ILP Foundation Course: Listening- Reading 4

Reading: Matching headings

Listening: Map labelling

A. Reading
Part 1: In class

Pedestrians only
How traffic-free shopping streets developed

A. The concept of traffic-free shopping areas goes back a long time. During the
Middle Ages, traffic-free shopping areas known as souks were built in Middle
Eastern countries to allow people to shop in comfort and more importantly,
safety. As far back as 2,000 years ago, road traffic was banned from central
Rome during the day to allow for the free movement of pedestrians, and was
only allowed in at night when shops and markets had closed for the day: In
most other cities, however, pedestrians were forced to share the streets with
horses, coaches and later, with cars and other motorised vehicles.

B. The modern traffic-free shopping street was born in Europe in the 1960 when
both City populations and car ownership increased rapidly. Dirty exhaust
fumes from cars and the risks involved in crossing the road were beginning to
make shopping an unpleasant and dangerous experience. Many believed the
time was right for experimenting with car-free streets, and shopping areas
seemed the best place to start.

C. At first there was resistance from shopkeepers. They believed that such a
move would be bad for business. They argued that people would avoid streets
if they were unable to get to them in their cars. When the first streets in
Europe were closed to traffic, there were even noisy demonstrations, as many
shopkeepers predicted they would lose customers.

D. However, research carried out afterwards in several European Cities revealed

some unexpected statistics. In Munich, Cologne and Hamburg, visitors to
shopping areas increased by 90 percent. On Copenhagen's main shopping
street, shopkeepers reported sales increases of 25-40 percent. Shopkeepers
in Minneapolis, USA, were so impressed When they learnt this that they even
offered to pay for the construction and maintenance costs of their own
traffic-free streets.

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 E. With the arrival of the traffic-free shopping street, many shops, especially
those selling things like clothes, food and smaller luxury items, prospered.
Unfortunately, it wasn't good news for everyone, as shops selling furniture and
larger electrical appliances actually saw their sales drop. Many of these were
forced to move elsewhere, away from the city centre. Today they are a
common feature on the outskirts of towns and cities, often situated in
out-of-town retail zones with their own car parks and other local facilities.

Part 2: Homework
Exercise 1: Match the two paragraphs with one of the following three headings

1. How wildlife benefits from big trees

2. Factors that enable trees to grow to significant heights
3. How other plants can cause harm

Paragraph 1- Big trees are incredibly important ecologically. For a start, they sustain
countless other species. They provide shelter for many animals, and their trunks and
branches can become gardens, hung with green ferns, orchids and bromeliads,
coated with mosses and draped with vines. With their tall canopies basking in the
sun, they capture vast amounts of energy. This allows them to sustain much of the
animal life in the forest.

Paragraph 2- Only a small number of tree species have the genetic capacity to grow
really big. The mightiest are native to North America, but big trees grow all over the
globe, from the tropics to the boreal forests of the high latitudes. To achieve giant

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stature, a tree needs three things: the right place to establish its seedling, good
growing conditions and lots of time with low adult mortality. Disrupt any of these, and
you can lose your biggest trees.

Now you’re ready for bigger challenges. Good luck!

Exercise 2:

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Exercise 3: Reading Passage 2 has 8 Paragraphs, 1-8. The first paragraph and
the last have been given headings. Choose the correct heading for the
remaining 6 Paragraphs from the list below.

RISING SEA

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Paragraph 1. INCREASED TEMPERATURES
The average air temperature at the surface of the earth has risen this century, as has
the temperature of ocean surface waters. Because water expands as it heats, a
warmer ocean means higher sea levels. We cannot say definitely that the
temperature rises are due to the greenhouse effect; the heating may be part of a
“natural” variability over a long time-scale that we have not yet recognized in our
short 100 years of recording. However, assuming the build up of greenhouse gases
is responsible, and that the warming will continue. Scientists and inhabitants of
low-lying coastal areas would like to know the extent of future sea level rises.

Paragraph 2.
Calculating this is not easy. Models used for the purpose have treated the oceans as
passive, stationary and one-dimensional. Scientists have assumed that heat simply
diffused into the sea from the atmosphere. Using basic physical laws, they then
predict how much a known volume of water would expand for a given increase in
temperature. But the oceans are not one-dimensional, and recent work by
oceanographers, using a new model which takes into account a number of subtle
facets of the sea-including vast and complex ocean currents-suggests that the rise in
sea level may be less than some earlier estimates had predicted.

Paragraph 3

An international forum on climate change, in 1986, produced figures for likely

sea-level rises of 20 cm and 1.4 m, corresponding to atmospheric temperature
increases of 1.5 and 4.5C respectively. Some scientists estimate that the ocean
warming resulting from those temperature increases by the year 2050 would raise
the sea level by between 10 cm and 40 cm. This model only takes into account the
temperature effect on the oceans; it does not consider changes in sea level brought
about by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, and changes in groundwater
storage. When we add on estimates of these, we arrive at figures for total sea-level
rises of 15 cm and 70 cm respectively.

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Paragraph 4
It’s not easy trying to model accurately the enormous complexities of the
ever-changing oceans, with their great volume, massive currents and sensitively to
the influence of land masses and the atmosphere. For example, consider how heat
enters the ocean. Does it just “diffuse” from the warmer air vertically into the water,
and heat only the surface layer of the sea? (Warm water is less dense than cold, so
it would not spread downwards). Conventional models of sea-level rise have
considered that this the only method, but measurements have shown that the rate of
heat transfer into the ocean by vertical diffusion is far lower in practice than the
figures that many models have adopted.

Paragraph 5
Much of the early work, for simplicity, ignored the fact that water in the oceans
moves in three dimensions. By movement, of course, scientists don’t mean waves,
which are too small individually to consider, but rather movement of vast volumes of
water in huge currents. To understand the importance of this, we now need to
consider another process-advection. Imagine smoke rising from a chimney. On a still
day it will slowly spread out in all directions by means of diffusion. With a strong
directional wind, however, it will all shift downwind, this process is advection-the
transport of properties (notably heat and salinity in ocean) by the movement of
bodies of air or water, rather than by conduction or diffusion.

Paragraph 6
Massive oceans current called gyres do the moving. These currents have far more
capacity to store heat than does the atmosphere. Indeed, just the top 3 m of the
ocean contains more heat than the whole of the atmosphere. The origin of the gyres
lies in the fact that more heat from the Sun reaches the Equator than the Poles, and
naturally heat trends to move from the former to the latter. Warm air rises at the
Equator, and draws more air beneath it in the form of winds (the “Trade Winds") that,
together with other air movements, provide the main force driving the ocean
currents.

Paragraph 7
Water itself is heated at the Equator and moves poleward, twisted by the Earth’s
rotation and affected by the positions of the continents. The resultant broadly circular
movements between about 10 and 40 ' North and South are clockwise in the
Southern Hemisphere. They flow towards the east at mind latitudes in the equatorial
region. They then flow towards the Poles, along the eastern sides of continents, as
warm currents. When two different masses of water meet, one will move beneath the
other, depending on their relative densities in the subduction process. The densities

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are determined by temperature and salinity. The convergence of water of different
densities from the Equator and the Poles deep in the oceans causes continuous
subduction. This means that water moves vertically as well as horizontally. Cold
water from the Poles travels as depth-it is denser than warm water-until it emerges at
the surface in another part of the world in the form of a cold current.

Paragraph 8. HOW THE GREENHOUSE EFFECTS WILL CHANGE OCEAN

TEMPERATURES
Ocean currents, in three dimensions, form a giant “conveyor belt”, distributing heat
from the thin surface layer into the interior of the oceans and around the globe.
Water may take decades to circulate in these 3-D gyres in the lop kilometer of the
ocean, and centuries in the deep water. With the increased atmospheric
temperatures due to the greenhouse effect, the ocean's conveyor belt will carry more
heat into the interior. This subduction moves heat around far more effectively than
simple diffusion. Because warm water expands more than cold when it is heated,
scientists had presumed that the sea level would rise unevenly around the globe. It is
now believed that these inequalities cannot persist, as winds will act to continuously
spread out the water expansion. Of course, if global warming changes the strength
and distribution of the winds, then this “evening-out” process may not occur, and the
sea level could rise more in some areas than others.

Exercise 4:

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 Inside the mind of the consumer

Could brain-scanning technology provide an accurate way to assess the appeal of

new products and the effectiveness of advertising?

A
MARKETING people are no longer prepared to take your word for it that you favour
one product over another. They want to scan your brain to see which one you really
prefer. Using the tools of neuroscientists, such as electroencephalogram (EEG)
mapping and functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), they are trying to learn
more about the mental processes behind purchasing decisions. The resulting fusion
of neuroscience and marketing is inevitably being called 'neuromarketing’.
B
The first person to apply brain-imaging technology in this way was Gerry Zaltman of
Harvard University, in the late 1990s. The idea remained in obscurity until 2001,
when BrightHouse, a marketing consultancy based in Atlanta, Georgia, set up a
dedicated neuromarketing arm, BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group. (BrightHouse
lists Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot among its clients.) But the
company's name may itself simply be an example of clever marketing. BrightHouse
does not scan people while showing them specific products or campaign ideas, but
bases its work on the results of more general fMRI-based research into consumer
preferences and decision-making carried out at Emory University in Atlanta.
C
Can brain scanning really be applied to marketing? The basic principle is not that
different from focus groups and other traditional forms of market research. A
volunteer lies in an fMRI machine and is shown images or video clips. In place of an
interview or questionnaire, the subject's response is evaluated by monitoring brain
activity. fMRIprovides real-time images of brain activity, in which different areas “light
up” depending on the level of blood flow. This provides clues to the subject's

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subconscious thought patterns. Neuroscientists know, for example, that the sense of
self is associated with an area of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex. A
flow of blood to that area while the subject is looking at a particular logo suggests
that he or she identifies with that brand.
D
At first, it seemed that only companies in Europe were prepared to admit that they
used neuromarketing. Two carmakers, DaimlerChrysler in Germany and Ford's
European arm, ran pilot studies in 2003. But more recently, American companies
have become more open about their use of neuromarketing. Lieberman Research
Worldwide, a marketing firm based in Los Angeles, is collaborating with the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to enable movie studios to market-test
film trailers. More controversially, the New York Times recently reported that a
political consultancy, FKF Research, has been studying the effectiveness of
campaign commercials using neuromarketing techniques.
E
Whether all this is any more than a modern-day version of phrenology, the Victorian
obsession with linking lumps and bumps in the skull to personality traits, is unclear.
There have been no large-scale studies, so scans of a handful of subjects may not
be a reliable guide to consumer behaviour in general. Of course, focus groups and
surveys are flawed too: strong personalities can steer the outcomes of focus groups,
and people do not always tell opinion pollsters the truth. And even honest people
cannot always explain their preferences.
F
That is perhaps where neuromarketing has the most potential. When asked about
cola drinks, most people claim to have a favourite brand, but cannot say why they
prefer that brand’s taste. An unpublished study of attitudes towards two well- known
cola drinks. Brand A and Brand 13. carried out last year in a college of medicine in
the US found that most subjects preferred Brand B in a blind tasting fMRI scanning
showed that drinking Brand B lit up a region called the ventral putamen, which is one
of the brain's ‘reward centres’, far more brightly than Brand A. But when told which
drink was which, most subjects said they preferred Brand A, which suggests that its
stronger brand outweighs the more pleasant taste of the other drink.
G
“People form many unconscious attitudes that are obviously beyond traditional
methods that utilise introspection,” says Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist at Caltech
who is collaborating with Lieberman Research. With over $100 billion spent each

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year on marketing in America alone, any firm that can more accurately analyse how
customers respond to products, brands and advertising could make a fortune.
H
Consumer advocates are wary. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a lobby group,
thinks existing marketing techniques are powerful enough. “Already, marketing is
deeply implicated in many serious pathologies,” he says. “That is especially true of
children, who are suffering from an epidemic of marketing- related diseases,
including obesity and type-2 diabetes. Neuromarketing is a tool to amplify these
trends.”
I
Dr Quartz counters that neuromarketing techniques could equally be used for benign
purposes. “There are ways to utilise these technologies to create more responsible
advertising,” he says. Brain-scanning could, for example, be used to determine when
people are capable of making free choices, to ensure that advertising falls within
those bounds.
J
Another worry is that brain-scanning is an invasion of privacy and that information on
the preferences of specific individuals will be misused. But neuromarketing studies
rely on small numbers of volunteer subjects, so that seems implausible. Critics also
object to the use of medical equipment for frivolous rather than medical purposes.
But as Tim Ambler, a neuromarketing researcher at the London Business School,
says: ‘A tool is a tool, and if the owner of the tool gets a decent rent for hiring it out,
then that subsidises the cost of the equipment, and everybody wins.’ Perhaps more
brain-scanning will some day explain why some people like the idea of
neuromarketing, but others do not.

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B. Listening
Part 1: In-class
Exercise 1 +2: What are the meanings of these words?

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Exercise 3:

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Exercise 4:

Exercise 5

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Part 2: Homework

Exercise 1:

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Exercise 2:

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Task 1: Analyze the Map of Red Hill improvement plan and fill in the blanks with the
appropriate words from the box

Entrance E Across Right

Days B Corner Other

1. C is on ______ Road, to the ______________ of the supermarket

2. D is at the __________ between Carberry street and Thomas street
3. G is at the at the ____________ to Thomas street from Days Road
4. ______ is at the junction of Evelyn street and Hill street
5. The position of F is halfway down Hills street, _________ the Days Road

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6. _______ is at the other end of Hills street, close the intersection with Carberry
street
7. A is on the _______ side of Hills street, from the supermarket
Task 2: Finish question 14-20.

Exercise 3: Identify the building described in the dialog.

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Exercise 4:

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