READING: LESSON 3

DẠNG 3: MATCHING NAMES

Exercise 1:

Holidays with a difference

Tribal tourism is becoming more popular. But at what cost to the locals?

Tribal tourism is a relatively new type of tourism. It involves travellers going to remote
destinations, staying with local people and learning about their culture and way of life. They stay
in local accommodation, share facilities with local people, and join in with meals and
celebrations. At the moment, less the one percent of holidays are tribal tourism holidays, but this
is set to change.
Tribal tourism is often compared with foreign exchange visits. However, a foreign exchange
involves staying with people who often share the same values. Tribal tourism takes visitors to
places where the lifestyle is very different from that in their home location. Those who have been
on a tribal holiday explain that experiencing this lifestyle is the main attraction. They say that it
offers them the chance to live in a way they never have before.
Not everyone is convinced that tribal tourism is a good thing, and opinions are divided. The
argument is about whether or not it helps the local population, or whether it exploits them. The
main problem is that, because tribal tourism is relatively new, the long-term effects on local
populations have not been studied in much detail. Where studies have been carried out, the
effects have been found to be negative.
Travel writer Ian Coleman recalls a recent trip to Guatemala, where he saw an example of this.
"There is a village with a statue of a man called Maximon, who has a special spiritual meaning
for the local tribe" he explains. "The statue kept indoors, and once a year the locals bring him out
and carry him around the village. However, visitors now pay money for them to bring the statue
out and carry it around, while they take photographs. As a result, Maximon has lost his original
meaning, and is now just another tourist attraction."
So, is it possible to experience an exotic culture without harming it in some way? "With a bit of
thought, we can maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative," says travel company
director Hilary Waterhouse. "Remember that you are there not only to experience a difference
culture, but to help it in some way. Tourists bring money to the community, which the
community can invest in local projects. However, this does not mean you can act the way you
might do back home. The most important thing is to show respect, learn about be aware of, local
customs and traditions. Always remember you're a guest".
Dawn baker, manager of travel company Footprints, runs tours to tribal areas in Peru. 'Good
companies specializing in tribal tours are very careful about who they allow on their tours', she
says. 'They won't take anyone they feel is unsuitable'. Baker offers reading recommendations so
that visitors.
Dawn baker, manager of travel company Footprints, runs tours to tribal areas in Peru. 'Good
companies specializing in tribal tours are very careful about who they allow on their tours', she
says. 'They won’t take anyone they feel is unsuitable’. Baker offers reading recommendations so
that visitors can read about the country and its cultures. 'The rewards of a trip to this country are
priceless, and the more you know in advance, the more priceless they are'.
Tribal tourism travelers are often surprised at how basic their facilities are when they get there.
'It's not for everyone, but for me it was all part of the experience', says Jamie White, who has
recently returned from a trip to Borneo. 'We stayed in the same huts that everyone was living in,
with no running water and no electricity. It was basic, but it was an ethical way to travel. Being
comfortable means you use more local resources and so have more of an environment impact.'
Source: Complete IELTS band 4-5

Questions 1-5:
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-D. You may use any letter more than once
1. Travellers may need to change the way they behave............. List of People
2. Some travellers would not enjoy living the way that the local people A Ian Coleman
do............. B Hilary Waterhouse
3. Tribal tourism can have benefits for local people............. C Dawn Baker
4. Some travellers make local people do things that they would not D Jamie White
normally do.............
5. Learning about a place before you go there makes your trip much
more satisfying.............

Exercise 2:

What is multi-tasking?
Multi-tasting might feel productive, but it can be more dangerous than drink driving and even
make you drop IQ points. Multi-tasking is the appearance of being able to handle more than one
task at the same time. For decades, humans have grappled with the notion that despite the 100
million neurons in their brains, we actually remain unable to do two things at once. When we
talk about multi-tasking, we're really referring to rapidly switching between tasks. A hot topic of
psychological research around the world, particularly in the US, the study of multi-tasking is still
in its infancy. Many questions remain unanswered and will only be resolved with time. However,
research is showing that the way the human brain functions does not allow multi-tasking to
deliver longed-for efficiencies.
Is it a myth?
Many scientists believe the ability to multi-task is a myth. In fact, one psychiatrist has gone so
far as to describe it as a 'mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more
tasks simultaneously as effectively as one'. Unlike computers, which can perform tasks at
lightning speed, the human brain needs to switch between tasks, depending on which area of the
brain is being used. Multi-tasking often involves goal switching and re-evaluating, which experts
say takes time. What appears to be human multi-tasking is more akin to channel surfing between
television stations.
Ernst Poppel, of the Institute for Medical Psychology at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian
University, believes humans cannot perform two or three tasks at once with the same degree of
concentration. He says seemingly simultaneous awareness and information processing takes
place in three-second windows. The human brain takes in the data about the environment
streaming in from the sensory systems; subsequent events are then processed in the next window.
For example, humans can concentrate on a conversation for three seconds, then move their focus
to a computer screen for three seconds, and then to a crying child three seconds later. While one
task is in the foreground of human consciousness, the others remain in the background until it is
their turn to be given access to the central processor in the human brain.
How did the notion of multi-tasking start?
The concept came to the fore with the advent of computers, which have central processing units
and can proceed rapidly from one task to another. The notion of multi-tasking appeals because it
suggests that more can be achieved within a certain amount of time. It is of particular appeal to
employers keen to gain efficiencies. However, research shows usually there is little to be gained
by humans switching between tasks.
Does multi-tasking save time?
Research has shown, generally, it doesn't. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. It can take
longer to do multiple tasks concurrently than if the focus were on completing one task at a time.
Dr Julia Irwin, of Macquarie University's Department of Psychology in Sydney, says the
problem with multi-tasking is that the amount of attentional capacity humans have is restricted,
and it has to be shared among the several tasks being performed. When flipping between tasks,
humans must pause between switching from one part of the brain to another. This is known as a
post-refractory pause and uses precious time. Switching back to the original task takes up more
time again.
Research shows it is less time-efficient to switch between tasks, as humans must, than to focus
on one task at a time. Multi-taskers can also be left with a reduced ability to perform each task.
Research done in 2004 by Marcel Just, Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University,
asked people to listen to a sentence and then say whether it was true or false at the same time as
they rotated an object in their hand. It was found that while people were able to perform both
tasks at the same time, it took them twice as long as it did if they focused on each task
individually, one after the other.
Professor David E. Meyer, a psychology .professor at the University of Michigan, has shown
how time is lost when humans shuttle between tasks. People were asked to write a report and
check their email at the same time. Those who constantly jumped between the tasks took about
one and a half times as long to complete the task as those who completed one job before turning
to another.
Given our human limitations, can we actually improve our performance at multi-tasking?
You can improve your multi-tasking ability, but only up to a point. For a long time, people have
known that training to perform a particular sequence of tasks can reduce the time it takes if those
tasks can become routine. This is because rote tasks require fewer mental demands. 'Those tasks
that benefit from practice and which we tend to do well when multi-tasking tend to be ones that
can be automated with practice and don't require much attention. So, for example, you can run
through in your head what you have to do in the coming day while having a shower,' says Dr
Julia Irwin. However, just because a person has improved their efficiency performing one set of
tasks does not mean they have improved their multi-tasking efficiency generally. Research has
shown the time lost when switching between tasks increases with the complexity and
unfamiliarity of the tasks.
Source: IELTS advantage

Questions 1-4:
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A- D.
1. Switching from task to task results in slower performance. List of People
2. Although possible, multi-tasking is time consuming. A Julia Irwin
3. Multi-tasking works best with undemanding activities. B Ernst Poppel
4. Multi-tasking is in fact the brain focusing on different things for short C Marcel Just
sequences. D David
E. Meyer

Exercise 3:

Out of Africa: solar energy from the Sahara

Vivienne Walt reports on how the Sahara Desert could offer a truly green solution to Europe's
energy problems A For years, the Sahara has been regarded by many Europeans as a terra
incognita* of little economic value or importance. But this idea may soon change completely.
Politicians and scientists on both sides of the Mediterranean are beginning to focus on the
Sahara's potent ial to provide power for Europe in the future.
They believe the desert's true value comes from the fact that it is dry and empty. Some areas of
the Sahara reach 45 degrees centigrade on many afternoons. It is, in other words, a gigantic
natural storehouse of solar energy. B A few years ago, scientists began to calculate just how
much energy the Sahara holds. They were astonished at the answer. In theory, a 90,600 square
kilometre chunk of the Sahara- smallerthan Portugal and a little over 1% of its total area- could
yield the same amount of electricity as all the world's power plants combined. A smaller square
of 15,500 square kilometres - about the size of
Connecticutcould provide electrrcity for Europe's 500 million people. 'I admit I was sceptical
until I did the calculations myself,' says Michael Pawlyn, director of Exploration Architecture,
one of three British environmental companies comprising the Sahara Forest Project, which is
testing solar plants in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Pawlyn calls the Sahara's potential
'staggering'. C At the moment, no one is proposing the creation of a solar power station the size
of a small country. But a relatively well-developed technology exists, which proponents say
could turn the Sahara's heat and sunlight into a major source of electricity- Concentrating Solar
Power [ CSP). Unlike solar panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, CSP utilises
mirrors which focus light on water pipes or boilers to produce very hot steam to operate the
turbines of generators. Small CSP plants have produced power in California's Mojave Desert
since the 1980s. The Sahara Forest Project proposes building CSP plants in areas below sea level
[the Sahara has several such depressions) so that sea water can flow into them. This water would
then be purified and used for powering turbines and washing dust off the mirrors. Waste water
would then supply irrigation to areas around the stations, creating lush oases - hence the 'forest'
in the group's name.
But producing significant quantities of electricity means building huge arrays of mirrors and
pipes across hundreds of miles of remote desert, which is expensive. Gerry Wolff, an engineer
who heads DESERTEC, an international consortium of solar-power scientists, says they have
estimated it will cost about $59 billion to begin transmitting power from the Sahara by 2020. E
Building plants is just part of the challenge. One of the drawbacks to CSP technology is that it
works at maximum efficiency only in sunny, hot climates- and deserts tend to be distant from
population centres. To supply Europe with 20% of its electricity needs, more than 19,300
kilometres of cables would need to be laid under the Mediterranean, says Gunnar Asplund, head
of HVOC research at ABB Power Technologies in Ludvika, Sweden. Indeed, to use renewable
sources of power, including solar, wind and tidal, Europe will need to build completely new
electrical grids. That's because existing infrastructures, built largely for the coalfired plants that
supply 80% of Europe's power, would not be suitable for carrying the amount of electricity
generated by the Sahara. Germany's government-run Aerospace Centre, which researches
energy, estimates that replacing those lines could raise the cost of building solar plants in the
Sahara and sending significant amounts of power to Europe to about $465 billion over the next
40 years. Generous government subsidies will be needed. 'Of course it costs a lot of money,' says
Asplund. 'It's a lot cheaper to burn coal than to make solar power in the Sahara.' F Meanwhile,
some companies are getting started. Sevi lle engineering company Abengoa is building one
solarthermal plant in Algeria and another in Morocco, while a third is being built in Egypt by a
Spanish-Japanese joint venture. The next step will be to get cables in place. Although the
European Parliament has passed a law that aids investors who help the continent reach its goal of
getting 20% of it~ power from renewable energy by 2020, it could take years to create the
necessary infrastructure. G Nicholas Dunlop, secretary-general of the London-based NGO e-
Parliament, thinks companies should begin transmitting small amounts of solar power as soon as
the North African plants begin operating, by linking a few cable lines under the Med. 'I call it the
Lego method,' he says. 'Build it piece by piece.' If it can be shown that power from the Sahara
can be produced profitably, he says, companies and governments will soon jump in. If they do,
perhaps airplane passengers flying across the Sahara will one day count the mirrors and patches
of green instead of staring at sand.

Source: Complete IELTS band 5.5-6.5

Question 1 - 4:
Look at the following statements and the list of organisations below. Match each statement
with the correct organisation, A- G.
1. They have set a time for achieving an objective. List of Organisations
2. They believe that successful small-scale projects will A) Exploration Architecture
demonstrate that larger projects are possible. B) DESERTEC
3. They have a number of renewable energy projects under C) ABB Power Technologies
construction. D) Aerospace Centre
4. They are already experimenting with solar energy E) Abengoa
installations in other parts of the world. F) The European Parliament

Exercise 4:

The truth about lying

Over the years Richard Wiseman has tried to unravel the truth about deception -
investigating the signs that give away a liar.

[Link] the 1970s, as part of a large-scale research programme exploring the area of interspecies
communication, Dr Francine Patterson from Stanford University attempted to teach two lowland
gorillas called Michael and Koko a simplified version of Sign Language. According to Patterson,
the great apes were capable of holding meaningful conversations, and could even reflect upon
profound topics, such as love and death. During the project, their trainers believe they uncovered
instances where the two gorillas' linguistic skills seemed to provide reliable evidence of
intentional deceit. In one example, Koko broke a toy cat, and then signed to indicate that the
breakage had been caused by one of her trainers. In another episode, Michael ripped a jacket
belonging to a trainer and, when asked who was responsible for the incident, signed 'Koko'.
When the trainer expressed some scepticism, Michael appeared to change his mind, and
indicated that Dr Patterson was actually responsible, before finally confessing.
[Link] researchers have explored the development of deception in children. Some of the most
interesting experiments have involved asking youngsters not to take a peek at their favourite
toys. During these studies, a child is led into a laboratory and asked to face one of the walls. The
experimenter then explains that he is going to set up an elaborate toy a few feet behind them.
After setting up the toy, the experimenter says that he has to leave the laboratory, and asks the
child not to turn around and peek at the toy. The child is secretly filmed by hidden cameras for a
few minutes, and then the experimenter returns and asks them whether they peeked. Almost all
three-year-olds do, and then half of them lie about it to the experimenter. By the time the
children have reached the age of five, all of them peek and all of them lie. The results provide
compelling evidence that lying starts to emerge the moment we learn to speak. adapted from The
National Newspaper
[Link] what are the tell-tale signs that give away a lie? In 1994, the psychologist Richard
Wiseman devised a large-scale experiment on a TV programme called Tomorrow's World. As
part of the experiment, viewers watched two interviews in which Wiseman asked a presenter in
front of the cameras to describe his favourite fi lm. In one interview, th~presenter picked Some
Like It Hot and he told the truth; in the other interview, he picked Gone with the Wind and lied.
The viewers were then invited to make a choice- to telephone in to say which film he was lying
about. More than 30,000 calls were received, but viewers were unable to tell the difference and
the vote was a 50/50 split. In similar experiments, the results have been remarkably consistent-
when it comes to lie detection, people might as well simply toss a coin. It doesn't matter if you
are male or female, young or old; very few people are able to detect deception.
D. Why is this? Professor Charles Bond from the Texas Christian University has conducted
surveys into the sorts of behaviour people associate with lying. He has interviewed thousands of
people from more than 60 countries, asking them to describe how they set about telling whether
someone is lying. People's answers are remarkably consistent. Almost everyone thinks liars tend
to avert their gaze, nervously wave their hands around and shift about in their seats. There is,
however, one small problem. Researchers have spent hour upon hour carefully comparing films
of liars and truth-tellers. The results are clear. Liars do not necessarily look away from you; they
do not appear nervous and move their hands around or shift about in their seats. People fail to
detect lies because they are basing their opinions on behaviours that are not actually associated
with deception.
E. So what are we missing? It is obvious that the more information you give away, the greater
the chances of some of it coming back to haunt you. As a result, liars tend to say less and provide
fewer details than truth-tellers. Looking back at the transcripts of the interviews with the
presenter, his lie about Gone with the Wind contained about 40 words, whereas the truth about
Some Like It Hot was nearly twice as long. People who lie also try psychologically to keep a
distance from their falsehoods, and so tend to include fewer references to themselves in their
stories. In his entire interview about Gone with the Wind, the presenter only once mentioned
how the film made him feel, compared with the several references to his feelings when he talked
about Some Like It Hot.
F. The simple fact is that the real clues to deceit are in the words that people use, not the body
language. So do people become better lie detectors when they listen to a liar, or even just read a
transcript of their comments? The interviews with the presenter were also broadcast on radio and
published in a newspaper, and although the lie-detecting abilities of the television viewers were
no better than chance, the newspaper readers were correct 64% of the time, and the radio
listeners scored an impressive 73% accuracy rate.
Source: Complete IELTS band 5.5-6.5

Questions 1-4:
Look at the following statements and the list of experiments below.
Match each statement with the correct experiment, A- C. You may use any letter more
than once.
List of Experiments
1. Someone who was innocent was blamed for A) the gorilla experiment
something. B) the experiment with children
2. Those involved knew they were being filmed. C) the TV experiment
3. Some objects were damaged.
4. Some instructions were ignored.

Exercise 5:

Last man standing

Some 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens beat other hominids to become the only surviving
species. Kate Ravilious reveals how we did it.
A. Today, there are over seven billion people living on Earth. No other species has exerted as
much influence over the planet as us. But turn the clock back 80,000 years and we were one of a
number of species roaming the Earth. Our own species. Homo sapiens (Latin for ’wise man'),
was most successful in Africa. In western Eurasia, the Neanderthals dominated, while Homo
erectus may have lived in Indonesia. Meanwhile, an unusual finger bone and tooth, discovered in
Denisova cave in Siberia in 2008, have led scientists to believe that yet another human
population - the Denisovans - may also have been widespread across Asia. Somewhere along the
line, these other human species died out, leaving Homo sapiens as the sole survivor. So what
made us the winners in the battle for survival?
B. Some 74.000 years ago, the Toba ‘supervolcano' on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted.
The scale of the event was so great that ash from the eruption was flung as far as eastern India,
more than 2,000 kilometres away. Oxford archaeologist Mike Petraglia and team have uncovered
thousands of stone tools buried underneath the Toba ash. The mix of hand axes and spear tips
have led Petraglia to speculate that Homo sapiens and Homo erectus were both living in eastern
India prior to the Toba eruption. Based on careful examination of the tools and dating of the
sediment layers where they were found. Petraglia and his team suggest that Homo sapiens
arrived in eastern India around 78.000 years ago. migrating out of Africa and across Arabia
during a favourable climate period. After their arrival, the simple tools belonging to Homo
erectus seemed to lessen in number and eventually disappear completely. 'We think that Homo
sapiens had a more efficient hunting technology, which could have given them the edge.' says
Petraglia. 'Whether the eruption of Toba also played a role in the extinction of the Homo erectus-
like species is unclear to us.'
C. Some 45.000 years later, another fight for survival took place. This time, the location was
Europe and the protagonists were another species, the Neanderthals. They were a highly
successful species that dominated the European landscape for 300.000 years. Yet within just a
few thousand years of the arrival of Homo sapiens, their number plummeted. They eventually
disappeared from the landscape around 30.000 years ago with their last known refuge being
southern Iberia, including Gibraltar. Initially. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived alongside
each other and had no reason to compete. But then Europe’s climate swung into a cold,
inhospitable, dry phase. ‘Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations had to retreat to refugia
(pockets of habitable land). This heightened competition between the two groups,’ explains Chris
Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London.
D. Both species were strong and stockier than the average human today, but Neanderthals were
particularly robust. ‘Their skeletons show that they had broad shoulders and thick necks,' says
Stringer. ‘Homo sapiens, on the other hand, had longer forearms, which undoubtedly enabled
them to throw a spear from some distance, with less danger and using relatively little energy,’
explains Stringer. This long-range ability may have given Homo sapiens an advantage in
hunting. When it came to keeping warm. Homo sapiens had another skill: weaving and sewing.
Archaeologists have uncovered simple needles fashioned from ivory and bone alongside Homo
sapiens, dating as far back as 35,000 years ago. ‘Using this technology, we could use animal
skins to make ourselves tents, warm clothes and fur boots,’ says Stringer. In contrast.
Neanderthals never seemed to master sewing skills, instead relying on pinning skins together
with thorns.
E. A thirst for exploration provided Homo sapiens with another significant advantage over
Neanderthals. Objects such as shell beads and flint tools, discovered many miles from their
source, show that our ancestors travelled over large distances, in order to barter and exchange
useful materials, and share ideas and knowledge. By contrast. Neanderthals tended to keep
themselves to themselves, living in small groups. They misdirected their energies by only
gathering resources from their immediate surroundings and perhaps failing to discover new
technologies outside their territory.
F. Some of these differences in behaviour may have emerged because the two species thought in
different ways. By comparing skull shapes, archaeologists have shown that Homo sapiens had a
more developed temporal lobe - the regions at the side of the brain, associated with listening,
language and long-term memory. 'We think that Homo sapiens had a significantly more complex
language than Neanderthals and were able to comprehend and discuss concepts such as the
distant past and future.' says Stringer. Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York,
has recently suggested that Homo sapiens may also have had a greater diversity of brain types
than Neanderthals. ‘Our research indicates that high-precision tools, new hunting technologies
and the development of symbolic communication may all have come about because they were
willing to include people with "different" minds and specialised roles in their society,’ she
explains. 'We see similar kinds of injuries on male and female Neanderthal skeletons, implying
there was no such division of labour,' says Spikins.
G. Thus by around 30,000 years ago. many talents and traits were well established in Homo
sapiens societies but still absent from Neanderthal communities. Stringer thinks that the
Neanderthals were just living in the wrong place at the wrong time. 'They had to compete with
Homo sapiens during a phase of very unstable climate across Europe. During each rapid climate
fluctuation, they may have suffered greater losses of people than Homo sapiens, and thus were
slowly worn down,’ he says. ‘If the climate had remained stable throughout, they might still be
here.’
Source: Complete IELTS band 5.5-6.5

Questions 1-4:
Look at the following statements and the list of researchers, A-C, below.
Match each statement with the correct researcher.
1. No evidence can be found to suggest that Neanderthal communities List of Researchers
allocated tasks to different members. A. Mike Petraglia
2. Homo sapiens may have been able to plan ahead. B. Chris Stringer
3. Scientists cannot be sure whether a sudden natural disaster C. Penny Spikins
contributed to the loss of a human species.
4. Environmental conditions restricted the areas where Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals could live.

DẠNG 4: MATCHING HEADINGS

Exercise 1:

Pedestrians only
How traffic-free shopping streets developed
A. The concept of traffic-free shopping areas goes back a long time. During the Middle Ages,
traffic-free shopping areas known as souks were built in Middle Eastern countries to allow
people to shop in comfort and, more importantly, safety. As far back as 2,000 years ago, road
traffic was banned from central Rome during the day to allow for the free movement of
pedestrians, and was only allowed in at night when shops and markets had closed for the day. In
most other cities, however, pedestrians were forced to share the streets with horses, coaches and,
later, with cars and other motorised vehicles.
B. The modern, traffic-free shopping street was born in Europe in the 1960s, when both city
populations and car ownership increased rapidly. Dirty exhaust fumes from cars and the risks
involved in crossing the road were beginning to make shopping an unpleasant and dangerous
experience. Many believed the time was right for experimenting with car-free streets, and
shopping areas seemed the best place to start.
C. At first, there was resistance from shopkeepers. They believed that such a move would be bad
for business. They argued that people would avoid streets if they were unable to get to them in
their cars. When the first streets in Europe were closed to traffic, there were even noisy
demonstrations, as many shopkeepers predicted they would lose customers.
D. However, research carried out afterwards in several European cities revealed some
unexpected statistics. In Munich, Cologne and Hamburg, visitors to shopping areas increased by
50 percent. On Copenhagen’s main shopping street, shopkeepers reported sales increases of 25-
40 percent. Shopkeepers in Minneapolis, USA, were so Impressed when they learnt this that they
even offered to pay for the construction and maintenance costs of their own traffic-free Streets.
E. With the arrival of the traffic-free shopping street, many shops, especially those selling things
like clothes, food and smaller luxury Items, prospered. Unfortunately, it wasn't good news for
everyone, as shops selling furniture and larger electrical appliances actually saw their sales drop.
Many of these were forced to move elsewhere, away from the city centre. Today they are a
common feature on the outskirts of towns and cities, often situated in out-of-town retail zones
with their own car parks and other local facilities.
Source: Complete IELTS band 4-5

Now match the headings i-vii below with paragraphs A-E in the passage. There are two
headings that you do not need.
List of headings
i Facing local opposition 1. Paragraph A...............
ii Some reasons for success 2. Paragraph B................
iii Winners and losers 2. Paragraph C................
iv A need for change 4. Paragraph D..............
v An experiment that went wrong 5. Paragraph E.............
vi An idea from ancient history
vii North America learns from Europe

Exercise 2:

The rain makers

Science and technology work with nature to bring
rain when and where it is needed
A. Wheat farmer Gang Liu is a worried man. The annual rains have not arrived, and there is a
danger that unless there is substantial rainfall soon, his annual wheat crop will fail. As he looks
anxiously at the clouds which promise rain but are failing to deliver it, there is a sudden loud
roar, and from fields for miles around, hundreds of small rockets are fired into the clouds. Within
twenty minutes, the farms around the eastern Chinese city of Luohe are experiencing their first
rain for many weeks. Gang Lius valuable wheat has been saved, thanks to a technique known as
'cloud seeding, in which the chemical silver iodide (Agl) is introduced into clouds. This causes
the tiny drops of moisture in the clouds to turn to ice. These tiny ice particles join until they
become heavy enough to fall from the sky, turning into rain as they melt.
B. But did cloud seeding really cause the rain in Luohe to fall, or was just a coincidence? Experts
often question whether cloud seeding actually works. It is hard to tell how effective cloud
seeding actually is, they say, as it might have rained anyway, without human intervention. But
this has not stopped many governments and organisations from trying. There are currently 150
weather-modifying projects taking place in more than 40 countries. Not all of them are aimed at
creating rain. The Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation in the USA, for example, is
experimenting with firing microwaves into clouds to prevent the tornadoes which cause
enormous damage to the country every year. In Russia, experiments have been carried out to
make sure the sun shines during important national events.
C. However, It is rainmaking that dominates the research programmes. In many of these,
researchers are using trials in which some clouds are 'seeded' while others are not, and both
groups are monitored. Arlen Huggins of the Desert Research Institute is leading a research
project in Australia. Weather-monitoring technology is so good nowadays, he says, that we can
measure clouds mụch more effectively, even from the inside. As a result, we now know mụch
more about the effect humans can have on the weather. What Huggins' team has discovered so
far is promising. They believe that cloud seeding does work, although there are still two years of
the six-year project left to go.
D. In China, where the majority of cloud-seeding operations take place, weather-modification
authorities use army rockets to fire silver-iodide particles into the clouds. 59,000 staff working
for the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) are equipped with 7,115 army cannons
which, in 2006, were used to fire a million silver-Iodide rockets into the atmosphere. This costs
over $100 million a year, although the CMA claims the results are worth the expense. Between
1999 and 2006, they say, cloud seeding produced 250 billion metric tonnes of rain and prevented
thousands of farmers from losing their crops.
E. We want to understand what makes clouds rain,“ says Philip Brown of the UK Meteorological
office, explaining why so much time, effort and money are being invested. “But there is a more
powerful economic reason. A lot of countries around the world are at risk from drought, and
governments will try anything to make sure that doesn’t happen, even if the scientific evidence is
weak. The potential economic value is greater than the scientific value. Making it rain might
allow you to keep agriculture going where, without human intervention, it might fail”.
F. Some people are concerned, however, that altering the weather can have negative
consequences. Leonard Barrie, director of the research department at the World Meteorological
Organisation in Geneva, explains why. “All areas of weather modification are still very
controversial. Some people think that diverting water for irrigation benefits some people, but ís a
disadvantage to others. Someone in one area will get more water, but as a result, someone
somewhere else could get less“. His fears may be justified. Recently, the town of Zhoukou in
China’s Henan province accused neighbouring town Pingdingshang of “stealing' rain from
clouds that were due to pass over its own farms, prompting what may be the world very first
documented incident of 'rain rage’.
Source: Complete IELTS band 4-5
Questions 1-6: The reading passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
i Making peaceful use of a military weapon 1. Paragraph A...............
ii How modifying the weather has changed the world 2. Paragraph B................
iii What is prompting this research? 2. Paragraph C................
iv A period of drought comes to an end 4. Paragraph D..............
v An old solution to a new problem 5. Paragraph E.............
vi Winners and losers 6. Paragraph E...............
vii Tests provide encouraging results
viii A waste of money
ix Global attempts to change the weather

Exercise 3:

Whale communication
A. It is only comparatively recently that we have become aware of the hauntingly beautiful
sounds made by humpback whales. The hydrophone, a microphone that can be used in water,
was developed by the British scientist Ernest Rutherford, and is particularly good at detecting the
presence of submarines underwater. During the Cold War, a Bermudian, Frank Watlington was
working for the US government, and it was his job to use hydrophones to listen out for Russian
submarines. While he was doing this, Watlington noticed that humpback whales appeared to
'sing'. Later, Watlington's work was taken up by two other researchers, Roger Payne and Scott
McVay, who studied the nature of these humpback whale 'songs'. They found that the various
sounds produced by the whale formed a song which lasts for about 30 minutes and is then
repeated by the whale for hours or even days.
B. Scientists believe there are two main reasons for whales to make sounds: echolocation, so that
the whales know what objects (and perhaps food) are around them; and communication. Whales
are capable of communicating to other whales over huge distances. Sound waves travel faster
through water (around 1.5 kilometre per second) than through air, and the sound of a whale can
travel thousands of kilometres through the oceans.
C. Many different species of whale are capable of making noises and some of them (as well as
dolphins and porpoises) are believed to use echolocation. Some whales look for food, such as
squid, down to a depth of 1.5 kilometres, and at that depth there is virtually no light at all.
Without being able to locate their food, the whales are going to go hungry. The whales send out
series of clicks and listen out for the echo of the sound. From this, the whale is able to work out
what is around it and can respond accordingly. The system whales use is highly complex, but it
is similar to the way that you can tell direction of sound. You have two ears and when a sound is
made, the sound reaches one ear a fraction of a second before the other. From this information,
your brain can work out the direction of the sound.
D. In addition to echolocation, some whales, most notably the humpback whale, are capable of
producing a range of notes which appear to be a form of communication. Humpback whales in
one school (as groups of whales are known) tend to sing virtually the same song. Perhaps like
football supporters they are demonstrating group identity, showing that they belong to the same
school. Other schools, particularly those found in other oceans, sing songs which are quite
different. It is also quite likely that the songs play a role in courtship. It is generally the males
that sing, so perhaps they are also trying to attract females.
E. For millions of years, whales have swum in the great oceans of the world and only recently
have they had to contend with a predator: man. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many countries
had fleets of ships which set out to bring back whales. The 20th century saw the development of
factory ships which were capable of killing and processing thousands of whales. In the 1930s,
over 50,000 whales were killed annually. It wasn't until 1986 that a moratorium was agreed to
stop whale hunting, and scientists hope that the number of whales will recover. So can the
whales of the world now cruise about without a care in the world? Sadly not. The growth of trade
in the world has meant that there are now more ships, particularly large container ships, than ever
before. In fact, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says that large numbers of northern right
whales are killed in collision with ships. But it is not only the physical danger that ships present.
The loud noises of ships' engines are very likely to disturb the whales, and the WWF have called
for shipping restrictions in certain areas.
F. In recent years, there have been many cases of whales dying on beaches. Could the reason for
these tragedies have something to do with the noise pollution that these majestic creatures have
to live with? There is no definite answer to the question, but it has attracted considerable
research, and findings seem to point to man's industrial activities in the ocean. With an ever-
growing need for oil, more and more drilling takes place offshore. To assess the likelihood of the
presence of oil, seismologists use sonar to work out the underlying geology. The sounds used in
such tests are believed by some people to have a highly damaging effect on whales, either simply
disrupting their method of communication, or, some scientists believe, actually killing them.
With an ever-increasing human population and dwindling resources, whales face an uncertain
future. While it is unlikely that we will ever know exactly why whales producing their whale
songs, the world will be a much poorer place without them.
Source: IELTS Advantage - Reading skills

Questions 1-6: The text has six untitled paragraphs A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below (i-ix).
 i Musical futures 1 Paragraph A
ii Sad mystery to solve 2 Paragraph B
iii Surprising discoveries 3 Paragraph C
iv The inventiveness of song 4 Paragraph D
v Singing effects 5 Paragraph E
vi Threats to survival 6 Paragraph F
vii Singing for supper
viii Varieties of song
ix The significance of song

Exercise 4:

Organic food: why?

by Rob Lyons and Jan Bowman

A. Today, many governments are promoting organic or natural farming methods that avoid the
use of pesticides and other artificial products. The aim is to show that they care about the
environment and about people's health. But is this the right approach? A Europe is now the
biggest market for organic food in the world, expanding by 25 percent a year over the past 10
years. So what is the attraction of organic food for some people? The really important thing is
that organic sounds more 'natural'. Eating organic is a way of defining oneself as natural, good,
caring, different from the junk-food-scoffing masses. As one journalist puts it: 'It feels closer to
the source, the beginning, the start of things.' The real desire is to be somehow close to the soil,
to Mother Nature.
B. Unlike conventional farming, the organic approach means farming with natural, rather than
man-made, fertilisers and pesticides. Techniques such as crop rotation improve soil quality and
help organic farmers compensate for the absence of man-made chemicals. As a method of food
production, organic is, however, inefficient in its use of labour and land; there are severe limits
to how much food can be produced. Also, the environmental benefits of not using artificial
fertiliser are tiny compared with the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by transporting food (a
great deal of Britain's organic produce is shipped in from other countries and transported from
shop to home by car).
C. Organic farming is often claimed to be safer than conventional farming - for the environment
and for consumers. Yet studies into organic farming worldwide continue to reject this claim. An
extensive review by the UK Food Standards Agency found that there was no statistically
significant difference between organic and conventional crops. Even where results indicated
there was evidence of a difference, the reviewers found no sign that these differences would have
any noticeable effect on health.
D. The simplistic claim that organic food is more nutritious than conventional food was always
likely to be misleading. Food is a natural product, and the health value of different foods will
vary for a number of reasons, including freshness, the way the food is cooked, the type of soil it
is grown in, the amount of sunlight and rain crops have received, and so on. Likewise, the
flavour of a carrot has less to do with whether it was fertilised with manure or something out of a
plastic sack than with the variety of carrot and how long ago it was dug up. The differences
created by these things are likely to be greater than any differences brought about by using an
organic or nonorganic system of production. Indeed, even some 'organic' farms are quite
different from one another.
E. The notion that organic food is safer than 'normal' food is also contradicted by the fact that
many of our most common foods are full of natural toxins. Parsnips cause blisters on the skin of
agricultural workers. Toasting bread creates carcinogens. As one research expert says: 'People
think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In
fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that
it will poison you. Naturally, many plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years
developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops.'
F. Yet educated Europeans are more scared of eating traces of a few, strictly regulated, man-
made chemicals than they are of eating the ones that nature created directly. Surrounded by
plentiful food, it's not nature they worry about, but technology. Our obsessions with the ethics
and safety of what we eat - concerns about antibiotics in animals, additives in food, GM crops
and so on- are symptomatic of a highly technological society that has little faith in its ability to
use this technology wisely. In this context, the less something is touched by the human hand, the
healthier people assume it must be
G. Ultimately, the organic farming movement is an expensive luxury for shoppers in well-
manicured Europe. For developing parts of the world, it is irrelevant. To European
environmentalists, the fact that organic methods require more labour and land than conventional
ones to get the same yields is a good thing; to a farmer in rural Africa, it is a disaster. Here, land
tends to be so starved and crop yields so low that there simply is not enough organic matter to
put back into the soil. Perhaps the focus should be on helping these countries to gain access to
the most advanced farming techniques, rather than going back to basics. "
adapted from articles in Spiked
Source: Complete IELTS band 5.5 - 6.5

Questions 1-7: The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A- G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B- G from the list of headings below.
i Research into whether organic food is better for us 1. Paragraph A ... viii
ii Adding up the cost of organic food 2. Paragraph B
iii The factors that can affect food quality 3. Paragraph C
iv The rich and poor see things differently 4. Paragraph D
v A description of organic farming 5. Paragraph E
vi Testing the taste of organic food 6. Paragraph F
vii Fear of science has created the organic trend 7. Paragraph G
viii The main reason for the popularity of organic food
ix The need to remove hidden dangers from food
Exercise 5:

Learning color words

Young children struggle with color concepts, and the reason for this may have something
to do with how we use the words that describe them.
A. In the course of the first few years of their lives, children who are brought up in English-
speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words. Words for objects, actions,
emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world quickly become part of their infant
repertoire. For some reason, however, when it comes to learning color words, the same children
perform very badly. At the age of four months, babies can distinguish between basic color
categories. Yet it turns out they do this in much the same way as blind children. "Blue" and
"yellow" appear in older children's expressive language in answer to questions such as "What
color is this?", but their mapping of objects to individual colors is haphazard and
interchangeable. If shown a blue cup and asked about its color, typical two-year-olds seem as
likely to come up with "red" as "blue." Even after hundreds of training trials, children as old as
four may still end up being unable to accurately sort objects by color.
B. In an effort to work out why this is, cognitive scientists at Stanford University in California
hypothesized that children's incompetence at color-word learning may be directly linked to the
way these words are used in English. While word order for color adjectives varies, they are used
overwhelmingly in pre-nominal position (e.g. "blue cup"); in other words, the adjective comes
before the noun it is describing. This is in contrast to post-nominal position (e.g. "The cup is
blue") where the adjective comes after the noun. It seems that the difficulty children have may
not be caused by any unique property of color, or indeed, of the world. Rather, it may simply
come down to the challenge of having to make predictions from color words to the objects they
refer to, instead of being able to make predictions from the world of objects to the color words.
To illustrate, the word "chair" has a meaning that applies to the somewhat varied set of entities in
the world that people use for sitting on. Chairs have features, such as arms and legs and backs,
that are combined to some degree in a systematic way; they turn up in a range of chairs of
different shapes, sizes, and ages. It could be said that children learn to narrow down the set of
cues that make up a chair and in this way they learn the concept associated with that word. On
the other hand, color words tend to be unique and not bound to other specific co-occurring
features; there is nothing systematic about color words to help cue their meaning. In the speech
that adults direct at children, color adjectives occur pre-nominally ("blue cup") around 70 percent
of the time. This suggests that most of what children hear from adults will, in fact, be unhelpful
in learning what color words refer to.
C. To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 41 English children aged between 23
and 29 months and carried out a three- phase experiment. It consisted of a pre-test, followed by
training in the use of color words, and finally a post-test that was identical to the pre-test. The
pre- and post-test materials comprised six objects that were novel to the children. There were
three examples of each object in each of three colors—red, yellow, and blue. The objects were
presented on trays, and in both tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to
requests in which the color word was either a prenominal ("Which is the red one?") or a post-
nominal ("Which one is red?").
In the training, the children were introduced to a "magic bucket" containing five sets of items
familiar to 26-month-olds (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) in each of the three
colors. The training was set up so that half the children were presented with the items one by one
and heard them labelled with color words used pre-nominally ("This is a red crayon"), while the
other half were introduced to the same items described with a post-nominal color word ("This
crayon is red"). After the training, the children repeated the selection task on the unknown items
in the post-test.
To assess the quality of children's understanding of the color words, and the effect of each type
of training, correct choices on items that were consistent across the pre- and post-tests were used
to measure children's color knowledge.
D. Individual analysis of pre- and post-test data, which confirmed parental vocabulary reports,
showed the children had at least some knowledge of the three colour words: they averaged two
out of three correct choices in response to both pre- and post-nominal question types, which, it
has been pointed out, is better than chance. When children's responses to the question types were
assessed independently, performance was at its most consistent when children were both trained
and tested on post-nominal adjectives, and worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and
tested on post-nominal adjectives.
Only children who had been trained with post- nominal color-word presentation and then tested
with post-nominal question types were significantly more accurate than chance. Comparing the
pre- and post-test scores across each condition revealed a significant decline in performance
when children were both pre- and post-tested with questions that placed the color words pre-
nominally.
As predicted, when children are exposed to color adjectives in post-nominal position, they learn
them rapidly (after just five training trials per color); when they are presented with them pre-
nominally, as English overwhelmingly tends to do, children show no signs of learning.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of Headings 1. Paragraph A
i A possible explanation 2. Paragraph B
ii Why names of objects are unhelpful 3. Paragraph C
iii Checking out the theory 4. Paragraph D
iv A curious state of affairs
v The need to look at how words are formed
vi How age impacts on learning colours
vii Some unsurprising data
Exercise 6:

Gold Dusters
They are the Earth’s pollinators and they
come in more than 200,000 shapes and sizes.

A. Row upon row, tomato plants stand in formation inside a greenhouse. To reproduce,
most flowering plants depend on a third party to transfer pollen between their male and
female parts. Some require extra encouragement to give up that golden dust. The tomato
flower, for example, needs a violent shake, a vibration roughly equivalent to 30 times the
pull of Earth’s gravity, explains Arizona entomologist Stephen Buchmann. Growers have
tried numerous ways to rattle pollen from tomato blossoms. They have used shaking tables,
air blowers and blasts of sound. But natural means seem to work better
B. It is no surprise that nature’s design works best. What’s astonishing is the array of
workers that do it: more than 200,000 individual animal species, by varying strategies,
help the world's 240,000 species of flowering plants make more flowers. Flies and beetles
are the original pollinators, going back to when flowering plants first appeared 130
million years ago. As for bees, scientists have identified some 20,000 distinct species so
far. Hummingbirds, butterflies, moths, wasps and ants are also up to the job. Even
non-flying mammals do their part: sugar-loving opossums, some rainforest monkeys, and
lemurs in Madagascar, all with nimble hands that tear open flower stalks and furry coats
to which pollen sticks. Most surprising, some lizards, such as geckos, lap up nectar and
pollen and then transport the stuff on their faces and feet as they forage onward.
C. All that messy diversity, unfortunately, is not well suited to the monocrops and
mega-yields of modern commercial farmers Before farms got so big, says conservation
biologist Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, ‘we didn’t have to
manage pollinators. They were all around because of the diverse landscapes. Now you
need to bring in an army to get pollination done. The European honeybee was first
imported to the US some 400 years ago.
Now at least a hundred commercial crops rely almost entirely on managed honeybees,
which beekeepers raise and rent out to tend to big farms. And although other species of
bees are five to ten times more efficient, on a per-bee basis, at pollinating certain fruits,
honeybees have bigger colonies, cover longer distances, and tolerate management and
movement better than most insects. They're not picky - they’ll spend their time on almost
any crop. It’s tricky to calculate what their work is truly worth; some economists put it at
more than $200 billion globally a year.
D. Industrial-scale farming, however, may be wearing down the system. Honeybees have
suffered diseases and parasite infestations for as long as they've been managed, but in
2006 came an extreme blow. Around the world, bees began to disappear over the winter in
massive numbers. Beekeepers would lift the lid of a hive and be amazed to find only the
queen and a few stragglers, the worker bees gone. In the US, a third to half of all hives
crashed; some beekeepers reported colony losses near 90 percent. The mysterious culprit
was named colony collapse disorder (CCD) and it remains an annual menace - and an
enigma.
E. When it first hit, many people, from agronomists to the public, assumed that our
slathering of chemicals on agricultural fields was to blame for the mystery. Indeed, says
Jeff Pettis of the USDA Bee Research Laboratory, ‘we do find more disease in bees that
have been exposed to pesticides, even at low levels.’ But it is likely that CCD involves
multiple stressors. Poor nutrition and chemical exposure, for instance, might wear down a
bee's immunities before a virus finishes the insect off. It’s hard to tease apart factors and
outcomes, Pettis says. New studies reveal that fungicides - not previously thought toxic to
bees - can interfere with microbes that break down pollen in the insects’ guts, affecting
nutrient absorption and thus long-term health and longevity. Some findings pointed to
viral and fungal pathogens working together. ‘I only wish we had a single agent causing
all the declines,’ Pettis says, ’that would make our work much easier!
F. However, habitat loss and alteration, he says, are even more of a menace to pollinators
than pathogens. Claire Kremen encourages farmers to cultivate the flora surrounding
farmland to help solve habitat problems. ‘You can't move the farm,’ she says, ‘but you can
diversify what grows in its vicinity: along roads, even in tractor yards.’ Planting
hedgerows and patches of native flowers that bloom at different times and seeding fields
with multiple plant species rather than monocrops 'not only is better for native pollinators,
but it’s just better agriculture,’ she says. Pesticide-free wildflower havens, adds
Buchmann, would also bolster populations of useful insects. Fortunately, too, ‘there are
far more generalist plants than specialist plants, so there's a lot of redundancy in
pollination,’ Buchmann says. ‘Even if one pollinator drops out, there are often pretty good
surrogates left to do the job. The key to keeping our gardens growing strong, he says, is
letting that diversity thrive.
G. Take away that variety, and we'll lose more than honey. ‘We wouldn't starve,’ says
Kremen. ‘But what we eat, and even what we wear pollinators, after all, give us some of
our cotton and flax - would be limited to crops whose pollen travels by other means. ‘In a
sense,’ she says, ‘our lives would be dictated by the wind. It’s vital that we give pollinators
more of what they need and less of what they don't, and ease the burden on managed bees
by letting native animals do their part, say scientists.
[Adapted from National Geographic Magazine.]
Source: Complete IELTS band 6.5-7.5

The reading passage has seven sections, A-G.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below. In boxes 15-21
on your answer sheet write A-G.

List of Headings
i Looking for clues 1. Section A
ii Blaming the beekeepers 2. Section B
iii Solutions to a more troublesome issue 3. Section C
iv Discovering a new bee species 4. Section D
v An impossible task for any human 5. Section E
vi The preferred pollinator 6. Section F
vii Plant features designed to suit the pollinator 7. Section G
viii Some obvious and less obvious pollen carriers
ix The undesirable alternative
x An unexpected setback
DẠNG 5: MULTIPLE CHOICE:
Exercise 1:

The ballpoint pen

Most of us have at least one, but how did this popular item evolve?
One morning in 1945, a crowd of 5,000 people jammed the entrance of Gimbels Department
Store in New York. The day before, Gimbels had placed a full-page advertisement in the New
York Times for a wonderful new invention, the ballpoint pen. The advertisement described the
pen as 'fantastic' and 'miraculous'. Although they were expensive, $12.50 each, all 10,000
pens in stock were sold on the first day.
In fact, this 'new' pen was not new at all. In 1888, John Loud, a leather manufacturer, had
invented a pen with a reservoir of ink and a rolling ball. However, his pen was never pro-
duced, and efforts by other people to produce a commercially successful one failed too. The
main problem was with the ink. If it was too thin, the ink leaked out of the pen. If it was too
thick, it didn't come out of the pen at all.
Almost fifty years later, in 1935, a newspaper editor in Hungary thought he spent too much
time filling his pens with ink. He decided to invent a better kind of pen. With the help of his
brother, who was a chemist, he produced a ballpoint pen that didn't leak when the pen wasn't
being used. The editor was called Ladislas Biro, and it was his name that people would asso-
ciate more than any other with the ballpoint pen.

By chance, Biro met Augustine Justo, the Argentinian president. Justo was so impressed with
Biro's invention that he invited him to set up a factory in Argentina. In 1943, the first Biro
pens were produced. Unfortunately, they were not popular, since the pen needed to be held
in a vertical position for the ink to come out. Biro redesigned the pen with a better ball, and
in 1944 the new product was on sale throughout Argentina.
It was a North American, Milton Reynolds, who introduced the ballpoint pen to the USA.
Copying Biro's design, he produced the version that sold so well at Gimbels. Another Ameri-
can, Patrick Frawley, improved the design and in 1950 began producing a pen he called the
Papermate. It was an immediate success, and within a few years, Papermates were selling in
their millions around the world.

Read each part carefully and choose the correct option, A, B, C or D.

1. People went to Gimbels to buy a ballpoint pen because
A. they couldn’t get them anywhere else
B. they had been told how good the pens were
C. they had never seen a ballpoint pen before
D. they thought the price good
2. Why were early ballpoint pens not produced commercially?
A. Nobody wanted to buy one
B. It cost too much to produce them
C. they used too much ink
D. they didn’t work properly
3. Why was Ladislas Biro's pen better than earlier models?
A. It didn’t need to be filled with ink as often
B. It was designed by a chemist
C. the ink stayed in the pen until it was needed
D. It was easier to use
4. Biro's first commercially-produced pen
A. was produced in a factory owned by the Argentinian president
B. only worked if used in a certain way
C. was a major success
D. went on sale in 1944
5. Patrick Frawley's pen
A. was a better version of an earlier model
B. took time to become successful
C. was the USA’s first commercially successful ballpoint pen
D. was only successful in the USA

Exercise 2:

On the trail of the honey badger

Researchers learn more about this fearless African predator
On a recent field trip to the Kalahari Desert, a team of researchers learnt a lot more about honey
badgers. They were rewarded with a detailed insight into how these fascinating creatures live and
hunt.
The team employed a local wildlife expert, Kitso Khama, to help them locate and follow the
badgers across the desert. Their main aim was to study the badgers' movements and behaviour as
discreetly as possible, without frightening them away or causing them to change their natural
behaviour. They also planned to trap a few and study them close up before releasing them. In
view of the animal's reputation, this was something that even Khama was reluctant to do.
'The problem with honey badgers is they are naturally curious animals, especially when they see
something new,' he says. 'That, combined with their unpredictable nature, can be a dangerous
mixture. If they sense you have food, for example, they won't be shy about coming right up to
you for something to eat. They're actually quite sociable creatures around humans, but as soon as
they feel they might be in danger, they can become extremely vicious. Fortunately this is rare,
but it does happen.'
The research confirmed many things that were already known. As expected, honey badgers ate
any creatures they could catch and kill. Even poisonous snakes, feared and avoided by most
other animals,, were not safe from them. The researchers were surprised, however, by the
animal's fondness for local melons, probably because of their high water content. Previously
researchers thought that the animal got all of its liquid requirements from its prey. The team also
learnt that, contrary to previous
research findings, the badgers occasionally formed loose family groups. They were also able to
confirm certain results from previous research, including the fact that female badgers never
socialised with each other.
Following some of the male badgers was a challenge, since they can cover large distances in a
short space of time. Some hunting territories cover more than 500 square kilometres. Although
they seem happy to share these territories with othermales, there are occasional fights over an
important food source, and male badgers can be as aggressive towards each other as they are
towards other species.
As the badgers became accustomed to the presence of people, it gave the team the chance to get
up close to them without being the subject of the animals' curiosity – or their sudden aggression.
The badgers' eating patterns, which had been disrupted, returned to normal. It also allowed the
team to observe more closely some of the other creatures that form working associations with the
honey badger, as these seemed to adopt the badgers' relaxed attitude when near humans.
Source: Complete IELTS Band 4-5

Read the rest of the passage and choose TWO letters, A—E, for Questions 2-5.
1. What two things does Kitso Khama 2. What two things did the team find out about
say about honey badgers? honey badgers?
A. They show interest in things they are A. There are some creatures they will not eat.
not familiar with. B. They were afraid of poisonous creatures.
B. It's hard to tell how they will behave. C. They may get some of the water they need from
C. They are always looking for food. fruit.
D. They do not enjoy human company. D. They do not always live alone.
E. It is common for them to attack people. E. Female badgers do not mix with male badgers.
3. According to the passage, which of 4. What two things happened when the honey
these two features are typical of male badgers got used to humans being
badgers? around them?
A. They don't run very quickly.B They A. The badgers lost interest in people.
hunt over a very large area. B. The badgers became less aggressive towards other
C. They defend their territory from other creatures.
badgers. C. The badgers started eating more.
D. They sometimes fight each other. D. Other animals started working with the badgers.
E. They are more aggressive than females. E. Other animals near them became more relaxed.

Exercise 3:

Society and social issues

I can put my cash card into an ATM anywhere in the world and take out a fistful of local
currency, while the corresponding amount is debited from my bank account at home. I
don't even think twice: regardless of the country, I trust that the system will work. The
whole world runs on trust. We trust that people on the street won't rob us, that the bank we
deposited money in last month returns it this month, that the justice system punishes the
guilty and exonerates the innocent. We trust the food we buy won't poison us, and the
people we let in to fix our boiler won't murder us . 'Society is an interdependent system
that requires widespread co-operation to function. People need to act in ways that are
expected of them, to be consistent and compliant. And not just individuals, but
organizations and systems. But in any cooperative system, there is an alternative, parasitic
strategy available - cheating.
A parasite obtains the benefits of widespread co-operation while at the same time taking
advantage of it. There are - and always will be - robbers, crooked banks and judges who
take bribes. So how do we ensure that the parasites are kept to a small enough minority to
not ruin everything for everyone? The paradox is that it is in our collective interest to be
trustworthy and to co-operate, while it is in our individual self-interest to be parasitic and
defect, or cheat. If too many defect, society stops functioning , the crime rate soars,
international banking collapses and judicial rulings become available for sale to the
highest bidder. No one would trust anyone because there wouldn't be enough trust to go
around.
If we can increase the benefits of co-operation or the costs of defection, we can induce
people to act in the group interest because it is also in their self-interest. These
mechanisms have been called societal pressures. A bank's reputation in the community is
a societal pressure. So is the lock on the ATM that keeps criminals out. In reality, there is
a complex interplay of societal pressures. The most basic are moral systems regulating our
own behaviour. Most of us try not to treat others unfairly because it makes us feel bad and
we know they will treat us badly in return. Most don't steal because we feel guilty - and
there are consequences when we are caught. We recognize it is in our long -term
self-interest not to act in our immediate self-interest. Morals and reputation worked well
enough for primitive lifestyles, but these began to fail as society grew too large. Trust is
personal and intimate among people who know each other, and morals and reputation are easily
limited to an in-group. Institutional systems - laws – formalized reputational
systems, and security technologies allowed societal pressures to scale up as we expanded
into ever-larger groups.
This trust isn't absolute, of course . Not every societal pressure affects everyone equally.
Some care more about their reputations, others are naturally law-abiding and still others
are better at picking locks. But the goal isn't total compliance, just to IitDit the scope for
defection. Criminals still target AT1s, and the occasional rogue bank employee steals
money from accounts . But for the most part, societal pressures keep defector damage
small enough to keep the system intact. But sometimes the scope is too great, and
underlying systems come crashing down . Overfishing has destroyed breeding stocks in
many places. Crime and corruption have devastated some countries. The international
banking system almost collapsed in 2008. But in general, societal pressures work as a
delicate balance between cooperation and defection. The balance isn't static -
technological changes disrupt it all the time . The changes can be related to defecting, so
ATM-based ‘card-skimmers' make it easier for criminals to steal my codes and empty my
bank account. Or they may be related to security, with computerized auditing technology
making it more difficult for fraudulent transactions to go through the system unnoticed .
Life becomes dangerous and insecure when new technologies, innovations and ideas
increase the scope of defection. Defectors innovate. New attacks become possible. Existing
attacks become eaSier, cheaper, more reliable or more devastating . More people may
defect, simply because it's easier to . In response, society must also innovate, to reduce the
scope of defection and restore the balance. This dynamic is as old as civilization .
Global banking, terrorists with nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, bio-weapons,
pandemics: we now have such dangerous systems that a few defectors can wreak havoc so
great that reactive rebalancing might not be enough. Worse still, by the time that society
realizes the gravity of the situation, irreversible damage may already have been done. To
add to the complexity, not all defectors are bad. Neither co-operation nor defection relate
to any absolute standard of morality. It is defectors who are in the vanguard for change, such as
those who helped escaped slaves in the US before the civil war. It is defectors who agitate to
overthrow the repressive regimes they live under. How to achieve the balance is at the core of
many of our debates about introducing laws to police the Internet. Anonymity is essential to
freedom and liberty and saves the lives of dissidents everywhere. Yet it also protects criminals.
Copyright both protects and stifles innovation. The big challenge will be to understand how to
simultaneously provide both more societal pressure to deal with the threats of technology, and
less pressure to ensure an open, free and evolving society .
Source: IELTS Advantage

Questions 1-5:
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

1. We tend to act in a trusting and co-operative way because

A. the collective interest is greater than our individual interest.
B. group and individual interest are generally equal.
C. the consequences of cheating are too great.
D. it is in our nature to act in a moral manner.
2. The writer says that trust is limited because
A. it does not include our opinions of the law.
B. we only trust those we are familiar with.
C. it is linked to our personal reputation.
D. it is likely that cheats do not trust anyone.
3. The examples of overfishing and the problem of the banking system show that
A. problems affect both society and the natural world.
B. the system of trust is not reliable.
C. the balance between cooperation and cheating is always at risk.
D. people who cheat the system will sometimes have an advantage.
4. According to the writer, defectors from the system
A. find it increasingly easy to cheat.
B. can hope to achieve positive solutions to problems.
C. are generally intelligent and innovative.
D. try to do as much damage as possible.
5. Which of the following is the most suitable title for the text?
A. The impossibility of cooperation in a world of cheats
B. The increased threats to a functioning society
C. How to keep criminals in check for the benefit of society
D. The importance of technology in balancing risk and reward in society
E. The complexities of a society based on trust
Exercise 4:

So you think humans are unique

There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know
better. We are not the only species that feels emotions, empathises with others or abides by
a moral code. Neither are we the only ones with personalities, cultures and the ability to
design and use tools. Yet we have steadfastly clung to the notion that one attribute, at least,
makes us unique: we alone have the capacity for language.
Alas, it turns out we are not so special in this respect either. Key to the revolutionary
reassessment of our talent for communication is the way we think about language itself.
Where once it was seen as a monolith, a discrete and singular entity, today scientists find
it is more productive to think of language as a suite of abilities. Viewed this way, it
becomes apparent that the component parts of language are not as unique as the whole.
Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered
uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have compiled a list of
gestures observed in monkeys, gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans,
which reveals that gesticulation plays a large role in their communication. Ape gestures
can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have
another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go
unacknowledged, they will often repeat them or touch the recipient.
In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the
University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly
desirable food such as banana to one side of them and some bland food such as celery to
the other. The orangutans, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures,
gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way.
If the person feigned incomprehension and offered the bland food, the animals would
change their gestures - just as humans would in a similar situation. If the human seemed
to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the
apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human
would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of nonhuman primates are not
merely innate reflexes but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all
characteristics that are considered prerequisites for human-like communication. As well as its
classic intonation patterns. Indeed, they lose their polymath talents so effectively that
they are ultimately unable to produce some sounds - think about the difficulty some
speakers have producing the English th.
Dolphin calves also pass through a babbling phase, Laurance Doyle from the SETI
Institute in Mountain View, California, Brenda McCowan from the University of
California at Davis and their colleagues analysed the complexity of baby dolphin sounds
and found it looked remarkably like that of babbling infants, in that the young dolphins had
a much wider repertoire of sound than adults. This suggests that they practise the sounds
of their species, much as human babies do, before they begin to put them together in the
way characteristic of mature dolphins of their species.
Of course, language is more than mere sound - it also has meaning. While the traditional,
cartoonish version of animal communication renders it unclear, unpredictable and
involuntary, it has become clear that various species are able to give meaning to
particular sounds by connecting them with specific ideas. Dolphins use 'signature
whistles’, so called because it appears that they name themselves. Each develops a unique
moniker within the first year of life and uses it whenever it meets another dolphin.
One of the clearest examples of animals making connections between specific sounds and
meanings was demonstrated by Klaus Zuberbuhler and Katie Slocombe of the University
of St Andrews in the UK. They noticed that chimps at Edinburgh Zoo appeared to make
rudimentary references to objects by using distinct cries when they came across different
kinds of food. Highly valued foods such as bread would elicit high-pitched grunts, less
appealing ones, such as an apple, got low-pitched grunts. Zuberbuhler and Slocombe
showed not only that chimps could make distinctions in the way they vocalised about food,
but that other chimps understood what they meant, When played recordings of grunts that
were produced for a specific food, the chimps looked in the place where that food was
usually found. They also searched longer if the cry had signalled a prized type of food.
Clearly animals do have greater talents for communication than we realised. Humans are
still special, but it is a far more graded, qualified kind of special than it used to be.
Source: Complete IELTS Band 5.5-6.5

Questions 1-5
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
1. What point does the writer make in the first paragraph?
A. We know more about language now than we used to.
B. We recognise the importance of talking about emotions.
C. We like to believe that language is a strictly human skill.
D. We have used tools for longer than some other species.
2. According to the writer, what has changed our view of communication?
A. analysing different world languages
B. understanding that language involves a range of skills
C. studying the different purposes of language
D. realising that we can communicate without language
3. The writer quotes the Cartmill and Byrne experiment because it shows
A. the similarities in the way humans and apes use gesture.
B. the abilities of apes to use gesture in different environments.
C. how food can be used to encourage ape gestures.
D. how hard humans find it to interpret ape gestures.
4. In paragraph 7, the writer says that one type of dolphin sound is
A. used only when dolphins are in danger.
B. heard only at a particular time of day.
C. heard at a range of pitch levels.
D. used as a form of personal identification.
5. Experiments at Edinburgh Zoo showed that chimps were able to
A. use grunts to ask humans for food.
B. use pitch changes to express meaning.
C. recognise human voices on a recording.
D. tell the difference between a false grunt and a real one.

Exercise 5:

Examining the placebo effect

The fact that taking a fake drug can powerfully improve some people's health - the
so-called placebo effect - was long considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of
pharmacology, but now things have changed.
Several years ago. Merck, a global pharmaceutical company, was falling behind its rivals
in sales. To make matters worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire,
which would allow cheaper generic products to flood the market. In interviews with the
press. Edward Scolnick. Merck's Research Director, presented his plan to restore the firm
to pre-eminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the anti
depressant, market, where Merck had trailed behind, while competitors like Pfizer and
GlaxoSmithKline had created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain
dominant in the future.” he told one media company, "we need to dominate the central
nervous system."
His plan hinged on the success of an experimental anti-depressant codenamed MK-869.
Still in clinical trials, it was a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in
innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested extremely well early on.
with minimal side effects. Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel.
True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift.
But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar
or another ineit substance given to groups of volunteers in subsequent clinical trials to
gauge the effectiveness of the real drug by comparison. Ultimately Merck's venture into
the anti depressant market failed. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the
"futility boundary".
MK-869 has not been the only much-ited medical breakthrough to be undone in recent
years by the placebo effect. And it's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the
futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades are faltering in
more recent follow-up tests It's not that the old medications are getting weaker, drug
developers say It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger The fact that an
increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry
into crisis The stakes could hardly be higher. To win FDA* approval, a new medication
must beat placebo In at least two authenticated trials. In today’s economy, the fate of a
well-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.
Why are fake pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines
alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent
researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings and potential applications of the
placebo effect A psychiatrist. William Potter, who knew that some patients really do seem
to get healthier for reasons that have more to do with a doctor's empathy than with the
contents of a pill, was baffled by the fact that drugs he had been prescribing for years
seemed to be struggling to prove their effectiveness Thinking that a crucial factor may
have been overlooked, Potter combed through his company’s database of published and
unpublished trials—including those that had been kept secret because of high placebo
response. His team aggregated the findings from decades of anti depressant trials, looking
for patterns and trying to see what was changing over time. What they found challenged
some of the industry’s basic assumptions about its drug-vetting process Assumption
number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as
well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore dinic. Potter discovered, however,
that geographic location alone could determine the outcome. By the late 1990s, for
example, the anti-anxiety drug Diazepam was still beating placebo in France and Belgium
But when the drug was tested in the U.S. it was likely to fail. Conversely, a similar drug.
Prozac, performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was
an unsettling prospect FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct
a trial.
Mistaken assumption number two was that the standard tests used to gauge volunteers'
improvement in trials yielded consistent results. Potter and his colleagues discovered that
ratings by trial observers varied significantly from one testing site to another. It was like
finding out that the judges in a tight race each had a different idea about the placement of
the finish line.
After some coercion by Potter and others, the National Institute of Health (NIH) focused
on the issue in 2000, hosting a three-day conference in Washington, and this conference
launched a new wave of placebo research in academic laboratories in the U.S. and Italy
that would make significant progress toward solving the mystery of what was happening in
clinical trials.
In one study last year. Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever
strategy for testing his volunteers’ response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual The
study focused on a common but painful medical condition that costs more than $40 billion a year
worldwide to treat. First, the volunteers were placed randomly in one of three
groups. One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients
get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment
from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the
same fake treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined
the causes of the illness, and displayed optimism about their condition.
Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by
participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did
people taking the two leading prescription drugs for the condition. And the benefits of their
“bogus” treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in
the pharmaceutical industry- that the placebo response is short-lived.
Studies like this open the door to hybrid treatment strategies that exploit the placebo effect
to make real drugs safer and more effective. As Potter says. “To really do the best for your
patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response'' adapted from
Wired Magazine
* The Food and Drugs Administration (an agency in the United States responsible for
protecting public health by assuming the safety of human drugs)
Source: Complete IELTS Band 6.5-7.5
Questions 1-4
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
1. Which of the following is true of William Potter’s research?
A. It was based on recently developed drugs that he had recommended
B. It included trial results from a range of drugs companies
C. Some of the trial results he investigated had not been made public
D. Some of the findings were not accepted by the drugs industry
2. What did William Potter's research reveal about the location of drugs trials?
A. The placebo effect was weakest in the US
B. Results were not consistent around the world
C. Results varied depending on the type of hospital
D. The FDA preferred drugs to be tested in different countries
3. What does the tight race refer to in line 80?
A. the standard tests
B. consistent results
C. ratings by trial observers
D. testing sites

4. What significant discovery was made by Ted Kaptchuk?

A. The effects of a placebo can last longer than previously thought
B. Patients’ health can improve while waiting to undergo a trial
C. Patients respond better to a placebo if they are treated by the same clinician throughout the
trial
D. Those conducting a placebo trial need to know the subjects’ disorder well
Exercise 6:

The Earth and Space Foundation

The community that focuses its efforts on the exploration of space has largely been
different from the community focused on the study and protection of the Earth's
environment, despite the fact that both fields of interest involve what might be referred to
as "scientific exploration'. The reason for this dichotomous existence is chiefly historical.
The exploration of the Earth has been occurring over many centuries, and the institutions
created to do it are often very different from those founded in the second part of the 20th
century to explore space. This separation is also caused by the fact that space exploration
has attracted experts from mainly non-biological disciplines - primarily engineers and
physicists - but the study of Earth and its environment is a domain heavily populated by
biologists.
The separation between the two communities is often reflected in attitudes. In the
environmental community, it is not uncommon for space exploration to be regarded as a
waste of money, distracting governments from solving major environmental problems here
at home. In the space exploration community, it is not uncommon for environmentalists to
be regarded as introspective people who divert attention from the more expansive visions
of the exploration of space - the ‘new frontier’. These perceptions can also be negative in
consequence because the full potential of both communities can be realised better when
they work together to solve problems. For example, those involved in space exploration
can provide the satellites to monitor the Earth’s fragile environments, and
environmentalists can provide information on the survival of life in extreme environments.
In the sense that Earth and space exploration both stem from the same human drive to
understand our environment and our place within it, there is no reason for the split to exist.
A more accurate view of Earth and space exploration is to see them as a continuum of
exploration with many interconnected and mutually beneficial links. The Earth and Space
Foundation, a registered charity, was established for the purposes of fostering such links
through field research and by direct practical action.
Projects that have been supported by the Foundation include environmental projects using
technologies resulting from space exploration: satellite communications, GPS, remote
sensing, advanced materials and power sources. For example, in places where people are faced
with destruction of the forests on which their livelihood depends, rather than
rejecting economic progress and trying to save the forests on their intrinsic merit, another
approach is to enhance the value of the forests - although these schemes must be carefully
assessed to be successful. In the past, the Foundation provided a grant to a group of
expeditions that used remote sensing to plan eco-tourism routes in the forests of
Guatemala, thus providing capital to the local communities through the tourist trade. This
novel approach is now making the protection of the forests a sensible economic decision.
The Foundation funds expeditions making astronomical observations from remote,
difficult-to-access Earth locations, archaeological field projects studying the development
of early civilisations that made significant contributions to astronomy and space sciences,
and field expeditions studying the way in which views of the astronomical environment
shaped the nature of past civilisations. A part of Syria - ‘the Fertile Crescent’ - was the
birthplace of astronomy, accountancy, animal domestication and many other fundamental
developments of human civilisation. The Foundation helped fund a large archaeology
project by the Society for Syrian Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles,
in collaboration with the Syrian government that used GPS and satellite imagery to locate
mounds, or ’tels’, containing artefacts and remnants of early civilisations. These
collections are being used to build a better picture of the nature of the civilisations that
gave birth to astronomy.
Field research also applies the Earth’s environmental and biological resources to the
human exploration and settlement of space. This may include the use of remote
environments on Earth, as well as physiological and psychological studies in harsh
environments. In one research project, the Foundation provided a grant to an
international caving expedition to study the psychology of explorers subjected to long-term
isolation in caves in Mexico. The psychometric tests on the cavers were used to enhance
US astronaut selection criteria by the NASA Johnson Space Center.
Space-like environments on Earth help us understand how to operate in the space
environment or help us characterise extraterrestrial environments for future scientific
research. In the Arctic, a 24-kilometre wide impact crater formed by an asteroid or comet
23 million years ago has become home tc a Mars- analogue programme. The Foundation
helped fund the NASA Haughton-Mars Project to use this crater to test communications
and exploration technologies in preparation for the human exploration of Mars. The
crater, which sits in high Arctic permafrost, provides an excellent replica of the physical
processes occurring on Mars, a permafrosted, impact-altered planet. Geologists and
biologists can work at the site to help understand how impact craters shape the geological
characteristics and possibly biological potential of Mars.
In addition to its fieldwork and scientific activities. the Foundation has award
programmes. These include a series of awards for the future human exploration of Mars,
a location with a diverse set of exploration challenges. The awards will honour a number
of ‘firsts’ on Mars that include landing on the surface, undertaking an overland expedition
to the Martian South Pole, undertaking an overland expedition to the Martian North Pole,
climbing Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, and descending to the
bottom of Valles Marineris, the deepest canyon on Mars. The Foundation will offer awards
for expeditions further out in the solar system once these Mars awards have been claimed.
Together, they demonstrate that the programme really has no boundary in what it could
eventually support, and they provide longevity for the objectives of the Foundation.

Questions 1-4
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
1. What was the significance of the ’novel approach' adopted in the Guatemala project?
A. It minimised the need to protect the forests.
B. It reduced the impact of tourists on the forests.
C. It showed that preserving the forests can be profitable.
D. It gave the Foundation greater control over the forests.
2. GPS and satellite imagery were used in the Syrian project to
A. help archaeologists find ancient items.
B. explore land that is hard to reach.
C. reduce the impact of archaeological activity.
D. evaluate some early astronomical theories.
3. One of the purposes of the Foundation’s awards is to
A. attract non-scientists to its work.
B. establish priorities for Mars exploration.
C. offer financial incentives for space exploration.
D. establish the long-term continuity of its activities.
4. What is the writer’s purpose in the passage?
A. to persuade people to support the Foundation
B. to explain the nature of the Foundation’s work
C. to show how views on the Foundation have changed
D. to reject earlier criticisms of the Foundation’s work