READING ( 31 /7/ 2021)

GAP-TEXT: Choose from the paragraphs ( A – H) the one which best fits each gap. There is one extra
paragraph which you do not need to use.
Exercise 1.
Playing the Game

It's a cut-throat business but there are massive rewards on offer in the software industry - and age is no barrier to
success, explains Rupert Jones.

The frequent claim that Britain has an unrivalled reputation when it comes to producing games is no idle boast; the UK
has by far the biggest development community in Europe and is also home to most of the global publishing giants. In
fact, the UK leisure software market is now said to be the fastest-growing sector of the UK entertainment media.
1.
"It's now very much a commercial exercise," says Roger Bennett, Director General of industry trade body, the
Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA). "Whereas people can make a film with a
camcorder, you can't make a game now unless you have a huge amount of equipment and the skills to use it." And lots
of money, too. A top-flight game can cost up to £5m to develop.
2.
This is borne out by Nick Wheelwright at Codemasters. He says it looks for "outstanding academic people". Those the
company takes on will normally have a degree in a relevant discipline, so for an artist that might be fine art or
illustration and animation, while for a programmer it could be computer science or maths.
3.
When it comes to publishing, distribution and marketing, the skills required tend to be more commercial. "It's an
industry that people do want to get into. Whenever we advertise a vacancy we get lots of interest," says Rob Murphy,
finance director at south-London-based SCi Entertainment.
4.
Games testers are a crucial component of the industry, and this is an area where a university qualification may not be
necessary - five GCSEs and good PC knowledge may be enough. These
are the people who play games all day, testing them for playability and making sure there are no bugs.
5.
Rachel Wood swapped her paintbrush for a computer and the latest graphics and animation software seven years ago.
She is now a senior lead artist at Codemasters, overseeing a team of artists working on two new games. "Everyone has
input into how the game looks, especially in the early stages. My job is to direct that, initially, and make sure everyone
is working in the same direction," says Rachel.
6.
When Rachel joined Codemasters she had little understanding of how computers worked, but she had had an interest in
maths and physics before choosing to take the fine art route. Working in this field does involve "a certain degree of
technological understanding" but Rachel stresses that traditional artistic talent and creativity are very important.
7.
Getting a job as a games tester can be a good route in. Many games-mad teenagers have got in this way and then
worked their way up the ladder. Students may be able to get a foot in the door by doing gap year or summer job work
experience, perhaps working on the company website. A passion for games isn’t obligatory but, obviously, it helps.
The missing paragraphs:
A. Perhaps inevitably, the development side in particular has become much more professional in the way it operates,
with a far greater emphasis on academic excellence when it comes to hiring staff. "The people being employed now are
highly educated and highly qualified. The biggest studios will only recruit people of high academic excellence," says
Mr Bennett.
B. Now 29, she studied fine art at Plymouth University and later spent time doing oil painting commissions but she was
not content. "Working as a fine artist is fairly isolated. This offered a chance to learn new technologies and to be
working in a team." Once she arrived, she was hooked, though she had to learn some new skills.
C. Based near Leamington Spa, Codemasters employs more than 400 people, and the average age of the staff is just 23-
24. It has, among others, people with physics degrees who measure things like the speed, momentum and crash impact
in racing games, computer science graduates who are responsible for testing the games to check for bugs, people with
law degrees involved with celebrity contracts and licences, and automotive engineering graduates who design the
structure of virtual racing cars.
D. For wannabe graphics artists, some degree of technological understanding is clearly an advantage. If you’re not up
on the latest software, however, don't be put off. There’s still space for people with traditional artistic talent and
creativity. You can pick up the tech side as you go.
E. "Quite often you will have to play the game for many months. You have to be dedicated and pretty systematic,"
says Mr Murphy. Codemasters says there may be as many as 30 people testing the same game for the final three
months. “A tester might be paid around £18,000 compared with an experienced producer, who can earn £40,000-
plus”, says Mr Murphy.
F. To stand a chance of serious long-term success in this cut-throat market, games consoles need great games, and lots
of them. It's on sales of games at up to £45 a throw that the real profits are made. ‘Club Football’ and ‘LMA Manager’
are two such titles. "We've been going out to the clubs and photographing the players. I've been to a couple of the
shoots," smiles Rachel.
G. But the past few years have brought big changes to the way companies work. The cottage industry days, when a
teenage techie could create a game in his bedroom that went on to become a blockbuster, are long gone.
H. SCi is one of the UK's longest-established games publishers, whose recent hits include ‘The Italian Job’, based on
the Michael Caine heist movie. Mr Murphy adds that it helps to have some experience under your belt. "There are a
lot of things people can do to get experience; for example, becoming a tester for a while. We have had students on
their gap year in to help on our website." Most people will have degrees but a lot comes down to the individual and
their enthusiasm for games.
Exercise 2.

STEP THIS WAY FOR AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY

I remember the day I met an idealistic pilgrim

Mark Boyle, or Saoirse as he preferred to be called, had set out to walk 12,000 kilometres from his home in the UK to
Gandhi’s birthplace in India. His mission was to prove that his dream of living in a money-free community really did
have legs. I met him in Brighton soon after the start of his epic journey. Obviously, I’d no sooner caught sight of him
approaching than I’d started peering downwards, because he’s obligingly stuck out a sandal-clad foot to give me a
closer look. The “boys”, as he called them on his blog, had become famous in their own right.
8.
There was indeed plenty more in the world to worry about yet something about this man – his gentleness, his over-
active conscience, his poor feet – brought out all my maternal instincts. Saoirse, then twenty-eight, still had another two
and a half years of walking ahead of him, carrying no money and very few possessions along a hair-raising route
through Europe and central Asia, to his ultimate destination in India.
9.
It had all begun, it transpired, when Saoirse (Gaelic for "freedom" and pronounced "sear-shuh") was studying business
and economics at Galway University. "One day I watched the film Gandhi, and it just changed the whole course of my
life. I took the next day off lectures to start reading about him, and after that I just couldn't read enough, it made me see
the whole world in a different way."
10.
The idea behind the website grew out of that seemingly simple proposition. You signed up and listed all the available
skills and abilities and tools you had, and donated them to others. In return you might make use of other people's skills.
For example, people borrow power tools, have haircuts or get help with their vegetable plots.
11.
I asked anxiously about his planning for the journey, and he said that he was leaving it all in the hands of fate. So far,
he had been in places where his friends and fellow Freeconomists could help him, so mainly he had had arrangements
for places to sleep and eat. Otherwise, he had tried to talk to people, to explain what he was doing and hope that they
would give him a hand. His T-shirt said, in big letters, "Community Pilgrim".
12.
His itinerary was certainly challenging - and he did not even have a single visa lined up. "They don't give visas more
than about three months in advance in a lot of countries," he said, "so I thought I would just go for it." But I had my
doubts whether some of the countries involved would let a westerner - even a gentle hippy such as Saoirse – just stroll
in.
 13.
Once I had suppressed my concerns for his welfare, I found myself thinking that, actually, it is only our cynical, secular
age that finds the notion of a pilgrimage odd. The idea of spiritual voyages seems to be built into every religion and, for
most believers, Saoirse's faith - that he would be looked after, that everything would turn out OK, that what he was
doing was a good thing to do for humanity – would not be odd at all. Most cultures accept the idea of a good person, a
saint or a prophet.
14.
After nearly an hour's talking, Saoirse was starting to look tired: but made one final attempt to explain. "Look, if I've
got £100 in the bank and somebody in India dies because they needed some money, then, in a way, the responsibility of
that person's death is on me. That's very extreme, I know, but I've got more than I need and that person needed it. And
if you know that, then you've either got to do something about it, or you have to wake up every morning and look at
yourself in the mirror." His eyes were now red-rimmed, I think with emotion and exhaustion. We said our goodbyes.
And I could not help noticing that he was limping. Those poor, poor feet.
The missing paragraphs:
A. After two weeks of solid walking from his starting point in Bristol at a rate of around 25 miles a day, his discomfort
was readily apparent, despite the sensible footwear. "It's all right," he said. "I've got blisters, but bombs are falling in
some places."
B. For Saoirse, both pilgrimage and this enterprise were only the first steps. His long-term vision was to nurture a
money-free community where people would live and work and care for each other. Perhaps that was why when I met
him that day, he struck me as an idealist who was going to come unstuck somewhere along the way.
C. Was there a back-up plan if any failed to materialise ? He said he didn’t really have one because that would be
"contrary to the spirit of the thing". Was he prepared to be lonely, scared, threatened? He said he had spent the previous
few months trying to work through the fear, but that he "just had to do it".
D. His mentor’s exhortation to "be the change you want to see in the world" had particular meaning for him. Then, a
few years later, he was sitting with a couple of friends talking about world problems - sweatshops, war and famine etc
– when it struck him that the root of those things was the fear and insecurity and greed that manifests itself in our quest
for money. He wondered what would happen if you just got rid of it?"
E. Indeed, his faith in human kindness, rather worryingly, seemed to know no bounds. I convinced myself, however,
that ordinary folk he’d meet along the way would mostly see that he was sincere, if a little eccentric, and would
respond to that.
F. I wondered if his mother at least shared some of these anxieties. All I learnt though was that she was, like his father,
thoroughly supportive and was following his progress keenly through the website.
G. Perhaps it is, in fact, only in the contemporary western world, the world of the selfish gene, that extreme altruism is,
according to Richard Dawkins at least, "a misfiring”. Because from all I ‘d heard, there it was before me on a pavement
in Brighton. I felt I still hadn’t got to the bottom of what drove Saoirse on, however.
H. He was undertaking that extraordinary pilgrimage to promote the idea of "freeconomy", a web-based money-free
community. What’s more, he’d be relying just on the kindness and generosity of strangers and contacts that he’d made
through the site. I pressed him for deeper reasons.
Exercise 3.

MERGING ART&SCIENCE: A FALSE PREMISE

The current vogue is for believing that art and science should be brought together. This obsession for showing that art -
particularly the visual arts - is similar to science in content and the creative processes is bemusing. I detect in it an
element of social snobbery - artists are envious of scientists and scientists want to be thought of as artists.
15.
If Watson and Crick had not got the structure of DNA we know that Franklin and Klug would soon have had it. Indeed
simultaneous discovery is a common feature of science. If one could rerun the history of science and start again it
would have a different history but the end results would be the same: water would be H2O and genes would code for
proteins but the names would be different.
16.
Whatever the feelings of the scientist these are absent from the final understanding of a process. while art is a personal
creation and contains the personal views of the artist. And since science is a communal process a scientist has to be
very aware of what is known about the problem being investigated. There are strict
criteria about lack of contradiction and, of course, correspondence with reality. Science makes progress, we build on
the work of our current and earlier colleagues. To talk about progress in art makes no sense, there is change but not
progress.
17.
Thus, I cannot understand what is being referred to when there is reference to critical thinking in art. In what sense can
a painting be right or wrong? Anyone can have views about a painting and engage in art discussions. Non-scientists can
thrill to scientific ideas but to make meaningful comments about them, and I exclude their application to technology,
one actually has to have detailed knowledge; science needs a much greater, and quite different, intellectual effort.
18.
It is very rare for referees to recommend acceptance without changes. This can be a complex procedure but in general
authors are grateful for the careful reading and criticism of their paper. Even so we reject about half of all papers we
receive. Paintings, however, are neither revised nor can be shown to be wrong.
19.
The idea of creativity makes scientists want to be thought of as artists and vice versa and there may well be something
similar in all human creativity, but that it is particularly similar in scientists and artists is without foundation. The
similarity between art and science is even less than that between billiards and rugby, both of which at least use a ball.
20.
It seems just poetic licence to suggest that this picture did much to convince European scientists that the great mystery
of life might be explained in terms of electrochemical forces. (Although it may be that Jan Vermeer did indeed discover
that more compelling illusions can be achieved through a kind of optical illusion that makes special use of the
perceptual system inside our brains, rather than through the details that reach our eyes).
21.
Art does not explain, but it broadens our experience in ways that are not clearly understood. I value it in its own terms,
but it has nothing to do with understanding how the world works. To pretend that it does is to
trivialise science and do nothing for art. We should stop pretending that the two disciplines are similar, and instead
rejoice in the very different ways that they enrich our culture..
The missing paragraphs:
A. What are the criteria used by the director of a gallery and his or her advisers when selecting for exhibition? Is he or
she like the editor of a science journal? No, for there is nothing in art like the peer review so fundamental to science;
there are no art critics, just art writers. As the editor of a scientific journal, it is extremely rare that my personal view
determines whether or not a paper gets published. My role is to choose a good editorial board and to know to whom the
papers to be reviewed should be sent.
B. Bringing visual artists and scientists together merely makes them feel elevated: it is not a scientific experience.
Although it must be said that science has had a strong influence on certain artists - in the efforts to imitate nature and
thus to develop perspective or in the area of new technologies - art has contributed virtually nothing to science.
C. Then of the hundreds of thousands of papers published each year, few have a lifetime of more than a few years.
Most disappear with little if any trace. The original papers, with very rare exceptions, like those of Einstein, are never
part of scientific culture and they are not for sale. Science, unlike art, is not entertainment.
D. What intrigued me at the opening was how the exhibits were chosen. There is less of a problem with well
established artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon or Matisse. It is the very modern works that present the
problem.
E. How different from this are all the arts. No Shakespeare - no Hamlet; no Picasso - no Guernica. Moreover a work of
art is capable of many interpretations and has moral content. There is but one correct scientific explanation for any set
of observations and reliable scientific understanding has no moral or ethical content; that is to say that the scientist does
not allow his own reactions to come into play.
F. The Oxford University art historian Martin Kemp takes a very different view from mine here. He claims that during
the 'Scientific Revolution' some artists were able to play an active role in the dialogue between seeing and knowing. He
gives the fiery emissions of Joseph Wright's volcanoes painted in the late eighteenth century as an example. Wright's
painting of Vesuvius erupting may be dramatic but it owes nothing to geology.
G. Art is not constrained by reality. It cannot be shown to be wrong. And of all the arts, painting is the one least related
to science as it does not deal with complex ideas or explanations, is the easiest to appreciate, and the response is often
an emotional one. Ideas in the visual arts come from art critics and historians, not the works themselves.
H. Science is about understanding how the world works, there being only one right description of any observed
phenomenon. Unlike the arts it is a collective endeavour in which the individual is ultimately irrelevant - geniuses
merely speed up discovery.
Exercise 4.
VALUES FOR A GODLESS AGE

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989 so did the plaster cast which had kept the idea of human rights in
limbo. It was now free to evolve in response to the changing conditions of the late twentieth century.
22.

Of course, in one sense, the quest for universal human rights standards after the Second World War was an early
attempt to communicate across national boundaries, albeit a rather faltering endeavour, with its claims to universality
challenged both in terms of authorship and content. More recently, a loosening of the reins of the human rights
dialogue has ushered in wider debate.
23.
Perhaps the best known of these is Amnesty International, established in 1961. Before Amnesty, there were very few
organizations like it, yet now there are thousands operating all over the world. Whether campaigning for the protection
of the environment or third-world debt relief, any such organization is engaged in the debate about fundamental human
rights. And it is no longer just a soft sideshow.
24.
The fact that strangers from different countries can communicate with each other through the worldwide web is having
a similar effect in dealing a blow to misinformation. During one recent major human rights trial over sixty websites
sprang up to cover the proceedings, while sales of the government-controlled newspaper in that country plummeted.
25.
The effect of increased responsibility at this highest level has been to continually extend the consideration of who is
legally liable, directly or indirectly, under international human rights law. In part, this is an acknowledgement that even
individuals need to be held responsible for flagrant breaches of others' rights, whether these are preventing protesters
from peacefully demonstrating or abusing the rights of children.
26.
It has been noted that paradoxically, in such circumstances, it may be in the interests of human rights organizations to
seek to reinforce the legitimacy and authority of the state, within a regulated global framework.
27.
Part of the new trend in human rights thinking is therefore to include powerful private bodies within its remit. The
International Commission of Jurists has recently explored ways in which international human rights standards could be
directly applied to transnational corporations.
28.
Whatever the way ahead, the lessons of the past must be learnt. Any world view or set of values which is presented as
self-evident is ultimately doomed to failure. The case for human rights always needs to be made and remade. In a world
where globalization too often seems like a modernized version of old-fashioned cultural imperialism, it is important to
query the claim that human rights are universally accepted.
The missing paragraphs:
A. This is, after all, a uniquely propitious time, as the values and language of human rights are becoming familiar to
more and more people, who judge the merits or otherwise of political and economic decisions increasingly in human
rights terms. Arguments seem fresh and appealing in many quarters where once they sounded weak and stale.
B. On a global scale, it is not strong states that are the problem here but weak ones, as they fail to protect their citizens
from private power - whether it is paramilitaries committing murder and torture or transnational corporations spreading
contamination and pollution.
C. The problem is that the growth of globalization makes the protection of nation states a pointless goal in certain
circumstances. Transnational corporations with multiple subsidiaries operating in a number of countries simultaneously
wield significant economic and political power and it is often extremely difficult for the state - both home and host
governments - to exercise effective legal control over them.
D. If the proliferation of pressure groups has raised the profile of the human rights debate, satellite television has
reinforced much of the content of their campaigns. The fact that from our armchairs we can all see live what is
happening to others around the world has had an enormous impact on the way the struggle for human rights is viewed.
It would not be remotely believable to plead ignorance nowadays, for 24-hour news coverage from the world's hotspots
reaches us all.
E. The results of its investigations were published in 1999 in a unique pamphlet on Globalization, Human Rights and
the Rule of Law. The issue to be faced is whether to treat these and other corporations as 'large para-state entities to be
held accountable under the same sort of regime as states', or whether to look for different approaches to accountability
'that are promulgated by consumer groups and the corporations themselves'.
F. No longer the preserve of representatives of nation states meeting under the auspices of the United Nations, a
developing conversation is taking place on a global scale and involving a growing cast of people - for an increasing
range of pressure groups now frame their aspirations in human rights terms.
G. One of the most significant of these is what has come to be called 'globalization', the collapsing of national
boundaries in economic, political and cultural life. From the expanding role of the world's financial markets and the
spread of transnational corporations to the revolution in communications and information technology, more and more
areas of people's lives are affected by regional, international or transnational developments, whether they are aware of
this or not.
H. Not only must states not infringe rights, and enforce those rights which fall within their direct sphere (like providing
a criminal justice system or holding fair elections), but they also have 'positive obligations' to uphold rights enshrined
in human rights treaties, even when it is private
parties which have violated them.
OPEN- CLOZE TEST: Read the texts below about pandemics and think of one word which best fits each space.
Use only ONE WORD for each space.
Exercise 5
Controlling deforestation and wildlife trade could prevent pandemics
Future pandemics could be prevented if unsustainable practices like deforestation and the industrial-scale wildlife trade
are halted, according to a global biodiversity report. The cost of doing so would be paid back many times over, simply
because we wouldn’t have to go (1)…………..another pandemic. Millions of people are living or working in close
contact with wild animals that carry diseases, and these industries aren’t (2)……………regulated. The more people cut
down forests for farmland, for example, the more they are (3)…………..into animals’ habitats and thus coming into
regular contact with disease-carrying wildlife.
Almost every (4) ………..pandemic disease came from an animal, says Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance in New
York. Covid-19 came from bats in China. “HIV emerged from the hunting of chimpanzees,” he says, and recent Ebola
(5)………………stemmed from the hunting of wild primates.
Studies of antibodies in people in China suggest that more than a million people every year are (6)………….. through
bats with coronaviruses related to the one fuelling the current pandemic, says Daszak. The vast majority of these
exposures don’t cause major outbreaks, but each (7)………….a risk.
“There’s this huge population that’s exposed at a (8)………….scale across the region,” he says. “It’s people who live
near bat caves, who shelter in bat caves to get out of the rain, who hunt and eat bats, who use bat faeces for medicine,
who (9)………….bat faeces on crops to fertilise them.”
Live wildlife markets, like the one that was implicated in the early spread of covid-19, are also a factor if they aren’t
well run. Often multiple species are housed together in close quarters, and the stall owners live (10)………. site with
their families. “There are many ways you could make that more secure,” says Daszak.
Exercise 6
Dietary change may help us avert future pandemics
Among the many steps we could (1)…………….to lower the (2)……………of the next pandemic, perhaps the most
effective would be to stop farming animals for meat. By removing that viral vector, we would make humanity’s future
much safer.
This isn’t another call for universal veganism (3)……………., we need to work to modernise meat production and
remove animals from the supply (4)………………... By making “meat” from plants or cultivating it from cells, we will
create a food system (5)………….is safe, secure and sustainable.
Yet just as we can’t depend on a private lab to (6) …………….up with a vaccine for the coronavirus, we can’t count on
a private company to shift global meat production on its own. As has been the case with just about (7)
………….transformative advancement, public funding of fundamental research will be key.
We have seen this in communications, aviation, microprocessors, clean energy, the internet and many other fields.
Shifting the agricultural research dollars of governments (8)………….developing and deploying plant-based “meat”
and (9)…………..meat will have countless pay offs, but the benefit of (10)………….devastating pandemics alone
makes it a vital and compelling public investment.
Exercise 7
Why air travel makes deadly disease pandemics less likely
Mass air travel might instead mean some bad outbreaks are less likely to (1)…………., according to an analysis that
turns accepted thinking about pandemics (2)………….. its head. The idea that the world is overdue for an outbreak of a
fatal infectious disease  is so (3)……………accepted it has become a sci-fi plot staple, and the target of intense
preparedness efforts by governments.
But new diseases don’t spring up from nowhere – they evolve from related strains of viruses or bacteria, point out
Robin Thompson of the University of Oxford and colleagues. The new microbe may (4)……………from the old by
only a few genetic mutations. That means people previously exposed to the first strain – thanks to air travel – may have
some (5)………… of immune resistance to the new deadly strain. So they’d be less likely to catch it, or if they do, to
die from it. “It’s like a natural vaccination,” says Thompson. In other words, the continual spreading of germs around
the world (6)……………..it all the harder for a microbe to evolve in isolation long enough that when it finally breaks
out, it wreaks destruction.
While the work is theoretical, it could explain why we haven’t yet had that devastating flu pandemic we keep being
warned about. For instance the 2009 swine flu outbreak, which was classed as a pandemic by the World Health
Organization, turned out to be a lot milder than (7)…………. Animal research suggests this could be because lots of
people had pre-existing immunity. Sadly, we can’t relax yet (8)………... The new view doesn’t mean there will never
be (9)………….deadly pandemic, says Thompson. Completely new diseases could spring up that have not been
preceded by a related strain. For instance, a microbe that currently affects animals could mutate to infect people. This is
what happened when HIV spread from chimps to humans in Africa in the early 20th Century. “Evolution can throw up
twists and ……….that are hard to predict,” says Stephen Parnell of the University of Salford in the UK, who was not
involved in the latest work. And even though swine flu didn’t turn out to be the Big One, it still killed 200,000 people
worldwide and was worrying because it mainly caused deaths in younger people, while normal winter flu generally
kills older people.