Driverless cars

 Driverless cars would of course, do (0)........ with the stress of driving, allowing their occupants to read, browse the internet or take a nap, and they would also eliminate accidents caused by human error.

The benefits would go (9).......... comfort and safety, however, since they would also revolutionise transport and urban planning. Traffic lights and road signs would no (10) ......... be needed. Different autonomous vehicles on the road would be able to coordinate their movements, and travel (11) ......... close formation, so that traffic would be kept flowing without interruption, (12)......... journeys quicker and road use more efficient. On the one hand, this might mean that cities got bigger, as a (13)......... of commuting times being reduced; on the (14)........... , they could become denser, with houses in the space previously dedicated to roads.

It may all sound (15) ......... science fiction, but much of the technology needed to turn ordinary vehicles into self-driving ones already exists. Almost (16) ......... car makers are developing systems which will in effect turn cars into autonomous robots.

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).

 Exploring the oceans

Example: (0) SCOPE: MICROSCOPIC

A million new species of (0) .......... sea life have recently been observed for the first time, promising (17) .......... about the marine ecosystem that could (18) .......... our understanding of the impact of climate change on the oceans. Each new life form was observed in the (19) .......... of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans by the research vessel, the Tara, which was a (20).......... small ship to be undertaking a mission on this scale.

The expedition's (21)........ show for the first time the quite remarkable diversity of tiny plankton that are a vital food source for fish and whales. In total, 1.5 million species of microorganisms were recorded — (22) .......... more than previously thought —and some of these were extraordinarily beautiful.

Worryingly, the scientists report that the oceans are becoming more acidic, and this will continue if (23) .......... of carbon dioxide increase, or even if they remain at current levels. Since these organisms are sensitive to acid, they could become (24).......... species in the future.

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. Do you mind if I watch you while you paint?

OBJECTION

Do you.................................................................. you while you paint?

The gap can be filled by the words 'HAVE ANY OBJECTION TO MY WATCHING'.

Write only the missing words IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

25. Sam moved house only because he disliked commuting. 

DISLIKE

But for his ................................................................ moved house.

26. Katy didn't seem nervous, even though she was making her speech without notes.

 SIGN

Katy ....................................................................... even though she was making her speech withoul notes.

27. The manager said he was extremely confident that his team could cope with the challenges ahead.

 EVERY

The manager said he  .................................................. to cope with the challenges ahead.

28. More and more tourists are visiting the ancient towns in the mountains.

GROWTH

There .............................................................. tourists visiting the ancient towns in the mountains.

29.I don't think Harriet has any idea how difficult it is to use this apparatus.

INVOLVED

I don't think Harriet has any idea .............................................................. this apparatus.

30.Because the room is not available today, they have rearranged the meeting for next week.

PUT

Because the room is not available today, the meeting

 .................................................................................. next week.

Reading and use of English

Part 5

 For questions 31—36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Are you an Optimist or a Pessimist?

Whichever you are, a new book reveals that you can learn a Iot from attempting the opposite attitude.

As a nation, the British are not a very optimistic bunch. When we were first granted the honour of hosting the 2012 Olympic Games, according to an opinion poll at the time, 55 per cent of us were more concerned about the likely impact on the transport network while the Games were on than with celebrating the arrival of the greatest show on Earth. But alongside this type of staunch pessimism resides an unsettling feeling that we should be more positive. We are always trying to dislodge each other's pessimism. Test it for yourself: sit gloomily in a public place and see how long it takes before a smiling passer-by says, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ or offers one of those trite aphorisms about ‘looking on the bright side’ or ‘clouds having silver linings’.

The self-help industry rakes in billions through peddling hope and positive thinking. But can a positive outlook really improve our lives? How can optimism make people more trustworthy, or sports events more successful? It can't, says Professor Elaine Fox, a neuroscientist who recently published a book called Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain about our ambivalent feelings of optimism and pessimism. Our negativity is the response of a rational mind and positivity is a delusion, she says, and for most of us they both act to balance us out. ‘Positivity is a delusion. But it is a useful delusion. If we didn't have some sort of optimism we wouldn't ever get out of bed in the morning. 8ut pessimism has its place,’ she says. So, when we think positively, are we just tricking ourselves that things will get better? It's a little more complicated than that, says Professor Fox. ‘Where self-help books say “just think happy thoughts” it doesn't work.’ But some degree of optimism can work to our advantage, because if we feel more positive, we will take more positive actions. ‘Optimism gives you a sense of control,’ she explains. So, to return to the example of the Olympics, if we had just repeated the mantra, ‘the Olympics will be amazing, the Olympics will be amazing’ it wouldn't have made it happen. In the event we actually did respond positively to them, but by taking the kind of actions — buying tickets to events, or getting
involved as volunteers — that meant we ended up loving the whole experience.

More dramatically, positive thoughts can have concrete health benefits and can help us through certain situations, Professor Fox explains. In experiments on pain in which students are asked to keep their hands in a bucket of ice water for as long as they can stand it, students who believe they have been given a painkiller but have in actual fact just been given a sugar pill, will keep their hand in longer than those who aren't given anything. Scans of their brains show they actually produce a surge of dopamine, a so-called ‘happy’ chemical, which combats the pain.
‘Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, said, “If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” In general, optimists wil! try harder and spend longer on something than pessimism,’ says Professor Fox. ‘They also believe they have some control over their life, and that's why they tend to be more successful.’

But don't shrug off your grumpy cynicism just yet. Professor Fox says a healthy dose of negativity can help us out, too. ‘The amygdala — the fear system in our brain that helps us detect threat and danger — is really at the root of pessimism. Pessimism helps us suss out danger in our lives.’ And although most of us are unlikely to need this reaction the same way our caveman ancestors did — for fight-or-flight reactions — fear is still a useful trait. ‘A pessimistic outlook would work if you were setting up your own business,’ says Professor Fox, ‘to identify risk and avoid it.’ So, there is a place for pessimism. ‘They say the aeroplane was invented by an optimist and the parachute was invented by a pessimist. That's the reason I called the book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, because we need both.’ Anticipate sunshine, but carry an umbrella and you should get along just fine.

Reading and use of English

Part 7

You are going to read an article about a tourist destination in Australia. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. 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.

Visiting Uluru

One day in 1874, an explorer, Ernest Giles, struggled up a small hill and was confronted with a sight such as he could never have dreamed of finding. Before him, impossibly imposing, stood the most singular monolith on earth, the great red rock now known as Uluru. Hastening to report the find, he was informed that a man named William Gosse had chanced upon it a few days ahead of him and had already named it Ayers  Rock after the South Australia governor.

So you are aware, as you drive to the park entrance, that you have driven 1,300 miles to look at something you have seen portrayed a thousand times already. In consequence, your mood as you approach this famous monolith is restrained, unexpectant — pessimistic even. And then you see it, and you are instantly transfixed. There, in the middle of a memorable and imposing emptiness, stands an eminence of exceptional nobility and grandeur, 1,150 feet high, a mile and a half long, five and a half miles around.

It's not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock. You know it in a way that has nothing to do with calendars and the covers of souvenir books.

It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you sense that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level — perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level — and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance.

I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveller who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: ’Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can't miss it.’ If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the Galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I'm not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all. I'm just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship, this is where I would start digging.

You realize that you could spend quite a lot of time - possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time — just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it. You can see yourself hanging out with much younger visitors and telling them: ’And the amazing thing is that every day it's different, you know what I'm saying? It's never the same rock twice. That's right, my friend — you put your finger on it there. It's awesome. It's an awesome thing.’

Instead, we stopped at the visitors' centre for a cup of coffee and to look at the displays, which were all to do with interpretations of the Dreamtime — the Aborigines' traditional conception of how the earth was formed and operates. There was nothing instructive in a historical or geological sense, which was disappointing because I was curious to know what Uluru is doing there. How do you get the biggest rock in existence onto the middle of an empty plain?

Afterwards we had one last drive around the rock before heading back to the lonely highway. We had been at the site for barely two hours, obviously not nearly enough time, but I realized as I turned around in my seat to watch it shrinking into the background behind us that there never could be enough, and I felt moderately comforted by that thought.

A. It is less red than photographs have led you to expect but in every other way more arresting than you could ever have I have discussed this since with many other people, nearly all of whom agreed that they approached Uluru with a kind of fatigue, and were left amazed in a way they could not adequately explain.

B. By the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of You can't go a day in Australia without seeing it four or five or six times — on postcards, on travel posters, on the cover of picture books — and as you get nearer, the frequency of exposure increases.

C. Climbing up takes several hours and much exertion. Even when it's not too hot, lots of people get in trouble. Just the day before a Canadian had had to be rescued off a ledge from which he could not get either up or down. Fortunately, they close it to climbers when the weather is really warm, as it was this day.

D. It is grounded in something much more In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel an acquaintance with it — a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of memory has twitched or stirred.

E. In fact, it is almost 300 miles across a largely featureless tract. Uluru's glory is that it stands alone in a boundless emptiness, but it does mean that you have to really want to see it; it's not something you're going to pass on the way to the beach.

F. It turns out that Uluru is what is known as a bornhardt: a hunk of weather-resistant rock left standing when all else around it has worn away; but nowhere else on earth has one hunk of rock been left in such dramatic and solitary splendour or assumed such a pleasing smooth symmetry.

G. I'm not saying that any of this is so. I'm just saying that this is how you feel. The other thought that strikes you —that struck me anyway —is that Uluru is not merely a splendid and mighty monolith, but also an extremely distinctive one.

H. Quite apart from that initial shock of indefinable recognition, there is also the fact that Uluru is totally arresting. You cannot and don't want to stop looking at it. As you draw closer, it becomes even more interesting. It is less regular than you had imagined. There are more curves and more irregularities than are evident from even a couple of hundred yards away.

Reading and use of English

Part 8

You are going to read an article about the present-day importance of the moon landings. For questions 47 – 56, choose from the sections (A – D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

Living in the Moon's Shadow

More than forty years on, why the moon landings are still having an impact today

 A. On December 19, 1972, a sonic boom above the South Pacific signaled the completion of the Apollo program, as a tiny space capsule burst back through the blue sky. On board were the last three astronauts to visit the moon. The space race has changed the course of human history far more profoundly than anyone could have predicted in 1961, when a new president challenged America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. No one present knew how to make it happen. But that wasn‘t going to stop them rising to President Kennedy‘s dare.

B. As progress in human space flight sped up through the 1960s, Ph.D. intake at American universities, particularly in the field of physics, increased almost threefold. Apollo was making America cleverer. Within weeks of Kennedy‘s speech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was asked to work out the small matter of helping astronauts make a soft landing on a moving target hurtling through space 250,000 miles from Earth. To assist them in this, a small, lightweight computer was proposed by MIT. In the early ‘60s, computers often took up entire rooms. To miniaturize one enough to pack it into a modestly-sized craft they‘d need new technology, so they turned to a brand new arrival on the technology scene: the integrated circuit.

C. Only a few companies were experimenting with these new micro-electronic components at the time; keen to help them perfect the performance of these novel miniature circuits, NASA ordered one million of them. The agency really only needed a few hundred, but, aware that they would be betting the lives of their astronauts on them, they were keen to make sure the manufacturers could make them as reliable as possible. Such a financial kickstart to a fledgling industry, coupled with another gift of Apollo — inspiration — would prove to be powerful drivers for technological change in the decades that followed. Those graduating across the world in the ‘70s and ‘80s had watched Apollo‘s engineers dream the impossible and then build it. As an act of human ingenuity, Apollo made them giddy, intoxicated on admiration and inspiration. As William Bainbridge put it in his book ‘The Spaceflight Revolution’, Apollo was ‘a grand attempt to reach beyond the world of mundane life and transcend the ordinary limits of human existence through accomplishment of the miraculous —a story of engineers who tried to reach the heavens'.

D. Many of the people who have built the new tools of the Internet and the technological infrastructure that underpins it cite Apollo as their motivator. Professor Sir Martin Sweeting founded the world-renowned small satellite company SSTL, which revolutionized the industry. Apollo started me on this whole pathway of getting involved in space,’ says Sweeting. ‘The idea of being able to participate in something as exciting as a lunar landing, it stimulated an ambition, the dream of building my own satellite with my friends.’ The idea of a small private enterprise launching a satellite was considered pretty crazy at the time, he points out. After building the first one, I had a lot of advice to go out and get a proper job. I'm sure that without Apollo I would have followed a more conventional career'.

E. Many of the people who have built the new tools of the Internet and the technological infrastructure that underpins it cite Apollo as their motivator. Professor Sir Martin Sweeting founded the world-renowned small satellite company SSTL, which revolutionized the industry. Apollo started me on this whole pathway of getting involved in space,’ says Sweeting. ‘The idea of being able to participate in something as exciting as a lunar landing, it stimulated an ambition, the dream of building my own satellite with my friends.’ The idea of a small private enterprise launching a satellite was considered pretty crazy at the time, he points out. After building the first one, I had a lot of advice to go out and get a proper job. I'm sure that without Apollo I would have followed a more conventional career'

In which section are the following mentioned?