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Reading Passage 1: Traditional Farming System in Africa
By tradition land in Luapula is not owned by individuals, but as in many other parts of Africa is allocated by the headman or headwoman of a village to people of either sex, according to need. Since land is generally prepared by hand, one ulupwa cannot take on a very large area; in this sense land has not been a limiting resource over large parts of the province. The situation has already changed near the main townships, and there has long been a scarcity of land for cultivation in the Valley. In these areas registered ownership patterns are becoming prevalent.
Most of the traditional cropping in Luapula, as in the Bemba area to the east, is based on citemene, a system whereby crops are grown on the ashes of tree branches. As a rule, entire trees are not felled but are pollarded so that they can regenerate. Branches are cut over an area of varying size early in the dry season, and stacked to dry over a rough circle about a fifth to a tenth of the pollarded area. The wood is fired before the rains and in the first year planted with the African cereal finger millet (Eleusine coracana). The grain of this crop is used to brew local beers such as cipumu, which contribute several vitamins of the B complex to peoples’ diet. Cipumu is also used in cementing reciprocal working relationships (Pottier 1985).
During the second season, and possibly for a few seasons more the area is planted to variously mixed combinations of annuals such as maize, pumpkins (Telfiria occidentalis) and other cucurbits, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, Phaseolus beans and various leafy vegetables, grown with a certain amount of rotation. The diverse sequence ends with vegetable cassava, which is often planted into the developing last-but-one crop as a relay.
Richards (1969) observed that the practice of citemene entails a definite division of labour between men and women. A man stakes out a plot in an unobtrusive manner, since it is considered provocative towards one’s neighbours to mark boundaries in an explicit way. The dangerous work of felling branches is the men’s province, and involves much pride. Branches are stacked by the women, and fired by the men. Formerly women and men cooperated in the planting work, but the harvesting was always done by the women. At the beginning of the cycle little weeding is necessary, since the firing of the branches effectively destroys weeds. As the cycle progresses weeds increase and nutrients eventually become depleted to a point where further effort with annual crops is judged to be not worthwhile: at this point the cassava is planted, since it can produce a crop on nearly exhausted soil. Thereafter the plot is abandoned, and a new area pollarded for the next citemene cycle.
When forest is not available—this is increasingly the case nowadays—various ridging systems (ibala) are built on small areas, to be planted with combinations of maize, beans, groundnuts and sweet potatoes, usually relayed with cassava. These plots are usually tended by women, and provide subsistence. Where their roots have year-round access to water tables mango, guava and oil-palm trees often grow around houses, forming a traditional agroforestry system. In season some of the fruit is sold by the roadside or in local markets.
The margins of dambos are sometimes planted to local varieties of rice during the rainy season, and areas adjacent to vegetables irrigated with water from the dambo during the dry season. The extent of cultivation is very limited, no doubt because the growing of crops under dambo conditions calls for a great deal of skill (Dougnac 1987:9-10). Near towns some of the vegetable produce is sold in local markets.
Fishing has long provided a much needed protein supplement to the diet of Luapulans, as well as being the one substantial source of cash. Much fish is dried for sale to areas away from the main waterways. The Mweru and Bangweulu Lake Basins are the main areas of year-round fishing, but the Luapula River is also exploited during the latter part of the dry season. Several previously abundant and desirable species, such as the Luapula salmon or mpumbu (Labeo altivelis) and pale (Sarotherodon machochir) have all but disappeared from Lake Mweru, apparently due to mismanagement (Huckaby 1979).
Fishing has always been a far more remunerative activity in Luapula than crop husbandry. A fisherman may earn more in a week than a bean or maize grower in a whole season. I sometimes heard claims that the relatively high earnings to be obtained from fishing induced an “easy come, easy go” outlook among Luapulan men. On the other hand, someone who secures good but erratic earnings may feel that their investment in an economically productive activity is not worthwhile because Luapulans fail to cooperate well in such activities. Besides, a fisherman with spare cash will find little in the way of working equipment to spend his money on. Better spend one’s money in the bars and have a good time!
Only small numbers of cattle or oxen are kept in the province owing to the prevalence of the tse-tse fly. For the few herds, the dambos provide subsistence grazing during the dry season. The absence of animal draft power greatly limits peoples’ ability to plough and cultivate land: a married couple can rarely manage to prepare by hand-hoeing.
Most people keep freely roaming chickens and goats. These act as a reserve for bartering, but may also be occasionally slaughtered for ceremonies or for entertaining important visitors. These animals are not a regular part of most peoples’ diet.
Citemene has been an ingenious system for providing people with seasonal production of high quality cereals and vegetables in regions of acid, heavily leached soils. Nutritionally, the most serious deficiency was that of protein. This could at times be alleviated when fish was available, provided that cultivators lived near the Valley and could find the means of bartering for dried fish. The citemene/fishing system was well adapted to the ecology of the miombo regions and sustainable for long periods, but only as long as human population densities stayed at low levels.
Although population densities are still much lower than in several countries of South-East Asia, neither the fisheries nor the forests and woodlands of Luapula are capable, with unmodified traditional practices, of supporting the people in sustainable manner. For instance, even in a normal season people suffer from a lack of energy, protein, vitamins and minerals in the diet. A third of under-five children brought to clinics are either stagnant in growth, or are losing weight.
Overall, people must learn to intensify and diversify their productive systems while yet ensuring that these systems will remain productive in the future, when even more people will need food. Increasing overall production of food, though a vast challenge in itself, will not be enough, however. At the same time storage and distribution systems must allow everyone access to at least a moderate share of the total.
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In Luapula land allocation is in accordance with __________.
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The citemene system provides the land with __________ where crops are planted.
- 3
During the second season, the last planted crop is __________.
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Under suitable conditions, fruit trees are planted near __________.
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be used in some unusual occasions, such as celebrations.
- A. fish
- B. oxen
- C. goats
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cannot thrive for being affected by the pests.
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be the largest part of creating profit.
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be sold beyond the local area.
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People rarely use animals to cultivate land.
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The local residents eat goats on a regular time.
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When it is a busy time, children are usually taken as the labor force.
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Though citemene has been a sophisticated system, it could not provide enough protein.
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What is the writer's opinion about the traditional ways of practices?
- A. They can supply the nutrition that people need.
- B. They are not capable of providing adequate support to the population.
- C. They are productive systems that need no more improving.
- D. They will be easily modified in the future.
Reading Passage 2: Father of Modern Management
A. Peter Drucker was one of the most important people to think about management in the last 100 years. He wrote about 40 books and thousands of articles, and he never stopped trying to show the world how important management is. "Management is a part of institutions. It is the part that turns a group of people into an organization and turns human effort into performance." Did he do well? It was amazing how far his influence went. Drucker's ideas can be found wherever people try to solve hard management problems. This includes big and small organizations, the public and private sectors, and, increasingly, the nonprofit sector.
B. Winston Churchill liked his first two books, The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), but academic critics didn't like how they covered so many different topics. Still, the second of these books got people's attention because it argued passionately that businesses had a social purpose as well as a financial one. The Concept of the Corporation, his third book, was an instant hit and has been in print ever since.
C. The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation had very little to do with the decentralization trend. They were going to dominate his work. The first one had to do with "empowering" workers. Drucker thought that workers should be seen as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production, which was the most common at the time. This was partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest worker and partly because they didn't use the creativity of individual workers. The second point had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker said that the world is moving from an "economy of goods" to an "economy of knowledge" and from a society ruled by the industrial proletariat to one ruled by brain workers. He insisted that this had huge implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like parts of a big, cold machine and start treating them like brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realize that knowledge, and therefore education, was the most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had effects on knowledge workers themselves. They had to accept that they were neither "bosses" nor "workers," but something in between entrepreneurs who had to develop their most important resource, their brainpower, and who also had to take more control of their careers, including their pension plans.
D. But his job was also hard in some ways. Drucker came up with "management by objectives," one of the most successful ideas from the rational school of management. In 1954's The Practice of Management, one of his most important books, he talked about how important it was for managers and businesses to set clear long-term goals and then turn those long-term goals into more immediate goals. He said that companies should have an elite group of general managers who set these long-term goals, and then another group of more specialized managers. For his critics, this was a change from the way he used to talk about the human side of management. Drucker thought that everything fit together perfectly: if you put too much faith in empowerment, you risk anarchy, and if you put too much faith in command and control, you lose creativity. Managers should set long-term goals, but then let their employees figure out how to reach those goals. Drucker may have helped make management a global field, but he also pushed it outside of business. He was a thinker about management, not just business. He thought that management is "the organ that defines all modern institutions," not just companies.
E. Drucker's work is often criticized for three reasons. The first is that he focused on big companies instead of small ones. In many ways, The Concept of the Corporation was a tribute to big organizations. Drucker said, "We know now that in modern industrial production, especially modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it can't produce at all." The book helped start the "big organization boom" that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second complaint is that Drucker's enthusiasm for management by objectives led the business down a dead end. They prefer that ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, come from the bottom and middle of the organization, not from the top. Third, Drucker is criticized for being an outsider who is getting left behind as his field becomes more strict. There is no area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F. The first two arguments have some merit. Drucker never wrote anything else as good as The Concept of the Corporation about how entrepreneurs start businesses. Drucker's work on "management by objectives" doesn't fit well with his earlier and later writings on how important knowledge workers and self-directed teams are. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it doesn't take into account Drucker's role as a pioneer in creating the modern profession of management. He made one of the first organized studies of a big company. He was the first person to suggest that ideas can help companies get going. The biggest problem with judging Drucker's impact is that so many of his ideas have become common knowledge. He is a victim of his success. His writings about the importance of knowledge workers and giving people power may sound a bit boring now. But they weren't boring when he first thought of them in the 1940s or when they were first used in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. In addition, Drucker kept coming up with new ideas until he was in his 90s. His work on how to run non-profit organizations remained at the cutting edge.
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Paragraph A
- i. The popularity and impact of Drucker's works
- ii. Finding fault with Drucker
- iii. The impact of economic globalisation
- iv. Government regulation of businesses
- v. Early publications of Drucker
- vi. Drucker's concept of balanced management
- vii. Drucker's rejection of big businesses
- viii. An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker's works
- ix. The changing role of the employee
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Paragraph B
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Paragraph C
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Paragraph D
- 18
Paragraph E
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Paragraph F
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Drucker thought that in a period of social transition, managers and politicians would dominate the economy.
- 21
Drucker believed that workers should not just put themselves just in employment relationships, but also take the initiative to develop their own intellectual resources.
- 22
Drucker's works on management is out of date in modern days.
- 23
Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker's views?
- A. Employees should be given more authority and carry out creative tasks.
- B. Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs.
- C. More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.
- D. Managers should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force.
- E. Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish feasible goals.
- 24
Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker's views?
- 25
Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as the criticisms of Drucker?
- A. His works focused too much on big organisations and ignored the small ones.
- B. His views were too broad and lacked precision and accuracy about the facts.
- C. He put the source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.
- D. He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his management group.
- E. He was overstating the case of knowledge workers when warning businesses to get prepared.
- 26
Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as the criticisms of Drucker?
Reading Passage 3: Science and the Stradivarius: Uncovering the secret of quality
A Violins made by long-dead Italian craftsmen from the Cremona region are beautiful works of art, coveted by collectors as well as players. Particularly outstanding violins have reputedly changed hands for over a million pounds. In contrast, fine modern instruments can be bought for under £100. Do such figures really reflect such large differences in quality? After more than a hundred years of vigorous debate, this question remains highly contentious, provoking strongly held but divergent views among musicians, violin makers and scientists.
B Every violin, whether a Stradivarius or the cheapest factory-made copy, has a distinctive 'voice' of its own. Just as any musician can immediately recognise the difference between Domingo and Pavarotti singing the same operatic aria, so a skilled violinist can distinguish between different qualities in the sound produced by individual Stradivari or Guarneri violins. Individual notes on a single instrument sound different each time they are played, which suggests that the perceived tone of a violin must be related to the overall design of the instrument, rather than the frequencies of particular resonances on it. But although various attempts have been made to analyse such global properties, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between a fine Stradivarius instrument and an indifferent modern copy on the basis of the measured response alone. The ear is a supreme detection device, and a system has yet to be developed which can match the brain's sophisticated ability to assess complex sounds.
C So how do skilled violinmakers optimise the tone of an instrument during the construction process? They begin by selecting a wood of the highest possible quality for the front and back plates (or parts of the violin), which they test by tapping with a hammer and judging how well it 'rings'. The next important step is to skillfully carve the plates out of the solid wood, taking great care to get the right degree of arching and variations in thickness. Traditional makers optimise the thickness by testing the 'feel' of the plates when they are flexed, and by the sounds produced when they are tapped at different positions with the fingers.
D However, in the last 50 years or so a group of violin makers has emerged who have tried to take a more overtly scientific approach to violin making. One common practice they have adopted is to replace the traditional flexing and tapping of plates by controlled measurements. During the carving process, the thinned plates are sprinkled with flakes of glitter and suspended horizontally above a loudspeaker. The glitter forms a pattern each time the loudspeaker excites a resonance. The aim is to interactively 'tune' these first few free plate resonances to specified frequencies.
E Unfortunately, there are very few examples of such measurements for really fine Italian instruments because their owners are naturally reluctant to allow their violins to be taken apart for the sake of science. The few tests that have been performed suggest that the first Italian makers may have tuned the resonant modes of the individual plates - which they could identify as they tapped them - to exact musical intervals. This would be consistent with the prevailing Renaissance view of 'perfection', which was measured in terms of numbers and exact ratios. However, there is no historical data to support this.
F Another factor that affects sound quality is the presence of moisture. To achieve the quality of "vibrancy" in a violin requires high-quality wood with low internal damping. By measuring the pattern of growth-rings in the wood of a Stradivarius, we know that the Italian violin makers sometimes used planks of wood that had only been seasoned for five years. However, such wood is now 300 years old, and the intrinsic internal damping will almost certainly have decreased with time. The age of the wood may therefore automatically contribute to the improved quality of older instruments. This may also explain why the quality of a modern instrument appears to improve in its first few years.
G Another factor thought to account for sound quality is the nature of the varnish used to protect the instrument. One of the most popular theories for well over a century to account for the Stradivarius secret has been that the varnish had some sort of 'magic' composition. However, historical research has shown that it was very similar to the varnish used today. So apart from the possibility that the Italian varnish was contaminated with the wings of passing insects and debris from the workshop floor, there is no convincing evidence to support the idea of a secret.
H Other researchers, meanwhile, have claimed that Stradivarius's secret was to soak the timber in water, to leach out supposedly harmful chemicals, before it was seasoned. Although this would be consistent with the idea that the masts and cars of recently sunken Venetian war galleys might have been used to make violins, other scientific and historical evidence to support this view is lacking.
I In conclusion, science has not provided any convincing evidence to set Cremonese instruments apart from the finest violins made by skilled craftsmen today. Indeed, some leading soloists do occasionally play on modern instruments. However, the foremost soloists - and, not surprisingly, violin dealers, who have a vested interest in maintaining the Cremonese legend of intrinsic superiority - remain utterly convinced of the superiority of the old instruments.
- 27
Paragraph A
- i. An analysis of protective coatings
- ii. Applying technology to violin production
- iii. Location - a key factor
- iv. A controversial range of prices
- v. Techniques of mass production
- vi. The advantages of older wood
- vii. A re-evaluation of documentary evidence
- viii. The mathematical basis of earlier design
- ix. Manual woodworking techniques
- x. Preferences of top musicians
- xi. The use of saturated wood
- xii. The challenge for scientists
- 28
Paragraph C
- 29
Paragraph D
- 30
Paragraph E
- 31
Paragraph F
- 32
Paragraph G
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Paragraph H
- 34
Paragraph I
- 35
Individual notes on the same violin vary in quality.
- 36
Scientific instruments analyse complex sound more accurately than the human ear.
- 37
The quality of handmade violins varies according to the musical ability of the maker.
- 38
Modern violins seem to improve in their early years.
- 39
Modern violins are gaining in popularity amongst top violinists.
Phiếu trả lời
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