Reading Passage 1
Practical Action
For more than 40 years, Practical Action has worked with poor communities to identify the types of transport that work best, taking into consideration culture, needs and skills. With our technical and practical support, isolated rural communities can design, build and maintain their own solutions.
A. Whilst the focus of National Development Plans in the transport sector lies heavily in the areas of extending road networks and bridges, there are still major gaps identified in addressing the needs of poorer communities. There is a need to develop and promote the sustainable use of alternative transport systems and intermediate means of transportation (IMTs) that complement the linkages of poor people with road networks and other socio-economic infrastructures to improve their livelihoods.
B. On the other hand, the development of all weathered roads (only 30 percent of the rural population have access to this so far) and motorable bridges are very costly for a country with a small and stagnant economy. In addition, these interventions are not always favourable in all geographical contexts environmentally, socially and economically. More than 60 percent of the network is concentrated in the lowland areas of the country. Although there are a number of alternative ways by which transportation and mobility needs of rural communities in the hills can be addressed, a lack of clear government focus and policies, lack of fiscal and economic incentives, lack of adequate technical knowledge and manufacturing capacities have led to under-development of this alternative transport sub-sector including the provision of IMTs.
C. One of the major causes of poverty is isolation. Improving the access and mobility of the isolated poor paves the way for access to markets, services and opportunities. By improving transport poorer people are able to access markets where they can buy or sell goods for income, and make better use of essential services such as health and education. No proper roads or vehicles mean women and children are forced to spend many hours each day attending to their most basic needs, such as collecting water and firewood. This valuable time could be used to tend crops, care for the family, study or develop small business ideas to generate much-needed income.
Road building
D. Without roads, rural communities are extremely restricted. Collecting water and firewood, and going to local markets is a huge task, therefore it is understandable that the construction of roads is a major priority for many rural communities. Practical Action is helping to improve rural access/transport infrastructures through the construction and rehabilitation of short rural roads, small bridges, culverts and other transport-related functions. The aim is to use methods that encourage community-driven development. This means villagers can improve their own lives through better access to markets, health care, education and other economic and social opportunities, as well as bringing improved services and supplies to the now-accessible villages.
Driving forward new ideas
E. Practical Action and the communities we work with are constantly crafting and honing new ideas to help poor people. Cycle trailers have practical business use too, helping people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale. Not only that, but those on the poverty-line can earn a decent income by making, maintaining and operating bicycle taxis. With Practical Action’s know-how, Sri Lanka communities have been able to start a bus service and maintain the roads along which it travels. The impact has been remarkable. This service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation. Quick and affordable, it gives them a reliable way to travel to the nearest town; and now their children can get an education, making it far more likely they’ll find a path out of poverty. Practical Action is also an active member of many national and regional networks through which exchange of knowledge and advocating based on action research are carried out and one conspicuous example is the Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement.
Sky-scraping transport system
F. For people who live in remote, mountainous areas, getting food to market in order to earn enough money to survive is a serious issue. The hills are so steep that travelling down them is dangerous. A porter can help but they are expensive, and it would still take hours or even a day. The journey can take so long that their goods start to perish and become worthless and less. Practical Action has developed an ingenious solution called an aerial ropeway. It can either operate by gravitation force or with the use of external power. The ropeway consists of two trolleys rolling over support tracks connected to a control cable in the middle which moves in a traditional flywheel system. The trolley at the top is loaded with goods and can take up to 120kg. This is pulled down to the station at the bottom, either by the force of gravity or by an external power. The other trolley at the bottom is, therefore, pulled upwards automatically. The external power can be produced by a micro-hydro system if access to an electricity grid is not an option.
Bringing people on board
G. Practical Action developed a two-wheeled iron trailer that can be attached (via a hitch behind the seat) to a bicycle and be used to carry heavy loads (up to around 200 kgs) of food, water or even passengers. People can now carry three times as much as before and still pedal the bicycle. The cycle trailers are used for transporting goods by local producers, as ambulances, as mobile shops, and even as mobile libraries. They are made in small village workshops from iron tubing, which is cut, bent, welded and drilled to make the frame and wheels. Modifications are also carried out to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers. The two-wheeled ‘ambulance’ is made from moulded metal, with standard rubber-tyred wheels. The “bed” section can be padded with cushions to make the patient comfortable, while the “seat” section allows a family member to attend to the patient during transit. A dedicated bicycle is needed to pull the ambulance trailer, so that other community members do not need to go without the bicycles they depend on in their daily lives. A joining mechanism allows for easy removal and attachment. In response to user comments, a cover has been designed that can be added to give protection to the patient and attendant in poor weather. Made of treated cotton, the cover is durable and waterproof.
Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage ?
YES If the statement is true
NO If the statement is false
NOT GIVEN If the information is not given in the passage
1. A slow-developing economy often can not afford some road networks, especially for those used regardless of weather conditions.
2. Rural communities’ officials know how to improve alternative transport technically.
3. The primary aim for Practical Action to improve rural transport infrastructures is meant to increase the trade among villages.
4. Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement provided service that Practical Action highly involved in.
Questions 5-8
Answer the following questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
5. What is the first duty for many rural communities to reach unrestricted development?
6. What was one of the new ideas to help poor people carry their goods, such as vegetables and charcoal, to markets for sale?
7. What service has put an end to rural people’s social isolation in Sri Lanka?
8. What solution had been applied for people who live in remote mountainous areas getting food to market?
Questions 9-13
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.
Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Besides normal transport task, changes are also implemented to the trailers in these workshops at the request of the buyers when it was used on a medical emergency or a moveable (9)…………………. ‘Ambulance’ is made from metal, with rubber wheels and drive-by another bicycle. When put with (10)………………… in the two-wheeled ‘ambulance’, the patient can stay comfortable and which another (11)…………………… can sit on caring for the patient in transport journey. In order to dismantle or attach other equipment, and assembling (12)…………………… is designed. Later, as users suggest, (13)……………………. has also been added to give protection to the patient.
Reading Passage 2
The discovery of baby mammoth
A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species
A. On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, looking carefully at a diminutive corpse. Although he’d never seen such an animal before, Khudi had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each summer, and this persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily well preserved. Apart from its missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi realised the find might be significant and he knew he couldn’t just return home and forget all about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend took him to meet the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.
B. Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the vegetation. ‘We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in their extinction.’ says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth expert at London’s Natural History Museum. ‘In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches closely.’ The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C. The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the st Petersburg Zoological Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum’s director, was one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued ‘the best preserved mammoth to come down to US from the Ice Age’, and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely, other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D. Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba’s anatomy: her milk tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the other hand, Pleistocene era: the time between roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10.000 years ago to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E. In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in st Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba’s trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba’s death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F. Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well- preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba’s premolars and tusks revealed that she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
14. Similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world.
15. Details of the uses to which mammoth body parts were put.
16. A theory that accounts for the damage to lyuba’s face.
17. An explanation of how an individual was able to identify a small corpse.
18. A comparison between lyuba and other young mammoth corpses.
Questions 19-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 6-10) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-G.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
19. The indications are that mammoths died as a result of climate change.
20. Teeth analysis is important in discovering why mammoths died out.
21. The corpse of the baby mammoth is in better condition than any other that has been discovered.
22. It would be a mistake to ignore the baby mammoth’s discovery, because of its potential importance.
23. Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good physical condition.
List of People
A Yuri Khudi
B Kirill Serotetto
C Adrian Lister
D Alexei Tikhonov
E Dan Fisher
F Bermard Buigues
G Naoki Suzuki
Questions 24-26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
24. Some researchers say that a marked rise in temperature impacted on mammoths by changing the type of (24)………………
25. Fisher concluded that many of the mammoth tusks he looked at displayed signs of (25)……………..
26. Not long after Lyuba’s death, the Mammuthus primigenius group she belonged to was replaced by another group that came from (26)………………
Reading Passage 3
“How should reading be taught”
A. Learning to speak is automatic for almost all children, but learning to read requires elaborate instruction and conscious effort. Well aware of the difficulties, educators have given a great deal of thought to how they can best help children learn to read. No single method has triumphed. Indeed, heated arguments about the most appropriate form of reading instruction continue to polarize the teaching community.
B. Three general approaches have been tried. In one, called whole-word instruction, children learn by rote how to recognise at a glance a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words. Then they gradually acquire other words, often through seeing them used over and over again in the context of a story.
Speakers of most languages learn the relationship between letters and the sounds associated with them (phonemes). That is, children are taught how to use their knowledge of the alphabet to sound out words. This procedure constitutes a second approach to teaching reading – phonics.
Many schools have adopted a different approach: the whole-language method. The strategy here relies on the child’s experience with the language. For example, students are offered engaging books and are encouraged to guess the words that they do not know by considering the context of the sentence or by looking for clues in the storyline and illustrations, rather than trying to sound them out.
Many teachers adopted the whole-language approach because of its intuitive appeal. Making reading fun promises to keep children motivated, and learning to read depends more on what the student does than on what the teacher does. The presumed benefits of whole-language instruction – and the contrast to the perceived dullness of phonics – led to its growing acceptance across American during the 1990s and a movement away from phonics.
C. However, many linguists and psychologists objected strongly to the abandonment of phonics in American schools. Why was this so? In short, because research had clearly demonstrated that understanding how letters related to the component sounds in words is critically important in reading. This conclusion rests, in part, on knowledge of how experienced readers make sense of words on a page. Advocates of whole-language instruction have argued forcefully that people often derive meanings directly from print without ever determining the sound of the word. Some psychologists today accept this view, but most believe that reading is typically a process of rapidly sounding out words mentally. Compelling evidence for this comes from experiments which show that subjects often confuse homophones (words that sound the same, such as Jrose and ‘rows5). This supports the idea that readers convert strings of letters to sounds.
D. In order to evaluate different approaches to teaching reading, a number of experiments have been carried out, firstly with college students, then with school pupils. Investigators trained English-speaking college students to read using unfamiliar symbols such as Arabic letters (the phonics approach), while another group learned entire words associated with certain strings of Arabic letters (whole-word). Then both groups were required to read a new set of words constructed from the original characters. In general, readers who were taught the rules of phonics could read many more new words than those trained with a whole-word procedure.
Classroom studies comparing phonics with either whole-word or whole-language instruction are also quite illuminating. One particularly persuasive study compared two programmed used in 20 first-grade classrooms. Half the students were offered traditional reading instruction, which included the use of phonics drills and applications. The other half were taught using an individualized method that drew from their experiences with languages; these children produce their own booklets of stories and developed sets of words to be recognized (common components of the whole-language approach). This study found that the first group scored higher at year’s end on tests of reading and comprehension.
E. If researchers are so convinced about the need for phonics instruction, why does the debate continue? Because the controversy is enmeshed in the philosophical differences between traditional and progressive (or new) approaches, differences that have divided educators for years. The progressive challenge the results of laboratory tests and classroom studies on the basis of a broad philosophical skepticism about the values of such research. They champion student-centered learned and teacher empowerment. Sadly, they fail to realize that these very admirable educational values are equally consistent with the teaching of phonics.
F. If schools of education insisted that would-be reading teachers learned something about the vast research in linguistics and psychology that bears on reading, their graduates would be more eager to use phonics and would be prepared to do so effectively. They could allow their pupils to apply the principles of phonics while reading for pleasure. Using whole-language activities to supplement phonics instruction certainly helps to make reading fun and meaningful for children, so no one would want to see such tools discarded. Indeed, recent work has indicated that the combination of literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either method used alone.
Teachers need to strike a balance. But in doing so, we urge them to remember that reading must be grounded in a firm understanding of the connections between letters and sounds. Educators who deny this reality are neglecting decades of research. They are also neglecting the needs of their student.
Questions 27-31
Reading Passage has six sections, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for sections B-F from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 24-28 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
I Disagreement about the reading process
II The roots of the debate
III A combined approach
IV Methods of teaching reading
V A controversial approach
VI Inconclusive research
VII Research with learners
VIII Allowing teachers more control
IX A debate amongst educators
Example
Section A ix
27. Section B
28. Section C
29. Section D
30. Section E
31. Section F
Questions 32-36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
TRUE If the statement agrees with the information
FALSE If the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN If there is no information on this
32. The whole-language approach relates letters to sounds.
33. Many educators believe the whole-language approach to be the most interesting way to teach children to read.
34. Research supports the theory that we read without linking words to sounds.
35. Research has shown that the whole-word approach is less effective than the whole-language approach.
36. Research has shown that phonics is more successful than both the whole-word and whole-language approaches.
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary of sections E and F using the list of words, A-G, below. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.
In the teaching community, (37)……………. question the usefulness of research into methods of teaching reading. These critics believe that (38) ……………… is incompatible with student-centered learning. In the future, teachers need to be aware of (39) ………………. so that they understand the importance of phonics. They should not, however, ignore the ideas of (40) ……………….. which make reading enjoyable for learners.
A the phonics method
B the whole-word method
C the whole-language method
D traditionalists
E progressives
F linguistics
G research studies
[toggle title=”Click for answers” state=”close”]
1. YES
2. NO
3. NOT GIVEN
4. YES
5. CONSTRUCTION OF ROADS
6. CYCLE TRAILERS
7. A BUS SERVICE
8. AERIAL ROPEWAY
9. SHOPS
10. CUSHIONS
11. FAMILY MEMBER
12. MECHANISM
13. A COVER
14. D
15. B
16. E
17. A
18. C
19. C
20. E
21. D
22. A
23. E
24. VEGETABLE
25. HUMAN HUNTING
26. NORTH AMERICA
27. IV
28. I
29. VII
30. II
31. III
32. FALSE
33. TRUE
34. FALSE
35. NOT GIVEN
36. TRUE
37. E
38. A
39. G
40. C [/toggle]