Category: IELTS Reading

The Risks Agriculture Faces In Developing Countries

A Two things distinguish food production from all other productive activities: first, every single person needs food each day and has a right to it; and second, it is hugely dependent on nature. These two unique aspects, one political, the other natural, make food production highly vulnerable and different from any other business. At the same time, cultural values are highly entrenched in food and agricultural systems worldwide.

B Farmers everywhere face major risks; including extreme weather, long-term climate change, and price volatility in input and product markets. However, smallholder farmers in developing countries must in addition deal with adverse environments, both natural, in terms of soil quality, rainfall, etc. and human, in terms of infrastructure, financial systems, markets, knowledge and technology. Counter-intuitively, hunger is prevalent among many smallholder farmers in the developing world.

C Participants in the online debate argued that our biggest challenge is to address the underlying causes of the agricultural system’s inability to ensure sufficient food for all, and they identified as drivers of this problem our dependency on fossil fuels and unsupportive government policies.

D On the question of mitigating the risks farmers face, most essayists called for greater state intervention. In his essay, Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, argued that governments can significantly reduce risks for farmers by providing basic services like roads to get produce more efficiently to markets, or water and food storage facilities to reduce losses. Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, suggested that the procurement and holding of stocks by governments can also help mitigate wild swings in food prices by alleviating uncertainties about market supply.

E Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, held up social safety nets and public welfare programmes in Ethiopia, Brazil and Mexico as valuable ways to address poverty among farming families and reduce their vulnerability to agriculture shocks. However, some commentators responded that cash transfers to poor families do not necessarily translate into increased food security, as these programmes do not always strengthen food production or raise incomes. Regarding state subsidies for agriculture, Rokeya Kabir, Executive Director of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, commented in her essay that these ‘have not compensated for the stranglehold exercised by private traders. In fact, studies show that sixty percent of beneficiaries of subsidies are not poor, but rich landowners and non-farmer traders.

F Nwanze, Murphy and Fan argued that private risk management tools, like private insurance, commodity futures markets, and rural finance can help small-scale producers mitigate risk and allow for investment in improvements. Kabir warned that financial support schemes often encourage the adoption of high-input agricultural practices, which in the medium term may raise production costs beyond the value of their harvests. Murphy noted that when futures markets become excessively financialised they can contribute to short-term price volatility, which increases farmers’ food insecurity. Many participants and commentators emphasised that greater transparency in markets is needed to mitigate the impact of volatility, and make evident whether adequate stocks and supplies are available. Others contended that agribusiness companies should be held responsible for paying for negative side effects.

G Many essayists mentioned climate change and its consequences for small-scale agriculture. Fan explained that in addition to reducing crop yields, climate change increases the magnitude and the frequency of extreme weather events, which increase smallholder vulnerability. The growing unpredictability of weather patterns increases farmers’ difficulty in managing weather-related risks. According to this author, one solution would be to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to new climate trends and extreme weather patterns. Accordingly, Pat Mooney, co-founder and executive director of the ETC Group, suggested that ‘if we are to survive climate change, we must adopt policies that let peasants diversify the plant and animal species and varieties/breeds that make up our menus.

H Some participating authors and commentators argued in favour of community- based and autonomous risk management strategies through collective action groups, co-operatives or producers’ groups. Such groups enhance market opportunities for small-scale producers, reduce marketing costs and synchronise buying and selling with seasonal price conditions. According to Murphy, ‘collective action offers an important way for farmers to strengthen their political and economic bargaining power, and to reduce their business risks. One commentator, Giel Ton, warned that collective action does not come as a free good. It takes time, effort and money to organise, build trust and to experiment. Others, like Marcel Vernooij and Marcel Beukeboom, suggested that in order to ‘apply what we already know’, all stakeholders, including business, government, scientists and civil society, must work together, starting at the beginning of the value chain.

I Some participants explained that market price volatility is often worsened by the presence of intermediary purchasers who, taking advantage of farmers’ vulnerability, dictate prices. One commentator suggested farmers can gain greater control over prices and minimise price volatility by selling directly to consumers. Similarly, Sonali Bisht, founder and advisor to the Institute of Himalayan Environmental Research and Education (INHERE), India, wrote that copipunity-supported agriculture, where consumers invest in local farmers by subscription and guarantee producers a fair price, is a risk-sharing model worth more attention. Direct food distribution systems not only encourage small-scale agriculture but also give consumers more control over the food they consume, she wrote.

Questions 1-3
Reading passage 1 has nine paragraphs A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

1. a reference to characteristics that only apply to food production
2. a reference to challenges faced only by farmers in certain parts of the world
3. a reference to difficulties in bringing about co-operation between farmers

Questions 4-9
Look at the following statements (questions 4-9) and list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person A-G. NB You may use any letter more than once.

4. Financial assistance from the government does not always go to the farmers who most need it.
5. Farmers can benefit from collaborating as a group.
6. Financial assistance from the government can improve the standard of living of farmers.
7. Farmers may be helped if there is financial input by the same individuals who buy from them.
8. Governments can help to reduce variation in prices.
9. Improvements to infrastructure can have a major impact on risk for farmers.

List of people
A Kanayo F. Nwanze
B Sophia Murphy
C Shenggen Fan
D Rokeya Kabir
E Pat Mooney
F Giel Ton
G Sonali Bisht

Questions 10 and 11
Choose TWO letters A-E.

Which TWO problems are mentioned which affect farmers with small farms in developing countries?
A. lack of demand for locally produced food
B. lack of irrigation programmes
C. being unable to get insurance
D. the effects of changing weather patterns
E. having to sell their goods to intermediary buyers

Questions 12 and 13
Choose TWO letters A-E.

Which TWO actions are recommended for improving conditions for farmers?
A. reducing the size of food stocks
B. attempting to ensure that prices rise at certain times of the year
C. organizing co-operation between a wide range of interested parties
D. encouraging consumers to take a financial stake in farming
E. making customers aware of the reasons for changing food prices

The Lost City

A When the US explorer and academic Hiram Bingham arrived in South America in 1911, he was ready for what was to be the greatest achievement of his life: the exploration of the remote hinterland to the west of Cusco, the old capital of the Inca empire in the Andes mountains of Peru. His goal was to locate the remains of a city called Vitcos, the last capital of the Inca civilisation. Cusco lies on a high plateau at an elevation of more than 3,000 metres, and Bingham’s plan was to descend from this plateau along the valley of the Urubamba river, which takes a circuitous route down to the Amazon and passes through an area of dramatic canyons and mountain ranges.

B When Bingham and his team set off down the Urubamba in late July, they had an advantage over travellers who had preceded them: a track had recently been blasted down the valley canyon to enable rubber to be brought up by mules from the jungle. Almost all previous travellers had left the river at Ollantaytambo and taken a high pass across the mountains to rejoin the river lower down, thereby cutting a substantial corner, but also therefore never passing through the area around Machu Picchu.

C On 24 July they were a few days into their descent of the valley. The day began slowly, with Bingham trying to arrange sufficient mules for the next stage of the trek. His companions showed no interest in accompanying him up the nearby hill to see some ruins that a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, had told them about the night before. The morning was dull and damp, and Bingham also seems to have been less than keen on the prospect of climbing the hill. In his book Lost City of the Incas, he relates that he made the ascent without having the least expectation that he would find anything at the top.

D Bingham writes about the approach in vivid style in his book. First, as he climbs up the hill, he describes the ever-present possibility of deadly snakes, ‘capable of making considerable springs when in pursuit of their prey’; not that he sees any. Then there’s a sense of mounting discovery as he comes across great sweeps of terraces, then a mausoleum, followed by monumental staircases and, finally, the grand ceremonial buildings of Machu Picchu. ‘It seemed like an unbelievable dream the sight held me spellbound ’, he wrote.

E We should remember, however, that Lost City of the Incas is a work of hindsight, not written until 1948, many years after his journey. His journal entries of the time reveal a much more gradual appreciation of his achievement. He spent the afternoon at the ruins noting down the dimensions of some of the buildings, then descended and rejoined his companions, to whom he seems to have said little about his discovery. At this stage, Bingham didn’t realise the extent or the importance of the site, nor did he realise what use he could make of the discovery.

F However, soon after returning it occurred to him that he could make a name for himself from this discovery. When he came to write the National Geographic magazine article that broke the story to the world in April 1913, he knew he had to produce a big idea. He wondered whether it could have been the birthplace of the very first Inca, Manco the Great, and whether it could also have been what chroniclers described as ‘the last city of the Incas’. This term refers to Vilcabamba the settlement where the Incas had fled from Spanish invaders in the 1530s. Bingham made desperate attempts to prove this belief for nearly 40 years. Sadly, his vision of the site as both the beginning and end of the Inca civilisation, while a magnificent one, is inaccurate. We now know, that Vilcabamba actually lies 65 kilometres away in the depths of the jungle.

G One question that has perplexed visitors, historians and archaeologists alike ever since Bingham, is why the site seems to have been abandoned before the Spanish Conquest. There are no references to it by any of the Spanish chroniclers – and if they had known of its existence so close to Cusco they would certainly have come in search of gold. An idea which has gained wide acceptance over the past few years is that Machu Picchu was a moya, a country estate built by an Inca emperor to escape the cold winters of Cusco, where the elite could enjoy monumental architecture and spectacular views. Furthermore, the particular architecture of Machu Picchu suggests that it was constructed at the time of the greatest of all the Incas, the emperor Pachacuti (1438-71). By custom, Pachacuti’s descendants built other similar estates for their own use, and so Machu Picchu would have been abandoned after his death, some 50 years before the Spanish Conquest.

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

List of headings
i Different accounts of the same journey
ii Bingham gains support
iii A common belief
iv The aim of the trip
v A dramatic description
vi A new route
vii Bingham publishes his theory
viii Bingham’s lack of enthusiasm

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

Questions 21-24
Do the following statements agree with the information given in reading passage 2?

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

21. Bingham went to South America in search of an Inca city.
22. Bingham chose a particular route down the Urubamba valley because it was the most common route used by travelers.
23. Bingham understood the significance of Machu Picchu as soon as he saw it.
24. Bingham returned to Machu Picchu in order to find evidence to support his theory.

Questions 25 and 26
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage

25. The track that took Bingham down the Urubamba valley had been created for the transportation of……………..
26. Bingham found out about the ruins of Machu Picchu from a…………………………….in the Urubamba valley.

The Benefits Of Being Bilingual

A According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual.

B Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear ‘can’, you will likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called ‘language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language.

C Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don’t match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.

D It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception.

E Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focussing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.

F Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during aging. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over 200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behaviour and abilities were the same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same amount of fuel.

G Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule they’d learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far beyond language.

Questions 27-31

Complete the table below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Test	Findings
Observing the (27)………………..of Russina-English bilingual people when asked to select certain objects	bilingual people engage both languages simultaneously a mechanism known as (28)…………………
A test called the (29)……………….focusing on naming colors	bilingual people are more able to handle tasks involving a skill called (30)………………….
A test involving switching between tasks	when changing strategies bilingual people have started (31)…………..

Questions 32-36
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in reading passage 3>

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

32. Attitudes towards bilingualism have changed in recent years.
33. Bilingual people are better than monolingual people at guessing correctly what words are before they are finished.
34. Bilingual people consistently name images faster than monolingual people.
35. Bilingual people’s brains process single sounds more efficiently than monolingual people in all situations.
36. Fewer bilingual people than monolingual people suffer from brain disease in old age.

Questions 37-40
Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information?

37. an example of how bilingual and monolingual people’s brains respond differently to a certain type of non-verbal auditory input
38. a demonstration of how a bilingual upbringing has benefits even before we learn to speak
39. a description of the process by which people identify words that they hear
40. reference to some negative consequences of being bilingual

Cork

Cork – the thick bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber) – is a remarkable material. It is tough, elastic, buoyant, and fire-resistant, and suitable for a wide range of purposes. It has also been used for millennia: the ancient Egyptians sealed then sarcophagi (stone coffins) with cork, while the ancient Greeks and Romans used it for anything from beehives to sandals.

And the cork oak itself is an extraordinary tree. Its bark grows up to 20 cm in thickness, insulating the tree like a coat wrapped around the trunk and branches and keeping the inside at a constant 20°C all year round. Developed most probably as a defence against forest fires, the bark of the cork oak has a particular cellular structure – with about 40 million cells per cubic centimetre – that technology has never succeeded in replicating. The cells are filled with air, which is why cork is so buoyant. It also has an elasticity that means you can squash it and watch it spring back to its original size and shape when you release the pressure.

Cork oaks grow in a number of Mediterranean countries, including Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Morocco. They flourish in warm, sunny climates where there is a minimum of 400 millimetres of rain per year, and no more than 800 millimetres. Like grape vines, the trees thrive in poor soil, putting down deep root in search of moisture and nutrients. Southern Portugal’s Alentejo region meets all of these requirements, which explains why, by the early 20th century, this region had become the world’s largest producer of cork, and why today it accounts for roughly half of all cork production around the world.

Most cork forests are family-owned. Many of these family businesses, and indeed many of the trees themselves, are around 200 years old. Cork production is, above all, an exercise in patience. From the planting of a cork sapling to the first harvest takes 25 years, and a gap of approximately a decade must separate harvests from an individual tree. And for top- quality cork, it’s necessary to wait a further 15 or 20 years. You even have to wait for the right kind of summer’s day to harvest cork. If the bark is stripped on a day when it’s too cold – or when the air is damp – the tree will be damaged.

Cork harvesting is a very specialised profession. No mechanical means of stripping cork bark has been invented, so the job is done by teams of highly skilled workers. First, they make vertical cuts down the bark using small sharp axes, then lever it away in pieces as large as they can manage. The most skilful cork- strippers prise away a semi-circular husk that runs the length of the trunk from just above ground level to the first branches. It is then dried on the ground for about four months, before being taken to factories, where it is boiled to kill any insects that might remain in the cork. Over 60% of cork then goes on to be made into traditional bottle stoppers, with most of the remainder being used in the construction trade, Corkboard and cork tiles are ideal for thermal and acoustic insulation, while granules of cork are used in the manufacture of concrete.

Recent years have seen the end of the virtual monopoly of cork as the material for bottle stoppers, due to concerns about the effect it may have on the contents of the bottle. This is caused by a chemical compound called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which forms through the interaction of plant phenols, chlorine and mould. The tiniest concentrations – as little as three or four parts to a trillion – can spoil the taste of the product contained in the bottle.

The result has been a gradual yet steady move first towards plastic stoppers and, more recently, to aluminium screw caps. These substitutes are cheaper to manufacture and, in the case of screw caps, more convenient for the user.

The classic cork stopper does have several advantages, however. Firstly, its traditional image is more in keeping with that of the type of high quality goods with which it has long been associated. Secondly – and very importantly – cork is a sustainable product that can be recycled without difficulty. Moreover, cork forests are a resource which support local biodiversity, and prevent desertification in the regions where they are planted. So, given the current concerns about environmental issues, the future of this ancient material once again looks promising.

Questions 1-5
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write

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

1. The cork oak has the thickest bark of any living tree.
2. Scientists have developed a synthetic cork with the same cellular structure as natural cork.
3. Individual cork oak trees must be left for 25 years between the first and second harvest.
4. Cork bark should be stripped in dry atmospheric conditions.
5. The only way to remove the bark from cork oak trees is by hand.

Questions 6-13
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Comparison of aluminium screw caps and cork bottle stoppers
Advantages of aluminium screw caps
• do not affect the (6)…………………………………of the bottle contents
• are (7)………………………….. to produce
• are (8)……………………………….. to use
Advantages of cork bottle stoppers
• suit the (9)……………………………. of quality products
• made from a (10)………………………. material
• easily (11)……………………………..
• cork forests aid (12)……………………….
• cork forests stop (13)…………………………….happening

Collecting As A Hobby

Collecting must one of the varied of human activities and its one that many of us psychologists find fascinating. Many forms of collecting have been dignified with a technical name: an archtophilist collects teddy bears, a philatelist collects postage stamps, and a deltiologist collects postcards. Amassing hundreds or even thousands of postcards, chocolate wrappers or whatever, takes time, energy and money that could surely to much more productive use. And yet there are millions of collectors around the world. Why do they do it?

There are the people who collect because they want to make money – this could be called an instrumental reason for collecting; that is, collecting as a means to an end. They’ll look for, say, antiques that they can buy cheaply and expect to be able to sell at a profit. But there may well be a psychological element, too – buying cheap and selling dear can give the collector a sense of triumph. And as selling online is so easy, more and more people are joining in.

Many collectors collect to develop their social life, attending meetings of a group of collectors and exchanging information on items. This is a variant on joining a bridge club or a gym, and similarly brings them into contact with like-minded people.

Another motive for collecting is the desire to find something special, or a particular example of the collected item, such as a rare early recording by a particular singer. Some may spend their whole lives in a hunt for this. Psychologically, this can give a purpose to a life that otherwise feels aimless. There is a danger, though, that if the individual is ever lucky enough to find what they’re looking for, rather than celebrating their success, they may feel empty, now that the goal that drove them on has gone.

If you think about collecting postage stamps another potential reason for it – Or, perhaps, a result of collecting is its educational value. Stamp collecting opens a window to other countries, and to the plants, animals, or famous people shown on their stamps. Similarly, in the 19th century, many collectors amassed fossils, animals and plants from around the globe, and their collections provided a vast amount of information about the natural world. Without those collections, our understanding would be greatly inferior to what it is.

In the past – and nowadays, too, though to a lesser extent – a popular form of collecting, particularly among boys and men, was trainspotting. This might involve trying to see every locomotive of a particular type, using published data that identifies each one, and ticking off each engine as it is seen. Trainspotters exchange information, these days often by mobile phone, so they can work out where to go to, to see a particular engine. As a by-product, many practitioners of the hobby become very knowledgeable about railway operations, or the technical specifications of different engine types.

Similarly, people who collect dolls may go beyond simply enlarging their collection, and develop an interest in the way that dolls are made, or the materials that are used. These have changed over the centuries from the wood that was standard in 16th century Europe, through the wax and porcelain of later centuries, to the plastics of today’s dolls. Or collectors might be inspired to study how dolls reflect notions of what children like, or ought to like.

Not all collectors are interested in learning from their hobby, though, so what we might call a psychological reason for collecting is the need for a sense of control, perhaps as a way of dealing with insecurity. Stamp collectors, for instance, arrange their stamps in albums, usually very neatly, organising their collection according to certain commonplace principles-perhaps by country in alphabetical order, or grouping stamps by what they depict -people, birds, maps, and so on.

One reason, conscious or not, for what someone chooses to collect is to show the collector’s individualism. Someone who decides to collect something as unexpected as dog collars, for instance, may be conveying their belief that they must be interesting themselves. And believe it or not, there is at least one dog collar museum in existence, and it grew out of a personal collection.

Of course, all hobbies give pleasure, but the common factor in collecting is usually passion: pleasure is putting it far too mildly. More than most other hobbies, collecting can be totally engrossing, and can give a strong sense of personal fulfilment. To non-collectors it may appear an eccentric, if harmless, way of spending time, but potentially, collecting has a lot going for it.

Questions 14-21
Complete the sentences below. Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

14. The writer mentions collecting………………….as an example of collecting in order to make money.
15. Collectors may get a feeling of ……………………………..from buying and selling items.
16. Collectors’ clubs provide opportunities to share…………………………
17. Collectors’ clubs offer……………………………with people who have similar interests.
18. Collecting sometimes involves a life-long………………………….for a special item.
19. Searching for something particular may prevent people from feeling their life is completely…………………..
20. Stamp collection may be………………………because it provides facts about different countries.
21. ……………………………….tends to be mostly a male hobby.

Questions 22-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. In boxes 22-26 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

22. The number of people buying dolls has grown over the centuries.
23. Sixteenth century European dolls were normally made of wax and porcelain.
24. Arranging a stamp collection by the size of the stamps is less common than other methods.
25. Someone who collects unusual objects may want others to think he or she is also unusual.
26. Collecting gives a feeling that other hobbies are unlikely to inspire.

What’s the purpose of gaining knowledge?

A ‘I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any subject’ That was the founders motto for Cornell University, and it seems an apt characterization of the different university, also in the USA, where I currently teach philosophy. A student can prepare for a career in resort management, engineering, interior design, accounting, music, law enforcement, you name it. But what would the founders of these two institutions have thought of a course called Arson for Profit’? I kid you not: we have it on the books. Any undergraduates who have met the academic requirements can sign up for the course in our program in ‘fire science’.

B Naturally, the course is intended for prospective arson investigators, who can learn all the tricks of the trade for detecting whether a fire was deliberately set, discovering who did it, and establishing a chain of evidence for effective prosecution in a court of law. But wouldn’t this also be the perfect course for prospective arsonists to sign up for? My point is not to criticize academic programs in fire science: they are highly welcome as part of the increasing professionalization of this and many other occupations. However, it’s not unknown for a firefighter to torch a building. This example suggests how dishonest and illegal behavior, with the help of higher education, can creep into every aspect of public and business life.

C I realized this anew when I was invited to speak before a class in marketing, which is another of our degree programs. The regular instructor is a colleague who appreciates the kind of ethical perspective I can bring as a philosopher. There are endless ways I could have approached this assignment, but I took my cue from the title of the course: ‘Principles of Marketing’. It made me think to ask the students, ‘Is marketing principled?’ After all, a subject matter can have principles in the sense of being codified, having rules, as with football or chess, without being principled in the sense of being ethical. Many of the students immediately assumed that the answer to my question about marketing principles was obvious: no. Just look at the ways in which everything under the sun has been marketed; obviously it need not be done in a principled (=ethical) fashion.

D Is that obvious? I made the suggestion, which may sound downright crazy in light of the evidence, that perhaps marketing is by definition principled. My inspiration for this judgement is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that any body of knowledge consists of an end (or purpose) and a means.

E Let us apply both the terms ‘means’ and ‘end’ to marketing. The students have signed up for a course in order to learn how to market effectively. But to what end? There seem to be two main attitudes toward that question. One is that the answer is obvious: the purpose of marketing is to sell things and to make money. The other attitude is that the purpose of marketing is irrelevant: Each person comes to the program and course with his or her own plans, and these need not even concern the acquisition of marketing expertise as such. My proposal, which I believe would also be Kant’s, is that neither of these attitudes captures the significance of the end to the means for marketing. A field of knowledge or a professional endeavor is defined by both the means and the end;hence both deserve scrutiny. Students need to study both how to achieve X, and also what X is.

F It is at this point that ‘Arson for Profit’ becomes supremely relevant. That course is presumably all about means: how to detect and prosecute criminal activity. It is therefore assumed that the end is good in an ethical sense. When I ask fire science students to articulate the end, or purpose, of their field, they eventually generalize to something like, ‘The safety and welfare of society,’ which seems right. As we have seen, someone could use the very same knowledge of means to achieve a much less noble end, such as personal profit via destructive, dangerous, reckless activity. But we would not call that firefighting. We have a separate word for it: arson. Similarly, if you employed the ‘principles of marketing’ in an unprincipled way, you would not be doing marketing. We have another term for it: fraud. Kant gives the example of a doctor and a poisoner, who use the identical knowledge to achieve their divergent ends. We would say that one is practicing medicine, the other, murder.

Questions 27-32
Reading passage 3 has six sections A-F. Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

List of headings
i Courses that require a high level of commitment
ii A course title with two meanings
iii The equal importance of two key issues
iv Applying a theory in an unexpected context
v The financial benefits of studying
vi A surprising course title
vii Different names for different outcomes
viii The possibility of attracting the wrong kind of student

27. Section A
28. Section B
29. Section C
30. Section D
31. Section E
32. Section F

Questions 33-36
Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The ‘Arson for Profit’ course
This is a university course intended for students who are undergraduates and who are studying (33)…………………….. The expectation is that they will become (34)………………………speacialising in arson. The course will help them to detect cases of arson and find (35)…………………………. of criminal intent, leading to successful (36)…………………………. in the courts.

Questions 37-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the reading passage?

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

37. It is difficult to attract students onto courses that do no focus on a career.
38. The ‘Arson for Profit’ course would be useful for people intending to set fire to buildings.
39. Fire science are too academic to help people to be good at the job of firefighting.
40. The writer’s fire science students provided a detailed definition of the purpose of their studies.

Section 1
Read the text below and answer questions 1-8.

The Guardian Newspaper’s Travel

The photo competition is back, giving you another chance to win an incredible trip to Swedish Lapland.

Do you have a camera and love travelling? If so, our annual photography competition run by the Travel section of The Guardian is for you. It’s an opportunity for you to capture the essence of the journeys you make, whether far afield or close to home, and for us to showcase your work online. The winner of each month’s competition will also see their shot mounted and displayed in the end-of-year exhibition for the public at The Guardian’s offices in London. Once the exhibition is finished, each monthly winner will receive a framed copy of their shot to place with pride on their own wall.

There will be a different theme for each month. Members of The Guardian travel writing team, and photographer Michael Ryan of Fotovue.com will judge the monthly entries and the overall winner.

To enter you must be living in the UK from the time you submit your entry into the competition to the time you are selected as a winner. The competition is open to all photographers (both amateur and professional).

The overall winner (chosen from the 12 monthly winners) will go on an amazing four- night trip to Swedish Lapland. The host for this specialist holiday is Fredrik Broman, who has been a nature photographer for 21 years. Fredrik will assist the winner and other participants in photographing a wide variety of winter subjects. Each day has a specific focus. The trip includes winter light photography workshops, an image editing workshop, a night photography course, and an action photography workshop.

Included in the prize: return flights from the UK, four nights’ accommodation with full board, cold weather clothing for the duration of the trip – thermal overalls, winter boots, gloves, hats and woollen socks – fully qualified wilderness guides, and instructors.

The overall winner will be required to write a report of the trip, and take accompanying photographs, which will be printed in the Travel section of The Guardian at a later date. The Guardian reserves the right, however, to modify your report and photos as necessary. Your name will of course appear with the article and photos.

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

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

1. This is the first year that The Guardian has run a travel photography competition.
2. Any photograph for the competition must have been taken on an overseas trip.
3. The end-of-year exhibition in London is free for the public to attend.
4. The judging panel is made up of a group of journalists and a professional photographer.
5. The trip to Swedish Lapland will only be offered to one winner.
6. Every activity on the trip is focused on improving photography techniques.
7. Anyone going on the trip may take some of the cold weather clothing home at the end of the trip.8. Articles written about the trip may be changed before being published.

Read the text below and answer Questions 9-14.

Running Headphones

Listening to music on headphones makes running and even working out at the gym much more enjoyable. Here are some alternatives to choose from.

A Plantronics Backbeat Fit
These headphones are really tough so you don’t need to worry about just throwing them into your bag before or after a workout. As well as providing reasonably clear sound they will also last a remarkable eight hours on a single charge.

B Sennheiser CX685 Sports
These headphones are impressively practical. Designed to fit firmly in your ear, however energetic you are, they’re tight without being uncomfortable, and have a handy remote and a mic for phone calls. They will also resist some water being spilt on them.

C Nokia WH-510 Coloud Pop
These stylish headphones have fantastic bass, giving you a bit of extra oomph when you run. They also have a tangle-free cable which avoids any time-consuming messing about before you set off on your run.

D Sony NWZ-W273S
It’s hard to imagine using any other headphones once you’ve tried these. As well as being wireless and waterproof at a depth of 2m, they even have a built-in MP3 player that can hold up to 1,000 songs. A charge provides up to an hour of playback.

E Betron B750S
If you’re on a tight budget, it can always feel risky buying a bottom of the market pair of headphones, but with these you needn’t worry. Not only do they provide fair sound quality, they also come with a pouch to keep them in.

F Happy Plugs
The sound quality on these is decent, although you’re probably not going to be hugely impressed. They also come with a handy remote built into the cable to skip and pause songs with while you work out.

G Powerbeats 2
If money is not an issue, then these are definitely worth considering. They make everything sound so crisp and they’re so light and comfortable that it’s easy to forget that you’re even wearing them.

Questions 9-14
Look at the seven reviews of headphones, A-G. For which headphones are the following statements true? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 9-14 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

9. These headphones would suit someone who doesn’t mind spending a lot to get good quality.
10. The battery on these headphones has a surprisingly long life.
11. It is possible to keep in contact with other people while using these headphones.
12. Although these headphones are cheaper than most, music sounds quite good through them.
13. These headphones are very strong and do not require gentle handling.
14. These headphones allow users to move around their playlist of music easily while they are exercising.

Section 2
Read the text below and answer questions 15-21.

A Case Study Of A Risk Assessment For General Office Cleaning

A commercial cleaning service took on a new contract to clean an office complex. Before sending cleaning staff to the offices, the manager of the cleaning service carried out a risk assessment using guidance provided by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

To identify the hazards, the cleaning service manager visited the office complex and walked through the areas where cleaning staff would be working, noting things that might pose potential risks. Following this, he consulted the health and safety representatives of the cleaning service about these risks, taking into account the needs of any particular staff members, such as whether they were pregnant or aged under 18.

In order to gather further information, he then had a meeting with the client company during which a number of issues were discussed. These included the client company’s own standard of housekeeping, such as the immediate clearing up of spills and keeping walkways clear, as well as the action to be taken if a fire broke out. He also established what facilities and equipment would be available to the cleaners, including the amount of storage space available, as well as the availability of sinks and taps, etc. and agreed on a method of reporting near-miss accidents and risks discovered by cleaners (e.g. damaged floor tiles).

Following the meeting, the manager created a risk assessment document. He wrote down who could be harmed by each risk or hazard identified and in what way, and he then described what controls, if any, were in existence to manage these hazards. The manager then compared these to the good practice guidance set out on the HSE’s website and identified any areas where improvement was needed.

The manager discussed the findings with the cleaning staff, making sure they understood the risks of the job and how these risks would be monitored. One cleaner, whose first language was not English, had difficulty understanding this, so the manager arranged for translation to be done by a bilingual cleaner from another team. Finally, to ensure that all the cleaning staff had access to a copy of the risk assessment, the manager pinned a copy in the cupboard where cleaning equipment was kept.

Questions 15-21
Complete the flow-chart below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.

Stages followed by manager in carrying out risk assessment
He visited the offices to be cleaned and noted potential risks
He talked to health and safety (15)……………………about the risks
At a meeting, he talked to the client company about – the policy of the company regarding (16)………………..(e.g. clear walkways) – procedures to be followed in case of a (17)………………….. – facilities available to cleaners (e.g. space available for (18)……………………) – a way of (19)……………….risks and hazards
He created a risk assessment document identifying existing controls of risks and hazards
He compared there to information that the HSE provided on its (20)…………………..
He displayed a copy of the risk assessment inside a (21)………………….available to all cleaning staff

Read the text below and answer Questions 22-27.

Preparing For A Virtual Job Interview

Businesses are always looking for new ways to increase efficiency and profits. For example, organisations often reduce costs by conducting virtual job interviews. The video or Skype interview benefits both interviewer and interviewee, especially when an applicant would otherwise need to travel far. Despite the convenience though, it poses unique challenges.

How a virtual interview is the same
The typical interview process usually entails multiple steps. First, there is screening, lasting about thirty minutes. Its purpose is to ensure candidates have the basic requirements. In the second interview, they’re assessed for their technical skills and on whether they would fit the organisation. Virtual interviews follow the same steps so you’ll need to focus on the same core topics. Identify what the critical topics are based on the job description and prepare to talk about them. If you can, gather inside information so you can impress interviewers with your knowledge.

How a virtual interview is different
Normally, you travel somewhere for an interview. One advantage of that is that you aren’t responsible for the place, whereas in a virtual interview you must ensure you have an appropriate location and appropriate equipment. Modern technology is great when it works, but a pain when it doesn’t. So, it’s wise to check you can operate your webcam, especially if you don’t use it often. Test the headset too and find out how intelligible your voice sounds. It’s also wise to establish what software the interviewer is going to work with and give it a trial run.

Probably the biggest problem in a virtual interview is what the camera can see. You want the interviewer to see you as a professional. Having a messy or cluttered room behind you won’t help you achieve this image – a clear white background is usually a safe bet.

The most important part of your preparation is to run through everything first as best you can. Have a friend conduct a rehearsal with you before the big day. This will help you know how to behave in front of the camera. All things considered, though, virtual interviews should be treated like any other type of interview. Being at home requires as much preparation as a traditional interview. If you follow the steps mentioned above, you have every chance of getting the job you want. Good luck!

Questions 22-27
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 22-27 on your answer sheet.

22. Some companies prefer to interview job applicants digitally because of lower………………..

23. As with the standard recruitment process, virtual recruitment opens with…………..

24. Applicants should read any details about the advertised post carefully and pick out important…………………. which they can discuss if necessary.

25. It is a good idea for applicants to check if they can be clearly understood when they use a……………..

26. Applicants may not be familiar with the…………………….that the person conducting the interview will use, so they should try it out.

27. It is very useful to go through a…………………..of the interview, with someone playing the part of the interviewer.

Section 3
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

Tuning Up Your Leadership Skills

A Ever since management expert Peter Drucker compared the job of Chief Executive Officer to that of an orchestra conductor, the business world has been exploring comparisons and inspirations from the world of music. Now Warwick Business School Professors Deniz Ucbasaran and Andy Lockett are hitting all the right notes with their study of famous jazz musicians, Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights From Jazz, providing some essential insights for entrepreneurial team leaders.

Ucbasaran and Lockett (together with Durham Business School Professor Michael Humphries) chose jazz for a number of reasons. For a start, jazz bands are synonymous with creativity, improvisation and innovation, all essential ingredients for entrepreneurship. Jazz groups and their members often operate in uncertain and dynamic environments, characterised by rapid change. Yet through collective endeavour many jazz bands find their own structure and harmony and become profitable enterprises – both creatively and commercially.

B The authors decided to focus on three of the best known names in jazz – Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. American composer Duke Ellington was a pioneering jazz orchestra leader from the 1920s through to the 1970s. Trumpet player Miles Davis was instrumental in the development of a number of new jazz styles, including bebop and jazz fusion. Jazz drummer Arthur ‘Art’ Blakey became famous as the leader of his band the Jazz Messengers. The research focused on the way that these jazz greats created and ran their musical enterprises. In particular, Ucbasaran and Lockett focused on three specific areas of leadership activity: team formation, team coordination and team turnover.

There were strong similarities in the processes the band leaders used to assemble their diverse teams of talent. In particular, they looked for musicians with a different sound or way of playing, one that was unique to that band member and would improve the overall sound of the band. That feature was as much bound up with the personality of the individual musician as it was to do with their technical proficiency.

C But disparate teams, many different personalities, and high levels of creativity are a recipe for group conflict. And, sure enough, there was plenty of dysfunctional conflict and disruptive clashes of egos and personalities evident in the jazz ensembles. Traditional team leadership theory suggests that to get the best team performance the leader should foster conflict that is productive in its effects, while minimising destructive conflict. But this is difficult when the sources of productive and destructive conflict are the same; that is, differences in personality and thinking. So how do leaders deal with destructive conflict? It didn’t seem to bother the likes of Ellington, Davis and Blakey. Their attitude was ‘the music comes first’. The moments of musical genius when everything came together excused minor problems such as if individuals occasionally turned up late for practice, or stepped out of a performance for a quick snack.

D Teams must coordinate their behaviour and action to achieve an outcome. The team leader can assume a number of different roles when helping the team achieve its objectives. Some leaders are very directive, detailing what tasks they want team members to perform, and how they want them to go about those tasks. But that was not the approach Ellington, Davis and Blakey adopted. Instead, these leaders acted more as facilitators, empowering the musicians to collectively coordinate their behaviour and action to produce the desired outcome. As Ucbasaran and Lockett note, Miles Davis discouraged band members from rehearsing in case it led to musical cliches from over-practice. Similarly, he often asked his musicians to play a piece in an unusual key, so they did not rely on learned fingering patterns. The performers were not left entirely to their own devices though. All three leaders created a general framework within which team members could work, providing guidance but also the freedom to explore, express and make mistakes.

E The third aspect of leadership behaviour that Ucbasaran and her colleagues looked at was managing team turnover – people joining and leaving the team. In the jazz ensembles studied, musicians joined and left on a regular basis. Yet the high turnover of team members, despite the resulting loss of knowledge and skills, was seen in a positive light. That was partly because of the advantages of getting a fresh shot of knowledge, ideas and creativity when new members joined.

A common reason for the jazz musicians leaving was that they felt sufficiently qualified to go and run another band. The three band leaders were understanding about this, particularly as it was a process they had also been through. In some cases, in particular with Art Blakey, they actively encouraged and coached team members to become leaders. As the jazz icons Ellington, Davis and Blakey would no doubt agree, there is no magic score that if followed note by note will make you a great leader of creative talent. However, take an entrepreneur, a few cues from the aforementioned jazz trio, mix in a little improvisation, and you are more likely to hear the sweet sound of success. As Louis Armstrong once sang: ‘Now that’s jazz’.

Questions 28-33
The text has five sections, A-E. Which section contains the following? Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet. NB You may choose any letter more than once.

28. a summary of the different aspects of leadership that are covered in the study
29. a description of how band leaders sometimes passed on their leadership skills to others
30. a summary of the backgrounds of the band leaders chosen for the study
31. examples of ways in which one band leader encouraged his musicians to be more creative
32. an overview of the main similarities between the work of business people and jazz musicians
33. a description of two contrasting ways of leading a team

Questions 34-36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text? In boxes 34-36 on your answer sheet, write

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

34. The study by Ucbasaran and Lockett was the first to compare the worlds of music and business.
35. One reason why jazz musicians were chosen for the research is because the setting in which they work is unpredictable.
36. The researchers decided to cover only certain aspects of leadership.

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

37. When assembling their teams, the band leaders all prioritised players
A who had special technical skill.
B who were used to working independently.
C who had an individual style of their own.
D who would get on well with other band members.

38. What obstacle might jazz leaders face in reducing destructive conflict among team members?
A They may also reduce productive conflict in the process.
B Their team members tend to have especially strong personalities.
C They are unaware of the theory concerning different types of conflict.
D Their team members may be unwilling to cooperate in reducing this.

39. What approach to group coordination was shared by Ellington, Davis and Blakey?
A They allowed musicians to be creative within certain agreed limits.
B They increased opportunities for success and reduced chances of failure.
C They provided a structure within which musicians could express themselves.
D They coordinated the work of their teams so each member contributed equally.

40. Ucbasaran and her colleagues found that the high turnover of members in jazz bands
A was eventually reduced by the policies of the band leaders.
B was welcomed by band leaders for the benefits it brought.
C was due to a shortage of effective band leaders.
D was a feature of the growing popularity of jazz.

SECTION 1
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-7.

New York Late-Starters String Orchestra

NYLSO, the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra, is something special. It was founded in early 2007, and grew out of a concept developed by The East London Late Starters Orchestra (ELLSO), an award-winning group in England. NYLSO is an amateur orchestra for adult players of violin, viola, cello, and double bass. If you played a string instrument when you were younger and would like to start again, or if you are learning as an adult and would like the chance to play in a group of similar people, then NYLSO is for you! Our goal is to create a fun, supportive, non-competitive environment for adults 18 to 80+ who wish to participate in collective music¬making.

Participants should have basic music reading skills and a willingness to commit to the group, but are not required to audition. It is recommended that you have studied your instrument for at least one year. If you have ever been paid to play your instrument, recently graduated with a degree in performance, or have been playing continuously since elementary school, you may decide we are not the appropriate group for you.

How We Work:
We know that New Yorkers are busy people. It is fine if you miss an entire rehearsal period when an emergency arises. Ultimately, though, too many absences disrupt the function of the group and make it difficult to perform the pieces. Sessions are in six-week rehearsal cycles, with two-hour rehearsals held once a week. We work with the goal of producing one to three very informal ‘friends-and-family’ concerts per year.

Our professional tutor/facilitator serves as coach and conductor during rehearsals. Substitute conductors also join in to teach different sections, providing groups of players with valuable experience in working with different approaches and styles. Everyone is encouraged to play to their fullest potential, whatever that may be, but please recognize that while we do have a conductor, her role is not to provide one-on-one instruction during rehearsals.

NYLSO is a self-supporting collective; we do not receive any other funding. The cost is $80 for each six-week cycle. Payments are applied to the costs of rehearsal space, conductor’s fees, and photocopying music.

Materials You Will Need At Rehearsals:
You will need an instrument, a portable music stand, and any other relevant accessories. You should bring a folder to keep your music together and a soft-lead pencil with an eraser for writing in changes. Sheet music is provided.

In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE                         if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                       if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN            if there is no information on this

1. The idea behind NYLSO was based on another orchestra.
2. An ability to read music is essential.
3. The NYLSO might be unsuitable for very advanced level musicians.
4. NYLSO concerts are free to members’ families and friends.
5. Rehearsals always involve the full orchestra playing together.6. The conductor provides her services free to NYLSO.
7. The NYLSO gives advice on what instrument to purchase.

The 7 best running watches

Kate Hilpern advises people on the best watches to use when they go running.

A Soleus FIT 1.0
Soleus claims this has everything you need and nothing you don’t. Water- resistant to 30m and with a built-in rechargeable battery, it’s accurate at measuring speed, pace, distance and calories burnt.

B Nike+ SportWatch GPS
You’ll be hard pushed to find a running watch that finds a GPS signal quicker than this. It will keep you updated on current location, distance covered, number of laps and calories burnt.

C Garmin Forerunner
This watch, which is small enough to wear at the office, is touchscreen and is packed with impressive features, although the battery life is limited.

D Timex Run Trainer 2.0
The hi-res screen makes this a great watch for athletes at any level. The easy-to-use, upgraded menu system makes monitoring pace, speed and distance child’s play. Alerts remind you when it’s time to hydrate or top up the nutrition.

E Garmin Forerunner 10
This is a well-priced, entry-level watch that’s light as well as waterproof and available in a range of colours. Don’t expect added extras, but do expect good basic functionality.

F Nike Fuelband
Described by the Huffington Post as ‘the sports watch you never knew you needed,’ this soft-touch and lightweight watch has been lovingly designed to appear more like a piece of futuristic jewellery than a running watch. But it’s hi-tech too and synchronises with your phone to show the results.

G Suunto Ambit2 S HR
This is better suited to off-roaders rather than urban runners and although it’s quite big, it has a functional design and is compatible with the thousands of Suunto apps available.

For which running watch are the following statements true?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 8-14 on your answer sheet NB You may use any letter more than once.

8. This would be a suitable and not too expensive first watch for a runner.
9. Care has been taken to make this watch very attractive to look at.
10. This watch can be programmed to let the runner know when it is time to get some refreshment.
11. This watch will need recharging at frequent intervals.
12. Both experienced and inexperienced runners will find this watch useful.
13. Runners will find all the features on this watch are useful.
14. People who do most of their running in cities may find this watch is not appropriate for them.

SECTION 2
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-22.

Employees’ health and safety responsibilities

As an employee you have rights and you have responsibilities for your own wellbeing and that of your colleagues. This article explains what these responsibilities are, and how you can meet them.

Your rights
Your rights as an employee to work in a safe and healthy environment are set down in law and generally can’t be changed or removed by your employer. The most important of these rights are:
• as far as possible, to have any hazards to your health and safety properly controlled
• to be given any personal protective and safety equipment without being charged for it
• to stop work and leave your work area, without being disciplined, if you have reasonable concerns about your safety
• to tell your employer about any health and safety concerns you have
• not to be disciplined if you contact the Health and Safety Executive, or your local authority, if your employer won’t listen to you
• to have breaks during the time you are at work
• to have time off from work during the working week
• to have annual paid holiday.

Your responsibilities
Your most important responsibilities as an employee are:
• to take reasonable care of your own health and safety
• to remove jewellery and avoid loose clothing when operating machinery
• if you have long hair, or wear a headscarf, make sure it’s tucked out of the way as it could get caught in machinery
• to take reasonable care not to expose fellow employees and members of the public to risk by what you do or don’t do in the course of your work
• to co-operate with your employer, making sure you complete the training that is provided and that you understand and follow the company’s health and safety policies
• not to interfere with or misuse anything that’s been provided for your health, safety or welfare
• to report any injuries you suffer as a result of doing your job – your employer may then need to change the way you work.
If you drive or operate machinery, you have a responsibility to tell your employer if you take medication that makes you feel sleepy. If you do, they should temporarily move you to another job if they have one for you to do.

Questions 15-22
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 15-22 on your answer sheet.

Health and Safety at Work
Employees’ rights
• are established by (15)……………. and include the following:
employers should manage any potential dangers to their staff’s health and safety
– any (16)…………….. needed for employees to work safely should be free
– employees may inform management of any (17)……………… they have relating to health and safety
employees are entitled to some (18)……………… while they are working
Employees’ responsibilities
to take off jewellery and dress appropriately for their particular work
– to avoid putting colleagues and others at (19)……………………
– to do any (20)……………….. that the employer offers
to inform the employer of any (21)………………. received while working
– to make sure the employer knows of any (22)…………………… you are taking that might affect performance

Read the text below and answer Questions 23-27.

Our company notices

A Advance warning
Refurbishment of offices in the Perkins Building will start on Monday 22 May, and is expected to be completed by the end of June. Staff based in that building will be individually notified of where they’ll work for that time. On the previous Friday, facilities staff will move everything that needs to go to your new office. Before then, please make a list of what should be moved, and another list of what can be stored.

B Information about financial systems
The review of the company’s financial systems is now complete, and modifications will shortly be introduced. Jane Phillips from Finance will explain the changes and how they affect you, and answer any queries about them, between 12 and 1 pm on 15 March in Room 5.

C Purchasing Manager
As you probably know, Sadia Ahmed is leaving the company on 31 March, after ten years as Purchasing Manager. Her replacement, Jeff Bridges, will join us on the previous Monday. Jeff will be in Room 70 between 12 and 2 pm on 3 April: feel free to drop in and say hello to him during your lunch break.

D We’re doing well!
We’ve received a large and urgent order from one of our major customers. As a result, we’ll need to run the production line for an additional three hours each evening throughout the week beginning 13 March. Any production workers willing to do this shift in addition to their normal work should speak to the Production Manager asap.

E Quality control
Because of recent concerns about product quality, we’re setting up a team to consider ways of raising quality and making recommendations for changes. As staff from any department might have useful ideas, anyone is welcome to join the team – ring Rodrigo Perez on 1012. It will involve fortnightly meetings and some research, over a six-month period.

F New opportunity
Dev Patel will cease to be part-time content editor of the company intranet at the end of April, as his new role in Marketing leaves him no time for it. We’re looking for two people to take over. If you’re interested, and can work an extra three or four hours a week (for extra pay, of course!), contact Maggie Campbell on 2146.

G And finally…
We hope to re-start the company tennis championship, which hasn’t taken place for the last three years. If this is something for you, talk to Bill Sinclair on extension 2371. You don’t need to be a star player!

For which company notice are the following statements true?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 23-27 on your answer sheet

23. Staff are needed to work on internal communications.
24. People are needed to help improve an internal system.
25. Staff are asked if they want to take part in an internal competition.
26. Volunteers are asked to work overtime for a limited period.
27. Staff will be told where to work temporarily.

SECTION 3
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

Vanilla – the most wonderful flavor in the world

Vanilla is the most popular and widely used flavor in the world. And, yet, the vanilla orchid is only grown in a few countries. Below you’ll discover why these countries are ideal and how the vanilla from each region differs.

Mexico
Vanilla (‘Vanilla planifolia Andrews) originated in Mexico and for centuries was the exclusive secret of the native Totonac Indians, who were later conquered by the Aztecs. The Aztecs in turn were conquered by the Spanish forces led by Cortez in 1520. He brought vanilla pods home to Spain, thus introducing the flavorful pods to the rest of the world.

However, Mexico remained the sole grower of vanilla for another 300 years. The particular relationship between the vanilla orchid and an indigenous bee called the Melipone was crucial. It was responsible for pollinating the flowers, resulting in fruit production.

Vanilla pods should be picked when the tip begins to turn yellow. The curing process gives the pods their characteristic brown color as well as their flavor and aroma. In Mexico, farmers cure the pods by wrapping them in blankets and straw mats and then placing them in ovens for 24 to 48 hours. After that, the pods are spread outdoors to absorb heat during the day and then placed in wooden boxes overnight. Once properly cured, they are stored to further develop the flavor. The entire curing process takes three to six months, making it a very labor-intensive process. Vanilla from Mexico has a flavor that combines creamy tones with a deep, spicy character, making it a delicious complement to chocolate, cinnamon and other warm spices. It also works wonderfully in tomato sauces.

Madagascar
Around 1793, a vanilla plant was smuggled from Mexico to the Island of Reunion, east of Africa. For almost 50 years, the production of vanilla struggled. The vines grew successfully with beautiful blossoms but vanilla pods were infrequent. Without the Melipone bee, the flowers weren’t being fertilized beyond occasional pollination by other insects. It wasn’t until 1836 that Charles Morren, a Belgian botanist, discovered the pollination link between bee and plant. And then in 1841, Edmond Albius of Reunion developed an efficient method for fertilizing the flower by hand. Now, growers could choose the best flowers to pollinate, resulting in a healthier and higher quality vanilla pod.

Eventually, the plants arrived on the nearby island of Madagascar, where hand pollination proved its worth. Assisted by the climate and rich soil, hand pollination by the country’s skilled farmers has enabled Madagascar to become the world’s top vanilla producer in quantity and, many would argue, quality

The curing process is similar to that in Mexico with one difference. The farmers initiate the process by immersing the green vanilla pods in hot water for some time. They then store them in sweat boxes before beginning the routine of spreading them outdoors during the day and packing them away at night. The different curing method used contributes to the overall flavor of the vanilla.

The sweet, creamy and mellow flavor is the one most people identify with vanilla. This flavor and the pod’s ability to hold that flavor in both hot and cold applications make it an exceptional ‘all-purpose’ vanilla which is many people’s first choice for a wide range of sweet recipes – from cooking and baking to ice creams and buttercreams.

Tahiti
Like the other countries, Tahiti’s tropical climate makes it ideal for growing vanilla. However, Tahiti differs in the species of vanilla that is most common: Vanilla tahitensis Moore. This is the hybrid of two vanilla species introduced in the 1800s. These two species were skilfully crossed in the next few decades, to create the plump Tahitian vanilla pods we know today.

The curing process also differs from other countries’. Mature pods are first stacked in a cool place until they are completely brown (five to ten days) and then rinsed briefly in clear water, a unique characteristic of the method used in Tahiti. For the next month, growers expose the pods to the gentle morning sunlight. In the afternoon, they bind the pods in cloths and store them in crates until the next morning, to promote transpiration. Little by little, the vanilla pods lose weight and shrink. Throughout this phase, the workers carefully smooth and even out the pods with their fingers. Then after a month, the final step is to leave the pods in a shaded and well-ventilated spot for 40 days to lower their moisture content.

This species of orchid combined with Tahiti’s advantageous climate and soil results in a vanilla that has fruity and sweet tones. Tahitian vanilla is especially vulnerable to heat and is therefore best used in refrigerated and frozen desserts, fruit pies and smoothies.

Indonesia
Indonesia is the second largest producer of vanilla. However, Indonesian production methods focus on quantity over quality. Unlike other regions, where vanilla beans are picked only when ripe, Indonesian growers harvest all the beans at one time, a labor-saving adjustment.

The curing process also features production shortcuts such as the use of propane heaters to speed up drying. The use of such heat, which chemically alters the beans, essentially ‘bums off flavor components while adding a smoky tone, resulting in a less complex taste and a sharper flavor. Indonesian vanilla works well when blended with vanillas from other regions and, because it’s more economical, it makes the end product more affordable.

Look at the following statements (Questions 28-31) and the list of countries below. Match each statement with the correct country, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet.

28 The vanilla that is grown here was created from more than one type of vanilla plant.
29 This vanilla is often mixed with other types of vanilla.
30 Some people claim that this country produces the finest vanilla.
31 This vanilla goes well with both sweet and savoury ingredients.

List of Countries
A Mexico
B Madagascar
C Tahiti
D Indonesia

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 32-34 on your answer sheet.

32 What prevented countries, apart from Mexico, from growing vanilla in the 17th and 18th centuries?
A the Aztecs’ refusal to let the pods be exported
B the lack of the most suitable pollinating insect
C the widespread ignorance of the existence of the plant
D the poor condition of the vanilla pods that Cortez collected

33 What does the writer suggest was the main reason for the success of vanilla cultivation on Madagascar?
A the adoption of a particular agricultural technique
B the type of vanilla orchid that was selected
C the unique quality of the soil on the islan
D the rapidly increasing number of growers

34 The writer believes that Madagascan vanilla is so popular because
A it works well in a variety of main courses and puddings.
B its pod is less likely than others to break up when it is cooked.
C its taste is widely considered to be the standard taste of vanilla.
D it is the one that is used in a number of commercial frozen desserts.

Questions 35-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.

How vanilla pods are cured in Tahiti
Tahitian farmers start by leaving the pods to turn 35………………………all over. They then wash them quickly before the main stage of the curing process begins. They place the pods in the 36………………………during the early part of the day. Cloths are then wrapped round them and they are left in boxes overnight. This procedure encourages 37…………………Gradually, the 38…………………of the individual pods starts to decrease. While this is happening, the farmers continue to work on the pods. They use their 39…………………to flatten them out. For the last stage in the curing process, the pods are kept in a cool place which is open to the air, so that the amount of 40…………………………within them is reduced.

SECTION 1 
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-7.

Online roommate finder: Toronto

I have one room available in a large apartment located just off Queen and Bathurst in Toronto. The room is fully furnished with a double bed, desk, shelf and wardrobe.

About us: I’m Sasha! I’m Canadian, and I’ve been living in this apartment since I was a teenager. I’m 23 and work in a restaurant. These past two years, my best friend has been living here but as she’s now moving to Europe there is a room available as of October 1. The third room is occupied by Simon, who is from Australia. He works part-time in a music shop downtown and is a great drummer. We both like keeping the place neat and tidy – I actually enjoy cleaning in my spare time and sometimes we do it together as a roommate team (we make it fun!). I love watching movies, exploring, getting out of the city and into the outdoors, and listening to music.

The apartment itself is very large and comes equipped with unlimited wi-fi, a fully stocked kitchen, cable television, and Netflix. The bedroom is a long way from the living room, so it shouldn’t disturb you if people come round and besides, we are certainly very respectful. Oh! We also have two cats who are well-behaved but they might be a problem if you have allergies. If you have a pet, that’s no problem – these cats get along with other animals.
We love having people coming from other countries as it’s really fun having the opportunity to show them around the neighborhood (it’s a great neighborhood – lots of character and plenty to do). That said, we’re certainly interested in living with Canadians too! We’re very easy-going and open-minded and just hope that our new roommate will be the same.

Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text on page 37?
In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write

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

1. The room available has two beds.
2. The Australian in Sasha’s apartment is a musician.
3. Sasha does all the cleaning in the apartment.
4. Sasha likes being in the open air.
5. The room available would be suitable for someone who likes to be quiet.
6. Sasha thinks her apartment is in the best part of Toronto.
7. Sasha has never had a roommate from Canada.

Read the text below and answer Questions 8-14.

Smartphone fitness apps

A Pacer
Although they were previously split into ‘pro’ and ‘free’ versions, Pacer’s developer now generously includes all the features in one free app. That means you can spend no money, yet use your smartphone’s GPS capabilities to track your jogging routes, and examine details of your pace and calories burned.

B Beat2
There are a wealth of running apps available, but Beat2 is a good one. This free app monitors your pace – or if you have a wrist or chest-based heart rate monitor, your beats per minute – and offers up its specially curated playlists to give you the perfect music for the pace you’re running at, adding a whole new dimension to your run. The best bit is when you explode into a sprint and the music pounds in your ears. Or if you fancy something different, the app also has In-App Purchases, including tales of past sporting heroes you can listen to while you run.

C Impel
If you’re serious about the sport you do, then you should be serious about Impel. As smartphone fitness tools go it’s one of the best, allowing you to track your performance, set goals and see daily progress updates. If you’re ever not sure where to run or cycle you can find user-created routes on the app, or share your own. All of that comes free of charge, while a premium version adds even more tools.

D Fast Track
There are plenty of GPS running apps for smartphones, but Fast Track is an excellent freebie. Although you naturally get more features if you pay for the ‘pro’ version, the free release gets you GPS tracking, a nicely designed map view, your training history, music, and cheering. Yes, you read the last of those right – you can have friends cheer you on as you huff and puff during a run. If you can afford the ‘pro’ version, you can add possible routes, voice coaches, smartwatch connectivity and more; but as a starting point, the free app gets you moving.

Questions 8-14
Look at the four reviews of smartphone fitness apps, A-D, on page 39. For which app are the following statements true?
Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 8-14 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

8. This app can be used for more than one sport.
9. You have to pay if you want this app to suggest where you can go.
10. This app has well-presented visuals.
11. You do not have to pay for any of the features on this app.
12. You can pay to download true stories on this app.
13. You can get ideas about where to go from other people on this app.
14. This app gives you details of the energy you have used.

SECTION 2
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-20.

Why you should delegate tasks to team members

Delegation helps you get more done, helps your team members progress through learning new things and spreads the load in the team.

When you give someone a project task to do, make sure that they have all the information they require to actually get on and do it. That includes specifying the date it is due, writing a clear definition of the task, providing any resources they need to get it done or names of people you expect them to talk to. It also means informing them of any expectations you have, such as delivering it as a spreadsheet rather than a Word document.

If you have concerns that someone doesn’t have the skills to do a good job (or they tell you this outright), make sure that you offer some help. It might take longer this time but next time they will be able to do it without you, so it will save you time in the long run.

Once you have given the task to someone, let them get on with it. Tell them how you expect to be kept informed, like through a report once a week. Then let them get on with it, unless you feel things are not progressing as you would like.

As a project manager, you have to retain some of the main project responsibilities for yourself. You shouldn’t expect someone else on the project team to do your job. Equally, don’t delegate tasks such as dull administrative ones, just because you don’t want to do them. But remember that project management is a leadership position so you don’t want your role to be seen as too basic.

One way to free up your time to spend on the more strategic and leadership parts of project management is to delegate things that are regular, like noting whether weekly targets have been met. Could someone in your team take this on for you? This can be a useful way of upskilling your team members to complement any ongoing training and allowing them to gain confidence too.

So in summary, be clear, supportive, and don’t micromanage. Don’t become the problem on your project that prevents progress just because you’re afraid to leave people alone to get on with their jobs.

Questions 15-20
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 15-20 on your answer sheet.

15. Ensure team members are aware of any…………………………………there are regarding how the work should be presented.
16. Make sure support is made available if any………………………………exist as to the team member’s ability to do the work.
17. Ask the team member to detail how the work is developing, for example by providing a regular…………………………………
18. Don’t delegate administrative tasks simply because they are…………………………………….
19. Managers can ask a team member to check on the achievement of …………………………………………… at fixed intervals.
20. If you………………………………………………….you risk delaying the whole project.

Read the text below and answer Questions 21-27.

Choosing the right format for your CV

A good CV should be clear, simple and easy to understand. Here are four of the most popular CV formats and advice on when to use them:

Chronological
This is the traditional CV format and is extremely popular because it allows employers to see all the posts you have held in order. It provides flexibility because it works in almost all circumstances, the exception being if you have blocks of unemployment that are difficult to account for. This type of format is particularly useful when you have a solid and complete working history spanning five years or more.

Functional
The functional CV is designed to describe your key skills rather than the jobs you have done. The functional CV format is typically used by people who have extensive gaps in their employment history, or have often changed jobs. It also suits those who want to go in a different direction work-wise and change industry. You might choose it if you want to highlight skills learned early in your career, points that might get missed if a chronological format is used. It is also appropriate if you have done little or no actual work, for example, if you are one of the current years graduates.

Because this format is often used to cover a patchy employment history, some interviewers may view such CVs with suspicion, so be very careful should you choose it.

Achievement
An alternative to the functional CV is to use an achievement-based resume highlighting key achievements in place of skills. This can help show your suitability for a role if you lack direct experience of it.

Non-traditional
With the explosion of digital and creative industries over recent years, CV formats have become more and more imaginative. You can present information through graphics, which can be more visually engaging and turn out to be an unusual but winning option. This will definitely make you stand out from the crowd. It also demonstrates design skills and creativity in a way that a potential employer can see and feel. However, a highly creative CV format is only really appropriate for creative and artistic sectors, such as those involving promoting products, though it would also work for the media too.

Questions 21-27
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 21-27 on your answer sheet.

CV formats
There are several different formats including:
Chronological
– very common
– gives (21)…………………………… in most cases
– perhaps inappropriate if there are periods where (22)…………………………. is not easy to explain

Functional
– appropriate for people who intend to follow a new (23)………………………………… in their career
– suits recent graduates
– can create (24)……………………………………..in recruiters, so is best used with caution

Achievement
– focuses mainly on what the person has achieved
– may be advisable if the person has no (25)…………………………………in the area

Non-traditional
– enables use of attractive (26)………………………………………..to present data –
– suits applications for jobs in marketing or (27)…………………………..

SECTION 3
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.

DINOSAURS AND THE SECRETS THEY STILL HOLD

I was recently part of a team of palaeontologists that discovered a new dinosaur. Living in what is now China, the species would have resembled a strange bird. It was about the size of a sheep and covered in feathers, with a sharp beak that it probably used to crack open shellfish. It was given the formal scientific name Tongtianlong, but we called it ‘Mud Dragon’ because its skeleton was discovered in rock that had hardened from ancient mud. It seems that the creature got trapped in the mud and died. Then its fossil remains were found a few months ago when workmen were excavating a site in order to build a school.

It is every dinosaur-obsessed child’s dearest wish to discover and name a completely new species. In fact what my colleagues and I did wasn’t that unusual. New dinosaurs are appearing everywhere these days – about 50 each year. And this pace shows no signs of slowing, as different areas continue to open up to fossil hunters and a fresh generation of scientists comes of age. Because of this plentiful supply of new fossils, we now know more about dinosaurs than we do about many modern animals. But there are still many unsolved mysteries.

Dinosaurs didn’t start out as huge monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex. Instead they evolved from a group of angular, cat-sized reptiles called dinosauromorphs. These creatures remained small and rare for millions of years until they developed into dinosaurs. The boundary between dinosauromorphs and dinosaurs is becoming less and less distinct with each new discovery that’s made, but what’s becoming clear is that it took millions of years for these first dinosaurs to spread around the world, grow to huge sizes and become truly dominant.

Some discoveries in the 1970s, like the agile and strangely bird-like Deinonychus, proved that dinosaurs were far more dynamic and intelligent than previously thought. Some palaeontologists even proposed that they were warm-blooded creatures like modern birds with a constant high body temperature that they controlled internally, rather than from warming themselves by lying in the sun. A few decades later opinions are still mixed. The problem is that dinosaurs can’t be observed. Palaeontologists must rely on studying fossils. Some results are convincing: we know from studying their bones that dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, just like modern, warm-blooded animals. Other palaeontologists, however, use the same fossils to suggest that dinosaurs were somewhere between cold-blooded reptiles and warm-blooded birds. More studies are needed to provide more clarity.

The discovery of Deinonychus with its long arms, skinny legs, arched neck and big claws on its feet, helped to strengthen the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. In the late 1990s, the discovery of thousands of feather- covered dinosaurs closed the argument. But the fossils raised another question: why did feathers first develop in dinosaurs? They probably originated as simple, hair-like strands — a necessary means of keeping warm. Many dinosaurs retained this basic fluffy coat, but in one group the strands modified. They grew bigger, started to branch out and changed into feathers like those on modern birds. They lined the arms, and sometimes the legs, forming wings. These feathers were probably for display: to attract mates or scare off rivals. They appeared in species such as the ostrich-like Ornithomimosaur. Such creatures were too large to fly. Flight may actually have come about by accident when smaller winged dinosaurs began jumping between trees or leaping in the air, and suddenly found that their wings had aerodynamic properties. This is one of the most stimulating new notions about dinosaurs and a fascinating area for further investigation.

There’s something else that these feathers can tell us. They allow us to determine what colour dinosaurs were. If you look at modern bird feathers under a microscope, you can see tiny blobs called melanosomes. These structures contain melanin, one of the main colour-producing pigments in animals. Some are round, others are egg-shaped, etc. And that’s important, because different shapes contain different colour pigments. So if you can identify the shape, you can identify the colour. A few years ago, some palaeontologists realised that you could find melanosomes in particularly well-preserved fossil feathers. They discovered that different dinosaurs had different melanosomes, which meant they had a variety of colours. Dinosaurs, therefore, probably came in a rainbow of colours – yet another thing that links them to modern birds.

The most enduring mystery of all, which has been argued about ever since the first dinosaur fossils were found, is ‘Why aren’t dinosaurs around today?’ Of course, we now know that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so some dinosaurs do continue in a sense. But there’s nothing like a Tyrannosaurus Rex today. They dominated the planet for over 150 million years, but suddenly disappeared from the fossil record 66 million years ago. That’s when a 10 km-wide asteroid came out of space and struck what is now Mexico, impacting with huge force and unleashing earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfires and hurricane-force winds. Although palaeontologists still like to argue about what part the asteroid played in the dinosaurs’ extinction, there really isn’t much of a mystery left. The asteroid did it and did it quickly. There are few signs that dinosaurs were struggling before the impact. None survived except a few birds and some small furry mammals. They found themselves in an empty world, and as the planet started to recover, they evolved into new creatures, including the first apes, and so the long journey began to the beginning of humankind.

Questions 28-32
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

The discovery of Tongtianlong

This species of dinosaur has only recently been found in an area of China. Scientists believe that it was bird-like in appearance and probably no bigger than a 28…………………………………………….It is thought to have eaten 29……………………………………….and it used its 30…………………………………………..to get through their hard exterior. The fossil of Tongtianlong was found surrounded by 31……………………………………….under the ground where the foundations of a new 32…………………………………..were being dug.

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

33. What does the writer suggest about finding new dinosaurs?
A Many scientists dream of being able to do so one day.
B It is probable that most have now been discovered.
C People are running out of places to look for them.
D It is becoming relatively common to dig one up.

34. In the fourth paragraph, what does the writer suggest about palaeontologists?
A They should study the fossilised bones of dinosaurs more closely.
B Their theories are based on evidence that can be interpreted in different ways.
C It is impossible to have any confidence in the proposals they have made.
D It is worrying that they still cannot agree about dinosaurs’ body temperature.

35. When describing the theory of how dinosaurs began to fly, the writer is
A amused that their flight probably came about by chance.
B surprised by the reason for the initial development of feathers.
C excited by the different possibilities it holds for future research.
D confused that feathers were also present on some creatures’ legs.

36. One significance of melanosomes is that they

A provide further evidence of where birds evolved from.
B are only found in certain parts of the world.
C can be clearly seen in most fossilised feathers.
D are only found in certain birds and dinosaurs.

37. Which of the following best summarises the writer’s point in the final paragraph?
A Scientists are right to continue questioning the effects of the asteroid strike.
B Large flightless dinosaurs may have existed after the asteroid hit.
C The dinosaurs were already declining before the asteroid hit.
D The effects of the asteroid strike killed most dinosaurs.

Questions 38-40
Look at the following statements (Questions 38-40) and the list of prehistoric animals below.
Match each statement with the correct animal, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

38. It may have used its feathers to frighten off members of the same species.
39. This species resembles a large flightless bird that exists today.
40. Finding this species made scientists revise their opinion of the brain power of dinosaurs.

List of Prehistoric Animals
A Tongtianlong
B Tyrannosaurus Rex
C Deinonychus
D Ornithomimosaur

SECTION 1 
Read the text below and answer Questions 1-7.

The Best Suitcases

A Briggs and Riley Weekender
A weekend suitcase that’s sophisticated and unusually spacious for its type. The strong nylon outer fabric is water and abrasion resistant, so it should handle any knocks without showing signs of damage.

B Mulberry Scotchgrain
Trimmed in brown leather, with gold details, this bag from the renowned fashion house is a truly indulgent buy. If you’re investing this much in a suitcase then you’d better be planning an amazing holiday to go with it.

C Rimova Salsa
A design you can trust, this case is built from super light polycarbonate and is incredibly solid. The built-in combination lock offers state-of-the-art security so you can travel with peace of mind.

D Tripp Holiday
Simple and affordable, the Tripp range offers a great selection of tough cases. They also come in a huge range of cheerful colours that should go with anything you choose to put on, and you’ll definitely be able to spot it on the luggage carousel at the airport.

E Eastpak Tranverz Holdall
For those who want something in between an annual holiday suitcase and a weekend bag, this is a fantastic compromise. With two wheels and a telescopic handle, the bag is guaranteed for 30 years. Did we mention it also comes in colourful leopard print?

F Herschel Parcel
From the brand behind some of today’s most popular rucksacks, this suitcase really is a delight. Custom printed, with Herschel’s signature leather toggles this well-crafted case is as cool, stylish and up to date as they come.

G The Diplomat
Travel in style with this beautiful suitcase that goes back to the days when trains ran on steam and air travel was leisurely. The leather case, part of the Steamline Luggage range, features roller wheels and a metal frame to hold it in shape.

Questions 1-7
Look at the seven reviews of suitcases, A-G, on page 16.
For which suitcase are the following statements true?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. This suitcase is for those who wish to purchase expensive luggage.
2. This suitcase is the right one for people who like to follow the latest fashion.
3. It is easy to choose one of these suitcases to match most clothing.
4. The manufacturer is confident that this suitcase will last a long time.
5. Items in this suitcase will not be affected if it gets wet.
6. This suitcase is of a useful, medium size.
7. Those who want to be reminded of an earlier age of travel will like this suitcase.

Read the text below and answer Questions 8-14.

The Oxford School Of Drama

One-Year Acting Course
This is an intensive course which is designed for those who have completed their academic studies and have some theatre or film experience already. In order to be accepted you should be a high achiever, knowledgeable about the industry and determined to succeed.

Term One: Technical classes in acting, voice, movement, applied movement and characterisation, music, singing, film, radio and professional development. The term finishes with an internal production given for tutors and students.

Term Two: All technical classes continue from term one. There is an internal performance of a one-act play, the recording of an audio showreel at a professional studio and the Showcase Drama in front of an invited audience including casting directors and agents.

Term Three: Technical classes continue with additional focus on audition technique, workshops and masterclasses. This term includes a public performance of a play outdoors in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, and the chance to act a short film recorded on location by a professional crew.

How to Apply
Entry to The Oxford School of Drama is by audition only and there are no academic requirements for any of our courses.

Once we have received your application form and audition fee, we will email you with a date for your audition and further details about what to expect when you are here.

For your initial audition, you will need to prepare two contrasting speeches from plays, lasting no longer than two minutes. There will also be some group work for which you will need to wear loose, comfortable clothing.

If you are applying from overseas, you will be able to submit your first audition by means of DVD, YouTube or link to a secure website. You will be invited to submit this once we have received your application form and audition fee. If you are successful in your first audition, you will be invited to attend future auditions here at the school. The school will provide a free bus from central Oxford for those attending auditions.

Questions 8-14

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. Students can begin the one-year course without any previous involvement in acting.
9. Students will act in a performance in front of their classmates at the end of the first term.
10. Family members may attend a performance during the second term.
11. Students are required to make a film on their own in the last term of the course.
12. In their first audition, candidates perform speeches they have worked on in advance.
13. The Oxford School of Drama will send candidates details of local accommodation.
14. Overseas candidates can do all their auditions via a digital link.

SECTION 2
Read the text below and answer Questions 15-20.

Border Crossing For Commercial Vehicles

This Border Crossing Guide is designed for drivers and motor carriers operating commercial vehicles at Michigan’s international border crossings. This information will help you cross the border from the US into Canada, and from Canada into the US.

Your first point of contact at the border consists of Primary Inspection. The best way to clear customs at Primary Inspection is to make sure Customs gets information about your shipment before you set off, using the Pre-Arrival Processing System (PAPS). When using this you need to provide information about your shipment, and you also need to send proof of a current annual inspection for your vehicle, tractor and trailer.

Before you arrive at the border, make sure you have all your paperwork up to date and ready to present at Primary Inspection. You’ll need a photo ID in addition to your birth certificate or passport. Drivers must also turn on interior cab lights and open all interior drapes or blinds to sleeper areas for easy inspection.

If all of your paperwork is in order and was processed ahead of time, you will be released at the primary lane and this may be your only stop. If you are not a Canadian or US citizen, a visa is obligatory and you will also be required to complete an I-94 card. 1-94 cards are available only at border crossings into the United States. Drivers who clear customs at Primary Inspection will be instructed to report to Immigration to fill out the I-94 card and receive verbal clearance from a US official to proceed into the United States. The charge for the I-94 card is $6.

If your paperwork is not in order, you will be directed to Secondary Inspection. When you get there, look for the signs for Truck Inspection and follow these.

Questions 15-20
Complete the flow-chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 15-20 on your answer sheet.

Procedure for border crossing
Before setting off – to speed up the border crossing use PAPS – for this send your (15)………………..details and current vehicle inspection documents
Before arriving at the border – check that documents such as (16)……………..and birth certificate/ passport are ready for inspection – make sure the (17)……………….are on inside the vehicle – check that the (18)……………..in the vehicle can be easily seen
At the border (Primary inspection) – this may be the only stop if paperwork is in order – Non US/ Canadian citizens must have a visa and go to the (19)……………..area to complete an I-94 card (there is a small (20)………………..for this) and to receive verbal clearance
At the border (Secondary inspection) – if there is a problem with paperwork you will be sent to Truck Inspection

Appendix: Dealing With Absence In The Workplace

This appendix considers how to handle problems of absence and gives guidance about authorised and unauthorised absence of employees from work.

The organisation should be aware of the rights of employees and in particular the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 when making any decisions about absences of employees who are disabled. In these cases the employer should consider what reasonable adjustments could be made in the workplace to help the employee. This might be something as simple as supplying an appropriate chair for the use of the employee. In cases where an employee suffers from an allergy caused by something in the workplace, the employer should consider remedial action or a transfer to alternative work.

If the absence is because of temporary difficulties relating to dependants, the employee may be entitled to have time off under the provisions of the Employment Rights Act 1996. In cases where the employee has difficulty managing both work and home responsibilities, employees have the right to request flexible ways of working, such as job-sharing, and employers must have a good business reason for rejecting any such application.

Employers should investigate unexpected absences promptly and the employee should be asked for an explanation at a return-to-work interview. In order to show both the employee concerned and other employees that absence is regarded as a serious matter and may result in dismissal, it is very important that persistent absence is dealt with firmly and consistently. Records showing lateness and the duration of and explanations for all spells of absence should be kept to help monitor levels of absence or lateness.

If the employer wishes to contact the employee’s doctor for more information about a medical condition, he or she must notify the employee in writing that they intend to make such an application and they must secure the employee’s consent in writing. Consideration should be given to introducing measures to help employees, regardless of status or seniority, who may be suffering from stress. The aim should be to identify employees affected and encourage them to seek help and treatment.

Questions 21-27
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21-27 on your answer sheet.

Absence in the workplace

Employees’ rights
• help with issues related to disabilities, e.g. provision of a suitable (21)…………..
• provision of arrangements to deal with any work-related (22)……………………
• time off work to deal with short-term problems of (23)………………….
• possibility of arrangements that are (24)………………… to help with domestic responsibilities

Recommendations to employers
• make it clear that absence is a possible reason for (25)………………….
• ask employees for consent before contacting their (26)………………..
• identify employees affected by (27)………………… and provide support

Section 3
The text on pages 25 and 26 has nine paragraphs, A-l. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 28-36 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Various sources of supplies
ii The effects of going outside
iii Oymyakon past and present
iv A contrast in the landscape
v Animals that can survive the cold
vi How Oymyakon is affected by its location
vii Keeping out the cold
viii Not the only challenging time of the year
ix Better than its reputation
x Very few facilities in buildings
xi More snow than anywhere else in the world

28 Paragraph A
29 Paragraph B
30 Paragraph C
31 Paragraph D
32 Paragraph E
33 Paragraph F
34 Paragraph G
35 Paragraph H
36 Paragraph I

A Visit To Oymyakon, The World’s Coldest Town

A You don’t need a sat nav to drive to Oymyakon. From Yakutsk you cross the Lena River and simply follow the M56 almost all of the way before taking a left at Tomtor for the final few kilometres. The journey takes two days of hard driving; two days of glistening landscapes, frozen rivers and untouched snow; two days of endless forest and breathtaking beauty; two days to penetrate the heart of Siberia and reach the coldest inhabited place on Earth. The beauty surprised me. Siberia isn’t known for its pleasant appearance. It’s always billed as a place of hardship. But for hour after hour, the wintry wonderland was bathed in a crisp, clean sunshine, presenting a continuous panorama of conifer trees wreathed in silence and snow.

B As we left the flat plain, the road began to twist and turn, leading us into untouched hills and on towards the Verkhoyansk Mountains. Beneath their snow-clad peaks, the slopes became steeper and the valleys deeper. Down in a valley, we stopped to look at a hot spring beside the road. It was immediately obvious against the snow – a spot shrouded in heavy mist. Trees emerged from the strange haze as ghostly silhouettes.

C Despite the magical ambience of the Siberian wilderness, its reputation for hardship hit me every time I climbed out of the vehicle. Within less than a minute, the skin all over my face began to feel as if it were burning. If I wasn’t wearing my two sets of gloves, I rapidly lost the feeling in my fingertips. I learned very quickly not to draw too deep a breath because the shock of the cold air in my lungs invariably set me off on an extended bout of coughing. Siberia in winter is a world barely fit for human habitation. This is a place of such searing cold that it bites through multiple layers of clothing as if they aren’t there.

D Oymyakon is a quiet little town – the world’s coldest – of about 550 inhabitants, with its own power station, a school, two shops and a small hospital. It probably originated as a seasonal settlement where reindeer herders spent the summer on the banks of the Indigirka River.

E The temperature when I arrived was -45°C – not particularly cold, I was informed. A number of factors combine to explain Oymyakon’s record low temperatures. It is far from the ocean, with its moderating effect on air temperature.

In addition, the town sits in a valley, below the general level of the Oymyakon Plateau, which, in turn, is enclosed on all sides by mountains up to 2,000 metres in height. As the cold air sinks, it accumulates in the valley, with little wind to disturb it. Oymyakon’s average temperature in January is -50°C. Lower temperatures have been recorded in Antarctica, but there are no permanent inhabitants there.

F Day-to-day life in Oymyakon presents certain challenges during the long winters. There are hardly any modern household conveniences. Water is hacked out of the nearby river as great chunks of ice and dragged home on a sledge. The giant ice cubes are stacked outdoors and carried into the house one at a time to melt when needed. The lack of running water also means no showers or baths, or indeed flushing toilets. Since 2008, the town’s school has enjoyed the luxury of indoor toilets, however. It’s one of the small number of civic buildings in the centre of town that are linked to the power station.

G The power station provides winter heating in the form of hot water, but many houses lie outside its range and rely on their own wood-burning stove. Fuel is plentiful enough in the surrounding forest, but someone still has to venture out to cut the wood. Everybody in Oymyakon owns good boots, a hat made of animal fur and fur-lined mittens. The boots are usually made from reindeer hide, which is light but keeps your feet very warm – the individual hairs are hollow, like a thin tube with air inside. Since air is a poor conductor of heat, the skin makes excellent winter footwear, and felt soles give added insulation. Hats come in a variety of furs, including fox, raccoon, sable and mink.

H Oymyakon’s two shops keep a decent stock of basic foods in tins and packets, but locals also have do-it yourself options, including hunting, trapping, ice-fishing, reindeer-breeding and horse-breeding. Indeed, being self-sufficient runs in the blood in Siberia. The Oymyakon diet relies heavily on meat for its protein, a primary source of energy in the prolonged winter. Unsurprisingly, given the weather, everyone eats heartily in Oymyakon. Atypical meal I was offered consisted of a thick horse soup and huge piles of horse meatballs, all washed down with cloudberry cordial.

I Spring is the best season here, I’m told. The snow melts, the river flows once more and the forest is full of wild flowers. But it’s short. In the summer Oymyakon can be uncomfortably hot. Much of the forest becomes boggy, so mosquitoes are a constant presence. Oymyakon’s climate certainly wouldn’t suit me, but residents I spoke to said they wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

Why Oymyakon gets so cold

Oymyakon is a long way from any 37………. which would prevent the temperature from falling so low. The town is located in a 38……….. within a plateau surrounded by 39…………………Because there is not much 40 ………..cold air collects in the town.

Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the soil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coconut Palm

For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in South Asia in the late 13th century, and among the mid-14th-century travel writings of Sir John Mandeville there is mention of ‘great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India). Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are cliches in the west to sell holidays, chocolate bars fizzy drinks and even romance.

Typically, we envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs that, when opened, provide sweet white flesh. But we see only part of the fruit and none of the plant from which they come. The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an important source of timber for building houses, and is increasingly being used as a replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long. The leaves have hard veins in their centres which, in many parts of the world, are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away. Immature coconut flowers are tightly clustered together among the leaves at the top of the trunk. The flower stems may be tapped for their sap to produce a drink, and the sap can also be reduced by boiling to produce a type of sugar used for cooking.

Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard, inner layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut fibre, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes. The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely used in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel. When broken in half, the shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.

Inside the shell are the nutrients (endosperm) needed by the developing seed. Initially, the endosperm is a sweetish liquid, coconut water, which is enjoyed as a drink, but also provides the hormones which encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields. As the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually solidifies to form the brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the world, as well as in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, acquired strategic importance in a quite different sphere, as Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

Their biology would appear to make coconuts the great maritime voyagers and coastal colonizers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits are able to float in water and tolerate salt, but cannot remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest after about 110 days at sea they are no longer able to germinate. Literally cast onto desert island shores, with little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun, coconut seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut seedling as it starts to grow.

There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americas before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. 16th century trade and human migration patterns reveal that Arab traders and European sailors are likely to have moved coconuts from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to the east coast of America. But the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th century sailors has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two diametrically opposed origins have been proposed: that they came from Asia, or that they were native to America. Both suggestions have problems. In Asia, there is a large degree of coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human use – but there are no relatives growing in the wild. In America, there are close coconut relatives, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous. These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.

Questions 1-8
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The Coconut Palm

Part	Description	Uses
Trunk	up to 30 meters	timber for houses and the making of (1)…………………..
Leaves	up to 6 meters long	to make brushes
Flowers	at the top of the trunk	stems provide sap, used as a drink or a source of (2)…………….
Fruits	– outer layer – middle layer (coir) – inner layer (shell) – coconut water – coconut flesh	– used for (3)………………..etc – a source of (4)………………(when halved) for (5)……………….. – a drink and a source of (6)…………………for other plants – oil and milk for cooking and (7)………………glycerine (an ingredient in (8)…………………)

Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. Write

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

9. Coconut seeds need shade in order to germinate.
10. Coconuts were probably transported to Asia from America in the 16th century.
11. Coconuts found on the west coast of America were a different type from those found on the east coast.
12. All the coconuts found in Asia are cultivated varieties.
13. Coconuts are cultivated in different ways in America and the Pacific.

How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains A Boost

A The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how ‘baby talk’ impacts on learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.

B Early language exposure seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the sweet if sometimes absurd sound of infant- directed speech influence a baby’s development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.

C Fathers don’t use baby talk as often or in the same ways as mothers – and that’s perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark Van Dam of Washington State University at Spokane and colleagues equipped parents with recording devices and speech-recognition software to study the way they interacted with their youngsters during a normal day. ‘We found that moms do exactly what you’d expect and what’s been described many times over,’ VanDam explains. ‘But we found that dads aren’t doing the same thing. Dads didn’t raise their pitch or fundamental frequency when they talked to kids.’ Their role may be rooted in what is called the bridge hypothesis, which dates back to 1975. It suggests that fathers use less familial language to provide their children with a bridge to the kind of speech they’ll hear in public. The idea is that a kid gets to practice a certain kind of speech with mom and another kind of speech with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practice,’ says VanDam.

D Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard speech,’ says Nairan Ramirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. ‘We also found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context,’ she adds. The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.’

E Another study suggests that parents might want to pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind. Researchers from McGill University and Universite du Quebec a Montreal found that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults – which may be why baby talk is such a universal tool among parents. They played repeating vowel sounds made by a special synthesizing device that mimicked sounds made by either an adult woman or another baby. This way, only the impact of the auditory cues was observed. The team then measured how long each type of sound held the infants’ attention. They found that the ‘infant’ sounds held babies’ attention nearly 40 percent longer. The baby noises also induced more reactions in the listening infants, like smiling or lip moving, which approximates sound making. The team theorizes that this attraction to other infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech. It may be some property of the sound that is just drawing their attention,’ says study co-author Linda Polka. ‘Or maybe they are really interested in that particular type of sound because they are starting to focus on their own ability to make sounds. We are speculating here but it might catch their attention because they recognize it as a sound they could possibly make.’

F In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a total of 57 babies from two slightly different age groups – seven months and eleven and a half months – were played a number of syllables from both their native language (English) and a non-native tongue (Spanish). The infants were placed in a brain- activation scanner that recorded activity in a brain region known to guide the motor movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk prompts infant brains to start practicing their language skills. Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start, and suggests that seven-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words,’ says co-author Patricia Kuhl. Another interesting finding was that while the seven-month-olds responded to all speech sounds regardless of language, the brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of non-native sounds compared to native sounds. The study may have also uncovered a process by which babies recognize differences between their native language and other tongues.

Questions 14-17
Look at the following ideas (Questions 14-17) and the list of researchers below. Match each idea with the correct researcher, A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 the importance of adults giving babies individual attention when talking to them
15 the connection between what babies hear and their own efforts to create speech
16 the advantage for the baby of having two parents each speaking in a different way
17 the connection between the amount of baby talk babies hear and how much vocalising they do themselves

List of researchers
A Mark VanDam
B Nairan Ramirez-Esparza
C Patricia Kuhl

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

Research into how parents talk to babies
Researchers at Washington State University used (18)……………………………., together with specialised computer programs, to analyse how parents interacted with their babies during a normal day. The study revealed that (19)………………………..tended not to modify their ordinary speech patterns when interacting with their babies. According to an idea known as the (20)……………………………, they may use a more adult type of speech to prepare infants for the language they will hear outside the family home. According to the researchers, hearing baby talk from one parent and ‘normal’ language from the other expands the baby’s (21)………………………..of types of speech which they can practise.

Meanwhile, another study carried out by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut recorded speech and sound using special (22)…………………………that the babies were equipped with. When they studied the babies again at age two, they found that those who had heard a lot of baby talk in infancy had a much larger (23)………………………..than those who had not.

Questions 24-26
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

24 a reference to a change which occurs in babies’ brain activity before the end of their first year
25 an example of what some parents do for their baby’s benefit before birth
26 a mention of babies’ preference for the sounds that other babies make

Whatever Happened To The Harappan Civilisation?

A The Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were abandoned. The Harappan Civilisation was a sophisticated Bronze Age society who built ‘megacities’ and traded internationally in luxury craft products, and yet seemed to have left almost no depictions of themselves. But their lack of self-imagery – at a time when the Egyptians were carving and painting representations of themselves all over their temples – is only part of the mystery.

B ‘There is plenty of archaeological evidence to tell us about the rise of the Harappan Civilisation, but relatively little about its fall,’ explains archaeologist Dr Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge. ‘As populations increased, cities were built that had great baths, craft workshops, palaces and halls laid out in distinct sectors. Houses were arranged in blocks, with wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own wells and drainage systems. It was very much a “thriving civilisation.’ Then around 2100 BC, a transformation began. Streets went uncleaned, buildings started to be abandoned, and ritual structures fell out of use. After their final demise, a millennium passed before really large-scale cities appeared once more in South Asia.

C Some have claimed that major glacier-fed rivers changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply and agriculture; or that the cities could not cope with an increasing population, they exhausted their resource base, the trading economy broke down or they succumbed to invasion and conflict; and yet others that climate change caused an environmental change that affected food and water provision. ‘It is unlikely that there was a single cause for the decline of the civilisation. But the fact is, until now, we have had little solid evidence from the area for most of the key elements,’ said Petrie. ‘A lot of the archaeological debate has really only been well- argued speculation.’

D A research team led by Petrie, together with Dr Ravindanath Singh of Banaras Hindu University in India, found early in their investigations that many of the archaeological sites were not where they were supposed to be, completely altering understanding of the way that this region was inhabited in the past. When they carried out a survey of how the larger area was settled in relation to sources of water, they found inaccuracies in the published geographic locations of ancient settlements ranging from several hundred metres to many kilometres. They realised that any attempts to use the existing data were likely to be fundamentally flawed. Over the course of several seasons of fieldwork they carried out new surveys, finding an astonishing 198 settlement sites that were previously unknown.

E Now, research published by Dr Yama Dixit and Professor David Hodell, both from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, has provided the first definitive evidence for climate change affecting the plains of north-western India, where hundreds of Harappan sites are known to have been situated. The researchers gathered shells of Melanoides tuberculata snails from the sediments of an ancient lake and used geochemical analysis as a means of tracing the climate history of the region. ’As today, the major source of water into the lake is likely to have been the summer monsoon,’ says Dixit. ‘But we have observed that there was an abrupt change about 4,100 years ago, when the amount of evaporation from the lake exceeded the rainfall – indicative of a drought.’ Hodell adds: ‘We estimate that the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon climate lasted about 200 years before recovering to the previous conditions, which we still see today.’

F It has long been thought that other great Bronze Age civilisations also declined at a similar time, with a global-scale climate event being seen as the cause. While it is possible that these local-scale processes were linked, the real archaeological interest lies in understanding the impact of these larger-scale events on different environments and different populations. ‘Considering the vast area of the Harappan Civilisation with its variable weather systems,’ explains Singh, ‘it is essential that we obtain more climate data from areas close to the two great cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and also from the Indian Punjab.’

G Petrie and Singh’s team is now examining archaeological records and trying to understand details of how people led their lives in the region five millennia ago. They are analysing grains cultivated at the time, and trying to work out whether they were grown under extreme conditions of water stress, and whether they were adjusting the combinations of crops they were growing for different weather systems. They are also looking at whether the types of pottery used, and other aspects of their material culture, were distinctive to specific regions or were more similar across larger areas. This gives us insight into the types of interactive networks that the population was involved in, and whether those changed.

H Petrie believes that archaeologists are in a unique position to investigate how past societies responded to environmental and climatic change. ’By investigating responses to environmental pressures and threats, we can learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant governmental and administrative bodies, to be more proactive in issues such as the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and rural development, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the future.’

Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.

27 proposed explanations for the decline of the Harappan Civilisation
28 reference to a present-day application of some archaeological research findings
29 a difference between the Harappan Civilisation and another culture of the same period
30 a description of some features of Harappan urban design
31 reference to the discovery of errors made by previous archaeologists

Questions 32-36
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for answer.

Looking at evidence of climate change
Yama Dixit and David Hodell have found the first definitive evidence of climate change affecting the plains of north-western India thousands of years ago. By collecting the (32)……………………………of snails and analysing them, they discovered evidence of a change in water levels in a (33)……………………….in the region. This occurred when there was less (34)…………………………… than evaporation, and suggests that there was an extended period of drought.

Petrie and Singh’s team are using archaeological records to look at (35)…………………………….. from five millennia ago, in order to know whether people had adapted their agricultural practices to changing climatic conditions. They are also examining objects including (36)……………………………., so as to find out about links between inhabitants of different parts of the region and whether these changed over time.

Questions 37-40
Look at the following statements (Questions 37-40) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A. B. C or D.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

37 Finding further information about changes to environmental conditions in the region is vital.
38 Examining previous patterns of behaviour may have long-term benefits.
39 Rough calculations indicate the approximate length of a period of water shortage.
40 Information about the decline of the Harappan Civilisation has been lacking.

List of researchers 

A Cameron Petrie
B Ravindanath Singh
C Yama Dixit
D David Hodell

Bringing Cinnamon to Europe

Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent. It was known in biblical times, and is mentioned in several books of the Bible, both as an ingredient that was mixed with oils for anointing people’s bodies, and also as a token indicating friendship among lovers and friends. In ancient Rome, mourners attending funerals burnt cinnamon to create a pleasant scent. Most often, however, the spice found its primary use as an additive to food and drink. In the Middle Ages, Europeans who could afford the spice used it to flavour food, particularly meat, and to impress those around them with their ability to purchase an expensive condiment from the exotic’ East. At a banquet, a host would offer guests a plate with various spices piled upon it as a sign of the wealth at his or her disposal. Cinnamon was also reported to have health benefits, and was thought to cure various ailments, such as indigestion.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the European middle classes began to desire the lifestyle of the elite, including their consumption of spices. This led to a growth in demand for cinnamon and other spices. At that time, cinnamon was transported by Arab merchants, who closely guarded the secret of the source of the spice from potential rivals. They took it from India, where it was grown, on camels via an overland route to the Mediterranean. Their journey ended when they reached Alexandria. European traders sailed there to purchase their supply of cinnamon, then brought it back to Venice. The spice then travelled from that great trading city to markets all around Europe. Because the overland trade route allowed for only small quantities of the spice to reach Europe, and because Venice had a virtual monopoly of the trade, the Venetians could set the price of cinnamon exorbitantly high. These prices, coupled with the increasing demand, spurred the search for new routes to Asia by Europeans eager to take part in the spice trade.

Seeking the high profits promised by the cinnamon market, Portuguese traders arrived on the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean toward the end of the 15th century. Before Europeans arrived on the island, the state had organized the cultivation of cinnamon. People belonging to the ethnic group called the Salagama would peel the bark off young shoots of the cinnamon plant in the rainy season, when the wet bark was more pliable. During the peeling process, they curled the bark into the ‘stick’ shape still associated with the spice today. The Salagama then gave the finished product to the king as a form of tribute. When the Portuguese arrived, they needed to increase production significantly, and so enslaved many other members of the Ceylonese native population, forcing them to work in cinnamon harvesting. In 1518, the Portuguese built a fort on Ceylon, which enabled them to protect the island, so helping them to develop a monopoly in the cinnamon trade and generate very high profits. In the late 16th century, for example, they enjoyed a tenfold profit when shipping cinnamon over a journey of eight days from Ceylon to India.

When the Dutch arrived off the coast of southern Asia at the very beginning of the 17th century, they set their sights on displacing the Portuguese as kings of cinnamon. The Dutch allied themselves with Kandy, an inland kingdom on Ceylon. In return for payments of elephants and cinnamon, they protected the native king from the Portuguese. By 1640, the Dutch broke the 150-year Portuguese monopoly when they overran and occupied their factories. By 1658, they had permanently expelled the Portuguese from the island, thereby gaining control of the lucrative cinnamon trade.

In order to protect their hold on the market, the Dutch, like the Portuguese before them, treated the native inhabitants harshly Because of the need to boost production and satisfy Europe’s ever-increasing appetite for cinnamon, the Dutch began to alter the harvesting practices of the Ceylonese. Over time, the supply of cinnamon trees on the island became nearly exhausted, due to systematic stripping of the bark. Eventually, the Dutch began cultivating their own cinnamon trees to supplement the diminishing number of wild trees available for use.
Then, in 1796, the English arrived on Ceylon, thereby displacing the Dutch from their control of the cinnamon monopoly. By the middle of the 19th century, production of cinnamon reached 1.000 tons a year, after a lower grade quality of the spice became acceptable to European tastes By that time, cinnamon was being grown in other parts of the Indian Ocean region and in the West Indies, Brazil, and Guyana. Not only was a monopoly of cinnamon becoming impossible, but the spice trade overall was diminishing in economic potential, and was eventually superseded by the rise of trade in coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar.

Questions 1-9
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The early history of Cinnamon

Biblical times: added to (1)…………..
Used to show (2)……………………between people

Ancient Rome: used for its sweet smell at (3)………………….
Was an indication of a person’s (4)…………………….
Known as a treatment for (5)……………………………..and other health problems
Grown in (6)…………………………
Merchants used (7)……………………………to bring it to the Mediterranean
Arrived in the Mediterranean at (8)………………………
Traders took it to (9)………………………and sold it to destinations around Europe

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. 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. The Portuguese had control over the cinnamon trade in Ceylon throughout the 16th century.
11. The Dutch took over the cinnamon trade from the Portuguese as soon as they arrived in Ceylon.
12. The trees planted by the Dutch produced larger quantities of cinnamon than the wild trees.
13. The spice trade maintained its economic importance during the 19th century.

Oxytocin

A Oxytocin is a chemical, a hormone produced in the pituitary gland in the brain. It was through various studies focusing on animals that scientists first became aware of the influence of oxytocin. They discovered that it helps reinforce the bonds between prairie voles, which mate for life, and triggers the motherly behaviour that sheep show towards their newborn lambs. It is also released by women in childbirth, strengthening the attachment between mother and baby. Few chemicals have as positive a reputation as oxytocin, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘love hormone’. One sniff of it can, it is claimed, make a person more trusting, empathetic, generous and cooperative. It is time, however, to revise this wholly optimistic view. A new wave of studies has shown that its effects vary greatly depending on the person and the circumstances, and it can impact on our social interactions for worse as well as for better.

B Oxytocin’s role in human behaviour first emerged in 2005. In a groundbreaking experiment, Markus Heinrichs and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg, Germany, asked volunteers to do an activity in which they could invest money with an anonymous person who was not guaranteed to be honest. The team found that participants who had sniffed oxytocin via a nasal spray beforehand invested more money than those who received a placebo instead. The study was the start of research into the effects of oxytocin on human interactions. ‘For eight years, it was quite a lonesome field,’ Heinrichs recalls. ‘Now, everyone is interested.’ These follow-up studies have shown that after a sniff of the hormone, people become more charitable, better at reading emotions on others’ faces and at communicating constructively in arguments. Together, the results fuelled the view that oxytocin universally enhanced the positive aspects of our social nature.

C Then, after a few years, contrasting findings began to emerge. Simone Shamay- Tsoory at the University of Haifa, Israel, found that when volunteers played a competitive game, those who inhaled the hormone showed more pleasure when they beat other players, and felt more envy when others won. What’s more, administering oxytocin also has sharply contrasting outcomes depending on a person’s disposition. Jennifer Bartz from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, found that it improves people’s ability to read emotions, but only if they are not very socially adept to begin with. Her research also shows that oxytocin in fact reduces cooperation in subjects who are particularly anxious or sensitive to rejection.

D Another discovery is that oxytocin’s effects vary depending on who we are interacting with. Studies conducted by Carolyn DeClerck of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, revealed that people who had received a dose of oxytocin actually became less cooperative when dealing with complete strangers. Meanwhile, Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands discovered that volunteers given oxytocin showed favouritism: Dutch men became quicker to associate positive words with Dutch names than with foreign ones, for example. According to De Dreu, oxytocin drives people to care for those in their social circles and defend them from outside dangers. So, it appears that oxytocin strengthens biases, rather than promoting general goodwill, as was previously thought.

E There were signs of these subtleties from the start. Bartz has recently shown that in almost half of the existing research results, oxytocin influenced only certain individuals or in certain circumstances. Where once researchers took no notice of such findings, now a more nuanced understanding of oxytocin’s effects is propelling investigations down new lines. To Bartz, the key to understanding what the hormone does lies in pinpointing its core function rather than in cataloguing its seemingly endless effects. There are several hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive. Oxytocin could help to reduce anxiety and fear. Or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections. She believes that oxytocin acts as a chemical spotlight that shines on social clues – a shift in posture, a flicker of the eyes, a dip in the voice – making people more attuned to their social environment. This would explain why it makes us more likely to look others in the eye and improves our ability to identify emotions. But it could also make things worse for people who are overly sensitive or prone to interpreting social cues in the worst light.

F Perhaps we should not be surprised that the oxytocin story has become more perplexing. The hormone is found in everything from octopuses to sheep, and its evolutionary roots stretch back half a billion years. ‘It’s a very simple and ancient molecule that has been co-opted for many different functions,’ says Sue Carter at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. ‘It affects primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala, so it’s going to have many effects on just about everything.’ Bartz agrees. ‘Oxytocin probably does some very basic things, but once you add our higher-order thinking and social situations, these basic processes could manifest in different ways depending on individual differences and context.’

Questions 14-17
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 reference to research showing the beneficial effects of oxytocin on people
15 reasons why the effects of oxytocin are complex
16 mention of a period in which oxytocin attracted little scientific attention
17 reference to people ignoring certain aspects of their research data

Questions 18-20
Look at the following research findings (Questions 18-20) and the list of researchers below.
Match each research finding with the correct researcher, A-F Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.

18 People are more trusting when affected by oxytocin.
19 Oxytocin increases people’s feelings of jealousy.
20 The effect of oxytocin varies from one type of person to another.

List of researchers
A Markus Heinrichs
B Simone Shamay-Tsoory
C Jennifer Bartz
D Carolyn DeClerck
E Carsten De Dreu
F Sue Carter

Questions 21-26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

Oxytocin research

The earliest findings about oxytocin and bonding came from research involving (21)……………………….. it was also discovered that humans produce oxytocin during (22)………………………. An experiment in 2005, in which participants were given either oxytocin or a (23)………………………….reinforced the belief that the hormone had a
positive effect.

However, later research suggests that this is not always the case. A study at the University of Haifa where participants took part in a (24)………………………..revealed the negative emotions which oxytocin can trigger. A study at the University of Antwerp showed people’s lack of willingness to help (25)……………………….while under the influence of oxytocin. Meanwhile, research at the University of Amsterdam revealed that people who have been given oxytocin consider (26)…………………………..that are familiar to them in their own country to have more positive associations than those from other cultures.

Making the most of trends

Most managers can identify the major trends of the day. But in the course of conducting research in a number of industries and working directly with companies, we have discovered that managers often fail to recognize the less obvious but profound ways these trends are influencing consumers’ aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. This is especially true of trends that managers view as peripheral to their core markets.

Mam ignore trends in their innovation strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach and let competitors take the lead. At a minimum, such responses mean missed profit opportunities. At the extreme, they can jeopardize a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry. The purpose of this article is twofold: to spur managers to think more expansively about how trends could engender new value propositions in their core markets, and to provide some high-level advice on how’ to make market research and product development personnel more adept at analyzing and exploiting trends.

One strategy, known as ‘infuse and augment’, is to design a product or service that retains most of the attributes and functions of existing products in the category but adds others that address the needs and desires unleashed by a major trend. A case in point is the Poppy range of handbags, which the firm Coach created in response to the economic downturn of 2008. The Coach brand had been a symbol of opulence and luxury for nearly 70 years, and the most obvious reaction to the downturn would have been to lower prices. However, that would have risked cheapening the brand’s image. Instead, they initiated a consumer-research project which revealed that customers were eager to lift themselves and the country out of tough limes. Using these insights. Coach launched the lower-priced Poppy handbags, which were in vibrant colors, and looked more youthful and playful than conventional Coach products. Creating the sub-brand allowed Coach to avert an across-the-board price cut. In contrast to the many companies that responded to the recession by cutting prices. Coach saw the new consumer mindset as an opportunity for innovation and renewal.

A further example of this strategy was supermarket Tesco’s response to consumers’ growing concerns about the environment. With that in mind. Tesco, one of the world’s top five retailers, introduced its Greener Living program, which demonstrates the company’s commitment to protecting the environment by involving consumers in ways that produce tangible results. For example. Tesco customers can accumulate points for such activities as reusing bags, recycling cans and printer cartridges, and buying home-insulation materials. Like points earned on regular purchases, these green points can be redeemed for cash. Tesco has not abandoned its traditional retail offerings but augmented its business with these innovations, thereby infusing its value proposition with a green streak.

A more radical strategy is ‘combine and transcend’. This entails combining aspects of the product s existing value proposition with attributes addressing changes arising from a trend, to create a novel experience – one that may land the company in an entirely new market space. At first glance, spending resources to incorporate elements of a seemingly irrelevant trend into one’s core offerings sounds like it’s hardly worthwhile. But consider Nike’s move to integrate the digital revolution into its reputation for high-performance athletic footwear. In 2006, they teamed up with technology company Apple to launch Nike-f. a digital sports kit comprising a sensor that attaches to the running shoe and a wireless receiver that connects to the user’s iPod, By combining Nike’s original value proposition for amateur athletes with one for digital consumers, the Nike • sports kit and web interface moved the company from a focus on athletic apparel to a new plane of engagement with its customers.

A third approach, known as ‘counteract and reaffirm’, involves developing products or services that stress the values traditionally associated with the category in ways that allow consumers to oppose or at least temporarily escape from the aspects of trends they view as undesirable. A product that accomplished this is the ME2, a video game created by Canada’s iToys. By reaffirming the toy category’s association with physical play, the ME2 counteracted some of the widely perceived negative impacts of digital gaming devices. Like other handheld games, the device featured a host of exciting interactive games, a lull-color LCD screen, and advanced 3D graphics. What set it apart was that it incorporated the traditional physical component of children’s play: it contained a pedometer, which tracked and awarded points for physical activity (walking, running, biking, skateboarding, climbing stairs). The child could use the points to enhance various virtual skills needed for the video game. The ME2, introduced in mid- 2008, catered to kids’ huge desire to play video games while countering the negatives, such as associations with lack of exercise and obesity.

Once you have gained perspective on how trend-related changes in consumer opinions and behaviors impact on your category, you can determine which of our three innovation strategies to pursue. When your category’s basic value proposition continues to be meaningful for consumers influenced by the trend, the infuse-and-augment strategy will allow you to reinvigorate the category. If analysis reveals an increasing disparity between y our category and consumers’ new focus, your innovations need to transcend the category to integrate the two worlds. Finally, if aspects of the category clash with undesired outcomes of a trend, such as associations with unhealthy lifestyles, there is an opportunity to counteract those changes by reaffirming the core values of your category.

Trends – technological, economic, environmental, social, or political – that affect how people perceive the world around them and shape what they expect from products and services present firms with unique opportunities for growth.

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

27 In the first paragraph, the writer says that most managers
A fail to spot the key consumer trends of the moment.
B make the mistake of focusing only on the principal consumer trends.
C misinterpret market research data relating to current consumer trends.
D are unaware of the significant impact that trends have on consumers’ lives.

28 According to the third paragraph, Coach was anxious to
A follow what some of its competitors were doing.
B maintain its prices throughout its range.
C safeguard its reputation as a manufacturer of luxury goods.
D modify the entire look of its brand to suit the economic climate.

29 What point is made about Tesco’s Greener Living programme?
A It did not require Tesco to modify its core business activities.
B It succeeded in attracting a more eco-conscious clientele.
C Its main aim was to raise consumers’ awareness of environmental issues.
D It was not the first time that Tesco had implemented such an initiative.

30 What does the writer suggest about Nike’s strategy?
A It was an extremely risky strategy at the time.
B It was a strategy that only a major company could afford to follow.
C It was the type of strategy that would not have been possible in the past.
D It was the kind of strategy which might appear to have few obvious benefits.

31 What was original about the ME2?
A It contained technology that had been developed for the sports industry.
B It appealed to young people who were keen to improve their physical fitness.
C It took advantage of a current trend for video games with colourful 3D graphics.
D It was a handheld game that addressed people’s concerns about unhealthy lifestyles

Questions 32-37
Look at the following statements and the list of companies below. Match each statement with the correct company A, B, C or D.

32. It turned the notion that its products could have harmful effects to its own advantage.
33. It extended its offering by collaborating with another manufacturer.
34. It implemented an incentive scheme to demonstrate its corporate social responsibility.
35. It discovered that customers had a positive attitude towards dealing with difficult circumstances.
36. It responded to a growing lifestyle trend in an unrelated product sector.
37. It successfully avoided having to charge its customers less for its core products.

List of companies
A Coach
B Tesco
C Nike
D iToys

Questions 38-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending. A, B, C or D below.

38 If there are any trend-related changes impacting on your category, you should
39 If a current trend highlights a negative aspect of your category, you should
40 If the consumers’ new focus has an increasing lack of connection with your offering, you should

A employ a combination of strategies to maintain your consumer base.
B identify the most appropriate innovation strategy to use.
C emphasise your brand’s traditional values with the counteract-and- affirm strategy.
D use the combine-and-transcend strategy to integrate the two worlds.

Case Study: Tourism New Zealand Website

New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country’s gross domestic product, and is the country’s largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas, tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself – the people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on New Zealand’s scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture, and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world.

A key feature of the campaign was the website www.newzealand.com, which provided potential visitors to New Zealand with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer. The heart of the website was a database of tourism services operators, both those based in New Zealand and those based abroad which offered tourism services to the country. Any tourism-related business could be listed by filling in a simple form. This meant that even the smallest bed and breakfast address or specialist activity provider could gain a web presence with access to an audience of long-haul visitors. In addition, because participating businesses were able to update the details they gave on a regular basis, the information provided remained accurate. And to maintain and improve standards, Tourism New Zealand organised a scheme whereby organisations appearing on the website underwent an independent evaluation against a set of agreed national standards of quality. As part of this, the effect of each business on the environment was considered.

To communicate the New Zealand experience, the site also carried features relating to famous people and places. One of the most popular was an interview with former New Zealand All Blacks rugby captain Tana Umaga. Another feature that attracted a lot of attention was an interactive journey through a number of the locations chosen for blockbuster films which had made use of New Zealand’s stunning scenery as a backdrop. As the site developed, additional features were added to help independent travellers devise their own customised itineraries. To make it easier to plan motoring holidays, the site catalogued the most popular driving routes in the country, highlighting different routes according to the season and indicating distances and times.

Later a Travel Planner feature was added, which allowed visitors to click and ‘bookmark’ : paces or attractions they were interested in, and then view the results on a map. The Travel Planner offered suggested routes and public transport options between the chosen locations. There were also links to accommodation in the area. By registering with the website, users could save their Travel Plan and return to it later, or print it out take on the visit. The website also had a ‘Your Words’ section where anyone could submit a blog of their New Zealand travels for possible inclusion on the website.

The Tourism New Zealand website won two Webby awards for online achievement and innovation. More importantly perhaps, the growth of tourism to New Zealand was impressive. Overall tourism expenditure increased by an average of 6.9% per year between 1999 and 2004. From Britain, visits to New Zealand grew at an average annual rate of 13% between 2002 and 2006, compared to a rate of 4% overall for British visits abroad.

The website was set up to allow both individuals and travel organisations to create itineraries and travel packages to suit their own needs and interests. On the website, visitors can search for activities not solely by geographical location, but also by the particular nature of the activity. This is important as research shows that activities are the key driver of visitor satisfaction, contributing 74% to visitor satisfaction, while transport and accommodation account for the remaining 26%. The more activities that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. It has also been found that visitors enjoy cultural activities most when they are interactive, such as visiting a marae (meeting ground) to learn about traditional Maori life. Many long-haul travellers enjoy such earning experiences, which provide them with stories to take home to their friends and family. In addition, it appears that visitors to New Zealand don’t want to be ‘one of the crowd’ and find activities that involve only a few people more special and meaningful.

It could be argued that New Zealand is not a typical destination. New Zealand is a small country with a visitor economy composed mainly of small businesses. It is generally perceived as a safe English-speaking country with a reliable transport infrastructure. Because of the long-haul flight, most visitors stay for longer (average 20 days) and want to see as much of the country as possible on what is often seen as a once-in-a-lifetime visit. However, the underlying lessons apply anywhere-the effectiveness of a strong brand, a strategy based on unique experiences and a comprehensive and user-friendly website.

Questions 1-7
Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Section of website	Comments
Database of tourism	– easy for tourism-related businesses to get on the list – allowed businesses to (1)………………………information regularly – provided a country-wide evaluation of businesses including their impact on the (2)……………..
Special features on local topics	– e.g. an interview with a former a sports (3)………………..and an interactive tour of various locations used in (4)………………….
Information on driving routes	– varied depending on the (5)……………….
Travel planner	– included a map showing selected places, details of public transport and local (6)……………..
Your Words	– travellers could send a link to their (7)………………….

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

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

8. The website www.newzealand.com aimed to provide ready-made itineraries and packages for travel companies and individual tourists.
9. It was found that most visitors started searching on the website by geographical location.
10. According to research, 26% of visitor satisfaction is related to their accommodation.
11. Visitors to New Zealand like to become involved in the local culture.
12. Visitors like staying in small hotels in New Zealand rather than in larger ones.
13. Many visitors feel it is unlikely that they will return to New Zealand after their visit.

A We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether Boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

B By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

C Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

D Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada isn’t convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.

E Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill -it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

F Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i The productive outcomes that may result from boredom
ii What teachers can do to prevent boredom
iii A new explanation and a new cure for boredom
iv Problems with a scientific approach to boredom
v A potential danger arising from boredom
vi Creating a system of classification for feelings of boredom
vii Age groups most affected by boredom
viii Identifying those most affected by boredom

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

Questions 20-23
Look at the following people (Questions 20-23) and the list of ideas below.
Match each person with the correct idea, A-E. Choose the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.

20. Peter Toohey
21. Thomas Goetz
22. John Eastwood
23. Francoise Wemelsfelder

List of Ideas
A The way we live today may encourage boredom.
B One sort of boredom is worse than all the others.
C Levels of boredom may fall in the future.
D Trying to cope with boredom can increase its negative effects.
E Boredom may encourage us to avoid an unpleasant experience.

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

Responses to boredom
For John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot (24)………………………………, due to a failure in what he calls the ‘attention system’, and as a result they become frustrated and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom (25) …………………………………….is an important aim in life may have problems in coping with boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic of 26………….. generally cope with it.

Artificial Artists

The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score. Artworks painted by a robot have sold for thousands of dollars and been hung in prestigious galleries. And software has been built which creates art that could not have been imagined by the programmer.

Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? This is a question at the very core of humanity,’ says Geraint Wiggins, a computational creativity researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. ‘It scares a lot of people. They are worried that it is taking something special away from what it means to be human.’

To some extent, we are all familiar with computerised art. The question is: where does the work of the artist stop and the creativity of the computer begin? Consider one of the oldest machine artists, Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in London’s Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron can pick up a paintbrush and paint on canvas on its own. Impressive perhaps, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer’s own creative ideas.

Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to make sure his creation doesn’t attract the same criticism. Unlike earlier ‘artists’ such as Aaron, the Painting Fool only needs minimal direction and can come up with its own concepts by going online for material. The software runs its own web searches and trawls through social media sites. It is now beginning to display a kind of imagination too, creating pictures from scratch. One of its original works is a series of fuzzy landscapes, depicting trees and sky. While some might say they have a mechanical look, Colton argues that such reactions arise from people’s double standards towards software-produced and human-produced art. After all, he says, consider that the Painting Fool painted the landscapes without referring to a photo. ‘If a child painted a new scene from its head, you’d say it has a certain level of imagination,’ he points out. The same should be true of a machine.’ Software bugs can also lead to unexpected results. Some of the Painting Fool’s paintings of a chair came out in black and white, thanks to a technical glitch. This gives the work an eerie, ghostlike quality. Human artists like the renowned Ellsworth Kelly are lauded for limiting their colour palette – so why should computers be any different?

Researchers like Colton don’t believe it is right to measure machine creativity directly to that of humans who have had millennia to develop our skills’. Others, though, are fascinated by the prospect that a computer might create something as original and subtle as our best artists So far, only one has come close. Composer David Cope invented a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI, Not only did EMI create compositions in Cope s style, but also that of the most revered classical composers, including Bach, Chopin and Mozart. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts into thinking they were hearing genuine Bach. Not everyone was impressed however. Some, such as Wiggins, have blasted Cope’s work as pseudoscience, and condemned him for his deliberately vague explanation of how the software worked. Meanwhile. Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University said EMI created replicas which still rely completely on the original artist’s creative impulses, When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged with Cope, and one music lover even tried to punch him. Amid such controversy, Cope destroyed EMI’s vital databases.

But why did so many people love the music, yet recoil when they discovered how it was composed? A study by computer scientist David Moffat of Glasgow Caledonian University provides a clue. He asked both expert musicians and non-experts to assess six compositions. The participants weren’t told beforehand whether the tunes were composed by humans or computers, but were asked to guess, and then rate how much they liked each one. People who thought the composer was a computer tended to dislike the piece more than those who believed it was human. This was true even among the experts, who might have been expected to be more objective in their analyses.

Where does this prejudice come from? Paul Bloom of Yale University has a suggestion: he reckons part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind the work. This can give it an ‘irresistible essence’, says Bloom. Meanwhile, experiments by Justin Kruger of New York University have shown that people s enjoyment of an artwork increases if they think more time and effort was needed to create it. Similarly, Colton thinks that when people experience art, they wonder what the artist might have been thinking or what the artist is trying to tell them. It seems obvious, therefore, that with computers producing art, this speculation is cut short – there’s nothing to explore. But as technology becomes increasingly complex, finding those greater depths in computer art could become possible. This is precisely why Colton asks the Painting Fool to tap into online social networks for its inspiration: hopefully this way it will choose themes that will already be meaningful to us.

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

27. What is the writer suggesting about computer-produced works in the first paragraph?
A People’s acceptance of them can vary considerably.
B A great deal of progress has already been attained in this field.
C They have had more success in some artistic genres than in others.
D The advances are not as significant as the public believes them to be.

28. According to Geraint Wiggins, why are many people worried by computer art?
A It is aesthetically inferior to human art.
B It may ultimately supersede human art.
C It undermines a fundamental human quality.
D It will lead to a deterioration in human ability.

29. What is a key difference between Aaron and the Painting Fool?
A its programmer’s background
B public response to its work
C the source of its subject matter
D the technical standard of its output

30. What point does Simon Colton make in the fourth paragraph?
A Software-produced art is often dismissed as childish and simplistic.
B The same concepts of creativity should not be applied to all forms of art.
C It is unreasonable to expect a machine to be as imaginative as a human being.
D People tend to judge computer art and human art according to different criteria.

31. The writer refers to the paintings of a chair as an example of computer art which
A achieves a particularly striking effect.
B exhibits a certain level of genuine artistic skill.
C closely resembles that of a well-known artist.
D highlights the technical limitations of the software.

Questions 32-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G below. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 32-37 on your answer sheet.

32. Simon Colton says it is important to consider the long-term view when
33. David Cope’s EMI software surprised people by
34. Geraint Wiggins criticised Cope for not
35. Douglas Hofstadter claimed that EMI was
36. Audiences who had listened to EMI’s music became angry after
37. The participants in David Moffat’s study had to assess music without

List of Ideas
A generating work that was virtually indistinguishable from that of humans.
B knowing whether it was the work of humans or software.
C producing work entirely dependent on the imagination of its creator.
D comparing the artistic achievements of humans and computers.
E revealing the technical details of his program.
F persuading the public to appreciate computer art.
G discovering that it was the product of a computer program.

Questions 38-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet, write

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

38. Moffat’s research may help explain people’s reactions to EMI.
39. The non-experts in Moffat’s study all responded in a predictable way.
40. Justin Kruger s findings cast doubt on Paul Bloom’s theory about people’s prejudice towards computer art.