Demo Class Material

Listening material
Where can you see each of the following?

11. trophies ...................
12. photographs ..................
13. items of clothing ................
14. an interactive display ................
15. posters ............
16. films ..............
Reading material
Let’s Go Bats
A. Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark they
hunt at flight, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid
obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making one
that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day.
But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures
such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given
that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection
has favored bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable
that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals. In
the time when the dinosaurs. dominated the daytime economy, our
mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because
they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the my stenos
mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our
ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.
B. Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find
their prey in the absence of light Bats are not the only creatures to face
this difficulty today. Obviously, the night-flying insects that they prey on
must find their way about somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little
or no light by day or by night. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely
muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed
and scattered by the dirt in the water Plenty" of other modern animals
make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible.
C. Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions

might an engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to
manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight Fireflies and some
fish (usually with the help of bacteria) have the power to - manufacture
their own light but the process seems to consume a large amount of
energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn't require
a prohibitive amount of energy: a male's tiny pinprick of light can be seen
by a female from some distance on a dark night since her eyes are
exposed directly to the light source itself. However, using light to find
one's own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have
to detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the
scene. The light source must, therefore, be immensely brighter if it is to
be used as a headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a
signal to others. In any event, whether or not the reason is the energy
expense, it seems to be the case that with the possible exception of some
weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to
find its way about
D. What else might the engineer think off Well, blind humans sometimes
seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path, ft has been
given the name’ facial vision', because blind people have reported that Ft
feels a bit like the sense of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally
blind boy who could and his tricycle at good speed round the block near
his home, using facial vision. Experiments showed that, in fact, facial
vision is nothing to do with touch or the front of the face, although the
sensation may be referred to the front of the face, like the referred pain
in a phantom limb The sensation of facial vision, it turns out really goes in
through the ears. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact are
actually using echoes of their own footsteps and of other sounds, to sense
the presence of obstacles. Before this was discovered, engineers had
already built instruments to exploit the principle, for example, to measure
the depth of the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented,
it was only a matter of time before weapons designers adapted ft for the
detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second World War relied
heavily on these devices, under such code names as Asdic (British) and
Sonar (American), as well as Radar (American) or RDF (British), which
uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.
E. The Sonar and Radar pioneers Didn’t know it then, but all the world
now knows that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had
perfected the system tens of millions of years earlier, and their radar'"
achieves feats of detection and navigation that would strike an engineer
dumb with admiration It is technically incorrect to talk about bat'radar1,
since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar. But the underlying
mathematical the ones of radar and sonar are very similar, and much of
our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing has’
come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald
Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats,
coined the term 'echolocation' to cover both sonar and radar, whether
used’ by animals or by human instruments.
Questions 1-5
The Reading Passage has five paragraphs, A-E.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter. A-E, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. examples of wildlife other than bats which do not rely on vision to

navigate by
2. how early mammals avoided dying out
3. why bats hunt in the dark
4. how a particular discovery has helped our understanding of bats
5. early military uses of echolocation
Questions 6-9
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.
Facial Vision
Blind people report that so-called 'facial vision' is comparable to the
sensation of touch on the face. In fact, the sensation is more similar to
the way in which pain from a 6…………… arm or leg might be felt. The
ability actually comes from perceiving 7………….. through the ears.
However, even before this was understood, the principle had been
applied in the design of instruments which calculated the 8 ………….. of
the seabed. This was followed by a wartime application in devices for
finding 9……………….. .

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Listening material

Where can you see each of the following?

C. Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions

1. examples of wildlife other than bats which do not rely on vision to

Complete the summary below.

Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

Blind people report that so-called 'facial vision' is comparable to the

sensation of touch on the face. In fact, the sensation is more similar to

ability actually comes from perceiving 7………….. through the ears.

applied in the design of instruments which calculated the 8 ………….. of

the seabed. This was followed by a wartime application in devices for

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