Zheng He
The Chinese admiral-explorer of the 15th Century
A Zheng He was born around 1371, to a Muslim family in China’s southern Yunan Province, just north
of Laos. When he was ten years old, he, along with other children, was captured by the army, and
three years later he became a servant in the household of the Chinese emperor’s fourth son, Prince
Zhu Di.
B He proved himself to be an exceptional servant, becoming skilled in the arts of war and diplomacy
and serving as an officer of the prince. Zhu Di became emperor in 1402, and a year later, he appointed
Zheng He to the high military position of admiral and ordered him to oversee the construction of a
Treasure Fleet to explore the seas surrounding China.
C The first Treasure Fleet comprised 62 ships. The four flagships were huge wooden boats, some of
the largest ever built in history: they were approximately 120 metres long and 50 metres wide. The fleet
assembled at the capital, Nanjing, on the Yangtze River, and included 100-metre-long horse ships that
carried nothing but horses, water ships that carried fresh water for the crew, troop transports, supply
ships and war ships for offensive and defensive needs. The ships were filled with thousands of tons of
goods to trade with others during the voyage. In the autumn of 1405, the fleet set sail with 27,800 men.
D The fleet used the compass-invented in China in the 11th century-for navigation. Marked sticks of
incense were burned to measure time. Latitude was determined by monitoring the North Star in the
Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Cross in the Southern Hemisphere. The ships of the Treasure
Fleet communicated with one another through the use of flags, lanterns, bells, carrier pigeons, gongs
and banners.
E The destination of the first voyage of the Treasure Fleet was Calicut, known as a major trading
centre on the south-western coast of India. The fleet reached Sri Lanka and India in 1406, and stayed
there for several months, carrying on barter and trade. The following spring, the seasonal change in
direction of the monsoon winds enabled the ships to sail towards home. On the return voyage, the
Treasure Fleet was forced to battle with pirates near Sumatra for several months. Eventually Zheng
He’s men managed to capture the pirate leader and take him to the Chinese capital Nanjing, where
they arrived in 1407.
F A succession of other voyages followed, back to India and Sri Lanka, to the rich city of Hormuz on
the Persian Gulf, and along the east coast of Africa, almost as far south as Mozambique. During each
of Zheng He’s voyages, he encouraged diplomats from other countries to travel to China, either aboard
his ships or on their own vessels.
G Emperor Zhu Di died in 1424 and was succeeded by his son Zhu Gaozhi. The new emperor
cancelled the voyages of the Treasure Fleets and ordered shipbuilders and sailors to stop their work
and return home. Zheng He was appointed military commander of Nanjing.
H The leadership of Zhu Gaozhi did not last long, as he died in 1426 at the age of 26. His son Zhu Di’s
grandson-Zhu Zhanji became emperor. Zhu Zhanji was much more like his grandfather than his father
was, and in 1430, he restarted the Treasure Fleet voyages by ordering Zheng He to resume his duties
as admiral and make a seventh voyage, in an attempt to restore peaceful relations with the kingdoms
of Malacca and Siam. It took a year to gear up for the voyage, which departed as a large expedition
with 100 ships and 27,500 men.
I Zheng He is believed to have died in 1433, on the return trip, although others claim that he died in
1435 after the return to China. Nonetheless, the era of exploration for China was soon over, as the
following emperors prohibited trade with foreign countries and even the construction of ocean-going
vessels, thus ending an era of trade and exploration.
J It seems likely that a detachment of one of Zheng He’s fleets, though not the admiral himself, sailed
to northern Australia during one of the seven voyages. The evidence lies both in the Chinese artefacts
found there and in the oral history of the native Australians.
Questions 1-5
The Reading Passage has ten paragraphs labeled A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
1 a summary of journeys to various places
2 examples of equipment used during voyages
3 speculation concerning a possible destination
4 details of the composition of a fleet of ships
5 how the weather affected the timing of a voyage
Keep the Water Away
A Last winter’s floods on the rivers of central Europe were among the worst since the Middle Ages,
and as winter storms return, the spectre of floods is returning too. Just weeks ago, the river Rhone in
south-east France burst its banks, driving 15,000 people from their homes, and worse could be on the
way. Traditionally, river engineers have gone for Plan A: get rid of the water fast, draining it off the land
and down to the sea in tall-sided rivers re-engineered as high-performance drains. But however big
they dug city drains, however wide and straight they made the rivers, and however high they built the
banks, the floods kept coming back to taunt them, from the Mississippi to the Danube. And when the
floods came, they seemed to be worse than ever. No wonder engineers are turning to Plan B: sap the
water’s destructive strength by dispersing it into fields, forgotten lakes, flood plains and aquifers.
B Back in the days when rivers took a more tortuous path to the sea, flood waters lost impetus and
volume while meandering across flood plains and idling through wetlands and inland deltas. But today
the water tends to have an unimpeded journey to the sea. And this means that when it rains in the
uplands, the water comes down all at once. Worse, whenever we close off more flood plains, the river’s
flow farther downstream becomes more violent and uncontrollable. Dykes are only as good as their
weakest link—-and the water will unerringly find it. By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into
the simple mechanics of a water pipe, engineers have often created danger where they promised
safety, and intensified the floods they meant to end. Take the Rhine, Europe’s most engineered river.
For two centuries, German engineers have erased its backwaters and cut it off from its flood plain.
C Today, the river has lost 7 percent of its original length and runs up to a third faster. When it rains
hard in the Alps, the peak flows from several tributaries coincide in the main river, where once they
arrived separately. And with four-fifths of the lower Rhine’s floodplain barricaded off, the waters rise
ever higher. The result is more frequent flooding that does ever-greater damage to the homes, offices
and roads that sit on the floodplain. Much the same has happened in the US on the mighty Mississippi,
which drains the world’s second largest river catchment into the Gulf of Mexico.
D The European Union is trying to improve rain forecasts and more accurately model how intense
rains swell rivers. That may help cities prepare, but it won’t stop the floods. To do that, say
hydrologists, you need a new approach to engineering not just rivers, but the whole landscape. The
UK’s Environment Agency -which has been granted an extra £150 million a year to spend in the wake
of floods in 2000 that cost the country £1 billion- puts it like this: “The focus is now on working with the
forces of nature. Towering concrete walks are out, and new wetlands : are in.” To help keep London’s
feet dry, the agency is breaking the Thames’s banks upstream and reflooding 10 square kilometres of
ancient flood plain at Otmoor outside Oxford. Nearer to London it has spent £100 million creating new
wetlands and a relief channel across 16 kilometres of flood plain to protect the town of Maidenhead, as
well as the ancient playing fields of Eton College. And near the south coast, the agency is digging out
channels to reconnect old meanders on the river Cuckmere in East Sussex that were cut off by flood
banks 150 years ago.
E The same is taking place on a much grander scale in Austria, in one of Europe’s largest river
restorations to date. Engineers are regenerating flood plains along 60 kilometres of the river Drava as it
exits the Alps. They are also widening the river bed and channelling it back into abandoned meanders,
oxbow lakes and backwaters overhung with willows. The engineers calculate that the restored flood
plain can now store up to 10 million cubic metres of flood waters and slow storm surges coming out of
the Alps by more than an hour, protecting towns as far downstream as Slovenia and Croatia.
F “Rivers have to be allowed to take more space. They have to be turned from flood-chutes into flood-
foilers,” says Nienhuis. And the Dutch, for whom preventing floods is a matter of survival, have gone
furthest. A nation built largely on drained marshes and seabed had the fright of its life in 1993 when the
Rhine almost overwhelmed it. The same happened again in 1995, when a quarter of a million people
were evacuated from the Netherlands. But a new breed of “soft engineers” wants our cities to become
porous, and Berlin is their shining example. Since reunification, the city’s massive redevelopment has
been governed by tough new rules to prevent its drains becoming overloaded after heavy rains. Harald
Kraft, an architect working in the city, says: “We now see rainwater as a resource to be kept rather than
got rid of at great cost.”. A good illustration is the giant Potsdamer Platz, a huge new commercial
redevelopment by Daimler Chrysler in the heart of the city.
G Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars digging huge drains and concreting river beds to carry
away the water from occasional intense storms. The latest plan is to spend a cool $280 million raising
the concrete walls on the Los Angeles river by another 2 metres. Yet many communities still flood
regularly. Meanwhile this desert city is shipping in water from hundreds of kilometres away in northern
California and from the Colorado river in Arizona to fill its taps and swimming pools, and irrigate its
green spaces. It all sounds like bad planning. “In LA we receive half the water we need in rainfall, and
we throw it away. Then we spend hundreds of millions to import water,” says Andy Lipkis, an LA
environmentalist, along with citizen groups like Friends of the Los Angeles River and Unpaved LA,
want to beat the urban flood hazard and fill the taps by holding onto the city’s flood water. And it’s not
just a pipe dream. The authorities this year launched a $100 million scheme to road-test the porous city
in one flood-hit community in Sun Valley. The plan is to catch the rain that falls on thousands of
driveways, parking lots and rooftops in the valley. Trees will soak up water from parking lots. Homes
and public buildings will capture roof water to irrigate gardens and parks. And road drains will empty
into old gravel pits and other leaky places that should recharge the city’s underground water reserves.
Result: less flooding and more water for the city. Plan B says every city should be porous, every river
should have room to flood naturally and every coastline should be left to build its own defences. It
sounds expensive and utopian, until you realise how much we spend trying to drain cities and protect
our watery margins -and how bad we are at it.
Questions 1-6
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
1 a new approach carried out in the UK
2 the reason why twisty path and dykes failed
3 illustration of an alternative plan in LA which seems much unrealistic
4 traditional way of tackling flood
5 efforts made in Netherlands and Germany
6 one project on a river that benefits three nations
Company Innovation
A In a scruffy office in midtown Manhattan, a team of 30 artificial intelligence programmers is trying to
simulate the brains of an eminent sexologist, a well-known dietician, a celebrity fitness trainer and
several other experts. Umagic Systems is a young firm, setting up websites that will allow clients to
consult the virtual versions of these personalities. Subscribers will feed in details about themselves and
their goals; Umagic’s software will come up with the advice that the star expert would give. Although
few people have lost money betting on the neuroses of the American consumer, Umagic’s prospects
are hard to gauge (in ten years’ time, consulting a computer about your sex life might seem natural, or
it might seem absurd). But the company and others like it are beginning to spook large American firms,
because they see such half-barmy “innovative” ideas as the key to their own future success.
B Innovation has become the buzz-word of American management. Firms have found that most of the
things that can be outsourced or reengineered have been (worryingly, by their competitors as well).
The stars of American business tend today to be innovators such as Dell, Amazon and WalMart, which
have produced ideas or products that have changed their industries.
C A new book by two consultants from Arthur D. Little records that, over the past 15 years, the top
20% of firms in an annual innovation poll by Fortune magazine have achieved double the shareholder
returns of their peers. Much of today’s merger boom is driven by a desperate search for new ideas. So
is the fortune now spent on licensing and buying others’ intellectual property. According to the
Pasadena-based Patent & Licence Exchange, trading in intangible assets in the United States has
risen from $15 billion in 1990 to $100 billion in 1998, with an increasing proportion of the rewards going
to small firms and individuals.
D And therein lies the terror for big companies: that innovation seems to work best outside them.
Several big established “ideas factories”, including 3M, Procter & Gamble and Rubbermaid, have had
dry spells recently. Gillette spent ten years and $1 billion developing its new Mach 3 razor; it took a
British supermarket only a year or so to produce a reasonable imitation. “In the management of
creativity, size is your enemy”, argues Peter Chernin, who runs the Fox TV and film empire for News
Corporation. One person managing 20 movies is never going to be as involved as one doing five
movies. He has thus tried to break down the studio into smaller units—even at the risk of incurring
higher costs.
E It is easier for ideas to thrive outside big firms these days. In the past, if a clever scientist had an
idea he wanted to commercialize, he would take it first to a big company. Now, with plenty of cheap
venture capital, he is more likely to set up on his own. Umagic has already raised $5m and is about to
raise $25m more. Even in capital-intensive businesses such as pharmaceuticals, entrepreneurs can
conduct early-stage research, selling out to the big firms when they reach expensive, risky clinical
trials. Around a third of drug firms’ total revenue now comes from licensed-in technology.
F Some giants, including General Electric and Cisco, have been remarkably successful at snapping up
and integrating scores of small companies. But many others worry about the prices they have to pay
and the difficulty in hanging on to the talent that dreamt up the idea. Everybody would like to develop
more ideas inhouse. Procter & Gamble is now shifting its entire business focus from countries to
products; one aim is to get innovations accepted across the company. Elsewhere, the search for
innovation has led to a craze for “intrapreneurship”— devolving power and setting up internal ideas
factories and tracking stocks so that talented staff will not leave.
G Some people think that such restructuring is not enough. In a new book Clayton Christensen argues
that many things which established firms do well, such as looking after their current customers, can
hinder the sort of innovative behavior needed to deal with disruptive technologies. Hence the fashion
for cannibalization, setting up businesses that will actually fight your existing ones. Bank One, for
instance, has established Wingspan, an Internet bank that competes with its real branches (see
article). Jack Welch’s Internet initiative at General Electric is called “[Link]’”.
H Nobody could doubt that innovation matters. But need large firms be quite so pessimistic? A recent
survey of the top 50 innovations in America, by Industry Week, a journal, suggested that ideas are as
likely to come from big firms as from small ones. Another sceptical note is sounded by Amar Bhide, a
colleague of Mr. Christensen’s at the Harvard Business School and the author of another book on
entrepreneurship. Rather than having to reinvent themselves, big companies, he believes, should
concentrate on projects with high costs and low uncertainty, leaving those with low costs and high
uncertainty to small entrepreneurs. As ideas mature and the risks and rewards become more
quantifiable, big companies can adopt them.
I At Kimberly-Clark, Mr. Sanders had to discredit the view that jobs working on new products were for
“those who couldn’t hack it in the real business”. He has tried to change the culture not just by
preaching fuzzy concepts but also by introducing hard incentives, such as increasing the rewards for
those who come up with successful new ideas and, particularly, not punishing those whose
experiments fail. The genesis of one of the firm’s current hits, Depend, a more dignified incontinence
garment, lay in a previous miss, Kotex Personals, a form of disposable underwear for menstruating
women.
J Will all this creative destruction, cannibalization and culture tweaking make big firms more creative?
David Post, the founder of Umagic, is sceptical: “The only successful intrapreneurs are ones who leave
and become entrepreneurs”. He also recalls with glee the looks of total incomprehension when he tried
to hawk his “virtual experts” idea three years ago to the idea labs of firms such as IBM—though, as he
cheerfully adds, “of course, they could have been right”. Innovation— unlike, apparently, sex, parenting
and fitness— is one area where a computer cannot tell you what to do.
Questions 1-6
The reading passage has ten paragraphs A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1 Approach to retain best employees
2 Safeguarding expenses on innovative idea
3 Integrating outside firms might produce certain counter effect
4 Example of three famous American companies’ innovation
5 Example of one company changing its focus.
7 Example of a company resolving financial difficulties itself
A There are now over 700 million motor vehicles in the world - and the number is
rising by more than 40 million each year. The average distance driven by car
users is growing too - from 8km a day per person in western Europe in 1965 to
25 km a day in 1995. This dependence on motor vehicles has given rise to major
problems, including environmental pollution, depletion of oil resources, traffic
congestion and safety.
B While emissions from new cars are far less harmful than they used to be, city
streets and motorways are becoming more crowded than ever, often with
older trucks, buses and taxis which emit excessive levels of smoke and fumes.
This concentration of vehicles makes air quality in urban areas unpleasant and
sometimes dangerous to breathe. Even Moscow has joined the list of capitals
afflicted by congestion and traffic fumes. In Mexico City, vehicle pollution is a
major health hazard.
C Until a hundred years ago, most journeys were in the 20km range, the distance
conveniently accessible by horse. Heavy freight could only be carried by water or
rail. Invention of the motor vehicle brought personal mobility to the masses and
made rapid freight delivery possible over a much wider area. In the United
Kingdom, about 90 per cent of inland freight is carried by road. The world cannot
revert to the horse-drawn wagon. Can it avoid being locked into congested and
polluting ways of transporting people and goods?
D In Europe most cities are still designed for the old modes of transport. Adaptation
to the motor car has involved adding ring roads, one-way systems and parking
lots. In the United States, more land is assigned to car use than to housing.
Urban sprawl means that life without a car is next to impossible. Mass use of
motor vehicles has also killed or injured millions of people.
Other social effects have been blamed on the car such as alienation and aggressive
human behaviour.
E A 1993 study by the European Federation for Transport and Environment found
that car transport is seven times as costly as rail travel in terms of the external
social costs it entails - congestion, accidents, pollution, loss of cropland and natural
habitats, depletion of oil resources, and so on. Yet cars easily surpass trains or
buses as a flexible and convenient mode of personal transport. It is unrealistic to
expect people to give up private cars in favour of mass transit.
F Technical solutions can reduce the pollution problem and increase the fuelled
efficiency of engines. But fuel consumption and exhaust emissions depend on
which cars are preferred by customers and how they are driven. Many people
buy larger cars than they need for daily
purposes or waste fuel by driving aggressively. Besides, global car use is increasing
at a faster rate than the improvement in emissions and fuel efficiency which
technology is now making possible.
G Some argue that the only long-term solution is to design cities and
neighbourhoods so that car journeys are not necessary - all essential services
being located within walking distance or easily accessible by public transport.
Not only would this save energy and cut carbon dioxide emissions, it would also
enhance the quality of community life, putting the emphasis on people instead of
cars. Good local government is already bringing this about in some places. But
few democratic communities are blessed with the vision – and the capital – to
make such profound changes in modern lifestyles.
H A more likely scenario seems to be a combination of mass transit systems for
travel into and around cities, with small ‘low emission’ cars for urban use and
larger hybrid or lean burn cars for use elsewhere. Electronically tolled highways
might be used to ensure that drivers pay charges geared to actual road use.
Better integration of transport systems is also highly desirable - and made more
feasible by modern computers. But these are solutions for countries which can
afford them. In most developing countries, old cars and old technologies
continue to predominate
Questions 14 – 19
Sample Passage 7 has eight paragraphs labelled A-H.
Which paragraphs contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-H in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
14 a comparison of past and present transportation methods
15 how driving habits contribute to road problems
16 the relative merits of cars and public transport
17 the writer’s prediction on future solutions
18 the increasing use of motor vehicles
19 the impact of the car on city development
The lost giants of Australian fauna
(A) Australia's wildlife is unique. The vast majority of the animals that live
there are not found anywhere else – and things were no different 1 million
years ago during the Pleistocene: the age of the super-sized mammal.
Before humanity became Earth's undisputed superpower, giant beasts of all
shapes and sizes dominated every continent, but the Pleistocene mammals
of Australia were different. Some of them could grow to the size of small
cars, or possessed teeth longer than knife blades.
(B) None of these animals survive today – although exactly why that's the
case is a mystery. Humans, with their advanced hunting techniques and
use of fire to modify the landscape, may have played a central role in the
megafauna's disappearance, but this idea is still a matter of heated debate.
(C) Even if we cannot be sure that the arrival of Australian Aboriginals on
the continent had catastrophic effects on its native animals, it seems that
the animals had a rather spiritual effect on the humans. The Aboriginal
mythological "Dreamtime" includes a cast of monstrous creatures, many of
which bear a close resemblance to some of the real-life monsters that once
stalked Australia's plains. Are the myths based in fact? Perhaps: after all,
these creatures are far stranger than anything dreamed up by humans.
(D) For instance, the two-tonnes weighting Diprotodon comfortably holds
the title of largest marsupial ever. In size and appearance it looked
superficially like a modern rhinoceros, but the Diprotodon seems to have
had a social lifestyle more like that of an elephant, another mammal with
which it shares anatomical similarities. What the Diprotodon most
resembles, however, is exactly what it is: an enormous wombat.
(E) Another record breaker, this time a world champion; Varanus priscus,
commonly known by its antiquated genus name Megalania – was the
largest terrestrial lizard the world has ever known. Megalania was a goanna
lizard, a relative of today's infamous Komodo dragon, and conservative
estimates have predicted that it was at least 5.5m long.
(F) These monster marsupials were not the only giants. Their numbers
were swelled by half-tonne birds and dinosaur-like tortoises. Although this
biological assemblage was truly nightmarish for humans, it greatly enriched
the Australia’s fauna and contributed to the world’s biological diversity.
Unfortunately, all of these species are extinct nowadays. This fact shows us
that even strong, monstrous creatures can easily die out. So we need to
care about animals that surround us today and don’t let them disappear as
it happened to their distant ancestors.
Matching paragraphs questions:
Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter,
A-F, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet
1. Extinction of monstrous creatures
2. The largest mammal
3. Myths and reality
4. Incredible creatures of Pleistocene Australia
5. Importance of animal protection
6. Giant lizards
7. Arrival of Australian Aboriginals
8. Mystery the giants' disappearance