Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Vanishing topsoil influences farm productivities
B. Water is being polluted by chemical fertilisers
C. Advantages and disadvantages of fuel produced from crop residues
D. Environmental damages were even worsened by government policies
E. A modest cut in subsidies is adopted in some countries
F. Removal of certain subsidies achieves some positive results
All these activities may have damaging environmental impacts. For example, land clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertilizers and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread of monoculture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided some insurance against pests or diseases in future.
Soil erosion threatens the productivity of land in both rich and poor countries. The United States, where the most careful measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soil’s productivity. The country subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 percent of its cropped land to meadow or forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America.
Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports for farm output drive up the price of land. The annual value of these subsidies is immense: about $ 250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To increase the output of crops per acre, a farmer’s easiest option is to use more of the most readily available inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in Denmark in the period 1960 - 1985 and increased in the Netherlands by 150 percent. The quantity of pesticides applied has risen too: by 69 percent in 1975 - 1984 in Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 percent in the frequency of application in the three years from 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies. The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm support in1984. A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall compounded by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes). The removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past had been the principal causes of erosion. Farms began to diversify. The one kind of subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the environment was the subsidy to manage soil erosion.
In less enlightened countries, and in the European Union, the trend has been to reduce rather than eliminate subsidies, and to introduce new payments to encourage farmers to treat their land in environmentally friendlier ways, or to leave it fallow. It may sound strange but such payments need to be higher than the existing incentives for farmers to grow food crops. Farmers, however, dislike being paid to do nothing. In several countries they have become interested in the possibility of using fuel produced from crop residues either as a replacement for petrol (as ethanol) or as fuel for power stations (as biomass). Such fuels produce far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
They are therefore less likely to contribute to the greenhouse effect. But they are rarely competitive with fossil fuels unless subsidized- and growing them does no less environmental harm than other crops.
Passage 2 ● Look at the sentences below and five paragraphs
● Which view (A, B, C, D or E) does each statement l-8 refer to?
● For each sentence l-8, mark the letter (A, B, C, D or E) on your Answer Sheet.
● You will need to use some of these letters more than once.
Example:
0. Skills of opening are introduced to them in order to attract attention.
1. During the course, the use of such aids as projectors, slides, recordings and videos is also encouraged so as to improve the effect of oral presentation.
2. It is the national capital of Australia.
3. It includes determining the conference agenda.
4. If you communicate at international academic conferences, you will use it.
5. It may be able to come up with solutions much faster.
6. If you want to go some place for a holiday, you can go there.
7. The work force with electronics industry provides most of the other jobs available.
8. Faced with the unexpected, it counts for more than one person working single handed.
A
The Speech of the Paper Presenters
The presentation of academic papers is the most fundamental form of communication at international academic conferences and the core activity of a simulated international academic conference as well. Well require that, on the platform, the students should be able to adjust themselves to the optimal state, control their voice, volume, speed and intonation, adapt themselves to the situation and express themselves freely. Skills of opening are introduced to them such as direct opening, thanking and praising, background introduction, and humorous expressions, in order to attract attention. They are also taught the approaches to logical development, topic shifting illustrating facts, displaying concrete examples, emphasizing key points, dealing with long sentences, repairing slip of the tongue, etc. Various aids are encouraged to improve the courses.
B
On the-spot Preparations
On-the-spot preparations relatively simple, which mainly refers to the arrangement of the conference room one or two hours before the conference, including hanging the logo, posting the papers(or abstracts), preparing drinks(for the breaks), adjusting the projector, arranging the seats of the guests, ensuring the recording and photographing, etc.
C
Canberra
Canberra, with a population of 286,000, is the regional capital of the Australinal Capital Territory (A.C. T.). The A.C.T was created especially as home for the national capital in l911 to prevent jealousy between the various states (former colonies) of the country. It is located in south-east Australia and surrounded on all sides by New South Wales (originally the prison colony established by the British in l788). All the major government administrative offices, the Australian National University, and the national museums are sited in Canberra. About 60%of the work force is employed by the government, with a small electronics industry providing most of the other jobs available. Originally a small town, the purpose-built capital shows urban planning at its best, with elegant public buildings and landscapes gardens.
D
Algarve
Whatever kind of holiday you want, you’ll find it in the Algarve, the garden coast of Portugal. But what the Algarve does, and better than most places, is the villa holiday. With your chosen companions—there are villas catering for from four to eight people-you for a package that includes transfers from Faro Airport to the villa, a fully-stocked fridge on arrival, maid service, and a fabulous villa with its own swimming pool are feeling really lazy, or simply want to try Portuguese cuisine without the worry of which restaurant to choose a cook. The best villas are usually those located on a hill— side overlooking the sea, although there are some very attractive ones that are almost on the beach.
E
The ideal size for a team is between 5 and 8 members. Larger that this and agreements are more difficult to reach. Each member of the team must have a clear picture of the goals of that particular team and be committed to, and responsible for, the other members of his or her team. It is essential that teams should act together and develop the team’s spirit rather than working individually. Training should take place together, along with group discussions, debate and decision-making based on the various situations that team is being trained to respond to.
In paragraphs 4 and 5 the author discusses that______.
Which of the following is true according to the first two paragraphs?
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A.Gaining attention
B.Making sense of information
C.Trade secrets
D.Academic approval
E.A change of focus
F.An ancient skill
1 ______
The Greek philosophers knew about it and it could still dramatically improve children’s school results today, except that no one teaches it. It is a very old technique for making your memory better. Try memorizing this series of random numbers: 3, 6, 5, 5, 2, 1, 2, 4. About as meaningful as dates in history, aren’t they? It is likely that you won’t remember them in five minutes, let alone in five hours. However, had you been at a lecture given at a school in the south of England last month, you would now be able to fix them in your head for five days, five weeks, in fact for ever.
2______
“I am going to give you five techniques that will enable you to remember anything you need to know at school,” promised lecturer Ian Robinson to a hundred schoolchildren. “When I’ve finished in two hours’ time, your work will be far more effective and productive. Anyone not interested, leave now.” The entire room sat still, glued to their seats.
3______
Robinson specializes in doing magic tricks that look totally impossible, and then he shows that they involve nothing more mysterious than good old-fashioned trickery. “I have always been interested in tricks involving memory,” he explains.
4 ______
What Robinson’s schoolchildren get are methods that will be familiar to anyone who has dipped into any one of a dozen books on memory. The difference is that Robinson’s approach is aimed at schoolchildren. The basic idea is to take material that is random and meaningless and give them a structure. That series of numbers at the beginning of the article fits in here. Once you think of it as the number of days in the year—365—and the number of weeks—52—and so on, it suddenly becomes permanently memorable.
5 ______
The reaction of schools has been uniformly enthusiastic. “The pupils benefited a lot from Ian’s talk,” says Dr Johnston, head of the school where Robinson was speaking. “Ideally we should run a regular class in memory techniques so pupils can pick it up gradually.”
According to the first two paragraphs, which has the least probability to happen on mentally troubled undergraduates?
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Vanishing topsoil influences farm productivities
B. Water is being polluted by chemical fertilisers
C. Advantages and disadvantages of fuel produced from crop residues
D. Environmental damages were even worsened by government policies
E. A modest cut in subsidies is adopted in some countries
F. Removal of certain subsidies achieves some positive results
All these activities may have damaging environmental impacts. For example, land clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertilizers and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread of monoculture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided some insurance against pests or diseases in future.
Soil erosion threatens the productivity of land in both rich and poor countries. The United States, where the most careful measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soil’s productivity. The country subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 percent of its cropped land to meadow or forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America.
Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports for farm output drive up the price of land. The annual value of these subsidies is immense: about $ 250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To increase the output of crops per acre, a farmer’s easiest option is to use more of the most readily available inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in Denmark in the period 1960 - 1985 and increased in the Netherlands by 150 percent. The quantity of pesticides applied has risen too: by 69 percent in 1975 - 1984 in Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 percent in the frequency of application in the three years from 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies. The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm support in1984. A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall compounded by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes). The removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past had been the principal causes of erosion. Farms began to diversify. The one kind of subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the environment was the subsidy to manage soil erosion.
In less enlightened countries, and in the European Union, the trend has been to reduce rather than eliminate subsidies, and to introduce new payments to encourage farmers to treat their land in environmentally friendlier ways, or to leave it fallow. It may sound strange but such payments need to be higher than the existing incentives for farmers to grow food crops. Farmers, however, dislike being paid to do nothing. In several countries they have become interested in the possibility of using fuel produced from crop residues either as a replacement for petrol (as ethanol) or as fuel for power stations (as biomass). Such fuels produce far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
They are therefore less likely to contribute to the greenhouse effect. But they are rarely competitive with fossil fuels unless subsidized- and growing them does no less environmental harm than other crops.
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Decrease in food yields
B. Drop in yield affected by reduction in research
C. Pollution mining crops
D. Desperate situation for Asia
E. Population explosion compounds Asia’s problems
F. International commerce threatens Asian agriculture
WHY WE CAN’T AFFORD TO LET ASIA STARVE Among the problems afflicting a burgeoning world population, overcrowding, poverty and environmental degradation are combining to put at risk the very essence of our survival-food.
“If by the beginning of the next century we have failed to satisfy the very basic needs of the two billion very poor and four billion poor, life for the rest of us could be extremely risky and uncomfortable,” predicts Dr. Klaus Lampe of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. This is a highly threatening, even terrifying prediction for Asia, where 70 per cent of the world’s poor live but where reserves of good quality arable land have practically run out.
Although the world regards Asia as the focus of an economic and industrial miracle, without adequate supplies of food, Lampe says, chaos could easily result in many countries. And the impact will be felt widely throughout the region. In the 1990s alone, he says, the cities of Asia will be swollen by a further 500 million people—nearly equal to the population of the United States and European Community combined. “The only growing population in Asia is that of the poor. Prime productive land is being used for city expansion and building roads, while thousands of hectares are being taken out of production each year because of salinity or alkalinity.”
From the mid-1960s when the Green Revolution began, Asian food production doubled through a combination of highyielding crops, expanded farming area and greater intensification. From now on, growing enough food will depend almost entirely on increasing yield from the same, or smaller, area of land. However, a mysterious threat is emerging in the noticeably declining yields of rice from areas that have been most intensively farmed. Unless scientists can unravel why this is so, food output in Asia may actually stagnate at a time when population will double.
Such issues, Lampe argues, while seen as remote by many countries and international corporations, will strike at their economic base as well. Societies that are too poor or driven by internal strife and civil war will be bad for investment or as markets for goods. Pressure from a rising tide of environmental and political refugees may also be felt.
One significant factor undermining the agricultural economies of developing countries has been the farm trade war between the US and the EC. “We talk about environmental degradation and dangerous chemicals, yet spend billions of US dollars and ECUs producing things we don’t want which ruin local production systems and incomes for poor people,” Lampe says. And instead of developed countries helping struggling nations to develop sustainable food production systems, their policies tend to erode and destroy them.
When world grain prices are bad, farmers in Asia’s uplands turn from rice to cash crops to supplement failing incomes, or clear larger areas of rainforest with catastrophic environmental consequences within just a few years. Cleared rainforest soils are highly erosive; even where they are not, they rapidly become acid and toxic under intense cultivation and plants die, forcing the clearing of ever-larger areas.
Research at the IRRI has indicated that intensive rice production-growing two or three crops a year on the same land is showing signs of yield declines as great as 30 per cent. Evidence for this comes from as far a field as India, The Philippines and Indonesia. At the same time, agricultural research worldwide has been contracting as governments, non-government bodies and private donors reduce funding because of domestic economic pressures. This means, Lampe says, that at risk is the capacity to solve such problems as rice yield decline and research to breed the new generation of superyielding crops. Yet rice will be needed to feed more than half the human population—an estimated 4.5 billion out of 8.3 billion people by 2030.
Compared with the building of weapons of mass destruction or the mounting of space missions to Mars, Lampe says, the devising of sustainable farming systems has little political appeal to most governments: “To them I say: I hope you can sleep well at night.”
What can we infer from the first three paragraphs?
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A.Some cultures communicate by using signals.
B.The commonest form of greeting is kiss.
C.Using body language can say much more than words.
D.The international business community is busy learning languages.
E.The handshake is a universal form of greeting.
F.Greeting people with a kiss can create confusion.
1 ______
One of the most important aspects of doing business internationally is being able to speak other languages. For this reason, there is a current boom in language learning for business people. But unless they can speak a foreign language really well, it is best to save it for socializing.
2 ______
But actions speak louder than words, and psychologists say that your body language is much more important than what you say. Doing the wrong thing, making eye contact, touching, using people’s first names, even how you eat and drink—can all be hazardous for people who are unfamiliar with certain cultures.
3 ______
Cultures are divided into “low context” and “high context”. In low context cultures such as North America, Britain, Sweden and Germany, people say things very plainly, and rely on clear verbal communication. High context cultures such as France, Japan, Spain, Saudi Arabia, China and South Korea often use silence or hand signals to communicate, and this can sometimes be as important as speaking.
4 _______
Shaking hands is often the most common form of greeting people, but even this can create problems. In Japan, people bow to each other. In England, people shake hands firmly, but not very often—while in places like Italy and France people shake hands all the time but not as firmly as the English. The Germans and the Danish nod their heads while they shake hands, as a mark of respect, while people in Mediterranean countries sometimes lean their heads backwards while doing the same thing.
5 _______
People from “low context” cultures tend to look into other people’s eyes, but in “high context” cultures such as the Chinese and Japanese, this can be interpreted as aggressive behavior. As a rule, though, close physical greetings such as kissing are not a good idea. For example, the British kiss each other once, on the right cheek, the French kiss each other twice, first on the left cheek and then on the right, but in some cultures, especially in the Middle East, they kiss up to four times and still shake hands!