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Reading Passage 1
Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
The 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and
Gilbert. The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist,
also the accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of
learning and a physician at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of
electricity and magnetism was what the ancients knew, nothing more than that the
lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would
attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific gravity. However, he is less
well known than he deserves.
He was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the
president of the Royal Science Society. He was also appointed personal physician to
the Queen (Elizabeth I), and later knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until
her death. However, he didn’t outlive the Queen for long and died on November 30,
1603, only a few months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.
Gilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large
portion of mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He
gradually developed his interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient,
particularly about the knowledge the ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange
minerals with the power to attract iron. In the meantime, Britain became a major
seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeated, opening the way to
British settlement of America. British ships depended on the magnetic compass, yet no
one understood why it worked. Did the Pole Star attract it, as Columbus once
speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in Odyssey,
which ships would never approach, because the sailors thought its pull would yank out
all their iron nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years, William Gilbert conducted ingenious
experiments to understand magnetism. His works include On the Magnet, Magnetic
Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth.
His research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure
logic and reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude
towards scientific investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion. It
was because of this scientific attitude, together with his contribution to our knowledge of
magnetism, that a unit of magneto motive force, also known as magnetic potential, was
named Gilbert in his honour. His approach of careful observation and experimentation
rather than the authoritative opinion or deductive philosophy of others had laid the very
foundation for modern science.
Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of headings
1Paragraph A
2Paragraph B
3Paragraph C
4Paragraph D
Paragraph E
6Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-10
Show Notepad
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
Questions 11-13
Choose THREE letters A-F.
Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In
boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet write
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
…………. The average summer temperature in 2003 is almost 4 degrees higher than the average
temperature of the past.
…………. Global warming is caused by human activities.
…………. Jones believes the temperature variation is within the normal range.
…………. The temperature is measured twice a day in major cities.
………….There were milder winters rather than hotter summers.
………….Governments are building new high-altitude ski resorts.
Questions 20-21
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR
NUMBERS from the passage for each answer.
Question 26
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answer in box 26 on your answer sheet.
26 Which one of the following can be best used as the title of this passage?
A Global Warming
B What Caused Global Warming
C The Effects of Global Warming
DThat Hot Year in Europe
Amateur Naturalists
From the results of an annual Alaskan betting contest to sightings of migratory birds,
ecologists are using a wealth of unusual data to predict the impact of climate change.
A Tim Sparks slides a small leather-bound notebook out of an envelope. The book's yellowing
pages contain bee-keeping notes made between 1941 and 1969 by the late Walter Coates of
Kilworth, Leicestershire. He adds it to his growing pile of local journals, birdwatchers' lists and
gardening diaries. "We're uncovering about one major new record each month," he says, "I still
get surprised." Around two centuries before Coates, Robert Marsham, a landowner from Norfolk
in the east of England, began recording the life cycles of plants and animals on his estate - when
the first wood anemones flowered, the dates on which the oaks burst into leaf and the rooks
began nesting. Successive Marshams continued compiling these notes for 211 years.
B Today, such records are being put to uses that their authors could not possibly have expected.
These data sets, and others like them, are proving invaluable to ecologists interested in the timing
of biological events, or phenology. By combining the records with climate data, researchers can
reveal how, for example, changes in temperature affect the arrival of spring, allowing ecologists
to make improved predictions about the impact of climate change. A small band of researchers is
combing through hundreds of years of records taken by thousands of amateur naturalists. And
more systematic projects have also started up, producing an overwhelming response. "The
amount of interest is almost frightening," says Sparks, a climate researcher at the Centre for
Ecology and Hydrology in Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire.
D Other researchers have unearthed data from equally odd sources. Rafe Sagarin, an ecologist at
Stanford University in California, recently studied records of a betting contest in which
participants attempt to guess the exact time at which a specially erected wooden tripod will fall
through the surface of a thawing river. The competition has taken place annually on the Tenana
River in Alaska since 1917, and analysis of the results showed that the thaw now arrives five
days earlier than it did when the contest began.
E Overall, such records have helped to show that, compared with 20 years ago, a raft of natural
events now occur earlier across much of the northern hemisphere, from the opening of leaves to
the return of birds from migration and the emergence of butterflies from hibernation. The data
can also hint at how nature will change in the future. Together with models of climate change,
amateurs' records could help guide conservation. Terry Root, an ecologist at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor, has collected birdwatchers' counts of wildfowl taken between 1955 and
1996 on seasonal ponds in the American Midwest and combined them with climate data and
models of future warming. Her analysis shows that the increased droughts that the models
predict could halve the breeding populations at the ponds. "The number of waterfowl in North
America will most probably drop significantly with global warming," she says.
F But not all professionals are happy to use amateur data. "A lot of scientists won't touch them,
they say they're too full of problems," says Root. Because different observers can have different
ideas of what constitutes, for example, an open snowdrop. "The biggest concern with ad hoc
observations is how carefully and systematically they were taken," says Mark Schwartz of the
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who studies the interactions between plants and climate.
"We need to know pretty precisely what a person's been observing - if they just say 'I noted when
the leaves came out', it might not be that useful." Measuring the onset of autumn can be
particularly problematic because deciding when leaves change colour is a more subjective pro-
cess than noting when they appear.
G Overall, most phenologists are positive about the contribution that amateurs can make. "They
get at the raw power of science: careful observation of the natural world," says Sagarin. But the
professionals also acknowledge the need for careful quality control. Root, for example, tries to
gauge the quality of an amateur archive by interviewing its collector. "You always have to worry
- things as trivial as vacations can affect measurement. I disregard a lot of records because
they're not rigorous enough," she says. Others suggest that the right statistics can iron out some
of the problems with amateur data. Together with colleagues at Wageningen University in the
Netherlands, environmental scientist Arnold van Vliet is developing statistical techniques to
account for the uncertainty in amateur phenological data. With the enthusiasm of amateur
phenologists evident from past records, professional researchers are now trying to create
H Phenology also helps to drive home messages about climate change. "Because the public
understand these records, they accept them," says Sparks.
It can also illustrate potentially unpleasant consequences, he adds, such as the finding that more
rat infestations are reported to local councils in warmer years. And getting people involved is
great for public relations. "People are thrilled to think that the data they've been collecting as a
hobby can be used for something scientific - it empowers them," says Root.
Questions 27-33
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs A-H.
Questions 34-36
Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for
each answer.
But knowing how to catch deceit can be just as important a survival skill as knowing how to tell
a lie and get away with it. A person able to spot falsehood quickly is unlikely to be swindled by
an unscrupulous business associate or hoodwinked by a devious spouse. Luckily, nature provides
more than enough clues to trap dissemblers in their own tangled webs- if you know where to
look. By closely observing facial expressions, body language and tone of voice, practically
anyone can recognise the tell-tale signs of lying. Researchers are even programming computers –
like those used on Lie Detector -to get at the truth by analysing the same physical cues available
to the naked eye and ear. “With the proper training, many people can learn to reliably detect
lies,” says Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco,
who has spent the past 15 years studying the secret art of deception.
In order to know what kind of Lies work best, successful liars need to accurately assess other
people’s emotional states. Ackman’s research shows that this same emotional intelligence is
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 14
essential for good lie detectors, too. The emotional state to watch out for is stress, the conflict
most liars feel between the truth and what they actually say and do.
Even high-tech lie detectors don’t detect lies as such; they merely detect the physical cues of
emotions, which may or may not correspond to what the person being tested is saying.
Polygraphs, for instance, measure respiration, heart rate and skin conductivity, which tend to
increase when people are nervous – as they usually are when lying. Nervous people typically
perspire, and the salts contained in perspiration conducts electricity. That’s why sudden leap in
skin conductivity indicates nervousness -about getting caught, perhaps -which makes, in turn,
suggest that someone is being economical with the truth. On the other hand, it might also mean
that the lights in the television Studio are too hot- which is one reason polygraph tests are
inadmissible in court. “Good lie detectors don’t rely on a single thing” says Ekma ,but interpret
clusters of verbal and non-verbal clues that suggest someone might be lying.”
The clues are written all over the face. Because the musculature of the face is directly connected
to the areas of the brain that processes emotion, the countenance can be a window to the soul.
Neurological studies even suggest that genuine emotions travel different pathways through the
brain than insincere ones. If a patient paralyzed by stroke on one side of the face, for example, is
asked to smile deliberately, only the mobile side of the mouth is raised. But tell that same person
a funny joke, and the patient breaks into a full and spontaneous smile. Very few people -most
notably, actors and politicians- are able to consciously control all of their facial expressions. Lies
can often be caught when the liars true feelings briefly leak through the mask of deception. We
don’t think before we feel, Ekman says. “Expressions tend to show up on the face before we’re
even conscious of experiencing an emotion.”
One of the most difficult facial expressions to fake- or conceal, if it’s genuinely felt - is sadness.
When someone is truly sad, the forehead wrinkles with grief and the inner corners of the
eyebrows are pulled up. Fewer than 15% of the people Ekman tested were able to produce this
eyebrow movement voluntarily. By contrast, the lowering of the eyebrows associated with an
angry scowl can be replicated at will but almost everybody. “ If someone claims they are sad and
the inner corners of their eyebrows don’t go up, Ekmam says, the sadness is probably false.”
The smile, on the other hand, is one of the easiest facial expressions to counterfeit. It takes just
two muscles -the zygomaticus major muscles that extend from the cheekbones to the corners of
the lips- to produce a grin. But there’s a catch. A genuine smile affects not only the corners of
the lips but also the orbicularis oculi, the muscle around the eye that produces the distinctive
“crow’s feet” associated with people who laugh a lot. A counterfeit grin can be unmasked if the
corners of the lips go up, the eyes crinkle, but the inner corners of the eyebrows are not lowered,
a movement controlled by the orbicularis oculi that is difficult to fake. The absence of lowered
eyebrows is one reason why the smile looks so strained and stiff.
3.Scientists have used computers to analyze which part of the brain is responsible for telling lies.
Questions 6-9
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 6-9.
Questions 10-13
Classify the following facial traits as referring to
A sadness
B anger
C happiness
A The probability that two right-handed people would have a left-handed child is only about 9.5
percent. The chance rises to 19.5 percent if one parent is a lefty and 26 percent if both parents are
left-handed. The preference, however, could also stem from an infant’s imitation of his parents.
To test genetic influence, starting in the 1970s British biologist Marian Annett of the University
of Leicester hypothesized that no single gene determines handedness. Rather, during fetal
development, a certain molecular factor helps to strengthen the brain’s left hemisphere, which
increases the probability that the right hand will be dominant, because the left side of the brain
controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. Among the minority of people who lack this
factor, handedness develops entirely by chance. Research conducted on twins complicates the
theory, however. One in fivesets of identical twins involves one right-handed and one left-
handed person, despite the fact that their genetic material is the same. Genes, therefore, are not
solely responsible for handedness.
B Genetic theory is also undermined by results from Peter Hepper and his team at Queen’s
University in Belfast, Ireland. In 2004 the psychologists used ultrasound to show that by the 15th
week of pregnancy, fetuses already have a preference as to which thumb they suck. In most
cases, the preference continued after birth. At 15 weeks, though, the brain does not yet have
control over the body’s limbs. Hepper speculates that fetuses tend to prefer whichever side of the
C But even if these correlations were true, they did not explain what actually causes left-
handedness. Furthermore, specialization on either side of the body is common among animals.
Cats will favor one paw over another when fishing toys out from under the couch. Horses stomp
more frequently with one hoof than the other. Certain crabs motion predominantly with the left
or right claw. In evolutionary terms, focusing power and dexterity in one limb is more efficient
than having to train two, four or even eight limbs equally. Yet for most animals, the preference
for one side or the other is seemingly random. The overwhelming dominance of the right hand is
associated only with humans. That fact directs attention toward the brain’s two hemispheres and
perhaps toward language.
D Interest in hemispheres dates back to at least 1836. That year, at a medical conference, French
physician Marc Dax reported on an unusual commonality among his patients. During his many
years as a country doctor, Dax had encountered more than 40 men and women for whom speech
was difficult, the result of some kind of brain damage. What was unique was that every
individual suffered damage to the left side of the brain. At the conference, Dax elaborated on his
theory, stating that each half of the brain was responsible for certain functions and that the left
hemisphere controlled speech. Other experts showed little interest in the Frenchman’s ideas.
Over time, however, scientists found more and more evidence of peopleexperiencing speech
difficulties following injury to the left brain. Patients with damage to the right hemisphere most
often displayed disruptions in perception or concentration. Major advancements in understanding
the brain’s asymmetry were made in the 1960s as a result of so-called split-brain surgery,
developed to help patients with epilepsy. During this operation, doctors severed the corpus
callosum—the nerve bundle that connects the two hemispheres. The surgical cut also stopped
almost all normal communication between the two hemispheres, which offered researchers the
opportunity to investigate each side’s activity.
E In 1949 neurosurgeon Juhn Wada devised the first test to provide access to the brain’s
functional organization of language. By injecting an anesthetic into the right or left carotid
artery, Wada temporarily paralyzed one side of a healthy brain, enabling him to more closely
study the other side’s capabilities. Based on this approach, Brenda Milner and the late Theodore
Rasmussen of the Montreal Neurological Institute published a major study in 1975 that
confirmed the theory that country doctor Dax had formulated nearly 140 years earlier: in 96
percent of right-handed people, language is processed much more intensely in the left
hemisphere. The correlation is not as clear in lefties, however. For two thirds of them, the left
hemisphere is still the most active language processor. But for the remaining third, either the
right side is dominant or both sides work equally, controlling different language functions. That
last statistic has slowed acceptance of the notion that the predominance of right-handedness is
driven by left-hemisphere dominance in language processing. It is not at all clear why language
F Perhaps we will know more soon. In the meantime, we can revel in what, if any, differences
handedness brings to our human talents. Popular wisdom says right-handed, left-brained people
excel at logical, analytical thinking. Lefthanded, right-brained individuals are thought to possess
more creative skills and may be better at combining the functional features emergent in both
sides of the brain. Yet some neuroscientists see such claims as pure speculation. Fewer scientists
are ready to claim that left-handedness means greater creative potential. Yet lefties are prevalent
among artists, composers and the generally acknowledged great political thinkers. Possibly if
these individuals are among the lefties whose language abilities are evenly distributed between
hemispheres, the intense interplay required could lead to unusual mental capabilities.
G Or perhaps some lefties become highly creative simply because they must be more clever to
get by in our right-handed world. This battle, which begins during the very early stages of
childhood, may lay the groundwork for exceptional achievements.
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has seven sections A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
14. Preference of using one side of the body in animal species.
15. How likely one-handedness is born.
16. The age when the preference of using one hand is settled.
17. Occupations usually found in left-handed population.
18. A reference to an early discovery of each hemisphere’s function.
A Early language evolution is correlated to body movement and thus affecting the
preference of use of one hand.
F The rate of development of one side of the body has influence on hemisphere
preference in fetus.
19.Marian Annett
20. Peter Hepper
21.Brenda Milner & Theodore Rasmussen
22. Michael Corballis
Questions 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet write
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
23. The study of twins shows that genetic determinationis not the only factor for left-handedness.
24. Marc Dax’s report was widely accepted in his time.
25. Juhn Wada based his findings on his research of people with language problems
26. There tend to be more men with left-handedness than women.
What is a dinosaur?
A. Although the name dinosaur is derived from the Greek for "terrible lizard", dinosaurs were
not, in fact, lizards at all. Like lizards, dinosaurs are included in the class Reptilia, or reptiles,
one of the five main classes of Vertebrata, animals with backbones. However, at the next level of
classification, within reptiles, significant differences in the skeletal anatomy of lizards and
dinosaurs have led scientists to place these groups of animals into two different superorders:
Lepidosauria, or lepidosaurs, and Archosauria, or archosaurs.
B. Classified as lepidosaurs are lizards and snakes and their prehistoric ancestors. Included
among the archosaurs, or "ruling reptiles", are prehistoric and modern crocodiles, and the now
extinct thecodonts, pterosaurs and dinosaurs. Palaeontologists believe that both dinosaurs and
crocodiles evolved, in the later years of the Triassic Period (c. 248-208 million years ago), from
creatures called pseudosuchian thecodonts. Lizards, snakes and different types of thecodont are
believed to have evolved earlier in the Triassic Period from reptiles known as eosuchians.
C. The most important skeletal differences between dinosaurs and other archosaurs are in the
bones of the skull, pelvis and limbs. Dinosaur skulls are found in a great range of shapes and
sizes, reflecting the different eating habits and lifestyles of a large and varied group of animals
that dominated life on Earth for an extraordinary 165 million years. However, unlike the skulls
of any other known animals, the skulls of dinosaurs had two long bones known as vomers. These
bones extended on either side of the head, from the front of the snout to the level of the holes on
the skull known as the antorbital fenestra, situated in front of the dinosaur's orbits or eyesockets.
E. For the purpose of further classification, dinosaurs are divided into two orders: Saurischia, or
saurischian dinosaurs, and Ornithischia, or ornithischian dinosaurs. This division is made on the
basis of their pelvic anatomy. All dinosaurs had a pelvic girdle with each side comprised of three
bones: the pubis, ilium and ischium. However, the orientation of these bones follows one of two
patterns. In saurischian dinosaurs, also known as lizard-hipped dinosaurs, the pubis points
forwards, as is usual in most types of reptile. By contrast, in ornithischian, or bird-hipped,
dinosaurs, the pubis points backwards towards the rear of the animal, which is also true of birds.
F. Of the two orders of dinosaurs, the Saurischia was the larger and the first to evolve. It is
divided into two suborders: Therapoda, or therapods, and Sauropodomorpha, or
sauropodomorphs. The therapods, or "beast feet", were bipedal, predatory carnivores. They
ranged in size from the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, 12m long, 5.6m tall and weighing an
estimated 6.4 tonnes, to the smallest known dinosaur, Compsognathus, a mere 1.4m long and
estimated 3kg in weight when fully grown. The sauropodomorphs, or "lizard feet forms",
included both bipedal and quadrupedal dinosaurs. Some sauropodomorphs were carnivorous or
omnivorous but later species were typically herbivorous. They included some of the largest and
best-known of all dinosaurs, such as Diplodocus, a huge quadruped with an elephant-like body, a
long, thin tail and neck that gave it a total length of 27m, and a tiny head.
G. Ornithischian dinosaurs were bipedal or quadrupedal herbivores. They are now usually
divided into three suborders: Ornithipoda, Thyreophora and Marginocephalia. The ornithopods,
or "bird feet", both large and small, could walk or run on their long hind legs, balancing their
body by holding their tails stiffly off the ground behind them. An example is Iguanodon, up to
9m long, 5m tall and weighing 4.5 tonnes. The thyreophorans, or "shield bearers", also known as
armoured dinosaurs, were quadrupeds with rows of protective bony spikes, studs, or plates along
their backs and tails. They included Stegosaurus, 9m long and weighing 2 tonnes.
NB. There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use all of them.
27. Paragraph A
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph C
30. Paragraph D
31.Paragraph E
32. Paragraph F
33. Paragraph G
vii Unique body plan helps identify dinosaurs from other animals
ix Lepidosaurs
Questions 34-36
Complete then sentences below.
Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each blank space.
Questions 37-40
Choose one phrase (A-H) from the List of features to match with the Dinosaurs listed below.
The information in the completed sentences should be an accurate summary of the points made
by the writer.
NB. There are more phrases (A-H) than sentences, so you will not need to use them all.
Dinosaurs
37. Dinosaurs differed from lizards, because
38. Saurischian and ornithischian dinosaurs
39. Unlike therapods, sauropodomorphs
40. Some dinosaurs used their tails to balance and could walk
List of features
Answer Keys:
1YES
2YES
3NOT GIVEN
4NO
5YES
6C
7D
8B
9D
10A
11B
12C
13A
14C
15A
16B
17F
18D
19B
20F
21D
22A
23YES
24NO
25NOT GIVEN
26NOT GIVEN
27vi
28xi
29xiii
30vii
31iv
32v
33viii
34skeletal anatomy
35eosuchians
36two long bones
37B
38G
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
B Role models are a popular notion for guiding child development, but in recent years very
interesting research has been done on learning by examples in other animals. If the subject of
animal learning is taught very much in terms of classical or operant conditioning, it places too
much emphasis on how we allow animals to learn and not enough on how they are equipped to
learn. To teach a course of mine, I have been dipping profitably into a very interesting and
accessible compilation of papers on social learning in mammals, including chimps and human
children, edited by Heyes and Galef (1996).
C The research reported in one paper started with a school field trip to Israel to a pine forest
where many pine cones were discovered, stripped to the central core. So the investigation started
with no weighty theoretical intent, but was directed at finding out what was eating the nutritious
pine seeds and how they managed to get them out of the cones. The culprit proved to be the
versatile and athletic black rat,(Rattus rattus), and the technique was to bite each cone scale off at
its base, in sequence from base to tip following the spiral growth pattern of the cone.
D Urban black rats were found to lack the skill and were unable to learn it even if housed with
experienced cone strippers. However, infants of urban mothers cross-fostered by stripper
mothers acquired the skill, whereas infants of stripper mothers fostered by an urban mother could
not. Clearly the skill had to be learned from the mother. Further elegant experiments showed that
naive adults could develop the skill if they were provided with cones from which the first
complete spiral of scales had been removed; rather like our new photocopier which you can work
out how to use once someone has shown you how to switch it on. In the case of rats, the young-
sters take cones away from the mother when she is still feeding on them, allowing them to
acquire the complete stripping skill.
E A good example of adaptive bearing we might conclude, but let’s see the economies. This was
determined by measuring oxygen uptake of a rat stripping a cone in a metabolic chamber to
calculate energetic cost and comparing it with the benefit of the pine seeds measured by
F A paper in 1996, Animal Behaviour by Bednekoff and Baida, provides a different view of the
adaptiveness of social learning. It concerns the seed caching behaviour of Clark's Nutcracker
(Nucifraga columbiana) and the Mexican Jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina). The former is a
specialist, caching 30,000 or so seeds in scattered locations that it will recover over the months
of winter; the Mexican Jay will also cache food but is much less dependent upon this than the
Nutcracker. The two species also differ in their social structure: the Nutcracker being rather
solitary while the Jay forages in social groups.
G The experiment is to discover not just whether a bird can remember where it hid a seed but
also if it can remember where it saw another bird hide a seed. The design is slightly comical with
a cacher bird wandering about a room with lots of holes in the floor hiding food in some of the
holes, while watched by an observer bird perched in a cage. Two days later, cachers and
observers are tested for their discovery rate against an estimated random performance. In the role
of cacher, not only the Nutcracker but also the less specialised Jay performed above chance;
more surprisingly, however, jay observers were as successful as jay cachers whereas nutcracker
observers did no better than chance. It seems that, whereas the Nutcracker is highly adapted at
remembering where it hid its own seeds, the social living Mexican Jay is more adept at
remembering, and so exploiting, the caches of others.
SECTION 1: QUESTIONS 1-13
Questions 1-4
Show Notepad
Questions 5-8
Show Notepad
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
5 The field trip to Israel was to investigate how black rats learn to strip pine
cones.
6 The pine cones were stripped from bottom to top by black rats.
7 It can be learned from other relevant experiences to use a photocopier.
8 Stripping the pine cones is an instinct of the black rats.
Questions 9-13
Show Notepad
READING PASSAGE 2
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 30
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the 16th-century
Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the
1565 masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow”, make the now-temperate European landscapes look
more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from
1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age.
And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists
believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cooldown, or small ice age. While no one is
predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers
about 12,000 years ago, the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees
Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and
northern Asia.
“It could happen in 10 years,” says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical
Oceanography Department. “Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.” And he is
alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and
carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 31
devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises”,
produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at
$100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and
incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling fresh
water, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick climate change wreaks far more disruption
than a slow one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that depend on them are like rivers;
says the report: "For example, high water in a river will pose few problems until the water runs
over the bank, after which levees can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many
biological processes undergo shifts at particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation.”
Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world's
poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that
option doesn't work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. "To the extent that abrupt
climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land,
the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,” says the
report.
But first things first. Isn't the earth actually warming? Indeed it is, says Joyce. ‘ In his cluttered
office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could
actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the
appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of fresh water - the
equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer - mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh
torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a build-up of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British
oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop
in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea - a body of water between northeastern Canada
and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic - "arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the
modern instrumental oceanographic record”.
The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream
waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the
east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to
the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to
Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as
36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston,
for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say
the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. “It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a
European phenomenon," says Joyce.
Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the
North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This
massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep-water current called the
Questions 14-17
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
15
16
Why is it difficult for the poor to survive the next ice age?
A People don’t live in tribes anymore.
B Politics are changing too fast today.
C Abrupt climate change causes people to live off their land.
D Migration has become impossible because of closed borders.
17
Questions 18-22
Show Notepad
Look at the following statements (Questions 18-22) and the list of people in the box below.
A William Curry
B Terrence Joyce
C Bob Dickson
Questions 23-26
Complete the flow chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
A The book is called Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians, but is better
known simply as the “fruit book”. The second edition was produced at the request of politicians
in western Amazonia. Its blend of hard science and local knowledge on the use and trade of 35
native forest species has been so well received (and well used) that no less a dignitary than Bra-
zil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has written the foreword. “There is nothing else like
the Shanley book,” says Adalberto Verrisimo, director of the Institute of People and the
Environment of the Amazon. “It gives science back to the poor, to the people who really need
it.”
B Shanley’s work on the book began a decade ago, with a plea for help from the Rural Workers’
Union of Paragominas, a Brazilian town whose prosperity is based on exploitation of timber. The
union realised that logging companies would soon be knocking on the doors of the caboclos,
peasant farmers living on the Rio Capim, an Amazon tributary in the Brazilian state of Para. Isol-
ated and illiterate, the caboclos would have little concept of the true value of their trees;
communities downstream had already sold off large blocks of forest for a pittance. “What they
wanted to know was how valuable the forests were,” recalls Shanley, then a researcher in the
area for the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Centre.
C The Rural Workers’ Union wanted to know whether harvesting wild fruits would make
economic sense in the Rio Capim. “There was a lot of interest in trading non-timber forest
products (NTFPs),” Shanley says. At the time, environmental groups and green-minded
businesses were promoting the idea. This was the view presented in a seminal paper, Valuation
of an Amazonian Rainforest, published in Nature in 1989. The researchers had calculated that
revenues from the sale of fruits could far exceed those from a one- off sale of trees to loggers.
“The union was keen to discover whether it made more sense conserving the forest for
subsistence use and the possible sale of fruit, game and medicinal plants, than selling trees for
timber,” says Shanley. Whether it would work for the caboclos was far from clear.
D Although Shanley had been invited to work in the Rio Capim, some caboclos were suspicious.
“When Patricia asked if she could study my forest,” says Joao Fernando Moreira Brito, "my
neighbours said she was a foreigner who’d come to rob me of my trees." In the end, Moreira
Brito, or Mangueira as he is known, welcomed Shanley and worked on her study. His land, an
hour's walk from the Rio Capim, is almost entirely covered with primary forest. A study of this
and other tracts of forest selected by the communities enabled Shanley to identify three trees,
found throughout the Amazon, whose fruit was much favoured by the caboclos: bacuri (Platonia
insignis), uxi (Endop- leura uchi) and piquia (Cayocas villosum). The caboclos used their fruits,
E After three logging sales and a major fire in 1997, the researchers were also able to study the
ecosystem's reaction to logging and disturbance. They carried out a similar, though less
exhaustive, study in 1999, this time with 15 families. The changes were striking. Average annual
household consumption of forest fruit had fallen from 89 to 28 kilogrammes between 1993 and
1999. “What we found,” says Shanley, “was that fruit collection could coexist with a certain
amount of logging, but after the forest fire, it dropped dramatically.” Over the same period, fibre
use also dropped from around 20 to 4 kilogrammes. The fire and logging also changed the nature
of the caboclo diet. In 1993 most households ate game two or three times a month. By 1999
some were fortunate if they ate game more than two or three times a year.
F The loss of certain species of tree was especially significant. Shanley’s team persuaded local
hunters to weigh their catch, noting the trees under which the animals were caught. Over the
year, they trapped five species of game averaging 232 kilogrammes under piquia trees. Under
copaiba, they caught just two species averaging 63 kilogrammes; and under uxi, four species
weighing 38 kilogrammes. At last, the team was getting a handle on which trees were worth
keeping, and which could reasonably be sold. “This showed that selling piquia trees to loggers
for a few dollars made little sense,” explains Shanley. “Their local value lies in providing a
prized fruit, as well as flowers which attract more game than any other species.”
G As a result of these studies, Shanley had to tell the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas that
the Nature thesis could not be applied wholesale to their community - harvesting NTFPs would
not always yield more than timber sales. Fruiting patterns of trees such as uxi were
unpredictable, for example. In 1994, one household collected 3,654 uxi fruits; the following year,
none at all.
H This is not to say that wild fruit trees were unimportant. On the contrary, argues Shanley, they
are critical for subsistence, something that is often ignored in much of the current research on
NTFPs, which tends to focus on their commercial potential. Geography was another factor
preventing the Rio Capim caboclos from establishing a serious trade in wild fruit: villagers in
remote areas could not compete with communities collecting NTFPs close to urban markets,
although they could sell them to passing river boats.
I But Shanley and her colleagues decided to do more than just report their results to the union.
Together with two of her research colleagues, Shanley wrote the fruit book. This, the Bible and a
publication on medicinal plants co-authored by Shanley and designed for people with minimal
literacy skills are about the only books you will see along this stretch of the Rio Capim. The first
print ran to only 3,000 copies, but the fruit book has been remarkably influential, and is used by
colleges, peasant unions, industries and the caboclos themselves. Its success is largely due to the
Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs A-I.
Questions 33-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Game
There is the least amount of game hunted under 35 yield is also 36
. Thus, it is more reasonable to keep 37 .
All the trees can also be used for 38 besides selling them to loggers. But this is
often ignored, because most researches usually focus on the 39 of the trees.
Answer Keys:
1D
2A
3C
4E
5FALSE
6TRUE
7TRUE
8FALSE
9less
10social
11watched
12observer
13Nutcracker
14B
15A
16D
17A
18B
19D
20A
21B
22C
23heat
24denser
25Great Ocean Conveyor
26fresh water
27D
28A
29C
30B
31E
32I
33(forest) fruit/Fibre
34(forest) fruit/Fibre
35uxi
36unpredictable
37piquia (trees)
38subsistence
39commercial potential
40non-timber forest products/NTFPs
Frances H. Rauscher, PhD, first demonstrated the correlation between music and learning in an
experiment in 1993. His experiment indicated that a 10-minute dose of Mozart could temporarily
boost intelligence. Groups of students were given intelligence tests after listening to silence,
relaxation tapes, or Mozart’s "Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major” for a short time. He found that
after silence, the average IQ score was 110, and after the relaxation tapes, the score rose a point.
After listening to Mozart’s music, however, the score jumped to 119 (Westley, 1998). Even
students who did not like the music still had an increased score in the IQ test. Rauscher hy-
pothesised that “listening to complex, non-repetitive music, like Mozart's, may stimulate neural
pathways that are important in thinking” (Castleman, 1994).
The same experiment was repeated on rats by Rauscher and Hong Hua Li from Stanford. Rats
also demonstrated enhancement in their intelligence performance. These new studies indicate
that rats that were exposed to Mozart’s showed “increased gene expression of BDNF (a neural
growth factor), CREB (a learning and memory compound), and Synapsin I (a synaptic growth
protein) ” in the brain’s hippocampus, compared with rats in the control group, which heard only
white noise (e.g. the whooshing sound of a V radio tuned between stations).
How exactly does the Mozart Effect work? Researchers are still trying to determine the actual
mechanisms for the formation of these enhanced learning pathways. Neuroscientists suspect that
music can actually help build and strengthen connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex
in a process similar to what occurs in brain development despite its type.
When a baby is born, certain connections have already been made - like connections for
heartbeat and breathing. As new information is learned and motor skills develop, new neural
connections are formed. Neurons that are not used will eventually die while those used
Music seems to work in the same way. In October of 1997, researchers at the University of
Konstanz in Germany found that music actually rewires neural circuits (Begley, 1996). Although
some of these circuits are formed for physical skills needed to play an instrument, just listening
to music strengthens connections used in higher-order thinking. Listening to music can then be
thought of as “exercise” for the brain, improving concentration and enhancing intuition.
If you’re a little sceptical about the claims made by supporters of the Mozart Effect, you’re not
alone. Many people accredit the advanced learning of some children who take music lessons to
other personality traits, such as motivation and persistence, which are required in all types of
learning. There have also been claims of that influencing the results of some experiments.
Furthermore, many people are critical of the role the media had in turning an isolated study into a
trend for parents and music educators. After the Mozart Effect was published to the public, the
sales of Mozart CDs stayed on the top of the hit list for three weeks. In an article by Michael
Linton, he wrote that the research that began this phenomenon (the study by researchers at the
University of California, Irvine) showed only a temporary boost in IQ, which was not significant
enough to even last throughout the course of the experiment. Using music to influence
intelligence was used in Confucian civilisation and Plato alluded to Pythagorean music when he
de- jj scribed its ideal state in The Republic. In both of these examples, music did not cause any
overwhelming changes, and the theory eventually died out. Linton also asks, “If Mozart’s music
were able to improve health, why was Mozart himself so frequently sick? If listening to Mozart’s
music increases intelligence and encourages spirituality, why aren’t the world’s smartest and
most spiritual people Mozart specialists?” Linton raises an interesting point, if the Mozart Effect
causes such significant changes, why isn’t there more documented evidence?
The “trendiness’’ of the Mozart Effect may have died out somewhat, but there are still strong
supporters (and opponents) of the claims made in 1993. Since that initial experiment, there has
not been a surge of supporting evidence. However, many parents, after playing classical music
while pregnant or when their children are young, will swear by the Mozart Effect.
Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs A-H.
Questions 6-8
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
9 All kinds of music can enhance one’s brain performance to somewhat extent.
10 There is no neural connection made when a baby is born.
11 There are very few who question the Mozart Effect.
12 Michael Linton conducted extensive research on Mozart’s life.
13 There is not enough evidence in support of the Mozart Effect today.
Please
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
For an insect that bites, the yellow citrus ant is remarkably popular. Even by ant standards,
Oecophylla smaragdina is a fearsome predator. It's big, runs fast and has a powerful nip - painful
to humans but lethal to many of the insects that plague the orange groves of Guangdong and
Guangxi in southern China. And for at least 17 centuries, Chinese orange growers have
harnessed these six-legged killing machines to keep their fruit groves healthy and productive.
Citrus fruits evolved in the Far East and the Chinese discovered the delights of their flesh early
on. As the ancestral home of oranges, lemons and pomelos, China also has the greatest diversity
of citrus pests. And the trees that produce the sweetest fruits, the mandarins - or kan - attract a
host of plant-eating insects, from black ants and sap-sucking mealy bugs to leaf-devouring
The West did not discover the Chinese orange growers' secret weapon until 1 the early 20th
century. At the time, Florida was suffering an epidemic of citrus canker and in 1915 Walter
Swingle, a plant physiologist working for the US f Department of Agriculture, was sent to China
in search of varieties of orange that were resistant to the disease. Swingle spent some time
studying the citrus orchards around Guangzhou, and there he came across the story of the culti-
vated ant. These ants, he was told, were "grown'' by the people of a small village nearby who
sold them to the orange growers by the nestful.
The earliest report of citrus ants at work among the orange trees appeared in a book on tropical
and subtropical botany written by Hsi Han in AD 304. "The people of Chiao-Chih sell in their
markets ants in bags of rush matting. The nests are like silk. The bags are all attached to twigs
and leaves which, with the ants inside the nests, are for sale. The ants are reddish-yellow in
colour, bigger than ordinary ants. In the south, if the kan trees do not have this kind of ant, the
fruits will all be damaged by many harmful insects, and not a single fruit will be perfect."
Initially, farmers relied on nests which they collected from the wild or bought in the market
where trade in nests was brisk. "It is said that in the south orange trees which are free of ants will
have wormy fruits. Therefore, people race to buy nests for their orange trees," wrote Liu Hsun in
Strange Things Noted in the South in about 890.
The business quickly became more sophisticated. From the 10th century, country people began
to trap ants in artificial nests baited with fat. "Fruit-growing families buy these ants from vendors
who make a business of collecting and selling such creatures," wrote Chuang Chi-Yu in 1130.
"They trap them by filling hogs' or sheep's bladders with fat and placing them with the cavities
open next to the ants' nests. They wait until the ants have migrated into the bladders and take
them away. This is known as 'rearing orange ants'." Farmers attached k the bladders to their
trees, and in time the ants spread to other trees and built new nests.
By the 17th century, growers were building bamboo walkways between their trees to speed the
colonisation of their orchards. The ants ran along these narrow bridges from one tree to another
and established nests "by the hundreds of thousands”.
Did it work? The orange growers clearly thought so. One authority, Chhii Ta-Chun, writing in
1700, stressed how important it was to keep the fruit trees free of insect pests, especially
caterpillars. "It is essential to eliminate them so that the trees are not injured. But hand labour is
not nearly as efficient as ant power..."
Swingle was just as impressed. Yet despite his reports, many Western biologists t were sceptical.
In the West, the idea of using one insect to destroy another was new and highly controversial.
The first breakthrough had come in 1888, when the infant orange industry in California had been
saved from extinction by the Australian vedalia beetle. This beetle was the only thing that had
made any in- T roads into the explosion of cottony cushion scale that was threatening to destroy
The long tradition of ants in the Chinese orchards only began to waver in the 1950s and 1960s
with the introduction of powerful organic insecticides. Although most fruit growers switched to
chemicals, a few hung onto their ants. Those who abandoned ants in favour of chemicals quickly
became disillusioned. As costs soared and pests began to develop resistance to the chemicals,
growers began to revive the old ant patrols in the late 1960s. They had good reason to have faith
in their insect workforce.
Research in the early 1960s showed that as long as there were enough ants in the trees, they did
an excellent job of dispatching some pests - mainly the larger insects - and had modest success
against others. Trees with yellow ants produced almost 20 per cent more healthy leaves than
those without. More recent trials have shown that these trees yield just as big a crop as those
protected by expensive chemical sprays.
One apparent drawback of using ants - and one of the main reasons for the early scepticism by
Western scientists - was that citrus ants do nothing to control mealy bugs, waxy-coated scale
insects which can do considerable damage to fruit trees. In fact, the ants protect mealy bugs in
exchange for the sweet honey-dew they secrete. The orange growers always denied this was a
problem but Western scientists thought they knew better.
Research in the 1980s suggests that the growers were right all along. Where X mealy bugs
proliferate under the ants' protection, they are usually heavily parasitised and this limits the harm
they can do.
Orange growers who rely on carnivorous ants rather than poisonous chemicals maintain a better
balance of species in their orchards. While the ants deal with the bigger insect pests, other
predatory species keep down the numbers of smaller pests such as scale insects and aphids. In
the long run, ants do a lot less damage than chemicals - and they're certainly more effective than
excommunication.
SECTION 2: QUESTIONS 14-26
Questions 14-18
Look at the following events (Questions 14-18) and the list of dates below.
A 1888
B AD 890
C AD 304
D 1950s
E 1960s
F 1915
G 1130
Questions 19-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
19 China has more citrus pests than any other country in the world.
20 Swingle came to China to search for an insect to bring back to the US.
21 Many people were very impressed by Swingle's discovery.
22 Chinese farmers found that pesticides became increasingly expensive.
23 Some Chinese farmers abandoned the use of pesticide.
24 Trees with ants had more leaves fall than those without.
25 Fields using ants yield as large a crop as fields using chemical pesticides.
26 Citrus ants often cause considerable damage to the bio-environment of the
orchards.
Music is one of the human species' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training,
any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise
music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't
necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly
indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere - but for reasons that are more obvious.
With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration across Africa, build
reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other.
Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for
manipulating symbols and syntax.
Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over
the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar
room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human
Section B
But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of
recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are
and where we're from - not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature
Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the 6 August issue of the
Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University
argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.
To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realise two things about how music has
traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture
stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example,
in virtually all cultures, sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the
chromatic scale -that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers
have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties
of sound itself.
Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the
harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced
it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its
size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two thirds its length. This link between simple ratios
and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
Section C
This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at
least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York
Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while
painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes
thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in
which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human
musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the
messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular – which in turn is shaped by our
evolutionary heritage. "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the
mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se," says Schwartz.
Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of
languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on
the raw sounds, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning, and sliced sentences into
random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which
frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they
discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music
are to be found in speech.
This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech
directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also
conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song - that in everyday
speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the
general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech.
"We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know is that they both come from the same
system, and it is this that shapes our preferences."
Section D
Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or
appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world - birdsong,
whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting - previous studies have found that
many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience
that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can
show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory
system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts,
they generally recognise their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies
like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played to animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve
preferences for sound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then their
"music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from
human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To
demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sound the way we do, we'd need evidence that they
don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.
Section E
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our
sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as
language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto,
who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.
For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate
infants' emotional states", Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all
mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song". This kind of
Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has five sections A-E.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
Questions 32-38
Look at the following people (Questions 32-38) and the list of statements below.
Questions 39-40
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
Every year, during the rainy season, the mountain gorillas of Central Africa migrate to the
foothills and lower slopes of the Virunga Mountains to graze on bamboo. For the 650 0r so that
remain in the wild, it’s a vital food source. Although there are at almost 150 types of plant, as
well as various insects and other invertebrates, bamboo accounts for up t0 90 percent of their diet
at this time of year. Without it, says Ian Redmond, chairman of the Ape Alliance, their chances
of survival would be reduced significantly. Gorillas aren’t the only locals keen on bamboo. For
the people who live close to the Virungas, it’s a valuable and versatile raw material used for
building houses and making household items such as mats and baskets. But in the past 100 years
or so, resources have come under increasing pressure as populations have exploded and large
areas of bamboo forest have been cleared to make way for farms and commercial plantations.
B
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated story. All over the world, the ranges of many bamboo species appear
to be shrinking, endangering the people and animals that depend upon them. But despite
bamboo’s importance, we know surprisingly little about it. A recent report published by the UN
Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Inter-national Network for Bamboo and Rattan
(INBAR) has revealed just how profound is our ignorance of global bamboo resources,
particularly in relation to conservation. There are almost 1,600 recognized species of bamboo,
but the report concentrated on the 1,200 or so woody varieties distinguished by the strong stems,
or culms, that most people associate with this versatile plant. Of these, only 38 ‘priority species’
Bamboo is a type of grass. It comes in a wide variety of forms, ranging in height from 30
centimeters to more than 40 meters. It is also the world’s fastest-growing woody plant; some
species can grow more than a meter in a day. Bamboo’s ecological role extends beyond
providing food and habitat for animals. Bamboo tends to grow in stands made up of groups of
individual plants that grow from root systems known as rhizomes. Its extensive rhizome systems,
which tie in the top layers of the soil, are crucial in preventing soil erosion. And there is growing
evidence that bamboo plays an important part in determining forest structure and dynamics.
“Bamboo’s pattern of mass flowering and mass death leaves behind large areas of dry biomass
that attract wildfire,” says Kapos. “When these burn, they create patches of open ground within
the forest far bigger than would be left by a fallen tree.”Patchiness helps to preserve diversity
because certain plant species do better during the early stages of regeneration when there are
gaps in the canopy.
However, bamboo’s most immediate significance lies in its economic value. Modern processing
techniques mean that it can be used in a variety of ways, for example, as flooring and laminates.
One of the fastest growing bamboo products is paper-25 percent of paper produced in India is
made from bamboo fiber, and in Brazil, 100,000 hectares of bamboo are grown for its
production. Of course, bamboo’s main function has always been in domestic applications, and as
a locally traded commodity it’s worth about $4.5billion annually. Because of its versatility,
flexibility and strength (its tensile strength compares to that of some steel), it has traditionally
been used in construction. Today, more than one billion people worldwide live in bamboo
houses. Bamboo is often the only readily available raw material for people in many developing
countries, says Chris Stapleton, a research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “Bamboo can
be harvested from forest areas or grown quickly elsewhere, and then converted simply without
expensive machinery or facilities,” he says. “In this way, it contributes substantially to poverty
alleviation and wealth creation.”
Given bamboo’s value in economic and ecological terms, the picture painted by theUNEP report
is all the more worrying. But keen horticulturists will spot an apparent contradiction here. Those
who’ve followed the recent vogue for cultivating exotic species in their gardens will point out
that if it isn’t kept in check, bamboo can cause real problems. “In a lot of places, the people who
live with bamboo don’t perceive it as being endangered in any way,” says Kapos. “In fact, a lot
Around the world, bamboo species are routinely protected as part of forest eco-systems in
national parks and reserves, but there is next to nothing that protects bamboo in the wild for its
own sake. However, some small steps are being taken to address this situation. The UNEP-
INBAR report will help conservationists to establish effective measures aimed at protecting
valuable wild bamboo species. Townsend, too, sees the UNEP report as an important step
forward in promoting the cause of bamboo conservation. “Until now, bamboo has been
perceived as a second-class plant. When you talk about places such as the Amazon, everyone
always thinks about the hardwoods. Of course these are significant, but there is a tendency to
overlook the plants they are associated with, which are often bamboo species. In many ways, it is
the most important plant known to man. I can’t think of another plant that is used so much and is
so commercially important in so many countries.”He believes that the most important first step is
to get scientists into the field. “We need to go out there, look at these plants and see how they
survive and then use that information to conserve them for the future.”
Questions 1-7
Reading Passage I has six sections A-F.
Which section contains the following information ?
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet
NB You may use any letter more than once
1 Comparison of bamboo with other plant species
2 Commercial products of bamboo
3 Limited extent of existing research
4 A human development that destroyed large areas of bamboo
5 How bamboos are put to a variety of uses
6 An explanation of how bamboo can help the survival of a range of plants
7 The methods used to study bamboo
Questions 8-11
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-D) with opinions or deeds
below.
B Valerie Kapos
C Ray Townsend
D Chris Stapleton
Questions 12-13
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each
answer.
Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet
What environmental problem does the unique root system of bamboo prevent? 12
Which bamboo product is experiencing market expansion? 13
the test.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 58
Children’s Literature
Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history:lullabies, for example,
were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery games and rhymes are almost as ancient. Yet so
far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that
children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop’s fables, fairy-
stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular.
Since the only genuinely child-oriented literature at this time would have been a few
instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, plus the odd Puritanical tract as
an aid to morality, the only course for keen child readers was to read adult literature. This still
occurs today, especially with adult thrillers or romances that include more exciting, graphic
detail than is normally found in the literature for younger readers.
By the middle of the 18th century there were enough eager child readers, and enough parents
glad to cater to this interest, for publishers to specialize in children’s books whose first aim was
pleasure rather than education or morality. In Britain, a London merchant named Thomas
Boreham produced Cajanus, The Swedish Giant in 1742, while the more famous John Newbery
published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744. Its contents - rhymes, stories, children’s games
plus a free gift (‘A ball and a pincushion’)——in many ways anticipated the similar lucky-dip
contents of children’s annuals this century. It is a tribute to Newbery’s flair that he hit upon a
winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America.
Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile(1762) decreed that all
books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw
to it that children’s literature should be instructive and uplifting. Prominent among such voices
was Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, whose magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) carried the first
regular reviews of children’s books. It was she who condemned fairy-tales for their violence and
general absurdity; her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786) described talking animals who
were always models of sense and decorum.
So the moral story for children was always threatened from within, given the way children have
of drawing out entertainment from the sternest moralist. But the greatest blow to the improving
children’s book was to come from an unlikely source indeed: early 19th century interest in
What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special
children’s literature as such but access to books that contained characters, such as young people
or animals, with whom they could more easily empathize, or action, such as exploring or
fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding.
The final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality
came with the arrival in the late 1930s of child-centered best-sellers intend on entertainment at
its most escapist. In Britain novelist such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton described
children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, secure in the knowledge
that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. The fact that war broke out again during
her books’ greatest popularity fails to register at all in the self-enclosed world inhabited by Enid
Blyton’s young characters. Reaction against such dream-worlds was inevitable after World War
II, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, children’s libraries and a new spirit of moral
and social concern. Urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians, writers slowly
began to explore new areas of interest while also shifting the settings of their plots from the
middle-class world to which their chiefly adult patrons had always previously belonged.
Critical emphasis, during this development, has been divided. For some the most important task
was to rid children’s books of the social prejudice and exclusiveness no longer found acceptable.
Others concentrated more on the positive achievements of contemporary children’s literature.
That writers of these works are now often recommended to the attentions of adult as well as child
readers echoes the 19th-century belief that children’s literature can be shared by the generations,
rather than being a defensive barrier between childhood and the necessary growth towards adult
understanding.
Questions 14-18
Complete the table below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Reading Passage 2 for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
DATE FEATURES AIM EXAMPLE
By the middle of Collection Read for pleasure A Little Pretty Pocket Book
18th century
Questions 19-21
Look at the following people and the list of statements below.
Questions 22-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
High in the French Pyrenees, some 1,700m above see level, lies Trimouns, a huge deposit of
hydrated magnesium silicate - talc to you and me. Talc from Trimouns, and from ten other
Luzenac mines across the globe, is used in the manufacture of a vast array of everyday products
extending from paper, paint and plaster to cosmetics, plastics and car tyres. And of course there
is always talc’s best known end use: talcum powder for babies’ bottoms. But the true versatility
of this remarkable mineral is nowhere better displayed than in its sometimes surprising use in
certain niche markets in the food and agriculture industries.
Take, for example, the chewing gum business. Every year, Talc de Luzenac France—which
owns and operates the Trimouns mine and is a member of the international Luzenac Group (art
of Rio Tinto minerals)—supplies about 6,000 tones of talc to chewing gum manufacturers in
Europe. “We’ve been selling to this sector of the market since the 1960s,”says Laurent Fournier,
sales manager in Luzenac’s Specialties business unit in Toulouse. “Admittedly, in terms of our
total annual sales of talc, the amount we supply to chewing gum manufacturers is relatively
small, but we see it as a valuable niche market: one where customers place a premium on
securing supplies from a reliable, high quality source. Because of this, long term allegiance to a
proven suppler is very much a feature of this sector of the talc market.”Switching sources—in
the way that you might choose to buy, say, paperclips from Supplier A rather than from Supplier
B—is not a easy option for chewing gum manufacturers,”Fournier says. “The cost of
But how is talc actually used in the manufacture of chewing gum? PatrickDelord, an engineer
with a degree in agronomics, who has been with Luzenac for 22 years and is now senior market
development manager, Agriculture and Food, in Europe, explains that chewing gums has four
main components. “The most important of them is the gum base,”he says. “It’s the gum base that
puts the chew into chewing gum. It binds all the ingredients together, creating a soft, smooth
texture. To this the manufacturer then adds sweeteners, softeners and flavourings. Our talc is
used as a filler in the gum base. The amount varies between, say, ten and 35 per cent, depending
on the type of gum. Fruit flavoured chewing gum, for example, is slightly acidic and would react
with the calcium carbonate that the manufacturer might otherwise use as a filler. Talc, on the
other hand, makes an ideal filler because it’s non-reactive chemically. In the factory, talc is also
used to dust the gum base pellets and to stop the chewing gum sticking during the lamination and
packing process,”Delord adds.
The chewing gum business is, however, just one example of talc’s use in the food sector. For the
past 20 years or so, olive oil processors in Spain have been taking advantage of talc’s unique
characteristics to help them boost the amount of oil they extract from crushed olives. According
to Patrick Delord, talc is especially useful for treating what he calls “difficult” olives. After the
olives are harvested-preferably early in the morning because their taste is better if they are
gathered in the cool of the day - they are taken to the processing plant. There they are crushed
and then stirred for 30-45 minutes. In the old days, the resulting paste was passed through an
olive press but nowadays it’s more common to add water and centrifuge the mixture to separate
the water and oil from the solid matter. The oil and water are then allowed to settle so that the
olive oil layer can be decanted oft and bottled. “Difficult” olives are those that are more reluctant
than the norm to yield up their full oil content. This may be attributable to the particular species
of olive, or to its water content and the time of year the olives are collected—at the beginning
and the end of the season their water content is often either too high or too low. These olives are
easy to recognize because they produce a lot of extra foam during the stirring process, a
consequence of an excess of a fine solid that acts as anatural emulsifier. The oil in this emulsion
is lost when the water is disposed of. Not only that, if the waste water is disposed of directly into
local fields—often the case in many smaller processing operations—the emulsified oil may take
some time to biodegrade and so be harmful to the environment.
“If you add between a half and two percent of talc by weight during the stirring process, it
absorbs the natural emulsifier in the olives and so boosts the amount of oil you can extract,”says
Delord. “In addition, talc’s flat, 'platy’ structure helps increase the size of the oil droplets
liberated during stirring, which again improves the yield. However, because talc is chemically
inert, it doesn’t affect the colour, taste, appearance or composition of the resulting olive oil.”
If the use of talc in olive oil processing and in chewing gum is long established, new applications
To combat this, farmers normally use either chemicals or spray a continuous fine canopy of mist
above the fruit trees or bushes. The trouble is, this uses a lot of water—normally a precious
commodity in hot, sunny areas—and it is therefore expensive. What’s more, the ground can
quickly become waterlogged.” So our idea was to coat the fruit with talc to protect it from the
sun,”says Greg Hunter, a marketing specialist who has been with Luzenac for ten years. “But to
do this, several technical challenges had first to be overcome. Talc is very hydrophobic: it
doesn’t like water. So in order to have a viable product we needed a wettable powder—
something that would go readily into suspension so that it could be sprayed onto the fruit. It also
had to break the surface tension of the cutin (the natural waxy, waterproof layer on the fruit) and
of course it had to wash off easily when the fruit was harvested. No-one’s going to want an apple
that’s covered in talc.”
Initial trials in the state of Washington in 2003 showed that when the product was sprayed onto
Granny Smith apples, it reduced their surface temperature and lowered the incidence of sunburn
by up to 60 per cent. Today the new product, known as Invelop Maximum SPF, is in its second
commercial year on the US market. Apple growers are the primary target although Hunter
believes grape growers represent another sector with long term potential. He is also hopeful of
extending sales to overseas markets such as Australia, South America and southern Europe.
Questions 27-32
Use the information in the passage to match each use of talc power with correct application
from A, B or C.
Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
NB you may use any letter more than once
A Chewing gum manufacture
Questions 39-40
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.
What are the last two stages of chewing gum manufacturing process?
39
Answer Keys:
1E
2D
3B
4A
READING PASSAGE 1
B One of Australia’s latest innovation successes stems from a lemon-scented bath-room cleaner
called Shower Power, the formula for which was concocted in afactory in Yatala, Queensland. In
1995, Tom Quinn and John Heron bought a struggling cleaning products business, OzKleen, for
250,000. It was selling 100 different kinds of cleaning products, mainly in bulk. The business
was in bad shape, the cleaning formulas were ineffective and environmentally harsh, and there
were few regular clients. Now Shower Power is claimed to be the top-selling bathroom cleaning
product in the country. In the past 12 months ,almost four million bottles of OzKleen’s Power
products have been sold and the company forecasts 2004 sales of 10 million bottles. The
company’s, sales in2003 reached $11 million, with 700k of business being exports. In particular,
Shower Power is making big inroads on the British market.
D To begin with, Shower Power was sold only in commercial quantities but Tom Quinn decided
to sell it in 750ml bottles after the constant “raves”from customers at their retail store at
Beenleigh, near Brisbane. Customers were travel- ling long distances to buy supplies. Others
began writing to OzKleen to say how good Shower Power was. “We did a dummy label and
went to see Woolworths,”Tom Quinn says. The Woolworths buyer took a bottle home and was
able to remove a stain from her basin that had been impossible to shift. From that point on, she
championed the product and OzKleen had its first super- market order, for a palette of Shower
Power worth $3000. “We were over the moon,”says OzKleen’s financial controller, Belinda
McDonnell.
E Shower Power was released in Australian supermarkets in 1997 and became the top-selling
product in its category within six months. It was all hands on deck cat the factory, labeling and
bottling Shower Power to keep up with demand. OzKleen ditched all other products and rebuilt
the business around Shower Power. This stage, recalls McDonnell, was very tough. “It was hand-
to-mouth, cashflow was very difficult,” she says. OzKleen had to pay new-line fees to
supermarket chains, which also squeezed margins.
F OzKleen’s next big break came when the daughter of a Coles Myer executive used the product
while on holidays in Queensland and convinced her father that Shower Power should be in Coles
supermarkets. Despite the product success, Peter Quinn says the company was wary of how long
the sales would last and hesitated to spend money on upgrading the manufacturing process. As a
result, he remembers long periods of working round the clock to keep up with orders. Small
tanks were still being used, so batches were small and bottles were labelled and filled manually.
The privately owned OzKleen relied on cash flow to expand. “The equipment could not keep up
with demand,” Peter Quinn says. Eventually a new bottling machine was bought for $50,000 in
the hope of streamlining production, but he says: “We got ripped off.” Since then, he has been
developing a new automated bottling machine that can control the amount of foam produced in
the liquid, so that bottles can be filled more effectively - “I love coming up with new ideas.” The
machine is being patented.
Questions 1-7
Show Notepad
Questions 8-11
Look at the following people and list of statements below.
Match each person with the correct statement.
Write the correct letter A-E in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet
List of Statement
8 Grant Kearney
9 Tom Quinn
10 Peter Quinn
11 Belinda McDonnell
Questions 12-13
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet.
12
Tom Quinn changed the bottle size to 750ml to make Shower Power
A Easier to package.
B Appealing to individual customers.
C Popular in foreign markets.
D Attractive to supermarkets.
13
READING PASSAGE 2
Three days later, London housewife Louisa Carlill went down with flu. She was shocked. For
two months, she had inhaled thrice daily from a carbolic smoke ball, a preventive measure
guaranteed to fend off flu - if you believed the advert. Which she did. And why shouldn’t she
when the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company had promised to cough up £100 for any customer who
fell ill? Unlike Albert, Louisa recovered, claimed her £100 and set in train events that would win
her lasting fame.
It started in the spring of 1889. The first reports of a flu epidemic came from Russia. By the end
of the year, the world was in the grip of the first truly global flu pandemic. The disease came in
waves, once a year for the next four years, and each worse than the last.
Whole cities came to a standstill. London was especially hard-hit. As the flu reached each annual
peak, normal life stopped. The postal service ground to a halt, trains stopped running, banks
closed. Even courts stopped sitting for lack of judges. At the height of the third wave in 1892,
200 people were buried every day at just one London cemetery. This flu was far more lethal than
previous epidemics, and those who recovered were left weak, depressed, and often unfit for
work. It was a picture repeated across the continent.
Accurate figures for the number of the sick and dead were few and far between but Paris, Berlin
and Vienna all reported a huge upsurge in deaths. The newspapers took an intense interest in the
disease, not just because of the scale of it but because of who it attacked. Most epidemics carried
off the poor and weak, the old and frail. This flu was cutting as great a swathe through the upper
classes, dealing death to the rich and famous, and the young and fit.
The newspaper-reading public was fed a daily diet of celebrity victims. The flu had worked its
way through the Russian imperial family and invaded the royal palaces of Europe. It carried off
The public grew increasingly fearful. The press might have been overdoing the doom and gloom,
but their hysterical coverage had exposed one terrible fact.
The medical profession had no answer to the disease. This flu, which might ft not even have
begun in Russia, was a mystery. What caused it and how did it spread? No one could agree on
anything.
By now, the theory that micro-organisms caused disease was gaining ground, g but no one had
identified an organism responsible for flu (and wouldn’t until 1933). In the absence of a germ,
many clung to the old idea of bad airs, or miasmas, possibly stirred by some great physical force
- earthquakes, perhaps, or electrical phenomena in the upper atmosphere, even a passing comet.
Doctors advised people to eat well avoiding “unnecessary assemblies”, and if they were really
worried, to stuff cotton wool up their nostrils. If they fell ill, they should rest, keep warm and eat
a nourishing diet of “milk, eggs and farinaceous puddings”. Alcohol figured prominently among
the prescriptions: one eminent English doctor suggested champagne, although he conceded
“brandy M in considerable quantities has sometimes been given with manifest advantages”.
French doctors prescribed warm alcoholic drinks, arguing that they never saw an alcoholic with
flu. Their prescription had immediate results: over a three-day period, 1,200 of the 1,500 drunks
picked up on the streets of Paris claimed they were following doctor’s orders.
Some doctors gave drugs to ease symptoms - quinine for fever, salicin for headache, heroin for
an “incessant cough”. But nothing in the pharmacy remotely resembled a cure. Not surprisingly,
people looked elsewhere for help. Hoping to cash in while the pandemic lasted, purveyors of
patent medicines competed for the public’s custom with ever more outrageous advertisements.
One of the most successful was the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.
The carbolic smoke ball was a hollow rubber ball, 5 centimetres across, with a nozzle covered by
gauze. Inside was a powder treated with carbolic acid, or phenol. The idea was to clutch it close
to the nose and squeeze gently, inhaling deeply from the emerging cloud of pungent powder.
This, the company claimed, would disinfect the mucous membranes, curing any condition related
to “taking cold”. In the summer of 1890, sales were steady at 300 smoke balls a month. In
January 1891, the figure skyrocketed to 1,500.
Eager to exploit the public’s mounting panic, the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company made
increasingly extravagant claims. Oh 13 November 1892, its latest advert in the Pall Mall Gazette
caught the eye of south London housewife Louisa Carlill. “Carbolic Smoke Ball,” it declared,
“will positively cure colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, hoarseness, influenza, croup, whooping
cough ...”. And the list went on. But it was the next part Mrs. Carlill found compelling. “A £100
reward will be paid by the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company to any person who contracts the
increasing epidemic influenza, colds or any disease caused by taking cold, after having used the
Mrs. Carlill hurried off to buy a smoke ball, price 10 shillings. After carefully reading the
instructions, she diligently dosed herself thrice daily until 17 January - when she fell ill.
On 20 January, Louisa’s husband wrote to the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company. Unfortunately for
them, Mr. Carlill happened to be a solicitor. His wife, he wrote, had seen their advert and bought
a smoke ball on the strength of it. She had followed the instructions to the letter, and yet now - as
their doctor could confirm - she had flu.
There was no reply. But £100 was not a sum to be sneezed at. Mr. Carlill persisted. The company
resisted. Louisa recovered and sued. In June, Mr. Justice Hawkins found in Mrs. Carlill’s favour.
The company’s main defence was that adverts were mere “puffery” and only an idiot would
believe such extravagant claims. Judge Hawkins pointed out that adverts were not aimed at the
wise and thoughtful, but at the credulous and weak. A vendor who made a promise “must not be
surprised if occasionally he is held to his promise”.
Carbolic appealed. In December, three lord justices considered the case. Carbolic’s lawyers tried
several lines of defence. But in the end, the case came down to a single matter: not whether the
remedy was useless, or whether Carbolic had committed fraud, but whether its advert constituted
a contract - which the company had broken. A contract required agreement between two parties,
argued Carbolic’s lawyers. What agreement had Mrs. Carlill made with them?
There were times, the judges decided, when a contract could be one-sided. The advert had made
a very specific offer to purchasers: protection from flu or £100. By using the smoke ball as
instructed, Mrs. Carlill had accepted that offer. The company might just have wriggled out of if
if it hadn’t added the bit about the £1,000 deposit. That, said the judges, gave buyers reason to
believe Carbolic meant what it said. “It seems to me that if a person chooses to make extravagant
promises of this kind, he probably does so because it pays him to make them, and, if he has made
them, the extravagance of the promises is no reason in law why he should not be bound by
them,” pronounced Lord Justice Bowen.
Louisa got her £100. The case established the principle of the unilateral contract and is
frequently cited today.
Questions 14-17
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
Questions 18-21
Complete the diagram below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.
18
19
20
21
Questions 22-25
Look at the following people (Questions 22-25) and the list of statements.
Match each person with the correct statement.
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.
List of Statements
Question 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in box 26 on your answer sheet.
26
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
A As far back as Hippocrates’ time (460-370B.C.), people have tried to understand other people
by characterizing them according to personality type or temperament.Hippocrates believed there
were four different body fluids that influenced four basic types of temperament. His work was
further developed 500 years later by Galen. These days there are any number of self-assessment
tools that relate to the basic descriptions developed by Galen, although we no longer believe the
source to be the types of body fluid that dominate our systems.
B The values in self-assessments that help determine personality style. Learning styles,
communication styles, conflict-handling styles, or other aspects of individuals is that they help
depersonalize conflict in interpersonal relationships. The depersonalization occurs when you
realize that others aren’t trying to be difficult, but they need different or more information than
you do. They’re not intending to be rude: they are so focused on the task they forget about
greeting people. They would like to work faster but not at the risk of damaging the relationships
needed to get the job done. They understand there is a job to do. But it can only be done right
with the appropriate information, which takes time to collect. When used appropriately,
understanding communication styles can help resolve conflict on teams. Very rarely are conflicts
true personality issues. Usually they are issues of style, information needs, or focus.
C Hippocrates and later Galen determined there were four basic temperaments: sanguine,
phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric. These descriptions were developed centuries ago and are
still somewhat apt, although you could update the wording. In today’s world, they translate into
the four fairly common communication styles described below:
D The sanguine person would be the expressive or spirited style of communication. These people
speak in pictures. They invest a lot of emotion and energy in their communication and often
E Tile phlegmatic person - cool and persevering - translates into the technical or systematic
communication style. This style of communication is focused on facts and technical details.
Phlegmatic people have an orderly methodical way of approaching tasks, and their focus is very
much on the task, not on the people, emotions, or concerns that the task may evoke. The focus is
also more on the details necessary to accomplish a task. Sometimes the details overwhelm the
big picture and focus needs to be brought back to the context of the task. People with this style
think the facts should speak for themselves, and they are not as comfortable with conflict. They
need time to adapt to change and need to understand both the logic of it and the steps involved.
F Tile melancholic person who is soft hearted and oriented toward doing things for others
translates into the considerate or sympathetic communication style. A person with this
communication style is focused on people and relationships. They are good listeners and do
things for other people-sometimes to the detriment of getting things done for themselves. They
want to solicit everyone’s opinion and make sure everyone is comfortable with whatever is
required to get the job done. At times this focus on others can distract from the task at hand.
Because they are so concerned with the needs of others and smoothing over issues, they do not
like conflict. They believe that change threatens the status quo and tends to make people feel
uneasy, so people with this communication style, like phlegmatic people need time to consider
the changes in order to adapt to them.
G The choleric temperament translates into the bold or direct style of communication. People
with this style are brief in their communication - the fewer words the better. They are big picture
thinkers and love to be involved in many things at once. They are focused on tasks and outcomes
and often forget that the people involved in carrying out the tasks have needs. They don’t do
detail work easily and as a result can often underestimate how much time it takes to achieve the
task. Because they are so direct, they often seem forceful and can be very intimidating to others.
They usually would welcome someone challenging them. But most other styles are afraid to do
so. They also thrive on change, the more the better.
H A well-functioning team should have all of these communication styles for true effectiveness.
All teams need to focus on the task, and they need to take care of relationships in order to
achieve those tasks. They need the big picture perspective or the context of their work, and they
need the details to be identified and taken care of for success. We all have aspects of each style
within us. Some of us can easily move from one style to another and adapt our style to the needs
of the situation at hand-whether the focus is on tasks or relationships. For others, a dominant
style is very evident, and it is more challenging to see the situation from the perspective of
another style. The work environment can influence communication styles either by the type of
The good news about communication styles is that we have the ability to develop flexibility in
our styles. The greater the flexibility we have, the more skilled we usually are at handling
possible and actual conflicts. Usually it has to be relevant to us to do so, either because we think
it is important or because there are incentives in our environment to encourage it. The key is that
we have to want to become flexible with our communication style. As Henry Ford said,
“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!”
Questions 27-34
Reading Passage 3 has eight sections A-H.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
27 Section A
28 Section B
29 Section C
30 Section D
31 Section E
Questions 35-39
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 35-39 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
Question 40
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in box 40 on your answer sheet.
40
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
Section A
Seaweed is a particularly nutritious food, which absorbs and concentrates traces of a wide variety
of minerals necessary to the body's health. Many elements may occur in seaweed - aluminium,
barium, calcium, chlorine, copper, iodine and iron, to name but a few - traces normally produced
by erosion and carried to the seaweed beds by river and sea currents. Seaweeds are also rich in
vitamins: indeed, Eskimos obtain a high proportion of their bodily requirements of vitamin C
from the seaweeds they eat.
The nutritive value of seaweed has long been recognised. For instance, there is a remarkably low
incidence of goitre amongst the Japanese, and for that matter, amongst our own Maori people,
who have always eaten seaweeds, and this may well be attributed to the high iodine content of
this food. Research into old Maori eating customs shows that jellies were made using seaweeds,
fresh fruit and nuts, fuchsia and tutu berries, cape gooseberries, and many other fruits which
either grew here naturally or were sown from seeds brought by settlers and explorers.
Section B
New Zealand lays claim to approximately 700 species of seaweed, some of which have no
representation outside this country. Of several species grown worldwide, New Zealand also has a
particularly large share. For example, it is estimated that New Zealand has some 30 species of
Gigartina, a close relative of carrageen or Irish moss. These are often referred to as the New
Zealand carrageens. The gel-forming substance called agar which can be extracted from this
species gives them great commercial application in seameal, from which seameal custard is
made, and in cough mixture, confectionery, cosmetics, the canning, paint and leather industries,
the manufacture of duplicating pads, and in toothpaste. In fact, during World War II, New
Zealand Gigartina were sent toAustralia to be used in toothpaste.
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 82
Section C
Yet although New Zealand has so much of the commercially profitable red seaweeds, several of
which are a source of agar (Pterocladia, Gelidium, Chondrus, Gigartina), before 1940 relatively
little use was made of them. New Zealand used to import the Northern Hemisphere Irish moss
(Chondrus crispus) from England and ready-made agar from Japan. Although distribution of the
Gigartina is confined to certain areas according to species, it is only on the east coast of the
North Island that its occurrence is rare. And even then, the east coast, and the area around
Hokiangna, have a considerable supply of the two species of Pterocladia from which agar is also
available. Happily, New Zealand-made agar is now obtainable in health food shops.
Section D
Seaweeds are divided into three classes determined by colour - red, brown and green - and each
tends to live in a specific location. However, except for the unmistakable sea lettuce (Ulva), few
are totally one colour; and especially when dry, some species can change colour quite
significantly - a brown one may turn quite black, or a red one appear black, brown, pink or
purple.
Identification is nevertheless facilitated by the fact that the factors which determine where a
seaweed will grow are quite precise, and they therefore tend to occur in very well-defined zones.
Although there are exceptions, the green seaweeds are mainly shallow-water algae; the browns
belong to medium depths, and the reds are plants of the deeper water. Flat rock surfaces near
mid-level tides are the most usual habitat of sea bombs, Venus’ necklace and most brown
seaweeds. This is also the location of the purple laver or Maori karengo, which looks rather like
a reddish-purple lettuce. Deep-water rocks on open coasts, exposed only at very low tide, are
usually the site of bull kelp, strap weeds and similar tough specimens. Those species able to
resist long periods of exposure to the sun and air are usually found on the upper shore, while
those less able to stand such exposure occur nearer to or below the low-water mark. Radiation
from the sun, the temperature level, and the length of time immersed all play a part in the zoning
of seaweeds.
Section E
Propagation of seaweeds occurs by spores, or by fertilisation of egg cells. None have roots in the
usual sense; few have leaves, and none have flowers, fruits or seeds. The plants absorb their
nourishment through their fronds when they are surrounded by water: the base or "holdfast" of
seaweeds is purely an attaching organ, not an absorbing one.
Section F
Some of the large seaweeds maintain buoyancy with air-filled floats; others, such as bull kelp,
have large cells filled with air. Some, which spend a good part of their time exposed to the air,
often reduce dehydration either by having swollen stems that contain water, or they may (like
Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has six sections A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
i Locations and features of different seaweeds
ix Mystery solved
1 Section A
2 Section B
3 Section C
4 Section D
5 Section E
6 Section F
Questions 7-10
Complete the flow chart below.
7
8
9
10
Questions 11-13
Classify the following description as relating to
A Green seaweeds
B Brown seaweeds
C Red seaweeds
Write the correct letter A, B, or C in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
11 Can resist exposure to sunlight at high-water mark
12 Grow in far open sea water
13 Share their habitat with karengo
Faced with 12 months of plummeting economics and rising human distress, staunchly
maintaining a rosy view might seem deludedly Pollyannaish. But here we encounter the
optimism paradox. As Brice Pitt, an emeritus professor of the psychiatry of old age at Imperial
College, London, told me: “Optimists are unrealistic. Depressive people see things as they really
are, but that is a disadvantage from an evolutionary point of view. Optimism is a piece of evolu-
tionary equipment that carried us through millennia of setbacks.”
Optimists have plenty to be happy about. In other words, if you can convince yourself that things
will get better, the odds of it happening will improve - because you keep on playing the game. In
this light, optimism “is a habitual way of explaining your setbacks to yourself”, reports Martin
Seligman, the psychology professor and author of Learned Optimism. The research shows that
when times get tough, optimists do better than pessimists - they succeed better at work, respond
better to stress, suffer fewer depressive episodes, and achieve more personal goals.
Studies also show that belief can help with the financial pinch. Chad Wallens, a social forecaster
at the Henley Centre who surveyed middle-class Britons’ beliefs about income, has found that
Optimists have something else to be cheerful about - in general, they are more robust. For
example, a study of 660 volunteers by the Yale University psychologist Dr. Becca Levy found
that thinking positively adds an average of seven years to your life. Other American research
claims to have identified a physical mechanism behind this. A Harvard Medical School study of
670 men found that the optimists have significantly better lung function. The lead author, Dr.
Rosalind Wright, believes that attitude somehow strengthens the immune system. “Preliminary
studies on heart patients suggest that, by changing a person’s outlook, you can improve their
mortality risk,” she says.
Few studies have tried to ascertain the proportion of optimists in the world. But a 1995
nationwide survey conducted by the American magazine Adweek found that about half the
population counted themselves as optimists, with women slightly more apt than men (53 per cent
versus 48 per cent) to see the sunny side.
Of course, there is no guarantee that optimism will insulate you from the crunch’s worst effects,
but the best strategy is still to keep smiling and thank your lucky stars. Because (as every good
sports coach knows) adversity is character-forming - so long as you practise the skills of
resilience. Research among tycoons and business leaders shows that the path to success is often
littered with failure: a record of sackings, bankruptcies and blistering castigation. But instead of
curling into a foetal ball beneath the coffee table, they resiliently pick themselves up, learn from
their pratfalls and march boldly towards the next opportunity.
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of
adversity, trauma or tragedy. A resilient person may go through difficulty and uncertainty, but he
or she will doggedly bounce back.
Optimism is one of the central traits required in building resilience, say Yale University
investigators in the. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. They add that resilient people learn
to hold on to their sense of humour and this can help them to keep a flexible attitude when big
changes of plan are warranted. The ability to accept your lot with equanimity also plays an
important role, the study adds.
One of the best ways to acquire resilience is through experiencing a difficult childhood, the
sociologist Steven Stack reports in the Journal of Social Psychology. For example, short men are
less likely to commit suicide than tall guys, he says, because shorties develop psychological
defence skills to handle the bullies and mickey-taking that their lack of stature attracts. By
contrast, those who enjoyed adversity-free youths can get derailed by setbacks later on because
they’ve never been inoculated against aggro.
If you are handicapped by having had a happy childhood, then practising proactive optimism can
help you to become more resilient. Studies of resilient people show that they take more risks;
'they court failure and learn not to fear it.
It’s about optimistic risk-taking - being confident that people will like you. Simply smiling and
being warm to people can help. It’s an altruistic path to self-interest - and if it achieves nothing
else, it will reinforce an age-old adage: hard times can bring out the best in you.
SECTION 2: QUESTIONS 14-26
Questions 14-17
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Reading Passage 2
for each answer.
A study group from Yale University had discovered that optimism can stretch one's life length
by 14 years. And another group from Harvard thinks they have found the biological basis -
Questions 18-22
Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-H.
18 Brice Pitt believes
19 The research at Henley Centre discovers
20 The study conducted by Adweek finds
21 The Annual Review of Clinical Psychology reports
22 Steven Stack says in his report
Questions 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet write
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
B When Europeans first touched the shores of the Americas, Old World crops such as wheat,
barley, rice, and turnips had not travelled west across the Atlantic, and New World crops such as
maize, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc had not travelled east to Europe. In the
Americas, there were no horses, cattle, sheep, or goats, all animals of Old World origin. Except
for the llama, alpaca, dog, a few fowl, and guinea pig, the New World had no equivalents to the
domesticated animals associated with the Old World, nor did it have the pathogens associated
with the Old World’s dense populations of humans and such associated creatures as chickens,
cattle, black rats, and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Among these germs were those that carried
smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever.
C As might be expected, the Europeans who settled on the east coast of the United States
cultivated crops like wheat and apples, which they had brought with them. European weeds,
which the colonists did not cultivate, and, in fact, preferred to uproot, also fared well in the New
World. John Josselyn, an Englishman and amateur naturalist who visited New England twice in
the seventeenth century, left us a list, “Of Such Plants as Have Sprung Up since the English
Planted and Kept Cattle in New England,” which included couch grass, dandelion, shepherd’s
purse, groundsel, sow thistle, and chickweed.
One of these, a plantain (Plantago major), was named “Englishman’s Foot” by the Amerindians
of New England and Virginia who believed that it would grow only where the English “have
trodden, and was never known before the English came into this country”. Thus, as they
intentionally sowed Old World crop seeds, the European settlers were unintentionally
D Cattle and horses were brought ashore in the early 1600s and found hospitable climate and
terrain in North America. Horses arrived in Virginia as early as 1620 and in Massachusetts in
1629. Many wandered free with little more evidence of their connection to humanity than collars
with a hook at the bottom to catch on fences as they tried to leap over them to get at crops.
Fences were not for keeping livestock in, but for keeping livestock out.
E Native American resistance to the Europeans was ineffective. Indigenous peoples suffered
from white brutality, alcoholism, the killing and driving off of game, and the expropriation of
farmland, but all these together are insufficient to explain the degree of their defeat. The crucial
factor was not people, plants, or animals, but germs. Smallpox was the worst and the most
spectacular of the infectious diseases mowing down the Native Americans. The first recorded
pandemic of that disease in British North America detonated among the Algonquin of
Massachusetts in the early 1630s. William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation wrote that the
victims “fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one
another, no, not to make a fire nor fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead”. The
missionaries and the traders who ventured into the American interior told the same appalling
story about smallpox and the indigenes. In 1738 alone, the epidemic destroyed half the
Cherokee; in 1759 nearly half the Catawbas; in the first years of the next century, two thirds of
the Omahas and perhaps half the entire population between the Missouri River and New Mexico;
in 1837-38 nearly every last one of the Mandans and perhaps half the people of the high plains.
F The export of America’s native animals has not revolutionised Old World agriculture or
ecosystems as the introduction of European animals to the New World did. America’s grey
squirrels and muskrats and a few others have established themselves east of the Atlantic and west
of the Pacific, but that has not made much of a difference. Some of America’s domesticated
animals are raised in the Old World, but turkeys have not displaced chickens and geese, and
guinea pigs have proved useful in laboratories, but have not usurped rabbits in the butcher shops.
G The New World’s great contribution to the Old is in crop plants. Maize, white potatoes, sweet
potatoes, various squashes, chiles, and manioc have become essentials in the diets of hundreds of
millions of Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Their influence on Old World peoples, like that of
wheat and rice on New World peoples, goes far to explain the global population explosion of the
past three centuries. The Columbian Exchange has been an indispensable factor in that
demographic explosion.
H All this had nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of biosystems in any absolute sense. It
has to do with environmental contrasts. Amerindians were accustomed to living in one particular
kind of environment, Europeans and Africans in another. When the Old World peoples came to
America, they brought with them all their plants, animals, and germs, creating a kind of
environment to which they were already adapted, and so they increased in number. Amerindians
had not adapted to European germs, and so initially their numbers plunged. That decline has
Questions 27-34
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs A-H.
Questions 35-38
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 35-38 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
35 European settlers built fences to keep their cattle and horses inside.
36 The indigenous people had been brutally killed by the European colonists.
37 America's domesticated animals, such as turkey, became popular in the Old
World.
38 Crop exchange between the two worlds played a major role in world
population
Questions 39-40
Who reported the same story of European diseases among the indigenes from the American
interior?
39
What is the still existing feature of the Old World's invasion of the New?
40
take the test.
Answer Keys:
1v
2ii
3viii
4i
5x
6vi
7New Zealand carrageen(s)
8agar
9seameal
10cough mixture
11A
12C
13B
147/seven
15lung function
16immune system
17heart patients
18C
19A
20E
21G
22D
23NOT GIVEN
24NOT GIVEN
25YES
26YES
27C
28G
29A
30E
31B
32F
33H
34D
READING PASSAGE 1
Going Bananas
The world's favourite fruit could disappear forever in 10 years’ time
The banana is among the world's oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible
banana was discovered around ten thousand years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill
ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last ice age.
Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb called Musa acuminata, contains a mass of hard
seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter- gatherers must have
discovered rare mutant plants that produced seedless, edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the
vast majority of these soft-fruited I plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells
three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and
pollen from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some
scientists believe the world’s most popular fruit could be doomed. It lacks the genetic diversity to
fight off pests and diseases that are invading the banana plantations of Central America and the
smallholdings of Africa and Asia alike.
In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought famine to Ireland a
century and a half ago. But “it holds a lesson for other crops, too,” says Emile Frison, top banana
at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France.
“The state of the banana,” Frison warns, “can teach a broader lesson: the increasing
standardisation of food crops round the world is threatening their ability to adapt and survive.”
The first Stone Age plant breeders cultivated these sterile freaks by replanting cuttings from their
stems. And the descendants of those original cuttings are the bananas we still eat today. Each is a
virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity makes it ripe for disease
like no other crop on Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually reproducing crops have always had
a much broader genetic base, and the genes will recombine in new arrangements in each
generation. This gives them much greater flexibility in evolving responses to disease - and far
more genetic resources to draw on in the face of an attack. But that advantage is fading fast, as
growers increasingly plant the same few, high-yielding varieties. Plant breeders work feverishly
The banana is an excellent case in point. Until the 1950s, one variety, the Gros Michel,
dominated the world’s commercial banana business. Found by French botanists in Asia in the
1820s, the Gros Michel was by all accounts a fine banana, richer and sweeter than today’s
standard banana and without the latter’s bitter aftertaste when green. But it was vulnerable to a
soil fungus that produced a wilt known as Panama disease. “Once the fungus gets into the soil, it
remains there for many years. There is nothing farmers can do. Even chemical spraying won’t
get rid of it,” says Rodomiro Ortiz, director of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture
in Ibadan, Nigeria. So plantation owners played a running game, abandoning infested fields and
moving to “clean” land - until they ran out of clean land in the 1950s and had to abandon the
Gros Michel. Its successor, and still the reigning commercial king, is the Cavendish banana, a
19th-century British discovery from southern China. The Cavendish is resistant to Panama
disease and, as a result, it literally saved the international banana industry. During the 1960s, it
replaced the Gros Michel on supermarket shelves. If you buy a banana today, it is almost
certainly a Cavendish. But even so, it is a minority in the world’s banana crop.
Half a billion people in Asia and Africa depend on bananas. Bananas provide the largest source
of calories and are eaten daily. Its name is synonymous with food. But the day of reckoning may
be coming for the Cavendish and its indigenous kin. Another fungal disease, black Sigatoka, has
become a global epidemic since its first appearance in Fiji in 1963. Left to itself, black Sigatoka -
which causes brown wounds on leaves and premature fruit ripening - cuts fruit yields by 50 to 70
per cent and reduces the productive lifetime of banana plants from 30 years to as little as 2 or 3.
Commercial growers keep black Sigatoka at bay by a massive chemical assault. Forty sprayings
of fungicide a year is typical. But despite the fungicides, diseases such as black Sigatoka are
getting more and more difficult to control. “As soon as you bring in a new fungicide, they
develop resistance,” says Frison. “One thing we can be sure of is that black Sigatoka won't lose
in this battle.” Poor farmers, who cannot afford chemicals, have it even worse. They cap do little
more than watch their plants die. “Most of the banana fields in Amazonia have already been
destroyed by the disease,” says Luadir Gasparotto, Brazil’s leading banana pathologist with the
government research agency EMBRAPA. Production is likely to fall by 70 per cent as the
disease spreads, he predicts. The only option will be to find a new variety.
But how? Almost all edible varieties are susceptible to the diseases, so growers cannot simply
change to a different banana. With most crops, such a threat would unleash an army of breeders,
scouring the world for resistant relatives whose traits they can breed into commercial varieties.
Not so with the banana. Because all edible varieties are sterile, bringing in new genetic traits to
help cope with pests and diseases is nearly impossible. Nearly, but not totally. Very rarely, a
sterile banana will experience a genetic accident that allows an almost normal seed to develop,
giving breeders a tiny window for improvement. Breeders at the Honduran Foundation of
Agricultural Research have tried to exploit this to create disease-resistant varieties. Further back-
crossing with wild bananas yielded a new seedless banana resistant to both black Sigatoka and
Panama disease.
Last year, a global consortium of scientists led by Frison announced plans to sequence the
banana genome within five years. It would be the first edible fruit to be sequenced. Well, almost
edible. The group will actually be sequencing inedible wild bananas from East Asia because
many of these are resistant to black Sigatoka. If they can pinpoint the genes that help these wild
varieties to resist black Sigatoka, the protective genes could be introduced into laboratory tissue
cultures of cells from edible varieties. These could then be propagated into new disease-resistant
plants and passed on to farmers.
It sounds promising, but the big banana companies have, until now, refused to get involved in
GM research for fear of alienating their customers. “Biotechnology is extremely expensive and
there are serious questions about consumer acceptance,” says David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s
senior director for environ- mental affairs. With scant funding from the companies, the banana
genome researchers are focusing on the other end of the spectrum. Even if they can identify the
crucial genes, they will be a long way from developing new varieties that smallholders will find
suitable and affordable. But whatever biotechnology’s academic interest, it is the only hope for
the banana. Without it, banana production worldwide will head into a tailspin. We may even see
the extinction of the banana as both a lifesaver for hungry and impoverished Africans and the
most popular product on the world’s supermarket shelves.
SECTION 1: QUESTIONS 1-13
Questions 1-3
Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for
each answer.
Questions 4-10
Look at the statements (Questions 4-10) and the list of people. Match each statement with the
correct person A-F.
A Rodomiro Ortiz
B David McLaughlin
C Emile Frison
D Ronald Romero
E Luadir Gasparotto
F Geoff Hawtin
Questions 11-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
(1,456 votes)
Views: 2,154,374
READING PASSAGE 2
B It is possible to trace a variety of causes for this concentration of effort and interest. In the
1980s and 1990s scientific research into climate change and its environmental impact spilled
over into a much broader public debate as awareness of these issues grew; the prospect of rising
sea levels over the next century, and their impact on current coastal environments, has been a
particular focus for concern. At the same time archaeologists were beginning to recognize that
the destruction caused by natural processes of coastal erosion and by human activity was having
an increasing impact on the archaeological resource of the coast.
C The dominant process affecting the physical form of England in the post- glacial period has
been rising in the altitude of sea level relative to the land, as theglaciers melted and the landmass
readjusted. The encroachment of the sea, the loss of huge areas of land now under the North Sea
and the English Channel, and especially the loss of the land bridge between England and France,
which finally made Britain an island, must have been immensely significant factors in the lives
D So great has been the rise in sea level and the consequent regression of the coast that much of
the archaeological evidence now exposed in the coastal zone. Whether being eroded or exposed
as a buried land surface, is derived from what was originally terres-trial occupation. Its current
location in the coastal zone is the product of later unrelated processes, and it can tell us little
about past adaptations to the sea. Estimates of its significance will need to be made in the context
of other related evidence from dry land sites. Nevertheless, its physical environment means that
preservation is often excellent, for example in the case of the Neolithic structure excavated at the
Stumble in Essex.
E In some cases these buried land surfaces do contain evidence for human exploitation of what
was a coastal environment, and elsewhere along the modem coast there is similar evidence.
Where the evidence does relate to past human exploitation of the resources and the opportunities
offered by the sea and the coast, it is both diverse and as yet little understood. We are not yet in a
position to make even preliminary estimates of answers to such fundamental questions as the
extent to which the sea and the coast affected human life in the past, what percentage of the
population at any time lived within reach of the sea, or whether human settlements in coastal
environments showed a distinct character from those inland.
F The most striking evidence for use of the sea is in the form of boats, yet we still have much to
learn about their production and use. Most of the known wrecks around our coast are not
unexpectedly of post-medieval date, and offer an unparalleled opportunity for research which has
yet been little used. The prehistoric sewn-plank boats such as those from the Humber estuary and
Dover all seem to belong to the second millennium BC; after this there is a gap in the record of a
millennium, which cannot yet be explained before boats reappear, but it built using a very
different technology. Boatbuilding must have been an extremely important activity around much
of our coast, yet we know almost nothing about it. Boats were some of the most complex
artefacts produced by pre-modem societies, and further research on their production and use
make an important contribution to our understanding of past attitudes to technology and
technological change.
G Boats need landing places, yet here again our knowledge is very patchy. In many cases the
natural shores and beaches would have sufficed, leaving little or no archaeological trace, but
especially in later periods, many ports and harbors, as well as smaller facilities such as quays,
wharves, and jetties, were built. Despite a growth of interest in the waterfront archaeology of
some of our more important Roman and medieval towns, very little attention has been paid to the
H One of the most important revelations of recent research has been the extent of industrial
activity along the coast. Fishing and salt production are among the better documented activities,
but even here our knowledge is patchy. Many forms of fishing will leave little archaeological
trace, and one of the surprises of recent survey has been the extent of past investment in facilities
for procuring fish and shellfish. Elaborate wooden fish weirs, often of considerable extent and
responsive to aerial photography in shallow water, have been identified in areas such as Essex
and the Severn estuary. The production of salt, especially in the late Iron Age and early Roman
periods, has been recognized for some time, especially in the Thames estuary and around the
Solent and Poole Harbor, but the reasons for the decline of that industry and the nature of later
coastal salt working are much less well understood. Other industries were also located along the
coast, either because the raw materials outcropped there or for ease of working and transport:
mineral resources such as sand, gravel, stone, coal, ironstone, and alum were all exploited. These
industries are poorly documented, but their remains are sometimes extensive and striking.
I Some appreciation of the variety and importance of the archaeological remains preserved in the
coastal zone, albeit only in preliminary form, can thus be gained from recent work, but the
complexity of the problem of managing that resource is also being realized. The problem arises
not only from the scale and variety of the archaeological remains, but also from two other
sources: the very varied natural and human threats to the resource, and the complex web of
organizations with authority over, or interests in, the coastal zone. Human threats include the
redevelopment of historic towns and old dockland areas, and the increased importance of the
coast for the leisure and tourism industries, resulting in pressure for the increased provision of
facilities such as marinas. The larger size of ferries has also caused an increase in the damage
caused by their wash to fragile deposits in the intertidal zone. The most significant natural threat
is the predicted rise in sea level over the next century especially in the south and east of England.
Its impact on archaeology is not easy to predict, and though it is likely to be highly localized, it
will be at a scale much larger than that of most archaeological sites. Thus protecting one site may
simply result in transposing the threat to a point further along the coast. The management of the
archaeological remains will have to be considered in a much longer time scale and a much wider
geographical
scale than is common in the case of dry land sites, and this will pose a serious challenge for
archaeologists.
SECTION 2: QUESTIONS 14-26
Questions 14-16
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
15
16
Questions 17-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 17-23 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
17 England lost much of its land after the ice age due to the rising sea level.
18 The coastline of England has changed periodically.
19 Coastal archaeological evidence may be well protected by sea water.
20 The design of boats used by pre-modern people was very simple.
21 Similar boats were also discovered in many other European countries.
22 There are few documents relating to mineral exploitation.
23 Large passenger boats are causing increasing damage to the seashore.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel
accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of large,
imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in
many lands, and they held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about
their realms. The Greek historian Herodotus reported on his travels in Egypt and Anatolia in
researching the history of the Persian wars. The Chinese envoy Zhang Qian described much of
central Asia as far west as Bactria (modern- day Afghanistan) on the basis of travels undertaken
in the first century BCE while searching for allies for the Han dynasty. Hellenistic and Roman
geographers such as Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder relied on their own travels through
much of the Mediterranean world as well as reports of other travellers to compile vast compendia
of geographical knowledge.
During the post-classical era (about 500 to 1500 CE), trade and pilgrimage j? emerged as major
incentives for travel to foreign lands. Muslim merchants sought trading opportunities throughout
much of the eastern hemisphere. They described lands, peoples, and commercial products of the
Indian Ocean basin from East Africa to Indonesia, and they supplied the first written accounts of
societies in sub-Saharan West Africa. While merchants set out in search of trade and profit,
devout Muslims travelled as pilgrims to Mecca to make their hajj and visit the holy sites of
Islam. Since the prophet Muhammad’s original pilgrimage to Mecca, untold millions of Muslims
Medieval Europeans did not hit the roads in such large numbers as their Muslim and East Asian
counterparts during the early part of the post-classical era, although gradually increasing crowds
of Christian pilgrims flowed to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela (in northern Spain),
and other sites. After the 12th century, however, merchants, pilgrims, and missionaries from
medieval Europe travelled widely and left numerous travel accounts, of which Marco Polo’s
description of his travels and sojourn in China is the best known. As they became familiar with
the larger world of the eastern hemisphere - and the profitable commercial opportunities that it
offered - European peoples worked to find new and more direct routes to Asian and African
markets. Their efforts took them not only to all parts of the eastern hemisphere, but eventually to
the Americas and Oceania as well.
If Muslim and Chinese peoples dominated travel and travel writing in post- classical times,
European explorers, conquerors, merchants, and missionaries took centre stage during the early
modern era (about 1500 to 1800 CE). By no means did Muslim and Chinese travel come to a halt
in early modern times. But European peoples ventured to the distant corners of the globe, and
European printing presses churned out thousands of travel accounts that described foreign lands
and peoples for a reading public with an apparently insatiable appetite for news about the larger
world. The volume of travel literature was so great that several editors, including Giambattista
Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, Theodore de Biy, and Samuel Purchas, assembled numerous travel
accounts and made them available in enormous published collections.
During the 19th century, European travellers made their way to the interior regions of Africa and
the Americas, generating a fresh round of travel writing as they did so. Meanwhile, European
colonial administrators devoted numerous writings to the societies of their colonial subjects,
particularly in Asian and African colonies they established. By mid-century, attention was
flowing also in the other direction. Painfully aware of the military and technological prowess of
European and Euro-American societies, Asian travellers in particular visited Europe and the
United States in hopes of discovering principles useful for the organisation of their own
societies. Among the most prominent of these travellers who made extensive use of their
overseas observations and experiences in their own writings were the Japanese reformer
Fukuzawa Yu- kichi and the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.
Questions 27-28
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 27-28 on your answer sheet.
27
28
Why did the author say writing travel books is also “a mirror” for travellers themselves?
A Because travellers record their own experiences.
B Because travellers reflect upon their own society and life.
C Because it increases knowledge of foreign cultures.
D Because it is related to the development of human society.
Questions 29-36
Complete the table on the next page.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each answer.
To seek 30
Han Dynasty Zhang Qian Central Asia
To acquire 31
Roman Empire Ptolemy, Strabo, The Mediterranean
Pliny the Elder
For trading
Post-classical era Muslims From East Africa to and 32
(about 500 to Indonesia, Mecca
1500 CE)
33
5th - 9thCenturies Chinese Buddhists To collect Buddhist texts
CE and for spiritual
enlightenment
Sun Yat-sen,
To study the 35
Fukuzawa Europe and the United of their societies
By mid-century States
of the 1800s Yukichi
People from
36
Questions 37-40
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 108
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Why were the imperial rulers especially interested in these travel stories?
A Reading travel stories was a popular pastime.
B The accounts are often truthful rather than fictional.
C Travel books played an important role in literature.
D They desired knowledge of their empire.
38
Who were the largest group to record their spiritual trips during the post-classical era?
A Muslim traders
B Muslim pilgrims
C Chinese Buddhists
D Indian Buddhist teachers
39
During the early modern era, a large number of travel books were published to
A meet the public’s interest.
B explore new business opportunities.
C encourage trips to the new world.
D record the larger world.
40
Answer Keys:
110,000
2South-East Asia
3hard seeds
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
A Fire and flood are two of humanity’s worst nightmares. People have,therefore,always sought
to control them. Forest fires are snuffed out quickly. The flow of rivers is regulated by weirs and
dams. At least, that is how it used to be. But foresters have learned that forests need fires to clear
out the brash and even to get seeds to germinate. And a similar revelation is now – dawning on
hydrologists. Rivers – and the ecosystems they support – need floods. That is why a man-made
torrent has been surging down the Grand Canyon. By Thursday March 6th it was running at full
throttle, which was expected to be sustained for 60 hours.
B Floods once raged through the canyon every year. Spring Snow from as far away as
Wyoming would melt and swell the Colorado river to a flow that averaged around 1,500 cubic
metres (50,000 cubic feet) a second. Every eight years or so, that figure rose to almost 3,000
cubic metres. These floods infused the river with sediment, carved its beaches and built its
sandbars.
C However, in the four decades since the building of the Glen Canyon dam, just upstream of
the Grand Canyon, the only sediment that it has collected has come from tiny, undammed
tributaries. Even that has not been much use as those tributaries are not powerful enough to
distribute the sediment in an ecologically valuable way.
E And the chub are not alone. In the years since the Glen Canyon dam was built, several
species have vanished altogether. These include the Colorado pike-minnow, the razorback
sucker and the round-tail chub. Meanwhile, aliens including fathead minnows, channel catfish
and common carp, which would have been hard, put to survive in the savage waters of the
undammed canyon, have moved in.
F So flooding is the obvious answer. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Floods were sent
down the Grand Canyon in 1996 and 2004 and the results were mixed. In 1996 the flood was
allowed to go on too long. To start with,all seemed well. The floodwaters built up sandbanks and
infused the river with sediment. Eventually, however, the continued flow washed most of the
sediment out of the canyon. This problem was avoided in 2004, but unfortunately, on that
occasion, the volume of sand available behind the dam was too low to rebuild the sandbanks.
This time, the USGS is convinced that things will be better. The amount of sediment available is
three times greater than it was in 2004. So if a flood is going to do some good, this is the time to
unleash one.
G Even so, it may turn out to be an empty gesture. At less than 1,200 cubic metres a second, this
flood is smaller than even an average spring flood, let alone one of the mightier deluges of the
past. Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of sediment through the Grand
Canyon,wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess of silt and muck that would make
modern river rafters cringe.
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
Questions 8-13
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
take the test.
READING PASSAGE 2
B In 1985, Professor Armstrong headed a five-year research project into children’s fitness. The
results, published in 1990, were alarming. The survey, which monitored 700 11-16-year-olds,
found that 48 per cent of girls and 41 per cent of boys already exceeded safe cholesterol levels
set for children by the American Heart Foundation. Armstrong adds, “heart is a muscle and need
exercise, or it loses its strength.” It also found that 13 per cent of boys and 10 per cent of girls
were overweight. More disturbingly, the survey found that over a four-day period, half the girls
and one-third of the boys did less exercise than the equivalent of a brisk 10-minute walk. High
levels of cholesterol, excess body fat and inactivity are believed to increase the risk of coronary
heart disease.
C Physical education is under pressure in the UK – most schools devote little more than 100
minutes a week to it in curriculum time, which is less than many other European countries. Three
European countries are giving children a head start in PE, France, Austria and Switzerland –
offer at least two hours in primary and secondary schools. These findings, from the European
Union of Physical Education Associations, prompted specialists in children’s physiology to call
on European governments to give youngsters a daily PE programme. The survey shows that the
UK ranks 13th out of the 25 countries, with Ireland bottom, averaging under an hour a week for
D As a former junior football international, Professor Armstrong is a passionate advocate for
sport. Although the Government has poured millions into beefing up sport in the community,
there is less commitment to it as part of the crammed school curriculum. This means that many
children never acquire the necessary skills to thrive in team games. If they are no good at them,
they lose interest and establish an inactive pattern of behaviour. When this is coupled with a poor
diet, it will lead inevitably to weight gain. Seventy per cent of British children give up all sport
when they leave school, compared with only 20 per cent of French teenagers. Professor
Armstrong believes that there is far too great an emphasis on team games at school. “We need to
look at the time devoted to PE and balance it between individual and pair activities, such as
aerobics and badminton, as well as team sports. “He added that children need to have the
opportunity to take part in a wide variety of individual, partner and team sports.
E The good news, however, is that a few small companies and children’s activity groups have
reacted positively and creatively to the problem. Take That, shouts Gloria Thomas, striking a
disco pose astride her mini-spacehopper. Take That, echo a flock of toddlers, adopting
outrageous postures astride their space hoppers. ‘Michael Jackson, she shouts, and they all do a
spoof fan-crazed shriek. During the wild and chaotic hopper race across the studio floor,
commands like this are issued and responded to with untrammelled glee. The sight of 15
bouncing seven-year-olds who seem about to launch into orbit at every bounce brings tears to the
eyes. Uncoordinated, loud, excited and emotional, children provide raw comedy.
F Any cardiovascular exercise is a good option, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be high
intensity. It can be anything that gets your heart rate up: such as walking the dog, swimming,
miming, skipping, hiking. “Even walking through the grocery store can be exercise,” Samis-
Smith said. What they don’t know is that they’re at a Fit Kids class, and that the fun is a disguise
for the serious exercise plan they’re covertly being taken through. Fit Kids trains parents to run
fitness classes for children. ‘Ninety per cent of children don’t like team sports,’ says company
director, Gillian Gale.
G A Prevention survey found that children whose parents keep in shape are much more likely to
have healthy body weights themselves. “There’s nothing worse than telling a child what he needs
to do and not doing it yourself,” says Elizabeth Ward, R.D., a Boston nutritional consultant and
author of Healthy Foods, Healthy Kids . “Set a good example and get your nutritional house in
order first.” In the 1930s and ’40s, kids expended 800 calories a day just walking, carrying water,
and doing other chores, notes Fima Lifshitz, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist in Santa Barbara.
“Now, kids in obese families are expending only 200 calories a day in physical activity,” says
Lifshitz, “incorporate more movement in your family’s lifepark farther away from the stores at
the mall, take stairs instead of the elevator, and walk to nearby friends’ houses instead of
driving.”
Questions 14-17
Questions 18-21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
Questions 22-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
24
25
26
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
B When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations or more,
we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example, over a certain
period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may change into long [e:] vowels,
or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example at the end of a word) may change into
[p] consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound
laws (even though sound laws often reflect universal tendencies), but simply particular sound
laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period
C It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a part in
the spread of change: one person imitates another, and people with the most prestige are most
likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social group may be imitated (more
or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a social group goes up or down in the
world, its pronunciation of Russian, which had formerly been considered desirable, became on
the contrary an undesirable kind of accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the
changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been
shown to consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already
existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes of the
D A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy
their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is true, but it is also true that such
deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood. Perhaps it is more
significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a
given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged. This, however, cannot explain
changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that there is some systematic trend in the
failures of imitation: if they are merely random deviations they will cancel one another out and
there will be no net change in the language.
E One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimization of effort. The
change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimilation, which is a very common kind
of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one.
For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has been changed to /n/ under the
influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has hereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are
articulated in the same place (with the tip of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is
articulated elsewhere (with the two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has
been changed to conform with that of the following plosive. A more recent example of the same
kind of thing is the common pronunciation of football as football.
F Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pronunciation in order to increase
efficiency. It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end of a word: in Middle English,
word-final [-n] was often lost in unstressed syllables, so that baken ‘to bake’ changed from
[‘ba:kan] to [‘ba:k3],and later to [ba:k]. Consonant-clusters are often simplified. At one time
there was a [t] in words like castle and Christmas, and an initial [k] in words like knight and
know. Sometimes a whole syllable is dropped out when two successive syllables begin with the
same consonant (haplology): a recent example is temporary, which in Britain is often
pronounced as if it were tempory.
Questions 27-30
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Changes are usually called 27 . There are three reasons for these changes. Firstly,
the influence of one language on another; when one person imitates another pronunciation(the most
prestige’s), the imitation always partly involving factor of 28 . Secondly, the imitation of
Questions 31-37
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 31-37 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
31 It is impossible for modern people to find pronunciation of words in an earlier
age
32 The great change of language in Russian history is related to the rising status
and fortune of middle classes.
33 All the children learn speeches from adults while they assume that certain
language is difficult to imitate exactly.
34 Pronunciation with causal inaccuracy will not exert big influence on language
changes.
35 The word scant can be pronounced more easily than skamt
36 The [g] in gnat not being pronounced will not be spelt out in the future.
37 The sound of ‘temporary’ cannot wholly present its spelling.
Questions 38-40
Look at the following sentences and the list of statements below. Match each statement with the
correct sentence, A-D.
D Because the speaker can pronounce [n] and [t] both in the same time
Answer Keys:
1NOT GIVEN
2FALSE
3TRUE
4FALSE
5TRUE
6TRUE
7NOT GIVEN
8spring
9sediment
10razorback sucker
11common carp
12visibility
13sand
14A
15B
16C
17D
18NOT GIVEN
19TRUE
20NOT GIVEN
21FALSE
22C
23B
24C
25A
26B
27Sound laws
28fashion
29imperfect
30principle of ease
31FALSE
32NOT GIVEN
33NOT GIVEN
34TRUE
35NOT GIVEN
36NOT GIVEN
37TRUE
38C
39B
40A
take the test.
(1,456 votes)
Views: 2,154,440
READING PASSAGE 1
A The potato was first cultivated in South America between three and seven thousand years ago,
though scientists believe they may have grown wild in the region as long as 13,000 years ago.
B Early Spanish chroniclers who misused the Indian word batata (sweet potato) as the name for
the potato noted the importance of the tuber to the Incan Empire. The Incas had learned to
preserve the potato for storage by dehydrating and mashing potatoes into a substance called
Chuchu could be stored in a room for up to 10 years, providing excellent insurance against
possible crop failures. As well as using the food as a staple crop, the Incas thought potatoes
made childbirth easier and used it to treat injuries.
C The Spanish conquistadors first encountered the potato when they arrived in Peru in 1532 in
search of gold, and noted Inca miners eating chuchu. At the time the Spaniards failed to realize
that the potato represented a far more important treasure than either silver or gold, but they did
gradually begin to use potatoes as basic rations aboard their ships. After the arrival of the potato
in Spain in 1570,a few Spanish farmers began to cultivate them on a small scale, mostly as
food for livestock.
D Throughout Europe, potatoes were regarded with suspicion, distaste and fear. Generally
considered to be unfit for human consumption, they were used only as animal fodder and
sustenance for the starving. In northern Europe, potatoes were primarily grown in botanical
gardens as an exotic novelty. Even peasants refused to eat from a plant that produced ugly,
misshapen tubers and that had come from a heathen civilization. Some felt that the potato plant’s
resemblance to plants in the nightshade family hinted that it was the creation of witches or
devils.
E In meat-loving England, farmers and urban workers regarded potatoes with extreme distaste.
In 1662, the Royal Society recommended the cultivation of the tuber to the English government
and the nation, but this recommendation had little impact. Potatoes did not become a staple until,
during the food shortages associated with the Revolutionary Wars, the English government
began to officially encourage potato cultivation. In 1795, the Board of Agriculture issued a
pamphlet entitled “Hints Respecting the Culture and Use of Potatoes”; this was followed
shortly by pro-potato editorials and potato recipes in The Times. Gradually, the lower classes
began to follow the lead of the upper classes.
F A similar pattern emerged across the English Channel in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
While the potato slowly gained ground in eastern France (where it was often the only crop
remaining after marauding soldiers plundered wheat fields and vineyards), it did not achieve
widespread acceptance until the late 1700s. The peasants remained suspicious, in spite of a 1771
paper from the Facult de Paris testifying that the potato was not harmful but beneficial. The
people began to overcome their distaste when the plant received the royal seal of approval: Louis
XVI began to sport a potato flower in his buttonhole, and Marie-Antoinette wore the purple
potato blossom in her hair.
G Frederick the Great of Prussia saw the potato’s potential to help feed his nation and lower the
price of bread, but faced the challenge of overcoming the people’s prejudice against the plant.
When he issued a 1774 order for his subjects to grow potatoes as protection against famine, the
H Historians debate whether the potato was primarily a cause or an effect of the huge population
boom in industrial-era England and Wales. Prior to 1800,the English diet had consisted
primarily of meat, supplemented by bread, butter and cheese. Few vegetables were consumed,
most vegetables being regarded as nutritionally worthless and potentially harmful. This view
began to change gradually in the late 1700s. The Industrial Revolution was drawing an ever
increasing percentage of the populace into crowded cities, where only the richest could afford
homes with ovens or coal storage rooms, and people were working 12-16 hour days which left
them with little time or energy to prepare food. High yielding, easily prepared potato crops were
the obvious solution to England’s food problems.
I Whereas most of their neighbors regarded the potato with suspicion and had to be persuaded to
use it by the upper classes, the Irish peasantry embraced the tuber more passionately than anyone
since the Incas. The potato was well suited to the Irish the soil and climate, and its high yield
suited the most important concern of most Irish farmers: to feed their families.
J The most dramatic example of the potato’s potential to alter population patterns occurred in
Ireland, where the potato had become a staple by 1800. The Irish population doubled to eight
million between 1780 and 1841,this without any significant expansion of industry or reform of
agricultural techniques beyond the widespread cultivation of the potato. Though Irish
landholding practices were primitive in comparison with those of England, the potato’s high
yields allowed even the poorest farmers to produce more healthy food than they needed with
scarcely any investment or hard labor. Even children could easily plant, harvest and cook
potatoes, which of course required no threshing, curing or grinding. The abundance provided by
potatoes greatly decreased infant mortality and encouraged early marriage.
SECTION 1: QUESTIONS 1-13
Questions 1-5
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1?
Questions 6-13
Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage 1 for
each answer.
SECTION 1
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage
2 below.
A Art changes over time and our idea of what art is changes too. For example, objects originally
intended for devotional, ritualistic or re-creational purposes may be recategorised as art by
members of other later civilisations, such as our own, which no longer respond to these purposes.
B What also happens is that techniques and crafts which would have been judged inartistic at the
time they were used are reassessed. Life-casting is an interesting example of this. It involved
making a plaster mould of a living person or thing. This was complex, technical work, as
Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he poured 250 litres of plaster over his human model
and nearly killed him. At the time, the casts were used for medical research and, consequently, in
the nineteenth century life-casting was considered inferior to sculpture in the same way that,
more recently, photography was thought to be a lesser art than painting. Both were viewed as
unacceptable shortcuts by the "senior" arts. Their virtues of speed and unwavering realism also
implied their limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination.
C For many, life-casting was an insult to the sculptor’s creative genius. In an infamous lawsuit of
1834, a moulder whose mask of the dying French emperor Napoleon had been reproduced and
sold without his permission was judged to have no rights to the image. In other words, he was
specifically held not to be an artist. This judgement reflect the view of established members of
the nineteenth-century art world such as Rodin, who commented that life-casting ‘happens fast
but it doesn’t make Art’. Some even feared that ‘if too much nature was allowed in, it would lead
Art away from its proper course of the Ideal.
E Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new movement implies a reassessment of
what has gone before. What is done now alters what was done before. In some cases this is
merely self-serving, with the new art using the old to justify itself. It seems to be saying, look at
how all of that points to this! Aren’t we clever to be the culmination of all that has gone before?
But usually it is a matter of re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted.
Take, for example, the cast of the hand of a giant from a circus, made by an anonymous artist
around 1889, an item that would now sit happily in any commercial or public gallery. The most
significant impact of this piece is on the eye, in the contradiction between unexpected size and
verisimilitude. Next, the human element kicks in. you note that the nails are dirt-encrusted,
unless this is the caster’s decorative addition, and the fingertips extend far beyond them. Then
you take in the element of choice, arrangement, art if you like, in the neat, pleated, buttoned
sleeve-end that gives the item balance and variation of texture. This is just a moulded hand, yet
the part stands utterly for the whole. It reminds us slyly, poignantly, of the full-size original
F But is it art? And, if so, why? These are old tediously repeated questions to which artists have
often responded, ‘It is art because I am an artist and therefore what I do is art. However, what
doesn’t work for literature works much better for art – works of art do float free of their creators’
intentions. Over time the “reader” does become more powerful. Few of us can look at a medieval
altarpiece as its painter intended. We believe too little and aesthetically know too much, so we
recreate and find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic intention of Paul
Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil onto flesh, who moulded, cast and
decorated in the nineteenth century is now irrelevant. What counts is the surviving object and our
response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to
reflection and involve the heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful but it is rarely true
to any significant depth. One of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an
unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder.
SECTION 2: QUESTIONS 14-26
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Questions 19-24
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
Questions 25-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
26
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage
3 below.
B But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs.
For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest
impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination in modem agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s
industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been
somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers
began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop mono-
cultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field
margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native bees outright—they’re as vulnerable
to insecticides as any agricultural pest—and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to
those that remained. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new—in
her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that
could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.
C If that ‘Fruitless Fall, has not—yet—occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which
farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. The honeybee has
been semi-domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that
determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural
system that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the
way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 131
used to pollinate many different crops. And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of
every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single
hive. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the
honeybee, “says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The honeybee, in other words,
has become a crucial cog in the modem system of industrial agriculture. That system delivers
more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that system
is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory
floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out some of the
resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems.
D Breno Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of specialization
usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs
quickly to extinction at the least disbalance. In effect, by developing an agricultural system that
is heavily reliant on a single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialized.
And when the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony collapse
disorder, the vulnerability of that agricultural system begins to become clear.
E In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. “The
problem is trying to provide native bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short
number of years in order to service the crop , ” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of
flowers per acre in a two-to three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand,
native bees can be much more efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so you don’t
need as many to do the job. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) can
pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a task that would require roughly 50,000 to 150,000
honeybees. There are bee tinkerers engaged in similar work in many comers of the world. In
Brazil, Breno Freitas has found that Centris tarsata, the native pollinator of wild cashew, can
survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as by
interplanting their cashew trees with Caribbean cherry.
F In certain places, native bees may already be doing more than they’re getting credit for.
Ecologist Rachael Winfree recently led a team that looked at pollination of four summer crops
(tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon) at 29 farms in the region of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. Winfiree’s team identified 54 species of wild bees that visited these crops, and
found that wild bees were the most important pollinators in the system: even though managed
honeybees were present on many of the farms, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of
flower visits in the study. In another study focusing specifically on watermelon, Winfree and her
colleagues calculated that native bees alone could provide sufficient pollination at 90 percent of
the 23 farms studied. By contrast, honeybees alone could provide sufficient pollination at only 78
percent of farms.
G “The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced ,” Winfree admits. In
the Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively small, each fanner typically grows
a variety of crops, and farms are interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which
means there are opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee conservation, too. The
landscape is a bee-friendly patchwork that provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral
resources distributed among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields,
H Of course, not all farmers will be able to implement all of these practices. And researchers are
suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural system. For some small-scale farms, native
bees may indeed be all that’s needed. For larger operations, a suite of managed bees—with
honeybees filling the generalist role and other, native bees pollinating specific crops—could be
augmented by free pollination services from resurgent wild pollinators. In other words, they’re
saying, we still have an opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse,
resilient, and robust.
SECTION 3: QUESTIONS 27-40
Questions 27-30
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27 In the United States, farmers use honeybees in a large scale over the past few
years.
28 Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers.
29 The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among native bees for
every crop.
30 It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees.
Questions 31-35
Choose the correct letter, A,B,C or D.
The example of the "Fruitless Fair" underlines the writer’s point about
A needs for using pesticides.
B impacts of losing insect pollinators.
32
33
34
35
Questions 36-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Answer Keys:
1FALSE
2FALSE
3NOT GIVEN
4TRUE
5TRUE
6flower
7prejudice
8reverse
9meat
10crops
11soil
12cultivation
13investment
14C
15E
16B
17F
18D
19NO
20NOT GIVEN
21NO
22NOT GIVEN
23NO
24YES
25B
• the effect, if any, that this promotion has on their food knowledge, preferences and behaviour.
A Children’s food promotion is dominated by television advertising, and the great majority of
this promotes the so-called ‘Big Four’ of pre-sugared breakfast cereals, soft-drinks,
confectionary and savoury snacks. In the last ten years advertising for fast food outlets has
rapidly increased. There is some evidence that the dominance of television has recently begun to
wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for multi-faceted
communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point of sale activity.
The advertised diet contrasts sharply with that recommended by public health advisors, and
themes of fun and fantasy or taste, rather than health and nutrition, are used to promote it to
children. Meanwhile, the recommended diet gets little promotional support.
B There is plenty of evidence that children notice and enjoy food promotion. However,
establishing whether this actually influences them is a complex problem. The review tackled it
by looking at studies that had examined possible effects on what children know about food, their
C The review also found evidence that food promotion influences children’s food preferences
and their purchase behaviour. A study of primary school children, for instance, found that
exposure to advertising influenced which foods they claimed to like; and another showed that
labelling and signage on a vending machine had an effect on what was bought by secondary
school pupils. A number of studies have also shown that food advertising can influence what
children eat. One, for example, showed that advertising influenced a primary class’s choice of
daily snack at playtime.
D The next step, of trying to establish whether or not a link exists between food promotion and
diet or obesity, is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real world settings. A
number of studies have attempted this by using amount of television viewing as a proxy for
exposure to television advertising. They have established a clear link between television viewing
and diet, obesity, and cholesterol levels. It is impossible to say, however, whether this effect is
caused by the advertising, the sedentary nature of television viewing or snacking that might take
place whilst viewing. One study resolved this problem by taking a detailed diary of children’s
viewing habits. This showed that the more food adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories
they consumed.
E Thus the literature does suggest food promotion is influencing children’s diet in a number of
ways. This does not amount to proof; as noted above with this kind of research, incontrovertible
proof simply isn’t attainable. Nor do all studies point to this conclusion; several have not found
an effect. In addition, very few studies have attempted to measure how strong these effects are
relative to other factors influencing children’s food choices. Nonetheless, many studies have
found clear effects and they have used sophisticated methodologies that make it possible to
determine that i) these effects are not just due to chance; ii) they are independent of other factors
that may influence diet, such as parents’ eating habits or attitudes; and iii) they occur at a brand
and category level.
F Furthermore, two factors suggest that these findings actually downplay the effect that food
promotion has on children. First, the literature focuses principally on television advertising; the
cumulative effect of this combined with other forms of promotion and marketing is likely to be
significantly greater. Second, the studies have looked at direct effects on individual children, and
understate indirect influences. For example, promotion for fast food outlets may not only
influence the child, but also encourage parents to take them for meals and reinforce the idea that
this is a normal and desirable behaviour.
G This does not amount to proof of an effect, but in our view does provide sufficient evidence to
conclude that an effect exists. The debate should now shift to what action is needed, and
Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the
ppropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
1 Paragraph A
2 paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-13
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
The Millennium Bridge is the first new bridge across the river Thames in London since Tower
Bridge opened in 1894, and it is the first ever designed for pedestrians only. The bridge links the
City of London near St Paul’s Cathedral with the Tate Modern art gallery on Bankside.
The bridge opened initially on Saturday 10th June 2000. For the opening ceremony, a crowd of
over 1,000 people had assembled on the south half of the bridge with a band in front. When they
started to walk across with the band playing, there was immediately an unexpectedly pronounced
lateral movement of the bridge deck. “It was a fine day and the bridge was on the route of a
major charity walk,” one of the pedestrians recounted what ho saw that day. “At first, it was still.
Then if began to sway sideways, just slightly. Then, almost from one moment to the next, when
large groups of people were crossing, the wobble intensified. Everyone had to stop walking to
retain balance and sometimes to hold onto the hand rails for support.” Immediately it was
decided to limit the number of people on the bridge, and the bridge was dubbed the ‘wobbly’
bridge by the media who declared it another high-profile British Millennium Project failure. In
older to fully investigate and resolve the issue the decision was taken to close the bridge on 12th
June 2000.
Arup, the leading member of the committee in charge of the construction of the bridge, decided
to tackle the issue head on. They immediately undertook a fast-track research project to seek the
cause and the cure. The embarrassed engineers found the videotape that day which showed the
center span swaying about 3 inches sideways every second and the south span 2 inches every
1.25 seconds. Because there was a significant wind blowing on the opening days (force 3-4) and
The unexpected motion was the result of a natural human reaction to small lateral movements. It
is well known that a suspension bridge has tendency to sway when troops march over it in
lockstep, which is why troops arc required to break step when crossing such a bridge. “If we
walk on a swaying surface we tend to compensate and stabilise ourselves by spreading our legs
further apart but this increases the lateral push”. Pat Dallard, the engineer at Arup, says that you
change the way you walk to match what the bridge is doing. It is an unconscious tendency for
pedestrians to match their footsteps to the sway, thereby exacerbating it even more. “It’s rather
like walking on a rolling ship deck you move one way and then the other to compensate for the
roll.” The way people walk doesn’t have to match exactly the natural frequency of the bridge as
in resonance the interaction is more subtle. As the bridge moves, people adjust the way they walk
in their own manner. The problem is that when there are enough people on the bridge the total
sideways push can overcome the bridge’s ability to absorb it. The movement becomes excessive
and continues to increase until people begin to have difficulty in walking they may even have to
hold on to the rails.
Professor Fujino Yozo of Tokyo University, who studied the earth-resistant Toda Bridge in
Japan, believes the horizontal forces caused by walking, running or jumping could also in
turn cause excessive dynamic vibration in the lateral direction in the bridge. He explains that
as the structure began moving, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the same lateral rhythm as
the bridge; the adjusted footsteps magnified the motion just like when four people all stand up
in small boat at the same time. As more pedestrians locked into the same rhythm, the
increasing oscillation led to the dramatic swaying captured on film until people stopped walking
altogether, because they could not even keep upright.
In order to design a method of reducing the movements, an immediate research program was
launched by the bridge’s engineering designer Arup. It was decided that the force exerted by the
pedestrians had to be quantified and related to the motion of the bridge. Although there are some
descriptions of this phenomenon in existing literature, none of these actually quantifies the force.
So there was no quantitative analytical way to design the bridge against this effect. The efforts to
solve the problem quickly got supported by a number of universities and research organisations.
The tests at the University of Southampton involved a person walking on the spot on a small
shake table. The tests at Imperial College involved persons walking along a specially built, 7.2m-
long platform, which could be driven laterally at different frequencies and amplitudes. These
tests have their own limitations. While the Imperial College test platform was too short that only
seven or eight steps could be measured at one time, the “walking on the spot” test did not
accurately replicate forward walking, although many footsteps could be observed using this
method. Neither test could investigate any influence of other people in a crowd on the behavior
of the individual tested.
Questions 14-17
Choose FOUR letters, A-I.
Which FOUR of the following could be seen on the day when the bridge opened to the public?
A the bridge moved vertically
B the bridge swayed from side to side
C the bridge swayed violently throughout the opening ceremony
D it was hard to keep balance on the bridge
E pedestrians walked in synchronised steps
F pedestrians lengthened their footsteps
G a music band marched across the bridge
H the swaying rhythm varied to the portions of the bridge
I flags and banners kept still on the bridge
Questions 18-23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
the day of the opening ceremony. In the beginning they thought the forces of 18 might
have caused the movement because there were many flags and banners on the bridge that day. But
quickly new understandings arose after series of tests were conducted on how people walk
on 19 floors. The tests showed people would place their leg 20 to keep
balance when the floor is shaking. Pat Dallard even believes pedestrians may unknowingly adjust
their 21 to match the sway of the bridge. Professor Fujino Yozo’s study found that the
Questions 24-26
Complete the table below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
thetest.
Why is internal marketing so important? First, because it's the best way to help employees make
a powerful emotional connection to the products and services you sell. Without that connection,
employees are likely to undermine the expectations set by your advertising. In some cases, this is
because they simply don't understand what you have promised the public, so they end up
working at cross-purposes. In other cases, it may be they don't actually believe in the brand and
feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. We've found that when people care about
and believe in the brand, they're motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company
increases. Employees are united and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity.
Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace. At most
companies, however, internal and external communications are often mismatched. This can be
very confusing, and it threatens employees' perceptions of the company's integrity: They are told
one thing by management but observe that a different message is being sent to the public. One
health insurance company, for instance, advertised that the welfare of patients was the company's
number one priority, while employees were told that their main goal was to increase the value of
their stock options through cost reductions. And one major financial services institution told
customers that it was making a major shift in focus from being a financial retailer to a financial
adviser, but, a year later, research showed that the customer experience with the company had
not changed. It turned out that company leaders had not made an effort to sell the change
internally, so employees were still churning out transactions and hadn't changed their behavior to
match their new adviser role.
Enabling employees to deliver on customer expectations is important, of course, but it's not the
only reason a company needs to match internal and external messages. Another reason is to help
push the company to achieve goals that might otherwise be out of reach. In 1997, when IBM
launched its e-business campaign (which is widely credited for turning around the company's
image), it chose to ignore research that suggested consumers were unpre-pared to embrace IBM
as a leader in e-business. Although to the outside world this looked like an external marketing
effort, IBM was also using the campaign to align employees
around the idea of the Internet as the future of technology. The internal campaign changed the
way employees thought about everything they did, from how they named products to how they
organised staff to how they approached selling. The campaign was successful largely because it
gave employees a sense of direction and purpose, which in turn restored their confidence in
IBM's ability to predict the future and lead the technology industry. Today, research shows that
people are four times more likely to associate the term "e-busi-ness" with IBM than with its
nearest competitor.
Perhaps even more important, by taking employees into account, a company can avoid creating a
message that doesn't resonate with staff or, worse, one that builds resentment. In 1996, United
Airlines shelved its "Come Fly the Friendly Skies" slogan when presented with a survey that
revealed the depth of customer resentment toward the airline industry. In an effort to own up to
the industry's shortcomings, United launched a new campaign, "Rising," in which it sought to
differentiate itself by acknowledging poor service and prom-ising incremental improvements
such as better meals. While this was a logical premise for the campaign given the tenor of the
times, a campaign focusing on customers' distaste for flying was deeply discouraging to the staff.
Employee resentment, ultimately made it impos-sible for United to deliver the improvements it
was promising, which in turn undermined the "Rising" pledge. Three years later, United decided
employee opposition was under-mining its success and pulled the campaign. It has since moved
to a more inclusive brand message with the line "United," which both audiences can embrace.
When it comes to execution, the most common and effective way to link internal and external
marketing campaigns is to create external advertising that targets both audiences. IBM used this
tactic very effectively when it launched its e-business campaign, It took out an eight-page ad in
the Wall Street Journal declaring its new vision, a message directed at both customers and
internal stakeholders. This is an expensive way to capture attention, but if used sparingly, it is the
most powerful form of communication; in fact, you need do it only once for everyone in the
company to read it. There's a symbolic advantage as well. Such a tactic signals that the company
is taking its pledge very seriously; it also signals transparency—the same message going out to
both audiences.
Advertising isn’t the only way to link internal and external marketing. At Nike, a number of
senior executives now hold the additional title of "Corporate Storyteller." They deliberately
avoid stories of financial successes and concentrate on parables of "just doing it," reflecting and
reinforcing the company's ad campaigns. One tale, for example, recalls how legendary coach and
Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, in an effort to build a better shoe for his team, poured rubber
into the family waffle iron, giving birth to the prototype of Nike's famous Waffle Sole. By
talking about such inventive moves, the company hopes to keep the spirit of innovation that
characterises its ad campaigns alive and well within the company.
But while their messages must be aligned, companies must also keep external promises a little
ahead of internal realities. Such promises provide incentives for employees and give them
something to live up to. In the 1980s, Ford turned "Quality Is Job 1" from an internal rallying cry
into a consumer slogan in response to the threat from cheaper, more reliable Japanese cars. It did
so before the claim was fully justified, but by placing it in the public arena, it gave employees an
incentive to match the Japanese. If the promise is pushed too far ahead, however, it loses
credibility. When a beleaguered British Rail launched a cam-paign announcing service
improvements under the banner "We're Getting There," it did so prematurely. By drawing
attention to the gap between the promise and the reality, it prompted destructive press coverage.
This, in turn, demoralised staff, who had been legiti-mately proud of the service advances they
had made.
Questions 27-32
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.
C produced conflicting image between its employees and the general public.
Questions 33-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
33 A strong conviction in the brand can contribute to higher job performance.
34 It is common for companies to overlook the necessity for internal
communication.
35 Consumers were ready to view IBM as a leader in e-business before
the advertising campaign.
36 United Airlines’ failure in its branding campaign was due to the bad advice
of an advertisement agency.
37 United Airlines eventually abolished its campaign to boost image as the
result of a market research.
38 It is an expensive mistake for IBM to launch its new e-business campaign.
39 Nike employees claimed that they were inspired by their company tales.
40 A slight difference between internal and external promises can create a
sense of purpose.
to take the test.
THE BEAUTY AND THE BIODIVERSITY of the longleaf pine forest are well-kept secrets,
even in its native South. Yet it is among the richest ecosystems in North America, rivaling
tallgrass prairies and the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest in the number of species it
shelters. And like those two other disappearing wildlife habitats, longleaf is also critically
endangered.
In longleaf pine forests, trees grow widely scattered, creating an open, parklike environment,
more like a savanna than a forest. The trees are not so dense as to block the sun. This openness
creates a forest floor that is among the most diverse in the world, where plants such as many-
flowered grass pinks, trumpet pitcher plants, Venus flytraps, lavender ladies and pineland bog-
buttons grow. As many as 50 different species of wildflowers, shrubs, grasses and ferns have
been cataloged in just a single square meter.
Once, nearly 92 million acres of longleaf forest flourished from Virginia to Texas, the only place
in the world where it is found. By the turn of the 2lst century, however, virtually all of it had
been logged, paved or farmed into oblivion. Only about 3 percent of the original range still
supports longleaf forest, and only about 10,000 acres of that is uncut old-growth—the rest is
forest that has regrown after cutting. An estimated 100,000 of those acres are still vanishing
every year. However, a quiet movement to reverse this trend is rippling across the region.
Figuring out how to bring back the piney woods also will allow biologists to help the plants and
animals that depend on this habitat. Nearly two-thirds of the declining, threatened or endangered
species in the southeastern United States are associated with longleaf. The outright destruction of
longleaf is only part of their story, says Mark Danaher, the biologist for South Carolina's Francis
Marion National Forest. He says the demise of these animals and plants also is tied to a lack of
fire, which once swept through the southern forests on a regular basis. "Fire is absolutely critical
for this ecosystem and for the species that depend on it," says Danaher.
Name just about any species that occurs in longleaf and you can find a connection to fire.
Bachman's sparrow is a secretive bird with a beautiful song that echoes across the longleaf
flatwoods. It tucks its nest on the ground beneath clumps of wiregrass and little bluestem in the
open under-story. But once fire has been absent for several years, and a tangle of shrubs starts to
grow, the sparrows disappear. Gopher tortoises, the only native land tortoises east of the
Mississippi, are also abundant in longleaf. A keystone species for these forests, its burrows
provide homes and safety to more than 300 species of vertebrates and invertebrates ranging from
eastern diamond-back rattlesnakes to gopher frogs. If fire is suppressed, however, the tortoises
are choked out. "If we lose fire," says Bob Mitchell, an ecologist at the Jones Center, "we lose
wildlife."
Without fire, we also lose longleaf. Fire knocks back the oaks and other hardwoods that can
grow up to overwhelm longleaf forests. "They are fire forests," Mitchell says. "They evolved in
the lightning capital of the eastern United States." And it wasn't only lightning strikes that set the
forest aflame. "Native Americans also lit fires to keep the forest open," Mitchell says. "So did the
early pioneers. They helped create the longleaf pine forests that we know today."
Fire also changes how nutrients flow throughout longleaf ecosystems, in ways we are just
beginning to understand. For example, researchers have discovered that frequent fires provide
extra calcium, which is critical for egg production, to endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers.
Frances James, a retired avian ecologist from Florida State University, has studied these small
black-and-white birds for more than two decades in Florida's sprawling Apalachicola National
Forest. When she realised female woodpeckers laid larger clutches in the first breeding season
after their territories were burned, she and her colleagues went searching for answers. "We
learned calcium is stashed away in woody shrubs when the forest is not burned," James says.
"But when there is a fire, a pulse of calcium moves down into the soil and up into the longleaf."
Eventually, this calcium makes its way up the food chain to a tree-dwelling species of ant, which
is the red-cockaded's favorite food. The result: more calcium for the birds, which leads to more
eggs, more young and more woodpeckers.
Today, fire is used as a vital management tool for preserving both longleaf and its wildlife. Most
of these fires are prescribed burns, deliberately set with a drip torch. Although the public often
opposes any type of fire—and the smoke that goes with it—these frequent, low-intensity burns
reduce the risk of catastrophic conflagrations. "Forests are going to burn," says Amadou Diop,
Diop is spearheading a new NWF effort to restore longleaf. "It's a species we need to go back
to," he says. Educating landowners about the advantages of growing longleaf is part of the
program, he adds, which will soon be under way in nine southern states. "Right now, most
longleaf is on public land," says Jerry McCollum, president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation.
"Private land is where we need to work," he adds, pointing out that more than 90 percent of the
acreage within the historic range of longleaf falls under this category.
Interest among private landowners is growing throughout the South, but restoring longleaf is not
an easy task. The herbaceous layer—the understory of wiregrasses and other plants - also needs
to be re-created. In areas where the land has not been chewed up by farming, but converted to
loblolly or slash pine plantations, the seed bank of the longleaf forest usually remains viable
beneath the soil. In time, this original vegetation can be coaxed back. Where agriculture has
destroyed the seeds, however, wiregrass must be replanted. Right now, the expense is pro-
hibitive, but researchers are searching for low-cost solutions.
Bringing back longleaf is not for the short-sighted, however. Few of us will be alive when the
pines being planted today become mature forests in 70 to 80 years. But that is not stopping
longleaf enthusiasts. "Today, it's getting hard to find longleaf seedlings to buy," one of the
private landowners says. "Everyone wants them. Longleaf is in a resurgence."
SECTION 1: QUESTIONS 1-13
Questions 1-5
Show Notepad
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 6-
9 on your answer sheet.
Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
10 The sparse distribution of longleaf pine trees leads to the most diversity
of species.
11 It is easier to restore forests converted to farms than forests converted to
plantations.
12 The cost to restore forest is increasing recently.
13 Few can live to see the replanted forest reach its maturity.
the test.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
B The first fireside stories in human history can never be known. They were kept in the heads of
those who told them. This method of storage is not necessarily inefficient. From documented oral
traditions in Australia, the Balkans and other parts of the world we know that specialised
storytellers and poets can recite from memory literally thousands of lines, in verse or prose,
verbatim - word for word. But while memory is rightly considered an art in itself, it is clear that a
primary purpose of making symbols is to have a system of reminders or mnemonic cues - signs
that assist us to recall certain information in the mind's eye.
C In some Polynesian communities, a notched memory stick may help to guide a storyteller
through successive stages of recitation. But in other parts of the world, the activity of storytelling
historically resulted in the development or even the invention of writing systems. One theory
about the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece, for example, argues that the epic tales about the
Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus traditionally attributed to Homer were just so
enchanting to hear that they had to be preserved. So the Greeks, c. 750-700BC. borrowed an
alphabet from their neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians.
D The custom of recording stories on parchment and other materials can be traced in many
manifestations around the world, from the priestly papyrus archive of ancient Egypt to the birch-
bark scrolls on which the North American Ojibway Indians set down their creation myth. It is a
well-tried and universal practice: so much so that to this day storytime is probably most often
associated with words on paper. The formal practice of narrating a story aloud would seem-so we
assume-to have given way to newspapers, novels and comic strips. This, however, is not the
case. Statistically it is doubtful that the majority of humans currently rely upon the written word
to get access to stories. So what is the alternative source?
E Each year, over 7 billion people will go to watch the latest offering from Hollywood.
Bollywood and beyond. The supreme storyteller of today is cinema. The movies, as distinct from
still photography, seem to be an essentially modern phenomenon. This is an illusion, for there
are, as we shall see, certain ways in which the medium of film is indebted to very old precedents
of arranging 'sequences' of images. But any account of visual storytelling must begin with the
recognition that all storytelling beats with a deeply atavistic pulse: that is, a 'good story' relies
upon formal patterns of plot and characterisation that have been embedded in the practice of
storytelling over many generations.
F Thousands of scripts arrive every week at the offices of the major film studios. But aspiring
screenwriters really need look no further for essential advice than the fourth-century BC Greek
Philosopher Aristotle. He left some incomplete lecture notes on the art of telling stories in
various literary and dramatic modes, a slim volume known as the Poetics. Though he can never
have envisaged the popcorn-fuelled actuality of a multiplex cinema, Aristotle is almost prescient
G We know the feeling. If ever we have stayed in our seats, stunned with grief, as the credits roll
by, or for days after seeing that vivid evocation of horror have been nervous about taking a
shower at home, then wo have suspended disbelief. We have been caught, or captivated, in the
storyteller's wet). Did it all really happen? We really thought so for a while. Aristotle must have
witnessed often enough this suspension of disbelief. Ho taught at Athens, the city where theater
developed as a primary form of civic ritual and recreation. Two theatrical types of storytelling,
tragedy and comedy, caused Athenian audiences to lose themselves in sadness and laughter
respectively. Tragedy, for Aristotle, was particularly potent in its capacity to enlist and then
purge the emotions of those watching the story unfold on the stage, so he tried to identify those
factors in the storyteller's art that brought about such engagement. He had, as an obvious sample
for analysis, not only the fifth-century BC masterpieces of Classical Greek tragedy written by
Aeschylus. Sophocles and Euripides. Beyond them stood Homer. whose stories oven then had
canonical status: The lliad and The Odyssey were already considered literary landmarks-stories
by which all other stories should he measured. So what was the secret of Homer's narrative art?
H It was not hard to find. Homer created credible heroes. His heroes belonged to the past, they
were mighty and magnificent, yet they were not, in the end, fantasy figures. He made his heroes
sulk, bicker, cheat and cry. They were, in short, characters-protagonists of a story that an
audience would care about, would want to follow, would want to know what happens next. As
Aristotle saw, the hero who shows a human side some flaw or weak-ness to which mortals are
prone is intrinsically dramatic.
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Questions 19-22
Classify the following information as referring to
A adopted the writing system from another country
Questions 23-26
Complete the sentences below with ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.
Living Dunes
When you think of a sand dune, you probably picture a barren pile of lifeless sand. But sand
dunes are actually dynamic natural structures. They grow, shift and travel. They crawl with
living things. Some sand dunes even sing.
A Although no more than a pile of wind-blown sand, dunes can roll over trees and buildings,
march relentlessly across highways, devour vehicles on its path, and threaten crops and factories
in Africa, the Middle East, and China. In some places, killer dunes even roll in and swallow up
towns. Entire villages have disappeared under the sand. In a few instances the government built
new villages for those displaced only to find that new villages themselves were buried several
years later. Preventing sand dunes from overwhelming cities and agricultural areas has become a
priority for the United Nations Environment Program.
B Some of the most significant experimental measurements on sand movement were performed
by Ralph Bagnold, a British engineer who worked in Egypt prior to World War II. Bagnold
investigated the physics of particles moving through the atmosphere and deposited by wind. He
recognised two basic dune types, the crescentic dune, which he called “barchan,” and the linear
dune, which he called longitudinal or “sief ’ (Arabic for “sword”). The crescentic barchan dune
is the most common type of sand dune. As its name suggests, this dune is shaped like a crescent
C Despite the complicated dynamics of dune formation, Bagnold noted that a sand dune
generally needs the following three things to form: a large amount of loose sand in an area with
little vegetation—usually on the coast or in a dried-up river, lake or sea bed; a wind or breeze to
move the grains of sand; and an obstacle, which could be as small as a rock or as big as a tree,
that causes the sand to lose momentum and settle. Where these three variables merge, a sand
dune forms.
D As the wind picks up the sand, the sand travels, but generally only about an inch or two above
the ground, until an obstacle causes it to stop. The heaviest grains settle against the obstacle, and
a small ridge or bump forms. The lighter grains deposit themselves on the other side of the
obstacle. Wind continues to move sand up to the top of the pile until the pile is so steep that it
collapses under its own weight. The collapsing sand comes to rest when it reaches just the right
steepness to keep the dune stable. The repeating cycle of sand inching up the windward side to
the dune crest, then slipping down the dune’s slip face allows the dune to inch forward,
migrating in the direction the wind blows.
E Depending on the speed and direction of the wind and the weight of the local sand, dunes will
develop into different shapes and sizes. Stronger winds tend to make taller dunes; gentler winds
tend to spread them out. If the direction of the wind generally is the same over the years, dunes
gradually shift in that direction. But a dune is “a curi-ously dynamic creature”, wrote Farouk El-
Baz in National Geographic. Once formed, a dune can grow, change shape, move with the wind
and even breed new dunes. Some of these offspring may be carried on the back of the mother
dune. Others are bom and race downwind, outpacing their parents.
F Sand dunes even can be heard ‘singing’ in more than 30 locations worldwide, and in each
place the sounds have their own characteristic frequency, or note. When the thirteenth century
explorer Marco Polo encountered the weird and wonderful noises made by desert sand dunes, he
attributed them to evil spirits. The sound is unearthly. The volume is also unnerving. Adding to
the tone’s otherworldliness is the inability of the human ear to localise the source of the noise.
Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS and his colleagues have been
delving deeper into dunes in Morocco, Chile, China and Oman, and believe they can now explain
the exact mechanism behind this acoustic phenomenon.
G The group hauled sand back to the laboratory and set it up in channels with automated pushing
plates. The sands still sang, proving that the dune itself was not needed to act as a resonating
body for the sound, as some researchers had theorised. To make the booming sound, the grains
have to be of a small range of sizes, all alike in shape: well-rounded. Douady’s key discovery
was that this synchronised frequency—which determines the tone of sound—is the result of the
grain size. The larger the grain, the lower the key. He has successfully predicted the notes
Questions 27-33
Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the
correct number, i-x, in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
ii Causes of desertification
27 Paragraph A
28 Paragraph B
29 Paragraph C
30 Paragraph D
31 Paragraph E
Questions 34-36
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
throughout the world, the linear dune and the 37 dune, some times also known as the
crescentic dune. It’s been long known that in some places dunes can even sing and the answer lies in
the sand itself. To produce singing sand in lab, all the sands must have similar 38 . And
scientists have discovered that the size of the sand can affect the 39 of the sound. But the
Answer Keys:
1nest
2tortoises
3oaks
4Native Americans
5prescribed burns
6shrubs
CLASSIFYING SOCIETIES
Although humans have established many types of societies throughout history, sociologists and
anthropologists tend to classify different societies according to the degree to which different
groups within a society have unequal access to advantages such as resources, prestige or power,
and usually refer to four basic types of societies. From least to most socially Complex they are
clans, tribes, chiefdoms and states.
Clan
These are small-scale societies of hunters and gatherers, generally of fewer than 100 people, who
move seasonally to exploit wild (undomesticated) food resources. Most surviving hunter-
gatherer groups are of this kind, such as the Hadza of Tanzania or the San of southern Africa.
Clan members are generally kinsfolk, related by descent or marriage. Clans lack formal leaders,
so there are no marked economic differences or disparities in status among their members.
Because clans are composed of mobile groups of hunter-gatherers, their sites consist mainly of
seasonally occupied camps, and other smaller and more specialised sites. Among the latter are
kill or butchery sites—locations where large mammals are killed and sometimes butchered— and
work sites, where tools are made or other specific activities carried out. The base camp of such a
Tribe
These are generally larger than mobile hunter-gatherer groups, but rarely number more than a
few thousand, and their diet or subsistence is based largely on cultivated plants and domesticated
animals. Typically, they are settled farmers, but they may be nomadic with a very different,
mobile economy based on the intensive exploitation of livestock. These are generally multi-
community societies, with the individual communities integrated into the larger society through
kinship ties. Although some tribes have officials and even a "capital" or seat of government, such
officials lack the economic base necessary for effective use of
The typical settlement pattern for tribes is one of settled agricultural homesteads or villages.
Characteristically, no one settlement dominates any of the others in the region. Instead, the
archaeologist finds evidence for isolated, permanently occupied houses or for permanent
villages. Such villages may be made up of a collection of free-standing houses, like those of the
first farms of the Danube valley in Europe. Or they may be clusters of buildings grouped
together, for example, the pueblos of the American Southwest, and the early farming village or
small town of (catalhoyuk in modern Turkey.
Chiefdom
These operate on the principle of ranking—differences in social status between people. Different
lineages (a lineage is a group claiming descent from a common ancestor) are graded on a scale of
prestige, and the senior lineage, and hence the society as a whole, is governed by a chief.
Prestige and rank are determined by how closely related one is to the chief, and there is no true
stratification into classes. The role of the chief is crucial.
Often, there is local specialisation in craft products, and surpluses of these and of foodstuffs are
periodically paid as obligation to the chief. He uses these to maintain his retainers, and may use
them for redistribution to his subjects. The chiefdom generally has a center of power, often with
temples, residences of the chief and his retainers, and craft specialists. Chiefdoms vary greatly in
size, but the range is generally between about 5000 and 20,000 persons.
Early State
These preserve many of the features of chiefdoms, but the ruler (perhaps a king or sometimes a
queen) has explicit authority to establish laws and also to enforce them by the use of a stand-ing
army. Society no longer depends totally upon kin relationships: it is now stratified into dif-ferent
classes. Agricultural workers and the poorer urban dwellers form the lowest classes, with the
craft specialists above, and the priests and kinsfolk of the ruler higher still. The functions of the
ruler are often separated from those of the priest: palace is distinguished from temple. The
society is viewed as a territory owned by the ruling lineage and populated by tenants who have
an obligation to pay taxes. The central capital houses a bureaucratic administration of officials;
one of their principal purposes is to collect revenue (often in the form of taxes and tolls) and
This rather simple social typology, set out by Elman Service and elaborated by William Sanders
and Joseph Marino, can be criticised, and it should not be used unthinkingly. Never-theless, if we
are seeking to talk about early societies, we must use words and hence concepts to do so.
Service’s categories provide a good framework to help organise our thoughts.
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
Questions 8-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR/AND A NUMBER from the passage for each
answer.
What is the other way of life for tribes besides settled farming?
9
What does a chief give to his subjects as rewards besides crafted goods?
11
Which group of people is at the bottom of an early state but higher than the farmers?
13
take the test.
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
Tasmanian Tiger
Although it was called tiger, it looked like a dog with black stripes on its back and it was the
largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. Yet, despite its fame for being one of the
most fabled animals in the world, it is one of the least understood of Tasmania’s native animals.
The scientific name for the Tasmanian tiger is Thylacine and it is believed that they have become
extinct in the 20th century.
Fossils of thylacines dating from about almost 12 million years ago have been dug up at various
places in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. They were widespread in Australia
7,000 years ago, but have probably been extinct on the continent for 2,000 years. This is believed
to be because of the introduction of dingoes around 8,000 years ago. Because of disease,
thylacine numbers may have been declining in Tasmania at the time of European settlement 200
Hans Naarding, whose study of animals had taken him around the world, was conducting a
survey of a species of endangered migratory bird. What he saw that night is now regarded as the
most credible sighting recorded of thylacine that many believe has been extinct for more than 70
years.
“I had to work at night,” Naarding takes up the story. “I was in the habit of intermittently shining
a spotlight around. The beam fell on an animal in front of the vehicle, less than 10m away.
Instead of risking movement by grabbing for a camera, I decided to register very carefully what I
was seeing. The animal was about the size of a small shepherd dog, a very healthy male in prime
condition. What set it apart from a dog, though, was a slightly sloping hindquarter, with a fairly
thick tail being a straight continuation of the backline of the animal. It had 12 distinct stripes on
its back, continuing onto its butt. I knew perfectly well what I was seeing. As soon as I reached
for the camera, it disap-peared into the tea-tree undergrowth and scrub.”
The director of Tasmania’s National Parks at the time, Peter Morrow, decided in his wisdom to
keep Naarding’s sighting of the thylacine secret for two years. When the news finally broke, it
was accompanied by pandemonium. “I was besieged by television crews, including four to live
from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America,”
said Naarding.
Government and private search parties combed the region, but no further sightings were made.
The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair, a place many insist exists only in our imagination.
But since then, the thylacine has staged something of a comeback, becoming part of Australian
mythology.
There have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the beast since it supposedly died out, and
the average claims each year reported to authorities now number 150. Associate professor of
zoology at the University of Tasmania, Randolph Rose, has said he dreams of seeing a thylacine.
But Rose, who in his 35 years in Tasmanian academia has fielded countless reports of thylacine
sightings, is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled.
“The consensus among conservationists is that, usually, any animal with a population base of
less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years,” says Rose. “Sixty years ago, there was
only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo,” he says.
Dr. David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, whose PhD
thesis was on the thylacine, says that despite scientific thinking that 500 animals are required to
sustain a population, the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals and, while it does have
some inbreeding problems, is still ticking along. “I’ll take a punt and say that, if we manage to
find a thylacine in the scrub, it means that there are 50-plus animals out there.”
Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney has the unenviable task of investigating all “sightings” of the
tiger totalling 4,000 since the mid-1980s, and averaging about 150 a year. It was Mooney who
was first consulted late last month about the authenticity of digital photographic images
purportedly taken by a German tourist while on a recent bushwalk in the state. On face value,
Mooney says, the account of the sighting, and the two photographs submitted as proof, amount to
one of the most convincing cases for the species’ survival he has seen.
And Mooney has seen it all—the mistakes, the hoaxes, the illusions and the plausible accounts of
sightings. Hoaxers aside, most people who report sightings end up believing they have seen a
thy-lacine, and are themselves believable to the point they could pass a lie-detector test,
according to Mooney. Others, having tabled a creditable report, then become utterly obsessed
like the Tasmanian who has registered 99 thylacine sightings to date. Mooney has seen
individuals bankrupted by the obsession, and families destroyed. “It is a blind optimism that
something is, rather than a cynicism that something isn’t,” Mooney says. “If something crosses
the road, it’s not a case of ‘I wonder what that was?’ Rather, it is a case of ‘that’s a thylacine!’ It
is a bit like a gold prospector’s blind faith, ‘it has got to be there’.”
However, Mooney treats all reports on face value. “I never try to embarrass people, or make
fools of them. But the fact that 1 don’t pack the car immediately they ring can often be taken as
ridicule. Obsessive characters get irate that someone in my position is not out there when they
think the thy-lacine is there.”
But Hans Naarding, whose sighting of a striped animal two decades ago was the highlight of “a
life of animal spotting”, remains bemused by the time and money people waste on tiger searches.
He says resources would be better applied to saving the Tasmanian devil, and helping migratory
bird popula-tions that are declining as a result of shrinking wetlands across Australia.
Gould the thylacine still be out there? “Sure,” Naarding says. But be also says any discovery of
sur-viving thylacines would be “rather pointless”. “How do you save a species from extinction?
What could you do with it? If there are thylacines out there, they are better off right where they
are,”
Questions 14-17
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Tasmanian tiger, also called thylacine, resembles the look of a dog and has 14 on its
years ago. They lived throughout 16 before disappearing from the mainland. And soon
after the 17 settlers arrived the size of thylacine population in Tasmania shrunk at a
higher speed.
Questions 18-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 18-23) and the list ofpeople below. Match each
statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D.
A Hans Naarding
B Randolph Rose
C David Pemberton
D Nick Mooney
Questions 24-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
25
26
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
on the following pages.
B As in so many things, the ideal position is widely supposed to reside somewhere in between
these two impossible-to-realise extremes. You want to have a good enough idea of what you are
looking for to be surprised when you find something else of value, and you want to be ignorant
enough of your end point that you can entertain alternative outcomes. Scientific discovery
should, therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one. Serendipity is a word that
expresses a position something like that. It’s a fascinating word, and the late Robert King Merton
—“the father of the sociology of science”—liked it well enough to compose its biography,
assisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.
C The word did not appear in the published literature until the early 19th century and did not
become well enough known to use without explanation until sometime in the first third of the
20th century. Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”, specifically, the
accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The first noted use of
“serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole. He explained that it came from
the fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip (the ancient name for Ceylon, or present day
Sri Lanka), whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things
which they were not in quest of’.
D Antiquarians, following Walpole, found use for it, as they were always rummaging about for
curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant surprises were not unknown to them. Some people just
E Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to the situation; some
treated serendipity as a personal capacity; many others exploited the ambiguity of the notion. Yet
what Cannon and Medawar took as a benign nose-thumbing at Dreams of Method, other
scientists found incendiary. To say that science had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken
by some as dangerous denigration. If scientific discovery were really accidental, then what was
the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, the aphorism of choice came from no
less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Accidents may happen, and things may turn up unplanned and unforeseen, as one is looking for
something else, but the ability to notice such events, to see their potential bearing and meaning,
to exploit their occurrence and make constructive use of them—these are the results of
systematic mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form of expertise. On
closer inspection, it is insisted, accident dissolves into sagacity.
F The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and had its greatest resonance
was that connected with the idea of planned science. The serendipitists were not all inhab-itants
of academic ivory towers. As Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-20th-century
American pioneers of industrial research—Willis Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General
Electric—made much play of serendipity, in the course of arguing against overly rigid research
planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about the certainty and ratio-nality of the
research process did much harm and that a mature acceptance of uncertainty was far more likely
to result in productive research policies. For his own part, Langmuir said that satisfactory
outcomes “occurred as though we were just drifting with the wind. These things came about by
accident.” If there is no very determinate relationship between cause and effect in research, he
said, “then planning does not get us very far.” So, from within the bowels of corporate capitalism
came powerful arguments, by way of serendipity, for scientific spontane-ity and autonomy. The
notion that industry was invariably committed to the regimentation of scientific research just
doesn’t wash.
G For Merton himself—who one supposes must have been the senior author-serendipity rep-
resented the keystone in the arch of his social scientific work. In 1936, as a very young man,
Merton wrote a seminal essay on “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social
Action.” It is, he argued, the nature of social action that what one intends is rarely what one gets:
Questions 27-32
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the
appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
27 Paragraph A
Example Answer
28 Paragraph C
29 Paragraph D
30 Paragraph E
31 Paragraph F
32 Paragraph G
Questions 33-37
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
34
35
36
37
Questions 38-40
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your
answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
Answer Keys:
1TRUE
2NOT GIVEN
3FALSE
4FALSE
5TRUE
6TRUE
7NOT GIVEN
8tools
9nomadic
10grouped (together)
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
B Scent is used for hunting on land, for communication and for detecting danger. Otterine sense
of smell is likely to be similar in sensitivity to dogs. Otters have small eyes and are probably
short-sighted on land. But they do have the ability to modify the shape of the lens in the eye to
make it more spherical, and hence overcome the refraction of water. In clear water and good
light, otters can hunt fish by sight. The otter’s eyes and nostrils arc placed high on its head so
that it can see and breathe even when the rest of the body is submerged. The long whiskers
growing around the muzzle are used to detect the presence of fish. They detect regular vibrations
caused by the beat of the fish’s tail as it swims away. This allows otters to hunt even in very
murky water. Underwater, the otter holds its legs against the body, except for steering, and the
hind end of the body is flexed in a series of vertical undulations. River otters have webbing
which extends for much of the length of each digit, though not to the very end. Giant otters and
sea otters have even more prominent webs, while the Asian short-clawed otter has no webbing—
C A number of constraints and preferences limit suitable habitats for otters. Water is a must and
the rivers must be large enough to support a healthy population of fish. Being such shy and wary
crea-tures, they will prefer territories where man’s activities do not impinge greatly. Of course,
there must also be no other otter already in residence—this has only become significant again
recently as populations start to recover. A typical range for a male river otter might be 25km of
river, a female’s range less than half this. However, the productivity of the river affects this
hugely and one study found male ranges between 12 and 80km. Coastal otters have a much more
abundant food supply and ranges for males and females may be just a few kilometers of
coastline. Because male ranges are usually larger, a male otter may find his range overlaps with
two or three females. Otters will eat anything that they can get hold of—there are records of
sparrows and snakes and slugs being gobbled. Apart from fish the most common prey are
crayfish, crabs and water birds. Small mammals are occasionally taken, most commonly rabbits
but sometimes even moles.
D Eurasian otters will breed any time where food is readily available. In places where condition
is more severe, Sweden for example where the lakes are frozen for much of winter, cubs are bom
in Spring. This ensures that they are well grown before severe weather returns. In the Shetlands,
cubs are born in summer when fish is more abundant. Though otters can breed every year, some
do not. Again, this depends on food availability. Other factors such as food range and quality of
the female may have an effect. Gestation for Eurasian otter is 63 days, with the exception of
North American river otter whose embryos may undergo delayed implantation.
E Otters normally give birth in more secure dens to avoid disturbances. Nests are lined with
bedding (reeds, waterside plants, grass) to keep the cubs warm while mummy is away feeding.
Litter Size varies between 1 and 5 (2 or 3 being the most common). For some unknown reason,
coastal otters tend to produce smaller litters. At five weeks they open their eyes—a tiny cub of
700g. At seven weeks they’re weaned onto solid food. At ten weeks they leave the nest, blinking
into daylight for the first time. After three months they finally meet the water and learn to swim.
After eight months they are hunting, though the mother still provides a lot of food herself.
Finally, after nine months she can chase them all away with a clear conscience, and relax—until
the next fella shows up.
F The plight of the British otter was recognised in the early 60s, but it wasn’t until the late 70s
that the chief cause was discovered. Pesticides, such as dieldrin and aldrin, were first used in
'1955 in agriculture and other industries—these chemicals are very persistent and had already
been recognised as the cause of huge declines in the population of peregrine falcons,
sparrowhawks and other predators. The pesticides entered the river systems and the food chain—
micro-organisms, fish and finally otters, with every step increasing the concentration of the
chemicals. From 1962 the chemicals were phased out, but while some species recovered quickly,
otter numbers did not—and continued to fall into the 80s. This was probably due mainly to
habitat destruction and road deaths. Acting on populations fragmented by the sudden decimation
in the 50s and 60s, the loss of just a handful of otters in one area can make an entire population
enviable and spell the end.
Questions 1-9
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Questions 10-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
on the following pages.
A Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when inspiration struck. "There was
this anecdote about the great yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793,” Masters
recalls. “This epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came." The inclement weather
froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover.
B If weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the historical
fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring economic
mysteries of all—why are almost all the wealthy, industrialised nations to be found at latitudes
above 40 degrees? After two years of research, he thinks that he has found a piece of the puzzle.
Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in Indiana, and Margaret McMillan at
Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are among the factors that distinguish rich
nations from poor ones. Their study is published this month in the Journal of Economic Growth.
The pair speculate that cold snaps have two main benefits - they freeze pests that would
otherwise destroy crops, and also freeze organisms, such as mosquitoes, that carry disease. The
result is agricultural abundance and a big workforce.
C The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for countries, the
second climate data from the University of East Anglia. They found a curious tally between the
sets. Countries having five or more frosty days a month are uniformly rich, those with fewer than
five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day figure is important; it could be the
minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. Masters says: "For example, Finland is a small
country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a small country that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps
climate has something to do with that.” In fact, limited frosts bring huge benefits to farmers. The
chills kill insects or render them inactive; cold weather slows the break-up of plant and animal
material in the soil, allowing it to become richer; and frosts ensure a build-up of moisture in the
D Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor - the wealth of nations is too
complicated to be attributable to just one factor. Climate, he feels, somehow combines with other
factors such as the presence of institutions, including governments, and access to trading routes
to determine whether a country will do well. Traditionally, Masters says, economists thought that
institutions had the biggest effect on the economy, because they brought order to a country in the
form of, for example, laws and property rights. With order, so the thinking went, came affluence.
“But there are some problems that even countries with institutions have not been able to get
around,” he says. “My feeling is that, as countries get richer, they get better institutions. And the
accumulation of wealth and improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a
favourable environment, including climate.”
E This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and destined
to remain penniless. Instead, richer countries should change the way in which foreign aid is
given. Instead of aid being geared towards improving governance, it should be spent on
technology to improve agriculture and to combat disease. Masters cites one example: “There are
regions in India that have been provided with irrigation, agricultural productivity has gone up
and there has been an improvement in health.” Supplying vaccines against tropical diseases and
developing crop varieties that can grow in the tropics would break the poverty cycle.
F Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations, citing
anthropological, climatic and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the most affluent.
In 350 BC, Aristotle observed that “those who live in a cold climate...are full of spirit”. Jared
Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in his book Guns, Germs
and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa and the Americas are aligned
north-south. So, in Europe, crops can spread quickly across latitudes because climates are
similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, spread quickly from the Middle East
into Europe; it took twice as long for corn to spread from Mexico to what is now the eastern
United States. This easy movement along similar latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant a
faster dissemination of other technologies such as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates.
The region also boasted domesticated livestock, which could provide meat, wool and motive
power in the fields. Blessed with such natural advantages, Eurasia was bound to take off
economically.
G John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, two US economists, have also pointed out striking correlations
between the geographical location of countries and their wealth. They note that tropical countries
between 23.45 degrees north and south of the equator are nearly all poor. In an article for the
Harvard International Review, they concluded that “development surely seems to favour the
temperate-zone economies, especially those in the northern hemisphere, and those that have
managed to avoid both socialism and the ravages of war”. But Masters cautions against
geographical determinism, the idea that tropical countries are beyond hope: “Human health and
agriculture can be made better through scientific and technological research,” he says, "so we
Questions 14-20
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-Gfrom the list of headings below.
14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F
20 Paragraph G
Questions 21-26
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Dr William Masters read a book saying that a(an) 21 epidemic which struck an
American city hundreds of years ago was terminated by a cold frost. And academics found
that there is a connection between climate and country’s wealth as in the rich but small
country of 22 . Yet besides excellent surroundings and climate, one country still
needs to improve their 23 to achieve long prosperity.
Thanks to resembling weather conditions across latitude in the continent of 24 ,
crops such as 25 is bound to spread faster than from South America to the North.
Other researchers also noted that even though geographical factors are important, tropical
country such as 26 still became rich due to scientific advancement.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
Music and the brain are both endlessly fascinating subjects, and as a neuroscientist specialis-ing
in auditory learning and memory, I find them especially intriguing. So I had high expecta-tions
of Musicophilia, the latest offering from neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks. And I
confess to feeling a little guilty reporting that my reactions to the book are mixed.
Sacks himself is the best part of Musicophilia. He richly documents his own life in the book and
reveals highly personal experiences. The photograph of him on the cover of the book— which
shows him wearing headphones, eyes closed, clearly enchanted as he listens to Alfred Brendel
perform Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata—makes a positive impression that is borne out by the
contents of the book. Sacks’s voice throughout is steady and erudite but never pon-tifical. He is
neither self-conscious nor self-promoting.
The preface gives a good idea of what the book will deliver. In it Sacks explains that he wants to
convey the insights gleaned from the “enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural
underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often bizarre disorders to
which these are prone ” He also stresses the importance of “the simple art of observation” and
“the richness of the human context.” He wants to combine “observation and description with the
latest in technology,” he says, and to imaginatively enter into the expe-rience of his patients and
subjects. The reader can see that Sacks, who has been practicing neurology for 40 years, is torn
between the "old-fashioned” path of observation and the new-fangled, high-tech approach: He
knows that he needs to take heed of the latter, but his heart lies with the former.
The book consists mainly of detailed descriptions of cases, most of them involving patients
whom Sacks has seen in his practice. Brief discussions of contemporary neuroscientific reports
are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Part I, “Haunted by Music,” begins with the strange
case of Tony Cicoria, a nonmusical, middle-aged surgeon who was consumed by a love of music
after being hit by lightning. He suddenly began to crave listening to piano music, which he had
never cared for in the past. He started to play the piano and then to compose music, which arose
Part II, “A Range of Musicality,” covers a wider variety of topics, but unfortunately, some of the
chapters offer little or nothing that is new. For example, chapter 13, which is five pages long,
merely notes that the blind often have better hearing than the sighted. The most interest-ing
chapters are those that present the strangest cases. Chapter 8 is about “amusia,” an inabil-ity to
hear sounds as music, and “dysharmonia,” a highly specific impairment of the ability to hear
harmony, with the ability to understand melody left intact. Such specific “dissociations” are
found throughout the cases Sacks recounts.
To Sacks’s credit, part III, “Memory, Movement and Music,” brings us into the underappreci-
ated realm of music therapy. Chapter 16 explains how “melodic intonation therapy” is being
used to help expressive aphasie patients (those unable to express their thoughts verbally fol-
lowing a stroke or other cerebral incident) once again become capable of fluent speech. In
chapter 20, Sacks demonstrates the near-miraculous power of music to animate Parkinson’s
patients and other people with severe movement disorders, even those who are frozen into odd
postures. Scientists cannot yet explain how music achieves this effect.
To readers who are unfamiliar with neuroscience and music behavior, Musicophilia may be
something of a revelation. But the book will not satisfy those seeking the causes and implica-
tions of the phenomena Sacks describes. For one thing, Sacks appears to be more at ease dis-
cussing patients than discussing experiments. And he tends to be rather uncritical in accepting
scientific findings and theories.
It’s true that the causes of music-brain oddities remain poorly understood. However, Sacks could
have done more to draw out some of the implications of the careful observations that he and
other neurologists have made and of the treatments that have been successful. For example, he
might have noted that the many specific dissociations among components of music
comprehension, such as loss of the ability to perceive harmony but not melody, indicate that
there is no music center in the brain. Because many people who read the book are likely to
believe in the brain localisation of all mental functions, this was a missed educational oppor-
tunity.
Another conclusion one could draw is that there seem to be no "cures” for neurological prob-
lems involving music. A drug can alleviate a symptom in one patient and aggravate it in another,
or can have both positive and negative effects in the same patient. Treatments men-tioned seem
to be almost exclusively antiepileptic medications, which “damp down” the excit-ability of the
brain in general; their effectiveness varies widely.
Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Why does the writer have a mixed feeling about the book?
A The guilty feeling made him so.
B The writer expected it to be better than it was.
C Sacks failed to include his personal stories in the book.
D This is the only book written by Sacks.
28
29
30
Questions 31-36
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
Questions 37-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Answer Keys:
1B
2A
3B
4F
5C
6E
7G
8G
9A
10sea water/salt water/salt
11swimming speed
12coastal otters
13small mammals
14iii
15vi
16i
17ii
18ix
19v
20iv
21yellow fever
22Finland
23institutions/governments
24Europe
25einkorn wheat
26Singapore
27B
28C
29A
30A
31YES
32NOT GIVEN
33NO
34NOT GIVEN
35YES
36NO
37F
38B
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
on the following pages.
A "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” Surprisingly this message, which
flashed over the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January 31st 1997, was not a
desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it was a message signal-ling
the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French waters. Since 1992 countries around
the world have been decommissioning their Morse equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-
offs, as the world's shipping switches over to a new satellite-based arrangement, the Global
Maritime Distress and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is
February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end of art era.
B The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology commonly associ-
ated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to
Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic, At the time Morse Was a
painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ships passengers informed him of recent
advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric
telegraph to send messages in codes. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best
part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered as "the father of the tele-graph"
partly thanks to his single-mindedness—it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money
from Congress to build his first telegraph line—but also for technical reasons.
C Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the needle telegraph developed by
William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morses design was very simple: it required
little more than a "key” (essentially, a spring-loaded switch) to send messages, a clicking
“sounder" to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although Morses hardware was simple,
there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots
and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of
D At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morses telegraph seem
impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs, Cookes and Wheatstones
telegraph, for example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But
although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph
stations. Morses telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon transpired, had a natural
facility for Morse code.
E As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became domi-
nant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the
telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to participate, sticking with needle
telegraphs for a few more years.) By this time Morse code had been revised to allow for accents
and other foreign characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that
continues to this day.
F On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected from a tiny
rotating mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct telegraphic sub-
culture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy based on the speed
at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and
receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in
big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom
worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural opera-tors found
that their new-found skill was a passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon, swelled
the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women.
By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph
office in America, were female.
G In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of
telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many adulatory speeches,
Morse sat down behind an operators table and, placing his finger on a key connected to every
telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final farewell to a standing ovation. By the time of his
death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and
30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages
were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet is today often called an "information
superhighway”, the telegraph was described in its day as an “instantaneous highway of thought",
H But by the 1890s the Morse telegraph's heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an
end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs, precursors of the
teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about
to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the
Questions 1-8
Reading passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list of headings below. Write the
correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
An individual enters a field of study as a novice. The novice needs to learn the guiding prin-
ciples and rules of a given task in order lo perform that task. Concurrently, the novice needs to he
exposed fo specific cases, or instances, that lest the boundaries of such principles. Gen-erally, a
novice will find a mentor to guide her through the process of acquiring new knowl-edge. A fairly
simple example would he someone learning lo play chess. The novice chess player seeks a
mentor to leach her the object of the game, the number of spaces, the names of the pieces, the
function of each piece, how each piece is moved, and the necessary condi-tions for winning, or
losing the game.
In lime, and with much practice, the novice begins to recognise patterns of behavior within cases
and, thus, becomes a journeyman. With more practice and exposure to increasingly complex
cases, The journeyman finds patterns not only within cases but also between cases. More
importantly, the journeyman learns that these patterns often repeat themselves over time. The
journeyman still maintains regular contact with a mentor to solve specific prob-lems and learn
more complex strategies. Returning to the example of the chess player, the individual begins to
learn patterns of opening moves, offensive and defensive game-playing, strategies, and patterns
of victory and defeat.
When a journeyman starts to make and test hypotheses about future behavior based on past
experiences, she begins the next transition. Once she creatively generates knowledge, rather than
simply matching, superficial patterns, she becomes an expert. At this point, she is confi-dent in
An expert perceives meaningful patterns in her domain better than non-experts. Where a novice
perceives random or disconnected data points, an expert connects regular patterns within and
between cases. This ability to identify patterns is not an innate perceptual skill; rather it reflects
the organisation of knowledge after exposure to and experience with thou-sands of cases.
Experts have a deeper understanding of their domains than novices do, and utilise higher-order
principles to solve- problems. A novice, for example, might group objects together by color or
size, whereas an expert would group the same objects according to their function or utility.
Experts comprehend the meaning of data and weigh variables with different criteria within their
domains belter than novices. Experts recognise variables that have the largest influence on a
particular problem and focus their attention on those variables.
Experts have better domain-specific short-term and long-term memory than novices do.
Moreover, experts perform tasks in their domains faster than novices and commit fewer errors
while problem solving. Interestingly, experts go about solving problems differently than novices.
Experts spend more time thinking, about a problem to fully understand it at the beginning of a
task than do novices, who immediately seek to find a solution, Experts use their knowledge of
previous cases as context tor creating mental models to solve given problems.
Better at self-monitoring than novices, experts are more aware of instances where they have
committed errors or failed to understand a problem. Experts check their solution more often than
novices and recognise when they are missing, information necessary for solving a problem.
Experts are aware of the limits of their domain knowledge and apply their domain's heuristics to
solve problems that fall outside of their experience base.
The strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts to be
good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the future. Since the
1930s, researchers have been testing, the ability of experts to make forecasts. The performance
of experts has been tested against actuarial tables to determine if they are better at making
predictions than simple statistical models. Seventy years later, with more than two hundred
experiments in different domains, it is clear that the answer is no. If sup-plied with an equal
amount of data about a particular case, an actuarial table is as good, or better, than an expert at
making, calls about the future. Even if an expert is given more spe-cific case information than is
available to the statistical model, the expert does not tend to outperform the actuarial table.
A number of researchers point to human biases to explain unreliable expert predictions. During,
the last 30 years, researchers have categorised, experimented, and theorised about the cognitive
aspects of forecasting. Despite such efforts, the literature shows little consen-sus regarding the
causes or manifestations of human bias.
Questions 14-18
Complete the flow-chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your
answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
Expert: creates predictions and new 18 ; performs task independently without the
help of a mentor
Questions 19-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
READING PASSAGE 3
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 199
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
B One of such techniques is called fast motion or professionally known as time-lapse. Time-
lapse photography is the perfect technique for capturing events and movements in the natural
world that occur over a timescale too slow for human perception to follow. The life cycle of a
mushroom, for example, is incredibly subtle to the human eye. To present its growth in front of
audiences, the principle applied is a simple one: a series of photographs are taken and used in
sequence to make a moving-image film, but since each frame is taken with a lapse at a time
interval between each shot, when played back at normal speed, a continuous action is produced
and it appears to speed up. Put simply: we are shrinking time. Objects and events that: would
normally take several minutes, days or even months can be viewed to completion in seconds
having been sped up by factors of tens to millions.
C Another commonly used technique is high-speed photography, the science of taking pictures
of very fast phenomena. High-speed photography can be considered to be the opposite of time-
D In common usage, high-speed photography can also refer to the use of high-speed cameras that
the photograph itself may be taken in a way as to appear to freeze the motion, especially to
reduce motion blur. It requires a sensor with good sensitivity and either a very good shut-tering
system or a very fast strobe light. The recent National Geographic footage—captured last
summer during an intensive three-day shoot at the Cincinnati Zoo—is unprecedented in its
clarity and detail. “I’ve watched cheetahs run for 30 years,” said Cathryn Milker, founder of the
zoo’s Cat Ambassador Program. “But I saw things in that super slow-motion video that I’ve
never seen before.” The slow-motion video is entrancing. Every part of the sprinting cat’s
anatomy—supple limbs, rippling muscles, hyperflexible spine—works together in a sym-phony
of speed, revealing the fluid grace of the world’s fastest land animal.
E But things can’t get any more complicated in the case of filming a frog catching its prey. Frogs
can snatch up prey in a few thousandths of a second—striking out with elastic tongues.
Biologists would love to see how a frog’s tongue roll out, adhere to prey, and roll back into the
frog’s mouth. But this all happened too fast, 50 times faster than an eye blink. So natu-rally
people thought of using high-speed camera to capture this fantastic movement in slow motion.
Yet one problem still remains—viewers would be bored if they watch the frog swim in slow
motion for too long. So how to skip this? The solution is a simple one—adjust the playback
speed, which is also called by some the film speed adjustment. The film will origi-nally be shot
at a high frame (often 300 frames per second, because it can be converted to much lower frame
rates without major issues), but at later editing stage this high frame rate will only be preserved
for the prey catching part, while the swimming part will be converted to the normal speed at 24
frames per second. Voila, the scientists can now sit back and enjoy watching without having to
go through the pain of waiting.
F Sometimes taking a good picture or shooting a good film is not all about technology, but
patience, like in the case of bat. Bats are small, dark-colored; they fly fast and are active only at
night. To capture bats on film, one must use some type of camera-tripping device. Photog-
raphers or film-makers often place camera near the bat cave, on the path of the flying bats. The
camera must be hard-wired with a tripping device so that every time a bat breaks the tripping
beam the camera fires and it will keep doing so through the night until the camera’s battery runs
out. Though highly-advanced tripping device can now allow for unmanned shooting, it still may
take several nights to get a truly high quality film.
G Is it science? Is it art? Since the technique was first pioneered around two hundred years ago,
photography has developed to a state where it is almost unrecognisable. Some people would
Questions 27-30
Look at the following organisms (Questions 27-30) and the list of features below. Match each
organism with the correct feature, A-D.
Questions 31-35
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Answer Keys:
1x
2xi
3iii
4i
5vi
6ii
7ix
8vii
9FALSE
10TRUE
11TRUE
12NOT GIVEN
13NOT GIVEN
14rules, guiding principles
15mentor
16patterns of behavior/patterns
17complex
18knowledge
19FALSE
20NOT GIVEN
21TRUE
22TRUE
23TRUE
24accurate
25human biases
26consensus
27C
28A
READING PASSAGE 1
Young, of course, did more than write encyclopedia entries. He presented his first paper to the
Royal Society of London at the age of 20 and was elected a Fellow a week after his 21st
birthday. In the paper, Young explained the process of accommodation in the human eye —on
how the eye focuses properly on objects at varying distances. Young hypothesised that this was
achieved by changes in the shape of the lens. Young also theorised that light traveled in waves
and ho believed that, to account for the ability to see in color, there must be three receptors in the
eye corresponding to the three "principal colors" to which the retina could respond: red, green,
violet. All these hypotheses Were subsequently proved to be correct.
Later in his life, when he was in his forties, Young was instrumental in cracking the code that
unlocked the unknown script on the Rosetta Stone, a tablet that was "found" in Egypt by the
Napoleonic army in 1799. The stone contains text in three alphabets: Greek, something
unrecognisable and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The unrecognisable script is now known as demotic
and, as Young deduced, is related directly to hieroglyphic. His initial work on this appeared in
Bom in 1773 in Somerset in England, Young lived from an early age with his maternal
grandfather, eventually leaving to attend boarding school. He had devoured books from the age
of two, and through his own initiative he excelled at Latin, Greek, mathematics and natural
philosophy. After leaving school, he was greatly encouraged by his mother's uncle, Richard
Brock-lesby, a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Following Brocklesby's lead, Young
decided to pursue a career in medicine. He studied in London, following the medical circuit, and
then moved on to more formal education in Edinburgh, Gottingen and Cambridge. After
completing his medical training at the University of Cambridge in 1808, Young set up practice as
a physician in London. He soon became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a few
years later was appointed physician at St. George's Hospital.
Young's skill as a physician, however, did not equal his skill as a scholar of natural philosophy or
linguistics. Earlier, in 1801, he had been appointed to a professorship of natural philosophy at the
Royal Institution, where he delivered as many as 60 lectures in a year. These were published in
two volumes in 1807. In 1804 Young had become secretary to the Royal Society, a post he
would hold until his death. His opinions were sought on civic and national matters, such as the
introduction of gas lighting to London and methods of ship construction. From 1819 he was
superintendent of the Nautical Almanac and secretary to the Board of Longitude. From 1824 to
1829 he was physician to and inspector of calculations for the Palladian Insurance Company.
Between 1816 and 1825 he contributed his many and various entries to the Encyclopedia Britan-
nica, and throughout his career he authored numerous books, essays and papers.
Young is a perfect subject for a biography — perfect, but daunting. Few men contributed so
much to so many technical fields. Robinson's aim is to introduce non-scientists to Young's work
and life. He succeeds, providing clear expositions of the technical material (especially that on
optics and Egyptian hieroglyphs). Some readers of this book will, like Robinson, find Young's
accom-plishments impressive; others will see him as some historians have —as a dilettante. Yet
despite the rich material presented in this book, readers will not end up knowing Young
personally. We catch glimpses of a playful Young, doodling Greek and Latin phrases in his notes
on medical lectures and translating the verses that a young lady had written on the walls of a
summerhouse into Greek elegiacs. Young was introduced into elite society, attended the theatre
and learned to dance and play the flute. In addition, he was an accomplished horseman.
However, his personal life looks pale next to his vibrant career and studies.
Young married Eliza Maxwell in 1804, and according to Robinson, "their marriage was a happy
one and she appreciated his work," Almost all we know about her is that she sustained her
husband through some rancorous disputes about optics and that she worried about money when
his medical career was slow to take off. Very little evidence survives about the complexities of
Young's relationships with his mother and father. Robinson does not credit them, or anyone else,
with shaping Young's extraordinary mind. Despite the lack of details concerning Young's rela-
tionships, however, anyone interested in what it means to be a genius should read this book.
1 ‘The last man who knew everything’ has also been claimed to other people.
2 All Young’s articles were published in Encyclopedia Britannica.
3 Like others, Young wasn’t so brilliant when growing up.
4 Young’s talent as a doctor surpassed his other skills.
5 Young’s advice was sought by people responsible for local and
national issues.
6 Young took part in various social pastimes.
7 Young suffered from a disease in his later years.
Questions 8-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each
answer.
How many life stories did Young write for the Encyclopedia Britannica?
8
What aspect of scientific research did Young focus on in his first academic paper?
9
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
B As we enter the 21st century, our perception of Antarctica has changed. Although physically
Antarctica is no closer and probably no warmer, and to spend time there still demands a
dedication not seen in ordinary life, the continent and its surrounding ocean are increasingly seen
to be an integral part of Planet Earth, and a key component in the Earth System. Is this because
the world seems a little smaller these days, shrunk by TV and tourism, or is it because Antarctica
really does occupy a central spot on Earth’s mantle? Scientific research during the past half
century has revealed—and continues to reveal—that Antarctica's great mass and low temperature
C Antarctica was not always cold. The slow break-up of the super-continent Gondwana with the
northward movements of Africa, South America, India and Australia eventually created enough
space around Antarctica for the development of an Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), that
flowed from west to east under the influence of the prevailing westerly winds. Antarctica cooled,
its vegetation perished, glaciation began and the continent took on its present-day appearance.
Today the ice that overlies the bedrock is up to 4km thick, and surface temperatures as low as
-89.2deg C have been recorded. The icy blast that howls over the ice cap and out to sea—the so-
called katabatic wind—can reach 300 km/hr, creating fearsome wind-chill effects,
D Out of this extreme environment come some powerful forces that reverberate around the
world. The Earth’s rotation, coupled to the generation of cells of low pressure off the Antarctic
coast, would allow Astronauts a view of Antarctica that is as beautiful as it is awesome. Spinning
away to the northeast, the cells grow and deepen, whipping up the Southern Ocean into the
mountainous seas so respected by mariners. Recent work is showing that the temperature of the
ocean may be a better predictor of rainfall in Australia than is the pressure difference between
Darwin and Tahiti—the Southern Oscillation Index. By receiving more accurate predictions,
graziers in northern Queensland are able to avoid overstocking in years when rainfall will be
poor. Not only does this limit their losses but it prevents serious pasture degradation that may
take decades to repair. CSIRO is developing this as a prototype forecasting system, but we can
confidently predict that as we know more about the Antarctic and Southern Ocean we will be
able to enhance and extend our predictive ability.
E The ocean’s surface temperature results from the interplay between deep-water temperature,
air temperature and ice. Each winter between 4 and 19 million square km of sea ice form,
locking up huge quantities of heat close to the continent. Only now can we start to unravel the
influ-ence of sea ice on the weather that is experienced in southern Australia. But in another way
the extent of sea ice extends its influence far beyond Antarctica. Antarctic krill—the small
shrimp-like crustaceans that are the staple diet for baleen whales, penguins, some seals, flighted
sea birds and many fish—breed well in years when sea ice is extensive and poorly when it is not.
Many species of baleen whales and flighted sea birds migrate between the hemispheres and when
the krill are less abundant they do not thrive.
F The circulatory system of the world’s oceans is like a huge conveyor belt, moving water and
dis-solved minerals and nutrients from one hemisphere to the other, and from the ocean's abyssal
depths to the surface. The ACC is the longest current in the world, and has the largest flow.
Through it, the deep flows of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans are joined to form part of a
single global thermohaline circulation, During winter, the howling katabatics sometimes scour
the ice off patches of the sea's surface leaving large ice-locked lagoons, or ’polynyas'. Recent
research has shown that as fresh sea ice forms, it is continuously stripped away by the wind and
may be blown up to 90km in a single day. Since only fresh water freezes into ice, the water that
remains becomes increasingly salty and dense, sinking until it spills over the continental shelf.
Cold water carries more oxygen than warm water, so when it rises, well into the northern hemi-
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Questions 19-21
Match the natural phenomenon with the correct determined factor.
B katabatic winds
C rainfall
D temperature
E glaciers
F pressure
Questions 22-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
MENTORS’ INTERNATIONAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 210
Write the correct letter in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.
22
23
Why should Australian farmers keep an eye on the Antarctic ocean temperature?
A It can help farmers reduce their economic loss.
B It allows for recovery of grassland lost to overgrazing.
C It can help to prevent animals from dying
D It enables astronauts to have a clear view of the Antarctic continent.
24
25
26
What factor drives Antarctic water to move beyond the continental shelf?
A A The increase of salt and density of the water
B The decrease of salt and density of the water
C The rising temperature due to global warming
D The melting of fresh ice into the ocean
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
Source of Knowledge
A What counts as knowledge? What do we mean when we say that we know some-thing? What
is the status of different. kinds of knowledge? In order to explore those questions we are going to
focus on one particular area of knowledge medicine.
B How do you know when you are ill? This may seem to be an absurd question. You know you
are ill because you feel ill; your body tells you that you are ill. You may know that you feel pain
or discomfort Iml knowing you are ill is a bit. more complex. At times, people experience the
symptoms of illness, but in tact they are simply tired or over-worked or they may just have a
hangover. At other limes, people may be suffering from a disease and fail to be aware of the
illness until it has reached a late stage in its development. So how do we know we are ill, and
what counts as knowledge?
C Think about this example. You feel unwell. You have a bad cough and always seem to be
tired. Perhaps it could be stress at work, or maybe you should give up smoking. You tool worse.
You visit the doctor who listens to your chest and heart, take's your temperature and blood
pressure, and then finally prescribes antibiotics lor your cough.
E This scenario shows many different sources of knowledge. For example, you decide to consult
the doctor in the first place because you feel unwell - this is personal knowledge about your own
body. However, the doctor's expert diagno-sis is based on experience and training, with sources
of knowledge as diverse as other experts, laboratory reports, medical textbooks and yours of
experience.
F One source of knowledge is the experience of our own bodies; the personal knowledge we
have of change's that might be significant, as well as the subjec-tive experience of poin and
physical distress. These experiences are mediated by other forms of knowledge such as the
words we have available to describe our experience and the common sense of our families and
friends as well as that drown from popular culture. Over the post decade, for example, Western
culture has seen a significant emphasis on stress-related illness in the media. Refer-ence to being
‘stressed end' has become a common response in daily exchanges in the workplace and has
become port of popular common-sense knowledge. It is thus not surprising that we might seek
such an explanation of physical symp-toms of discomfort.
G We might also rely on Ihe observations of others who know us. Comments from friends and
family such as ‘you do look ill' or 'that's a bad cough' might be another source of knowledge.
Complementary health practices, such as holistic medicine, produce their own sets of knowledge
upon which we might also draw in deciding the nature and degree of our ill health and about
possible treatments.
H Perhaps the most influential and authoritative source of knowledge is the medical knowledge
provided by the general practitioner. We expect he doctor to hove access to expert knowledge.
This is socially sanctioned. It would not be acceptable to notify our employer Unit we simply felt
too unwell to turn up for work or that our faith healer, astrologer, therapist or even our priest
thought it was not a good idea. We need on expert medical diagnosis in order to obtain the
necessary certificate it we need to be off work for more than the statutory self-certificaion period.
The knowledge of the medical sciences is privileged in this respect in contemporary Western
culture. Medical practitioners are also seen as having the required expert knowledge that permits
then legally to pre-scribe drugs and treatment to which patients would not. otherwise have
access. However there is a rauge of different knowledge upon which we draw when making
decisions about our own state of health.
I However, there is more than existing knowledge in this little story; new knowledge is
constructed within it.Given the doctor's medical training and background, she may hypothrsie 'is
Questions 27-34
Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs, A-I.
Questions 35-40
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Source of
Examples
knowledge
Answer Keys:
1TRUE
2FALSE
3FALSE
4FALSE
5TRUE
6TRUE
7NOT GIVEN
846
9human eye accommodation
10Indo-European
11Richard Brocklesby
12Royal Institution
13gas lighting
14D
15F
16E
17C
18A
19D
20A
21C
22C
23A
24C
25C
26A
27E
28F
29H
30H
31I
32G
33D
34B
35bad cough
36blood pressure
37friends and family/friends and families
38practitioner
39diagnosis