Lesson 2

Reading part
What's in the Academic Reading test?
● Three reading texts (with a total of 2,200 to 2,750 words) and 40 questions.
● 3 passages. 60 minutes total. Only 20 minutes for each passage.
● 13-14 questions for each reading passage
● texts come from magazines, journals, books and newspapers and have been
written for a non-specialist audience
● at least one text contains detailed logical argument
● texts may include diagrams, graphs or illustrations
● Level of English required gets progressively more difficult - Reading
passage 1 will be easier than passage 3.
● Essentially, this is a test of whether you can understand synonyms.
● IELTS Reading is a test of only 2 things:
○ Can you find the part of the text that has the answer?
○ Do you understand that part of the text?

● Each question is worth 1 point. So don’t waste precious time on doing

difficult questions first.
● You must use correct spelling and grammar

● Time: 60 minutes. No extra time for transferring answers, so you must enter
your answers on the Reading Answer Sheet straightaway
● You only have 1.5 minutes (90 seconds) per question.

The following question types are used in the Academic Reading test:
● Short Answer questions
● Note Completion
● Sentence Completion
● multiple choice
● True/False/Not Given
● Yes/No/Not Given
● Diagram label/Flow Chart Completion
● Table Completion
● Summary Completion
● Matching Headings
 ● Matching Features
● Matching Sentence Endings
● matching information
● Pick from the list
● Classification

All these questions are variations of Multiple Choice or Fill-Blank. Any of these
question types may appear in any section. Not all question types will appear in an
individual Academic Reading test.

● Examiners create a question from only 1-2 sentences from a passage

Which Question Types Are In Order?

ALWAYS IN ORDER MOSTLY IN ORDER NOT IN ORDER

Sentence Completion Flow Charts Matching

Answer Sentence Completion Classification
Multiple Choice Table Headings
Yes (True), No (False), Not Diagram Pick 2-4 from List
Given Summary Paragraph Location

What are we going to study here? Question types

as:
Short-answer questions
Note completion
Sentence Completion

Short answer questions

Strategies for short answer questions:
➢ These focus on particular points. For each question, highlight the key words.
➢ Go back to the part of the text where you remember this point being
mentioned.
 ➢ Read through that part for the key words with similar meaning, and highlight
them.
➢ Read the question again and decide on your answer, taking care with your
grammar and spelling.
➢ Remember that the questions are in the same order as the information in the
passage. This can help you if you’re having trouble finding an answer.
➢ Remember that all of your answers must be words from the passage.

Sample Test 1

William Henry Perkin was born on March 12,1838, in London, England. As a

boy, Perkin’s curiosity prompted early interests in the arts, sciences,
photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down,
yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather’s home that solidified the young
man’s enthusiasm for chemistry.

As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study
of chemistry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his
teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given
by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those
speeches fired the young chemist’s enthusiasm further, and he later went on to
attend the Royal College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853,
at the age of 15.

At the time of Perkin’s enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed
by the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkin’s scientific gifts
soon caught Hofmann’s attention and, within two years, he became Hofmann’s
youngest assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough
that would bring him both fame and fortune.

At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug
is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and by
1856 demand for the drug was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when
Hofmann made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic
substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take
up the challenge.

During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time in the laboratory on the top
floor of his family’s house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from
aniline, an inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product. Despite his
best efforts, however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a
mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perkin’s scientific training and nature prompted
him to investigate the substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate
and alcohol into the aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he
finally produced a deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous
scientist Louis Pasteur’s words ‘chance favours only the prepared mind’, Perkin
saw the potential of his unexpected find.

Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and
animal excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were
difficult to obtain and outrageously expensive. Indeed, the purple colour
extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich
could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly.
It was against this backdrop that Perkin’s discovery was made.

Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric,
thus making it the world’s first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this
breakthrough, he lost no time in patenting it. But perhaps the most fascinating
of all Perkin’s reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the
new dye had commercial possibilities.
Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly
known as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet).
He asked advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him
that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the colour remained fast
(i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce
objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern
chemical industry.

With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from
London. Utilising the cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited
byproduct of London’s gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the
world’s first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a
commercial boost from the Empress Eugenie of France, when she decided the
new colour flattered her. Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the
fashionable ladies in that country. Not to be outdone, England’s Queen Victoria
also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in
England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for more.
Perkin went back to the drawing board.

Although Perkin’s fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery,
the chemist continued his research. Among other dyes he developed and
introduced were aniline red (1859) and aniline black (1863) and, in the late
1860s, Perkin’s green. It is important to note that Perkin’s synthetic dye
discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also
became vital to medical research in many ways. For instance, they were used to
stain previously invisible microbes and bacteria, allowing researchers to identify
such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play
a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to
Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria.
Questions 1-6
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

1 Before Perkin’s discovery, with what group in society was the colour purple
associated? ……………………………………………………
2 What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had?
……………………………………………………
3 What was the name finally used to refer to the first colour Perkin invented?
……………………………………………………
4 What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own
dye works? ……………………………………………………
5 In what country did Perkin’s newly invented colour first become fashionable?
……………………………………………………
6 According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers
using synthetic dyes? ……………………………………………………

Sample Test 2

Looming majestically over New York City’s East River, the Brooklyn Bridge is
one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the nineteenth century. At its
opening ceremony, it was proclaimed the eighth wonder of the world because of
its two stately towers and unprecedented length. Suspension bridges are
generally measured by the length of their main span, which is the distance
between their two supporting towers. The Brooklyn Bridge is dwarfed by
modern suspension bridges, the longest of which is 1,991 metres, but at the time
of its construction, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at 480
metres. That was substantially longer than the previous record holder, which
was 322 metres in length.

Prior to its completion in 1883, commuters had only been able to travel
between the then-separate cities of Brooklyn and New York by ferry. A range of
proposals for a bridge spanning the East River were put forward as early as
1800, but none were accepted by city officials due to the technical difficulty or
prohibitive cost involved. It was not until 1867 that permission to build the
Brooklyn Bridge as we know it today was finally granted by New York
legislators. The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, German-born immigrant John
A. Roebling, was a pioneer in the design of steel suspension bridges, having
previously designed and built others including the John A. Roebling Suspension
Bridge. Opened in 1866, this bridge is still standing today and crosses the Ohio
River between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky.

Unfortunately, John A. Roebling did not live to see the completion of his bridge.
While conducting final surveys of the site of the Brooklyn tower in June 1869,
he sustained an injury when an incoming ferry crushed his foot against the dock.
The injury itself was not life-threatening, but apart from allowing a surgeon to
amputate his injured toes, he refused medical treatment, opting to treat his
wound himself. His condition deteriorated when he contracted tetanus, which
claimed his life three weeks later. His 32-year-old son, Washington A. Roebling,
also a trained engineer, took over his father’s role.

Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began in January 1870. In order to dig solid
foundations for the bridge’s stone towers, massive wooden boxes with no
bottoms called caissons were used. The caissons allowed workers to dig away at
the sand and rock on the riverbed without being flooded by the river water. The
stone towers were built on top of the caissons, which sank deeper into the
riverbed as the workers dug. Water was kept out of the work chamber at the
base of the caisson where the workers dug by means of compressed air, which
was pumped in through a special duct in the roof of the caisson. Workers
entered via a series of ladders, passing through an air lock on the way down. This
had a door on each side, only one of which could be opened at any one time. Had
both doors been opened, compressed air would have escaped, with dire
consequences for the workers. The sand, rock and boulders that workers
excavated were hoisted out of the caisson in huge buckets via a debris shaft.
This was filled with water in order to maintain the correct air pressure. When
the caissons had reached the desired depth, concrete was pumped into them
until they formed solid blocks. These then become part of the permanent
foundations.

Caisson work was extremely difficult, and the men who worked in the caissons
took great risks. Not only was flooding a possibility, but fire was also a very real
threat. In 1870, the timber roof of the Brooklyn caisson caught fire from a
worker’s candle. This fire, nicknamed the “Great Blowout”, delayed construction
for several months because repairs had to be carried out. The Manhattan
caisson, which was built after the Brooklyn one, was lined with plate iron to
ensure that it would not become engulfed in flames like its counterpart had.
Many of the workers were also struck down by a mysterious ailment. Poorly
understood at the time, the bends killed at least three workers, and caused joint
pain, speech impediments and paralysis in many others. The high toll that the
caisson work was taking on workers ultimately led Washington A. Roebling to
halt construction, but that was not before Roebling himself had succumbed to
the illness. His condition left him unable to supervise the project in person. He
was forced to remain in his home, but his wife Emily, also a trained engineer,
relayed his instructions to site workers, and eventually took over day-to-day
supervision and project management.

Once the caissons were completed, the masonry towers continued to be built on
top, a complex process that took four years. The weight of the blocks meant that
a pulley system had to be used to transport them to the base of each tower. They
were then carried up a timber track and manoeuvred into position with the help
of a derrick. The next stage was the cabling. Work began on the four enormous
cables that would support the roadway in 1877. Work was well underway when
it was discovered that the cable manufacturer had been selling them faulty
wires. This could have caused the bridge to collapse had it not been for the
over-engineering in John A. Roebling’s design. It was too late to replace the
cables, but they were able to reinforce them with additional wires, and the
roadway was then suspended from the cables.

The Brooklyn Bridge was officially opened on 24 May 1883, connecting the
cities of Brooklyn and New York for the first time in history. The project had
taken 15 years, claimed the lives of 27 workers, and cost almost half a billion
dollars in today’s money.

Questions 1–7
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1–7 on your answer sheet.

1 How long is the Brooklyn Bridge’s main span?

……………………………………………………
2 In what year was the design of the Brooklyn Bridge officially approved?
……………………………………………………
3 What was the cause of John A. Roebling’s death?
……………………………………………………
4 What was used to fill the caissons once they were deep enough?
……………………………………………………
5 What was used to protect the Manhattan caisson from fire?
……………………………………………………
6 What illness affected many caisson workers?
……………………………………………………
7 What was the problem with the cables? ……………………………………………………

Sample Test 3
If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in
evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal
groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts,
taking their own private seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids. In
addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us,
other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails,
crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders
and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without whose prior
invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened.

Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life,
including breathing and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of
thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned
terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only gone part
way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the
way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small
whales we call dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins the manatees,
ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of
their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed. They do,
however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the
gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long
time ago and, like all vertebrate returnees to the water, they breathe air.
However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the water than whales
or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches.

There is evidence that all modem turtles are descended from a terrestrial
ancestor which lived before most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils
called Proganochelys quenstedti and Palaeochersis talampayensis dating from early
dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all modern turtles
and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived on
land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it’s obvious.
Ichthyosaurs were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and
streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like
dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a little less obvious. One way to tell is by
measuring the bones of their forelimbs.

Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three

measurements in these particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and
tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the three
measurements against one another. All the land tortoise species formed a tight
cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle; all the water turtles cluster in
the lower part of the triangular graph. There was no overlap, except when they
added some species that spend time both in water and on land. Sure enough,
these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately half
way between the ‘wet cluster’ of sea turtles and the ‘dry cluster’ of land
tortoises. The next step was to determine where the fossils fell. The bones of P
quenstedti and JR talampayensis leave us in no doubt. Their points on the graph
are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land
tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the water.

You might think, therefore, that modern land tortoises have probably stayed on
land ever since those early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of
them went back to the sea. But apparently not. If you draw out the family tree of
all modern turtles and tortoises, nearly all the branches are aquatic. Today’s land
tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested among branches consisting of
aquatic turtles. This suggests that modern land tortoises have not stayed on
land continuously since the time of P. quenstedti and P talampayensis. Rather,
their ancestors were among those who went back to the water, and they then
re-emerged back onto the land in (relatively) more recent times.

Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return. In common with all

mammals, reptiles and birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and
before that various more or less worm-like creatures stretching back, still in the
sea, to the primeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and stayed there for
a very large number of generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the
water and became sea turtles. And finally they returned yet again to the land as
tortoises, some of which now live in the driest of deserts.
 Questions 1-4
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 What had to transfer from sea to land before any animals could migrate?
……………………………………………………
2 Which TWO processes are mentioned as those in which animals had to make
big changes as they moved onto land? ……………………………………………………
3 Which physical feature, possessed by their ancestors, do whales lack?
……………………………………………………
4 Which animals might ichthyosaurs have resembled?
……………………………………………………

Sample Test 4

A. Hearing impairment or other auditory function deficit in young children can

have a major impact on their development of speech and communication,
resulting in a detrimental effect on their ability to learn at school. This is likely to
have major consequences for the individual and the population as a whole. The
New Zealand Ministry of Health has found from research carried out over two
decades that 6-10% of children in that country are affected by hearing loss.
B. A preliminary study in New Zealand has shown that classroom noise presents a
major concern for teachers and pupils. Modern teaching practices, the
organisation of desks in the classroom, poor classroom acoustics, and
mechanical means of ventilation such as air-conditioning units all contribute to
the number of children unable to comprehend the teacher's voice. Education
researchers Nelson and Soli have also suggested that recent trends in learning
often involve collaborative interaction of multiple minds and tools as much as
individual possession of information. This all amounts to heightened activity and
noise levels, which have the potential to be particularly serious for children
experiencing auditory function deficit. Noise in classrooms can only exacerbate
their difficulty in comprehending and processing verbal communication with
other children and instructions from the teacher.

C. Children with auditory function deficit are potentially failing to learn to their
maximum potential because of noise levels generated in classrooms. The effects
of noise on the ability of children to learn effectively in typical classroom
environments are now the subject of increasing concern. The International
Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE), on the advice of the World
Health Organization, has established an international working party, which
includes New Zealand, to evaluate noise and reverberation control for school
rooms.

D. While the detrimental effects of noise in classroom situations are not limited to
children experiencing disability, those with a disability that affects their
processing of speech and verbal communication could be extremely vulnerable.
The auditory function deficits in question include hearing impairment, autistic
spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit disorders (ADD/ADHD).

E. Autism is considered a neurological and genetic life-long disorder that causes

discrepancies in the way information is processed. This disorder is characterised
by interlinking problems with social imagination, social communication and
social interaction. According to Janzen, this affects the ability to understand and
relate in typical ways to people, understand events and objects in the
environment, and understand or respond to sensory stimuli. Autism does not
allow learning or thinking in the same ways as in children who are developing
normally. Autistic spectrum disorders often result in major difficulties in
comprehending verbal information and speech processing. Those experiencing
these disorders often find sounds such as crowd noise and the noise generated
by machinery painful and distressing. This is difficult to scientifically quantify as
 such extra-sensory stimuli vary greatly from one autistic individual to another.
But a child who finds any type of noise in their classroom or learning space
intrusive is likely to be adversely affected in their ability to process information.

F. The attention deficit disorders are indicative of neurological and genetic

disorders and are characterised by difficulties with sustaining attention, effort
and persistence, organisation skills and disinhibition. Children experiencing
these disorders find it difficult to screen out unimportant information, and focus
on everything in the environment rather than attending to a single activity.
Background noise in the classroom becomes a major distraction, which can
affect their ability to concentrate.

G. Children experiencing an auditory function deficit can often find speech and
communication very difficult to isolate and process when set against high levels
of background noise. These levels come from outside activities that penetrate
the classroom structure, from teaching activities, and other noise generated
inside, which can be exacerbated by room reverberation. Strategies are needed
to obtain the optimum classroom construction and perhaps a change in
classroom culture and methods of teaching. In particular, the effects of noisy
classrooms and activities on those experiencing disabilities in the form of
auditory function deficit need thorough investigation. It is probable that many
undiagnosed children exist in the education system with 'invisible' disabilities.
Their needs are less likely to be met than those of children with known
disabilities.

H. The New Zealand Government has developed a New Zealand Disability Strategy
and has embarked on a wide-ranging consultation process. The strategy
recognises that people experiencing disability face significant barriers in
achieving a full quality of life in areas such as attitude, education, employment
and access to services. Objective 3 of the New Zealand Disability Strategy is to
'Provide the Best Education for Disabled People' by improving education so that
all children, youth learners and adult learners will have equal opportunities to
learn and develop within their already existing local school. For a successful
education, the learning environment is vitally significant, so any effort to
improve this is likely to be of great benefit to all children, but especially to those
with auditory function disabilities.

I. A number of countries are already in the process of formulating their own

standards for the control and reduction of classroom noise. New Zealand will
 probably follow their example. The literature to date on noise in school rooms
appears to focus on the effects on schoolchildren in general, their teachers and
the hearing impaired. Only limited attention appears to have been given to
those students experiencing the other disabilities involving auditory function
deficit. It is imperative that the needs of these children are taken into account in
the setting of appropriate international standards to be promulgated in future.

Questions 1-4
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 For what period of time has hearing loss in schoolchildren been studied in
New Zealand? ……………………………………………………
2 In addition to machinery noise, what other type of noise can upset children
with autism? ……………………………………………………
3 What term is used to describe the hearing problems of schoolchildren which
have not been diagnosed? ……………………………………………………
4 What part of the New Zealand Disability Strategy aims to give schoolchildren
equal opportunity? ……………………………………………………

Sample Test 5

The question of whether we are alone in the Universe has haunted humanity for centuries, but we
may now stand poised on the brink of the answer to the question, as we search for radio signals
from the other intelligent civilisations. This search, often known by the acronym SETI (search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence), is a difficult one. Although groups around the world have been
searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have reached the level of
technology where we can make a determined attempt to search all nearby stars for any sign of
life.

A. The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity - the same curiosity about
the natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are
alone in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given
the right conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth
to have fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet.
The simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic
of all questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure
science which is continually pushing out the horizon of our knowledge.
However, there are other reasons for being interested in whether life exists
elsewhere. For example, we have had civilization on Earth for perhaps only a few
thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few
decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two
thousand years or will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like
ours is several billion years, we can expect that if other civilizations do survive in
our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus any
other civilization that we hear from is likely to be far older on average than
ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilization will tell us that long-term
survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that
the older civilization may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with
threats to survival such as nuclear war and global pollution, and other threats
that we haven't yet discovered.

B. In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground
rules. First, UFOs [Unidentified Flying objects] are generally ignored since most
scientists don't consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear
serious consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case
any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very
conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well
like us, since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognize it as a life
form, quite apart from whatever we are able to communicate with it. In other
words, the life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven
fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with
its fellows. Be interested in the Universe, Live on a planet orbiting a star like our
 Sun, and perhaps most restrictively have chemistry, like us, based on carbon and
water.

C. Even when we make these assumptions. our understanding of other life forms is
still severely limited. We do not even know. for example, how many stars have
planets, and we certainly do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally,
given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our
galaxy [the Milky Way], and 100 billion galaxies. In the observable Universe, It
seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form
on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make using the little that we do
know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that
perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That
means that our nearest neighbors are perhaps 1000 light years away. which is
almost next door in astronomical terms.

D. An alien civilization could choose many different ways of sending information

across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy. or else are
severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It
bums out that. for a given amount of transmitted power: radio waves in the
frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance. and so all
searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency
range. So far there have been a number of searches by various groups around
the world, including Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes,
New South Wales. Until now there have not been any detections from the few
hundred stars which have been searched. The scale of the searches has been
increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10
million per year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial
life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special
hardware needed to search many frequencies at once. The project has two
parts. One part is a targeted search using the world's largest radio telescopes.
The American-operated telescope in Arecibo. Puerto Rico and the French
telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is searching the nearest
1000 likely stars with a high sensibility for signals in the frequency range 1000
to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected search which is
monitoring all of the space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller antennas of
NASA's Deep Space Network.

E. There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal

from an alien civilization. Everybody agrees that we should not reply
immediately. Quite apart from the impracticality of sending e reply over such
large distances at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would
have to be addressed by the global community before any reply could be sent.
Would the human race face the culture shock if faced with a superior and much
older civilization? Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being
searched are hundreds of light years away. so it takes hundreds of years for their
signal to reach us, and a further few hundred years for our reply to reach them.
It is not important, then, if there's a delay of a few years, or decades, while the
human race debates the question of whether to reply and perhaps carefully
drafts a reply.

Questions 1-3
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

1 What is the life expectancy of Earth? ……………………………………………………

2 What kind of signals from other intelligent civilisations are SETI scientists
searching for? ……………………………………………………
3 How many stars are the world’s most powerful radio telescopes searching
for? ……………………………………………………
Sample Test 6
 Why do whales leave the ocean and become stuck on beaches?

When the last stranded whale of a group eventually dies, the story does not end
there. A team of researchers begins to investigate, collecting skin samples for
instance, recording anything that could help them answer the crucial question:
why? Theories abound, some more convincing than others. In recent years, navy
sonar has been accused of causing certain whales to strand. It is known that
noise pollution from offshore industry, shipping and sonar can impair
underwater communication, but can it really drive whales onto our beaches?

In 1998, researchers at the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, a Greek

non-profit scientific group, linked whale strandings with low-frequency sonar
tests being carried out by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). They
recorded the stranding of 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales over 38.2 kilometres of
coastline. NATO later admitted it had been testing new sonar technology in the
same area at the time as the strandings had occurred. ‘Mass’ whale strandings
involve four or more animals. Typically they all wash ashore together, but in
mass atypical strandings (such as the one in Greece), the whales don’t strand as a
group; they are scattered over a larger area.

For humans, hearing a sudden loud noise might prove frightening, but it does not
induce mass fatality. For whales, on the other hand, there is a theory on how
sonar can kill. The noise can surprise the animal, causing it to swim too quickly to
the surface. The result is decompression sickness, a hazard human divers know
all too well. If a diver ascends too quickly from a high-pressure underwater
environment to a lower-pressure one, gases dissolved in blood and tissue
expand and form bubbles. The bubbles block the flow of blood to vital organs,
and can ultimately lead to death.

Plausible as this seems, it is still a theory and based on our more comprehensive
knowledge of land-based animals. For this reason, some scientists are wary.
Whale expert Karen Evans is one such scientist. Another is Rosemary Gales, a
leading expert on whale strandings. She says sonar technology cannot always be
blamed for mass strandings. “It’s a case-by-case situation. Whales have been
stranding for a very long time – pre-sonar.” And when 80% of all Australian
whale strandings occur around Tasmania, Gales and her team must continue in
the search for answers.
When animals beach next to each other at the same time, the most common
cause has nothing to do with humans at all. “They’re highly social creatures,” says
Gales. “When they mass strand – it’s complete panic and chaos. If one of the
group strands and sounds the alarm, others will try to swim to its aid, and
become stuck themselves.”

Activities such as sonar testing can hint at when a stranding may occur, but if
conservationists are to reduce the number of strandings, or improve rescue
operations, they need information on where strandings are likely to occur as
well. With this in mind, Ralph James, physicist at the University of Western
Australia in Perth, thinks he may have discovered why whales turn up only on
some beaches. In 1986 he went to Augusta, Western Australia, where more
than 100 false killer whales had beached. “I found out from chatting to the locals
that whales had been stranding there for decades. So I asked myself, what is it
about this beach?” From this question that James pondered over 20 years ago,
grew the university’s Whale Stranding Analysis Project.

Data has since revealed that all mass strandings around Australia occur on
gently sloping sandy beaches, some with inclines of less than 0.5%. For whale
species that depend on an echolocation system to navigate, this kind of beach
spells disaster. Usually, as they swim, they make clicking noises, and the resulting
sound waves are reflected in an echo and travel back to them. However, these
just fade out on shallow beaches, so the whale doesn’t hear an echo and it
crashes onto the shore.

But that is not all. Physics, it appears, can help with the when as well as the
where. The ocean is full of bubbles. Larger ones rise quickly to the surface and
disappear, whilst smaller ones – called microbubbles – can last for days. It is
these that absorb whale ‘clicks.’ “Rough weather generates more bubbles than
usual,” James adds. So, during and after a storm, echolocating whales are
essentially swimming blind.

Last year was a bad one for strandings in Australia. Can we predict if this – or
any other year – will be any better? Some scientists believe we can. They have
found trends which could be used to forecast ‘bad years’ for strandings in the
future. In 2005, a survey by Klaus Vanselow and Klaus Ricklefs of sperm whale
strandings in the North Sea even found a correlation between these and the
sunspot cycle, and suggested that changes in the Earth’s magnetic field might be
involved. But others are sceptical. “Their study was interesting… but the
analyses they used were flawed on a number of levels,” says Evans. In the same
year, she co-authored a study on Australian strandings that uncovered a
completely different trend. “We analysed data from 1920 to 2002… and
observed a clear periodicity in the number of whales stranded each year that
coincides with a major climatic cycle.” To put it more simply, she says, in the years
when strong westerly and southerly winds bring cool water rich in nutrients
closer to the Australia coast, there is an increase in the number of fish. The
whales follow.

So what causes mass strandings? “It’s probably many different components,”

says James. And he is probably right. But the point is we now know what many
of those components are.

Questions 1-4
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 What do researchers often take from the bodies of whales?

……………………………………………………
2 What do some industries and shipping create that is harmful to whales?
……………………………………………………
3 In which geographical region do most whale strandings in Australia happen?
……………………………………………………
4 Which kind of whale was the subject of a study in the North Sea?
……………………………………………………
Note completion
Strategies for completing notes:
➢ Study each question and decide what is needed, for example - a noun
phrase, a number.
➢ In your mind, try to turn the notes or sentences into questions and then
answer them. This should give you the missing words.
➢ Check your completed sentences make sense and paraphrase what the
test says.
➢ Read the instructions carefully, noting how many words you can write,
and if they want you to include the exact words from the question or not.
➢ Read the incomplete sentences first. Think about what word form can be
used, and try to predict the answer. Also think about keywords and how
they could be represented by synonyms or paraphrasing. Locate where
 the information is located by scanning quickly. If you can’t locate the
answer quickly, move on.
➢ Read the incomplete sentence again.
➢ Study the reading text more carefully to establish the answer.
➢ Check your spelling.
➢ Repeat with the other sentences.

Sample Test 1

La Gomera is one of the Canary Islands situated in the Atlantic Ocean off the
northwest coast of Africa. This small volcanic island is mountainous, with steep
rocky slopes and deep, wooded ravines, rising to 1,487 metres at its highest
peak. It is also home to the best known of the world’s whistle ‘languages’, a
means of transmitting information over long distances which is perfectly
adapted to the extreme terrain of the island.

This ‘language’, known as ‘Silbo’ or ‘Silbo Gomero’ – from the Spanish word for
‘whistle’ – is now shedding light on the language-processing abilities of the
human brain, according to scientists. Researchers say that Silbo activates parts
of the brain normally associated with spoken language, suggesting that the brain
is remarkably flexible in its ability to interpret sounds as language.
‘Science has developed the idea of brain areas that are dedicated to language,
and we are starting to understand the scope of signals that can be recognised as
language,’ says David Corina, co-author of a recent study and associate
professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Silbo is a substitute for Spanish, with individual words recoded into whistles
which have high- and low-frequency tones. A whistler – or silbador – puts a
finger in his or her mouth to increase the whistle’s pitch, while the other hand
can be cupped to adjust the direction of the sound. ‘There is much more
ambiguity in the whistled signal than in the spoken signal,’ explains lead
researcher Manuel Carreiras, psychology professor at the University of La
Laguna on the Canary island of Tenerife. Because whistled ‘words’ can be hard
to distinguish, silbadores rely on repetition, as well as awareness of context, to
make themselves understood.

The silbadores of Gomera are traditionally shepherds and other isolated

mountain folk, and their novel means of staying in touch allows them to
communicate over distances of up to 10 kilometres. Carreiras explains that
silbadores are able to pass a surprising amount of information via their whistles.
‘In daily life they use whistles to communicate short commands, but any Spanish
sentence could be whistled.’ Silbo has proved particularly useful when fires have
occurred on the island and rapid communication across large areas has been
vital.

The study team used neuroimaging equipment to contrast the brain activity of
silbadores while listening to whistled and spoken Spanish. Results showed the
left temporal lobe of the brain, which is usually associated with spoken language,
was engaged during the processing of Silbo. The researchers found that other
key regions in the brain’s frontal lobe also responded to the whistles, including
those activated in response to sign language among deaf people. When the
experiments were repeated with non-whistlers, however, activation was
observed in all areas of the brain.

‘Our results provide more evidence about the flexibility of human capacity for
language in a variety of forms,’ Corina says. ‘These data suggest that
left-hemisphere language regions are uniquely adapted for communicative
purposes, independent of the modality of signal. The non-Silbo speakers were
not recognising Silbo as a language. They had nothing to grab onto, so multiple
areas of their brains were activated.’
 Carreiras says the origins of Silbo Gomero remain obscure, but that indigenous
Canary Islanders, who were of North African origin, already had a whistled
language when Spain conquered the volcanic islands in the 15th century.
Whistled languages survive today in Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Vietnam,
Guyana, China, Nepal, Senegal, and a few mountainous pockets in southern
Europe. There are thought to be as many as 70 whistled languages still in use,
though only 12 have been described and studied scientifically. This form of
communication is an adaptation found among cultures where people are often
isolated from each other, according to Julien Meyer, a researcher at the Institute
of Human Sciences in Lyon, France. ‘They are mostly used in mountains or dense
forests,’ he says. ‘Whistled languages are quite clearly defined and represent an
original adaptation of the spoken language for the needs of isolated human
groups.’

But with modern communication technology now widely available, researchers

say whistled languages like Silbo are threatened with extinction. With dwindling
numbers of Gomera islanders still fluent in the language, Canaries’ authorities
are taking steps to try to ensure its survival. Since 1999, Silbo Gomero has been
taught in all of the island’s elementary schools. In addition, locals are seeking
assistance from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO). ‘The local authorities are trying to get an award from
the organisation to declare [Silbo Gomero] as something that should be
preserved for humanity,’ Carreiras adds.

Questions 1-7
Complete the nates below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Silbo Gomero
How Silbo is produced
● high- and low-frequency tones represent different sounds in Spanish (1)
…………………………
● pitch of whistle is controlled using silbador’s (2) …………………………
● (3) ………………………… is changed with a cupped hand

How Silbo is used

● has long been used by shepherds and people living in secluded locations
● in everyday use for the transmission of brief (4) …………………………
● can relay essential information quickly, e.g. to inform people about (5) …………………………

The future of Silbo

● future under threat because of new (6) …………………………
● Canaries’ authorities hoping to receive a UNESCO (7) ………………………… to help preserve
it
Sample Test 2

Information theory lies at the heart of everything - from DVD players and the genetic code of
DNA to the physics of the universe at its most fundamental. It has been central to the
development of the science of communication, which enables data to be sent electronically and
has therefore had a major impact on our lives.

A. In April 2002 an event took place which demonstrated one of the many
applications of information theory. The space probe, Voyager I, launched in
1977, had sent back spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared
out of the Solar System on a one-way mission to the stars. After 25 years of
exposure to the freezing temperatures of deep space, the probe was beginning
to show its age. Sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing and NASA
experts realised that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe
forever. The solution was to get a message to Voyager I to instruct it to use
spares to change the failing parts. With the probe 12 billion kilometres from
 Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a radio dish belonging to NASA’s
Deep Space Network, the message was sent out into the depths of space. Even
travelling at the speed of light, it took over 11 hours to reach its target, far
beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the
faint call from its home planet, and successfully made the switchover.

B. It was the longest-distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA
engineers. But it also highlighted the astonishing power of the techniques
developed by American communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had
died just a year earlier. Born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, Shannon showed an
early talent for maths and for building gadgets, and made breakthroughs in the
foundations of computer technology when still a student. While at Bell
Laboratories, Shannon developed information theory, but shunned the resulting
acclaim. In the 1940s, he single-handedly created an entire science of
communication which has since inveigled its way into a host of applications,
from DVDs to satellite communications to bar codes - any area, in short, where
data has to be conveyed rapidly yet accurately.

C. This all seems light years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally
had for his work, which began when he was a 22-year-old graduate engineering
student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. He
set out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the
concept of ‘information’. The most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is
whether something is true or false - which can be captured in the binary unit, or
‘bit’, of the form 1 or 0. Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set
about defining otherwise vague ideas about information and how to transmit it
from place to place. In the process he discovered something surprising: it is
always possible to guarantee information will get through random interference -
‘noise’ - intact.

D. Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine

information. Information theory generalises this idea via theorems that capture
the effects of noise with mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed
that noise sets a limit on the rate at which information can pass along
communication channels while remaining error-free. This rate depends on the
relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication
channel, and on its capacity (its ‘bandwidth’). The resulting limit, given in units of
bits per second, is the absolute maximum rate of error-free communication
given signal strength and noise level. The trick, Shannon showed, is to find ways
 of packaging up - ‘coding’ - information to cope with the ravages of noise, while
staying within the information-carrying capacity - ‘bandwidth’ - of the
communication system being used.

E. Over the years scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they
have proved crucial in many technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft
transmitted data using codes which added one extra bit for every single bit of
information; the result was an error rate of just one bit in 10,000 - and
stunningly clear pictures of the planets. Other codes have become part of
everyday life - such as the Universal Product Code, or bar code, which uses a
simple error-detecting system that ensures supermarket check-out lasers can
read the price even on, say, a crumpled bag of crisps. As recently as 1993,
engineers made a major breakthrough by discovering so-called turbo codes -
which come very close to Shannon’s ultimate limit for the maximum rate that
data can be transmitted reliably, and now play a key role in the mobile
videophone revolution.

F. Shannon also laid the foundations of more efficient ways of storing information,
by stripping out superfluous (‘redundant’) bits from data which contributed little
real information. As mobile phone text messages like ‘I CN C U’ show, it is often
possible to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning. As with error
correction, however, there’s a limit beyond which messages become too
ambiguous. Shannon showed how to calculate this limit, opening the way to the
design of compression methods that cram maximum information into the
minimum space.

Questions 1-5
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

The Voyager 1 Space Probe

❖ The probe transmitted pictures of both (1) ………………………… and ………………………… ,

then left the (2) ………………………… .
❖ The freezing temperatures were found to have a negative effect on parts of the
space probe.
 ❖ Scientists feared that both the (3) ………………………… and ………………………… were
about to stop working.
❖ The only hope was to tell the probe to replace them with (4) ………………………… - but
distance made communication with the probe difficult.
❖ A (5) ………………………… was used to transmit the message at the speed of light.
❖ The message was picked up by the probe and the switchover took place.

Sample Test 3

A. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all corners
of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine,
literature, and for work in peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895
when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the
establishment of the Nobel Prize.

B. Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father Immanuel
Nobel was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in
Stockholm. In connection with his construction work, Immanuel Nobel also
experimented with different techniques for blasting rocks. Successful in his
industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his
 family to St. Petersburg. There, his sons were given a first-class education by
private teachers. The training included natural sciences, languages and
literature. By the age of 17, Alfred Nobel was fluent in Swedish, Russian, French,
English and German. His primary interests were in English literature and poetry
as well as in chemistry and physics. Alfred’s father, who wanted his sons to join
his enterprise as engineers, disliked Alfred’s interest in poetry and found his son
rather introverted.

C. In order to widen Alfred’s horizons, his father sent him abroad for further
training in chemical engineering. During a two year period, Alfred Nobel visited
Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. In Paris, the city he came to
like best, he worked in the private laboratory of Professor T. J. Pclouze, a famous
chemist. There he met the young Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who, three
years earlier, had invented nitroglycerine, a highly explosive liquid. But it was
considered too dangerous to be of any practical use. Although its explosive
power greatly exceeded that of gunpowder, the liquid would explode in a very
unpredictable manner if subjected to heat and pressure. Alfred Nobel became
very interested in nitroglycerine and how it could be put to practical use in
construction work. He also realized that the safety problems had to be solved
and a method had to be developed for the controlled detonation of
nitroglycerine.

D. After his return to Sweden in 1863, Alfred Nobel concentrated on developing

nitroglycerine as an explosive. Several explosions, including one (1864) in which
his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the
authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous. They
forbade further experimentation with nitroglycerine within the Stockholm city
limits and Alfred Nobel had to move his experimentation to a barge anchored on
Lake Malaren. Alfred was not discouraged and in 1864 he was able to start mass
production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer Alfred
Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing
nitroglycerine with kieselguhr would turn the liquid into a paste which could be
shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In
1867 he patented this material under the name of dynamite. To be able to
detonate the dynamite rods he also invented a detonator (blasting cap) which
could be ignited by lighting a fuse. These inventions were made at the same time
as the pneumatic drill came into general use. Together these inventions
drastically reduced the cost of blasting rock, drilling tunnels, building canals and
many other forms of construction work.
E. The market for dynamite and detonating caps grew very rapidly and Alfred
Nobel also proved himself to be a very skillful entrepreneur and businessman.
Over the years he founded factories and laboratories in some 90 different
places in more than 20 countries. Although he lived in Paris much of his life he
was constantly traveling. When he was not traveling or engaging in business
activities Nobel himself worked intensively in his various laboratories, first in
Stockholm and later in other places. He focused on the development of
explosives technology as well as other chemical inventions including such
materials as synthetic rubber and leather, artificial silk, etc. By the time of his
death in 1896, he had 355 patents.

F. Intensive work and travel did not leave much time for private life. At the age of
43, he was feeling like an old man. At this time he advertised in a newspaper
“Wealthy, highly-educated elderly gentleman seeks the lady of mature age,
versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household.” The most
qualified applicant turned out to be an Austrian woman, Countess Bertha
Kinsky. After working a very short time for Nobel she decided to return to
Austria to marry Count Arthur von Suttner. In spite of this Alfred Nobel and
Bertha von Suttner remained friends and kept writing letters to each other for
decades. Over the years Bertha von Suttner became increasingly critical of the
arms race. She wrote a famous book, Lay Down Your Arms and became a
prominent figure in the peace movement. No doubt this influenced Alfred Nobel
when he wrote his final will which was to include a Prize for persons or
organizations who promoted peace. Several years after the death of Alfred
Nobel, the Norwegian Storting (Parliament) decided to award the 1905 Nobel
Peace Prize to Bertha von Suttner.

G. Alfred Nobel died in San Remo, Italy, on December 10, 1896. When his will was
opened it came as a surprise that his fortune was to be used for Prizes in
Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The executors
of his will were two young engineers, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist.
They set about forming the Nobel Foundation as an organization to take care of
the financial assets left by Nobel for this purpose and to coordinate the work of
the Prize-Awarding Institutions. This was not without its difficulties since the
will was contested by relatives and questioned by authorities in various
countries.
 H. Alfred Nobel’s greatness lay in his ability to combine the penetrating mind of the
scientist and inventor with the forward-looking dynamism of the industrialist.
Nobel was very interested in social and peace-related issues and held what were
considered radical views in his era. He had a great interest in literature and
wrote his own poetry and dramatic works. The Nobel Prizes became an
extension and a fulfillment of his lifetime interests.

Questions 1-7
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Education:

Having accumulated a great fortune in his business, Nobel’s father determined to give his
son the best education and sent him abroad to be trained in (1) ………………………… during
Nobel’s study in Paris, he worked in a private laboratory, where he came in contact with a
young engineer (2) ………………………… and his invention nitroglycerine, a more powerful
explosive than (3) ………………………… .

Benefits in construction works:

Nobel became really interested in this new explosive and experimented on it. But
nitroglycerine was too dangerous and was banned for experiments within the city of (4)
………………………… . So Nobel had to move his experiments to a lake. To make nitroglycerine
easily usable, Nobel invented dynamite along with (5) ………………………… while in the
meantime (6) ………………………… became popular, all of which dramatically lowered the (7)
………………………… of construction works.
 Sample Test 4

Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining

fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes,
she’s creating an enchanting world. Although she isn’t aware of it, this fantasy is
helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for creativity and so it will
have important repercussions in her adult life.

Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools
with her younger brother. When she bosses him around as his ‘teacher’, she’s
practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. Later on, when they
tire of this and settle down with a board game, she’s learning about the need to
follow rules and take turns with a partner.

‘Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human
species,’ says Dr David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the
University of Cambridge, UK. ‘It underpins how we develop as intellectual,
problem-solving adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable
species.’

Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the
Greek philosopher Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for
adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the
19th century.

But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline

in play, pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. ‘The
opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my
childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce,’ he says. Outdoor play is curtailed
by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, as well as parents’ increased wish to
protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis on
‘earlier is better’ which is leading to greater competition in academic learning
and schools.

International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have
begun to develop policies concerned with children’s right to play, and to
consider implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But
what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.

‘The type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and

unpredictable – but, as soon as you ask a five-year-old “to play”, then you as the
researcher have intervened,’ explains Dr Sara Baker. ‘And we want to know what
the long-term impact of play is. It’s a real challenge.’

Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the
puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little
data on the impact it has on the child’s later life.

Now, thanks to the university’s new Centre for Research on Play in Education,
Development and Learning (PEDAL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of
researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child
develops.

‘A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children’s self
control,’ explains Baker. ‘This is our ability to develop awareness of our own
thinking processes – it influences how effectively we go about undertaking
challenging activities.’

In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she
found that children with greater self-control solved problems more quickly
when exploring an unfamiliar set-up requiring scientific reasoning. ‘This sort of
evidence makes us think that giving children the chance to play will make them
more successful problemsolvers in the long run.’

If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the

researchers, it could be extremely significant for educational practices, because
the ability to self regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic
performance.

Gibson adds: ‘Playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social

and emotional development. In my previous research, I investigated how
observing children at play can give us important clues about their well-being and
can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.’

Whitebread’s recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to

supporting children’s writing. ‘Many primary school children find writing
difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more
effective than an instructional one.’ Children wrote longer and
better-structured stories when they first played with dolls representing
characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with
Lego *, with similar results. ‘Many teachers commented that they had always
previously had children saying they didn’t know what to write about. With the
Lego building, however, not a single child said this through the whole year of the
project.’

Whitebread, who directs PEDAL, trained as a primary school teacher in the

early 1970s, when, as he describes, ‘the teaching of young children was largely a
quiet backwater, untroubled by any serious intellectual debate or controversy.’
Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly debated topics such as school
starting age.

‘Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It’s regarded
as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with “work”.
Let’s not lose sight of its benefits, and the fundamental contributions it makes to
human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology. Let’s make sure
children have a rich diet of play experiences.’
 Questions 1-8
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

Children's play
Uses of children’s play
● building a ‘magical kingdom’ may help develop (1) …………………………
● board games involve (2) ………………………… and turn-taking

Recent changes affecting children’s play

● populations of (3) ………………………… have grown
● opportunities for free play are limited due to:
○ fear of (4) …………………………
○ fear of (5) …………………………
○ increased (6) ………………………… in schools

International policies on children’s play:

● it is difficult to find (7) ………………………… to support new policies
● research needs to study the impact of play on the rest of the child’s (8)
…………………………
Sample Test 5
 The country’s achievements in education have other nations doing their homework.

A. At Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a suburb west of Helsinki, Kari

Louhivuori, the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme by Finnish
standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a recent immigrant, was falling
behind, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. So he decided to hold the boy back a
year. Standards in the country have vastly improved in reading, maths and
science literacy over the past decade, in large part because its teachers are
trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. ‘I took Besart on that
year as my private student,’ explains Louhivuori. When he was not studying
science, geography and maths, Besart was seated next to Louhivuori’s desk,
taking books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring
them by the dozens. By the end of the year, he had conquered his adopted
country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realisation that he could, in
fact, learn.

B. This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for Finland’s
amazing record of education success. The transformation of its education
system began some 40 years ago but teachers had little idea it had been so
successful until 2000. In this year, the first results from the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardised test given to
15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the
best at reading in the world. Three years later, they led in maths. By 2006,
Finland was first out of the 57 nations that participate in science. In the latest
PISA scores, the nation came second in science, third in reading and sixth in
maths among nearly half a million students worldwide.

C. In the United States, government officials have attempted to improve standards

by introducing marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a
group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put
money behind private-sector ideas, such as charter schools, which have doubled
in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, apparently thought
competition was the answer. One policy invited states to compete for federal
dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that
would not be welcome in Finland. ‘I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their
shirts,’ said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching
experience. ‘If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.’
D. There are no compulsory standardised tests in Finland, apart from one exam at
the end of students’ senior year in high school. There is no competition between
students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in
the government agencies running them, from national officials to local
authorities, are educators rather than business people or politicians. Every
school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of
university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good chance
of getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a
rural village or a university town.

E. It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry to school. Finland provides
three years of maternity leave and subsidised day care to parents, and preschool
for all five-year-olds, where the emphasis is on socialising. In addition, the state
subsidises parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child
until he or she turns 17. Schools provide food, counselling and taxi service if
needed. Health care Is even free for students taking degree courses.

F. Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. For the first half of the twentieth
century, only the privileged got a quality education. But In 1963, the Finnish
Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as the best means
of driving the economy forward and out of recession. Public schools were
organised into one system of comprehensive schools for ages 7 through 16.
Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that
provided guidelines, not prescriptions, for them to refer to. Besides Finnish and
Swedish (the country’s second official language), children started learning a
third language (English Is a favourite) usually beginning at age nine. The equal
distribution of equipment was next, meaning that all teachers had their fair
share of teaching resources to aid learning. As the comprehensive schools
Improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The
second critical decision came In 1979, when it was required that every teacher
gain a fifth-year Master’s Degree In theory and practice, paid for by the state.
From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and
lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries
were so high but because autonomous decision-making and respect made the
job desirable. And as Louhivuori explains, ‘We have our own motivation to
succeed because we love the work.’

Questions 1-7
Complete the notes below.
 Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7 on your answer sheet.

The School system in Finland

PISA tests
❖ In the most recent tests, Finland’s top subject was (1) …………………………

History

In 1963:
❖ A new school system was needed to improve Finland’s (2) …………………………
❖ Schools followed (3) ………………………… that were created partly by teachers.
❖ Young pupils had to study an additional (4) …………………………
❖ All teachers were given the same (5) ………………………… to use.

In 1979:
❖ Teachers had to get a (6)………………………… but they did not have to pay for this.
❖ Applicants were attracted to the (7) ………………………… that teaching received.

Sentence completion
Strategies for completing sentences:
➢ Study each question and decide what is needed, e.g. a noun phrase, a number.
➢ In your mind, try to turn the notes or sentences into questions and then
answer them. This should give you the missing words.
➢ Check your completed sentences make sense and paraphrase what the text
says.
 Sample Test 1

By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the Earth’s population will live in urban centres.
Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the
human population will increase by about three billion people by then. An
estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% larger than Brazil) will be
needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming methods
continue as they are practised today. At present, throughout the world, over
80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Historically, some 15%
of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to
ensure enough food for the world’s population to live on?

The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of

tomatoes and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is
the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another three
billion people. Many believe an entirely new approach to indoor farming is
required, employing cutting-edge technologies. One such proposal is for the
‘Vertical Farm’. The concept is of multi-storey buildings in which food crops are
grown in environmentally controlled conditions. Situated in the heart of urban
centres, they would drastically reduce the amount of transportation required to
bring food to consumers. Vertical farms would need to be efficient, cheap to
construct and safe to operate. If successfully implemented, proponents claim,
vertical farms offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a
safe and varied food supply (through year-round production of all crops), and
the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal
farming.
It took humans 10,000 years to learn how to grow most of the crops we now
take for granted. Along the way, we despoiled most of the land we worked, often
turning verdant, natural eco-zones into semi-arid deserts. Within that same
time frame, we evolved into an urban species, in which 60% of the human
population now lives vertically in cities. This means that, for the majority, we
humans have shelter from the elements, yet we subject our food-bearing plants
to the rigours of the great outdoors and can do no more than hope for a good
weather year. However, more often than not now, due to a rapidly changing
climate, that is not what happens. Massive floods, long droughts, hurricanes and
severe monsoons take their toll each year, destroying millions of tons of valuable
crops.

The supporters of vertical farming claim many potential advantages for the
system. For instance, crops would be produced all year round, as they would be
kept in artificially controlled, optimum growing conditions. There would be no
weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods or pests. All the food could
be grown organically, eliminating the need for herbicides, pesticides and
fertilisers. The system would greatly reduce the incidence of many infectious
diseases that are acquired at the agricultural interface. Although the system
would consume energy, it would return energy to the grid via methane
generation from composting non-edible parts of plants. It would also
dramatically reduce fossil fuel use, by cutting out the need for tractors, ploughs
and shipping.

A major drawback of vertical farming, however, is that the plants would require
artificial light. Without it, those plants nearest the windows would be exposed to
more sunlight and grow more quickly, reducing the efficiency of the system.
Single-storey greenhouses have the benefit of natural overhead light; even so,
many still need artificial lighting. A multi-storey facility with no natural overhead
light would require far more. Generating enough light could be prohibitively
expensive, unless cheap, renewable energy is available, and this appears to be
rather a future aspiration than a likelihood for the near future.

One variation on vertical farming that has been developed is to grow plants in
stacked trays that move on rails. Moving the trays allows the plants to get
enough sunlight. This system is already in operation, and works well within a
single-storey greenhouse with light reaching it from above: it Is not certain,
however, that it can be made to work without that overhead natural light.
Vertical farming is an attempt to address the undoubted problems that we face
in producing enough food for a growing population. At the moment, though,
more needs to be done to reduce the detrimental impact it would have on the
environment, particularly as regards the use of energy. While it is possible that
much of our food will be grown in skyscrapers in future, most experts currently
believe it is far more likely that we will simply use the space available on urban
rooftops.

Questions 1-7
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Indoor farming
1 Some food plants, including ………………………… , are already grown indoors.
2 Vertical farms would be located in ………………………… , meaning that there
would be less need to take them long distances to customers.
3 Vertical farms could use methane from plants and animals to produce
………………………… .
4 The consumption of v would be cut because agricultural vehicles would be
unnecessary.
5 The fact that vertical farms would need ………………………… light is a
disadvantage.
6 One form of vertical farming involves planting in ………………………… which are
not fixed.
7 The most probable development is that food will be grown on
………………………… in towns and cities.
 Sample Test 2

What is causing the decline of the world’s giant forests?

A. 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
(leaves and branches that form a cover high above the ground) basking in the
sun, they capture vast amounts of energy. This allows them to produce massive
crops of fruit, flowers and foliage that sustain much of the animal life in the
forest.

B. 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
stature, a tree needs three things: the right place to establish its seedling, good
growing conditions and lots of time with low adult mortality(no. of deaths within
a particular group). Disrupt any of these, and you can lose your biggest trees.

C. In some parts of the world, populations of big trees are dwindling because their
seedlings cannot survive or grow. In southern India, for instance, an aggressive
non-native shrub, Lantana camara, is invading the floor of many forests. Lantana
grows so thickly that young trees often fail to take root. With no young trees to
 replace them, it is only a matter of time before most of the big trees disappear.
Across much of northern Australia, gamba grass from Africa is overrunning
native savannah woodlands. The grass grows up to four metres tall and burns
fiercely, creating super hot fires that cause catastrophic tree mortality.

D. Without the right growing conditions trees cannot get really big, and there is
some evidence to suggest tree growth could slow in a warmer world,
particularly in environments that are already warm. Having worked for decades
at La Selva Biological Station in Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, David and
Deborah Clark and colleagues have shown that tree growth there declines
markedly in warmer years. “During the day, their photosynthesis shuts down
when it gets too warm, and at night they consume more energy because their
metabolic rate increases, much as a reptile’s would when it gets warmer,”
explains David Clark. With less energy produced in warmer years and more
being consumed just to survive, there is even less energy available for growth.

E. The Clarks’ hypothesis, if correct, means tropical forests would shrink over time.
The largest, oldest trees would progressively die off and tend not to be replaced.
According to the Clarks, this might trigger a destabilisation of the climate; as
older trees die, forests would release some of their stored carbon into the
atmosphere, prompting a vicious cycle of further warming, forest shrinkage and
carbon emissions.

F. Big trees face threats from elsewhere. The most serious is increasing mortality,
especially of mature trees. Across much of the planet, forests of slow-growing
ancient trees have been cleared for human use. In western North America, most
have been replaced by monocultures of fast-growing conifers. Siberia’s forests
are being logged at an incredible rate. Logging in tropical forests is selective but
the timber cutters usually prioritise the biggest and oldest trees. In the Amazon,
my colleagues and I found the mortality rate for the biggest trees had tripled in
small patches of rainforest surrounded by pasture land. This happens for two
reasons. First, as they grow taller, big trees become thicker and less flexible:
when winds blow across the surrounding cleared land, there is nothing to stop
their acceleration. When they hit the trees, the impact can snap them in half.
Second, rainforest fragments dry out when surrounded by dry, hot pastures and
the resulting drought can have devastating consequences: one four-year study
has shown that death rates will double for smaller trees but will increase 4.5
times for bigger trees.
G. Particular enemies to large trees are insects and disease. Across vast areas of
western North America, increasingly mild winters are causing massive
outbreaks of bark beetle. These tiny creatures can kill entire forests as they
tunnel their way through the inside of trees. In both North America and Europe,
fungus-causing diseases such as Dutch elm disease have killed off millions of
stately trees that once gave beauty to forests and cities. As a result of human
activity, such enemies reach even the remotest corners of the world,
threatening to make the ancient giants a thing of the past.

Questions 1-6
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-6.

1 The biggest trees in the world can be found in …………………… .

2 Some trees in Northern Australia die because of …………………… made worse by
gamba grass.
3 The Clarks believe that the release of …………………… from dead trees could
lead to the death of more trees.
4 Strong …………………… are capable of damaging tall trees in the Amazon.
5 …………………… has a worse impact on tall trees than smaller ones.
6 In western Northern America, a species of …………………… has destroyed many
trees.
 Sample Test 3

A. Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at
night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might
say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply
by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already
heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to
be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly
occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the
night-hunting trade. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the
ancestry of all mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime
economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all
because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious
mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors
able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.

B. Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in
the absence of light. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today.
Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about
somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night. Fish
and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although
there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Plenty of
other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or
impossible.
C. Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an
engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light,
to use a lantern or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help of
bacteria) have the power to manufacture their own light, but the process seems
to consume a large amount of energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting
mates.This doesn't require a prohibitive amount of energy: a male’s tiny pinprick
of light can be seen by a female from some distance on a dark night, since her
eyes are exposed directly to the light source itself. However, using light to find
one's own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to
detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the scene. The
light source must therefore be immensely brighter if it is to be used as a
headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. In
any event, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it seems to be the
case that, with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal
apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about.

D. What else might the engineer think of? Well, blind humans sometimes seem to
have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path. It has been given the name
'facial vision’, because blind people have reported that it feels a bit like the sense
of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who could ride his
tricycle at good speed round the block near his home, using facial vision.
Experiments showed that, in fact, facial vision is nothing to do with touch or the
front of the face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of the face,
like the referred pain in a phantom limb.The sensation of facial vision, it turns
out, really goes in through the ears.

E. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes of
their own footsteps and of other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles.
Before this was discovered, engineers had already built instruments to exploit
the principle, for example to measure the depth of the sea under a ship. After
this technique had been invented, it was only a matter of time before weapons
designers adapted it for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second
World War relied heavily on these devices, under such codenames as Asdic
(British) and Sonar (American), as well as Radar (American) or RDF (British),
which uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.

F. The Sonar and Radar pioneers didn't know it then, but all the world now knows
that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had perfected the system
tens of millions of years earlier; and their radar' achieves feats of detection and
navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with admiration. It is technically
incorrect to talk about bat 'radar', since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar.
But the underlying mathematical theories of radar and sonar are very similar;
and much of our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing
has come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald
Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined
the term 'écholocation' to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals
or by human instruments.

Questions 1-4
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

1 Long before the invention of radar, ………………………… had resulted in a

sophisticated radar-like system in bats.
2 Radar is an inaccurate term when referring to bats because …………………………
are not used in their navigation system.
3 Radar and sonar are based on similar ………………………… .
4 The word ‘echolocation’ was first used by someone working as a
………………………… .
 Sample Test 4

A. Occasionally, in some difficult musical compositions, there are beautiful, but

easy parts - parts so simple a beginner could play them. So it is with mathematics
as well. There are some discoveries in advanced mathematics that do not
depend on specialised knowledge, not even on algebra, geometry, or
trigonometry. Instead, they may involve, at most, a little arithmetic, such as ‘the
sum of two odd numbers is even’, and common sense. Each of the eight chapters
in this book illustrates this phenomenon. Anyone can understand every step in
the reasoning.

The thinking in each chapter uses at most only elementary arithmetic, and
sometimes not even that. Thus all readers will have the chance to participate in a
mathematical experience, to appreciate the beauty of mathematics, and to
become familiar with its logical, yet intuitive, style of thinking.

B. One of my purposes in writing this book is to give readers who haven’t had the
opportunity to see and enjoy real mathematics the chance to appreciate the
mathematical way of thinking. I want to reveal not only some of the fascinating
discoveries, but, more importantly, the reasoning behind them.
 In that respect, this book differs from most books on mathematics written for
the general public. Some present the lives of colourful mathematicians. Others
describe important applications of mathematics. Yet others go into
mathematical procedures, but assume that the reader is adept in using algebra.

C. I hope this book will help bridge that notorious gap that separates the two
cultures: the humanities and the sciences, or should I say the right brain
(intuitive) and the left brain (analytical, numerical). As the chapters will
illustrate, mathematics is not restricted to the analytical and numerical;
intuition plays a significant role. The alleged gap can be narrowed or completely
overcome by anyone, in part because each of us is far from using the full capacity
of either side of the brain. To illustrate our human potential, I cite a structural
engineer who is an artist, an electrical engineer who is an opera singer, an opera
singer who published mathematical research, and a mathematician who
publishes short stories.

D. Other scientists have written books to explain their fields to non-scientists, but
have necessarily had to omit the mathematics, although it provides the
foundation of their theories. The reader must remain a tantalised spectator
rather than an involved participant, since the appropriate language for
describing the details in much of science is mathematics, whether the subject is
expanding universe, subatomic particles, or chromosomes. Though the
broad.outline of a scientific theory can be sketched intuitively, when a part of
the physical universe is finally understood, its description often looks like a page
in a mathematics text.

E. Still, the non-mathematical reader can go far in understanding mathematical

reasoning. This book presents the details that illustrate the mathematical style
of thinking, which involves sustained, step-by-step analysis, experiments, and
insights. You will turn these pages much more slowly than when reading a novel
or a newspaper. It may help to have a pencil and paper ready to check claims and
carry out experiments.

F. As I wrote, I kept in mind two types of readers: those who enjoyed mathematics
until they were turned off by an unpleasant episode, usually around fifth grade,
and mathematics aficionados, who will find much that is new throughout the
book. This book also serves readers who simply want to sharpen their analytical
skills. Many careers, such as law and medicine, require extended, precise
analysis. Each chapter offers practice in following a sustained and closely argued
 line of thought. That mathematics can develop this skill is shown by these two
testimonials:

G. A physician wrote, The discipline of analytical thought processes [in

mathematics] prepared me extremely well for medical school. In medicine one is
faced with a problem which must be thoroughly analyzed before a solution can
be found. The process is similar to doing mathematics.’

A lawyer made the same point, “Although I had no background in law - not even
one political science course — I did well at one of the best law schools. I attribute
much of my success there to having learned, through the study of mathematics,
and, in particular, theorems, how to analyse complicated principles. Lawyers
who have studied mathematics can master the legal principles in a way that
most others cannot.’

I hope you will share my delight in watching as simple, even naive, questions lead
to remarkable solutions and purely theoretical discoveries find unanticipated
applications.

Questions 1-6
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

1 Some areas of both music and mathematics are suitable for someone who is a
………………………… .
2 It is sometimes possible to understand advanced mathematics using no more
than a limited knowledge of ………………………… .
3 The writer intends to show that mathematics requires …………………………
thinking, as well as analytical skills.
4 Some books written by ………………………… have had to leave out the
mathematics that is central to theories.
5 The writer advises non-mathematical readers to perform …………………………
while reading the book.
6 A lawyer found that studying ………………………… helped even more than other
areas of mathematics in the study of law.
 Sample Test 5

A. While many diseases that affect humans have been eradicated due to
improvements in vaccinations and the availability of healthcare, there are still
areas around the world where certain health issues are more prevalent. In a
world that is far more globalised than ever before, people come into contact
with one another through travel and living closer and closer to each other. As a
result, super-viruses and other infections resistant to antibiotics are becoming
more and more common.

B. Geography can often play a very large role in the health concerns of certain
populations. For instance, depending on where you live, you will not have the
same health concerns as someone who lives in a different geographical region.
Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this idea is malaria-prone areas,
which are usually tropical regions that foster a warm and damp environment in
which the mosquitos that can give people this disease can grew. Malaria is much
less of a problem in high-altitude deserts, for instance.

C. In some countries, geographical factors influence the health and well-being of

the population in very obvious ways. In many large cities, the wind is not strong
enough to clear the air of the massive amounts of smog and pollution that cause
asthma, lung problems, eyesight issues and more in the people who live there.
Part of the problem is, of course, the massive number of cars being driven, in
 addition to factories that run on coal power. The rapid industrialisation of some
countries in recent years has also led to the cutting down of forests to allow for
the expansion of big cities, which makes it even harder to fight the pollution with
the fresh air that is produced by plants.

D. It is in situations like these that the field of health geography comes into its own.
It is an increasingly important area of study in a world where diseases like polio
are re-emerging, respiratory diseases continue to spread, and malaria-prone
areas are still fighting to find a better cure. Health geography is the combination
of, on the one hand, knowledge regarding geography and methods used to
analyse and interpret geographical information, and on the other, the study of
health, diseases and healthcare practices around the world. The aim of this
hybrid science is to create solutions for common geography-based health
problems. While people will always be prone to illness, the study of how
geography affects our health could lead to the eradication of certain illnesses,
and the prevention of others in the future. By understanding why and how we
get sick, we can change the way we treat illness and disease specific to certain
geographical locations.

E. The geography of disease and ill health analyses the frequency with which
certain diseases appear in different parts of the world, and overlays the data
with the geography of the region, to see if there could be a correlation between
the two. Health geographers also study factors that could make certain
individuals or a population more likely to be taken ill with a specific health
concern or disease, as compared with the population of another area. Health
geographers in this field are usually trained as healthcare workers, and have an
understanding of basic epidemiology as it relates to the spread of diseases
among the population.

F. Researchers study the interactions between humans and their environment that
could lead to illness (such as asthma in places with high levels of pollution) and
work to create a clear way of categorising illnesses, diseases and epidemics into
local and global scales. Health geographers can map the spread of illnesses and
attempt to identify the reasons behind an increase or decrease in illnesses, as
they work to find a way to halt the further spread or re-emergence of diseases in
vulnerable populations.

G. The second subcategory of health geography is the geography of healthcare

provision. This group studies the availability (of lack thereof) of healthcare
 resources to individuals and populations around the world. In both developed
and developing nations there is often a very large discrepancy between the
options available to people in different social classes, income brackets, and
levels of education. Individuals working in the area of the geography of
healthcare provision attempt to assess the levels of healthcare in the area (for
instance, it may be very difficult for people to get medical attention because
there is a mountain between their village and the nearest hospital). These
researchers are on the frontline of making recommendations regarding policy to
international organisations, local government bodies and others.

H. The field of health geography is often overlooked, but it constitutes a huge area
of need in the fields of geography and healthcare. If we can understand how
geography affects our health no matter where in the world we are located, we
can better treat disease, prevent illness, and keep people safe and well.

Questions 1-6
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

1 Certain diseases have disappeared, thanks to better ………………………… and

healthcare.
2 Because there is more contact between people, ………………………… are losing
their usefulness.
3 Disease-causing ………………………… are most likely to be found in hot, damp
regions.
4 One cause of pollution is ………………………… that burn a particular fuel.
5 The growth of cities often has an impact on nearby ………………………… .
6 ………………………… is one disease that is growing after having been eradicated.
7 A physical barrier such as a ………………………… can prevent people from
reaching a hospital.