READING PASSAGE – 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on this passage.

Iconoclast
In light of a few recent scientific discoveries, it seems that the very decisions we make are directly connected with the
neurons in certain parts of our brains. It is from these very discoveries that a field known as neuroeconomics was
born. Neuroeconomics delves into the ways that success in an economic environment can be affected by our brains
in terms of being innovative and creative. Findings in the field of neuroeconomics show that brains which are able to
do this well are “iconoclastic,” meaning that they tend to question or challenge the status quo. An iconoclast can be
defined as a person who defies the expectations of others.
This definition suggests that iconoclasts are not the same as other individuals. However, a more accurate way of
putting it is that their brains are diverse in three particular ways: perception, fear response, and social
intelligence. Every one of these three capacities requires alternative brain circuitry. Critics may claim that the ability to
think in a unique, or progressive way is more a matter of identity, and can’t simply be boiled down to the way that our
brains are wired. In any case, the field of neuroeconomics was conceived out of the acknowledgment that the
physicalities of our brains may actually put restrictions on our decision-making processes. When we start to
understand these limitations, we can then also start to comprehend why some of us are distinctly different in the ways
that we think.
It’s important to realize that the brain is only working with finite resources. Almost the same as a 40 watt light bulb, the
brain has a limited budget for the amount of energy it can spend. This limitation has led the brain to evolve to work as
efficiently as possible, and this is exactly what prevents the vast majority of people from being an iconoclast. For
instance, when overwhelmed with information input, our brains will attempt to process this information as quickly as
possible. In these kinds of situations, the brain uses both past experiences as well as any other information which is
readily available to interpret the stimulus.
The brain is constantly choosing its favorite shortcuts without us ever knowing. Though we may think our impression
of the world is genuine, it seems it may instead be a collection of electrical impulses within our brains. Recognition
isn’t just a result of what the eyes or ears transmit to our brains. Rather than taking in the physical reality of photons
or sound waves, our perceptions depend on reactions happening within our brains.
Iconoclasm requires perception above all else, and iconoclasts don’t necessarily see what others around them see. In
areas where the average person’s brain might be inclined to stumble or get stuck, an iconoclast efficient brain will
not. Whether iconoclasts’ brains can take shortcuts inherently from birth or through learning is not yet known. While
we are awake, our brains are constantly processing physical stimuli from the senses. All that we see, hear, or touch
could be interpreted in many different ways, and the brain must then select which option it thinks is best to make
sense of the stimuli. In fact, the statistical likelihood of the brain selecting one interpretation in particular depends on
both past experience and what other people say, the latter being especially important for possible iconoclasts.
The most ideal approach to see things differently than others is overwhelming our brains with new things to
experience. With no previous experience to draw from, the brain is then empowered to make novel judgments, and
this remarkable tolerance to fresh experience is a telltale sign of iconoclasm. When an iconoclast reacts, they do so
by accepting what is unfamiliar rather than trying to avoid it.
However, fear is a natural response to the unknown, and so many people might experience fear in new situations.
Fear itself can be what stops people from iconoclastic-thinking or risk-taking. There are many types of fear, but the
two that are perhaps most challenging, and may even stop us from thinking thinking iconoclastically are fear of
uncertainty and fear of public ridicule. Although these two might seem like minor issues, they are certainly
widespread. For example, one-third of the population reports suffering from fear of public speaking. This reaction of
fear to public speaking must, then, be one expression of human nature, as it is too common to be considered a
mental disorder. But iconoclasts, on the other hand, do not allow these types of trivial fears to stop them.
Last of all, a successful iconoclast has to be able to pitch their ideas to those around them, and in this area in
particular, social intelligence is essential. The abilities to both understand and manage other people in a business
setting are examples of social intelligence. Within the last ten years, more information on the social brain and how the
brain works when groups work together to make decisions has become available. The brain circuits which control our
understanding what other people think, empathy, fairness, and social identity are better understood through
developments in neuroscience. Whether we are able to effectively persuade others is directly related to these
particular brain regions. In social cognition, our perceptions are of great importance. The way we perceive those
around us can make all the difference, such as noticing someone’s level of enthusiasm, or social status. When we
make sense of how perception and social decision are related, it becomes clear why iconoclasts are so rare.
Iconoclasts seize and generate their own novel experiences in areas such as artistic expression, technology, or
business. Their levels of creativity and innovation are not necessarily able to be imitated by groups. Iconoclasts do not
consider rules to be of great importance. They also come up against being singled out socially, or labeled as a
failure. All things considered, iconoclasts have quite a bit to offer all kinds of organizations. Unlocking the secrets of
an iconoclastic mind could prove essential in almost any field.

Questions 1-5Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1. Which best describes one goal of neuroeconomics as a field of study?
A. to discover the link between economics and the choices we make.
B. to study the decision-making process of successful business owners.
C. to learn about how our success is related to our physical brains.
D. to find connections in the brain which relate to how we think about finances.
2. Which of the following best supports the notion that the brain has evolved to be efficient?
A. it can remember past experiences.
B. it interprets stimulus exactly as it appears in reality.
C. it helps the senses to function optimally.
D. it is able to use a limited amount of energy resources to function.
3. How does the passage describe the perception?
A. It is a product of how the brain accurately relays information about the stimulus to the senses.
B. It is a product of what the senses transmit based on the reality of our environments.
C. It is a result of brain processes.
D. Its process is currently very poorly understood
4. According to the passage, iconoclasts can be identified by which of the following?
A. their brains remember information in a linear way
B. they will voluntarily expose themselves to new situations
C. they have uniquely independent personalities
D. they take their time when making important decisions
5. According to the passage, which of the following does an iconoclastic brain do?
A. processes information by using particular areas in the brain
B. stay away from potential traps in their thinking
C. learn at an exceptionally fast pace
D. easily manipulate the minds of others through social intelligence
Questions 6-11 YES, NO, NOT GIVEN
6. Iconoclasts are special because their brains function differently.
7. The brain works efficiently because it relies on previous events.
8. Novelty releases the perceptual process from the chains of past experience and forces the brain not to make new
judgments.
9. 30% of the general population claims to avoid activities which are unfamiliar.
10. Fear is proportionally related to risk levels for potential danger.
11. Irrational fears, such as fear of public-speaking, are classifiable as mental disorders.

Questions 12-14 Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-G from the box below.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
A. be simultaneously perceptive and socially intelligent
B. try to challenge the status quo by rebelling against the system
C. react appropriately to certain social cues from others, like someone’s level of enthusiasm
D. criticize and reject others who do not perform adequately
E. try new things and have novel experiences
F. works in many fields, both artistic and scientific.
G. leaves one open to criticism and rejection
12. To think like an iconoclast, it is necessary for the brain to
13. The social brain benefits iconoclasts by allowing them to
14. Iconoclasts are generally an asset because their way of thinking

READING PASSAGE – 2 What’s the connection between your morning coffee, wintering North American birds
and the cool shade of a tree? Actually, unite a lot, says Simon Birch.
When scientists from London’s Natural History Museum descended on the coffee farms of the tiny Central American
republic of El Salvador, they were astonished to find such diversity of insect and plant species. During 18 months’
work on 12 farms, they found a third more species of parasitic wasp than are known to exist in the whole country of
Costa Rica. They described four new species and are aware of a fifth. On 24 farms, they found nearly 300 species of
tree when they had expected to find about 100.
El Salvador has lost much of its natural forest, with coffee farms covering nearly 10% of the country. Most of them use
the ‘shade-grown’ method of production, which utilises a semi-natural forest ecosystem. Alex Munro, the museum’s
botanist on the expedition, says: ‘Our findings amazed our insect specialist. There’s a very sophisticated food web
present. The wasps, for instance, may depend on specific species of tree.
It’s the same the world over. Species diversity is much higher where coffee is grown in shade conditions. In addition,
coffee (and chocolate) is usually grown in tropical rainforest – regions that are biodiversity hotspots. ‘These habitats
support up to 70% of the planets plant and animal species, and so the production methods of cocoa and coffee can
have a hugely significant impact,’ explains Dr Paul Donald of the Royal Society for the. Protection of Birds.
So what does ‘shade-grown’ mean, and why is it good for wildlife? Most of the world’s coffee is produced by poor
farmers in the developing world. Traditionally they have grown coffee (and cocoa) under the shade of selectively
thinned tracts of rain forest in a genuinely sustainable form of farming. Leaf fall from the canopy provides a supply of
nutrients and acts as a mulch that suppresses weeds. The insects that live in the canopy pollinate the cocoa and
coffee and prey on pests. The trees also provide farmers with fruit and wood for fuel.
Bird diversity in shade-grown coffee plantations rivals that found in natural forests in the same region.’ says Robert
Rice from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. In Ghana, West Africa – one of the world’s biggest producers of
cocoa – 90% of the cocoa is grown under shade, and these forest plantations are a vital habitat for wintering
European migrant birds. In the same way, the coffee forests of Central and South America are a refuge for wintering
North American migrants.
More recently, a combination of the collapse in the world market for coffee and cocoa and a drive to increase yields
by producer countries has led to huge swathes of shade-grown coffee and cocoa being cleared to make way for a
highly intensive, monoculture pattern of production known as ‘full sun’. But this system not only reduces the diversity
of flora and fauna, it also requires huge amounts of pesticides and fertilisers. In Cote d’Ivoire, which produces more
than half the world’s cocoa, more than a third of the crop is now grown in full-sun conditions.
The loggers have been busy in the Americas too, where nearly 70% of all Colombian coffee is now produced using
full-sun production. One study carried out in Colombia and Mexico found that, compared with shade coffee, full-sun
plantations have 95% fewer species of birds.
In El Salvador, Alex Munro says shade-coffee farms have a cultural as well as ecological significance and people are
not happy to see them go. But the financial pressures are great, and few of these coffee farms make much money.
‘One farm we studied, a cooperative of 100 families, made just $10,000 a year, $100 per family and that’s not taking
labour costs into account.
The loss of shade-coffee forests has so alarmed a number of North American wildlife organisations that they are now
harnessing consumer power to help save these threatened habitats. They are promoting a ‘certification’ system that
can indicate to consumers that the beans have been grown on shade plantations. Bird-friendly coffee, for instance, is
marketed by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. The idea is that the small extra cost is passed directly on to the
coffee farmers as a financial incentive to maintain their shade-coffee farms.
Not all conservationists agree with such measures, however. Some say certification could be leading to the loss not
preservation of natural forests. John Rappole of the Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center, for example,
argues that shade-grown marketing provides ‘an incentive to convert existing areas of primary forest that are too
remote or steep to be converted profitably to other forms of cultivation into shade-coffee plantations’.
Other conservationists, such as Stacey Philpott and colleagues, argue the case for shade coffee. But there are
different types of shade growing. Those used by subsistence farmers are virtually identical to natural forest (and have
a corresponding diversity), while systems that use coffee plants as the under storey and cacao or citrus trees as
the over storey may be no more diverse than full-sun farms. Certification procedures need to distinguish between the
two. and Ms. Philpott argues that as long as the process is rigorous and offers financial gains to the producers, shade
growing does benefit the environment.

Questions 15 – 19 TRUE, FALSE, NOT GIVEN

15. More species survive on the farms studied by the researchers than in the natural El Salvador forests.
16. Nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s wildlife species can be found in shade- coffee plantations.
17. Farmers in El Salvador who have tried both methods prefer shade-grown plantations.
18. Shade plantations are important for migrating birds in both Africa and the Americas.
19. Full-sun cultivation can increase the costs of farming.

Questions 20 – 23 Look at the following opinions (Questions 20-23) and the list of people below.
Match each opinion to the person credited with it.
NB You can write any letter more than once.
20. Encouraging shade growing may lead to farmers using the natural forest for their plantations.
21. If shade-coffee farms match the right criteria, they can be good for wildlife.
22. There may be as many species of bird found on shade farms in a particular area, as in natural habitats there.
23. Currently, many shade-coffee farmers earn very little.
A. Alex Munroe
B. Paul Donald
C. Robert Rice
D. John Rappole
E. Stacey Philpott

Questions 24-27 Classify the features described below as applying to

A. the shade-grown method
B. the full-sun method
C. both shade-grown and full-sun methods
Write the correct letter A-C in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet.
24. can be used on either coffee or cocoa plantations
25. is expected to produce bigger crops
26. documentation may be used to encourage sales
27. can reduce wildlife diversity

READING PASSAGE – 3 Information Theory – The Big Idea

A. In April 2002 an event took place which demonstrated one of the many applications of information theory. The
space probe, Voyager I, launched in 1977, had sent back spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared
out of the Solar System on a one-way mission to the stars. After 25 years of exposure to the freezing temperatures of
deep space, the probe was beginning to show its age. Sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing and NASA
experts realised that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe forever. The solution was to get a
message to Voyager I to instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts. With the probe 12 billion kilometres from
Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a radio dish belonging to NASA’s Deep Space Network, the message
was sent out into the depths of space. Even travelling at the speed of light, it took over 11 hours to reach its target, far
beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the faint call from its home planet, and
successfully made the switchover.
B. It was the longest-distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA engineers. But it also highlighted the
astonishing power of the techniques developed by American communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had
died just a year earlier. Born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, Shannon showed an early talent for maths and for
building gadgets, and made breakthroughs in the foundations of computer technology when still a student. While at
Bell Laboratories, Shannon developed information theory, but shunned the resulting acclaim. In the 1940s, he single-
handedly created an entire science of communication which has since inveigled its way into a host of applications,
from DVDs to satellite communications to bar codes – any area, in short, where data has to be conveyed rapidly yet
accurately.
C. This all seems light years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally had for his work, which began
when he was a 22-year-old graduate engineering student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
1939. He set out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept of ‘information’. The
most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether something is true or false – which can be captured in the
binary unit, or ‘bit’, of the form 1 or 0. Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set about defining otherwise
vague ideas about information and how to transmit it from place to place. In the process he discovered something
surprising: it is always possible to guarantee information will get through random interference – ‘noise’ – intact.
D. Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine information. Information theory generalises
this idea via theorems that capture the effects of noise with mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed
that noise sets a limit on the rate at which information can pass along communication channels while remaining error-
free. This rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication channel,
and on its capacity (its ‘bandwidth’). The resulting limit, given in units of bits per second, is the absolute maximum rate
of error-free communication given signal strength and noise level. The trick, Shannon showed, is to find ways of
packaging up – ‘coding’ – information to cope with the ravages of noise, while staying within the information-carrying
capacity – ‘bandwidth’ – of the communication system being used.
E. Over the years scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they have proved crucial in many
technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft transmitted data using codes which added one extra bit for every single
bit of information; the result was an error rate of just one bit in 10,000 – and stunningly clear pictures of the planets.
Other codes have become part of everyday life – such as the Universal Product Code, or bar code, which uses a
simple error-detecting system that ensures supermarket check-out lasers can read the price even on, say, a crumpled
bag of crisps. As recently as 1993, engineers made a major breakthrough by discovering so-called turbo codes –
which come very close to Shannon’s ultimate limit for the maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably, and now
play a key role in the mobile videophone revolution.
F. Shannon also laid the foundations of more efficient ways of storing information, by stripping out superfluous
(‘redundant’) bits from data which contributed little real information. As mobile phone text messages like ‘I CN C U’
show, it is often possible to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning. As with error correction, however,
there’s a limit beyond which messages become too ambiguous. Shannon showed how to calculate this limit, opening
the way to the design of compression methods that cram maximum information into the minimum space.

Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information?
27. an explanation of the factors affecting the transmission of information
28. an example of how unnecessary information can be omitted
29. a reference to Shannon`s attitude to fame
30. details of a machine capable of interpreting incomplete information
31. a detailed account of an incident involving information theory
32. a reference to what Shannon initially intended to achieve in his research

Questions 33-37 Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage
The Voyager l Space Probe
The probe transmitted pictures of both (33)……………….,and ……………. , then left the (34)……………. The freezing
temperatures were found to have a negative effect on parts of the space probe. Scientists feared that both the
(35)……………….. and ………………… were about to stop working. The only hope was to tell the probe to replace
them with (36)…………. – but distance made communication with the probe difficult. A (37)………….. was used to
transmit the message at the speed of light. The message was picked up by the probe and the switchover took place.
Questions 38-40 TRUE , FALSE, NOT GIVEN
38. The concept of describing something as true or false was the starting point for Shannon in his attempts to send
messages over distances.
39. The amount of information that can be sent in a given time period is determined with reference to the signal
strength and noise level.
40. Products have now been developed which can convey more information than Shannon had anticipated as
possible.