MOCK TEST 05 – READING

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.

Sending money home

the economics of migrant remittances

Every year millions of migrants travel vast distances using borrowed money for their airfares and
taking little or no cash with them. They seek a decent job to support themselves with money
left over that they can send home to their families in developing countries. These remittances
exceeded $400 billion last year. It is true that the actual rate per person is only about $200 per
month but it all adds up to about triple the amount officially spent on development aid.

In some of the poorer, unstable or conflict-torn countries, these sums of money are a lifeline –
the only salvation for those left behind. The decision to send money home is often inspired by
altruism – an unselfish desire to help others. Then again, the cash might simply be an exchange
for earlier services rendered by the recipients or it could be intended for investment by the
recipients. Often it will be repayment of a loan used to finance the migrant’s travel and
resettlement.

At the first sign of trouble, political or financial upheaval, these personal sources of support do
not suddenly dry up like official investment monies. Actually, they increase in order to ease the
hardship and suffering of the migrants’ families and, unlike development aid, which is

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channelled through government or other official agencies, remittances go straight to those in
need. Thus, they serve an insurance role, responding in a countercyclical way to political and
economic crises.

This flow of migrant money has a huge economic and social impact on the receiving countries. It
provides cash for food, housing and necessities. It funds education and healthcare and
contributes towards the upkeep of the elderly. Extra money is sent for special events such as
weddings, funerals or urgent medical procedures and other emergencies. Occasionally it
becomes the capital for starting up a small enterprise.

Unfortunately, recipients hardly ever receive the full value of the money sent back home
because of exorbitant transfer fees. Many money transfer companies and banks operate on a
fixed fee, which is unduly harsh for those sending small sums at a time. Others charge a
percentage, which varies from around 8% to 20% or more dependent on the recipient country.
There are some countries where there is a low fixed charge per transaction; however, these
cheaper fees are not applied internationally because of widespread concern over money
laundering. Whether this is a genuine fear or just an excuse is hard to say. If the recipients live in
a small village somewhere, usually the only option is to obtain their money through the local
post office. Regrettably, many governments allow post offices to have an exclusive affiliation
with one particular money transfer operator so there is no alternative but to pay the
extortionate charge.

The sums of money being discussed here might seem negligible on an individual basis but they
are substantial in totality. If the transfer cost could be reduced to no more than one per cent,
that would release another $30 billion dollars annually – approximately the total aid budget of

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the USA, the largest donor worldwide – directly into the hands of the world’s poorest. If this is
not practicable, governments could at least acknowledge that small remittances do not come
from organised crime networks, and ease regulations accordingly. They should put an end to
restrictive alliances between post offices and money transfer operators or at least open up the
system to competition. Alternately, a non-government humanitarian organisation, which would
have the expertise to navigate the elaborate red tape, could set up a non-profit remittance
platform for migrants to send money home for little or no cost.

Whilst contemplating the best system for transmission of migrant earnings to the home country,
one should consider the fact that migrants often manage to save reasonable amounts of money
in their adopted country. More often than not, that money is in the form of bank deposits
earning a tiny percentage of interest, none at all or even a negative rate of interest.

If a developing country or a large charitable society could sell bonds with a guaranteed return of
three or four per cent on the premise that the invested money would be used to build
infrastructure in that country, there would be a twofold benefit. Migrants would make a
financial gain and see their savings put to work in the development of their country of origin.
The ideal point of sale for these bonds would be the channel used for money transfers so that,
when migrants show up to make their monthly remittance, they could buy bonds as well.
Advancing the idea one step further, why not make this transmission hub the conduit for
affluent migrants to donate to worthy causes in their homeland so they may share their
prosperity with their compatriots on a larger scale?

Questions 1-7

Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B–H from the list of headings below.

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

List of Headings

i. Stability of remittances in difficult times

ii. Effect of cutback in transaction fees

iii. Targeted investments and contributions

iv. Remittances for business investment

v. How to lower transmission fees

vi. Motivations behind remittances

vii. Losses incurred during transmission

viii. Remittances worth more than official aid

ix. How recipients utilise remittances

x. Frequency and size of remittances

xi. Poor returns on migrant savings

Example:

Paragraph G xi

1. Paragraph A …….

2. Paragraph B …….

3. Paragraph C …….

4. Paragraph D …….

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5. Paragraph E …….

6. Paragraph F …….

7. Paragraph H …….

Questions 8–13

Complete the summary below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 8–13 on your answer sheet.

Countries are unwilling to enforce lower transaction fees as they are worried
about 8……………….., and villagers lose out when post offices have a special relationship with
one particular money transfer agency.

Each remittance might be small but the total cost of remittance fees is huge. Governments
should 9……………….. on small amounts and end the current post office system or make it
more competitive. Another idea would be for a large non-profit association, capable of handling
complicated 10……………….. to take charge of migrant remittances.

Migrants who send money home are able to save money, too, but it receives little or no interest
from 11………………… If a country or organisation sold bonds that earned a reasonable rate
of interest for the investor, that money could fund the development of
homeland 12………………… The bonds could be sold at the remittance centre, which could
also take donations from 13..……………….. to fund charitable projects in their home country.

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.

Daylight Saving Time

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Each year in many countries around the world, clocks are set forward in spring and then back
again in autumn in an effort to ‘save’ daylight hours. Like many modern practices, Daylight
Savings Time (DST) dates back to ancient civilisations. The Romans would adjust their routines
to the sun’s schedule by using different scales in their water clocks for different months of the
year.

This practice fell out of favour, however, and the concept was renewed only when, in 1784, the
American inventor Benjamin Franklin wrote a jocular article for The Journal of Paris exhorting
the city’s residents to make more use of daylight hours in order to reduce candle use. In 1895, in
a more serious effort, New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson proposed a biannual
two-hour shift closely resembling current forms of DST. His cause was not taken up, however,
until Germany first pushed their clocks forward in April 1916 as part of a drive to save fuel in
World War I.

Over the next several decades, global use of DST was sporadic and inconsistent. Countries such
as the UK and USA adopted DST in World Wars I and II, but reverted to standard time after the
wars ended. In the USA, the decision to use DST was determined by states and municipalities
between 1945 and 1966, causing widespread confusion for transport and broadcasting
schedules until Congress implemented the Uniform Time Act in 1966.

Today, DST is used in some form by over 70 countries worldwide, affecting around one sixth of
the world’s population. There is still no uniform standard, however. Countries such as Egypt and
Russia have adjusted their policies on multiple occasions in recent years, in some instances
leading to considerable turmoil. Muslim countries often suspend DST for the month of
Ramadan. The European Union finally standardised DST in 2000, while the USA’s most recent
adjustments were introduced with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

In general, the benefits of DST are considerable and well documented. Perhaps the most
significant factor in terms of popular support is the chance to make better use of daylight in the
evening. With extended daylight hours, office workers coming off a 9 to 5 shift can often take

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part in outdoor recreational activities for an hour or two. This has other positive effects, such as
reducing domestic electricity consumption as more opportunities become available to use
sunlight instead of artificial lighting. A further benefit is a reduction in the overall rate of
automobile accidents, as DST ensures that streets are well lit at peak hours.

Many industries are supportive of DST due to the opportunities it provides for increased
revenue. Extended daylight hours mean people are more likely to stay out later in the evening
and spend more money in bars and restaurants, for example, so tourism and hospitality are two
sectors that stand to gain a lot from more daylight. In Queensland, Australia, which elected not
to implement DST due to complaints from dairy farmers over disruption to milking schedules,
the annual drain on the state’s economy is estimated to be as high as $4 billion.

Some research casts doubt on the advantages of DST, however. Although the overall incidence
of traffic accidents is lower, for pedestrians the risk of being hit by a car in the evening increases
by as much as 186 per cent in the weeks after clocks are set back in autumn, possibly because
drivers have not yet adjusted to earlier sunsets. Although this shift does in turn make streets
safer in early mornings, the risk to pedestrians is not offset simply because fewer pedestrians
use the streets at that time.

A further health concern involves the disruption of our body clock. Setting clocks one hour
forward at night can cause many people to lose sleep, resulting in tiredness and all its
well-documented effects, such as mood swings, reduced productivity and problems with overall
physical well-being. In 2008, a Swedish study found that heart attack rates spike in the few days
following the switch to DST for summer. Tiredness may also be a factor behind the increase in
road accidents in the week after DST begins.

Finally, safety issues have arisen in parts of Latin America relating to a suspected relationship
between DST and higher incidences of street crime. In 2008, Guatemala chose not to use DST
because it forced office workers to leave their homes while it was still dark outside in the
morning. This natural cover for criminals was thought to increase incidents of crime at this hour.

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Questions 14-19

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

In boxes 14–19 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

14. Daylight savings time has been in continual use since ancient times.

15. Today, DST is very similar to how George Vernon Hudson suggested it.

16. DST was not considered successful during World Wars I and II.

17. The USA finalised its DST policy in 1966.

18. Around the world, there is now general agreement on how DST should be used.

19. Frequent changes to DST over a short time span have caused problems in some countries.

Questions 20–26

Complete the table below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 20 –26 on your answer sheet.

Advantages and disadvantages of Daylight Saving Time

Advantages Disadvantages

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 More opportunities
Dairy farmers find that DST upsets
for 20……………….. after work.
their 23………………..
People use less power in their homes
More dangerous for 24………………..
because they don’t need as much
following re-setting of clocks in autumn.
lighting.
Loss of sleep can lead
Better lighting during 21………………..
to 25……………….., inferior performance
leads to fewer car crashes following the
at work and poorer general health because
spring change to DST.
of fatigue.
Some industries, such
Darker mornings may lead to
as 22……………….., earn more money
more 26……………….
with DST.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.

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

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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

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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

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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

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 is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

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.

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32. Sylvain Sirois found serious flaws in the experimental designs by Baillargeon and Elizabeth
Spelke.

Questions 33-37

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

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.

Questions 38-40

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

38. What can we know about Daniel in the third paragraph?

A. Daniel’s attention level rose when he saw a blue train.

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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.

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