Tổng hợp topic Technology (Computer, Science,...) IELTS READING (PDF)

A spark, a flint: How fire leapt to life

The control of fire was the first and perhaps greatest of humanity’s steps towards a life-enhancing technology.

To early man, fire was a divine gift randomly delivered in the form of lightning, forest fire or burning lava. Unable to make flame for themselves, the earliest peoples probably stored fire by keeping slow burning logs alight or by carrying charcoal in pots.

How and where man learnt how to produce flame at will is unknown. It was probably a secondary invention, accidentally made during tool-making operations with wood or stone. Studies of primitive societies suggest that the earliest method of making fire was through friction. European peasants would insert a wooden drill in a round hole and rotate it briskly between their palms. This process could be speeded up by wrapping a cord around the drill and pulling on each end.

The Ancient Greeks used lenses or concave mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays and burning glasses were also used by Mexican Aztecs and the Chinese.

Percussion methods of fire-lighting date back to Paleolithic times, when some Stone Age toolmakers discovered that chipping flints produced sparks. The technique became more efficient after the discovery of iron, about 5000 years ago. In Arctic North America, the Eskimos produced a slow-burning spark by striking quartz against iron pyrites, a compound that contains sulphur. The Chinese lit their fires by striking porcelain with bamboo. In Europe, the combination of steel, flint and tinder remained the main method of fire lighting until the mid 19th century.

Fire-lighting was revolutionized by the discovery of phosphorus, isolated in 1669 by a German alchemist trying to transmute silver into gold. Impressed by the element’s combustibility, several 17th century chemists used it to manufacture fire-lighting devices, but the results were dangerously inflammable. With phosphorus costing the equivalent of several hundred pounds per ounce, the first matches were expensive.

The quest for a practical match really began after 1781 when a group of French chemists came up with the Phosphoric Candle or Ethereal Match, a sealed glass tube containing a twist of paper tipped with phosphorus. When the tube was broken, air rushed in, causing the phosphorus self-combust. An even more hazardous device, popular in America, was the Instantaneous Light Box — a bottle filled with sulphuric acid into which splints treated with chemicals were dipped.

The first matches resembling those used today were made in 1827 by John Walker, an English pharmacist who borrowed the formula from a military rocket-maker called Congreve. Costing a shilling a box, Congreves were splints coated with sulphur and tipped with potassium chlorate. To light them, the user drew them quickly through folded glass paper.

Walker never patented his invention, and three years later it was copied by a Samuel Jones, who marketed his product as Lucifers. About the same time, a French chemistry student called Charles Sauria produced the first “strike-anywhere” match by substituting white phosphorus for the potassium chlorate in the Walker formula. However, since white phosphorus is a deadly poison, from 1845 match-makers exposed to its fumes succumbed to necrosis, a disease that eats away jaw-bones. It wasn’t until 1906 that the substance was eventually banned.

That was 62 years after a Swedish chemist called Pasch had discovered non-toxic red or amorphous phosphorus, a development exploited commercially by Pasch’s compatriot J E Lundstrom in 1885. Lundstrom’s safety matches were safe because the red phosphorus was non-toxic; it was painted on to the striking surface instead of the match tip, which contained potassium chlorate with a relatively high ignition temperature of 182 degrees centigrade.

America lagged behind Europe in match technology and safety standards. It wasn’t until 1900 that the Diamond Match Company bought a French patent for safety matches — but the formula did not work properly in the different climatic conditions prevailing in America and it was another 11 years before scientists finally adapted the French patent for the US.

The Americans, however, can claim several “firsts” in match technology and marketing. In 1892 the Diamond Match Company pioneered book matches. The innovation didn’t catch on until after 1896, when a brewery had the novel idea of advertising its product in match books. Today book matches are the most widely used type in the US, with 90 percent handed out free by hotels, restaurants and others.

Other American innovations include an anti-after-glow solution to prevent the match from smoldering after it has been blown out; and the waterproof match, which lights after eight hours in water.

Questions 1-8
Complete the summary below. Choose your answers from the box at the bottom of the page and write them in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more words than spaces so you will not use them all You may use any of the words more than once.

EARLY FIRE-LIGHTING METHODS

Primitive Societies saw fire as a ….….(Example)…..… gift. Answer: heavenly

They tried to ...... (1) ...... burning logs or charcoal ...... (2) ...... that they could create fire themselves. It is suspected that the first man-made flames were produced by ...... (3) ......

The very first fire-lighting methods involved the creation of ...... (4) ...... by, for example, rapidly ...... (5) ...... a wooden stick in a round hole. The use of ...... (6) ...... or persistent chipping was also widespread in Europe and among other peoples such as the Chinese and ...... (7) ........ European practice of this method continued until the 1850s ....... (8) ....... the discovery of phosphorus some years earlier.

List of Words

Mexicans

random

rotating

despite

preserve

realising

sunlight

lacking

heavenly

percussion

Chance

friction

unaware

without

make

heating

Eskimos

surprised

until

smoke

Questions 9-15
Look at the following notes that have been made about the matches described in Reading Passage 32. Decide which type of match (A-H) corresponds with each description and write your answers in boxes 9-15 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more matches than descriptions so you will not use them all. You may use any match more than once.

Example: could be lit after soaking in water. Answer: H

NOTES
9. made using a less poisonous type of phosphorus
10. identical to a previous type of match
11. caused a deadly illness
12. first to look like modern matches
13. first matches used for advertising
14. relied on an airtight glass container
15. made with the help of an army design

Types of Matches

A. the Ethereal Match
B. the Instantaneous Light box
C. Congreves
D. Lucifers
E. the first strike-anywhere match
F. Lundstrom’s safety match
G. book matches
H. waterproof matches

ARCHITECTURE - Reaching for the Sky

Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. A building reflects the scientific and technological achievements of the age as well as the ideas and aspirations of the designer and client. The appearance of individual buildings, however, is often controversial.

The use of an architectural style cannot be said to start or finish on a specific date. Neither is it possible to say exactly what characterises a particular movement. But the origins of what is now generally known as modern architecture can be traced back to the social and technological changes of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Instead of using timber, stone and traditional building techniques, architects began to explore ways of creating buildings by using the latest technology and materials such as steel, glass and concrete strengthened steel bars, known as reinforced concrete. Technological advances also helped bring about the decline of rural industries and an increase in urban populations as people moved to the towns to work in the new factories. Such rapid and uncontrolled growth helped to turn parts of cities into slums.

By the 1920s architects throughout Europe were reacting against the conditions created by industrialisation. A new style of architecture emerged to reflect more idealistic notions for the future. It was made possible by new materials and construction techniques and was known as Modernism.

By the 1930s many buildings emerging from this movement were designed in the International Style. This was largely characterised by the bold use of new materials and simple, geometric forms, often with white walls supported by stiltlike pillars. These were stripped of unnecessary decoration that would detract from their primary purpose to be used or lived in.

Walter Gropius, Charles Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were among the most influential of the many architects who contributed to the development of Modernism in the first half of the century. But the economic depression of the 1930s and the second world war (1939-45) prevented their ideas from being widely realised until the economic conditions improved and war-torn cities had to be rebuilt. By the 1950s, the International Style had developed into a universal approach to building, which standardised the appearance of new buildings in cities across the world.

Unfortunately, this Modernist interest in geometric simplicity and function became exploited for profit. The rediscovery of quick-and-easy-to-handle reinforced concrete and an improved ability to prefabricate building sections meant that builders could meet the budgets of commissioning authorities and handle a renewed demand for development quickly and cheaply. But this led to many badly designed buildings, which discredited the original aims of Modernism.

Influenced by Le Corbusier's ideas on town planning, every large British city built multi-storey housing estates in the 1960s. Mass produced, low-cost high-rises seemed to offer a solution to the problem of housing a growing inner-city population. But far from meeting human needs, the new estates often proved to be windswept deserts lacking essential social facilities and services. Many of these buildings were poorly designed and constructed and have since been demolished.

By the 1970s, a new respect for the place of buildings within the existing townscape arose. Preserving historic buildings or keeping only their facades (or fronts) grew common. Architects also began to make more use of building styles and materials that were traditional to the area. The architectural style usually referred to as High Tech was also emerging. It celebrated scientific and engineering achievements by openly parading the sophisticated techniques used in construction. Such buildings are commonly made of metal and glass; examples are Stansted airport and the Lloyd's building in London.

Disillusionment at the failure of many of the poor imitations of Modernist architecture led to interest in various styles and ideas from the past and present. By the 1980s the coexistence of different styles of architecture in the same building became known as Post-Modern. Other architects looked back to the classical tradition. The trend in architecture now favours smaller scale building design that reflects a growing public awareness of environmental issues such as energy efficiency. Like the Modernists, people today recognise that a well-designed environment improves the quality of life but is not necessarily achieved by adopting one well-defined style of architecture.

Twentieth century architecture will mainly be remembered for its tall buildings. They have been made possible by the development of light steel frames and safe passenger lifts. They originated in the US over a century ago to help meet the demand for more economical use of land. As construction techniques improved, the skyscraper became a reality.

                                                             Ruth Coleman

Questions 29-35
Complete the table below using information from Reading Passage 3. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 29-35 on your answer sheet.

Questions 36-40
Reading Passage 3 describes a number of cause and effect relationships.
Match each Cause (36-40) in List A, with its Effect (A-H) in List B.
Write your answers (A-H) in boxes 36 40 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more effects in List B than you will need, so you will not use all of them. You may use any effect more than once if you wish.

Spoken Corpus Comes To Life

A. The compiling of dictionaries has been historically the provenance of studious professorial types - usually bespectacled - who love to pore over weighty tomes and make pronouncements on the finer nuances of meaning. They were probably good at crosswords and definitely knew a lot of words, but the image was always rather dry and dusty. The latest technology, and simple technology at that, is revolutionising the content of dictionaries and the way they are put together.

B. For the first time, dictionary publishers are incorporating real, spoken English into their data. It gives lexicographers (people who write dictionaries) access to a more vibrant, up-to-date vernacular language which has never really been studied before. In one project, 150 volunteers each agreed to discreetly tie a Walkman recorder to their waist and leave it running for anything up to two weeks. Every conversation they had was recorded. When the data was collected, the length of tapes was 35 times the depth of the Atlantic Ocean. Teams of audio typists transcribed the tapes to produce a computerised database of ten million words.

C. This has been the basis - along with an existing written corpus - for the Language Activator dictionary, described by lexicographer Professor Randolph Quirk as “the book the world has been waiting for”. It shows advanced foreign learners of English how the language is really used. In the dictionary, keywords such as “eat” are followed by related phrases such as “wolf down” or “be a picky eater”, allowing the student to choose the appropriate phrase.

D. “This kind of research would be impossible without computers,” said Delia Summers, a director of dictionaries. “It has transformed the way lexicographers work. If you look at the word “like”, you may intuitively think that the first and most frequent meaning is the verb, as in “I like swimming”. It is not. It is the preposition, as in: “she walked like a duck”. Just because a word or phrase is used doesn’t mean it ends up in a dictionary. The sifting out process is as vital as ever. But the database does allow lexicographers to search for a word and find out how frequently it is used - something that could only be guessed at intuitively before.

E. Researchers have found that written English works in a very different way to spoken English. The phrase “say what you like” literally means “feel free to say anything you want”, but in reality it is used, evidence shows, by someone to prevent the other person voicing disagreement. The phrase “it”s a question of crops up on the database over and over again. It has nothing to do with enquiry, but it’s one of the most frequent English phrases which has never been in a language learner’s dictionary before: it is now.

F. The Spoken Corpus computer shows how inventive and humorous people are when they are using language by twisting familiar phrases for effect. It also reveals the power of the pauses and noises we use to play for time, convey emotion, doubt and irony.

G. For the moment, those benefiting most from the Spoken Corpus are foreign learners. “Computers allow lexicographers to search quickly through more examples of real English,” said Professor Geoffrey Leech of Lancaster University. “They allow dictionaries to be more accurate and give a feel for how language is being used.” The Spoken Corpus is part of the larger British National Corpus, an initiative carried out by several groups involved in the production of language learning materials: publishers, universities and the British Library.

Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs (A-G). Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-xi) in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet. Paragraph C has been done for you as an example.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them. You may use any heading more than once.

List of Headings

i. Grammar is corrected
ii. New method of research
iii. Technology learns from dictionaries
iv. Non-verbal content
v. The first study of spoken language
vi. Traditional lexicographical methods
vii. Written English tells the truth
viii. New phrases enter dictionary
ix. A cooperative research project
x. Accurate word frequency counts
xi. Alternative expressions provided

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B

Example Answer:
Paragraph C xi

3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E
5. Paragraph F
6. Paragraph G

Questions 7-11
The diagram below illustrates the information provided in paragraphs B-F of Reading Passage 127. Complete the labels on the diagram with an appropriate word or words Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each space. Write your answers in boxes 7-11 on your answer sheet.

Question 12
Choose the appropriate letter A-D and write it in box 12 on your answer sheet.

12. Why was this article written?
A. To give an example of a current dictionary.
B. To announce a new approach to dictionary writing.
C. To show how dictionaries have progressed over the years.
D. To compare the content of different dictionaries

Moles happy as homes go underground

A. The first anybody knew about Dutchman Frank Siegmund and his family was when workmen tramping through a field found a narrow steel chimney protruding through the grass. Closer inspection revealed a chink of sky-light window among the thistles, and when amazed investigators moved down the side of the hill they came across a pine door complete with leaded diamond glass and a brass knocker set into an underground building. The Siegmunds had managed to live undetected for six years outside the border town of Breda, in Holland. They are the latest in a clutch of individualistic homemakers who have burrowed underground in search of tranquillity.

B. Most, falling foul of strict building regulations, have been forced to dismantle their individualistic homes and return to more conventional lifestyles. But subterranean suburbia, Dutch-style, is about to become respectable and chic. Seven luxury homes cosseted away inside a high earth-covered noise embankment next to the main Tilburg city road recently went on the market for $296,500 each. The foundations had yet to be dug, but customers queued up to buy the unusual part-submerged houses, whose back wall consists of a grassy mound and whose front is a long glass gallery.

C. The Dutch are not the only would-be moles. Growing numbers of Europeans are burrowing below ground to create houses, offices, discos and shopping malls. It is already proving a way of life in extreme climates; in winter months in Montreal, Canada, for instance, citizens can escape the cold in an underground complex complete with shops and even health clinics. In Tokyo, builders are planning a massive underground city to be begun in the next decade, and underground shopping malls are already common in Japan, where 90 percent of the population is squeezed into 20 percent of the land space.

D. Building big commercial buildings underground can be a way to avoid disfiguring or threatening a beautiful or 'environmentally sensitive' landscape. Indeed many of the buildings which consume most land -such as cinemas, supermarkets, theatres, warehouses or libraries -have no need to be on the surface since they do not need windows.

E. There are big advantages, too, when it comes to private homes. A development of 194 houses which would take up 14 hectares of land above ground would occupy 2.7 hectares below it, while the number of roads would be halved. Under several metres of earth, noise is minimal and insulation is excellent. "We get 40 to 50 enquiries a week," says Peter Carpenter, secretary of the British Earth Sheltering Association, which builds similar homes in Britain. "People see this as a way of building for the future." An underground dweller himself, Carpenter has never paid a heating bill, thanks to solar panels and natural insulation.

F. In Europe the obstacle has been conservative local authorities and developers who prefer to ensure quick sales with conventional mass-produced housing. But the Dutch development was greeted with undisguised relief by South Limburg planners because of Holland's chronic shortage of land. It was the Tilburg architect Jo Hurkmans who hit on the idea of making use of noise embankments on main roads. His two floored, four-bedroomed, two-bathroomed detached homes are now taking shape. "They are not so much below the earth as in it," he says. "All the light will come through the glass front, which runs from the second-floor ceiling to the ground. Areas which do not need much natural lighting are at the back. The living accommodation is to the front so nobody notices that the back is dark."

G. In the US, where energy-efficient homes became popular after the oil crisis of 1973, 10,000 underground houses have been built. A terrace of five homes, Britain's first subterranean development, is under way in Nottinghamshire. Italy's outstanding example of subterranean architecture is the Olivetti residential centre in Ivrea. Commissioned by Roberto Olivetti in 1969, it comprises 82 one-bedroomed apartments and 12 maisonettes and forms a house/ hotel for Olivetti employees. It is built into a hill and little can be seen from outside except a glass facade. Patnzia Vallecchi, a resident since 1992, says it is little different from living in a conventional apartment.

H. Not everyone adapts so well, and in Japan scientists at the Shimizu Corporation have developed "space creation" systems which mix light, sounds, breezes and scents to stimulate people who spend long periods below ground. Underground offices in Japan are being equipped with "virtual" windows and mirrors, while underground departments in the University of Minnesota have periscopes to reflect views and light.

I. But Frank Siegmund and his family love their hobbit lifestyle. Their home evolved when he dug a cool room for his bakery business in a hill he had created. During a heatwave, they took to sleeping there. "We felt at peace and so close to nature," he says. "Gradually I began adding to the rooms. It sounds strange but we are so close to the earth we draw strength from its vibrations. Our children love it; not every child can boast of being watched through their playroom windows by rabbits.

Questions 13-20
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs (A-I). Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-xii) in boxes 13 -20 on your answer sheet. Paragraph A has been done for you as an example.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them.

List of Headings

i. A designer describes his houses

ii. Most people prefer conventional housing

iii. Simulating a natural environment

iv. How an underground family home developed

v. Demands on space and energy are reduced

vi. The plans for future homes

vii. Worldwide examples of underground living accommodation

viii. Some buildings do not require natural light

ix. Developing underground services around the world

x. Underground living improves health

xi. Homes sold before completion

xii. An underground home is discovered

13. Paragraph B
14. Paragraph C
15. Paragraph D
16. Paragraph E
17. Paragraph F
18. Paragraph G
19. Paragraph H
20. Paragraph I

Questions 21-26
Complete the sentences below with words taken from the reading passage. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

21. Many developers prefer mass-produced houses because they ..............
22. The Dutch development was welcomed by ............
23. Hurkmans’ houses are built into ............
24. The Ivrea centre was developed for .............
25. Japanese scientists are helping people ............. underground life.
26. Frank Siegmund’s first underground room was used for ...........

Glass

Capturing the Dance of Light

A. Glass, in one form or another, has long been in noble service to humans As one of the most widely used of manufactured materials, and certainly the most versatile, it can be as imposing as a telescope mirror the width of a tennis court or as small and simple as a marble rolling across dirt. The uses of this adaptable material have been broadened dramatically by new technologies glass fibre optics — more than eight million miles — carrying telephone and television signals across nations, glass ceramics serving as the nose cones of missiles and as crowns for teeth; tiny glass beads taking radiation doses inside the body to specific organs, even a new type of glass fashioned of nuclear waste in order to dispose of that unwanted material.

B. On the horizon are optical computers These could store programs and process information by means of light - pulses from tiny lasers - rather than electrons And the pulses would travel over glass fibres, not copper wire These machines could function hundreds of times faster than today’s electronic computers and hold vastly more information Today fibre optics are used to obtain a clearer image of smaller and smaller objects than ever before - even bacterial viruses. A new generation of optical instruments is emerging that can provide detailed imaging of the inner workings of cells. It is the surge in fibre optic use and in liquid crystal displays that has set the U.S. glass industry (a 16 billion dollar business employing some 150,000 workers) to building new plants to meet demand.

C. But it is not only in technology and commerce that glass has widened its horizons. The use of glass as art, a tradition spins back at least to Roman times, is also booming. Nearly everywhere, it seems, men and women are blowing glass and creating works of art. «I didn’t sell a piece of glass until 1975,» Dale Chihuly said, smiling, for in the 18 years since the end of the dry spell, he has become one of the most financially successful artists of the 20th century. He now has a new commission - a glass sculpture for the headquarters building of a pizza company - for which his fee is half a million dollars.

D. But not all the glass technology that touches our lives is ultra-modern. Consider the simple light bulb; at the turn of the century most light bulbs were hand blown, and the cost of one was equivalent to half a day’s pay for the average worker. In effect, the invention of the ribbon machine by Corning in the 1920s lighted a nation. The price of a bulb plunged. Small wonder that the machine has been called one of the great mechanical achievements of all time. Yet it is very simple: a narrow ribbon of molten glass travels over a moving belt of steel in which there are holes. The glass sags through the holes and into waiting moulds. Puffs of compressed air then shape the glass. In this way, the envelope of a light bulb is made by a single machine at the rate of 66,000 an hour, as compared with 1,200 a day produced by a team of four glassblowers.

E. The secret of the versatility of glass lies in its interior structure. Although it is rigid, and thus like a solid, the atoms are arranged in a random disordered fashion, characteristic of a liquid. In the melting process, the atoms in the raw materials are disturbed from their normal position in the molecular structure; before they can find their way back to crystalline arrangements the glass cools. This looseness in molecular structure gives the material what engineers call tremendous “formability” which allows technicians to tailor glass to whatever they need.

F. Today, scientists continue to experiment with new glass mixtures and building designers test their imaginations with applications of special types of glass. A London architect, Mike Davies, sees even more dramatic buildings using molecular chemistry. “Glass is the great building material of the future, the «dynamic skin»,’ he said. “Think of glass that has been treated to react to electric currents going through it, glass that will change from clear to opaque at the push of a button, that gives you instant curtains. Think of how the tall buildings in New York could perform a symphony of colours as the glass in them is made to change colours instantly.” Glass as instant curtains is available now, but the cost is exorbitant. As for the glass changing colours instantly, that may come true. Mike Davies’s vision may indeed be on the way to fulfilment.

Adapted from “Glass: Capturing the Dance of Light” by William S. Ellis, National Geographic

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs (A-F). Choose the most suitable heading/or each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-x) in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. Paragraph A has been done for you as an example.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them. You may use any heading more at once.

Example: Paragraph A. Answer: X

List of Headings

i. Growth in the market for glass crafts
ii. Computers and their dependence on glass

iii. What makes glass so adaptable
iv. Historical development of glass
v. Scientists’ dreams cost millions
vi. Architectural experiments with glass
vii. Glass art galleries flourish
viii. Exciting innovations in fibre optics
ix. A former glass technology
x . Everyday uses of glass

1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E
5. Paragraph F

Questions 6-8
The diagram below shows the principle of Coming’s ribbon machine. Label the diagram by selecting NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage to fill each numbered space. Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

Questions 9-13
Look at the list below of the uses of glass. According to the passage, state whether these uses exist today, will exist in the future or are not mentioned by the writer. In boxes 9-13, write:

A if the uses exist today
B if the uses will exist in the future
C if the uses are not mentioned by the writer

9. dental fittings
10. optical computers
11. sculptures
12. fashions
13. curtains

AIRPORTS ON WATER

River deltas are difficult places for map makers. The river builds them up, the sea wears them down; their outlines are always changing. The changes in China's Pearl River delta, however, are more dramatic than these natural fluctuations. An island six kilometers long and with a total area of 1248 hectares is being created there. And the civil engineers are as interested in performance as in speed and size. This is a bit of the delta that they want to endure.

The new island of Chek Lap Kok, the site of Hong Kong's new airport, is 83% complete. The giant dumper trucks rumbling across it will have finished their job by the middle of this year and the airport itself will be built at a similarly breakneck pace.

As Chek Lap Kok rises, however, another new Asian island is sinking back into the sea. This is a 520-hectare island built in Osaka Bay, Japan, that serves as the platform for the new Kansai airport. Chek Lap Kok was built in a different way, and thus hopes to avoid the same sinking fate.

The usual way to reclaim land is to pile sand rock on to the seabed. When the seabed oozes with mud, this is rather like placing a textbook on a wet sponge: the weight squeezes the water out, causing both water and sponge to settle lower. The settlement is rarely even: different parts sink at different rates. So buildings, pipes, roads and so on tend to buckle and crack. You can engineer around these problems, or you can engineer them out. Kansai took the first approach; Chek Lap Kok is taking the second.

The differences are both political and geological. Kansai was supposed to be built just one kilometer offshore, where the seabed is quite solid. Fishermen protested, and the site was shifted a further five kilometers. That put it in deeper water (around 20 meters) and above a seabed that consisted of 20 meters of soft alluvial silt and mud deposits. Worse, below it was a not-very- firm glacial deposit hundreds of meters thick.

The Kansai builders recognized that settlement was inevitable. Sand was driven into the seabed to strengthen it before the landfill was piled on top, in an attempt to slow the process; but this has not been as effective as had been hoped. To cope with settlement, Kansai's giant terminal is supported on 900 pillars. Each of them can be individually jacked up, allowing wedges to be added underneath. That is meant to keep the building level. But it could be a tricky task.

Conditions are different at Chek Lap Kok. There was some land there to begin with, the original little island of Chek Lap Kok and a smaller outcrop called Lam Chau. Between them, these two outcrops of hard, weathered granite make up a quarter of the new island's surface area. Unfortunately, between the islands there was a layer of soft mud, 27 meters thick in places.

According to Frans Uiterwijk, a Dutchman who is the project's reclamation director, it would have been possible to leave this mud below the reclaimed land, and to deal with the resulting settlement by the Kansai method. But the consortium that won the contract for the island opted for a more aggressive approach. It assembled the worlds largest fleet of dredgers, which sucked up l50m cubic meters of clay and mud and dumped it in deeper waters. At the same time, sand was dredged from the waters and piled on top of the layer of stiff clay that the massive dredging had laid bare.

Nor was the sand the only thing used. The original granite island which had hills up to 120 meters high was drilled and blasted into boulders no bigger than two meters in diameter. This provided 70m cubic meters of granite to add to the island's foundations. Because the heap of boulders does not fill the space perfectly, this represents the equivalent of 105m cubic meters of landfill. Most of the rock will become the foundations for the airport's runways and its taxiways. The sand dredged from the waters will also be used to provide a two-meter capping layer over the granite platform. This makes it easier for utilities to dig trenches –granite is unyielding stuff. Most of the terminal buildings will be placed above the site of the existing island. Only a limited amount of pile-driving is needed to support building foundations above softer areas.

The completed island will be six to seven meters above sea level. In all, 350m cubic meters of material will have been moved. And much of it, like the overloads, has to be moved several times before reaching its final resting place. For example, there has to be a motorway capable of carrying 150-tonne dump-trucks; and there has to be a raised area for the 15,000 construction workers. These are temporary; they will be removed when the airport is finished.

The airport, though, is here to stay. To protect it, the new coastline is being bolstered with a formidable twelve kilometers of sea defenses. The brunt of a typhoon will be deflected by the neighboring island of Lantau; the sea walls should guard against the rest. Gentler but more persistent bad weather - the downpours of the summer monsoon – is also being taken into account. A mat-like material called geo textile is being laid across the island to separate the rock and sand layers. That will stop sand particles from being washed into the rock voids, and so causing further settlement This island is being built never to be sunk.

Questions 1–5
Classify the following statements as applying to

A Chek Lap Kok airport only
B Kansai airport only
C Both airports

Write the appropriate letters A–C in boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet.

Example: built on a man-made island. Answer: C

1. having an area of over 1000 hectares
2. built in a river delta
3. built in the open sea
4. built by reclaiming land
5. built using conventional methods of reclamation

Questions 6–9
Complete the labels on Diagram B below.Choose your answers from the box below the diagram and write them in boxes 6–9 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more words/phrases than spaces, so you will not use them all.

DIAGRAM A
Cross-section of the original area around Chek Lap Kok before work began

DIAGRAM B
Cross-section of the same area at the time the article was written

granite

runways and taxiways
mud

water
terminal building site

stiff clay
sand

Questions 10–13
Complete the summary below. Choose your answers from the box below the summary and write them in boxes 10–13 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more words than spaces, so you will not use them all.

When the new Chek Lap Kok airport has been completed, the raised area and the .......... ( Example ) .......... will be removed. Answer: motorway

The island will be partially protected from storms by .........(10)......... and also by .........(11)......... . Further settlement caused by .........(12)......... will be prevented by the use of .........(13)......... .

construction workers

coastline

dump-trucks
geotextile

Lantau Island

motorway
rainfall

rock and sand

rock voids
sea walls

typhoons

The Motor Car

A. There are now over 700 million motor vehicles in the world - and the number is rising by more than 40 million each year. The average distance driven by car users is growing too - from 8 km a day per person in western Europe in 1965 to 25 km a day in 1995. This dependence on motor vehicles has given rise to major problems, including environmental pollution, depletion of oil resources, traffic congestion and safety.

B. While emissions from new cars are far less harmful than they used to be, city streets and motorways are becoming more crowded than ever, often with older trucks, buses and taxis, which emit excessive levels of smoke and fumes. This concentration of vehicles makes air quality in urban areas unpleasant and sometimes dangerous to breathe. Even Moscow has joined the list of capitals afflicted by congestion and traffic fumes. In Mexico City, vehicle pollution is a major health hazard.

C. Until a hundred years ago, most journeys were in the 20 km range, the distance conveniently accessible by horse. Heavy freight could only be carried by water or rail. The invention of the motor vehicle brought personal mobility to the masses and made rapid freight delivery possible over a much wider area. Today about 90 percent of inland freight in the United Kingdom is carried by road. Clearly, the world cannot revert to the horse-drawn wagon. Can it avoid being locked into congested and polluting ways of transporting people and goods?

D. In Europe, most cities are still designed for the old modes of transport. Adaptation to the motor car has involved adding ring roads, one-way systems and parking lots. In the United States, more land is assigned to car use than to housing. Urban sprawl means that life without a car is next to impossible. Mass use of motor vehicles has also killed or injured millions of people. Other social effects have been blamed on the car such as alienation and aggressive human behaviour.

E. A 1993 study by the European Federation for Transport and Environment found that car transport is seven times as costly as rail travel in terms of the external social costs it entails such as congestion, accidents, pollution, loss of cropland and natural habitats, depletion of oil resources, and so on. Yet cars easily surpass trains or buses as a flexible and convenient mode of personal transport. It is unrealistic to expect people to give up private cars in favour of mass transit.

F. Technical solutions can reduce the pollution problem and increase the fuel efficiency of engines. But fuel consumption and exhaust emissions depend on which cars are preferred by customers and how they are driven. Many people buy larger cars than they need for daily purposes or waste fuel by driving aggressively. Besides, global car use is increasing at a faster rate than the improvement in emissions and fuel efficiency which technology is now making possible.

G. One solution that has been put forward is the long-term solution of designing cities and neighbourhoods so that car journeys are not necessary - all essential services being located within walking distance or easily accessible by public transport. Not only would this save energy and cut carbon dioxide emissions, it would also enhance the quality of community life, putting the emphasis on people instead of cars. Good local government is already bringing this about in some places. But few democratic communities are blessed with the vision - and the capital - to make such profound changes in modern lifestyles.

H. A more likely scenario seems to be a combination of mass transit systems for travel into and around cities, with small 'low emission' cars for urban use and larger hybrid or lean burn cars for use elsewhere. Electronically tolled highways might be used to ensure that drivers pay charges geared to actual road use. Better integration of transport systems is also highly desirable - and made more feasible by modern computers. But these are solutions for countries which can afford them. In most developing countries, old cars and old technologies continue to predominate.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 39 has eight paragraphs (A-H). Which paragraphs concentrate on the following information? Write the appropriate letters (A-H) in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
NB You need only write ONE letter for each answer.

14. a comparison of past and present transportation methods
15. how driving habits contribute to road problems
16. the relative merits of cars and public transport
17. the writer's own prediction of future solutions
18. the increasing use of motor vehicles
19. the impact of the car on city development

Questions 20-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 20-26 on your answer sheet, write:
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage

20. Vehicle pollution is worse in European cities than anywhere else.
21. Transport by horse would be a useful alternative to motor vehicles.
22. Nowadays freight is not carried by water in the United Kingdom.
23. Most European cities were not designed for motor vehicles.
24. Technology alone cannot solve the problem of vehicle pollution.
25. People's choice of car and attitude to driving is a factor in the pollution problem.
26. Redesigning cities would be a short-term solution.

Questions 27-33
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs (A-H). Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B-H from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-x) in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use all of them.

List of Headings
i. Common objections
ii. Who's planning what
iii. This type sells best in the shops
iv. The figures say it all
v. Early trials
vi. They can't get in without these
vii. How does it work?
viii. Fighting fraud
ix. Systems to avoid
x. Accepting the inevitable

27. Paragraph B
28. Paragraph C
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E
31. Paragraph F
32. Paragraph G
33. Paragraph H

The Keyless Society

A. Students who want to enter the University of Montreal's Athletic Complex need more than just a conventional ID card - their identities must be authenticated by an electronic hand scanner. In some California housing estates, a key alone is insufficient to get someone in the door; his or her voiceprint must also be verified. And soon, customers at some Japanese banks will have to present their faces for scanning before they can enter the building and withdraw their money.

B. All of these are applications of biometrics, a little-known but fast-growing technology that involves the use of physical or biological characteristics to identify individuals. In use for more than a decade at some high-security government institutions in the United States and Canada, biometrics are now rapidly popping up in the everyday world. Already, more than 10,000 facilities, from prisons to day-care centres, monitor people's fingerprints or other physical parts to ensure that they are who they claim to be. Some 60 biometric companies around the world pulled in at least $22 million last year and that grand total is expected to mushroom to at least $50 million by 1999.
C. Biometric security systems operate by storing a digitised record of some unique human feature. When an authorised user wishes to enter or use the facility, the system scans the person's corresponding characteristics and attempts to match them against those on record. Systems using fingerprints, hands, voices, irises, retinas and faces are already on the market. Others using typing patterns and even body odours are in various stages of development.

D. Fingerprint scanners are currently the most widely deployed type of biometric application, thanks to their growing use over the last 20 years by law-enforcement agencies. Sixteen American states now use biometric fingerprint verification systems to check that people claiming welfare payments are genuine. In June, politicians in Toronto voted to do the same, with a pilot project beginning next year.

E. To date, the most widely used commercial biometric system is the handkey, a type of hand scanner which reads the unique shape, size and irregularities of people's hands. Originally developed for nuclear power plants, the handkey received its big break when it was used to control access to the Olympic Village in Atlanta by more than 65,000 athletes, trainers and support staff. Now there are scores of other applications.
F. Around the world, the market is growing rapidly. Malaysia, for example, is preparing to equip all of its airports with biometric face scanners to match passengers with luggage. And Japan's largest maker of cash dispensers is developing new machines that incorporate iris scanners. The first commercial biometric, a hand reader used by an American firm to monitor employee attendance, was introduced in 1974. But only in the past few years has the technology improved enough for the prices to drop sufficiently to make them commercially viable. 'When we started four years ago, I had to explain to everyone what a biometric is,' says one marketing expert. 'Now, there's much more awareness out there.'

G. Not surprisingly, biometrics raise thorny questions about privacy and the potential for abuse. Some worry that governments and industry will be tempted to use the technology to monitor individual behaviour. 'If someone used your fingerprints to match your health-insurance records with a credit-card record showing you regularly bought lots of cigarettes and fatty foods,' says one policy analyst, 'you would see your insurance payments go through the roof.' In Toronto, critics of the welfare fingerprint plan complained that it would stigmatise recipients by forcing them to submit to a procedure widely identified with criminals.

H. Nonetheless, support for biometrics is growing in Toronto as it is in many other communities. In an increasingly crowded and complicated world, biometrics may well be a technology whose time has come.

Questions 34-40
Look at the following groups of people (Questions 34-40) and the list of biometric systems (A-F) below. Match the groups of people to the biometric system associated with them in Reading Passage 3. Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 34-40 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any biometric system more than once.

34. sports students
35. Olympic athletes
36. airline passengers
37. welfare claimants
38. business employees
39. homeowners
40. bank customers

List of Biometric Systems

A. fingerprint scanner

B. hand scanner

C. body odor

D. voiceprint

E. face scanner

F. typing pattern

The Discovery of Uranus

Someone once put forward an attractive though unlikely theory. Throughout the Earth’s annual revolution around the sun, there is one point of space always hidden from our eyes. This point is the opposite part of the Earth’s orbit, which is always hidden by the sun. Could there be another planet there, essentially similar to our own, but always invisible?

If a space probe today sent back evidence that such a world existed it would cause not much more sensation than Sir William Herschel’s discovery of a new planet, Uranus, in 1781. Herschel was an extraordinary man — no other astronomer has ever covered so vast a field of work — and his career deserves study. He was born in Hanover in Germany in 1738, left the German army in 1757, and arrived in England the same year with no money but quite exceptional music ability. He played the violin and oboe and at one time was organist in the Octagon Chapel in the city of Bath. Herschel’s was an active mind, and deep inside he was conscious that music was not his destiny; he therefore, read widely in science and the arts, but not until 1772 did he come across a book on astronomy. He was then 34, middle-aged by the standards of the time, but without hesitation he embarked on his new career, financing it by his professional work as a musician. He spent years mastering the art of telescope construction, and even by present-day standards his instruments are comparable with the best.

Serious observation began 1774. He set himself the astonishing task of ‘reviewing the heavens’, in other words, pointing his telescope to every accessible part of the sky and recording what he saw. The first review was made in 1775; the second, and most momentous, in 1780-81. It was during the latter part of this that he discovered Uranus. Afterwards, supported by the royal grant in recognition of his work, he was able to devote himself entirely to astronomy. His final achievements spread from the sun and moon to remote galaxies (of which he discovered hundreds), and papers flooded from his pen until his death in 1822. Among these, there was one sent to the Royal Society in 1781, entitled An Account of a Comet. In his own words:

On Tuesday the 13th of March, between ten and eleven in the evening, while I was examining the small stars in the neighbourhood of H Geminorum, I perceived one that appeared visibly larger than the rest; being struck with its uncommon magnitude, I compared it to H Geminorum and the small star in the quartile between Auriga and Gemini, and finding it to be much larger than either of them, suspected it to be a comet.

Herschel’s care was the hallmark of a great observer; he was not prepared to jump any conclusions. Also, to be fair, the discovery of a new planet was the last thought in anybody’s mind. But further observation by other astronomers besides Herschel revealed two curious facts. For the comet, it showed a remarkably sharp disc; furthermore, it was moving so slowly that it was thought to be a great distance from the sun, and comets are only normally visible in the immediate vicinity of the sun. As its orbit came to be worked out the truth dawned that it was a new planet far beyond Saturn’s realm, and that the ‘reviewer of the heavens’ had stumbled across an unprecedented prize. Herschel wanted to call it georgium sidus (Star of George) in honour of his royal patron King George III of Great Britain. The planet was later for a time called Herschel in honour of its discoverer. The name Uranus, which was first proposed by the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, was in use by the late 19th century.

Uranus is a giant in construction, but not so much in size; its diameter compares unfavourably with that of Jupiter and Saturn, though on the terrestrial scale it is still colossal. Uranus’ atmosphere consists largely of hydrogen and helium, with a trace of methane. Through a telescope the planet appears as a small bluish-green disc with a faint green periphery. In 1977, while recording the occultation¹ of a star behind the planet, the American astronomer James L. Elliot discovered the presence of five rings encircling the equator of Uranus. Four more rings were discovered in January 1986 during the exploratory flight of Voyager 2². In addition to its rings, Uranus has 15 satellites (‘moons’), the last 10 discovered by Voyager 2 on the same flight; all revolve about its equator and move with the planet in an east—west direction. The two largest moons, Titania and Oberon, were discovered by Herschel in 1787. The next two, Umbriel and Ariel, were found in 1851 by the British astronomer William Lassell. Miranda, thought before 1986 to be the innermost moon, was discovered in 1948 by the American astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper.

Glossary:
'Occultation' : in astronomy, when one object passes in front of another and hides the second from view, especially, for example, when the moon comes between an observer and a star or planet .
‘Voyager 2‘ : an unmanned spacecraft sent on a voyage past Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter in 1986; during which it sent back information about these planets to scientists on earth .

Questions 27-31
Complete the table below. Write a date for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

Questions 32-36
Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer of the Reading Passage? In boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet, write:

YES if the statement reflects the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

Example: Herschel was multi-talented. Answer: YES

32. It is improbable that there is a planet hidden behind the sun.
33. Herschel knew immediately that he had found a new planet.
34. Herschel collaborated with other astronomers of his time.
35. Herschel’s newly-discovered object was considered to be too far from the sun to be a comet.
36. Herschel’s discovery was the most important find of the last three hundred years.

Questions 37-40
Complete each of the following statements (Questions 37-40) with a name from the Reading Passage. Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

The suggested names of the new planet started with …….. (37) …….., then …….. (38) ……., before finally settling on Uranus. The first five rings around Uranus were discovered by …….. (39) ……… From 1948 until 1986, the moon …….. (40)…….. was believed to be the moon closest to the surface of Uranus.

Questions 27-32
The following Reading Passage has seven paragraphs (A-G). Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs A-B and D-G from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-ix) in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use all of them.

List of Headings
i. Robots working together
ii. Preparing LGVs for take-over
iii. Looking ahead
iv. The LGVs' main functions
v. Split location for newspaper production
vi. Newspapers superseded by technology
vii. Getting the newspaper to the printing centre
viii. Controlling the robots
ix. Beware of robots!

Example: Paragraph C. Answer: ix

27. Paragraph A
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E
31. Paragraph F
32. Paragraph G

ROBOTS AT WORK

A. The newspaper production process has come a long way from the old days when the paper was written, edited, typeset and ultimately printed in one building with the journalists working on the upper floors and the printing presses going on the ground floor. These days the editor, subeditors and journalists who put the paper together are likely to find themselves in a totally different building or maybe even in a different city. This is the situation which now prevails in Sydney. The daily paper is compiled at the editorial headquarters, known as the prepress centre, in the heart of the city, but printed far away in the suburbs at the printing centre. Here human beings are in the minority as much of the work is done by automated machines controlled by computers.

B. Once the finished newspaper has been created for the next morning’s edition, all the pages are transmitted electronically from the prepress centre to the printing centre. The system of transmission is an update on the sophisticated page facsimile system already in use in many other newspapers. An imagesetter at the printing centre delivers the pages as films. Each page takes less than a minute to produce, although for colour pages four versions, once each for black, cyan, magenta and yellow are sent. The pages are then processed into photographic negatives and the film is used to produce aluminium printing plates ready for the presses.

C. A procession of automated vehicles is busy at the new printing centre where the Sydney Morning Herald is printed each day. With lights flashing and warning horns honking, the robots (to give them their correct name, the LGVs or laser guided vehicles) look for all the world like enthusiastic machines from a science fiction movie, as they follow their own random paths around the plant busily getting on with their jobs. Automation of this kind is now standard in all modern newspaper plants. The robots can detect unauthorised personnel and alert security staff immediately if they find an “intruder”; not surprisingly, tall tales are already being told about the machines starting to take on personalities of their own.

D. The robots’ principal job, however, is to shift the newsprint (the printing paper) that arrives at the plant in huge reels and emerges at the other end sometime later as newspapers. Once the size of the day’s paper and the publishing order are determined at head office, the information is punched into the computer and the LGVs are programmed to go about their work. The LGVs collect the appropriate size paper reels and take them where they have to go. When the press needs another reel its computer alerts the LGV system. The Sydney LGVs move busily around the press room fulfilling their two key functions to collect reels of newsprint either from the reel stripping stations or from the racked supplies in the newsprint storage area. At the stripping station, the tough wrapping that helps to protect a reel of paper from rough handling is removed. Any damaged paper is peeled off and the reel is then weighed.

E. Then one of the four paster-robots moves in. Specifically designed for the job, it trims the paper neatly and prepares the reel for the press. If required the reel can be loaded directly onto the press; if not needed immediately, an LGV takes it to the storage area. When the press computer calls for a reel, an LGV takes it to the reel loading area of the presses. It lifts the reel into the loading position and places it in the correct spot with complete accuracy. As each reel is used up, the press drops the heavy cardboard core into a waste bin. When the bin is full, another LGV collects it and deposits the cores into a shredder for recycling.
F. The LGVs move at walking speed. Should anyone step in front of one or get too close, sensors stop the vehicle until the path is clear. The company has chosen a laser guide function system for the vehicles because, as the project development manager says “The beauty of it is that if you want to change the routes, you can work out a new route on your computer and lay it down for them to follow”. When an LGV’s batteries run low, it will take itself offline and go to the nearest battery maintenance point for replacement batteries. And all this is achieved with absolute minimum human input and a much reduced risk of injury to people working in the printing centres.

G. The question newspaper workers must now ask, however, is, “how long will it be before the robots are writing the newspapers as well as running the printing centre, churning out the latest edition every morning?”

Questions 33 - 40
Using the information in the passage, complete the flow-chart below. Write your answers in boxes 33-40 on your answer sheet. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The Production Process

Questions 1-4
Reading passage 1 has six paragraphs labelled A-F. Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B-E from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-ix) in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i. How the reaction principle works
ii. The impact of the reaction principle
iii. Writer's theories of the reaction principle
iv. Undeveloped for centuries
v. The first rockets
vi. The first use of steam
vii. Rockets for military use
viii. Developments of fire
ix. What's next?
Example: Paragraph A Answer ii

1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E

Example: Paragraph F Answer ix

THE ROCKET - FROM EAST TO WEST

A. The concept of the rocket, or rather the mechanism behind the idea of propelling an object into the air, has been around for well over two thousand years. However, it wasn’t until the discovery of the reaction principle, which was the key to space travel and so represents one of the great milestones in the history of scientific thought, that rocket technology was able to develop. Not only did it solve a problem that had intrigued man for ages, but, more importantly, it literally opened the door to the exploration of the universe.

B. An intellectual breakthrough, brilliant though it may be, does not automatically ensure that the transition is made from theory to practice. Despite the fact that rockets had been used sporadically for several hundred years, they remained a relatively minor artefact of civilization until the twentieth century. Prodigious efforts, accelerated during two world wars, were required before the technology of primitive rocketry could be translated into the reality of sophisticated astronauts. It is strange that the rocket was generally ignored by writers of fiction to transport their heroes to mysterious realms beyond the Earth, even though it had been commonly used in fireworks displays in China since the thirteenth century. The reason is that nobody associated the reaction principle with the idea of traveling through space to a neighbouring world.

C. A simple analogy can help us to understand how a rocket operates. It is much like a machine gun mounted on the rear of a boat. In reaction to the backward discharge of bullets, the gun, and hence the boat, move forwards. A rocket motor’s ‘bullets’ are minute, high-speed particles produced by burning propellants in a suitable chamber. The reaction to the ejection of these small particles causes the rocket to move forwards. There is evidence that the reaction principle was applied practically well before the rocket was invented. In his Noctes Atticae or Greek Nights, Aulus Gellius describes ‘the pigeon of Archytas’, an invention dating back to about 360 BC. Cylindrical in shape, made of wood, and hanging from string, it was moved to and fro by steam blowing out from small exhaust ports at either end. The reaction to the discharging steam provided the bird with motive power.

D. The invention of rockets is linked inextricably with the invention of ‘black powder’. Most historians of technology credit the Chinese with its discovery. They base their belief on studies of Chinese writings or on the notebooks of early Europeans who settled in or made long visits to China to study its history and civilisation. It is probable that, sometime in the tenth century, black powder was first compounded from its basic ingredients of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur. But this does not mean that it was immediately used to propel rockets. By the thirteenth century, powder propelled fire arrows had become rather common. The Chinese relied on this type of technological development to produce incendiary projectiles of many sorts, explosive grenades and possibly cannons to repel their enemies. One such weapon was the ‘basket of fire’ or, as directly translated from Chinese, the ‘arrows like flying leopards’. The 0.7 metre-long arrows, each with a long tube of gunpowder attached near the point of each arrow, could be fired from a long, octagonal-shaped basket at the same time and had a range of 400 paces. Another weapon was the ‘arrow as am flying sabre’, which could be fired from crossbows. The rocket, placed in a similar position to other rocket-propelled arrows, was designed to increase the range. A small iron weight was attached to the 1.5m bamboo shaft, just below the feathers, to increase the arrow’s stability by moving the centre of gravity to a position below the rocket. At a similar time, the Arabs had developed the ‘egg which moves and burns’. This ‘egg’ was apparently full of gunpowder and stabilised by a 1.5m tail. It was fired using two rockets attached to either side of this tail.

E. It was not until the eighteenth century that Europe became seriously interested in the possibilities of using the rocket itself as a weapon of war and not just to propel other weapons. Prior to this, rockets were used only in pyrotechnic displays. The incentive for the more aggressive use of rockets came not from within the European continent but from far-away India, whose leaders had built up a corps of rocketeers and used rockets successfully against the British in the late eighteenth century. The Indian rockets used against the British were described by a British Captain serving in India as ‘an iron envelope about 200 millimetres long and 40 millimetres in diameter with sharp points at the top and a 3m-long bamboo guiding stick’. In the early nineteenth century, the British began to experiment with incendiary barrage rockets. The British rocket differed from the Indian version in that it was completely encased in a stout, iron cylinder, terminating in a conical head, measuring one metre in diameter and having a stick almost five metres long and constructed in such a way that it could be firmly attached to the body of the rocket. The Americans developed a rocket, complete with its own launcher, to use against the Mexicans in the mid-nineteenth century. A long cylindrical tube was propped up by two sticks and fastened to the top of the launcher, thereby allowing the rockets to be inserted and lit from the other end. However, the results were sometimes not that impressive as the behaviour of the rockets in flight was less than predictable. Since then, there have been huge developments in rocket technology, often with devastating results in the forum of war. Nevertheless, the modern day space programs owe their success to the humble beginnings of those in previous centuries who developed the foundations of the reaction principle. Who knows what it will be like in the future?

Questions 5 and 6
Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 5 and 6 on your answer sheet.

5. The greatest outcome of the discovery of the reaction principle was that
A. rockets could be propelled into the air.
B. space travel became a reality.
C. a major problem had been solved.
D. bigger rockets were able to be built.
6. According to the text, the greatest progress in rocket technology was made
A. from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.
B. from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
C. from the early nineteenth to the late nineteenth century.
D. from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

Questions 7-10
From the information in the text, indicate who FIRST invented or used the items in the list below. Write the appropriate letters A-E in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Example: rockets for displays. Answer: A

7. black powder
8. rocket-propelled arrows for fighting
9. rockets as war weapons
10. the rocket launcher

FIRST invented or used by
A. the Chinese
B. the Indians
C. the British
D. the Arabs
E. the Americans

Questions 11-14
Look at the drawings of different projectiles below, A-H, and the names of types of projectiles given in the passage, Questions 11-14. Match each name with one drawing. Write the appropriate letters A-H in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.

Example: The Greek ‘pigeon of Archytas’. Answer: C

11. The Chinese ‘basket of fire’
12. The Arab ‘egg which moves and burns’
13. The Indian rocket
14. The British barrage rocket

Questions 29-33
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-G. Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs C-G from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers i-x in boxes 29-33 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i. The Crick and Watson approach to research
ii. Antidotes to bacterial infection
iii. The testing of hypotheses
iv. Explaining the inductive method
v. Anticipating results before data is collected
vi. How research is done and how it is reported
vii. The role of hypotheses in scientific research
viii. Deducing the consequences of hypotheses
ix. Karl Popper’s claim that the scientific method is hypothetico-deductive
x. The unbiased researcher
Example: Paragraph A Answer: ix

29. Paragraph C
30. Paragraph D
31. Paragraph E
32. Paragraph F
33. Paragraph G

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

A. ‘Hypotheses,’ said Medawar in 1964, are imaginative and inspirational in character’; they are ‘adventures of the mind’. He was arguing in favour of the position taken by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1972, 3rd edition) that the nature of scientific method is hypothetico-deductive and not, as is generally believed, inductive.

B. It is essential that you, as an intending researcher, understand the difference between these two interpretations of the research process so that you do not become discouraged or begin to suffer from a feeling of ‘cheating’ or not going about it the right way.

C. The myth of scientific method is that it is inductive: that the formulation of scientific theory starts with the basic, raw evidence of the senses - simple, unbiased, unprejudiced observation. Out of these sensory data - commonly referred to as ‘facts’ — generalisations will form. The myth is that from a disorderly array of factual information an orderly, relevant theory will somehow emerge. However, the starting point of induction is an impossible one.

D. There is no such thing as an unbiased observation. Every act of observation we make is a function of what we have seen or otherwise experienced in the past. All scientific work of an experimental or exploratory nature starts with some expectation about the outcome. This expectation is a hypothesis. Hypotheses provide the initiative and incentive for the inquiry and influence the method. It is in the light of an expectation that some observations are held to be relevant and some irrelevant, that one methodology is chosen and others discarded, that some experiments are conducted and others are not. Where is, your naive, pure and objective researcher now?

E. Hypotheses arise by guesswork, or by inspiration, but having been formulated they can and must be tested rigorously, using the appropriate methodology. If the predictions you make as a result of deducing certain consequences from your hypothesis are not shown to be correct then you discard or modify your hypothesis.If the predictions turn out to be correct then your hypothesis has been supported and may be retained until such time as some further test shows it not to be correct. Once you have arrived at your hypothesis, which is a product of your imagination, you then proceed to a strictly logical and rigorous process, based upon deductive argument — hence the term ‘hypothetico-deductive’.

F. So don’t worry if you have some idea of what your results will tell you before you even begin to collect data; there are no scientists in existence who really wait until they have all the evidence in front of them before they try to work out what it might possibly mean. The closest we ever get to this situation is when something happens by accident; but even then the researcher has to formulate a hypothesis to be tested before being sure that, for example, a mould might prove to be a successful antidote to bacterial infection.

G. The myth of scientific method is not only that it is inductive (which we have seen is incorrect) but also that the hypothetico-deductive method proceeds in a step-by-step, inevitable fashion. The hypothetico-deductive method describes the logical approach to much research work, but it does not describe the psychological behaviour that brings it about. This is much more holistic — involving guesses, reworkings, corrections, blind alleys and above all inspiration, in the deductive as well as the hypothetic component -than is immediately apparent from reading the final thesis or published papers. These have been, quite properly, organised into a more serial, logical order so that the worth of the output may be evaluated independently of the behavioural processes by which it was obtained. It is the difference, for example between the academic papers with which Crick and Watson demonstrated the structure of the DNA molecule and the fascinating book The Double Helix in which Watson (1968) described how they did it. From this point of view, ‘scientific method’ may more usefully be thought of as a way of writing up research rather than as a way of carrying it out.

Questions 34 and 35
In which TWO paragraphs in Reading Passage 3 does the writer give advice directly to the reader?

Write the TWO appropriate letters (A—G) in boxes 34 and 35 on your answer sheet.

34. ...........................

35. ...........................

Questions 36-39
Do the following statements reflect the opinions of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 36-39 on your answer sheet, write:

YES if the statement reflects the opinion of the writer.

NO if the statement contradicts the opinion of the writer.
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

36. Popper says that the scientific method is hypothetico-deductive.
37. If a prediction based on a hypothesis is fulfilled, then the hypothesis is confirmed as true.
38. Many people carry out research in a mistaken way.
39. The ‘scientific method’ is more a way of describing research than a way of doing it.

Question 40
Choose the appropriate letter A-D and write it in box 40 on your answer sheet.
Which of the following statements best describes the writer’s main purpose in Reading Passage 3?

A. to advise Ph.D students not to cheat while carrying out research.
B. to encourage Ph.D students to work by guesswork and inspiration.
C. to explain to Ph.D students the logic which the scientific research paper follows.
D. to help Ph.D students by explaining different conceptions of the research process.

The Department of Ethnography

The Department of Ethnography was created as a separate department within the British Museum in 1946, after 140 years of gradual development from the original Department of Antiquities. If is concerned with the people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Pacific and parts of Europe. While this includes complex kingdoms, as in Africa, and ancient empires, such as those of the Americas, the primary focus of attention in the twentieth century has been on small-scale societies. Through its collections, the Department’s specific interest is to document how objects are created and used, and to understand their importance and significance to those who produce them. Such objects can include both the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the banal.

The collections of the Department of Ethnography include approximately 300,000 artifacts, of which about half are the product of the present century. The Department has a vital role to play in providing information on non-Western cultures to visitors and scholars. To this end, the collecting emphasis has often been less on individual objects than on groups of material which allow the display of a broad range of a society’s cultural expressions. Much of the more recent collecting was carried out in the field, sometimes by Museum staff working on general anthropological projects in collaboration with a wide variety of national governments and other institutions. The material collected includes great technical series - for instance, of textiles from Bolivia, Guatemala, Indonesia and areas of West Africa - or of artifact types such as boats. The latter include working examples of coracles from India, reed boars from Lake Titicaca in the Andes, kayaks from the Arctic, and dug-out canoes from several countries. The field assemblages, such as those from the Sudan, Madagascar and Yemen, include a whole range of material culture representative of one people. This might cover the necessities of life of an African herdsman or on Arabian farmer, ritual objects, or even on occasion airport art. Again, a series of acquisitions might represent a decade’s fieldwork documenting social experience as expressed in the varieties of clothing and jewellery styles, tents and camel trappings from various Middle Eastern countries, or in the developing preferences in personal adornment and dress from Papua New Guinea. Particularly interesting are a series of collections which continue to document the evolution of ceremony and of material forms for which the Department already possesses early (if nor the earliest) collections formed after the first contact with Europeans.

The importance of these acquisitions extends beyond the objects themselves. They come to the Museum with documentation of the social context, ideally including photographic records. Such acquisitions have multiple purposes. Most significantly they document for future change. Most people think of the cultures represented in the collection in terms of the absence of advanced technology. In fact, traditional practices draw on a continuing wealth of technological ingenuity. Limited resources and ecological constraints are often overcome by personal skills that would be regarded as exceptional in the West. Of growing interest is the way in which much of what we might see as disposable is, elsewhere, recycled and reused.

With the Independence of much of Asia and Africa after 1945, it was assumed that economic progress would rapidly lead to the disappearance or assimilation of many small-scale societies. Therefore, it was felt that the Museum should acquire materials representing people whose art or material culture, ritual or political structures were on the point of irrevocable change. This attitude altered with the realisation that marginal communities can survive and adapt. In spite of partial integration into a notoriously fickle world economy. Since the seventeenth century, with the advent of trading companies exporting manufactured textiles to North America and Asia, the importation of cheap goods has often contributed to the destruction of local skills and indigenous markets. On the one hand, modern imported goods may be used in an everyday setting, while on the other hand other traditional objects may still be required for ritually significant events. Within this context trade and exchange, attitudes are inverted. What are utilitarian objects to a Westerner may be prized objects in other cultures - when transformed by local ingenuity - principally for aesthetic value. In the same way, the West imports goods from other peoples and in certain circumstances categorise them as ‘art’.

Collections act as an ever-expanding database, nor merely for scholars and anthropologists, bur for people involved in a whole range of educational and artistic purposes. These include schools and universities as well as colleges of art and design. The provision of information about non-Western aesthetics and techniques, not just for designers and artists but for all visitors, is a growing responsibility for a Department whose own context is an increasingly multicultural European society.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage
FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

Example: The Department of Ethnography replaced the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum.

Answer: FALSE

1. The twentieth-century collections come mainly from mainstream societies such as the US and Europe.
2. The Department of Ethnography focuses mainly on modern societies.
3. The Department concentrates on collecting single unrelated objects of great value.
4. The textile collection of the Department of Ethnography is the largest in the world.
5. Traditional societies are highly inventive in terms of technology.
6. Many small-scale societies have survived and adapted in spite of predictions to the contrary.

Questions 7-12
Some of the exhibits at the Department of Ethnography are listed below (Questions 7-12). The writer gives these exhibits as examples of different collection types. Match each exhibit with the collection type with which it is associated in Reading Passage 1. Write the appropriate letters in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any collection type more than once.

Collection Type

AT Artifact Types
EC Evolution of Ceremony
FA Field Assemblages
SE Social Experience
TS Technical Series

Example: Boats. Answer: AT

7. Bolivian textiles
8. Indian coracles
9. airport art
10. Arctic kayaks
11. necessities of life of an Arabian farmer
12. tents from the Middle East

Obtaining Linguistic Data

A. Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one’s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.

B. In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data — an informant. Informants are (ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgments on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist’s personal judgments are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgments of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.

C. Many factors must be considered when selecting informants – whether one is working with single speakers (a common situation when language has not been described before), two people interacting small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting ( e.g. the level of formality ) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants (e.g. their fluency and consistency ). For large studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.

D. Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist’s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate (“difficult” pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimize the “observer’s paradox” (how to observe the way people behave when they are not being observed). Some recordings are made without the speakers being aware of the fact- a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style (e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality )

E. An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist’s problems, however. Speech is often unclear and ambiguous. Where possible, therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer’s written comments on the non-verbal behavior of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations (the camera cannot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.

F. Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviour. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques (‘How do you say table in your language?’). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just s single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame (e.g. I___ see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus of correction (‘is it possible to say I no can see?’)

G. A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text, others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the corpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs labeled A-G. Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

NB. You may use any letter more than once.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

27. the effect of recording on the way people talk
28. the importance of taking notes on body language
29. the fact that language is influenced by social situation
30. how informants can be helped to be less self-conscious
31. various methods that can be used to generate specific data

Questions 32-36
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAT THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet.

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary of paragraph G below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

A linguist can use a corpus to comment objectively on 37…….......... Some corpora include a wide range of language while others are used to focus on a 38….........…. The length of time the process takes will affect the 39.........…..… of the corpus. No corpus can ever cover the whole language and so linguists often find themselves relying on the additional information that can be gained from the 40….........…of those who speak the language concerned.

The Nature and Aims of Archaeology

Archaeology is partly the discovery of treasures of the past, partly the work of the scientific analyst, partly the exercise of the creative imagination. It is toiling in the sun on an excavation in the Middle East, it is working with living Inuit in the snows of Alaska, and it is investigating the sewers of Roman Britain. But it is also the painstaking task of interpretation, so that we come to understand what these things mean for the human story. And it is the conservation of the world’s cultural heritage against looting and careless harm.

Archaeology, then, is both a physical activity out in the field, and an intellectual pursuit in the study or laboratory. That is part of its great attraction. The rich mixture of danger and detective work has also made it the perfect vehicle for fiction writers and film-makers, from Agatha Christie with Murder in Mesopotamia to Stephen Spielberg with Indiana Jones. However far from reality such portrayals are, they capture the essential truth that archaeology is an exciting quest – the quest for knowledge about ourselves and our past.

But how does archaeology relate to other disciplines such as anthropology and history that are also concerned with the human story? Is archaeology itself a science? And what are the responsibilities of the archaeologist in today’s world?

Anthropology, at its broadest, is the study of humanity- our physical characteristics as animals and our unique non-biological characteristics that we call culture. Culture in this sense includes what the anthropologist, Edward Tylor, summarised in 1871 as ‘knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. Anthropologists also use the term ‘culture’ in a more restricted sense when they refer to the ‘culture’ of a particular society, meaning the non-biological characteristics unique to that society, which distinguish it from other societies. Anthropology is thus a broad discipline – so broad that it is generally broken down into three smaller disciplines: physical anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology.

Physical anthropology, or biological anthropology as it is called, concerns the study of human biological or physical characteristics and how they evolved. Cultural anthropology – or social anthropology – analyses human culture and society. Two of its branches are ethnography (the study at first hand of individual living cultures) and ethnology (which sets out to compare cultures using ethnographic evidence to derive general principles about human society).

Nevertheless, one of the most important tasks for the archaeologist today is to know how to interpret material culture in human terms. How were those pots used? Why are some dwellings round and others square. Here the methods of archaeology and ethnography overlap. Archaeologists in recent decades have developed ‘ethnoarchaeology’ where, like ethnographers, they live among contemporary communities, but with the specific purpose of learning how such societies use material culture – how they make their tools and weapons, why they build their settlements where they do, and so on. Moreover, archaeology has a role to play in the field of conservation. Heritage studies constitute a developing field, where it is realised that the world’s cultural heritage is a diminishing resource which holds different meanings for different people.

If, then, archaeology deals with the past, in what way does it differ from history? In the broadest sense, just as archaeology is an aspect of anthropology, so too is it a part of history – where we mean the whole history of humankind from its beginnings over three million years ago. Indeed, for more than ninety-nine percent of that huge span of time, archaeology – the study of past material culture – is the only significant source of information. Conventional historical sources begin only with the introduction of written records around 3,000 BC in western Asia, and much later in most other parts in the world.

A commonly drawn distinction is between pre-history, i.e. the period before written records - and history in the narrow sense, meaning the study of the past using written evidence. To archaeology, which studies all cultures and periods, whether with or without writing, the distinction between history and pre-history is a convenient dividing line that recognises the importance of the written word, but in no way lessens the importance of the useful information contained in oral histories.

Since the aim of archaeology is the understanding of humankind, it is a humanistic study, and since it deals with the human past, it is a historical discipline. But it differs from the study of written history in a fundamental way. The material the archaeologist finds does not tell us directly what to think. Historical records make statements, offer opinions and pass judgements. The objects the archaeologists discover, on the other hand, tell us nothing directly in themselves. In this respect, the practice of the archaeologist is rather like that of the scientist, who collects data, conducts experiments, formulates a hypothesis tests the hypothesis against more data, and then, in conclusion, devises a model that seems best to summarise the pattern observed in the data. The archaeologist has to develop a picture of the past, just as the scientist has to develop a coherent view of the natural world.

Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet, write:

YES if the statement agrees with the cliams of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

14. Archaeology involves creativity as well as investigative work.
15. Archaeologist must be able to translate texts from ancient languages.
16. Movies give a realistic picture of the work of archaeologists.
17. Anthropologists define culture in more than one way.
18. Archaeology is a more demanding field of study than anthropology.
19. The history of Europe has been documented since 3,000 BC.

Questions 20 and 21
Choose TWO letters A – E. Write your answer in boxes 20 and 21 on your answer sheet.
The list below gives some statements about anthropology.

Which TWO statements are mentioned by the writer of the text?

A. It is important for government planners.
B. It is a continually growing field of study.
C. It often involves long periods of fieldwork.
D. It is subdivided for study purposes.
E. It studies human evolutionary patterns.

Questions 22 and 23
Choose TWO letters A – E. Write your answer in boxes 22 and 23 on your answer sheet.

The list below gives some of the tasks of an archaeologist.
Which TWO of these tasks are mentioned by the writer of the text?

A. examining ancient waste sites to investigate diet
B. studying cave art to determine its significance
C. deducing reasons for the shape of domestic buildings
D. investigating the way different cultures make and use objects
E. examining evidence for past climate changes

Questions 24-27
Complete the summary of the last two paragraphs of Reading Passage 2. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answer in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet.

Much of the work of archaeologists can be done using written records, but they find 24............................ equally valuable. The writer describes archaeology as both a 25.......................... and a 26 ....................... However, as archaeologists do not try to influence human behaviour, the writer compares their style of working to that of a 27..........................