1) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
You used to think that being green was a luxury for your company, but climate change has made you realize that you can no longer ignore it. The buzz is about becoming carbon-neutral, but where do you start? Consider your drivers. Do you want to become carbon-neutral for marketing reasons, for financial reasons or to help save the planet? Simon Armitage of the Carbon Neutral Company believes: "Your drivers will help you tailor your carbon-reduction program and determine key performance indicators." This will help build a case for going carbon-neutral. First, measure your carbon footprint, or get a specialist to do it for you. That primarily means taking account of your energy usage and emissions caused through travel. Before you begin, think about whether you're collecting the right data and whether it's readily accessible. When implementing any energy reduction measures, ensure you engage with your staff. "It's much better if your people decide for themselves when it's sensible for them to travel," says Armitage. You'll also need them to participate in switching off the lights and other energy-saving measures. Set targets and show it's not a one-off exercise.
2) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Contrary to popular belief, babies under a few months don't grin at you because they're copying your own smile, according to new research.Many studies have indicated that from birth, infants imitate the behaviors and facial expressions of the adults around them. However, a team of Australian, South African and British researchers have released a study this week that refutes this widespread belief. "Numerous studies from the 1980s and 90s indicated no imitation by newborns, while others claimed it was there," says Virginia Slaughter, a biologist at the University of Queensland and co-author of the study."We wanted to clear up the confusion because the 'fact' that newborns imitate is widely cited, not just in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and paediatrics, but also in popular sources for parents.’
The international research team, led by Janine Oostenbroek, a psychologist at the University of York in the UK, exposed more than 100 infants to a broad range of gestures and recorded their responses at one, two, six and nine weeks of age.The gestures included social cues like adults poking their tongues out, frowning or grinning, as well as non-social cues such as pointing or opening a box.The findings showed no link between behaviors exhibited by babies in their first few months and the gestures they were exposed to. The babies were just as likely to exhibit gestures they had never seen before as repeat ones they had.For instance, babies stuck their tongues out just as frequently if they were being exposed to pointing or opening a box, rather than anything to do with mouths or tongues.
3) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Ecology is the study of interactions of organisms among themselves and with their environment. It seeks to understand patterns in nature (e.g., the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms) and the processes governing those patterns. Climatology is the study of the physical state of the atmosphere – its instantaneous state or weather, its seasonal-to-interannual variability, its long-term average condition or climate, and how climate changes over time. These two fields of scientific study are distinctly different. Ecology is a discipline within the biological sciences and has as its core the principle of natural selection. Climatology is a discipline within the geophysical sciences based on applied physics and fluid dynamics. Both, however, share a common history.
The origin of these sciences is attributed to Aristotle and Theophrastus and their books Meteorological and Enquiry into Plants, respectively, but their modern beginnings trace back to natural history and plant geography. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century naturalists and geographers saw changes in vegetation as they explored new regions and laid the foundation for the development of ecology and climatology as they sought explanations for these geographic patterns. Alexander von Humboldt, in the early 1800s, observed that widely separated regions have structurally and functionally similar vegetation if their climates are similar. Alphonse de Candolle hypothesized that latitudinal zones of tropical, temperate, and arctic vegetation are caused by temperature and in 1874 proposed formal vegetation zones with associated temperature limits.
4) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Working nine to five for a single employer bears little resemblance to the way a substantial share of the workforce makes a living today. Millions of people assemble various income streams and work independently, rather than in structured payroll jobs. This is hardly a new phenomenon, yet it has never been well measured in official statistics— and the resulting data gaps prevent a clear view of a large share of labor-market activity.
To better understand the independent workforce and what motivates the people who participate in it, the McKinsey Global Institute surveyed some 8,000 respondents across Europe and the United States. We asked about their income in the past 12 months—encompassing primary work, as well as any other income-generating activities—and about their professional satisfaction and aspirations for work in the future.
The resulting report, Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy, finds that up to 162 million people in Europe and the United States—or 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population—engage in some form of independent work. While demographically diverse, independent workers largely fit into four segments (exhibit): free agents, who actively choose independent work and derive their primary income from it; casual earners, who use independent work for supplemental income and do so by choice; reluctants, who make their primary living from independent work but would prefer traditional jobs; and the financially strapped, who do supplemental independent work out of necessity.
5) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
A day would come, Percy Shelley predicted in 1813, when “the monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by eating an acre at a meal”. He explained: “The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcass of an ox would afford 10 times the sustenance if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.” Two hundred years later, mainstream agronomists and dietitians have caught up with the poet. A growing scientific consensus agrees that feeding cereals and beans to animals is an inefficient and extravagant way to produce human food, that there is a limited amount of grazing land, that the world will be hard-pressed to supply a predicted population of 9 billion people with a diet as rich in meat as the industrialized world currently enjoys, and that it’s not a very healthy diet anyway. On top of this, livestock contribute significantly towards global warming, generating 14.5% of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions, according to one much-quoted estimate from the United Nations. Now that the problem has been identified, the challenge is to persuade people in wealthy countries to eat less meat. That might seem a tall order, but governments have successfully persuaded people to quit smoking through a combination of public information, regulation and taxation.
6) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The advantages and disadvantages of solar power compared to other forms of renewable energy have been greatly debated. While obviously superior to some forms of energy, solar power's high cost and efficiency dependent on geography have limited its appeal. However, a large number of advantages also merit further development and even possible adaptation for residences. Solar energy remains popular because it is both a renewable and clean source of energy. These advantages along with the hope that eventually nations can use solar power to decrease global warming ensure its popularity. Renewable Solar energy is a true renewable resource. All areas of the world have the ability to collect some amount of solar power and solar power is available for collection each day. Clean Solar energy is non-polluting. It does not create greenhouse gases, such as oil based energy does, nor does it create waste that must be stored, such as nuclear energy. It is also far more quiet to create and harness, drastically reducing the noise pollution required to convert energy to a useful form. Residential size solar energy systems also have very little impact on the surrounding environment, in contrast with other renewable energy sources such as wind and hydro electric power. Low Maintenance Solar panels have no moving parts and require very little maintenance beyond regular cleaning. Without moving parts to break and replace, after the initial costs of installing the panels, maintenance and repair costs are very reasonable.
7) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
In a study in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists in Germany showed experts and novices simple geometric objects and simple chess positions and asked the subjects to identify them. Reaction times were measured and brain activity was monitored using functional M.R.I. scans. On the identification of the geometric objects, the subjects performed the same, showing that the chess experts had no special visualization skills. When the subjects were shown the chess positions, the experts identified them faster. Focusing on an element of an earlier study on pattern and object recognition by chess experts, the researchers had expected to see parts of the left hemispheres of the experts’ brains — which are involved in object recognition — react more quickly than those of the novices when they performed the chess tasks. But the reaction times were the same. What set the experts apart was that parts of their right brain hemispheres — which are more involved in pattern recognition — also lit up with activity. The experts were processing the information in two places at once. The researchers also found that when the subjects were shown the chess diagrams, the novices looked directly at the pieces to recognize them, while the experts looked on the middle of the boards and took everything in with their peripheral vision.
8) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centers of the brain that are used in the process of concreating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself—and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought. The simulation of reality accomplished in the television medium is so astonishingly vivid and compelling compared with the representations of reality conveyed by printed words that it signifies much more than an incremental change in the way people consume information. Books also convey compelling and vivid representations of reality, of course. But the reader actively participates in the conjuring of the reality the book’s author Is attempting to depict. Moreover, the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words: Words are composed of abstract symbols—letters— that have no intrinsic meaning themselves until they are strung together into recognizable sequences. Television, by contrast, presents to its viewers a much more fully formed representation of reality—without requiring the creative collaboration that words have always demanded.
9) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
In 2005 Japan had the highest median age of all countries in the world, while Australia's population was only moderately aged. Some 50 years ago the demographic situation was quite different, with the median age of Australia's population being seven years older than Japan's.
The ageing of the population is a major issue for Australian policy makers, particularly in regard to the long-term implications for reduced economic growth and the increasing demand for Age Pensions, and health and aged care services. As the population ages, growth in the number of people of working age will slow, while the proportion of people of retirement age will increase.
Sustained population ageing also leads to slowing or negative population growth. While declining population growth in developed countries is welcomed by some environmentalist and social scientists, economists tend to agree that population decline brings gloomy economic prospects. In addition to the decrease in the labour supply, the demand side of the economy may be affected through shrinking markets for goods and services.
How quickly this occurs depends on the dynamics of fertility, mortality and overseas migration. While a moderate pace of demographic change allows for gradual adjustment of the economy and policies to the changing population demographics, rapid changes are more difficult to manage. As a result, governments and society as a whole may need to take actions to address these issues. But how severe is the ageing of Australia's population, relative to other countries?
One way of applying a degree of perspective to the ageing debate is to compare ageing in Australia with that of other countries. This article examines the population structures in Australia and Japan and the demographic forces that shape the respective populations, both historically and projections for the future.
10) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
With an abundance of low priced labor relative to the United States, it is no surprise that China, India and other developing countries specialize in the production of labour-intensive products. For similar reasons, the United States will specialize in the production of goods that are human and physical capital intensive because of the relative abundance of a highly educated labor force and technically sophisticated equipment in the United States.
This division of global production should yield higher global output of both types of goods than would be the case if each country attempted to produce both of these goods itself. For example, the United States would produce more expensive labor intensive goods because of its more expensive labor and the developing countries would produce more expensive human and physical capital intensive goods because of their relative scarcity of these inputs. This logic implies that the United States is unlikely to be a significant global competitor in the production of green technologies that are not relatively intensive in human and physical capital.
Nevertheless, during the early stages of the development of new technology, the United States has a comparative advantage in the production of the products enabled by this innovation. However, once these technologies become well understood and production processes are designed that can make use of less-skilled labor; production will migrate to countries with less expensive labor.
11) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Diasporas – communities which live outside, but maintain links with, their homelands are getting larger, thicker and stronger. They are the human face of globalization. Diaspora consciousness is on the rise: Diasporas are becoming more interested in their origins, and organising themselves more effectively; homelands are revising their opinions of their diasporas as the stigma attached to emigration declines, and stepping up their engagement efforts; meanwhile, host countries are witnessing more assertive diasporic groups within their own national communities, worrying about fifth columns and foreign lobbies, and suffering outbreaks of ‘diasporaphobia’.
This trend is the result of five factors, all of them connected with globalisation: the growth in international migration; the revolution in transport and communications technology, which is quickening the pace of diasporans’ interactions with their homelands; a reaction against global homogenised culture, which is leading people to rethink their identities; the end of the Cold War, which increased the salience of ethnicity and nationalism and created new space in which diasporas can operate;
And policy changes by national governments on issues such as dual citizenship and multiculturalism, which are enabling people to lead transnational lives. Diasporas such as those attaching to China, India, Russia and Mexico are already big, but they will continue to grow; the migration flows which feed them are likely to widen and quicken in the future.
12) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize justly rewards the thousands of scientists of the United Nations Climate Change Panel (the IPCC). These scientists are engaged in excellent, painstaking work that establishes exactly what the world should expect from climate change.
The other award winner, former US Vice President Al Gore, has spent much more time telling us what to fear. While the IPCC’s estimates and conclusions are grounded in careful study, Gore doesn’t seem to be similarly restrained.
Gore told the world in his Academy Award winning movie (recently labeled “one sided” and containing “scientific errors” by a British judge) to expect 20 foot sea level rises over this century. He ignores the findings of his Nobel co winners, the IPCC, who conclude that sea levels will rise between only a half foot and two feet over this century, with their best expectation being about one foot. That’s similar to what the world experienced over the past 150 years.
Likewise, Gore agonizes over the accelerated melting of ice in Greenland and what it means for the planet, but overlooks the IPCC’s conclusion that, if sustained, the current rate of melting would add just three inches to the sea level rise by the end of the century. Gore also takes no notice of research showing that Greenland’s temperatures were higher in 1941 than they are today.
Gore also frets about the future of polar bears. He claims they are drowning as their icy habitat disappears. However, the only scientific study showing any such thing indicates that four polar bears drowned because of a storm.
The politician turned movie maker loses sleep over a predicted rise in heat related deaths. There’s another side of the story that’s inconvenient to mention: rising temperatures will reduce the number of cold spells, which are a much bigger killer than heat. The best study shows that by 2050, heat will claim 400,000 more lives, but 1.8 million fewer will die because of cold. Indeed, according to the first complete survey of the economic effects of climate change for the world, global warming will actually save lives.
13) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Who would have thought back in 1698, as they downed their espressos, that the little band of stockbrokers from Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley EC3 would be the founder members of what would become the world's mighty money capital?
Progress was not entirely smooth. The South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 and the coffee house exchanges burned down in 1748. As late as Big Bang in 1986, when bowler hats were finally hung up, you wouldn't have bet the farm on London surpassing New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo as Mammon's international nexus. Yet the 325,000 souls who operate in the UK capital's financial hub have now overtaken their New York rivals in size of the funds managed (including offshore business); they hold 70% of the global secondary bond market and the City dominates foreign exchange trading. And its institutions paid out £9 billion in bonuses in December. The Square Mile has now spread both eastwards from EC3 to Canary Wharf and westwards into Mayfair, where many of the private equity 'locusts' and their hedge fund pals now hang out.
For foreigners in finance, London is the place to be. It has no Sarbanes Oxley and no euro to hold it back, yet the fact that it still flies so high is against the odds. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, transport systems groan and there's an ever present threat of terrorist attack. But, for the time being, the deals just keep on getting bigger.
14) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Since Australians Jennifer Hawkins and Lauryn Eagle were crowned Miss Universe and Miss Teen International respectively, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in beauty pageants in this country. These wins have also sparked a debate as to whether beauty pageants are just harmless reminders of old fashioned values or a throwback to the days when women were respected for how good they looked. Opponents argue that beauty pageants, whether its Miss Universe or Miss Teen International, are demeaning to women and out of sync with the times. They say they are nothing more than symbols of decline.
In the past few decades Australia has taken more than a few faltering steps toward treating women with dignity and respect. Young women are being brought up knowing that they can do anything, as shown by inspiring role models in medicine such as 2003 Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Stanley.
In the 1960s and 70s, one of the first acts of the feminist movement was to picket beauty pageants on the premise that the industry promoted the view that it was acceptable to judge women on their appearance. Today many young Australian women are still profoundly uncomfortable with their body image, feeling under all kinds of pressures because they are judged by how they look.
Almost all of the pageant victors are wafer thin, reinforcing the message that thin equals beautiful. This ignores the fact that men and women come in all sizes and shapes. In a country where up to 60% of young women are on a diet at any one time and 70% of school girls say they want to lose weight, despite the fact that most have a normal BMI, such messages are profoundly hazardous to the mental health of young Australians.
15) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
As far as prediction is concerned, remember that the chairman of IBM predicted in the fifties that the world would need a maximum of around half a dozen computers, that the British Department for Education seemed to think in the eighties that we would all need to be able to code in BASIC and that in the nineties Microsoft failed to foresee the rapid growth of the Internet. Who could have predicted that one major effect of the automobile would be to bankrupt small shops across the nation? Could the early developers of the telephone have foreseen its development as a medium for person to person communication, rather than as a form of broadcasting medium? We all, including the 'experts', seem to be peculiarly inept at predicting the likely development of our technologies, even as far as the next year. We can, of course, try to extrapolate from experience of previous technologies, as I do below by comparing the technology of the Internet with the development of other information and communication technologies and by examining the earlier development of radio and print. But how justified I might be in doing so remains an open question. You might conceivably find the history of the British and French videotex systems, Prestel and Minitel, instructive. However, I am not entirely convinced that they are very relevant, nor do I know where you can find information about them on line, so, rather than take up space here, I've briefly described them in a separate article.
16) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Why and to what extent should parents control their children’s TV watching? There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with TV. The problem is how much television a child watches and what effect it has on his life. Research has shown that as the amount of time spent watching TV goes up, the amount of time devoted not only to homework and study but other important aspects of life such as social development and physical activities decreases. Television is bound to have it tremendous impact on a child, both in terms of how many hours a week he watches TV and of what he sees. When a parent is concerned about the effects of television, he should consider a number of things: what TV offers the child in terms of information and knowledge, how many hours a week a youngster his age should watch television, the impact of violence and sex, and the influence of commercials.
What about the family as a whole? Is the TV set a central piece of furniture in your home! Is it flicked on the moment someone enters the empty house? Is it on during the daytime? Is it part of the background noise of your family life? Do you demonstrate by your own viewing that television should be watched selectively?
17) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
When Namibia gained independence in 1990, teenager Pascolena Florry was herding goats in the country's dry, desolate northern savannah. Her job, unpaid and dangerous, was to protect her parents' livestock from preying jackals and leopards. She saw wildlife as the enemy, and many of the other indigenous inhabitants of Namibia's rural communal lands shared her view. Wildlife poaching was commonplace. Fifteen years later, 31 year old Pascolena's life and outlook are very different. She has built a previously undreamed of career in tourism and is the first black Namibian to be appointed manager of a guest lodge. Her village, and hundreds of others, have directly benefited from government efforts to devolve management and tourism development on communal lands to conservancies run by indigenous peoples. “Now we see the wildlife as our way of creating jobs and opportunities as the tourism industry grows,” she says. “The future is better with wildlife around, not only for jobs, but also for the environment”.
18) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Armed police have been brought into NSW schools to reduce crime rates and educate students. The 40 School Liaison Police (SLP) officers have been allocated to public and private high schools across the state. Organisers say the officers, who began work last week, will build positive relationships between police and students. But parent groups warned of potential dangers of armed police working at schools in communities where police relations were already under strain.Among their duties, the SLPs will conduct crime prevention workshops, talking to students about issues including shoplifting, offensive behaviour, graffiti and drugs and alcohol. They can also advise school principals. One SLP, Constable Ben Purvis, began work in the inner Sydney region last week, including at Alexandria Park Community School's senior campus. Previously stationed as a crime prevention officer at The Rocks, he now has 27 schools under his jurisdiction in areas including The Rocks, Redfern and Kings Cross. Constable Purvis said the full time position would see him working on the broader issues of crime prevention. “I am not a security guard,” he said. “I am not there to patrol the school.
We want to improve relationships between police and schoolchildren, to have positive interaction. We are coming to the school and giving them knowledge to improve their own safety.”The use of fake ID among older students is among the issues he has already discussed with principals. Parents' groups responded to the program positively, but said it may spark a range of community reactions." It is a good thing and an innovative idea and there could be some positive benefits," Council of Catholic School Parents executive officer Danielle Cronin said. "Different communities will respond to this kind of presence in different ways.
19) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The co-evolutionary relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated wonders; it also happens to be the key to understanding just about everything about modern meat. For the grasses, which have evolved to withstand the grazing of ruminants, the cow maintains and expands their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold and hogging the sunlight; the animal also spreads grass seed, plants it with his hooves, and then fertilizes it with his manure. In exchange for these services the grasses offer ruminants a plentiful and exclusive supply of lunch. For cows (like sheep, bison, and other ruminants) have evolved the special ability to convert grass which single stomached creatures (like us can't digest into high quality protein). They can do this because they possess what is surely the most highly evolved digestive organ in nature: the rumen. About the size of a medicine ball, the organ is essentially a forty five gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass.
20) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Males do the singing and females do the listening. This has been the established, even cherished view of courtship in birds, but now some ornithologists are changing tune. László Garamszegi of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and colleagues studied the literature on 233 European songbird species. Of the 109 for which information on females was available, they found evidence for singing in 101 species. In only eight species could the team conclude that females did not sing?
Females that sing have been overlooked, the team say, because their songs are quiet, they are mistaken for males from their similar plumage or they live in less well studied areas such as the tropics. Garamszegi blames Charles Darwin for the oversight. “He emphasised the importance of male sexual display, and this is what everyone has been looking at.”
The findings go beyond modern species. After carefully tracing back an evolutionary family tree for their songbirds, Garamszegi’s team discovered that, in at least two bird families, singing evolved in females first. They suggest these ancient females may have been using their songs to deter other females from their territories, to coordinate breeding activities with males, or possibly to attract mates. “It leaves us with a perplexing question,” says Garamszegi. “What evolutionary forces drove some females to give up singing?”
21) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Parents' own birth order can become an issue when dynamics in the family they are raising replicate the family in which they were raised. Agati notes common examples, such as a firstborn parent getting into "raging battles" with a firstborn child. "Both are used to getting the last word. Each has to be right. But the parent has to be the grown up and step out of that battle," he advises. When youngest children become parents, Agati cautions that because they "may not have had high expectations placed on them, they in turn may not see their kids for their abilities." But he also notes that since youngest children tend to be more social, "youngest parents can be helpful to their firstborn, who may have a harder time with social situations. These parents can help their eldest kids loosen up and not be so hard on themselves. Mom Susan Ritz says her own birth order didn't seem to affect her parenting until the youngest of her three children, Julie, was born. Julie was nine years younger than Ritz's oldest, Joshua, mirroring the age difference between Susan and her own older brother. "I would see Joshua do to Julie what my brother did to me," she says of the taunting and teasing by a much older sibling.
"I had to try not to always take Julie's side." Biases can surface no matter what your own birth position was, as Lori Silverstone points out. "As a middle myself, I can be harder on my older daughter. I recall my older sister hitting me," she says of her reactions to her daughters' tussles.
"My husband is a firstborn. He's always sticking up for the oldest. He feels bad for her that the others came so fast. He helps me to see what that feels like, to have that attention and then lose it." Silverstone sees birth order triggers as "an opportunity to heal parts of ourselves. I've learned to teach my middle daughter to stand up for herself. My mother didn't teach me that. I'm conscious of giving my middle daughter tools so she has a nice way to protect herself."
Whether or not you subscribe to theories that birth order can affect your child's personality, ultimately, "we all have free will," Agati notes. It's important for both parents and kids to realize that, despite the characteristics often associated with birth order, "you're not locked into any role."
22) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Live in the country and last three years longer than my city friends? Good news indeed, more backing for a lifestyle choice made half a lifetime ago when it seemed a good idea to exchange an Edinhurgh terrace for a farm cottage.
I knew it was a good idea because I had been there before. Born and reared on a farm I had been seduced for a few years by the idea of being a big shot who lived and worked in a city rather than only going for the day to wave at the buses.
True, I was familiar with some of the minor disadvantages of country living such as an iffy private water supply sometimes infiltrated by a range of flora and fauna (including, on one memorable occasion, a dead lamb), the absence of central heating in farm houses and cottages, and a single track farm road easily blocked by snow, broken down machinery or escaped livestock.
But there were many advantages as I told Liz back in the mid-Seventies. Town born and bred, eight months pregnant and exchanging a warm, substantial Corstorphine terrace for a windswept farm cottage on a much lower income, persuading her that country had it over town might have been difficult.
23) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
A large new study has found that people who regularly took a siesta were significantly less likely to die of heart disease. "Taking a nap could turn out to be an important weapon in the fight against coronary mortality," said Dimitrios Trichopoulos of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who led the study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The study of more than 23,000 Greek adults the biggest and best examination of the subject to date found that those who regularly took a midday siesta were more than 30 percent less likely to die of heart disease.
Other experts said the results are intriguing. Heart disease kills more than 650,000 Americans each year, making it the nation's No. 1 cause of death.
"It's interesting. A little siesta, a little snooze may be beneficial," said Gerald Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., speaking on behalf of the American Heart Association. "It's simple, but it has a lot of promise."
While more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, there are several ways napping could reduce the risk of heart attacks, experts said. "Napping may help deal with the stress of daily living," said Michael Twery, who directs the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute's National Center on Sleep Disorders Research.
"Another possibility is that it is part of the normal biological rhythm of daily living. The biological clock that drives sleep and wakefulness has two cycles each day, and one of them dips usually in the early afternoon. It's possible that not engaging in napping for some people might disrupt these processes." Researchers have long known that countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, where people commonly take siestas, have lower rates of heart disease than would be expected. But previous studies that attempted to study the relationship between naps and heart disease have produced mixed results. The new study is first to try to fully account for factors that might confuse the findings, such as physical activity, diet and other illnesses.
24) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Could midday napping save your life? If the experience of Greek men is any guide, the answer just may be yes.
In a study released yesterday, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and in Athens reported that Greeks who took regular 30-minute siestas were 37 percent less likely to die of heart disease over a six-year period than those who never napped. The scientists tracked more than 23,000 adults, finding that the benefits of napping were most pronounced for working men.
Researchers have long recognized that Mediterranean adults die of heart disease at a rate lower than Americans and Northern Europeans. Diets rich in olive oil and other heart-healthy foods have received some of the credit, but scientists have been intrigued by the potential role of napping.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that napping was more likely than diet or physical activity to lower the incidence of heart attacks and other life-ending heart ailments. Essentially, they said, sleep at any time of day acts like a valve to release the stress of everyday life. Still, the authors cautioned that further research is needed to confirm their findings. Specialists not involved with the study said there are sound biochemical reasons to believe that a nap may help protect against heart disease.
25) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
According to new research, house mice (Mus musculus) are ideal biomarkers of human settlement, as they tend to stow away in crates or on ships that end up going where people go. Using mice as a proxy for human movement can add to what is already known through archaeological data and answer important questions in areas where there is a lack of artifacts, Searle said. Where people go, so do mice, often stowing away in carts of hay or on ships. Despite a natural range of just 100 meters (109 yards) and an evolutionary base near Pakistan, the house mouse has managed to colonize every continent, which makes it a useful tool for researchers like Searle. Previous research conducted by Searle at the University of York supported the theory that Australian mice originated in the British Isles and probably came over with convicts shipped there to colonize the continent in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the Viking study, he and his fellow researchers in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden took it a step further, using ancient mouse DNA collected from archaeological sites dating from the 10th to 12th centuries, as well as modern mice. He is hoping to do just that in his next project, which involves tracking the migration of mice and other species, including plants, across the Indian Ocean, from South Asia to East Africa.
26) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
In 1920, the eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution created yet another setback for the American wine industry. The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, delivery, or possession of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes. Prohibition, which continued for thirteen years, nearly destroyed what had become a thriving and national industry.
One of the loopholes in the Volstead Act allowed for the manufacture and sale of sacramental wine, medicinal wines for sale by pharmacists with a doctor’s prescription, and medicinal wine tonics (fortified wines) sold without prescription. Perhaps more important, prohibition allowed anyone to produce up to two hundred gallons yearly of fruit juice or cider. The fruit juice, which was sometimes made into a concentrate, was ideal for making wine. People would buy grape concentrate from California and have it shipped to the East Coast. The top of the container was stamped in big bold letters: caution: do not add sugar or yeast or else fermentation will take place! Some of this yield found its way to bootleggers throughout America who did just that. But not for long, because the government stepped in and banned the sale of grape juice, preventing illegal wine production. Vineyards stopped being planted, and the American wine industry came to a halt.
27) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
All non-human animals are constrained by the tools that nature has bequeathed them through natural selection. They are not capable of striving towards truth; they simply absorb information and behave in ways useful for their survival. The kinds of knowledge they require of the world have been largely pre-selected by evolution. No animal is capable of asking questions or generating problems that are irrelevant to its immediate circumstances or its evolutionarily designed needs. When a beaver builds a dam, it doesn't ask itself why it does so, or whether there is a better way of doing it. When a swallow flies south, it doesn't wonder why it is hotter in Africa or what would happen if it flew still further south.
Humans do ask themselves these and many other kinds of questions, questions that have no relevance, indeed make little sense, in the context of evolved needs and goals. What marks out humans is our capacity to go beyond our naturally defined goals such as the need to find food, shelter or a mate and to establish human-created goals.
Some contemporary thinkers believe that there are indeed certain questions that humans are incapable of answering because of our evolved nature. Steven Pinker, for instance, argues that "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in our short-term memory. We cannot see ultraviolet light. We cannot mentally rotate an object in the fourth dimension. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience."
28) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Consider the current situation: like their counterparts in the United States, engineers and technicians in India have the capacity to provide both computer programming and innovative new technologies. Indian programmers and high-tech engineers earn one-quarter of what their counterparts earn in the United States; Consequently, India is able to do both jobs at a lower dollar cost than the United States: India has an absolute advantage in both. In other words, it can produce a unit of programming for fewer dollars than the United States, and it can also produce a unit of technology innovation for fewer dollars. Does that mean that the United States will lose not only programming jobs but innovative technology job, too? Does that mean that our standard of living will fall if the United States and India engage in international trade?
David Ricardo would have answered no to both questions-- as we do today. While India may have an absolute advantage in both activities, that fact is irrelevant in determining what India or the United States will produce. India has a comparative advantage in doing programming in part because of such activity requires little physical capital. The flip side is that the United States has a comparative advantage in technology innovation partly because it is relatively easy to obtain capital in this country to undertake such long--run projects. The result is that Indian programmers will do more and more of what U.S. programmers have been doing in the past. In contrast, American firms will shift to more and more innovation.
29) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
When Australians engage in debate about the educational quality or equity, they often seem to accept that a country cannot achieve both at the same time. Curriculum reforms intended to improve equity often fail to do so because they increase breadth or differentiation in offerings in a way that increases differences in quality. Further, these differences in quality often reflect differences in students’ social backgrounds because the ‘new’ offerings are typically taken up by relatively disadvantaged students who are not served well them. Evidence from New South Wales will be used to illustrate this point. The need to improve the quality of education is well accepted across OECD and other countries as they seek to strengthen their human capital to underpin their modern, knowledge economies. Improved equity is also important for this purpose since the demand for high-level skills is widespread and the opportunities for the low skilled are diminishing.
Improved equity in education is also important for social cohesion. There are countries in which the education system seems primarily to reproduce existing social arrangements, conferring privilege where it already exists and denying it where it does not. Even in countries where the diagnosis might be less extreme, the capacity of schooling to build social cohesion is often diminished by the way in which schools separate individuals and groups.
30) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Jobs generated by Travel & Tourism are spread across the economy in retail, construction, manufacturing and telecommunications, as well as directly in Travel & Tourism companies. These jobs employ a large proportion of women, minorities and young people are predominantly in small and medium-sized companies and offer good training and transferability. Tourism can also be one of the most effective drivers for the development of regional economies. These patterns apply to both developed and emerging economies.
There are numerous good examples of where Travel & Tourism is acting as a catalyst for conservation and improvement of the environment and maintenance of local diversity and culture. Travel & Tourism creates jobs and wealth and has tremendous potential to contribute to economically, environmentally and socially sustainable development in both developed countries and emerging nations. It has a comparative advantage in that its start-up and running costs can be low compared to many other forms of industrial development.
It is also often one of the few realistic options for development in many areas. Therefore, there is a strong likelihood that the Travel & Tourism industry will continue to grow globally over the short to medium term.
31) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Some of this panic is overdone—and linked to the business cycle: there was much ado about “war for talent” in America in the 1990s, until the dotcom bubble burst. People often talk about shortages when they should really be discussing price. Eventually, supply will rise to meet demand and the market will adjust. But, while you wait, your firm might go bust. The evidence is that the talent shortage is likely to get worse.
Nobody really disputes the idea that the demand for talent-intensive skills is rising. The value of “intangible” assets—everything from skilled workers to patents to know-how—has ballooned from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 to 70% today. The proportion of American workers doing jobs that call for complex skills has grown three times as fast as employment in general. As other economies move in the same direction, global demand is rising quickly.
As for supply, the picture in much of the developed world is haunted by demography. By 2025 the number of people aged 15-64 is projected to fall by 7% in Germany, 9% in Italy and 14% in Japan. Even in still growing America, the imminent retirement of the baby-boomers means that companies will lose large numbers of experienced workers in a short space of time (by one count half the top people at America's 500 leading companies will go in the next five years). Meanwhile, two things are making it much harder for companies to adjust.
The first is the collapse of loyalty. Companies happily chopped out layers of managers during the 1990s; now people are likely to repay them by moving to the highest bidder. The second is the mismatch between what schools are producing and what companies need. In most Western countries schools are churning out too few scientists and engineers—and far too many people who lack the skills to work in a modern economy (that's why there are talent shortages at the top alongside structural unemployment for the low-skilled).
32) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
We live in an ageing world. While this has been recognized for some time in developed countries, it is only recently that this phenomenon has been fully acknowledged. Global communication is "shrinking" the world, and global ageing is "maturing" it. The increasing presence of older persons in the world is making people of all ages more aware that we live in a diverse and multigenerational society. It is no longer possible to ignore ageing, regardless of whether one views it positively or negatively.
Demographers note that if current trends in ageing continue as predicted, a demographic revolution, wherein the proportions of the young and the old will undergo a historic crossover, will be felt in just three generations. This portrait of change in the world's population parallels the magnitude of the industrial revolution traditionally considered the most significant social and economic breakthrough in the history of humankind since the Neolithic period. It marked the beginning of a sustained movement towards modern economic growth in much the same way that globalization is today marking an unprecedented and sustained movement toward a "global culture". The demographic revolution, it is envisaged, will be at least as powerful.
While the future effects are not known, a likely scenario is one where both the challenges as well as the opportunities will emerge from a vessel into which exploration and research, dialogue and debate are poured. Challenges arise as social and economic structures try to adjust to the simultaneous phenomenon of diminishing young cohorts with rising older ones, and opportunities present themselves in the sheer number of older individuals and the vast resources societies stand to gain from their contribution.
This ageing of the population permeates all social, economic and cultural spheres. Revolutionary change calls for new, revolutionary thinking, which can position policy formulation and implementation on a sounder footing. In our ageing world, new thinking requires that we view ageing as a lifelong and older person.
33) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Human remains are a fundamental part of the archaeological record, offering unique insights into the lives of individuals and populations in the past. Like many archaeological materials, human remains require distinctive and specialised methods of recovery, analysis and interpretation, while technological innovations and the accumulation of expertise have enabled archaeologists to extract ever greater amounts of information from assemblages of skeletal material. Alongside analyses of new finds, these advances have consistently thrown new light on existing collections of human remains in museums, universities and other institutions. Given the powerful emotional, social and religious meanings attached to the dead body, it is perhaps unsurprising that human remains pose a distinctive set of ethical questions for archaeologists.
With the rise of indigenous rights movements and the emergence of post-colonial nations, the acquisition and ownership of human remains became a divisive and politically loaded issue. It became increasingly clear that many human remains in museum collections around the world represented the traces of colonial exploitation and discredited pseudo-scientific theories of race. In the light of these debates and changing attitudes, some human remains were returned or repatriated to their communities of origin, a process which continues to this day. Recently a new set of challenges to the study of human remains has emerged from a rather unexpected direction: the British government revised its interpretation of nineteenth-century burial legislation in a way that would drastically curtail the ability of archaeologists to study human remains of any age excavated in England and Wales. This paper examines these extraordinary events and the legal, political and ethical questions that they raise.
In April 2008 the British government announced that, henceforth, all human remains archaeologically excavated in England and Wales should be reburied after a two-- year period of scientific analysis. Not only would internationally important prehistoric remains have to be returned to the ground, removing them from public view, but also there would no longer be any possibility of long--term scientific investigation as new techniques and methods emerged and developed in the future. Thus, while faunal remains, potsherds, artefacts and environmental samples could be analysed and re-analysed in future years, human remains were to be effectively removed from the curation process. Archaeologists and other scientists were also concerned that this might be the first step towards a policy of reburying all human remains held in museum collections in England and Wales including prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, Viking and Medieval as well as more recent remains.
34) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The history of marketers seeking the advice of physicists is a short one, but an understanding of the Theory of Resonance may give communications experts the edge. Resonance Theory explains the curious phenomenon of how very small pebbles dropped into a pond can create bigger waves than a large brick. The brick makes a decent splash but its ripples peter out quickly. A tiny pebble dropped into the same pond, followed by another, then another, then another, all timed carefully, will create ripples that build into small waves.
As Dr Carlo Contaldi, a physicist at Imperial College London, explains, a small amount of energy committed at just the right intervals the 'natural frequency' creates a cumulatively large effect.
Media consultant Paul Bay believes that just as with the pebbles in a pond, a carefully choreographed and meticulously timed stream of communication (a monthly ad in MT, for example) will have a more lasting effect than a sporadic big splash during primetime ad breaks.
Innocent is a testament to the power of pebbles. Until last year, the maker of smoothies had never advertised on TV, instead of drip feeding the market with endless ingenious marketing ploys from annotating its drinks labels with quirky messages to hosting its own music festival, Fruitstock. The company sent a constant stream of messages rather than communicating through the occasional big and expensive noise.
So whether you're trying to make waves in the laboratory or in the media, the people in white coats would advise a little and often. A big-budget is not the prerequisite of success. Intelligent planning and execution are.
35) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Spurred by the sense that disorderly behaviour among students in South Euclid was increasing, the school resource officer (SRO) reviewed data regarding referrals to the principal's office. He found that the high school reported thousands of referrals a year for bullying and that the junior high school had recently experienced a 30 percent increase in bullying referrals. Police data showed that juvenile complaints about disturbances, bullying, and assaults after school hours had increased 90 percent in the past 10 years.
A researcher from Kent State University (Ohio) conducted a survey of all students attending the junior high and high school. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with a student identified as victims or offender teachers, and guidance counsellors. Finally, the South Euclid Police Department purchased a Geographic Information System to conduct crime incident mapping of hotspots within the schools. The main findings pointed to four primary areas of concern: the environmental design of the school; Teacher knowledge of and response to the problem; parental attitudes and responses and student perspectives and behaviours.
The SRO worked in close collaboration with a social worker and the university researcher. They coordinated a Response Planning Team comprising many stakeholders that were intended to respond to each of the areas identified in the initial analysis. Environmental changes included modifying the school schedule and increasing teacher supervision of hotspots. Counsellors and social workers conducted teacher-training courses in conflict resolution and bullying prevention. Parent education included mailings with information about bullying, an explanation of the new school policy, and a discussion about what could be done at home to address the problems. Finally, student education included classroom discussions between homeroom teachers and students, as well as assemblies conducted by the SRO. The SRO also opened a substation next to a primary hotspot. The Ohio Department of Education contributed by opening a new training centre to provide a nontraditional setting for specialized help.
The results from the various responses were dramatic. School suspensions decreased 40 percent. Bullying incidents dropped 60 percent in the hallways and 80 percent in the gym area. Follow-up surveys indicated that there were positive attitudinal changes among students about bullying and that more students felt confident that teachers would take action when a problem arose. Teachers indicated that training sessions were helpful and that they were more likely to talk about bullying as a serious issue. Parents responded positively, asking for more information about the problem in future mailings. The overall results suggest that the school environments were not only safer, but that early intervention was helping at- risk students succeed in school (South Euclid (Ohio) Police Department, 2001).
36) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Here’s how tree ring dating, known to scientists as dendrochronology (from the Greek roots dendron = tree, and Chronos = time), works. If you cut a tree down today, it’s straightforward to count the rings inwards, starting from the tree’s outside (corresponding to this year’s growth ring), and thereby to state that the 177th ring from the outermost one towards the centre was laid down in the year 2005 minus 177, or 1828. But it’s less straight forward to attach a date to a particular ring in an ancient Anasazi wooden beam because at first, you don’t know in what year the beam was cut. However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on the rain or drought conditions in each year.
Hence the sequence of the rings in a tree cross-section is like a message in Morse code formerly used for sending telegraph messages, dot-dot-dash-dot-dash in the Morse code, wide-wide-narrow-wide-narrow in the tree ring sequence. Actually, the tree ring sequence is even more diagnostic and richer in information than the Morse code, because trees actually contain rings spanning much different width, rather than the Morse code choice between dot and dash.
Tree ring specialists (known as dendrochronologists) proceed by noting the sequence of wider and narrower rings in a tree cut down in a known recent year, and noting the sequences in beams from trees cut down at various times in the past. They then match up and align the tree ring sequences with the same diagnostic wide/narrow patterns from different beams.
In that way, dendrochronologists have constructed tree ring records extending back for thousands of years in some parts of the world. Each record is valid for a geographic area whose extent depends on local weather patterns because weather and hence tree growth patterns vary with location. For instance, the basic tree ring chronology of the American Southwest applies (with some variation) to the area from Northern Mexico to Wyoming.
A bonus of dendrochronology is that the width and substructure of each ring reflects the amount of rain and the season at which the rain fell during that particular year. Thus, tree ring studies also allow one to reconstruct the past climate, e.g., a series of wide rings means a very wet period, and a series of narrow rings means a drought. Tree rings thereby provide southwestern archaeologists with uniquely exact dating and uniquely detailed year-to-year environmental information.
37) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Here’s how tree ring dating, known to scientists as dendrochronology (from the Greek roots dendron = tree, and chronos = time), works. If you cut a tree down today, it’s straightforward to count the rings inwards, starting from the tree’s outside (corresponding to this year’s growth ring), and thereby to state that the 177th ring from the outermost one towards the center was laid down in the year 2005 minus 177, or 1828. But it’s less straight forward to attach a date to a particular ring in an ancient Anasazi wooden beam because at first, you don’t know in what year the beam was cut. However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on the rain or drought conditions in each year.
Hence the sequence of the rings in a tree cross-section is like a message in Morse code formerly used for sending telegraph messages, dot-dot-dash-dot-dash in the Morse code, wide-wide-narrow-wide-narrow in the tree ring sequence. Actually, the tree ring sequence is even more diagnostic and richer in information than the Morse code, because trees actually contain rings spanning much different width, rather than the Morse code choice between dot and dash.
Tree ring specialists (known as dendrochronologists) proceed by noting the sequence of wider and narrower rings in a tree cut down in a known recent year, and noting the sequences in beams from trees cut down at various times in the past. They then match up and align the tree ring sequences with the same diagnostic wide/narrow patterns from different beams.
In that way, dendrochronologists have constructed tree ring records extending back for thousands of years in some parts of the world. Each record is valid for a geographic area whose extent depends on local weather patterns because weather and hence tree growth patterns vary with location. For instance, the basic tree ring chronology of the American Southwest applies (with some variation) to the area from Northern Mexico to Wyoming.
A bonus of dendrochronology is that the width and substructure of each ring reflects the amount of rain and the season at which the rain fell during that particular year. Thus, tree ring studies also allow one to reconstruct the past climate, e.g., a series of wide rings means a very wet period, and a series of narrow rings means a drought. Tree rings thereby provide southwestern archaeologists with uniquely exact dating and uniquely detailed year-to-year environmental information.
38) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
When an individual drives a car, heats a house, or uses an aerosol hair spray, greenhouse gases are produced. In economic terms, this creates a classic negative externality. Most of the cost (in this case, those arising from global warming) are borne by individuals other than the one making the decision about how many miles to drive or how much hair spray to use. Because the driver (or sprayer) enjoys all the benefits of the activities but suffers only part of the cost, that individual engages in more than the economically efficient amount of the activity. In this sense, the problem of greenhouse gases parallels the problem that occurs when someone smokes a cigarette in an enclosed space or litters the countryside with fast-food wrappers. If we are to get individuals to reduce the production of greenhouse gases to the efficient rate, we must somehow induce them to act as though they bear all the costs of their actions. The two most widely accepted means of doing this are government regulation and taxation, both of which have been proposed to deal with greenhouse gases. Many human activities are responsible for the production of greenhouse gases. Generating electricity is the single largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States, followed by transportation. Negative externalities are created by individuals that engage in more than the economically efficient amount of an activity, such as driving. Because the driver enjoys all of the benefits that come along with driving and only suffer part of the cost, they do not put a limit on how far or how often they should drive. The only way to get individuals to participate in reducing greenhouse gases is by having them bear all the costs of their actions. This is difficult because the costs are so little compared to the benefit, so why give up something that benefits more than sets you back. Two different methods are being proposed in order to help humans take into consideration the costs of their actions in order to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. The methods proposed are government regulation and taxation. Unless the government sets regulations and taxes, the individual level of involvement will be very low and unless many people participate, the amount of greenhouse gases will not be significantly reduced.
39) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
What is the solution for nations with increasing energy demands, hindered by frequent power cuts and an inability to compete in the international oil market? For East Africa at least, experts think geothermal energy is the answer. More promising still, the Kenyan government and international investors seem to be listening. This is just in time according to many, as claims of an acute energy crisis are afoot due to high oil prices, population spikes and droughts. Geothermal energy works by pumping water into bedrock, where it is heated and returns to the surface as steam which is used directly as a heat source or to drive electricity production. Source: Energy Information Administration, Geothermal Energy in the Western United States and Hawaii.
Currently, over 60% of Kenya’s power comes from hydroelectric sources but these are proving increasingly unreliable as the issue of seasonal variation is intensified by erratic rain patterns. Alternative energy sources are needed and the leading energy supplier in Kenya, Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen), hopes to expand its geothermal energy supply from 13% to 25 % of its total usage by 2020. The potential of geothermal energy in the region was first realised internationally by the United Nations Development Program when geologists observed thermal anomalies below the East African Rift system. Locals have been utilizing this resource for centuries using steam vents to create the perfect humidity for greenhouses, or simply to enjoy a swim in the many natural hot lakes.
Along the 6000 km of the rift from the Red Sea to Mozambique, geochemical, geophysical and heat flow measurements were made to identify areas suitable for geothermal wells.
One area lies next to the extinct Olkaria volcano, within the Hell’s Gate National Park, and sits over some of the thinnest continental crust on Earth. This is a result of the thinning of the crust by tectonic stretching, causing hotter material below the Earth’s surface to rise, resulting in higher temperatures. This thin crust was ideal for the drilling of geothermal wells, reaching depths of around 3000 m, where temperatures get up to 342°C, far higher than the usual temperature of 90°C at this depth. Water in the surrounding rocks is converted to steam by the heat. The steam can be used to drive turbines and produce electricity.
40) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The world engages in improving the literacy of reading and writing, but it is not that important now. What is text/written language anyway? It's an ancient IT for storing and retrieving information. We store information by writing it, and we retrieve it by reading it. Six thousand to 10,000 years ago, many of our ancestors' hunter-gatherer societies settled on the land and began what's known as the agricultural revolution. That new land settlement led to private property and increased production and trade of goods, generating a huge new influx of information. Unable to keep all this information in their memories, our ancestors created systems of written records that evolved over millennia into today's written language.
But this ancient IT is already becoming obsolete. The text has run its historic course and is now rapidly getting replaced in every area of our lives by the ever-increasing array of emerging ITs driven by voice, video, and body movement rather than the written word.
In my view, this is a positive step forward in the evolution of human technology, and it carries great potential for a total positive redesign of education.
41) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The notion that office space has a role in promoting or inhibiting performance is backed up by solid research. A recent study conducted by Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that improvements to the physical surroundings of workers impacted on productivity not just because the working environment was more attractive, but because the changes made employees feel cared for. A Swedish research paper revealed a strong link between the type of office an employee worked in and their overall job satisfaction and health. Various findings have emerged as a result of studies such as this. Pot plants and greenery can apparently have a real impact on psychological well-being. Those who work in a private room tend to be in better health than workers based in open-plan offices. Sufficient light can reduce sickness among workers and increase productivity and an attractive office can make workers feel more cared for and therefore more loyal to their company. Most of these points make good rational sense. But some companies aren’t content simply to increase the health, productivity and contentment of their employees. Pioneers such as Google, Walt Disney and Dyson have tried to create offices that will do everything from promoting collaboration between workers to stimulating their creative juices. “Environment, both physical and cultural, can make or break creativity,” says Kursty Groves, author of I Wish I Worked There! A Look Inside the Most Creative Spaces in Business. “Stimulating spaces expose the mind to a variety of stimuli-planned or random-in order to encourage people to think differently. Reflective spaces promote the filtering of information into the brain, slowing it to make connections. An environment which encourages a team to build trust and to play freely is an essential ingredient for innovation.” In my view, this is a positive step forward in the evolution of human technology, and it carries great potential for a total positive redesign of education.
42) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
In its periodic quest for culinary identity, Australia automatically looks to its indigenous ingredients, the foods that are native to this country. ‘There can be little doubt that using an indigenous product must qualify a dish as Australian notes, Stephanie Alexander. Similarly, and without qualification, Cherikoff state that ‘A uniquely Australian food culture can only be based upon foods indigenous to this country, although, as Craw remarks, proposing Australian native foods as national symbols relies more upon their association with ‘nature’ and geographic origin than on common usage. Notwithstanding the lack of justification for the premise that national dishes are, of necessity, founded on ingredients native to the country – after all, Italy’s gastronomic identity is tied to the non-indigenous tornado, Thailand’s to the non-indigenous chilli—the reality is that Australians do not eat indigenous foods in significant quantities. The exceptions are fish, crustaceans and shellfish from oceans, rivers and lakes, most of which are unarguably unique to this country. Despite valiant and well-intentioned efforts today at promoting and encouraging the consumption of native resources, bush foods are not harvested or produced in sufficient quantities for them to be a standard component of Australian diets, nor are they generally accessible. Indigenous foods are less relevant to Australian identity today than lamb and passionfruit, both initially imported and now naturalised.
43) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Plants serve as the conduit of energy into the biosphere, provide food and materials used by humans, and they shape our environment. According to Ehrhardt and Frommer, the three major challenges facing humanity in our time are food, energy, and environmental degradation. All three are plant related.
All of our food is produced by plants, either directly or indirectly via animals that eat them. Plants are a source of energy production. And they are intimately involved in climate change and a major factor in a variety of environmental concerns, including agricultural expansion and its impact on habitat destruction and waterway pollution. What’s more, none of these issues are independent of each other. Climate change places additional stresses on the food supply and on various habitats. So plant research is instrumental in addressing all of these problems and moving into the future.
For plant research to move significantly forward, Ehrhardt and Former say technological development is critical, both to test existing hypotheses and to gain new information and generate fresh hypotheses. If we are to make headway in understanding how these essential organisms function and build the foundation for a sustainable future, then we need to apply the most advanced technologies available to the study of plant life, they say.
44) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The ways of life of Upper Palaeolithic people are known through the remains of meals scattered around their hearths, together with many tools and weapons and the debris leftover from their making. The people were hunter-gatherers who lived exclusively from what they could find in nature without practising either agriculture or herding. They hunted the bigger herbivores, while berries, leaves, roots, wild fruit and mushrooms probably played a major role in their diet. Their hunting was indiscriminate, perhaps because so many animals were about that they did not need to spare pregnant females or the young. In the cave of Enlene, for example, many bones of reindeer and bison foetuses were found. Apparently, upper Palaeolithic people hunted like other predators and killed the weakest prey first. They did, however, sometimes concentrate on salmon runs and migrating herds of reindeer. Contrary to popular beliefs about ‘cave men’, Upper Palaeolithic people did not live deep inside caves. They rather chose the foot of cliffs, especially when an overhang provided good shelter. On the plains and in the valleys, they used tents made from hides of the animals they killed. At times, on the great Russian plains, they built huts with huge bones and tusks collected from the skeletons of mammoths.
Men hunted mostly with spears; the bow and arrow were probably not invented until the Magdalenian period that came at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Tools and weapons, made out of wood or reindeer antlers, often had flint cutting edges. Flint snappers were skilful and traditions in flint snapping were pursued for thousands of years. This continuity means that they must have been carefully taught how to find good flint nodules and how to knap them in order to make knives, burins (chisel-like tools) or scrapers, which could be used for various purposes.
45) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Orville and Wilbur Wright were brothers living in Dayton, Ohio. The two had started making bicycles during the 1890s and had a successful small business selling their Wright Specials for $18 each ($475 in today’s green). This experience with building light, strong machines would prove valuable in the coming years after the brothers’ interest turned to flight.
Others in the United States were also developing aircraft at the time the Wright brothers started turning their curiosity skyward. Samuel Langley had flown an unmanned steam-powered aircraft in 1896. Octave Chanute and others were flying gliders near Chicago late in the decade as well. But it wasn’t until the Wright brothers started working on the matter that the “flying problem” would finally be solved.
Beginning in 1899, the brothers designed and built a series of gliders to test their various ideas on a flying machine. They constructed a wind tunnel that allowed them to test designs without having to build a full-size model. They even built their own gasoline-powered motor for their aircraft.
46) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Major athletic events around the globe from the 2014 Sochi Olympics to an annual powerboat race in Norwegian fjords – are striving to neutralize their carbon footprint as part of a worldwide climate network, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said today. The sporting events are the latest participants to join the network, and are particularly important for inspiring further global action on the environment, said Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director. Organizers of the 2014 Sochi Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games – to be held in a unique natural setting between the shores of the Black Sea and the soaring snow-capped Caucasus Mountains say they will put an estimated $1.75 billion into energy conservation and renewable energy.
That investment will be dedicated to improving transport infrastructure, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from the use of electricity, air travel and ground transportation, the reforestation of Sochi National Park and the development of green belts in the city.
47) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
What is museology? A simple definition might be that it is the study of museums, their history and underlying philosophy, the various ways in which they have, in the course of time, been established and developed, their avowed or unspoken aims and policies, their educative or political or social role. More broadly conceived, such a study might also embrace the bewildering variety of audiences – visitors, scholars, art lovers, children- at whom the efforts of museum staff are supposedly directed, as well as related topics such as the legal duties and responsibilities placed upon ( or incurred by) museums, perhaps even some thought as to their future. Seen in this light, museology might appear at first sight a subject so specialized as to concern only museum professionals, who by virtue of their occupation are more or less obliged to take an interest in it. In reality, since museums are almost, if not quite as old as civilization itself, and since the plethora of present-day museums embraces virtually every field of human endeavour- not just art, or craft, or science, but entertainment, agriculture, rural life, childhood, fisheries, antiquities, automobiles: the list is endless – it is a field of enquiry so broad as to be a matter of concern to almost everybody.
48) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The world engages in improving the literacy of reading and writing, but it is not that important now. What is text/written language anyway? It's an ancient IT for storing and retrieving information. We store information by writing it, and we retrieve it by reading it. Six thousand to 10,000 years ago, many of our ancestors' hunter-gatherer societies settled on the land and began what's known as the agricultural revolution. That new land settlement led to private property and increased production and trade of goods, generating a huge new influx of information. Unable to keep all this information in their memories, our ancestors created systems of written records that evolved over millennia into today's written language.
But this ancient IT is already becoming obsolete. The text has run its historic course and is now rapidly getting replaced in every area of our lives by the ever-increasing array of emerging ITs driven by voice, video, and body movement rather than the written word.
In my view, this is a positive step forward in the evolution of human technology, and it carries great potential for a total positive redesign of education.
49) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Skipping breakfast seems a simple way of losing weight or saving time while getting the children ready for school or rushing off to work. But it can also be a sign of an unhealthy lifestyle with potentially dangerous consequences, including a higher risk of premature death. According to a study, adults and teenagers who miss the first meal of the day are less likely to look after their health. They tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol and take less exercise than those who do eat. Those who skip food in the morning are also more likely to be fatter and less well-educated, meaning they find it harder to get a job.
Researcher Dr. Anna Keski-Rahkonen said: Smoking, infrequent exercise, a low level of education, frequent alcohol use and a high body mass index were all associated with skipping breakfast in adults and adolescents. Our findings suggest this association exists throughout adulthood. Individuals who skip breakfast may care less about their health than those who eat breakfast.
Previously, experts assumed that missing breakfast often called the most important meal of the day was simply the marker of a hectic life or a way to try to lose weight. But Dr. Keski-Rahkonen, who led the study at Helsinki University, said the results revealed starting the day without food suggests an unhealthy lifestyle.
50) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Compulsory voting is often suggested as a solution to the problem of declining turnout. But how are individuals and countries affected by compulsory voting beyond boosting electoral participation? Shane Singh investigates the social, economic, and political consequences of compelling citizens to vote.
There has been a lot of discussion about compulsory voting these days. In the United Kingdom, in particular, as voter turnout rates have declined, many commentators and politicians have begun advocating for mandatory electoral participation. Those in favour of compulsory voting often adduce the importance of participation among all segments of society. Citizens of democracies are forced to do many things in the interest of the public good, they maintain, including serving on juries and educating their children, and full participation serves the country as a whole. Those opposed to compulsory voting often argue that, from a democratic theory perspective, the right to vote implicitly includes a right not to vote. Such a right of abstention, they argue, is more important than any societal good that might accompany high turnout. In fact, opponents of compulsory voting often contend that the country may be better off if those who are disinclined to vote are not pushed to participate in public affairs.
Regardless of whether one of these sets of arguments is more persuasive than the other, compulsory voting is commonly used around the world. Several European democracies mandate voting, as do Australia and most of the countries in Latin America. By evaluating results from these countries, it is possible to assess the mechanics and effects of compulsory voting.
51) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The National Oceanography Center (NOC) is engaged in research into the potential risks and benefits of exploiting deep-sea mineral resources, some of which are essential for low-carbon technology, as well as using ocean robots to estimate the environmental impact of these potential deep-sea mining activities.
Late last year the NOC led an expedition on the RRS James Cook that found enough of the scarce element Tellurium present in the crust of a submerged volcano that, if it were all to be used in the production of solar PV panels, could provide two-thirds of the UK’s annual electricity supply. Recently, the NOC also led an international study demonstrating deep-sea nodule mining will cause long-lasting damage to deep-sea life, lasting at least for decades.
These nodules are potato-sized rocks containing high levels of metals, including copper, manganese and nickel. They grow very slowly on the sea-bed, over millions of years. Although no commercial operations exist to extract these resources, many are planned.
Professor Edward Hill, Executive Director at the NOC commented, “By 2050 there will be nine billion people on earth and attention is increasingly turning to the ocean, particularly the deep ocean, for food, clean supplies of energy and strategic minerals. The NOC is undertaking research related to many aspects and perspectives involved in exploiting ocean resources. This research is aimed at informing with sound scientific evidence the decisions that will need to be taken in the future, as people increasingly turn to the oceans to address some of society’s greatest challenges.”
52) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Research shows that when people work with a positive mind-set, performance on nearly every level — productivity, creativity, engagement — improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success precedes happiness. “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy,” they think. Or, “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great.” But because success is a moving target — as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again—the happiness that results from success is fleeting.
In fact, it works the other way around: People who cultivate a positive mind-set perform better in the face of challenge. I call this the “happiness advantage” — every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I’ve observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I’m not alone: In a meta-analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found strong evidence of directional causality between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.
Another common misconception is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one’s general sense of well-being is surprisingly malleable. The habits you cultivate, the way you interact with coworkers, how you think about stress — all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success.
53) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Ethics is a set of moral obligations that define right and wrong in our practices and decisions. Many professions have a formalized system of ethical practices that help guide professionals in the field. For example, doctors commonly take the Hippocratic Oath, which, among other things, states that doctors “do no harm” to their patients. Engineers follow an ethical guide that states that they “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.” Within these professions, as well as within science, the principles become so ingrained that practitioners rarely have to think about adhering to the ethic – it’s part of the way they practice. And a breach of ethics is considered very serious, punishable at least within the profession (by revocation of a license, for example) and sometimes by the law as well. Scientific ethics calls for honesty and integrity in all stages of scientific practice, from reporting results regardless to properly attributing collaborators. This system of ethics guides the practice of science, from data collection to publication and beyond. As in other professions, the scientific ethic is deeply integrated into the way scientists work, and they are aware that the reliability of their work and scientific knowledge in general depends upon adhering to that ethic. Many of the ethical principles in science relate to the production of unbiased scientific knowledge, which is critical when others try to build upon or extend research findings. The open publication of data, peer review, replication, and collaboration required by the scientific ethic all help to keep science moving forward by validating research findings and confirming or raising questions about results.
54) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Over the years, language teachers have alternated between favouring teaching approaches that focus primarily on language use and those that focus on language forms or analysis. The alternation has been due to a fundamental disagreement concerning whether one learns to communicate in a second language by communicating in that language (such as in an immersion experience) or whether one learns to communicate in a second language by learning the lexicon grammar-the words and grammatical structures of the target language. In other words, the argument has been about two different means of achieving the same end.
As with any enduring controversy, the matter is not easily resolved. For one thing, there is evidence to support both points of view. It is not uncommon to find learners who, for whatever reason, find themselves in a new country or a new region of their own country, who need to learn a new language, and who do so without the benefit of formal instruction. If they are postpubescent, they may well retain an accent of some kind, but they can pick up enough language to satisfy their communicative needs. In fact, some are natural acquirers who become highly proficient in this manner. In contrast, there are learners whose entire exposure to the new language comes in the form of classroom instruction in lexicogrammar. Yet they too achieve a measure of communicative proficiency, and certain of these learners become highly proficient as well. What we can infer from this is that humans are amazingly versatile learners and that some people have a natural aptitude for acquiring languages and will succeed no matter what the circumstances.
55) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
It’s important to realise that the brain doesn’t see the world around it simply as though the scene was projected onto a cinema screen on the inside of your skull. Before a scene can be observed “in your head” it has to be broken down into a number of different components for processing, and these components then have to be recombined into the meaningful form that we call “an image”. Amongst other things, the scene is broken down into its different colours – red, green and blue – in a way that’s analogous to the manner in which a television image or magazine photograph is broken down into tiny dots of primary colours (which are too small to be noticed individually when we look at them, but which when seen collectively give the impression of a continuous full-colour image). However, unlike TV and magazine images, the image that we see with our eyes is broken down not only into separate colour components but into other components too. It is, rather incredibly, deconstructed into component parts such as horizontal lines, vertical lines, circles and so on. Each of these component parts is sent to a separate area of the brain for processing, with the different components of the scene only merging again when they are unified into what you perceive as the image.
56) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Malaysia is one of the most pleasant, hassle-free countries to visit in Southeast Asia. Aside from its gleaming 21st-century glass towers, it boasts some of the most superb beaches, mountains and national parks in the region. Malaysia is also launching its biggest-ever tourism campaign in an effort to lure 20 million visitors here this year. More than 16 million tourists visited in 2005, the last year for which complete statistics were available. While the majority of them were from Asia, mostly neighbouring Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, China, Japan and India, a growing number of Western travellers are also making their way to this Southeast Asian tropical paradise. Of the 885,000 travellers from the West, 240,000 were from the United Kingdom, 265,000 from Australia and 150,000 from the U.S.Any tourist itinerary would have to begin in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, where you will find the Petronas Twin Towers, which once comprised the world’s tallest buildings and now hold the title of second-tallest. Both the 88-story towers soar 1,480 feet high and are connected by a sky-bridge on the 41st floor. Also worth visiting is the Central Market, a pre-war building that was the main wet market for the city, and has now been transformed into art and cultural centre.The limestone temple Batu Caves, located 9 miles north of the city, have a 328-foot-high ceiling and feature ornate Hindu shrines, including a 141-foot-tall gold-painted statue of a Hindu deity. To reach the caves, visitors have to climb a steep flight of 272 steps. In Sabah state on Borneo Island – not to be confused with Indonesia’s Borneo – you’ll find the small mushroom-shaped Sipadan island, off the coast of Sabah, rated as one of the top five diving sites in the world. Sipadan is the only oceanic island in Malaysia, rising from a 2,300-foot abyss in the Celebes Sea. You can also climb Mount Kinabalu, the tallest peak in Southeast Asia, visit the Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary, go white-water rafting and catch a glimpse of the bizarre Proboscis monk.
57) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
On a field trip to the Amazon in 1807, 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt witnessed a group of horses lead through a muddy pool filled with electric eels, which he described as dramatically leaping up to attack the intruders. But scientists have doubted the story. “The first time I read von Humboldt's tale, I thought it was completely bizarre,” Catania says. “Why would the eels attack the horses instead of swimming away? “But then he observed the same behaviour by accident as he transferred the eels in his lab from one tank to another using a metal-rimmed net. Instead of swimming away, larger eels attacked the net by leaping out of the water. Catania tracked the strength of the eels’ electric shock by attaching a voltmeter to an aluminium plate, or conductive metal strips to “predator” objects such as a crocodile head replica.
The zap a submerged eel distributes through the water is relatively weak when it reaches the target. But when an eel touches it with its electricity-generating chin, the current travels directly to the target and has to travel through its body before it gets back to the water, Catania reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This allows the eels to deliver shocks with a maximum amount of power to partially submerged land animals that invade their territory,” Catania explains. “It also allows them to electrify a much larger portion of the invader's body.” Catania found the eels leapt to attack, rather than receded, more often when the water in the aquarium was lower. He argues the attack lets electric eels better defend themselves during the Amazonian dry season when they’re cornered in small pools and make easy prey.
58) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Negotiation is a common process in business to mainly solve business conflicts between both parties. Compromise is a basic negotiation strategy in which both parties give up something that they want in order to get something else they want more. Compromise usually occur in unfair parties when there is a fixed pie to be divided up, and whatever on one side gets, the other side loses. In compromise situations, neither side gets all of what they really want, but they each make concessions in order to reach an agreement that is acceptable to both. Both parties usually can reach win-win concept through compromise.However, negotiation cannot resolve all the conflict if one party is unwilling to resolve the problem.
59) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
A government is the organization, machinery, or agency, through which a political unit exercises its authority, controls and administers public policy, and directs and controls the actions of its members or subjects. The government makes laws, regulate economies, conduct relations with other countries, provide infrastructure and services, and maintain an army and a police force amongst others on behalf of the people of the country.
Democracy is any system of government in which the people have the rule. The ancient Greeks used the word democracy to mean government by the many in contrast to the government by the few. The key to democracy is that the people hold ultimate power. Abraham Lincoln best captured this spirit by describing democracy as a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Democratic government is opposed to an authoritative government, where the participation of its citizenry is limited or prohibited, and a state of anarchy where no form of government exists.
60) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Scientists often think that invasive plants succeed in a habitat because they happened to have already evolved favorable traits—a taste for the local soil, for example, or resistance to local pests. This research shows something different. It found that once relocated, a plant is able to continue to evolve rapidly to conquer its new habitat. Two biologists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia did an experiment to demonstrate that purple loosestrife living in different parts of the continent is adapted to its environment. They gathered purple loosestrife from the northern and southern regions of its range, then transplanted the northerners south, and the southerners north. The researchers, Robert Colautti and Spencer Barrett, found purple loosestrife produced fewer fruits the farther away it was from its original habitat. That indicated that the plants' differences were adapted to their environments. Northern purple loosestrife has to deal with a shorter growing season, so it blooms early in the spring to take advantage of as much time as possible. Compared to southern loosestrife grown in the north, it can produce up to 37 times as many fruits. But because it blooms later, southern loosestrife can grow bigger. In the southern U.S., where the growing season is long, southern-adapted loosestrife makes nine times as many fruits as northern-adapted loosestrife. By looking at other studies of the plant, Colautti and Barrett also found that purple loosestrife's blooming time and size adaptions were at least as important to its survival as the lack of natural predators in its new environment. This may also apply to Australia's weeds like thistle, lantana, Paterson's Curse and more.
61) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
An international team of scientists is set to go to the Arctic to investigate the Greenland shark longevity mystery. The shark is known to be the longest living vertebrate animal on the planet Earth. One of the members is Dr. Holy Shiels, a physiologist and senior lecturer in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester. She will be the only British scientist in the team to study Greenland shark, which is believed to be the vertebrate animals and mammals with the longest living. The shark is reported to have lived for more than 200 years, and possibly close to or more than 400 years. The shark is both hunter and a scavenger, that feed on seals and other animals including polar bears and whales. It is also known as one of the largest sharks, reaching to five and a half meters (18 feet), very close to the size of a great white. The research team is commissioned by the Greenland government and will conduct the research onboard the multi-purpose research vessel Sanna, operated by the Greenland Institute of Natural resources. A Greenland shark is estimated to be able to live for 400 years according to Science Magazine. Professor shiels expect to gather sufficient data of Greenland shark, a top predator in the Arctic sea. She wanted to find a clue of how Greenland shark is able to survive in the deep sea of the Arctic sea, by examining how its heart and circulation work in its normal habitat, as she specializes in the cardiovascular function.”Greenland sharks are classified as data deficient.”Shiels said. “ This means that we don’t know enough to put measures in place to protect them from over-fishing, pollution or climate change.”
62) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Brand loyalty exists when consumers repeat-purchase your brand rather than swapping and switching between brands. It is widely agreed that it is far more expensive to have to find a new customer than to keep existing ones happy, so brand loyalty is crucial for achieving high-profit margins. For charities, it is important to set a marketing objective of improving brand loyalty. If existing donors can be persuaded to set up a direct debit to the charity, its cash flow will improve significantly. Although some brands stay fresh for generations (Marmite is over 100 years old) others become jaded due to changes in consumer tastes and lifestyles. At this point, the firms need to refresh the brand image to keep the products relevant to the target market. A clear objective must be set. For instance: what brand attributes do we want to create? What do we want the brand to stand for? This occurs when a firm aims to change a brand’s image so that the brand appeals to a new target market. Twelve years into its life cycle, McVitie’s decided to reposition its Hobnobs biscuit brand. Hobnobs had been positioned as a homely, quite healthy biscuit for middle-aged consumers. The research pointed McVitie’s in a new direction: younger, more male, and less dull. So new packaging was designed and then launched in conjunction with a new, brighter advertising campaign. In 2013 Hobnobs sales were worth 36 million pounds, 9 percent up on the previous year.
63) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
One of Guinness World Records’ more unusual awards was presented at the National Maritime Museum yesterday. After a 100-day trial, the timepiece known as Clock B – which had been sealed in a clear plastic box to prevent tampering – was officially declared, by Guinness, to be the world’s “most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air”.
It was an intriguing enough award. But what is really astonishing is that the clock was designed more than 250 years ago by a man who was derided at the time for “an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity”, and whose plans for the clock lay ignored for two centuries.
The derision was poured on John Harrison, the British clockmaker whose marine chronometers had revolutionised seafaring in the 18th century (and who was the subject of Longitude by Dava Sobel). His subsequent claim – that he would go on to make a pendulum timepiece that was accurate to within a second over a 100-day period – triggered widespread ridicule. The task was simply impossible, it was declared.
But now the last laugh lies with Harrison. At a conference, Harrison Decoded: Towards a Perfect Pendulum Clock, held at Greenwich yesterday, observatory scientists revealed that a clock that had been built to the clockmaker’s exact specifications had run for 100 days during official tests and had lost only five-eighths of a second in that period.
64) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Almost 120 years ago, during the first Gilded Age, sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption”. He used it to refer to rich people flaunting their wealth through wasteful spending. Why buy a thousand-dollar suit when a hundred-dollar one serves the same function? The answer, Veblen said, was power. The rich asserted their dominance by showing how much money they could burn on things they didn’t need.
While radical at the time, Veblen’s observation seems obvious now. In the intervening decades, conspicuous consumption has become deeply embedded in the texture of American capitalism. Our new Gilded Age is even more Veblenian than the last. Today’s captains of industry publicize their social position with private islands and superyachts while the president of the United States covers nearly everything he owns in gold.
But the acquisition of insanely expensive commodities isn’t the only way that modern elites project power. More recently, another form of the status display has emerged. In the new Gilded Age, identifying oneself as a member of the ruling class doesn’t just require conspicuous consumption. It requires conspicuous production. If conspicuous consumption involves the worship of luxury, conspicuous production involves the worship of labour. It isn’t about how much you spend. It’s about how hard you work. Nowhere is the cult of conspicuous production more visible than among America’s CEOs.
65) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
As an art, architecture is essentially abstract and nonrepresentational and involves the manipulation of the relationships of spaces, volumes, planes, masses, and voids. Time is also an important factor in architecture since a building is usually comprehended in a succession of experiences rather than all at once. In most architecture, there is no one vantage point from which the whole structure can be understood. The use of light and shadow, as well as surface decoration, can greatly enhance a structure.
The analysis of building types provides insight into past cultures and eras. Behind each of the greater styles lies not a casual trend nor a vogue, but a period of serious and urgent experimentation directed toward answering the needs of a specific way of life. Climate, methods of labour, available materials, and economy of means all impose their dictates. Each of the greater styles has been aided by the discovery of new construction methods. Once developed, a method survives tenaciously, giving way only when social changes or new building techniques have reduced it. That evolutionary process is exemplified by the history of modern architecture, which developed from the first uses of structural iron and steel in the mid-19th cent.
66) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Asda has become the first food retailer in the country to measure how much customers can save by cutting back on food waste, thanks to a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Leeds. The idea behind the KTP was for the University, using Asda’s customer insight data, to apply its research to identify, investigate and implement ways of helping customers to reduce their food waste. This was one of the first times that a major retailer had tried to deliver large-scale sustainability changes, with the two-year project seen as a way for Asda to position themselves as true innovators in this area.
The campaign focused on providing customers with advice on everything from food storage and labelling, to create recipes for leftovers. Meanwhile, in-store events encouraged customers to make changes in their own homes. In fact, two million customers have said they will make changes to how they deal with food waste in their own homes, leading to an average saving of 57 pounds per customer, as well as a reduction in waste.
A key aspect of a KTP is that an associate is employed by the University to work in the firm and help deliver the desired outcomes of the KTP. As a part of the collaboration with Asda, Laura Babbs was given the task of driving forward the sustainability changes in the retailer. As a result of the success of her work, Laura eventually became a permanent member of the team at Asda.
67) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
The 1920's movie goers experience was largely dominated by silent movies but saw the introduction of synchronized sound.
In the 1920s movie stars were really stars - with huge salaries, the fashions and activities of the Hollywood greats echoed around the world and 100,000 people would gather in cities all over the world, including such diverse cities as London and Moscow, to greet Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks when they toured of Europe.
Early silent movies were often accompanied by live piano or organ music and provided enormous entertainment value to audiences captivated by the experience of watching moving pictures on the silver screen. Although the had been previous attempts to introduce sound, it wasn't until 1923 that a synchronised soundtrack was photographically recorded and printed on to the side of the strip of motion picture film and made it on to a commercially distributed movie. It would still be seven long years before talking pictures gained total supremacy and finally replaced the silent film era.
The first movie theatres were called Nickelodeons, and were very basic compared the luxurious picture palaces that followed but what an aura of excitement, of laughter, fun and tears surrounded them! Before the introduction of movie soundtracks, movies were often accompanied by scripted music from a piano.
68) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
According to researchers, the invisibility cloak illusion stems from the belief that we are much more socially observant than the people around us. This means that, while we watch and wonder about other people as much as possible, we often think that people around us are less aware. This illusion occurs because, while we are fully aware of our own impressions and speculations about other people, we have no idea about what those other people are thinking unless they choose to share with us, something that rarely happens except in exceptional circumstances.
To better understand what is happening, it is important to consider the groundbreaking research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman on cognitive biases. When people make judgments about other people in social situations, they often depend on specific biases such as the availability heuristic, i. e., that we attach more significance to thoughts that come to mind easily. This is why we consider thoughts about other people as being more important than thoughts about inanimate objects. And so, as we look around us, we tend to focus our thoughts on the people we see and what they happen to be doing. Which is why people-watching can be so addictive.
What adds to the sense that we are relatively invisible to others is that people tend to be as discreet as possible about their people-watching. Just because other people aren ‘ t sharing their observations with us, it ‘ s easy to pretend that they are not as observant as we are. Of course, people may share their people-watching observations with anyone they happen to be with but, for the most part, that only applies to something remarkable enough to comment on. For most of us, what we are seeing tends to be extremely private and not to be shared with others.
69) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
In a study in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, a team of scientists in Germany showed experts and novices simple geometric objects and simple chess positions and asked the subjects to identify them.Reaction times were measured and brain activity was monitored using functional M.R.I. scans. On the identification of the geometric objects, the subjects performed the same, showing that the chess experts had no special visualization skills. When the subjects were shown the chess positions, the experts identified them faster.
Focusing on an element of an earlier study on pattern and object recognition by chess experts, the researchers had expected to see parts of the left hemispheres of the experts’ brains — which are involved in object recognition — react more quickly than those of the novices when they performed the chess tasks. But the reaction times were the same.What set the experts apart was that parts of their right brain hemispheres — which are more involved in pattern recognition — also lit up with activity. The experts were processing the information in two places at once.
The researchers also found that when the subjects were shown the chess diagrams, the novices looked directly at the pieces to recognize them, while the experts looked on the middle of the boards and took everything in with their peripheral vision.
70) Read the passage below and summarize it using your own sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and how well your response presents the key points in the passage. Time: 10 minutes
Contrary to popular belief, babies under a few months don't grin at you because they're copying your own smile, according to new research. Many studies have indicated that from birth, infants imitate the behaviours and facial expressions of the adults around them. However, a team of Australian, South African and British researchers have released a study this week that refutes this widespread belief. "Numerous studies from the 1980s and 90s indicated no imitation by newborns, while others claimed it was there," says Virginia Slaughter, a biologist at the University of Queensland and co-author of the study. "We wanted to clear up the confusion because the 'fact' that newborns imitate is widely cited, not just in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and paediatrics, but also in popular sources for parents."
The international research team, led by Janine Oostenbroek, a psychologist at the University of York in the UK, exposed more than 100 infants to a broad range of gestures and recorded their responses at one, two, six and nine weeks of age. The gestures included social cues like adults poking their tongues out, frowning or grinning, as well as non-social cues such as pointing or opening a box. The findings showed no link between behaviours exhibited by babies in their first few months and the gestures they were exposed to. The babies were just as likely to exhibit gestures they had never seen before as repeat ones they had.
For instance, babies stuck their tongues out just as frequently if they were being exposed to pointing or opening a box, rather than anything to do with mouths or tongues.