RC

Practice Session 3
Why do the songs I heard when I was teenager sound sweeter than anything I listen to as an adult? I’m
happy to report that my own failures of discernment as a music critic may not be entirely to blame. In
recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have confirmed that these songs hold disproportionate
power over our emotions. And researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to
the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults – a connection that
doesn’t weaken as we age. Musical nostalgia, in other words, isn’t just a cultural phenomenon: it’s a
neuronic command. And no matter how sophisticated our tastes might otherwise grow to be, our brains
may stay jammed on those songs we obsessed over during the high drama of adolescence.

To understand why we grow attached to certain songs, it helps to understand the brain’s relationship with
music. When you listen to a song that triggers personal memories, your prefrontal cortex, which maintains
information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action. But memories are
meaningless without emotion – and aside from love and drugs, nothing spurs an emotional reaction like
music. Brain imaging studies show that our favourite songs stimulate the brain’s pleasure circuit, which
releases an influx of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and other neurochemicals that make us feel good. The
more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss, flooding our brains with some of the
same neurotransmitters that cocaine chases after.

Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a
fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development – and
the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural
connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened
emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that
everything is incredibly important – especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams
(and embarrassments).
On its own, these neurological pyrotechnics would be enough to imprint certain songs into our brain.
But there are other elements at work. First, some songs become memories in and of themselves, so
forcefully do they worm their way into memory. Many of us can vividly remember the first time we
heard that one Beatles (or Backstreet Boys) song that, decades later, we still sing at every karaoke
night. Second, these songs form the soundtrack to what feel, at the time, like the most vital and
momentous years of our lives. The music that plays during our first kiss or our first dance gets
attached to that memory and takes on a glimmer of its profundity. We may recognize in retrospect
that the dance wasn’t really all that profound. But even as the importance of the memory itself fades,
the emotional afterglow tagged to the music lingers.

As fun as these theories may be, their logical conclusion – you’ll never love another song the way you
loved the music of your youth – is a little depressing. It’s not all bad news, of course: Our adult tastes
aren’t really weaker; they’re just more mature, allowing us to appreciate complex aesthetic beauty on
an intellectual level. No matter how adult we may become, however, music remains an escape hatch
from our adult brains back into the raw, unalloyed passion of our youths. The nostalgia that
accompanies our favourite songs isn’t just a fleeting recollection of earlier times; it’s a neurological
wormhole that gives us a glimpse into the years when our brains leapt with joy at the music that’s
come to define us. Those years may have passed. But each time we hear the songs we loved, the joy
they once brought surges anew.
1. What is the author's purpose in writing this passage?

A. To reminisce about the music he loved in his youth

B. To demonstrate the connection between music and the brain

C. To provide scientific reasons for our attachment to the music of our youth

D. To explain why no music is as good as the music of our youth

2. The author uses evidence from which of the following fields in order to prove his
argument?

i] Psychology ii] Neuroscience iii] Physiology iv] Sociology

A. [i] and [ii]

B. [ii] and [iv]

C. [i], [ii] and [iii]

D.[i], [ii], [iii] and [iv]

3. Which of the following, if true, could be an additional reason why we become so
attached to the music we listened to in our teenage years?

A. We invest the music we listen to in our teenage years with an unusual degree of
emotion.

B. During our teenage years, we are particularly keen to impress our peers, so we listen to
and claim to like the music they do.

C. Our teenage years are the time when we develop our identity, and the music we love
at the time becomes part of that identity.

D. As we grow older, we become less capable of discerning the finer nuances in music,
so we most love the music we heard when we were younger.
As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, and on behalf of all the variations and sub-genres such as
urban fantasy, alternate history and steampunk which collectively make up 'speculative fiction', I'd
argue that this genre is different from literary fiction.

Whether it's dealing with rayguns and rocket ships, or swords and sorcery, speculative fiction's
unifying, identifying characteristic is that it doesn't attempt to mimic real life in the way that literary
fiction does. It stands apart from the world we know. It takes us away to an entirely secondary realm,
be that Middle-Earth or Westeros, or to an alternate present where vampires and werewolves really
do exist.

Read science fiction and you can visit a near-future world where advances in bio-sciences see
mega-corporations using genetic engineering to exploit the human genome for corporate profit. You
can see mankind terraforming Mars or can step into a far future where humanity has colonized the
stars, leaving an excluded, remnant population on Earth trying to understand their place in this
expanded universe.

I've read all those stories recently, and as it always has, that distinctive unfamiliarity made me read
with closer attention. I wouldn't go so far as saying 'familiarity breeds contempt' with literary fiction,
but familiarity can certainly breed speed-reading. The reader's unconscious mind latches on to
familiar elements and fills in the rest. If you're reading a novel set in Manchester, even if you've never
been there, you have a mental image of 'Manchesterness' from other cities you've visited and what
you've seen on television.
Peter Jackson's best efforts notwithstanding, no one's ever been to Middle-Earth. Speculative fiction
prompts the reader to pay so much more attention, looking for the details that make sense of this strange
world. Reading speculative fiction isn't arriving in Manchester. It's finding yourself in Outer Mongolia with
no help from Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide.

Speculative fiction may not mimic real life but it uses its magic mirror to reflect on the world around us.
It's a fundamentally outward-looking genre, in direct contrast to literary fiction, which looks inward to
explore the human condition.

Setting a story in another place or another time enables speculative fiction to explore ideas that literary
fiction might really struggle with. A literary novelist dealing with the intractable, complex conflicts of
contemporary politics or recent history faces countless challenges and pitfalls. But write a fantasy novel
centred on a fractious, fractured country, where arrogant aristocrats pursue their ambition heedless of
ordinary people's suffering and you can explore the rights and responsibilities of power, the uses and
abuses of privilege and the importance of people of every class getting involved in managing their own
destiny. By drawing readers in large numbers, contemporary fantasy becomes a platform to debate key
current social and political challenges, while science fiction continues to explore the impact of
technological developments, for good and ill, before we have to tackle these things in reality.

Speculative fiction has been the mainstay of children's literature for many decades, and has now
become a dominant force in popular culture, from Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones on TV to the
Hunger Games films and the new Captain America. However, this is a double-edged sword. The common
assumption that 'kids' stuff' or 'commercially popular' means simplistic or inferior helps perpetuate the
prejudice against science fiction and fantasy.
Challenge people to justify that disdain and you'll almost always find out they don't actually read
current speculative fiction. They read The Lord of the Rings at school and lost the will to live
somewhere around Tom Bombadil. Frankly, that's understandable and I say that as a Tolkien fan. But
to reject an entire genre on that basis? That's like reading Murder on the Orient Express as a teenager,
deciding the solution is preposterous and dismissing all crime fiction. Such prejudice makes no sense.
And worse, it cuts a reader off from some of the most challenging, most immersive contemporary
fiction.

So yes, the speculative fiction genre is different from literary fiction. By celebrating its distinctive
strengths we will come to recognize the weakness of knee-jerk prejudice against it.
1. What is the author's opinion of speculative fiction as opposed to literary fiction?

A. She thinks that speculative fiction and literary fiction have different strengths and
purposes.

B. She thinks that speculative fiction is more entertaining, while literary fiction is more
serious.

C. She thinks that speculative fiction is a better genre than literary fiction, though more
limited in scope.

D. She thinks that speculative fiction is essentially no different from literary fiction.
2. What does the author mean by claiming that reading speculative fiction is 'finding
yourself in Outer Mongolia with no help from Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide'?

A. Speculative fiction can be daunting to understand with no guide to explain what is

what.

B. Speculative fiction places you in unfamiliar surroundings, leaving you to figure things
out on your own.

C.Speculative fiction allows you to enter a rich imaginary world, as fully-fledged as real
places such Outer Mongolia.

D. You can get completely lost while reading speculative fiction, such that you might find
yourself in a completely different world
3. Which of the following cannot be inferred from this passage?

A. The speculative fiction genre is made up of a number of distinct subgenres.

B. People tend to be biased against speculative fiction, without ever giving it a

real chance.

C. The current dominance of speculative fiction in popular culture has ironically

reinforced prejudices against it.

D. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films have given people an idea of what
Middle-Earth looks like.
The creation hypothesis posits that the universe was created by a supernatural being. Until early in
the twentieth century, there seemed to be strong indications that it might be true. The universe
currently contains a large amount of matter that is characterized by the physical quantity we define
as mass. Prior to the twentieth century, it was believed that matter could neither be created nor
destroyed, just changed from one type to another. So the very existence of matter seemed to be a
miracle, a violation of the assumed law of conservation of mass, that occurred just once – at the
creation of the universe.

However, in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be
created out of energy and can disappear into energy. Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, relates the
mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where c is a universal constant, the speed of light in
a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
When a body is moving, it carries an additional energy of motion called kinetic energy. In chemical
and nuclear interactions, kinetic energy can be converted into rest energy, which is equivalent to
generating mass. Also, the reverse happens; mass or rest energy can be converted into kinetic
energy. In that way, chemical and nuclear interactions can generate kinetic energy, which then can
be used to run engines or blow things up.

So, the existence of mass in the universe violates no law of nature. Mass can come from energy. But,
then, where does the energy come from? The law of conservation of energy, also known as the first
law of thermodynamics, requires that energy come from somewhere. In principle, the creation
hypothesis could have been confirmed by the direct observation or theoretical requirement that
conservation of energy was violated 13.7 billion years ago at the start of the big bang.
 However, neither observations nor theory indicates this to have been the case. The first law allows
energy to convert from one type to another as long as the total for a closed system remains fixed.
Remarkably, the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. As famed cosmologist Stephen
Hawking said in his 1988 best seller, A Brief History of Time, ‘In the case of a universe that is
approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels
the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.’ Specifically,
within small measurement errors, the mean energy density of the universe is exactly what it should be
for a universe that appeared from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty.

A close balance between positive and negative energy is predicted by the modern extension of the
big bang theory called the inflationary big bang, according to which the universe underwent a period
of rapid, exponential inflation during a tiny fraction of its first second. The inflationary theory has
recently undergone a number of stringent observational tests that would have been sufficient to
prove it false. So far, it has successfully passed all these tests.

In short, the existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy
conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such
miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creation hypothesis, then that
prediction is not confirmed.
1. What is the main point of this passage?

A. The creation hypothesis suggests that certain aspects of the universe, such as the
existence of mass and energy, have a supernatural origin.
B.The creation hypothesis suggests that the universe has a supernatural origin, which is
validated by the fact that the mass and energy in the universe came from nowhere.
C. According to the creation hypothesis, the universe has a supernatural origin; but this is
not meant to apply to mass and energy, which can be explained scientifically.
D. The existence of mass and energy in the universe can be explained by scientific
means, so the creation hypothesis is not valid.
2. Why does the author claim that 'the total energy of the universe appears to be zero'?

A. Because the mean energy density of the universe is exactly right for a universe that
appeared from an initial state of zero energy
B. Because the positive gravitational energy and the negative energy represented by
matter counterbalance each other
C. Because, according to Stephen Hawking, gravitational energy and matter energy
cancel each other out
D. Because Stephen Hawking claimed it in his bestselling book – though the author
himself does not necessarily agree with it
3.Which of the following is true as per this passage?

A. Converting kinetic energy into rest energy is the same as generating mass.
B. Recent observations have shown that the inflationary theory is false.
C. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one type to another.
D. According to the first law of thermodynamics, the work done by the system is
proportional to the energy consumed by it.
4. Which of the following questions is not answered within the passage?

A. What is the inflationary big bang?

B. What does Einstein's famous equation mean?
C. How much is the total mass in the universe?
D. How can kinetic energy be generated?
One of the most widely-discussed topics in the biomedical sciences in recent years is the potential of embryonic
stem cells to revolutionize medicine. The use of these stem cells, however, is an extremely controversial subject
that has aroused strong passions in both those who support the use of these cells and those who oppose it.

A stem cell is a type of cell that has the ability to split into a new type of cell; most cells in an adult human body
can only grow cells exactly like themselves. The cells of a human embryo in the first five days after fertilization, by
contrast, can become any of the approximately 200 types of cells found in the human body, such as nerve,
bone, or muscle cells. This capacity is called “pluripotency.” After around the fifth day after fertilization, the
embryo’s cells begin to specialize in certain functions and almost all of them lose their pluripotency. The reason
biomedical researchers are interested in these early stem cells is that they could, in theory, be used to treat
ailments of the heart, liver, nervous system, and essentially any other type of tissue at the cellular level, ushering
in cures for conditions that until today have eluded medical science.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research say that these potential benefits do not justify the destruction of
embryos that could grow into human beings. They also warn against the morally questionable ends that stem
cell research could lead to, such as the cloning of human beings or the creation in labs of human bodies solely
for the purpose of harvesting spare organs. Many of those who oppose research on embryonic stem cells
suggest that most of the medical wonders they promise can be achieved equally well with “adult” stem cells
that are found in the bone marrow of adult humans and the umbilical cords of infants.

Biomedical researchers are currently exploring therapies using adult stem cells, but most insist that these later -
stage cells lack the full pluripotency of embryonic stem cells, and therefore have a far more limited range of
therapeutic benefits. Researchers also point out that there are thousands of fertilized embryos in fertility clinics
that will never be implanted into a human womb; it would be immoral, some argue, to simply discard these
embryos when their stem cells could offer extraordinary benefits to millions of living people today.
1. The fourth paragraph plays what role in the passage?

A. It discusses future possible research directions for therapies involving embryonic stem
cells.
B. It presents arguments that attempt to refute arguments put forth in the third
paragraph.
C. It presents technical information about embryonic stem cells that may be helpful in
answering questions that arose in earlier paragraphs.
D. It presents the author’s opinion about the best policies for embryonic stem cell
research.
2. According to the information presented in the passage, an opponent of embryonic
stem cell research would be most likely to agree with which of the following
statements?

A. Adult stem cells found in bone marrow or umbilical cords offer exactly the same
medical promise as embryonic stem cells.
B. Anyone who engages in biomedical research using embryonic stem cells should be
tried for murder.
C. The possible medical benefits offered by embryonic stem cells are actually far less
extensive than proponents of stem cell research have suggested.
D. It is not ethical for society to trade a potential human life for a potential cure to a
presently incurable disease.
3. The writer’s tone and presentation of the information can best be characterized as

A. Unreservedly in support of research involving embryonic stem cells

B. Generally balanced, with a degree of enthusiasm for the medical possibilities offered
by embryonic stem cell research
C. Generally balanced, with a tendency to sympathize with those who oppose embryonic
stem cell research as unethical
D. Skeptical about the arguments put forth by researchers who wish to use embryonic
stem cells in their research
4. The attribute of pluripotency found in embryonic stem cells is most comparable to
the attribute of which of the following?

A. A lizard that, after discarding its tail to elude a predator, can re-grow its lost tail
B. A computer virus that can replicate itself indefinitely across a computer network
C. A car that can be converted from a hard-top car into a convertible at the touch of a
button
D. An investment that can grow and be transformed into multiple different types of
investments