READING PASSAGE 1
Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
The Effects of Food Promotion
A.TV publicity plays a major role in marketing children food and the dominant part of this supports the supposed 'Big Four' of pre-sugary breakfast cereals, soft drinks, candy and flavorful snacks. In the last decade, advertising for fast food spots has rapidly grown. There is also proof that predominance of television ads has recently begun to wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for multi-faceted communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point of sale activity.There's a dramatic difference between the publicised diet and the one advised by health advisors, and themes of fun and fantasy or taste, instead of nutrition and health, are utilized to promote it to children. In the meantime, the suggested diet gets minimal publicity support.
B.There is a lot of proof that children understand and appreciate food publicity. Be that as it may, establishing whether this really impacts them is an intricate issue. A review handled it by looking into researches that had analyzed conceivable impacts on what kids think about food, their food choices and their food habits (both buying and eating), and their health results (eg. weight or cholesterol levels). Most of the studies analyzed food publicizing, yet a few inspected other types of food promotion. In terms of nutritional knowledge, food publicizing appears to have little impact on kids' general perceptions of what makes up a healthy diet, but in certain areas, it does have an impact on more specific types of nutritional knowledge. For instance, seeing cereals and soft drinks adverts helped the little children unable to differentiate between products that have natural fruits.
C. A proof also derived from the review explains that food publicity impacts children's food choices and their purchase habits. The primary school as a case study, for example, found out that awareness to publicized food influenced which one they professed to like, and another demonstrated that labelling and signage on a vending machine affected what was purchased by secondary school students. More research have additionally demonstrated that food advertising can impact what children eat. One, for instance, demonstrated that publicity affected a primary class's decision of day by day snacks at recess.
D. Comprehensive research is then to be done to prove whether or not a correlation exists between food advertising and diet. This is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real world settings. Various reviews have endeavoured this by examining the number of TV viewing as a basis of exposure for TV publicity. A suitable connection has been made concerning TV viewing, diet, obesity and cholesterol levels. However, it is difficult to state, regardless of whether this impact is as a result of publicizing, the stationary factor of TV viewing, or snacking that may happen while viewing. A reviewed settled this issue by taking a look at a detailed diary of children’s viewing habits. This demonstrated the more food adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories they consumed.
E. In this manner, the research suggests food publicity is affecting children's diet in various ways. This does not amount to evidence; as noted above, it's difficult for research of this sort to come across indisputable confirmation. Not to mention much research had similar conclusions of not identifying an effect. Furthermore, only a few studies have endeavoured to uncover how solid these effects are with respect to different variables affecting kids' food choices. Nonetheless, numerous studies have discovered clear effects using complex approaches that make it possible to confirm that these effects are not only because of chance, they are independent of different components that may impact diet, for example, parents diet attitudes or behaviours, and they happen at a brand and classification level.
F. Also, two factors suggest that these findings make the effect of food publicity on children less noteworthy. To start with, the research centers primarily around TV publicizing. The summation of this effect accumulated with different types of marketing and advertising is probably going to be more noteworthy. Secondly, the research has mainly focused on the direct effects on individual children and downplay indirect effects. For instance, fast food adverts may influence children and also parents with the idea that it is a desirable behaviour.
G. In summary, no proof of an effect has been deduced, yet in our view, there is sufficient proof to reason that an effect exists. The next question then is, what should be done? and how commercial publicity can help better our children’s diet.
Questions 1-7
The reading passage has seven sections, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for sections A-G from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
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Section A
Section B
Section C
Section D
Section E
Section F
Section G
Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
The commercial benefits from television advertising are less than in the past
TV advertising has successfully taught children nutritional knowledge about vitamins and others.
There is a clear connection between food advertising and diet-related health problems
Research has proved that food publicity directly influences what children eat
As a result of watching TV advertising adults and children eat more
The majority of the research carried out on the effects of food publicity has been directed at television advertising
READING PASSAGE 2
Questions 14-30. which are based on Reading Passage 2 below
Why the Millennium Bridge Swayed
When the London Millennium footbridge was opened in June 2000, it swayed alarmingly. This generated huge public interest and the bridge became known as London’s “wobbly bridge.” The Millennium Bridge is the first new bridge across the river Thames in London since Tower Bridge opened in 1894, and it is the first ever designed for pedestrians only. The bridge links the City of London near St Paul’s Cathedral with the Tate Modern art gallery on Bankside.
The bridge opened initially on Saturday 10th June 2000. For the opening ceremony, a crowd of over 1,000 people had assembled on the south half of the bridge with a band in front. When they started to walk across with the band playing, there was immediately an unexpectedly pronounced lateral movement of the bridge deck. “It was a fine day and the bridge was on the route of a major charity walk,” one of the pedestrians recounted what he saw that day. “At first, it was still. Then it began to sway sideways, just slightly. Then, almost from one moment to the next, when large groups of people were crossing, the wobble intensified. Everyone had to stop walking to retain balance and sometimes to hold onto the hand rails for support.” Immediately it was decided to limit the number of people on the bridge, and the bridge was dubbed the “wobbly” bridge by the media who declared it another high-profile British Millennium Project failure. In order to fully investigate and resolve the issue the decision was taken to close the bridge on 12 June 2000.
Arup, the leading member of the committee in charge of the construction of the bridge, decided to tackle the issue head on. They immediately undertook a fast-track research project to seek the cause and the cure. The embarrassed engineers found the videotape that day which showed the center span swaying about 3 inches sideways every second and the south span 2 inches every 1.25 seconds. Because there was a significant wind blowing on the opening days (force 3-4) and the bridge had been decorated with large flags, the engineers first thought that winds might be exerting excessive force on the many large flags and banners, but it was rapidly concluded that wind buffeting had not contributed significantly to vibration of the bridge. But after measurements were made in university laboratories of the effects of people walking on swaying platforms and after large-scale experiments with crowds of pedestrians were conducted on the bridge itself, a new understanding and a new theory were both developed.
The unexpected motion was the result of a natural human reaction to small lateral movements. It is well known that a suspension bridge has a tendency to sway when troops march over it in lockstep, which is why troops arc required to break step when crossing such a bridge. “If we walk on a swaying surface we tend to compensate and stabilize ourselves by spreading our legs further apart, but this increases the lateral push.” Pat Dallard, the engineer at Arup, says that you change the way you walk to match what the bridge is doing. It is an unconscious tendency for pedestrians to match their footsteps to the sway, thereby exacerbating it even more. “It’s rather like walking on a rolling ship deck you move one way and then the other to compensate for the roll.” The way people walk doesn’t have to match exactly the natural frequency of the bridge as in resonance the interaction is more subtle. As the bridge moves, people adjust the way they walk in their own manner. The problem is that when there are enough people on the bridge the total sideways push can overcome the bridge’s ability to absorb it. The movement becomes excessive and continues to increase until people begin to have difficulty in walking they may even have to hold on to the rails.
Professor Fujino Yozo of Tokyo University, who studied the earth-resistant Toda Bridge in Japan, believes the horizontal forces caused by walking, running or jumping could also in turn cause excessive dynamic vibration in the lateral direction in the bridge. He explains that as the structure began moving, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the same lateral rhythm as the bridge; the adjusted footsteps magnified the motion just like when four people all stand up in a small boat at the same time. As more pedestrians locked into the same rhythm, the increasing oscillation led to the dramatic swaying captured on film until people stopped walking altogether, because they could not even keep upright.
In order to design a method of reducing the movements, Arup, the bridge’s engineering designer, immediately launched a research program. It was decided that the force exerted by the pedestrians had to be quantified and related to the motion of the bridge. Although there are some descriptions of this phenomenon in existing literature, none of these actually quantifies the force. So, there was no quantitative analytical way to design the bridge against this effect. The efforts to solve the problem quickly got supported by a number of universities and research organizations.
The tests at Imperial College involved persons walking along a specially built, 7.2m-long platform, which could be driven laterally at different frequencies and amplitudes. These tests have their own limitations. While the Imperial College test platform was too short that only seven or eight steps could be measured at one time, the “walking on the spot” test did not accurately replicate forward walking, although many footsteps could be observed using this method. Neither test could investigate any influence of other people in a crowd on the behavior of the individual tested.
The results of the laboratory tests provided information which enabled the initial design of a retrofit to be progressed. However, unless the usage of the bridge was to be greatly restricted, only two generic options to improve its performance were considered feasible. The first was to increase the stiffness of the bridge to move all its lateral natural frequencies out of the range that could be excited by the lateral footfall forces, and the second was to increase the damping of the bridge to reduce the resonant response.
Questions 14-17
Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-H from the box below.
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14. When people started crossing ………………
15. Because of the strong winds ………………
16. When a body of troops crossed a bridge marching in step ………………
17. Research into the phenomenon involved ………………
Questions 18-23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
In order to understand why the Millennium bridge swayed, engineers studied a tape of the opening ceremony and instigated a 18 …………… straight away. Engineers originally believed that the lateral movement was caused by the wind’s effect on the many 19 ………… flying that day. However, later studies, based on how people walk on moving platforms, meant that a 20 ………… was reached. The tests showed that people walking on a swaying surface tend to compensate by taking longer strides which increases the 21 ………., this in turn makes the sway worse. A study by Professor Fujino Yozo found that vibration from people moving caused high 22 ………. in the sideways movement of the bridge. They would then change their 23 ……….., causing the structure to move even more.
Questions 24-26
Complete the table using the list of words, A-C, below.
|
Said by |
Statements |
24 ………… |
The structure moves because of users changing their walk to fit the same sideways sway as the bridge. This helps exacerbate the movement even more. |
25 …………. |
Sideways movement becomes a problem when there is more lateral impact than the bridge can take. |
26 ………… |
The tests were found to have shortcomings in that insufficient steps could be measured and these did not duplicate the action of walking forward. |
READING PASSAGE 3
Questions 27-40. which are based on Reading Passage 3 below
Disappearing Bananas
The bananas we know today all originate from Musa acuminata, a wild, spindly banana plant native to the South East Asian islands that make up modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The evolution of bananas has been traced back to 10,000 years by agricultural experts. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last ice age. Normally wild bananas produce tiny fruits filled with hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter-gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seedless, edible fruits. Genetics now know that most of these edible plants are mostly results of accidental mutation that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of two. This alteration prevents seeds and pollen from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile, which is why scientists believe the world’s famous fruit (banana) could disappear forever in 10 years’ time as it lacks the genetic capability to ward off pests and diseases that are in Central America, Africa and Asia.
The banana needs a pick-me-up fast. But science has so far let it down. For decades plant breeders have all but ignored it, because developing new varieties without the help of sexual reproduction is expensive and time-consuming. As a result, most people in the developed world eat just one variety. In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought famine to Ireland a century and a half ago. But it holds a lesson for other crops, too, says Emile Frison of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France. Frison explains, “The state of banana can teach a broader lesson: the increasing requirements of food crops around the world is threatening their ability to adapt and survive.”
The unproductive hybrids were cultivated by the first men. They were planted by replanting their cuttings from their stem. And descendants of the results of those plantings are the bananas we eat today. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity makes it ripe for disease like no other crop on Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually reproducing crops have always had a much broader genetic base, and the genes will recombine in new arrangements in each generation giving them enough resist the ability to fight pests and diseases. But that advantage is fading fast with the repeated plantation of high yielding varieties by planters. Plant breeders work tirelessly to maintain the resistance of standardized crops because even yields of the most productive crop could just nose dive, so they have to keep everything in check at all times. Even the director of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Geoff Hawtin says “When some pest or disease comes along, severe epidemics can occur.”
Banana is an interesting case study. Until the 1950s, one variety, the Gros Michel, dominated the world’s commercial banana business. Found by French botanists in Asia in the 1820s, the Gros Michel was by all accounts a fine banana, richer and sweeter than today’s standard banana without the latter’s bitter aftertaste when green. But it was vulnerable to a soil fungus that produced a wilt known as Panama disease. “Once the fungus gets into the soil, it remains there for many years. There is nothing farmers can do. Even chemical spraying won’t get rid of it,” says Rodomiro Ortiz, director of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria. So, plantation owners played a running game, abandoning infested fields and moving to “clean” land - until they ran out of clean land in the 1950s and had to abandon the Gros Michel. Its successor, and still the reigning commercial king, is the Cavendish banana, a 19th- century British discovery from southern China. The Cavendish is resistant to Panama disease and, as a result, it literally saved the international banana industry. During the 1960s, it replaced the Gros Michel on supermarket shelves. If you buy a banana today, it is almost certainly a Cavendish. But even so, it is a minority in the world’s banana crop.
Bananas are widely known and eaten daily. It is the largest producer of calories and over 500 million people depend on this crop. Although bananas might have resisted the Panama disease a greater resistance will be needed to withstand black Sigatoka disease. The Sigatoka disease which is also a fungal disease was first sighted in Fiji 1963. The black Sigatoka generates brown wounds on leaves causing premature ripening. It is also capable of cutting crops yield down to 40 per cent and also cutting the productivity lifetime of bananas from 30 to as short as 3 years. Planters keep the black Sigatoka in check by frequent chemical use, 40 as a basic number of chemical spraying annually. But diseases like black Sigatoka adapt to these fungicides. Frison says, “ as soon as you bring a new fungicide they develop resistance”. “One thing we can be sure of is that black Sigatoka won’t lose in this battle”. Some planters are unable to afford these fungicides, so all they can do is watch their plants die. Brazil's leading banana pathologist with the government research EMBRAPA Luadir Gasparotto, says “Most of the banana fields in Amazonia have already been destroyed by the disease. Predicting a fall in production to 70 per cent, with an only option to find a new variety.
With most crops, such a threat would unleash an army of breeders, scouring the world for resistant relatives whose traits they can breed into commercial varieties. Not so with the banana. Because all edible varieties are sterile, bringing in new genetic traits to help cope with pests and diseases is nearly impossible. Nearly, but not totally. Very rarely, a sterile banana will experience a genetic accident that allows an almost normal seed to develop, giving breeders a tiny window for improvement. Breeders at the Honduran Foundation of Agricultural Research have tried to exploit this to create disease-resistant varieties. Further back-crossing with wild bananas yielded a new seedless banana resistant to both Sigatoka and Panama disease.
The results of the new hybrid are rather disheartening as western supermarkets and peasant farmers dislike it. Some say it tastes like an apple instead of a banana, causing planters to grow other plants avoiding bananas. And the banana companies also abandoned the breeding effort and invested more assets on finding new fungicides. The Cavendish is still the only success for over 40 years in the breeding program. “It was quite expensive and we got nothing back, ” says Ronald Romero, head of research at Chiquita, one of the three biggest companies dominating the banana industry.
A global consortium of scientists led by Frison announced last year, plans to sequence the banana genome within five years. Being the first edible fruit sequenced. Well, almost edible. The association will be sequencing wild inedible bananas from East Asia because they are resistant to the fast-growing fungus, the black Sigatoka. Then the genes resisting black Sigatoka can be identified and processed in a laboratory tissue culture of cells from edible varieties. This can thereafter turn to new disease-resistant plants and further distributed to local farmers.
It sounds promising, but the big banana companies have, until now, refused to get involved in GM research for fear of alienating their customers. “Biotechnology is extremely expensive and there are serious questions about consumer acceptance,” says David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs. With scant funding from the companies, the banana genome researchers are focusing on the other end of the spectrum. Even if they can identify the crucial genes, they will be a long way from developing new varieties that smallholders will find suitable and affordable. But whatever biotechnology’s academic interest, it is the only hope for the banana. Without it, banana production worldwide will head into a tailspin. Preventing the extinction of the banana could be both a lifesaver for hungry and impoverished Africans and the most popular product on the world’s supermarket shelves.
Questions 27-32
Complete the table using the list of words, A-F, below.
|
Said by |
Statements |
Emile Frison |
Lessons can be learned from bananas for other crops. |
27 ………….. |
Consumers would not accept genetically modified crops. |
28 …………. |
The impact of fungal infection in soil is often long-lasting |
29 …………. |
A banana disease has damaged a huge number of banana plantation |
30 …………. |
A pest invasion may seriously cause damage to the banana industry. |
31 …………. |
Banana disease may develop resistance to sprayed chemicals. |
32 …………. |
A manufacturer gave up on breeding bananas for disease-resistant |
Questions 33-39
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the 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
33. The banana and the potato have a similar nutritional content.
34. The bananas that we commonly eat today have a strong natural immunity to infection.
35. Fungal disease is almost impossible to eradicate.
36. Modern supermarkets stock a wide range of banana varieties.
37. Black Sigatoka cuts fruit yields by 40% and drastically reduces the productive lifetime of bananas.
38. The black Sigatoka disease can be effectively combated by genetic modification.
39. The introduction of a new disease resistant banana proved unsuccessful.
Question 40
Complete the answers below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
40. Where was Banana first planted?