The Innovation of Grocery Stores

A. At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American grocery stores offered
comprehensive services: the customers would ask help from the people behind the counters
(called clerks) for the items they liked, and then the clerks would wrap the items up. For the
purpose of saving time, customers had to ask delivery boys or go in person to send the lists of
what they intended to buy to the stores in advance and then went to pay for the goods later.
Generally speaking, these grocery stores sold only one brand for each item. Such early chain
stores as A&P stores, although containing full services, were very time-consuming and
inefficient for the purchase.

B. Born in Virginia, Clarence Saunders left school at the age of 14 in 1895 to work first as a
clerk in a grocery store. During his working in the store, he found that it was very inefficient
for people to buy things there. Without the assistance of computers at that time, shopping was
performed in a quite backward way. Having noticed that this inconvenient shopping mode
could lead to tremendous consumption of time and money, Saunders, with great enthusiasm
and innovation, proposed an unprecedented solution—let the consumers do self-service in the
process of shopping—which might bring a thorough revolution to the whole industry.

C. In 1902, Saunders moved to Memphis to put his perspective into practice, that is, to
establish a grocery wholesale cooperative. In his newly designed grocery store, he divided the
store into three different areas: A 'front lobby’ served as an entrance, an exit, and included
checkouts at the front. ‘A sales department’ was deliberately designed to allow customers to
wander around the aisle and select their needed groceries. In this way, the clerks would not
do the unnecessary work but arrange more delicate aisle and shelves to display the goods and
enable the customers to browse through all the items. In the gallery above the sales
department, supervisors can monitor the customers without disturbing them. ‘Stockroom’,
where large fridges were placed to maintain fresh products, is another section of his grocery
store only for the staff to enter. Also, this new shopping design and layout could
accommodate more customers to go shopping simultaneously and even lead to some
unimaginable phenomena: impulse buying and later supermarket.

D. On September 6, 1916, Saunders performed the self-service revolution in the USA by
opening the first Piggly Wiggly featured by the turnstile at the entrance store at 79 Jefferson
Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Quite distinct from those in other grocery stores, customers in
Piggly Wiggly chose the goods on the shelves and paid the items all by themselves. Inside the
Piggly Wiggly, shoppers were not at the mercy of staff. They were free to roam the store,
check out the products and get what they needed by their own hands. There, the items were
clearly priced, and no one forced customers to buy the things they did not need. As a matter
of fact, the biggest benefit that the Piggly Wiggly brought to customers was the money-
saving effect. Self-service was optimistic for the improvement. ‘It is good for both the
consumer and retailer because it cuts costs,’ noted George T. Haley, a professor at the
University of New Haven and director of the Centre for International Industry
Competitiveness, ‘if you look at the way in which grocery stores (previous to Piggly Wiggly
and Alpha Beta) were operated, what you can find is that there are a great number of workers
involved, and labour is a major expense.’ Fortunately, the chain stores such as Piggly Wiggly
cut the fat.
E. Piggly Wiggly and this kind of self-service stores soared at that time. In the first year,
Saunders opened nine branches in Memphis. Meanwhile, Saunders immediately applied a
patent for the self-service concept and began franchising Piggly Wiggly stores. Thanks to the
employment of self-service and franchising, the number of Piggly Wiggly had increased to
nearly 1,300 by 1923. Piggly Wiggly sold $100 million (worth $1.3 billion today) in
groceries, which made it the third-biggest grocery retailer in the nation. After that, this chain
store experienced company listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with the stocks
doubling from late 1922 to March 1923. Saunders contributed significantly to the perfect
design and layout of grocery stores. In order to keep the flow rate smooth, Saunders even
invented the turnstile to replace the common entrance mode.

F. Clarence Saunders died in 1953, leaving abundant legacies mainly symbolised by Piggly
Wiggly, the pattern of which spread extensively and lasted permanently.

Questions 1-5

Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1      layout of Clarence Saunders’ store
2      a reference to a reduction by chain stores in labour costs
3      how Clarence Saunders’ idea had been carried out
4      how people used to shop before Clarence Saunders’ stores opened
5      a description of economic success brought by Clarence Saunders’s stores

Questions 6-10
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Complete the sentences below.

Choose  NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

Clarence Saunders’ first job was as 6   in a grocery store.
In Clarence Saunders’ store, people should pay for goods in the 7 

 
Customers would be under surveillance when shopping in the 8 
Another area in his store was called '9  ’, which was only accessible to the internal
staff.
 
In Clarence Saunders’ shopping design, much work was done by the 10  .

Questions 11-13
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Choose the correct letter,  A, B, C or D,

Write the correct letter in  boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
11

Why did Clarence Saunders want to propel the improvement of grocery stores at his age?
 A  He wanted to transfer business to retailing.
 B  He thought it was profitable.
 C  He thought this could enable customers’ life to be more convenient.
 D  He wanted to create a new shop by himself.

12

The Piggly Wiggly store was

 A.  located in Virginia.
 B  mainly featured self-service.
 C  initially very unpopular with customers.
 D  developed with a pessimistic future.

13

Today, the main thing associated with Clarence Saunders is that

 A  a fully automatic store system opened soon near his first store.
 B  his Piggly Wiggly store was very popular at that time.
 C  his name was usually connected with Piggly Wiggly stores.
 D  his name was printed together with that of his famous store.

The Study of Chimpanzee Culture

A After studying the similarities between chimpanzees and humans for years, researchers
have recognised these resemblances run much deeper than anyone first thought in the latest
decade. For instance, the nut cracking observed in the Tai Forest is not a simple chimpanzee
behaviour, but a separate adaptation found only in that particular part of Africa, as well as a
trait which is considered to be an expression of chimpanzee culture by biologists. These
researchers frequently quote the word ‘culture’ to describe elementary animal behaviours,
like the regional dialects of different species of songbirds, but it turns out that the rich and
varied cultural traditions chimpanzees enjoyed rank secondly in complexity only to human
traditions.

B During the past two years, the major research group which studies chimpanzees
collaborated unprecedentedly and documented some distinct cultural patterns, ranging from
animals’ use of tools to their forms of communication and social customs. This emerging
picture of chimpanzees affects how human beings ponder upon these amazing creatures.
Also, it alters our conception of human uniqueness and shows us the extraordinary ability of
our ancient ancestors to create cultures.

C Although we know that Homo sapiens and Pan Troglodytes have coexisted for hundreds of
millennia and their genetic similarities surpass 98 per cent, we still knew next to nothing
about chimpanzee behaviour in the wild until 40 years ago. All this began to change in the
1960s when Toshisada Nishida of Kyoto University in Japan and renowned British
primatologist Jane Goodall launched their studies of wild chimpanzees at two field sites in
Tanzania. (Goodall’s research station at Gombe—the first of its kind—is more famous, but
Nishida’s site at Mahale is the second oldest chimpanzee research site in the world.)

D During these primary studies, as the chimpanzees became more and more accustomed to
close observation, the remarkable discoveries emerged. Researchers witnessed a variety of
unexpected behaviours, ranging from fashioning and using tools, hunting, meat eating, food
sharing to lethal fights between members of neighbouring communities.

E In 1973, 13 forms of tool use and 8 social activities which appeared to differ between the
Gombe chimpanzees and chimpanzee species elsewhere were recorded by Goodall. She
speculated that some variations shared what she referred to as a ‘cultural origin’. But what
exactly did Goodall mean by ‘culture’? According to the Oxford Encyclopedic English
Dictionary, culture is defined as ‘the customs. . .and achievements of a particular time or
people.’ The diversity of human cultures extends from technological variations to marriage
rituals, from culinary habits to myths and legends. Of course, animals do not have myths and
legends, but they do share the capacity to pass on behavioural traits from one generation to
another, not through their genes but via learning. From biologists’ view, this is the
fundamental criterion for a cultural trait—something can be learnt by observing the
established skills of others and then passed on to following generations.

F What are the implications for chimpanzees themselves? We must place a high value upon
the tragic loss of chimpanzees, who are decimated just when finally we are coming to
appreciate these astonishing animals more completely. The population of chimpanzees has
plummeted and continued to fall due to illegal trapping, logging and, most recently, the
bushmeat trade within the past century. The latter is particularly alarming because logging
has driven roadways, which are now used to ship wild animal meat—including chimpanzee
meat to consumers as far afield as Europe, into forests. Such destruction threatens not only
the animals themselves but also a host of fascinatingly different ape cultures.

G However, the cultural richness of the ape may contribute to its salvation. For example, the
conservation efforts have already altered the attitudes of some local people. After several
organisations showed videotapes illustrating the cognitive prowess of chimpanzees, one
Zairian viewer was heard to exclaim, ‘Ah, this ape is so like me, I can no longer eat him.’

H How did an international team of chimpanzee experts perform the most comprehensive
survey of the animals ever attempted? Although scientists have been delving into chimpanzee
culture for several decades, sometimes their studies contained a fatal defect. So far, most
attempts to document cultural diversity among chimpanzees have solely relied upon officially
published accounts of the behaviours reported at each research site. But this approach
probably neglects a good deal of cultural variation for three reasons.
I First, scientists normally don’t publish an extensive list of all the activities they do not see
at a particular location. Yet this is the very information we need to know—which behaviours
were and were not observed at each site. Second, there are many reports describing
chimpanzee behaviours without expressing how common they are; without this information,
we can’t determine whether a particular action was a transient phenomenon or a routine event
that should be considered part of its culture. Finally, researchers’ description of potentially
significant chimpanzee behaviours often lacks sufficient detail, which makes it difficult for
scientists from other spots to report the presence or absence of the activities.

J To tackle these problems, my colleague and I determined to take a new approach. We asked
field researchers at each site to list all the behaviours which they suspected were local
traditions. With this information, we assembled a comprehensive list of 65 candidates for
cultural behaviours.

K Then we distributed our list to team leaders at each site. They consulted with their
colleagues and classified each behaviour regarding its occurrence or absence in the
chimpanzee community. The major brackets contained customary behaviour (occurs in most
or all of the able-bodied members of at least one age or sex class, such as all adult males),
habitual (less common than customary but occurs repeatedly in several individuals), present
(observed at the site but not habitual), absent (never seen), and unknown.

Questions 14-18
 Show Notepad

Reading Passage 2 has eleven paragraphs,  A-K.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14      an approach to research on chimpanzees' culture that is only based on
official sources
15      mention of a new system designed by two scientists who aim to solve
the problem
16      reasons why previous research on ape culture is problematic
17      new classification of data observed or collected
18      an example showing that the cultural traits of chimpanzees can lead to a
change in local people’s attitude towards their preservation

Questions 19-23
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Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
 FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

19      The research found that scientists can make chimpanzees possess the
same complex culture as human beings.
20      Humans and apes lived together long time ago and shared most of
their genetic substance.
21      Even Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall’s beginning studies observed
many surprising features of civilised behaviours among chimpanzees.
22      Chimpanzees, like humans, have the ability to deliver cultural
behaviours mostly from genetic inheritance.
23      For decades, researchers have investigated chimpanzees by data
obtained from both unobserved and observed approaches.

Questions 24-27
 Show Notepad

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 24-27 on your answer sheet.

When did the unexpected discoveries of chimpanzee behaviour start?

24 

Which country is the researching site of Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall?
25 

What did the chimpanzee have to get used to in the initial study?
26 

What term did Jane Goodall suggest to describe chimpanzees in different regions using
different tools in 1973?
27 

Quantitative Research in Education

Many education researchers used to work on the assumption that children experience
different phases of development, and that they cannot execute the most advanced level of
cognitive operation until they have reached the most advanced forms of cognitive process.
For example, one researcher Piaget had a well-known experiment in which he asked the
children to compare the amount of liquid in containers with different shapes. Those
containers had the same capacity, but even when the young children were demonstrated that
the same amount of fluid could be poured between the containers, many of them still believed
one was larger than the other. Piaget concluded that the children were incapable of
performing the logical task in figuring out that the two containers were the same size even
though they had different shapes, because their cognitive development had not reached the
necessary phase. Critics on his work, such as Donaldson, have questioned this interpretation.
They point out the possibility that the children were just unwilling to play the experimenter’s
game, or that they did not quite understand the question asked by the experimenter. These
criticisms surely do state the facts, but more importantly, it suggests that experiments are
social situations where interpersonal interactions take place. The implication here is that
Piaget’s investigation and his attempts to replicate it are not solely about measuring the
children’s capabilities of logical thinking, but also the degree to which they could understand
the directions for them, their willingness to comply with these requirements, how well the
experimenters did in communicating the requirements and in motivating those children, etc.

The same kinds of criticisms have been targeted to psychological and educational tests. For
instance, Mehan argues that the subjects might interpret the test questions in a way different
from that meant by the experimenter. In a language development test, researchers show
children a picture of a medieval fortress, complete with moat, drawbridge, parapets and three
initial consonants in it: D, C, and G. The children are required to circle the correct initial
consonant for ‘castle’. The answer is C, but many kids choose D. When asked what the name
of the building was, the children responded ‘Disneyland’. They adopted the reasoning line
expected by the experimenter but got to the wrong substantive answer. The score sheet with
the wrong answers does not include in it a child’s lack of reasoning capacity; it only records
that the children gave a different answer rather than the one the tester expected.

Here we are constantly getting questions about how valid the measures are where the findings
of the quantitative research are usually based. Some scholars such as Donaldson consider
these as technical issues, which can be resolved through more rigorous experimentation. In
contrast, others like Mehan reckon that the problems are not merely with particular
experiments or tests, but they might legitimately jeopardise the validity of all researches of
this type.

Meanwhile, there are also questions regarding the assumption in the logic of quantitative
educational research that causes can be identified through physical and/or statistical
manipulation of the variables. Critics argue that this does not take into consideration the
nature of human social life by assuming it to be made up of static, mechanical causal
relationships, while in reality, it includes complicated procedures of interpretation and
negotiation, which do not come with determinate results. From this perspective, it is not clear
that we can understand the pattern and mechanism behind people’s behaviours simply in
terms of the casual relationships, which are the focuses of quantitative research. It is implied
that social life is much more contextually variable and complex.

Such criticisms of quantitative educational research have also inspired more and more
educational researchers to adopt qualitative methodologies during the last three or four
decades. These researchers have steered away from measuring and manipulating variables
experimentally or statistically. There are many forms of qualitative research, which is loosely
illustrated by terms like ‘ethnography’, ‘case study’, ‘participant observation’, ‘life history’,
‘unstructured interviewing’, ‘discourse analysis’ and so on. Generally speaking, though, it
has characteristics as follows:

Qualitative researches have an intensive focus on exploring the nature of certain phenomena
in the field of education, instead of setting out to test hypotheses about them. It also inclines
to deal with ‘unstructured data’, which refers to the kind of data that have not been coded
during the collection process regarding a closed set of analytical categories. As a result, when
engaging in observation, qualitative researchers use audio or video devices to record what
happens or write in detail open-ended field-notes, instead of coding behaviour concerning a
pre-determined set of categories, which is what quantitative researchers typically would do
when conducting ‘systematic observation’. Similarly, in an interview, interviewers will ask
open-ended questions instead of ones that require specific predefined answers of the kind
typical, like in a postal questionnaire. Actually, qualitative interviews are often designed to
resemble casual conversations.

The primary forms of data analysis include verbal description and explanations and involve
explicit interpretations of both the meanings and functions of human behaviours. At most,
quantification and statistical analysis only play a subordinate role. The sociology of education
and evaluation studies were the two areas of educational research where-criticism of
quantitative research and the development of qualitative methodologies initially emerged in
the most intense way. A series of studies conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert in a
boys’ grammar school, a boys’ secondary modem school, and a girls’ grammar school in
Britain in the 1960s marked the beginning of the trend towards qualitative research in the
sociology of education. Researchers employed an ethnographic or participant observation
approach, although they did also collect some quantitative data, for instance on friendship
patterns among the students. These researchers observed lessons, interviewed both the
teachers and the students, and made the most of school records. They studied the schools for
a considerable amount of time and spent plenty of months gathering data and tracking
changes over all these years.

Questions 28-32
 Show Notepad

Look at the following statements or descriptions (Questions  28-32) and the list of people
below.

Match each statement or description with the correct person or people, A, B, C or D

Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Lists of People

A Piaget

B Mehan
 C Donaldson

D Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert

28      A wrong answer indicates more of a child’s different perspective than

incompetence in reasoning.
29      Logical reasoning involving in the experiment is beyond children’s
cognitive development.
30      Children’s reluctance to comply with the game rules or
miscommunication may be another explanation.
31      There is evidence of a scientific observation approach to research.
32      There is a flawed detail in experiments on children's language development.

Questions 33-36
 Show Notepad

Complete the sentences below.

Choose  NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

In Piaget’s experiment, he asked the children to distinguish the amount of 33   in
different containers.
In response to Mehan’s question, subjects are more inclined to answer with the wrong answer
'‘34  ’' instead of the correct answer C.
Some people criticised the result of Piaget experiment, but Donaldson thought the flaw could
be rectified by 35 
Most qualitative research conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert was done in
a 36 

Questions 37-39
 Show Notepad

Choose  THREE letters, A-F.

Write the correct letters in boxes  37-39 on your answer sheet.

The list below includes characteristics of the ‘qualitative research’.

Which THREE are mentioned by the writer of the passage?

  A  Coding behaviour in terms of a predefined set of categories
 B  Designing an interview as an easy conversation
 C  Working with well-organised data in a closed set of analytical categories
 D  Full of details instead of loads of data in questionnaires
 E  Asking to give open-ended answers in questionnaires
 F  Recording the researching situation and applying note-taking

Question 40
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter,  A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in  box 40 on your answer sheet.

 
40

What is the main idea of the passage?

 A  to prove that quantitative research is most applicable to children’s education
 B  to illustrate the society lacks of deep comprehension of educational approach
 C  to explain the ideas of quantitative research and the characteristics of the related
criticisms
 D  to imply qualitative research is a flawless method compared with quantitative one

What the Managers Really Do?

When students graduate and first enter the workforce, the most common choice is to find an
entry-level position. This can be a job such as an unpaid internship, an assistant, a secretary,
or a junior partner position. Traditionally, we start with simpler jobs and work our way up.
Young professionals start out with a plan to become senior partners, associates, or even
managers of a workplace. However, these promotions can be few and far between, leaving
many young professionals unfamiliar with management experience. An important step is
understanding the role and responsibilities of a person in a managing position. Managers are
organisational members who are responsible for the work performance of other
organisational members. Managers have formal authority to use organisational resources and
to make decisions. Managers at different levels of the organisation engage in different
amounts of time on the four managerial functions of planning, organising, leading, and
controlling.

However, as many professionals already know, managing styles can be very different
depending on where you work. Some managing styles are strictly hierarchical. Other
managing styles can be more casual and relaxed, where the manager may act more like a
team member rather than a strict boss. Many researchers have created a more scientific
approach in studying these different approaches to managing. In the 1960s, researcher Henry
Mintzberg created a seminal organisational model using three categories. These categories
represent three major functional approaches, which are designated as interpersonal,
informational and decisional.
Introduced Category 1: INTERPERSONAL ROLES. Interpersonal roles require managers to
direct and supervise employees and the organisation. The figurehead is typically a top of
middle manager. This manager may communicate future organisational goals or ethical
guidelines to employees at company meetings. They also attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies,
host receptions, presentations and other activities associated with the figurehead role. A
leader acts as an example for other employees to follow, gives commands and directions to
subordinates, makes decisions, and mobilises employee support. They are also responsible for
the selection and training of employees. Managers must be leaders at all levels of the
organisation; often lower-level managers look to top management for this leadership
example. In the role of liaison, a manager must coordinate the work of others in different
work units, establish alliances between others, and work to share resources. This role is
particularly critical for middle managers, who must often compete with other managers for
important resources, yet must maintain successful working relationships with them for long
time periods.

Introduced Category 2: INFORMATIONAL ROLES. Informational roles are those in which

managers obtain and transmit information. These roles have changed dramatically as
technology has improved. The monitor evaluates the performance of others and takes
corrective action to improve

that performance. Monitors also watch for changes in the environment and within the
company that may affect individual and organisational performance. Monitoring occurs at all
levels of management. The role of disseminator requires that managers inform employees of
changes that affect them and the organisation. They also communicate the company’s vision
and purpose.

Introduced Category 3: DECISIONAL ROLES. Decisional roles require managers to plan

strategy and utilise resources. There are four specific roles that are decisional. The
entrepreneur role requires the manager to assign resources to develop innovative goods and
services, or to expand a business. The disturbance handler corrects unanticipated problems
facing the organisation from the internal or external environment. The third decisional role,
that of resource allocator, involves determining which work units will get which resources.
Top managers are likely to make large, overall budget decisions, while middle managers may
make more specific allocations. Finally, the negotiator works with others, such as suppliers,
distributors, or labor unions, to reach agreements regarding products and services.

Although Mintzberg’s initial research in 1960s helped categorise manager approaches,

Mintzberg was still concerned about research involving other roles in the workplace.
Minstzberg considered expanding his research to other roles, such as the role of disseminator,
figurehead, liaison and spokesperson. Each role would have different special characteristics,
and a new categorisation system would have to be made for each role to understand it
properly.

While Mintzberg’s initial research was helpful in starting the conversation, there has since
been criticism of his methods from other researchers. Some criticisms of the work were that
even though there were multiple categories, the role of manager is still more complex. There
are still many manager roles that are not as traditional and are not captured in Mintzberg’s
original three categories. In addition, sometimes, Mintzberg’s research was not always
effective. The research, when applied to real-life situations, did not always improve the
management process in real-life practice.
These two criticisms against Mintzberg’s research method raised some questions about
whether or not the research was useful to how we understand “managers” in today’s world.
However, even if the criticisms against Mintzberg’s work are true, it does not mean that the
original research from the 1960s is completely useless. Those researchers did not say
Mintzberg’s research is invalid. His research has two positive functions to the further
research.

The first positive function is Mintzberg provided a useful functional approach to analyse
management. And he used this approach to provide a clear concept of the role of manager to
the researcher. When researching human behavior, it is important to be concise about the
subject of the research. Mintzberg’s research has helped other researchers clearly define what
a “manager” is, because in real-life situations, the “manager” is not always the same position
title. Mintzberg’s definitions added clarity and precision to future research on the topic.

The second positive function is Mintzberg’s research could be regarded as a good beginning
to give a new insight to further research on this field in the future. Scientific research is
always a gradual process. Just because Mintzberg’s initial research had certain flaws, does
not mean it is useless to other researchers. Researchers who are interested in studying the
workplace in a systematic way have older research to look back on. A researcher doesn’t
have to start from the very beginning— older research like Mintzberg’s has shown what
methods work well and what methods are not as appropriate for workplace dynamics. As
more young professionals enter the job market, this research will continue to study and
change the way we think about the modern workplace.

Questions 1-6
 Show Notepad

Look at the following descriptions or deeds (Questions 1-6) and the list of categories below.

Match each description or deed with the correct category, A,B or C.

Write the correct letter, A, B, or  C, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter  more than once.

List of Categories

A INTERPERSONAL ROLES

B INFORMATIONAL ROLES

C DECISIONAL ROLES

1      the development of business scheme

2     presiding at formal events
3      using employees and funds
4      getting and passing message on to related persons
5      relating the information to employees and organisation
6      recruiting the staff

Questions 7-8
 Show Notepad

Choose  TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes  7-8 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO positive functions about Mintzberg’s research are mentioned in the last two
paragraphs?
 A  offers waterproof categories of managers
 B  provides a clear concept to define the role of a manager
 C  helps new graduates to design their career
 D  suggests ways for managers to do their job better
 E  makes a fresh way for further research

Questions 9-13
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 9-13 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

9      Young professionals can easily know management experience in the

workplace.
10      Mintzberg’s theory broke well-established notions about managing
styles.
11      Mintzberg got a large amount of research funds for his contribution.
12      All managers do the same work.
13      Mintzberg’s theory is valuable for future studies.

How Well Do We Concentrate?

A

Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your
homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multi-taskers. Multitaskers are
able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus. However, Thomas
Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really do multiple things
simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music, but in reality, the brain
can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will cause you to ignore some of the
words of the music. When people think they are accomplishing two different tasks efficiently,
what they are really doing is dividing their focus. While listening to music, people become
less able to focus on their surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when
we talk with friends and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to
someone else talk, or maybe they are reading a text on their smart phone and don't hear what
you are saying. Lehman called this phenomenon “email voice"

the world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or cellphones.
Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smart-phone or a laptop, they are
frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of
multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter,
your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In
professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are
more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more
people than ever, liven inventions such as the cordless phone has increased multitasking. In
the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop
her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up. and
chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology
is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.

Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal
cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the
size of this cortex varies between species, He found that for humans, the size of this part
constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs, and about 15% in
monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows a human to be more flexible
and accurate in his or her multitasking.. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether
the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks
simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimulants to his
subjects in a wax that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients "
heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if " the brain
particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the
brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.

Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar
experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple
words into different categories. For this experiment. Meyer found that when you think you
are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even
though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually
accomplished, overall, the task look more time than if the person focused on a single task one
at a time.

People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his subjects.
He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly every 11 minutes
people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at the same time may
actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are
more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be interrupted by outside
sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no
reason at all, cheek a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they
concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. He suggested that the
average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might
be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and
computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of
media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so
people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time

So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it
is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more
comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that
people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions
and self-distractions. As it matter of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to
be dramatic. No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task.
However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient
if we banned cell-phones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent
self-distraction. Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new
tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing
in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks
one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking.

Questions 14-18
 Show Notepad

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14      a reference to a domestic situation that does not require multitasking
15      a possible explanation of why we always do multitask together
16      a practical solution to multitask in work environment
17      relating multitasking to the size of prefrontal cortex
18      longer time spent doing two tasks at the same time than one at a time

Questions 19-23
 Show Notepad

Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of scientists below. Match
each statement with the correct scientist, A-E.

Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter  more than once.

List of Scientists

A Thomas Lehman

B Earl Miller

C David Meyer

D Gloria Mark

E Edward Hallowell

19      When faced multiple visual stimulants, one can only concentrate on one
of them.
20      Doing two things together may be faster but not better.
21      People never really do two things together even if you think you do.
22      The causes of multitask lie in the environment.
23      Even minor changes in the workplace will improve work efficiency.

Questions 24-26
 Show Notepad

Complete the sentences below.

Choose  NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

A term used to refer to a situation when you are reading a text and cannot focus on your
surroundings is 24 
The 25   part of the brain controls multitasking.
The practical solution of multitask in work is not to allow use of cellphone in 26 

Improving Patient Safety

Packaging

One of the most prominent design issues in pharmacy is that of drag packaging and patient
information leaflets (Pits). Many letters have appeared in The Journal's letters pages over the
years from pharmacists dismayed at the designs of packaging that are “accidents waiting to
happen”.

Packaging design in the pharmaceutical industry is handled by either in-house teams or

design agencies. Designs for over-the-counter medicines, where characteristics such as
attractiveness and distinguish-ability are regarded as significant, are usually commissioned
from design agencies. A marketing team will prepare a brief and the designers will come up
with perhaps six or seven designs. These are whittled down to two or three that might be
tested on a consumer group. In contrast, most designs for prescription-only products are
created in-house. In some cases, this may simply involve applying a company’s house design
(ie, logo, colour, font, etc). The chosen design is then handed over to design engineers who
work out how the packaging will be produced.

Design considerations

The author of the recently published “Information design for patient safety,” Thea Swayne,
tracked the journey of a medicine from manufacturing plant, through distribution warehouses,
pharmacies and hospital wards, to patients’ homes. Her book highlights a multitude of design
problems with current packaging, such as look-alikes and sound-alikes, small type sizes and
glare on blister foils. Situations in which medicines are used include a parent giving a cough
medicine to a child in the middle of the night and a busy pharmacist selecting one box from
hundreds. It is argued that packaging should be designed for moments such as these.
“Manufacturers are not aware of the complex situations into which products go. As designers,
we are interested in not what is supposed to happen in hospital wards, but what happens in
the real world,” Ms Swayne said.

Incidents where vein has been injected intrathecally instead of spine are a classic example of
how poor design can contribute to harm. Investigations following these tragedies have
attributed some blame to poor typescript.

Safety and compliance

Child protection is another area that gives designers opportunities to improve safety.
According to the Child Accident Prevention Trust, seven out of 10 children admitted to
hospital with suspected poisoning have swallowed medicines. Although child-resistant
closures have reduced the number of incidents, they are not: fully child-proof. The definition
of such a closure is one that not more than 15 percent of children aged between 42 and 51
months can open within five minutes. There is scope for improving what is currently
available, according to Richard Mawle, a freelance product designer. “Many child-resistant
packs

are based on strength. They do not necessarily prevent a child from access, but may prevent
people with a disability,” he told The Journal. “The legal requirements are there for a good
reason, but they are not good enough in terms of the users,” he said. “Older people, especially
those with arthritis, may have the same level of strength as a child,” he explained, and
suggested that better designs could rely on cognitive skills (eg, making the opening of a
container a three-step process) or be based on the physical size of hands.

Mr. Mawle worked with GlaxoSmithKline on a project to improve compliance through

design, which involved applying his skills to packaging and PILs. Commenting on the
information presented, he said: “There can be an awful lot of junk at the beginning of PILs.
For example, why are company details listed towards the beginning of a leaflet when what
might be more important for the patient is that the medicine should not be taken with
alcohol?”

Design principles and guidelines

Look-alike boxes present a potential for picking errors and an obvious solution would be to
use colours to highlight different strengths. However, according to Ms.Swayne, colour
differentiation needs to be approached with care. Not only should strong colour contrasts be
used, but designating a colour to a particular strength (colour coding) is not recommended
because this could lead to the user not reading the text on a box.

Design features can provide the basis for lengthy debates. For example, one argument is that
if all packaging is white with black lettering, people would have no choice but to read every
box carefully. The problem is that trials of drug packaging design are few—common studies
of legibility and comprehensibility concern road traffic signs and visual display units.
Although some designers take results from such studies into account, proving that a particular
feature is beneficial can be difficult. For example, EU legislation requires that packaging
must now include the name of the medicine in Braille but, according to Karel van der
Waarde, a design consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, “it is not known how much
visually impaired patients will benefit nor how much the reading of visually able patients will
be impaired”.

More evidence might, however, soon be available. EU legislation requires PILs to reflect
consultations with target patient groups to ensure they are legible, clear and easy to use. This
implies that industry will have to start conducting tests. Dr. van der Waarde has performed
readability studies on boxes and PILs for industry. A typical study involves showing a leaflet
or package to a small group and asking them questions to test understanding. Results and
comments are used to modify the material, which is then tested on a larger group. A third
group is used to show that any further changes made are an improvement. Dr. van der
Waarde is, however, sceptical about the legal requirements and says that many regulatory
authorities do not have the resources to handle packaging information properly. “They do not
look at the use of packaging in a practical context—they only see one box at a time and not
several together as pharmacists would do,” he said.

Innovations
The RCA innovation exhibition this year revealed designs for a number of innovative objects.
“The popper”, by Hugo Glover, aims to help arthritis sufferers remove tablets from blister
packs, and “pluspoint”, by James Cobb, is an adrenaline auto-injector that aims to overcome
the fact that many patients do not carry their auto-injectors due to their prohibitive size. The
aim of good design, according Roger Coleman, professor of inclusive design at the RCA, is
to try to make things more user-friendly as well as safer. Surely, in a patient-centred health
system, that can only be a good thing. “Information design for patient safety” is not intended
to be mandatory. Rather, its purpose is to create a basic design standard and to stimulate
innovation. The challenge for the pharmaceutical industry, as a whole, is to adopt such a
standard.

Questions 27-32
 Show Notepad

Look at the following statements (Questions 27-32) and the list of people or organisation
below.

Match each statement with the correct person or organisation, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D,  in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter  more than once.

A Thea Swayne

B Children Accident Prevention Trust

C Richard Mawle

D Karel van der Waarde

27      Elderly people may have the same problem with children if the lids of
containers require too much strength to open.
28      Adapting packaging for the blind may disadvantage the sighted people.
29      Specially designed lids cannot eliminate the possibility of children
swallowing pills accidentally.
30      Container design should consider situations, such as drug used at home.
31      Governing bodies should investigate many different container cases
rather than individual ones.
32      Information on the list of a leaflet hasn’t been in the right order.

Questions 33-37
 Show Notepad
Complete the notes using the list of words, A-G, below.

Write the correct letter, A-G,  in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.

Packaging in pharmaceutical industry Designs for over-the-counter medicines

First, 33   make the proposal, then pass them to the 34   Finally,
these designs will be tested by 35 

Prescription-only
First, the design is made by 36   and then subjected to 37 
A consumers

B marketing teams

C pharmaceutical industry

D external designers

E in-house designers

F design engineers

G pharmacist

Questions 38-40
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter,  A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

38

What may cause the accident in “design container”?

 A  a print error
 B  style of print
 C  wrong label
 D  the shape of the bottle

39

What do people think about the black and white only print?
  A  Consumers dislike these products.
 B  People have to pay more attention to the information.
 C  That makes all products looks alike.
 D  Sighted people may feel it more helpful.

40

Why does the writer mention “popper” and “pluspoint”?

 A  to show that container design has made some progress
 B  to illustrate an example of inappropriate design which can lead to accidents
 C  to show that the industry still needs more to improve
 D  to point out that consumers should be more informed about the information

The “Extinct” Grass in Britain

A

The British grass interrupted brome was said to be extinct, just like the Dodo. Called
interrupted brome because of its gappy seed-head, this unprepossessing grass was found
nowhere else in the world, Gardening experts from the Victorian lira were first to record it. In
the early 20th century, it grew far and wide across southern England. But it quickly vanished
and by 1972 was nowhere to be found. Even the seeds stored at the Cambridge University
Botanic Garden as an insurance policy were dead, having been mistakenly kept at room
temperature. Fans of the glass were devastated.

However, reports of its decline were not entirely correct. Interrupted brome has enjoyed a
revival, one that's not due to science. Because of the work of one gardening enthusiast,
interrupted brome is thriving as a pot plant. The relaunching into the wild of Britain's almost
extinct plant has excited conservationists everywhere

Originally, Philip Smith didn’t know that he had the very unusual grass at his own home.
When he heard about the grass becoming extinct, he wanted to do something surprising. He
attended a meeting of the British Botanical Society in Manchester in 1979, and seized His
opporlunity. He said that it was so disappointing to hear about the demise of the interrupted
brome. "What a pity we didn’t research it further!” he added. Then. all of a sudden he
displayed his pots with so called "extinct grass" lot all to see.

Smith had kept the seeds from the last stronghold of the grass, Pamisford in 1963. It was then
when the grass stalled to disappear from the wild. Smith cultivated the grass, year after year.
Ultimately, it was his curiosity in the plant that saved it. not scientific or technological
projects that
E.

For now, the bromes future is guaranteed. The seeds front Smith's plants have beet, securely
stored in the cutting edge facilities of Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex.
And living plants thrive at the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Cambridge. This year,
seeds are also saved at sites all across the country and the grass now nourishes at several
public gardens too.

The grass will now be reintroduced to the British countryside. As a part of the Species
Recovery Project, the organisation English Nature will re-introduce interrupted brome into
the agricultural landscape, provided willing farmers are found. Alas, the grass is neither
beautiful not practical. it is undoubtedly a weed, a weed that nobody cares for these days. The
brome wax probably never widespread enough to annoy farmers and today, no one would
appreciate its productivity or nutritious qualities. As a grass, it leaves a lot to be desited by
agriculturalists.

Smith’s research has attempted to answer the question of where the grass came from. His
research points to mutations from other weedy grasses as the most likely source. So close is
the relationship that interrupted brome was originally deemed to be a mere variety of soil
brome by the great Victorian taxonomist Professor Hackel. A botanist from the 19th century,
Druce. had taken notes on the grass and convinced his peers that the grass deserved its own
status as a species. Despite Druce growing up in poverty and his self-taught profession, he
became the leading botanist of his time.

Where the grass came from may be clear, but the timing of its birth may be tougher to find
out. A clue lies in its penchant for growing as a weed in fields shared with a fodder crop, in
particular nitrogen-fixing legumes such as sainfoin, lucerne or clover. According to
agricultural historian Joan Thirsk. the humble sainfoin and its company were first noticed in
Britain in the early 17th century. Seeds brought in from the Continent were sown in pastures
to feed horses and other livestock. However, back then, only a few enthusiastic gentlemen
were willing to use the new crops for their prized horses.

Not before too long though, the need to feed the parliamentary armies in Scotland, England
and behind was more pressing than ever. farmers were forced to produce more bread, cheese
and beer. And by 1650 the legumes were increasingly introduced into arable rotations, to
serve as green nature to boost grain yields. A bestseller of its day, Nathaniel Fiennes's
Sainfoin Improved, published in 1671, helped to spread the word. With the advent of
sainfoin, clover and lucerne. Britain's very own rogue grass had suddenly at rivet.

J
Although the credit for the discovery of interrupted brome goes to a Miss A. M. Barnard,
who collected the first specimens at Odsey, Bedfordshire, in 1849, the grass had probably
lurked undetected in the English countryside for at least a hundred years. Smith thinks the
plant- the world’s version of the Dodo probably evolved in the late 17th or early 18th
century, once sainfoin became established. Due mainly to the development of the motor car
and subsequent decline of fodder crops for horses, the brome declined rapidly over the 20th
century. Today, sainfoin has almost disappeared from the countryside, though occasionally its
colourful flowers are spotted in lowland nature reserves. More recently artificial fertilizers
have made legume rotations unnecessary

The close relationship with out-of-fashion crops spells trouble for those seeking to re-
establish interrupted brome in today’s countryside. Much like the once common arable
weeds, such as the corncockle, its seeds cannot survive long in the soil. Each spring, the
brome relied on farmers to resow its seeds; in the days before weed killers and advanced seed
sieves, an ample supply would have contaminated supplies of crop seed. However fragile
seeds are not the brome’s only problem: this species is also unwilling to release its seeds as
they ripen. According to Smith. The grass will struggle to survive even in optimal conditions.
It would be very difficult to thrive amongst its more resilient competitors found in today’s
improved agricultural landscape

L.

Nonetheless, interrupted brome’s reluctance to thrive independently may have some benefits.
Any farmer willing to foster this unique contribution to the world's flora can rest assured that
the grass will never become an invasive pest. Restoring interrupted brome to its rightful home
could bring other benefits too, particularly if this strange species is granted recognition as a
national treasure. Thanks to British farmers, interrupted brome was given the chance to
evolve in the first place. Conservationists would like to see the grass grow once again in its
natural habitat and perhaps, one day, seeing the grass become a badge of honour for a new
generation of environmentally conscious farmers.

Questions 1-8
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1 ?

In boxes 1-8 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

1      The name of interrupted brome came from the unprepossessing grass

disappeared from places in the world for a period.
2      Interrupted brome seeds cannot sprout because they were kept accidentally
at unsuitable temperature.
3      Philip Smith works at University of Manchester.
4      Kew Botanic Gardens will operate English Nature.
5      Interrupted brome grew unwantedly at the sides of sainfoin.
6      Legumes were used for feeding livestock and enriching the soil.
7      The spread of seeds of interrupted brome depends on the harvesting of
the farmers.
8      Only the weed killers can stop interrupted brome from becoming an
invasive pest.

Questions 9-13
 Show Notepad

Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 9-13) and the list of people below.

Match each opinion or deed with the correct person, A-F.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

9      identified interrupted brome as another species of brome.
10      convinced others about the status of interrupted brome in the botanic world.
11      said that sainfoin was first found more than 300 years ago. 
12      helped farmers know that sainfoin is useful for enriching the soil.
13      collected the first sample of interrupted brome.
A A. M. Barnard

B Philip Smith

C George Claridge Druce

D Joan Thirsk

E Professor Hackel

F Nathaniel Fiennes

Keep the Water Away

A

Last winter’s floods on the rivers of central Europe were among the worst since the Middle
Ages, and as winter storms return, the spectre of floods is returning too. Just weeks ago, the
river Rhone in south-east France burst its banks, driving 15,000 people from their homes, and
worse could be on the way. Traditionally, river engineers have gone for Plan A: get rid of the
water fast, draining it off the land and down to the sea in tall-sided rivers re-engineered as
high-performance drains. But however big they dug city drains, however wide and straight
they made the rivers, and however high they built the banks, the floods kept coming back to
taunt them, from the Mississippi to the Danube. Arid when the floods came, they seemed to
be worse than ever. No wonder engineers are turning to Plan B: sap the water’s destructive
strength by dispersing it into fields, forgotten lakes, flood plains and aquifers.

Back in the days when rivers took a more tortuous path to the sea, flood waters lost impetus
and volume while meandering across flood plains and idling through wetlands and inland
deltas. But today the water tends to have an unimpeded journey to the sea. And this means
that when it rains in the uplands, the water comes down all at once. Worse, whenever we
close off more flood plains, the river’s flow farther downstream becomes more violent and
uncontrollable. Dykes are only as good as their weakest link—-and the water will unerringly
find it. By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into the simple mechanics of a
water pipe, engineers have often created danger where they promised safety, and intensified
the floods they meant to end. Take the Rhine, Europe’s most engineered river. For two
centuries, German engineers have erased its backwaters and cut it off from its flood plain.

Today, the river has lost 7 percent of its original length and runs up to a third faster. When it
rains hard in the Alps, the peak flows from several tributaries coincide in the main river,
where once they arrived separately. And with four-fifths of the lower Rhine’s flood plain
barricaded off, the waters rise ever higher. The result is more frequent flooding that does
ever-greater damage to the homes, offices and roads that sit on the flood plain. Much the
same has happened in the US on the mighty Mississippi, which drains the world’s second
largest river catchment into the Gulf of Mexico.

The European Union is trying to improve rain forecasts and more accurately model how
intense rains swell rivers. That may help cities prepare, but it won’t stop the floods. To do
that, say hydrologists, you need a new approach to engineering not just rivers, but the whole
landscape. The UK’s Environment Agency -which has been granted an extra £150 million a
year to spend in the wake of floods in 2000 that cost the country £1 billion- puts it like this:
“The focus is now on working with the forces of nature. Towering concrete walks are out,
and new wetlands : are in.” To help keep London’s feet dry, the agency is breaking the
Thames’s banks upstream and reflooding 10 square kilometres of ancient flood plain at
Otmoor outside Oxford. Nearer to London it has spent £100 million creating new wetlands
and a relief channel across 16 kilometres of flood plain to protect the town of Maidenhead, as
well as the ancient playing fields of Eton College. And near the south coast, the agency is
digging out channels to reconnect old meanders on the river Cuckmere in East Sussex that
were cut off by flood banks 150 years ago.

The same is taking place on a much grander scale in Austria, in one of Europe’s largest river
restorations to date. Engineers are regenerating flood plains along 60 kilometres of the river
Drava as it exits the Alps. They are also widening the river bed and channelling it back into
abandoned meanders, oxbow lakes and backwaters overhung with willows. The engineers
calculate that the restored flood plain can now store up to 10 million cubic metres of flood
waters and slow storm surges coming out of the Alps by more than an hour, protecting towns
as far downstream as Slovenia and Croatia.

“Rivers have to be allowed to take more space. They have to be turned from flood-chutes into
flood-foilers,” says Nienhuis. And the Dutch, for whom preventing floods is a matter of
survival, have gone furthest. A nation built largely on drained marshes and seabed had the
fright of its life in 1993 when the Rhine almost overwhelmed it. The same happened again in
1995, when a quarter of a million people were evacuated from the Netherlands. But a new
breed of “soft engineers” wants our cities to become porous, and Berlin is their shining
example. Since reunification, the city’s massive redevelopment has been governed by tough
new rules to prevent its drains becoming overloaded after heavy rains. Harald Kraft, an
architect working in the city, says: “We now see rainwater as a resource to be kept rather than
got rid of at great cost.” A good illustration is the giant Potsdamer Platz, a huge new
commercial redevelopment by Daimler Chrysler in the heart of the city.

Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars digging huge drains and concreting river beds to
carry away the water from occasional intense storms. The latest plan is to spend a cool $280
million raising the concrete walls on the Los Angeles river by another 2 metres. Yet many
communities still flood regularly. Meanwhile this desert city is shipping in water from
hundreds of kilometres away in northern California and from the Colorado river in Arizona to
fill its taps and swimming pools, and irrigate its green spaces. It all sounds like bad planning.
“In LA we receive half the water we need in rainfall, and we throw it away. Then we spend
hundreds of millions to import water,” says Andy Lipkis, an LA environmentalist, along with
citizen groups like Friends of the Los Angeles River and Unpaved LA, want to beat the urban
flood hazard and fill the taps by holding onto the city’s flood water. And it’s not just a pipe
dream. The authorities this year launched a $100 million scheme to road-test the porous city
in one flood-hit community in Sun Valley. The plan is to catch the rain that falls on thousands
of driveways, parking lots and rooftops in the valley. Trees will soak up water from parking
lots. Homes and public buildings will capture roof water to irrigate gardens and parks. And
road drains will empty into old gravel pits and other leaky places that should recharge the
city’s underground water reserves. Result: less flooding and more water for the city. Plan B
says every city should be porous, every river should have room to flood naturally and every
coastline should be left to build its own defences. It sounds expensive and utopian, until you
realise how much we spend trying to drain cities and protect our watery margins -and how
bad we are at it.
Questions 14-19
 Show Notepad

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs,  A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

14      a new approach carried out in the UK
15      the reason why twisty path and dykes failed
16      illustration of an alternative plan in LA which seems much unrealistic
17      traditional way of tackling flood
18      efforts made in Netherlands and Germany
19      one project on a river that benefits three nations

Questions 20-23
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 20-23 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

20      In the ancient times, the people in Europe made their efforts to improve
the river banks, so the flood was becoming less severe than before.
21      Flood makes river shorter than it used to be, which means faster speed
and more damage to the constructions on flood plain.
22      The new approach in the UK is better than that in Austria.
23      At least 300,000 people left from Netherlands in 1995.

Questions 24-26
 Show Notepad

Complete the sentences below.

Choose  NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.
UK’s Environment Agency carried out one innovative approach: a wetland is generated not
far from the city of 24   to protect it from flooding,
25   suggested that cities should be porous, and Berlin set a good example.
Another city devastated by heavy storms casually is 26  , though government pours
billions of dollars each year in order to solve the problem.

What Do Babies Know?

As Daniel Haworth is settled into a high chair and wheeled behind a black screen, a sudden
look of worry furrows his 9-month-old brow. His dark blue eyes dart left and right in search
of the familiar reassurance of his mother’s face. She calls his name and makes soothing
noises, but Daniel senses something unusual is happening. He sucks his fingers for comfort,
but, finding no solace, his month crumples, his body stiffens, and he lets rip an almighty
shriek of distress. This is the usual expression when babies are left alone or abandoned. Mom
picks him up, reassures him, and two minutes later, a chortling and alert Daniel returns to the
darkened booth behind the screen and submits himself to baby lab, a unit set up in 2005 at the
University of Manchester in northwest England to investigate how babies think.

Watching infants piece life together, seeing their senses, emotions and motor skills take
shape, is a source of mystery and endless fascination—at least to parents and developmental
psychologists. We can decode their signals of distress or read a million messages into their
first smile. But how much do we really know about what’s going on behind those wide,
innocent eyes? How much of their understanding of and response to the world comes
preloaded at birth? How much is built from scratch by experience? Such are the questions
being explored at baby lab. Though the facility is just 18 months old and has tested only 100
infants, it’s already challenging current thinking on what babies know and how they come to
know it.

Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a circular track. The
train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other side. A hidden device above the
screen is tracking Daniel’s eyes as they follow the train and measuring the diametre of his
pupils 50 times a second. As the child gets bored—or “habituated”, as psychologists call the
process— his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is
introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing
happens— the train goes into the tunnel one color and comes out another.

Variations of experiments like this one, examining infant attention, have been a standard tool
of developmental psychology ever since the Swiss pioneer of the field, Jean Piaget, started
experimenting on his children in the 1920s. Piaget’s work led him to conclude that infants
younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works or any sense of
“object permanence” (that people and things still exist even when they’re not seen). Instead,
babies must gradually construct this knowledge from experience. Piaget’s “constructivist”
theories were massively influential on postwar educators and psychologist, but over the past
20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation of “nativist”
psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more sophisticated experiments led them to
theorise that infants arrive already equipped with some knowledge of the physical world and
even rudimentary programming for math and language. Baby lab director Sylvain Sirois has
been putting these smart-baby theories through a rigorous set of tests. His conclusions so far
tend to be more Piagetian: “Babies,” he says, “know nothing.”

What Sirois and his postgraduate assistant Lain Jackson are challenging is the interpretation
of a variety of classic experiments begun in the mid-1980s in which babies were shown
physical events that appeared to violate such basic concepts as gravity, solidity and
contiguity. In one such experiment, by University of Illinois psychologist Renee Baillargeon,
a hinged wooden panel appeared to pass right through a box. Baillargeon and M.I.T’s
Elizabeth Spelke found that babies as young as 3 1/2 months would reliably look longer at the
impossible event than at the normal one. Their conclusion: babies have enough built-in
knowledge to recognise that something is wrong.

Sirois does not take issue with the way these experiments were conducted. “The methods are
correct and replicable,” he says, “it’s the interpretation that’s the problem.” In a critical
review to be published in the forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Developmental
Psychology, he and Jackson pour cold water over recent experiments that claim to have
observed innate or precocious social cognition skills in infants. His own experiments indicate
that a baby’s fascination with physically impossible events merely reflects a response to
stimuli that are novel. Data from the eye tracker and the measurement of the pupils (which
widen in response to arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar
objects are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In other words,
when Daniel had seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored
as when it stays the same color. The mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to
leap to the conclusion that infants can understand the concept of impossibility from the mere
fact that they are able to perceive some novelty in it. “The real explanation is boring,” he
says.

So how do babies bridge the gap between knowing squat and drawing triangles—a task
Daniel’s sister Lois, 2 1/2, is happily tackling as she waits for her brother? “Babies have to
learn everything, but as Piaget was saying, they start with a few primitive reflexes that get
things going,” said Sirois. For example, hardwired in the brain is an instinct that draws a
baby’s eyes to a human face. From brain imaging studies we also know that the brain has
some sort of visual buffer that continues to represent objects after they have been removed—
a lingering perception rather than conceptual understanding. So when babies encounter novel
or unexpected events, Sirois explains, “there’s a mismatch between the buffer and the
information they’re getting at that moment. And what you do when you’ve got a mismatch is
you try to clear the buffer. And that takes attention.” So learning, says Sirois, is essentially
the laborious business of resolving mismatches. “The thing is, you can do a lot of it with this
wet sticky thing called a brain. It’s a fantastic, statistical-learning machine”. Daniel, exams
ended, picks up a plastic tiger and, chewing thoughtfully upon its heat, smiles as if to agree.

Questions 27-32
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 27-32 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
 FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

27      Baby’s behavior after being abandoned is not surprising.

28      Parents are over-estimating what babies know.
29      Only 100 experiments have been done but can prove the theories about
what we know.
30      Piaget’s theory was rejected by parents in 1920s.
31      Sylvain Sirois’s conclusion on infant’s cognition is similar to Piaget’s.
32      Sylvain Sirois found serious flaws in the experimental designs by
Baillargeon and Elizabeth Spelke.

Questions 33-37
 Show Notepad

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.

Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.

33      Jean Piaget thinks infants younger than 9 months won’t know
something existing
34      Jean Piaget thinks babies only get the knowledge
35      Some cognitive scientists think babies have the mechanism to learn a
language
36      Sylvain Sirois thinks that babies can reflect a response to stimuli that
are novel
37      Sylvain Sirois thinks babies’ attention level will drop
A before they are born.

B before they learn from experience.

C when they had seen the same thing for a while.

D when facing the possible and impossible events.

E when the previous things appear again in the lives.

Questions 38-40
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter,  A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

38

What can we know about Daniel in the third paragraph?

 A  Daniel’s attention level rose when he saw a blue train.
 B  Kid’s attention fell when he was accustomed to the changes.
 C  Child’s brain activity was monitored by a special equipment.
 D  Size of the train changed when it came out of the tunnel.

39

What can we know from the writer in the fourth paragraph?

 A  The theories about what baby knows changed over time.
 B  Why the experiments that had been done before were rejected.
 C  Infants have the innate knowledge to know the external environment.
 D  Piaget’s “constructivist” theories were massively influential on parents.

40

What can we know from the argument of the experiment about the baby in the sixth
paragraph?
 A  Infants are attracted by various colours of the trains all the time.
 B  Sylvain Sirois accuses misleading approaches of current experiments.
 C  Sylvain Sirois indicates that only impossible events make children interested.
 D  Sylvain Sirois suggests that novel things attract baby’s attention.
 A Americans today choose among more options in more parts of life than has
ever been possible before. To an extent, the opportunity to choose enhances
our lives. It is only logical to think that if some choices are good, more is
better; people who care about having infinite options will benefit from them,
and those who do not can always just ignore the 273 versions of cereal they
have never tried. Yet recent research strongly suggests that, psychologically,
this assumption is wrong, with 5% lower percentage announcing they are
happy. Although some choices are undoubtedly better than none, more is not
always better than less.
 B Recent research offers insight into why many people end up unhappy rather
than pleased when their options expand. We began by making a distinction
between "maximizers” (those who always aim to make the best possible
choice) and "satisficers” (those who aim for "good enough,” whether or not
better selections might be out there).
 C In particular, we composed a set of statements— the Maximization Scale—to
diagnose people’s propensity to maximize. Then we had several thousand people
 rate themselves from 1 to 7 (from “completely disagree” to "completely
agree”) on such statements as “I never settle for second best.” We also
evaluated their sense of satisfaction with their decisions. We did not define a
sharp cutoff to separate maximizers from satisficers, but in general, we think
of individuals whose average scores are higher than 4 (the scale’s midpoint)
as maxi- misers and those whose scores are lower than the midpoint as
satisficers. People who score highest on the test—the greatest maximizers—
engage in more product comparisons than the lowest scorers, both before
and after they make purchasing decisions, and they take longer to decide
what to buy. When satisficers find an item that meets their standards, they
stop looking. But maximizers exert enormous effort reading labels, checking
out consumer magazines and trying new products. They also spend more
time comparing their purchasing decisions with those of others.
 D We found that the greatest maximizers are the least happy with the fruits
of their efforts. When they compare themselves with others, they get little
pleasure from finding out that they did better and substantial dissatisfaction
from finding out that they did worse. They are more prone to experiencing
regret after a purchase, and if their acquisition disappoints them, their sense
of well-being takes longer to recover. They also tend to brood or ruminate
more than satisficers do.
 E Does it follow that maximizers are less happy in general than satisficers?
We tested this by having people fill out a variety of questionnaires known to
be reliable indicators of wellbeing. As might be expected, individuals with high
maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life and were less
happy, less optimistic and more depressed than people with low maximization
scores. Indeed, those with extreme maximization ratings had depression
scores that placed them in the borderline of clinical range.
 F Several factors explain why more choice is not always better than less,
especially for maximisers. High among these are “opportunity costs.” The
quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its
alternatives. One of the “costs” of making a selection is losing the
opportunities that a different option would have afforded. Thus, an
opportunity cost of vacationing on the beach in Cape Cod might be missing
the fabulous restaurants in the Napa Valley. Early Decision Making Research  by
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people respond much more
strongly to losses than gains. If we assume that opportunity costs reduce the
overall desirability of the most preferred choice, then the more alternatives
there are, the deeper our sense of loss will be and the less satisfaction we will
derive from our ultimate decision.
 G The problem of opportunity costs will be better for a satisficer. The latter’s
“good enough” philosophy can survive thoughts about opportunity costs. In
addition, the “good enough" standard leads to much less searching and
inspection of alternatives than the maximizer’s “best" standard. With fewer
choices under consideration, a person will have fewer opportunity costs to
subtract.
 H Just as people feel sorrow about the opportunities they have forgone, they
may also suffer regret about the option they settled on. My colleagues and I
devised a scale to measure proneness to feeling regret, and we found that
people with high sensitivity to regret are less happy, less satisfied with life,
less optimistic and more depressed than those with low sensitivity. Not
surprisingly, we also found that people with high regret sensitivity tend to be
maximizers. Indeed, we think that worry over future regret is a major reason
that individuals become maximizers. The only way to be sure you will not
regret a decision is by making the best possible one. Unfortunately, the more
 options you have and the more opportunity costs you incur, the more likely
you are to experience regret.
 I In a classic demonstration of the power of sunk costs, people were offered
season subscriptions to a local theatre company. Some were offered the
tickets at full price and others at a discount. Then the researchers simply kept
track of how often the ticket purchasers actually attended the plays over the
course of the season. Full-price payers were more likely to show up at
performances than discount payers. The reason for this, the investigators
argued, was that the full-price payers would experience more regret if they
did not use the tickets because not using the more costly tickets would
constitute a bigger loss. To increase sense of happiness, we can decide to
restrict our options when the decision is not crucial. For example, make a rule
to visit no more than two stores when shopping for clothing.

Questions 1-4
 Show Notepad

Look at the following descriptions or deeds (Questions 1-4) and the list of categories below.

Match each description or deed with the correct category, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

A maximizers

B satisficers

C neither “maximizers” nor “satisficers”

D both “maximizers” and “satisficers”

1   rated to the Maximization Scale of making choice

2   don’t take much time before making a decision
3   are likely to regret about the choice in the future
4   choose the highest price in the range of purchase

Questions 5-8
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 5-8 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

 NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

5   In today’s world, since the society is becoming wealthier, people are
happier.
6   In society, there are more maximisers than satisficers.
7   People tend to react more to loses than gains.
8   Females and males acted differently in the study of choice making.

Questions 9-13
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter.  A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 9-13  on your answer sheet.

9

The Maximization Scale is aimed to

 A  know the happiness when they have more choices.
 B  measure how people are likely to feel after making choices.
 C  help people make better choices.
 D  reduce the time of purchasing.

10

According to the text, what is the result of more choices?

 A  People can make choices more easily
 B  Maximizers are happier to make choices.
 C  Satisficers are quicker to make wise choices.
 D  People have more tendency to experience regret.

11

The example of theatre ticket is to suggest that

 A  they prefer to use more money when buying tickets.
 B  they don’t like to spend more money on theatre.
 C  higher-priced things would induce more regret if not used properly
 D  full-price payers are real theatre lovers.

12

How to increase the happiness when making a better choice?

 A  use less time
 B  make more comparisons
  C  buy more expensive products
 D  limit the number of choices in certain situations

13

What is the best title for Reading Passage 1?

 A  Reasoning of Worse Choice Making
 B  Making Choices in Today’s World
 C  The Influence of More Choices
 D  Complexity in Choice Making

Implication of False Belief Experiments

A

A considerable amount of research since the mid 1980s has been concerned with what has
been termed children’s theory of mind. This involves children’s ability to understand that
people can have different beliefs and representations of the world– a capacity that is shown
by four years of age. Furthermore, this ability appears to be absent in children with autism.
The ability to work out that another person is thinking is clearly an important aspect of both
cognitive and social development. Furthermore, one important explanation for autism is that
children suffering from this condition do not have a theory of mind(TOM). Consequently, the
development of children’s TOM has attracted considerable attention.

Wimmer and Perner devised a ‘false belief task’ to address this question. They used some
toys to act out the following story. Maxi left some chocolate in a blue cupboard before he
went out. When he was away his mother moved the chocolate to a green cupboard. Children
were asked to predict where Maxi willlook for his chocolate when he returns. Most children
under four years gave the incorrect answer, that Maxi will look in the green cupboard. Those
over four years tended to give the correct answer, that Maxi will look in the blue cupboard.
The incorrect answers indicated that the younger children did not understand that Maxi’s
beliefs and representations no longer matched the actual state of the world, and they failed to
appreciate that Maxi will act on the basis of his beliefs rather than the way that the world is
actually organised.

A simpler version of the Maxi task was devised by Baron-Cohen to take account of criticisms
that younger children may have been affected by the complexity and too much information of
the story in the task described above. For example, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and
Anne, who have a basket and a box， respectively. Sally also has a marble, which she places
in her basket，and then leaves to take a walk. While she is out of the room, Anne takes the
marble from the basket, eventually putting it in the box. Sally returns，and child is then
asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally
will look in the basket, where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that
Sally will look in the box，where the child knows the marble is hidden， even though Sally
cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be
able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their
own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding. The results
of research using false-belief tasks have been fairly consistent: most normally-developing
children are unable to pass the tasks until around age four.

Leslie argues that, before 18 months, children treat the world in a literal way and rarely
demonstrate pretence. He also argues that it is necessary for the cognitive system to
distinguish between what is pretend and what is real. If children were not able to do this, they
would not be able to distinguish between imagination and reality. Leslie suggested that this
pretend play becomes possible because of the presence of a de-coupler that copies primary
representations to secondary representations. For example, children, when pretending a
banana is a telephone, would make a secondary representation of a banana. They would
manipulate this representation and they would use their stored knowledge of ‘telephone’ to
build on this pretence.

There is also evidence that social processes play a part in the development of TOM. Meins
and her colleagues have found that what they term mind mindedness in maternal speech to
six-month old infants is related to both security of attachment and to TOM abilities. Mind
Mindedness involves speech that discusses infants’ feelings and explains their behaviour in
terms of mental stages(e.g_ ‘you1 re feeling hungry’)

Lewis investigated older children living in extended families in Crete and Cyprus. They
found that children who socially interact with more adults，who have more friends. And who
have more older siblings tend to pass TOM tasks at a slightly earlier age than other children.
Furthermore, because young children are more likely to talk about their thoughts and feelings
with peers than with their mothers, peer interaction may provide a special impetus to the
development of a TOM. A similar point has been made by Dunn, who argues that peer
interaction is more likely to contain pretend play and that it is likely to be more challenging
because other children, unlike adults, do not make large adaptations to the communicative
needs of other children.

In addition, there has been concern that some aspects of the TOM approach underestimate
children’s understanding of other people. After all，infants will point to objects apparently in
an effort to change a person’s direction of gaze and interest; they can interact quite
effectively with other people; they will express their ideas in opposition to the wishes of
others; and they will show empathy for the feeling of others. Schatz studied the spontaneous
speech of three-year-olds and found that these children used mental terms，and used them in
circumstances where there was a contrast between, for example, not being sure where an
object was located and finding it, or between pretending and reality. Thus the social abilities
of children indicate that they are aware of the difference between mental states and external
reality at ages younger than four.

A different explanation has been put forward by Harris. He proposed that children use
‘simulation’. This involves putting yourself in the other person’s position, and then trying to
predict what the other person would do. Thus success on false belief tasks can be explained
by children trying to imagine what they would do if they were a character in the stories,
rather than children being able to appreciate the beliefs of other people. Such thinking about
situations that do not exist involves what is termed counterfactual reasoning.

A different explanation has been put forward by Harris. He proposed that children use
"simulation”. This involves putting yourself in the other person’s position, and then trying to
predict what the other person would do. Thus, success on false belief tasks can be explained
by children trying to imagine what they would do if they were a character in the stories,
rather than children being able to appreciate the beliefs of other people. Such thinking about
situations that do not exist involves what is termed counterfactual reasoning.

Questions 14-20
 Show Notepad

Look at the following statements (Questions 14-20) and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-G.

Write the correct letter. A-G. in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

List of Researchers

A Baron-Cohen

B Meins

C Wimmer and Pemer

D Lewis E Dunn F Schatz G Harris

E Dunn

F Schatz

G Harris
14   gave an alternative explanation that children may not be understanding other’s
belief
15   found that children under certain age can tell difference between reality and
mentality
16   conducted a well-known experiment and drew conclusion that young children
were unable to comprehend the real state of the world
17   found that children who get along with adults often comparatively got through
the test more easily
18   revised an easier experiment to rule out the possibility that children might be
influenced by sophisticated reasoning
19   related social factor such as mother-child communication to capability act in
TOM
20   explained children are less likely to tell something interactive to their mother
than to their friends

Questions 21-26
 Show Notepad

Complete the summary below.

Choose  ONE WORD ONLY  from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

In 1980s, research studies were designed to test the subject called Theory of Mind that if
children have the ability to represent the reality. First experiments were carried out on this
subject on a boy. And questions had been made on where the boy can find the location of
the 21   . But it was accused that it had excessive 22  . So second modified
experiment was can ducted involving two dolls, and most children passed the test at the age
of 23   . Then Lewis and Dunn researched 24   children in a certain place,
and found children who have more interaction such as more conversation with 25   
have better performance in the test, and peer interaction is 26   because of consisting
pretending elements.

What is Meaning
—Why do we respond to words and symbols in the waves we do?

The end, product of education, yours and mine and everybody's, is the total pattern of
reactions and possible reactions we have inside ourselves. If you did not have within you at
this moment the pattern of reactions that we call "the ability to read.” you would see here
only meaningless black marks on paper. Because of the trained patterns of response, you are
(or are not) stirred to patriotism by martial music, your feelings of reverence are aroused by
symbols of your religion, you listen more respectfully to the health advice of someone who
has “MD" after his name than to that of someone who hasn’t. What I call here a “pattern of
reactions”, then, is the sum total of the ways we act in response to events, to words, and to
symbols.

Our reaction patterns or our semantic habits, are the internal and most important residue of
whatever years of education or miseducation we may have received from our parents’
conduct toward us in childhood as well as their teachings, from the formal education we may
have had, from all the lectures we have listened to, from the radio programs and the movies
and television shows we have experienced, from all the books and newspapers and comic
strips we have read, from the conversations we have had with friends and associates, and
from all our experiences. If, as the result of all these influences that make us what we are, our
semantic habits are reasonably similar to those of most people around us, we are regarded as
"normal,” or perhaps “dull.” If our semantic habits are noticeably different from those of
others, we are regarded as “individualistic" or “original.” or, if the differences are
disapproved of or viewed with alarm, as “crazy.”

Semantics is sometimes defined in dictionaries as “the science of the meaning of words”—

which would not be a bad definition if people didn’t assume that the search for the meanings
of words begins and ends with looking them up in a dictionary. If one stops to think for a
moment, it is clear that to define a word, as a dictionary does, is simply to explain the word
with more words. To be thorough about defining, we should next have to define the words
used in the definition, then define the words used in defining the words used in the definition
and so on. Defining words with more words, in short, gets us at once into what mathemati-
cians call an “infinite regress”. Alternatively, it can get us into the kind of run-around we
sometimes encounter when we look up “impertinence” and find it defined as “impudence," so
we look up “impudence” and find it defined as “impertinence." Yet—and here we come to
another common reaction pattern—people often act as if words can be explained fully with
more words. To a person who asked for a definition of jazz, Louis Armstrong is said to have
replied, "Man. when you got to ask what it is, you’ll never get to know,” proving himself to
be an intuitive semanticist as well as a great trumpet player.

Semantics, then, does not deal with the “meaning of words” as that expression is commonly
understood. P. W. Bridgman, the Nobel Prize winner and physicist, once wrote, “The true
meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says
about it.” He made an enormous contribution to science by showing that the meaning of a
scientific term lies in the operations, the things done, that establish its validity, rather than in
verbal definitions.

Here is a simple, everyday kind of example of “operational” definition. If you say, “This
table measures six feet in length,” you could prove it by taking a foot rule, performing the
operation of laying it end to end while counting, “One...two...three...four...” But if you say—
and revolutionists have started uprisings with just this statement “Man is born free, but
everywhere he is in chains!”—what operations could you perform to demonstrate its accuracy
or inaccuracy?

But let us carry this suggestion of “operationalism" outside the physical sciences where
Bridgman applied it, and observe what “operations” people perform as the result of both the
language they use and the language other people use in communicating to them. Here is a
personnel manager studying an application blank. He comes to the words “Education:
Harvard University,” and drops the application blank in the wastebasket (that’s the
“operation”) because, as he would say if you asked him, “I don’t like Harvard men.” This is
an instance of "meaning” at work—but it is not a meaning that can be found in dictionaries.

If I seem to be taking a long time to explain what semantics is about, it is because I am trying,
in the course of explanation, to introduce the reader to a certain way of looking at human
behavior. I say human responses because, so far as we know, human beings are the only
creatures that have, over and above that biological equipment which we have in common
with other creatures, the additional capacity for manufacturing symbols and systems of
symbols. When we react to a flag, we are not reacting simply to a piece of cloth, but to the
meaning with which it has been symbolically endowed. When we react to a word, we are not
reacting to a set of sounds, but to the meaning with which that set of sounds has been
symbolically endowed.

A basic idea in general semantics, therefore, is that the meaning of words (or other symbols)
is not in the words, but in our own semantic reactions. If I were to tell a shockingly obscene
story in Arabic or Hindustani or Swahili before an audience that understood only English, no
one would blush or be angry; the story would be neither shocking nor obscene-induced, it
would not even be a story. Likewise, the value of a dollar bill is not in the bill, but in our
social agreement to accept it as a symbol of value. If that agreement were to break down
through the collapse of our government, the dollar bill would become only a scrap of paper.
We do not understand a dollar bill by staring at it long and hard. We understand it by
observing how people act with respect to it. We understand it by understanding the social
mechanisms and the loyalties that keep it meaningful. Semantics is therefore a social study,
basic to all other social studies.

Questions 27-31
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter,  A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

27

What point is made in the first paragraph?

 A  The aim of education is to teach people to read
 B  Everybody has a different pattern of reactions.
 C  Print only carries meaning to those who have received appropriate ways to respond.
 D  The writers should make sure their works satisfy a variety of readers.

28

According to the second paragraph, people are judged by

 A  the level of education.
 B  the variety of experience.
 C  how conventional their responses are.
 D  complex situations.
 29

What point is made in the third paragraph?

 A  Standard ways are incapable of defining words precisely.
 B  A dictionary is most scientific in defining words.
 C  A dictionary should define words in as few words as possible.
 D  Mathematicians could define words accurately.

30

What does the writer suggest by referring to Louis Armstrong?

 A  He is an expert of language.
 B  Music and language are similar.
 C  He provides insights to how words are defined.
 D  Playing trumpet is easier than defining words.

31

What does the writer intend to show about the example of “personnel manager”?
 A  Harvard men are not necessarily competitive in the job market.
 B  Meaning cannot always be shared by others.
 C  The idea of operationalism does not make much sense outside the physical science.
 D  Job applicants should take care when filling out application forms.

Questions 32-35
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 32-35 on you answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

32   Some statements are incapable of being proved or disproved.

33   Meaning that is personal to individuals is less worthy to study than shared
meanings.
34   Flags and words are eliciting responses of the same reason.
35   A story can be entertaining without being understood.

Questions 36-40
 Show Notepad
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-H, below.

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

36   A comic strip
37   A dictionary
38   Bridgman
39   A story in a language the audience cannot understand
40   A dollar bill
A is meaningless.

B has lasting effects on human behaviors.

C is a symbol that has lost its meaning.

D can be understood only in its social context.

E can provide inadequate explanation of meaning.

F reflects the variability of human behaviors.

G emphasizes the importance of analyzing how words were used.

H suggests that certain types of behaviors carry more meanings than others.

REFLECTING ON THE MIRROR

In all likelihood the first mirrors would have simply been pools of water that reflected the
image of the one who looked into it. Nature’s mirror, while cheap and readily accessible,
must have also been quite frustrating with the slightest disturbance on the surface of the water
making it difficult to see clearly. It is not altogether clear when the first man-made mirrors
were produced but mirrors made of brass are mentioned in the Bible, and after that mirrors of
bronze were in common use among the ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. In addition to
bronze, the Greeks and Romans experimented with polished silver to produce simple mirrors.

Crude forms of glass mirrors were first made in Venice in 1300. Small sheets of glass were
cut from disks made by a spinning process. When this glass was backed with a covering of tin
or lead, a ‘mirror’ resulted. During the early periods of their development, mirrors were rare
and expensive. France had glass factories but only in Venice, Italy was the secret of mirror
foiling know n. The chemical process of coating a glass surface with metallic silver was
discovered by German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1835, and this advance inaugurated the
modern techniques of mirror making.

By the end of the 17th century mirrors were made in Britain and the manufacture of mirrors
developed subsequently into an important industry in many other European countries. People
wore them in their hats, or set them like jewels in their rings. Society glittered and shone like
the firmament. A little later on, America was gripped by the mirror craze, only this time they
wore interested in larger mirrors. In house after house in residential districts and eastern cities
there could be found one long mirror after another placed between two front parlour
windows.

In the manufacture of mirrors today, plate glass is cut to size, and all blemishes are removed
by polishing with rouge. The glass is scrubbed and flushed with a reducing solution before
silver is applied. The glass is then placed on a hollow, cast-iron tabletop, covered with felt,
and kept warm by steam. A solution of silver nitrate is poured on the glass and left
undisturbed for about 1 hour. The silver nitrate is reduced to a metallic silver and a lustrous
deposit of silver gradually forms. The deposit is dried, coated with shellac, and painted. Most
present-day mirrors therefore, are made up of these layers. Glass is used on top because it is
smooth, clear, and protects the reflective surface. A mirror needs to be very smooth in order
for the best reflection to occur.

Mirrors may have plane or curved surfaces. A curved mirror is concave or convex depending
on whether the reflecting surface faces toward the centre of the curvature or away from it.
Curved mirrors in ordinary usage have surfaces of varying shapes. Perhaps the most common
is spherical. Spherical mirrors produce images that are magnified or reduced – exemplified,
by mirrors for applying facial makeup and by rear-view mirrors for vehicles. Cylindrical
mirrors are another common type of shape. These focus a parallel beam flight to a linear
focus. A paraboloidal mirror is one which is often used to focus parallel rays to a sharp focus,
as in a telescope mirror, or to produce a parallel beam from a source at its focus, such as a
searchlight. A less common but useful shape is the ellipsoidal. Such a mirror will reflect light
from one of its two focal points to the other.

While the mirror is the focus of the production, the frame plays an important albeit slightly
lesser role as the anchor by which the mirror is affixed to its proper place. From the late 17th
century onward, mirrors and their frames played an increasingly important part in the
decoration of rooms. Complementing the shiny reflective mirror, the early frames were
usually of ivory, silver, ebony, or tortoiseshell or were veneered with walnut, olive, and
laburnum. Needlework and bead frames were also to be found. Craftsmen such as Grinling
Gibbons often produced elaborately carved mirror frames to match a complete decorative
ensemble. The tradition soon became established of incorporating a mirror into the space over
the mantelpiece; many of the early versions of these mirrors, usually known
as overmantels, were enclosed in glass frames. The architectural structure of which these
mirrors formed a part became progressively more elaborate. Focusing heavily on the effect
created by mirrors, 18th century designers such as the English brothers Robert and James
Adam created fireplace units stretching from the hearth to the ceiling. Oil the whole, mirror
frames reflected the general taste of the time and were often changed to accommodate
alterations in taste – frames usually being cheaper and hence more easily replaced than the
mirror itself.
By the end of the 18th century, painted decoration largely supplanted carving on mirrors, the
frames being decorated with floral patterns or classical ornaments. At the same time the
French started producing circular mirrors. Usually surrounded by a neoclassical gilt frame
that sometimes supported candlesticks, these mirrors enjoyed great popularity well into the
19thImproved skill in mirror making also made possible die introduction of the cheval glass, a
freestanding full-length mirror, supported on a frame with four feet. These were mainly used
for dressing purposes, though occasionally they had a decorative function. New, cheaper
techniques of mirror production in the 19th century led to a great proliferation in their use.
Not only were they regularly incorporated into pieces of furniture – such as wardrobes and
sideboards – they were also used in everything from high-powered telescopes to decorative
schemes in public places. Their popularity continues today. Through them, infants are able to
develop an awareness of their individuality through ‘mirror games’. This type of emotional
reflection stimulates babies to move various parts of their body and even promotes verbal
utterances.

Questions 1-5
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1 below

In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

1   The Creeks arid Egyptians used polished silver to make mirrors.

2   The first man-made mirrors were made of bronze.
3   Only the wealthy could afford the first mirrors.
4   The first mirrors in America were used for decoration.
5   Spherical mirrors are commonly used in cars.

Questions 6-9
 Show Notepad

Complete the labels on Diagram A below.

Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

Diagram A: Magnified side-view of a mirror

 A rouge 

B cast iron

C felt

D steam

E shellac

F glass

G metal

H silver nitrate paint

I reducing solution

6 
7 
8 
9 

Questions 10-13
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter  A, B, C, or D.

Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

10

The type of mirror used for looking at the stars is

 A  paraboloidal.
 B  spherical.
 C  cylindrical. 
 D  ellipsoidal.

11

17th century craftsmen
 A  blended mirror frames well with other household furniture.
 B  hung mirrors above fireplaces.
 C  used mirror frames as a focus for home decoration.
 D  established floral patterns as a standard for mirror frames.

12

18th century craftsmen
 A  designed furniture which highlighted the unique properties of mirrors.
 B  experimented largely with mirror frames made of ebony and ivory.
 C  built spherically-shaped minors.
 D  experimented with ceiling mirrors around fireplaces.

13

19th century craftsmen
 A  used mirrors less than any previous time in history.
 B  introduced mirrors as learning tools.
 C  used mirrors extensively in bedroom furniture.
 D  etched designs into mirrors.

EFFORT AND SCIENCE TO WIN

Winning nowadays is not only a question of disciplined training: The triumph of victory
today involves the collaboration of several medical specialists who combine their particular
knowledge in an effort to help each athlete to reach their potential.
A.  In Mexico, the Medicine Direction and .Applied Sciences of the National Commission of
Deporte analyses all aspects of sports science from the role of the auditory system in sporting
achievement to die power of the mind and its role in the ability to win. Everything, it seems,
is open to scrutiny. Recently, the focus has been evaluating the visual acuity of cyclists and
long distance runners but they also focus on the more traditional areas of sports research,
among them psychology, nutrition, anthropology, biochemistry and odontology1. From
budding child athletes as young as 9 to the more mature-aged sportsperson, the facility at
Deporte has attracted some of Mexico’s most famous sporting and Olympic hopefuls.

B. “The study of elite athletes is now more scientific than ever” says doctor Francisco Javier
Squares, “after each competition, athletes are exposed to vigorous medical examinations and
follow-up training in order to help US arrive at a program that is tailor-made. “The modern
athlete has become big business, no longer is there a one-size-fits-all approach. For example,
in the past two people both 1.70 meters tall and weighing 70 kilograms would have been
given the same program of athletic conditioning – now this idea is obsolete. It may be that the
first individual has 35 kgs of muscle and 15 kgs of fat and the other person, although the
same height and weight may have 30 kgs of muscle and 20 kgs of fat. Through detailed
scientific evaluation here at our facility in Deporte,” says Squares, “… we are able to
construct a very specific training programme for each individual.”

C. Whereas many countries in die world focus on the elevation of the glorious champion, the
Mexican Olympic team takes a slightly different approach. Psychologically speaking an
athlete must bring to his endeavour a healthy dose of humility. As Squares said, “When an
athlete wins for Mexico, it is always as a result of a combined team effort with many people
operating behind the scenes to realise the sporting achievement. When an athlete stands on
the dais, it is because of great effort on the part of many.”

D. As is often the case in some poorer countries, sportsmen and women are stifled in their
development due to budgetary constraints. However this has not been a factor for
consideration with the team in Mexico. The Mexican government has allocated a substantial
sum of money for the provision of the latest equipment and laboratories for sports research.
In fact, the quality of Mexico’s facilities puts them on a par with countries like Italy and
Germany in terms of access to resources. One example of sophisticated equipment used at the
Mexican facility is the hyperbaric chamber. This apparatus is used to enhance oxygen
recovery after a vigorous physical workout. Says Squares, “When you breathe the air while
inside a hyperbaric chamber the natural state of the oxygen does not change. Green plants
produced the oxygen; modern technology just increases the air pressure. This does not change
the molecular composition of oxygen. Increased pressure just allows oxygen to get into
tissues better. Due to our purchase of the hyperbaric chamber, athletes are able to recover
from an intense workout in a much shorter space of time. We typically use the chamber for
sessions of 45 to 60 minutes daffy or three times per week.”

E. When pushed to the limit, the true indicator of fitness is not how hard the heart operates,
but how quickly it can recover after an extreme workout. Therefore, another focus area of
study for the team in Mexico has been the endurance of the heart. To measure this recovery
rate, an electroencephalograph (EEG) is used. The EEG enables doctors to monitor the
brainwave activity from sensors placed on the scalp. Athletes exert intense effort for a
sustained period after which they are given time to rest and recover. During these periods
between intense physical exertion and recovery, doctors are able to monitor any weaknesses
in the way the heart responds. The CCG has had a big impact upon our ability to measure the
muscular endurance of the heart.

F. In 1796, the life expectancy of a human being was between 25 and 36 years, in 1886 that
number basically doubled to between 45 and 50. In 1996, the life expectancy of an average
Mexican stood at around 75 years. People are living longer and this is due in large part to the
advances of modern science. It is not all sophisticated medical equipment that is playing a
part; although lesser in impact, basic advances in engineering are also greatly assisting. Take
for example, a professional tennis player. In the past, most tennis players’ shoes were
constructed with fabric and a solid rubber sole. These shoes were of poor construction and
resulted in hip and foot injuries. Today the technology of shoe construction has radically
changed. Now some shoes are injected with silicone and made of more comfortable,
ergonomic1 construction. This has helped not only the elite but also the recreational
sportsperson and thus, helps in the preservation of the human body.

Questions 14 -17
 Show Notepad

The passage has eight paragraphs labelled A-F

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

14   the natural process of oxygen production
15   standard after-competition procedure
16   the areas of study undertaken to improve athletic performance
17   the Mexican viewpoint on winning

Questions 18 -20
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter  A, B, C, or D.

Write your answers in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.

18

The hyperbaric chamber

 A  helps athletes to breathe more easily. 
 B  increases the level of oxygen an athlete breathes. 
 C  decreases the pressure of the oxygen for Mexican athletes.
 D  speeds up recovery time for athletes.

19

The electroencephalograph (EEG)

  A  measures how fast brainwaves move during exercise.
 B  helps doctors to determine heart problems.
 C  measures how hard the heart works during exercise.
 D  strengthens the heart muscle in athletes.

20

The life-span of individuals in Mexico has increased due to

 A  medical improvements.
 B  more committed doctors.
 C  better made sporting equipment.
 D  advances in ergonomics.

Questions 21-26
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 21 -26 on your answer sheet write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this

21   There are limits to the level of sporting enquiry.

22   Specific athletic programs differ mostly between men and women
23   Mexico and Germany have similar sporting resources.
24   Lack of money is what stops athletic improvement in some poor countries.
25   Wealthy countries enjoy greater athletic success.
26   Mexican athletes have the support of their government.

Memory Decoding
Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first and
last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the
next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-
paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It
is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is
where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be
examined in an entirely different manner.

A
In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem,
memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their
photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a
few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships
was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than
30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive
memory, a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes,” as some of them like to be
called, is closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific
testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that
capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.

Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior
Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College
London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World
Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different in some
way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI
machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were
being scanned. When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference
between the memory contestant and the control subjects was, as expected, immense.
However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the
competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the control
group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs
were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were
using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be
involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial
navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are
revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length
mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks
of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing
in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and
shuffled it. He held up three cards – the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades.
He pointed at a fireplace and said, “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with
handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of
clubs.

How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he
associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or, in this
case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child, the action is surviving a storm,
and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is
thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When
Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group
forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet
becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images
along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In
competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to be as smooth and downhill
as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and
translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed
activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.

The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful
information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why competitive memorizers
place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the loci method,
reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the
sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies
were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by
closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had
discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial
information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably, our
ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the
cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method became popular across ancient Greece as a
trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of
treatises on the art of memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of
memory was considered a staple of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic, and
rhetoric.

The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S.V. Shereshevski, who could
recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense
syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity of his
memory had no distinct limits,” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studies
Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined.
For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste.
Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.

K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone

can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F., an undergraduate who
was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or
three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits
in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years,
S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more
than 80. The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn’t
exist at all. When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional
memorizers were using techniques – sometimes without realizing it – and lots of practice.
Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. “If we look at
some of these memory tasks, they’re the kind of thing most people don’t even waste one hour
practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would
be remarkable, he adds, to find a “person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t
think that there’s any compelling evidence that there are such people.”

Questions 27-31
 Show Notepad

The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

27   The reason why the competence of super memory is significant in academic
settings
28   Mention of a contest for extraordinary memory held in consecutive years
29   A demonstrative example of extraordinary person did an unusual recalling
game
30   A belief that extraordinary memory can be gained through enough practice
31   A depiction of the rare ability which assists the extraordinary memory reactions

Questions 32-36
 Show Notepad

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet.

Using visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers are investigated and
explained. A man called Ed Cooke in a pub, spoke a string of odd words when he held 7 of
the spades (the first one of any cards group) was remembered as he encoded it to
a 32   and the card deck to memory are set to be one time of an order of 33 
; When it comes time to recall, Cooke took a 34   along his way and interpreted the
imaginary scene into cards. This superior memory skill can be traced back to Ancient Greece,
the strategy was called 35   which had been a major subject was in
ancient 36  .

Questions 37-38
 Show Notepad

Choose TWO correct letters, A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 37-38 on your answer sheet.

According to World Memory Championships, what activities need good memory?

  A  order for a large group of each digit
 B  recall people’s face
 C  resemble a long Greek poem
 D  match name with pictures and features
 E  match name with pictures and features

Questions 39-40
 Show Notepad

Choose TWO correct letters, A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.

What is the result of Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding’s MRI Scan
experiment find out?
 A  the champions’ brains are different in some way from common people
 B  difference in the brain of champions’ scan image to control subjects are shown when
memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers
 C  champions did much worse when they are asked to remember photographs
 D  the memory-champs activated more brain regions than control subjects
 E there is some part in the brain coping with visual and spatial memory

Multitasking Debate
Can you do them at the same time?

Talking on the phone while driving isn’t the only situation where we’re worse at multitasking
than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that
some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental
findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably
just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might
improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a
time.

The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an
experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red
circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require
presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the
volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different
recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird
chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no
problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.
C

The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately
plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the
same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the
half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the
first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented
simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks
lengthens.

There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply
identifying what we’re looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time
we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the
“attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you’re watching out for a particular event
and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of
concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it.
Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble to respond to the second.
What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimated that we can keep track
of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to
explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are
otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos
– say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other – and they will fail to spot
the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting
factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much
attention a viewer is paying?

A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in
the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she’s
thinking of leaving your dad – also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these
things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is
called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.

But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn’t buy the
bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the
brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his
peers. He has written papers with titles like “Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task
performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown that
with enough practice – at least 2000 tries – some people can execute two tasks
simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests
that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what’s more, he thinks
it used discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with
just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at
managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing
to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less
congested circuits to execute a task – rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy
traffic on main roads – effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all,
there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage:
walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.

It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we

age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who
studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is
slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more
precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a
simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers
tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly
relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important
parts of a scene than young drivers.

It’s not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit
from the practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, but brain scans also showed that
underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it’s
clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain
sobering. “We have this impression of an almighty complex brain,” says Marois, “and yet we
have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed
to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven’t evolved to be able to. Perhaps
we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as
ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.

Questions 1-5
 Show Notepad

The Reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes  1-5 on your answer sheet.

1   A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction
2   Different age group responds to important things differently
3   Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously
4   An experiment designed to demonstrates the critical part of the brain for
multitasking
5   A viewpoint favors the optimistic side of multitasking performance

Questions 6-8
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

6

Which one is correct about the experiment conducted by René Marois?

 A  participants performed poorly on the listening task solely
 B  volunteers press a different key on different color
 C  participants need to use different fingers on the different colored object
 D  they did a better fob on Mixed image and sound information

Which statement is correct about the first limitation of Marois’s experiment?

 A  “attentional blink” takes about ten seconds
 B  lag occurs if we concentrate on one object while the second one appears
 C  we always have trouble in reaching the second one
 D  first limitation can be avoided by certain measures

Which one is NOT correct about Meyer’s experiments and statements?

 A  just after failure in several attempts can people execute dual-task
 B  Practice can overcome dual-task interference
 C  Meyer holds a different opinion on Marois’s theory
 D  an existing processor decides whether to delay another task or not

Questions 9-13
 Show Notepad

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer

 NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

9   The longer gap between two presenting tasks means shorter delay toward
the second one.
10   Incapable of human memory cause people to sometimes miss the
differences when presented two similar images.
11   Marois has a different opinion on the claim that training removes the
bottleneck effect.
12   Art Kramer proved there is a correlation between multitasking performance
and genders
13   The author doesn’t believe that the effect of practice could bring any
variation.

A decibel Hell (The Effects of Living in a Noisy

World)
Section A decibel Hell:

It’s not difficult for a person to encounter sound at levels that can cause adverse health
effects. During a single day, people living in a typical urban environment can experience a
wide range of sounds in many locations, even once-quiet locales have become polluted with
noise. In fact, it’s difficult today to escape sound completely. In its 1999 Guidelines for
Community Noise, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, “Worldwide, noise-
induced hearing impairment is the most prevalent irreversible occupational hazard, and it is
estimated that 120 million people worldwide have disabling hearing difficulties.” Growing
evidence also points to many other health effects of too much volume.

Mark Stephenson, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based senior research audiologist at the National

Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says his agency’s definition of
hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the time-weighted average of 85 dBA, meaning the
average noise exposure measured over a typical eight-hour workday. Other measures and
definitions are used for other purposes.

Section B Growing Volume

In the United States, about 30 million workers are exposed to hazardous sound levels on the
job, according to NIOSH. Industries having a high number of workers exposed to loud
sounds include construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and
the military.

Noise in U.S. industry is an extremely difficult problem to monitor, acknowledges Craig

Moulton, a senior industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA). “Still,” he says, “OSHA does require that any employer with workers overexposed
to noise provide protection for those employees against the harmful effects of noise.
Additionally, employers must implement a continuing, effective hearing conservation
program as outlined in OSHA’s Noise Standard.”

Section C Scary Sound Effects

Numerous scientific studies over the years have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of
sound can damage hearing. Prolonged exposure can actually change the structure of the hair
cells in the inner ear, resulting in hearing loss. It can also cause tinnitus, a ringing, roaring,
buzzing, or clicking on the ears.

NIOSH studies from the mid to late 1990s show that 90% of coal miners have hearing
impairment by age 52 – compared to 9% of the general population – and 70% of male
metal/nonmetal miners will experience hearing impairment by age 60 (Stephenson notes that
from adolescence onward, females tend to have better hearing than males). Neitzel says
nearly half of all construction workers have some degree of hearing loss. “NIOSH research
also reveals that by age twenty-five, the average carpenter’s hearing is equivalent to an
otherwise healthy fifty-year-old male who hasn’t been exposed to noise,” he says.

William Luxford, medical director of the House Ear Clinic of St. Vincent Medical Center in
Los Angeles, points out one piece of good news: “It’s true that continuous noise exposure
will lead to the continuation of hearing loss, but as soon as the exposure is stopped, the
hearing loss stops. So a change in environment can improve a person’s hearing health.”

Research is catching up with this anecdotal evidence. In the July 2001 issue of Pediatrics,
researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, based on
audiometric testing of 5,249 children as part of the Third National Health and Nutrition,
Examination Survey, an estimated 12.5% of American children have noise-induced hearing
threshold shifts – or dulled hearing – in one or both ears. Most children with noise-induced
hearing threshold shifts have only limited hearing damage, but continued exposure to
excessive noise can lead to difficulties with high-frequency sound discrimination. The report
listed stereos, music concerts, toys (such as toy telephones and certain rattles), lawnmowers,
and fireworks as producing potentially harmful sounds.

Section D Beyond the Ears

The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears. Nonauditory effects of noise exposure are those
effects that don’t cause hearing loss but still can be measured, such as elevated blood
pressure, loss of sleep, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing,
and changes in brain chemistry.

The nonauditory effects of noise were noted as early as 1930 in a study published by E.L.
Smith and D.L. Laird in volume 2 of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The
results showed that exposure to noise caused stomach contractions in healthy human beings.
Reports on noise’s nonauditory effects published since that pioneering study have been both
contradictory and controversial in some areas.

Bronzaft and the school principal persuaded the school board to have acoustical tile installed
in the classrooms adjacent to the tracks. The Transit Authority also treated the tracks near the
school to make them less noisy. A follow-up study published in the September 1981 issue of
the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that children’s reading scores improved after
these interventions were put in place.

Section E Fighting for Quiet

Anti-noise activists say that Europe and several countries in Asia are more advanced than the
United States in terms of combating noise. “Population pressure has prompted Europe to
move more quickly on the noise issue that the United States has,” Hume says. In the
European Union, countries with cities of at least 250,000 people are creating noise maps of
those cities to help leaders determine noise pollution policies. Paris has already prepared its
first noise maps. The map data, which must be finished by 2007, will be fed into computer
models that will help test the sound impact of street designs or new buildings before
construction begins.

Activists in other countries say they too want the United States to play a more leading role on
the noise issue. But as in other areas of environmental health, merely having a more powerful
government agency in place that can set more regulations is not the ultimate answer,
according to other experts. Bronzaft stresses that governments worldwide need to increase
funding for noise research and do a better job coordinating their noise pollution efforts so
they can establish health and environmental policies based on solid scientific research.
“Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens by curbing noise pollution,” she
says.

Questions 14-18
 Show Notepad

Complete the summary below

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Nowadays it seems difficult for people to avoid the effects of living in a noisy world. Noise is
the sound beyond the average of 14   referring to the agency’s definition. Scientific
studies over the years from the mid to late 1990s have confirmed that exposure to certain
levels of sound can cause damage 15   on certain senior age.
From the testing of 5,249 children, those who are constantly exposed to excessive noise may
have trouble in 16   sound discrimination. The effects of sound don’t stop with the
ears, exposure to noise may lead to the unease of 17   a in healthy people. Europe
has taken steps on the noise issue, big cities of over 250,000 people are creating 18   
to help to create noise pollution policies.

Questions 19-23
 Show Notepad
Look at the following researchers and the list of findings below. Match each researcher with
the correct finding.
Write the correct letter in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.
A WHO

B William Luxford (the House Ear Clinic)

C Craig Moulton (OSHA)

D Arline Bronzaft

E Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

19   People can change the environment to improve hearing health.

20   The government should continue the research on anti-noise researches with the
fund.
21   companies should be required to protect the employees to avoid noise
22   Noise has posed an effect on American children’s hearing ability
23   noise has seriously affected human being where they live worldwide

Questions 24-26
 Show Notepad

Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24

The board of schools built close to the tracks are convinced to

 A  moved the classrooms away from the noisy track
 B  regulated the track usage to a less extent
 C  utilised a special material into classroom buildings lessening the effect of outside noise
 D  organised a team for a follow-up study

25

In European countries, the big cities’ research on noise focuses on

 A  How to record pollution details of the city on maps
 B  the impact of noise on population shift in the European cities
 C  how wide can a city be to avoid noise pollution
 D  helping the authorities better make a decision on management of the city

26
What is the best title in paragraph 1?
 A  How people cope with noise pollutions
 B  the fight against the noise with the powerful technology
 C  The Effects of Living in a Noisy World
 D  The Effects of noise on children’s learning

Is Graffiti Art or Crime

A

The term graffiti derives from the Italian graffito meaning ‘scratching’ and can be defined as
uninvited marking or writing scratched or applied to objects, built structures and natural
features. It is not a new phenomenon: examples can be found on ancient structures around the
world, in some cases predating the Greeks and Romans. In such circumstances it has acquired
invaluable historical and archaeological significance, providing a social history of life and
events at that time. Graffiti is now a problem that has become pervasive, as a result of the
availability of cheap and quick means of mark-making.

It is usually considered a priority to remove graffiti as quickly as possible after it appears.

This is for several reasons. The first is to prevent ‘copy-cat’ emulation which can occur
rapidly once a clean surface is defaced. It may also be of a racist or otherwise offensive
nature and many companies and councils have a policy of removing this type of graffiti
within an hour or two of it being reported. Also, as paints, glues and inks dry out over time
they can become increasingly difficult to remove and are usually best dealt with as soon as
possible after the incident. Graffiti can also lead to move serious forms of vandalism and,
ultimately, the deterioration of an area, contributing to social decline.

Although graffiti may be regarded as an eyesore, any proposal to remove it from sensitive
historic surfaces should be carefully considered: techniques designed for more robust or
utilitarian surfaces may result in considerable damage. In the event of graffiti incidents, it is
important that the owners of buildings or other structures and their consultants are aware of
the approach they should take in dealing with the problem. The police should be informed as
there may be other related attacks occurring locally. An incidence pattern can identify
possible culprits, as can stylised signatures or nicknames, known as ‘tags’, which may
already be familiar to local police. Photographs are useful to record graffiti incidents and may
assist the police in bringing a prosecution. Such images are also required for insurance claims
and can be helpful in cleaning operatives, allowing them to see the problem area before
arriving on site.

There are a variety of methods that are used to remove graffiti. Broadly these divide between
chemical and mechanical systems. Chemical preparations are based on dissolving the media;
these solvents can range from water to potentially hazardous chemical ‘cocktails’.
Mechanical systems such as wire-brushing and grit-blasting attempt to abrade or chip the
media from the surface. Care should be taken to comply with health and safety legislation
with regard to the protection of both passers-by and any person carrying out the cleaning.
Operatives should follow product guidelines in terms of application and removal, and wear
the appropriate protective equipment. Measures must be taken to ensure that run-off, aerial
mists, drips and splashes do not threaten unprotected members of the public. When
examining a graffiti incident it is important to assess the ability of the substrate to withstand
the prescribed treatment. If there is any doubt regarding this, then small trial areas should be
undertaken to assess the impact of more extensive treatment.

A variety of preventive strategies can be adopted to combat a recurring problem of graffiti at

a given site. As no two sites are the same, no one set of protection measures will be suitable
for all situations. Each site must be looked at individually. Surveillance systems such as
closed-circuit television may also help. In cities and towns around the country, prominently
placed cameras have been shown to reduce anti-social behavior of all types including graffiti.
Security patrols will also act as a deterrent to prevent recurring attacks. However, the cost of
this may be too high for most situations. A physical barriers such as a wall, railings, doors or
gates can be introduced to discourage unauthorized access to a vulnerable site. However,
consideration has to be given to the impact measures have on the structure being protected. In
the worst cases, they can be almost as damaging to the quality of the environment as the
graffiti they prevent. In others, they might simply provide a new surface for graffiti.

One of the most significant problems associated with graffiti removal is the need to remove it
from surfaces that are repeatedly attacked. Under these circumstances, the repeated removal
of graffiti using even the most gentle methods will ultimately cause damage to the surface
material. There may be situations where the preventive strategies mentioned above do not
work or are not a viable proposition at a given site. Anti-graffiti coatings are usually applied
by brush or spray leaving a thin veneer that essentially serves to isolate the graffiti from the
surface.

Removal of graffiti from a surface that has been treated in this way is much easier, usually
using low-pressure water which reduces the possibility of damage. Depending on the type of
barrier selected it may be necessary to reapply the coating after each graffiti removal
exercise.

Questions 27-32
 Show Notepad

Reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.
27   why chemically cleaning graffiti may cause damage
28   the benefit of a precautionary strategy on the gentle removal
29   the damaging and accumulative impact of graffiti on the community
30   the need for different preventive measures being taken to cope with graffiti
31   a legal proposal made to the owner of building against graffiti
32   the reasons for removing graffiti as soon as possible.

Questions 33-34
 Show Notepad

Choose TWO letters, A-E

Write your answers in boxes 33-34 on your answer sheet.

Which two statements are true concerning the removal of graffiti

 A  cocktail removal can be safer than water treatment
 B  small patch trial before applying large scale of removing
 C  Chemical treatments are the most expensive way of removing
 D  there are risks for both Chemical and medication method
 E  mechanical removals are much more applicable than Chemical treatments

Questions 35-36
 Show Notepad

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 35-36 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following preventive measures against graffiti are mentioned effectively
in the passage?
 A  organise more anti-graffiti movement in the city communities
 B  increase the police patrols on the street
 C  Build a new building with material repelling to water
 D  installing more visible security cameras
 E  Provide a whole new surface with a chemical coat

Questions 37-40
 Show Notepad

Complete the Summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.

Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
Ancient graffiti is of significance and records the 37   of details life for that period.
The police can recognize newly committed incidents of graffiti by the signature which is
called 38   that they are familiar with
Operatives ought to comply with relevant rules during the operation, and put on the
suitable 39 
Removal of graffiti from a new type of coating surface can be much convenient of
using 40