AA ELTsMaterial.com Section 2 Instructions to follow © You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2. Gateway Academy Pre-Sessional Courses Our pre-sessional courses are ideal for students who have a conditional place at a British university, but who need to achieve a certain level of English in order to be accepted. The course aims to provide students with the English language and study skills that they need in order to be successful at university or another academic establishment. It is important to note that completion of the course does not guarantee students entrance into a university. It is necessary for students to show during the course that they have understood the information and skills that they have been taught, and can incorporate it into their work. Pre-sessional students at Gateway Academy will benefit from: Small class sizes (no more than 10 students per class) © Twenty-three hours of tuition per week © Individual support and tutorials © Regular guest lecturers © The use of the Academy's study and recreational facilities, including the Language Library, the computer suite, and the academy's sports facilities. © Avaried social programme including evening entertainments and weekend excursions to. popular tourist attractions and cities such as Stonehenge, Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. The course offers a holistic approach to learning and covers reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. During the course, students will receive instruction on important techniques suchAA ELTsMaterial.com as summary-writing, analysing essay titles, organising writing, note-taking in lectures, giving seminars and making presentations. Students will gain experience in working both individually and in groups. As part of the course, all students will work towards a 5000-word project in their ‘own field of study. Students will receive guidance from their tutors on how best to conduct research and write it up effectively. Students will also work towards a presentation on the same subject. There is no final examination. Students are assessed continuously, taking into account their attendance, successful completion of assignments and participation in class. Students will be given a full report on their progress at the end of the course. Students need to be aware that the course involves a great deal of coursework, which will require students to manage their time effectively. Gateway Academy offers three pre-sessional courses. A five-week course beginning in August is available for advanced level students; a ten-week course beginning in July is available for upper-intermediate students. Intermediate level students should take our twenty-week course beginning in May. Intermediate level students get a two-week break in July. Questions 14-21 Instructions to follow © Complete the sentences below. © Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text for each answer. @ The Pre-Sessional course is suitable for students whose place at a British university isAA ELTsMaterial.com During the course, students need to show that they can understand and ... new skills. ©® students will be able to use many of the Academy's... studying, .. while they are © Students will have the opportunity to vi on Saturdays and Sundays. © students will work both alone and related to their subject © Students will have to research and write up a ... area. @ inorder to successfully complete their assignments, students will have to... well @ .. students should start their course in July. Instructions to follow © Look at the information below and then answer questions 22-27 below. If you are currently studying for an undergraduate or post-graduate degree, you may wish to take one of our in-sessional courses, which run during the academic year. You may take up to three hours of classes per semester. Please choose your courses from the list below, complete an application form and hand it in at the Gateway Office. Course Outlines A. Particularly useful for science students, but of interest to all, this course is an introduction to statistics. It shows how numbers can be manipulated to suggest different results, and how Public opinion can be altered by clever statistical methods. It will provide an introduction intoAA ELTsMaterial.com useful statistical methods, but is unsuitable for students who require advanced statistical sl for a thesis or dissertation. B. This course teaches advanced mathematical and statistical skills and is suitable for students working on projects which involve a great deal of quantitative data. The course outlines how to gather data, how to draw conclusions from it, and how best to present it diagrammatically. C. This course concentrates on the skills needed to write academic essays. Students will learn how to develop essay titles, structure essays correctly, avoid plagiarism and reference their work. There will also be the opportunity to work on other elements of writing, including grammar and punctuation. The course is most suitable for non-native speakers and native speakers at the undergraduate level. D. A course especially designed for PhD students working on a long-term project. As well as looking at conventions of PhD theses and improving research and study skills, the course also serves as a social group where PhD students, who often work alone, can share their experiences and offer each other encouragement and advice. E. A course to iron out those typical mistakes in English essay writing. Common grammar mistakes, spelling errors and that dreaded apostrophe will be covered in detail. The course is designed for native speakers who lack confidence in writing, particularly those who have been away from academic environments for some time. F. This course is suitable for non-native students at the undergraduate or postgraduate level who wish to focus on grammar and language. Students will look at which tenses are used in which situations, look at passive structures and relative clauses. Suitable ‘chunks’ of language‘AA leLTsMaterial.com for academic situations will also be presented. Students will also have the chance to focus on individual grammar needs. Unsuitable for native speakers of English. Questions 22-27 Instructions to follow © The list contains a total of 9 course titles, i-x. © Choose the correct title for the courses from the list of titles and write letters, i-ix, in boxes 22-27 on your answer sheet. © NB. There are more titles than necessary. Course Titles i, Statistics for Life and Study ii, Writing for Masters Students il, Tips for Extended Research iv, Statistics for science and research v. Advanced Grammar for International Students vi. Essays — From Planning to Production vii, Use Vocabulary Correctly viii. Common Errors in English Writing ix. Improve your Referencing Techniques @ course a ® course 8 @ course c @ course dAA ELTsMaterial.com ® course € @ course F Section 3 Instructions to follow You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3. The Accidental Rainforest According to ecological theory, rainforests are supposed to develop slowly over years. But now ecologists are being forced to reconsider their idea. When Peter Osbeck, a Swedish priest, stopped off at the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension in 1752 on his way home from China, he wrote of ‘a heap of ruinous rocks’ with a bare, white mountain in the middle. All it boasted was a couple of dozen species of plant, most of them ferns and some of them unique to the island. ‘And so it might have remained. But in 1843 British plant collector Joseph Hooker made a brief call on his return from Antarctica. Surveying the bare earth, he concluded that the island had suffered some natural calamity that had denuded it of vegetation and triggered a decline in rainfall that was turning the place into a desert. The British Navy, which by then maintained a garrison on the island, was keen to improve the place and asked Hooker's advice. He suggested an ambitious scheme for planting trees and shrubs that would revive rainfall and stimulate a wider ecological recovery. And, perhaps lacking anything else to do, the sailors set to with a will.AA ELTsMaterial.com In 1845, a naval transport ship from Argentina delivered a batch of seedlings. In the following years, more than 200 species of plant arrived from South Africa, from England came 700 packets of seeds, including those of two species that especially liked the place: bamboo and prickly pear. With sailors planting several thousand trees a year, the bare white mountain was soon cloaked in green and renamed Green Mountain, and by the early twentieth century, the mountain’s slopes were covered with a variety of trees and shrubs from all over the world. Modern ecologists throw up their hands in horror at what they see as Hookers environmental anarchy, The exotic species wrecked the indigenous ecosystem, squeezing out the islands endemic plants. In fact. Hooker knew well enough what might happen. However, he saw greater benefit in improving rainfall and encouraging more prolific vegetation on the island. But there is a much deeper issue here than the relative benefits of sparse endemic species versus luxuriant imported ones. And as botanist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK pointed out after a recent visit to the island, it goes to the heart of some of, the most dearly held tenets of ecology. Conservationists’ understandable concern for the fate of Ascension’s handful of unique species has, he says, blinded them to something quite astonishing the fact that the introduced species have been a roaring success. Today's Green Mountain, says Wilkinson, is ‘a fully functioning man-made tropical cloud forest’ that has grown from scratch from a ragbag of species collected more or less at random from all over the planet. But how could it have happened? Conventional ecological theory says that complex ecosystems such as cloud forests can emerge only through evolutionary processes in which each organism develops in concert with others to fill particular niches. Plants eco-evolve with their pollinators and seed dispersers, while microbes in the soil evolve to deal with the leafAA ELTsMaterial.com But that’s not what happened on Green Mountain. And the experience suggests that perhaps natural rainforests are constructed far more by chance than by evolution. Species, say some ecologists, don’t so much evolve to create ecosystems as make the best of what they have. ‘The Green Mountain system is a man-made system that has produced a tropical rainforest without any co-evolution between its constituent species, says Wilkinson. Not everyone agrees. Alan Gray, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. argues that the surviving endemic species on Green Mountain, though small in number, may still form the framework of the new ecosystem. The new arrivals may just be an adornment, with little structural importance for the ecosystem. But to Wilkinson, this sounds like clutching at straws. And the idea of the instant formation of rainforests sounds increasingly plausible as research reveals that supposedly pristine tropical rainforests from the Amazon to south-east Asia may in places be little more titan the overgrown gardens of past rainforest civilisations. The most surprising thing of all is that no ecologists have thought to conduct proper research into this human-made rainforest ecosystem. A survey of the island's flora conducted six years ago by the University of Edinburgh was concerned only with endemic species. They characterised everything else as a threat. And the Ascension authorities are currently turning Green Mountain into a national park where introduced species, at least the invasive ones, are earmarked for culling rather than conservation. Conservationists have understandable concerns, Wilkinson says. At least four endemic species have gone extinct on Ascension since the exotics started arri ing. But in thei urgency to protect endemics, ecologists are missing out on the study of a great enigmaAA ELTsMaterial.com ‘As you walk through the forest, you see lots of leaves that have had chunks taken out of them by various insects. There are caterpillars and beetles around’ says Wilkinson. ‘But where did they come from? Are they endemic or alien? If aliens, did they come with the plant on which they feed or discover it on arrival?” Such questions go to the heart of how- rainforests happen. The Green Mountain forest holds many secrets. And the irony is that the most artificial rainforest in the world could tell us more about rainforest ecology than any number of natural forests. Questions 28-32 Instructions to follow © Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? * In boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet write- © TRUE if the statement agrees with the information © FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this © The natural vegetation on the island contained some species which were found nowhere else. © Joseph Hooker assumed that human activity had caused the decline in the istand’s plant life. © British sailors on the island took part in a major tree planting project. ©) Hooker sent details of his planting scheme to a number of different countries. © The bamboo and prickly pear seeds sent from England were unsuitable for Ascension.‘AA leLTsMaterial.com Questions 33-37 Instructions to follow © Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-G from the box below. Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet. @ The reason for modern conservationists’ concern over Hooker's tree planting programme is that @ David wilkinson says the creation of the rainforest in Ascension is important because it shows that A B c D E ip G Wilkinson says the existence of Ascension’s rainforest challenges the theory that A B c D e P G © Alan Gray questions Wilkinson's theory, claiming that A B c D e P G @ Additional support for Wilkinson’s theory comes from findings that A B @ D ® F G A. other rainforests may have originally been planted by man. B_ many of the island's original species were threatened with destruction. C the species in the original rainforest were more successful than the newer arrivals.AA ELTsMaterial.com D. rainforests can only develop through a process of slow and complex evolut E steps should be taken to prevent the destruction of the original ecosystem. F randomly introduced species can coexist together. G the introduced species may have less ecological significance than the original ones. Questions 38-40 Instructions to follow © Choose the correct letter, A, B, Cor D. ‘© Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet. © Wilkinson suggests that conservationists’ concern about the island is misguided because A it is based on economic rather than environmental principles. 8 it is not focusing on the most important question. G itis encouraging the destru n of endemic species. it is not supported by the local authorities. © According to Wilkinson, studies of insects on the island could demonstrate A the possibility of new ecological relationships. 8 a future threat to the ecosystem of the island. © the existence of previously unknown species. a chance for the survival of rainforest ecology. ©‘AA leLTsMaterial.com 40. Overall, what feature of the Ascension rainforest does the writer stress? A 8 c D the conflict of natural and artificial systems the unusual nature of its ecological structure the harm done by interfering with nature the speed and success of its development IELTS General Reading Test 11 Section 1 Instructions to follow © You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1.AA ELTsMaterial.com COVER STORY 5 REGULAR FEATURES Filey Review 20 eta tarot soeevend, z psa adiesslaties oo ig Whats on Round Town? 23 12 Getaway Holidays Some popular and some unusual Cee ey 18 pears sea eter stains Martssa Brown of EastBank xets out testy sound investment and savings plan for aris 26 ~~ Best Wheels Racing « driver Marce Leont changes ik be Ford or Ferrarit 28 Theme Metropolitan Art Museum hosts a new exhibition of post-modern paintings Questions 1-4 Instructions to follow © Answer questions 1-4 by writing the appropriate page number or numbers where the information appears in the magazine. @ what page would you turn to for advice about money?AA ELTsMaterial.com 2. On what TWO pages can you read about art? (© on what page can you play a game? © what page would you go to for information on exotic trips? Instructions to follow © Read the advertisements for concerts below and answer Question 5-9. ‘SYDNEY CONSERVATORIUM OF MUSIC Concerts for January ‘A. THE EASTERN YOUTH ORCHESTRA Conservatorium High School students play a selection of Mozart concerter. Date and time: Sat. 7th and 14th January, 8:00 pm. Ticket price: $10 and 5 B. LET'S SING TOGETHER ‘An Afternoon for the young and the young-at-heart. Led by the Giggle Band, sing children’s songs from your childhood and from all over the world. There will be a special appearance by Willy Wallaby from the popular children’s programme “Hoppy”! Date and time: Sun. 8th January, 3:00 pm. Ticket price: $5 C. ONE ROMANTIC EVENING‘AA leLTsMaterial.com Bring someone special with you and listen to some of the greatest love songs as you gaze at the stars together! Date and time: Sat. 28th January, 8:00 pm. Ticket price: $20 and $12 NOTE: This content will be held in the Conservatorium Rose Garden, not in the Concert Hall. D. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. Bop along until late to the rock hits of the last 10 years. Bands playing include The Hippies, The Hypers and The Heroes. If you have a special request, write it down at the ticket counter when you come in. Date and time: Sat. 21st January, 8:00 pm Ticket price: $10 and $5 E, FLAMENCO World-famous classical guitarist Rodrigo Paras will play a selection of traditional Spanish Flamenco pieces. Date and time: Sun. 15th and 22nd January, 7:30 pm. Ticket price: $20 and $12.‘AA leLTsMaterial.com Questions 5-9 Instructions to follow ‘© Which concerts do the following statements talk about? © Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet. © Young performers will play at this concert. A B c D E @ The concert will be held outdoors. A B Cc D e @ There will be only one performer. A B c D 5 © This concert will not be held at night. A B c D E @ The audience can choose what will be performed. A B © D © Instructions to follow © Read the information below on treatment for snake bites and answer Questions 10-14.AA ELTsMaterial.com FIRST AID FOR SNAKE BITES. Snakes are not normally aggressive and tend to bite only when they are threatened or mishandled. Some snakes, such as the carpet snake, are not poisonous. Others, such as the brown snake, tiger snake and taipan, are very poisonous. Prevention = leave snakes alone and do not collect snakes — do not put your hands in hollow logs, under piles of wood or in rubbish be noisy when walking in the bush look carefully when walking through thick grass use a torch around camps at night Symptoms and signs These symptoms do not appear immediately, but from about 15 minutes to 2 hours after the Person is bitten. There are often no visible symptoms or signs. Take seriously any information from the person concerning ~ strong emotional reaction —headache or double vision = drowsiness, giddiness or faintness nausea and/or vomiting and diarrhoea ~ puncture marks about 1 centimetre apart at the site of the bite. — Bites are usually on the limbs, especially the legs. — reddening bruising — sweatingAA ELTsMaterial.com = breathing difficulties Management — reassure the casualty — apply a pressure immobilisation bandage over the bitten area and around the limb seek medical aid urgently ‘Snakebite Warnings —never wash the venom off the skin as this will help in later identification never cut or squeeze the bitten area never try to suck the venom out of the wound Questions 10-14 Instructions to follow © Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text? © TRUE if the statement agrees with the inform: @ FALSE if the statement contradicts the information © NOTGIVEN if there is no information on this © 1o avoid being bitten by a snake at night, you should use a flashlight. @ Taipans are one of the most poisonous snakes. @ snakes will usually bite a person on the arm or leg. ® it bitten by a snake the person should lie down and keep still. @ The snake poison should be removed from the wound.AA ELTsMaterial.com Section 2 Instructions to follow © You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 15-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2. Eastways offers the most flexible and cost-effective courier service on the market today. We can pick up a package from your premises or you can drop things off at any of our centres, which are manned 24 hours a day. You can prepare and pay for any of the parcels that you want to send at your offices or at home. All you need to do is to log in to our website and fill in the package and receiver details. The fee is calculated automatically and charged to your account. You can pay by credit card if you don’t have an account yet. You then just need to print out the label and stick it on the package. The barcode on the label will be scanned every time your package is moved, and in this way you can track your package 24 hours a day and know exactly where it is and what its status is. Bronze Service 20 letters or packages free of charge of weight up to 20 kilograms; discounts on national and international pick-ups and deliveries when 20 letters or packages are passed. Silver Service. 50 letters or packages free of charge of weight up to 20 kilograms (discounts on weights over this); considerable discounts on national and international pick-ups and deliveries when SO letters or packages are passed.AA ELTsMaterial.com Gold Service Unlimited numbers of letters and packages of weight up to 20 kilograms (considerable discounts ‘on weights over this); all pick-ups and deliveries free of charge for national and international deliveries. Online Trader Service Successful businesses that sell online require a specialised, efficient and cost-effective service. To receive a bespoke service, call 0300 654 112 to discuss your requirements with a sales executive on our team. Our service can include dedicated daily pick-ups, weekend pick-ups and specialised bulk discounts Please consult our website for current details of our price lists. Prices vary considerably due to fuel price fluctuations and our costs and charges are updated regularly to reflect rises and drops. Check our website for recommendations from hundreds of satisfied businesses in your area. Questions 15-20 Instructions to follow © Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. © what feature of the Eastways package label allows a package or letter to be tracked? © what is offered to silver customers if they pass their monthly limit? © How many letters can be delivered for free with Eastways’ gold service? © who will discuss the specialised service offered for online traders?AA ELTsMaterial.com © what factor influences the change in Eastways’ prices? © what are readers advised to find on Eastways’ website? MediaWork PLC — Security for New Staff Welcome to your new job at MediaWork. In order to ensure your personal security and the security of the company, we ask you to read, take note of, and act on the information below. First, we require a passport sized digital photo for your company ID card. Please email us one as soon as possible. If you have to pay for one, please retain the receipt, so that you can be reimbursed. When you arrive for your first day at work, please go to reception. They will be expecting you and will issue you with your ID card. The card has a long green cord attached to it. Please wear the ID card around your neck at all times whilst in the company building. In this way, it’s easy to spot anyone who should not be in the building, After you re ing, please ive your ID card and every time you enter or leave the company buil swipe your card on the reader at the entrance. The reader is at chest level for people who already have the cards around their necks. The swiping of your card allows the company to track your working hours, so that they can correctly assess any overtime or flexitime that you do. It also allows the company to know who is in the building at any one time, in case there is a fire practice or emergency. After you have reported to your department, your first day induction will begin with a security briefing. This will let you know about various security procedures that are necessary in ourAA ELTsMaterial.com company. This will take place in the meeting room on the 10th floor. During it, you will be asked to endorse a waiver, allowing us to monitor your movements around the building on our CCTV system and your movements on the Internet. Our systems are designed to cover all people’s movements around the building for security purposes and they are not designed to single out you or any other individual. ‘After your security briefing, please go to the IT department on the 3rd floor. The IT people will assign you all the passwords that you will need to operate our systems. Please commit these to memory as soon as you can. If you feel that any of your passwords are compromised, let the IT department know as soon as possible, so that they can cancel them and issue new ones. Finally, on return to your department, you will be asked to read and initial our visitors’ policy. We all have visitors from time to time and your visitors must be met at reception by you, so that you can sign them in. Visitors will be issued a visitors’ card, which has a bright blue cord that must be worn around their necks for easy identification. Questions 21-27 Instructions to follow ‘© Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.‘AA leLTsMaterial.com My First Day at MediaWork ‘Send a digital passport photo for the ID card. Keep the jet the ID Card from €2) and wear it around my neck with its green cord. L @ the card at the entrance — this keeps track of all employees’ time in the building. L Report to my department and then attend the @). in the 10t floor reeting room. Sign regarding the company using tracking cameras and software. U Go to the IT department on the 3° floor to get the necessary 2) Call IT if there are ever any problems with these. L Check and sign the) in my department.AA ELTsMaterial.com Section 3 Instructions to follow © You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3. Ettraining ‘A. E-learning is the unifying term to describe the fields of online learning, web-based training, and technology-delivered instruction, which can be a great benefit to corporate e-learning. IBM, for instance, claims that the institution of its e-training program, Basic Blue, whose purpose is to train new managers, saved the company in the range of $200 million in 1999. Cutting the travel expenses required to bring employees and instructors to a central classroom account for the lion’s share of the savings. With an online course, employees can learn from any Internet-connected PC, anywhere in the world. Ernst and Young reduced training costs by 35 percent while improving consistency and scalability. B. In addition to generally positive economic benefits, other advantages such as convenience, standardized delivery, self-paced learning, and a variety of available content, have made e-learning a high priority for many corporations. E-learning is widely believed to offer flexible “any time, any place” learning, The claim for “any place” is valid in principle and is a great development. Many people can engage with rich learning materials that simply were not possible in a paper of the broadcast distance learning era. For teaching specific information and skills, e-training holds great promise. It can be especially effective at helping employees prepare for IT certification programs. E-learning also seems to effectively address topics such as sexual harassment education’, safety training and management training — all areas where a clear set ofAA ELTsMaterial.com objectives can be identified. Ultimately, training experts recommend a “blended” approach that combines both online and in-person training as the instruction requires. E-learning is not an end-all solution. But if it helps decrease costs and windowless classrooms filled with snoring students, it definitely has its advantages. C. Much of the discussion about implementing e-learning has focused on the technology, but as Driscoll and others have reminded us, e-learning is not just about the technology, but also many human factors. As any capable manager knows, teaching employees new skills is critical to a smoothly run business. Having said that, however, the traditional route of classroom instruction runs the risk of being expensive, slow and, oftentimes, ineffective. Perhaps the classroom’s greatest disadvantage is the fact that it takes employees out of their jobs. Every minute an employee is sitting in a classroom training session is a minute they're not out ‘on the floor working. It now looks as if there is a way to circumvent these traditional training drawbacks. E-training promises more effective teaching techniques by integrating audio, video, animation, text and interactive materials with the intent of teaching each student at his or her ‘own pace. In addition to higher performance results, there are other immediate benefits to students such as increased time on task, higher levels of motivation, and reduced test anxiety for many learners. D. On the other hand, nobody said E-training technology would be cheap. E-training service providers, on the average, charge from $10,000 to $60,000 to develop one hour of online instruction. This price varies depending on the complexity of the training topic and the media used. HTML pages are a little cheaper to develop while streaming-video presentations or flash animations cost more. Course content is just the starting place for the cost. A complete e-learning solution also includes the technology platform (the computers, applications and network connections that are used to deliver the courses). This technology platform, known as a learning management system (LMS), can either be installed onsite or outsourced. Add to thatAA ELTsMaterial.com cost the necessary investments in network bandwidth to deliver multimedia courses, and you're left holding one heck of a bill. For the LMS infrastructure and a dozen or so online courses, costs can top $500,000 in the first year. These kinds of costs mean that custom e-training is, for the time being, an option only for large organizations. For those companies that have a large enough staff, the e-training concept pays for itself, Aware of this fact, large companies are investing heavily in online training, Today, over half of the 400-plus courses that Rockwell Collins offers are delivered instantly to its clients in an e-learning format, a change that has reduced its annual training costs by 40%. Many other success stories exist. E. Elearning isn’t expected to replace the classroom entirely. For one thing, bandwidth limitations are still an issue in presenting multimedia over the Internet. Furthermore, e-training isn’t suited to every mode of instruction or topic. For instance, it's rather ineffective at imparting cultural values or building teams. If your company has a unique corporate culture it would be difficult to convey that to first-time employees through a computer monitor. Group training sessions are more ideal for these purposes. In addition, there is a perceived loss of research time because of the work involved in developing and teaching online classes. Professor Wallin estimated that it required between 500 and 1,000 person-hours, that is, Wallin-hours, to keep the course at the appropriate level of currency and usefulness. (Distance learning instructors often need technical skills, no matter how advanced the courseware system.) That amounts to between a quarter and half of a person-year. Finally, teaching materials require computer literacy and access to equipment. Any e-Learning system involves basic equipment and a minimum level of computer knowledge in order to perform the tasks required by the system. A student that does not possess these skills, or have access to these tools, cannot succeed in an e-Learning program. F. While few people debate the obvious advantages of e-learning, systematic research is needed to confirm that learners are actually acquiring and using the skills that are being taught online,