MATCHING HEADINGS
Questions 1-7
The passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of headings
i Early years of Gilbert
ii What was new about his scientific research method
iii The development of chemistry
iv Questioning traditional astronomy
v Pioneers of the early science
vi Professional and social recognition
vii Becoming the president of the Royal Science Society
viii The great works of Gilbert
ix His discovery about magnetism
x His change of focus.
William Gilbert and Magnetism
A - (____)
The 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and Gilbert. The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist, also the accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of learning and a physician at the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of electricity and magnetism was what the ancients knew, nothing more than that the lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific gravity. However, he is less well known than he deserves.
B - (____)
Gilbert’s birth pre-dated Galileo. Born in an eminent local family in Colchester County in the UK, on May 24, 1544, he went to grammar school, and then studied medicine at St John’s College, Cambridge,
graduating in 1573. Later he travelled in the continent and eventually settled down in London.
C - (____)
He was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the president of the
Royal Science Society. He was also appointed personal physician to the Queen (Elizabeth I), and later
knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until her death. However, he didn’t outlive the Queen forlong and died on November 30, 1603, only a few months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.
D
Gilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large portion of mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He gradually developed his interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient, particularly about the knowledge the ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange minerals with the power to attract iron. In the meantime, Britain became a major seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeated, opening the way to British settlement of America. British ships depended on the magnetic compass, yet no one understood why it worked. Did the Pole Star attract it, as Columbus once speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in Odyssey, which ships would never approach, because the sailors thought its pull would yank out all their iron nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years, William Gilbert conducted ingenious experiments to understand magnetism. His works include On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth.
E
Gilbert’s discovery was so important to modern physics. He investigated the nature of magnetism and
electricity. He even coined the word “electric”. Though the early beliefs of magnetism were also largely
entangled with superstitions such as that rubbing garlic on lodestone can neutralise its magnetism, one
example being that sailors even believed the smell of garlic would even interfere with the action of compass, which is why helmsman were forbidden to eat it near a ship’s compass. Gilbert also found that metals can be magnetised by rubbing materials such as fur, plastic or the like on them. He named the ends of a magnet “north pole” and “south pole”. The magnetic poles can attract or repel, depending on polarity. In addition, however, ordinary iron is always attracted to a magnet. Though he started to study the relationship between magnetism and electricity, sadly he didn’t complete it. His research of static electricity using amber and jet only demonstrated that objects with electrical charges can work like magnets attracting small pieces of paper and stuff. It is a French guy named du Fay that discovered that there are actually two electrical charges, positive and negative.
F
He also questioned the traditional astronomical beliefs. Though a Copernican, he didn’t express in his
quintessential beliefs whether the earth is at the centre of the universe or in orbit around the sun. However, he believed that stars are not equidistant from the earth but have their own earth-like planets orbiting around them. The earth itself is like a giant magnet, which is also why compasses always point north. They spin on an axis that is aligned with the earth’s polarity. He even likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the earth and built an entire magnetic philosophy on this analogy. In his explanation, magnetism is the soul of the earth. Thus a perfectly spherical lodestone, when aligned with the earth’s poles, would wobble all by itself in 24 hours. Further, he also believed that the sun and other stars wobble just like the earth does around a crystal core, and speculated that the moon might also be a magnet caused to orbit by its magnetic attraction to the earth. This was perhaps the first proposal that a force might cause a heavenly orbit.
G
His research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure logic and reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude towards scientific investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion. It was because of this scientific attitude, together with his contribution to our knowledge of magnetism, that a unit of magneto motive force, also known as magnetic potential, was named Gilbert in his honour. His approach of careful observation and experimentation rather than the authoritative opinion or deductive philosophy of others had laid the very foundation for modern science.
TEST 1 - Music: Language We All Speak
The passage has seven paragraphs A-E.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of headings
i Communication in music with animals
ii New discoveries on animal music
iii Music and language contrasted
iv Current research on music
v Music is beneficial for infants.
vi Music transcends cultures.
vii Look back at some of the historical theories
viii Are we genetically designed for music?
Section A
Music is one of the human species' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any
individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting
through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere - but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax. Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery - mere "auditory cheesecake", as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
Section B
But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent
publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we're from - not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the 6 August issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected. To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realise two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale -that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
Section C
This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular – which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se," says Schwartz. Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sounds, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning, and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech. Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analogue to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world,"says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument - the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us - specifically, we like the sounds that remind us of us.This brings up some chicken-or egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song - that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to
be mostly speech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences."
Section D
Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world - birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting - previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts. But what's been played to animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sound the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.
Section E
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue. For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states", Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song". This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trancelike state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture". So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realise.
TEST 2 - Communicating Styles and Conflict
The passage has seven paragraphs A-H.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of headings
i Summarising personality types
ii Combined styles for workplace
iii Physical explanation
iv A lively person who encourages
v Demanding and unsympathetic personality
vi Lazy and careless personality
vii The benefits of understanding communication styles
viii Cautious and caring
ix Factual and analytical personality
x Self-assessment determines one’s temperament.
A. As far back as Hippocrates’ time (460-370B.C.), people have tried to understand other people by
characterizing them according to personality type or temperament. Hippocrates believed there were four
different body fluids that influenced four basic types of temperament. His work was further developed
500 years later by Galen. These days there are any number of self-assessment tools that relate to the basic descriptions developed by Galen, although we no longer believe the source to be the types of body fluid that dominate our systems.
B. The values in self-assessments that help determine personality style. Learning styles, communication
styles, conflict-handling styles, or other aspects of individuals is that they help depersonalize conflict in
interpersonal relationships. The depersonalization occurs when you realize that others aren’t trying to be
difficult, but they need different or more information than you do. They’re not intending to be rude: they are so focused on the task they forget about greeting people. They would like to work faster but not at the risk of damaging the relationships needed to get the job done. They understand there is a job to do. But it can only be done right with the appropriate information, which takes time to collect. When used appropriately, understanding communication styles can help resolve conflict on teams. Very rarely are conflicts true personality issues. Usually they are issues of style, information needs, or focus.
C. Hippocrates and later Galen determined there were four basic temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic,
melancholic and choleric. These descriptions were developed centuries ago and are still somewhat apt,
although you could update the wording. In today’s world, they translate into the four fairly common
communication styles described below:
D. The sanguine person would be the expressive or spirited style of communication. These people speak in pictures. They invest a lot of emotion and energy in their communication and often speak quickly. Putting their whole body into it. They are easily sidetracked onto a story that may or may not illustrate the point they are trying to make. Because of their enthusiasm, they are great team motivators. They are concerned about people and relationships. Their high levels of energy can come on strong at times and their focus is usually on the bigger picture, which means they sometimes miss the details or the proper order of things. These people find conflict or differences of opinion invigorating and love to engage in a spirited discussion. They love change and are constantly looking for new and exciting adventures.
E. Tile phlegmatic person - cool and persevering - translates into the technical or systematic communication style. This style of communication is focused on facts and technical details. Phlegmatic people have an orderly methodical way of approaching tasks, and their focus is very much on the task, not on the people, emotions, or concerns that the task may evoke. The focus is also more on the details necessary to accomplish a task. Sometimes the details overwhelm the big picture and focus needs to be brought back to the context of the task. People with this style think the facts should speak for themselves, and they are not as comfortable with conflict. They need time to adapt to change and need to understand both the logic of it and the steps involved.
F. Tile melancholic person who is soft hearted and oriented toward doing things for others translates into the considerate or sympathetic communication style. A person with this communication style is focused on people and relationships. They are good listeners and do things for other people-sometimes to the detriment of getting things done for themselves. They want to solicit everyone’s opinion and make sure everyone is comfortable with whatever is required to get the job done. At times this focus on others can distract from the task at hand. Because they are so concerned with the needs of others and smoothing over issues, they do not like conflict. They believe that change threatens the status quo and tends to make people feel uneasy, so people with this communication style, like phlegmatic people need time to consider the changes in order to adapt to them.
G. The choleric temperament translates into the bold or direct style of communication. People with this style are brief in their communication – the fewer words the better. They are big picture thinkers and love to be involved in many things at once. They are focused on tasks and outcomes and often forget that the people involved in carrying out the tasks have needs. They don’t do detail work easily and as a result can often underestimate how much time it takes to achieve the task. Because they are so direct, they often seem forceful and can be very intimidating to others. They usually would welcome someone challenging them. But most other styles are afraid to do so. They also thrive on change, the more the better.
H. A well-functioning team should have all of these communication styles for true effectiveness. All teams need to focus on the task, and they need to take care of relationships in order to achieve those tasks. They need the big picture perspective or the context of their work, and they need the details to be identified and taken care of for success. We all have aspects of each style within us. Some of us can easily move from one style to another and adapt our style to the needs of the situation at hand-whether the focus is on tasks or relationships. For others, a dominant style is very evident, and it is more challenging to see the situation from the perspective of another style. The work environment can influence communication styles either by the type of work that is required or by the predominance of one style reflected in that environment. Some people use one style at work and another at home. The good news about communication styles is that we have the ability to develop flexibility in our styles. The greater the flexibility we have, the more skilled we usually are at handling possible and actual conflicts. Usually it has to be relevant to us to do so, either because we think it is important or because there are incentives in our environment to encourage it. The key is that we have to want to become flexible with our communication style. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!”
TEST 3 – New Zealand Seaweed
Reading Passage has six sections A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of headings
i Locations and features of different seaweeds
ii Various products of seaweeds
iii Use of seaweeds in Japan
iv Seaweed species around the globe
v Nutritious value of seaweeds
vi Why it doesn't dry or sink
vii Where to find red seaweeds
viii Underuse of native species
ix Mystery solved
x How seaweeds reproduce and grow.
Call us not weeds; we are flowers of the sea.
Section A
Seaweed is a particularly nutritious food, which absorbs and concentrates traces of a wide variety of
minerals necessary to the body's health. Many elements may occur in seaweed - aluminium, barium,
calcium, chlorine, copper, iodine and iron, to name but a few - traces normally produced by erosion and
carried to the seaweed beds by river and sea currents. Seaweeds are also rich in vitamins: indeed, Eskimos obtain a high proportion of their bodily requirements of vitamin C from the seaweeds they eat. The nutritive value of seaweed has long been recognised. For instance, there is a remarkably low incidence of goitre amongst the Japanese, and for that matter, amongst our own Maori people, who have always eaten seaweeds, and this may well be attributed to the high iodine content of this food. Research into old Maori eating customs shows that jellies were made using seaweeds, fresh fruit and nuts, fuchsia and tutu berries, cape gooseberries, and many other fruits which either grew here naturally or were sown from seeds brought by settlers and explorers.
Section B
New Zealand lays claim to approximately 700 species of seaweed, some of which have no representation outside this country. Of several species grown worldwide, New Zealand also has a particularly large share. For example, it is estimated that New Zealand has some 30 species of Gigartina, a close relative of carrageen or Irish moss. These are often referred to as the New Zealand carrageenan. The gel-forming substance called agar which can be extracted from this species gives them great commercial application in seameal, from which seameal custard is made, and in cough mixture, confectionery, cosmetics, the canning, paint and leather industries, the manufacture of duplicating pads, and in toothpaste. In fact, during World War II, New Zealand Gigartina were sent to Australia to be used in toothpaste.
Section C
Yet although New Zealand has so much of the commercially profitable red seaweeds, several of which are a source of agar (Pterocladia, Gelidium, Chondrus, Gigartina), before 1940 relatively little use was made of them. New Zealand used to import the Northern Hemisphere Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) from England and ready-made agar from Japan. Although distribution of the Gigartina is confined to certain areas according to species, it is only on the east coast of the North Island that its occurrence is rare. And even then, the east coast, and the area around Hokianga, have a considerable supply of the two species of Pterocladia from which agar is also available. Happily, New Zealand made agar is now obtainable in health food shops.
Section D
Seaweeds are divided into three classes determined by colour - red, brown and green - and each tends to live in a specific location. However, except for the unmistakable sea lettuce (Ulva), few are totally one colour; and especially when dry, some species can change colour quite significantly - a brown one may turn quite black, or a red one appear black, brown, pink or purple. Identification is nevertheless facilitated by the fact that the factors which determine where a seaweed will grow are quite precise, and they therefore tend to occur in very well-defined zones. Although there are exceptions, the green seaweeds are mainly shallow water algae; the browns belong to medium depths, and the reds are plants of the deeper water. Flat rock surfaces near mid-level tides are the most usual habitat of sea bombs, Venus’ necklace and most brown seaweeds. This is also the location of the purple laver or Maori karengo, which looks rather like a reddish purple lettuce. Deep-water rocks on open coasts, exposed only at very low tide, are usually the site of bull kelp, strap weeds and similar tough specimens. Those species able to resist long periods of exposure to the sun and air are usually found on the upper shore, while those less able to stand such exposure occur nearer to or below the low water mark. Radiation from the sun, the temperature level, and the length of time immersed
all play a part in the zoning of seaweeds.
Section E
Propagation of seaweeds occurs by spores, or by fertilisation of egg cells. None have roots in the usual
sense; few have leaves, and none have flowers, fruits or seeds. The plants absorb their nourishment through their fronds when they are surrounded by water: the base or "holdfast" of seaweeds is purely an attaching organ, not an absorbing one.
Section F
Some of the large seaweeds maintain buoyancy with air-filled floats; others, such as bull kelp, have large cells filled with air. Some, which spend a good part of their time exposed to the air, often reduce dehydration either by having swollen stems that contain water, or they may (like Venus' necklace) have swollen nodules, or they may have distinctive shape like a sea bomb. Others, like the sea cactus, are filled with slimy fluid or have coating of mucilage on % the surface. In some of the larger kelps, this coating is not only to keep the plant moist but also to protect it from the violent action of waves.
TEST 4 – REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF
FOOD PROMOTION TO CHILDREN
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below.
Write the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i General points of agreements and disagreements of researchers
ii How much children really know about food
iii Need to take action
iv Advertising effects of the “Big Four”
v Connection of advertising and children’s weight problems
vi Evidence that advertising affects what children buy to eat
vii How parents influence children’s eating habits
viii Advertising’s focus on unhealthy options
ix Children often buy what they want
x Underestimating the effects advertising has on children.
This review was commissioned by the Food Standards Agency to examine the current research evidence on:
• the extent and nature of food promotion to children
• the effect, if any, that this promotion has on their food knowledge, preferences and behaviour.
A. Children’s food promotion is dominated by television advertising, and the great majority of this promotes the so-called ‘Big Four’ of pre-sugared breakfast cereals, soft-drinks, confectionary and savoury snacks. In the last ten years advertising for fast food outlets has rapidly increased. There is some evidence that the dominance of television has recently begun to wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for multi-faceted communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point of sale activity. The advertised diet contrasts sharply with that recommended by public health advisors, and themes of fun and fantasy or taste, rather than health and nutrition, are used to promote it to children. Meanwhile, the recommended diet gets little promotional support.
B. There is plenty of evidence that children notice and enjoy food promotion. However, establishing whether this actually influences them is a complex problem. The review tackled it by looking at studies that had examined possible effects on what children know about food, their food preferences, their actual food behaviour (both buying and eating), and their health outcomes (eg. obesity or cholesterol levels). The majority of studies examined food advertising, but a few examined other forms of food promotion. In terms of nutritional knowledge, food advertising seems to have little influence on children’s general perceptions of what constitutes a healthy diet, but, in certain contexts, it does have an effect on more specific types of nutritional knowledge. For example, seeing soft drink and cereal adverts reduced primary aged children’s ability to determine correctly whether or not certain products contained real fruit.
C. The review also found evidence that food promotion influences children’s food preferences and their
purchase behaviour. A study of primary school children, for instance, found that exposure to advertising
influenced which foods they claimed to like; and another showed that labelling and signage on a vending machine had an effect on what was bought by secondary school pupils. A number of studies have also shown that food advertising can influence what children eat. One, for example, showed that advertising influenced a primary class’s choice of daily snack at playtime.
D. The next step, of trying to establish whether or not a link exists between food promotion and diet or
obesity, is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real world settings. A number of studies have attempted this by using amount of television viewing as a proxy for exposure to television advertising. They have established a clear link between television viewing and diet, obesity, and cholesterol levels. It is impossible to say, however, whether this effect is caused by the advertising, the sedentary nature of television viewing or snacking that might take place whilst viewing. One study resolved this problem by taking a detailed diary of children’s viewing habits. This showed that the more food adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories they consumed.
E. Thus the literature does suggest food promotion is influencing children’s diet in a number of ways. This does not amount to proof; as noted above with this kind of research, incontrovertible proof simply isn’t attainable. Nor do all studies point to this conclusion; several have not found an effect. In addition, very few studies have attempted to measure how strong these effects are relative to other factors influencing children’s food choices. Nonetheless, many studies have found clear effects and they have used sophisticated methodologies that make it possible to determine that i) these effects are not just due to chance; ii) they are independent of other factors that may influence diet, such as parents’ eating habits or attitudes; and iii) they occur at a brand and category level.
F. Furthermore, two factors suggest that these findings actually downplay the effect that food promotion has on children. First, the literature focuses principally on television advertising; the cumulative effect of this combined with other forms of promotion and marketing is likely to be significantly greater. Second, the studies have looked at direct effects on individual children, and understate indirect influences. For example, promotion for fast food outlets may not only influence the child, but also encourage parents to take them for meals and reinforce the idea that this is a normal and desirable behaviour.
G. This does not amount to proof of an effect, but in our view does provide sufficient evidence to conclude that an effect exists. The debate should now shift to what action is needed, and specifically to how the power of commercial marketing can be used to bring about improvements in young people’s eating.
TEST 5 – Accidental Scientists
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
i Examples of some scientific discoveries
ii Horace Walpole’s fairy tale
iii Resolving the contradiction
iv What is the Scientific Method
v The contradiction of views on scientific discovery
vi Some misunderstandings of serendipity
vii Opponents of authority
viii Reality doesn’t always match expectation
ix How the word came into being
x Illustration of serendipity in the business sector.
A. A paradox lies close to the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what you are looking for,
finding it can hardly count as a discovery, since it was fully anticipated. But if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot know when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the question. In the philosophy of science, these extremes map onto the purist forms of deductivism and inductivism: In the former, the outcome is supposed to be logically contained in the premises you start with; in the latter, you are recommended to start with no expectations whatsoever and see what turns up.
B. As in so many things, the ideal position is widely supposed to reside somewhere in between these two impossible-to-realise extremes. You want to have a good enough idea of what you are looking for to be surprised when you find something else of value, and you want to be ignorant enough of your end
point that you can entertain alternative outcomes. Scientific discovery should, therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one. Serendipity is a word that expresses a position something like that. It’s a fascinating word, and the late Robert King Merton—“the father of the sociology of science”—liked it well enough to compose its biography, assisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.
C. The word did not appear in the published literature until the early 19th century and did not become well enough known to use without explanation until sometime in the first third of the 20th century. Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”, specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole. He explained that it came from the fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip (the ancient name for Ceylon, or present day Sri Lanka), whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of’.
D. Antiquarians, following Walpole, found use for it, as they were always rummaging about for curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant surprises were not unknown to them. Some people just seemed to have a knack for that sort of thing, and serendipity was used to express that special capacity. The other community that came to dwell on serendipity to say something important about their practice was that of scientists, and here usages cut to the heart of the matter and were often vigorously contested. Many scientists, including the Flarvard physiologist Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medawar, liked to emphasise how much of scientific discovery was unplanned and even accidental. One of the examples is Hans Christian Orsted’s discovery of electromagnetism when he unintentionally brought a current carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. Rheto-ric about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as Medawar insisted, “There is no such thing as The Scientific Method,” no way at all of systematis-ing the process of discovery. Really important discoveries had a way of showing up when they had a mind to do so and not when you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book collectors, had a happy knack; maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a personal skill or capacity.
E Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to the situation; some treated serendipity as a personal capacity; many others exploited the ambiguity of the notion. Yet what Cannon and Medawar took as a benign nose-thumbing at Dreams of Method, other scientists found incendiary. To say that science had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken by some as dangerous denigration. If scientific discovery were really accidental, then what was the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, the aphorism of choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Accidents may happen, and things may turn up unplanned and unforeseen, as one is looking for something else, but the ability to notice such events, to see their potential bearing and meaning, to exploit their occurrence and make constructive use of them—these are the results of systematic mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form of expertise. On closer inspection, it is insisted, accident dissolves into sagacity.
F. The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and had its greatest resonance was that connected with the idea of planned science. The serendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory towers. As Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-20th-century American pioneers of industrial research—Willis Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General Electric—made much play of serendipity, in the course of arguing against overly rigid research planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about the certainty and rationality of the research process did much harm and that a mature acceptance of uncertainty was far more likely to result in productive research policies. For his own part, Langmuir said that satisfactory outcomes “occurred as though we were just drifting with the wind. These things came about by accident.” If there is no very determinate relationship between cause and effect in research, he said, “then planning does not get us very far.” So, from within the bowels of corporate capitalism came powerful arguments, by way of serendipity, for scientific spontaneity and autonomy. The notion that industry was invariably committed to the regimentation of scientific research just doesn’t wash.
G. For Merton himself—who one supposes must have been the senior author serendipity rep-resented the keystone in the arch of his social scientific work. In 1936, as a very young man, Merton wrote a seminal essay on “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.” It is, he argued, the nature of social action that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intending to provide resources for buttressing Christian religion, the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for secularism; people wanting to be alone with nature in Yosemite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don’t know enough—and we can never know enough to ensure that the past is an adequate guide to the future: Uncertainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All social action, including that undertaken with the best evidence and formulated according to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its consequences.
TEST 6 - Wealth in A Cold Climate
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of
headings below.
List of Headings
i The positive correlation between climate and wealth
ii Other factors besides climate that influence wealth
iii Inspiration from reading a book
iv Other researchers’ results do not rule out exceptional cases
v Different attributes between Eurasia and Africa
vi Low temperature benefits people and crops
vii The importance of institution in traditional views
viii The spread of crops in Europe, Asia and other places
ix The best way to use aid
x Confusions and exceptions.
Latitude is crucial to a nation's economic strength.
A. Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when inspiration struck. "There was this
anecdote about the great yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793,” Masters recalls. “This
epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came." The inclement weather froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover.
B. If weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the historical fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring economic mysteries of all—why are almost all the wealthy, industrialised nations to be found at latitudes above 40 degrees? After two years of research, he thinks that he has found a piece of the puzzle. Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in Indiana, and Margaret McMillan at Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are among the factors that distinguish rich nations from poor ones. Their study is published this month in the Journal of Economic Growth. The pair speculate that cold snaps have two main benefits - they freeze pests that would otherwise destroy crops, and also freeze organisms, such as mosquitoes, that carry disease. The result is agricultural abundance and a big workforce.
C. The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for countries, the second
climate data from the University of East Anglia. They found a curious tally between the sets. Countries
having five or more frosty days a month are uniformly rich, those with fewer than five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day figure is important; it could be the minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. Masters says: "For example, Finland is a small country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a small country that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps climate has something to do with that.” In fact, limited frosts bring huge benefits to farmers. The chills kill insects or render them inactive; cold weather slows the breakup of plant and animal material in the soil, allowing it to become richer; and frosts ensure a build-up of moisture in the ground for spring, reducing dependence on seasonal rains. There are exceptions to the “cold equals rich” argument. There are well-heeled tropical places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, a result of their superior trading positions. Like-wise, not all European countries are moneyed in the former communist colonies, economic potential was crushed by politics.
D. Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor - the wealth of nations is too complicated to be attributable to just one factor. Climate, he feels, somehow combines with other factors such as the presence of institutions, including governments, and access to trading routes to determine whether a country will do well. Traditionally, Masters says, economists thought that institutions had the biggest effect on the economy, because they brought order to a country in the form of, for example, laws and property rights. With order, so the thinking went, came affluence. “But there are some problems that even countries with institutions have not been able to get around,” he says. “My feeling is that, as countries get richer, they get better institutions. And the accumulation of wealth and improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a favourable environment, including climate.”
E. This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and destined to remain penniless. Instead, richer countries should change the way in which foreign aid is given. Instead of aid being geared towards improving governance, it should be spent on technology to improve agriculture and to combat disease. Masters cites one example: “There are regions in India that have been provided with irrigation, agricultural productivity has gone up and there has been an improvement in health.” Supplying vaccines against tropical diseases and developing crop varieties that can grow in the tropics would break the poverty cycle.
F. Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations, citing anthropological, climatic and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the most affluent. In 350 BC, Aristotle observed that “those who live in a cold climate...are full of spirit”. Jared Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in his book Guns, Germs and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa and the Americas are aligned north-south. So, in Europe, crops can spread quickly across latitudes because climates are similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, spread quickly from the Middle East into Europe; it took twice as long for corn to spread from Mexico to what is now the eastern United States. This easy movement along similar latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant a faster dissemination of other technologies such as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates. The region also boasted domesticated livestock, which could provide meat, wool and motive power in the fields. Blessed with such natural advantages, Eurasia was bound to take off economically.
G. John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, two US economists, have also pointed out striking correlations between the geographical location of countries and their wealth. They note that tropical countries between 23.45 degrees north and south of the equator are nearly all poor. In an article for the Harvard International Review, they concluded that “development surely seems to favour the temperate-zone economies, especially those in the northern hemisphere, and those that have managed to avoid both socialism and the ravages of war”. But Masters cautions against geographical determinism, the idea that tropical countries are beyond hope: “Human health and agriculture can be made better through scientific and technological research,” he says, "so we shouldn’t be writing off these countries. Take Singapore: without air conditioning, it wouldn’t be rich.”
TEST 7 – Morse Code
Reading passage has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list of headings.
List of Headings
i The advantage of Morse’s invention
ii A suitable job for women
iii Morse’s invention was developed
iv Sea rescue after the invention of radiotelegraphy
v The emergence of many job opportunities
vi Standard and variations
vii Application of Morse code in a new technology
viii The discovery of electricity
ix International expansion of Morse Code
x The beginning of an end
xi The move of using code to convey information.
Morse code is being replaced by a new satellite-based system for sending distress calls at sea. Its dots and dashes have had a good run for their money.
A. "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” Surprisingly this message, which flashed over the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January 31st 1997, was not a desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it was a message signal-ling the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French waters. Since 1992 countries around the world have been decommissioning their Morse equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-offs, as the world's shipping switches over to a new satellite-based arrangement, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end of art era.
B. The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology commonly associated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic, At the time Morse Was a painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ships passengers informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric telegraph to send messages in codes. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered as "the father of the telegraph" partly thanks to his single mindedness it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line—but also for technical reasons.
C. Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the needle telegraph developed by William
Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morses design was very simple: it required little more than a
"key” (essentially, a spring loaded switch) to send messages, a clicking “sounder" to receive them, and a
wire to link the two. But although Morses hardware was simple, there was a catch: in order to use his
equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first code, sketched in his notebook during that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to represent the digits 0 to 9. Morses idea was that messages would consist of strings of numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail, devised the Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and dashes.
D. At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morses telegraph seem impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs, Cookes and Wheatstones telegraph, for example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph stations. Morses telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon transpired, had a natural facility for Morse code.
E. As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became domi-nant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to participate, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few more years.) By this time Morse code had been revised to allow for accents and other foreign characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that continues to this day.
F. On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected from a tiny rotating
mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct telegraphic sub-culture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural opera-tors found that their newfound skill was a passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon, swelled the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female.
G. In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many adulatory speeches, Morse sat down behind an operators table and, placing his finger on a key connected to every telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final farewell to a standing ovation. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet is today often called an "information superhighway”, the telegraph was described in its day as an “instantaneous highway of thought",
H. But by the 1890s the Morse telegraph's heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs, precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its potential for use at sea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and an Italian warship 19km (12 miles) away. By 1910, Morse radio equipment was commonplace on ships.
TEST 8 – Saving the British Bitterns
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-H.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list below.
List of Headings
i research findings into habitats and decisions made
ii fluctuation in bittern number
iii protect the young bittern
iv international cooperation works
v Began in calculation of the number
vi importance of food
vii Research has been successful.
viii research into the reedbed
ix reserve established holding bittern in winter
A . Breeding bitterns became extinct in the UK by 1886 but, following recolonization early last century,
numbers rose to a peak of about 70 booming (singing) males in the 1950s, falling to fewer than 20 by the 1990s. In the late 1980s it was clear that the bittern was in trouble, but there was little information on which to base recovery actions.
B. Bitterns have cryptic plumage and a shy nature, usually remaining hidden within the cover of reed bed vegetation. Our first challenge was to develop standard methods to monitor their numbers. The boom of the male bittern is its most distinctive feature during the breeding season, and we developed a method to count them using the sound patterns unique to each individual. This not only allows us to be much more certain of the number of booming males in the UK, but also enables us to estimate local survival of males from one year to the next
C. Our first direct understanding of the habitat needs of breeding bitterns came from comparisons of reed bed sites that had lost their booming birds with those that retained them. This research showed that bitterns had been retained in reed beds where the natural process of succession, or drying out, had been slowed through management. Based on this work, broad recommendations on how to manage and rehabilitate reed beds for bitterns were made, and funding was provided through the EU LIFE Fund to manage 13 sites within the core breeding range. This project, though led by the RSPB, involved many other organisations.
D. To refine these recommendations and provide fine-scale, quantitative habitat prescriptions on the bitterns preferred feeding habitat, we radio tracked male bitterns on the RSPB’s Minsmere and Leighton Moss reserves. This showed clear preferences for feeding in the wetter reed bed margins, particularly within the reed bed next to larger open pools. The average home range sizes of the male bitterns we followed (about 20 hectares) provided a good indication of the area of reed bed needed when managing or creating habitat for this species. Female bitterns undertake all the incubation and care of the young, so it was important to understand their needs as well. Over the course of our research, we located 87 bittern nests and found that female bitterns preferred to nest in areas of continuous vegetation, well into the reed bed, but where water was still present during the driest part of the breeding season.
E. The success of the habitat prescriptions developed from this research has been spectacular. For instance, at Minsmere, booming bittern numbers gradually increased from one to 10 following reed bed lowering, a management technique designed to halt the drying out process. After a low point of 11 booming males in 1997, bittern numbers in Britain responded to all the habitat management work and started to increase for the first time since the 1950s.
F. The final phase of research involved understanding the diet, survival and dispersal of bittern chicks. To do this we fitted small radio tags to young bittern chicks in the nest, to determine their fate through to fledging and beyond. Many chicks did not survive to fledging and starvation was found to be the most likely reason for their demise. The fish prey fed to chicks was dominated by those species penetrating into the reed edge. So, an important element of recent studies (including a PhD with the University of Hull) has been the development of recommendations on habitat and water conditions to promote healthy native fish populations
G. Once independent, radio-tagged young bitterns were found to seek out new sites during their first winter; a proportion of these would remain on new sites to breed if the conditions were suitable. A second EU LIFE funded project aims to provide these suitable sites in new areas. A network of 19 sites developed through this partnership project will secure a more sustainable UK bittern population with successful breeding outside of the core area, less vulnerable to chance events and sea level rise.
H. By 2004, the number of booming male bitterns in the UK had increased to 55, with almost all of the
increase being on those sites undertaking management based on advice derived from our research. Although science has been at the core of the bittern story, success has only been achieved through the trust, hard work and dedication of all the managers, owners and wardens of sites that have implemented, in some cases very drastic, management to secure the future of this wetland species in the UK. The constructed bunds and five major sluices now control the water level over 82 ha, with a further 50 ha coming under control in the winter of 2005/06. Reed establishment has principally used natural regeneration or planted seedlings to provide small core areas that will in time expand to create a bigger reed area. To date nearly 275,000 seedlings have been planted and reed cover is extensive. Over 3 km of new ditches have been formed, 3.7 km of existing ditch have been reprofiled and 2.2 km of old meander (former estuarine features) has been cleaned out.
I . Bitterns now regularly winter on the site some indication that they are staying longer into the spring. No breeding has yet occurred but a booming male was present in the spring of 2004. A range of wildfowl breed, as well as a good number of reed bed passerines including reed bunting, reed, sedge and grasshopper warblers. Numbers of wintering shoveler have increased so that the site now holds a UK important wintering population. Malltraeth Reserve now forms part of the UK network of key sites for water vole (a UK priority species) and 12 monitoring transects has been established. Otter and brown-hare occur on the site as does the rare plant. Pillwort.
TEST 9 – Corporate Social Responsibility
Reading passage has seven paragraphs, A–G
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of heading below.
List of Headings
i How CSR may help one business to expand
ii CSR in many aspects of a company’s business
iii A CSR initiative without a financial gain
iv Lack of action by the state of social issues
v Drives or pressures motivate companies to address CSR
vi The past illustrates business are responsible for future outcomes
vii Companies applying CSR should be selective
viii Reasons that business and society benefit each other
A. An excellent definition was developed in the 1980s by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlen Brundtland and used by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development: “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Nowadays, governments and companies need to account for the social consequences of their actions. As a result, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a priority for business leaders around the world. When a well-run business applies its vast resources and expertise to social problems that it understands and in which it has a stake, it can have a greater impact than any other organization. The notion of license to operate derives from the fact that every company needs tacit or explicit permission from governments, communities, and numerous other stakeholders to justify CSR initiatives to improve a company’s image, strengthen its brand, enliven morale and even raise the value of its stock.
B. To advance CSR. we must root it in a broad understanding of the interrelationship between a corporation and society. Successful corporations need a healthy society. Education, health care, and equal opportunity are essential lo a productive workforce. Safe products and working conditions not only attract customers but lower the internal costs of accidents. Efficient utilization of land, water, energy, and other natural resources makes business more productive. Good government, the rule of law, and property rights are essential for efficiency and innovation. Strong regulatory standards protect both consumers and competitive companies from exploitation. Ultimately, a healthy society creates expanding demand for business, as more human needs are met and aspirations grow. Any business that pursues its ends at the expense of the society in which it operates will find its success to be illusory and ultimately temporary. At the same time, a healthy society needs successful companies. No social program can rival the business sector when it comes lo creating the jobs, wealth, and innovation that improve standards of living and social conditions over time.
C. A company’s impact on society also changes over time, as social standards evolve and science
progresses. Asbestos, now understood as a serious health risk was thought to be safe in the early 1900s,
given the scientific knowledge then available. Evidence of its risks gradually mounted for more than 50
years before any company was held liable for the harms it can cause. Many firms that failed to anticipated the consequences of this evolving body of research have been bankrupted by the results. No longer can companies be content to monitor only the obvious social impacts of today. Without a careful process for identifying evolving social effects of tomorrow, firms may risk their very survival.
D. No business can solve all of society’s problems or bear the cost of doing so. Instead, each company must select issues that intersect with its particular business. Other social agendas are best left to those companies in other industries, NGOs, or government institutions that are better positioned to address them. The essential test that should guide CSR is not whether a cause is worthy but whether it presents an opportunity to create shared value – that is, a meaningful benefit for society that is also valuable to the business. Each company can identify the particular set of societal problems that it is best equipped to help resolve and from which it can gain the greatest competitive benefit.
E. The best corporate citizenship initiatives involve far more than writing a check: They specify clear,
measurable goals and track results over time. A good example is General Electronics’s program to adopt
underperforming public high schools near several of its major U.S. facilities. The company contributes
between $250,000 and $1 million over a five-year period to each school and makes in-kind donations as
well. GE managers and employees take an active role by working with school administrators to assess needs and mentor or tutor students. In an independent study of Ion schools in the program between 1989 and 1999, nearly all showed significant improvement, while the graduation rate in four of the five worst performing schools doubled from an average of 30% to 60%. Effective corporate citizenship initiatives such as this one create goodwill and improve relations with local governments and other important constituencies. What’s more, GE’s employees feel great pride in their participation. Their effect is inherently limited, however. No matter how beneficial (he program is, it remains incidental to the company’s business, and the direct effect on GE’s recruiting and retention is modest.
F. Microsoft s Working Connections partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges
(AACC) is a good example of a shared-value opportunity arising from investments in context. The shortage of information technology workers is a significant constraint on Microsoft’s growth; currently, there are more than 450,000 unfilled IT positions in the United States alone. Community colleges, with an enrollment of 11.6 million students, representing 45% of all U.S. undergraduates, could be a major solution. Microsoft recognizes, however, that community colleges face special challenges: IT curricula are not standardized, technology used in classrooms is often outdated, and there are no systematic professional development programs to keep faculty up to date. Microsoft’s $50 million five-year initiative was aimed at all three problems. In addition to contributing money and products, Microsoft sent employee volunteers to colleges to assess needs, contribute to curriculum development, and create faculty development institutes. Microsoft has achieved results that have benefited many communities while having a direct-and potentially significant impact on the company.
G. At the heart of any strategy is a unique value proposition: a set of needs a company can meet for its
chosen customers that others cannot. The most strategic CSR occurs when a company adds a social
dimension to its value proposition, making social impact integral to the overall strategy. Consider Whole Foods Market, whose value proposition is to sell organic, natural, and healthy food products to customers who are passionate about food and the environment. The company’s sourcing emphasises purchases from local farmers through each store’s procurement process. Buyers screen out foods containing any of nearly 100 common ingredients that the company considers unhealthy or environmentally damaging. The same standards apply to products made internally. Whole Foods’ commitment to natural and environmentally friendly operating practices extends well beyond sourcing. Stores are constructed using a minimum of virgin raw materials. Recently, the company purchased renewable wind energy credits equal to 100% of its electricity use in all of its stores and facilities, the only Fortune 500 company to offset its electricity consumption entirely. Spoiled produce and biodegradable waste are trucked to regional centers for composting. Whole Foods’ vehicles are being converted to run on biofuels. Even the cleaning products used in its stores are environmentally friendly. And through its philanthropy, the company has created the Animal Compassion Foundation to develop more natural and humane ways of raising farm animals. In short, nearly every aspect of the company’s value chain reinforces the social dimensions of its value proposition, distinguishing Whole Foods from its competitors.
TEST 10 – Art Artists Liars
Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
i Unsuccessful deceit
ii Biological basis between liars and artists
iii How to lie in an artistic way
iv Confabulations and the exemplifiers
v The distinction between artists and common liars
vi The fine line between liars and artists
vii The definition of confabulation
viii Creativity when people lie
A. Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to he called "Lying for a living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can he seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). "If you can lie, you can act." Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. "Jesus." said Brando, “I'm fabulous at it".
B. Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a line one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order-as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have
observed. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root-one that is
exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief - a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying.
C. A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged
woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. In the language of psychiatry, this woman was “confabulating”. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain damaged people. In the literature it is defined as "the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission, there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill – confabulators make errors of commission: they make tilings up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they're in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical sear, explained that during the Second World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moseovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying". Uncertain and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate": a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not
understand. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been“ suicided" by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom "nothing is wasted". Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.
D. The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently, there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning, narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us out ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.
E. During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken's relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. Whitt amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken's charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory, they revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
F. Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us,
because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and we'll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we fell it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channeled into something socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insight till ones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies" differ from normal lies, and from the "honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can only he expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not.” Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
ANSWER KEY
Mini warm-up practice test – William Gilbert and Magnetism
Q1. V
Q2. I
Q3. VI
Q4. X
Q5. IX
Q6. IV
Q7.II
TEST 1 – Music Language
We All Speak
Q1. III
Q2. VII
Q3. IV
Q4. I
Q5. VIII
TEST 2 – Communicating
Styles and Conflict
Q1. III
Q2. VII
Q3. I
Q4. IV
Q5. IX
Q6. VIII
Q7. V
Q8. II
TEST 3 – New Zealand
Seaweed
Q1. V
Q2. II
Q3. VIII
Q4. I
Q5. X
Q6. VI
TEST 4 - REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE
EFFECTS OF FOOD PROMOTION TO CHILDREN
Q1. VIII
Q2. II
Q3. VI
Q4. V
Q5. I
Q6. X
Q7.III
TEST 5 – Accidental
Scientists
Q1. V
Q2. IX
Q3. I
Q4. VI
Q5. X
Q6. VIII
TEST 6 – Wealth in a cold
climate
Q1. III
Q2. VI
Q3. I
Q4. II
Q5. IX
Q6. V
Q7. IV
TEST 7 – Mose Code
Q1. X
Q2. XI
Q3. III
Q4. I
Q5. VI
Q6. II
Q7. IX
Q8. VII
TEST 8 – Saving the British
Bitterns
Q1. II
Q2. V
Q3. I
Q4. VIII
Q5. VI
Q6. III
Q7. IV
TEST 9 – Corporate Social
Responsibility
Q1. V
Q2. VIII
Q3. VI
Q4. VII
Q5. III
Q6. I
Q7. II
TEST 10 – Are Artists
Liars?
Q1. VI
Q2. II
Q3. IV
Q4. VIII
Q5. I
Q6. V
CLICK BELOW FOR OTHER QUESTIONS
Comments
Post a Comment