Tag: ielts reading tips and tricks

PASSAGE 1 The Dinosaurs Footprints and Extinction 

A

EVERYBODY knows that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Something big hit the earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice if ironic, symmetry in the idea that a similar impact brought about the dinosaurs’ rise. That is the thesis proposed by Paul Olsen, of Columbia University, and his colleagues in this week’s Science.

B

Dinosaurs first appeared in the fossil record 230m years ago, during the Triassic period. But they were mostly small, and they shared the earth with lots of other sorts of reptile. It was in the subsequent Jurassic, which began 202 million years ago, that they overran the planet and turned into the monsters depicted in the book and movie “Jurassic Park”. (Actually, though, the dinosaurs that appeared on screen were from the still more recent Cretaceous period.) Dr Olsen and his colleagues are not the first to suggest that the dinosaurs inherited the earth as the result of an asteroid strike. But they are the first to show that the takeover did, indeed, happen in a geological eyeblink.

C

Dinosaur skeletons are rare. Dinosaur footprints are, however, surprisingly abundant. And the sizes of the prints are as good an indication of the sizes of the beasts as are the skeletons themselves. Dr Olsen and his colleagues, therefore, concentrated on prints, not bones.

D

The prints in question were made in eastern North America, a part of the world the full of rift valleys to those in East Africa today. Like the modern African rift valleys, the Triassic/Jurassic American ones contained lakes, and these lakes grew and shrank at regular intervals because of climatic changes caused by periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit. (A similar phenomenon is responsible for modern ice ages.) That regularity, combined with reversals in the earth’s magnetic field, which are detectable in the tiny fields of certain magnetic minerals, means that rocks from this place and period can be dated to within a few thousand years. As a bonus, squishy lake-edge sediments are just the things for recording the tracks of passing animals. By dividing the labour between themselves, the ten authors of the paper were able to study such tracks at 80 sites.

E

The researchers looked at 18 so-called ichnotaxa. These are recognizable types of the footprint that cannot be matched precisely with the species of animal that left them. But they can be matched with a general sort of animal, and thus act as an indicator of the fate of that group, even when there are no bones to tell the story. Five of the ichnotaxa disappear before the end of the Triassic, and four march confidently across the boundary into the Jurassic. Six, however, vanish at the boundary, or only just splutter across it; and there appear from nowhere, almost as soon as the Jurassic begins.

F

That boundary itself is suggestive. The first geological indication of the impact that killed the dinosaurs was an unusually high level of iridium in rocks at the end of the Cretaceous when the beasts disappear from the fossil record. Iridium is normally rare at the earth’s surface, but it is more abundant in meteorites. When people began to believe the impact theory, they started looking for other Cretaceous-and anomalies. One that turned up was a surprising abundance of fern spores in rocks just above the boundary layer – a phenomenon known as a “fern spike”.

 G

That matched the theory nicely. Many modern ferns are opportunists. They cannot compete against plants with leaves, but if a piece of land is cleared by, say, a volcanic eruption, they are often the first things to set up shop there. An asteroid strike would have scoured much of the earth of its vegetable cover, and provided a paradise for ferns. A fern spike in the rocks is thus a good indication that something terrible has happened.

H

Both an iridium anomaly and a fern spike appear in rocks at the end of the Triassic, too. That accounts for the disappearing ichnotaxa: the creatures that made them did not survive the holocaust. The surprise is how rapidly the new ichnotaxa appear.

I

Dr Olsen and his colleagues suggest that the explanation for this rapid increase in size may be a phenomenon called ecological release. This is seen today when reptiles (which, in modern times, tend to be small creatures) reach islands where they face no competitors. The most spectacular example is on the Indonesian island of Komodo, where local lizards have grown so large that they are often referred to as dragons. The dinosaurs, in other words, could flourish only when the competition had been knocked out.

 J

That leaves the question of where the impact happened. No large hole in the earth’s crust seems to be 202m years old. It may, of course, have been overlooked. Old craters are eroded and buried, and not always easy to find. Alternatively, it may have vanished. Although the continental crust is more or less permanent, the ocean floor is constantly recycled by the tectonic processes that bring about continental drift. There is no ocean floor left that is more than 200m years old, so a crater that formed in the ocean would have been swallowed up by now.

K

There is a third possibility, however. This is that the crater is known, but has been misdated. The Manicouagan “structure”, a crater in Quebec, is thought to be 214m years old. It is huge – some 100km across – and seems to be the largest of between three and five craters that formed within a few hours of each other as the lumps of a disintegrated comet hit the earth one by one.

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

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ Dr Paul Olsen and his colleagues believe that asteroid knock may also lead to dinosaurs’ boom.

2/ Books and movie like Jurassic Park often exaggerate the size of the dinosaurs.

3 /Dinosaur footprints are more adequate than dinosaur skeletons.

4/ The prints were chosen by Dr Olsen to study because they are more detectable than the earth magnetic field to track the date of geological precise within thousands of years.

5/ Ichnotaxa showed that footprints of dinosaurs offer exact information of the trace left by an individual species.

6 We can find more Iridium in the earth’s surface than in meteorites.

Questions 7-13 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage . Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Dr Olsen and his colleagues applied a phenomenon named 7 ……………………to explain the large size of the Eubrontes, which is a similar case to that nowadays reptiles invade a place where there are no 8 …………………… for example, on an island called Komodo, indigenous huge lizards grow so big that people even regarding them as 9 …………………… However, there were no old impact trace being found? The answer may be that we have 10 …………………… . the evidence. Old craters are difficult to spot or it probably 11 …………………… Due to the effect of the earth moving. Even a crater formed in Ocean had been 12 ……………………under the impact of crust movement. Besides, the third hypothesis is that the potential evidence some craters maybe 13 ……………………

PASSAGE 2  Father of modern management 

A

Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters. “Management is an organ of institutions … the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.” Did he succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.

B

His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has remained in print ever since.

C

The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.

D

However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.

E

There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.

F

There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.

Questions 1-6

Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

i The popularity and impact of Drucker’s work

ii Finding fault with Drucker

iii The impact of economic globalisation

iv Government regulation of business

v Early publications of Drucker’s

vi Drucker’s view of balanced management

vii Drucker’s rejection of big business

viii An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker’s work

ix The changing role of the employee

1/ Paragraph A

2/ Paragraph B

3/ Paragraph C

4/ Paragraph D

5/ Paragraph E

6/ Paragraph F

Questions 7-10 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 7- 10 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with what is stated in the passage

NO if the statement counters to what is stated in the passage

NOT GIVEN if there is no relevant information given in the passage

7/ Drucker believed the employees should enjoy the same status as the employers in a company

8/ Drucker argued the managers and politicians will dominate the economy during a social transition

9/ Drucker support that workers are not simply put themselves just in the employment relationship and should develop their resources of intelligence voluntarily

10/ Drucker’s work on the management is out of date in moderns days

Questions 11-12 Choose TWO letters from A-E. Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker’s views?

A High-rank executives and workers should be put in balanced positions in management practice

B Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs

C More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.

D Management should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the

outside force

E Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish goals

Questions 13-14 Choose TWO letters from A-E. Write your answers in boxes 13 and 14 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as criticisms to Drucker and his views?

A His lectures focus too much on big organisations and ignore the small ones.

B His lectures are too broad and lack of being precise and accurate about the facts.

C He put a source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.

D He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his own management groups

E He was overstatin

PASSAGE 3  Age-proofing our brains – Making our minds last a lifetime 

{A} While it may not be possible to completely age-proof our brains, a brave new world of anti-aging research shows that our gray matter may be far more flexible than we thought. So no one, no matter how old, has to lose their mind. The brain has often been called the three-pound universe. It’s our most powerful and mysterious organ, the seat of the self, laced with as many billions of neurons as the galaxy has stars. No wonder the mere notion of an aging, failing brain–and the prospect of memory loss, confusion, and the unraveling of our personality–is so terrifying. As Mark Williams, M.D., author of The American Geriatrics Society’s Complete Guide to Aging and Health, says, “The fear of dementia is stronger than the fear of death itself.” Yet the degeneration of the brain is far from inevitable. “Its design features are such that it should continue to function for a lifetime,” says Zaven Khachaturian, Ph.D., director of the Alzheimer’s Association’s Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute. “There’s no reason to expect it to deteriorate with age, even though many of us are living longer lives.” In fact, scientists’ view of the brain’s potential is rapidly changing, according to Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. “Thirty-five years ago we thought Alzheimer’s disease was a dramatic version of normal aging . Now we realize it’s a disease with a distinct pathology. In fact, some people simply don’t experience any mental decline, so we’ve begun to study them.’ Antonio Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa and author of Descartes’ Error, concurs. “Older people can continue to have extremely rich and healthy mental lives.’

{B} The seniors were tested in 1988 and again in 1991. Four factors were found to be related to their mental fitness: levels of education and physical activity, lung function, and feelings of self-efficacy. “Each of these elements alters the way our brain functions,” says Marilyn Albert, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues from Yale, Duke, and Brandeis Universities and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who hypothesizes that regular exercise may actually stimulate blood flow to the brain and nerve growth, both of which create more densely branched neurons rendering the neurons stronger and better able to resist disease. Moderate aerobic exercise, including long brisk walks and frequently climbing stairs, will accomplish this.

{C} Education also seems to enhance brain function. People who have challenged themselves with at least a college education may actually stimulate the neurons in their brains. Moreover, native intelligence may protect our brains. It’s possible that smart people begin life with a greater number of neurons, and therefore have a greater reserve to fall back on if some begin to fail. “If you have a lot of neurons and keep them busy, you may be able to tolerate more damage to your brain before it shows,’ says Peter Davies, M.D., of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, Early linguistic ability also seems to help our brains later in life. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 93 elderly nuns and examined the autobiographies they had written 60 years earlier, just as they were joining a convent The nuns whose essays were complex and dense with ideas remained sharp into their eighties and nineties.

{D} Finally, personality seems to play an important role in protecting our mental prowess. A sense of self-efficacy may protect our brain, buffeting it from the harmful effects of stress. According to Albert, there’s evidence that elevated levels of stress hormones may harm brain cells and cause the hippocampus–a small seahorse-shaped organ that’s a crucial moderator of memory–to atrophy. A sense that we can effectively chart our own course in the world may retard the release of stress hormones and protect us as we age. “It’s not a matter of whether you experience stress or not,’ Albert concludes, “it’s your attitude toward it.” Reducing stress by meditating on a regular basis may buffer the brain as well. It also increases the activity of the brain’s pineal gland , the source of the antioxidant hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep and may retard the aging process. Studies at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the University of Western Ontario found that people who meditated regularly had higher levels of melatonin than those who took 5-milligram supplements. Another study, conducted jointly by Maharishi International University, Harvard University, and the University of Maryland, found that seniors who meditated for three months experienced dramatic improvements in their psychological well-being, compared to their non-meditative peers.

{E} Animal studies confirm that both mental and physical activity boost brain fitness. At the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in Urbana, Illinois, psychologist William Greenough, Ph.D., let some rats play with a profusion of toys. These rodents developed about 25 percent more connections between their neurons than did rats that didn’t get any mentally stimulating recreation. In addition, rats that exercised on a treadmill developed more capillaries in specific parts of their brains than did their sedentary counterparts. This increased the blood flow to their brains. “Clearly the message is to do as many different flyings as possible,” Greenough says.

 {F} It’s not just scientists who are catching anti-aging fever. Walk into any health food store, and you’ll find nutritional formulas –with names like Brainstorm and Smart ALEC–that claim to sharpen mental ability. The book Smart Drugs & Nutrients, by Ward Dean, M.D., and John Morgenthaler, was self-published in 1990 and has sold over 120,000 copies worldwide. It has also spawned an underground network of people tweaking their own brain chemistry with nutrients and drugs–the latter sometimes obtained from Europe and Mexico. Sales of ginkgo –an extract from the leaves of the 200-million-year-old ginkgo tree, which has been shown in published studies to increase oxygen in the brain and ameliorate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease–are up by 22 percent in the last six months alone, according to Paddy Spence, president of SPINS, a San Francisco-based market research firm. Indeed, products that increase and preserve mental performance are a small but emerging segment of the supplements industry, says Linda Gilbert, president of HealthFocus, a company that researches consumer health trends. While neuroscientists like Khachaturian liken the use of these products to the superstition of tossing salt over your shoulder, the public is nevertheless gobbling up nutrients that promise cognitive enhancement.

Questions 28-31 Choose the Four correct letters among A-G . Write your answers in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet. Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assisting the Brains’ function?

(A) Preventive treatment against Alzheimer’s disease

(B) Doing active aerobic exercise and frequently climbing stairs

(C) High levels of education

(D) Early verbal or language competence training

(E) Having more supplements such as ginkgo tree

(F) Participate in more physical activity involving in stimulating tasks

(G) Personality and feelings of self-fulfillment

Questions 32-39

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-G) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 32-39 on your answer sheet.

NB you may use any latter more than once

(A) Zaven Khachaturian

(B) William Greenough

(C) Marilyn Albert

(D) Robert Sapolsky

(E) Linda Gilbert

(F) Peter Davies

(G) Paddy Spence

(32) Alzheimer’s was probably a kind of disease rather than a normal aging process.

(33) Keeping neurons busy, people may be able to endure more harm to your brain

(34) Regular exercises boost blood flow to the brain and increase anti-disease disability.

(35) Significant increase of Sales of ginkgo has been shown.

(36) More links between their neurons are found among stimulated animals.

(37) Effectiveness of the use of brains supplements products can be of little scientific proof.

(38) Heightened levels of stress may damage brain cells and cause part of brain to deteriorate.

(39) Products that upgrade and preserve mental competence are still a newly developing industry.

Questions 40. Choose the correct letters among A-D Write your answers in box 40 on your answer sheet.

According to the passage, what is the most appropriate title for this passage?

(A) Making our minds last a lifetime

(B) amazing pills of the ginkgo

(C) how to stay healthy in your old hood

(D) more able a brain and neurons

PASSAGE 1 Consecutive and Simultaneous Translation 

{A}

When people are faced with a foreign-language barrier, the usual way around it is to find someone to interpret or translate for them. The term ‘translation’, is the neutral term used for all tasks where the meaning of expressions in one language (the source language) is turned into the meaning of another (the ‘target’ language), whether the medium is spoken, written, or signed. In specific professional contexts, however, a distinction is drawn between people who work with the spoken or signed language (interpreters), and those who work with the written language (translators). There are certain tasks that blur this distinction, as when source speeches turned into target writing. But usually the two roles are seen as quite distinct, and it is unusual to find one person who is equally happy with both occupations. Some writers on translation, indeed, consider the interpreting task to be more suitable for extrovert personalities, and the translating task for introverts.

{B}

Interpreting is today widely known from its use in international political life. When senior ministers from different language backgrounds meet, the television record invariably shows a pair of interpreters hovering in the background. At major conferences, such as the United Nations General Assembly, the presence of headphones is a clear indication that a major linguistic exercise is taking place. In everyday circumstances, interpreters are frequently needed, especially in cosmopolitan societies formed by new reiterations of immigrants and Gastarbeiter. Often, the business of law courts, hospitals, local health clinics, classrooms, or industrial tribunals cannot be carried on without the presence of an interpreter. Given the importance and frequency of this task, therefore, it is remarkable that so little study has been made of what actually happens when interpreting takes place, and of how successful an exercise it is.

{C}

There are two main kinds of oral translation – consecutive and simultaneous In consecutive translation the translating starts after the original speech or some part of it has been completed. Here the interpreter’s strategy and the final results depend, to a great extent on the length of the segment to be translated. If the segment is just a sentence or two the interpreter closely follows the original speech. As often as not, however, the interpreter is expected to translate a long speech which has lasted for scores of minutes or even longer. In this case he has to remember a great number of messages, and keep them in mind until he begins his translation. To make this possible the interpreter has to take notes of the original messages, various systems of notation having been suggested for the purpose. The study of, and practice in, such notation is the integral part of the interpreter’s training as are special exercises to develop his memory.

{D}

Doubtless the recency of developments in the field partly explains this neglect. One procedure, consecutive interpreting, is very old — and presumably dates from the Tower of Babel! Here, the interpreter translates after the speaker has finished speaking. This approach is widely practiced in informal situations, as well as in committees and small conferences. In larger and more formal settings, however, it has been generally replaced by simultaneous interpreting — a recent development that arose from the availability of modern audiological equipment and the advent of increased international interaction following the Second World War.

{E}

Of the two procedures, it is the second that has attracted most interest, because of the complexity of the task and the remarkable skills required. In no other context of human communication is anyone routinely required to listen and speak at the same time, preserving an exact semantic correspondence between the two modes. Moreover, there is invariably a delay of a few words between the stimulus and the response, because of the time it takes to assimilate what is being said in the source language and to translate it into an acceptable form in the target language. This ‘ear-voice span’ is usually about 2 or 3 seconds, but it may be as much as 10 seconds or so, if the text is complex. The brain has to remember what has just been said, attend to what is currently being said, and anticipate the construction of what is about to be said. As you start a sentence you are taking a leap in the dark, you are mortgaging your grammatical future; the original sentence may suddenly be turned in such a way that your translation of its end cannot easily be reconciled ( with your translation of its start. Great nimbleness is called for

{F}

How it is all done is not at all clear. That it is done at all is a source of some wonder, given the often lengthy periods of interpreting required, the confined environment of an interpreting booth, the presence of background noise, and the awareness that major decisions may depend upon the accuracy of the work. Other considerations such as cultural background also make it aim to pay full attention to the backgrounds of the authors and the recipients and to take into account differences between source and target language. 

{G}

Research projects have now begun to look at these factors – to determine, for example, how far successful interpreting is affected by poor listening conditions or the speed at which the source language is spoken. It seems that an input speed of between 100 and 120 words per minute is a comfortable rate for interpreting, with an upper limit of around 200 w.p.m. But even small increases in speed can dramatically affect the accuracy of output. In one controlled study, when speeds were gradually increased in a series of stages from 95 to 164 w.p.m., the ear-voice span also increased with each stage, and the amount correctly interpreted showed a clear decline. Also, as the translating load increases, not only are there more errors of commission (mistranslations, cases of vagueness replacing precision), there are also more errors of omission, as words and segments of meaning are filtered out. These are important findings, given the need for accuracy in international communication. What is needed is a more detailed identification of the problem areas, and of the strategies speakers, listeners, and interpreters use to solve them. There is an urgent need to expand what has so far been one of the most neglected fields of communication research.  

Questions 1-5

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

Question 1/ In which way does author state translation at the beginning of the passage?

A abstract and concrete meaning

B general and specific meaning

C several examples of translation’s meaning

D different meaning in various profession

Question 2/ Application of headphone in a UN conference tells us that:

A TV show is being conducted

B radio program is on the air

C two sides are debating

D language practice is in the process

Question 3/ In the passage, what is the author’s purpose in citing the Tower of Babel?

A interpreting secret is stored in the Tower

B interpreter emerged exactly from time of Tower of Babel

C consecutive interpreting has a long history

D consecutive interpreting should be abandoned

Question 4/ About simultaneous interpreting, which of the following is TRUE?

A it is an old and disposable interpretation method

B it doesn’t need outstanding professional ability

C it relies on professional equipment

D it takes less than two seconds ear-voice span

Question 5/ In consecutive translation, if the section is longer than expected, what would an interpreter most probably do?

A he or she has to remember some parts ahead

B he or she has to break them down first

C he or she has to respond as quickly as possible

D he or she has to remember all parts ahead

Questions 6-9 Summary

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words or a number from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet. The cycle from ear to voice normally lasts about 6 ……………………, which depends on the sophistication of paper, for example, it could go up to 7 …………………… sometimes. When experts took close research on affecting elements, they found appropriate speaking speed is somehow among 8 …………………… w.p.m. In a specific experiment, the accuracy of interpretation dropped while the ear-voice span speed increased between 95 to 164 w.p.m. However, the maximum speed was about 9 ……………………w.p.m.

Questions 10-13

Choose FOUR correct letters. Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

Which FOUR of the following are the factors that affect interpreting?

A mastery in structure and grammar of sentence in the script

B speed of incoming sound source

C noisy of background

D emotional states of interpreter

E culture of different backgrounds

F understanding the significance of being precise

G upper volume limit of speakers

Questions 1-4 The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 See grass turned to be more resistant to the saline water level in the Bay.

2 Significance of finding a specific reason in controversy

3 Expensive proposals raised to solve the nitrogen dilemma

4 A statistic of ecological changes in both the coral area and species

Questions 5-8

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.

A Bill Kruczynski

B Brian Lapointe

C Joseph Zieman

5/ Drainage system in everglades actually results in high salty water in the bay

6/ Restoring water high in nitrogen level will make more ecological side effect

7/ High nitrogen levels may be caused by the nearby farmland.

8/ Released sewage rather than nutrients from agricultural area increase the level of Nitrogen.

Questions 9-13: Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

9/ Everyone agrees with “pouring water into the sea is harmless enough” even in the Florida Bay area.

10/ Nitrogen was poured in from different types of crops as water flows through.

11/ Everglade restoration project can be effective regardless of the cause of the pollution.

12/ Human has changed Florida Bay where old image before 1950s is unrecalled.

13/ Tourism contributes fundamentally to the Florida Bay area.

PASSAGE 3 Artists’ Fingerprints 

Works of art often bear the fingerprints of the artist who created them. Such crucial evidence usually goes unnoticed even by connoisseurs, art experts, and conservators. If present, such evidence could be valuable in clarifying questions about authorship and dating.

{A} The unique character of ridges on our hands has been recognized for thousands of years. The study of ancient pottery for example reveals the utilization of fingerprint impressions in the clay as a maker’s mark. In prehistoric times, we find examples of handprints in cave paintings. Only as recently as 1858 did Sir William Herschel establish its use for identification. In 1888, Sir Francis Galton undertook to refine and formulate Herschel’s observations. Identification by fingerprint was first adopted in England in 1905 and received general acceptance worldwide in 1908. 

{B} The combination of a number of characteristics in a given finger impression is specific to a particular print. The placing of reliance on fingerprint evidence has always been on the assumption that no two fingers can have identical ridge characteristics. Galton’s mathematical conclusions predicted the possible existence of some 64 billion different fingerprint patterns. The functionality of this technique is that the probability for the existence of two identical finger impressions from different individuals is nil and no such possibility has ever been noticed in any part of the world at any time.

{C} The individuality of a fingerprint is not determined by its general shape or pattern but by the careful study of its ridge characteristics. Since at a scene of the crime, usually only partial prints are found, comparison of a relatively small number of characteristics is accepted in legal practice. In a judicial proceeding, a point-by-point comparison must be demonstrated by the fingerprint expert. This is exactly the principle that must be followed in art-related fingerprint issues.

{D} Artists in the area of the visual arts use their hands for creation. Their tools, such as brushes often isolate them from the surface they are working on. Inaccurate deposits of paint are often corrected by modelling with the fingertip. Some artists used the fingertip to soften the marks left by the brush by gently tapping or stroking the still wet surface. In some instances, the fingertip was used for literally ‘stamping’ the fine network of ridges onto the painting. 

{E} The eventual authentication of a painting by J. M. W. Turner entitled Landscape with Rainbow in 1993 is a good illustration of the process. The painting was discovered in the early 1980s. Biros took the painting to the Tate Gallery, in London, to show it to the world’s leading Turner experts and connoisseurs. The verdict was unanimous – the painting was a tattered imitation. However, fingerprint evidence was discovered on the painting during restoration, appropriately documented, and re-examined by a veteran expert from the RCMP. A match was found between a fingerprint on “Landscape with Rainbow and fingerprints photographed on another Turner painting, ‘Chichester Canal’. When an independent fingerprint examination by John Manners of the West Yorkshire Police confirmed the conclusions that the fingerprints on both paintings were identical, the unbelievers changed their minds. In addition, it is well known that Turner always worked alone and had no assistants. This reduces the chances of accidental contribution substantially. The painting, originally bought for a few hundred dollars, finally sold for close to $200,000 at auction at Phillips in London in 1995.

{F} In 1998, three envelopes containing old correspondence had been purchased in an antique shop. One of the envelopes postmarked April 2, 1915, was found to contain a drawing folded in half. The drawing depicts a woman’s head. It is executed in red chalk with an inscription written in reverse with brown ink. The design is faded and worn. Some spots suggest foxing and subsequent discolouration. The paper is yellowed and contaminated.

{G} The newly discovered design bears great similarity to that of the Head of St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci, (RL 12533) in the Windsor Collection since 1629. The medium is different, red chalk being used instead of black. The scale of the two images is different so offsetting (copying by contact transference) is not a satisfactory explanation for the new drawing. When the paper was first examined, several fingerprints were noticed on the verso. One of them was found clear and containing many ridges suitable for comparison, however, no analysis was done at the time due to the lack of reference material. Many of Leonardo’s works are not easily accessible and fingerprint data either does not exist or is not published. 

{H} By chance, on March 30, 1999, several clear and usable fingerprints were found on an unusually good detail photo in a publication on Leonardo. The photograph of Leonardo’s St Jerome, in the Vatican Museum, revealed no less than 16 partial fingertip marks. The importance of this is that the fingerprints are left in the still-wet paint and without doubt, the use of the fingertip served to model paint. Since the authorship of the painting of St Jerome is unquestioned by scholarship and has always been ascribed to Leonardo, the conclusion that these fingerprints are his would be hard to argue against.

{I} The fingerprints on the St Jerome illustration were scanned and enlarged so comparisons could be made with the fingerprint on the newly discovered drawing. One of them proved to match. The result of our analyses was presented on March 31, 1999, to fingerprint examiner Staff Sergeant André Turcotte for an independent assessment. He agreed with the findings and confirmed the conclusion. The fingerprint on the St Jerome painting in the Vatican and the newly discovered drawing were created by the same finger. 

{J] Remember, the authentication approach should rest on strict considerations and rigorous methodology. Only prints that are clearly from the original creative process are admitted for consideration. The reference samples should ideally come from unquestioned works of art with good provenance. Spurious contributors must be eliminated such as assistants who may have touched the painting while still wet. A match is never

Questions 1-4

The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1/ Mention of fingerprint identification in the legal process.

2 /The author’s advice on fingerprint authentication of arts.

3/ The use of fingerprints in ancient times.

4/ The medium comparison between two drawings.

Questions 5-9 Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-I below.

Write the correct letters in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.

5/ The fingerprint in ancient pottery

6/ The science of fingerprint identification

7 /The authentication of a painting without a signature

8/ Landscape with Rainbow

9/ When painting, artists

(A) might use fingers to remove unwanted paint left by brushes.

(B) revealed the utilization of clay.

(C) was first used on Galton’s mathematical assumption.

(D) was left to identify the person who made it.

(E) was restored at a high expense.

(F) was finally determined at an appropriate price.

(G) has been accepted as a reliable system available.

(H) was preserved at the Windsor Collection.

(I) could be authenticated by comparing fingerprints from other sources.

Questions 10-12 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D. Write your answers in boxes 10-12 on your answer sheet.

Question 10: The attribution of Landscape with Rainbow to Turner

A was in overwhelming consensus at the beginning.

B was first brought forward by the West Yorkshire Police.

C was rejected by the Biros.

D was not exactly located for years.

Question 11:- The drawing of a woman’s head contained in the envelope

A was finished in 1915.

B was executed in brown ink.

C was in poor condition.

D was folded for protection.

Question 12:- The drawing of The Head of St Anne

A is the work of Leonardo da Vinci

B is softer due to fading and contamination.

C bears some fingerprints on the verso.

D is in the Vatican Museum

PASSAGE 1 : video games Unexpected Benefits to Human Brain

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played his first video game years ago when his six-year-old son Sam was playing Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. He wanted to play the game so he could support Sam’s problem solving. Though Pajama Sam is not an “educational game”, it is replete with the types of problems psychologists study when they study thinking and learning. When he saw how well the game held Sam’s attention, he wondered what sort of beast a more mature video game might be.

Video and computer games, like many other popular, entertaining and addicting kid’s activities, are looked down upon by many parents as time-wasters, and worse, parents think that these games rot the brain. Violent video games are readily blamed by the media and some experts as the reason why some youth become violent or commit extreme anti-social behavior. Recent content analyses of video games show that as many as 89% of games contain some violent content, but there is no form of aggressive content for 70% of popular games. Many scientists and psychologists, like James Paul Gee, find that video games actually have many benefits – the main one being making kids smart. Video games may actually teach kids high-level thinking skills that they will need in the future.

“Video games change your brain,” according to University of Wisconsin psychologist Shawn Green. Video games change the brain’s physical structure the same way as do learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating using a map. Much like exercise can build muscle, the powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which strengthens neural circuits, can build the player’s brain.

Video games give your child’s brain a real workout. In many video games, the skills required to win involve abstract and high level thinking. These skills are not even taught at school. Some of the mental skills trained by video games include: following instructions, problem solving, logic, hand-eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills. Research also suggests that people can learn iconic, spatial, and visual attention skills from video games. There have been even studies with adults showing that experience with video games is related to better surgical skills. Jacob Benjamin, doctor from Beth Israel Medical Center NY, found a direct link between skill at video gaming and skill at keyhole or laparoscopic surgery. Also, a reason given by experts as to why fighter pilots of today are more skillful is that this generation’s pilots are being weaned on video games.

The players learn to manage resources that are limited, and decide the best use of resources, the same way as in real life. In strategy games, for instance, while developing a city, an unexpected surprise like an enemy might emerge. This forces the player to be flexible and quickly change tactics. Sometimes the player does this almost every second of the game giving the brain a real workout. According to researchers at the University of Rochester, led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist, games simulating stressful events such as those found in battle or action games could be a training tool for real-world situations. The study suggests that playing action video games primes the brain to make quick decisions. Video games can be used to train soldiers and surgeons, according to the study. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture, says gamers must deal with immediate problems while keeping their long-term goals on their horizon. Young gamers force themselves to read to get instructions, follow storylines of games, and get information from the game texts.

James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that playing a video game is similar to working through a science problem Like students in a laboratory, gamers must come up with a hypothesis. For example, players in some games constantly try out combinations of weapons and powers to use  to defeat an enemy. If one does not work, they change hypothesis and try the next one. Video games are goal- driven experiences, says Gee, which are fundamental to learning. Also, using math skills is important to win in  many games that involve quantitative analysis like managing resources. In higher levels of a game, players usually fail the first time around, but they keep on trying until they succeed and move on to the next level.

Many games are played online and involve cooperation with other online players in order to win. Video and computer games also help children gain self-confidence and many games are based on history, city building, and governance and so on. Such games indirectly teach children about aspects of life on earth.

In an upcoming study in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations. The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the fast-paced action video games “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game “The Sims 2.” After this training period, all of the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers. The action game players were up to 25 percent faster at coming to a conclusion and answered just as many questions correctly as their strategy game playing peers.

Questions 1-4 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1/ What is the main purpose of paragraph one

A Introduction of professor James Paul Gee.

B Introduction of the video game: Pajamas Sam.

C Introduction of types of video games.

D Introduction of the background of this passage.

2/ What does the author want to express in the second paragraph

A Video games are widely considered harmful for children’s brain.

B Most violent video games are the direct reason of juvenile delinquency.

C Even there is a certain proportion of violence in most video games; scientists and psychologists see its

benefits of children’s intellectual abilities.

D Many parents regard video games as time-wasters, which rot children’s brain.

3/ What is correctly mentioned in paragraph four

A Some schools use video games to teach students abstract and high level thinking.

B Video games improves the brain ability in various aspects.

C Some surgeons have better skills because they play more video games.

D Skillful fighter pilots in this generation love to play video games.

4/ What is the expectation of the experiment the three researchers did

A Gamers have to make the best use of the limited resource.

B Gamers with better math skills will win in the end.

C Strategy game players have better ability to make quick decisions.

D Video games help increase the speed of players’ reaction effectively.

Questions 5-8 In boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

5/ Most video games are popular because of their violent content.

6/ The action game players minimized the percentage of making mistakes in the experiment.

7/ It would be a good idea for schools to apply video games in their classrooms.

8 /Those People who are addicted to video games have lots of dopamine in their brains.

Questions 9-13

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters, A-F, in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

A. The writer’s opinion

B. James Paul Gee

C. Shawn Green

D. Daphne Bavelier

E . Steven Johnson

F . Jacob Benjamin

9/ Video games as other daily life skills alter the brain’s physical structure.

10/ Brain is ready to make decisions without hesitation when players are immersed in playing stressful games.

11/ The purpose-motivated experience that video games offer plays an essential role in studying.

12/ Players are good at tackling prompt issues with future intensions.

13/ It helps children broaden their horizon in many aspects and gain self-confidence.

Questions 1-5 Summary: Complete the Summary paragraph below. In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write the correct answer with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS

The result of Ekman’s study demonstrates that fear and surprise are persistently 1 ……………….. and made a conclusion that some facial expressions have something to do with certain 2 ………………… Which is impossible covered, despite of 3 ……………….. and whether the culture has been 4 ……………….. or 5 ……………….. to the mainstream.

Questions 6-11

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H, Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

6/ the difficulty identifying the actual meaning of facial expressions

7/ the importance of culture on facial expressions is initially described

8/ collected data for the research on the relation between blink and the success in elections

9/ the features on the sociality of several facial expressions

10/ an indicator to reflect one’s extent of nervousness

11/ the relation between emotion and facial expressions

Questions 12-13

Choose two letters from the A-E

Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet

Which Two of the following statements are true according to Ekman’s theory?

A/ No evidence shows animals have their own facial expressions.

B/ The potential relationship between facial expression and state of mind exists

C/ Facial expressions are concerning different cultures.

D/ Different areas on face convey a certain state of mind.

E/ Mind controls men’s facial expressions more obvious than women’s

PASSAGE 3 Grimm’s Fairy Tales 

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children’s and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in die Grimm’s’ collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remain unrivalled to this day.

Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves. Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany had been overrun by the French under Napoleon, who was intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of serving the endangered oral tradition of Germany.

For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence.

Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children’s and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children’s literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare. In the Grimms’ hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil.

In the 20th century the Grimms’ fairy tales have come to rule the bookshelves of children’s bedrooms. The stories read like dreams come true: handsome lads and beautiful damsels, armed with magic, triumph over giants and witches and wild beasts. They outwit mean, selfish adults. Inevitably the boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. And parents keep reading because they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents. According to the Grimms, the collection served as “a manual of manners”.

Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travellers  on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasure was “Aschenputtel” -Cinderella. Marie Hassenpflug was a 20-year- old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Snow White”, and “Sleeping Beauty”, among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian tales.

Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rolleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, creative energy—these are Teutonic traits. The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also coloured the narratives. Throughout Europe, children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hansel and Gretel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in “The Six Swans”. “The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimm’s fantasy”, Rolleke points out” It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times”.

The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the “universal style” of the writing, you have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless,” The tales allow us to express ‘our utopian longings’,” says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigour of the original text. They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.”

Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic of the Grimms’ stories, calling fairy tales the “great comforters. By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim’s theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren’t interested in exercising their unconsciousness. The Grimm tales, in fact, please in an infinite number of ways, something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. The flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ The Grimm brothers believed they would achieve international fame.

2/ The Grimm brothers were forced to work in secret.

3/ Some parents today still think Grimm fairy tales are not suitable for children.

4/ The first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales sold more widely in England than in Germany.

5/ Adults like reading Grimm’s fairy tales for reasons different from those of children.

6/ The Grimm brothers based the story “Cinderella” on the life of Dorothea Viehmann

Questions 7-9

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.

7./ In paragraph 4, what changes happened at that time in Europe?

A Literacy levels of the population increased.

B The development of printing technology made it easier to publish.

C Schools were open to children.

D People were fond of collecting superb picture books.

8./ What changes did the Grimm Brothers make in later editions?

A They made the stories shorter.

B They used more oral language.

C The content of the tales became less violent.

D They found other origins of the tales.

9./ What did Marie Hassenpflug contribute to the Grimm’s Fairy tales?

A She wrote stories.

B She discussed the stories with them.

C She translated a popular book for the brothers using her talent for languages.

D She told the oral stories that were based on traditional Italian stories.

Questions 10-14

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet.

10/ Heinz Rolleke said the Grimm’s tales are “German” because the tales

11/ Heinz Rolleke said the abandoned children in tales

12/ Bernhard Lauer said the writing style of the Grimm brothers is universal because they

13/ Jack Zipes said the pursuit of happiness in the tales means they

14/ Bruno Bettelheim said the therapeutic value of the tales means that the fairy tales

A reflect what life was like at that time

B help children deal with their problems

C demonstrate the outdated system

D tell of the simplicity of life in the German countryside

E encourage people to believe that they can do anything

F recognize the heroes in the real life

G contribute to the belief in nature power

H avoid details about characters’ social settings.

PASSAGE 1 Rural transport plan of “Practical action 

For more than 40 years, Practical Action has worked with poor communities to identify the types of transport that work best, taking into consideration culture, needs and skills. With our technical and practical support, isolated rural communities can design, build and maintain their own solutions.

A

Whilst the focus of National Development Plans in the transport sector lies heavily in the areas of extending road networks and bridges, there are still major gaps identified in addressing the needs of poorer communities. There is a need to develop and promote the sustainable use of alternative transport systems and intermediate means of transportation (IMTs) that complement the linkages of poor people with road networks and other socio-economic infrastructures to improve their livelihoods.

B

On the other hand, the development of all weathered roads (only 30 percent of the rural population have access to this so far) and motorable bridges are very costly for a country with a small and stagnant economy. In addition, these interventions are not always favourable in all geographical contexts environmentally, socially and economically. More than 60 percent of the network is concentrated in the lowland areas of the country. Although there are a number of alternative ways by which transportation and mobility needs of rural communities in the hills can be addressed, a lack of clear government focus and policies, lack of fiscal and  economic incentives, lack of adequate technical knowledge and manufacturing capacities have led to under- development of this alternative transport sub-sector including the provision of IMTs. 

C

One of the major causes of poverty is isolation. Improving the access and mobility of the isolated poor paves the way for access to markets, services and opportunities. By improving transport poorer people are able to access markets where they can buy or sell goods for income, and make better use of essential services such as health and education. No proper roads or vehicles mean women and children are forced to spend many hours each day attending to their most basic needs, such as collecting water and firewood. This valuable time could be used to tend crops, care for the family, study or develop small business ideas to generate much-needed income. Road building

D

Without roads, rural communities are extremely restricted. Collecting water and firewood, and going to local markets is a huge task, therefore it is understandable that the construction of roads is a major priority for many rural communities. Practical Action is helping to improve rural access/transport infrastructures through the construction and rehabilitation of short rural roads, small bridges, culverts and other transport-related functions. The aim is to use methods that encourage community-driven development. This means villagers can improve their own lives through better access to markets, health care, education and other economic and social opportunities, as well as bringing improved services and supplies to the now-accessible villages. Driving forward new ideas

E

Practical Action and the communities we work with are constantly crafting and honing new ideas to help poor people. Cycle trailers have practical business use too, helping people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale. Not only that, but those on the poverty-line can earn a decent income by making, maintaining and operating bicycle taxis. With Practical Action’s know-how, Sri Lanka communities have been able to start a bus service and maintain the roads along which it travels. The impact has been remarkable. This service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation. Quick and affordable, it gives them a reliable way to travel to the nearest town; and now their children can get an education, making it far more likely they’ll find a path out of poverty. Practical Action is also an active member of many national and regional networks through which exchange of knowledge and advocating based on action research are carried out and one conspicuous example is the Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement. Sky-scraping transport system

F

For people who live in remote, mountainous areas, getting food to market in order to earn enough money to survive is a serious issue. The hills are so steep that travelling down them is dangerous. A porter can help but they are expensive, and it would still take hours or even a day. The journey can take so long that their goods start to perish and become worthless and less. Practical Action has developed an ingenious solution called an aerial ropeway. It can either operate by gravitation force or with the use of external power. The ropeway consists of two trolleys rolling over support tracks connected to a control cable in the middle which moves in a traditional flywheel system. The trolley at the top is loaded with goods and can take up to 120kg. This is pulled down to the station at the bottom, either by the force of gravity or by an external power. The other trolley at the bottom is, therefore, pulled upwards automatically. The external power can be produced by a micro-hydro system if access to an electricity grid is not an option. Bringing people on board

G

Practical Action developed a two-wheeled iron trailer that can be attached (via a hitch behind the seat) to a bicycle and be used to carry heavy loads (up to around 200 kgs) of food, water or even passengers. People can now carry three times as much as before and still pedal the bicycle. The cycle trailers are used for transporting goods by local producers, as ambulances, as mobile shops, and even as mobile libraries. They are made in small village workshops from iron tubing, which is cut, bent, welded and drilled to make the frame and wheels.  Modifications are also carried out to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers. The two- wheeled ‘ambulance’ is made from moulded metal, with standard rubber-tyred wheels. The “bed” section can be  padded with cushions to make the patient comfortable, while the “seat” section allows a family member to attend to the patient during transit. A dedicated bicycle is needed to pull the ambulance trailer, so that other community members do not need to go without the bicycles they depend on in their daily lives. A joining mechanism allows for easy removal and attachment. In response to user comments, a cover has been designed that can be added to give protection to the patient and attendant in poor weather. Made of treated cotton, the cover is durable and waterproof.

Questions 1-4

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage ?

In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1/ A slow-developing economy often can not afford some road networks, especially for those used regardless of weather conditions.

2/ Rural communities’ officials know how to improve alternative transport technically.

3/ The primary aim for Practical Action to improve rural transport infrastructures is meant to increase the trade among villages.

4/ Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement provided service that Practical Action highly involved in.

Questions 5-8

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

5/ What is the first duty for many rural communities to reach unrestricted development?

6/ What was one of the new ideas to help poor people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale?

7/ What service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation in Sri Lanka?

8/ What solution had been applied for people who live in remote mountainous areas getting food to market?

Questions 9-13

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

Besides normal transport task, changes are also implemented to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers when it was used on a medical emergency or a moveable 9 ……………………..; ‘Ambulance’ is made from metal, with rubber wheels and drive-by another bicycle. When put with 10 ……………………..; in the two-wheeled ‘ambulance’, the patient can stay comfortable and which another 11 ……………………..;. can sit on caring for the patient in transport journey. In order to dismantle or attach other equipment, and assembling 12 ……………………..; is designed. Later, as users suggest, 13 ……………………..; has also been added to give protection to the patient.

PASSAGE 2 Follow your nose 

A.

Aromatherapy is the most widely used complementary therapy in the National Health Service, and doctors use it most often for treating dementia. For elderly patients who have difficulty interacting verbally, and to whom conventional medicine has little to offer, aromatherapy can bring benefits in terms of better sleep, improved motivation, and less disturbed behaviour. So the thinking goes. But last year, a systematic review of health care databases found almost no evidence that aromatherapy is effective in the treatment of dementia. Other findings suggest that aromatherapy works only if you believe it will. In fact, the only research that has unequivocally shown it to have an effect has been carried out on animals.

B.

Behavioural studies have consistently shown that odours elicit emotional memories far more readily than other sensory cues. And earlier this year, Rachel Herz, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues peered into people’s heads using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to corroborate that. They scanned the brains of five women while they either looked at a photo of a bottle of perfume that evoked a pleasant memory for them, or smelled that perfume. One woman, for instance, remembered how as a child living in Paris—she would watch with excitement as her mother dressed to go out and sprayed herself with that perfume. The women themselves described the perfume as far more evocative than the photo, and Herz and co-workers found that the scent did indeed activate the amygdala and other brain regions associated with emotion processing far more strongly than the photograph. But the interesting thing was that the memory itself was no better recalled by the odour than by the picture. “People don’t remember any more detail or with any more clarity when the memory is recalled with an odour,” she says. “However, with the odour, you have this intense emotional feeling that’s really visceral.” 

C.

That’s hardly surprising, Herz thinks, given how the brain has evolved. “The way I like to think about it is that emotion and olfaction are essentially the same thing,” she says. “The part of the brain that controls emotion literally grew out of the part of the brain that controls smell.” That, she says, probably explains why memories for odours that are associated with intense emotions are so strongly entrenched in us, because smell was initially a survival skill: a signal to approach or to avoid. 

D.

Eric Vermetten, a psychiatrist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, says that doctors have long known about the potential of smells to act as traumatic reminders, but the evidence has been largely anecdotal. Last year, he and others set out to document it by describing three cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in which patients reported either that a certain smell triggered their flashbacks, or that a smell was a feature of the flashback itself. The researchers concluded that odours could be made use of in exposure therapy, or for reconditioning patients’ fear responses.  

E.

After Vermetten presented his findings at a conference, doctors in the audience told him how they had turned this association around and put it to good use. PTSD patients often undergo group therapy, but the therapy itself can expose them to traumatic reminders. “Some clinicians put a strip of vanilla or a strong, pleasant, everyday odorant such as coffee under their patients’ noses, so that they have this continuous olfactory stimulation.” says Vermetten. So armed, the patients seem to be better protected against flashbacks. It’s purely anecdotal, and nobody knows what’s happening in the brain, says Vermetten, but it’s possible that the neural pathways by which the odour elicits the pleasant, everyday memory override the fear-conditioned neural pathways that respond to verbal cues.

F.

According to Herz, the therapeutic potential of odours could lie in their very unreliability. She has shown with her perfume-bottle experiment that they don’t guarantee any better recall, even if the memories they elicit feel more real. And there’s plenty of research to show that our noses can be tricked, because being predominantly visual and verbal creatures, we put more faith in those other modalities. In 2001, for instance, Gil Morrot, of the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, tricked 54 oenology students by secretly colouring a white wine with an odourless red dye just before they were asked to describe the odours of a range of red and white wines. The students described the coloured wine using terms typically reserved for red wines. What’s more, just like experts, they used terms alluding to the wine’s redness and darkness—visual rather than olfactory qualities. Smell, the researchers concluded, cannot be separated from the other senses. 

G.

Last July, Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience in London took that research a step fur

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A—G

Choose the correct heading for paragraph A, C, D, E and G from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number i—ix in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Questions 19 – 24

Look at the following findings (Questions 19-24) and the list of researchers

Match each finding with the correct researcher, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 19-24 on your answer sheet.

A. Rachel Hertz

B. Eric Vermetten

C. Gil Morrot

D. Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan

NB You may use any letter more than once.

19/ Smell can trigger images of horrible events.

20/ Memory cannot get sharper by smell.

21/ When people are given an odour and a picture of something to learn, they will respond more quickly in naming the smell because the stimulus is stronger when two or more senses are involved.

22/ Pleasant smells counteract unpleasant recollections.

23/ It is impossible to isolate smell from visual cues.

24/ The part of brain that governs emotion is more stimulated by a smell than an image.

25/ In the article, what is the opinion about the conventional method of aromatherapy?

A. Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils extracted from plants.

B. Evidence has proved that aromatherapy is effective in treating dementia.

C. People who feel aromatherapy is effective believe it is useful.

D. Aromatherapy is especially helpful for elderly patients.

26/ What is Rachel Hertz’s conclusion?

A. The area of the brain which activates emotion has the same physiological structure as the part controlling olfaction.

B. We cannot depend on smell, and people have more confidence in sight and spoken or written words.

C. Odours can recall real memories even after the perfume-bottle experiment.

D. Smell has proved its therapeutic effect over a long time span.

PASSAGE 3 Personality and appearance 

When Charles Darwin applied to be the “energetic young man” that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain, sought as his gentleman companion, he was almost let down by a woeful shortcoming that was as plain as the nose on his face. Fitzroy believed in physiognomy—the idea that you can tell a person’s character from their appearance. As Darwin’s daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy had “made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy”. This was hardly the case. Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s visage compensated for his sluggardly proboscis: “His brow saved him.”

The idea that a person’s character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin’s day, they were more or less taken as given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.

First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement about its owner’s character—caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on. Once that snap judgement has  formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. People also act on these snap judgements. Politicians with competent- looking faces have a greater chance of being elected, and CEOs who look dominant are more likely to run a  profitable company. There is also a well-established “attractiveness halo”. People seen as good-looking not only get the most valentines but are also judged to be more outgoing, socially competent, powerful, intelligent and healthy.

In 1966, psychologists at the University of Michigan asked 84 undergraduates who had never met before to rate each other on five personality traits, based entirely on appearance, as they sat for 15 minutes in silence. For three traits—extroversion, conscientiousness and openness—the observers’ rapid judgements matched real personality scores significantly more often than chance. More recently, researchers have re-examined the link between appearance and personality, notably Anthony Little of the University of Stirling and David Perrett of the University of St Andrews, both in the UK. They pointed out that the Michigan studies were not tightly controlled for confounding factors. But when Little and Perrett re-ran the experiment using mugshots rather than live subjects, they also found a link between facial appearance and personality—though only for extroversion and conscientiousness. Little and Perrett claimed that they only found a correlation at the extremes of personality.

Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario, Canada studied 90 ice-hockey players. They found that a wider face in which the cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance was unusually large relative to the distance between brow and upper lip was linked in a statistically significant way with the number of penalty minutes a player was given for violent acts including slashing, elbowing, checking from behind and fighting. The kernel of truth idea isn’t the only explanation on offer for our readiness to make facial judgements. Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, says that in many cases snap judgements are not accurate. The snap judgement, she says, is often an “overgeneralisation” of a more fundamental response. A classic example of overgeneralisation can be seen in predators’ response to eye spots, the conspicuous circular markings seen on some moths, butterflies and fish. These act as a deterrent to predators because they mimic the eyes of other creatures that the potential predators might see as a threat.

Another researcher who leans towards overgeneralisation is Alexander Todorov. With Princeton colleague Nikolaas Oosterhof, he recently put forward a theory which he says explains our snap judgements of faces in terms of how threatening they appear. Todorov and Oosterhof asked people for their gut reactions to pictures of emotionally neutral faces, sifted through all the responses, and boiled them down to two underlying factors: how trustworthy the face looks, and how dominant. Todorov and Oosterhof conclude that personality judgements based on people’s faces are an overgeneralisation of our evolved ability to infer emotions from facial expressions, and hence a person’s intention to cause us harm and their ability to carry it out. Todorov, however, stresses that overgeneralisation does not rule out the idea that there is sometimes a kernel of truth in these assessments of personality.

So if there is a kernel of truth, where does it come from? Perrett has a hunch that the link arises when our prejudices about faces turn into self-fulfilling prophecies—an idea that was investigated by other researchers back in 1977. Our expectations can lead us to influence people to behave in ways that confirm those expectations: consistently treat someone as untrustworthy and they end up behaving that way. This effect sometimes works the other way round, however, especially for those who look cute. The Nobel prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz once suggested that baby-faced features evoke a nurturing response. Support for this has come from work by Zebrowitz, who has found that baby-faced boys and men stimulate an emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, in a similar way. But there’s a twist. Babyfaced men are, on average, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts. They are also more likely to be criminals; think Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-faced boys to be quarrelsome and hostile, and more likely to be academic highfliers. She calls this the “self-defeating prophecy effect”: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up overcompensating.

There is another theory that recalls the old parental warning not to pull faces because they might freeze that way. According to this theory, our personality moulds the way our faces look. It is supported by a study two decades ago which found that angry old people tend to look cross even when asked to strike a neutral expression. A lifetime of scowling, grumpiness and grimaces seemed to have left its mark.

Questions 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say that the writer thinks about this

1/ Robert Fitzroy’s first impression of Darwin was accurate.

2/ The precise rules of “physiognomy” have remained unchanged since the 18th century.

3/ The first impression of a person can be modified later with little effort.

4/ People who appear capable are more likely to be chosen to a position of power.

5/ It is unfair for good-looking people to be better treated in society

Questions 6-10

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

Write your answers in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

6./ What’s true about Anthony Little and David Perrett’s experiment?

A It is based on the belief that none of the conclusions in the Michigan experiment is accurate.

B It supports parts of the conclusions in the Michigan experiment.

C It replicates the study conditions in the Michigan experiment.

D It has a greater range of faces than in the Michigan experiment.

7./ What can be concluded from Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick’s experiment?

A A wide-faced man may be more aggressive.

B Aggressive men have a wide range of facial features.

C There is no relation between facial features and an aggressive character.

D It’s necessary for people to be aggressive in competitive games.

8./ What’s exemplified by referring to butterfly marks?

A Threats to safety are easy to notice.

B Instinct does not necessarily lead to accurate judgment.

C People should learn to distinguish between accountable and unaccountable judgments.

D Different species have various ways to notice danger.

9./ What is the aim of Alexander Todorov’s study?

A to determine the correlation between facial features and social development

B to undermine the belief that appearance is important

C to learn the influence of facial features on judgments of a person’s personality

D to study the role of judgments in a person’s relationship

10./ Which of the following is the conclusion of Alexander Todorov’s study?

A People should draw accurate judgments from overgeneralization.

B Using appearance to determine a person’s character is undependable.

C Overgeneralization can be misleading as a way to determine a person’s character.

D The judgment of a person’s character based on appearance may be accurate.

Questions 11-14

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.

11/ Perret believed people behaving dishonestly

12/ The writer supports the view that people with babyish features

13/ According to Zebrowitz, baby-faced people who behave dominantly

14/ The writer believes facial features

A judge other people by overgeneralization,

B may influence the behaviour of other people,

C tend to commit criminal acts.

D may be influenced by the low expectations of other people.

E may show the effect of long-term behaviours.

F may be trying to repel the expectations of other people.