MATCHING HEADING

Exercise 1: Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
proposal that a force might cause a heavenly orbit.

List of headings

i Early years of Gilbert

ii What was new about his scientific research method

iii The development of chemistry

iv Questioning traditional astronomy

v Pioneers of the early science

vi Professional and social recognition

vii Becoming the president of the Royal Science Society

viii The great works of Gilbert

ix His discovery about magnetism

x His change of focus

 William Gilbert and Magnetism
A

The 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and Gilbert.
The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist, also the
accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of learning and a
physician at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of electricity and
magnetism was what the ancients knew, nothing more than that the lodestone possessed
magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other
substances of small specific gravity. However, he is less well known than he deserves.

Gilbert’s birth pre-dated Galileo. Born in an eminent local family in Colchester County in the
UK, on May 24, 1544, he went to grammar school, and then studied medicine at St John’s
College, Cambridge, graduating in 1573. Later he travelled to the continent and eventually
settled down in London.

He was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the
president of the Royal Science Society. He was also appointed personal physician to the
Queen (Elizabeth I), and later knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until her death.
However, he didn’t outlive the Queen for long and died on November 30, 1603, only a few
months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.

Gilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large portion of
mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He gradually developed
his interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient, particularly about the knowledge
the ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange minerals with the power to attract iron. In
the meantime, Britain became a major seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada
was defeat ed, opening the way to British settlement of America. British ships depended on
the magnetic compass, yet no one understood why it worked. Did the Pole Star attract it, as
Columbus once speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in
Odyssey, which ships would never approach, because the sail ors thought its pull would yank
out all their iron nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years, William Gilbert conducted ingenious
experiments to understand magnet ism. His works include On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies,
and the Great Magnet of the Earth.

E
Gilbert’s discovery was so important to modern physics. He investigated the nature of
magnetism and electricity. He even coined the word “electric”. Though the early beliefs of
magnetism were also largely entangled with superstitions such as that rubbing garlic on
lodestone can neutralise its magnetism, one example being that sailors even believed the
smell of garlic would even interfere with the action of compass, which is why helmsman
were forbidden to eat it near a ship’s compass. Gilbert also found that metals can be
magnetised by rubbing mater ials such as fur, plastic or the like on them. He named the ends
of a magnet “north pole” and “south pole”. The magnetic poles can attract or repel, depending
on polarity. In addition, however, ordinary iron is always attracted to a magnet. Though he
started to study the relationship between magnetism and electricity, sadly he didn’t complete
it. His research of static electricity using amber and jet only demonstrated that objects with
electrical charges can work like magnets attracting small pieces of paper and stuff. It is a
French guy named du Fay that discovered that there are actually two electrical charges,
positive and negative.

He also questioned the traditional astronomical beliefs. Though a Copernican, he didn’t

express in his quintessential beliefs whether the earth is at the centre of the universe or in
orbit around the sun. However, he believed that stars are not equidistant from the earth but
have their own earth-like planets orbiting around them. The earth itself is like a giant magnet,
which is also why compasses always point north. They spin on an axis that is aligned with the
earth’s polarity. He even likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the earth and
built an entire magnetic philosophy on this analogy. In his explanation, magnetism is the soul
of the earth. Thus a perfectly spherical lodestone, when aligned with the earth’s poles, would
wobble all by itself in 24 hours. Further, he also believed that the sun and other stars wobble
just like the earth does around a crystal core, and speculated that the moon might also be a
magnet caused to orbit by its magnetic attraction to the earth. This was perhaps the first

His research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure logic and
reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude towards scientific
investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion. It was because of this
scientific attitude, together with his contri bution to our knowledge of magnetism, that a unit
of magnetomotive force, also known as magnetic potential, was named Gilbert in his honour.
His approach of careful observation and experimentation rather than the authoritative opinion
or deductive philosophy of others had laid the very foundation for modern science.

Exercise 2:

Questions 1-7
Reading Passage has 8 paragraphs (A-H).
Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the List of headings below.

Write the appropriate numbers (i-xiii) in Boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

One of the headings has been done for you as an example.

NB. There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use all of them.

Example : Paragraph H Answer: x

List of headings

i. 165 million years

ii. The body plan of archosaurs

iii. Dinosaurs – terrible lizards

iv. Classification according to pelvic anatomy

v. The suborders of Saurischia

vi. Lizards and dinosaurs – two distinct superorders

vii. Unique body plan helps identify dinosaurs from other animals

viii. Herbivore dinosaurs

ix. Lepidosaurs

x. Frills and shelves

xi. The origins of dinosaurs and lizards

 xii. Bird-hipped dinosaurs

xiii. Skull bones distinguish dinosaurs from other archosaurs

What is a dinosaur?
A.

Although the name dinosaur is derived from the Greek for “terrible lizard”, dinosaurs were
not, in fact, lizards at all. Like lizards, dinosaurs are included in the class Reptilia, or reptiles,
one of the five main classes of Vertebrata, animals with backbones. However, at the next
level of classification, within reptiles, significant differences in the skeletal anatomy of
lizards and dinosaurs have led scientists to place these groups of animals into two different
superorders: Lepidosauria, or lepidosaurs, and Archosauria, or archosaurs. B.

Classified as lepidosaurs are lizards and snakes and their prehistoric ancestors. Included
among the archosaurs, or “ruling reptiles”, are prehistoric and modern crocodiles, and the
now extinct thecodonts, pterosaurs and dinosaurs. Palaeontologists believe that both
dinosaurs and crocodiles evolved, in the later years of the Triassic Period (c. 248-208 million
years ago), from creatures called pseudosuchia thecodonts. Lizards, snakes and different
types of thecodont are believed to have evolved earlier in the Triassic Period from reptiles
known as eosuchians. C.

The most important skeletal differences between dinosaurs and other archosaurs are in the
bones of the skull, pelvis and limbs. Dinosaur skulls are found in a great range of shapes and
sizes, reflecting the different eating habits and lifestyles of a large and varied group of
animals that dominated life on Earth for an extraordinary 165 million years. However, unlike
the skulls of any other known animals, the skulls of dinosaurs had two long bones known as
vomers. These bones extended on either side of the head, from the front of the snout to the
level of the holes on the skull known as the antorbital fenestra, situated in front of the
dinosaur’s orbits or eyesockets. D.

All dinosaurs, whether large or small, quadrupedal or bipedal, fleet-footed or slow-moving,

shared a common body plan. Identification of this plan makes it possible to differentiate
dinosaurs from any other types of animal, even other archosaurs. Most significantly, in
dinosaurs, the pelvis and femur had evolved so that the hind limbs were held vertically
beneath the body, rather than sprawling out to the sides like the limbs of a lizard. The femur
of a dinosaur had a sharply in-turned neck and a ball-shaped head, which slotted into a fully
open acetabulum or hip socket. A supra-acetabular crest helped prevent dislocation of the
femur. The position of the knee joint, aligned below the acetabulum, made it possible for the
whole hind limb to swing backwards and forwards. This unique combination of features gave
dinosaurs what is known as a “fully improved gait”. Evolution of this highly efficient method
of walking also developed in mammals, but among reptiles it occurred only in dinosaurs. E.

For the purpose of further classification, dinosaurs are divided into two orders: Saurischia, or
saurischian dinosaurs, and Ornithischia, or ornithischian dinosaurs. This division is made on
the basis of their pelvic anatomy. All dinosaurs had a pelvic girdle with each side comprised
of three bones: the pubis, ilium and ischium. However, the orientation of these bones follows
one of two patterns. In saurischian dinosaurs, also known as lizard-hipped dinosaurs, the
pubis points forwards, as is usual in most types of reptile. By contrast, in ornithischian, or
bird-hipped, dinosaurs, the pubis points backwards towards the rear of the animal, which is
also true of birds. F.

Of the two orders of dinosaurs, the Saurischia was the larger and the first to evolve. It is
divided into two suborders: Therapoda, or therapods, and Sauropodomorpha, or
sauropodomorphs. The therapods, or “beast feet”, were bipedal, predatory carnivores. They
ranged in size from the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, 12m long, 5.6m tall and weighing an
estimated 6.4 tonnes, to the smallest known dinosaur, Compsognathus, a mere 1.4m long and
estimated 3kg in weight when fully grown. The sauropodomorphs, or “lizard feet forms”,
included both bipedal and quadrupedal dinosaurs. Some sauropodomorphs were carnivorous
or omnivorous but later species were typically herbivorous. They included some of the largest
and best-known of all dinosaurs, such as Diplodocus, a huge quadruped with an elephant-like
body, a long, thin tail and neck that gave it a total length of 27m, and a tiny head. G.
Ornithischian dinosaurs were bipedal or quadrupedal herbivores. They are now usually
divided into three suborders: Ornithipoda, Thyreophora and Marginocephalia. The
ornithopods, or “bird feet”, both large and small, could walk or run on their long hind legs,
balancing their body by holding their tails stiffly off the ground behind them. An example is
Iguanodon, up to 9m long, 5m tall and weighing 4.5 tonnes. The thyreophorans, or “shield
bearers”, also known as armoured dinosaurs, were quadrupeds with rows of protective bony
spikes, studs, or plates along their backs and tails. They included Stegosaurus, 9m long and
weighing 2 tonnes. H.

The marginocephalians, or “margined heads”, were bipedal or quadrupedal ornithischians

with a deep bony frill or narrow shelf at the back of the skull. An example is Triceratops, a
rhinoceros-like dinosaur, 9m long, weighing 5.4 tonnes and bearing a prominent neck frill
and three large horns.

Exercise 3:

List of Headings

i. Communication in music with animals

ii. New discoveries on animal music iii.

Music and language contrasted iv.

Current research on music

v. Music is beneficial for infants.

vi. Music transcends cultures.

vii. Look back at some of the historical theories

viii. Are we genetically designed for music?

Music: Language We All Speak

Music is one of the human species’ relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training,
any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise
music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music
isn’t necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in
highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere – but for reasons that are
more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration
across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you
can’t see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly
from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet
over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the
seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the
mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery –
mere “auditory cheesecake”, as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B

But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of
recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we
are and where we’re from – not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature
Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the 6 August issue of
the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke
University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately
connected.

To grasp the originality of this idea, it’s necessary to realise two things about how music has
traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each
culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For
example, in virtually all cultures, sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that
make up the chromatic scale -that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For
centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the
mathematical properties of sound itself.

Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the
harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that
produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar
string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two thirds its length. This link
between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.

Section C

This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at
least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York
Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that
while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing
describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the
world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his
colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms
or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular – which in turn is
shaped by our evolutionary heritage. “The explanation of music, like the explanation of any
product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se,” says Schwartz.

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of
languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only
on the raw sounds, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning, and sliced
sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they
noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of
frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the
building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analogue to the patterns created by the
sounds of speech. “Music, like visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world,”
says Schwartz. “It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the
visual environment.” In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument – the
vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras’s mathematical
equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us – specifically, we like the sounds that
remind us of us.

This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates
speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first.
It’s also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song – that
in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that
music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens
to be mostly speech. “We can’t know this,” says Schwartz. “What we do know is that they
both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences.”

Section D

Schwartz’s study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand
or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of “music” in the natural world –
birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting – previous studies have
found that many laboratory animals don’t show a great affinity for the human variety of
music making.

Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature
Neuroscience that animals don’t create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that
laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared
general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for
birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes – a narrow
repertoire – but don’t generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.

But what’s been played to animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve
preferences for sound as we do – based upon the soundscape in which they live – then their
“music” would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from
human utterances, a cat’s idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To
demonstrate that animals don’t appreciate sound the way we do, we’d need evidence that they
don’t respond to “music” constructed from their own sound environment.

Section E
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that
our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as
language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of
Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.

For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to “regulate
infants’ emotional states”, Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all
mothers use with babies is the same: “something between speech and song”. This kind of
communication “puts the baby in a trancelike state, which may proceed to sleep or extended
periods of rapture”. So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on
language and music, they probably wouldn’t be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is
that music may be even more of a necessity than we realise.

Exercise 04:

Questions 1-8
Reading Passage has eight sections A-H.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Summarising personality types

ii Combined styles for workplace

iii Physical explanation

iv A lively person who encourages

v Demanding and unsympathetic personality

vi Lazy and careless personality

vii The benefits of understanding communication styles

viii Cautious and caring

ix Factual and analytical personality

x Self-assessment determines one’s temperament

Communicating Styles and Conflict

Knowing your communication style and having a mix of styles on your team can provide a
positive force for resolving conflict.

As far back as Hippocrates’ time (460-370B.C.), people have tried to understand other people
by characterizing them according to personality type or temperament.Hippocrates believed
there were four different body fluids that influenced four basic types of temperament. His
work was further developed 500 years later by Galen. These days there are any number of
self-assessment tools that relate to the basic descriptions developed by Galen, although we no
longer believe the source to be the types of body fluid that dominate our systems.

The values in self-assessments that help determine personality style. Learning styles,
communication styles, conflict-handling styles, or other aspects of individuals is that they
help depersonalize conflict in interpersonal relationships. The depersonalization occurs when
you realize that others aren’t trying to be difficult, but they need different or more
information than you do. They’re not intending to be rude: they are so focused on the task
they forget about greeting people. They would like to work faster but not at the risk of
damaging the relationships needed to get the job done. They understand there is a job to do.
But it can only be done right with the appropriate information, which takes time to collect.
When used appropriately, understanding communication styles can help resolve conflict on
teams. Very rarely are conflicts true personality issues. Usually they are issues of style,
information needs, or focus.

C
Hippocrates and later Galen determined there were four basic temperaments: sanguine,
phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric. These descriptions were developed centuries ago and
are still somewhat apt, although you could update the wording. In today’s world, they
translate into the four fairly common communication styles described below:

The sanguine person would be the expressive or spirited style of communication. These
people speak in pictures. They invest a lot of emotion and energy in their communication and
often speak quickly. Putting their whole body into it. They are easily sidetracked onto a story
that may or may not illustrate the point they are trying to make. Because of their enthusiasm,
they are great team motivators. They are concerned about people and relationships. Their
high levels of energy can come on strong at times and their focus is usually on the bigger
picture, which means they sometimes miss the details or the proper order of things. These
people find conflict or differences of opinion invigorating and love to engage in a spirited
discussion. They love change and are constantly looking for new and exciting adventures.

Tile phlegmatic person – cool and persevering – translates into the technical or systematic
communication style. This style of communication is focused on facts and technical details.
Phlegmatic people have an orderly methodical way of approaching tasks, and their focus is
very much on the task, not on the people, emotions, or concerns that the task may evoke. The
focus is also more on the details necessary to accomplish a task. Sometimes the details
overwhelm the big picture and focus needs to be brought back to the context of the task.
People with this style think the facts should speak for themselves, and they are not as
comfortable with conflict. They need time to adapt to change and need to understand both the
logic of it and the steps involved.

Tile melancholic person who is soft hearted and oriented toward doing things for others
translates into the considerate or sympathetic communication style. A person with this
communication style is focused on people and relationships. They are good listeners and do
things for other people-sometimes to the detriment of getting things done for themselves.
They want to solicit everyone’s opinion and make sure everyone is comfortable with
whatever is required to get the job done. At times this focus on others can distract from the
task at hand. Because they are so concerned with the needs of others and smoothing over
issues, they do not like conflict. They believe that change threatens the status quo and tends
to make people feel uneasy, so people with this communication style, like phlegmatic people
need time to consider the changes in order to adapt to them.

G
The choleric temperament translates into the bold or direct style of communication. People
with this style are brief in their communication – the fewer words the better. They are big
picture thinkers and love to be involved in many things at once. They are focused on tasks
and outcomes and often forget that the people involved in carrying out the tasks have needs.
They don’t do detail work easily and as a result can often underestimate how much time it
takes to achieve the task. Because they are so direct, they often seem forceful and can be very
intimidating to others. They usually would welcome someone challenging them. But most
other styles are afraid to do so. They also thrive on change, the more the better.

A well-functioning team should have all of these communication styles for true effectiveness.
All teams need to focus on the task, and they need to take care of relationships in order to
achieve those tasks. They need the big picture perspective or the context of their work, and
they need the details to be identified and taken care of for success. We all have aspects of
each style within us. Some of us can easily move from one style to another and adapt our
style to the needs of the situation at hand-whether the focus is on tasks or relationships. For
others, a dominant style is very evident, and it is more challenging to see the situation from
the perspective of another style. The work environment can influence communication styles
either by the type of work that is required or by the predominance of one style reflected in
that environment. Some people use one style at work and another at home.

The good news about communication styles is that we have the ability to develop flexibility
in our styles. The greater the flexibility we have, the more skilled we usually are at handling
possible and actual conflicts. Usually it has to be relevant to us to do so, either because we
think it is important or because there are incentives in our environment to encourage it. The
key is that we have to want to become flexible with our communication style. As Henry Ford
said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!”

Exercise 05:

Tackling Hunger in Msekeni

A. There are not enough classrooms at the Msekeni primary school, so half the lessons

take place in the shade of yellow-blossomed acacia trees. Given this shortage, it

might seem odd that one of the school’s purpose-built classrooms has been emptied

of pupils and turned into a storeroom for sacks of grain. But it makes sense. Food

matters more than shelter.

B. Msekeni is in one of the poorer parts of Malawi, a landlocked southern

African country of exceptional beauty and great poverty. No war lays waster Malawi,

nor is the land unusually crowded or infertile, but Malawians still have trouble

finding enough to eat. Half of the children under five are underfed to the point of

stunting. Hunger blights most aspects of Malawian life, so the country is as good a

place as any to investigate how nutrition affects development, and vice versa. C. The

headmaster at Msekeni, Bernard Kumanda, has strong views on the subject. He

thinks food is a priceless teaching aid. Since 1999, his pupils have received free

school lunches. Donors such as the World Food Programme (WFP) provide the food:

those sacks of grain (mostly mixes maize and soyabean flour, enriched with vitamin

A) in that converted classroom. Local volunteers do the cooking –turning the dry

ingredients into a bland but nutritious slop, and spooning it out on to plastic plates.

The children line up in large crowds, cheerfully singing a song called “We are

getting porridge”.

D. When the school’s feeding programme was introduced, enrolment as

Msekeni doubled. Some of the pupils had switched from nearby schools that did not

give out free porridge, but most were children whose families had previously kept

them at home to work. These families were so poor that the long-term benefits of

education seemed unattractive when set against the short-term gain of sending

children out to gather firewood or help in the fields. One plate of porridge a day

completely altered the calculation. A child fed at school will not howl so plaintively
for food at home. Girls, who are more likely than boys to be kept out of school, are

given extra snacks to take home.

E. When a school takes in a horde of extra students from the poorest homes, you

would expect standards to drop. Anywhere in the world, poor kids tend to perform

worse than their better-off classmates. When the influx of new pupils is not

accompanied by any increase in the number of teachers, as was the case at

Msekeni, you would expect standards to fall even further. But they have not. Pass

rates at Msekeni improved dramatically, from 30% to 85%. Although this was an

exceptional example, the nationwide results of school feeding programmes were

still pretty good. On average, after a Malawian school started handing out free

food it attracted 38% more girls and 24% more boys. The pass rate for boys stayed

about the same, while for girls it improved by 9.5%.

F. Better nutrition makes for brighter children. Most immediately, well-fed children

find it easier to concentrate. It is hard to focus the mind on long division when

your stomach is screaming for food. Mr. Kumanda says that it used to be easy to

spot the kids who were really undernourished. “They were the ones who stared

into space and didn’t respond when you asked them questions,” he says. More

crucially, though, more and better food helps brains grow and develop. Like any

other organ in the body, the brain needs nutrition and exercise. But if it is starved

of the necessary calories, proteins and micronutrients, it is stunted, perhaps not as

severely as a muscle would be, but stunted nonetheless. That is why feeding
 children at schools works so well. And the fact that the effect of feeding was more

pronounced on girls than on boys gives a clue to who eats first in rural Malawian

households. It isn’t the girls. G. On the global scale, the good news is that people

are eating better than ever before. Homo sapiens has grown 50% bigger since the

industrial revolution. Three centuries ago, chronic malnutrition was more or less

universal. Now, it is extremely rare in rich countries. In developing countries,

where most people live, plates and rice bowls are also fuller than ever before. The

proportion of children under five in the developing world who are malnourished to

the point of stunting fell from 39% in 1990 to 30% in 2000, says the World Health

Organization (WHO). In other places, the battle against hunger is steadily being

won. Better nutrition is making people cleverer and more energetic, which will

help them grow more prosperous. And when they eventually join the ranks of the

well-off, they can start fretting about growing too fat.

Questions 1-7

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of heading below.

Write appropriate number (i-xi) in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings i Why better food helps

students’ learning ii Becoming the headmaster

of Msekeni iii Surprising use of school

premises iv Global perspective v Why students

 were undernourished vi Surprising academic

outcome vii An innovative program to help

girls viii How food program is operated ix

How food program affects school attendance x

None of the usual reasons xi How to maintain

academic standard

Exercise 06:

Bird Migration

　　A

　 　 Birds have many unique design features that enable them to perform such amazing feats of
endurance. They are equipped with lightweight, hollow bones, intricately designed feathers
providing both lift and thrust for rapid flight, navigation systems superior to any that man has
developed, and an ingenious heat conserving design that, among other things, concentrates all
blood circulation beneath layers of warm, waterproof plumage, leaving them fit to face life in
the harshest of climates. Their respiratory systems have to perform efficiently during
sustained flights at altitude, so they have a system of extracting oxygen from their lungs that
far exceeds that of any other animal. During the later stages of the summer breeding season,
when food is plentiful, their bodies are able to accumulate considerable layers of fat, in order
to provide sufficient energy for their long migratory flights.

　　B

　　The fundamental reason that birds migrate is to find adequate food during the winter months
when it is in short supply. This particularly applies to birds that breed in the temperate and
Arctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere, where food is abundant during the short growing
season. Many species can tolerate cold temperatures if food is plentiful, but when food is not
available they must migrate. However, intriguing questions remain.

　　C

　 　 One puzzling fact is that many birds journey much further than would be necessary just to
find food and good weather. Nobody knows, for instance, why British swallows, which could
presumably survive equally well if they spent the winter in equatorial Africa, instead fly
several thousands of miles further to their preferred winter home in South Africa’s Cape
Province. Another mystery involves the huge migrations performed by arctic terns and
mudflat-feeding shorebirds that breed close to Polar Regions. In general, the further north a
migrant species breeds, the further south it spends the winter. For arctic terns this necessitates
an annual round trip of 25,000 miles. Yet, en route to their final destination in far-flung
southern latitudes, all these individuals overfly other areas of seemingly suitable habitat
spanning two hemispheres. While we may not fully understand birds’ reasons for going to
particular places, we can marvel at their feats.

　　D

　　One of the greatest mysteries is how young birds know how to find the traditional wintering
areas without parental guidance. Very few adults migrate with juveniles in tow, and
youngsters may even have little or no inkling of their parents’ appearance. A familiar
example is that of the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another species’ nest and never
encounters its young again. It is mind boggling to consider that, once raised by its host
species, the young cuckoo makes it own way to ancestral wintering grounds in the tropics
before returning single-handedly to northern Europe the next season to seek out a mate
among its own kind. The obvious implication is that it inherits from its parents an inbuilt
route map and direction-finding capability, as well as a mental image of what another cuckoo
looks like. Yet nobody has the slightest idea as to how this is possible.

　　E

　 　 Mounting evidence has confirmed that birds use the positions of the sun and stars to obtain
compass directions. They seem also to be able to detect the earth’s magnetic field, probably
due to having minute crystals of magnetite in the region of their brains. However, true
navigation also requires an awareness of position and time, especially when lost. Experiments
have shown that after being taken thousands of miles over an unfamiliar landmass, birds are
still capable of returning rapidly to nest sites. Such phenomenal powers are the product of
computing a number of sophisticated cues, including an inborn map of the night sky and the
pull of the earth’s magnetic field. How the birds use their ‘instruments’ remains unknown,
but one thing is clear: they see the world with a superior sensory perception to ours. Most
small birds migrate at night and take their direction from the position of the setting sun.
However, as well as seeing the sun go down, they also seem to see the plane of polarized
light caused by it, which calibrates their compass. Traveling at night provides other benefits.
Daytime predators are avoided and the danger of dehydration due to flying for long periods in
warm, sunlit skies is reduced. Furthermore, at night the air is generally cool and less turbulent
and so conducive to sustained, stable flight.
　　F

　　Nevertheless, all journeys involve considerable risk, and part of the skill in arriving safely is
setting off at the right time. This means accurate weather forecasting, and utilizing favorable
winds. Birds are adept at both, and, in laboratory tests, some have been shown to detect the
minute difference in barometric pressure between the floor and ceiling of a room. Often birds
react to weather changes before there is any visible sign of them. Lapwings, which feed on
grassland, flee west from the Netherlands to the British Isles, France and Spain at the onset of
a cold snap. When the ground surface freezes the birds could starve. Yet they return to
Holland ahead of a thaw, their arrival linked to a pressure change presaging an improvement
in the weather.

　　G

　 　 In one instance a Welsh Manx shearwater carried to America and released was back in its
burrow on Skokholm Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast, one day before a letter announcing
its release! Conversely, each autumn a small number of North American birds are blown
across the Atlantic by fast-moving westerly tail winds. Not only do they arrive safely in
Europe, but, based on ringing evidence, some make it back to North America the following
spring, after probably spending the winter with European migrants in sunny African climes.

Questions 1-7

　　Reading passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

　　Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

　　Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of headings

i The best moment to migrate

ii The unexplained rejection of closer feeding ground

iii The influence of weather on the migration route

iv Physical characteristics that allow birds to migrate

v The main reason why birds migrate

vi The best wintering grounds for birds

vii Research findings on how birds migrate

viii Successful migration despite trouble of wind

ix Contrast between long-distance migration and short-distance migration

x Mysterious migration despite lack of teaching

Exercise 07

REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF FOOD PROMOTION TO

CHILDREN

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-7, which are based on Reading Passage
1 on the following pages.

This review was commissioned by the Food Standards Agency to examine the current
research evidence on:

• the extent and nature of food promotion to children

• the effect, if any, that this promotion has on their food knowledge, preferences and
behaviour.

A Children’s food promotion is dominated by television advertising, and the great

majority of this promotes the so-called ‘Big Four’ of pre-sugared breakfast cereals, soft-
drinks, confectionary and savoury snacks. In the last ten years advertising for fast food
outlets has rapidly increased. There is some evidence that the dominance of television has
recently begun to wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for
multi-faceted communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point
of sale activity. The advertised diet contrasts sharply with that recommended by public
health advisors, and themes of fun and fantasy or taste, rather than health and nutrition, are
used to promote it to children. Meanwhile, the recommended diet gets little promotional
support.

B There is plenty of evidence that children notice and enjoy food promotion. However,
establishing whether this actually influences them is a complex problem. The review tackled
it by looking at studies that had examined possible effects on what children know about
food, their food preferences, their actual food behaviour (both buying and eating), and their
health outcomes (eg. obesity or cholesterol levels). The majority of studies examined food
advertising, but a few examined other forms of food promotion. In terms of nutritional
knowledge, food advertising seems to have little influence on children’s general perceptions
of what constitutes a healthy diet, but, in certain contexts, it does have an effect on more
specific types of nutritional knowledge. For example, seeing soft drink and cereal adverts
reduced primary aged children’s ability to determine correctly whether or not certain
products contained real fruit.

C The review also found evidence that food promotion influences children’s food
preferences and their purchase behaviour. A study of primary school children, for instance,
found that exposure to advertising influenced which foods they claimed to like; and another
showed that labelling and signage on a vending machine had an effect on what was bought
by secondary school pupils. A number of studies have also shown that food advertising can
influence what children eat. One, for example, showed that advertising influenced a primary
class’s choice of daily snack at playtime.

D The next step, of trying to establish whether or not a link exists between food
promotion and diet or obesity, is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real
world settings. A number of studies have attempted this by using amount of television
viewing as a proxy for exposure to television advertising. They have established a clear link
between television viewing and diet, obesity, and cholesterol levels. It is impossible to say,
however, whether this effect is caused by the advertising, the sedentary nature of television
viewing or snacking that might take place whilst viewing. One study resolved this problem
by taking a detailed diary of children’s viewing habits. This showed that the more food
adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories they consumed.

E Thus the literature does suggest food promotion is influencing children’s diet in a
number of ways. This does not amount to proof; as noted above with this kind of research,
incontrovertible proof simply isn’t attainable. Nor do all studies point to this conclusion;
several have not found an effect. In addition, very few studies have attempted to measure
how strong these effects are relative to other factors influencing children’s food choices.
Nonetheless, many studies have found clear effects and they have used sophisticated
methodologies that make it possible to determine that i) these effects are not just due to
chance; ii) they are independent of other factors that may influence diet, such as parents’
eating habits or attitudes; and iii) they occur at a brand and category level.

F Furthermore, two factors suggest that these findings actually downplay the effect that
food promotion has on children. First, the literature focuses principally on television
advertising; the cumulative effect of this combined with other forms of promotion and
marketing is likely to be significantly greater. Second, the studies have looked at direct
effects on individual children, and understate indirect influences. For example, promotion
for fast food outlets may not only influence the child, but also encourage parents to take
them for meals and reinforce the idea that this is a normal and desirable behaviour.

G This does not amount to proof of an effect, but in our view does provide sufficient
evidence to conclude that an effect exists. The debate should now shift to what action is
needed, and specifically to how the power of commercial marketing can be used to bring
about improvements in young people’s eating.

Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write
the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i General points of agreements and disagreements ofresearchers

 Living Dunes
When you think of a sand dune, you probably picture a barren pile of lifeless sand. But sand
dunes are actually dynamic natural structures. They grow, shift and travel. They crawl with
living things. Some sand dunes even sing.

A Although no more than a pile of wind-blown sand, dunes can roll over trees and
buildings, march relentlessly across highways, devour vehicles on its path, and threaten
crops and factories in Africa, the Middle East, and China. In some places, killer dunes even
roll in and swallow up towns. Entire villages have disappeared under the sand. In a few
instances the government built new villages for those displaced only to find that new
villages themselves were buried several years later. Preventing sand dunes from
overwhelming cities and agricultural areas has become a priority for the United Nations
Environment Program.
B Some of the most significant experimental measurements on sand movement were
performed by Ralph Bagnold, a British engineer who worked in Egypt prior to World War
II. Bagnold investigated the physics of particles moving through the atmosphere and
deposited by wind. He recognised two basic dune types, the crescentic dune, which he called
“barchan,” and the linear dune, which he called longitudinal or “sief ’ (Arabic for “sword”).
The crescentic barchan dune is the most common type of sand dune. As its name suggests,
this dune is shaped like a crescent moon with points at each end, and it is usually wider than
it is long. Some types of barchan dunes move faster over desert surfaces than any other type
of dune. The linear dune is straighter than the crescentic dune with ridges as its prominent
feature. Unlike crescentic dunes, linear dunes are longer than they are wide—in fact, some
are more than 100 miles (about 160 kilometers) long. Dunes can also be comprised of
smaller dunes of different types, called complex dunes.

C Despite the complicated dynamics of dune formation, Bagnold noted that a sand dune
generally needs the following three things to form: a large amount of loose sand in an area
with little vegetation—usually on the coast or in a dried-up river, lake or sea bed; a wind or
breeze to move the grains of sand; and an obstacle, which could be as small as a rock or as
big as a tree, that causes the sand to lose momentum and settle. Where these three variables
merge, a sand dune forms.

D As the wind picks up the sand, the sand travels, but generally only about an inch or
two above the ground, until an obstacle causes it to stop. The heaviest grains settle against
the obstacle, and a small ridge or bump forms. The lighter grains deposit themselves on the
other side of the obstacle. Wind continues to move sand up to the top of the pile until the
pile is so steep that it collapses under its own weight. The collapsing sand comes to rest
when it reaches just the right steepness to keep the dune stable. The repeating cycle of sand
inching up the windward side to the dune crest, then slipping down the dune’s slip face
allows the dune to inch forward, migrating in the direction the wind blows.

E Depending on the speed and direction of the wind and the weight of the local sand,
dunes will develop into different shapes and sizes. Stronger winds tend to make taller dunes;
gentler winds tend to spread them out. If the direction of the wind generally is the same over
the years, dunes gradually shift in that direction. But a dune is “a curi-ously dynamic
creature”, wrote Farouk El-Baz in National Geographic. Once formed, a dune can grow,
change shape, move with the wind and even breed new dunes. Some of these offspring may
be carried on the back of the mother dune. Others are bom and race downwind, outpacing
their parents.

F Sand dunes even can be heard ‘singing’ in more than 30 locations worldwide, and in
each place the sounds have their own characteristic frequency, or note. When the thirteenth
century explorer Marco Polo encountered the weird and wonderful noises made by desert
sand dunes, he attributed them to evil spirits. The sound is unearthly. The volume is also
unnerving. Adding to the tone’s otherworldliness is the inability of the human ear to localise
the source of the noise. Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS and
his colleagues have been delving deeper into dunes in Morocco, Chile, China and Oman, and
believe they can now explain the exact mechanism behind this acoustic phenomenon.

G The group hauled sand back to the laboratory and set it up in channels with
automated pushing plates. The sands still sang, proving that the dune itself was not needed
to act as a resonating body for the sound, as some researchers had theorised. To make the
booming sound, the grains have to be of a small range of sizes, all alike in shape: well-
rounded. Douady’s key discovery was that this synchronised frequency—which determines
the tone of sound—is the result of the grain size. The larger the grain, the lower the key. He
has successfully predicted the notes emitted by dunes in Morocco, Chile and the US simply
by measuring the size of the grains they contain. Douady also discovered that the singing
grains had some kind of varnish or a smooth coating of various minerals: silicon, iron and
manganese, which probably formed on the sand when the dunes once lay beneath an ancient
ocean. But in the muted grains this coat had been worn away, which explains why only some
dunes can sing. He admits he is unsure exactly what role the coating plays in producing the
noise. The mysterious dunes, it seems, aren’t quite ready yet to give up all of their secrets.

Questions 1-7
Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the
correct number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
Exercise 09:

Accidental Scientists

A A paradox lies close to the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what you
are looking for, finding it can hardly count as a discovery, since it was fully anticipated. But
if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot know
when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the question. In the philosophy of
science, these extremes map onto the purist forms of deductivism and inductivism: In the
former, the outcome is supposed to be logically contained in the premises you start with; in
the latter, you are recommended to start with no expectations whatsoever and see what turns
up.

B As in so many things, the ideal position is widely supposed to reside somewhere in

between these two impossible-to-realise extremes. You want to have a good enough idea of
what you are looking for to be surprised when you find something else of value, and you
want to be ignorant enough of your end point that you can entertain alternative outcomes.
Scientific discovery should, therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one.
Serendipity is a word that expresses a position something like that. It’s a fascinating word,
and the late Robert King Merton—“the father of the sociology of science”—liked it well
enough to compose its biography, assisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.
C The word did not appear in the published literature until the early 19th century and
did not become well enough known to use without explanation until sometime in the first
third of the 20th century. Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”,
specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The
first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole. He
explained that it came from the fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip (the ancient
name for Ceylon, or present day Sri Lanka), whose heroes “were always making discoveries,
by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of’.

D Antiquarians, following Walpole, found use for it, as they were always rummaging
about for curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant surprises were not unknown to them.
Some people just seemed to have a knack for that sort of thing, and serendipity was used to
express that special capacity. The other community that came to dwell on serendipity to say
something important about their practice was that of scientists, and here usages cut to the
heart of the matter and were often vigorously contested. Many scientists, including the
Flarvard physiologist Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medawar,
liked to emphasise how much of scientific discovery was unplanned and even accidental.
One of the examples is Hans Christian Orsted’s discovery of electromagnetism when he
unintentionally brought a current-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. Rheto-ric
about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as Medawar insisted,
“There is no such thing as The Scientific Method,” no way at all of systematis-ing the
process of discovery. Really important discoveries had a way of showing up when they had
a mind to do so and not when you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some
book collectors, had a happy knack; maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a
personal skill or capacity.

E Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to the
situation; some treated serendipity as a personal capacity; many others exploited the
ambiguity of the notion. Yet what Cannon and Medawar took as a benign nose-thumbing at
Dreams of
Method, other scientists found incendiary. To say that science had a significant serendipitous
aspect was taken by some as dangerous denigration. If scientific discovery were really
accidental, then what was the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, the
aphorism of choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis
Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Accidents may happen, and things may turn up
unplanned and unforeseen, as one is looking for something else, but the ability to notice
such events, to see their potential bearing and meaning, to exploit their occurrence and make
constructive use of them—these are the results of systematic mental preparation. What
seems like an accident is just another form of expertise. On closer inspection, it is insisted,
accident dissolves into sagacity.
F The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and had its greatest
resonance was that connected with the idea of planned science. The serendipitists were not
all inhab-itants of academic ivory towers. As Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-
20th-century American pioneers of industrial research—Willis Whitney and Irving
Langmuir, both of General Electric—made much play of serendipity, in the course of
arguing against overly rigid research planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about
the certainty and ratio-nality of the research process did much harm and that a mature
acceptance of uncertainty was far more likely to result in productive research policies. For
his own part, Langmuir said that satisfactory outcomes “occurred as though we were just
drifting with the wind. These things came about by accident.” If there is no very determinate
relationship between cause and effect in research, he said, “then planning does not get us
very far.” So, from within the bowels of corporate capitalism came powerful arguments, by
way of serendipity, for scientific spontane-ity and autonomy. The notion that industry was
invariably committed to the regimentation of scientific research just doesn’t wash.

G For Merton himself—who one supposes must have been the senior author-serendipity
rep-resented the keystone in the arch of his social scientific work. In 1936, as a very young
man, Merton wrote a seminal essay on “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive
Social Action.” It is, he argued, the nature of social action that what one intends is rarely
what one gets: Intending to provide resources for buttressing Christian religion, the natural
philoso-phers of the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for secularism; people
wanting to be alone with nature in Yosemite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just
don’t know enough—and we can never know enough—to ensure that the past is an adequate
guide to the future: Uncertainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All
social action, including that undertaken with the best evidence and formulated according to
the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its consequences.

Questions 1-6
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write
the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
 List of Headings

i Examples of some scientific discoveries

ii Horace Walpole’s fairy tale

iii Resolving the contradiction

Exercise 10

Wealth in A Cold Climate

Latitude is crucial to a nation’s economic strength.

A Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when inspiration struck.
“There was this anecdote about the great yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in
1793,” Masters recalls. “This epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came.” The
inclement weather froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover.

B If weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the
historical fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring
economic mysteries of all—why are almost all the wealthy, industrialised nations to be
found at latitudes above 40 degrees? After two years of research, he thinks that he has found
a piece of the puzzle. Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in Indiana,
and Margaret McMillan at Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are among the
factors that distinguish rich nations from poor ones. Their study is published this month in
the Journal of Economic Growth. The pair speculate that cold snaps have two main benefits
– they freeze pests that would otherwise destroy crops, and also freeze organisms, such as
mosquitoes, that carry disease. The result is agricultural abundance and a big workforce.

C The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for
countries, the second climate data from the University of East Anglia. They found a curious
tally between the sets. Countries having five or more frosty days a month are uniformly rich,
those with fewer than five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day figure is
important; it could be the minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. Masters says: “For
example, Finland is a small country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a small country
that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps climate has something to do with that.” In fact, limited
frosts bring huge benefits to farmers. The chills kill insects or render them inactive; cold
weather slows the break-up of plant and animal material in the soil, allowing it to become
richer; and frosts ensure a build-up of moisture in the ground for spring, reducing
dependence on seasonal rains. There are exceptions to the “cold equals rich” argument.
There are well-heeled tropical places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, a result of their
superior trading positions. Like-wise, not all European countries are moneyed in the former
communist colonies, economic potential was crushed by politics.

D Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor – the wealth of
nations is too complicated to be attributable to just one factor. Climate, he feels, somehow
combines with other factors such as the presence of institutions, including governments, and
access to trading routes to determine whether a country will do well. Traditionally, Masters
says, economists thought that institutions had the biggest effect on the economy, because
they brought order to a country in the form of, for example, laws and property rights. With
order, so the thinking went, came affluence. “But there are some problems that even
countries with institutions have not been able to get around,” he says. “My feeling is that, as
countries get richer, they get better institutions. And the accumulation of wealth and
improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a favourable environment,
including climate.”
E This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and
destined to remain penniless. Instead, richer countries should change the way in which
foreign aid is given. Instead of aid being geared towards improving governance, it should be
spent on technology to improve agriculture and to combat disease. Masters cites one
example: “There are regions in India that have been provided with irrigation, agricultural
productivity has gone up and there has been an improvement in health.” Supplying vaccines
against tropical diseases and developing crop varieties that can grow in the tropics would
break the poverty cycle.

F Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations,
citing anthropological, climatic and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the
most affluent. In 350 BC, Aristotle observed that “those who live in a cold climate…are full
of spirit”. Jared Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in
his book Guns, Germs and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa and
the Americas are aligned north-south. So, in Europe, crops can spread quickly across
latitudes because climates are similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat,
spread quickly from the Middle East into Europe; it took twice as long for corn to spread
from Mexico to what is now the eastern United States. This easy movement along similar
latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant a faster dissemination of other technologies such
as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates. The region also boasted domesticated
livestock, which could provide meat, wool and motive power in the fields. Blessed with such
natural advantages, Eurasia was bound to take off economically.

G John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, two US economists, have also pointed out striking
correlations between the geographical location of countries and their wealth. They note that
tropical countries between 23.45 degrees north and south of the equator are nearly all poor.
In an article for the Harvard International Review, they concluded that “development surely
seems to favour the temperate-zone economies, especially those in the northern hemisphere,
and those that have managed to avoid both socialism and the ravages of war”. But Masters
cautions against geographical determinism, the idea that tropical countries are beyond hope:
“Human health and agriculture can be made better through scientific and technological
research,” he says, “so we shouldn’t be writing off these countries. Take Singapore: without
air conditioning, it wouldn’t be rich.”

Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-Gfrom the list of headings below.

Write the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
Exercise 11:

Morse Code
Morse code is being replaced by a new satellite-based system for sending dis-tress calls at
sea. Its dots and dashes have had a good run for their money.

A “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” Surprisingly this
message, which flashed over the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January
31st 1997, was not a desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it
was a message signal-ling the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French
waters. Since 1992 countries around the world have been decommissioning their Morse
equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-offs, as the world’s shipping switches over to a
new satellite-based arrangement, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. The final
deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end
of art era.

B The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology
commonly associ-ated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said
to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic, At the
time Morse Was a painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ships passengers
informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the
idea of building an electric telegraph to send messages in codes. Other inventors had been
trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered
as “the father of the tele-graph” partly thanks to his single-mindedness—it was 12 years, for
example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line—but also
for technical reasons.

C Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the needle telegraph
developed by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morses design was very
simple: it required little more than a “key” (essentially, a spring-loaded switch) to send
messages, a clicking “sounder” to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although
Morses hardware was simple, there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had
to learn the special code of dots and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had
not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first
code, sketched in his notebook during that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to
represent the digits 0 to 9. Morses idea was that messages would consist of strings of
numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse
later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail, devised the
Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and
dashes.

D At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morses telegraph seem
impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs, Cookes and
Wheatstones telegraph, for example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-
shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires
between telegraph stations. Morses telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon
transpired, had a natural facility for Morse code.
E As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly
became domi-nant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct
connections between the telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to
participate, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few more years.) By this time Morse code
had been revised to allow for accents and other foreign characters, resulting in a split
between American and International Morse that continues to this day.

F On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected

from a tiny rotating mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct
telegraphic sub-culture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy
based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class
operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press
traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow,
inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their
Morse code improved, however, rural opera-tors found that their new-found skill was a
passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon, swelled the ranks of the emerging
middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of
the operators in the Western
Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female.

G In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global

community of telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many
adulatory speeches, Morse sat down behind an operators table and, placing his finger on a
key connected to every telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final farewell to a standing
ovation. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than
650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with
Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the
Internet is today often called an “information superhighway”, the telegraph was described in
its day as an “instantaneous highway of thought”,

H But by the 1890s the Morse telegraph’s heyday as a cutting-edge technology was
coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs,
precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse
code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology:
wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its
potential for use at sea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate
with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual
range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and
an Italian warship 19km (12 miles) away. By 1910, Morse radio equipment was
commonplace on ships.
Questions 1-8
Reading passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list of headings below. Write the
correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i The advantage of Morse’s invention

ii A suitable job for women

iii Morse’s invention was developed