MATCHING INFORMATION

ABOUT THE MATCHING INFORMATION TASK

 You are only reading to check facts and figures.

 The paragraphs in the passage are numbered.
 The numbered statements are in random order.
 The statements include the same words that you find in the passage. You don’t
have to use all the letters.
 You can sometimes use the letters more than once.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

N.B. You may use any letter more than once
1. visual evidence of the gecko’s ability to resist water
2. a question that is yet to be answered by the researchers
3. the method used to calculate the gripping power of geckos
4. the researcher’s opinion of the gecko’s gripping ability
 5. a mention of the different environments where geckos can be found
6. the contrast between Stark’s research and the work of other researchers
7. the definition of a scientific term

Reading Passage 1

A High traffic levels remain a problem for many governments. Car ownership in the world’s fast-
developing countries continues to double each year, and migration to cities is also rising quickly,
resulting in high levels of 5 congestion and pollution.

B Until recently, governments successfully controlled traffic levels by imposing financial

obligations on drivers. Initially, they made it more expensive to drive by raising taxes on petrol or
increasing parking costs. At the same time, they made it cheaper to use public transport by investing
in rail and bus travel. However, these ‘tax and spend’ approaches are no longer possible to introduce
easily. This is because living costs are growing in many countries and the global economy is not
strong, so governments can’t spend as much is money and people are angry when they have to pay
more. New controls are therefore needed.

C Legal solutions to congestion issues are now attracting greater interest. However, traffic laws and
regulations have often proved ineffective. For example, banning cars in city centres has simply
transferred problems to the edge of cities. Similarly, controlling speed limits has been effective on
fast roads but has done little to solve congestion in urban areas.

D A more effective legal intervention might be to stop some people from driving altogether - but
who exactly? If workers were stopped from driving, they might not be able to get to work. Many
older citizens and families also rely on cars to move around easily. Furthermore, both these groups
vote frequently so it would be a political disaster to prevent them from driving.

E This leaves young people. Many people, including road safety campaigners, would agree with
raising the minimum driving age. Young people make up over 25% of road deaths in many countries
and, according to recent research, parts of the brain that help to calculate risk and consequences are
not fully developed until the age of 25.

Consequently, there have already been discussions in the media about stopping young people
driving or carrying passengers. Above all, raising the minimum driving age to would reduce the
number of drivers on the road by over 10% and therefore cut pollution.

F Of course, young people would have to be given financial help to make sure public transport
remained affordable for them. But as pressure grows on the governments to reduce congestion, it
surely makes sense to postpone the time that young drivers get their licenses until a little later.

Which paragraphs (A-F) of the passage contain the information in 1-6 below?

1. an opinion on whether young people should drive

2. a social group that depends on cars
3. the relationship between driving age and serious accidents
4. an environmental benefit of raising the age you can drive
5. a continuing increase in the car's popularity
6. a general rise in prices across much of the world
(Foundation Masterclass-46)
Reading Passage 2
Vivienne Wait reports on how the Sahara Desert could offer a truly green solution to Europe’s
energy problems
A For years, the Sahara has been regarded by many Europeans as a terra incognita of little economic
value or Importance. But this idea may soon change completely. Politicians and scientists on both
sides of the Mediterranean are beginning to focus on the Sahara’s potential to provide power for
Europe in the future. They believe the desert’s true value comes from the fact that it is dry and
empty. Some areas of the Sahara reach 45 degrees centigrade on many afternoons. It is, in other
words, a gigantic natural storehouse of solar energy.

B A few years ago, scientists began to calculate just how much energy the Sahara holds. They were
astonished at the answer. In theory, a 90,600 square kilometer chunk of the Sahara - smaller than
Portugal and a little over 1% of its total area - could yield the same amount of electricity as all the
world’s power plants combined. A smaller square of 15,500 square kilometres - about the size of
Connecticut - could provide electricity for Europe’s 500 million people. 'I admit I was sceptical until
I did the calculations myself,’ says Michael Pawlyn, director of Exploration Architecture, one of
three British environmental companies comprising the Sahara Forest Project, which is testing solar
plants in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Pawlyn calls the Sahara’s potential ‘staggering’.

C At the moment, no one is proposing the creation of a solar power station the size of a small
country. But a relatively well-developed technology exists, which proponents say could turn the
Sahara’s heat and sunlight into a major source of electricity - Concentrating Solar Power [CSP].
Unlike solar panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, CSP utilizes mirrors which
focus light on water pipes or boilers to produce very hot steam to operate the turbines of generators.
Small CSP plants have produced power in California’s Mojave Desert since the 1980s. The Sahara
Forest Project proposes building CSP plants in areas below sea level (the Sahara has several such
depressions) so that sea water can flow into them. This water would then be purified and used for
powering turbines and washing dust off the mirrors. Waste water would then supply irrigation to
areas around the stations, creating lush oases - hence the ‘forest’ in the group’s name.

D But producing Significant quantities of electricity means building huge arrays of mirrors and
pipes across hundreds of miles of remote desert, which is expensive. Gerry Wolff, an engineer who
heads DESERTEC, an international consortium of solar-power scientists, says they have estimated
it will cost about $59 billion to begin transmitting power from the Sahara by 2020.

E Building plants is just part of the challenge. One of the drawbacks to CSP technology is that it
works at maximum efficiency only in sunny, hot climates - and deserts tend to be distant from
population centres. To supply Europe with 20% of its electricity needs, more than 19,300
kilometres of cables would need to be laid under the Mediterranean, says Gunnar Asplund, head of
HVDC research at ABB Power Technologies in Ludvika, Sweden. Indeed, to use renewable sources
of power, including solar, wind and tidal, Europe will need to build completely new electrical grids.
That’s because existing infrastructures, built largely for the coal- fired plants that supply 80% of
Europe’s power, would not be suitable for carrying the amount of electricity generated by the
Sahara. Germany’s government-run Aerospace Centre, which researches energy, estimates that
replacing those lines could raise the cost of building solar plants in the Sahara and sending
significant amounts of power to Europe to about $485 billion over the next 40 years. Generous
government subsidies will be needed. ‘Of course it costs a lot of money,’ says Asplund. ‘It’s a lot
cheaper to burn coal than to make solar power in the Sahara.’

F Meanwhile, some companies are getting started. Seville engineering company Abengoa is
building one solar- thermal plant in Algeria and another in Morocco, while a third is being built in
Egypt by a Spanish-Japanese joint venture. The next step will be to get cables in place. Although the
European Parliament has passed a law that aids investors who help the continent reach its goal of
getting 20% of its power from renewable energy by 2020, it could take years to create the necessary
infrastructure.

G Nicholas Dunlop, secretary-general of the London-based NGO e-Parliament, thinks companies

should begin transmitting small amounts of solar power as soon as the North African plants begin
operating, by linking a few cable lines under the Med. '1 call It the Lego method,’ he says. ‘Build It
piece by piece:' If It can be shown that power from the Sahara can be produced profitably, he says,
companies and governments will soon jump in. If they do, perhaps airplane passengers flying across
the Sahara will one day count the mirrors and patches of green instead of staring at sand.
*terra incognita - Latin, meaning ‘an unknown land'

Questions 1-5. The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph
contains the following information?

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. a mention of systems which could not be used
2. estimates of the quantity of power the Sahara could produce
3. a suggestion for how to convince organizations about the Sahara’s potential
4. a short description of the Sahara at present
5. a comparison of the costs of two different energy sources

Questions 6-9. Look at the following statements (Questions 6-9) and the list of
organizations below. Match each statement with the correct organization, A-G.

6. They have set a time for achieving an objective.

7. They believe that successful small-scale projects will demonstrate that larger projects are
possible.
8. They have a number of renewable energy projects under construction.
9. They are already experimenting with solar- energy installations in other parts of the world.

List of Organizations

A. Exploration Architecture
B. DESERTEC
C. ABB Power Technologies
D. Aerospace Centre
E. Abengoa
F. The European Parliament
G. e-Parliament

Questions 10-13. Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO
WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP)
Unlike solar panels, CSP concentrates the sun’s rays on boilers by using 10 ……………. The
resulting heat produces high-temperature 11 . ……………….., which in turn moves the turbines
which generate electricity. CSP plants will be situated in 12 …………………. to allow sea water
to run in. This, when purified, can be used to wash the equipment. The resulting dirty water will
be used for 13 ……………. around the power plant, and in this way oases will be formed.

Reading Passage 3

Do Animals Laugh?
A.According to a recent study, laughter and joy may not be unique to humans. Ancestral forms of
play and laughter existed in other animals long before they did in humans. Jaak Panksepp, a
professor of psychobiology at Washington State University and the author of the study, says,
'Human laughter has robust roots in our animal past.'

B.While humans are the only creatures that tell jokes, it's long been suspected that some animals
like to laugh. In his 1872 treatise, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles
Darwin pointed out that very many kinds of monkeys, when pleased, utter a reiterated sound, clearly
analogous to our laughter.' In an experiment Panksepp had performed earlier, he found that when
chimpanzees play and chase each other, they make noises strikingly like human laughter, and that
dogs have a similar response.
C. Panksepp notes that children who are too young to laugh, at verbal jokes tend to shriek and laugh
during rowdy play, Panksepp found in his recent study that when young rats are playing, they also
make sounds - they chirp, although people can’t hear them. These chirps are ultrasonic sounds, far
too high-pitched for the human ear. Researchers must use special electronic receivers that convert
the chirps to sounds that humans can hear. Rats also chirp when they are playfully tickled by
researchers. During the course of the experiment, it was discovered that rats are especially ticklish in
the area around the back of the neck, which is also the area young rats tend to nip each other during
chases and play.

D. According to Panksepp, the chirps resemble our giggles, and are a primitive form of laughter.
Rats who have been tickled before seem to bond socially with their human ticklers. The animals
seek out specific human hands that had tickled them previously and seek to be tickled more.

E. In studying laughter, scientists have focused mostly on related issues - humour, personality,
health benefits, social theory-rather than laughter itself. New research, however, shows that circuits
for laughter exist in very ancient regions the human brain. The capacity to laugh appears early in
childhood, as anyone who has tickled a baby knows. As humans have incorporated language into
play, we may have developed new connections to parts of our brains that evolved before the cerebral
cortex, the outer layer associated with thought and memory. In separate experiments, scientists have
scanned subjects' brains with magnetic resonance imaging as they took part in activities that made
then laugh.The two types of humour - verbal and non-verbal - lit up different parts of the brain. Non-
verbal, physical humour apparently appeals to some of the brain's more 'primitive' parts.

F. Indeed, some scientists say that other mammals, just like humans, are capable of many feelings.
'The recognition by neuroscientists that the brain mechanisms underlying pain, pleasure and fear
are the same in humans and other mammals underscores our similarity to other species and is
extremely important,' saidTecumseh Fitch, a psychology lecturer at the University of St Andrews
in Scotland. Science has traditionally held that humour is exclusively a human trait, and many
scientists believe that more research is required before the rats' chirping sounds can be considered
real laughter. Panksepp believes that, through a study of laughter in rats, the human sense of humour
can be more fully understood.

Questions 1-7. The Reading Passage has six paragraphs. A-F. Which paragraph
contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F, next to each
statement.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. examples of situations in which different animal species produce a kind of laughter
2. mention of the point in human development when the ability to laugh develops
3. a description of the method used to capture certain noises
4. a reference to earlier research conducted by the author of the new study
5. the idea that humans were not the first species to develop laughter
6. the realisation that one species has a particularly sensitive region or its body
7. the idea that people and animals may share a range of emotional responses
Reading Passage 4
Leonardo's lost mural
A. According to historical records, in 1502 Florentine statesman Piero Sodermi commissioned the
artist Leonardo da Vinci to paint a fresco on the inside wall of the Hall of the Five Hundred - a room
named after the 500 members of the Republic of Florence's Grand Council - which now serves as
the city hall. The painting, six metres long and three metres tall, was to depict the scene of the
knights of the Italian League defeating an army from Milan near the Tuscan town of Anghiari. Da
Vinci, it is said, used the opportunity to try out a new oil painting technique, but it was not very
successful, possibly because of the high humidity in the hall. He never completed the mural.
B. In the 1550s, biographer and artist Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the
Five Hundred and paint several enormous murals, each four or five metres high. One mural -
picturing the same battle – was to be painted over Leonardo's unfinished work, but at least one
source describes Vasari as a Leonardo fan who couldn't bring himself to destroy the work.
C.Maurizio Seracini, an art diagnostician at the University of California, San Diego, has spent
around 40 years on a quest to find out what happened to da Vinci's painting. He has said, 'I'm
convinced it's there.' A break came in the 1970s, when he climbed a scaffold in front of Vasari's
painting and spied two words inscribed on a banner one of the knights is carrying: 'cerca irova,’ it
said, which roughly translates as 'seek and find'. Seracini took it as a clue that rather than doing what
had been asked, Vasari had built a false wall in front of da Vinci's work and painted his mural on
that surface instead.
D.A team led by Seracini eventually got permission to scan the entire building with high-frequency
surface- penetrating radar. The scanning revealed some sort of hollow space directly behind the
section of mural where the inscription had been found. To peek behind Vasari's fresco, the team
planned to drill 14 strategically located centimetre-wide holes in the work. But an outcry ensued
after journalists publicised the project. Some 300 Italian scholars petitioned the mayor of Florence to
halt the work. ‘But the team was making little boreholes some nine to twelve metres above the
ground,' said art historian Martin Kempof of Oxford University, who wasn't involved in the work.
'That kind of damage can be repaired invisibly.'
E.Despite the public protests, in late 2011 Seracini and his team were given permission to continue
their work - but not in the 14 spots they'd originally hoped to investigate. To avoid damaging
original portions of Vasari's painting, museum curators permitted them to drill only into existing
cracks and recently restored spots. This time the researchers struck gold a hollow space behind 17
centimetres of fresco and brick. They inserted an endoscopic camera into the space and took video
footage of rough masonry work as well as spots that appear to have been stroked by a brush. A
substance removed from the void was analysed with x-rays, and the results suggested it contained
traces of black pigment.
F.Based on the x-ray data, Seracini thinks the black pigment, which is made up of an unusual
combination of manganese and iron, is similar to those found in brown glazes of what is probably 0a
Vinci's most famous painting. La Gioconda (Mona Lisa). That Seracini found components unique to
Renaissance painting leads him to call the results 'encouraging evidence’, yet he complained that
further samples couldn't be collected because he was only permitted to work on the project within a
very narrow time period. 'Unless I get hold of a piece of it, and prove that it is real paint. I cannot
say anything definite, and that's very frustrating,' he said.
fresco (n) a painting done directly in the wet plaster of a wall; a type of mural
Questions 1-8. The Reading Passage has six paragraphs. A-F. Which paragraph
contains the following information? Write the correct letter; A-F, next to each
statement.
NB You may use any letter more than once

1. a compromise that allowed work to continue

2. a connection that led weight to a theory
3. a report that suggests great professional respect
4. a restriction that prevented a conclusion from being reached
5. evidence of instructions not being followed
6. a long-term commitment to an investigation
7. an experiment that failed to produce satisfactory results
8. an independent opinion on a contentious issue.
Reading Passage 5
Job Sharing
A Job-sharing is a concept that first appeared as a trendy idea in the fifties and basically means two
people sharing one job.  Previously, people either worked full-time or part-time with no other
options and little flexibility to move between the two.  But more recently, opportunities have begun
to appear for alternatives as our lives have become more complex, expensive or stressful and as we
demand more.
A Job-sharing is a concept that first appeared as a trendy idea in the fifties and basically means two
people sharing one job.  Previously, people either worked full-time or part-time with no other
options and little flexibility to move between the two.  But more recently, opportunities have begun
to appear for alternatives as our lives have become more complex, expensive or stressful and as we
demand more.

B The issue has arisen mainly because of the nature of the female worker.  Although forty-five
percent of the Australian workforce is female, only thirty-five percent of women work full time,
since employers have been switching from full-time to part-time in high level jobs.  In 1998, The
Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission made a landmark decision when they found in
favour of a woman who accused her employers of discrimination when they did not allow her to
return to work on a part-time basis after having a child.

C Job-sharing has been seen as a cure for such economic problems as unemployment, under-
employment and under-utilisation of talent in the workforce.  The rewards for the employee are the
promise of a better work/family balance, the freedom to return to studies or flexibility to deal with
issues related to health.  It is especially popular with women nearing the end of their pregnancies,
people returning to work after an absence or those nearing retirement.  For the employer, the
organisation still gets the full-time position covered but simply by two people rather than one.  This
is different from a part-time job, where the role of the position within the company has to change. 
The quality of the work being done does not have to suffer because it is still being done on a full-
time basis.

D Job-sharing is not found in all areas of employment, but it has flourished in the financial services
industry, the airline industry and the independent schooling system.  Indeed, the school system has
played a pioneering role with regard to flexible work practices.  Since it is a female dominated
profession (almost seventy percent of the Independent Education Union's members are women), and
many women demand flexibility from their employers, many schools have successfully introduced a
number of schemes, including other work policies such as carers' leave and part-time work, in
addition to job-sharing.
Questions 1-6. The passage contains four paragraphs, A-D. Which paragraph contains
the following information?
NB You may use any letter more than once
1. a list of industries in which job-sharing is common                                      .............
....
2. a reference to people wanting more from their lives                                    ..............
...
3. a reference to job-sharing as a solution to work-related problems              ...............
..
4. reasons why workers can benefit from job sharing                                      ..............
...
5. a reference to one industry with a high proportion of female workers       
.................
6. a reason why job-sharing has become an important issue   
 .................