Part 1
Socotra Island
Socotra Island
Situated in the Arabian Sea off the Arabian Peninsula is the Socotra archipelago, a remnant of an ancient landmass that became separated from Africa and Arabia 18 million years ago.
When scientists began the first substantial exploration of the islands 30 years ago, they found a fascinating collection of unusual plants and animals -- a unique combination of ‘relict’ populations (organisms that have become extinct elsewhere) and species that have evolved to cope with the island’s harsh conditions. In fact, almost a third of its plant species and up to 80 percent of its terrestrial animals are found nowhere else.
Life in the arid conditions is harsh for the people living there too. Isolated from the mainland by hundreds of kilometres, and with monsoons that rage for several months every year, the islanders were historically self-sufficient -- relying only on what they themselves could produce to survive. There are floods and droughts, and many islanders lack adequate water resources and nutrition. Medical care and education are limited.
However, the main island, Socotra, is experiencing significant change. A rapid development programme has been instituted that will have far-reaching impacts on the island’s people and the environment for decades to come. In the past, the only way to get to Socotra was by travelling for several days on a boat, but irregular flights began touching down on dirt landing strips during the late 1960s. By 1999, a runway had been constructed on Socotra that was capable of taking larger aircraft all year round, and since 2000 the capital, Hadibo, has seen huge expansion. New schools have been built, and a modern terminal was added to the airport, through which an increasing number of tourists are beginning to pass. And there are plans to construct new harbour facilities that will enable fishermen to sell their catch more easily, and also make it simpler for local people to have food, and bricks and timber for construction projects brought to the island.
However, although these improvements are significant, it’s the continuing development of Socotra’s road system that is having the greatest impact on the islanders. Until 1991, a few dirt tracks, navigable only by four-wheel drive, gave access to part of the island. Otherwise it was only possible to reach most areas on foot, or with a donkey. By 2001, however, there was an extensive network of unpaved car tracks, and the following year a tarmac road, the first of its kind on Socotra, connecting the airport to Hadibo, was completed. Now, a road traverses the Diksam plateau and continues on to the south coast, making essential services more accessible to a large number of villages.
There is no doubt that the development of Socotra’s infrastructure has brought many benefits to the island’s inhabitants, but there is growing concern that the speed with which it is taking place is so rapid that it will be difficult for local people to maintain certain traditions. There is also the fear that the developments will threaten the island’s unique ecosystems. Building new roads and harbours may lead to the introduction of alien species to Socotra Island (as has already happened with the Indian house crow), damage to the sea’s biodiversity through the increased collection and sale of coral, and tourist developments on an inappropriate and unsustainable scale.
Problems were also caused by increasing access to sensitive areas. For example, cutting the road along the coast caused considerable damage to the stunning scenery. However, some steps were then taken to limit the damage caused by further development. For example, biodiversity project officers were consulted in the planning stages of the road that crosses the centre of Socotra, so it avoids some of the most scenic areas and sites that contain plants only found in a limited number of locations. It is an area which is also home to the greatest concentrations of dragon’s blood trees and supports many endemic animals.
An agreement has now been reached about all future construction of roads. To protect the island’s ecologically sensitive areas, any proposed road will be subject to a report assessing its environmental impact prior to construction. The challenge has been to bring the benefits of development to Socotra without damaging the environment, which supports the people’s way of life and will form the basis of future development on the island.
Questions 1--5
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1. Scientists found species on the islands that had died out in other countries.
2. The inhabitants used to be dependent on the mainland.
3. The fact that the first flights to the island were infrequent was because of poor weather conditions.
4. Most visitors to the islands stay in the capital city.
5. People’s lives have been changed more by the airport than any other development.
Questions 6--13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Development of Socotra
- At one time, it was only possible to reach Socotra by 6.
- In 7 the airport runway was finished.
- The airport was further expanded with an up-to-date 8.
- Harbour improvements have made it easier to import 9 and building materials.
- Before the new road system, parts of Socotra were only accessible on foot, by 10 or in a four-wheel drive.
- Fewer 11 will be continued by local inhabitants because of the speed of development.
- Biodiversity officers ensured the new road did not pass through places with rare 12.
- In future, environmental damage by road construction will be evaluated in a 13.
Part 2
The Development of Television and Its Introduction in Britain
The Development of Television and Its Introduction in Britain
A The possibility of seeing events without being present at them was a dream of humanity for countless centuries. When the telephone emerged as a practical device in the late 1870s, the idea of also ‘seeing by electricity’ caught the public imagination, and as early as 1878 a cartoonist conceived of the ‘telephonoscope’, a wildly accurate prediction of global video communication. Various experiments were conducted, and two forms of television were invented almost simultaneously: the electronic and the mechanical.
B In 1897 a German physicist, Ferdinand Braun, developed a method of displaying electronic traces on a fluorescent screen coated inside an evacuated glass bulb. He called this the cathode-ray oscilloscope. A few years later a British scientist, A. A. Campbell Swinton, realized that Braun’s device could be used to display pictures transmitted electronically. Campbell Swinton wrote about the possibility of a television system in a scientific journal, Nature, in 1911. However, at that time it could not be built, as the components were not available.
C The real pioneer of electronic television was Vladimir Zworykin. His interest in the field developed when he worked on a cathode-ray tube receiver in St. Petersburg. In 1918 he left Russia for the United States, and in 1923 he patented the principles of the Iconoscope, a camera tube, and in 1924 the Kinescope, or television receiver. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) recognized the potential of Zworykin’s ideas, and in 1929 funded a laboratory for him to continue his research. The work was conducted in secret and Zworykin did not publish his paper describing the Iconoscope in detail until 1933. This was the breakthrough that made electronic television a practical possibility. For the first time, a pick-up device could televise studio and outdoor scenes at a standard of definition that would bear comparison with the cinema.
D Meanwhile, in Britain, public interest in television was stimulated by a Scotsman, John L. Baird. He loved experimenting and, in 1922, found the cause to which he was to devote his life--to invent mechanical television. As he lacked a real understanding of electronics, and would probably have been unaware of Zworykin’s work, he began his research using very simple mechanical equipment. Baird successfully transmitted his first crude pictures in April 1925, and gave the first public demonstration of television in 1926. But it was not until 1929 that the government accepted that the technical quality of his pictures had improved sufficiently to allow broadcasting. Transmissions began on frequencies available when normal radio programs had finished for the day. Baird used the late transmission time to his advantage--it became an opportunity to encourage performers from top London shows to the medium. They dropped into his nearby studio after finishing on stage and performed a song or a dance for one of his shows. He developed a large amount of material, and in 1931 he televised the Epsom Derby horse race live.
E However, at the beginning of the 1930s, interest in television in Britain was spreading beyond Baird. The research departments of Britain’s two largest record companies came together and formed Electric and Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI) in 1931. The new department of brilliant scientists was led by Isaac Shoenberg, who, like Zworykin, had once worked in Russia. The group first looked to develop cathode-ray receivers, retaining mechanical scanning for generating the picture. However, work on an electronic camera tube started in 1933, after Zworykin’s paper was published.
F The EMI team made a successful electronic tube in January 1934 and they called the design the Emitron. This was fundamentally the same as Zworykin’s Iconoscope, though there were manufacturing differences that gave it a superior performance. EMI did not immediately give up mechanical scanning, but they now joined forces with the Marconi Company to design the components and circuits of an all-electronic system of television. Very soon the technical superiority of the Marconi-EMI system was so obvious that, on 30 January 1937, the BBC ended transmissions using Baird’s television equipment.
G In 1936 television receiving sets were very expensive, possibly costing as much as a small car. Fewer than 500 were in use when the broadcasting service started, and growth was slower than had been hoped for. The signals could only be received clearly within a radius of about 30 miles from the television studio. Gradually the cost of sets came down, and just under 19,000 had been sold by 1939, when television in Britain abruptly came to an end for security reasons. War was about to be declared. The screens were to be dark for nearly seven years until, in 1946, the British government decided to restart television.
H Transmissions restarted with a broadcast of the Victory Parade in London. Television remained confined to the London region until 1949 when studios in Birmingham opened. From then on, coverage gradually spread across Britain. Many people had their first experience of television watching Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation ceremony. Households with television receivers opened up their homes to friends and neighbours. As the better-off purchased their new sets, so their old ones were sold on, which enlarged the audience still further. With quality entertainment now cheaply available at home, people went out far less often. Many cinemas and theatres closed down, and town centers became much emptier at night. The television age had finally arrived.
Questions 14--19
Reading Passage 2 has eight sections, A--H.
Which section contains the following information?
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14. The reason for a delay between the initial idea for an electronic television and its production | ||||||||
| 15. An explanation of how professional entertainers agreed to appear on television | ||||||||
| 16. Some examples of the social effects of television broadcasts | ||||||||
| 17. Reference to the confidential nature of certain research | ||||||||
| 18. The reason for the termination of mechanical television broadcasting | ||||||||
| 19. The reason for a long period of inactivity in British television broadcasting |
Questions 20--23
Look at the following researchers and the list of activities below.
Match each researcher with the correct activity, A--E.
List of Activities
A. Was involved in both the technical aspects and the content of television
B. Published an academic paper suggesting an application for a fellow scientist’s invention
C. Was influenced by research into public expectations of television
D. Headed a team with experience of sound technology
E. Was given financial support to carry out scientific investigations
20. A. A. Campbell Swinton
20
21. Vladimir Zworykin
21
22. John L. Baird
22
23. Isaac Shoenberg
23
Questions 24--26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
24. In the first few years of broadcasting, the price of a television could be similar to that of a 24.
25. At first, good television reception could not be obtained further than approximately 25 from the studio.
26. 26 was the second city in Britain to establish television studios.
Part 3
The Hazards of Multitasking
The Hazards of Multitasking
Doing more than one thing at once -- is it always a good idea?
You arrive at the office, review your to-do list and start to feel a headache coming on. You resolve to tackle the items as quickly as possible. While you return calls, you sort email and other letters. You begin keying in slides for tomorrow’s presentation. Then your manager comes in wanting an immediate update on sales figures. You have just opened the spreadsheet when a very important customer calls. With the receiver held between your shoulder and your ear, you continue adding up the sales totals until, 15 minutes later, you finally manage, politely, to get rid of the client. You’ve been multitasking again.
You may believe that anyone who wants to get ahead today should master the art of multitasking. However, a recent study by the Families and Work Institute in New York City has found that 45 per cent of US workers believe that they are asked or expected to work on too many tasks at once. Managers may be surprised to learn that they are actually wasting their workers’ time. As it turns out, the human brain cannot really master the computer’s art of crunching data in the background while moving between process windows. Instead, a growing number of studies show that trying to juggle jobs rather than completing them sequentially can take longer, and leave workers with a reduced ability to perform each task. In addition, the stress associated with multitasking may contribute to short-term memory difficulties. The combination results in inefficiency, careless thinking and mistakes -- not to mention the possible dangers of divided attention for drivers, air traffic controllers, and others who handle machinery.
How can a time management strategy that has become part of the common wisdom actually be so wrong? Exploring that question requires a closer look at an area of consciousness research that examines how the brain focuses attention. One of the modern foundations of current knowledge of multitasking was laid in 1935, when the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop reported that processing information from one task could cause interference with another. Stroop noticed that when study participants were asked to name the colour of a word -- such as ‘green’ printed in a different colour -- red, for example -- they experienced difficulty saying the name of the colour. This phenomenon is thought to occur when two tasks get tangled: the brain must suppress one that has been learned so well that it has become automatic (reading), to attend to a second task that requires concentration (naming the colour).
During the past couple of decades, psychologists have probed more deeply into the nature and limitations of multitasking. Psychologist and brain researcher Ernst Pöppel, of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, believes that it is impossible to carry out two or three different tasks simultaneously with the same degree of concentration. He says that seemingly simultaneous awareness and processing of information actually takes place in ‘three-second windows’. In these three-second segments, the brain takes in, as a block, all the data about the environment streaming in from the sensory systems; subsequent events are processed in the next window. So a person can concentrate on a conversation for three seconds, then for three seconds on a crying child, and three seconds on a computer screen. While one subject at a time occupies the foreground of consciousness, the others stay in the background until they, in turn, are given access to the central processor.
Another experiment by psychologist David E Meyer, of the University of Michigan, quantified just how much time we can lose when we shuttle between tasks. The researchers asked test participants to write a report and check their email at the same time. Those individuals who constantly jumped back and forth between the two tasks took about one and a half times as long to finish as those who completed one job before turning to the other. Each switchover from one task to another meant rethinking, and thus involved additional neural resources. In effect, the brain needs time to turn off the rules for one task and turn on the rules for another. ‘Multitasking saves time only when it is a matter of relaxed, routine tasks,’ Meyer says. It also takes the brain longer to adapt when switching rapidly back to an interrupted task, rather than waiting longer before switching back.
By its nature multitasking is stressful, and the area in the brain most involved with multitasking is also most affected by the resulting stress. Located behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex, which neuroscientists call the ‘executive’ part of the brain, helps us to assess tasks, prioritise them and assign mental resources. It also ‘marks’ the spot at which a task has been interrupted, so that we can return to it later. This stress can also affect cells in another region, the hippocampus, which is important for forming new memories; damage in that area also makes it difficult for a person to acquire new skills.
Psychiatrists Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, of Harvard University, say that multitasking can bring about a brain condition that causes sufferers to constantly seek new information while having difficulties concentrating on its content. All in all, it may be wise to let the email wait while you work on your presentation. You will save time and perform each task better.
Questions 27--31
Look at the following theories and the list of people below.
Match each theory with the correct person or people, A--D.
You may use any letter more than once.
List of People
A. John Ridley Stroop
B. Ernst Pöppel
C. David E Meyer
D. Edward Hallowell & John Ratey
27. Less attention will be paid to each task when more than one task is attempted at the same time.
27
28. Repeated changes of task mean that the brain will take a while to adjust.
28
29. Using the skills required for one task may make performing another one more difficult.
29
30. When multitasking, the brain can only focus on single tasks for very short periods.
30
31. Multitasking can lead to a medical problem.
31
Questions 32--34
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
32. What is suggested about the worker in the opening paragraph?
33. Drivers and air traffic controllers are mentioned in the passage because they
34. In John Ridley Stroop’s experiment, participants found it difficult to
Questions 35--39
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Effects of Multitasking on the Brain
The stressful nature of multitasking has been shown to affect parts of the brain. The area most affected is the prefrontal cortex which is found to the rear of the 35. It is the part of the brain which judges tasks, then puts them in order of importance and allocates 36; it also enables a worker to resume a task which has been put to one side.
A second area, the hippocampus, may also be affected by the stress of multitasking. If any 37 in the hippocampus are affected, people may have problems with storing 38, as well as learning 39.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
40. The main aim of this passage is to