LESSON 39-MATCHING HEADINGS

Example: Choose the best heading for the paragraph below

Alan Macfarlane, professor of anthropological science at King’s College, Cambridge, has, like other
historians, spent decades wrestling with the enigma of the Industry Revolution. Why did this
particular Big Bang – the world changing birth of Industry-happen in Britain? And why did it strike at
the end of the 18th century?

A.The time and place of the Industrial revolution

B.The cases of Holland, France and China

C.Conditions required for Industrial Revolution

Exercise 1: Choose the best heading for each paragraph below

1.In January, the EPA released a long-awaited report on passive smoking. It considered more than 30
studies around the world that compared the incidence of lung cancer in non-smoking women whose
husbands smoked with that in those whose husbands did not. The report concluded that wives of
smokers had a higher risk of developing lung cancer, and that the risk increased with the amount of
smoke inhaled. Passive smoking causes 3000 deaths a year from lung cancer in the US alone, it said.

A Dangers of passive smoking

B. A report as good as any

C. EPA’s opinion on smoking

.2. Antismoking groups think the suit is a desperate attempt to stop the inevitable. Athena Mueller of
Action on Smoking and Health points out that more than 40 states now have at least some
restrictions on smoking in public places. In Los Angeles, smoking is now banned in restaurants. And if
a bill now before California’s senate is passed, smoking at work could for the first time be banned
across an entire state.

A Activists’ opinion on the lawsuit

B. The pass of a bill in a U.S. state

C. Ban of smoking in 40 states

3. Scotland is right to be proud of Edinburgh castle. It dominates the city of Edinburgh from high up
on its rock. The history of Castle Rock goes back all the way to the late Bronze Age (900 BC), when
there were already people living there. In the middle ages it became a royal castle, and this lasted
until the 17th century. In the 18th century, it became an army base, but it is now mainly known as a
visitor attraction.

A. Is Edinburgh the oldest castle in Britain?.

B.Edinburgh Castle: Scotland’s pride and joy

C.Edinburgh Castle and its many roles

Exercise 2. Read the paragraphs below to choose the correct headings

Traffic jam no end in sight

A. There are no easy answers to the problems of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion affects
people throughout the world. Traffic jams cause smog in dozens of cities across both the
developed and developing world. In the U.S., commuters spend an average of a full work
week each year sitting in traffic, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. While
alternative ways of getting around are available, most people still choose their cars because
they are looking for convenience, comfort and privacy.

B. The most promising technique for reducing city traffic is called congestion pricing, whereby
cities charge a toll to enter certain parts of town at certain times of day. In theory, if the toll
is high enough, some drivers will cancel their trips or go by bus or train. And in practice it
seems to work: Singapore, London and Stockholm have reduced traffic and pollution in city
centers thanks to congestion pricing.

C. Another way to reduce rush hour traffic is for employers to implement flexitime, which lets
employees travel to and from work at off-peak traffic times to avoid the rush hour. Those
who have to travel during busy times can do their part by sharing cars. Employers can also
allow more staff to telecommute (work from home) so as to keep more cars off the road
altogether.

D. Some urban planners still believe that the best way to ease traffic congestion is to build
more roads, especially roads that can take drivers around or over crowded city streets. But
such techniques do not really keep cars off the road;
they only accommodate more of them.

E. Other, more forward-thinking, planners know that more and more drivers and cars are taking
to the roads every day, and they are unwilling to encourage more private automobiles when
public transport is so much better both for people and the environment. For this reason, the
American government has decided to spend some $7 billion on helping to increase capacity on
public transport systems and upgrade them with more efficient technologies. But
environmentalists complain that such funding is tiny compared with the $50 billion being spent
on roads and bridges.

Read the paragraphs one by one to choose the correct headings.

1. Paragraph A

2. Paragraph B

3. Paragraph C

4. Paragraph D

5. Paragraph E

List of Headings

I A solution which is no solution

Ii Changing working practices

Iii Closing city centres to traffic

Iv Making cars more environmentally friendly

V Not doing enough

Vi Paying to get in

Vii A global problem

Lesson 21: Reading-True/False/ Not Given

Example: ‘Viet Nam is the largest rice exporting country in the world.”

Decide if each statement below is True, False or Not Given.

1. Thailand ranks first in rice exporting countries in Asian.

2. There isn’t any larger rice exporter than Viet Nam.

3. Viet Nam’s number-one export products is rice.

Exercise 1.

Beethoven

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born on or near December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany.
He is widely considered the greatest composer of all time. Sometime between the births of his
two younger brothers, Beethoven’s father began teaching him music with an extraordinary rigour
and brutality that affected him for the rest of his life. On a near daily basis, Beethoven was
flogged, locked in the cellar and deprived of sleep for extra hours of practice. He studied the
violin and clavier with his father as well as taking additional lessons from organists around town.
Beethoven was a prodigiously talented musician from his earliest days and displayed flashes of
the creative imagination that would eventually reach farther than any composer’s before or
since.

In 1804, only weeks after Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven debuted his
Symphony No. 3 in Napoleon’s honor. It was his grandest and most original work to date so
unlike anything heard before that through weeks of – rehearsal, the musicians could not figure
out how to play it. At the same time as he was composing these great and immortal works,
Beethoven was struggling to come to terms with a shocking and terrible fact, one that he tried
desperately to conceal. He was going deaf. At the turn of the century, Beethoven struggled to
make out the words spoken to him in conversation.

Despite his extraordinary output of beautiful music, Beethoven was frequently miserable
throughout his adult life. Beethoven died on March 26, 1827, at the age of 56.

Decide if each statement below is True, False or Not Given.

1. It is not known exactly when Beethoven was born.

2. Beethoven suffered cruelty at the hands of his father
3. Beethoven was denied hours of sleep as a punishment for poor performance.
4. Beethoven’s father was also a talented musician.
5. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 was inspired by a famous man.
 6. In the early 1800’s Beethoven struggled to follow a conversation.

Exercise 2.

Spam Messaging

SPAM, as every user of mobile phones in China is aware to their intense annoyance, is a roaring
trade in China. Its delivery-men drive through residential neighbourhoods in “text-messaging
cars”, with illegal but easy-to-buy gadgetry they use to hijack links between mobile-phone users
and nearby communications masts. They then target the numbers they harvest, blasting them
with spam text messages before driving away. Mobile-phone users usually see only the
wearisome results: another sprinkling of spam messages offering deals on flats, investment
advice and dodgy receipts for tax purposes.

Chinese mobile-users get more spam text messages than their counterparts anywhere else in the
world. They received more than 300 billion of them in 2013, or close to one a day for each
person using a mobile phone. Users in bigger markets like Beijing and Shanghai receive two a
day, or more than 700 annually, accounting for perhaps one-fifth to one-third of all texts.
Americans, by comparison, received an estimated 4.5 billion junk messages in 2011, or fewer
than 20 per mobile-user for the year-out of a total of more than two trillion text messages sent.

True/ False/ Not given

1. In China, SPAM text messaging is a successful business.

2. People’s phone numbers are collected through the use of technology which cannot be
readily bought.
3. In no other country do people receive more Spam texts than in China.
4. In 2013, the number of SPAM texts increased considerably to reach 300 billion.

5. The majority of all texts received in Shanghai and Beijing are SPAM.

6.In 2011, Americans sent more texts than anywhere else in the world.

Exercise 3.

Pyramid Building

The pyramid blocks were hewn from quarries using stone and copper tools. The blocks were
transported to the pyramid site from remote quarries using barges, and from local quarries using
wooden sleds. The Egyptians did not use the wheel during the Pyramid Age, an invention that would
have been of limited use on softer ground under heavy loads. The sleds were dragged manually,
sometimes with the help of beasts of burden, over smoothed roads. Some of the existing pathways
were equipped with transverse wooden beams to lend support to the sled. A lubricant may have
been poured upon the road to reduce friction.

Egyptians successfully completed the most massive building projects in all of history. There is nothing
magical or supernatural in the means by which they achieved their goals, as is commonly thought. By
all indications, they retained their knowledge of construction throughout their history, but they were
limited after the Fourth Dynasty not by the lack of technology but rather by the lack of the abundant
resources that were previously available. More than two thousand years later, the Romans would
move huge stones, some weighing nearly 1,000 tons, using similar techniques at Baalbek.

1. The blocks of Pyramid were transported to the construction site using the wheel.
2. Sleds were dragged by animals not humans.
3. It is possible that Ancient Egyptians could have lubricated their roads to aid transportation.
4. The building work of the Ancient Egyptians is unrivalled.
5. Some people believed that magic may have been used by the Ancient Egypfians.
6. Limited technology limited the construction of the Ancient Egyptians from the Fourth
Dynasty.

Exercise 4

The Thames Tunnel

The Thames Tunnel was a tunnel built under the River Thames in London. It was the first subaqueous
tunnel ever built and many people claimed it was the Eighth Wonder of the World at the time it was
opened. It was opened in 1843 to pedestrians only and people came from far and wide to see the
marvel. The day it was first opened, it attracted fifth thousand people to enter the tunnel and walk
its length of almost 400 metres. The Thames Tunnel was used by people from all classes. The working
class used it for its functional use of crossing from one side of the river to another, while for the
middle classes and upper classes, it was a tourist experience. In the age of sail and horse-drawn
coaches, people travelled a long way to visit the tunnel, but this was not enough to make the tunnel
a financial success. It had cost over £500,000 to complete which in those days was a considerable
amount of money. However, even though it attracted about 2 million people each year, each person
only paid a penny to use it. The aim had been for the tunnel to be used by wheeled vehicles to
transport cargo so that it could bring in a profit. But this failed and the tunnel eventually became
nothing more than a tourist attraction selling souvenirs. In 1865, the tunnel became part of the
London Underground railway system which continues to be its use today.

1. The Thames Tunnel was the first tunnel ever built under a river. 2. The Thames Tunnel was
the Eighth Wonder of the World.
2. People were drawn from all over to see the Thames Tunnel.

3. The tunnel was used more by the middle and upper classes. 5. People were able to travel by
sea or land in those days.

7. The aim of the tunnel was to turn a profit as a tourist attraction.

8. Statues of the tunnel could be bought as souvenirs.

9. The tunnel is no longer used as a pedestrian walkway to cross the river.

Execise 5.

An important language development

Cuneiform, the world’s first known system of handwriting, originated some 6.000 years ago
in Summer in what is now southern Iraq. It was most often inscribed on palmsized,
rectangular clay tablets measuring several centimetres across, although occasionally, larger
tablets or cylinders were used. Clay was an excellent medium for writing. Other surfaces
which have been employed – for example, parchment, papyrus and paper are not long
lasting and are easily destroyed by fire and water. But clay has proved to be resistant to those
particular kinds of damage.

The word ‘cuneiform’ actually refers to the marks or signs inscribed in the clay. The

Original ‘cuneiform’ signs consisted of a series of lines – triangular, vertical, diagonal and
horizontal. Sumerian writers would impress these lines into the wet clay with a stylus a long,
thin, pointed instrument which looked somewhat like a pen. Oddly, the signs were often
almost too small to see with the naked eye. Cuneiform signs were used for the writing of at
least a dozen languages. This is similar to how the Latin alphabet is used today for writing
English, French, Spanish and German for example.

Before the development of cuneiform, tokens were used by the Sumerians to record certain
information. For example, they might take small stones and use them as tokens or
representations of something else, like a goat. A number of tokens, then, might mean a herd
of goat. These tokens might then be placed in a cloth container and provided to a buyer as a
receipt for a transaction, perhaps five tokens for five animals. It was not that different from
what we do today when we buy some bread and the clerk gives us back a piece of paper
with numbers on it to confirm the exchange.
By the 4th century BCE, the Sumerians had adapted this system to a form of writing. They
began putting tokens in a container resembling an envelope, and now made of clay instead
of cloth. They then stamped the outside to indicate the number and type of tokens inside. A
person could then ‘read’ what was stamped on the container and know what was inside.

Gradually, Sumerians developed symbols for words. When first developed, each symbol
looked like the concrete thing it represented. For example, an image which resembled the
drawing of a sheep meant just that. Then another level of abstraction was introduced when
symbols were developed for intangible ideas such as ‘female’ of ‘hot’ or ‘God’. Cuneiform, in
other words, evolved from a way used primarily to track and store information into a way to
represent the world symbolically. Over the centuries, the marks became ever more abstract,
finally evolving into signs that looked nothing like what they referred to, just as the letters ‘h-
o-u-s-e’ have no visual connection to the place we live in. At this last stage in the evolution of
cuneiform, the signs took the form of triangles, which became common cuneiform signs.

As the marks became more abstract, the system became more efficient because there were
fewer marks a ‘reader’ needed to learn. But cuneiform also became more complex because
society itself was becoming more complex, so there were more ideas and concepts that
needed to be expressed. However, most linguists and historians agree cuneiform developed
primarily as a tool for accounting. Of the cuneiform tablets that have been discovered,
excavated and translated, about 75 percent contain this type of practical information, rather
than artistic or imaginative work.
Cuneiform writing was used for thousands of years, but it eventually ceased to be used in
everyday life. In fact, it died out and remained unintelligible for almost 2.000 years. In the
late 19th century, a British army officer, Henry Rawlinson, discovered cuneiform inscriptions
which had been carved in the surface of rocks in the Behistun mountains in what is present-
day Iran. Rawlinson made impressions of the marks on large pieces of paper, as he balanced
dangerously on the surrounding rocks.

Rawlinson took his copies home to Britain and studied them for years to determine what
each line stood for, and what each group of symbols meant. He found that in the writing on
those particular rocks every word was repeated three times in three languages: Old Persian,
Elamite and Babylonian. Since the meanings in these languages were already known to
linguists, he could thus translate the cuneiform. Eventually, he fully decoded the cuneiform
marks and he discovered that they described the life of Darius, a king of the Persian Empire
in the 5th century BCE.

Questions 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

TRUE

If the statement agrees with the information if the statement contradicts the information

FALSE

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

 1. Cuneiform tablets were produced in different shapes and sizes.

2. When Sumerian writers marked on the clay tablets, the tablets were dry.

3 Cuneiform was often difficult to read because of its size.

4. A number of languages adopted cuneiform.

5. Cuneiform signs, can be found in some modern alphabets.

Questions 6-13 Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Before cuneiform

⚫ tokens, for example, 6________

The first tokens were kept in containers made of 7__________

⚫ tokens were used as a 8________

By 4th century BCE

⚫ tokens were put in a container that looked like a clay 9___________

Complex, abstract symbols developed

At first, signs looked like what they indicated, e.g. 10,_________

⚫ eventually, cuneiform signs shaped like 11_______

⚫ according to experts, cuneiform was mainly used for 12_______

19th-century translation of cuneiform inscriptions by Henry Rawlinson

. Rawlinson found cuneiform inscriptions in the Behistun mountains

⚫ Rawlinson copied inscriptions onto 13_______

Lesson 26: READING-MATCHING FEATURES

Exercise 1: Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher, A, B, or C

1. He referred to the relevance of the form of transport used.

2. He worked for the benefit of specific groups of people.

3. He defined exploration as being both unique and of value to others.

List of Explorers

A Robin Hanbury-Tenison

B Ran Fiennes

C Wilfred Thesiger

Here is how some of today’s ‘explorers’ define the word. Ran Fiennes, dubbed the ‘greatest
living explorer’, said ‘An explorer is someone who has done something that no human has
done before- and also done something scientifically useful.’ Chris Bonington, a leading
mountaineer, felt exploration was to be found in the act of physically touching the unknown:
‘You have to have gone somewhere new.’ Then Robin Hanbury-Tenison, a campaigner on
behalf of remote so-called ‘tribal’ peoples, said, ‘A traveller simply records information about
some far-off world, and reports back; but an explorer changes the world. Wilfred Thesiger,
who crossed Arabia’s Empty Quarter in 1946, and belongs to an era of unmechanised travel
now lost to the rest of us, told me, ‘If I’d gone across by camel when I could have gone by car,
it would have been a stunt.’ To him, exploration meant bringing back information from a
remote place regardless of any great self-discovery.

Exercise 2: Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below. Match each
statement with the correct researcher, A, B, or C

“On the question of mitigating the risks farmers face, most essayists called for greater state
intervention. In his essay, Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for
Agricultural Development, argued that governments can significantly reduce risks for farmers
by providing basic services like roads to get produce more efficiently to markets, or water
and food storage facilities to reduce losses. Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, suggested that the procurement and holding of stocks by
governments can also help mitigate wild swings in food prices by alleviating uncertainties
about market supply.

Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, held up
social safety nets and public welfare programmes in Ethiopia, Brazil and Mexico as valuable
ways to address poverty among farming families and reduce their vulnerability to agriculture
shocks. However, some commentators responded that cash transfers to poor families do not
necessarily translate into increased food security, as these programmes do not always
strengthen food production or raise incomes. Regarding state subsidies for agriculture,
Rokeya Kabir, Executive Director of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, commented in her essay
that these ‘have not compensated for the stranglehold exercised by private traders. In fact,
studies show that sixty percent of beneficiaries of subsidies are not poor, but rich
landowners and non-farmer traders”.

Match each statement with the correct person, A – D.

1. Financial assistance from the government does not always go to the farmers who most
need it.

2. Financial assistance from the government can improve the standard of living of farmers.

3. Improvements to infrastructure can have a major impact on risk for farmers from them.
List of People

A. Kanayo F. Nwanze

B. Sophia Murphy

C. Shenggen Fan

D. Rokeya Kabir

Exercise 3

Why being bored is stimulating- and useful, too

There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of
emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book,
Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it
to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. If disgust
protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social
situations,’ he suggests.

By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the
University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent,
calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes one
running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to
bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has
found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to “specialise in one.
Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive
combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls
‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed
and calm.
However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the
kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All
emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that
being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it
can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year,
Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of
the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a
polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is
best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to
suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t convinced. ‘If you
are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition
boredom is an undesirable state. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he
adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us.
Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has
evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the
central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes
an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s
more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People
try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and
irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage
attention can lead to state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer
care.
Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days
but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness
has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to
suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a
high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes
from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore
easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of
course, boredom itself cannot kill-it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in
danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one
suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring
situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less
boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for
distraction.

Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might

even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of
overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of
seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and
use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

Match each person with the correct idea, A-E.

20 Peter Toohey

21 Thomas Goetz

22 John Eastwood
 23 Francoise Wemelsfelder
List of Ideas

A The way we live today may encourage boredom.

B One sort of boredom is worse than all the others.

C Levels of boredom may fall in the future.

D Trying to cope with boredom can increase its negative effects.

E Boredom may encourage us to avoid an unpleasant experience.

Questions 24-26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Responses to boredom

For John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot 24......., due to
a failure in what he calls the ‘attention system’, and as a result they become frustrated
and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom 25....... ... is an important aim in life
may have problems in coping with boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic
of 26............. can generally cope with it.
LESSON 51: MATCHING INFORMATION

Exercise 1:

A. A recent report, issued by the international news agency Reuters, reveals that
smartphones are quickly becoming the most popular way to access the news. Over
the last year, this increase has been particularly noted in countries such as the UK,
the USA and Japan. In fact, for all countries involved in the survey, usage has
increased from 37% to 46%. Furthermore, 66% of smartphone users are now using
the device for news on a weekly basis.
B. By comparison, the number of people using tablets to access the news is
decreasing in most countries. More sophisticated smartphones are reducing the
need for other portable devices. The need for accessing the news on laptops and
desktops has also changed. Over half (57%) still consider these devices the most
important ways to access the news, but this is a decrease of 8% from last year.

C.The report also revealed, however, that on average people only use a small number of
trusted news sources on their phones, the average across all countries being 1.52 per
 person, in the UK, for example, over half of smartphone users (51%) regularly use the BBC
app.
D. Across all countries included in the survey, 25% stated that their smartphone was the
main device used for accessing digital news, an increase of 20% since last year. This is
particularly true of those aged under 35, with the figure rising to 41%. The overall trend,
however, is not to use just one digital device to access the news, but rather a combination of
two or three.

Which paragraph contains this information? You may write any letter more than once.

1. Other ways news is accessed online.

2.Over half of smartphone users access news via their phone

4. The most popular way to access news digitally is by using several methods.

4. The younger generations are more likely to use their smartphone to access the news.

Exercise 2: Skim this text for the main ideas, then label each paragraph with ONE or
more of the descriptions from the box.

HOW THE YOUNGER GENERATION CONSUMES THE NEWS

A. In recent years, there has been growing concern by researchers and indeed the older
generation that the younger generation are somewhat disengaged from the news,
and as a result have a very narrow view of the world around them. This, however,
couldn’t be further from the truth, as shown by a recent study carried out by the
Media Insight Project (American Press Institute & Associated Press). According to this
research, 85% of youngsters say that keeping up to date with the news is important
to them, and 69% receive news on a daily basis.

B. Perhaps what some of the older generation fail to understand is that just because
the younger generation does not buy a daily newspaper, it doesn’t mean that they
don’t follow the news. Born into a digital age, or more specifically the age of the
internet, the younger generation simply accesses news through the digital devices
they grew up using: laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. A recent study produced by
Ofcom revealed that 60% of the youngsters in the UK use the Internet or apps for
news compared to just 21% of those in the older age range.

C. Social media also plays an important part in consuming the news for the younger
generation. It was also revealed that most youngsters actually don’t seek out news
from social media but choose to follow it once they see it there. In other words, they
encounter it accidentally and therefore following the news is secondary. For
 example, when accessing social media sites, news headlines automatically appear.
These catch the users’ eyes and consequently the link is clicked and followed.

D. For the moment, social networks are being used selectively, however. For example,
social media is used for breaking news, but is not relied on in terms of accuracy. For
hard news topics, such as economics or local crime, youngsters continue to look to
original sources. For accuracy and reliability, television is still the preferred choice for
both generations.

E. According to Alison Preston, Head of Literacy Research at Ofcom, motivations for

following the news also vary according to the generation. In her current report on
the topic, she states that, for the younger generation, news is largely about
convenience and being social. For the older generation, however, motivation is
greatly linked to a sense of duty and habit..
F. Overall, it is fair to say that news plays an important part in all our everyday lives,
regardless of generation. However, what is different amongst the generations is how
and why it is accessed.
The passage has six paragraphs A-F. Which paragraph contains the following
information?

1. The reasons why the younger generation seeks news

2. The opinion that news is important to the younger generation

3. The percentage of older adults in the UK who access the news digitally

4. The idea that the younger generation largely encounters the news by chance

5. The news is of great significance to both young and old people

6. Why the younger generation consumes the news through modern technology

Exercise 3.

The Farmers! Parade of history

A. History of Fanner trading company: In 1909 Robert Laidlaw establishes mail-order

company Laidlaw Leeds in Fort Street, Auckland. Then, Branch expansion: purchase
of Green and Colebrook chain store; further provincial stores in Auckland and
Waikato to follow. Opening of first furniture and boot factory. In 1920, Company now
has 29 branches; Whangarei store purchased. Doors open at Hobson Street for direct
selling to public. The firm establishes London and New York buying offices. With
permission from the Harbour Board, the large FARMERS electric sign on the
Wyndham Street frontage is erected.
B. In 1935, if the merchandise has changed, the language of the catalogues hasn’t
Robert Laidlaw, the Scottish immigrant who established die century-old business,
 might have been scripting a modern-day television commercial when he told his
earliest customers: Satisfaction, or your money back. “It was the first money back
guarantee ever offered in New Zealand by any firm,” says lan Hunter, business
historian. “And his mission statement was, potentially, only the second one ever
found in the world.” Laidlaw’s stated aims were simple to build the greatest business
in New Zealand, to simplify every transaction, to eliminate all delays, to only sell
goods it would pay the customer to buy.

C . This year, the company that began as a mail-order business and now employs 3500
staff across 58 stores turns 100. Its centenary will be celebrated with the release of a
book and major community fundraising projects, to be announced next week. Hunter,
who is writing the centenary history, says “coming to a Fanners store once a week was a
part of the New Zealand way of life”. By 1960, one in every 10 people had an account
with die company. It was the place where teenage girls shopped for their first bra, where
newlyweds purchased their first dinner sets, where first pay cheques were used to pay
off hire purchase furniture, where Santa paraded every Christmas.

D. Gary Blumenthal’s mother shopped there, and so does he. The fondest memory for
the Rotorua resident? “We were on holiday in Auckland... I decided that upon the
lookout tower on top of the Farmers building would be a unique place to fit the ring on
my new fiancee’s finger.” The lovebirds, who had to wait for “an annoying youth” to
leave the tower before they could enjoy their engagement kiss, celebrate their 50th
wedding anniversary in June.

E. Farmers, says Hunter, has always had a heart. This, from a 1993 North & South interview
with a former board chairman, Rawdon Busfield: “One day I was in the Hobson Street shop and I saw
a woman with two small children. They were clean and tidily dressed, but poor, you could tell. That
week we had a special on a big bar of chocolate for one shilling. I heard the woman say to her boy,
‘no, your penny won’t buy that. He wasn’t wearing shoes. So I went up to the boy said,” Son, have
you got your penny? ‘He handed it to me. It was hot he’d had it in his hand for hours. I took the
penny and gave him the chocolate.”

F. Farmers was once the home of genteel tearooms, children’s playgrounds and an
annual sale of celebration for birthday of Hector the Parrot (the store mascot died,
aged 131, in the 1970s his stuffed remains still occupy pride of place at the
company’s head office). You could buy houses from Farmers. Its saddle factory
supplied the armed forces, and its upright grand overstrung pianos offered “the
acme of value” according to those early catalogues hand-drawn by Robert Laidlaw
himself. Walk through a Farmers store today and get hit by bright lights and big
brands. Its Albany branch houses 16 international cosmetics companies. It buys from
approximately 500 suppliers, and about 30% of those are locally owned. G “Eight, 10
years ago,” says current chief executive Rod McDermott, “lots of brands wouldn’t
partner with us. The stores were quite distressed. We were first price point focused,
we weren’t fashion focused. “Remove the rose-tinted nostalgia, and Farmers is, quite
simply, a business, doing business in hard times. Dancing with the Stars presenter
Candy Lane launches a clothing line? “We put a trial on, and we thought it was really
lovely, but the uptake wasn’t what we thought it would be. It’s got to be what the
customer wants,” says McDermott.
 H. He acknowledges retailers suffer in a recession: “We’re celebrating 100 years because
we can and because we should.” Farmers almost didn’t pull through one economic crisis.
By the mid 1980s, it had stores across the country. It had acquired the South Island’s
Calder Mackay chain of stores and bought out Haywrights. Then, with sales topping $375
million, it was taken over by Chase Corporation. Lincoln Laidlaw, now aged 88, and the
son of the company’s founder, remembers the dark days following the stock market
crash and the collapse of Chase. “I think, once, Farmers was like a big family and all of
the people who worked for it felt they were building something which would ultimately
be to their benefit and to the benefit of New Zealand... then the business was being
divided up and so that kind of family situation was dispelled and it hasn’t been
recovered.” For a turbulent few years, the stores were controlled, first by a consortium of
Australian banks and later Deka, the Maori Development Corporation and Foodland
Associated Ltd. In 2003, it went back to “family” ownership, with the purchase by the
James Pascoe Group, owned by David and Anne Norman the latter being the great-
granddaughter of James Pascoe, whose first business interest was jewelry.

I. “Sheer power of the brand,” says McDermott, “pulled Farmers through and now we’re
becoming the brand it used to be again. Farmers was the company that, during World War n, topped
up the wages of any staff member. Disadvantaged by overseas service. Robert Laidlaw a committed
Christian who came to his faith at a 1902 evangelistic service in Dunedin concluded his original
mission statement with the words, “all at it, always at it, wins success”. Next week, 58 Farmers stores
across the country will announce the local charities they will raise funds for in their centenary
celebration everything from guide dog services to hospices to volunteer fire brigades will benefit.
Every dollar raised by the community will be matched by the company. “It’s like the rebirth of an
icon,” says McDermott.

Questions 14-18 Which paragraph contains the following information?

1 Generosity offered in an occasion.

2 Innovation of offer made by the head of company.

3 Fashion was not its strong point.

4 A romantic event on the roof of farmers.

5. Farmers were sold to a private owned company

Questions 19-23 Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage

Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.

6 Farmers was first founded as a........... in Auckland by Mr. Laidlaw.

7 Farmers developed fast and bought one... ....then.

8.During oversea expansion, Farmers set upfices..... in cities such as London.

9 Farmers held a ............ once a year for the well known parrot.
10 in the opinion of Lincoln Laidlaw, Farmers is like a ......... for employees, not just for themselves
but for the whole country.

Questions 24-26 Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with
opinions or deeds below.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

A Lincoln Laidlaw

B Rod McDermott

C Ian Hunter

11.Product became worse as wrong aspect focused.

12.An unprecedented statement made by Farmers in New Zealand.

13 Character of the company was changed

LESSON 48: MATCHING ENDINGS

Exercise 1:

Jurassic crocodile discovery sheds light on reptiles’ family tree

A. A newly identified species of 150-million-year-old marine crocodile has given insights into
how a group of ancient animals evolved. The ancestor of today’s crocodiles belonged to a
group of animals that developed a tail fin and paddle-like limbs for life in the sea, resembling
dolphins more than crocodiles. These slender animals, which fed on fast-moving prey such as
squid and small fish, lived during the Jurassic era in shallow seas and lagoons in what is now
Germany. Related species have previously been found in Mexico and Argentina.

B An international team of scientists, including researchers from Germany and the University of
Edinburgh, identified the new species from a remarkably well-preserved skeleton. The fossil was
discovered in 2014 in a quarry near the town of Bamberg in Bavaria, Germany by a team from the
Naturkunde-Museum Bamberg, where it is now housed. The species, Cricosaurus bambergensis,
takes its name from the town.

C. Researchers compared the fossil with those from other museum collections and confirmed that it
was areviously unseen species. The skeleton has several distinguishing features in its jaws, the roof of
its mouth and tail, some of which have not been seen in any other species. Experts created digital
images of the fossil in high resolution, to enable further research. They expect the fossil will aid
greater understanding of a wider family of ancient animals, known as metriorhynchid, to which this
species belonged.

D .Dr Mark Young, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who took part
in the study, said: “The rock formations of southern Germany continue to give us fresh
insights into the age of dinosaurs. These rock layers were deposited at a time when
Europe was covered by a shallow sea, with countas Germany and the UK being a
collection of islands.”

E. Sven Sachs, from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, who led the project, said: “The
study reveals peculiar features at the palate that have not been described in any fossil
crocodile so far. There are two depressions which are separated by a pronounced bar. It
is not clear what these depressions were good for.”

Questions 1-4 Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G, below.

1 The ancient species of crocodile ote marine creatures that

2 The skeleton is kept in

3 Bones of the early type of crocodile

4 The geology of southern Germany

 A is believed to have lived 150 million years ago.

B show some unique features.

C resembled dolphins.

D was laid down when the area was under water.

E a museum in the town near where it was found.

F swam fast through the water.

G the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences.

Exercise 2:

Gaint waves: exhilaration and devastation

Laird Hamilton, Brett Lickle and a small group of their surfer friends are among the first people ever
to ride waves higher than 40 feet. They created the sport of tow surfing- dragging people onto big
waves with jet skis or even helicopters in the early 1990s. No one had ridden waves this size,
Hamilton says. “It was the unknown, like outer space. We didn’t know if we were going to come
back.”

Of the two men, the better known is Hamilton, 46, who has worked as a model, actor, stunt double
(for Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, and Kevin Costner in Waterworld) and television presenter.
Hamilton and his friends have inspired many others- enthusiasts who tune into weather reports, and
catch the first plane to wherever the big waves are expected to hit land. Some of the younger surfers
know what they’re doing others- perhaps tempted by a $500,000 prize for anybody who rides a 100-
foot wave – are not ready. The fact that ocean waves are getting bigger must be exhilarating for all of
them.

For the rest of us, however, big waves are very bad news indeed. History is full of examples of
devastation being wreaked by waves like these. The biggest wave ever recorded was the one that hit
Alaska in 1958, after a huge landslide created a tsunami that peaked at 500 metres above sea level.
That’s not a misprint: it was more than twice as high as the tallest building in Britain today Canary
Wharf Tower. Scientists know how high it was because the towering wave scraped trees and soil off
nearby mountains up to that height.
It’s useful to distinguish between tsunamis, which are caused by geological events (such as landslides
or earthquakes), and giant waves generated by weather. The Alaskan wave is believed to have been a
tsunami, caused by a landslide. Italy has been hit by as many as 67 tsunamis in the past 2,000 years,
though none with the devastating force of that which kilted 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean
on Boxing Day 2004.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the oceans now absorb more than 80
per cent of the heat added to the climate system. As the waters heat up, wind velocity increases,
storm tracks become more volatile, polar ice and glaciers melt, and sea levels rise.

Everything in the oceans seems to be rising: wave heights, sea levels, surface temperatures, wind
speeds, storm intensities, coastal surges, tsunami risks. “Now is the time to prepare for great floods,
a July 2009 editorial in New Scientist advised. The future of the UK’s coastal cities is in jeopardy due
to rising sea levels, reported Lloyds. Similarly, nine out of the world’s ten largest cities are located on
low-lying coastal land.

And it s not only on land that higher seas and bigger waves pose a threat. Merchant shipping carries
around 90 per cent of international trade, on approximately 50,000 boats worldwide, with crew
numbers of around a million. Over the past decade, around 100 ships with a cargo capacity of 500
gross tons have been lost each year, or damaged beyond repair the equivalent of two large ships
every week.

But this is not new. For centuries, sailors told of the existence of monstrous waves up to 1 00 feet
high that could appear without warning in mid-ocean, against the prevailing current and wave
direction, and often in perfectly clear and calm weather. Such waves were said to consist of an
almost vertical wall of water preceded by a trough so deep that it was referred to as a hole in the
sea’. Scientists were skeptical, until the existence of freak waves was confirmed In 1995 in Norway,
where an 84-foot wave occurred amid seas where the average of the tallest 33 percent of waves was
39 feet

Match the sentence beginnings a-d with the endings 1-8. There may be some letters used MORE
THAN ONCE.

1........ threaten many cities.

2.......can involve helicopters.

3......have occurred in Norway.

4......can be caused by earthquakes.

5........ caused by increasing temperatures.

6.......are both dangerous and fun.

7.........caused a large number of deaths on an important holiday.

a. Rising sea levels

b. Tsunamis

c. Gaint waves

d. Water sports

Unit 5- Reading: Sentence/Summary Completion, Multiple Choice

Passage 1

The honey badger

It looks harmless and vulnerable. But the honey badger is afraid of

nothing... and will attack and eat almost anything.

The honey badger (Melivora capensis), is an African and south-Asian

mammal that has a reputation for being one of the world’s most fearless
animals, despite its small size. And in spite of its gentle-sounding name, it
is also one of its most aggressive. Honey badgers have been known to
attack lions, buffalo, and snakes three times their size. Even humans are
not safe from a honey badger if it thinks the human will attack or harm it.
They are also extremely tough creatures, and can recover quickly from
injuries that would kill most other animals.

At first glance, honey badgers look like the common European badger.
They are usually between 75cm and 1 metre long, although males are
about twice the size of females. They are instantly recognisable by grey
and white stripes that extend from: the top of the head to the tail. Closer
inspection, which is probably not a wise thing to do, reveals pointed teeth,
and sharp front claws which can be four centimetres in length.

Honey badgers are meat-eating animals with an extremely varied diet.

They mainly eat a range of small creatures like beetles, lizards and birds,
but will also catch larger reptiles like snakes and small crocodiles. Some
mammals, such as foxes, antelope and wild cats also form part of their
diet.
 The badgers locate their prey mainly using their excellent sense of smell,
and catch most of their prey through digging. During a 24-hour period,
they may dig as many as fifty holes, and travel more than 40 kilometres.
They are also good climbers, and can easily climb very tall trees to steal
eggs from birds’ nests, or catch other tree- dwelling creatures.

As their name suggests, honey badgers have always been associated with
honey, although they do not actually eat it. It is the highly nutritious bee
eggs (called ‘brood’) that they prefer, and they will do anything to find it.
They usually cause a lot of damage to the hive in the process, and for this
reason, humans are one of their main predators. Bee-keepers will often set
special traps for honey badgers, to protect their hives.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the honey badger is its working
relationship with a bird called the greater haneyguide (Indicator indicator).
This bird deliberately guides the badger to beehives, then waits while the
badger breaks into the hive and extracts the brood. The two creatures,
bird and mammal, then share the brood between them.

Questions 1-8 Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for
each answer

1. Although they are not big animals, honey badgers are fearless, …….and tough.

2. Honey badgers will attack ………. if they need to protect themselves.

3. The pattern and colours on the honey badger’s back make it ………

4 The food they eat is meat-based and …………

5………… the biggest part of a honey badger’s diet.

6.Honey badgers find the creatures they eat by their…………..

7. ………… are often used to catch honey badgers which attack beehives.

8 For one particular type of food, the honey badger has a……… with another creature.

Passage 2

On the trail of the honey badger

Researchers learn more about this fearless African predator

 On a recent field trip to the Kalahari Desert, a team of researchers learnt a
lot more about honey badgers. They were rewarded with a detailed insight
into how these fascinating creatures live and hunt.

The team employed a local wildlife expert, Kitso Khama, to help them
locate and follow the badgers across the desert. Their main aim was to
study the badgers’ movements and behaviour as discreetly as possible,
without frightening them away or causing them to change their natural
behaviour. They also planned to trap a few and study them close up before
releasing them. In view of the animal’s reputation, this was something that
even Khama was reluctant to do.
1 Why did the wildlife experts visit the Kalahari desert? Choose two
reasons.

A To find where honey badgers live.

To observe how honey badgers behave.

C To try to change the way honey badgers behave.

D To temporarily catch some honey badgers.

E To find out why honey badgers have such a bad reputation.

Read the rest of the passage and choose TWO letters, A-E, for Questions 2-5.

‘The problem with honey badgers is they are naturally curious animals, especially when they see
something new,’ he says. “That, combined with their unpredictable nature, can be a dangerous
mixture. If they sense you have food, for example, they won’t be shy about coming right up to you
for something to eat. They’re actually quite sociable creatures around humans, but as soon as they
feel they might be in danger, they can become extremely vicious. Fortunately this is rare, but it does
happen.”

The research confirmed many things that were already known. As expected, honey badgers ate any
creatures they could catch and kill. Even poisonous snakes, feared and avoided by most other
animals,, were not safe from them. The researchers were surprised, however, by the animal’s
fondness for local melons, probably because of their high water content. Previously researchers
thought that the animal got all of its liquid requirements from its prey. The team also learnt that,
contrary to previous research findings, the badgers occasionally formed loose family groups. They
were also able to confirm certain results from previous research, including the fact that female
badgers never socialised with each other.

Following some of the male badgers was a challenge, since they can cover large distances in a short
space of time. Some hunting territories cover more than 500 square kilometres. Although they seem
happy to share these territories with other males, there are occasional fights over an important food
source, and male badgers can be as aggressive towards each other as they are towards other species.

As the badgers became accustomed to the presence of people, it gave the team the chance to get up
close to them without being the subject of the animals’ curiosity – or their sudden aggression. The
badgers’ eating patterns, which had been disrupted, returned to normal. It also allowed the team to
observe more closely some of the other creatures that form working associations with the honey
badger, as these seemed to adopt the badgers’ relaxed attitude when near humans.

2. What two things does Kitso Khama say about honey badgers?

A They show interest in things they are not familiar with.

B It’s hard to tell how they will behave.

C They are always looking for food.

D They do not enjoy human company.

E It is common for them to attack people.

3. What two things did the team find out about honey badgers?

A. There are some creatures they will not eat.

B. They were afraid of poisonous creatures.

C They may get some of the water they need from fruit.

D.They do not always live alone.

E Female badgers do not mix with male badgers.

4. According to the passage, which of these two features are typical of male badgers?

A They don’t run very quickly.

B They hunt over a very large area.

 C They defend their territory from other badgers.

D. They sometimes fight each other. They are more aggressive than females.

5 What two things happened when the honey badgers got used to humans being around them?

A. The badgers lost interest in people.

B.The badgers became less aggressive towards other creatures.

C The badgers started eating more.

D.Other animals started working with the badgers.

E Other animals near them became more relaxed.

LESSON 32-READING

DIAGRAM LABELLING/FLOWCHART COMPLETION

Exercise 1: Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
When the compressed air passes through the hose into the gun. It atomises the water- that is, it
disrupts the stream so that the water splits up into tiny droplets. The droplets are then blown out of
the gun and if the outside temperature is below 0°C, ice crystals will form, and will then make
snowflakes in the same way as natural snow.

Exercise 2. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

How a caloric-restriction mimetic works

Cells use the glucose from food to generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the molecule that powers
many activities in the body. By limiting food intake, caloric restriction minimizes the amount of
glucose entering cells and decreases ATP generation. When 2DG is administered to animals that eat
normally, glucose reaches cells in abundance, but the drug prevents most of it from being processed
and thus reduces ATP synthesis. Researchers have proposed several explanations for why
interruption of glucose processing and ATP production might retard aging. One possibility relates to
the ATP making machinery’s emission of free radicals, which are thought to contribute to aging and
to such age-related diseases as cancer by damaging cells. Reduced operation of the machinery
should limit their production and thereby constrain the damage. Another hypothesis suggests that
decreased processing of glucose could indicate to cells that food is scarce (even if it isn’t) and induce
them to shift into an anti-aging mode that emphasizes preservation of the organism over such
‘luxuries’ as growth and reproduction.

Exercise 3:

The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland is the world’s first and only rotating boat lift. Opened in 2002, it is
central to the ambitious £84.5m Millennium Link project to restore navigability across Scotland by
reconnecting the historic waterways of the Forth & Clyde and Union Canals.

The major challenge of the project lays in the fact that the Forth & Clyde Canal is situated 35 metres
below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals had been joined near the town of
Falkirk by a sequence of 11 locks – enclosed sections of canal in which the water level could be raised
or lowered that stepped down across a distance of 1.5 km. This had been dismantled in 1933,
thereby breaking the link. When the project was launched in 1994, the British Waterways authority
were keen to create a dramatic twenty-first-century landmark which would not only be a fitting
commemoration of the Millennium, but also a lasting symbol of the economic regeneration of the
region.

Numerous ideas were submitted for the project, including concepts ranging from rolling eggs to
tilting tanks, from giant seesaws to overhead monorails. The eventual winner was a plan for the huge
rotating steel boat lift which was to become The Falkirk Wheel. The unique shape of the structure is
claimed to have been inspired by various sources, both manmade and natural, most notably a Celtic
double headed axe, but also the vast turning propeller of a ship, the ribcage of a whale or the spine
of a fish.

The various parts of The Falkirk Wheel were all constructed and assembled, like one giant toy
building set, at Butterley Engineering’s Steelworks in Derbyshire, some 400 km from Falkirk. A team
there carefully assembled the 1,200 tonnes of steel, painstakingly fitting the pieces together to an
accuracy of just 10 mm to ensure a perfect final fit. In the summer of 2001, the structure was then
dismantled and transported on 35 lorries to Falkirk, before all being bolted back together again on
the ground, and finally lifted into position in five large sections by crane. The Wheel would need to
withstand immense and constantly changing stresses as it rotated, so to make the structure more
robust, the steel sections were bolted rather than welded together. Over 45,000 bolt holes were
matched with their bolts, and each bolt was hand-tightened.

The Wheel consists of two sets of opposing axe-shaped arms, attached about 25 metres apart to a
fixed central spine.

Two diametrically opposed water-filled ‘gondolas’, each with a capacity of 360,000 litres, are fitted
between the ends of the arms. These gondolas always weigh the same, whether or not they are
carrying boats. This is because, according to Archimedes’ principle of displacement, floating objects
displace their own weight in water. So when a boat enters a gondola, the amount of water leaving
the gondola weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the Wheel balanced and so, despite its
enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in five and a half minutes while using very little power. It
takes just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 MJ) of energy to rotate the Wheel roughly the same as boiling eight
small domestic kettles of water.

Boats needing to be lifted up enter the canal basin at the level of the Forth & Clyde Canal and then
enter the lower gondola of the Wheel. Two hydraulic steel gates are raised, so as to seal the gondola
off from the water in the canal basin. The water between the gates is then pumped out. A hydraulic
clamp, which prevents the arms of the Wheel moving while the gondola is docked, is removed,
allowing the Wheel to turn. In the central machine room an array of ten hydraulic motors then
begins to rotate the central axle. The axle connects to the outer arms of the Wheel, which begin to
rotate at a speed of 1/8 of a revolution per minute. As the wheel rotates, the gondolas are kept in
the upright position by a simple gearing system. Two eight-metre-wide cogs orbit a fixed inner cog of
the same width, connected by two smaller.cogs travelling in the opposite direction to the outer cogs
– so ensuring that the gondolas always remain level. When the gondola reaches the top, the boat
passes straight onto the aqueduct situated 24 metres above the canal basin.

The remaining 11 metres of lift needed to reach the Union Canal is achieved by means of a pair of
locks. The Wheel could not be constructed to elevate boats over the full 35-metre difference
between the two canals, owing to the presence of the historically important Antonine Wall, which
was built by the Romans in the second century AD. Boats travel under this wall via a tunnel, then
through the locks, and finally on to the Union Canal.

Questions 1-6 True, False or Not Given

1 The Falkirk Wheel has linked the Forth & Clyde Canal with the Union Canal for the first time in their
history.

2 There was some opposition to the design of the Falkirk Wheel at first.

3 The Falkirk Wheel was initially put together at the location where its components were
manufactured.

4 The Falkirk Wheel is the only boat lift in the world which has steel sections bolted together by
hand.

5 The weight of the gondolas varies according to the size of boat being carried.

6 The construction of the Falkirk Wheel site took into account the presence of a nearby ancient
monument.

Questions 7-13 Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

How a boat is lifted on the Falkirk Wheel