38 Photonics
39 Amplification
40 IP packets
Definitions
A Increasing the volume of voice data
B Method of transmitting data
C Transmission of data using light waves
D Commercial agreement regulating the Internet
E Boosting fading signals
F Reception of data on computer screens
Academic Reading Test 8
INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TESTING SYSTEM
ACADEMIC READING
TEST 8
TIME ALLOWED:
NUMBER OF QUESTIONS:
1 hour40
Instructions
ALL ANSWERS MUST BE SRITTEN ON THE ANSWER SHEET
The test is divided as follows
Reading Passage 1 Questions 1-16
Reading Passage 2 Questions 17-32
Reading Passage 3 Questions 33-40
Start at the beginning of the test and work through it. You should answer all the questions. If you cannot do a particular question leave it and go on to the next. You can return to it later.
READING PASSGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1.
Amae: Key to Understanding Japanese Culture?
Students of Japan have commonly accepted the claim that amae (indulgent dependency) is distinctive to the production and reproduction of Japanese culture. The assumption is that all Japanese social bonding is patterned after the primary mother-child experience. This implies that the lifelong closeness of schoolmates, for example, which is a marked feature of Japanese culture, can be traced back to the mother-child bond. The loyalty which the typical Japanese employee feels toward his or her employer, and the isolation he feels away from familiar surroundings, are also explained as the influence of amae.
An American mother best confirms her identity as a mother by teaching her child to cope with strange situations—an act that implies independence training. A Japanese mother, however, is expected to carry or hug her child, protecting it from confronting strange experiences, as connotated by the dependence inherent in amae. Many observers have noted the overprotective and overindulgent attitudes of Japanese mothers. The Japanese mother who supervises or monitors her child is rewarded with uniquely identity-confirming responses like clinging and serving behavior from the child, while such behavior is not predicted for mothers and children in the United States.
For close to a third of a century, students of Japan have commonly accepted the claim of Doi that amae is distinctive to the production and reproduction of Japanese culture, and is what makes Japanese child rearing peculiarly different from that of Americans. Doi defines amae as "indulgent dependency", rooted in the mother-child bond. Vogel ( goes so far as to argue that "... I see amae (indulgence) as the universal basic instinct, more universal than Freud's two instincts, sex and aggression." According to Vogel, amae is experienced by the child as a "feeling of dependency or a desire to be loved", while the mother vicariously experiences satisfaction and fulfillment through overindulgence and overprotectiveness of her child's immaturity, leading to implied approval of immature behavior. A striking contrast between the American and Japanese mothers'? Approaches to child rearing is marked by the latter's almost complete refusal to punish a child. The assumption is that subsequent Japanese social bonding-teacher-student, supervisor-subordinate, etc., is patterned after the primary mother-child experience. This can be inferred from Vogel's observation that a large number of Japanese mothers blame themselves for not being loving or giving enough when their children are rebellious at school or misbehave in later life. Essentially, Japanese mothers report feelings of guilt if they are not all-giving to their children.
Doi asserts that European languages lack a word equivalent to amae. His argument is that the lack of an equivalent word implies lack of social recognition of and need for feelings of dependency and the desire to be loved in the West. The closest Western equivalents might be the classical Greek concepts of eros, which assumes the child's immature need to be loved, versus agape, deriving from the mother's need to give unqualified love (Tillich).
In contradistinction, Hess and Azuma suggest that the American preoccupation with independence prevents us from noticing the extent to which the need for "indulgent dependence" expressed by amae positively influences educational aspirations through American parent-child and teacher-pupil relationships. Doi would agree; he asserts that the psychic feeling from being emotionally close to another human being is not uniquely Japanese—only the rich semantic meaning of amae differentiates Japanese culture in his view.
Affect control theory (ACT) postulates that humans try to engage in identity-confirming events. A mother, in any culture, confirms her identity as a mother through culturally appropriate behavior. A Japanese mother, according to Doi's thesis, might optimally confirm herself as a mother through overindulging her child.
An American mother, by the same token, would presumably confirm herself as a mother by engaging in acts that show up the individuality and independence of her child. ACT assumes that agreeable past experiences (e.g., the pleasant, identity-confirming feelings of having been overindulged as a child oneself) motivate humans to act in similar manner-as when a woman passes into the role of motherhood.
In essence, cultural assumptions underlying the appropriateness or inappropriateness of any behavior derive from primal pleasant or unpleasant feelings attached through past experience.
From an article in the Electronic Journal of Sociology
Questions 1-9
The paragraph below is a summary of the reading passage. Complete the summary by choosing NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage to fill the spaces numbered 1-9. Write the words in boxes 1-9 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
It is assumed that all social bonding in Japan is pattrned on the relationship between mothers and children.
Scholars claim that the key to understanding Japanese social relations is the concept of amae, which is translated as...1...In America, mothers employ the method rear their children, and do not expect to be rewarded with...3..., as Japanese mothers do. While Doi says that amae is peciliar to Japanese culture, Vogel asserts that amae is a...4...According to him, a child's immaturity enables the mother to experience satisfaction, not directly but...5...Doi claims that because European languages lack a word equivalent to amae, Western cultures are deficient in dependency and the desire to be loved. But he also says that what distinguishes Japanese culture from European cultures in this respect is amae. Behavior which is marked by attempts to confirm one's identity is explained by...8...,which postulates that agreeable past experiences.
..9...people to reproduce the roles that produced them.
Questions 10-14
Some of the examples of behavior described below are typical of amae situations, while others are typical of non-amae situations. In boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet write A (amae) or NA (non-amae).
Example Answer
Lifelong bond between schoolmates A
10 Teaching a child to cope with strange situations
11 A child's clinging and serving behavior
12 A mother's guilt feelings about denying a child something
13 Readiness to punish a child
14 Approval of a child's immature conduct
Questions 15-16
Write either TRUE or FALSE in boxes 15 and 16 on your answer sheet.
15 The influence of amae is not unique to Japanese culture.
16 ACT stresses the striving to reproduce identity.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-25 which are based on Reading passage 2.
Welcoming the Third-Generation Mobile Phone
Telecom firms have introduced mobile phones with color screens and in-built cameras at the world's biggest technology fair. They are betting thatmillions of consumers will replace their old mobile phones with the third generation with additional high-tech features, to give the industry a desperately needed boost. If Nokia can't do it, then no one can—that has been the opinion of many in the mobile-telephone business looking desperately to the next stage in the evolution of the handset. While a number of companies at the giant Cebit technology trade fair in Hanover have unveiled new devices, it is Nokia's latest handsets that everyone was waiting for. With more than seven out of ten people in some countries already carrying mobile phones, new models with new features are needed to invigorate the saturated market. And because Nokia currently sells one in every three handsets, it sets the pace.
As far as products are concerned, Nokia did not disappoint. The Finnish company said it would start shipping later this year a long-awaited new handset with a color screen. The Nokia 7210 phone will also support multimedia messaging (MMS, which works like the popular text-messaging, but includes pictures.) The phone will also have an in-built stereo radio and the ability to work on five continents, provided the necessary networks are available.
While those specifications did not disappoint the 850,000 delegates who attended Cebit, the industry's financial problems remain worrying. In 2001, the telecom industry was hit by a global slowdown. Faced with growing debts, mobile service operators cut back on investment-especially in Europe where firms have splashed out billions of dollars to obtain licences to operate a “third generation” of mobile phones with even more appealing features.
While Nokia said it would meet or beat its first-quarter profits target, it also said sales would be slightly below its previous forecast of a decline of 6-10%, largely because of a big drop in sales of network equipment. That gave some investors the jitters. Even Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which is launching its successful i-mode service in Europe this month, gave a warning on March 15th that it may have to decrease its estimate of the value of some of its overseas investments.
Worldwide, sales of mobile phones have fallen to just below 400m in 2001, representing the first-ever decline in the industry, according to Gartner Dataquest, a research group. This means 2001 sales were down by 3.2% on the previous year, which compares with a 60%average growth rate between 1996 and 2000. According to Gartner Dataquest, Nokia increased its market share from 30.6% in 2000 to 35% last year. America's Motorola was in second place with 14.8%. Germany's Siemens, Sweden's Ericsson and South Korea's Samsung trailed behind.
The competition is growing harder, forcing some companies to join forces. Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric announced that they would pool resources from April to developthird-generation phones. Ericsson, which has reported the largest loss ever recorded by a Swedish company, has merged its handset business with that of Sony, and is concentrating instead on the manufacture of network equipment. This partnership has revealed a range of new mobile phones, including some with color screens and one with a built-in camera.
Like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, as the London-based joint venture is called, hopes that color screens and digital pictures will persuade existing users to trade in their handsets for newer models. The new phones will allow users to take and receive pictures using updated software, and transmit them between similarly equipped handsets or to and from PCs as e-mail attachments.
Mobile operators are also hoping to sell more profitable services. On March 13th, Microsoft announced that it was joining forces with Deutsche Telekom to offer a service allowing corporate users to connect to their office networks with mobile phones and handheld devices. Microsoft wants to replicate the success it has had with its Windows operating system for PCs with something similar on mobile devices. But Nokia, and many of the other companies in the industry, are trying to keep the software giant at bay by offering their own “open” systems.
The really big leap forward will come with third-generation handsets. These will be able to provide high-speed access to networks, allowing images like video to be viewed on handsets. But much of the technology has been plagued with problems. Nokia gave a glimpse at Cebit of its third-generation handset, which it said would be launched on September 26th.
One reason that telecom firms and handset manufacturers are so optimistic about the prospects for third-generation services is the wild success in Japan of i-mode. Although it is not a full third-generation service, i-mode already offers some multimedia services and Internet access, which has helped it to gain 30 million customers in Japan in three years. A Dutch operator, KPN Mobile, which is partly owned by NTT DoCoMo, is launching i-mode in Germany, and hoping for at least half that number of customers there. Later, it will introduce i-mode to the Dutch market, where the number of customers will, however, only be one tenth that of Germany. But the debts are piling up. KPN Mobile said on March 14th that it would make euro13.7 billion ($12.1 billion) less on its German investments. By the time full-fledged third-generation services start, many of Europe's mobile service operators will have gone bust or merged.
Questions 17-19
Complete each sentence below with a MAXIMUM OF THREE WORDS from the reading passage. Write your answers in boxes 17-19 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Telecom firms are hoping that consumers will buy the third generation of mobile phones.
17 New handset models are considered necessary to revive the ?
18 MMS is different from text messaging, because ?
19 Nokia's new phone will be able to function ?
Questions 20-21
Choose which of the options best represents the information in the reading passage. Write the appropriate letter (A-D) for each question in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
20. The telecom industry's financial problems are mainly due to?
A. a cutback in investment
B. expensive licenses
C. Nokia's domination of the market
D. a global slowdown
21. The significance of the sales figure for 2001 was that ?
A. fewer than 400 million phones were sold
B. it marked the first ever decline in the industry
C. it was down by 3.2% on the previous year
D. Motorola was in second place
Questions 22-29
The paragraph below is a summary of the reading passage. Complete the summary by choosing the appropriate word, phrase or clause from the list below to fill the spaces numbered 22-29. Write the corresponding letter (A-N) in boxes 22-29 on your answer sheet. There are more choices than spaces, so you will not need to use all of them. The first one has been done for you as an example.
Example Answer
Nokia leads the market because it sells I Handsets.
At the world's biggest technology fair, the world's biggest telecom firms are introducing new models of mobile phones with induce users to abandon their old handsets, and thereby provide a r the industry. Nokia is leading the way, with a new phone which boasts d...25...Beset by financial problems, telecom firms produce and market third-generation phones. Meanwhile, mobile service operators are...27...The industry is optimistic because of the success of Japan'er the past three years.
But there will be en the third generation of handsets makes its debut. AGartner Dataquest
Bdrop in sales
Cfollowing suit
DMMS
Ejoining forces
Fstart shipping
Gboost
Hmobile service operators
Ione in every three
JCebit
Khigh-tech features
Lin-built stereo radio
Mcolor screen
Ni-mode
Questions 30-31
Write one of the phrases in italics in box 30 on your answer sheet.
30. Will Sony Ericsson's new phones send pictures to other handsets by using updated software or as e-mail attachments?
31. Do Nokia and other companies want to limit the competition from Microsoft or exclude Microsoft from the mobile phone business?
Question 32
Write words or figures in box 32 on your answer sheet.
32. What is the size of the Dutch market for i-mode phones expected to be?
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3.
A Turnaround for U.S. Aid Policy?
U.S. President George W. Bush tried to avert a row over aid with his pledge of US$5 billion more help for poor countries before his arrival at this week's UN aid conference in Monterrey, Mexico. But has the American government really changed its mind about the effectiveness of aid-and will it now practice what Mr Bush
preaches?
“In Monterrey we have a tremendous opportunity to begin acting on a new vision of development.” This is not quite the line many of America's critics expected to hear from Bush. But his speech on foreign aid last week will have come as a pleasant surprise to the supporters of such aid, particularly James Wolfensohn, the boss of the World Bank, especially given the sweeping criticism of foreign aid recently expressed by Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's treasury secretary.
In his speech last week, Mr Bush pledged an extra US$5 billion from America, spread over the next three financial years. On the face of it, this suggests that the president decided to override the objections of his treasury secretary. Mr O'Neill consistently pours cold water on the need for more aid, claiming that there is scant evidence that it has done any good. In particular, he directs his criticism at the World Bank. Mr O'Neill attacks the Bank on another flank when he complains about its insistence on lending money, rather than giving it, to these countries. But World Bank officials, and many European shareholders, claim that loans rather than grants impose discipline on a borrowing country. Their real reason for objecting to Mr O'Neill's proposal, though, is a concern that shifting from loans to grants would cut off an important source of future funding (the repayments from today's borrowers). Given America's general stinginess when it comes to foreign aid, their concern is understandable.
The Bush administration wants the Bank to give half of its help to the poorest countries as grants, something that Europeans, in particular, strongly oppose. Further, the administration wants any increase in American contributions to the Bank's soft-loan arm to depend on measurable evidence of success. Mr Bush's U-turn, if that is what it was, was timed to set the scene for his arrival at a gathering of dozens of heads of government and hundreds of ministers in Monterrey, Mexico, for a huge United Nations conference on financing development. Mr Wolfensohn sees Monterrey as an occasion for rich countries to pledge a doubling of their foreign aid. He wants them to boost their aid budgets by US$10 billion in each of the next five years, to US$100 billion a year. That, he reckons, is the amount of money needed to reach the ambitious development goals that 189 countries committed themselves to in 2000. These goals include cutting poverty in half, reducing child mortality by two-thirds and ensuring universal primary education. Achieving these goals, Mr Wolfensohn claims, is not only right from a moral point of view; it is also essential for the security of the rich world.
A new report on aid effectiveness tries to pull together the considerable evidence on whether aid works. True, it is hard to find a clear correlation between overall aid flows on the one hand, and economic growth or reductions in poverty on the other. Yet there is now a strong body of evidence, led by the research done by economists at the World Bank, that aid does boost growth when countries have rational economic policies. And the poorer the country, the more effective aid is at reducing poverty. The trouble is, foreign aid has rarely been allocated with these points in mind. In 1990, for instance, countries with inefficient policies and institutions got an average of US$44 per person in aid, while those with better policies got US$39.
Things have changed since then. By the late 1990s, countries with more efficient policies got US$29 of aid a person, while countries with the least efficient policies got US$16. And-contrary to Mr O'Neill's assertions-the World Bank is a particularly effective poverty alleviator, because its subsidised lending to the poorest countries depends more on good economic performance than that of many individual country donors. Even in 1990, the World Bank spent more than twice as much per head on poor countries with good policies than on those with bad policies. Now the ratio has risen further, with good performers getting US$6.50 per head in World Bank help, compared with US$2.30 for weaker countries. Overall, World Bank lending to the poorest is now 60% more effective than in 1990 and 50% more than general foreign aid.
More broadly, the academic research on the effectiveness of aid suggests that the emphasis should be on choosing the right countries and programs, rather than on quantity. A recent study suggests that, given current policies and aid levels, sub-Saharan Africa will reduce poverty by 11% by 2015, far short of the goals set in 2000. Even without any improvement in overall economic policies in Africa, a 50% increase in aid flows would double poverty reduction, to 22%-so long as it was coupled with efficient reallocation of aid towards poor countries with efficient policies.
The president emphasised the importance of sound economic policies and the encouragement of enterprise. He promised that countries which adopt the right policies will get more aid from America. Of course, Mr Bush was right to point out that alleviating poverty takes more than aid alone. Private capital flows, and trade, are at least as important-though Mr Bush had less to say about the obligations of rich countries to open their markets.
Mr Bush's new development vision would require a near-revolution in aid policy from America above all. Not only is the United States currently the least generous of all rich-country aid-donors (spending only 0.1% of its national income on foreign aid, compared with the European average of 0.3%), most of its aid goes, for strategic reasons, to middle-income countries such as Egypt and Colombia. America spends only 40% of its aid on poorer countries, compared with the rich-country average of nearly 60%-which is itself too low, given that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the poorest countries can benefit most from aid. And American aid is not concentrated on countries with good economic policies: its measly African aid budget is scattered across numerous countries, many of them badly governed. Given the fact that, relatively, America is contributing so little foreign aid, and doing that so ineptly, an improvement in American aid alone would be a significant boost to poorer countries, not to mention to America's credibility in a world suddenly wary of the apparent unilateralism and future intentions of the U.S.
Adapted from the Economist Global Agenda
Questions 33-36
Choose which of the answers (A-D) best represents the information in the reading passage. Write the appropriate letter (A-D) for each question in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.
33. What is the writer's view in the reading passage. He believes that..........
A. The U.S. will not substantially increase its aid.
B. Bush's new aid policy is a significant change.
C. The U.S.and the World Bank cannot agree on aid.
D. The U.S. will no longer give aid in the form of loans.
34. According to the passage, Paul O'Neill...........
A. is skeptical about the utility of aid.
B. advocates the abolition of grant aid.
C. wants to replace James Wolfensohn as head of the World Bank.
D. backs Bush's new aid initiative.
35. According to the passage...............
A. an increase in aid automatically reduces poverty.
B. countries with inefficient policies get most World Bank loans.
C. U.S. aid is targeted at poorer countries.
D. Individual donor countries alleviate poverty more than the World Bank does.
36. In the writer's opinion...............
A. more than aid is needed to solve the poverty problem.
B. rich countries should open their markets wider.
C. U.S. aid compares well with that from Europe.
D. aid helps the poorest countries most.
Questions 37-40
Read the following statements, and say how they reflect the information in the reading passage by writing:
Tif the information is true according to the passage;
Fif the information is false according to the passage;
NG if the information is not given.
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
The first one has been done for you as an example.
Example Answer
U.S. aid to Africa is concentrated on a few countries.F
37. Most U.S. aid has strategic, not humanitarian, aims.
38. The World Bank's aid targets do not include education.
39. Wolfensohn sees aid to poor countries as beneficial to rich countries too.
40. Sub-Saharan Africa will reach its poverty-reduction goal by 2015.
Academic Reading Test 9
INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TESTING SYSTEM
ACADEMIC READING
TEST 9
TIME ALLOWED:
NUMBER OF QUESTIONS:
1 hour40
Instructions
ALL ANSWERS MUST BE SRITTEN ON THE ANSWER SHEET
The test is divided as follows
Reading Passage 1 Questions 1-16
Reading Passage 2 Questions 17-27
Reading Passage 3 Questions 28-40
Start at the beginning of the test and work through it. You should answer all the questions. If you cannot do a particular question leave it and go on to the next. You can return to it later.
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes onQuestions 1-16 which are based on Read
ing Passage 1.
Questions 1-5
The reading passage has six sections. Choose the most suitable heading for each section from the list below (A-L), and write the corresponding letter in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. There are more headings than sections, so you will not use all of them. You may use the same heading for more than one answer if you wish. List of headings
AThe airflow puzzle
BReynolds number
CFuture challenges
DFlight and insect evolution
EThe advent of airplanes
FRobot fruit fly
GSuper flyers
HEnergy efficiency
ISophisticated sensors
JMeasuring two forces
Example Answer
Section IG
1. Section II
2. Section III
3. Section IV
4. Section V
5. Section VI
Solving the Mystery of Insect Flight
Section I
The first animals to evolve active flight were insects. Most insects have two pairs of wings. The hind wings of flies, however, have evolved into tiny sensory organs that function as gyroscopes, monitoring the orientation of the fly's body. Per second, flying expends about 10 times more energy than locomotion on the ground. On the other hand, per kilometertraveled, flying is four times more energy-efficient than ground locomotion. Thus, flying is very hard to achieve but has great value for organisms that can do it. Insects possess the most diverse wing structure and kinematics of all flying animals. Moreover, the flight muscle of insects exhibits the highest-known metabolic rate of any tissue.
Section II
As measured by the sheer number of species, ecological impact or total biomass, insects are the dominant animals on our planet. Although numerous factors contribute the list. Flight enables insects to disperse from their birthplace, search for food over large distances and migrate to warmer climes with the changing seasons. But flight is not simply a means of transport-many insects use aerial acrobatics to capture prey, defend territories or acquire mates. Selection for ever more elaborate and efficient flight behavior has pushed the design of these organisms to the limit. Within insects we find the most sensitive noses, the fastest visual systems and the most powerful muscles-all specializations that are linked one way or another to flight behavior. Understanding how insects fly may have practical applications, as scientists could then construct thumb-sized flying robots for purposes such as environmental monitoring and space exploration.
Section III
Until recently, however, an embarrassing gap has marred our understanding of insect flight: scientists have had a difficult time explaining the aerodynamics of how insects generate the force needed to stay aloft. In the decades since 1934, engineers and mathematicians have amassed a body of aerodynamic theory sufficient to design Boeing 747s and Stealth fighters. As sophisticated as these aircraft may be, their design and function are based on steady-state principles: the flow of air around the wings and the resulting forces generated by that flow are stable over time. The reason insects represent such a challenge is that they flap and rotate their wings from 20 to 600 times a second. The resulting pattern of airflow creates aerodynamic forces that change continually and confound both mathematical and experimental analyses.
Section IV
Several groups have made informative and valiant efforts and are developing imaginative new approaches, but the delicate size and high speed of insect wings make force measurements difficult. To circumvent these limitations, biologists studying animal locomotion frequently employ scale models-the same trick used by engineers to design planes, boats and automobiles. Engineers scale their vehicles down in size, whereas insect-flight researchers enlarge and slow the wings to a more manageable size and speed. Such models produce meaningful aerodynamic results provided they meet a key condition regarding the two forces that an object encounters within a fluid: a pressure force produced by fluid inertia and a shear force caused by fluid viscosity. The inertial force is essentially that needed to push along a mass of fluid and is larger for denser fluids. Viscosity is more like friction; produced when adjacent regions of fluid move at different velocities, it is what makes molasses hard to stir. The underlying physics of the real and the model animals is identical as long as both have the same ratio of inertial to viscous forces, called the Reynolds number. The Reynolds number increases in proportion to an object's length and velocity and the density of the fluid; it decreases in proportion to the fluid's viscosity. Being large and fast, aircraft operate at Reynolds numbers of about a million to 100 million. Being small and slow, insects operate at Reynolds numbers of around 100 to 1,000 and under 100 for the tiniest insects, such as thrips, which are a common garden pest.
Section V
In 1998 a large model of a flapping fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was constructed and placed in a tank of viscous mineral oil. The oil within the tank slowed the 25-centimeter robot wings, driven by electric motors, so that they flapped once every five seconds — dynamically similar to 2.5-millimeter fruit-fly wings flapping 200 times a second in air. Two critical properties were measured-the aerodynamic forces on the wings and the fluid flow around them-that are nearly impossible to determine on real fly wings. It was found that flapping wings develop significant lift by rotational circulation of the air around them. This circulation, together with a phenomenon called wake capture-the collision of the wing with the swirling wake of the previous stroke, helped to explain the aerodynamics of insects' flight control-how flies steer, in other words.
Section VI
Flies are observed to adjust the timing of wing rotation when they turn. In some maneuvers, the wing on the outside of a turn rotates early, producing more lift, and the wing on the inside of a turn rotates late, generating less lift; the net force tilts and turns the fly in the desired direction. The fly has at its disposal an array of sophisticated sensors, including eyes, tiny hind wings that are used as gyroscopes, and a battery of mechanosensory structures on the wings that it can use to precisely tune rotational timing, stroke amplitude and other aspects of wing motion. The work of numerous researchers is beginning to coalesce into a coherent theory of insect flight, but many questions remain. Insects have evolved a vast array of body forms, sizes and behaviors, ranging from tiny thrips to large hawkmoths; from two-winged flies such as fruit flies to lacewings that flap two pairs of wings slightly out of sync and tiger beetles that have two large stationary wings (their elytra, which form their carapace when on the ground) in addition to the two wings that flap. To what extent do the results for fruit flies apply to these myriad cases?
Question 6
6 According to the information in the text, how would you describe research into
insect flight?
A vital
B significant
C interesting
D trivial
Write the appropriate letter (A-D) in box 6 on your answer sheet.
Questions 7-12
For each of the phrases in questions 7-12, say how they reflect the information
in the reading passage, by writing:
Iif it applies to insects
Sif it applies to scientists
Aif it applies to aerodynamics
Eif it applies to evolution
Write your answers in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Diverse wing structure I
7. energy efficiency
8. dominant animals
9. mathematical and experimental analyses
10. steady-state principles
11. wake capture
12. array of body forms
Questions 13-16
Read the following statements, and say how they reflect the information in the r
eading passage, by writing:
Tif it is true according to the passage
Fif it is false according to the passage
NG if the information is not clearly given in the passage
Write your answers in boxes 13-16 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Flies' hind wings help to guide them in flight T
13. Insects can fly higher than birds.
14. Flight helps insects to mate.
15. Insects' wings create an unstable airflow.
16. Scientists have solved the mystery of insect flight.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 17-27 which are based on Reading
passage 2.
The Great Health Hoax
In 1992, trials in Scotland of a blood clot-destroying drug called anistreplase suggested that it could double the chances of survival. A year later, another “miracle cure” emerged: injections of magnesium, which studies suggested could also double survival rates. Leading cardiologists hailed the injections as an “effective, safe, simple and inexpensive” treatment that could save the lives of thousands. But then something odd began to happen. In 1995, the Lancet published the results of a huge international study of heart attack survival rates among 58,000 patients - and the amazing life-saving abilities of magnesium injections had simply vanished. Anistreplase fared little better: the current view is that its real effectiveness is barely half that suggested by the original trial.
Heart attack therapies are not the only “breakthroughs” that are proving to be failures in the real world. Over the years, cancer experts have seen a host of promising drugs dismally fail once outside clinical trials. Scientists investigating supposed links between ill-health and various “risk factors” have seen the same thing: impressive evidence of a “significant” risk - which then vanishes again when others try to confirm its existence. Leukemia and overhead pylons, connective tissue disease and silicone breast implants, salt and high blood pressure: all have an impressive heap of studies pointing to a significant risk - and an equally impressive heap saying there isn't. It is the same story beyond the medical sciences, in a dozen fields from psychology to genetics: amazing results discovered by eputable research groups which then vanish again when others try to replicate them.
Much effort has been spent trying to explain these mysterious cases of “The Vanishing Breakthrough.” But the one feature all of these scientific disciplines have in common is that they all rely on so-called “significance tests” to gauge the importance of their findings. First developed in the 1920s, these tests are routinely used by the whole scientific community. Thousands of scientific papers and millions of pounds of research funding have been based on their conclusions. They are ubiquitous and easy to use. And they are fundamentally and dangerously flawed. Used to analyze clinical trials, these textbook techniques can easily double the apparent effectiveness of a new drug, and turn a borderline result into a highly “significant” breakthrough. They can throw up convincing yet utterly spurious evidence for “links” between diseases and any number of supposed causes. They can even lend impressive support to claims for the existence of the paranormal. The very suggestion that these basic flaws in such widely used techniques could have been missed for so long is astonishing. Altogether more astonishing, however, is the fact that the scientific community has been repeatedly warned about these flaws - and has ignored them. As a result, thousands of research papers are being published every year whose conclusions are based on techniques known to be unreliable. The time and effort - and public money - wasted in trying to confirm the consequent spurious findings is one of the great scientific scandals of our time.
Significance tests were concocted by the Cambridge mathematician and geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher, known as “the father of modern statistics.” All scientists had to do, said Fisher, was to convert their raw data into something called a P-value, a number giving the probability of getting at least as impressive results as those seen by chance alone. If this P-value is below 1 in 20, or 0.05, said Fisher, it is safe to conclude that a finding really is “significant”. Combining simplicity with apparent objectivity, Fisher's P-value method was an immediate hit with the scientific community. Its popularity endures to this day. Open any leading scientific journal and you will see the phrase “P< 0.05” - the hallmark of a significant finding. Fisher's standard is especially important for pharmaceuticals companies, as national regulatory bodies still use the standard to approve a new drug for general release. This can make the difference between millions in profits or bankruptcy.
