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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.

Becoming an expert
What is the nature of exercise and what is the process by which
one moves from being a novice, to a journeyman, and eventually
to becoming an expert?
Expertise is commitment coupled with creativity. It takes a considerable amount of time
and regular exposure to a large number of cases to become an expert.
An individual enters a field of study as a novice. The novice needs to learn the guiding
principles and rules of a given task in order to understand that task. Concurrently, the
novice needs to be exposed to specific cases, or instances, that test the boundaries of
such rules. Generally, a novice will find a mentor to direct them through the process of
acquiring new knowledge.
In time, and with much practice, the novice begins to distinguish patterns of behavior
within cases and, thus becomes a journeyman. With more practice and exposure to
increasingly complex cases, the journeyman finds patterns not only within cases but
also between cases. The journeyman still maintains regular contact with a mentor to
solve specific problems and learn more complex strategies.
When a journeyman starts to make and test hypotheses about future behavior based on
past experiences, they begin the next transition. Once they creatively generate
knowledge, rather than simply matching superficial patterns, they become an expert. At
this point, they are confident in their knowledge and no longer need a mentor as a guide
they become responsible for their own knowledge. Once they make predictions based
on patterns and tests those predictions against actual behavior, they are generating
new knowledge.
This process is rather like an apprenticeship model. An apprenticeship may seem like a
restrictive 18th-century model of education, but it is still a standard method of training for
many complex tasks. Academic doctoral programs are based on an apprenticeship
model, as are fields like law, music, engineering, and medicine. Graduate students
enter such fields of study, find mentors, and begin the long process of becoming
independent experts and generating new knowledge in their respective domains.
Experts have a deeper understanding of their domains than novices have, and utilize
higher-order principles to solve problems. A novice, for example, might group objects
together by color or size, whereas an expert would group the same objects according to
their function or utility. Experts comprehend the meaning of data and weigh variables
with different criteria within their domains better than novices. Experts recognize
variables that have the largest influence on a particular problem and focus their
attention on those variables.
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Experts have better domain-specific short-term and long-term memory than novices
have. Moreover, experts perform tasks in their domains faster than novices and commit
problems differently than novices. Experts spend more time thinking about a problem to
fully understand it at the beginning of a task than do novices, who immediately seek to
find a solution. Experts use their knowledge of previous cases as context for creating
mental models to solve given problems.

Better at self-monitoring than novices, experts are more aware of instances where they
have committed errors or failed to understand a problem. Experts check the solutions
more often than novices and recognize when they are missing information knowledge
and apply their domain’s principles and rules to solve problems that fall necessary for
solving a problem. Experts are aware of the limits of their domain knowledge and apply
their domain’s principles and rules to solve problems outside of their experience base.
The contradiction of Expertise
The strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts
to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the
future. The performance of experts has been tested against predictions derived from
pure statistical analysis of past events to determine if they are better than these models.
With more than 200 experiments in different domains, it is clear that the answer is no.
Theorists and researchers differ when trying to explain why experts are less accurate
forecasters than statistical models. Some have argued that experts, like all humans, are
inconsistent when using mental models to make predictions. That is, the model an
expert uses for predicting something in one month, is different from the model used for
predicting the same thing in a following, month, although identical data set are used in
both instances.
A number of other researchers point to human bias to explain unreliable expert
predictions. During the last 30 years, researchers have categorized, experimented with,
and theorized about the different aspects of forecasting. Despite such efforts, the
literature shows little consensus regarding the causes or manifestations of human bias.
The very method by which one becomes an expert explains why experts are much
better at describing, explaining, performing tasks, and problem-solving within their
domains than are novices, but with a few exceptions are worse at forecasting than
tables based on historical, statistical models.
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Questions 1-5
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
Novices: have to learn the key 1……………… and rules of tasks before
performing them
- Usually require the help of a 2………………
Journeyman: - recognize different 3………………
incases that become more and more 4………………
Experts: - are able to make and 5……………… predictions
- can base predictions on experience and on what they know in
order to create new knowledge

Questions 6-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN there is no information on this
6. Novices and experts use the same system to classify objects.
7. Novices are often required to work on tasks that build memory skills.
8. Novices perform tasks more slowly than experts.
9. Novices begin task by looking for an answer straight away.
10. Experts review their work more efficiently than novices.
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Questions 11-13
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.
The contradiction of expertise researchers
Researchers have conducted a large number of 11…………………. in different areas
which show that statistical models provide more accurate predictions than experts.
Some theorists think this may be because experts can apply different mental models to
the same data sets on different occasions.
Others suggest that forms of 12…………………. may also influence experts, although
there is not a great deal of 13…………………. about why or how this happens.
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.

The fascinating world of attine ants

Nicholas Wade examines leaf-cutter ants and their amazing
agriculture
A. Leaf-cutting ants and their fungus (fungus an organism such as a mushroom which
obtains its food from decaying material) ‘farm’ are a marvel of nature and perhaps the
best-known example of symbiosis- the mutual dependence of two species. ants
cultivate a mushroom – like fungus in ‘farms’. Both the ants and their so-called
‘agriculture have been extensively studied over the years, but recent research has
uncovered intriguing new findings. Ants invented agriculture 50 million years before
people did, and the leaf-cutters, members of the large attine ant family, practice the
most sophisticated example of it. They grow their fungus in underground chambers that
can reach the size of a football. A single leaf-cutter nest may contain a thousand such
chambers, embedded in an underground metropolis up to 18 feet deep, and support a
society of more than a million ants.
B. These ant communities are the dominant plant-eaters of the Neotropics, the region
comprising South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. Biologists believe
15 percent of the leaf production of tropical forests disappears down the nests of leaf-
cutter ants. In the nest, the leaves are shredded and added to the fungus, which digests
the leaves and is in turn eaten by the ants. The attine ants’ achievement is remarkable
because it allows them to consume, courtesy of their mushroom’s digestive powers, the
harvest of tropical forests whose leaves are laden with poisonous chemicals.
C. There are more than 200 known species of the attine ant tribe, divided into 12
groups, or genera. The leaf-cutters usefresh vegetation; the other groups, known as the
lower attines because their nests are smaller and their techniques more primitive, feed
their gardens with similar leaves which have fallen on the ground and insects that lie on
the forest floor. Lower attine ants are all a siilar size. However, leaf-cutter worker ants
come in made-to-fit sizes – large ants to saw off leaves, medium ones to shred them,
and miniature workers to seed them with fungus and clean off alien growths.
D. In 1994, biologists from the United States Department of Agriculture analyzed the
DNA of ant funguses. They found the leaf-cutters’ fungus was descended from a single
pure strain, propagated for at least 23 million years. However, the funguses grown by
lower attine ants fell into four different groups, as if the ants had domesticated wild
funguses at least four times in evolutionary history. What could be driving these two
patterns of fungus gardening, the pure clone cultivation of the leaf-cutters and multiple
varieties of the lower attines?
E. The answer has been suggested by Cameron Currie of University of Toronto, it. The
pure strain of fungus grown by the leaf-cutters, it seemed to him, resembled the single
crops grown by humans to the exclusion of all others, such as potato growing. These
‘monocultures, which lack the genetic diversity to respond to changing environmental
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threats, are particularly vulnerable to parasites – organisms which live and feed on their
host, often causing harm. Currie felt there had to be a parasite in the ant-fungus system.
But a century of ant research did not provide any evidence for his idea. Textbooks
describe how leaf-cutter ants scrupulously weed their gardens of all foreign organisms.
“People kept telling me, the ants keep their gardens free of parasites, “ said Currie.
Nevertheless, after three years of sifting through attine ant gardens, Currie discovered
several alien organisms, particularly a family of parasitic molds called ‘Escovopsis’.
F. Escovopsis is a deadly disease that can devastate a fungus garden in a couple of
days. It blooms like a white cloud which envelops the whole garden. Other ants won’t go
near it and the ants associated with the garden just starve to death. Evidently, the ants
usually manage to keep Escovopsis and other parasites under control. Nevertheless,
with any lapse in control Escovopsis will quickly burst forth. Although new leaf-cutter
gardens start off free of Escovopsis, within two years some 60 percent become
infected.
G. The discovery of Escovopsis’s role brings a new level of understanding to the
evolution of the attine ants. In the last decade, evolutionary biologists have been
increasingly aware of the role of parasites as driving forces in evolution. With Curries’s
work, there is now a possible reason for the different varieties of fungus in the lower
attine mushroom gardens- to stay one step ahead of the relentless Escovopsis.
Interestingly, the leaf-cutters had in general fewer alien molds in their gardens than the
lower attines, yet more Escovopsis infections. Clearly, the price they pay for cultivating
a pure variety of fungus is a higher risk from Escovopsis.
H. So how do attine ants keep this parasite under control? People have known for a
hundred years that ants have a whitish growth on their body surface. It was thought to
be wax but, after examining it under a microscope, Currie discovered a specialized
patch on the ants’ bodies that harbors a particular kind of bacterium, one well known to
the pharmaceutical industry and the source of half the antibiotics used in medicine. This
bacterium is potent poisoner of Escovopsis inhibiting its growth and suppressing spore
formation. Astoundingly, the leaf-cutter ants are accomplishing feats beyond the power
of humans: they are growing a monocultural crop year after year without disaster, and
they are using an antibiotic apparently so wisely that, unlike people, they are not
provoking antibiotic resistance in the target disease-producing organism.
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Questions 14 - 19
Reading passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
14. two things at which leaf-cutter ants have succeeded but humans have failed.
15. a comparison between the nests of leaf-cutter and lower attine ants.
16. an assessment of the impact leaf-cutter ants have on their environment.
17. the effect Escovopsis has on ant communities.
18. the advantage for lower attine ants of growing a range of funguses.
19. the discovery of the age of the attine ant funguses.
Questions 20 - 24
Classify the following features as belonging to based on Passage 2.
Write the correct letter A, B or C in boxes 20-24 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of features
A Leaf-cutting ants
B Lower attines
C Both leaf-cutting ants and lower attine ants

List of statements
20. the use of dead vegetation to cultivate their fungus.
21. very small ants that keep the fungus free of foreign organisms.
22. the ability to safely eat harmful plants.
23. the cultivation of a single fungus.
24. a nest with a very large number of rooms for growing fungus.
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Questions 25 - 26
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.
25. What does the writer say about Cameron Currie’s research?
A. No previous work had been done in this area.
B. Earlier studies did not support his theory.
C. Textbooks on this subject lacked specific detail.
D. Currie’s initial theory had proven to be incorrect.
26. Using a microscope Currie was the first to discover that the body of attine ants
A. has a white covering.
B. is covered in wax.
C. is poisonous to humans.
D. has a substance useful to humans.
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

Decisions, Decisions
Research explores when we can make a vital decision quickly
and when we need to proceed more deliberately.
A widely recognized legend tells us that in Gordium (in what is now Turkey) in the fourth
century BC an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot. It was said that the first
person to untie it would become the king of Asia. Unfortunately, the knot proved
impossible to untie. The story continues that when confronted with this problem, rather
than deliberating on how to untie the Gordian knot. Alexander, the famous ruler of the
Greeks in the ancient world, simply took out his sword and cut it in two – then went on
to conquer Asia. Ever since, the notion of a ‘Gordian solution’ has referred to the
attractiveness of a simple answer to an otherwise intractable problem.
Among researchers in the psychology of decision making, however, such solutions have
traditionally held little appeal. In particular, the ‘conflict model’ of decision making
proposed by psychologists Irving Janis and Leon Mann in their 1977 book, Decision
Making, argued that a complex decision-making process is essential for guarding
individuals and groups from the peril of ‘group-think’. Decisions made without thorough
canvassing, surveying, weighing, examining and reexamining relevant information and
options would be suboptimal and often disastrous. One foreign affair decision made by
a well-known US political leader in the 1960s is typically held us as an example of the
perils of inadequate thought, whereas his successful handling of a water crisis is cited
as an example of the advantages of careful deliberation. However, examination of these
historical events by Peter Suedfield, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia,
and Roderick Kramer, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business,
found little difference in the two decision-making processes; both crises required and
received complex consideration by the political administration, but later only the second
one was deemed to be the effective.
In general, however, organizational and political science offers little evidence that
complex decisions fare better than simpler ones. In fact, a growing body of work
suggests that in many situations simply ‘snap’ decisions with being routinely superior to
more complex ones – an idea that gained widespread public appeal with Malcolm
Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink (2005).
An article by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues, ‘On
Making the Right Choice: the Deliberation-without-attention Effect’, runs very much in
the spirit of Gladwell’s influential text. Its core argument is that to be effective, conscious
(deliberative) decision-making requires cognitive resources. Because increasingly
complex decisions place increasing strain on those resources, the quality of our
decisions declines as their complexity increases. In short, complex decisions overrun
our cognitive powers. On the other hand, unconscious decision-making (what the author
refers to as ‘deliberation without attention’) requires no cognitive resources, so task
complexity does not effectiveness. The seemingly counterintuitive conclusion is that
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although conscious thought enhances simple decisions, the opposite holds true for
more complex decisions.
Dijksterhuis reports four simple but elegant studies supporting this argument. In one,
participants assessed the quality of four hypothetical cars by considering either four
attributes (a simple task) or 12 attributes (a complex task). Among participants who
considered four attributes, those who were allowed to engage in undistracted
deliberative thought did better at discriminating between the best and worst cars. Those
who were distracted and thus unable to deliberate had to rely on their unconscious
thinking and did less well. The opposite pattern emerged when people considered 12
criteria. In this case, conscious deliberation led to inferior discrimination and poor
decisions.
In other studies, Dijksterhuis surveyed people shopping for clothes (‘simple’ products)
and furniture (‘complex’ products). Compared with those who said they had deliberated
long and hard, shoppers who bought with little conscious deliberation felt less happy
with their simple clothing purchase but happier with the complex furniture purchases.
Deliberation without attention actually produced better results as the decisions became
more complex.
From there, however, the researchers take a big leap. They write: There is no reason to
assume that the deliberation-without-attention effect does not generalize to other types
of choices – political, managerial or otherwise. In such cases, it should benefit the
individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more
complicated matters to the unconscious.
This radical inference contradicts standard political and managerial theory but doubtless
comforts those in politics and management who always find the simple solution to the
complex problem an attractive proposition. Indeed, one suspects many of our political
leaders already embrace this wisdom.
Still, it is there, in the realms of society and its governance, that the more problematic
implications of deliberation without attention begin to surface. Variables that can be
neatly circumscribed in decisions about shopping lose clarity in a world of group
dynamics, social interaction, history and politics. Two pertinent questions arise. First,
what counts as a complex decision? And second, what counts as a good outcome?
As social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) noted, a ‘good’ decision that nobody
respects is actually bad, his classic studies of decision making showed that participating
in deliberative processes makes people more likely to abide by the results. The issue
here is that when political decision-makers make mistakes, it is their politics, or the
relationship between their politics and our own, rather than psychology which is at fault.
Gladwell’s book and Dijksterhuis’s paper are invaluable in pointing out the limitations of
the conventional wisdom that decision quality rises with decision-making complexity.
But this work still tempts us to believe that decision making is simply a matter of
psychology, rather than also a question of politics, ideology and group membership.
Avoiding social considerations in a search for general appeal rather than toward it.
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Questions 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
27. The legend of the Gordian knot is used to illustrate the idea that
A. anyone can solve a difficult problem.
B. difficult problems can have easy solutions.
C. the solution to any problem requires a lot of thought.
D. people who can solve complex problems make good leaders.
28. The ‘conflict model’ of decision making proposed by Janis and Mann requires that
A. opposing political parties be involved.
B. all important facts be considered.
C. people be encouraged to have different ideas.
D. previous similar situations be thoroughly examined.
29. According to recent thinking reinforced by Malcolm Gladwell, the best decisions
A. involve consultation.
B. involve complex thought.
C. are made very quickly.
D. are the most attractive option.
30. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues claim in their article that
A. our cognitive resources improve as tasks become more complex.
B. conscious decision making is negatively affected by task complexity.
C. unconscious decision making is a popular approach.
D. deliberation without attention defines the way we make decisions.
31. Dijksterhuis’s car study found that, in simple tasks, participants
A. were involved in lengthy discussions.
B. found it impossible to make decisions quickly.
C. were unable to differentiate between the options.
D. could make a better choice when allowed to concentrate.
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Questions 32 - 35
Complete the summary using the list of words A-I below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.
Dijksterhuis’s shopping study and its conclusions
Using clothing and furniture as examples of different types of purchases, Dijksterhuis
questioned shoppers on their satisfaction with what they had bought. People who spent
32…………….. time buying simple clothing items were more satisfied than those who
had not.
However, when buying furniture, shoppers made 33…………….. purchasing decisions
if they didn’t think too hard. From this, the researchers concluded that in other choices,
perhaps more important than shopping.34…………….. decisions are best made by the
unconscious.
The writer comments that Dijksterhuis’s finding is apparently 35…………….. but
nonetheless true.

A more B counterintuitive C simple

D better E conscious F obvious
G complex H less I worse

Questions 36 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
36. Dijksterhuis’s findings agree with existing political and management theories.
37. Some political leaders seem to use deliberation without attention when making
complex decisions.
38. All political decisions are complex ones.
39. We judge political errors according to our own political beliefs.
40. Social considerations must be taken into account for any examination of decision
making to prove useful.