READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 on pages 2 and 3.
The Slow Food Organization
Taking time with food
Slow Food began when Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist, was dismayed by the opening of
a fast food restaurant on the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. He decided it was time to
celebrate the fast-disappearing virtues of the slow production, preparation and eating of
food.What he had in mind when he began the Slow Food organization were local foods
which were prepared in their traditional manner and eaten at leisurely meals with family
and friends. Slow Food is the antithesis of everything fast food stands for, and it is now a
thriving international organization with members in 45 countries, a successful publishing
operation and a biannual trade show. In addition, Slow Food has launched a project called
the 'Ark of Taste' and a concept called 'virtuous globalization'.

The Ark of Taste is the catalog of endangered food plant and animal species that Slow
Food has resolved to protect against the rising global tide of fast food.Some examples of
the biodiversity promoted by the Ark of Taste include Iroquois white corn and the
Narragansett turkey, both of which are old, or heritage, foods in North America.
Biodiversity is a term commonly associated with discussions of threats to wild species, but
according to Slow Food the biodiversity of the domesticated species people have
depended on for centuries is no less important. For example, when the latest patented
hybrid variety of plant proves unable to withstand fungal or bacterial disease, plant
breeders will need the disease-resistant genes which can be obtained from heritage plant
varieties. If Iroquois white corn had fallen out of production, as it very nearly did two
decades ago due to the commercial launch of a new hybrid corn, irreplaceable and
possibly crucial sets of corn genes would have been lost forever.

For some time, plant-saver groups have been preserving heritage plant varieties, but Slow
Food takes that project a step further. The movement understands that all the food and
plant species in its Ark of Taste carry not only information about genetic traits but they also
embody a set of social practices, and in some cases even a way of life of previous
generations. Slow Food teaches that when a variety of food or breed of animal disappears,
something greater also disappears: a specific, irreplaceable mode of life that a particular
people have devised for living in a particular part of the Earth. An example of this is the
Iroquois white corn. By working to find new markets for this ancient variety of corn, Slow
Food is ensuring a source of income for the Native Americans who grow, roast, and grind
this corn and, at the same time, helping to preserve the specific cookery and religious uses
that the corn has been selected to support over hundreds of years.

Slow Food has moved away from the traditional locations for preserving rare animal and
plant species. For example, instead of zoos for rare animals and botanic gardens for rare
plants, Slow Food maintains that its plants and animals are best preserved on the dishes
and plates of discerning customers. To this end, Slow Food has introduced the concept of
virtuous globalization, which recognizes that the best way to ensure a safe future for
distinctive local products and practices is to find a global market for them. In this way, local
producers will be able to continue producing the food which for many years has been a
defining factor of their cultural identity. The characteristics of the virtuous globalization of
Slow Foods show how different the concept is from the globalization of fast foods.
Whereas global fast food companies aim to sell food that has an unchanging taste
wherever in the world it is eaten, the taste of a recognized Slow Food is unique to that
food. Another aspect is the quantities sold of these two types of food. In the case of fast
food, these are enormous, but the quantities of Slow Food products which are available for
selling are limited, due to the rarity of the plants or animals. The customers of virtuous
globalization Slow Foods are affluent people who value novelty and are undeterred by the
costs, which are high when compared to fast food.

Some years ago, a network of farmers in the USA volunteered to take part in a national
Slow Food project. The project was for the farmers to raise a total of 5,000 turkeys from
eggs which had been selected from four varieties of endangered turkey. The farmers had
to begin by hatching the eggs they had been supplied with, then raising the young turkeys
to adults. They were promised a guaranteed price per pound for the adult turkeys. The
object of the enterprise was to raise heritage turkeys for the North American holiday of
Thanksgiving. Although chefs in some restaurants where the turkeys were on the menu
complained that the Slow Food turkeys were smaller than industrially produced turkeys,
the distinctive flavors were very well received by consumers. By the following year, the
world population of these turkeys had nearly doubled.
It may seem strange that taking pleasure in eating could be a strategy for preserving
biodiversity because pleasure is not normally associated with environmentalism. However,
pleasure is part of what Slow Food aims to bring back, by demonstrating that, at least
when it comes to the politics of food, the best choice is often the one that provides the
most enjoyment.

Questions 1 - 6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1.The Ark of Taste lists food plant and animal species in danger of extinction.
2.Slow Food considers the term biodiversity should be restricted to wild species.
3.The genes of heritage plants may be of vital importance to modern plant breeders.
4.Countries can sell the genes of their heritage plant varieties internationally.
5.Slow Food maintains that food and culture exist independently of each other.
6.Some Native Americans are now giving cookery classes featuring Iroquois white corn.

Questions 7 - 9
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.
Taste Quantities sold Cost
Slow Foods 7............. 8.............. high
Fast Food 9............. enomous low

Questions 10 - 13
Answer the questions below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.
10.What were farmers in the USA given so that they could raise endangered turkeys?
11.How many varieties of endangered turkey benefited from the project?
12.Who was not happy with the size of the turkeys?
13.Who liked the taste of the endangered turkeys?
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.
Considerate Technology
Digital gadgets demand ever more of our attention with their continual interruptions. Engineers are
now testing computers and phones that sense when you're busy and spare you from distraction

With rapid changes in technology, people are being subjected to a relentless barrage of
emails, calls, instant messages and automated notifications - all of them oblivious to
whether we are busy or even present.Although we could simply turn off the phones or
close the email program when it is time for a meeting or a stretch of concentrated work, we
usually don't. We just endure the consequences.

However, numerous studies have shown that when people are unexpectedly interrupted,
they not only work less efficiently but also make more mistakes. 'It seems to add
cumulatively to a feeling of frustration,' says Rosalind Picard, a cognitive scientist at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and that stress response makes it hard to regain
focus.It's not only a matter of productivity.For pilots, drivers, soldiers and doctors, errors of
inattention can be downright dangerous. 'If we could just give our computers and phones
some understanding of human attention and memory, it would make them seem a lot more
thoughtful and courteous,' says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research.

To do this, the machines need new skills of three kinds: sensing, reasoning and
communicating. First a system must sense or infer where its owner is and what he or she
is doing. Next it must weigh the value of the message it wants to convey against the cost
of disruption. Then it has to choose the best mode and time to interject.

Surprisingly, surveys show that most people aren't really as busy as they think they are,
which is why we can usually tolerate interruptions from our inconsiderate paraphernalia.
James Fogarty and Scott E. Hudson of Carnegie Mellon University recently teamed up
with Jennifer Lai of IBM Research to study ten managers, researchers and interns at work.
They videotaped their subjects and periodically had them rate their ‘interruptibility’ . On
average the subjects wanted to work without interruption about one third of the time.
In studies of Microsoft employees, Horvitz has similarly found that they typically spend
more than 65 per cent of their day doing things which do not require their full attention.
Therefore, today's phones and computers, which naively assume that the user is never too
busy to take a call or receive an email, are probably correct two thirds of the time. (Hudson
and Horvitz acknowledge, however, that it is not yet clear how well these figures
generalize to other jobs.) To be useful, then, considerate systems will have to be more
than 65 per cent accurate in sensing when their users are near their cognitive limits.

Fortunately, this doesn't seem to require strapping someone into a heart monitor or brain
scanner. Fogarty and his collaborators have found that simply using a microphone to
detect whether anyone is talking within earshot meant accuracy rates of 76 per cent. That
is as good as the human judgment of coworkers who viewed videotapes of the subjects
and guessed when they were uninterruptible. When Fogarty's group enhanced the
software to detect not only conversations but also mouse movement, keyboard activity and
the applications running on machines, the system's accuracy rates were even higher.

Bestcom/Enhanced Telephony, a Microsoft prototype based on Horvitz's work, digs a little

deeper to find clues about what users are doing. Microsoft launched a test of the system in
mid-2003 and by October 2001 about 3,800 people were using the system to field their
incoming phone calls. Horvitz himself is one of those testers. When he is busy, Bestcom
silently handles one call after the other. First it checks whether the caller is listed in his
address book, the company directory, or its log of people whom he has called recently.
Triangulating these sources, it tries to deduce their relationship with the person they are
calling.Family members, supervisors and people Horvitz called earlier in the day ring
through. Others see a message on their computer that he is busy and won't be available
until a certain time.The system scans Horvitz's and the caller's calendars and offers to
reschedule the call at a time that is open for both. Some callers choose that option; others
leave voicemail. Emails get a similar screening. When Horvitz is out of the office, Bestcom
automatically offers to forward selected callers to his cell phone - unless his calendar and
other evidence suggest that he is in a meeting.

Most large companies already use computerized phone systems and standard calendar
and contact management software, so tapping into those 'sensors' should be
straightforward to set up. However, not all employees will like the idea of having a
microphone on all the time in their office, nor will everyone want to expose their datebook
to some program they do not ultimately control.

Moreover, some managers may be tempted to equate a 'state of low attention' with
slacking off and punish those who seem insufficiently busy. The researchers seem to
appreciate these risks. Hudson argues that an attentive system should not record audio or
keystrokes but simply analyze data streams and discard them after logging
'conversation in progress', 'typing detected', and so on. 'We built a privacy tool into
Bestcom from the beginning,' Horvitz emphasizes, 'so users can control various kinds of
information it collects about them.' Measures such as these may go some way towards
addressing the issue of privacy.

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
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
14.People generally seem to prefer to put up with interruptions rather than take measures
to avoid them.
15.Research suggests that people are often wrong in their perceptions of how busy they
are.
16.Hudson and Horvitz are convinced that they would find the same results in all fields of
employment.
17.In experiments, Fogarty's considerate system's ability to assess a person's
interruptibility was improved when the person's computer use was monitored.
18.Initially there was reluctance to test the Bestcom system.
19.It will be a complicated procedure to integrate considerate technology, such as
Bestcom, with existing office systems.

Questions 20 - 26
Complete the flow-chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 20-26 on your answer sheet.
 How Bestcom works
Identity of caller is checked against various sources in an

READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 on pages 11 and 12.
Questions 27 - 32
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C- from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i.How serendipity was wrongly understood
ii.Resolving a contradiction
iii.recent scientific discovery
iv.Views on serendipity from the business sector
v.Stating the basic contradiction in scientific research
vi.How the word 'serendipity' came into being
vii.How reality does not always match expectations
viii.Illustrating serendipity in scientific research
ix.A possible reason for a publishing success
27.Paragraph A
Example
Paragraph B ii
28.Paragraph C
29.Paragraph D
30.Paragraph E
31.Paragraph F
32.Paragraph G

The Accidental Scientist

The role of chance in scientific discovery

A A paradox lies within the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what you are
looking for, finding it can hardly count as a discovery, since it was fully anticipated.
But if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot know
when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the question. In the philosophy of
science, these two extremes are known as deductivism and inductivism.
In the former, the outcome is supposed to be logically contained in the premises you start
with; in the latter you are recommended to start with no expectations and see what turns
up.

B As in so many things, the ideal position resides somewhere between these two
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 aim to 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 is such a fascinating word that the late Robert King Merton -
the father of the sociology of science - liked it enough to write a book about it, assisted by
the French cultural historian Elinor Barber. Merton and Barber's book was finished in 1958,
but did not appear for many years, perhaps because, in the intervening period, American
academic sociology was taking a radically different direction from that represented in the
book. It tended to be more rationalistic and less willing to attend to voices speaking of
unanticipated consequences, complexities, and indeed, serendipity

C The word 'serendipity, meaning a discovery made in the course of looking for something
quite different, was first used by the English writer Horace Walpole in 1754.
He explained that he took it from a book called The Three Princes of Serendip, a fairy tale,
in which the princes were always making discoveries of things they were not actually
looking for. 'Serendip' was an old name for the island of Sri Lanka (formerly known as
Ceylon).

D The word 'serendipity was next used by antiquarians in the early 19th century, and in
the following century came into common use among scientists. Many of the latter,
including Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon (1871-1945) and British immunologist Peter
Medawar (1915-1987), liked to emphasise how much of scientific discovery was
unplanned, and even accidental. One example was the discovery by Hans Christian
Orsted (1777-1851) of electromagnetism, when he unintentionally brought a wire carrying
an electric current parallel to a magnetic needle; such instances led Medawar to insist,
'There is no such thing as the Scientific Method' - no way of systematising the process of
discovery. Important discoveries seemed to appear when no-one was looking for them.

E Yet what Cannon and Medawar believed, other scientists found infuriating, perhaps
because they misinterpreted the original concept. If scientific discovery were accidental,
then what was the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, they were opposed
by no less an authority than Louis Pasteur: 'Chance favours the prepared mind, he stated.
Accidents may happen, and things may turn up as one is looking for something else, but
the ability to notice such events and make use of them - these are the results of systematic
mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form of expertise. But the
coniunction of accident and expertise was part of Walpole's original definition. The three
princes made their discoveries by 'accident and sagacity (wisdom)'. There is no agreement
among scientists on the term and its use.
Some scientists using the word 'serendipity meant to stress those accidents belonging to
the situation; others treated serendipity as a personal capacity, and many others exploited
the ambiguity of the notion

F The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested was the idea of planned
science. Those who thought that scientific research could be confidently planned, as did
some corporate capitalists and government functionaries, were betting against serendipity.
Those who, on the other hand, considered that attempts to organise and plan science
were ill-advised could recruit the idea of serendipity to their cause. The
'serendipitists' were not all academics; as authors Merton and Barber note, two of the
great early 20th-century pioneers of industrial research, Willis Whitney and Irving
Langmuir, both of General Electric, made much of serendipity as they argued against
overly rigid research planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about the rationality
of the research process did much harm, and that an acceptance of uncertainty was much
more likely to result in productive research policies. So from the centre of the corporate
world came powerful arguments for scientific spontaneity and autonomy.

G For Merton, the concept was central to his work in the social sciences. In 1936 he wrote
an essay in which he argued that it is the nature of social action that what one intends is
seldom what one gets; people wanting to be alone with nature go to national parks like the
Yosemite Valley, and end up crowding each other. We do not know enough, and can
never know enough, to ensure that the past is an adequate guide to the future.
Eventually, he believes, all social action, including that formulated according to the most
rational criteria, is uncertain in its consequences.

Questions 33 - 37
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.
33.The concept of inductivism mentioned in paragraph A
A.means being ready to accept chance results.
B.evolved out of the idea of serendipity.
C.is very similar to deductivism.
D. means planning research thoroughly.
34.In paragraph D, Medawar's statement that There is no such thing as the Scientific
Method' meant that he
A.felt that scientific research was useless.
B.wanted scientists to be more methodical.
C.believed in the concept of serendipity.
D.doubted the usefulness of serendipity in science.
35.According to the writer, some scientists disliked the concept of serendipity because
they
A.felt it devalued their scientific expertise.
B.believed it would make research unnecessary.
C.did not believe accidents could be useful.
D. thought it would lead to mistakes in science.
36.Irving Langmuir believed that acceptance of uncertainty
A.would be useless in the industrial field.
B.could not be a part of research planning.
C.would improve the chances of research success.
D. would attract more support from business.
37.The example of Yosemite Valley is used to demonstrate that
A.natural places are often very overcrowded.
B.it is difficult to be sure about the outcome of plans.
C. history provides a good model when planning for the future.
D.human knowledge of nature is inadequate.

Questions 38 - 40
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
38.The word 'serendipity' appeared for the first time in the writings of ...............
39.The story from which the word 'serendipity' was taken was a ..............
40.The word 'serendipity' derives from the former name of a place now called ............. .