READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2.

Psychology and Personality Assessment

Our daily lives are largely made up of contacts with other people, during which we are constantly making judgments of their personalities and accommodating our behaviour to them in accordance with these judgments. A casual meeting of neighbours on the street, an employer giving instructions to an employee, a mother telling her children how to behave, a journey in a train where strangers eye one another without exchanging a word, all those involve mutual interpretations of personal qualities.

Success in many vocations largely depends on skill in signing up people. It is important not only to such professionals as the clinical psychologist, the psychiatrist, or the social worker, but also to the doctor or lawyer in dealing with their clients, the businessman trying to outwit his rivals, the salesman with potential customers, the teacher with his pupils, not to speak of the pupils judging their teacher. Social life, indeed, would be impossible if we did not, to some extent, understand and react to the motives and qualities of those we meet, and clearly, we are sufficiently accurate for most practical purposes, although we also recognize that misinterpretations easily arise, particularly on the part of others who judge us!

Errors can often be corrected as we go along. But whenever we are pinned down to a decision about a person, which cannot easily be revised through his ‘feedback’, the inadequacies of our judgments become apparent. The hostess who wrongly thinks that the Smiths and the Joneses will get on well together can do little to retrieve the success of her party. A school or a business may be saddled for years with an undesirable member of staff, because the selection committee which interviewed him for a quarter of an hour misjudged his personality.

Just because the process is so familiar and taken for granted, it has aroused little scientific curiosity until recently. Dramatists, writers and artists throughout the centuries have excelled in the portrayal of character, but have seldom stopped to ask how they, or we, get to know people, or how accurate our knowledge is. However, the popularity of such unscientific systems as Lava tor's physiognomy in the eighteenth century, Gall's phrenology in the nineteenth, and of handwriting interpretations by graphologists, or palm-readings by gipsies, shows that people are aware of weaknesses in their judgments and desirous of better methods of diagnosis. It is natural that they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in 'human nature'.

This belief is hardly justified: for the primary aim of psychology had been to establish the general laws and principles underlying behaviour and thinking, rather than to apply these to concrete problems of the individual person. A great many professional psychologists still regard it as their main function to study the nature of learning, perception and motivation in the abstracted or average human being, or in lower organisms, and consider it premature to put so young a science to practical uses. They would disclaim the possession of any superior skill in judging their fellow man. Indeed, being more aware of the difficulties than is the non-psychologist, they may be more reluctant to commit themselves to definite predictions or decisions about other people. Nevertheless, to an increasing extent, psychologists are moving into educational, occupational, clinical and other applied fields, where they are called upon to use their expertise for such. fitting the as purposes education or job to the child or adult, and the person to the job. Thus, a considerable proportion of their activities consists of personality assessment.

The success of psychologists in personality assessment has been limited, in comparison with what they have achieved in the fields of abilities and training, with the result that most people continue to rely on unscientific methods of assessment. In recent times, there has been a tremendous amount of work on personality tests and on carefully controlled experimental studies of personality. Investigations of personality by Freudian and other 'depth' psychologists have an even longer history. And yet psychology seems to be no nearer to providing society with practicable techniques which are sufficiently reliable and accurate to win general acceptance. The soundness of the methods of psychologists in the field of personality assessment and the value of their work are under constant fire from other psychologists, and it is far from easy to prove their worth.

The growth of psychology has probably helped responsible members of society to become more aware of the difficulties of assessment. But it is not much use telling employers, educationists and judges how inaccurately they diagnose the personalities with which they have to deal unless psychologists are sure that they can provide something better. Even when university psychologists themselves appoint a new member of staff, they almost always resort to the traditional techniques of assessing the candidates through interviews, past records, and testimonials, and probably make at least as many bad appointments as other employers do. However, a large amount of experimental development of better methods has been carried out since 1940 by groups of psychologists in the Armed Services and in the Civil Service, and by such organizations as the (British) National Institute of Industrial Psychology and the American Institute of Research.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 on pages 7 and 8.

TITAN of technology

Gordon Moore is one of the people who gave the world personal computers. Peter Richards spoke to him in 2003

Gordon Moore is the scientific brain behind Intel, the world's biggest maker of computer chips. Both funny and self-deprecating, he's a shrewd businessman too, but admits to being an 'accidental entrepreneur', happier in the back room trading ideas with techies than out selling the product or charting up the stockholders. When he applied for a job at Dow Chemical after gaining his PhD, the company psychologist ruled that 'I was okay technically, but that I'd never manage anything'. This year, Intel is set to turn over $28 billion.

When Moore co-founded Intel (short for Integrated Electronics) to develop integrated circuits thirty-five years ago, he provided the motive force in R&D (Research & Development) while his more extroverted partner Robert Noyce became the public face of the company. Intel's ethos was distinctively Californian: laid-back, democratic, polo shirt and chinos. Moore worked in a cubicle like everyone else, never had a designated parking space and flew Economy. None of this implied a lack of ambition. Moore and Noyce shared a vision, recognising that success depended just as much on intellectual pizazz as on Intel's ability to deliver a product. Noyce himself received the first patent for an integrated circuit in 1961, while both partners were learning the business of electronics at Fairchild Semiconductor.

Fairchild's success put money in Moore and Noyce's pockets, but they were starved of R&D money. They resigned, frustrated, to found Intel in 1968. 'It was one of those rare periods when money was available,' says Moore. They put in $250,000 each and drummed up another $2.5m of venture capital 'on the strength of a one-page business plan that said essentially nothing'. Ownership was divided 50:50 between founders and backers. Three years later, Intel's first microprocessor was released: the 4004, carrying 2,250 transistors. Progress after that was rapid. By the time the competition realised what was happening, Intel had amassed a seven-year R&D lead that it was never to relinquish.

By the year 2000, Intel's Pentium 4 chip was carrying 42 million transistors. 'Now,' says Moore, 'we put a quarter of a billion transistors on a chip and are looking forward to a billion in the near future.' The performance gains have been phenomenal. The 4004 ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), the Pentium 4 at three gigahertz (3 billion hertz). It's calculated that if automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from New York to San Francisco in six seconds.

Moore's prescience in forecasting this revolution is legendary. In 1965, while still head of the R&D laboratory at Fairchild, he wrote a piece for Electronics magazine observing that over the first few years, we had essentially doubled the complexity of integrated circuits every year. ‘I blindly extrapolated for the next ten years and said we'd go from about 60 to about 60,000 transistors on a chip. It proved a much more spot-on prediction than I could ever have imagined. Up until then, integrated circuits had been expensive and had had principally military applications. But I could see that the economics were going to switch dramatically. This was going to become the cheapest way to make electronics.’

The prediction that a chip's transistor count and thus its performance would keep doubling every year soon proved so accurate that Carver Mead, a Friend from Caltech, dubbed it 'Moore's Law'. The name has stuck. 'Moore's Law' has become the yardstick by which the exponential growth of the computer industry has been measured ever since. When, in 1975, Moore looked around him again and saw transistor counts slowing, he predicted that in the future, chip performance would double only every two years. But that proved pessimistic. Actual growth since then has split the difference between his two predictions, with performance doubling every 18 months.

And there's no corollary, says Moore. 'If the cost of a given amount of computer power drops 50 per cent every 18 months, each time that happens the market explodes with new applications that hadn't been economical before.' He sees the microprocessor as 'almost infinitely elastic'. As prices fall, new applications keep emerging: smart light bulbs, flashing trainers or greetings cards that sing 'Happy Birthday'. Where will it all stop? Well, it's true, he says, 'that in a few more generations [of chips], the fact that materials are made of atoms starts to be a real problem. Essentially, you can't make things any smaller. But in practice, the day of reckoning is endlessly postponed as engineers find endlessly more ingenious ways of loading more transistors on a chip. 'I suspect I shared the feelings of everybody else that when we got to the dimensions of a micron [about 1986], we wouldn't be able to continue because we were touching the wavelength of light. But as we got closer, the barriers just melted away.'

When conventional chips finally reach their limits, nanotechnology beckons. Researchers are already working on sci-fi-sounding alternatives, such as molecular computers, built atom by atom, that theoretically could process hundreds of thousands of times more information than today's processors. Quantum computers using the state of electrons as the basis for calculation could operate even faster. On any measure, there looks to be plenty of life left in Moore's Law yet.