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E x e r c i s e 1:

The man who tried to destroy P aris

Le Corbusier was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. But many may wish he
had never built anything.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, the architect Le Corbusier used his
grandfather's name when he went to Paris at the age of 29. As Jeanneret, he had been a fairly
successful small-town architect; as Le Corbusier, he had bigger ideas. He disliked the
architectural styles that were popular at the time, and considered them to be out of date in an
industrial age. He believed that the 20th century deserved a brand-new style of architecture.
“We must start again from zero,” he said.

The new style of architecture was called the International Style, and it attracted many
followers in the architectural world. However, nobody was as enthusiastic about it as Le
Corbusier at the beginning. He worked hard to promote his ideas at exhibitions, at talks, in
books and in his own magazine. He loved machines, and believed that, like a machine, a
building should have a function. He is famous for saying: “A house is a machine for living
in.”

The machines he admired the most were ships, and his early buildings tried to capture the
spirit of the sea with their white walls, exposed rooms, shining glass and flat roofs. He called
this style of architecture ‘purism'. The first building to embrace this style was the Villa
Savoye in France. Le Corbusier believed that it was one of the best, most functional houses
ever built. Unfortunately, this turned out to be an exaggeration. The flat roof was a
particular problem, as water poured in every time it rained, and it needed constant repairs.
Nevertheless, its design was revolutionary, and it should be considered a significant piece of
early 20th-century architecture.

In 1935, Le Corbusier visited New York City. He loved the city, and especially its tall
buildings. He had only one reservation, which he explained to a journalist for the Herald
Tribune newspaper. American skyscrapers were the biggest, tallest buildings in the world at
that time, but Le Corbusier was a man who always thought big, and as far as he was
concerned, they were “just too small”. Le Corbusier had always admired tall buildings.
Now, inspired by his visit, he abandoned purism. It is doubtful that he could have created
anything as grand as the skyscrapers he had seen in the city, but from now on Le Corbusier
started designing buildings that sent out a more powerful message.
He first started using bright colours, and then experimented with concrete. Le Corbusier
loved the look and flexibility of concrete, and found it hard to hide it behind brick or paint,
preferring to leave it on full view. At a time when concrete was seen as modern and exciting,
his designs made him world famous, and he was asked to design several important buildings
around the world. Altogether, he designed about 60 major buildings worldwide, in a style that
became known as ‘modernism'.

However, while many admired and copied his new style of architecture, many more hated it.
They turned against him, and tried to block his plans. Buildings should inspire people and
make them feel good, they said, and Le Corbusier's ugly, depressing buildings often had the
opposite effect. In this respect, the people of Paris had a lucky escape. Early in his career, Le
Corbusier had wanted to knock down the centre of Paris and replace the old buildings with
huge towers. Fortunately, his plan was rejected. Justifiably, in view of his plans to transform
one of the world's most beautiful cities into a hideous concrete jungle, Le Corbusier is still
known as ‘the man who tried to destroy Paris'.

Despite the criticism, he had an enormous effect on the world of architecture, and attracted
a large number of followers. As a result, many places were subjected to his style. In the Paris
suburbs of Bobigny, for example, huge towers were built to house some of the city's poorer
inhabitants. Other European cities such as London, Berlin and Dublin also felt his influence.
Apart from the buildings that were directly influenced by Le Corbusier, something else
happened that the architect never planned: there was a return to older styles of architecture.
Today, many people live in modern houses that look like they are much older. This look may
represent a return to traditional tastes and values. More likely, however, it represents a
reaction against modernist architecture.
Source: IELTS Complete Band 4-5

Q u e s t i o n s 5-8:
C o m p l e t e e a c h s e n t e n c e w i t h t h e c o r r e c t e n d i n g , A-F b e l o w

5. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye A. copied the style t h a t he had invented

6.The concrete in Le Corbusier’s B.is a classic example of modernist
later buildings architecture
7.Le Corbusier’s style of C. made him friends and enemies
architecture D. was not as good as he claimed
8.Le Corbusier had a large E. was covered in bright colours
following which F. was left exposed so t h a t people could see it
E x e r c i s e 2:

Fashion and Design

An astonishingly intricate project is being undertaken to restore a legendary theatrical dress,
Angela Wintle explains.

On December 28th, 1888, the curtain rose on a daring new stage revival of
Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Topping the bill, playing
Lady Macbeth, a main character in the play, was Ellen Terry. She was the greatest and
most adored English actress of the age. But she didn't achieve this devotion through her
acting ability alone. She knew the power of presentation and carefully cultivated her
image. That first night was no exception. When she walked on stage for the famous
banqueting scene, her appearance drew a collective gasp from the audience.

She was dressed in the most extraordinary clothes ever to have graced a British stage:
a long, emerald and sea-green gown with tapering sleeves, surmounted by a velvet
cloak, which glistened and sparkled eerily in the limelight. Yet this was no mere stage
trickery. The effect had been achieved using hundreds of wings from beetles. The gown
- later named the ‘Beetlewing dress' - became one of the most iconic and celebrated
costumes of the age.

Terry was every bit as remarkable as her costumes. At 31, she became a leading lady at
the Lyceum Theatre and for two decades, she set about bringing culture to the masses.
The productions she worked on were extravagant and daring. Shakespeare's plays were
staged alongside blood-and-thunder melodramas and their texts were ruthlessly cut.
Some people were critical, but they missed the point. The innovations sold tickets and
brought new audiences to see masterpieces that they would never otherwise have seen.

However, it was a painter who immortalised her. John Singer Sargent had been so
struck by Terry's appearance at that first performance that he asked her to model for
him, and his famous portrait of 1889, now at the Tate Gallery in London, showed her
with a glint in her eye, holding a crown over her flame-red hair. But while the painting
remains almost as fresh as the day it was painted, the years have not been so kind to the
dress. Its delicate structure, combined with the cumulative effects of time, has meant it
is now in an extremely fragile condition. Thus, two years ago, a fundraising project was
launched by Britain's National Trust (1) to pay for its conservation.
It turned to textile conservator Zenzie Tinker to do the job. Zenzie loves historical dress because
of the link with the past. ‘Working on costumes like the Beetlewing dress gives you a real sense
of the people who wore them; you can see the sweat stains and wear marks. But it's quite
unusual to know who actually wore a garment. That's the thing that makes the Beetlewing
project so special.'

Before any of Zenzie's conservation work can begin, she and her team will conduct a thorough
investigation to help determine what changes have been made to the dress and when. This will
involve close examination of the dress for signs of damage and wear, and will be aided by
comparing it with John Singer Sargent's painting and contemporary photographs. Then Zenzie
and the National Trust will decide how far back to take the reconstruction, as some members
feel that even the most recent changes are now part of the history of the dress.

The first stages in the actual restoration will involve delicate surface cleaning, using a small
vacuum suction device. Once the level of reconstruction has been determined, the original
crocheted (2) overdress will be stitched onto a dyed net support before repairs begin. ‘It's going
to be extraordinarily difficult, because the original cloth is quite stretchy, so we've deliberately
chosen net because that has a certain amount of flexibility in it too,' says Zenzie. When the
dress is displayed, none of our work will be noticeable, but we'll retain all the evidence on the
reverse so that future experts will be able to see exactly what we've done - and I'll produce a
detailed report.'

Zenzie has estimated that the project, costing about £30,000, will require more than 700 hours'
work. ‘It will be a huge undertaking and I don't think the Trust has ever spent quite as much on
a costume before,’ she says. ‘But this dress is unique. It's very unusual to see this level of
workmanship on a theatrical costume, and it must have looked spectacular on stage.' If Terry
was alive today, there's no doubt she would be delighted. Unlike many other actresses, she
valued her costumes because she kept and reused them time and time again. ‘I'd like to think
she'd see our contribution as part of the ongoing history of the dress,' says Zenzie.

1.A conservation organisation whose work includes the funding of projects designed to protect and
preserve Britain's cultural heritage
2. Produced using wool and a special needle with a hook at the end

Source: IELTS Complete Band 5-6.5

Q u e s t i o n s 1-4
C o m p l e t e e a c h s e n t e n c e w i t h t h e c o r r e c t e n d i n g , A-F, bel ow.

1. Pictures will be used A.to show how the team did the repairs on
2. A special machine will be used the dress.
3. A net material has been selected B.to reduce the time taken to repair the
4. Work will be visible on one side dress.
C.to remove the dirt from the top layer of
the dress.
D.to demonstrate the quality of the team's
work on the dress.
E.to match a quality of the original fabric
used in the dress.
F.to help show where the dress needs repair
work.
E x e r c i s e 3:

Scientific Management in the workplace

The car and computer manufacturing plants, the work environments we go to every day;
the hospitals we are treated in, and even some of the restaurants we might at in all function
more efficiently due to the application of methods that come from Scientific Management.
In fact, these methods of working seem so commonplace and so logical to a citizen of the
modem world that it is almost impossible to accept that they were revolutionary only 100
years ago.

Scientific Management was developed in the first quarter of the 20th century; its father is
commonly accepted to be F.W. Taylor. Taylor recognized labor productivity was largely
inefficient due to a workforce that functioned by “rules of thumb.” Taylor carried out
studies to ensure that factual scientific knowledge would replace these traditional “rules
of thumb.” The backbone of this activity was his “time-and-motion study.” This involved
analyzing all the operations and the motions performed in a factory, and timing them with
a stopwatch. By knowing how long it took to perform each of the elements of each job, he
believed it would be possible to determine a fair day's work.

Work, he contended, was more efficient when broken down into its constituent parts, and
the management, planning, and decision-making functions had been developed elsewhere.
As this implies, Taylor viewed the majority of workers as ill-educated and unfit to make
important decisions about their work.

Taylor's system ensured the most efficient way would be used by all workers, therefore
making the work process standard. Intariably, managers found that maximal efficiency
was achieved by a subdivision of labor. This subdivision entailed breaking the workers'
tasks into smaller and smaller parts. In short, he specified not only what was to be done,
but also how it was to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.

One theory based on the Scientific Management model is Fordism. This theory refers to the
application of Henry Ford's faith in mass production-in his case, of cars- and combined
the idea of the moving assembly line with Taylor's systems of division of labor and piece-
rate payment. With Fordism, jobs are automated or broken down into unskilled or semi-
skilled tasks. The pace of the continuous-flow assembly line dictated work. But Ford's
theory retained the faults of Taylor's. Autocratic management ensured a high
division of labor in order to effectively run mass production; this led to little workplace
democracy, and alienation. Equally, with emphasis on the continuous flow of the assembly
line, machinery was given more importance than workers.

The benefits of Scientific Management lie within its ability provide a company with the
focus to organize its structure in order to meet the objectives of both the employer and
employee. Taylor found that the firms that introduced Scientific Management became the
world's most carefully organized corporations.

Scientific Management, however, has been criticized for “deskilling” labor. As jobs are
broken down into their constituent elements, humans become little more than “machines”
in the chain. Their cognitive input is not required: it is best if they do not have to think
about their tasks. Yet the average intelligence of employees has risen sharply; people have
been made aware of their value as human beings. They are no longer content to receive
only financial reward for their tasks. It has been recognized that productivity and success
are not just obtained by controlling all factors in the workplace, but by contributing to the
social well-being and development of the individual employee.

Higher levels of access to technology and information, as well as increased competition,

present another difficulty to theory of Scientific Management in the 21st century. Modern
organizations process huge amounts of input, and employees no longer work in isolated
units cut off from the organization at large. Managers recognize they are unable to control
all aspects of employees' functions, as the number layers of information factored into
everyday decisions is so high that it is imperative employees use their own initiative. High
competition between organizations also means that companies must react fast to maintain
market positions. All this forces modem companies to maintain high levels of flexibility.

In the era during which Scientific Management was developed, each worker had a specific
task that he or she had to perform, with little or no real explanation of why, or what part it
played in the organization as a whole. In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to find
an employee in the developed world who is not aware of nhat his or her organization
stands for, what their business strategy is, how well the company is performing, and what
their job means to the company as a whole. Organizations actively encourage employees,
know about their company and to work across departments, ensuring that communication
at all levels is mixed and informal.
 Another weakness in Scientific Management theory is that it can lead to workers becoming
too highly specialized, therefore hindering their adaptability to new situations. Nowadays,
employers not only want workers to be efficient, they must also exhibit flexibility. In
conclusion, it can be seen that Scientific Management is still very much part of
organizations today. Its strengths in creating a divide between management functions and
work functions have been employed widely at all levels and in all industries.

In addition, its strengths in making organizations efficient through replacement of “rules of

thumb” with scientific fact ensured its widespread application.

adapted [ram www.articlecity.com]

Source: IELTS Advantage – Reading Skills

Q u e s t i o n s 1-6
C o m p l e t e e a c h s e n t e n c e w i t h t h e c o r r e c t e n d i n g A-H.
A c c o r d i n g t o t h e article:

1. Productivity A.meant a job was reduced to a number of basic

2. Time-and-motion analysis elements.
3. Decision-making B.was considered undesirable in the role of the
4. Subdivision of labour workers.
5. Fordism C.became specialized in certain unchanging work
6. A worker routines.
D.measured the exact time it took to do each par t
of a job.
E.carefully calculated what was required for the
success of a business.
F.was a n application of a theory to mass
production.
G. took a critical view of the style of management.
H.suffered as a result of established inefficient
practices.
E x e r c i s e 4:

The new way to be a fifth grader

I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth-grader is
pondering. It's a trigonometry problem. Carpenter, a serious-feced ten-year-old, pauses
for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” The computer tells him that he's correct.
“It took a while for me to work it out,” he admits sheepishly. The software then generates
another problem, followed by another, until eventually he's done ten in a row.

Last November, his teacher, Kami Thordarson, began using Khan Academy in her class. It
is an educational website on which students can watch some 2,400 videos. The videos are
anything but sophisticated. At seven to 14 minutes long, they consist of a voiceover by the
site's founder, Salman Khan, chattily describing a mathematical concept or explaining
how to solve a problem, while his hand-scribbled formulas and diagrams appear on-
screen. As a student, you can review a video as many times as you want, scrolling back
several times over puzzling parts and fast-forwarding through the boring bits you already
know. Once you've mastered a video, you can move on to the next one.

Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her
normal instruction. But it quickly became far more than that. She is now on her way to
“flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with
Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then in class, they focus on working on
the problem areas together. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that
lectures are viewed in the children's own time and homework is done at school. It sounds
weird, Thordarson admits, but this reversal makes sense when you think about it. It is when
they are doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most
likely to want someone to talk to. And Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard
application that lets them see the instant a student gets stuck.

For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching to
the “middle” of the class. They stand at the whiteboard trying to get 25 or more students
to learn at the same pace. Advanced students get bored and tune out, lagging ones get lost
and tune out, and pretty soon half the class is not paying attention. Since the rise of
personal computers in the 1980s, educators have hoped that technology could save the day
by offering lessons tailored to each child. Schools have spent millions of dollars on
sophisticated classroom technology, but the effort has been in vain. The one-to-one
instruction it requires is, after all, prohibitively expensive. What country can afford such a
luxury?

Khan never intended to overhaul the school curricula and he doesn't have a consistent,
comprehensive plan for doing so. Nevertheless, some of his fans believe that he has
stumbled onto the solution to education's middle-of-the-class mediocrity. Most notable
among them is Bill Gates, whose foundation has invested $1.5 million in Khan's site.
Students have pointed out that Khan is particularly good at explaining all the hidden,
small steps in math problems—steps that teachers often gloss over. He has an uncanny
ability to inhabit the mind of someone who doesn't already understand something.

However, not all educators are enamoured with Khan and his site. Gary Stager, a long-
time educational consultant and advocate of laptops in classrooms, thinks Khan Academy
is not innovative at all. The videos and software modules, he contends, are just a high-tech
version of the outdated teaching techniques—lecturing and drilling. Schools have
become “joyless test-prep factories,” he says, and Khan Academy caters to this dismal
trend.

As Sylvia Martinez, president of an organization focusing on technology in the classroom,

puts it, “The things they're doing are really just rote.” Flipping the classroom isn't an
entirely new idea, Martinez says, and she doubts that it would work for the majority of
pupils: “I'm sorry, but if they can't understand the lecture in a classroom, they're not
going to grasp it better when it's done through a video at home.”

Another limitation of Khan's site is that the drilling software can only handle questions
where the answers are unambiguously right or wrong, like math or chemistry; Khan has
relatively few videos on messier, grey-area subjects like history. Khan and Gates admit
there is no easy way to automate the teaching of writing—even though it is just as critical
as math.

Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it is not clear that
schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students
moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you
wind up with a ten-year-old who has already mastered high-school physics? Khan's
programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who have seen Khan Academy
presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop
students from becoming this advanced.”
 Khan's success has injected him into the heated wars over school reform. Reformers today,
by and large, believe student success should be carefully tested, with teachers and
principals receiving better pay if their students advance more quickly. In essence, Khan
doesn't want to change the way institutions teach; he wants to change how people learn,
whether they're in a private school or a public school—or for that matter, whether they're
a student or an adult trying to self-educate in Ohio, Brazil, Russia, or India. One member
of Khan's staff is spearheading a drive to translate the videos into ten major languages.
It's classic start-up logic: do something novel, do it with speed, and the people who love it
will find you.
Adapted from Wired Magazine
Source: IELTS Complete Band 6.5-7.5

Q u e s t i o n s 1-4:

1.Bill Gates thinks Khan A.is only suited to subjects where questions have
Academy exact answers.
2. According to G a ry B.can teach both the strongest and the weakest
Stager, Khan Academy pupils in a class.
3.Sylvia Martinez regrets C.means the teaching of other school subjects will
t h a t Khan Academy have to be changed.
4.Ben Kamens has been D. only prepares students to pass exams.
told t h a t Khan Academy E.could cause student achievement to improve too
quickly.
F.requires all students to own the necessary
technology.
G.is unlikely to have a successful outcome for most
students.
E x e r c i s e 5:

Mind readers
It may one day be possible to eavesdrop on another person’s inner voice.

As you begin to read this article and your eyes follow the words across the page, you may
be aware of a voice in your head silently muttering along. The very same thing happens
when we write: a private, internal narrative shapes the words before we commit them to
text.

What if it were possible to tap into this inner voice? Thinking of words does, after all.
create characteristic electrical signals in our brains, and decoding them could make it
possible to piece together someone’s thoughts. Such an ability would have phenomenal
prospects, not least for people unable to communicate as a result of brain damage. But it
would also carry profoundly worrisome implications for the future of privacy.

The first scribbled records of electrical activity in the human brain were made in 1924 by
a German doctor called Hans Berger using his new invention - the electroencephalogram
(EEG). This uses electrodes placed on the skull to read the output of the brain's billions of
nerve cells or neurons. By the mid-1990s, the ability to translate the brain's activity into
readable signals had advanced so far that people could move computer cursors using only
the electrical fields created by their thoughts.

The electrical impulses such innovations tap into are produced in a part of the brain called
the motor cortex, which is responsible for muscle movement. To move a cursor on a screen,
you do not think ‘move left’ in natural language. Instead, you imagine a specific motion
like hitting a ball with a tennis racket. Training the machine to realise which electrical
signals correspond to your imagined movements, however, is time consuming and difficult.
And while this method works well for directing objects on a screen, its drawbacks become
apparent when you try using it to communicate. At best, you can use the cursor to select
letters displayed on an on-screen keyboard. Even a practised mind would be lucky to write
15 words per minute with that approach. Speaking, we can manage 150.

Matching the speed at which we can think and talk would lead to devices that could
instantly translate the electrical signals of someone’s inner voice into sound produced by
a speech synthesiser. To do this, it is necessary to focus only on the signals coming from
the brain areas that govern speech. However, real mind reading requires some way to
intercept those signals before they hit the motor cortex.
The translation of thoughts to language in the brain is an incredibly complex and largely
mysterious process, but this much is known: before they end up in the motor cortex,
thoughts destined to become spoken words pass through two ‘staging areas’ associated
with the perception and expression of speech.

The first is called Wernicke’s area, which deals with semantics - in this case, ideas based
in meaning, which can include images, smells or emotional memories. Damage to
Wernicke’s area can result in the loss of semantic associations: words can’t make sense
when they are decoupled from their meaning. Suffer a stroke in that region, for example,
and you will have trouble understanding not just what others are telling you, but what you
yourself are thinking.

The second is called Broca’s area, agreed to be the brain’s speech-processing centre.
Here, semantics are translated into phonetics and ultimately, word components. From
here, the assembled sentences take a quick trip to the motor cortex, which activates the
muscles that will turn the desired words into speech.

Injure Broca’s area, and though you might know what you want to say you just can’t send
those impulses.

When you listen to your inner voice, two things are happening. You ‘hear’ yourself
producing language in Wernicke’s area as you construct it in Broca’s area. The key to
mind reading seems to lie in these two areas.

The work of Bradley Greger in 2010 broke new ground by marking the first-ever excursion
beyond the motor cortex into the brain’s language centres. His team used electrodes
placed inside the skull to detect the electrical signatures of whole words, such as ‘yes’,
‘no’, ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘thirsty', ‘hungry’, etc. Promising as it is. this approach requires a new
signal to be learned for each new word. English contains a quarter of a million distinct
words. And though this was the first instance of monitoring Wernicke’s area, it still relied
largely on the facial motor cortex.

Greger decided there might be another way. The building blocks of language are called
phonemes, and the English language has about 40 of them - the ‘kuh’ sound in ‘school’, for
example the ‘$h' in ‘shy’. Every English word contains some subset of these components.
Decode the brain signals that correspond to the phonemes, and you would have a system
to unlock any word at the moment someone thinks it.
 In 2011, Eric Leuthardt and his colleague Gerwin Schalk positioned electrodes over the
language regions of four fully conscious people and were able to detect the phonemes ‘oo’,
‘ah’, ‘eh’ and ‘ee’. What they also discovered was that spoken phonemes activated both the
language areas and the motor cortex, while imagined speech - that inner voice - boosted
the activity of neurons in Wernike’s area. Leuthardt had effectively read his subjects'
minds. ‘I would call it brain reading,’ he says. To arrive at whole words. Leuthardt’s next
step is to expand his library of sounds and to find out how the production of phonemes
translates across different languages.

For now, the research is primarily aimed at improving the lives of people with locked-in
syndrome, but the ability to explore the brain’s language centres could revolutionise other
fields. The consequences of these findings could ripple out to more general audiences who
might like to use extreme hands-free mobile communication technologies that can be
manipulated by inner voice alone. For linguists, it could provide previously unobtainable
insight into the neural origins and structures of language. Knowing what someone is
thinking without needing words at all would be functionally indistinguishable from
telepathy.

Source: IELTS Complete Band 6.5-7.5

Q u e s t i o n s 1-4:
C o m p l e t e e a c h s e n t e n c e w i t h t h e c o r r e c t e n d i n g , A-G.

1.In Wernicke’s area, our A. receive impulses from the motor cortex.
thoughts B. pass directly to the motor cortex.
2.It is only in Broca’s area t h a t C. are processed into language.
ideas we wish to express D. require a listener.
3.The muscles t h a t articulate our E. consist of decoded phonemes.
sentences F. are largely non-verbal.
4.The words and sentences t h a t G. match the sounds t h a t they make.
we speak