Mr Bush's new development vision would require a near-revolution in aid policy from America above all. Not only is the United States currently the least generous of all rich-country aid-donors (spending only 0.1% of its national income on foreign aid, compared with the European average of 0.3%), most of its aid goes, for strategic reasons, to middle-income countries such as Egypt and Colombia. America spends only 40% of its aid on poorer countries, compared with the rich-country average of nearly 60%-which is itself too low, given that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the poorest countries can benefit most from aid. And American aid is not concentrated on countries with good economic policies: its measly African aid budget is scattered across numerous countries, many of them badly governed. Given the fact that, relatively, America is contributing so little foreign aid, and doing that so ineptly, an improvement in American aid alone would be a significant boost to poorer countries, not to mention to America's credibility in a world suddenly wary of the apparent unilateralism and future intentions of the U.S.
Adapted from the Economist Global Agenda
Questions 33-36
Choose which of the answers (A-D) best represents the information in the reading passage. Write the appropriate letter (A-D) for each question in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.
33. What is the writer's view in the reading passage. He believes that..........
A. The U.S. will not substantially increase its aid.
B. Bush's new aid policy is a significant change.
C. The U.S.and the World Bank cannot agree on aid.
D. The U.S. will no longer give aid in the form of loans.
34. According to the passage, Paul O'Neill...........
A. is skeptical about the utility of aid.
B. advocates the abolition of grant aid.
C. wants to replace James Wolfensohn as head of the World Bank.
D. backs Bush's new aid initiative.
35. According to the passage...............
A. an increase in aid automatically reduces poverty.
B. countries with inefficient policies get most World Bank loans.
C. U.S. aid is targeted at poorer countries.
D. Individual donor countries alleviate poverty more than the World Bank does.
36. In the writer's opinion...............
A. more than aid is needed to solve the poverty problem.
B. rich countries should open their markets wider.
C. U.S. aid compares well with that from Europe.
D. aid helps the poorest countries most.
Questions 37-40
Read the following statements, and say how they reflect the information in the reading passage by writing:
Tif the information is true according to the passage;
Fif the information is false according to the passage;
NG if the information is not given.
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
The first one has been done for you as an example.
Example Answer
U.S. aid to Africa is concentrated on a few countries.F
37. Most U.S. aid has strategic, not humanitarian, aims.
38. The World Bank's aid targets do not include education.
39. Wolfensohn sees aid to poor countries as beneficial to rich countries too.
40. Sub-Saharan Africa will reach its poverty-reduction goal by 2015.
Academic Reading Test 9
INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TESTING SYSTEM
ACADEMIC READING
TEST 9
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 17-27
Reading Passage 3 Questions 28-40
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 PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes onQuestions 1-16 which are based on Read
ing Passage 1.
Questions 1-5
The reading passage has six sections. Choose the most suitable heading for each section from the list below (A-L), and write the corresponding letter in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. There are more headings than sections, so you will not use all of them. You may use the same heading for more than one answer if you wish. List of headings
AThe airflow puzzle
BReynolds number
CFuture challenges
DFlight and insect evolution
EThe advent of airplanes
FRobot fruit fly
GSuper flyers
HEnergy efficiency
ISophisticated sensors
JMeasuring two forces
Example Answer
Section IG
1. Section II
2. Section III
3. Section IV
4. Section V
5. Section VI
Solving the Mystery of Insect Flight
Section I
The first animals to evolve active flight were insects. Most insects have two pairs of wings. The hind wings of flies, however, have evolved into tiny sensory organs that function as gyroscopes, monitoring the orientation of the fly's body. Per second, flying expends about 10 times more energy than locomotion on the ground. On the other hand, per kilometertraveled, flying is four times more energy-efficient than ground locomotion. Thus, flying is very hard to achieve but has great value for organisms that can do it. Insects possess the most diverse wing structure and kinematics of all flying animals. Moreover, the flight muscle of insects exhibits the highest-known metabolic rate of any tissue.
Section II
As measured by the sheer number of species, ecological impact or total biomass, insects are the dominant animals on our planet. Although numerous factors contribute the list. Flight enables insects to disperse from their birthplace, search for food over large distances and migrate to warmer climes with the changing seasons. But flight is not simply a means of transport-many insects use aerial acrobatics to capture prey, defend territories or acquire mates. Selection for ever more elaborate and efficient flight behavior has pushed the design of these organisms to the limit. Within insects we find the most sensitive noses, the fastest visual systems and the most powerful muscles-all specializations that are linked one way or another to flight behavior. Understanding how insects fly may have practical applications, as scientists could then construct thumb-sized flying robots for purposes such as environmental monitoring and space exploration.
Section III
Until recently, however, an embarrassing gap has marred our understanding of insect flight: scientists have had a difficult time explaining the aerodynamics of how insects generate the force needed to stay aloft. In the decades since 1934, engineers and mathematicians have amassed a body of aerodynamic theory sufficient to design Boeing 747s and Stealth fighters. As sophisticated as these aircraft may be, their design and function are based on steady-state principles: the flow of air around the wings and the resulting forces generated by that flow are stable over time. The reason insects represent such a challenge is that they flap and rotate their wings from 20 to 600 times a second. The resulting pattern of airflow creates aerodynamic forces that change continually and confound both mathematical and experimental analyses.
Section IV
Several groups have made informative and valiant efforts and are developing imaginative new approaches, but the delicate size and high speed of insect wings make force measurements difficult. To circumvent these limitations, biologists studying animal locomotion frequently employ scale models-the same trick used by engineers to design planes, boats and automobiles. Engineers scale their vehicles down in size, whereas insect-flight researchers enlarge and slow the wings to a more manageable size and speed. Such models produce meaningful aerodynamic results provided they meet a key condition regarding the two forces that an object encounters within a fluid: a pressure force produced by fluid inertia and a shear force caused by fluid viscosity. The inertial force is essentially that needed to push along a mass of fluid and is larger for denser fluids. Viscosity is more like friction; produced when adjacent regions of fluid move at different velocities, it is what makes molasses hard to stir. The underlying physics of the real and the model animals is identical as long as both have the same ratio of inertial to viscous forces, called the Reynolds number. The Reynolds number increases in proportion to an object's length and velocity and the density of the fluid; it decreases in proportion to the fluid's viscosity. Being large and fast, aircraft operate at Reynolds numbers of about a million to 100 million. Being small and slow, insects operate at Reynolds numbers of around 100 to 1,000 and under 100 for the tiniest insects, such as thrips, which are a common garden pest.
Section V
In 1998 a large model of a flapping fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was constructed and placed in a tank of viscous mineral oil. The oil within the tank slowed the 25-centimeter robot wings, driven by electric motors, so that they flapped once every five seconds — dynamically similar to 2.5-millimeter fruit-fly wings flapping 200 times a second in air. Two critical properties were measured-the aerodynamic forces on the wings and the fluid flow around them-that are nearly impossible to determine on real fly wings. It was found that flapping wings develop significant lift by rotational circulation of the air around them. This circulation, together with a phenomenon called wake capture-the collision of the wing with the swirling wake of the previous stroke, helped to explain the aerodynamics of insects' flight control-how flies steer, in other words.
Section VI
Flies are observed to adjust the timing of wing rotation when they turn. In some maneuvers, the wing on the outside of a turn rotates early, producing more lift, and the wing on the inside of a turn rotates late, generating less lift; the net force tilts and turns the fly in the desired direction. The fly has at its disposal an array of sophisticated sensors, including eyes, tiny hind wings that are used as gyroscopes, and a battery of mechanosensory structures on the wings that it can use to precisely tune rotational timing, stroke amplitude and other aspects of wing motion. The work of numerous researchers is beginning to coalesce into a coherent theory of insect flight, but many questions remain. Insects have evolved a vast array of body forms, sizes and behaviors, ranging from tiny thrips to large hawkmoths; from two-winged flies such as fruit flies to lacewings that flap two pairs of wings slightly out of sync and tiger beetles that have two large stationary wings (their elytra, which form their carapace when on the ground) in addition to the two wings that flap. To what extent do the results for fruit flies apply to these myriad cases?
Question 6
6 According to the information in the text, how would you describe research into
insect flight?
A vital
B significant
C interesting
D trivial
Write the appropriate letter (A-D) in box 6 on your answer sheet.
Questions 7-12
For each of the phrases in questions 7-12, say how they reflect the information
in the reading passage, by writing:
Iif it applies to insects
Sif it applies to scientists
Aif it applies to aerodynamics
Eif it applies to evolution
Write your answers in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Diverse wing structure I
7. energy efficiency
8. dominant animals
9. mathematical and experimental analyses
10. steady-state principles
11. wake capture
12. array of body forms
Questions 13-16
Read the following statements, and say how they reflect the information in the r
eading passage, by writing:
Tif it is true according to the passage
Fif it is false according to the passage
NG if the information is not clearly given in the passage
Write your answers in boxes 13-16 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Flies' hind wings help to guide them in flight T
13. Insects can fly higher than birds.
14. Flight helps insects to mate.
15. Insects' wings create an unstable airflow.
16. Scientists have solved the mystery of insect flight.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 17-27 which are based on Reading
passage 2.
The Great Health Hoax
In 1992, trials in Scotland of a blood clot-destroying drug called anistreplase suggested that it could double the chances of survival. A year later, another “miracle cure” emerged: injections of magnesium, which studies suggested could also double survival rates. Leading cardiologists hailed the injections as an “effective, safe, simple and inexpensive” treatment that could save the lives of thousands. But then something odd began to happen. In 1995, the Lancet published the results of a huge international study of heart attack survival rates among 58,000 patients - and the amazing life-saving abilities of magnesium injections had simply vanished. Anistreplase fared little better: the current view is that its real effectiveness is barely half that suggested by the original trial.
Heart attack therapies are not the only “breakthroughs” that are proving to be failures in the real world. Over the years, cancer experts have seen a host of promising drugs dismally fail once outside clinical trials. Scientists investigating supposed links between ill-health and various “risk factors” have seen the same thing: impressive evidence of a “significant” risk - which then vanishes again when others try to confirm its existence. Leukemia and overhead pylons, connective tissue disease and silicone breast implants, salt and high blood pressure: all have an impressive heap of studies pointing to a significant risk - and an equally impressive heap saying there isn't. It is the same story beyond the medical sciences, in a dozen fields from psychology to genetics: amazing results discovered by eputable research groups which then vanish again when others try to replicate them.
Much effort has been spent trying to explain these mysterious cases of “The Vanishing Breakthrough.” But the one feature all of these scientific disciplines have in common is that they all rely on so-called “significance tests” to gauge the importance of their findings. First developed in the 1920s, these tests are routinely used by the whole scientific community. Thousands of scientific papers and millions of pounds of research funding have been based on their conclusions. They are ubiquitous and easy to use. And they are fundamentally and dangerously flawed. Used to analyze clinical trials, these textbook techniques can easily double the apparent effectiveness of a new drug, and turn a borderline result into a highly “significant” breakthrough. They can throw up convincing yet utterly spurious evidence for “links” between diseases and any number of supposed causes. They can even lend impressive support to claims for the existence of the paranormal. The very suggestion that these basic flaws in such widely used techniques could have been missed for so long is astonishing. Altogether more astonishing, however, is the fact that the scientific community has been repeatedly warned about these flaws - and has ignored them. As a result, thousands of research papers are being published every year whose conclusions are based on techniques known to be unreliable. The time and effort - and public money - wasted in trying to confirm the consequent spurious findings is one of the great scientific scandals of our time.
