Reading Comprehension Test 72

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]New research findings on the ability of a fetus to recognize its mother's voice and even distinguish it from other female voices confirm what the scientists have speculated about for more than twenty years, that experiences in the womb help shape newborn preferences and behavior.

Dr. Barbara Kisilevsky, a Queen's University professor of nursing, along with a team of psychologists at Queen's and obstetricians in Hangzhou, China, found that fetuses are capable of learning in the womb and can remember and recognize their mother's voice before they are even born. Their research findings are published in the international journal Psychological Science. 

While previous research on infant development has demonstrated that newborns prefer to listen to their own mother's voice than to that of a female stranger and will even change their behavior to elicit their mother's voice, Dr. Kisilevsky's research proves that this 'preference/recognition' begins before birth. 

"This is an extremely exciting finding that provides evidence of sustained attention, memory, and learning by the fetus," says Dr. Kisilevsky. "The fetuses learn about their mother's voice in the womb and then prefer it, after birth. Our findings provide evidence that in-utero experience has an impact on newborn infant behavior and development and that voice recognition may play a role in mother-infant attachment."

The findings also suggest that the foundation for speech perception and language acquisition is laid before birth, says Dr. Kisilevsky. Therefore, the precocious language processing abilities observed in newborns and young infants may not be due to a hardwired speech processing module in the brain as has been assumed, but may instead stem from the interaction of the fetus with its environment.

Along with researchers at Zhejiang University, China, Dr. Kisilevsky tested 60 fetuses. Thirty fetuses were played a two-minute audiotape of their own mother reading a poem and 30 fetuses were played the voice of a female stranger reading the poem. The researchers found that the fetuses responded to their own mother's voice with heart-rate acceleration and to the stranger's voice with a heart-rate deceleration. The responses lasted during the two-minute tape as well as for at least two minutes after the offset of the voices.

"These results tell us that the fetuses heard and responded to both voices and that there was sustained attention to both voices," notes Dr. Kisilevsky. "But, because they responded differently to the two voices, we know they had to recognize their own mother's voice. We believe they are probably already learning about language in general and their own language specifically."

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]The United States must learn to lose this war - a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway). The cost of leaving will certainly be high, just not anywhere near as high as trying to 'stay the course', which can only magnify and postpone the disaster. And yet, regrettable to say, even if this difficult step is taken, no one should imagine that democracy will be achieved by this means. The great likelihood is something else - something worse, perhaps a recrudescence of dictatorship or Civil War, or both.  An interim period, probably very brief, of international trusteeship, is the best solution, yet it is unlikely to be a good solution. It is merely better than any other recourse. The good options have probably passed us by. They may never have existed. If the people of Iraq are given back their country, there isn't the slightest guarantee that they will use the privilege to create a liberal democracy. The creation of democracy is an organic process that must proceed from the will of the local people. Sometimes that will is present, more often it is not. Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the self-determination it battled to achieve for so long, but it has not become a democracy. On the other hand, just because Iraq's future remains to be decided by its talented people, it would also be wrong to categorically rule out the possibility that they will escape tyranny and create a democratic government for themselves. The United States and other countries might even find ways of offering modest assistance in the project. It's just that it is beyond the power of the United States to create democracy for them. The matter is not in our hands. It never was.

[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]New research findings on the ability of a fetus to recognize its mother's voice and even distinguish it from other female voices confirm what the scientists have speculated about for more than twenty years, that experiences in the womb help shape newborn preferences and behavior.

Dr. Barbara Kisilevsky, a Queen's University professor of nursing, along with a team of psychologists at Queen's and obstetricians in Hangzhou, China, found that fetuses are capable of learning in the womb and can remember and recognize their mother's voice before they are even born. Their research findings are published in the international journal Psychological Science. 

While previous research on infant development has demonstrated that newborns prefer to listen to their own mother's voice than to that of a female stranger and will even change their behavior to elicit their mother's voice, Dr. Kisilevsky's research proves that this 'preference/recognition' begins before birth. 

"This is an extremely exciting finding that provides evidence of sustained attention, memory, and learning by the fetus," says Dr. Kisilevsky. "The fetuses learn about their mother's voice in the womb and then prefer it, after birth. Our findings provide evidence that in-utero experience has an impact on newborn infant behavior and development and that voice recognition may play a role in mother-infant attachment."

The findings also suggest that the foundation for speech perception and language acquisition is laid before birth, says Dr. Kisilevsky. Therefore, the precocious language processing abilities observed in newborns and young infants may not be due to a hardwired speech processing module in the brain as has been assumed, but may instead stem from the interaction of the fetus with its environment.

Along with researchers at Zhejiang University, China, Dr. Kisilevsky tested 60 fetuses. Thirty fetuses were played a two-minute audiotape of their own mother reading a poem and 30 fetuses were played the voice of a female stranger reading the poem. The researchers found that the fetuses responded to their own mother's voice with heart-rate acceleration and to the stranger's voice with a heart-rate deceleration. The responses lasted during the two-minute tape as well as for at least two minutes after the offset of the voices.

"These results tell us that the fetuses heard and responded to both voices and that there was sustained attention to both voices," notes Dr. Kisilevsky. "But, because they responded differently to the two voices, we know they had to recognize their own mother's voice. We believe they are probably already learning about language in general and their own language specifically."

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Biologists have advanced two theories to explain why schooling of fish occurs in so many fish species. Because schooling is particularly widespread among species of small fish, both theories assume that schooling offers the advantage of some protection from predators. Proponents of theory dispute the assumption that a school of thousands of fish is highly visible. Experiments have shown that any fish can be seen, even in very clear water, only within a sphere of 200 meters in diameter. When fish are in a compact group, the spheres of visibility overlap. Thus the chance of a predator finding the school is only slightly greater than the chance of the predator finding a single fish swimming alone. Schooling is advantageous to the individual fish because a predator's chance of finding any particular fish swimming in the school is much smaller than its chance of finding at least one of the same group of fish if the fish were dispersed throughout an area.
However, critics of theory A point out that some fish form schools even in areas where predators are abundant and thus little possibility of escaping detection exists. They argue that the school continues to be of value to its members even after detection. They advocate theory B, the "confusion effect," which can be explained in two different ways.
Sometimes, proponents argue, predators simply cannot decide which fish to attack. This indecision supposedly results from a predator's preference for striking prey that is distinct from the rest of the school in appearance. In many schools, the fish are almost identical in appearance, making it difficult for a predator to select one. The second explanation for the "confusion effect" has to do with the sensory confusion caused by a large number of prey moving around the predator. Even if the predator makes the decision to attack a particular fish, the movement of other prey in the school can be distracting. The predator's difficulty can be compared to that of a tennis player trying to hit a tennis ball when two are approaching simultaneously.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Early in the careers of most novelists, the critics nag and carp; later, the cold eye of reassessment is cast over their life work at the peak of a writing career, which is where Doris Lessing now stands, the years of solid achievement command maximum respect.

A survey of critical responses to Lessing's books might reveal curious strata of social history. It is hard to remember now that she was once considered very daring and very militant (she insisted that relations between the sexes were difficult and unequal). She has been accused of being a feminist and then accused by feminists of not being a feminist enough. She has been a communist but then moved on from a belief in simplistic political solutions to interest in deeper psychological change, touching on themes of madness and of mystical and extrasensory states of consciousness.

Lessing has written clearly into all her work the conviction that we are moving blindly and inevitably toward global catastrophe. Her message seems to be of complete moral and social bankruptcy, particularly in the relations between men and women. Hers is not an angry feminism, though her men are rather poor creatures compared to her bruised but gritty women. Anger may imply a hope that things could be better if only some sense could be knocked into somebody's head, a hope for a time 'after the revolution.' One does not feel that Lessing sees any hope, only perpetual deadlock.

Certainly, Lessing has earned the respect accorded to a writer 'of her stature and productivity'. Doggedly, she has been writing into her fiction signposts and warnings that we need desperately to be reminded of and writing in a way that has been more persuasive and imaginative than if she had been a pure polemicist. But the critic has the problem of distinguishing between what an author says and the way she says it. The moralist in Lessing, struggling with the very skilled writer, at times, has made her writing prolix, clogged, slow - though in her latest novels she has successfully introduced a leavening of fantasy. The fact is that there are writers who in an economical page or two can make us feel our dilemmas more piercingly than she does in a leisurely fictional experience. Missing from her work is that sense of time and space gathered up for a moment between the hands, that sudden shift from understanding to seeing directly, that we expect at rare moments from our storytellers.

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
 Economic growth involves both benefits and costs. The desirability of increasing production has frequently been challenged in recent years and some have even mentioned that economic growth is merely a quantitative enlargement that has no human meaning or value. However, economic growth is an increase in the capacity to produce goods and services that people want. Since the product of economic growth can be measured by its value to someone, it is important to ask whose standard of valuation counts.
  In the U.S., the value of a product is what purchasers pay for it. That is determined by the purchaser's preferences combined with the condition of supply which in turn reflects various other factors, such as natural and technological circumstances of those who supply capital and labor. The value by which we measure a product synthesizes all these factors.
  Gross National Product (GNP) is the market value of the nation's total output of goods and services. GNP is not a perfect measure of all the activities involved in economic output. It does not account for the deterioration or improvement in the environment even when they are, incidentally, results of the production process. On the other hand, it does not count as "Product" many benefits provided as side-effects of the economic process. It does not include productive but unpaid work (such as that done by a home-maker) and it does not reckon with such other factors as the burdensomeness of work, the length of the work, week, and so forth. Nonetheless, the GNP concept makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the economy is working while it is not a complete measure of economic productivity and even less so of "welfare". The level and rate of the increase of GNP are clearly and positively associated with what most people throughout the world see as an improvement in the quality of life. In the long run, the same factor results in a growing GNP and in other social benefits: size and competence of population, state of knowledge, amount of capital and the effectiveness with those are combined and utilized.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Early in the careers of most novelists, the critics nag and carp; later, the cold eye of reassessment is cast over their life work at the peak of a writing career, which is where Doris Lessing now stands, the years of solid achievement command maximum respect.

A survey of critical responses to Lessing's books might reveal curious strata of social history. It is hard to remember now that she was once considered very daring and very militant (she insisted that relations between the sexes were difficult and unequal). She has been accused of being a feminist and then accused by feminists of not being a feminist enough. She has been a communist but then moved on from a belief in simplistic political solutions to interest in deeper psychological change, touching on themes of madness and of mystical and extrasensory states of consciousness.

Lessing has written clearly into all her work the conviction that we are moving blindly and inevitably toward global catastrophe. Her message seems to be of complete moral and social bankruptcy, particularly in the relations between men and women. Hers is not an angry feminism, though her men are rather poor creatures compared to her bruised but gritty women. Anger may imply a hope that things could be better if only some sense could be knocked into somebody's head, a hope for a time 'after the revolution.' One does not feel that Lessing sees any hope, only perpetual deadlock.

Certainly, Lessing has earned the respect accorded to a writer 'of her stature and productivity'. Doggedly, she has been writing into her fiction signposts and warnings that we need desperately to be reminded of and writing in a way that has been more persuasive and imaginative than if she had been a pure polemicist. But the critic has the problem of distinguishing between what an author says and the way she says it. The moralist in Lessing, struggling with the very skilled writer, at times, has made her writing prolix, clogged, slow - though in her latest novels she has successfully introduced a leavening of fantasy. The fact is that there are writers who in an economical page or two can make us feel our dilemmas more piercingly than she does in a leisurely fictional experience. Missing from her work is that sense of time and space gathered up for a moment between the hands, that sudden shift from understanding to seeing directly, that we expect at rare moments from our storytellers.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Scientists have developed a hydrogen-making catalyst that uses cheaper materials and yields much fewer contaminants than do the current processes while extracting the element from common renewable plant sources. Further, the new catalyst lies at the heart of a chemical process the authors say is a significant advance in producing alternate fuels from domestic sources.

In the journal of science, James Dumesic, John Shabaker, and George Huber of the University of Wisconsin at Madison report developing the catalyst from nickel, tin, and aluminum and using it in a process called aqueous-phase reforming (APR), which converts plant by-products into hydrogen. The process performs as well as current methods that use precious metals such as platinum, yet runs at lower temperatures and is much cleaner.

'The APR process can be used on the small scale to produce fuel for portable devices, such as cars, batteries, and military equipment,' said Dumesic. 'But it could also be scaled up as a hydrogen source for industrial applications, such as the production of fertilizers or the removal of sulfur from petroleum products.'

Hydrogen is a 'clean' fuel because when it burns, it combines with oxygen to form water; no toxic by-products or greenhouse gasses are produced in the process. The APR process extracts hydrogen from a variety of biological sources, especially simple carbohydrates, and sugars generated by common plants.

Platinum is known to be an excellent catalyst in a number of chemical reactions. It is one component in a car's catalytic converter, for example, that helps remove toxins from automobile exhaust. Catalytic platinum (Pt) and nickel (Ni) are preferred over other metals because they process reaction molecules much faster. But pure nickel, unlike platinum, recombines the hydrogen product with carbon atoms to make methane, a common greenhouse gas.

Using a specially designed reactor, the team found a match in a modified version of what researchers call a Raney-nickel catalyst. Raney-nickel is a highly porous catalyst made of about 90 percent nickel (Ni) and 10 percent Aluminium (AI).

While Raney-nickel proved somewhat effective at separating hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules, the researchers improved the material's effectiveness by adding more tin (Sn), which stops the production of methane and instead generates more hydrogen. Relative to the other catalysts, the new Raney-NiSn can perform for very long time periods (at least for about 48 hours) and at much lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Early in the careers of most novelists, the critics nag and carp; later, the cold eye of reassessment is cast over their life work at the peak of a writing career, which is where Doris Lessing now stands, the years of solid achievement command maximum respect.

A survey of critical responses to Lessing's books might reveal curious strata of social history. It is hard to remember now that she was once considered very daring and very militant (she insisted that relations between the sexes were difficult and unequal). She has been accused of being a feminist and then accused by feminists of not being a feminist enough. She has been a communist but then moved on from a belief in simplistic political solutions to interest in deeper psychological change, touching on themes of madness and of mystical and extrasensory states of consciousness.

Lessing has written clearly into all her work the conviction that we are moving blindly and inevitably toward global catastrophe. Her message seems to be of complete moral and social bankruptcy, particularly in the relations between men and women. Hers is not an angry feminism, though her men are rather poor creatures compared to her bruised but gritty women. Anger may imply a hope that things could be better if only some sense could be knocked into somebody's head, a hope for a time 'after the revolution.' One does not feel that Lessing sees any hope, only perpetual deadlock.

Certainly, Lessing has earned the respect accorded to a writer 'of her stature and productivity'. Doggedly, she has been writing into her fiction signposts and warnings that we need desperately to be reminded of and writing in a way that has been more persuasive and imaginative than if she had been a pure polemicist. But the critic has the problem of distinguishing between what an author says and the way she says it. The moralist in Lessing, struggling with the very skilled writer, at times, has made her writing prolix, clogged, slow - though in her latest novels she has successfully introduced a leavening of fantasy. The fact is that there are writers who in an economical page or two can make us feel our dilemmas more piercingly than she does in a leisurely fictional experience. Missing from her work is that sense of time and space gathered up for a moment between the hands, that sudden shift from understanding to seeing directly, that we expect at rare moments from our storytellers.

Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
 Economic growth involves both benefits and costs. The desirability of increasing production has frequently been challenged in recent years and some have even mentioned that economic growth is merely a quantitative enlargement that has no human meaning or value. However, economic growth is an increase in the capacity to produce goods and services that people want. Since the product of economic growth can be measured by its value to someone, it is important to ask whose standard of valuation counts.
  In the U.S., the value of a product is what purchasers pay for it. That is determined by the purchaser's preferences combined with the condition of supply which in turn reflects various other factors, such as natural and technological circumstances of those who supply capital and labor. The value by which we measure a product synthesizes all these factors.
  Gross National Product (GNP) is the market value of the nation's total output of goods and services. GNP is not a perfect measure of all the activities involved in economic output. It does not account for the deterioration or improvement in the environment even when they are, incidentally, results of the production process. On the other hand, it does not count as "Product" many benefits provided as side-effects of the economic process. It does not include productive but unpaid work (such as that done by a home-maker) and it does not reckon with such other factors as the burdensomeness of work, the length of the work, week, and so forth. Nonetheless, the GNP concept makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the economy is working while it is not a complete measure of economic productivity and even less so of "welfare". The level and rate of the increase of GNP are clearly and positively associated with what most people throughout the world see as an improvement in the quality of life. In the long run, the same factor results in a growing GNP and in other social benefits: size and competence of population, state of knowledge, amount of capital and the effectiveness with those are combined and utilized.