READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1 – 13, which are based on reading
passage 1 below

Foot Pedal Irrigation

A Until now, governments and development agencies have tried to tackle the problem
through large-scale projects: gigantic dams, sprawling, irrigation canals and vast new fields of
high-yield crops introduced during the Green Revolution, the famous campaign to increase
grain harvests in developing nations. Traditional irrigation, however, has degraded the soil in
many areas, and the reservoirs behind dams can quickly fill up with silt, reducing their storage
capacity and depriving downstream farmers of fertile sediments. Furthermore, although the
Green Revolution has greatly expanded worldwide farm production since 1950, poverty
stubbornly persists in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Continued improvements in the
productivity of large farms may play the main role in boosting food supply, but local efforts to
provide cheap, individual irrigation systems to small farms may offer a better way to lift
people out of poverty.
B The Green Revolution was designed to increase the overall food supply, not to raise the
incomes of the rural poor, so it should be no surprise that it did not eradicate poverty or
hunger. India, for example, has been self-sufficient in food for 15 years, and its granaries are
full, but more than 200 million Indians – one fifth of the country’s population – are
malnourished because they cannot afford the food they need and because the country’s
safety nets are deficient. In 2000, 189 nations committed to the Millennium Development
Goals, which called for cutting world poverty in half by 2015. With business as usual, however,
we have little hope of achieving most of the Millennium goals, no matter how much money
rich countries contribute to poor ones.
C The supply-driven strategies of the Green Revolution, however, may not help subsistence
farmers, who must play to their strengths to compete in the global marketplace. The average
size of a family farm is less than four acres in India, 1.8 acres in Bangladesh and about half an
acre in China. Combines and other modern farming tools are too expensive to be used on such
small areas. ZL 0927090848 An Indian farmer selling surplus wheat grown on his one-acre plot
could not possibly compete with the highly efficient and subsidized Canadian wheat farms
that typically stretch over thousands of acres. Instead subsistence farmers should exploit the
fact that their labor costs are the lowest in the world, giving them a comparative advantage in
growing and selling high-value, intensely farmed crops.
D Paul Polak saw firsthand the need for a small-scale strategy in 1981 when he met
Abdul Rahman, a farmer in the Noakhali district of Bangladesh. From his three quarter-acre
plots of rain-fed rice fields, Abdul could grow only 700 kilograms of rice each year – 300
kilograms less than what he needed to feed his family. During the three months before the
October rice harvest came in, Abdul and his wife had to watch silently while their three
children survived on one meal a day or less. As Polak walked with him through the scattered
fields he had inherited from his father, Polak asked what he needed to move out of poverty.
“Control of water for my crops,” he said, “at a price I can afford.”
E Soon Polak learned about a simple device that could help Abdul achieve his goal: the
treadle pump. Developed in the late 1970s by Norwegian engineer Gunnar Barnes, the pump
is operated by a person walking in place on a pair of treadles and two handle arms made
of bamboo. Properly adjusted and maintained, it can be operated several hours a day without
tiring the users. Each treadle pump has two cylinders which are made of engineering plastic.
The diameter of a cylinder is 100.5mm and the height is 280mm. The pump is capable of
working up to a maximum depth of 7 meters. Operation beyond 7 meters is not
recommended to preserve the integrity of the rubber components. The pump mechanism
has piston and foot valve assemblies. The treadle action creates alternate strokes in the two
pistons that lift the water in pulses.
F The human-powered pump can irrigate half an acre of vegetables and costs only $25
(including the expense of drilling a tube well down to the groundwater). Abdul heard about
the treadle pump from a cousin and was one of the first farmers in Bangladesh to buy one. He
borrowed the $25 from an uncle and easily repaid the loan four months later. During the five-
month dry season, when Bangladeshis typically farm very little, Abdul used the treadle pump
to grow a quarter-acre of chili peppers, tomatoes, cabbage and eggplants. He also improved
the yield of one of his rice plots by irrigating it. His family ate some of the vegetables and sold
the rest at the village market, earning a net profit of $100. ZL 0927090848 With his new
income, Abdul was able to buy rice for his family to eat, keep his two sons in school until they
were 16 and set aside a little money for his daughter’s dowry. When Polak visited him again in
1984, he had doubled the size of his vegetable plot and replaced the thatched roof on his
house with corrugated tin. His family was raising a calf and some chickens. He told me that
the treadle pump was a gift from God.
G Bangladesh is particularly well suited for the treadle pump because a huge reservoir of
groundwater lies just a few meters below the farmers’ feet. In the early 1980s IDE initiated a
campaign to market the pump, encouraging 75 small private-sector companies to
manufacture the devices and several thousand village dealers and tube-well drillers to sell and
install them. ZL 0927090848 Over the next 12 years one and a half million farm families
purchased treadle pumps, which increased the farmers’ net income by a total of $150 million
a year. The cost of IDE’s market-creation activities was only $12 million, leveraged by the
investment of $37.5 million from the farmers themselves. In contrast, the expense of building
a conventional dam and canal system to irrigate an equivalent area of farmland would be in
the range of $2,000 per acre, or $1.5 billion.
Questions 1 - 6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In boxes 1 – 6 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. It is more effective to resolve poverty or food problem in large scale rather than in
small scale.
2. Construction of gigantic dams costs more time in developing countries.
3. Green revolution failed to increase global crop production from the mid of 20th
century.
4. Agricultural production in Bangladesh declined in last decade.
5. Farmer Abdul Rahman knew how to increase production himself.
6. Small pump spread into the big project in Bangladesh in the past decade.

Questions 7 – 10
Filling the blanks in the diagram of treadle pump’s each part.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each
answer.
Questions 11-13
Answer the questions below. Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each
answer.

11. How large area can a treadle pump irrigate the field at a low level of expense?
12. What is Abdul’s new roof made of?
13. How much did Bangladesh farmers invest by IDE’s stimulation?
READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14 – 26, which are based on
reading passage 2 below

Coastal Archaeology of Britain

A The recognition of the wealth and diversity of England’s coastal archaeology has
been one of the most important developments of recent years. Some elements of this
enormous resource have long been known. The so-called ‘submerged forests’ off the
coasts of England, sometimes with clear evidence of human activity, had attracted the
interest of antiquarians since at least the eighteenth century but serious and
systematic attention has been given to the archaeological potential of the coast only
since the early 1980s.

B It is possible to trace a variety of causes for this concentration of effort and

interest. In the 1980s and 1990s scientific research into climate change and its
environmental impact spilt over into a much broader public debate as awareness of
these issues grew; the prospect of rising sea levels over the next century, and their
impact on current coastal environments, has been a particular focus for concern. At the
same time, archaeologists were beginning to recognize that the destruction caused by
natural processes of coastal erosion and by human activity was having an increasing
impact on the archaeological resource of the coast.

C The dominant process affecting the physical form of England in the post-glacial
period has been the rise in the altitude of sea level relative to the land, as the glaciers
melted and the landmass readjusted. The encroachment of the sea, the loss of huge
areas of land now under the North Sea and the English Channel, and especially the loss
of the land bridge between England and France, which finally made Britain an island,
must have been immensely significant factors in the lives of our prehistoric ancestors.
Yet the way in which prehistoric communities adjusted to these environmental changes
has seldom been a major theme in discussions of the period. One factor contributing to
this has been that, although the rise in relative sea level is comparatively well
documented, we know little about the constant reconfiguration of the coastline. This
was affected by many processes, mostly quite, which have not yet been adequately
researched. The detailed reconstruction of coastline histories and the changing
environments available for human use will be an important theme for future research.

D So great has been the rise in sea level and the consequent regression of the coast
that much of the archaeological evidence now exposed in the coastal zone, whether
being eroded or exposed as a buried land surface, is derived from what was originally
terrestrial occupation. Its current location in the coastal zone is the product of later
unrelated processes, and it can tell us little about past adaptations to the sea.
Estimates of its significance will need to be made in the context of other related
evidence from dry land sites. Nevertheless, its physical environment means that
preservation is often excellent, for example in the case of the Neolithic structure
excavated at the Stumble in Essex.

E In some cases, these buried land surfaces do contain evidence for human
exploitation of what was a coastal environment, and elsewhere along the modern
coast, there is similar evidence. Where the evidence does relate to past human
exploitation of the resources and the opportunities offered by the sea and the coast, it
is both diverse and as yet little understood. We are not yet in a position to make even
preliminary estimates of answers to such fundamental questions as the extent to which
the sea and the coast affected human life in the past, what percentage of the
population at any time lived within reach of the sea, or whether human settlements in
coastal environments showed a distinct character from that inland.

F The most striking evidence for use of the sea is in the form of boats, yet we still
have much to learn about their production and use. Most of the known wrecks around
our coast are not unexpectedly of post-medieval date and offer an unparalleled
opportunity for research which has as yet been little used. The prehistoric sewn-plank
boats such as those from the Humber estuary and Dover all seem to belong to the
second millennium BC; after this, there is a gap in the record of a millennium, which
cannot yet be explained, before boats reappear, but built using a very different
technology. Boatbuilding must have been an extremely important activity around much
of our coast, yet we know almost nothing about it. Boats were some of the most
complex artefacts produced by pre-modern societies, and further research on their
production and use make an important contribution to our understanding of past
attitudes to technology and technological change.

G Boats needed landing places, yet here again, our knowledge is very patchy. In
many cases the natural shores and beaches would have sufficed, leaving little or no
archaeological trace, but especially in later periods, many ports and harbors, as well as
smaller facilities such as quays, wharves, and jetties, were built. Despite a growth of
interest in the waterfront archaeology of some of our more important Roman and
medieval towns, very little attention has been paid to the multitude of smaller landing
places. Redevelopment of harbor sites and other development and natural pressures
along the coast are subjecting these important locations to unprecedented threats, yet
few surveys of such sites have been undertaken.

H One of the most important revelations of recent research has been the extent of
industrial activity along the coast. Fishing and salt production are among the better-
documented activities, but even here our knowledge is patchy. Many forms of fishing
will eave little archaeological trace and one of the surprises of the recent survey has
been the extent of past investment in facilities for procuring fish and shellfish.
Elaborate wooden fish weirs, often of considerable extent and responsive to aerial
photography in shallow water, have been identified in areas such as Essex and the
Severn estuary. The production of salt, especially in the late Iron Age and early Roman
periods, has been recognized for some time, especially in the Thames estuary and
around the Solent and Poole Harbor, but the reasons for the decline of that industry
and the nature of later coastal salt working are much less well understood. Other
industries were also located along the coast, either because the raw materials
outcropped there or for ease of working and transport: mineral resources such as sand,
gravel, stone, coal, ironstone, and alum were all exploited. These industries are poorly
documented, but their remains are sometimes extensive and striking.
I Some appreciation of the variety and importance of the archaeological remains
preserved in the coastal zone, albeit only in preliminary form, can thus be gained from
recent work, but the complexity of the problem of managing that resource is also being
realised. The problem arises not only from the scale and variety of the archaeological
remains, but also from two other sources: the very varied natural and human threats to
the resource, and the complex web of organisations with authority over, or interests in,
the coastal zone. Human threats include the redevelopment of historic towns and old
dockland areas, and the increased importance of the coast for the leisure and tourism
industries, resulting in pressure for the increased provision of facilities such as marinas.
The larger size of ferries has also caused an increase in the damage caused by their
wash to fragile deposits in the intertidal zone. The most significant natural threat is the
predicted rise in sea level over the next century especially in the south and east of
England. Its impact on archaeology is not easy to predict, and though it is likely to be
highly localised, it will be at a scale much larger than that of most archaeological sites.
Thus protecting one site may simply result in transposing the threat to a point further
along the coast. The management of the archaeological remains will have to be
considered in a much longer time scale and a much wider geographical scale than is
common in the case of dry land sites, and this will pose a serious challenge for
archaeologists.
Questions 14-16

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

Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

14 What has caused public interest in coastal archaeology in recent years?

A Golds and jewelleries in the ships that have submerged

B The rising awareness of climate change

C Forests under the sea

D Technological advance in the field of sea research

15 What does the passage say about the evidence of boats?

A We have a good knowledge of how boats were made and what boats were for
prehistorically

B Most of the boats discovered was found in harbors

C The use of boats had not been recorded for a thousand years

D The way to build boats has remained unchanged throughout human history

16 What can be discovered from the air?

A Salt mines

B Shellfish

C Ironstones

D Fisheries
Questions 17-23

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

In boxes 17-23 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

17 England lost much of its land after the ice-age due to the rising sea level.

18 The coastline of England has changed periodically.

19 Coastal archaeological evidence may be well-protected by seawater.

20 The design of boats used by pre-modern people was very simple.

21 Similar boats were also discovered in many other European countries.

22 There are a few documents relating to mineral exploitation.

23 Large passenger boats are causing increasing damage to the seashore.

Questions 24-26

Choose THREE letters A-G

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

Which THREE of the following statements are mentioned in the passage?

A Our prehistoric ancestors adjusted to the environmental change caused by the rising
sea level by moving to higher lands.

B It is difficult to understand how many people lived close to the sea.

C Human settlements in the coastal environment were different from that inland

D Our knowledge of boat evidence is limited.

E The prehistoric boats were built mainly for collecting sand from the river.

F Human development threatens the archaeological remains.

G The reason for the decline of the salt industry was the shortage of laborers.
READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27 – 13, which are based on reading
passage 3 below

Biology of Bitterness

To many people, grapefruit is palatable only when doused in sugar. Bitter Blockers like
adenosine monophosphate could change that.

A. There is a reason why grapefruit juice is served in little glasses: most people don’t want
to drink more than a few ounces at a time. aringin, a natural chemical compound found in
grapefruit, tastes bitter. Some people like that bitterness in small doses and believe it
enhances the general flavor, but others would rather avoid it altogether. So juice packagers
often select grapefruit with low naringin though the compound has antioxidant properties
that some nutritionists contend may help prevent cancer and arteriosclerosis.

B .It is possible, however, to get the goodness of grapefruit juice without the bitter taste.
I found that out by participating in a test conducted at the Linguagen Corporation, a
biotechnology company in Cranbury, New Jersey. Sets of two miniature white paper cups,
labeled 304and 305, were placed before five people seated around a conference table. Each
of us drank from one cup and then the other, cleansing our palates between tastes with water
and a soda cracker. Even the smallest sip of 304 had grapefruit ‘s unmistakable bitter bite. But
305 was smoother; there was the sour taste of citrus but none of the bitterness of naringin.
This juice had been treated with adenosine monophosphate, or AMP, a compound that blocks
the bitterness in foods without making them less nutritious.

C. Taste research is a booming business these days, with scientists delving into all five
basics-sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami, the savory taste of protein. Bitterness is of special
interest to industry because of its untapped potential in food. There are thousands of bitter -
tasting compounds in nature. They defend plants by warning animals away and protect
animals by letting them know when a plant may be poisonous. But the system isn’t foolproof.
Grapefruit and cruciferous vegetable like Brussels sprouts and kale are nutritious despite-and
sometimes because of-their bitter-tasting components. Over time, many people have learned
to love them, at least in small doses. “Humans are the only species that enjoys bitter taste,”
says Charles Zuker, a neuroscientist at the University of California School of Medicine at San
Diego. “Every other species is averse to bitter because it means bad news. But we have
learned to enjoy it. We drink coffee, which is bitter, and quinine [in tonic water] too. We enjoy
having that spice in our lives.” Because bitterness can be pleasing in small quantities but
repellent when intense, bitter blockers like AMP could make a whole range of foods, drinks,
and medicines more palatable-and therefore more profitable.

D. People have varying capacities for tasting bitterness, and the differences appear to be
genetic. About 75 percent of people are sensitive to the taste of the bitter compounds
phenylthiocarbamide and 6-n-propylthiouracil. and 25 percent are insensitive. Those who are
sensitive to phenylthiocarbamide seem to be less likely than others to eat cruciferous
vegetables, according to Stephen Wooding, a geneticist at the University of Utah. Some
people, known as supertasters, are especially sensitive to 6-n-propylthiouraci because they
have an unusually high number of taste buds. Supertasters tend to shun all kinds of bitter-
tasting things, including vegetable, coffee, and dark chocolate. Perhaps as a result, they tend
to be thin. They’re also less fond of alcoholic drinks, which are often slightly bitter. Dewar’s
scotch, for instance, tastes somewhat sweet to most people. ” But a supertaster tastes no
sweetness at all, only bitterness,” says Valerie Duffy, an associate professor of dietetics at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs.

E. In one recent study, Duffy found that supertasters consume alcoholic beverages, on
average, only two to three times a week, compared with five or six times for the average
nontasters. Each taste bud, which looks like an onion, consists of 50 to 100 elongated cells
running from the top of the bud to the bottom. At the top is a little clump of receptors that
capture the taste molecules, known as tastants, in food and drink. The receptors function
much like those for sight and smell. Once a bitter signal has been received, it is relayed via
proteins known as G proteins. The G protein involved in the perception of bitterness,
sweetness, and umami was identified in the early 1990s by Linguagen’s founder, Robert
Margolskee, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Known as gustducin, the
protein triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that lead to changes in ion concentrations
within the cell. Ultimately, this delivers a signal to the brain that registers as bitter. “The
signaling system is like a bucket brigade,” Margolskee says. “It goes from the G protein to
other proteins.”

F. In 2000 Zuker and others found some 30 different kinds of genes that code for bitter-
taste receptors. “We knew the number would have to be large because there is such a large
universe of bitter tastants,” Zuker says. Yet no matter which tastant enters the mouth or
which receptor it attaches to, bitter always tastes the same to us. The only variation derives
from its intensity and the ways in which it can be flavored by the sense of smell. “Taste cells
are like a light switch,” Zuker says. “They are either on or off.”

G. Once they figured put the taste mechanism, scientists began to think of ways to
interfere with it. They tried AMP, an organic compound found in breast milk and other
substances, which is created as cells break down food. Amp has no bitterness of its own, but
when put it in foods, Margolskee and his colleagues discovered, it attaches to bitter-taste
receptors. As effective as it is, AMP may not be able to dampen every type pf bitter taste,
because it probably doesn’t attach to all 30 bitter-taste receptors. So Linguagen has scaled up
the hunt for other bitter blockers with a technology called high-throughput screening.
Researchers start by coaxing cells in culture to activate bitter-taste receptors. Then candidate
substances, culled from chemical compound libraries, are dropped onto the receptors, and
scientists look for evidence of a reaction.

H. Tin time, some taste researchers believe, compounds like AMP will help make
processed foods less unhealthy. Consider, for example, that a single cup of Campbell’s chicken
noodle soup contains 850 milligrams of sodium chloride, or table salt-more than a third of the
recommended daily allowance. The salt masks the bitterness created by the high
temperatures used in the canning process, which cause sugars and amino acids to react. Part
of the salt could be replaced by another salt, potassium chloride, which tends to be scarce in
some people’s diets. Potassium chloride has a bitter aftertaste, but that could be eliminated
with a dose of AMP. Bitter blockers could also be used in place of cherry or grape flavoring to
take the harshness out of children’s cough syrup, and they could dampen the bitterness of
antihistamines, antibiotics, certain HIV drugs, and other medications.
I. A number of foodmakers have already begun to experiment with AMP in their
products, and other bitter blockers are being developed by rival firms such as Senomyx in La
Jolla, California. In a few years, perhaps, after food companies have taken the bitterness from
canned soup and TV dinners, they can set their sights on something more useful: a bitter
blocker in a bottle that any of us can sprinkle on our brussels sprouts or stir into our grapefruit
juice.

Questions 27-34

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet.

27. Experiment on bitterness conducted

28. Look into the future application

29. Bitterness means different information for human and animals

30. Spread process of bitterness inside of body

31. How AMP blocks bitterness

32. Some bitterness blocker may help lower unhealthy impact

33. Bitterness introduced from a fruit

34. Genetic feature determines sensitivity

Question 35-38

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more
than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 35-
38 on your answer sheet.

The reason why grapefruit tastes bitter is because a substance called 35____ contained
in it. However, bitterness plays a significant role for plants. It gives a signal that certain plant is
36______. For human beings, different person carries various genetic abilities of tasting
bitterness. According to a scientist at the University of Utah, 37_______ have exceptionally
plenty of 38______, which allows them to perceive bitter compounds.

Questions 39-40

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

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

39 What is the main feature of AMP according to this passage?

A. offset bitter flavour in food

B. only exist in 304 cup

C. tastes like citrus

D. chemical reaction when meets biscuit

40 What is the main function of G protein?

A. collecting taste molecule

B. identifying different flavors elements

C. resolving large molecules

D. transmitting bitter signals to the brain