READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.

Bovid
A bovid is any member of almost 140 species of ungulates belonging
to the family Bovidae. The bovids are the largest family of hoofed mammals
and are native to Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Members
include antelope, bison, buffalo, cattle, sheep and goats. Bovids have
mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships with bacteria and other
microorganisms that allow the digestion of cellulose, the most abundant
form of living terrestrial biomass, but one that is indigestible for many
animals, including humans.
Bovids are not so common in endemic insular faunas and are mainly
recorded in Southeast Asia, Japan and some Mediterranean islands. Ely
the late Miocene, the bovids rapidly diversified, leading to the creation of 70
new genera. This late Miocene radiation was partly because most bovids
became adapted to more open, grassland habitats. Some species of bovid
are solitary, but others live in large groups with complex social structures.
All bovids have the similar basic form—a snout with a blunt end, one
or more pairs of horns immediately after the oval or pointed ears, a distinct
neck and a tail varying in length and bushiness among the species.
However, the bovids show great variation in size: the gaur can weigh as
much as 1,000kg and stands 2-3m high at the shoulder. The royal
antelope, at the opposite extreme, is only 25cm tall and weighs at most
3kg.
Despite differences in size and appearance, bovids are united by the
possession of certain common features. Being ruminants, the stomach is
composed of four chambers: the rumen (80%), the omasum, the reticulum,
and the abomasum. Bovids retain undigested food in their stomachs to be
regurgitated and chewed again as necessary Bovids are almost exclusively
herbivorous. Most bovids bear 30 to 32 teeth. While the upper incisors are
absent, the upper canines are either reduced or absent. Instead of the
upper incisors, bovids have a thick and tough layer of tissue, called the
dental pad, which provides a surface to grip grasses and foliage. All bovids
have four toes on each foot—they walk on the central two (the hooves),
while the outer two (the dewclaws) are much smaller and rarely touch the
ground. Bovid horns vary in shape and size: the relatively simple horns of a
large Indian buffalo may measure around 4m from tip to tip along the outer
curve, while the various gazelles have horns with a variety of elegant
curves.
Bovids are the largest of 10 extant families within Artiodactyla,
consisting of more than 140 extant and 300 extinct species. Fossil
evidence suggests five distinct subfamilies: Bovinae (bison, buffalos, cattle,
and relatives). Antelope (addax, oryxes, roan antelopes and relatives),
Caprinae (chamois, goats, sheep, and relatives), Cephalophinae (duikers),
and Antilocapridae (pronghorn). Unlike most other bovids, Bovinae species
are ail non-territorial. As the ancestors of the various species of domestic
cattle, banteng, gaur, yak and water buffalo are generally rare and
endangered in the wild, while another ancestor, auroch, has been extinct in
the wild for nearly 300 years.
Antelope is not a cladistic or taxonomically defined group. The term is
used to describe all members of the family Bovidae that do not fall under
the category of, cattle, or goats. Not surprisingly for animals with long,
slender yet powerful legs, many antelopes have long strides and can run
fast. There are two main sub-groups of antelope: Hippotraginae, which
includes the oryx and the addax, and Antilopinae, which generally contains
slighter and more graceful animals such as gazelle and the springbok. The
antelope is found in a wide range of habitats, typically woodland, forest,
savannah, grassland plains, and marshes. Several species of antelope
have adapted to living in the mountains and rocky outcrops and a couple of
species of antelope are even semi-aquatic and these antelope live in
swamps, for instance, the sitatunga has long, splayed hooves that enable it
to walk freely and rapidly on swampy ground.
Subfamily Caprinae consists of mostly medium-sized bovids. Its
members are commonly referred to as the sheep and the goat, together
with various relatives such as the goral and the tahr. The group did not
reach its greatest diversity until the recent ice ages, when many of its
members became specialised for marginal, often extreme, environments:
mountains, deserts, and the subarctic region. Barbary and bighorn sheep
have been found in arid deserts, while Rocky Mountain sheep survive high
up in mountains and musk oxen in arctic tundra.
The duiker, belonging to Cephalophinae sub-family is a small to
medium-sized species, brown in colour, and native to sub-Saharan Africa.
Duikers are primarily browsers rather than grazers, eating leaves, shoots,
seeds, fruit buds and bark. Some duikers consume insects and carrion
(dead animal carcasses) from time to time and even manage to capture
rodents or small birds.
The pronghorn is the only living member of the sub-family
Antilocapridae in North America. Each “horn” of the pronghorn is composed
of a slender, laterally flattened blade of bone that grows from the frontal
bones of the skull, forming a permanent core. Unlike the horns of the family
Bovidae, the horn sheaths of the pronghorn are branched, each sheath
possessing a forward-pointing tine (hence the name pronghorn). The
pronghorn is the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, being
built for maximum predator evasion through running. Additionally,
pronghorn hooves have two long, cushioned, pointed toes which help
absorb shock when running at high speeds.
Questions 1-3
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.
1 Bovids mostly inhabit
A Africa.
B Eurasia.
C Southeast Asia.
D South America.
2 What are the most favorable locations for the existence of bovids?
A tropical forests
B wetlands
C mountains
 D open grassy areas
3 What is the common feature of idle bovid species?
A Their horns are short.
B They store food in the body.
C They have upper incisors.
D Their hooves are undivided.
Questions 4 – 8
Look at the following characteristics (Questions and the list of sub-families
below).
Match each characteristic with the correct;
Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 4-8 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
4 can survive in harsh habitats.
5 move at a high speed.
6 origins of modern ox and cow.
7 does not defend a particular area of land.
8 sometimes take small animals as their food supply.
A Bovinae
B Antelope
C Caprinae
D Cephalophinae
Questions 9-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each
answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.
9 What is the smallest species of Bovids?
10 Which member of Bovinae has died out?
11 What helps sitatunga move quickly on swampy lands?
12 Where can Barbary sheep survive?
13 What is the only survivor of Antilocapridae?
___________________________________________________________

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based
on Reading Passage 2 below.

Are Artists Liars?

A
Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of
instructional videos about acting, to he called “Lying for a Iiving”. On the
surviving footage, Brando can he seen dispensing gnomic advice on his
craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars,
including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited
random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to
improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two
dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act.” Brando told Jod
Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed
the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus.” said Brando,
“I’m fabulous at it”.
B
Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a
liar is a line one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a
lower order-as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Indeed, lying
and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root-one that is
exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular
kind of impairment. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of
reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief – a skill requiring
intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control
(liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are
hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying.
C
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the
story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of
strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but
what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge
of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. In
the language of psychiatry, this woman was “confabulating”. Chronic
confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small
proportion of brain damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the
production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about
oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas
amnesiacs make errors of omission, there are gaps in their recollections
they find impossible to fill – confabulators make errors of commission: they
make tilings up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating
patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will
earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital,
or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical sear, explained
that during the Second World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot him
three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life.
The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various
times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others
tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside
Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out
to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moseovitch, a neuropsychologist,
calls “honest lying”. Uncertain and obscurely distressed by their
uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated
need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand. Chronic
confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming
together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when
asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that
she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense, these patients are like
novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom “nothing is
wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their
own material.
D
The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves.
Evidently, there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human
mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born
storytellers, spinning, narrative out of our experience and imagination,
straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a
wonderful thing; it is what gives us out ability to conceive of alternative
futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives
through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble,
particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real.
Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise
our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet
people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can
be dangerously fun.
E
During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet
minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a
national newspaper tainted his name. The case, which stretched on for
more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian
about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he
allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government
minister. Whitt amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the
lies Aitken told during his testimony. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997,
when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip.
Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of
sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory, they revealed that not
only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed
doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and
drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
F
Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally
attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come
to the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why
we fell it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into
which our lies can be corralled, and channeled into something socially
useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to
refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insight till ones. But that is not
the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies,
and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a
meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of
himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a
compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the
human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a
curious truth that can only he expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion,
masquerading as what it is not.” Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings
below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Unsuccessful deceit
ii Biological basis between liars and artists
iii How to lie in an artistic way
iv Confabulations and the exemplifiers
v The distinction between artists and common liars
vi The fine line between liars and artists
vii The definition of confabulation
viii Creativity when people lie
14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F
Questions 20-21
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements about people suffering from
confabulation are true?
A They have lost cognitive abilities.
B They do not deliberately tell a lie.
C They are normally aware of their condition
D They do not have the impetus to explain what they do not understand.
E They try to make up stories.
Questions 22-23
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Write the correct letters in boxes 22-23 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements about playwrights and novelists are
true?
A They give more meaning to the stories.
B They tell lies for the benefit of themselves.
C They have nothing to do with the truth out there.
D We can be misled by them if not careful.
E We know there are lies in the content.
Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below.
hoose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.
A 24………………………. accused Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet
minister, who was selling and buying with 25……………………… Aitken’s
case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable
evidence about his Paris trip. He was deemed to have
his 26…………………….. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s
daughter not with him that day, but also that the minister had simply got
into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
___________________________________________________________

READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

What Do Babies Know?

As Daniel Haworth is settled into a high chair and wheeled behind a
black screen, a sudden look of worry furrows his 9-month-old brow. His
dark blue eyes dart left and right in search of the familiar reassurance of his
mother’s face. She calls his name and makes soothing noises, but Daniel
senses something unusual is happening. He sucks his fingers for comfort,
but, finding no solace, his month crumples, his body stiffens, and he lets rip
an almighty shriek of distress. This is the usual expression when babies are
left alone or abandoned. Mom picks him up, reassures him, and two
minutes later, a chortling and alert Daniel returns to the darkened booth
behind the screen and submits himself to baby lab, a unit set up in 2005 at
the University of Manchester in northwest England to investigate how
babies think.
Watching infants piece life together, seeing their senses, emotions
and motor skills take shape, is a source of mystery and endless fascination
—at least to parents and developmental psychologists. We can decode
their signals of distress or read a million messages into their first smile. But
how much do we really know about what’s going on behind those wide,
innocent eyes? How much of their understanding of and response to the
world comes preloaded at birth? How much is built from scratch by
experience? Such are the questions being explored at baby lab. Though
the facility is just 18 months old and has tested only 100 infants, it’s already
challenging current thinking on what babies know and how they come to
know it.
 Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a
circular track. The train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other
side. A hidden device above the screen is tracking Daniel’s eyes as they
follow the train and measuring the diametre of his pupils 50 times a second.
As the child gets bored—or “habituated”, as psychologists call the process
— his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some
novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And
sometimes an impossible thing happens— the train goes into the tunnel
one color and comes out another.
Variations of experiments like this one, examining infant attention,
have been a standard tool of developmental psychology ever since the
Swiss pioneer of the field, Jean Piaget, started experimenting on his
children in the 1920s. Piaget’s work led him to conclude that infants
younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works
or any sense of “object permanence” (that people and things still exist even
when they’re not seen). Instead, babies must gradually construct this
knowledge from experience. Piaget’s “constructivist” theories were
massively influential on postwar educators and psychologist, but over the
past 20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation
of “nativist” psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more
sophisticated experiments led them to theorise that infants arrive already
equipped with some knowledge of the physical world and even rudimentary
programming for math and language. Baby lab director Sylvain Sirois has
been putting these smart-baby theories through a rigorous set of tests. His
conclusions so far tend to be more Piagetian: “Babies,” he says, “know
nothing.”
What Sirois and his postgraduate assistant Lain Jackson are
challenging is the interpretation of a variety of classic experiments begun in
the mid-1980s in which babies were shown physical events that appeared
to violate such basic concepts as gravity, solidity and contiguity. In one
such experiment, by University of Illinois psychologist Renee Baillargeon, a
hinged wooden panel appeared to pass right through a box. Baillargeon
and M.I.T’s Elizabeth Spelke found that babies as young as 3 1/2 months
would reliably look longer at the impossible event than at the normal one.
Their conclusion: babies have enough built-in knowledge to recognise that
something is wrong.
Sirois does not take issue with the way these experiments were conducted.
“The methods are correct and replicable,” he says, “it’s the interpretation
that’s the problem.” In a critical review to be published in the forthcoming
issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, he and
Jackson pour cold water over recent experiments that claim to have
observed innate or precocious social cognition skills in infants. His own
experiments indicate that a baby’s fascination with physically impossible
events merely reflects a response to stimuli that are novel. Data from the
eye tracker and the measurement of the pupils (which widen in response to
arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar objects
are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In
other words, when Daniel had seen the red train come out of the tunnel
green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same color. The
mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to leap to the
conclusion that infants can understand the concept of impossibility from the
mere fact that they are able to perceive some novelty in it. “The real
explanation is boring,” he says.
So how do babies bridge the gap between knowing squat and
drawing triangles—a task Daniel’s sister Lois, 2 1/2, is happily tackling as
she waits for her brother? “Babies have to learn everything, but as Piaget
was saying, they start with a few primitive reflexes that get things going,”
said Sirois. For example, hardwired in the brain is an instinct that draws a
baby’s eyes to a human face. From brain imaging studies we also know
that the brain has some sort of visual buffer that continues to represent
objects after they have been removed—a lingering perception rather than
conceptual understanding. So when babies encounter novel or unexpected
events, Sirois explains, “there’s a mismatch between the buffer and the
information they’re getting at that moment. And what you do when you’ve
got a mismatch is you try to clear the buffer. And that takes attention.” So
learning, says Sirois, is essentially the laborious business of resolving
mismatches. “The thing is, you can do a lot of it with this wet sticky thing
called a brain. It’s a fantastic, statistical-learning machine”. Daniel, exams
ended, picks up a plastic tiger and, chewing thoughtfully upon its heat,
smiles as if to agree.
Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 3?
In boxes 27-32 on you answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement is true
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
27 Baby’s behavior after being abandoned is not surprising.
28 Parents are over-estimating what babies know.
29 Only 100 experiments have been done but can prove the theories
about what we know.
30 Piaget’s theory was rejected by parents in 1920s.
31 Sylvain Sirois’s conclusion on infant’s cognition is similar to Piaget’s.
32 Sylvain Sirois found serious flaws in the experimental designs by
Baillargeon and Elizabeth Spelke.
Questions 33-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.
33 Jean Piaget thinks infants younger than 9 months won’t know
something existing
34 Jean Piaget thinks babies only get the knowledge
35 Some cognitive scientists think babies have the mechanism to learn a
language
36 Sylvain Sirois thinks that babies can reflect a response to stimuli that
are novel
37 Sylvain Sirois thinks babies’ attention level will drop
A before they are born.
B before they learn from experience.
C when they had seen the same thing for a while.
 D when facing the possible and impossible events.
E when the previous things appear again in the lives.
Questions 38-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
38 What can we know about Daniel in the third paragraph?
A Daniel’s attention level rose when he saw a blue train.
B Kid’s attention fell when he was accustomed to the changes.
C Child’s brain activity was monitored by a special equipment.
D Size of the train changed when it came out of the tunnel.
39 What can we know from the writer in the fourth paragraph?
A The theories about what baby knows changed over time.
B Why the experiments that had been done before were rejected.
C Infants have the innate knowledge to know the external environment.
D Piaget’s “constructivist” theories were massively influential on parents.
40 What can we know from the argument of the experiment about the
baby in the sixth paragraph?
A Infants are attracted by various colours of the trains all the time.
B Sylvain Sirois accuses misleading approaches of current experiments.
C Sylvain Sirois indicates that only impossible events make children
interested.
D Sylvain Sirois suggests that novel things attract baby’s attention.