep comprehension of educational approach
C to explain the ideas of quantitative research and the characteristics of the related criticisms
D to imply qualitative research is a flawless method compared with quantitative one

The Concept Of Childhood In Western Countries

The history of childhood has been a heated topic in social history since the highly influential book Centuries of Childhood’, written by French historian Philippe Aries, emerged in 1960. He claimed that ‘childhood’ is a concept created by modern society.

Whether childhood is itself a recent invention has been one of the most intensely debated issues in the history of childhood. Historian Philippe Aries asserted that children were regarded as miniature adults, with all the intellect and personality that this implies, in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (up to about the end of the 15th century). After scrutinising medieval pictures and diaries, he concluded that there was no distinction between children and adults for they shared similar leisure activities and work; However, this does not mean children were neglected, forsaken or despised, he argued. The idea of childhood corresponds to awareness about the peculiar nature of childhood, which distinguishes the child from adult, even the young adult. Therefore, the concept of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children.

Traditionally, children played a functional role in contributing to the family income in the history. Under this circumstance, children were considered to be useful. Back in the Middle Ages, children of 5 or 6 years old did necessary chores for their parents. During the 16th century, children of 9 or 10 years old were often encouraged or even forced to leave their family to work as servants for wealthier families or apprentices for a trade.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialisation created a new demand for child labour; thus many children were forced to work for a long time in mines, workshops and factories. The issue of whether long hours of labouring would interfere with children’s growing bodies began to perplex social reformers. Some of them started to realise the potential of systematic studies to monitor how far these early deprivations might be influencing children’s development.

The concerns of reformers gradually had some impact upon the working condition of children. For example, in Britain, the Factory Act of 1833 signified the emergence of legal protection of children from exploitation and was also associated with the rise of schools for factory children. Due partly to factory reform, the worst forms of child exploitation were eliminated gradually. The influence of trade unions and economic changes also contributed to the evolution by leaving some forms of child labour redundant during the 19th century. Initiating children into work as ‘useful’ children was no longer a priority, and childhood was deemed to be a time for play and education for all children instead of a privileged minority. Childhood was increasingly understood as a more extended phase of dependency, development and learning with the delay of the age for starting full-time work- Even so, work continued to play a significant, if less essential, role in children’s lives in the later 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, the ‘useful child’ has become a controversial concept during the first decade of the 21st century, especially in the context of global concern about large numbers of children engaged in child labour.

The half-time schools established upon the Factory Act of 1833 allowed children to work and attend school. However, a significant proportion of children never attended school in the 1840s, and even if they did, they dropped out by the age of 10 or 11. By the end of the 19th century in Britain, the situation changed dramatically, and schools became the core to the concept of a ‘normal’ childhood.

It is no longer a privilege for children to attend school and all children are expected to spend a significant part of their day in a classroom. Once in school, children’s lives could be separated from domestic life and the adult world of work. In this way, school turns into an institution dedicated to shaping the minds, behaviour and morals of the young. Besides, education dominated the management of children’s waking hours through the hours spent in the classroom, homework (the growth of ‘after school’ activities), and the importance attached to parental involvement.

Industrialisation, urbanisation and mass schooling pose new challenges for those who are responsible for protecting children’s welfare, as well as promoting their learning. An increasing number of children are being treated as a group with unique needs, and are organised into groups in the light of their age. For instance, teachers need to know some information about what to expect of children in their classrooms, what kinds of instruction are appropriate for different age groups, and what is the best way to assess children’s progress. Also, they want tools enabling them to sort and select children according to their abilities and potential.

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

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

1. Aries pointed out that children did different types of work to adults during the Middle Ages.
2. Working children during the Middle Ages were generally unloved.
3. Some scientists thought that overwork might damage the health of young children.
4. The rise of trade unions majorly contributed to the protection of children from exploitation in the 19th century.
5. Through the aid of half-time schools, most children went to school in the mid-19th century.
6. In the 20th century, almost all children needed to go to school with a full-time schedule.
7. Nowadays, children’s needs are much differentiated and categorised based on how old they are.

Questions 8-13
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer:

8. What had not become a hot topic until the French historian Philippe Aries’ book caused great attention?
9. According to Aries, what was the typical image of children in Western Europe during the Middle Ages?
10. What historical event generated the need for a large number of children to work for a long time in the 18th and 19th centuries?
11. What bill was enacted to protect children from exploitation in Britain in the 1800s?
12. Which activities were becoming regarded as preferable for almost all children in the 19th century?
13. In what place did children spend the majority of time during their day in school?

Bestcom – Considerate Computing

‘Your battery is now fully charged,’ announced the laptop to its owner Donald A. Norman in a synthetic voice, with great enthusiasm and maybe even a hint of pride. For the record, humans are not at all unfamiliar with distractions and multitasking. ‘We are used to a complex life that gets constantly interrupted by computer’s attention-seeking requests, as much as we are familiar with procreation,’ laughs Ted Selker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab,

Humanity has been connected to approximately three billion networked telephones, computers, traffic lights and even fridges and picture frames since these things can facilitate our daily lives. That is why we do not typically turn off the phones, shut down the e-mail system, or close the office door even when we have a meeting coming or a stretch of concentrated work. We merely endure the consequences. Countless research reports have confirmed that if people are unexpectedly interrupted, they may suffer a drop in work efficiency, and they are more likely to make mistakes. According to Robert G. Picard from the University of Missouri, it appears to build up the feeling of frustration cumulatively, and that stress response makes it difficult to focus again. It is. not solely about productivity and the pace of life. For some professionals like pilots, drivers, soldiers and doctors, loss of focus can be downright disastrous. ‘If we could find a way to make our computers and phones realise the limits of human attention and memory, they may come off as more thoughtful and courteous,’ says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research. Horvitz, Selker and Picard are just a few of a small but prospering group of researchers who are attempting to make computers, phones, cars and other devices to function more like considerate colleagues instead of egocentric oafs.

To do this, the machines need new skills of three kinds: sensing, reasoning and communicating. First, a system must: sense or infer where its owner is and what he or she is doing. Next, it must weigh the value of the messages it wants to convey against the cost of the disruption. Then it has to. choose the best mode and time to interject: Each of these pushes the limits of computer science and raises issues of privacy, complexity or reliability. Nevertheless, ‘Attentive’ Computing Systems, have started to make an appearance in the latest Volvos, and IBM has designed and developed a communications software called WebSphere that comes with an underlying sense of busyness. Microsoft has been conducting extensive in-house tests of a way more sophisticated system since 2003. In a couple of years, companies might manage to provide each office employee with a software version of the personal receptionist which is only available to corner-suite executives today.

However, the truth is that most people are not as busy as they claim to be, which explains why we can often stand interruptions from our inconsiderate electronic paraphernalia. To find out the extent to which such disruption may claim people’s daily time, an IBM Research team led by Jennifer Lai from Carnegie Mellon University studied ten managers, researchers and interns at the workplace. They had the subjects on videotape, and within every period of a specific time, they asked the subjects to evaluate their ‘interruptibility’. The time a worker spent in leave-me-alone state varied from individual to individual and day to day, and the percentage ranged from 10 to 51. Generally, the employees wished to work without interruption for roughly 1/3 of the time. Similarly, by studying Microsoft workers, Horvitz also came to the discovery that they ordinarily spend over 65 per cent of their day in a low-attention mode.

Obviously, today’s phones and computers are probably correct about two-thirds of time by assuming that their users are always available to answer a call, check an email, or click the ‘OK’ button on an alert box. But for the considerate systems to be functional and useful, their accuracy has to be above 65 in sending when their users are about to reach their cognitive limit.

Inspired by Horvitz’s work, Microsoft prototype Bestcom-Enhanced Telephony (Bestcom-ET) digs a bit deeper into every user’s computer to find out clues about what they are dealing with. As I said earlier, Microsoft launched an internal beta test of the system in mid-2003. Horvitz points out that by the end of last October, nearly 3,800 people had been relying on the system to field their incoming calls.

Horvitz is, in fact, a tester himself, and as we have our conversation in his office, Bestcom silently takes care of all the calls. Firstly, it checks if the caller is in his address book, the company directory, or the ‘recent call’ list. After triangulating all these resources at the same time, it attempts to figure out what their relationship is. The calls that get through are from family, supervisors and people he called earlier that day. Other callers will get a message on their screens that say he cannot answer now because he is in a meeting, and will not be available until 3pm. The system will scan both Horvitz’s and the caller’s calendar to check if it can reschedule a callback at a time which works for both of them. Some callers will take that option, while others simply leave a voicemail. The same happens with e-mails. When Horvitz is not in his office, Bestcom automatically offers to transfer selected callers to his cellphone, unless his calendar implies that he is in a meeting.

Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? Inboxes 14-19 on your answer sheet, write

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

14. According to Ted Selker, human reproduction has been disturbed throughout history.
15. If people are interrupted by calls or e-mails, they usually put up with it.
16. Microsoft is now investigating a software which is compatible with ordinary offices.
17. People usually have a misperception about whether they are busy or not.
18. Experts in Carnegie Mellon University conducted a research observing all occupations of IBM.
19. Current phone and computer systems have shortcut keys for people receiving information immediately.

Questions 20-26
Complete the table below. Choose ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Bestcom Working Process

Bestcom system carries out further analysis in order to find (20)……………..about what users are doing.

In the office	In the office	Out of the office
Check the (21)………………….between the caller and the user, whether the caller has contact information of the user such as their family or colleagues	if callers are not in directory, a(n) (22)……………will show up on their screen, saying the user is not available at moment. The system will (23)………………a suitable time for both or callers can choose to leave a(n) (24)…………..to users	Bestcom will provide a solution by transferring your call to the user’s (25)…………..if there is no (26)……………in his or her schedule

Can Hurricanes Be Moderate Or Diverted?

A Each year, massive swirling storms bringing along winds greater than 74 miles per hour wipe across tropical oceans and land on shorelines—usually devastating vast swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests strike densely inhabited territories, they have the power to kill thousands and cause property damage worth of billions of dollars. Besides, absolutely nothing stands in their way. But can we ever find a way to control these formidable forces of nature?

B To see why hurricanes and other severe tropical storms may be susceptible to human intervention, a researcher must first learn about their nature and origins. Hurricanes grow in the form of thunderstorm clusters above the tropical seas. Oceans in low-latitude areas never stop giving out heat and moisture to the atmosphere, which brings about warm, wet air above the sea surface. When this kind of air rises, the water vapour in it condenses to form clouds and precipitation. Condensation gives out heat in the process the solar heat is used to evaporate the water at the ocean surface. This so-called invisible heat of condensation makes the air more buoyant, leading to it ascending higher while reinforcing itself in the feedback process. At last, the tropical depression starts to form and grow stronger, creating the familiar eye — the calm centre hub that a hurricane spins around. When reaching the land, the hurricane no longer has a continuous supply of warm water, which causes it to swiftly weaken.

C Our current studies are inspired by my past intuition when I was learning about chaos theory 30 years ago. The reason why long-range forecasting is complicated is that the atmosphere is highly sensitive to small influences and tiny mistakes can compound fast in the weather-forecasting models. However, this sensitivity also made me realise a possibility: if we intentionally applied some slight inputs to a hurricane, we might create a strong influence that could affect the storms, either by steering them away from densely populated areas or by slowing them down. Back then, I was not able to test my ideas, but thanks to the advancement of computer simulation and remote-sensing technologies over the last 10 years, I can now renew my enthusiasm in large-scale weather control.

D To find out whether the sensitivity of the atmospheric system could be exploited to adjust such robust atmospheric phenomena as hurricanes, our research team ran simulation experiments on computers for a hurricane named Iniki that occurred in 1992. The current forecasting technologies were far from perfect, so it took us by surprise that our first simulation turned out to be an immediate success. With the goal of altering the path of Iniki in mind, we first picked the spot where we wanted the storm to stop after six hours. Then we used this target to generate artificial observations and put these into the computer model.

E The most significant alteration turned out to be the initial temperatures and winds. Usually, the temperature changes across the grid were only tenths of a degree, but the most noteworthy change, which was an increase of almost two degrees Celsius, took place in the lowest model layer to the west of the storm centre. The calculations produced wind-speed changes of two or three miles per hour. However, in several spots, the rates shifted by as much as 20 mph due to minor redirections of the winds close to the storm’s centre. In terms of structure, the initial and altered versions of Hurricane Iniki seemed almost the same, but the changes in critical variables were so substantial that the latter one went off the track to the west during the first six hours of the simulation and then travelled due north, leaving Kauai untouched.

F Future earth-orbiting solar power stations, equipped with large mirrors to focus the sun’s rays and panels of photovoltaic cells to gather and send energy to the Earth, might be adapted to beam microwaves which turn to be absorbed by water vapour molecules inside or around the storm. The microwaves would cause the water molecules to vibrate and heat up the surrounding air, which then leads to the hurricane slowing down or moving in a preferred direction.

G Simulations of hurricanes conducted on a computer have implied that by changing the precipitation, evaporation and air temperature, we could make a difference to a storm’s route or abate its winds. Intervention could be in many different forms: exquisitely targeted clouds bearing silver iodide or other rainfall-inducing elements might deprive a hurricane of the water it needs to grow and multiply from its formidable eyewall, which is the essential characteristic of a severe tropical storm.

Questions 27-33
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i Hurricanes in history
ii How hurricanes form
iii How a laboratory exercise re-routed a hurricane
iv Exciting ways to utilise future technologies
v Are hurricanes unbeatable?
vi Re-visiting earlier ideas
vii How lives might have been saved
viii A range of low-tech methods

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

Questions 34-38
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Hurricanes originate as groups of (34)……………………….over the tropical oceans. Low-latitude seas continuously provide heat and moisture to the atmosphere, producing warm, humid air above the sea surface. When this air rises, the water vapour in it condenses to form clouds and precipitation. (35)……………………….releases heat—the solar heat it took to evaporate the water at the ocean surface. This so-called latent (36)……………………..of condensation makes the air more buoyant, causing it to ascend still higher in a self-reinforcing feedback process. Eventually, the tropical depression begins to organise and strengthen, forming the familiar (37)…………………….—the calm central hub around which a hurricane spins. On passing over (38)…………………….the hurricane’s sustaining source of warm water is cut off, which leads to the storm’s rapid weakening.

Questions 39-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

39. What encouraged the writer to restart researching hurricane control?
A the huge damage hurricane trigger
B the developments in computer technologies
C the requirement of some local people
D the chaos theory learnt as a student

40. What was the writer’s reaction after their first experiment?
A surprised that their intervention had not achieved a lot
B ecstatic with the achievement the first experiment had
C surprised that their intervention had the intended effect
D regretful about the impending success

Reading Passage 1

A Americans today choose among more options in more parts of life than has ever been pos­sible before. To an extent, the opportunity to choose enhances our lives. It is only logical to think that if some choices are good, more is better; people who care about having infinite options will benefit from them, and those who do not can always just ignore the 273 versions of cereal they have never tried. Yet recent research strongly suggests that, psychologically, this assumption is wrong, with 5% lower percentage announcing they are happy. Although some choices are undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less.

B Recent research offers insight into why many people end up unhappy rather than pleased when their options expand. We began by making a distinction between “maximizers” (those who always aim to make the best possible choice) and “satisficers” (those who aim for “good enough,” whether or not better selections might be out there).

C In particular, we composed a set of statements—the Maximization Scale—to diagnose peo­ple’s propensity to maximize. Then we had several thousand people rate themselves from 1 to 7 (from “completely disagree” to “completely agree”) on such statements as “I never settle for second best.” We also evaluated their sense of satisfaction with their decisions. We did not define a sharp cutoff to separate maximizers from satisficers, but in general, we think of individuals whose average scores are higher than 4 (the scale’s midpoint) as maxi- misers and those whose scores are lower than the midpoint as satisficers. People who score highest on the test—the greatest maximizers—engage in more product comparisons than the lowest scorers, both before and after they make purchasing decisions, and they take longer to decide what to buy. When satisficers find an item that meets their standards, they stop looking. But maximizers exert enormous effort reading labels, checking out consumer magazines and trying new products. They also spend more time comparing their purchas­ing decisions with those of others.

D We found that the greatest maximizers are the least happy with the fruits of their efforts. When they compare themselves with others, they get little pleasure from finding out that they did better and substantial dissatisfaction from finding out that they did worse. They are more prone to experiencing regret after a purchase, and if their acquisition disappoints them, their sense of well-being takes longer to recover. They also tend to brood or ruminate more than satisficers do.

E Does it follow that maximizers are less happy in general than satisficers? We tested this by having people fill out a variety of questionnaires known to be reliable indicators of well­being. As might be expected, individuals with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life and were less happy, less optimistic and more depressed than people with low maximization scores. Indeed, those with extreme maximization ratings had depression scores that placed them in the borderline of clinical range.

F Several factors explain why more choice is not always better than less, especially for maxi­misers. High among these are “opportunity costs.” The quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the “costs” of making a selection is losing the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. Thus, an opportunity cost of vacationing on the beach in Cape Cod might be missing the fabulous restaurants in the Napa Valley. Early Decision Making Research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people respond much more strongly to losses than gains. If we assume that opportunity costs reduce the overall desirability of the most preferred choice, then the more alternatives there are, the deeper our sense of loss will be and the less satisfaction we will derive from our ultimate decision.

G The problem of opportunity costs will be better for a satisficer. The latter’s “good enough” philosophy can survive thoughts about opportunity costs. In addition, the “good enough” standard leads to much less searching and inspection of alternatives than the maximizer’s “best” standard. With fewer choices under consideration, a person will have fewer opportu­nity costs to subtract.

H Just as people feel sorrow about the opportunities they have forgone, they may also suffer regret about the option they settled on. My colleagues and I devised a scale to measure proneness to feeling regret, and we found that people with high sensitivity to regret are less happy, less satisfied with life, less optimistic and more depressed than those with low sensitivity. Not surprisingly, we also found that people with high regret sensitivity tend to be maximizers. Indeed, we think that worry over future regret is a major reason that individuals become maximizers. The only way to be sure you will not regret a decision is by making the best possible one. Unfortunately, the more options you have and the more opportunity costs you incur, the more likely you are to experience regret.

I In a classic demonstration of the power of sunk costs, people were offered season subscrip­tions to a local theatre company. Some were offered the tickets at full price and others at a discount. Then the researchers simply kept track of how often the ticket purchasers actu­ally attended the plays over the course of the season. Full-price payers were more likely to show up at performances than discount payers. The reason for this, the investigators argued, was that the full-price payers would experience more regret if they did not use the tickets because not using the more costly tickets would constitute a bigger loss. To increase sense of happiness, we can decide to restrict our options when the decision is not crucial. For example, make a rule to visit no more than two stores when shopping for clothing.

Questions 1-4
Look at the following descriptions or deeds (Questions 1-4) and the list of catego­ries below. Match each description or deed with the correct category, A-D. Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

A maximizers
B satisficers
C neither “maximizers” nor “satisficers”
D both “maximizers” and “satisficers”

1. rated to the Maximization Scale of making choice
2. don’t take much time before making a decision
3. are likely to regret about the choice in the future
4. choose the highest price in the range of purchase

Questions 5-8
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 5-8 on you 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

5. In today’s world, since the society is becoming wealthier, people are happier.
6. In society, there are more maximisers than satisficers.
7. People tend to react more to loses than gains.
8. Females and males acted differently in the study of choice making.

Questions 9-13
Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

9. The Maximization Scale is aimed to
A know the happiness when they have more choices.
B measure how people are likely to feel after making choices.
C help people make better choices.
D reduce the time of purchasing.

10. According to the text, what is the result of more choices?
A People can make choices more easily
B Maximizers are happier to make choices.
C Satisficers are quicker to make wise choices.
D People have more tendency to experience regret.

11. The example of theatre ticket is to suggest that
A they prefer to use more money when buying tickets.
B they don’t like to spend more money on theatre.
C higher-priced things would induce more regret if not used properly
D full-price payers are real theatre lovers.

12. How to increase the happiness when making a better choice?
A use less time
B make more comparisons
C buy more expensive products
D limit the number of choices in certain situations

13. What is the best title for Reading Passage 1?
A Reasoning of Worse Choice Making
B Making Choices in Today’s World
C The Influence of More Choices
D Complexity in Choice Making

Implication of False Belief Experiments

A A considerable amount of research since the mid 1980s has been concerned with what has been termed children’s theory of mind. This involves children’s ability to understand that people can have different beliefs and representations of the world– a capacity that is shown by four years of age. Furthermore, this ability appears to be absent in children with autism. The ability to work out that another person is thinking is clearly an important aspect of both cognitive and social development. Furthermore, one important explanation for autism is that children suffering from this condition do not have a theory of mind(TOM). Consequently, the development of children’s TOM has attracted considerable attention.

B Wimmer and Perner devised a ‘false belief task’ to address this question. They used some toys to act out the following story. Maxi left some chocolate in a blue cupboard before he went out. When he was away his mother moved the chocolate to a green cupboard. Children were asked to predict where Maxi willlook for his chocolate when he returns. Most children under four years gave the incorrect answer, that Maxi will look in the green cupboard. Those over four years tended to give the correct answer, that Maxi will look in the blue cupboard. The incorrect answers indicated that the younger children did not understand that Maxi’s beliefs and representations no longer matched the actual state of the world, and they failed to appreciate that Maxi will act on the basis of his beliefs rather than the way that the world is actually organised.

C A simpler version of the Maxi task was devised by Baron-Cohen to take account of criticisms that younger children may have been affected by the complexity and too much information of the story in the task described above. For example, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, who have a basket and a box， respectively. Sally also has a marble, which she places in her basket，and then leaves to take a walk. While she is out of the room, Anne takes the marble from the basket, eventually putting it in the box. Sally returns，and child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the basket, where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the box，where the child knows the marble is hidden， even though Sally cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding. The results of research using false-belief tasks have been fairly consistent: most normally-developing children are unable to pass the tasks until around age four.

D Leslie argues that, before 18 months, children treat the world in a literal way and rarely demonstrate pretence. He also argues that it is necessary for the cognitive system to distinguish between what is pretend and what is real. If children were not able to do this, they would not be able to distinguish between imagination and reality. Leslie suggested that this pretend play becomes possible because of the presence of a de-coupler that copies primary representations to secondary representations. For example, children, when pretending a banana is a telephone, would make a secondary representation of a banana. They would manipulate this representation and they would use their stored knowledge of ‘telephone’ to build on this pretence.

E There is also evidence that social processes play a part in the development of TOM. Meins and her colleagues have found that what they term mind mindedness in maternal speech to six-month old infants is related to both security of attachment and to TOM abilities. Mind Mindedness involves speech that discusses infants’ feelings and explains their behaviour in terms of mental stages (e.g_ ‘you1 re feeling hungry’)

F Lewis investigated older children living in extended families in Crete and Cyprus. They found that children who socially interact with more adults，who have more friends. And who have more older siblings tend to pass TOM tasks at a slightly earlier age than other children. Furthermore, because young children are more likely to talk about their thoughts and feelings with peers than with their mothers, peer interaction may provide a special impetus to the development of a TOM. A similar point has been made by Dunn, who argues that peer interaction is more likely to contain pretend play and that it is likely to be more challenging because other children, unlike adults, do not make large adaptations to the communicative needs of other children.

G In addition, there has been concern that some aspects of the TOM approach underestimate children’s understanding of other people. After all，infants will point to objects apparently in an effort to change a person’s direction of gaze and interest; they can interact quite effectively with other people; they will express their ideas in opposition to the wishes of others; and they will show empathy for the feeling of others. Schatz studied the spontaneous speech of three-year-olds and found that these children used mental terms，and used them in circumstances where there was a contrast between, for example, not being sure where an object was located and finding it, or between pretending and reality. Thus the social abilities of children indicate that they are aware of the difference between mental states and external reality at ages younger than four.

H A different explanation has been put forward by Harris. He proposed that children use ‘simulation’. This involves putting yourself in the other person’s position, and then trying to predict what the other person would do. Thus success on false belief tasks can be explained by children trying to imagine what they would do if they were a character in the stories, rather than children being able to appreciate the beliefs of other people. Such thinking about situations that do not exist involves what is termed counterfactual reasoning.

I A different explanation has been put forward by Harris. He proposed that children use “simulation”. This involves putting yourself in the other person’s position, and then trying to predict what the other person would do. Thus, success on false belief tasks can be explained by children trying to imagine what they would do if they were a character in the stories, rather than children being able to appreciate the beliefs of other people. Such thinking about situations that do not exist involves what is termed counterfactual reasoning.

Questions 14-20
Look at the following statements (Questions 14-20) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-G. Write the correct letter. A-G. in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

List of Researchers
A Baron-Cohen
B Meins
C Wimmer and Pemer
D Lewis E Dunn F Schatz G Harris
E Dunn
F Schatz
G Harris

14. gave an alternative explanation that children may not be understanding other’s belief
15. found that children under certain age can tell difference between reality and mentality
16. conducted a well-known experiment and drew conclusion that young children were unable to comprehend the real state of the world
17. found that children who get along with adults often comparatively got through the test more easily
18. revised an easier experiment to rule out the possibility that children might be influenced by sophisticated reasoning
19. related social factor such as mother-child communication to capability act in TOM
20. explained children are less likely to tell something interactive to their mother than to their friends

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

In 1980s, research studies were designed to test the subject called Theory of Mind that if children have the ability to represent the reality. First experiments were carried out on this subject on a boy. And questions had been made on where the boy can find the location of the (21)……………………. But it was accused that it had excessive (22)……………………………. So second modified experiment was can­ ducted involving two dolls, and most children passed the test at the age of (23)………………………………. Then Lewis and Dunn researched (24)………………….. children in a certain place, and found children who have more interaction such as more con­versation with (25)…………………………….have better performance in the test, and peer interaction is (26)………………………….. because of consisting pretending elements.

What is Meaning

The end, product of education, yours and mine and everybody’s, is the total pattern of reactions and possible reactions we have inside ourselves. If you did not have within you at this moment the pattern of reactions that we call “the ability to read.” you would see here only meaningless black marks on paper. Because of the trained patterns of response, you are (or are not) stirred to patriotism by martial music, your feelings of reverence are aroused by symbols of your religion, you listen more respectfully to the health advice of someone who has “MD” after his name than to that of someone who hasn’t. What I call here a “pattern of reactions”, then, is the sum total of the ways we act in response to events, to words, and to symbols.

Our reaction patterns or our semantic habits, are the internal and most important residue of whatever years of education or miseducation we may have received from our parents’ conduct toward us in childhood as well as their teachings, from the formal education we may have had, from all the lectures we have listened to, from the radio programs and the movies and televi­sion shows we have experienced, from all the books and newspapers and comic strips we have read, from the conversations we have had with friends and associates, and from all our experi­ences. If, as the result of all these influences that make us what we are, our semantic habits are reasonably similar to those of most people around us, we are regarded as “normal,” or perhaps “dull.” If our semantic habits are noticeably different from those of others, we are regarded as “individualistic” or “original.” or, if the differences are disapproved of or viewed with alarm, as “crazy.”

Semantics is sometimes defined in dictionaries as “the science of the meaning of words”— which would not be a bad definition if people didn’t assume that the search for the meanings of words begins and ends with looking them up in a dictionary. If one stops to think for a moment, it is clear that to define a word, as a dictionary does, is simply to explain the word with more words. To be thorough about defining, we should next have to define the words used in the definition, then define the words used in defining the words used in the definition and so on. Defining words with more words, in short, gets us at once into what mathemati­cians call an “infinite regress”. Alternatively, it can get us into the kind of run-around we sometimes encounter when we look up “impertinence” and find it defined as “impudence,” so we look up “impudence” and find it defined as “impertinence.” Yet—and here we come to another common reaction pattern—people often act as if words can be explained fully with more words. To a person who asked for a definition of jazz, Louis Armstrong is said to have replied, “Man. when you got to ask what it is, you’ll never get to know,” proving himself to be an intuitive semanticist as well as a great trumpet player.

Semantics, then, does not deal with the “meaning of words” as that expression is commonly understood. P. W. Bridgman, the Nobel Prize winner and physicist, once wrote, “The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.” He made an enormous contribution to science by showing that the meaning of a scientific term lies in the operations, the things done, that establish its validity, rather than in verbal definitions.

Here is a simple, everyday kind of example of “operational” definition. If you say, “This table measures six feet in length,” you could prove it by taking a foot rule, performing the operation of laying it end to end while counting, “One…two…three…four…” But if you say—and revolu­tionists have started uprisings with just this statement “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains!”—what operations could you perform to demonstrate its accuracy or inaccuracy?

But let us carry this suggestion of “operationalism” outside the physical sciences where Bridgman applied it, and observe what “operations” people perform as the result of both the language they use and the language other people use in communicating to them. Here is a personnel manager studying an application blank. He comes to the words “Education: Harvard University,” and drops the application blank in the wastebasket (that’s the “operation”) because, as he would say if you asked him, “I don’t like Harvard men.” This is an instance of “meaning” at work—but it is not a meaning that can be found in dictionaries.

If I seem to be taking a long time to explain what semantics is about, it is because I am trying, in the course of explanation, to introduce the reader to a certain way of looking at human behavior. I say human responses because, so far as we know, human beings are the only creatures that have, over and above that biological equipment which we have in common with other creatures, the additional capacity for manufacturing symbols and systems of symbols. When we react to a flag, we are not reacting simply to a piece of cloth, but to the meaning with which it has been symbolically endowed. When we react to a word, we are not reacting to a set of sounds, but to the meaning with which that set of sounds has been symbolically endowed.

A basic idea in general semantics, therefore, is that the meaning of words (or other symbols) is not in the words, but in our own semantic reactions. If I were to tell a shockingly obscene story in Arabic or Hindustani or Swahili before an audience that understood only English, no one would blush or be angry; the story would be neither shocking nor obscene-induced, it would not even be a story. Likewise, the value of a dollar bill is not in the bill, but in our social agreement to accept it as a symbol of value. If that agreement were to break down through the collapse of our government, the dollar bill would become only a scrap of paper. We do not understand a dollar bill by staring at it long and hard. We understand it by observing how people act with respect to it. We understand it by understanding the social mechanisms and the loyalties that keep it meaningful. Semantics is therefore a social study, basic to all other social studies.

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

27. What point is made in the first paragraph?
A The aim of education is to teach people to read
B Everybody has a different pattern of reactions.
C Print only carries meaning to those who have received appropriate ways to respond.
D The writers should make sure their works satisfy a variety of readers.

28. According to the second paragraph, people are judged by
A the level of education.
B the variety of experience.
C how conventional their responses are.
D complex situations.

29. What point is made in the third paragraph?
A Standard ways are incapable of defining words precisely.
B A dictionary is most scientific in defining words.
C A dictionary should define words in as few words as possible.
D Mathematicians could define words accurately.

30. What does the writer suggest by referring to Louis Armstrong?
A He is an expert of language.
B Music and language are similar.
C He provides insights to how words are defined.
D Playing trumpet is easier than defining words.

31. What does the writer intend to show about the example of “personnel manager”?
A Harvard men are not necessarily competitive in the job market.
B Meaning cannot always be shared by others.
C The idea of operationalism does not make much sense outside the physical science.
D Job applicants should take care when filling out application forms.

Questions 32-35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-35 on you answer sheet, write

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

32. Some statements are incapable of being proved or disproved.
33. Meaning that is personal to individuals is less worthy to study than shared meanings.
34. Flags and words are eliciting responses of the same reason.
35. A story can be entertaining without being understood.

Questions 36-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-H, below. Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

36. A comic strip
37. A dictionary
38. Bridgman
39. A story in a language the audience cannot understand
40. A dollar bill

A is meaningless.
B has lasting effects on human behaviors.
C is a symbol that has lost its meaning.
D can be understood only in its social context.
E can provide inadequate explanation of meaning.
F reflects the variability of human behaviors.
G emphasizes the importance of analyzing how words were used.
H suggests that certain types of behaviors carry more meanings than others.

The Connection Between Culture and Thought

A The world’s population has surpassed 7 billion and continues to grow. Across the globe, humans have many differences. These differences can be influenced by factors such as geography, climate, politics, nationality, and many more. Culture is one such aspect that can change the way people behave.

B Your culture may influence your clothing, your language, and many aspects of your life. But is culture influential enough to change the way an individual thinks? It has long been believed that people from different cultures would think differently. For example, a young boy from a farm would talk about cows while a boy from New York will talk about cars. If two young children from different countries are asked about their thoughts about a painting, they would answer differently because of their cultural backgrounds.

C In recent years, there has been new research that changed this long-held belief; However, this new research is not the first to explore the idea that culture can change the way we think. Earlier research has provided valuable insight to the question. One of the earliest research projects was carried out in the Soviet Union. This project was designed to find out whether culture would affect peopled way of thought processing. The researchers focused on how living environment and nationality might influence how people think. The experiment led by Bessett aimed to question such awareness of cognitive psychology. Bessett conducted several versions of the experiment to test different cognitive processes.

D One experiment led by Bessett and Masuku showed an animated video picturing a big fish swimming among smaller fish and other sea creatures. Subjects were asked to describe the scene. The Japanese participants tended to focus on the aquatic background, such as the plants and colour of the water, as well as the relationship between the big and small fish. American participants tended to focus on individual fishes, mainly the larger, more unique looking fish. The experiment suggested that members of Eastern cultures focus more on the overall picture, while members of Western culture focus more on the individuals.

E In another experiment performed by Bessett and Choi, the subjects were presented with some very convincing evidence for a position. Both the Korean and the American showed strong support. And after they were given some evidence opposing the position, the Korean started to modified or decreased their support. However, the American began to give more support to the former argument. This project suggested that in Korean culture, support for arguments is based on context. Ideas and conclusions are changeable and flexible, so an individual may be more willing to change his or her mind. For Americans, they were less willing to change their original conclusion.

F Bessett and Ara devised an experiment to test the thought processing of both oriental and occidental worlds. Test subject was given an argument “All animals with furs hibernate. Rabbit has fur. Therefore, rabbit hibernate”. People from the eastern world questioned the argument as not being logical, because in their knowledge some furry animals just don’t hibernate. But the American think the statement is right. They assume the logic deduction is based on a correct argument, thus the conclusion is right since the logic is right.

G From these early experiments in the Soviet Union, one might conclude that our original premise— that culture can impact the way we think—was still correct. However, recent research criticises this view, as well as Bessett’s early experiments. Though these experiments changed the original belief on thought processing, how much does it result from all factors needs further discussion. Fischer thinks Bessett’s experiments provide valuable information because his research only provides qualitative descriptions, not results from controlled environment. Chang partly agrees with him, because there are some social factors that might influence the results.

H Another criticism of Bessett’s experiments is that culture was studied as a sub-factor of nationality. The experiments assumed that culture would be the same among all members of a nationality. For example, every American that participated in the experiments could be assumed to have the same culture. In reality, culture is much more complicated than nationality. These early experiments did not control for other factors, such as socioeconomic status, education, ethnicity, and regional differences in culture. All of these factors could have a big effect on the individual’s response.

I A third criticism of Bessett’s experiment is that the content itself should have been more abstract, such as a puzzle or an IQ test. With objective content, such as nature and animals, people from different countries of the world might have different pre-conceived ideas about these animals. Prior knowledge based on geographic location would further complicate the results. A test that is more abstract, or more quantitative, would provide a more controlled study of how cognitive processing works for different groups of people.

J The research on culture’s effect on cognitive processing still goes on today, and while some criticisms exist of Bessett’s early studies, the projects still provide valuable insight. It is important for future research projects to control carefully for the variables, such as culture. Something like culture is complex and difficult to define. It can also be influenced by many other variables, such as geography or education styles. When studying a variable like culture, it is critical that the researcher create a clear definition for what is—and what is not—considered culture.

K Another important aspect of modern research is the ethical impact of the research. A researcher must consider carefully whether the results of the research will negatively impact any of the groups involved. In an increasingly globalised job economy, generalisations made about nationalities can be harmful to prospective employees. This information could also impact the way tests and university admissions standards are designed, which would potentially favor one group or create a disadvantage for another. When conducting any research about culture and nationality, researchers should consider all possible effects, positive or negative, that their conclusions may have when published for the world to see.

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has eleven paragraphs, A-K. Which paragraph contains the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. All people have the same reaction to a certain point of view.
2. Qualitative descriptions are valuable in exploring thought processing.
3. Different cultures will affect the description of the same scene.
4. We thought of young people as widely different at different geographical locations.
5. Eastern people are less likely to stick to their argument.

Questions 6-9
Look at the following statements (Questions 6-9) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-C. Write the correct letter, A-C, in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

A Bessett & Masuku
B Bessett & Choi
C Bessett & Ara

6. Geographical location affects people’s position on certain arguments.
7. Animated images reveal different process strategies.
8. Eastern people challenge a deduction because they knew it is not true.
9. Eastern people find more difficulty when asked to identify the same object.

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

Researchers in the Soviet Union wanted to find out how (10)……………………and nationality will control the way people think.

Bessett and Ara’s experiment shows, for Americans, so long as the logic deduction is based on a correct argument, the (11)………………………….should be right.

Fischer thinks Bessett’s research is quite valuable because it is conducted in a (12)……………………way rather than in controlled environment.

Future researchers on culture’s effect on cognitive processing should start with a (13)……………………of culture as a variable.

Eco-Resort Management Practices

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. I996).

Conran 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 die mainland by the Broadwater, a stretch of sea.’ kilometres wide. More than a century ago. there was only one Stradbroke Island, and there were at least four Aboriginal tribes living and limiting 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 century. The second ship wrecked 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 bloke through the weakened land form and Stradbroke became two islands. Conran Cove Island Resort is built on one of the world’s lew 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. Farmers and graziers finally abandoned South Stradbroke Island in 1959 because the vegetation and the soil conditions there were not suitable for agricultural activities.

SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES OF COUKAN COVE RESORT
Being located on an offshore island, the resort is only accessible by means of water transport. 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 for 8 years at least. The accommodation is an octagonal “Bure’’. These are large rooms that are clean but the equipment is tiled and in some cases just working. Our ceiling fan only worked on high speed for example. Beds are hard but clean. There is a television, a radio, an old air conditioner and a small fridge. These “Bures” are right on top of each other and night noises do carry. So he careful what you say and do. The only tiling is the mosquitoes, but if you forget to bring mosquito repellent they sell some oil the island. As an ecotourism-based resort most of the planning and development of the attraction lies 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
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 arc 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 systems, and are rewarded with prizes (such as a free return trip to the resort) accordingly if their usage level is low.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
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 Resort Development Spectrum, as proposed by Pridcaux (2000). According to Pridcaux. 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 front 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 minimise damage done to the natural environment on South Stradbrokc 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 14-18
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14. 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.

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

16. The major water supplier in South Stradbroke Island is by
A desalining the sea water.
B collecting the rainfall.
C transporting from the mainland.
D boring ground water.

17. 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

18. What does, as the managers of resorts believe, the prospective future focus on?
A more awards 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 of the Resort Development Spectrum

Questions 19-23
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.

Being located away from the mainland, tourists can attain the resort only by (19)……………………in a regular service provided by the resort itself. Within the resort, transports include trails for walking or tracks for both (20)……………………………and the beach train. The on-island equipment is old-fashioned which is barely working such as the (21)………………………overhead. There is television, radio, an old (22)……………………..and a small fridge. And you can buy the repellent for (23)………………………..if you forget to bring some.

Questions 24-26
Choose THREE letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Which THREE of the following statements are true as to the contemporary situation of Couran Cove Island Resort 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 will restrict the future businesses’ expansion

The future of the World’s Language

Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to the out by the end of this century, according to UNESCO. Just 11 are spoken by more than half of the earth’s population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by only five percent of its population—a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world. Mark Turin, a university professor, has launched WOLP (World Oral Language Project) to prevent the language from the brink of extinction.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls “oral literature” through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available.

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded until now.

The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor’s wall. The map was full of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world’s languages that were completely undocumented. At random, Turin chose a “pin” to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. “Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on these traditional field-work projects are quite random,” he admits.

Continuing his work with the Thangmi community in the 1990s, Turin began to record the language he was hearing, realising that not only was this language and its culture entirely undocumented, it was known to few outside the tiny community. He set about trying to record their language and myth of origins. “I wrote 1,000 pages of grammar in English that nobody could use—but I realised that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for me, it wasn’t enough for them. It simply wasn’t going to work as something for the community. So then I produced this trilingual word list in Thangmi, Nepali and English.”

In short, it was the first ever publication of that language. That small dictionary is still sold in local schools for a modest 20 rupees, and used as part of a wider cultural regeneration process to educate children about their heritage and language. The task is no small undertaking: Nepal itself is a country of massive ethnic and linguistic diversity, home to 100 languages from four different language families. What’s more, even fewer ethnic Thangmi speak the Thangmi language. Many of the community members have taken to speaking Nepali, the national language taught in schools and spread through the media, and community elders are dying without passing on their knowledge.

Despite Turin’s enthusiasm for his subject, he is baffled by many linguists’ refusal to engage in the issue he is working on. “Of the 6,500 languages spoken on Earth, many do not have written traditions and many of these spoken forms are endangered,” he says. “There are more linguists in universities around the world than there are spoken languages—but most of them aren’t working on this issue. To me it’s amazing that in this day and age, we still have an entirely incomplete image of the world’s linguistic diversity. People do PhDs on the apostrophe in French, yet we still don’t know how many languages are spoken.”

“When a language becomes endangered, so too does a cultural world view. We want to engage with indigenous people to document their myths and folklore, which can be harder to find funding for if you are based outside Western universities.”

Yet, despite the struggles facing initiatives such as the World Oral Literature Project, there are historical examples that point to the possibility that language restoration is no mere academic pipe dream. The revival of a modern form of Hebrew in the 19th century is often cited as one of the best proofs that languages long dead, belonging to small communities, can be resurrected and embraced by a large number of people. By the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. It is now spoken by more than seven million people in Israel.

Yet, despite the difficulties these communities face in saving their languages, Dr Turin believes that the fate of the world’s endangered languages is not sealed, and globalisation is not necessarily the nefarious perpetrator of evil it is often presented to be. “I call it the globalisation paradox: on the one hand globalisation and rapid socio-economic change are the things that are eroding and challenging diversity But on the other, globalisation is providing us with new and very exciting tools and facilities to get to places to document those things that globalisation is eroding. Also, the communities at the coal-face of change are excited by what globalisation has to offer.”

In the meantime, the race is on to collect and protect as many of the languages as possible, so that the Rai Shaman in eastern Nepal and those in the generations that follow him can continue their traditions and have a sense of identity. And it certainly is a race: Turin knows his project’s limits and believes it inevitable that a large number of those languages will disappear. “We have to be wholly realistic. A project like ours is in no position, and was not designed, to keep languages alive. The only people who can help languages survive are the people in those communities themselves. They need to be reminded that it’s good to speak their own language and I think we can help them do that—becoming modem doesn’t mean you have to lose your language.”

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

Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, about half of them are expected to be extinct. Most of the world’s languages are spoken by a (27)…………………of people. However, Professor Turin set up a project WOLP to prevent (28)……………….of the languages. The project provides the community with (29)………………….to enable people to record their endangered languages. The oral tradition has great cultural (30)……………….. An important (31)………………..between languages spoken by few people and languages with celebrated written documents existed in many communities.

A similarity
B significance
C funding
D minority
E education
F difference
G education
H diversity
I majority
J disappearance

Questions 32-35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-35 on you answer sheet, write

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

32. Turin argued that anthropologists and linguists usually think carefully before selecting an area to research.
33. Turin concluded that the Thangmi language had few similarities with other languages.
34. Turin has written that 1000-page document was inappropriate for Thangmi community;
35. Some Nepalese schools lack resources to devote to language teaching.

Questions 36-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

36. Why does Turin say people do PhDs on the apostrophe in French?
A He believes that researchers have limited role in the research of languages.
B He compares the methods of research into languages.
C He thinks research should result in a diverse cultural outlook.
D He holds that research into French should focus on more general aspects.

37. What is discussed in the ninth paragraph?
A Forces driving people to believe endangered languages can survive.
B The community where people distrust language revival.
C The methods of research that have improved language restoration.
D Initiatives the World Oral Literature Project is bringing to Israel.

38. How is the WOLP’s prospect?
A It would not raise enough funds to achieve its aims.
B It will help keep languages alive.
C It will be embraced by a large number of people.
D It has chance to succeed to protect the engendered languages.

39. What is Turin’s main point of globalisation?
A Globalisation is the main reason for endangered language.
B Globalisation has both advantages and disadvantages.
C We should have a more critical view of globalisation.
D We should foremost protect our identity in face of globalisation.

40. What does Turin suggest that community people should do?
A Learn other languages.
B Only have a sense of identity.
C Keep up with the modem society without losing their language.
D Join the race to protect as many languages as possible but be realistic.