TEST 14

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
WILLIAM GILBERT AND MAGNETISM
A 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and Gilbert. The
impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist, also the accredited
father of the science of electricity and magnetism, an Englishman of learning and a physician at
the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of electricity and magnetism was what
the ancients knew, nothing more than that the lodestone possessed magnetic properties and that
amber and jet, when rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other substances of small specific
gravity. However, he is less well-known than he deserves.

B Gilbert’s birth predated Galileo. Born in an eminent local family in Colchester county in the
UK, on May 24, 1544, he went to grammar school, and then studied medicine at St. John’s
College, Cambridge, graduating in 1573. Later he traveled in the continent and eventually settled
down in London.

C He was a very successful and eminent doctor. All this culminated in his election to the
president of the Royal Science Society. He was also appointed the personal physician to the
Queen (Elizabeth I), and later knighted by the Queen. He faithfully served her until her death.
However, he didn’t outlive the Queen for long and died on December 10, 1603, only a few
months after his appointment as personal physician to King James.

D Gilbert was first interested in chemistry but later changed his focus due to the large portion of
mysticism of alchemy involved (such as the transmutation of metal). He gradually developed his
interest in physics after the great minds of the ancient, particularly about the knowledge the
ancient Greeks had about lodestones, strange minerals with the power to attract iron. In the
meantime, Britain became a major seafaring nation in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was
defeated, opening the way to British settlement of America. British ships depended on the
magnetic compass, yet no one understood why it worked. Did the pole star attract it, as
Columbus once speculated; or was there a magnetic mountain at the pole, as described in
Odyssey, which ships would never approach, because the sailors thought its pull would yank out
all their iron nails and fittings? For nearly 20 years William Gilbert conducted ingenious
experiments to understand magnetism. His works include On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies,
Great Magnet of the Earth.
E Gilbert’s discovery was so important to modern physics. He investigated the nature of
magnetism and electricity. He even coined the word “electric”. Though the early beliefs of
magnetism were also largely entangled with superstitions such as that rubbing garlic on
lodestone can neutralize its magnetism, one example being that sailors even believed the smell of
garlic would even interfere with the action of compass, which is why helmsmen were forbidden
to eat it near a ship’s compass. Gilbert also found that metals can be magnetized by rubbing
materials such as fur, plastic or the like on them. He named the ends of a magnet “north pole”
and “south pole”. The magnetic poles can attract or repel, depending on polarity. In addition,
however, ordinary iron is always attracted to a magnet. Though he started to study the
relationship between magnetism and electricity, sadly he didn’t complete it. His research of static
electricity using amber and jet only demonstrated that objects with electrical charges can work
like magnets attracting small pieces of paper and stuff. It is a French guy named du Fay that
discovered that there are actually two electrical charges, positive and negative.

F He also questioned the traditional astronomical beliefs. Though a Copernican, he didn’t

express in his quintessential beliefs whether the earth is at the center of the universe or in orbit
around the sun. However he believed that stars are not equidistant fr om the earth , but have their
own earthlike planets orbiting around them. The earth is itself like a giant magnet, which is also
why compasses always point north. They spin on an axis that is aligned with the earth’s polarity.
He even likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the earth and built an entire
magnetic philosophy on this analogy. In his explanation, magnetism was the soul of the earth.
Thus a perfectly spherical lodestone, when aligned with the earth’s poles, would wobble all by
itself in 24 hours. Further, he also believed that suns and other stars wobble just like the earth
does around a crystal core, and speculated that the moon might also be a magnet caused to orbit
by its magnetic attraction to the earth. This was perhaps the first proposal that a force might
cause a heavenly orbit.

G His research method was revolutionary in that he used experiments rather than pure logic and
reasoning like the ancient Greek philosophers did. It was a new attitude toward scientific
investigation. Until then, scientific experiments were not in fashion. It was because of this
scientific attitude, together with his contribution to our knowledge of magnetism, that a unit of
magneto motive force, also known as magnetic potential, was named Gilbert in his honor. His
approach of careful observation and experimentation rather than the authoritative opinion or
deductive philosophy of others had laid the very foundation for modern science.
Questions 1-7
Reading passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Early years of Gilbert
ii What was new about his scientific research method
iii The development of chemistry
iv Questioning traditional astronomy
v Pioneers of the early science
vi Professional and social recognition
vii Becoming the president of the Royal Science Society
viii The great works of Gilbert
ix His discovery of magnetism
x His change of focus

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
8 He is less famous than he should be.
9 He was famous as a doctor before he was employed by the Queen.
10 He lost faith in the medical theories of his time.
Questions 11-13
Choose THREE letters A-F.
Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE of the following are parts of Gilbert’s discovery?
A Metal can be transformed into another.
B Garlic can remove magnetism.
C Metals can be magnetized.
D Stars are at different distances from the earth.
E The earth wobbles on its axis.
F There are two charges of electricity.
TEST 14
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
below.
WE HAVE STAR PERFORMERS!
A The difference between companies is people. With capital and technology in plentiful supply,
the critical resource for companies in the knowledge era will be human talent. Companies full of
achievers will, by definition, outperform organisations of plodders. Ergo, compete ferociously
for the best people. Poach and pamper stars; ruthlessly weed out second-raters. This in essence
has been the recruitment strategy of the ambitious company of the past decade. The ‘talent
mindset’ was given definitive form in two reports by the consultancy McKinsey famously
entitled The War for Talent. Although the intensity of the warfare subsequently subsided along
with the air in the internet bubble, it has been warming up again as the economy tightens: labour
shortages, for example, are the reason the government has laid out the welcome mat for
immigrants from the new Europe.

B Yet while the diagnosis-people are important-is evident to the point of platitude, the apparently
logical prescription-hire the best-like so much in management is not only not obvious: it is in fact
profoundly wrong. The first suspicions dawned with the crash to earth of the dotcom meteors,
which showed that dumb is dumb whatever the IQ of those who perpetrate it.The point was
illuminated in brilliant relief by Enron, whose leaders, as a New Yorker article called The Talent
Myth’ entertainingly related, were so convinced of their own cleverness that they never twigged
that collective intelligence is not the sum of a lot of individual intelligences. In fact in a profound
sense the two are opposites. Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because
they didn’t believe in systems. But companies don’t just create: ‘they execute and compete and
co-ordinate the efforts of many people, and the organisations that are most successful at that task
are the ones where the system is the star’. The truth is that you can’t win the talent wars by hiring
stars-only lose it. New light on why this should be so is thrown by an analysis of star behaviour
in this month’s Harvard Business Review. In a study of the careers of 1,000 starstock analysts in
the 1990s, the researchers found that when a company recruited a star performer, three things
happened.

C First, stardom doesn’t easily transfer from one organisation to another. In many cases,
performance dropped sharply when high performers switched employers and, in some instances,
never recovered. More of success than commonly supposed is due to the working environment-
systems, processes, leadership, accumulated embedded learning that are absent in and can’t be
transported to the new firm. Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars
were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonised those (on whom they now unwittingly
depended) who could teach them. So they moved, upping their salary as they did-36 per cent
moved on within three years, fast even for Wall Street. Second, group performance suffered as a
result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star
to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply, other
organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplant
altogether, he said. ‘You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a
healthy body.’ Third, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This is ironic, since the
motive for importing stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders
evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hiree is cashing in on a glorious past rather
than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.

D The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seem to confirm such doubts. Look at
County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud
fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone
accepts the cliche that people make the organisation-but much more does the organisation make
the people. When researchers studied the performance of fund managers in the 1990s, they
discovered that just 30 per cent of variation in fund performance was due to the individual,
compared to 70 per cent to the company-specific setting.

E That will be no surprise to those familiar with systems thinking. W Edwards Deming used to
say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation
was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter
not of raising the level of individual intelligence, but of the learning of the organisation as a
whole. The star system is glamorous – for the few. But it rarely benefits the company that thinks
it is working it. And the knock-on consequences indirectly affect everyone else too. As one
internet response to Gladwell’s New Yorker article put it: after Enron, ‘the rest of corporate
America is stuck with overpaid, arrogant, underachieving, and relatively useless talent.’

F Football is another illustration of the stars vs systems strategic choice. As with investment
banks and stockbrokers, it seems obvious that success should ultimately be down to money.
Great players are scarce and expensive. So the club that can afford more of them than anyone
else will win. But the performance of Arsenal and Manchester United on one hand and Chelsea
and Real Madrid on the other proves that it’s not as easy as that. While Chelsea and Real have
the funds to be compulsive star collectors-as with Juan Sebastian Veron-they are less successful
than Arsenal and United which, like Liverpool before them, have put much more emphasis on
developing a setting within which stars in-the-making can flourish. Significantly, Thierry Henry,
Patrick Veira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value
(in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system. At Chelsea, by contrast, the only context is the
stars themselves-managers with different outlooks come and go every couple of seasons. There is
no settled system for the stars to blend into. The Chelsea context has not only not added value, it
has subtracted it. The side is less than the sum of its exorbitantly expensive parts. Even Real
Madrid’s galacticos, the most extravagantly gifted on the planet, are being outperformed by less
talented but better-integrated Spanish sides. In football, too, stars are trumped by systems.

G So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own. This
worked for investment analysts, where some companies were not only better at creating stars but
also at retaining them. Because they had a much more sophisticated view of the interdependent
relationship between star and system, they kept them longer without resorting to the exorbitant
salaries that were so destructive to rivals.

Questions 14-17
The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
14 One example from non-commerce/business settings that better system wins bigger stars
15 One failed company that believes stars rather than system
16 One suggestion that author made to acquire employees then to win the competition nowadays
17 One metaphor to human medical anatomy that illustrates the problems of iring stars.
Questions 18-21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
18 McKinsey who wrote The War for Talent had not expected the huge influence made by this
book.
19 Economic condition becomes one of the factors which decide whether or not a country would
prefer to hire foreign employees.
20 The collapse of Enron is caused totally by a unfortunate incident instead of company’s
management mistake.
21 Football clubs that focus making stars in the setting are better than simply collecting stars.

Questions 22-26
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.
Summary
An investigation carried out on 1000 22 ………………… participants of a survey by Harvard
Business Review found a company hire a 23 ………………… has negative effects. For instance,
they behave considerably worse in a new team than in the 24 ………………… that they used to
be. They move faster than wall street and increase their 25 ………………… Secondly, they
faced rejections or refuse from those 26 ………………… within the team. Lastly, the one who
made mistakes had been punished by selling his/her stock share.
TEST 14
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below.
THE ORIGIN OF ANCIENT WRITING
A The Sumerians, an ancient people of the Middle East, had a story explaining the invention of
writing more than 5,000 years ago. It seems a messenger of the King of Uruk arrived at the court
of a distant ruler so exhausted that he was unable to deliver the oracle message. So the king set
down the words of his next messages on a clay tablet. A charming story, whose retelling at a
recent symposium at the University of Pennsylvania amused scholars. They smiled at the
absurdity of a letter which the recipient would not have been able to read.

B They also doubted that the earliest writing was a direct, rendering of speech. Writing more
likely began as a separate, symbolic system of communication and only later merged with
spoken language.

C Yet in the story the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, in what is ow southern Iraq,
seemed to understand writing’s transforming function. s Dr Holly Pittman, director of the
University’s Center for Ancient Studies, observed, writing “arose out of the need to store and
transmit information…over time and space”.

D In exchanging interpretations and information, the scholars acknowledged that they still had
no fully satisfying answers to the questions of how and why writing developed. Many favoured
an explanation of writing’s origins in the visual arts, pictures becoming increasingly abstract and
eventually representing spoken words. Their views clashed with a widely held theory among
archaeologists that writing developed from the pieces of clay that Sumerian accountants used as
tokens to keep track of goods.

E Archaeologists generally concede that they have no definitive answer to the question of
whether writing was invented only once, or arose independently in several places, such as Egypt,
the Indus Valley, China, Mexico and Central America. The preponderance of archaeological data
shows that the urbanizing Sumerians were the first to develop writing, in 3,200 or 3,300 BC.
These are the dates for many clay tablets in an early form of cuneiform, a script written by
pressing the end of a sharpened stick into wet clay, found at the site of the ancient city of Uruk.
The baked clay tablets bore such images as pictorial symbols of the names of people, places and
things connected with government and commerce. The Sumerian script gradually evolved from
the pictorial to the abstract, but did not at first represent recorded spoken language.

F Dr Peter Damerow, a specialist in Sumerian cuneiform at the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin, said, it is likely that there were mutual influences of writing
systems around the world. However, their great variety now shows that the development of
writing, once initiated, attains a considerable degree of independence and flexibility to adapt to
specific characteristics of the sounds of the language to be represented. Not that he accepts the
conventional view that writing started as a representation of words by pictures. New studies of
early Sumerian writing, he said, challenge this interpretation. The structures of this earliest
writing did not, for example, match the structure of spoken language, dealing mainly in lists and
categories rather than in sentences and narrative.
G For at least two decades, Dr Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a University of Texas archaeologist,
has argued that the first writing grew directly out of a system practised by Sumerian accountants.
They used clay tokens, each one shaped to represent a jar of oil, a container of grain or a
particular kind of livestock. These tokens were sealed inside clay spheres, and then the number
and type of tokens inside was recorded on the outside using impressions resembling the tokens.
Eventually, the token impressions were replaced with inscribed signs, and writing had been
invented.
H Though Dr Schmandt-Besserat has won much support, some linguists question her thesis, and
others, like Dr Pittman, think it too narrow. They emphasis that pictorial representation and
writing evolved together. ‘There’s no question that the token system is a forerunner of writing’.
Dr Pittman said, but I have an argument with her evidence for a link between tokens and signs,
and she doesn’t open up the process to include picture making.
I Dr Schmandt-Besserat vigorously defended her ideas. ‘My colleagues say that pictures were
the beginning of writing’, she said, ‘but show me a single picture that becomes a sign in writing.
They say that designs on pottery were the beginning of writing, but show me a single sign of
writing you can trace back to a pot — it doesn’t exist’. In its first 500 years, she asserted,
cuneiform writing was used almost solely for recording economic information, and after that its
uses multiplied and broadened.
J Yet other scholars have advanced different ideas. Dr. Piotr Michalowski, Professor of Near
East Civilizations at the University of Michigan, said that the proto-writing of Sumerian Uruk
was ‘so radically different as to be a complete break with the past’. It no doubt served, he said, to
store and communicate information, but also became a new instrument of power. Some scholars
noted that the origins of writing may not always have been in economics. In Egypt, most early
writing is high on monuments or deep in tombs. In this case, said Dr Pascal Vernus from a
university in Paris, early writing was less administrative than sacred. It seems that the only
certainty in this field is that many questions remain to be answered.
Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.
27 The researchers at the symposium regarded the story of the King of Uruk as ridiculous
because
A writing probably developed independently of speech.
B clay tablets had not been invented at that time.
C the distant ruler would have spoken another language.
D evidence of writing has been discovered from an earlier period.
28 According to the writer, the story of the King of Uruk
A is a probable explanation of the origins of writing.
B proves that early writing had a different function to writing today.
C provides an example of symbolic writing.
D shows some awareness amongst Sumerians of the purpose by writing.
29 There was disagreement among the researchers at the symposium about
A the area where writing began.
B the nature of early writing materials.
C the way writing began.
D the meaning of certain abstract images.
30 The opponents of the theory that writing developed from tokens believe that it
A grew out of accountancy.
B evolved from pictures.
C was initially intended as decoration.
D was unlikely to have been connected with commerce.

Questions 31-36
Look at the following statements (Questions 31-36) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 31-36 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of People
A Dr Holly Pittman
B Dr Peter Damerow
C Dr Denise Schmandt-Besserat
D Dr Piotr Michalowski
E Dr Pascal Vernus

31 There is no proof that early writing is connected to decorated household objects.

32 As writing developed, it came to represent speech.
33 Sumerian writing developed into a means of political control.
34 Early writing did not represent the grammatical features of speech.
35 There is no convincing proof that tokens and signs are connected.
36 The uses of cuneiform writing were narrow at first, and later widened.
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-M, below.
Write the correct letter, A-M, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
The earliest form of writing Most archaeological evidence shows that the people of
37 ……………….. invented writing in around 3,300 BC. Their script was written on
38 ……………….. and was called 39 ……………….. Their script originally showed images
related to political power and business, and later developed to become more 40 ………………..

A cuneiform G simple
B pictorial H Mesopotamia
C tomb walls I abstract
D urban J papyrus sheets
E legible K decorative
F stone blocks L clay tablets Uruk
M Egypt