READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the Reading Passage 1 on pages 2 and 3.
Face recognition in everyday life
A. Remembering faces is a skill that is in daily use, but in real life, we are not often called on to recognise people by their faces alone. Information about a person's identity is supplied by body build, clothes, gait, voice and the context in which the person is encountered, as well as the face. We know very little about the relative contribution of these different aspects of personal identity to the recognition process, but mistakes in, and difficulties of, identification suggest they are important cues. Clothes and context are both liable to change, and therefore ought to be less reliable as cues, but experience suggests that we do rely on them to a considerable extent.
B. In contrast to the real-life situation, many of the experiments that test face-recognition ability use still photographs of isolated faces, taken out of context, and stripped of all the additional information that normally accompanies a face. Unlike photographs, real faces are three-dimensional and dynamic, and these characteristics yield a great deal of additional information. Face recognition in natural situations can exploit a much wider and richer range of cues and is therefore more likely to be successful.
C. We know from our own experience that people seem to vary in face memory ability quite considerably, so that it is difficult to say what level of performance should be considered normal. The incidence of errors varies with the degree of familiarity. Identification failures for faces that are well known do sometimes occur, but they are usually temporary errors due to misleading circumstances, such as changes of appearance, seeing someone in an unusual context or poor visibility. Confusions may happen if a person is very similar in appearance to someone else, but such errors do not usually persist with prolonged inspection. With less well-known faces, identification failures are more common. It is quite easy to forget the face of someone you have only met casually, seldom or a long time ago.
D. When we need to describe a person to someone else, with the intention of enabling the hearer to identify that person, we do not usually supply much detail about the face. We generally describe age, height, build and any very distinctive features (e.g. 'curly red hair', 'beard' or 'glasses') rather than giving a comprehensive description of the face. However, more complete and accurate recall is sometimes required, as when witnesses are asked to describe suspects to the police or to construct a photofit picture. Not all faces are equally easy to recognise. Experiments have shown that face memory is superior if a face is seen in a variety of different poses rather than in repeated exposures of the same pose. In everyday life, faces that are familiar are ones that have been seen from many different viewpoints.
E. The everyday intuition that highly distinctive faces are easier to remember than faces that are ordinary and typical has. also been experimentally confirmed. The effects of attractiveness are less clear-cut. Some researchers have reported that attractive faces are easier to remember and others have reported the opposite result. There is also some evidence that memory representations of faces are influenced by stereotypes. It appears that people do believe that facial appearance is linked to personality traits and this means that judgements may be biased by the physical appearance of a person.
F. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that faces are represented holistically, or configurally (that is, by their overall shape or structure, rather than as a list of features). Tanaka and Farah (1993) argued in their studies that if facial features are represented separately, then memory for a particular feature should be as good when it is seen in isolation as when it is seen in the context of the whole face. If faces are represented configurally, then it should be more difficult to recognise Isolated features. Their results showed that features learned in the context of a whole normal face were better recognised when seen in a whole normal face, although this advantage did not hold for scrambled faces or when the faces were upside down. The conclusion is that normal faces are represented configurally in memory but the representation of scrambled or inverted faces is different. By contrast, object recognition seems to involve specific parts or features being represented and processed separately and is not so much affected by inversion.
G. Despite the evidence that faces are represented configurally, features also seem to play some part in face recognition. There is evidence, for example, that some features are more salient than others. Subjects spend more time looking at some features when memorising a face; recognition is more disrupted by changing some features than by changing others; and a face with a highly distinctive feature is more easily recognised. Experiments suggest that features in the inner part of the face (eyes, nose, and mouth) are more important than features in the outer part (hair and face shape).
H. On the whole, current research has little to say about why some people are better than others at remembering faces, and little to offer in the way of suggestions as to how we could train people to improve their face-recognition skills. Laboratory experiments using artificial material, such as photographs presenting disembodied faces divorced from any social or situational context, pose problems that are very different from those encountered in the real world.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.
Children's Literature
Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history in Britain: lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery rhymes and games are almost as ancient. Yet so far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop's fables, fairy-stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular. Since the only genuine child-oriented literature at this time would have been a few instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, plus the odd Puritanical tract as an aid to morality, the only course for keen child readers was to raid adult literature. This still occurs today, especially with adult thrillers or romances that include more exciting, graphic detail than is normally found in literature for younger readers.
By the mid-1700s, there were enough eager child readers and enough parents glad to cater for this interest for publishers to specialise in children's books whose first aim was pleasure rather than education or morality. In Britain, a London merchant named Thomas Boreham produced Cajanus, the Swedish Giant in 1742, while the more famous John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744, containing stories, games, plus a free gift (a ball and a pin-cushion). It is a tribute to Newbery's flair that he hit upon a winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America.
Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) decreed that all books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw to it that children's literature should be instructive and uplifting. Prominent among such voices was Mrs Sarah Trimmer, whose magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) carried the first regular reviews of children's books. In these, she condemned fairy tales for their violence and general absurdity; her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786), described talking animals, who were always models of sense and decorum.
The great blow to the instructive children's book was to come from an unlikely source: early 19th-century interest in folklore. Both nursery rhymes, selected by James Orchard Halliwell for a folklore society in 1842, and collections of fairy stories from the scholarly Grimm brothers, swiftly translated into English in 1823, soon rocketed to popularity with the young, quickly leading to new editions, each one more child-centred than the last. From this time onwards, younger children could expect stories written for their particular interests, and with the needs of their own limited experience of life kept well to the fore.
However, while such books were available for young children from homes wealthy enough to afford such fare, older child readers and adults still tended to read the same books as each other. What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special children's literature as such, but access to books that contained characters, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily empathise, or action, such as exploring or fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding.
In time, however, adults themselves moved on to a narrower spectrum of imaginative literature, leaving genres they once freely enjoyed - such as animal or fairy stories - to a younger audience.
The final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality came with the arrival in the late 1930s of the child-centred bestsellers intent on entertainment at its most escapist. In Britain, novelists such as Enid Blyton described children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. Reaction against such dream worlds was inevitable after World War II, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, children's libraries and a new spirit of moral and social concern. Urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians, writers slowly began to explore new areas of interest, while also shifting the settings of their plots away from the middle-class world to which their chiefly adult patrons had always previously belonged.
The situation today seems to be that writers of children's literature are often recommended to the attention of adult as well as child readers. This echoes the 19th-century belief that children's literature, rather than representing a defensive barrier between childhood and adulthood, can be shared by different generations.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the Reading Passage 3 on pages 10 and 11.
Honeybees in trouble - can native pollinators fill the gap?
Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment: colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is destroying whole colonies of honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile and economies will collapse. However, what is at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. In the USA, where CCD has its greatest impact, honeybees are not a native species and the way most commercial crops are pollinated, with enormous populations of honeybees, is a very different practice from how things happen in nature or how they happened in days gone by. Pollination in modern agriculture is an industry.
Agricultural intensification began as farmers started using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides and planting large-scale crop monocultures (using just one species of crop). This killed many native bees and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those remaining. Concern about these practices is not new. In 1962, the ecologist Rachel Carson warned of a 'Fruitless Fall' that could follow the disappearance of insect pollinators.
The fact that the 'Fruitless Fall' has not yet occurred may be thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. This bee's biology suited the kind of agriculture that was emerging. Honeybee hives can be closed and shifted to protect their occupants when pesticides are applied to a field. Honeybees can be used to pollinate different crops, and although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 in a hive. 'Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee,' says Jim Cane, of the US Department of Agriculture.
The honeybee is a crucial cog in the system of industrial agriculture that delivers more food, and more kinds of it, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is vulnerable because making a farm into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory also leaches out some resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems. Breno Freitas, at the Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil, believes such a high degree of specialisation, 'usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance.' When the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it is by CCD, we see the vulnerability of this practice.
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to freeing agriculture from a honeybee monoculture. One is to learn how to manage additional species of bees for the pollination of specific crops. The other is to learn how to shape the agricultural landscape to support a diverse community of wild bees. In Brazil, Freitas found that the native pollinator of wild cashew can survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as the Caribbean cherry tree.
It is unlikely that any native bees will prove as versatile as the honeybee, but native bees can be matched to specific crops. Cane says, ‘Just about every crop is visited and effectively pollinated by a native bee’ - even crops that are not native. 'The problem is trying to provide [native] bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the crop.' However, often not as many native bees are needed to pollinate a crop. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees can pollinate a hectare of apples, a task that would require 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. Nevertheless, millions of native bees would be needed to pollinate a large commercial orchard.
In certain places, wild bees may already do more than they get credit for. Rachael Winfree of Rutgers University recently led a team that studied pollination of four crops (tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon) in Delaware. Winfree's team identified 54 species of wild bees visiting these crops, and found wild bees were the most important pollinators: although managed honeybees were present, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower visits. 'The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,' Winfree concedes. In the Delaware Valley, most farms are small and each farmer typically grows a variety of crops. 'But I think what my work shows is that native bees can be sufficient in a certain type of agricultural system.'
'Native bees can be a component of our agricultural systems if we do the right thing,' concludes Scott Hoffman Black of the Xerces Society. He suggests leaving weeds along field margins, growing a variety of crops rather than large monocultures and planting patches of native wildflowers, to give native bees a place within the agricultural landscape. Moreover, many of these strategies to assist bees would also help butterflies, birds, beetles, and native plants.
Researchers working on alternatives to honeybees are not suggesting that honeybees be made obsolete in agriculture. Instead, they suggest shifting to an agricultural system which comprises a mixture of species. For small-scale farms, native bees may be enough. For larger operations, a suite of managed bees with honeybees filling the generalist role and native bees pollinating specific crops could be more suitable. In other words, we have an opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse and resilient.
Part 1
Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1 People may be temporarily confused when attempting to identify a person who looks like someone else.
2 When describing someone, people generally describe the person's whole face.
3 The best remembered faces are those that have been seen frequently in the same pose.
4 Face recognition improves in situations where observers are shown a very expressive face.
Questions 5-10
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet.
5 how certain types of faces suggest ideas about the person's character
6 a reference to the variability in the factors used to identify a person
7 a reservation about the future usefulness of face recognition studies
8 situations in which remembering a face can be vitally important
9 the fact that some parts of the face may receive more attention than others
10 examples of how mistakes may arise when identifying a person
Questions 11-13
Choose THREE letters, A-G.
Write the correct letters in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE of the following problems are mentioned by the writer of the passage?
Part 2
Questions 14-18
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
Literature written for children
|
Dates
|
Types of literature |
Aims |
Examples |
|
Before 1700
|
Some instructional works and Puritanical tracts
|
To promote literacy, education and morality
|
|
|
1700-1750
|
Collections of 14 and games
|
To encourage reading for 15
|
A Little Pretty Pocket Book (format exported to 16 )
|
|
Early 19th century
|
Nursery rhymes and fairy stories
|
To cater for the interests and restricted life 17 of children
|
Fairy-stories-Grimm brothers |
|
1930s
|
Books in which children are involved in extraordinary 18
|
To provide children with escapist entertainment
|
Books written by Enid Blyton
|
Questions 19-21
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 19-21 on your answer sheet.
19 Aesop's Fables are given as an example of something that
20 A Little Pretty Pocket Book
21 In the 19th century, a particular book would be chosen by older children because it
A. contained characters that were easy to identify with.
B. did not have a happy ending.
C. achieved instant success.
D. was originally written for an adult readership.
E. had a lasting effect on the reader.
Questions 22-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
22 Children did not start reading stories until 1700.
23 The characters in Sarah Trimmer's books were intended to set good examples.
24 Parents in the 19th century were concerned about the level of violence in fairy stories.
25 An interest in folklore resulted in another change in direction for children's literature.
26 The current belief is that children's literature can be enjoyed by adults as well.
Part 3
Questions 27-30
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims 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
27 In the USA, farms have always used large numbers of honeybees.
28 Rachel Carson argued that using insecticides could cause disease in farmers.
29 Of the native bees, the blue orchard bee is the most effective pollinator.
30 Other living creatures may benefit from measures used to support native bees.
Questions 31-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet.
Questions 36-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-H, below.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.
36 Headlines state that CCD
37 Freitas cautioned that severe consequences
38 Freitas's research revealed that native bees
39 In Cane's opinion, the population of native bees
40 Winfree admits that the crops in her research
A. differ from others in terms of size of growing area.
B. will lead to agricultural and commercial disaster.
C. might make honeybees unable to breed.
D. will not affect the number of native bees.
E. tend to be easily affected by diseases.
F. may not be sufficient for large-scale pollination.
G. can be supported if certain plant species are supplied.
H. could follow a slight irregularity in the industrial agricultural system.