Beekeeping at school

When a swarm of bees descended on a primary school one day, (0) …….. surprisingly there was panic among the teachers. (9) …….. , most of the children watched fascinated as a bee catcher rounded (10) …….. the uninvited visitors. This unexpected event led to the school getting its own bee hive a year later and integrating beekeeping into the curriculum, all of (11) …….. has resulted in notable benefits.

The children study the dance that the bees do to communicate where nectar (12) …….. to be found and use honey in cooking lessons. They have even opened a school shop selling honey, with the pupils responsible for collecting and pricing it, as well as every other step of production.

Interestingly, nobody anticipated the most significant benefit of (13) …….. of this: the effect bees seem to (14) …….. had on the pupils’ behaviour. (15) …….. getting children to think of their responsibility to others can often (16) …….. a challenge, making bees the focus has brought about this behaviour effortlessly.

Reading and use of English

Part 3

For questions 17—24, read the text below. Use the word given in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the gap in the same line. There is an example at the beginning (0).

Example: (0) INCREASE: INCREASINGLY

Dance stress away

Often considered the domain of just a few, ballet is (0) …….. finding its way into our daily lives. People from all walks of life are now appreciating just how (17) …….. ballet can be.

The benefits of ballet have not gone (18) …….. in the business world, with some companies offering ballet classes to their (19) …….. . It may not, at first, seem to be an obvious combination, but the techniques used in classical ballet are regarded by some as the perfect antidote to a stressful working environment.

In today’s corporate world, unhealthy posture resulting from being hunched over a laptop, is not uncommon. This, added to stress from dealing with tense situations, can increase the (20) …….. of headaches and back pain. However, the (21) …….. , fluid movements of ballet will counteract the physical (22) …….. of office workers as they stretch and evaluate their posture.

Regular ballet also has a myriad of mental benefits as its themed exercises enhance memory and co-ordination. The overall result is: a reduction in stress levels, enhanced (23) …….. , determination and focus, not to mention a (24) …….. improved sense of well-being.

Reading and use of English

Part 4

For question 25—30, complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence, using the word given.

Do not change the word given. You must use between two and five words, including the word given. Here is an example (O).

Example:

0. James would only speak to the head of department alone.
ON
James …………………………………………………… to the head of department alone.

The gap can be filled by the words 'INSISTED ON SPEAKING'.

Write only the missing words IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

25. According to the film director, it was the quality of the photography that was most important.

MORE

For the film director, ……………………………….... than the quality of the photography.

26. The instructor told me that I would be evaluated in half an hour’s time.

TAKE

The instructor told me that my ……………………………….... in half an hour’s time.

27. Even though Sarah started badly, she went on to win the race.

WINNING

Sarah ended ……………………………….... of having started badly.

28. Hannah was surprised to be offered a pay rise by the company.

SURPRISE

Much ……………………………….... her a pay rise.

29. Harry didn’t realise how late it had got and missed his bus.

TRACK

Harry didn’t……………………………….... and missed his bus.

30. Alec went out of his way to introduce himself to his new neighbours.

POINT

Alec ……………………………….... himself to his new neighbours.

Reading and use of English

Part 5

You are going to read an article about a writer called Matthew Crawford, who has just written a book about coping with modern life. For questions 31—36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Living in the modern world

When Matthew Crawford is not thinking and writing about how we ought to live, he works as a motorcycle mechanic. His first book was about the benefits of the manual trades. His most recent one is a kind of philosophical treatise on how to cope with modernity. He was inspired to write it when he noticed that advertisements popped up on the credit card machine during a short delay while he entered his pin number.

Crawford says he realised that these demands on our attention from the advertising industry were becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. What we want to be at the forefront of our mind at any particular moment is a very personal matter, and we are being prevented from deciding this for ourselves by something which we are, in the main, unaware of. It is becoming more and more difficult to think, or spend time remembering conversations we’ve had. And because everyone is trying to protect themselves from the irritation of constantly being interrupted, we close ourselves off and no longer want to do simple things like chat to strangers. ‘We increasingly encounter the world through these representations that are addressed to us: video games, apps on your phone,’ says Crawford. They reflect our desires and end up taking over.

Everyone knows that office worker who complains about emails all day and then spends their free time emailing. Studies have shown that our attention wanders if a phone is merely visible on the table. There’s no scientific evidence yet on whether our attention spans have been affected – there have been fears of this kind since the telegraph was invented in 1837. But it’s indisputable that we are more conscious of other things we might be doing. It’s tempting to see the advent of this crisis as technological, but for Crawford it’s more that the technology has created the perfect vehicles for our self-obsession. A world of constant choice means that our powers of self-control are heavily taxed, and this has a social impact.

We’d rather send a text message to a friend, free from the risk of having a conversation. By only engaging with representations of people rather than people themselves, Crawford argues, we risk losing something fundamental in our society. And screens are only part of the problem. He gives his gym as an example. There used to be a single music player in the middle of the room. People didn’t all like the same music and that could lead to tension. Now people tend to listen to their own music. ‘The gym used to be a social place and it has lost that character. Genuine connection to other people tends to happen in the context of conflict’ he says.

Crawford’s proposed solution has two parts. First, we need regulation of noise and distraction in public space. More importantly, though,
Crawford advocates skilled practices as a way of engaging with the world in a more satisfying way. He gives the examples of an ice-hockey player and a motorbike racer as people whose roles force them to deal with material reality. No representation can replicate the feel of the hockey puck on ice, or gravel under your tyres at high speed. Each relies on their good judgment of a complicated subject and the ability to manage the presence of (line 69) others in the same space.

‘When you engage with the world this way, manufactured experiences are revealed as pale substitutes for the kind of involvement you have with real things,’ he says. ‘They lose some of their grip.’ It is important to find a way to use your judgment. Constantly resisting distractions can be exhausting and makes you less able to focus on what matters. The practice of paying attention to one thing, by contrast, makes it easier to pay attention to others.

Reading and use of English

Part 6

You are going to read four extracts by academics about photography. For questions 37 – 40, choose from the experts A – D. The expert may be chosen more than once.

Is photography art?

A. In my view, when a photograph is produced, this is not the result of genuinely creative camera work. A scientific technique is being applied, and with a good camera, even an amateur photographer with no artistic ability can reliably produce acceptable images. Compare this to the likelihood of someone with no idea how to paint or carve ever creating a decent watercolour or statue. Clearly, the creative quality of photography is far removed from that of such genuinely artistic endeavours. And yet there are those who persist in claiming that photography is the most significant contemporary art form. Perhaps I should qualify the extent to which I disagree: admittedly, when a photographer captures a moment of reality, it is done deliberately. It is perhaps this deliberateness that contains the germ of what might be called art.

B. Photography belongs both to the realms of reality and imagination: although it sometimes favours one over the other, it never quite relinquishes its hold on either. Little does it matter that a photograph can be printed out a thousand times, thus depriving the ‘original’ of its unique status. For me, it is sufficient that no two photographers are likely to create an identical image, and it is this which sets photography on a par with more established artistic disciplines such as sculpture or
painting when it comes to inventiveness and originality. And now, although the idea that photography could be art at one time appeared absurd to many people, it is without a doubt our foremost and most immediately accessible means of artistic expression. In no way is it undermined by the fact that everyone has a camera these days and can take excellent photos without formal instruction.

C. To draw comparisons between painting and photography as art forms is to miss the point; they are so very different. Moreover, photographs capture reality, and therefore can often have a far
greater impact on the viewer. There are those who insist that unlike painting, which can take years of practice to master, photography is easy: anyone can pick up a camera and take a reasonable picture. However, I would contend that it is unlikely ever to match the creativity of one taken by a professional photographer, and if it does, its success is unlikely to be replicated. These issues have been debated by art critics for over a century, and yet, arguably, photography is not only one of the newest types of art, it is the ultimate form of modern art.

D.There are many thousands of important early art photographs in public and private collections worldwide and yet the majority were not made with the art exhibition in mind. Some were intended as demonstrations of what the new medium could do; others began life as documents, records or illustrations; only later were they seen as art objects. The central role photography currently plays in the international artistic realm would once have been unimaginable. There are still those who judge photography not to be a true art. One reason given is that it can be duplicated again and again. I would remind them that bronze sculpture, which no-one denies is an art form, can involve
casting and recasting a large number of copies. Surely a photographer’s art, like that of a painter, is the ability to capture a moment of reality and turn it into an image of interest and beauty – a true measure of creativity.

Which expert...

Reading and use of English

Part 7

You are going to read an article about sugar and its alternatives. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41 – 46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Finding an alternative to sugar

So much for the decades in which fats and oils were public enemy number one on our dinner plates

There is more and more evidence that sugar – or more precisely, carbohydrate – is behind our increasing rates of obesity and heart disease. Even if it is still not completely clear how it is bad for us, there are endless calls for reducing the quantity of sugar in the foods we eat.

Replacing the sweetness of sugar in foods is actually relatively straightforward. The first synthetic sweetener, saccharine, was discovered accidentally by a young Russian chemist named Constantin Fahlberg in 1879. While studying coal-tar derivatives, he unwittingly got some on his hands and then licked his fingers. Saccharine became widely used around World War I, when natural sugar was often in short supply. In the 1960s, scientists discovered several more sweeteners in similarly serendipitous ways, including aspartame and acesulfame K.

Yet while we have plenty of options for sweetness, there are several difficulties associated with using sugar substitutes in our diet. There have been various health scares over the years, which have negatively affected stevia, saccharine and aspartame, among others.

And there are other issues, aside from health scares and labelling problems. Sugar’s bad press puts the food industry in a difficult position because sugars have chemical functions in foods that make them difficult to replace. Sugar solutions freeze at a lower temperature than pure water, for instance. In products like ice cream, this is critical to maintaining a soft texture at freezer temperatures. Sugars also play an important role in giving products like bread and cakes their darker colour, through what chemists call non-enzymatic browning reactions.
Unfortunately, artificial sweeteners are not good at reproducing either of these functions.

All in all, although non-sugar sweeteners are a huge industry, these drawbacks help to explain why they have come nowhere near eclipsing sugar. However, things are looking up for natural sweeteners. The evidence of health risks associated with them has turned out to be less convincing than first thought. Stevia’s years in the wilderness were apparently the result of an anonymous complaint about the risks to the U.S. authorities, which is now commonly thought to have come from a rival producer of an alternative sweetener.

As for the problem of taste, manufacturers have sought to overcome the aftertaste issue by combining a number of different sweeteners. We
perceive the aftertaste of different sweeteners over differing timescales, so one sweetener can be used to mask the aftertaste of another.

In the absence of a perfect sugar replacement, such ploys could be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future. No wonder governments are instead beginning to intervene by employing measures such as higher taxes on products containing excessive sugar to save us from our sweet tooth.

A.Scientists have also been playing their part in this rehabilitation. When it comes to texture, for instance, protein texturisers can be added instead – soy, for example. And for other substances which have a similar effect as sugar on the freezing properties of water, scientists
have discovered that erythritol is one option.

B. Public suspicions are further fuelled by the fact that many governments classify all nonsugar sweeteners as additives – even those which occur naturally in plants. As consumers have become increasingly wary of anything containing additives, manufacturers have been moving towards products which are freeof them, thus putting these sweeteners at a disadvantage.

C. An additional, increasingly common practice is to mix sugar and non-sugar sweeteners together. This helps explain why the use of
non-sugar sweeteners in new product launches has risen significantly in recent years.

D.But while sweeteners have this particular advantage, it remains a problem that they adhere more strongly to our sweetness
receptors and have a different and longerlasting taste profile to sugar, and so are perceived as tasting different by consumers.

E. Had we ever come up with a viable alternative to sugar, of course, we wouldn’t be facing such seemingly insurmountable problems now. In our sweetness-addicted era, finding a healthier substitute for sugar is one of science’s greatest challenges. The question is, why has a solution
eluded us for so long?

F. Then there is the problem of the bitter aftertaste of artificial sweeteners experienced by some consumers, which arises from the
mechanism by which sweetness is detected in the taste buds. One problem is that the structural features of a sweet molecule which
allow it to bind to the sweetness receptors on the tongue are similar to those which bind to our bitterness receptors.

G. As well as these substances, there are naturally occurring sweeteners that we have actually known about for much longer. For example, the Guarani peoples of modern-day Brazil and Paraguay have been using the leaves of the stevia plant to sweeten foods for about 1,500 years. Also well known is the West African katemfe fruit, the seeds of which contain a sweet chemical called thaumatin.

Reading and use of English

Part 8

You are going to read an article about dolphin intelligence. For questions 47 – 56, choose from the sections (A – D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

Dolphin intelligence
Unlocking the mysteries of dolphin communication

A. The acrobatic acts of dolphins have fascinated humans, but scientists are now more interested in how dolphins think than in what they can do. When the head researcher presses her palms together over her head, the signal to innovate, and then puts her fists together, the sign for tandem, she has instructed a pair of dolphins to show her a behaviour and to do it in unison. As they disappear below the surface, another researcher carrying a large underwater video camera with hydrophones sinks with them. He records several seconds of audible chirping between them, then his camera captures them both slowly rolling over in unison and flapping their tails simultaneously. There are two possible explanations of this remarkable behaviour. Either one dolphin is mimicking the other so quickly and precisely that the apparent coordination is only an illusion. Or when they whistle back and forth beneath the surface, they’re literally discussing a plan.

B. When a chimpanzee gazes at a piece of fruit or a silverback gorilla beats his chest to warn off an approaching male, it’s hard not to see a bit of ourselves in those behaviours and even to imagine what the animals might be thinking. We are, after all, great apes like them, and their intelligence often feels like a familiar version of our own. But dolphins are something truly different. They ‘see’ using sonar and do so with such phenomenal precision that they can tell from a hundred feet away what something is made of. Their eyes operate independently of each other. They’re a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet – watching them may be the closest we’ll come to encountering an extra-terrestrial.

C. Dolphins are extraordinarily garrulous. Not only do they whistle and click, but they also emit loud broadband packets of sound called burst pulses to discipline their young and chase away sharks. Scientists listening to these sounds have long wondered what they
might mean. Yet despite a half century of research, we are none the wiser. Virtually no evidence supports the existence of anything resembling a dolphin language, and scientists have been known to voice exasperation at the continued quixotic search. However, other
researchers see circumstantial evidence that the problem simply hasn’t yet been looked at with the right set of tools. Only recently have high-frequency underwater audio recorders been able to capture the full spectrum of dolphin sounds. In the past couple of years, new data-mining algorithms have made possible a meaningful analysis of those recordings. Ultimately dolphin vocalisation is either one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science or one of its greatest blind alleys.

D. Why did dolphins, of all the creatures roaming land and sea, acquire such large brains? To answer that question, we must look at the fossil record. About 34 million years ago the ancestors of modern dolphins were large creatures with wolflike teeth. Around that time, it’s theorised, a period of significant oceanic cooling shifted food supplies and created a new ecological niche, which offered dolphins opportunities and changed how they hunted. Dolphins became more communicative, more social – and probably more intelligent.
Researchers have identified three levels of alliances within their large, open social network and found that two dolphins can be friends one day and foes the next. All these behaviours have the mark of intelligence. But what is intelligence really? When pressed, we often have to admit that we’re measuring how similar a species is to us. The question is not how smart are dolphins, but how are dolphins smart?

In which section are the following mentioned?