READING SKILL 3 - A20 - FINAL TEST

05 pages – 45 minutes

READING PASSAGE 1
The census of marine life
Scientists on the Polarstern expedition have just finished searching the ocean bottom off the Antarctic
Peninsula to look for any mollusks or other creatures that live under several hundred meters of ice. They
cruised waters made more accessible when the Larsen A and B ice Shelves shattered. For the exploration,
they used a German icebreaker that pushes slowly through ice 1.5 m thick. An earlier expedition to the area
had videoed what looked like clams living there. That earlier expedition could not bring back samples, but
the new cruise could.
This expedition is part of a ten-year international project called the Census of Marine Life. Some 2,000
researchers at schools, museums and government agencies in more than 70 countries are developing new
methods for studying marine life and are sampling the residents of both familiar and unfamiliar waters.
Some general trends are already emerging, such as worrying drops in some species’ populations as modelled
by computer programs. Yet the current phase of the census emphasizes fieldwork over computer modelling,
says Ron O’Dor, the census’ scientific coordinator. ‘There were perfectly good reasons why people didn’t
know very much about the ocean,’ says O’Dor. For example, standard winches on research vessels can take
eight hours just to lower a collecting contraption to the bottom, and then another eight hours to haul a single
sample back up. Because cruise time runs up big bills in a hurry, deep ocean samples are extremely valuable.
And only recently did remotely-operated vehicles and underwater digital cameras become good at collecting
deep-ocean samples and images.
Now, the census has grown to 17 projects. One project searches for historical records of sea life, such as
fishing communities’ tax records, as measured in barrels of their catch. Another relies heavily on modelling
to predict the future of marine populations. Fourteen projects focus on field studies of marine creatures, from
albatrosses soaring over the water to microbes living several kilometres deep. The remaining census
participants are creating the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), which offers internet access
to 12.9 million records of 77,000 species from 200 databases.
Planners early on recognized that the ocean depths need special attention. Scientists’ knowledge of marine
life is, literally, shallow. Although the ocean bottom lies 4,000m underwater on average and in places plunges
much deeper, nearly 90 per cent of the original entries into OBIS came from the top 100m of water, and 99
per cent came from the top 3000m. ‘Nobody knows how many or what types of organisms live at lower
depths’, O’Dor says.
With a wide variety of techniques, scientists are working to take a good look into the sea. Nicholas Makris
and his fish-tracking research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently unveiled a sensor

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that can observe 10,000 square kilometres at a time over the continental shelf. Older tracking systems for fish
could cover just 100 square meters at a time. Those systems gave only rough ideas of the size of huge fish
clusters that swam this way and that. In a test off the coast of New Jersey, the new tool detected what may
be the largest school of fish ever recorded in one image. It covered an area the size of Manhattan and included
some 20 million fish.
The census is finding where fish aren’t, as well as where they are. Sharks don’t seem to frequent the ocean
below 3000m, say Imants G. Priede of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues. They
looked at worldwide records and their own sampling data from five cruises in the northeastern Atlantic. Shark
species inhabit the waters down to 2,000 m, they report. In the depths though, sharks rarely appear, although
bony fish live there. Sharks are apparently confined to about 30 per cent of the total ocean,’ the researchers
report. That puts all of them within the reach of fishing fleets, so ‘sharks may be more vulnerable to over-
exploitation than previously thought,’ the researchers concluded.
Questions 1-6
Complete the notes.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

CENSUS OF MARINE LIFE

Polartern expedition:
Exploring area found Antarctic Peninsula
Footage of (1) ____________ obtained by earlier expeditions
Current expedition able to (2) ______________ to be studied
Forms part of Census of Marine Life.
Current trends:
Computers indicate falls in (3) _______________
Census concentrating on (4) __________________ rather than theoretical predictions
Improved technology such as (5) __________________ and (6) _______________ saves time and money.

Questions 7-11
Complete the summary.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Census of marine Life aims to learn more about life in the ocean. It involves creating (7)
________________ to study and sample marine life. Better technology makes this possible. The different
projects that make up the census work in different ways. Apart from those that concentrate on fieldwork,

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others study (8) ________________, such as those kept by tax authorities and computer models. One study
used (9) ________________to scan the bottom of the ocean for fish. Another analysed sampling data and
(10) ________________ and came to the conclusion that shark populations could be (11)
________________to the effects of the fishing industry.

Question 12
Choose TWO letters A-F.
Which TWO factors make exploring the bottom of the ocean particularly difficult?
A. Thick surface ice
B. Falling numbers of creatures
C. High operating costs
D. Poor computer modelling
E. Technological limitations
F. The presence of sharks

READING PASSAGE 2

A. It is the mainstay of countless magazine and newspaper features. Differences between male and
female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing emotion – can
be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed. Men instinctively like
the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are
innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the
intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our
brains.
B. The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international
bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate
differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are
challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising concerns about its
implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring
good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and
unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children's education.
C. In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her
book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight
variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the
wiring is soft, not hard. "It is flexible, malleable and changeable," she said.
D. In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim otherwise
are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility. It is a case backed
by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. "All the mounting evidence

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 indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong," she
told the Observer. "Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note
that these differences increase with age because our children's intellectual biases are being
exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don't inherit intellectual differences.
They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be."
E. Thus boys develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are
expected and are encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing.
Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are
emphasised by teachers and parents. The latter example, on the issue of verbal skills, is particularly
revealing, neuroscientists argue. Girls do begin to speak earlier than boys, by about a month on
average, a fact that is seized upon by supporters of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from
Venus school of intellectual differences.
F. However, this gap is really a tiny difference compared to the vast range of linguistic abilities that
differentiate people, Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, pointed out.
His studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due
to their gender."If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two
graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between
them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the
tiny difference between them. It drives me wild," Plomin told the Observer.
G. This point is backed by Eliot. "Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different," she states in a
recent paper in New Scientist. "But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men Are from
Mars, Women Are from Venus stereotypes suggest. "Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing,
emphasising, navigating and other cognitive differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains.
"All such skills are learned and neuro-plasticity – the modifications of neurons and their connections
in response experience – trumps hard-wiring every time."
H. The current popular stress on innate intellectual differences between the sexes is, in part, a response
to psychologists' emphasis of the environment's importance in the development of skills and
personality in the 1970s and early 1980s, said Eliot. This led to a reaction against nurture as the
principal factor in the development of human characteristics and to an exaggeration of the influence
of genes and inherited abilities. This view is also popular because it propagates the status quo, she
added. "We are being told there is nothing we can do to improve our potential because it is innate.
That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills."
I. In short, women can read maps despite claims that they lack the spatial skills for such efforts, while
men can learn to empathise and need not be isolated like Mel Gibson's Nick Marshall, the emotionally
retarded male lead of the film What Women Want and a classic stereotype of the unfeeling male that
is perpetuated by the supporters of the hard-wired school of intellectual differences.

Questions 13-17
The reading passage has nine paragraphs, A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information?

13. The role played by age in increasing gender differences.

14. Women’s supposed inability to be funny.
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15. Men are as capable as women of being sensitive to others.
16. A figure noting how much gender differences affect speech.
17. A book suggesting that gender differences are genetic.

Questions 18-22
Answer the questions below with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer.
18. What do children learn through society’s expectations? __________________
19. Who focuses on girls’ oral skills? __________________
20. What are reasoning, speaking, computing, emphasizing, and navigating examples of?
__________________
21. When did experts first start to give a greater role to nurture rather than nature? __________________
22. What enables both boys and girls to learn things? __________________

Questions 23-25
Complete the sentences below with ONE WORD OR A NUMBER from the passage.
23. Parents’ ill-founded beliefs and expectations can negatively affect their children’s _____________
24. There is increasing _____________showing that gender differences are due to nurture.
25. Girls are often believed to have fewer __________skills than boys.

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