Adapted from an article by Tim Stoddard in Discover magazine
Questions 15-16
15 According to the passage, AMANDA differs from ordinary telescopes because it does NOT observe .... ......
16 What do you think is the main purpose of the passage?
A To publicize the University of Wisconsin.
B To warn about the danger of man interfering with Antarctica.
C To describe a possible breakthrough in astronomy.
D To expose the mistakes of earlier astronomers.
Questions 17-21
Complete the sentences, selecting the most appropriate word or words from the list below. Write the corresponding letters (A-J) in boxes 17-21 on your answer sheet.
Neutrinos originate in ..17...and ...18....
They have zero...19...
Their paths are identified by observing...20...
The blue flashes are picked up by AMANDA's...21...
supernovas the South Pole muons magnetic fields telescop photoreceptors electricity energy computer quasars
Questions 22-25
Choose which of the options (A-D) best represents the information in the reading passage. Write the appropriate letter for each question in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.
22. Photons are unsuitable for studying space phenomena because...
A they cannot be trapped in ice
B they do not originate in violent phenomena
C they are visible to the naked eye
D they interact with everything they come into contact with on their way to Earth
23. The value of neutrinos to scientists is that...
A they bring pure information about the universe
B they can be measured more accurately than photons
C they are high-energy articles
D they are soluble in ice
24. The deep ice in Antarctica is made highly transparent by...
A extreme cold
B blue light from muons
C the elimination of air bubbles
D lack of pollution
25. Ice Cube will be unique because...
A it will have 5,700 sensors
B it will be the biggest single scientific instrument ever built
C it will be the only scientific instrument in Antarctica
D it will detect both high-and low-energy neutrinos
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3.
Fiber Optics Promises Unlimited Network Capacity
Engineers and scientists agree that the only transmission medium that could come close to meeting the seemingly infinite demand for more space in international communications is optical fiber. Fiber links can channel hundreds of thousands of times the bandwidth of microwave transmitters or satellites, the nearest competitors in long-distance communications.
The race to augment the fiber content of the world's networks has started. Every day, installers lay enough new cable to circle the earth three times. If improvements in fiber optics continue, the carrying capacity of a single fiber may reach hundreds of trillions of bits a second just decade or so from now.
New photonic technologies, which use light waves instead of electrons for signal processing, will make current electronic switching systems obsolete. Even now the transmission speeds of the most advanced networks—at 10 billion bits a second—threaten to choke the processing units and memory of microchips in existing switches. As the network becomes faster than the processor, the cost of using electronics with optical transmissions is skyrocketing. The gigabit torrent contained in a wavelength of light in the fiber must be broken up into slower-flowing data streams that can be converted to electrons for processing—and then re-aggregated into a fast-flowing river of bits. The equipment for going from photon to electron and back to photon not only slows traffic on the superhighway, it makes equipment costs soar.
Besides lower transmission costs, optical fiber solutions have the added advantages of bigger bandwidth capacity and the potential of full integration of voice, video and data services. While network designers contemplate the prospect of machine overload, hundreds of companies, big and small, now grapple with creating networks that can exploit fiber's full bandwidth by transmitting, combining, amplifying and switching wavelengths without ever converting the signal to electrons. Photonics is at a stage that electronics experienced 30 years ago—with the development and integration of component parts into larger systems and subsystems. Investment in optical communications already yields payoffs, as the cost of transmitting a bit of information optically halves every nine months, as against 18 months to achieve the same cost reduction for a circuit integrating photonics and electronics. "Because of dramatic advances in the capacity and ubiquity of fiber-optic systems and subsystems, bandwidth will become too cheap to measure," predicts Arun Netravali, president of Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories in a recent issue of Bell Labs Technical Journal.
Today some fibers are pure enough that a light signal can travel for about 80 kilometers without the need for amplification. But at some point the signal still needs to be boosted. The next significant step on the road to the all-optical network came in the early 1990s, a time when the technology made astounding advances. It was then that electronics for amplifying signals were replaced by stretches of fiber infused with one of the rare-earth elements known as erbium. When these erbium-doped fibers were zapped by a pump laser, the excited erbium ions could revive a fading signal. This process restores a signal without any optical-to-electronic conversion and can do so for very high speed signals sending tens of gigabits a second. Perhaps most important, however, it can boost the power of multiple wavelengths simultaneously.
This ability to channel multiple wavelengths expands the capacity of the fiber by the number of wavelengths, each of which can carry more data than could be handled previously by a single fiber. Nowadays it is possible to send 160 frequencies simultaneously, supplying a total bandwidth of 400 gigabits a second over a single fiber. Every major telecommunications carrier is now using this technique to increase the capacity of the fiber that is already in the ground, spending less than half of what it would cost to lay new cable, while the equipment gets installed in a fraction of the time it takes to dig a hole.
In this new photonic world, any type of traffic, whether voice, video or data, may travel as IP (Internet Protocol) packets. A development heralded in telecommunications for at least 20 years—voice, video and data services all at the same time—will be complete. And all because of the miracle of optical fiber.
From an article by Gary Stix in Discover magazine
Questions 26-28
Read the following statements and say how they reflect the information in the reading passage by writing
T if it is true according to the passage,
F if it is false according to the passage, and
NG if the information is not given in the passage.
Write your answers in boxes 26-28 on your answer sheet.
26 There is a limit to the demand for international communications capacity.
27 Electronic switching systems will soon be discarded.
28 Satellites can be used to transmit optical signals.
Questions 29-34
The paragraph below is a summary of the first part of the reading passage. Complete the summary by choosing NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage to fill the spaces 29-34. Write the words in boxes 29-34 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
A race has started to increase the fiber content of
telecommunications networks worldwide
Experts are of the opinion that only...29...can meet the demand for expansion of the carrying capacity of international communications links. The bottleneck at present is the use of ...30..., which is also sending costs...31...Companies are now working on ways to modify light signal wavelengths without changing the signals into...32... and back again. Electronics is being overtaken by...33..., as investment in the latter is already producing...34...
Questions 35-37
Give three factors which are responsible for increasing interest in optical fiber as a transmission medium. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each factor in boxes 35-37 on your answer sheet.
Questions 38-40
Match the items below with the appropriate definition A-F
38 Photonics
39 Amplification
40 IP packets
Definitions
A Increasing the volume of voice data
B Method of transmitting data
C Transmission of data using light waves
D Commercial agreement regulating the Internet
E Boosting fading signals
F Reception of data on computer screens
Academic Reading Test 8
INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TESTING SYSTEM
ACADEMIC READING
TEST 8
TIME ALLOWED:
NUMBER OF QUESTIONS:
1 hour40
Instructions
ALL ANSWERS MUST BE SRITTEN ON THE ANSWER SHEET
The test is divided as follows
Reading Passage 1 Questions 1-16
Reading Passage 2 Questions 17-32
Reading Passage 3 Questions 33-40
Start at the beginning of the test and work through it. You should answer all the questions. If you cannot do a particular question leave it and go on to the next. You can return to it later.
READING PASSGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1.
Amae: Key to Understanding Japanese Culture?
Students of Japan have commonly accepted the claim that amae (indulgent dependency) is distinctive to the production and reproduction of Japanese culture. The assumption is that all Japanese social bonding is patterned after the primary mother-child experience. This implies that the lifelong closeness of schoolmates, for example, which is a marked feature of Japanese culture, can be traced back to the mother-child bond. The loyalty which the typical Japanese employee feels toward his or her employer, and the isolation he feels away from familiar surroundings, are also explained as the influence of amae.
An American mother best confirms her identity as a mother by teaching her child to cope with strange situations—an act that implies independence training. A Japanese mother, however, is expected to carry or hug her child, protecting it from confronting strange experiences, as connotated by the dependence inherent in amae. Many observers have noted the overprotective and overindulgent attitudes of Japanese mothers. The Japanese mother who supervises or monitors her child is rewarded with uniquely identity-confirming responses like clinging and serving behavior from the child, while such behavior is not predicted for mothers and children in the United States.
For close to a third of a century, students of Japan have commonly accepted the claim of Doi that amae is distinctive to the production and reproduction of Japanese culture, and is what makes Japanese child rearing peculiarly different from that of Americans. Doi defines amae as "indulgent dependency", rooted in the mother-child bond. Vogel ( goes so far as to argue that "... I see amae (indulgence) as the universal basic instinct, more universal than Freud's two instincts, sex and aggression." According to Vogel, amae is experienced by the child as a "feeling of dependency or a desire to be loved", while the mother vicariously experiences satisfaction and fulfillment through overindulgence and overprotectiveness of her child's immaturity, leading to implied approval of immature behavior. A striking contrast between the American and Japanese mothers'? Approaches to child rearing is marked by the latter's almost complete refusal to punish a child. The assumption is that subsequent Japanese social bonding-teacher-student, supervisor-subordinate, etc., is patterned after the primary mother-child experience. This can be inferred from Vogel's observation that a large number of Japanese mothers blame themselves for not being loving or giving enough when their children are rebellious at school or misbehave in later life. Essentially, Japanese mothers report feelings of guilt if they are not all-giving to their children.
Doi asserts that European languages lack a word equivalent to amae. His argument is that the lack of an equivalent word implies lack of social recognition of and need for feelings of dependency and the desire to be loved in the West. The closest Western equivalents might be the classical Greek concepts of eros, which assumes the child's immature need to be loved, versus agape, deriving from the mother's need to give unqualified love (Tillich).
In contradistinction, Hess and Azuma suggest that the American preoccupation with independence prevents us from noticing the extent to which the need for "indulgent dependence" expressed by amae positively influences educational aspirations through American parent-child and teacher-pupil relationships. Doi would agree; he asserts that the psychic feeling from being emotionally close to another human being is not uniquely Japanese—only the rich semantic meaning of amae differentiates Japanese culture in his view.
Affect control theory (ACT) postulates that humans try to engage in identity-confirming events. A mother, in any culture, confirms her identity as a mother through culturally appropriate behavior. A Japanese mother, according to Doi's thesis, might optimally confirm herself as a mother through overindulging her child.
An American mother, by the same token, would presumably confirm herself as a mother by engaging in acts that show up the individuality and independence of her child. ACT assumes that agreeable past experiences (e.g., the pleasant, identity-confirming feelings of having been overindulged as a child oneself) motivate humans to act in similar manner-as when a woman passes into the role of motherhood.
In essence, cultural assumptions underlying the appropriateness or inappropriateness of any behavior derive from primal pleasant or unpleasant feelings attached through past experience.
From an article in the Electronic Journal of Sociology
Questions 1-9
The paragraph below is a summary of the reading passage. Complete the summary by choosing NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage to fill the spaces numbered 1-9. Write the words in boxes 1-9 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
It is assumed that all social bonding in Japan is pattrned on the relationship between mothers and children.
Scholars claim that the key to understanding Japanese social relations is the concept of amae, which is translated as...1...In America, mothers employ the method of...2...to rear their children, and do not expect to be rewarded with...3..., as Japanese mothers do. While Doi says that amae is peciliar to Japanese culture, Vogel asserts that amae is a...4...According to him, a child's immaturity enables the mother to experience satisfaction, not directly but...5...Doi claims that because European languages lack a word equivalent to amae, Western cultures are deficient in a...6...of dependency and the desire to be loved. But he also says that what distinguishes Japanese culture from European cultures in this respect is the...7...of amae. Behavior which is marked by attempts to confirm one's identity is explained by...8...,which postulates that agreeable past experiences.
