Category: IELTS Reading

An Essential Intermediary

There is a strange irony about the blue whale. With fully grown adults reaching up to 30 metres long, and weighing in at almost 200 tons, it is not only the largest animal in the world, but also the largest to have ever existed. Yes, not even the most imposing of the dinosaurs from the Jurassic era can match this sleek streamlined aquatic mammal in scale. So, where is the irony? It lies in the fact that this huge beast feeds primarily on one of the smallest life forms in the oceans, a tiny crustacean known as krill.

Krill live in every ocean of the world. They thus come in many varieties, although all sporting a similar shrimp-like appearance, with an exoskeleton divided into three parts, and with two large antennae at the front, and pairs of legs running down the underside. These creatures are distinguishable from shrimp by their gills, which are externally mounted, and resemble rows of fibrous combs alongside their bodies. Another oddity is that their exoskeleton is usually transparent. This, and their small size, lead to the deceptive conclusion that they are an insubstantial presence, of little importance, until one is informed that an adult blue whale can consume almost 40 million krill, with a total weight of 3,600 kilograms, in just one day.

It is this, their huge numbers, which makes these mysterious ghost-like crustaceans so important. Just looking at one species, the Antarctic krill, their collective weight (or bio-mass) is estimated to be about 500 million tons. Putting this another way, that is over twice the weight of all human beings currently on Earth. Some scientists estimate that, each year, as much as half of this is eaten by whales, seals, penguins, squid, and fish, illustrating that krill constitute an enormous food resource for other animals. The question is whether humans can get in on the act.

Antarctic krill are the largest species, at six centimeters. Most other species are about two centimeters, and this makes them awkward to catch. Very fine fishing nets are needed, but these are difficult to drag through the water, quickly clogged, and easily broken. In addition, when lifted in large piles, the delicate krill crush each other, forcing out their internal fluids. They must also be peeled due to the dangerously high levels of fluoride in their exoskeleton, and finally, they must be quickly prepared and frozen due to the strong enzymes in their gut, which would otherwise cause rapid putrefaction. It is problems such as these which have limited processed krill to being mostly used as fish food in aquariums or aquaculture, or bait in commercial fishing operations, but otherwise very much out of the public’s mind.

Seafood-loving Japan is the only country in the world in which some krill end up on the table. The boiled, peeled, then frozen tail-meat is sold on the market, and there is some lower-grade krill-paste used as a food flavouring or colouring agent. These products originate from the small North-Pacific krill, yet it is the large Antarctic species which would seem to offer the best commercial prospects, and perhaps a more appetising meal. The majority of krill trawlers thus target the waters around coastal Antarctica, but it is a remote region, subject to harsh weather conditions, making operations there difficult and expensive, as well as raising issues of the ecological consequences, especially given the importance of krill as the basis of the food chain in that pristine and untouched environment.

Yet to explore this food chain fully, one must go smaller still. Krill themselves are filter feeders, using very fine comb-like appendages on the front of their bodies to extract microscopic organisms known as phytoplankton. These live in almost every body of water in the world, but only in the well-lit surface layers, since these organisms need exposure to sunlight, from which they obtain their energy. In the same way that plants on land are ultimately the basis of all food chains there, so too are phytoplankton in the oceans. Since krill exist in such large numbers, logically then, their primary food source must be even more numerous. There is, in fact, so much phytoplankton that their collective photosynthesis accounts for up to half of the oxygen produced in the world.

However, as with krill, the vast numbers of phytoplankton live unnoticed and unobserved. Their presence can only be indirectly deduced when they are pressed together by currents, where there can be correspondingly high concentrations of krill feeding on them. This can similarly result in the usually solitary blue whales being found together, and revealing one of the most remarkable and elusive food chains in nature: from phytoplankton, to krill, to the blue whale. In other words, from the tiniest elements in nature, in two short steps leading to a mighty and awe-inspiring leviathan of the deep, the largest animal that has ever existed. And the small ghostly krill are the essential intermediary in this wondrous process.

Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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. Some dinosaurs were bigger than the blue whale.
2. The blue whale does not only eat krill.
3. Some krill are smaller than shrimp.
4. There are about 500 million tons of krill in the ocean.

Questions 5-9
Complete the diagram. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Questions 10-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

10. Fishing for krill is
A not too difficult.
B mostly done in Antarctic waters.
C mostly done in Japanese waters.
D done with large fishing nets.

11. Krill
A move like ghosts.
B are processed soon after capture.
C are mostly used for human consumption.
D come in two varieties.

12. Phytoplankton
A outnumber krill.
B produce over half of the oxygen in the world.
C can be seen with the naked eye.
D can live anywhere in the ocean.

13. Blue whales
A are a very large species offish.
B can weigh 200 tons.
C prefer to be alone.
D are in the middle of a food chain.

A Meat-Eater’s Counter

A You might be forgiven sometimes for thinking that vegetarians are somehow superior human beings. In today’s climate of New Age spiritualism, animal rights, and Mother Earth naturalism, confirmed meat-eaters must necessarily be categorised as selfish, environmentally-irresponsible, spiritually-deprived gluttons, whose dietary desire is akin to cannibalism. Each lamb chop, carving of roast beef, or chicken drumstick, signifies a brutal execution of a sentient animal, to whose suffering we remain callously indifferent. Here, I would like to offer some arguments to counter the more extreme claims of the bean-sprout crowd.

B Vegetarians’ first justification is that eating meat is cruel to animals. But when pondering cruelty, it may pay to reflect on how animals fare in the wild. I was recently watching a documentary concerning herbivores on the African plains — where the parasite and insect-tormented herds lead lives of hair-raising and nerve-jittering bolts and dashes as they are constantly stalked by a range of predators. Now, compare this to the animals munching grass in our domestic pastures. Our four-legged friends, watered, well-fed, and attended to when sick, have an essentially stress-free and easy existence.

C But, the vegetarians claim, our slaughterhouses deal out brutal deaths. Brutal? Let us reflect again on that documentary. At one point, it showed an injured zebra, an animal which was quickly spotted by a pack of hyenas. The rest was a display of such cruelty and barbarity that it would make vegetarians think twice before intoning the mantra that ‘nature is good’. Yet being viciously torn to pieces by snapping jaws is more or less the inevitable end of most animals in the wild. It is simply a fact that they do not expire peacefully — they face, instead, brutalising and painful exits. If not becoming another animal’s dinner, they starve to death, or are victims of floods, droughts, and other merciless acts of nature. Compared to this, the relatively quick and clean death that we humans deliver to our cud-chewing cousins must be considered a privileged way to go.

D So, eating meat is not ‘cruel’ — at least, not compared to the natural world, and in fact can even allow the animals in question a certain quality of life that they would almost certainly never enjoy in the wild. But the vegetarians counter that, we, the human species, have a higher awareness, and should avail ourselves of other forms of food, rather than causing the deaths of living creatures. Yet it is worth realising that for tens of thousands of years our species did not have this luxury of choice. Killing animals was essential in staying alive. It is only very recently (in terms of human history), that society has reached a stage of affluence whereby a sufficiently high amount of non-animal nutrition can be obtained, and then only by a privileged and small percentage of the world’s population. Thus, the argument from moral high ground is, at best, an arbitrary one.

E But then the vegetarians come out with their next core claim to superiority — that their diet is healthier. Eating meat is going to have such nasty consequences for the heart, lungs, kidneys, and immune system that we will end up in an early grave. One can agree that this may be true for people who eat too much meat, but is it true for those who eat meat in proportion with an otherwise balanced diet? So many dubious facts and figures are produced to ‘prove’ the vegetarians’ viewpoint that I would recommend a quick read of a well-known book entitled, ‘How to lie with statistics’. This emphasises two foundations for statistical validity: gaining truly representative samples, and eliminating outside variables, both of which the green-eaters ignore.

F It is the second point I would like to look at. The lean and fit, health-conscious vegetarian doing his daily yoga and nightly guitar-strumming will certainly live much longer, on average, than the meat-eating, chain-smoking, beer-swilling, donut-chomping couch potatoes of this world, but not necessarily due (or in any way related) to the former’s abstinence from meat. It is not hard to deduce that those cigarettes, beer, donuts, and sedentary lifestyle are almost certainly responsible for the meat-eater’s diminished life expectancy. For a true comparison, one must compare lean and fit, health-conscious vegetarians with lean and fit, health-conscious non-vegetarians, the latter of whom mix moderate amounts of meat in their diet.

G And this is the point. It is almost impossible in this complex, mixed, and multi-faceted modern society to find enough people who can constitute a truly representative sample, while eliminating the many outside variables. Any assertion that statistics ‘prove’ vegetarians live longer must note that these vegetarians have already made (compared to the average sofa sprouts) a very rigorous and disciplined health-enhancing lifestyle change, which is probably accompanied with many other similar choices, all of which are almost certainly the real cause of any statistical trends. Factor these into the equation, and so far there is no convincing statistical evidence that vegetarianism is better for the health.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage Two has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for Paragraphs B-G from the list of headings.

List of Headings
i Animals attack
ii Needless killing countered
iii Better people?
iv A need for statistics
v The real cause of longer lives
vi Untrustworthy numbers
vii Cruel killing countered
viii Comparing lives
ix Quick efficient killing
x The real cause of early deaths

Example Answer Paragraph A iii

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

Questions 20-23
Complete the table. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

	Domestic animals	Wild animals
Life is	(20)………………….	threatened by numerous (21)……………………
Death is	(22)……………….	brutalising and painful
They	have some (23)………………	are unlikely to have this easy existence

Questions 24-26
Complete the table. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each term.

Find two interesting terms used in the text to refer to

	One term	Another term
Vegetarians	bean-sprout crowd	(24)……………………
Sheep and cattle	(25)…………………	cud-chewing cousins
Lazy people	couch potatoes	(26)…………………

Cubism

When the name of Picasso is spoken, the concept of ‘Cubism’ usually springs to mind. That this happens indicates just how deep and long-lasting has been its influence on the world, yet although many people know of the name ‘Cubism’, few can speak about it with any degree of conversancy. It is Georges Braque who is now credited as an equal pioneer in this revolutionary art movement, but claiming that these two artists alone created cubism oversimplifies a very complex issue.

Defining Cubism itself is difficult. At its simplest, the three-dimensional object being painted can be considered broken into pieces, sometimes square or cube-shaped (hence the name). These are reassembled in less than coherent order, and often at different angles. They can overlap, and sometimes more than one view is presented at the same time, moving beyond the limits of a fixed observer. The terms ‘multiple viewpoints’ and ‘mobile perspectives’ are often used — that is, the subject is captured from different angles, at different times, with the corresponding images fused into a single picture.

Braque’s pre-war paintings began experimenting with this idea, which inevitably led to an association with Picasso, who had been dabbling also in rendering three-dimensional views into two-dimensional geometric shapes — for example, in his painting Young Ladies of Avignon — often labelled ‘proto-cubist’. Some even consider this painting to be the true beginning of Cubism itself, as it inspired Braque to follow the lead, developing the movement towards its trademark features.

Yet both artists were influenced by earlier painters, in particular, the later works of Cezanne. Cezanne was one of the first to divide the canvas into several views, as well as to begin presenting natural objects in geometric figures.

Paul Cezanne had died in 1906, but a year later several museums exhibited his paintings in a retrospective of the artist’s life. Inevitably, young painters in the Parisian art scene, including Picasso and Braque, would have seen these. Whilst not yet fractured into facets or cubes, Cezanne occasionally implanted an underlying geometry—for example, in one of his most famous (and unfinished) paintings, The Bathers. This work breaks tradition in its unflattering portrait of the women, whose naked forms are rendered in sharp symmetry, also forming a triangular pattern with the river and trees. It is said to have inspired Picasso’s very similarly styled work, mentioned previously.

Moving beyond those early years of Cubism, many other artists were exploring the same idea, but taking it in individual directions. They are often unfairly considered as having played less significant roles simply because they did not adhere to the strict perspectives of Braque or Picasso. Yet, conceivably they could have evolved their own awareness of Cubism more from Cezanne’s pervading and almost universal influence on the Parisian art scene of that day, meaning that they must now be considered true innovators in their own right. Juan Gris, for example, produced many interesting works, yet now remains little regarded. Interestingly, being a compatriot of Picasso, the two artists became personally acquainted, to the extent that Gris painted his well-known Portrait of Picasso, now regarded as one of the best examples of the Cubist style.

Gris ventured beyond the monochromatic (or single family of colours) employed by Picasso and Braque. He combined vibrant hues in interesting and sometimes unusual combinations, such as in his still life, Newspaper and Fruit Dish. Similarly exploratory were the Orphic Cubists (as they would later become known), who moved further towards abstraction, but with Gris’s similar use of bright colours. These were used to convey meaning but blended in a way that went beyond the physical subject. Its main proponent was the Frenchman, Robert Delaunay, who, together with his wife, regularly exhibited in Parisian salons with increasingly non-representational forms. His Simultaneous Windows is barely recognisable as a window—just a blend of prismatic hues with one prominent square, giving a hint of three-dimensionality.

Léger also followed a more personal form of Cubism. As with most of his generation, he had seen the Cezanne 1907 retrospective, which enkindled interest in experimentation with geometric forms. This eventually led to the completely abstract, in which tubes, cones, and cubes, are all splayed on the canvas in bold primary colours — seen, for example, in his Railway Crossing. Merc, in spite of its non-representational quality, is the suggestion of the harsh mechanisation and alienation of modern life, a theme which the artist’s experiences in World War One only accentuated, and which pre-dates similar trends (such as pop art) by decades.

Clearly, Cubism was a complex art movement, and names such as Analytical, Synthetic, and Orphic Cubism are constructs which were invented long after the events and artworks which they

attempt to describe. These names appear to give a coherent order to what was actually a collective movement in which many individuals contributed. Among all this confusion, one does not doubt that the early years of last century were a fascinating period in the Parisian art scene.

Questions 27-31
Answer the questions. Choose the correct letter, A-F, for each answer.

Which painter

A Braque
B Cezanne
C Delaunay
D Gris
E Léger
F Picasso

27. led a new abstraction movement?
28. was the most influential?
29. was affected by a global conflict?
30. is inevitably linked with an art movement?
31. was married?

Questions 32-37
Answer the questions. Choose the correct letter, A-F, for each answer. NB You can use an answer ONLY once.

A Newspaper and Fruit Dish
B Portrait of Picasso
C Railway Crossing
D Simultaneous Windows
E The Bathers
F Young Ladies of Avignon

Which painting is

32. a confusing abstraction in many colours?
33. a darker view, ahead of its time?
34. probably the first of its kind?
35. an intriguing and multi-chromatic view?
36. very representative of its type?
37. an early painting which influenced another?

Questions 38-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

38. The Cezanne Retrospective
A was attended by Cezanne.
B showed his Cubist paintings.
C was attended by very many people.
D influenced an artist to move to non-representational style.

39. Many Cubist innovators
A preferred still-life paintings.
B favoured monochrome.
C invented names for their styles.
D were not adequately recognised.

40. Cubism
A is fairly easily explained.
B has cubes in incoherent order.
C shows different views of a subject.
D was created by Picasso and Braque.

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The King of Fruits

A One fact is certain: you’ll smell it before you see it. The scent (or should that be odour?) is overpowering (or should that be nauseating?). One inhales it with delight, or shrinks back in disgust. Is it sweet almonds with vanilla custard and a splash of whiskey? Or old socks garnished with rotten onion and a sprinkling of turpentine? Whatever the description, it wafts from what must be considered the most singular fruit on the planet—the durian, a Southeast Asian favourite, commonly called the ‘king of fruits’.

B Its title is, in many ways, deserved. As fruits go, it is huge and imposing. As big as a basketball, up to three kilograms heavy, and most noticeably, covered with a thick and tough thorn-covered husk, it demands a royal respect. The thorns are so sharp that even holding the massive object is difficult. In supermarkets, they are usually put into mesh bags to ease handling, while extracting the flesh itself requires the wearing of thick protective gloves, a delicate and dextrous use of a large knife, and visible effort. One can see why it is increasingly popular, in western markets, to have that flesh removed, wrapped up, and purchased directly.

C This leads one to wonder why nature designed such a smelly fruit in such an inconvenient package. Nature is, however, cleverer than one might think. For a start, that pungent odour allows easier detection by animals in the thick tropical forests of Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia, where the wild durian originates. When the pod falls, and the husk begins to crack open, wild deer, pigs, orangutans, and elephants, are easily drawn forth, navigating from hundreds of meters away directly to the tree. The second clever fact is that, since the inner seeds are rather large, the durian tree needs correspondingly larger animals to eat, ingest, and transport these seeds away, hence the use of that tough spiny cover. Only the largest and strongest animals can get past that.

D And what are they seeking? Upon prising open the large pod, one is presented with white fibrous pith in which are nestled pockets of soft yellowish flesh, divided into lobes. Each lobe holds a large brown seed within. Although these seeds themselves can be cooked and eaten, it is the surrounding flesh over which all the fuss is made. One of the best descriptions comes from the British naturalist, Alfred Wallace. Writen in 1856, his experience is typical of many, and certainly of mine. At first, he struggled hard to overcome the ‘disagreeable aroma’, but upon ‘eating it out of doors’ found the flesh to have a ‘rich glutinous smoothness, neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect’. He ‘at once became a confirmed durian eater’. Exactly!

E In actual fact, the flavour can vary considerably depending on the stage of ripeness and methods of storage. In Southern Thailand, the people prefer younger durian, with firmer texture and milder flavour, whereas in Malaysia, the preference is to allow the durian to fall naturally from the tree, then further ripen during transport. This results in a buttery texture and highly individual aroma, often slightly fermented. Whatever the case, it is this soft creamy consistency which easily allows durian to blend with other Southeast Asian delicacies, from candy and cakes, to modern milkshakes and ice cream. It can also appear in meals, mixed with vegetables or chili, and lower-grade durian (otherwise unfit for human consumption) is fermented into paste, used in a variety of local rice dishes.

F Such popularity has seen the widespread cultivation of durian, although the tree will only respond to tropical climates’—for example, only in the very northern parts of Australia, where it was introduced in the early 1960s. Since that time, modern breeding and cultivating techniques have resulted in the introduction of hundreds of cultivars (subspecies bred, and maintained by propagation, for desirable characteristics). They produce different degrees of odour, seed size, colour, and texture of flesh. The tree itself is always very large, up to 50 metres, and given that the heavy thorny pods can hang from even the highest branches, and will drop when ripened, one does not walk within a durian plantation without a hardhat—or at least, not without risking serious injury.

G Thailand, where durian remains very popular, now exports most of this fruit, with five cultivars in large-scale commercial production. The market is principally other Asian nations, although interest is growing in the West as Asian immigrants take their tastes and eating preferences with them — for example, in Canada and Australia. The fruit is seasonal, and local, sale of durian pods is usually done by weight. These can fetch high prices, particularly in the more affluent Asian countries, and especially when one considers that less than one third of that heavy pod contains the edible pulp. In the true spirit of Alfred Wallace, there are certainly a large and growing number of ‘confirmed durian eaters’ out there.

Questions 1-4
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph gives a reason for durian’s

1. spread outside of Asia?
2. variety of forms?
3. variety of food uses?
4. defining characteristics?

Questions 5-7
Label the diagram. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Questions 8-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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

8. The seeds can be eaten.
9. Durian trees are grown in many parts of Australia.
10. Thailand consumes the most durians.

Questions 11-13
Answer the questions. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

11. What can help to carry durians around?
12. Which sort of durian is usually fermented into paste?
13. What should one wear when walking among durian trees?

Esperanto

Cu vi paroli Esperanlon? Ne? Can you understand this? Should you be expected to? Depending on who you ask, somewhere from 10,000 to two million people in places all over the world could understand this sentence, and presumably reply in this same language. And it is not one that ever evolved through any natural process. To give it its technical name, it is a ‘constructed auxiliary language’. More specifically, it is ‘Esperanto’, and out of the several attempts throughout modern history to create artificial languages, Esperanto remains the most widely spoken.

‘Widely spoken’ is a relative term here. Compared to any natural language, the number of Esperanto speakers remains pitiably small — a far cry from the high hopes of its inventor, Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof, who was an eye doctor growing up in the racially divided Eastern-European town of Bialystok. In this complex and uneasy mixture of Poles, Jews, Russians, and Germans, each speaking their own language, a high-minded Zamenhof lamented how these languages so obviously categorised the city’s residents into different, and often hostile, groups. He resolved to create an easily learnt and politically neutral language, one that would transcend nationality, ethnicity, race, colour, and creed. It would be a universal second language, and his first book detailing this idea was published in 1887.

Surprisingly perhaps, the concept quickly gained acceptance and a loyal following. It seems that in a linguistically divided Eastern Europe, many people possessed the same idealism which drove Zamenhof. From there, then to the West, then into the Americas and Asia, Esperanto journals, magazines, and clubs, were formed, ultimately leading to the first world congress of Esperanto speakers in France, in 1905. These congresses have been held every year since then, apart from when world wars delayed proceedings. And today, Esperanto is still present, although very much under the radar. Whilst not yet having achieved the status of being an official language of any state or governing body, it is, at least, occasionally taught at schools and educational institutions on an informal or experimental basis.

What actually keeps Esperanto going is the motivation of those who become interested. Language books, journals, and various online and video-based self-learning technologies exist, as well as an active speaking community, but the key question remains: whether it is worth investing the time in acquiring the language. In other words, does it have any innate advantages over other languages or equip its speakers with a useful skill in life? The first question can be promptly answered. Proponents explain that, by being so simple and internally consistent, Esperanto is easy to learn, being able to be mastered in a fraction of the lime needed for any conventional language.

While we may accept that, the second question is far more problematic and raises further issues, the main one being whether the language is even necessary. Would international communication indeed be better if we all spoke Esperanto? Are there not other factors involved? And why cannot the English language take that role (which it virtually has)? Why divert state funds to support what may always remain a marginalised speech community, especially when there exists so many other languages spoken by far more people, and of far greater utility? The answers are emotional, complex, and confusing.

One problem with Esperanto is that it is culturally European. Its vocabulary and internal rules of construction derive from European languages, making it difficult for Asian learners. There is also a large and imposing vocabulary, with many nouns rather idiosyncratically chosen, and a certain unnecessary complexity which Zamenhof (who was not a professional linguist) had not realised. In 1894, he suggested a ‘reformed Esperanto’; however, the Esperanto speakers of that day were loathe to alter a language which they had already mastered, rejecting Zamenhof’s proposals, and also those of a special French committee formed 13 years later to discuss the adoption of a standard international language.

In the meantime, another artificial language had emerged. Called ‘Ido’, it was a product of various academics who embedded the changes that Esperanto was thought to have needed. This new language, sharing the same lofty goals, divided the support base of Esperanto. A large number defected to Ido, which then underwent further changes through committee after committee, and eventually the formation of an independent academy. However, Ido suffered substantial decline when its best-known advocate was killed in a car accident, and with the advent of World War One. After the war, its most vocal proponent published his own constructed language, ‘Novial’, making the schism all too confusing, such that the original Esperanto quickly became the predominant language of its type.

Esperanto may lead the field, but it falls far short of the aim of both its creator and many of its speakers — that of a truly global second language uniting all in mutual understanding. This high-minded goal, almost universally shared in the early days of the language, has mellowed among many followers, who are now content just to have a special language and its culture and community with whom they can interact. The unlikelihood of achieving more than this was even admitted in an Esperanto convention in 1980, although many still cling to the pracelo, the ‘original goal’, of an official status and worldwide use. Will this ever be achieved? All I can say is estus agrable pensas tiel, sed preshau certe ne estos.

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

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. The number of Esperanto speakers is quite large.
15. Zamenhof spoke many languages.
16. Esperanto is easier to learn than other languages.
17. Esperanto World Congresses have been held every year since 1905.

Questions 18-21
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The different ethnic groups in Zamenhof s hometown were frequently (18)……………………

The first Esperanto speakers shared Zamenhofs (19)……………………

English now essentially provides the means of (20)……………………..

Official support of Esperanto could be considered a waste of (21)…………………..

Questions 22-26
Answer the questions. Choose the correct letter, E, I, or B.

E Esperanto
I Ido
B Both

Which language

22. had many stages in its development?
23. had its development affected by World War One?
24. has some strange words?
25. was designed by many people?
26. has never achieved its aim?

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The Year Without a Summer

1816 was a strange year indeed. In America, in midsummer, a ‘dry log’ covered the land so thickly that snow fell, and large parts of the country were gripped by an intense and lingering cold front. The situation was no better in Great Britain and Europe, where cool temperatures and wet weather persisted for months. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, while holidaying in Switzerland, complained of ‘incessant rainfall’, a feeling which may have put her in the mood for writing her most famous work. But there were to be far more significant effects of what become known as the ‘year without a summer”.

But where did the summer go? The main culprit, surprisingly, was a volcano on the other side of the planet: Mount Tamhora. in Indonesia, whose eruption of the year before was of such colossal magnitude that it altered global climate. In the years leading to this, the mountain had experienced minor eruptions, but the 18.15 event was the culmination — a huge explosive outburst of the central volcanic vent with subsequent caldera collapse. Over 70,000 people in the vicinity were killed from lava flows, tsunamis, and pumice and ash falls. But more significantly, the eruption — now acknowledged as the largest in recorded history —ejected huge amounts of dust into the stratosphere. This atmospheric layer is the highest and most static, and least affected by rainfall, which means that it takes relatively long periods for volcanic dust to be washed out. If these dust particles are of fine composition, they are quickly blown around the globe, to remain there for years.

On a somewhat benign note, this air-borne ash resulted in beautiful pastel-coloured sunsets and extended twilights in Northern Europe. However, on a (quite literally) darker note, it set into motion a ‘volcanic winter’ due to the filtering of the sun’s rays, and the increased reflectivity of the atmosphere, where heat and sunlight are bounced back into space. But what is intriguing in this case is that even without the Tambora explosion, the period 1790 to 1830 was already one of the coldest on record. This period has officially become known as the ‘Dalton Minimum’, after John Dalton, a London-based meteorologist who noted that the sun at that time did not seem as active in its production of sunspots and solar flares. Whether there is a correlation between this and the average amount of solar radiation emitted is still unclear. If this does exist, the effect would be small—a fraction of a percent less, but, arguably, significant to our small planet orbiting so far away.

Adding further complexity to the issue, there had been other significant volcanic eruptions in the years prior to Tambora — in the Caribbean, Japan, and the Philippines — in which massive dust clouds were the characterising feature. Looking at the Philippino example, 1814 saw the most destructive eruption of Mt Mayon ever. Killing thousands, burying whole towns and villages, the volcano spewed out millions of tons of ash and rock into the high atmosphere. When we put all these factors together, the sequence is thus clearer. With the world already suffering from lower temperatures due to natural variations in the sun’s surface action, a series of severe volcanic eruptions occurred. As a result, the accumulation of ash in the stratosphere rose to a historic high, to which the mammoth Tambora explosion substantially added, sending a savage cold spike throughout the already cooler globe.

The consequences were dire. With the dramatic temperature swings, falling to near-freezing within hours, and with the sudden summer frosts and sustained drenching rainfall, all across the Northern Hemisphere, staple crops such as maize and wheat failed to mature, and much livestock were killed. With agricultural production already low due to the cooler preceding years, and with the rudimentary road systems of those times rendering the importation and distribution of emergency food supplies limited, this final blow was devastating. It resulted in widespread malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of diseases such as typhus and cholera. It created streams of starving refugees, large shifts of population, riots, looting of food warehouses, and other breakdowns of civic order. 100,000 people were thought to have died in Ireland alone, with many times that figure on the European continent. There was such mortality that the famine is now considered the worst of that century.

The question then is whether it could happen again. And the answer is, since it has happened many times before in geological history, a definite yes. The most extreme case occurred about 70,000 years ago, when the world’s largest known eruption took place at Lake Toba (relatively close to Tambora). This is thought to have plunged the planet into a decade-long volcanic winter, and triggered the onset of the last ice age, a deep freeze of the planet which lasted many tens of thousands of years, all of which, some speculate, just about wiped out the human race. We can rest in the assurance, however, that such events are extremely few and far between. You will certainly be able to enjoy your summer holidays, for a long time to come.

Questions 27-34
Complete the flowchart. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

A Year without a summer

Questions 35-40
Answer the questions.

Which location saw

A America
B Lake Toba
C London
D Northern Europe
E Philippines
F Switzerland
G Tambora

35. a positive effect of a volcanic eruption?
36. the biggest volcanic eruption?
37. scientific observation?
38. a series of eruptions?
39. buildings destroyed?
40. a book written?

The Search for Colour

We seldom reflect on the artificial colour of modern merchandise. A blue car is blue; a red chair, red; a green bicycle, green. But why does it have colour? Answer, because its surface contains pigment. If this was originally dissolved in a carrier liquid to transfer the colour, it is known as a dye, but whatever the case, since colour is the most visible element in all objects we desire, pigments can be said to be the basis of customer choice, and therefore of almost all hard trade and transactions. Consequently, production of this substance is big business, now accounting for over twenty billion dollars annually in global sales—yet there was a time when none of it existed.

Going back into the mists of prehistory, objects, tools, and clothing were all earthen and bland, without anything except their natural colours. The first pigments used were of mineral origin — from natural clays tinted by the presence of iron-oxides. The best known examples are the gold colour of ochre, the brown of umber, and the yellow of sienna. These were ground up and mixed with fat to create paint, used, for example, in the earliest European cave paintings. Ash, as well as charcoal (derived from heating wood in the absence of oxygen), were also used to provide black, but in the search for colour, it was soon discovered that biological matter, such as plants, animal waste, mollusks, and insects, could yield more interesting results.

Crimson —a bright red colour—is a good example. It was extracted from kermes, a small insect found on Southern-European oak trees. The pigment is a constituent of the carminic acid produced inside the creature’s body, used to discourage predation by birds or other insects. However, with the trees being large and bushy, and the sap-feeding insects few and far between, pigment production was a meticulous and time-consuming process. This increased the price of the product, the end result being that, in Northern Europe, pure crimson long remained a luxury colour for clothing and textiles.

Interestingly, across the Pacific Ocean, people were producing the same colour from the same chemical within another insect. They were called cochineals: small scaly creatures which breed in abundant clusters on the fleshy leaves of a commonly occurring cactus. These insects have many advantages over kermes. Being so prolific and so easily seen by predators, they need to produce higher concentrations of carminic acid for protection, up to a quarter of their body weight. The pigment which results is also stronger and longer-lasting. Finally, the insects are far more easily obtained, being simply scrapped or knocked off the cactus leaves, Thus, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, cochineals replaced kermes almost completely, becoming a lucrative Central American export for the next few centuries.

The lure of crimson was only exceeded by the vivid ‘Tyrian purple’ — a colour which had ranked in highest favour since antiquity. Its source was the medium-sized Murex sea snail. With a range around the coastal Mediterranean, early civilisations there soon realised that the mucus the snail secretes when poked and prodded could be treated to produce a purplish-blue dye which did not fade with time. However, by needing thousands of sea snails and using a complicated (and still little known) process, all for the production of only small amounts of pigment, the colour was so expensive it could only be afforded by the ruling classes. This led to purple becoming associated with royalty. Roman emperors traditionally wore clothing of this colour.

For a less durable blue, suitable for dyeing clothes, the indigo plant was discovered. Its leaves were fermented, and then left to age, and the sediment eventually produced was dried, treated, then reduced to a blue powder. This pigment can, in fact, be said to be the oldest used to colour fabric. It is one reason jeans were originally blue, and remain so to this day, indigo being the dye used to colour them. However, it was not suitable for painting or artistic purposes. For that, European artists used a mixture derived from the grinding up of lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone, whose only known source was in far Afghanistan. Consequently, this colour was very costly, and many artists avoided it altogether. Others, however, were deliberately extravagant in its use, producing proportionally more expensive paintings.

The cost of this paint resulted in much experimentation during the Industrial Revolution in search of chemical-based alternatives. This eventually led to the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue. Discovered in Germany in the early 18thcentury, it was put into rapid production and exportation, giving artists around the world the first cheap, yet stable, blue pigment. Other chemists were making similar breakthroughs. The vivid purple of the Murex snail was accidentally produced by an English chemist, William Perkins, who soon put ‘mauveine’ into commercial production. With such efforts, affordable pigments were soon found in all colours.

Mass production followed, bringing industrial prosperity to Northern Europe, but decline in many parts of the world where traditional organic pigments were still under production. In the Americas, for example, the crimson of cochineals, having long been a Spanish monopoly and rich source of export income, went into steady decline. However, all was not lost. In this modern age, there has been a shift back towards naturalness, even in pigments, and this has seen a resurgence in the popularity of cochineals. The pigment is now commercially produced in several countries, with Peru being the largest exporter.

Questions 1-4
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Ultimately, pigments are important because they are so (1)………………………..

Umber and sienna are examples of (2)……………………….

Originally, more unusual colours were derived from (3)……………………

Generally, predators of insects do not like the taste of (4)………………………

Questions 5-8
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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. Kermes were easy to collect.
6. Kermes produce better pigment than cochineals.
7. Kermes are bigger than cochineals.
8. Cochineals are still a valuable crop.

Questions 9-13
Complete the summary of the second half of the passage. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

The best purple originally came from the (9)……………………of sea snails, although the oldest pigment for clothing was from the (10)………………………..of indigo. The blue for picture-painting originated from a (11)………………………costing so much that an artificial replacement. Prussian Blue, was eventually produced, being not only inexpensive but also (12)……………………….Ironically, the prized purple colour was discovered (13)………………….

The Most Dangerous Insect in the World

If asked to name the deadliest insect in the world, most people would search their minds for some sinister-looking spiders or scorpions, or exotic garden pests. However, if we define ‘deadly’ in terms of the number of people who die directly as a result of the insect, one of them leads the field, by far: the mosquito. As a blood-sucking pest, it transmits diseases to over 700 million people a year, killing a fair proportion of them in the process. No other insect comes even close to this.

Although all mosquitoes are nectar feeders, the females also need protein from a blood meal in order to produce eggs. To find this, they have a keen sense of smell, detecting the sweat and other organic compounds of mammals, such as the carbon dioxide they exhale. Scientific tests have proven that some people attract more mosquitoes than others, presumably having a better ‘scent profile’ — in fact, so adept are female mosquitoes at following these trails, they can infiltrate buildings through pipeways and air-conditioning ducts as they move inexorably towards their victims. Upon biting, they inject an anti-coagulating saliva into the flesh, and it is this fluid (and not their blood) which may contain the range of viral and parasitical nasties for which mosquitoes are notorious.

Yet even without such diseases, mosquitoes are an irritating nuisance which can occasionally cause serious injury. Upon being bitten, the body’s immune system is activated, and subsequent bites trigger antibodies which cause inflammation and itching, particularly with young children. More bites can increase such sensitivity, resulting in pronounced swelling and blistering — wounds which can occasionally become infected, particularly when scratched. Two famous victims of infected mosquito bites are Lord Carnarvon, the Egyptologist who played a role in the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and the British poet, Rupert Brooke, passing away in Egypt and Greece, respectively.

But the real danger will always be mosquito-borne diseases. Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and several encephalitis-type diseases are all modern day killers. A less deadly but more insidious example is filariasis, a disease named from the thread-like parasites which migrate to the body’s lymphatic system, causing parts of the body to permanently swell to grotesque proportions. Yet, as distressing as all this is, in terms of its death toll, the worst disease is undoubtedly malaria. Carried by the Anopheles mosquito, this parasite causes fever, shivering, joint pains, vomiting, and, if left untreated, a painful death. It infects over two million people a year, most of them children, killing over one quarter in the process.

The Aedes Aepypti mosquito is the species responsible for that other great killer: yellow fever. This is a viral disease, but limited to tropical areas, primarily in Africa, but also Central and South America. After high lever, nausea, and joint pains, the virus attacks the liver, causing the host’s skin to turn yellow (hence the name), with death following some days later. Its toll is much smaller than malaria, with about 200,000 infections and 30,000 deaths every year, mostly in Africa. Unlike malaria, there exists a vaccine, and extensive vaccination programs sponsored by the WHO have had some success, whilst travelers to disease-prone areas are usually similarly protected.

With such a death toll, it took a surprisingly long time before the link between mosquitoes and disease was realised. This is exemplified in the construction of the Panama Canal — that ambitious project to excavate a passageway for ships through that narrow Central-American nation. In the 1880s, the French struggled for eight years in insect-infested jungle, but the death toll from malaria and yellow fever made it very difficult to maintain an experienced work force. After the loss of 22,000 lives, work was abandoned, yet shortly afterwards, a British doctor in India, Ronald Ross, deduced the means of disease transmission, identifying the malaria parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of mosquitoes. He also realised that mosquito numbers could be reduced by limiting their access to water, providing two crucial insights which laid the foundations for controlling the disease.

Thus, in 1904, when America resumed work on the Panama Canal, they instituted a multi-million dollar mosquito-abatement program, consisting of many strategies. Houses for workers were built with screens on the windows, buildings harbouring mosquitoes were fumigated, and sick workers were isolated behind nets. Stagnant pools of water (where mosquitoes breed) were sprayed with oil and insecticide, and roads were paved to eliminate puddles. For this same reason, swamps were drained, and proper piping was used for the transmission of drinking and waste water. All this reduced the number of deaths from disease over the ten-year construction phase to less than 6,000 — a considerable number, but still considered a major success.

To this day, reducing the incidence of stagnant pools of water, however small, remains very cost-effective in combatting mosquito-borne diseases in urban areas. Many of the most dangerous species breed in incidental ditches, flowerpots, or discarded containers into which rainwater has pooled. By eliminating such sites, the insects’ numbers fall greatly, limiting bites to those mosquitoes which come from further afield, yet since they cannot travel far, the likelihood of being bitten (and infected) is greatly reduced.

Questions 14-18
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage Two?

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. Mosquito blood transmits disease.
15. Mosquitoes have good vision.
16. Rupert Brooke died in Greece.
17. Malaria kills over half a million people per year.
18. There is a vaccine for malaria.

Questions 19-22
Answer the questions. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

19. What can cause mosquito bites to become inflamed?
20. Which disease causes the body to change shape?
21. Which organ does yellow fever affect?
22. In which parts of a country is removing exposed water a particularly cheap way to reduce mosquito numbers?

Questions 23-26
Complete the summary. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

The Panama Canal
This large undertaking took place in (23)……………………..full with insects. The number of workers was greatly reduced by disease, but after the malaria (24)……………………..was discovered, all exposed water was removed or (25)……………………………..to deny breeding sites. The relatively low number of deaths which followed is attributed to these (26)…………………….

Waterfalls

Waterfalls are places where rivers or streams direct their flow over vertical drops. They have always been a lure for their scenic beauty or, in the case of the biggest, their ability to showcase nature’s might and majesty. Niagara Falls, on the border of Canada and America (discharging the most water of all), is a magnet for visitors, as is Victoria Falls, also straddling an international boundary between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and presenting the single largest sheet of falling water in the world. Similarly, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the highest waterfall, Angel Falls, located deep in the middle of the Venezuelan jungle, has not stopped it from becoming one of the country’s top tourist attractions.

There are many possible causes of waterfalls, but a common one is differences in rock type. When a river flows over a resistant rock bed, erosion is slow, but with the complex geological faulting of the Earth’s surface, softer patches of rock can be exposed. The water cuts into this, resulting in a minor turbulence at the boundary, stirring up pebbles and grit from the riverbed, which increases the erosive capacity of the current. And so a process begins whereby the river takes on two tiers, or levels, and a waterfall is born. Other more abrupt causes of waterfalls are earthquakes or landslides, which create fault lines in the land, or divert watercourses, respectively. Additionally, during past ice ages, glaciers scoured out many deep basins. These glaciers may have disappeared, but their feeder rivers can continue to flow as waterfalls into the remaining depressions.

Obviously then, waterfalls come in a variety of shapes and sizes, as different as the local geology in which they are found, and this has resulted in an abundance of descriptive terms. The word ‘cataract’ refers simply to a large powerful waterfall, while a ‘cascade’ descends a series of rock steps. If these steps are very distinct, it is a ‘tiered waterfall’, and if each step is larger still, of approximately the same size, and with a significant pool of water at each base, it is known as a multi-step waterfall’. If the falling water engages with the rock face, it often widens, to be called a ‘horsetail waterfall’, while if it does not touch the rock face at all, it is a ‘plunge waterfall’ — often the most picturesque.

Regardless of such differences, all waterfalls have in common a vertical height and average flow of water. These features, taken together, are a measure of the waterfall’s power, quantified using a ten-point logarithmic scale. Giant falls, such as Niagara, are graded at the very top of this scale, find smaller falls, which may occur in town creeks, at the bottom. Another common feature of larger falls is a ‘plunge pool’. This is caused by the rubble at the base of the falls, which is stirred and broken into smaller pieces. In the never-ending eddies and whirlpools, these pieces scour out a deep underwater basin. An interesting consequence is that such falls are in the process of retreat, since the softer material at the lower face suffers undercutting. This gives rise to rock shelters behind the falling water, which steadily become larger until the roof collapses, and the waterfall retreats significantly backward into the Earth.

Of course, to people at large, a waterfall seems fixed and forever. Erosion is indeed a slow process; however, given a sufficiently powerful waterfall and the right sort of rock, the retreat can be over a meter a year. This would be clearly observable over a person’s life time, and a fast-motion view, spanning several decades, would see an essentially unchanged height of falling water burrowing backwards with surprising evenness. Since this motion is towards higher elevations or through more hilly terrain, a host of geological features can be laid in the waterfall’s retreating path. Victoria Falls are a prime example, with its lower reaches characterised by spectacular islands, gorges, and rock formations.

This retreat occasionally causes problems, as can be seen with Niagara Falls. In just over ten millennia, the falls have moved almost 11 kilometres upstream. Since the Niagara river marks the border of Canada and America, as agreed in 1819, the detectable retreat of these falls since that time technically means that the Canadian frontier has advanced forward at the expense of America, although this argument has obviously caused dispute. More practically, with so much infrastructure, such as hotels, roads, bridges, and scenic viewpoints, all rigidly established, it remains important to limit the erosion. For this reason, the exposed ridges of the falls have been extensively strengthened, and underwater barriers installed to divert the more erosive of river currents.

The most ambitious erosion-control measure took place in 1969 on Niagara’s American Falls, whose retreat was nibbling away at American territory. The branch of the Niagara river which feeds these subsidiary falls was dammed, allowing the main Horseshoe Falls to absorb the excess flow. The then-completely-dry-and-exposed river bottom and cliff face allowed a team of US-army engineers to use bolts, cement, and brackets, to strengthen any unstable rock. Five months later, the temporary dam was destroyed with explosives, returning water to the falls, but with the inexorable erosion process having been slowed considerably.

Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage Three?

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

27. Niagara, Victoria, and Angel Falls are on international boundaries.
28. Landslides can create waterfalls faster than erosion.
29. Glaciers have produced the most waterfalls.
30. A tiered waterfall has the largest steps.
31. Niagara is a Grade Ten waterfall.

Questions 32-36
Complete the diagrams. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 37-40
Answer the questions. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

37. What are gorges and rock formations examples of?
38. Who has benefited from the erosion at Niagara Falls?
39. What is used to control some of Niagara’s water movements?
40. On what geological parts of American Falls did the 1969 project focus?

It’s Dynamite

In 1866, an American railroad company was constructing a tunnel through the Sierra Nevada mountains. They encountered particularly hard rock, and ordered three crates of the only blasting explosive that could do the job: nitroglycerine. The first of these crates arrived in a postal centre in San Francisco, and upon being accidentally dropped, promptly exploded, killing all 15 people present. The point was taken. ‘Nitro’ was dangerously shock sensitive. Its transportation was soon banned, and from then on, it had to be manufactured by on-site laboratories – an expensive and still quite dangerous task, as the number of deadly explosions would demonstrate.

The history of nitroglycerine is full of such sad events. It was first synthesised in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, an Italian chemist, and he was so frightened by his discovery that he did not immediately publish his findings. He was also the first to caution the world against its use, in both private letters and a journal article, arguing that it was impossible to handle the substance safely. However, it was soon discovered that when frozen (at about five degress), nitro was much less sensitive to shock. The problem was then in thawing it back into liquid form, at which point it became even more unstable. Again, a mounting death toll would testify to this fact.

Yet nitroglycerine always remained in demand, being the first practical mining explosive produced. Prior to this, gunpowder was used, but this was limited and clumsy. Gupowder is a ‘low’ explosive, meaning that it ‘burns’ from layer to layer, producing gases which expand at less than the speed of sound. Nitro is a ‘high’ explosive, meaning that it ‘detonates’ – that is, is triggered to react by the virtually instrantancous shock wave, producing gases which expand at more than the speed of sound. Gunpowder could not efficiently shatter rock (although it was suitable for bullets and artillery shells). Only nitro could really do the job, and a Swedish chemist, Alfred Nobel, became interested.

Nobel’s companies were moving from primarily iron and steel production to the almost exclusive manufacture of cannons, armaments, and gunpowder, and he saw the commercial value in making nitroglycerine manageable. He began experimenting – at considerable cost. In 1864, his younger brother and several workers were killed in a factory explosion. Undererred, Nobel built a new factory in the remote hills of Germany, determined to find the answer. He first tried combining nitro with conventional gunpowder, marketing the final product as ‘blasting oil’, yet accidental explosions continued. His factory was destroyed yet again, on two occasions!

The breakthrough finally came when Nobel’s company mixed liquid nitroglycerine with an inert absorbent silicate sand, known as ‘diatomaccous earth’. This was produced by grinding down diatomite, a rock found around the local hills. It is similar to volcanic pumice, being very light and highly porous, yet it is actually the fossilised remains of diatoms, a hard-shelled alga. This combination immediately made nitro less dangerous to handle, and by being solid, more convenient to package and transport. Nobel patented his invention in 1867 under the name of ‘dynamite’, based on ‘dyna’ the Greek word for ‘power’.

In its best-known form, dynamite was made in short paper-wrapped sticks consisting of three quarters intro to one quarter diatomaccous earth, but it would always remain dangerous to manufacture, store, and use. Over time, the nitro can seep out, crystallising on the outside of the sticks or pooling at the bottom of storage boxes, with all the consequent instability that raw nitro possesses. Nevertheless, in an age of extensive railroad and tunnel construction, the product would earn Nobel a great fortune. Yet, while high explosives serve a commendable purpose in peacetime engineering projects, Nobel’s fortune was also based on weapons of death and destruction, and the public knew it.

Nobel himself was to become greatly perturbed, especially given the events which occurred when his brother Ludvig died. The French newspapers mistakenly thought it was the death of Alfred himself, and published an obituary. Alfred happened to be in France at the time, and one can only wonder at his reaction upon reading about his own death! Yet the obituary was harsh and condemning, calling Nobel the ‘merchant of death’, someone who ‘became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before’. It was certainly this event which influenced him, in 1895, to write a new last will and testament, one year before he died. It would astonish everyone, and change the course of history.

When Alfred Nobel died, single and childless, at age 63, he specified that, apart from some minor bequests, his vast fortune (about 200 million dollars in today’s money) be set aside for the establishment of the Nobel Prizes. These would be awarded annually for those who confer the ‘greatest benefit on mankind’ in physics, chemistry, peace, medicine, and literature. Nobel’s strategy worked, as the Nobel Prizes are now considered among the most prestigious in the world. Few consider that all that money comes from nitroglycerine, dynamite, gunpowder, and armament manufacture, the indirect cause of incalculable human carnage.

Questions 1-5
Complete the summary of the first three paragraphs. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Nitroglycerine could explode with even a small (1)……………………, thus it was the cause of a growing (2)…………………..It was able to (3)………………………..since, in contrast to gunpowder, it (4)………………………..When (5)………………………………., nitro could be handled more safely, yet deaths continued.

Questions 6-9
Answer the questions. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

6. What were the two products that Nobel’s companies originally manufacture?
7. What was the first nitroglycerine product called?
8. What rock does diatomite resemble?
9. In what field was dynamite used most beneficially?

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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

10. Dynamite is safer than nitroglycerine.
11. The French newspaper condemned Alfred Nobel because of his wealth.
12. Nobel’s will leave some money to his friends.
13. Many now condemn Nobel for his production of weapons.

Single-Gender Education: A Case Made?

A All modern democracies, instilled as they are with the ethics of freedom and equality of the sexes, nevertheless offer the option of single-sex education. This separates the genders into their own classrooms, buildings, and often schools. Traditionally, women had to fight hard and long to achieve equal opportunities in education, and the single-gender controversy is mostly in relation to them. The question is whether this educational system advances or retards their cause, and there are supporters on both sides, each convinced that the case is made.

B Given that the word ‘segregation’ has such negative connotations, the current interest in single-gender schooling is somewhat surprising. In the same way that a progressive society would never consider segregation on the basis of skin colour, income, or age, it seems innately wrong to do this on gender. Yet in the real world and the society in which we live, segregation of some sort happens all the time. Clubs inevitably form – for example, of clerical workers, of lawyers, of the academically gifted, and of those skilled in music or the arts. Exclusionary cliques, classes, and in-groups, are all part of everyday life. Thus, it may simply be an idealistic illusion to condemn single-gender settings on that basis alone, as do many co-educational advocates.

C This suggests that single-gender education must necessarily be condemned on other grounds, yet the issue is complicated, and research often sinks into a morass of conflicting data. and. occasionally, emotional argument. Thus, one study comes out with strong proof of the efficacy of single-gender schooling, causing a resurgence of interest and positive public sentiment, only to be later met with a harshly-titled article. ‘Single-Sex Schooling: The Myth and the Pseudoscience’, published and endorsed by several respected magazines. Similarly, the arguments on both sides have apparent validity and often accord, on the surface at least, with common sense and personal observation. What then can parents do?

D Proponents of separating the genders often argue that it promotes better educational results, not only in raw academic scores but also behaviour. The standard support for this is the claim of innate gender differences in the manner in which boys and girls learn and behave in educational settings. Separation allows males to be taught in a ‘male way’ and in accordance with the ‘male’ developmental path, which is said to be very different to the female one. Such claims demand hard evidence, but this is difficult to come by. since statistics are notoriously unreliable and subject to varying interpretations.

E Of course, one of the key factors that leads to superior performance at single-gender schools is often the higher quality of the teachers, the better resources at hand, and the more motivated students, often coming as they do from wealthier or more privileged backgrounds. Single-gender schools are often the most prestigious in society, demanding the highest entry marks from their new students, who, in turn, receive more deference and respect from society. When taking these factors into account, large-scale studies, as well as the latest findings of neuroscientists, do not support the claims of superior results or persistent gender differences, respectively. Those who make such claims are accused of emphasising favourable data, and drawing conclusions based more on anecdotal evidence and gender stereotyping.

F Yet the single-sex educationalists come out with other positives. One of the most common is that girls are free from the worry of sexual harassment or negative behaviour originating from the presence of boys. Girls are said to develop greater self-confidence, and a preparedness to study subjects, such as engineering and mathematics, which were once the exclusive province of males. Conversely, boys can express a greater interest in the arts, without the possible jibe, ‘That’s a girls’ subject’. But logically, one senses such stereotyping could equally come in single-gender settings, since it is the society outside of school, with all its related expectations, which has the greatest influence.

G Among this welter of conflicting argument, one can, at least, fall back on one certainty – that the real world is co-gendered, and each side often misunderstands the other. Supporters of co-education argue that positive and co-operative interaction between the genders at school reduces such divisions by de-emphasising gender as a factor of concern. In theory, stereotypes are broken down, and inclusion is emphasised, providing benefits for society as a whole. But such sentiments, admittedly, do sound as if we are retreating into self-promotional propaganda. In other words, these statements are just glib and unreal assertions, rather than a reflection of what actually happens in the co-educational classroom.

H The key point is whether the interaction in co-educational settings is indeed positive and co-operative. Some would say it could equally be the opposite, and surely it must occasionally be so (if we abandon the rosy picture painted in the previous paragraph). But I would say that that interaction, whether good or bad, whether academically enhancing or retarding, still constitutes education, and of a vital nature. It presents exactly the same subset of challenges that students, male or female, will ultimately have to deal with in the real world. This is the most important point, and would determine my choice regarding in which educational setting I would place my children.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage Two has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Choose the correct heading for Paragraphs B-E and G-H from the list of headings.

List of Headings
i Another argument in favour
ii Conflicting evidence
iii Negatives are positives
iv An emotional argument
v Does it help or not?
vi Looking at the other side
vii A counter-argument
viii It’s happening anyway
ix The problems with genders
x An argument in favour

Example

Paragraph A v

Paragraph F i

14. Paragraph B
15. Paragraph c
16. Paragraph D
17. Paragraph E
18. Paragraph G
19. Paragraph H

Questions 20-24
Complete the sentences with the correct ending, A-E.

A have some strong views
B think boys and girls are similar
C often have idealistic views
D are surprising in some ways
E often receive much respect

20. Neuroscientists
21. The magazines
22. Students from single-gender schools
23. People in society
24. Supporters of co-education

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

25. The author believes co-education has
A clear statistical support.
B less stereotyping.
C much positive interaction.
D generally lower-quality teaching (compared to single-gender schools).

26. The author believes
A single-gender schooling is better.
B co-educational schooling is preferable.
C we cannot say which sort of schooling is better.
D more evidence is needed.

The Mother of All Languages

In 1786, William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, made what must be ranked as one of the most amazing discoveries of all time, yet it is little known outside of linguistic circles. Jones was studying Sanskrit, a long dead Indian language only used in classic or liturgical texts. Upon examining many of the words, he was struck by their similarity to the two most ancient languages known at that time: Greek and Latin. He would later write that Sanskrit has ‘a stronger affinity’ with these other languages ‘than could possibly have been produced by accident’.

Jones drew the conclusion that Greek and Latin, and even the Germanic languages (including English), were all related to Sanskrit, and thus, logically, all of them must necessarily have evolved from a single earlier language. Subsequent scholars were able to confirm this, adding to this linguistic family all of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, and others), Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, and many others), and Indo-lranian (Persian, Afghan, and many others). There are, in fact, hundreds of languages and dialects all over Europe, Iran, and South Asia, which can now trace their ancestry to an original Indo-European language, now called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.

According to linguistic theory, proto-languages are usually spoken over relatively limited geographical areas, over a short time span, and by a tightly-knit community. The implication is simple, but also stunning that some single ancient tribe which spoke this mother of languages eventually took over most of the middle and western Eurasian landmass, spreading their language with them. This subsequently evolved into many others over the course of time, creating a language family which now has the greatest number of speakers in the world. The big question concerns who these Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where their ancestral homeland lay.

Archaeologists have examined many sites of European prehistory, occasionally identifying these as the homeland of the PIE population. This is often done with nationalistic overtones, raising the anger of others in this field, and there still remains controversy over each claim. It is linguistic evidence which provides, perhaps, more definite clues. The similarities in vocabulary between all PIE’s daughter languages have allowed linguists to deduce a probable grammar and fairly extensive vocabulary. It is irresistible not to read into this a tentative lifestyle and location, with the quaint proviso that it remains ‘at best, highly speculative’.

Looking at just one example, there are PIE words for the temperate trees of the Northern Hemisphere, but not tropical or Mediterranean varieties. This indicates a northern European location, with a cold climate. And so, with such detailed linguistic analysis, the most widely accepted theory places the PIE origin in the Caspian Steppe – a vast region of temperate grass and shrub-land north of the Black Sea, across present-day Ukraine, Southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. Their language was spoken around 4000 BC (plus or minus a millennium, since exact dates are impossible at such an early stage in European pre-history).

What then enabled this single tribe to advance outwards and take over Eurasia? Some geneticists have suggested that it was the domestication of the horse, perhaps giving that tribe a thitherto unheard-of military superiority (as would the Huns and the Mongols possess many thousands of years later). Some of them have also suggested that the discovery of farming was the impetus of this tribe’s advance, as with a stable and steady food supply at hand, their numbers could increase at the expense of the other fragmented hunter-gathering tribes roaming the wilds of Eurasia. Perhaps then, PIE simply moved alongside the outward wave of the implementation of agriculture, together with a rapidly expanding and interbreeding population.

But even PIE must have evolved from some earlier language, and audacious linguists are digging deeper into the past. PIE gave birth to a large family of languages, but there exists other families, such as Afro-Asiatic (which includes Arabic), Dravidian (comprising the many languages of Southern India), and Altaic (which includes Mongolian and Japanese). It has been proposed that these themselves may all belong to a ‘macro-family’, sometimes called Proto-Nostratic. Most linguists maintain that, although it is theoretically possible that such an original language existed, it is next to impossible to prove, since resemblances among languages can also be due to chance, and thus they remain skeptical over such a claim.

Still, the implications are mind-boggling that perhaps almost every single language on Earth can ultimately be traced back to a single source possessed by a small group of individuals. This language is sometimes called Proto-Human, the mother of all languages. One interesting theory posited by geologists is that a huge catastrophe occurred in the not-so-distant past some 70,000 years ago, linked to the volcanic eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia. This reduced the world population to a small band of survivors, and theirs is the Proto-Human from which all languages subsequently evolved. If this is true, it is intriguing to think that had that catastrophe not occurred, we would all be speaking totally different languages today.

Questions 27-30
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

William Jones’s findings are mostly known within (27)……………………

A community which speaks a proto-language is (28)……………………

Proto-Indo-Europeans might have come from the (29)………………

Mount Toba was the site of a (30)…………………..

Questions 31-35
Write the correct letter, A-E. NB You can use an answer one time only.

A Archaeologists
B Geneticists
C Geologists
D Linguists
E Scholars

Which people

31. believe that reliable nutrition may be the answer?
32. have categorised very many languages?
33. often face anger and controversy?
34. are skeptical about some issues?
35. have speculated about a disaster?

Questions 36-39
Complete the flow chart. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

40. The author thinks the subject is
A complicated.
B controversial.
C interesting.
D fascinating.

The Spice of Life!

A When thinking of the most popular restaurant dish in the UK, the answer ‘chicken tikka masala’ does not spring readily to mind. But it is indeed the answer, often now referred to as a true ‘British national dish’. It may even have been invented by Indian immigrants in Scotland, who roasted chicken chunks (tikka), mixed them with spices and yoghurt, and served this in a bowl of masala sauce. The exact ingredients of the sauce vary from restaurant to restaurant, but the dish usually includes purced tomatoes and cream, coloured orange by turmeric and paprika. British cuisine? Yes, spices have come a long way.

B Spices are dried seeds, fruit, roots, bark, or vegetative parts of plants, added to food in small amounts to enhance flavour or colour. Herbs, in contrast, are only from the leaves, and only used for flavouring. Looking at the sources of some common spices, mustard and black pepper arc from seeds, cinnamon from bark, cloves from dried flower buds, ginger and turmeric from roots, while mace and saffron are from seed covers and stigma tips, respectively. In the face of such variety, it is becoming increasingly common for spices to be offered in pre-made combinations. Chili powder is a blend of chili peppers with other spices, often cumin, oregano, garlic powder, and salt. Mixed spice, which is often used in baking, is a British blend of sweet spices, with cinnamon being the dominant flavour. The ever-popular masala, as noted, could be anything, depending on the chef.

C Although human communities were using spices tens of thousands of years ago, the trade of this commodity only began about 2000 BC, around the Middle Last. Early uses were less connected with cooking, and more with such diverse functions as embalming, medicine, religion, and food preservation. Eventually, extensive overland trade routes, such as the Silk Road, were established, yet it was maritime advances into India and East Asia which led to the most dramatic growth in commercial activities. From then on, spices were the driving force of the world economy, commanding such high prices that it pitted nation against nation, and became the major impetus to exploration and conquest, It would be hard to underestimate the role spices have played in human history.

D Originally, Muslim traders dominated these routes, seeing spice-laden ships from the Orient crossing the Indian Ocean to Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports, from where camel caravans transported the goods overland. However, although slow to develop, European nations, using aggressive exploration and colonisation strategies, eventually came to rule the Far East and, consequently, control of the spice trade. At first, Portugal was the dominant power, but the British and Dutch eventually gained the upper hand, so that by the 19th century, the British controlled India, while the Dutch had the greater portion of the East Indies (Indonesia). Cloves, nutmeg, and pepper were some of the most valuable spices of the time.

E But why were spices always in such demand? There are many answers. In the early days, they were thought to have strong medicinal properties by balancing ‘humours’, or excesses of emotions in the blood. Other times they were thought to prevent maladies such as the plague, which often saw prices of recommended spices soar. But most obviously, spices flavoured the bland meat-based European cuisines. Pepper, historically, has always been in highest demand for this reason, and even today, peppercorns (dried black pepper kernels) remain, by monetary value, the most widely traded spice in the world. However, saffron, by being produced within the small saffron flower, has always been among the world’s most costly spice by weight, valued mostly for its vivid colour.

F Predictably, the majority of the world’s spices are produced in India, although specific spices arc often produced in greater amounts in other countries. Vietnam is the largest producer and exporter of pepper, meeting nearly one third of the world’s demand. Indonesia holds a clear lead in nutmeg production, Iran in saffron, and Sri Lanka in cinnamon. However, exportation of such spices is not always simple. Most are dried as a whole product, or dried and ground into powder, both forms allowing bulk purchase, easier storage and shipping, and a longer shelf life. For example, the rhizomes (underground stems) of turmeric are boiled lor several hours, then dried in ovens, after which they are ground into the yellow powder popular in South-Asian and Middle-Eastern cuisines.

G However, there are disadvantages in grinding spices. It increases their surface area many fold, accelerating the rate of evaporation and oxidation of their flavour-bearing and aromatic compounds. In contrast, whole dried spices retain these for much longer. Thus, seed-based varieties (which can be packaged and stored well) are often purchased in this form. This allows grinding to be done at the moment of cooking or eating, maximising the flavour and effect, a fact which often results in pepper ‘grinders’, instead of ‘shakers’, gracing the tables of the better restaurants around the world.

Questions 1-6
Reading Passage One has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for Paragraphs B-G from the list of headings.

List of Headings
i Uses of spice
ii Spices for cooking
iii Changing leaders
iv A strange choice
v Preserving flavours
vi Famous spice routes
vii The power of spice
viii Some spices
ix Medicinal spices
x Spice providers

Example Answer Paragraph A iv

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

Questions 7-9
Complete the sentence. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Saffron, from the small (7)……………………of flowers, has a (8)……………………….and is mostly grown in (9)…………………..

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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

10. The ingredients of masala are fairly standardised.
11. The demand for spices led to greater exploration.
12. Vietnam consumes a lot of pepper.
13. Seed-based spices can be easily stored.

Unsung and Lowly Creatures

Earthworms are not creatures likely to attract much attention. Socretive, silent, slow-moving, and featureless, almost no one would ever think. Let’s quote Charles Darwin, who wrote: ‘It may be doubted wheather there are many other animals whichs have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly-organised creatures’.

That is high praise indeed for what is basically a slimy, muscular, moist, segmented tube. This tube is also hermaphroditic, meaning that there are both male and female segments in the one creature. Some segment contain testes, others eggs, released ooze, exchange, and store fluids, and then a long complicated process eventually leads to the secretion of an egg case. From this, small but fully-formed worms will emerge, reaching full size in about one year, and living for one or two years after that.

Yet earthworms are rarely seen, spending as they do their whole lives underground. Only after heavy rains can they sometimes be found on the surface, apparently stranded. Three hypotheses are put forward to explain this. The stormwater may flood their burrows, forcing them upwards. Alternatively, the worms may be taking advantage of the wet conditions to either travel more quickly through the open air (compared to burrowing beneath the ground), or otherwise to meet and mate. Whatever the case, if they find themselves on concreted, rocky, or hardened earth, they are effectively trapped. If this is during dawn, in high summer, or in the daytime, these earthworms quickly die due to bird predation or dehydration.

Normally, however, worms quietly go about their hidden business, and this often leads to an underestimation of their actual numbers. Darwin himself thought that arable land contained about 50,000 worms per acre, yet modern research has suggested that the figure could reach as high as almost two million. Putting this another way, the weight of earthworms beneath the soil is often greater than that of the cows, horses, and sheep are zing upon is surface. And those worms are just as hungry. Worms do, in fact, have a small mouth and a simple but effective digestive system, similar to the animals above, Food is sucked into the body, then pushed along the length of the worm through muscular action, passing through the crop, gizzard, intestine, and finally the anus.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is this constant eating which so benefits the chemistry of the soil. Earthworms feed on undecayed leaf litter and organic matter. They pull pieces down into their burrows, shred them into smaller parts, and then consume each of these, along with small soil particles. In the worms’ gut, everything is ground into a a fine paste, to be eventually excreted , releasing essential minerals in an easily accessible form. One single worm may produce over four kilograms of this digested paste per year. Multiply that by a million worms, and one can understand Darwin’s comment about ‘unsung creatures which, in their untold millions, transformed the land’.

The other great benefit relates to earthworms’ search for food. It might surprise many to know that these creatures are very mobile, moving to the surface then down into the safer depths on a daily basis. Aided by the secretion of lubricating mucus, they push themselves through the soil using waves of bodily contractions, which alternately shorten and lengthen their form. The point is, water can also move through their tunnels. More importantly, as the worms travel, they push air in and out of the soil on a continuous basis. In the same way that animals need oxygen, so too do the myriad micro-organisms in the soil. Thus, without worms, the ground would become waterlogged, airless, and less productive for farming purposes.

Naturally, with so many worms in the soil, they form the base of many food chains. Not only birds, but also some mammals, such as hedgehogs, moles, and even larger ones, such as foxes and bears, will actively dig into the ground of worms. Such predation is natural, and has little effect on worm populations. However, the use of certain fertilisers is a different case. Earthworms depend on the temperature, texture, and moisture content of the soil, but it is its acidity to which they are most sensitive. Nitrogenous fertilisers can raise this to levels fatal to these creatures, often causing disastrous drops in numbers. The more ecologically-aware farmer avoids such chemicals, and regularly adds a surface mulch of organic matter raising worm numbers for the natural benefit of both soil and man.

Questions 14-17
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

14. Charles Darwin thought that worms
A were only moderately important.
B were organised.
C liked arable land.
D numbered in the many millions.

15. A single worm
A is either male or female.
B has many segments.
C is a complicated organism.
D lives for about a year.

16. Stormwater may possibly
A clean out worm burrows.
B slow down worms.
C help worms encounter others.
D harden the earth.

17. Grazing animals
A often weigh less than the worms below.
B are hungrier than the worms below.
C have very different digestive systems from worms.
D have simpler digestive systems than worms.

Questions 18-24
Complete the diagram. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 25-26
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Worm numbers will especially fall when the soil has high (25)………………..

Adding mulch to the soil shows (26)……………………..

Organisational Conflict and Change

Change is a natural process. As humans, we are born, we grow, we mature, we decline, and we eventually die. On a bigger scale, modern existence is similarly in a constant state of flux, with global change, life strategic change, and personal change constantly upon us. With the current rate of technological advance, this is only happening at a faster pace. Putting it simply, life is change, and in a manner never before experienced.

Organisations, also, are analogous to organisms. They similarly grow, mature, suffer injury and crises, and may well die (for example, become bankrupt). The implications of this new ‘change paradigm’ are that the stable structures and static systems which in the past made organisations strong, now only contribute to their decline. Textbooks cite many examples of this: large monolithic institutions that failed to respond to external circumstances. Many were former government monopolies, and their break-up into smaller divisions was one attempt to deal with this issue. The message was clear: respond to change, or fail to thrive.

However, the big problem is that change promotes resistance among people. It brings a degree of discomfort, which in turns results in conflict. Thus, since change is constant, so too must be this conflict, and it is this which must be considered. The word ‘conflict’ has negative connotations, and deservedly so. It is often the result of negative forces, producing negative results. Resources are diverted, judgements distorted, co-ordination reduced, and ill-feeling generated. It thus seems strange to argue that conflict is not necessarily unwelcome, and can, in fact, be necessary, yet that is exactly what I propose.

To understand this, we must first accept one crucial fact: in this new era of increasing change and complexity, accurate and considered decision-making is critical, and can no longer be considered the province of just one person. There is simply too much information to be processed, and too much knowledge needed, to be within the capability of single individuals. As a result, decision making in modern organisations is now based on group discussions, meetings, and presentations, all to allow the exchange of a variety of perspectives from appropriately qualified people.

The next fact that we must accept is that such gatherings are often affected by ‘groupthink’. This is when tightly-knit cohorts of workers uncritically accept the feelings of the group (rather than ‘lighting it out’). Individual dissent is squashed, leaving decision-making not as a product of a pool of thinking individuals, all with valuable insights, but merely a collective desire to promote harmony. Clearly, this is not a method likely to optimise the chances of making the best decision.

So, two facts, which when brought together lead to the interesting conclusion: that some degree of conflict is necessary in order to produce better decision-making and, ultimately, higher organisational performance. Extending this further, somewhat paradoxically, very low levels or an absence of conflict may actually be worrying, indicating a lack of staff involvement or interest, or that problems are being hidden, new ideas stifled, and morale low. The focus thus shifts to conflict management (reducing conflict or creating it, as deemed optimum for the organisation), not conflict removal.

So, this is the contradiction. Change must happen, causing significant resistance and conflict, some of which is constructive and necessary, but some of which impedes progress. These feelings can originate from even the most level-headed, open-minded, and rational of people; thus, the next issue is how change agents can deal with it. One essential strategy is to listen to all those involved, even the angriest, most strident and difficult (since, after all, they may be right). Another strategy is to concur with what is factually accurate. People find it difficult to argue with those who agree with them, and this means resistance is reduced, communication enhanced, and insights into the situation will certainly come.

The third strategy for change agents is to always remind themselves of two basic facts. The first is not to expect complete rationality from those around them at all times. Expecting such ideal behaviour is itself irrational, and by resigning oneself to the inevitability of human failings, conflict can become more manageable. The other basic fact is that human beliefs are not necessarily encapsulations of the truth. Instead, they are often constructions of the mind, serving to maximise the security of the self. Thus, when encountering difficulties in implementing change, there is a good chance that the stakeholders are merely protecting such beliefs, and this should also be taken into account.

The experienced change agent realises that everyone’s perspective needs to he examined with an open mind. Conflicting viewpoints should be promoted in a healthy way, where people are disarmed and not reacting as a result of ill-feeling or malice. Yet. when such emotions emerge, the important point is to understand that it is not unnatural, and by understanding where it comes from and how to handle it. one can follow- constructive, rather than destructive, paths. It is not easy, but it is certainly possible.

Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

27. Organisations
A should be broken into divisions.
B need stable structures.
C are similar to living things.
D must be responsible.

28. Conflict
A is sometimes welcome.
B is usually good.
C should be removed.
D comes and goes.

29. Groupthink can
A be better than fighting.
B produce valuable insights.
C lead to wrong decisions.
D optimise chances.

30. Very little conflict is often
A better for organisations.
B good for morale.
C constructive.
D a warning sign.

Questions 31-35
Complete the flow chart. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 36-40
Answer the questions. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

36. What can even rational people still produce?
37. What sort of information should a change agent agree with?
38. What quality does not constantly come from people?
39. People often lie to enhance what feeling?
40. What emotions can produce unhealthy conflict?

Could You Pass Me My Glasses, Please?

The human eye was not designed for the years of intensive book learning that are now common in modern society. The result is eye strain and deterioration, often at an early age, but this same society has provided the obvious answer: corrective lensed eyeglasses. Ubiquitous and ever present, coming in all styles, colours, and designs, the optical correction of faulty vision with these devices is a phase which probably everyone will have to face at some stage in their lives.

It is not surprising that the first eyeglasses were made by the Catholic monks dedicated to the writing, translation, and reproduction of finely written religious texts. In contrast to the general undereducation and illiteracy of the times, these monks were versed in many languages, and worked for years in badly-illuminated candle-lit ‘scriptoriums’ – an effort which took its toll on their eyesight. Thus, the earliest pictorial evidence for the use of eyeglasses is a 1352 portrait of the Catholic cardinal, Hugh de Provence. However, the usefulness of glasses had already long been realised by the population at large, and by 1300 the trade of lens-grinding was widespread enough to require formal guilds and regulations.

Although popular and effective, no one was quite sure of the mechanics of it all. The first detailed mathematical explanation would not come until Johannes Kepler published his work on optics in 1604. Basically, glasses modify the focal length of the eye’s lens. There are two main focusing disorders: myopia and hyperopia. In the case of the first (near-sightedness, in which it is difficult to see objects at a distance), concave lenses are used, compensating for the eye’s refractive error by pushing the focal point back, to the retina. Hyperopia (far-sightedness) uses convex lenses to do the opposite, bringing the focal point forward, to the retina.

Yet, to accommodate the range of situations in which clear vision is needed, from reading books and computer monitors, to television watching and driving cars, some glasses are equipped with more than one lens type. The most common are bi-focal lenses, with two distinct horizontal viewing areas. A conscious effort is thus necessary to focus through the band of the lens necessary to solve the visual challenge faced. A variation which helps with this are lenses which allow progressive transitions, rather than distinct changes between viewing angles. The simplest system of all is to merely have several pairs of glasses, reserving them for specific tasks.

These days, lenses are most commonly a plastic polycarbonate material, offering lower weight and higher scratch resistance, as well as the ability to screen out harmful ultraviolet and infrared rays from the sun. Similarly, the frames are flexible and lightweight, offering less friction and irritation for the skin. Nevertheless, glasses cannot be said to be convenient devices. Grease, dirt, sweat, and vapour can streak them when eating or cooking, or from natural condensation due to temperature changes (such as when exiting a heated building into the colder outdoors). Glasses are also awkward during fast-motion sports or labouring jobs, are rather easily broken, and not cheap to repair.

Obviously then, contact lenses have considerable advantages. These are inserted directly over the pupil, and have the additional benefit of a perceived aesthetic appeal. Traditional glasses are sometimes seen as unfashionable, carrying associations of age or infirmity. The almost invisible contacts avoid this, which is perhaps one reason why most wearers are female. Having said that, by completely covering the pupil, contacts also offer better peripheral vision, and are more appropriate for certain less common vision impairments. Their disadvantage is the difficulty and discomfort involved in putting them on and taking them off. They can also result in dryness and irritation.

Interestingly though, the modern era has seen eyeglasses become somewhat of a fashion accessory. The musicians Buddy Holly and John Lennon were so characterised by their glasses that their names have been given to the style they wore. Glasses can now even be bought ‘off the shelf’, without an eye examination, cashing in on the need for quick solutions that people want in a busy society. Although they are a source of much revenue, opticians advise people to first have proper eye examinations, not only to ensure the best results, but also for early detection of potential eye diseases, such as glaucoma, which might actually be the root cause of focusing problems.

The lace of the future may well be ‘laser eye surgery’. In this process, laser beams are used, usually to alter the curvature of the cornea and thus provide long-term corrective benefits. Although straightforward enough and increasingly safe and affordable, given the delicacy of the eye, there remains a small risk of failure and resultant vision problems, such as ghosting or halos. It is an interesting fact, that, despite the growth of such surgery, and the use of contacts, traditional lenses remain as popular as ever. Nothing, it seems, can match the simple convenience of putting on a pair of glasses.

Questions 1-3
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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. Most people study hard today.
2. When glasses were invented, most people could read.
3. Most monks suffered eye problems.

Questions 4-6
Complete the diagram. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 7-10
Answer the questions. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

7. Who first explained how glasses function?
8. What is needed when viewing through bi-focal glasses?
9. What can cause condensation on glasses?
10. What aspect of sight do contact lenses improve better than glasses?

Questions 11-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

11. Modern lenses are
A safer.
B heavier.
C softer.
D more flexible.

12. ‘Off-the-shelf’ glasses
A are not popular.
B can cause glaucoma.
C earn shops good money.
D are recommended.

13. Laser eye surgery is
A of limited benefit.
B more convenient than glasses.
C becoming more popular.
D complex.

Subtitling: Some Strategies

When movies made in one language are shown to speakers of another, the two methods of resolving the language barrier are subtitling and dubbing. Subtitling is the written translation of the words, usually appearing discreetly at the bottom of the screen, while dubbing is the recording of voices in the target language.

Dubbing, although seemingly more accessible to movie watches, comes with many disadvantages. For a start, it is expensive, hence it needs a large audience to justify the cost, yet even big films carry no guarantee of such commercial success. In addition, the dubbed voices may seem detached or inappropriate to the characters, or otherwise, the absurdity of having an undereducated American ranffian saying. ‘Je voudrais déclarer un vol’ becomes too much, affecting appreciation of the film. Finally, films and TV programs now have an increasingly rapid turnover rate, and subtitling is faster and more practical in such situations.

However, one should not assume subtitling is easier than dubbing. Subtitling requires careful strategies, and here I will outline some of them. In order to do this, a sample movie is needed, and the one examined here is an Italian movie subtitled into English. Comprehension of subtitles will always be affected by lack of familiarity with the values, beliefs, and interactive differences between the host and viewing cultures. The subtitlers need to be aware of this in order to translate true meaning. Thus, before beginning any work, a brief ‘cultural audit’ is absolutely necessary, involving a comparison of the two cultures in relation to the storyline of the movie.

The movie is set in the late 1960s, at a time when the wealth and materialism of American society was very high, contrasting the relative poverty of Italian village life. The plot tells the story of a poor couple who dream of winning large sums of money by gambling in a card game against a wealthy elderly American woman, who occasionally visits Italy just for that purpose. The final thematic assertion that there are more important factors than money reflects the warmth and solidarity of the Italian village in the face of adversity. Although these themes are universal, one could speculate that a Western audience might not like or identify with them as much, give the increasing urbanisation and materialism of their own society.

The most immediate translation issue relates to the movie’s title, ‘Lo Scopone Scientifico’, translates as ‘Scientific Scopone’, whereas the English title is, ‘The Scientific Card Player’. ‘Scopone’ is the name of a traditional Italian card game of great antiquity. Obviously, the translators could not use this name, obscure to the Westren viewers, but they insert a blander and inappropriate term. An even clearer subtitling lapse is that the betting is always done using, apparently, ludicrously high figures. Subtitles such as, ‘Let’s start with a million’ regularly jump out. This is a literal translation of the figures (in Italian lira), yet it is the dollar with which the English-speaking audience would associate. The result is an apparent lack of plausibility, changing the comedic nature of the film.

With respect to the specific subtitling used, there are five. Let us begin with the subtitle, ‘The old bag’s here.’ This is idiomatic in English, being an insulting term for an elderly woman. However, it is a simple expression comprising only two words, one of which is literally intended (‘old’). I would speculate that the same idiom occurs in Italian (that is, the direct translation of ‘old’ and ‘bag’ in Italian carries the same idiomatic meaning). This is the strategy of Transfer, where the full expression without time or space consideration is given. Otherwise, there could well be a closely aligned idiom, in which case the strategy would be Imitation, where there are similar lexical elements between both languages.

Continuing with idioms, we read, ‘Catches win matches’. This derives from certain ball games, such as cricket, where catching the ball after it is struck by the batsman contributes towards winning the game. There are no such sporting cultures in Italy followed. Thus, one can be certain that other words were used in the original Italian, but that these have a similar pragmatic effect (in meaning and idiomatic nature). The strategy used is thus Paraphrasing, where different expressions specific to the source language (Italian) and target language (English) are required.

Later on, we read, ‘A sign of destiny’. When this subtitle appears, there are actually two to three people speaking with equal force at the same time. Space and time constraints render it impossible to have them all translated, so only the quoted subtitle appears, using the strategy known as Condensation. Finally, we read scopa – an Italian word referring to a variation of the central card game. Being unique to Italy, there is no equivalent word in English, so the strategy used here is Regination, where the subtitler leaves the word in the original language. The meaning remains obvious from the context, and only in such minimal and unlikely situations does this strategy become acceptable.

Questions 14-17
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

14. Dubbing can
A appeal to larger audiences.
B seem silly.
C increase appreciation of the film.
D be faster

15. Cultural audits
A look at one culture.
B are long and involved.
C help comprehension.
D are not normally required.

16. The movie which was examined
A has common human themes.
B has a surprising ending.
C is set in an Italian city.
D involves two main actors.

17. Scopone
A is a relatively new game.
B is known to the Western audience.
C is a bland term.
D has a variation called scopa.

Questions 18-22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage One?

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

18. The English title is a subtitling lapse.
19. Transfer and imitation are interesting strategies.
20. Paraphrasing is often used.
21. Resignation can be used in many situations.
22. Almost all Italians love scopa.

Questions 23-26
Match the translation example with its associated fact.

Write the correct letter, A-D, next to the questions.

A a practical decision
B clarified by the situation
C using other words, but with the same meaning
D probably exists in the source language

23. The old bag’
24. ‘Catches win matches’
25. ‘A sign of destiny’
26. ‘Scopa’

Continents Collide!

The idea that the continents are moving was first proposed by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, in a book published in 1915. He had gathered a great deal of careful and tantalising evidence, the most obvious being the simple observation that the great landmasses of the world seem to fit together, jigsaw-like, a striking example being the coastlines of either side of the Atlantic ocean. Wegener was even able to theorise, correctly, that all the continents were once assembled into a supercontinent (now called Pangaea). Pangaea broke up into Laurasia (which became North America and Eurasia) and Gondwana (which became the remaining continents).

Unfortunately, Wegener could propose no propulsive force for this movement, apart from the vague and erroneous suggestion that it might be centrifugal forces. He also severely overestimated the speed of this motion. These problems, and the fact that he was a meteorologist (rather than a geologist), meant that, upon publishing his ideas, the scientific community was resolutely and implacably hostile. It is an interesting example of that not uncommon instance in which a scientist who was fundamentally correct was denied any recognition in his lifetime. Semmelweis, who advocated the washing of hands before surgery as a way to reduce hospital fatalities, is another example. Wegener was to unexpectedly die on an expedition in Greenland, probably of a heart attack – in his death, as in his life, left out in the cold.

The first hints of the existence of Gondwana came from the similarity of fossil plants and animals distributed in the same geological period over South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia. Similarly, the composition and nature of the rocks along relevant coastlines spoke the same story, yet to become scientifically credible, the theory needed evidence of a propulsive force to move such huge continents (in the same way that Semmelweis’s ideas needed the germ theory of disease). It was only in the 1960s, decades after Wegener’s death, that hard evidence for his theory began amassing to eventually become overwhelming.

The theory is now called ‘plate tectonics’, since it was proven that the Earth’s surface is fractured into ‘plates’. These bump and grind as they steadily move at infinitesimally slow rates in given directions, driven by ‘convention forces’. These are formed by the vast circular rising of superheated rock from the planet’s molten interior. This material cools as it nears the surface, eventually sinking once again towards the centre. Add to this the rotation of the Earth itself, and there is a complicated and barely understood set of cyclic swirls of molten rock, producing drags and pulls on each tectonic plate, the sum of which results in a steady migration.

Of course, this motion is slow, typically at the speed at which fingernails grow, and at its fastest, the rate at which hair does. But by being consistent and essentially unstoppable, the results can be spectacular, particularly when plates meet. Here, the release of heat, as well as the buckling and melting which results, gives rise to geological events such as earthquakes, and geological features such as mountains, volcanoes, and oceanic ridges and trenches. Plate boundaries see most of the world’s active volcanoes, with the Pacific Plate’s ‘Ring of Fire’ being a good example. Volcanism may sometimes occur in the middle of plates, but this has been theorised to be a result of ‘hotspots’: anomalously hot areas of interior rock which melt through the plate, forcing an escape to the surface.

Plate boundaries come in three types. First, Transform boundaries, where the plates grind past each other. It was once thought that the well-known Aegir Ridge was an example, until studies showed that it had never been active, whereas the periodic earthquakes along California’s San Andreas Fault show the very opposite case. The second type is Divergent boundaries, where the two plates slide apart from each other. Mid-oceanic ridges, such as in the Atlantic, and active rift zones, such as in East Africa, are examples. Finally, there are Convergent boundaries, where the two plates slide towards each other. This can form either a subduction zone (if one plate moves underneath the other) or a continental collision. Deep marine trenches are formed in the former case, and with the descending plate releasing its trapped water on being heated in the Earth’s interior, huge amounts of heat and pressure rise to the surface, causing mountains and volcanoes to form, such as in the Andes mountain range.

The best example of a continental collision is the Indian plate, which is steadily and implacably migrating straight into central Asia. The Himalayas of Nepal and Northern India, the Karakoram Ranges of Northern Pakistan, and the highlands of Afghanistan, are all part of the complex fold system that resulted, producing some of the highest peaks in the world. There are also some deep valleys receiving the run-off melt-water from the far side of these mountains, creating some mighty rivers, such as the Indus, the Irrawaddy, and the Mekong. Interestingly, the Himalayas are still growing, meaning that the summit of Mount Everest is perhaps a couple of metres higher now than when people first stood there in 1953, presumably making it just that little bit harder to reach.

Questions 27-28
Complete the sentences. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

The combination of North America and Eurasia had the name (27)……………….

The combination of Laurasia and Gondwana had the name (28)……………………..

Questions 29-32
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.

29. Scientists disliked Wegener’s idea because he
A was German.
B made simple observations.
C was a meteorologist.
D made too many suggestions.

30. Both Wegener and Semmelweis
A died prematurely.
B lacked crucial evidence.
C were never given recognition.
D were German.

31. The motion of tectonic plates
A is faster than hair growth.
B does not change.
C is well understood.
D can start cyclic swirls.

32. Volcanos are formed away from plate boundaries due to
A buckling and melting.
B oceanic effects.
C geological events.
D heated regions.

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

The Birds Of London

There are more than two hundred different species and sub-species of birds in the London area, ranging from the magpie to the greenfinch, but perhaps the most ubiquitous is the pigeon. It has been suggested that the swarms of feral pigeons are all descended from birds which escaped from dovecotes in the early medieval period; they found a natural habitat in the crannies and ledges of buildings as did their ancestors, the rock doves, amid the sea-girt cliffs. ‘They nest in small colonies,’ one observer has written, ‘usually high up and inaccessible’ above the streets of London as if the streets were indeed a sea. A man fell from the belfry of St Stephens Walbrook in 1277 while in quest of a pigeon’s nest, while the Bishop of London complained in 1385 of ‘malignant persons’ who threw stones at the pigeons resting in the city churches. So pigeons were already a familiar presence, even if they were not treated with the same indulgence as their more recent successors. A modicum of kindness to these creatures seems to have been first shown in the late nineteenth century, when they were fed oats rather than the customary stale bread.

From the end of the nineteenth century, wood pigeons also migrated into the city; they were quickly urbanised, increasing both in numbers and in tameness. ‘We have frequently seen them on die roofs of houses,’ wrote the author of Bird Life in London in 1893, apparently as much at home as any dovecote pigeon.’ Those who look up today may notice their ‘fly-lines’ in the sky. from Lincoln’s Inn Fields over Kingsway and Trafalgar Square to Battersea, with other lines to Victoria Park and to Kenwood. The air of London is filled with such ‘fly-lines’, and to trace the paths of the birds would be to envisage the city in an entirely different form; then it would seem linked and unified by thousands of thoroughfares and small paths of energy, each with its own history of use.

The sparrows move quickly in public places, and they are now so much part of London that they have been adopted by the native population as the sparred; a friend was known to Cockneys as a ‘cocksparrer’ in tribute to a bird which is sweet and yet watchful, blessed with a dusky plumage similar to that of the London dust, a plucky little bird darting in and out of the city’s endless uproar. They are small birds which can lose body heat very quickly, so they are perfectly adapted to the ‘heat island’ of London. They will live in any small cranny or cavity, behind drainpipes or ventilation shafts, or in public statues, or holes in buildings; in that sense diet are perfectly suited to a London topography. An ornithologist who described the sparrow as peculiarly attached to man’ said it never now breeds at any distance from an occupied building’. This sociability, bred upon the fondness of the Londoner, is manifest in many ways. One naturalist, W.H. Hudson, has described how any stranger in a green space or public garden will soon find that ‘several sparrows are keeping him company … watching his every movement, and if he sits down on a chair or a bench several of them will come close to him, and hop this way and that before him, uttering a little plaintive note of interrogation — Have you got nothing for us? They have also been described as die urchins of the streets — ‘thievish, self-assertive and pugnacious’ — a condition which again may merit the attention and admiration of native Londoners. Remarkably attached to their surroundings, they rarely create ‘fly-lines’ across the city; where they are born, like other Londoners, they stay.

There are some birds, such as the robin and the chaffinch, which are less approachable and trustful in the city than in the country. Other species, such as the mallard, grow increasingly shyer as they leave London. There has been a severe diminution of the number of sparrows, while blackbirds are more plentiful. Swans and ducks have also increased in number. Some species, however, have all but vanished. The rooks of London are, perhaps, the most notable of the disappeared, their rookeries destroyed by building work or by tree-felling. Areas of London were continuously inhabited by rooks for many hundreds of years. The burial ground of St Deinstalls in the East and the college garden of the Ecclesiastical Court in Doctors’ Commons, the turrets of the Tower of London and the gardens of Grays Inn, were once such localities. There was a rookery in the Inner Temple dating from at least 1666, mentioned by Oliver Goldsmith in 1774. Rooks nested on Bow Church and on St Olave’s. They were venerable London birds, preferring to cluster around ancient churches and the like as if they were their local guardians. Yet, in the words of the nineteenth-century song, ‘Now the old rooks have lost their places’. There was a grove in Kensington Gardens devoted to the rooks; it contained some seven hundred trees forming a piece of wild nature, a matter of delight and astonishment to those who walked among them and listened to the endless cawing that blotted out the city’s noise. But the trees were torn down in 1880. The rooks have never returned.

Questions 1-4
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1. What kind of birds are the London pigeons descended from?
2. What were pigeons given to eat before attitudes towards them changed?
3. What are the routes taken by wood pigeons known as?
4. What TWO activities have contributed to the drastic reduction in the number of rooks?

Questions 5-9
Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

SPARROWS

Word meaning (5)………………….is derived from the bird’s name suited to atmosphere of London because of tendency to rapidly (6)………………………always likely to reproduce close to (7)…………………….characteristic noted: (8)……………………….because of attitude of people in London make a sound that seems to be a kind of (9)……………………..

Question 10-13
Classify the following as being stated of

A pigeons
B wood pigeons
C sparrows
D chaffinches
E blackbirds
F rooks

10. They are happier with people when they are in rural areas.
11. They rapidly became comfortable being with people.
12. They used to congregate particularly at old buildings.
13. They used to be attacked by people.

Psychology And Personality Assessment

A Our daily lives are largely made up of contacts with other people, during which we are constantly making judgments of their personalities and accommodating our behaviour to them in accordance with these judgments. A casual meeting of neighbours on the street, an employer giving instructions to an employee, a mother telling her children how to behave, a journey in a train where strangers eye one another without exchanging a word – all these involve mutual interpretations of personal qualities.

B Success in many vocations largely depends on skill in sizing up people. It is important not only to such professionals as the clinical psychologist, the psychiatrist or the social worker, but also to the doctor or lawyer in dealing with their clients, the businessman trying to outwit his rivals, the salesman with potential customers, the teacher with his pupils, not to speak of the pupils judging their teacher. Social life, indeed, would be impossible if we did not. to some extent, understand, and react to the motives and qualities of those we meet; and clearly we are sufficiently accurate for most practical purposes, although we also recognize that misinterpretations easily arise – particularly on the pare of others who judge us!

C Errors can often be corrected as we go along. But whenever we are pinned down to a definite decision about a person, which cannot easily be revised through his ‘feed-back’, the Inadequacies of our judgments become apparent. The hostess who wrongly thinks that the Smiths and the Joneses will get on well together can do little to retrieve the success of her party. A school or a business may be saddled for years with an undesirable member of staff, because the selection committee which interviewed him for a quarter of an hour misjudged his personality.

D Just because the process is so familiar and taken for granted, It has aroused little scientific curiosity until recently. Dramatists, writers and artists throughout the centuries have excelled in the portrayal of character, but have seldom stopped to ask how they, or we, get to know people, or how accurate is our knowledge. However, the popularity of such unscientific systems as Lavater’s physiognomy in the eighteenth century, Gall’s phrenology in the nineteenth, and of handwriting interpretations by graphologists, or palm-readings by Gypsies, show that people are aware of weaknesses in their judgments and desirous of better methods of diagnosis. It is natural that they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in ‘human nature’.

E This belief is hardly justified: for the primary aim of psychology had been to establish the general laws and principles underlying behaviour and thinking, rather than to apply these to concrete problems of the individual person. A great many professional psychologists still regard it as their main function to study the nature of learning, perception and motivation in the abstracted or average human being, or in lower organisms, and consider it premature to put so young a science to practical uses. They would disclaim the possession of any superior skill in judging their fellow-men. Indeed, being more aware of the difficulties than is the non-psychologist, they may be more reluctant to commit themselves to definite predictions or decisions about other people. Nevertheless, to an increasing extent psychologists are moving into educational, occupational, clinical and other applied fields, where they are called upon to use their expertise for such purposes as fitting the education or job to the child or adult, and the person to the job, Thus a considerable proportion of their activities consists of personality assessment.

F The success of psychologists in personality assessment has been limited, in comparison with what they have achieved in the fields of abilities and training, with the result that most people continue to rely on unscientific methods of assessment. In recent times there has been a tremendous amount of work on personality tests, and on carefully controlled experimental studies of personality. Investigations of personality by Freudian and other ‘depth’ psychologists have an even longer history. And yet psychology seems to be no nearer to providing society with practicable techniques which are sufficiently reliable and accurate to win general acceptance. The soundness of the methods of psychologists in the field of personality assessment and the value of their work are under constant fire from other psychologists, and it is far from easy to prove their worth.

G The growth of psychology has probably helped responsible members of society to become more aware of the difficulties of assessment. But it is not much use telling employers, educationists and judges how inaccurately they diagnose the personalities with which they have to deal unless psychologists are sure that they can provide something better. Even when university psychologists themselves appoint a new member of staff, they almost always resort to the traditional techniques of assessing the candidates through interviews, past records, and testimonials, and probably make at least as many bad appointments as other employers do. However, a large amount of experimental development of better methods has been carried out since 1940 by groups of psychologists in the Armed Services and in the Civil Service, and by such organizations as the (British) National Institute of Industrial Psychology and the American Institute of Research.

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

List of Headings
i The advantage of an intuitive approach to personality assessment
ii Overall theories of personality assessment rather than valuable guidance
iii The consequences of poor personality assessment
iv Differing views on the importance of personality assessment
v Success and failure in establishing an approach to personality assessment
vi Everyone makes personality assessments
vii Acknowledgement of the need for improvement in personality assessment
viii Little progress towards a widely applicable approach to personality assessment
ix The need for personality assessments to be well judged
x The need for a different kind of research into personality assessment

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

Question 21
Choose THREE letters A-F.

Which THREE of the following are stated about psychologists involved in personality assessment?

A Depth psychologists are better at it than some other kinds of psychologist
B many of them accept that their conclusions are unreliable
C they receive criticism from psychologists not involved in the field
D they have made people realise how hard the subject is
E they have told people what not to do rather than what they should do
F they keep changing their minds about what the best approaches are

Questions 22-26
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 21 in boxes 22-26 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

22. People often feel that they have been precisely assessed.
23. Unscientific systems of personality assessment have been of some use.
24. People make false assumptions about the expertise of psychologists.
25. It is likely that some psychologists are no better than anyone else at assessing personality.
26. Research since 1940 has been based on acceptance of previous theories.

TITAN of Technology

Gordon Moore is the scientific brain behind Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips. Both funny and self-deprecating, he’s a shrewd businessman too, but admits to being an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, happier in the back room trading ideas with techies than out selling the product or chatting up the stockholders. When he applied for a job at Dow Chemical after gaining his PhD, the company psychologist ruled that it was okay technically, but that I’d never manage anything’. This year Intel is set to turn over $28 billion.

When Moore co-founded Intel (short for Integrated Electronics) to develop integrated circuits thirty-five years ago, he provided the motive force in R&D (Research & Development) while his more extrovert partner Robert Noyce became the public face of the company. Intel’s ethos was distinctively Californian: laid- back, democratic, polo shirt and chinos. Moore worked in a cubicle like everyone else, never had a designated parking space and flew Economy. None of this implied lack of ambition. Moore and Noyce shared a vision, recognising that success depended just as much on intellectual pizazz as on Intel’s ability to deliver a product. Noyce himself received the first patent for an integrated circuit in 1961, while both partners were learning the business of electronics at Fair child Semiconductor.

Fair child’s success put money in Moore and Noyce’s pockets, but they were starved of R&D money. They resigned, frustrated, to found Intel in 1968. ‘It was one of those rare periods when money was available,’ says Moore. They put in $250,000 each and drummed up another $2.5m of venture capital ‘on the strength of a one-page business plan that said essentially nothing’. Ownership was divided 50:50 between founders and backers. Three years later, Intel’s first microprocessor was released: the 4004, carrying 2,250 transistors. Progress after that was rapid. By the time the competition realised what was happening, Intel had amassed a seven-year R&D lead that it was never to relinquish.

By the year 2000, Intel’s Pentium-4 chip was carrying 42 million transistors. ‘Now,’ says Moore, ‘we put a quarter of a billion transistors on a chip and are looking forward to a billion in the near future.’ The performance gains have been phenomenal. The 4004 ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), the Pentium*4 at three gigahertz (3 billion hertz). It’s calculated that if automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from New York to San Francisco in six seconds.

Moore’s prescience in forecasting this revolution is legendary. In 1965, while still head of the R&D laboratory at Fair child, he wrote a piece for Electronics magazine observing ‘that over the first few years we had essentially doubled the complexity of integrated circuits every year. I blindly extrapolated for the next ten years and said we’d go from about 60 to about 60,000 transistors on a chip. It proved a much more spot-on prediction than I could ever have imagined, up until then, integrated circuits had been expensive and had had principally military applications. But I could see that the economics were going to switch dramatically. This was going to become the cheapest way to make electronics.’

The prediction that a chip’s transistor-count – and thus its performance – would keep doubling every year soon proved so accurate that Carver Mead, a friend from Caltech, dubbed it ‘Moore’s Law’. The name has stuck. ‘Moore’s Law’ has become the yardstick by which the exponential growth of the computer industry has been measured ever since. When, in 1975, Moore looked around him again and saw transistor-counts slowing, he predicted that in future chip-performance would double only every two years. But that proved pessimistic. Actual growth since then has split the difference between his two predictions, with performance doubling every 1 8 months.

And there’s a corollary, says Moore. ‘If the cost of a given amount of computer power drops 50 per cent every 1 8 months, each time that happens the market explodes with new applications that hadn’t been economical before.’ He sees the microprocessor as ‘almost infinitely elastic’. As prices fall, new applications keep emerging: smart light bulbs, flashing trainers or greetings cards that sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Where will it all stop? Well, it’s true, he says, ‘that in a few more generations [of chips], the fact that materials are made of atoms starts to be a real problem. Essentially, you can’t make things any smaller.’ But in practice, the day of reckoning is endlessly postponed as engineers find endlessly more ingenious ways of loading more transistors on a chip. ‘I suspect I shared the feelings of everybody else that when we got to the dimensions of a micron [about 1986Ị, we wouldn’t be able to continue because we were touching the wavelength of light. But as we got closer, the barriers just melted away,’

When conventional chips finally reach their limits, nanotechnology beckons. Researchers are already working on sci-fi sounding alternatives such as molecular computers, built atom by atom, that theoretically could process hundreds of thousands times more information than today’s processors. Quantum computers using the state of electrons as the basis for calculation could operate still faster. On any measure, there looks to be plenty of life left in Moore’s Law yet.

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

27. What do we learn about Gordon Moore’s personality in the first two paragraphs?
A It has changed noticeably as his career has developed.
B It was once considered unsuitable for the particular type of business he was in.
C It made him more suited to producing things than to selling them.
D It is less complicated than it may at first appear.

28. What do we learn about Intel when it was first established?
A It was unlike any ocher company in its field at the time.
B It combined a relaxed atmosphere with serious intent.
C It attracted attention because of the unconventional way in which it was run.
D It placed more emphasis on ingenuity than on any other aspect.

29. What is stated about the setting up of Intel in the third paragraph?
A It was primarily motivated by the existence of funds that made it possible.
B It involved keeping certain sensitive information secret.
C It resulted from the founders’ desire to launch a particular product.
D It was caused by the founders’ dissatisfaction with their employer’s priorities.

Questions 30-34
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading -Passage 3? In boxes 30-34 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

30. Competitors soon came close to catching up with Intel’s progress.
31. Intel’s Pentium 4 chip was more successful than Moore had anticipated.
32. Moore’s prediction in 1975 was based on too little evidence.
33. Flashing trainers are an example of Moore’s theory about the relationship between cost and applications.
34. Moore has always been confident that problems concerning the sire of components will be overcome.

Questions 35-40
Complete the summary below using words from the box. Write your answers in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.

MOORE’S LAW

Gordon Moore’s ability to foresee developments is well-known. In 1965, he referred to the increase in the (35)………………of integrated circuits and guessed that the number of transistors would go on rising for a decade. The (36)………………………..of his prediction surprised him. Previously, the (37)…………………..and main (38)……………………of integrated circuits had been the major (39)……………………..with regard to their development. But Moore observed that the (40)…………………………of integrated circuits was going to improve dramatically. His resulting forecasts concerning chips led to the creation of the term ‘Moore’s Law’.

design	use	opinion	invention
cost-effectiveness	failure	sophistication	proposition
production	influence	understanding	cost
accuracy	demand	theory	inter-dependence
familiarity	reception	appearance	reference

How to run a… Publisher and author David Harvey on what makes a good management book

A Prior to the Second World War, all the management books ever written could be comfortably stacked on a couple of shelves. Today, you would need a size able library, with plenty of room for expansion, to house them. The last few decades have seen the stream of new titles swell into a flood. In 1975, 771 business books were published. By 2000, the total for the year had risen to 3,203, and the trend continues.

B The growth in publishing activity has followed the rise and rise of management to the point where it constitutes a mini-industry in its own right. In the USA alone, the book market is worth over $1bn. Management consultancies, professional bodies and business schools were part of this new phenomenon, all sharing at least one common need: to get into print. Nor were they the only aspiring authors. Inside stories by and about business leaders balanced the more straight-laced textbooks by academics. How-to books by practising managers and business writers appeared on everything from making a presentation to developing a business strategy. With this upsurge in output, it is not really surprising that the quality is uneven.

C Few people are probably in a better position to evaluate the management canon than Carol Kennedy, a business journalist and author of Guide to the Management Gurus, an overview of the world’s most influential management thinkers and their works. She is also the books editor of The Director. Of course, it is normally the best of the bunch that are reviewed in the pages of The Director. But from time to time, Kennedy is moved to use The Director’s precious column inches to warn readers off certain books. Her recent review of The Leader’s Edge summed up her irritation with authors who over-promise and under-deliver. The banality of the treatment of core competencies for leaders, including the ‘competency of paying attention’, was a conceit too far in the context of a leaden text. ‘Somewhere in this book,’ she wrote, ‘there may be an idea worth reading and taking note of, but my own competency of paying attention ran out on page 31.’ Her opinion of a good proportion of the other books that never make it to the review pages is even more terse. ‘Unreadable’ is her verdict.

D Simon Caulkin, contributing editor of the Observer’s management page and former editor of Management Today, has formed a similar opinion. A lot is pretty depressing, unimpressive stuff.’ Caulkin is philosophical about the inevitability of finding so much dross. Business books, he says, ‘range from total drivel to the ambitious stuff. Although the confusing thing is that the really ambitious stuff can sometimes be drivel.’ Which leaves the question open as to why the subject of management is such a literary wasteland. There are some possible explanations.

E Despite the attempts of Frederick Taylor, the early twentieth-century founder of scientific management, to establish a solid, rule-based foundation for the practice, management has come to be seen as just as much an art as a science. Once psychologists like Abraham Maslow, behaviouralists and social anthropologists persuaded business to look at management from a human perspective, the topic became more multi­dimensional and complex. Add to that the requirement for management to reflect the changing demands of the times, the impact of information technology and other factors, and it is easy to understand why management is in a permanent state of confusion. There is a constant requirement for reinterpretation, innovation and creative thinking: Caulkin’s ambitious stuff. For their part, publishers continue to dream about finding the next big management idea, a topic given an airing in Kennedy’s book. The Next Big Idea.

F Indirectly, it tracks one of the phenomena of the past 20 years or so: the management blockbusters which work wonders for publishers’ profits and transform authors’ careers. Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies achieved spectacular success. So did Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Yet the early euphoria with which such books are greeted tends to wear off as the basis for the claims starts to look less than solid. In the case of In Search of Excellence, it was the rapid reversal of fortunes that turned several of the exemplar companies into basket cases. For Hammer’s and Champy’s readers, disillusion dawned with the realisation that their slash-and-burn prescription for reviving corporate fortunes caused more problems than it solved.

G Yet one of the virtues of these books is that they could be understood. There is a whole class of management texts that fail this basic test. ‘Some management books are stuffed with jargon,’ says Kennedy. ‘Consultants are among the worst offenders.’ She believes there is a simple reason for this flight from plain English. ’They all use this jargon because they can’t think clearly. It disguises the paucity of thought.’

H By contrast, the management thinkers who have stood the test of time articulate their ideas in plain English. Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the doyen of management thinkers, has written a steady stream of influential books over half a century. ‘Drucker writes beautiful, dear prose.’ says Kennedy, ‘and his thoughts come through.’ He is among the handful of writers whose work, she believes, transcends the specific interests of the management community. Caulkin also agrees that Drucker reaches out to a wider readership. ‘What you get is a sense of the larger cultural background,’ he says. ‘That’s what you miss in so much management writing.’ Charles Handy, perhaps the most successful UK business writer to command an international audience, is another rare example of a writer with a message for the wider world.

Questions 1-2
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1. What does the writer say about the increase in the number of management books published?
A It took the publishing industry by surprise.
B It is likely to continue.
C It has produced more profit than other areas of publishing.
D It could have been foreseen.

2. What does the writer say about the genre of management books?
A It includes some books that cover topics of little relevance to anyone.
B It contains a greater proportion of practical than theoretical books.
C All sorts of people have felt that they should be represented in it.
D The best books in the genre are written by business people.

Questions 3-7
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information!

3. reasons for the deserved success of some books
4. reasons why managers feel the need for advice
5. a belief that management books are highly likely to be very poor
6. a reference to books nor considered worth reviewing
7. an example of a group of people who write particularly poor books

Questions 8-13
Look at the statements (Questions 8-13) and the list of books below. Match each statement with the book it relates to.

8. It examines the success of books in the genre.
9. Statements made in it were later proved incorrect.
10. It tails to live up to claims made about it.
11. Advice given in it is seen to be actually harmful.
12. It examines the theories of those who have developed management thinking
13. It states die obvious in an unappealing way.

List of Books
A Guide to the Management Gurus
B The Leader’s Edge
C The Next Big Idea
D In Search of Excellence
E Reengineering the Corporation

Stadium Australia

A You might ask, why be concerned about the architecture of a stadium? Surely, as Long as die action is entertaining and the building is safe and reasonably comfortable, why should the aesthetics matter’ This one question has dominated my professional life, and its answer is one 1 find myself continually rehearsing. If one accepts that sporting endeavour is as important an outlet for human expression as, say, the theatre or cinema, fine art or music, why shouldn’t the buildings in which we celebrate this outlet he as grand and as inspirational as those we would expect, and demand, in those other areas of cultural life? Indeed, one could argue that because stadiums are, in many instances, far more popular than theatres or art galleries, we should actually devote more, and nor less, attention to their form. Stadiums have frequently been referred to as ‘cathedrals’. Football has often been dubbed ‘the opera of the people’. What better way, therefore, to raise the general public’s awareness and appreciation of quality design than to offer them the very’ best buildings in the one area of life that seems to touch them most? Could it even be drat better stadiums might just make tor better citizens?

B But then maybe, as my detractors have labelled me in the past, 1 am a snob. Maybe I should just accept that sport, and its associated accoutrements and products, is an essentially tacky and ephemeral business, while stadium design is all too often driven by pragmatists and penny-pinchers. Certainly, when 1 first started writing about stadium architecture, one of the first and most uncomfortable truths 1 had to confront was that some of the mast popular stadiums in the world were also amongst the least attractive or innovative in architectural terms. ‘Worthy and predictable’ has usually won more votes than ’daring and different’. Old Trafford football ground in Manchester, the Yankee Stadium in New York, Ellis Park in Johannesburg. The list is long and is not intended to suggest that these are necessarily poor buildings. Rather, that each has derived its reputation more from the events that it has staged, from its associations, than from the actual form it takes. Equally, those stadiums whose forms have been revered – such as the Maracana in Rio, oi the San Siro in Milan – have turned out to be rather poorly designed in several respects, once one analyses them not as icons but as functioning ‘public assembly facilities’ (to use the current jargon). Finding the balance between beauty and practicality has never been easy.

C Homebush Bay was the site of the main Olympic Games complex for the Sydney Olympics of 2000. To put it politely, 1 am no great admirer of the Olympics as an event, or, rather, of the insane pressures its past bidding procedures have placed upon candidate cities. Nor, as a spectator, do 1 much enjoy the bloated Games programme and the consequent demands this places upon the designers of stadiums. Yet in my calmer moments it would be churlish to deny that, if approached sensibly and imaginatively, the opportunity to stage the Games can yield enormous benefits in the long term (as well they should, considering the expenditure involved), if not (or sport then at least for the cause of urban regeneration. Following in Barcelona’s footsteps, Sydney undoubtedly set about its urban regeneration in a wholly impressive way. To an outsider, the 760-hectare sire at Homebush Bay, once the home of an abattoir, a racecourse, a brickworks and light industrial units, seemed miles from anywhere – it was actually fifteen kilometres from the centre of Sydney and pretty much in the heart of the city’s extensive conurbation. Some £1.3 billion worth of construction and reclamation was commissioned, all of it, crucially, with an eye to post- Olympic usage- Strict guidelines, studiously monitored by Greenpeace, ensured that the 2000 Games would be the most environmentally friendly ever. What’s more, much of the work was good-looking, distinctive and lively. ‘That’s a reflection of the Australian spirit,’ I was told.

D At the centre of Homebush lay the main venue for the Olympics, Stadium Australia. It was funded by means of a BOOT (Budd, Own, Operate and Transfer) contract, which meant that the Stadium Australia consortium, led by the contractors Multiplex and the financiers Hambros, bore i he bulk of the construction costs, in return for which it was allowed to operate the facility for thirty years, and thus, it hopes, recoup its outlay, before handing the whole building over to the New South Wales government in the year 2030.

E Stadium Australia was the most environmentally friendly Olympic stadium ever built. Every single product and material used had to meet strict guidelines, even if it turned our to he more expensive. All the timber was either recycled or derived from renewable sources. In order to reduce energy’ costs, the design allowed for natural lighting in as many public areas as possible, supplemented by solar-powered units. Rainwater collected from the roof ran off into storage- ranks, where it could be tapped for pitch irrigation. Stormwater run-off was collected for toilet flushing. Wherever possible, passive ventilation was used instead of mechanical air- conditioning. Even the steel and concrete from the two end stands due to be demolished at the end of the Olympics was to be recycled. Furthermore, no private cars were allowed on the Homebush site. Instead, every spectator was to arrive by public transport, and quite right too. If ever there was a stadium to persuade a sceptic like myself that the Olympic Games do, after all, have a useful function in at least setting design and planning trends, this was the one. 1 was, and still am, I freely confess, quite knocked out by Stadium Australia.

Questions 14-18
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number i—x in boxes 14—18 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i A strange combination
ii An overall requirement
iii A controversial decision
iv A strong contrast
v A special set-up
vi A promising beginning
vii A shift in attitudes
viii A strongly held belief
ix A change of plan
x A simple choice

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

Questions 19-22
In boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet unite

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 public have been demanding a better quality of stadium design.
20. It is possible that stadium design has an effect on people’s behaviour in life in general.
21. Some stadiums have come in for a lot more criticism than others.
22. Designers of previous Olympic stadiums could easily have produced far better designs.

Question 23-26
Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

A Theory of Shopping

For a one-year period I attempted to conduct an ethnography of shopping on and around a street in North London. This was carried out in association with Alison Clarke. I say ‘attempted’ because, given the absence of community and the intensely private nature of London households, this could not be an ethnography in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, through conversation, being present in the home and accompanying householders during their shopping, I tried to reach an understanding of the nature of shopping through greater or lesser exposure to 76 households.

My part of the ethnography concentrated upon shopping itself. Alison Clarke has since been working with the same households, but focusing upon other forms of provisioning such as the use of catalogues (see Clarke 1997). We generally first met these households together, but most of the material that is used within this particular essay derived from my own subsequent fieldwork. Following the completion of this essay, and a study of some related shopping centres, we hope to write a more general ethnography of provisioning. This will also examine other issues, such as the nature of community and the implications for retail and for the wider political economy. None of this, however, forms part of the present essay, which is primarily concerned with establishing the cosmological foundations of shopping.

To state that a household has been included within the study is to gloss over a wide diversity of degrees of involvement. The minimum requirement is simply that a householder has agreed to be interviewed about their shopping, which would include the local shopping parade, shopping centres and supermarkets. At the other extreme are families that we have come to know well during the course of the year. Interaction would include formal interviews, and a less formal presence within their homes, usually with a cup of tea. It also meant accompanying them on one or several ‘events’, which might comprise shopping trips or participation in activities associated with the area of Clarke’s study, such as the meeting of a group supplying products for the home.

In analysing and writing up the experience of an ethnography of shopping in North London, I am led in two opposed directions. The tradition of anthropological relativism leads to an emphasis upon difference, and there are many ways in which shopping can help us elucidate differences. For example, there are differences in the experience of shopping based on gender, age, ethnicity and class. There are also differences based on the various genres of shopping experience, from a mall to a corner shop. By contrast, there is the tradition of anthropological generalisation about ‘peoples’ and comparative theory. This leads to the question as to whether there are any fundamental aspects of shopping which suggest a robust normativity that comes through the research and is not entirely dissipated by relativism. In this essay I want to emphasize the latter approach and argue that if not all, then most acts of shopping on this street exhibit a normative form which needs to be addressed. In the later discussion of the discourse of shopping I will defend the possibility that such a heterogenous group of households could be fairly represented by a series of homogenous cultural practices.

The theory that I will propose is certainly at odds with most of the literature on this topic. My premise, unlike that of most studies of consumption, whether they arise from economists, business studies or cultural studies, is that for most households in this street the act of shopping was hardly ever directed towards the person who was doing the shopping. Shopping is therefore not best understood as an individualistic or individualising act related to the subjectivity of the shopper. Rather, the act of buying goods is mainly directed at two forms of ‘otherness’. The first of these expresses a relationship between the shopper and a particular other individual such as a child or partner, either present in the household, desired or imagined. The second of these is a relationship to a more general goal which transcends any immediate utility and is best understood as cosmological in that it takes the form of neither subject nor object but of the values to which people wish to dedicate themselves.

It never occurred to me at any stage when carrying out the ethnography that I should consider the topic of sacrifice as relevant to this research. In no sense then could the ethnography be regarded as a testing of the ideas presented here. The Literature that seemed most relevant in the initial analysis of the London material was that on thrift discussed in chapter 3. The crucial element in opening up the potential of sacrifice for understanding shopping came through reading Bataiile. Bataille, however, was merely the catalyst, since I will argue that it is the classic works on sacrifice and, in particular, the foundation to its modern study by Hubert and Mauss (1964) that has become the primary grounds for my interpretation. It is important, however, when reading the following account to note that when I use the word ‘sacrifice’, I only rarely refer to the colloquial sense of the term as used in the concept of the ‘self-sacrificial’ housewife. Mostly the allusion is to this Literature on ancient sacrifice and the detailed analysis of the complex ritual sequence involved in traditional sacrifice. The metaphorical use of the term may have its place within the subsequent discussion but this is secondary to an argument at the level of structure.

Questions 27-29
Choose THREE letters A-F.

Which THREE of the following are problems the writer encountered when conducting his study?

A uncertainty as to what the focus of the study should be
B the difficulty of finding enough households to make the study worthwhile
C the diverse nature of the population of the area
D the reluctance of people to share information about their personal habits
E the fact that he was unable to study some people’s habits as much as others
F people dropping out of the study after initially agreeing to take part

Questions 30-37
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 30-37 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

30. Anthropological relativism is more widely applied than anthropological generalisation.
31. Shopping lends itself to analysis based on anthropological relativism.
32. Generalisations about shopping are possible.
33. Tire conclusions drawn from this study will confirm some of the findings of other research.
34. Shopping should be regarded as a basically unselfish activity.
35. People sometimes analyse their own motives when they are shopping.
36. The actual goods bought are the primary concern in the activity of shopping.
37. It was possible to predict the outcome of the study before embarking on it.

Questions 38-40
Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage 3. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

The subject of written research the writer first thought was directly connected with his study was (38)…………….

The research the writer has been most inspired by was carried out by (39)……………………

The writer mostly does not use the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ that he regards as (40)……………………

Bilingualism In Children

A One misguided legacy of over a hundred years of writing on bilingualism is that children’s intelligence will suffer if they are bilingual. Some of the earliest research into bilingualism examined whether bilingual children were ahead or behind monolingual2 children on IQ tests. From the 1920s through to the 1960s, the tendency was to find monolingual children ahead of bilinguals on IQ tests. The conclusion was that bilingual children were mentally confused. Having two languages in the brain, it was said, disrupted effective thinking. It was argued that having one well-developed language was superior to having two half-developed languages.

B The idea that bilinguals may have a lower IQ still exists among many people, particularly monolinguals. However, we now know that this early research was misconceived and incorrect. First, such research often gave bilinguals an IQ test in their weaker language – usually English. Had bilinguals been tested in Welsh or Spanish or Hebrew, a different result may have been found. The testing of bilinguals was thus unfair. Second, like was not compared with like. Bilinguals tended to come from, for example, impoverished New York or rural Welsh backgrounds. The monolinguals tended to come from more middle class, urban families. Working class bilinguals were often compared with middle class monolinguals. So the results were more likely to be due to social class differences than language differences. The comparison of monolinguals and bilinguals was unfair.

C The most recent research from Canada, the United States and Wales suggests that bilinguals are, at least, equal to monolinguals on IQ tests. When bilinguals have two well- developed languages (in the research literature called balanced bilinguals), bilinguals tend to show a slight superiority in IQ tests compared with monolinguals. This is the received psychological wisdom of the moment and is good news for raising bilingual children. Take, for example, a child who can operate in either language in the curriculum in the school. That child is likely to be ahead on IQ tests compared with similar (same gender, social class and age) monolinguals. Far from making people mentally confused, bilingualism is now associated with a mild degree of intellectual superiority.

D One note of caution needs to be sounded. IQ tests probably do not measure intelligence. IQ tests measure a small sample of the broadest concept of intelligence. IQ tests are simply paper and pencil tests where only ’right and wrong ’answers are allowed. Is all intelligence summed up in such right and wrong, pencil and paper tests? Isn’t there a wider variety of intelligences that are important in everyday functioning and everyday life?

E Many questions need answering. Do we only define an intelligent person as somebody who obtains a high score on an IQ test? Are the only intelligent people those who belong to high IQ organisations such as MENSA? Is there social intelligence, musical intelligence, military intelligence, marketing intelligence, motoring intelligence, political intelligence? Are all, or indeed any, of these forms of intelligence measured by a simple pencil and paper IQ test which demands a single, acceptable, correct solution to each question? Defining what constitutes intelligent behaviour requires a personal value judgement as to what type of behaviour, and what kind of person is of more worth.

F The current state of psychological wisdom about bilingual children is that, where two languages are relatively well developed, bilinguals have thinking advantages over monolinguals. Take an example. A child is asked a simple question: How many uses can you think offer a brick? Some children give two or three answers only. They can think of building walls, building a house and perhaps that is all. Another child scribbles away, pouring out ideas one after the other: blocking up a rabbit hole, breaking a window, using as a bird bath, as a plumb line, as an abstract sculpture in an art exhibition.

G Research across different continents of the world shows that bilinguals tend to be more fluent, flexible, original and elaborate in their answers to this type of open-ended question. The person who can think of a few answers tends to be termed a convergent thinker. They converge onto a few acceptable conventional answers. People who think of lots of different uses for unusual items (e.g. a brick, tin can, cardboard box) are called divergers. Divergers like a variety of answers to a question and are imaginative and fluent in their thinking.

H There are other dimensions in thinking where approximately ’balanced’ bilinguals may have temporary and occasionally permanent advantages over monolinguals: increased sensitivity to communication, a slightly speedier movement through the stages of cognitive development, and being less fixed on the sounds of words and more centred on the meaning of words. Such ability to move away from the sound of words and fix on the meaning of words tends to be a (temporary) advantage for bilinguals around the ages four to six This advantage may mean an initial head start in learning to read and learning to think about language.

Questions 1-3
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

For more than (1)……………………, books and articles were wrong about the intelligence of bilingual children.

For approximately 40 years, there was a mistaken belief that children who spoke two languages were (2)………………….

It was commonly thought that people (3)………………………with a single were more effective thinkers.

Questions 4-9
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-G from the list of headings below

List of Headings
i No single definition of intelligence
ii Faulty testing, wrong conclusion
iii Welsh research supports IQ testing
iv Beware: inadequate for Selling intelligence
v International research supports bilingualism
vi Current thought on the advantage bilinguals have
vii Early beliefs regarding bilingualism
viii Monolinguals ahead of their bilingual peers
ix Exemplifying the bilingual advantage

Example Paragraph A vii

4. Paragraph B
5. Paragraph C
6. Paragraph D
7. Paragraph E
8. Paragraph F
9. Paragraph G

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Write

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

10. Balanced bilinguals have more permanent than temporary advantages over monolinguals.
11. Often bilinguals concentrate more on the way a word sounds than on its meaning.
12. Monolinguals learn to speak at a younger age than bilinguals.
13. Bilinguals just starting school might pick up certain skills faster than monolinguals.

Changing Rules For Health Treatment

People who are grossly overweight, who smoke heavily or drink excessively could be denied surgery or drugs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which advises on the clinical and cost effectiveness of treatments for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, said that in some cases the ’self-inflicted’ nature of an illness should be taken into account.

NICE stressed that people should not be discriminated against by doctors simply because they smoked or were overweight. Its ruling should apply only if the treatment was likely to be less effective, or not work because of an unhealthy habit The agency also insisted that its decision was not an edict for the whole NHS but guidance for its own appraisal committees when reaching judgements on new drugs or procedures. But the effect is likely to be the same.

NICE is a powerful body and the cause of much controversy. It is seen by some as a new way of rationing NHS treatment Across the UK, primary care trusts (PCTs) regularly wait for many months for a NICE decision before agreeing to fund a new treatment. One group of primary care trusts is ahead of NICE. Three PCTs in east Suffolk have already decided that obese people would not be entitled to have hip or knee replacements unless they lost weight The group said the risks of operating on them were greater, the surgery may be less successful and the joints would wear out sooner. It was acknowledged that the decision would also save money.

NICE said no priority should be given to patients based on income, social class or social roles at different ages when considering the cost effectiveness of a treatment. Patients should not be discriminated against on the grounds of age either, unless age has a direct relevance to the condition. NICE has already ruled that IVF should be available on the NHS to women aged 23 to 39 as the treatment has less chance of success in older women. It also recommends that flu drugs should be available to over-65s, as older people are more vulnerable.

But NICE also said that if self-inflicted factors meant that drugs or treatment would be less clinically and cost effective, this may need to be considered when producing advice for the NHS. They state that If the self-inflicted cause of the condition will influence the likely outcome of a particular treatment, then it may be appropriate to take this into account in some circumstances. ’They acknowledge that it can be difficult to decide whether an illness such as a heart attack was self-inflicted in a smoker. ‘A patient’s individual circumstances may only be taken into account when there will be an impact on the clinical and cost effectiveness of the treatment’

Prof Sir Michael Rawlins, the chairman of NICE, said: ‘On age we are very clear – our advisory groups should not make recommendations that depend on people’s ages when they are considering the use of a particular treatment unless there is clear evidence of a difference in its effectiveness for particular age groups. Even then, age should only be mentioned when it provides the only practical ‘marker1 of risk or benefit NICE values people, equally, at all ages.’

But Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said there was a danger of primary care trusts following the same course of action. There is no excuse for cash-strapped hospitals denying treatment to people whose lifestyle they disapprove of/ he said. Treatment decisions involving people’s lifestyle should be based on clinical reasons, not grounds of cost The NHS is there to keep people healthy, not to sit in judgement on individual lifestyles.’

A spokesman for NICE said: ‘We want to reassure people that in producing our guidance we are not going to take into consideration whether or not a particular condition was or is self-inflicted. The only circumstances where that may be taken into account is where that treatment may be less effective because of lifestyle choices.’

Jonathan Ellis, the policy manager at Help the Aged, said it was pleased NICE had finally shown an understanding of the importance of tackling age discrimination. ’While this is a major feat, there is still some way to go to banish the evident inherent age discrimination that exists within health care services,’ he said. The NHS now has much to leam. It will ensure a fairer deal all round for older people using the NHS.’

Questions 14-16
Choose THREE letters A-H.
Which THREE of the following statements are true of NICE, according to the text?

A it feels that people with bad health habits should not receive treatment
B it is an agency that offers advice to the NHS
C some of the reports they produce discriminate against the elderly
D it insists its decision should only be applicable in certain situations
E it is an agency that controls all NHS policy regarding treatments
F its powers are not as extensive as those of the NHS
G many PCTs base their decisions concerning funding on ones made by NICE
H it has made a statement that overweight people will not receive new joints

Questions 17-19
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

17. NICE argues that
A rich people should not be given special consideration over the poor.
B only patients from certain classes should be considered for treatment
C social roles should be considered when deciding treatment.
D cost of treatment would depend on patients’ income.

18. What recommendations has NICE made?
A to provide older women with IVF treatments
B to make flu drugs accessible to women under 40
C to give people between 23-39 flu drugs
D to allow certain women to have IVF treatments

19. NICE admits that
A some drugs used by the NHS were not clinically effective.
B their advice is sometimes ignored by the NHS.
C it is often hard to determine if a patient has caused his or her condition.
D they are more concerned about cost effectiveness than patients

Questions 20-26
Look at the following statements (Questions 20-26) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person A-C.

20. This person was happy that-NICE realised age discrimination needed dealing with.
21. This person holds a very high position in the NICE agency.
22. This person is a member of a political party.
23. This person says their policy regarding age is precise and easy to understand.
24. This person does not agree with the position taken by NICE.
25. This person feels the NHS must further improve its relations with the elderly.
26. This person says that NICE does not discriminate on the grounds of age.

A Michael Rawlins
B Steve Webb
C Jonathan Ellis

The Romantic Poets

One of the most evocative eras in the history of poetry must surely be that of the Romantic Movement. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a group of poets created a new mood in literary objectives, casting off their predecessors’ styles in favour of a gripping and forceful art which endures with us to this day.

Five poets emerged as the main constituents of this movement – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The strength of their works lies undoubtedly in the power of their imagination. Indeed, imagination was the most critical attribute of the Romantic poets. Each poet had the ability to portray remarkable images and visions, although differing to a certain degree in their intensity and presentation. Nature, mythology and emotion were of great importance and were used to explore the feelings of the poet himself.

The lives of the poets often overlapped and tragedy was typical in most of them. Byron was born in London in 1788. The family moved to Aberdeen soon after, where Byron was brought up until he inherited the family seat of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire from his great uncle. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1808 and left England the following year to embark on a tour of the Mediterranean. During this tour, he developed a passion for Greece which would later lead to his death in 1824. He left for Switzerland in 1816 where he was introduced to Shelley.

Shelley was born to a wealthy family in 1792. He was educated at Eton and then went on to Oxford. Shelley was not happy in England, where his colourful lifestyle and unorthodox beliefs made him unpopular with the establishment In 1818 he left for Italy, where he was reunited with Byron. However, the friendship was tragically brought to an end in July 1822, when Shelley was drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast. In somewhat dramatic form, Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach, witnessed by a small group of friends, including Byron.
Historically, Shelley and Byron are considered to have been the most outspoken and radical of the Romantic poets. By contrast, Wordsworth appears to have been of a pleasant and acceptable personality, even receiving the status of Poet Laureate in 1843. He was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumbria. By the time he entered his early teens, both his parents had died. As he grew older, Wordsworth developed a passion for writing.

In 1798 Wordsworth published a collection of poems with Coleridge, whom he had met, a few years earlier, when he settled in Somerset with his sister Dorothy. He married in 1802 and, as time passed, he deserted his former political views and became increasingly acceptable to popular society. Indeed, at the time of his death in the spring of 1850, he had become one of the most sought-after poets of his time.

Wordsworth shared some of the years at Dove Cottage in Somerset with his friend and poetical contemporary, Coleridge. Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772. He was a bright young scholar but never achieved the same prolific output of his fellow Romantic poets. In 1804 he left for a position in Malta for three years. On his return he separated from his wife and went to live with the Wordsworths, where he produced a regular periodical.

With failing health, he later moved to London. In 1816 he went to stay with a doctor and his family. He remained with them until his death in 1834. During these latter years, his poetry was abandoned for other forms of writing equally outstanding in their own right.

Perhaps the most tragic of the Romantic poets was Keats. Keats was born in London in 1795. Similar to Wordsworth, both his parents had died by his early teens. He studied as a surgeon, qualifying in 1816. However, poetry was his great passion and he decided to devote himself to writing. For much of his adult life Keats was in poor health and fell gravely ill in early 1820. He knew he was dying and in the September of that year he left for Rome hoping that the more agreeable climate might ease his suffering. Keats died of consumption in February 1821 at the age of twenty-five.

It is sad that such tragedy often accompanies those of outstanding artistic genius. We can only wonder at the possible outcome had they all lived to an old age. Perhaps even Byron and Shelley would have mellowed with the years, like Wordsworth. However, the contribution to poetry by all five writers is immeasurable. They introduced the concepts of individualism and imagination, allowing us to explore our own visions of beauty without retribution. We are not now required to restrain our thoughts and poetry to that of the socially acceptable.

Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

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

27. The Romantic Movement lasted for more than a century.
28. The Romantic poets adopted a style dissimilar to that of poets who had come before them.
29. Unfortunately, the works of the Romantics had no lasting impression on art.
30. The Romantics had no respect for any style of poetry apart from their own.
31. The Romantics were gifted with a strong sense of imagination.
32. Much of the Romantics’ poetry was inspired by the natural world.

Questions 33-39
Complete the table below. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

	Date of birth	Education
Bryon	1788	Cambridge University	went on journey around (33)…………………; came to love (34)……………………
Shelley	1972	Eton and Oxford University	some people disapproved of (35)………………….and the beliefs he held
Wordsworth	1770		became more accepted when he changed his (36)……………….
Coleridge	1772	bright scholar	his (37)………………was smaller than the other Romantic poets; left the Wordsworths due to (38)…………………….
Keats	1795	qualified as a surgeon	left England for a change of (39)…………………..

Question 40
Complete the sentence. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for the answer.

40. According to the writer, the Romantic poets left us with the ideas of………………

Seed vault guards resources for the future

Fiona Harvey paid a visit to a building whose contents are very precious.

About 1,000 km from the North Pole, Svalbard is one of the most remote places on earth. For this reason, it is the site of a vault that will safeguard a priceless component of our common heritage – the seeds of our staple crops. Here, seeds from the world’s most vital food crops will be locked away for hundreds or even thousands of years. If something goes wrong in the world, the vault will provide the means to restore farming. We, or our descendants, will not have to retread thousands of years of agriculture from scratch.

Deep in the vault at the end of a long tunnel, are three storage vaults which are lined with insulated panels to help maintain the cold temperatures. Electronic transmitters linked to a satellite system monitor temperature, etc. and pass the information back to the appropriate authorities at Longycarbyen and the Nordic Gene Bank which provide the technical information for managing the seed vaults. The seeds are placed in scaled boxes and stored on shelves in the vaults. The minimal moisture level and low temperature ensure low metabolic activity. The remote location, as well as the rugged structure, provide unparalleled security for the world’s agricultural heritage.

The three vaults are buried deep in the hillside. To reach them, it is necessary to proceed down a long and surprisingly large corridor. At 93.3 metres in length, it connects the 26-metre long entrance building to the three vaults, each of which extends a further 27 metres into the mountain. Towards the end of this tunnel, after about 80 metres, there are several small rooms on the right-hand side. One is a transformer room to which only the power company officials have access – this houses the equipment needed to transform the incoming electrical current down to 220 volts. A second is an electrical room housing controls for the compressor and other equipment. I he oilier room is an office which can be heated to provide comfortable working conditions for those who will make an inventory of the samples in and out of the vault.

Anyone seeking access to the seeds has to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 90 metres down the tunnel and finally the two keyed doors separated by an airlock, from which it is possible to proceed directly into the seed vaults. Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. A work of art will make the vault visible for miles with reflective sheets of steel and mirrors which form an installation acting as a beacon. It reflects polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light. Cary Fowler, the mastermind behind the vault, stands inside the echoing cavern. For him, this is the culmination of nearly 30 years of work. ‘It’s an insurance policy,’ he explains, ‘a very cheap insurance policy when you consider what we’re insuring – the earth’s biological diversity.’

Seeds are being brought here from all over the world, from seed banks created by governments, universities and private institutions. Soon, there will be seed varieties from at least 100 crops in the Svalbard vault – extending to examples of all of the 1.5 million known crop seed varieties in the world. If any more are unearthed. either in the wild or found in obscure collections, they can be added, too – the vault has room for at least 4.5 million samples. Inside the entrance area it is more than 10® C below freezing, but in the chambers where the seeds are kept, refrigerators push down the temperature even further, to -18oC. At this temperature, which will be kept constant to stop the seeds germinating or rotting, the wheat seeds will remain viable for an estimated 1.700 vears. the years.

Svalbard’s Arctic conditions will keep the seeds cold. In order to maintain the temperature at a constant -10° C to -20® C, the cold Arctic air will be drawn into the vault during the winter, automatically and without human intervention. The surrounding rock will maintain the temperature requirements during the extremely cold season and, during warmer periods, refrigeration equipment will engage. Looking out across the snow-covered mountains of Svalbard, it is hard not to feel respect for the 2,300 or so people who live here, mainly in Longyearbyen, a village a few miles away. There are three months without light in winter.
Svalbard is intended 3s the seed bank of last resort. Each sample is made up of a few hundred seeds, sealed inside a watertight package which will never be tampered with while it is in the vault. The packages of seeds remain the property of the collections they have come from. Svalbard will disburse samples ‘only if all the other seeds in other collections around the world are gone,’ explains Fowler. If seeds do have to be given out, those who receive them are expected to germinate them and generate new samples, to be returned to the vault.

Questions 1-6
Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

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

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

7. The vault has the capacity to accommodate undiscovered types of seed at a later date.
8. There are different levels of refrigeration according to the kinds of seeds stored.
9. During winter, the flow of air entering the vault is regularly monitored by staff.
10. There is a back-up refrigeration system ready to be switched on if the present one fails.
11. The people who work at Svalbard are mainly locals.
12. Once a seed package Is In the vault, it remains unopened.
13. If seeds are sent from Svalbard to other banks, there is an obligation for the recipient to send replacements back.

WHAT COOKBOOKS REALLY TEACH US

A Shelves bend under their weight of cookery books. Even a medium-sized bookshop contains many more recipes than one person could hope to took in a lifetime. Although the recipes in one book are often similar to those in another, their presentation varies wildly, from an array of vegetarian cookbooks to instructions on cooking the food that historical figures might have eaten. The reason for this abundance is that cookbooks promise to bring about a kind of domestic transformation for the user. The daily routine can be put on one side and they liberate the user, if only temporarily. To follow their instructions is to turn a task which has to be performed every day into an engaging, romantic process. Cookbooks also provide an opportunity to delve into distant cultures without having to turn up at an airport to get there.

B The first Western cookbook appeared just over 1,600 years ago. De re couquinara (it means ‘concerning cookery’) is attributed to a Roman gourmet named Apicius. It is probably a compilation of Roman and Greek recipes, some or all of them drawn from manuscripts that were later loss. The editor was sloppy, allowing several duplicated recipes to sneak in. Yet Apicius’s book set the tone of cookery advice in Europe for more than a thousand years. As a cookbook it is unsatisfactory with very basic instructions. Joseph Vehling, a chef who translated Apicius in the 1930s, suggested the author had been obscure on purpose, in ease his secrets leaked out.

C But a more likely reason is that Apicius’s recipes were written by and for professional cooks, who could follow their shorthand. This situation continued for hundreds of years. There was no order to cookbooks: a cake recipe might be followed by a mutton one. But then, they were not written for careful study. Before the 19th century few educated people cooked for themselves. The wealthiest employed literate chefs; others presumably read recipes to their servants. Such cooks would have been capable of creating dishes from the vaguest of instructions.

D The invention of printing might have been expected to lead to greater clarity but at first the reverse was true. As words acquired commercial value, plagiarism exploded. Recipes were distorted through reproduction. A recipe for boiled capon in Vk Good Huswives Jewell, printed in 1596, advised the cook to add three or four dates. By 1653. when the recipe was given by a different author in A Book of Fruits & Flowers, the cook was told to see the dish aside for three or four days.

E The dominant theme in 16th and 17th century cookbooks was order. Books combined recipes and household advice, on the assumption that a well-made dish, a well-ordered larder and well- disciplined children were equally important. Cookbooks thus became a symbol of dependability in chaotic times. They hardly seem to have been affected by the English civil war or the revolutions in America and France.

F In the 1850s, Isabella Becton published the Book of Household Management. Like earlier cookery writers she plagiarized freely, lifting not just recipes bur philosophical observations from other books. If Becton’s recipes were not wholly new. though, the way in which she presented them certainly was. She explains when the chief ingredients are most likely to be in season, how long the dish will take to prepare and even how much it is likely to cost. Bee ton’s recipes were well suited to her times. Two centuries earlier, an understanding of rural ways had been so widespread that one writer could advise cooks to heat water until it was a little hotter than milk comes from a cow. By the 1850s Britain was industrializing. The growing urban middle class needed details, and Becton provided them in hill.

G In France, cookbooks were fast becoming even more systematic. Compared with Britain, France had produced few books written for the ordinary householder by the end of the 19th century. The most celebrated French cookbooks were written by superstar chefs who had a clear sense of codifying a unified approach to sophisticated French cooking. The 5.000 recipes in Auguste Escoffiers Le Guide CuJinaire (The Culinary Guide), published in 1902, might as well have been written in stone, given the book’s reparation among French chefs, many of whom still consider it the definitive reference book.

H What Escoffier did for French cooking. Fannie Farmer did for American home cooking. She not only synthesized American cuisine; she elevated it to the status of science. ‘Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery,’ she breezily announced in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, before launching into a collection of recipes that sometimes resembles a book of chemistry experiments. She was occasionally over-fussy. She explained that currants should be picked between June 28th and July 3rd, but not when it is raining. But in the main her book is reassuringly authoritative. Its recipes are short, with no unnecessary that and no unnecessary spices.

I In 1950, Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David launched a revolution in cooking advice in Britain. In some ways Mediterranean Food recalled even older cookbooks but the smells and noises that filled David’s books were not mere decoration for her recipes. They were the point of her books. When she began to write, many ingredients were not widely available or affordable. She understood this, acknowledging in a later edition of one of her books that even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them. David’s books were not so much cooking manuals as guides to the kind of food people might well wish to cat.

Questions 14-16
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-16 on your answer sheet.

Why are there so many cookery books?

There are a great number more cookery books published than is really necessary and it is their (14)……………………which makes them differ from each other. There are such large numbers because they offer people an escape from their (15)………………………..and some give the user the chance to inform themselves about other (16)……………………..

Questions 17-21
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 17-21 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

17. cookery books providing a sense of stability during periods of unrest
18. details in recipes being altered as they were passed on
19. knowledge which was in danger of disappearing
20. the negative effect on cookery books of a new development
21. a period when there was no need for cookery books to be precise

Questions 22-26
Look at the following statements (Questions 22-26) and list of books (A-E) below. Match each statement with the correct book A-E.

22. Its recipes were easy to follow despite the writer’s attention to detail.
23. Its writer may have deliberately avoided passing on details.
24. It appealed to ambitious ideas people have about cooking.
25. Its writer used ideas from other books but added additional related information.
26. It put into print ideas which are still respected today.

List of cookery books
A De re couquinara
B The Book of Household Management
C Le Guide Culinaire
D The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
E Mediterranean Food

Is there more to video games than people realize?

Many people who spend a lot of time playing video games insist that they have helped them in areas like confidence-building, presentation skills and debating. Yet this way of thinking about video games can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the alien. This lack of awareness has become increasingly inappropriate, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big business indeed.

Recently, the British government released the Byron report into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. The ensuing debate, however, has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions: the preachers of mental and moral decline, and the innovative game designers. In between are the gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

Susan Greenfield, renowned neuroscientist, outlines her concerns in a new book. Every individual’s mind is the product of a brain that has been personalized by the sum total of their experiences; with an increasing quantity of our experiences from very early childhood taking place ‘on screen’ rather than in the world, there is potentially a profound shift in the way children’s minds work. She suggests that the fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the Internet may inculcate a worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think of as healthy.

Greenfield’s prose is full of mixed metaphors and self-contradictions and is perhaps the worst enemy of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however much technophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the latest electronic media are at once domestic and work-related, their mobility blurring the boundaries between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront. A generational divide has opened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television, more alienating for those unfamiliar with new’ technologies, more absorbing for those who are. So how do our lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled?

Adam Martin, a lead programmer for an online games developer, says:’ Computer games teach and people don’t even notice they’re being taught.’ But isn’t the kind of learning that goes on in games rather narrow? ‘A large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact that as you play you are mastering a set of challenges. But humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily through communication and experimentation, through answering the question “What if?’ Games excel at teaching this too.’

Steven Johnson’s thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art, but that the mean level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more intellectual engagement from consumers. Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity of their virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of the laws of such imaginary worlds has more in common with scientific methods than with a pointless addiction, while the complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds that of anything they might find at school.

Greenfield argues that there are ways of thinking that playing video games simply cannot teach. She has a point. We should never forget, for instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the human imagination, and to give us the means of more fully expressing our situations in the world. Intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with an old-fashioned world of companionable pastimes than with a cyber future of lonely, isolated obsessives. Games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities are growing in popularity. The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.

These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products, and lie within our control. This doesn’t mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, instinctive fear is an inappropriate response to technology of any kind.

So far, the dire predictions many traditionalists have made about the ‘death’ of old-fashioned narratives and imaginative thought at the hands of video games cannot be upheld. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the hands of interactive media. But literacy standards have failed to decline. Young people still enjoy sport, going out and listening to music And most research – including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US government – suggests that even pre- teens are not in the habit of blurring game worlds and real worlds.

The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave little room for complacency. Richard Battle, a British writer and game researcher, says Times change: accept it; embrace it.’ Just as, today, we have no living memories of a time before radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living experienced growing up without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we stand to lose and gain, before it is too late.

Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 27-32 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

27. Much media comment ignores the impact that video games can have on many people’s lives.
28. The publication of the Byron Report was followed by a worthwhile discussion between those for and against video games.
29. Susan Greenfield’s way of writing has become more complex over the years.
30. It is likely that video games will take over the role of certain kinds of books in the future.
31. More sociable games are being brought out to satisfy the demands of the buying public.
32. Being afraid of technological advances is a justifiable reaction.

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

33. According to the writer, what view about video games does Susan Greenfield put forward in tier new book?
A They are exposing a child to an adult view of the world too soon.
B Children become easily frightened by some of the situations in them.
C They are changing the way children’s view of the world develops.
D Children don’t learn from them because they are too repetitive.

34. According to the writer, what problems are faced when regulating video games?
A The widespread and ever-changing use of games makes it difficult for lawmakers to control them.
B The appeal of the games to a younger generation isn’t really understood by many lawmakers.
C The lawmakers try to apply the same rules to the games as they did to radio and television.
D Many lawmakers feel it is too late for the regulations to have much effect on the use of games.

35. What main point does Adam Martin make about video games?
A People are learning how to avoid becoming addicted to them.
B They enable people to learn without being aware of it happening.
C They satisfy a need for people to compete with each other.
D People learn a narrow range of skills but they are still useful.

36. Which of the following does Steven Johnson disagree with?
A the opinion that video games offer educational benefits to the user
B the attitude that video games are often labelled as predictable and undemanding
C the idea that children’s logic is tested more by video games than at school
D the suggestion that video games can be compared to scientific procedures

37. Which of the following is the most suitable subtitle for Reading Passage 3?
A A debate about the effects of video games on other forms of technology.
B An examination of the opinions of young people about video games.
C A discussion of whether attitudes towards video games are outdated.
D An analysis of the principles behind the historical development of video games.

Questions 38-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.

38. There is little evidence for the traditionalists’ prediction that
39. A recent study by the US government found that
40. Richard Battle suggests that it Is important for people to accept the fact that

A young people have no problem separating their own lives from the ones they play on the screen.
B levels of reading ability will continue to drop significantly.
C new advances in technology have to be absorbed into our lives.
D games cannot provide preparation for the skills needed in real life.
E young people will continue to play video games despite warnings against doing so.