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Reading Passage 1: Learning to Walk
These days the feet of a typical city dweller rarely encounter terrain any more uneven than a crack in the pavement. While that may not seem like a problem, it turns out that by flattening our urban environment we have put ourselves at risk of a surprising number of chronic illnesses and disabilities. Fortunately, the commercial market has come to the rescue with a choice of products. Research into the idea that flat floors could be detrimental to our health was pioneered back in the late 1960s in Long Beach, California. Podiatrist Charles Brantingham and physiologist Bruce Beekman were concerned with the growing epidemic of high blood pressure, varicose veins and deep-vein thromboses and reckoned they might be linked to the uniformity of the surfaces that we tend to stand and walk on.
The trouble, they believed, was that walking continuously on flat floors, sidewalks and streets concentrates forces on just a few areas of the foot. As a result, these surfaces are likely to be far more conducive to chronic stress syndromes than natural surfaces, where the foot meets the ground in a wide variety of orientations. They understood that the anatomy of the foot parallels that of the human hand - each having 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments - and that modern lifestyles waste all this potential flexibility.
Brantingham and Beekman became convinced that the damage could be rectified by making people wobble. To test their ideas, they got 65 factory workers to try standing on a variable terrain floor - spongy mats with varying degrees of resistance across the surface. This modest irregularity allowed the soles of the volunteers' feet to deviate slightly from the horizontal each time they shifted position. As the researchers hoped, this simple intervention made a huge difference, within a few weeks. Even if people were wobbling slightly, it activated a host of muscles in their legs, which in turn helped pump blood back to their hearts. The muscle action prevented the pooling of blood in their feet and legs, reducing the stress on the heart and circulation. Yet decades later, the flooring of the world's largest workplaces remains relentlessly smooth. Earlier this year, however, the idea was revived when other researchers in the US announced findings from a similar experiment with people over 60. John Fisher and colleagues at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene designed a mat intended to replicate the effect of walking on cobblestones.
In tests funded by the National Institute of Aging, they got some 50 adults to walk on the tools in their bare feet for less than an hour, three times a week. After 16 weeks, these people showed marked improvements in mobility, and even a significant reduction in blood pressure. People in a control group who walked on ordinary floors also improved but not as dramatically. The mats are now available for purchase and production is being scaled up. Even so, demand could exceed supply if this foot-stimulating activity really is a 'useful nonpharmacological approach for preventing or controlling hypertension of older adults, as the researchers believe.
They are not alone in recognising the benefits of cobblestones. Reflexologists have long advocated walking on textured surfaces to stimulate so-called 'acupoints' on the soles of the feet. They believe that pressure applied to particular spots on the foot connects directly to particular organs of the body and somehow enhances their function. In China, spas, apartment blocks and even factories promote their cobblestone paths as healthful amenities. Fisher admits he got the concept from regular visits to the country. Here, city dwellers take daily walks along cobbled paths for five or ten minutes, perhaps several times a day, to improve their health. The idea is now taking off in Europe too.
People in Germany, Austria and Switzerland can now visit 'barefoot parks' and walk along 'paths of the senses' - with mud, logs, stone and moss underfoot. And it is not difficult to construct your own path with simple everyday objects such as stones or bamboo poles. But if none of these solutions appeal, there is another option. A new shoe on the market claims to transform flat, hard, artificial surfaces into something like uneven ground. 'These shoes have an unbelievable effect,' says Benno Nigg, an exercise scientist at Calgary University in Canada.
Known as the Masai Barefoot Technology, the shoes have rounded soles that cause you to rock slightly when you stand still, exercising the small muscles around the ankle that are responsible for stability. Forces in the joint are reduced, putting less strain on the system, Nigg claims.
Some of these options may not appeal to all consumers and there is a far simpler alternative.
If the urban environment is detrimental to our health, then it is obvious where we should turn. A weekend or even a few hours spent in the countryside could help alleviate a sufferer's aches and pains, and would require only the spending of time. However, for many modern citizens, the countryside is not as accessible as it once was and is in fact a dwindling resource. Our concrete cities are growing at a terrifying rate - perhaps at the same rate as our health problems.
- 1
Brantingham and Beekman were the first researchers to investigate the relationship between health problems and flat floors.
- 2
The subjects in Fisher's control group experienced a decline in their physical condition.
- 3
The manufacturers are increasing the number of cobblestone mats they are making.
- 4
Fisher based his ideas on what he saw during an overseas trip.
- 5
The Masai Barefoot Technology shoes are made to fit people of all ages.
- 6
The writer suggests that Brantingham and Beekman's findings were
- A. ignored by big companies.
- B. doubted by other researchers.
- C. applicable to a narrow range of people.
- D. surprising to them.
- 7
What claim is made by the designers of the cobblestone mats?
- A. They need to be used continuously in order to have a lasting effect.
- B. They would be as beneficial to younger people as to older people.
- C. They could be an effective alternative to medical intervention.
- D. Their effects may vary depending on individual users.
- 8
Which of the following points does the writer make in the final paragraph?
- A. People should question new theories that scientists put forward.
- B. High prices do not necessarily equate to a quality product.
- C. People are setting up home in the country for health reasons.
- D. The natural environment is fast disappearing.
- 9
Brantingham and Beekman looked at the complex physical ______ of the foot and noted that the surfaces of modern environments restrict its movement.
- 10
Whenever the workers walked on the mat, the different levels of ______ in the mat would encourage greater muscle action.
- 11
In turn, this lessened the effect of ______ on the cardiovascular system.
- 12
As a result of their findings, Fisher and colleagues decided to market cobblestone mats to the elderly as a means of dealing with ______.
- 13
Reflexologists claim that by manipulating specific parts of the feet, the performance of certain ______ will also improve.
- 14
Benno Nigg at Calgary University believes that specially shaped ______ should give health benefits.
Reading Passage 2: Hunting Perfume in Madagascar!
Ever since the unguentari plied their trade in ancient Rome, perfumers have to keep abreast of changing fashions. These days they have several thousand ingredients to choose from when creating new scents, but there is always demand for new combinations. The bigger the ‘palette’ of smells, the better the perfumer’s chance of creating something fresh and appealing. Even with everyday products such as shampoo and soap, kitchen cleaners and washing powders, consumers are becoming increasingly fussy. And many of today’s fragrances have to survive tougher treatment than ever before, resisting the destructive power of bleach or a high temperature wash cycle. Chemists can create new smells from synthetic molecules, and a growing number of the odours on the perfumer’s palette are artificial. But nature has been in the business far longer.
The island of Madagascar is an evolutionary hot spot; 85% of its plants are unique, making it an ideal source for novel fragrances. Last October, Quest International, a company that develops fragrances for everything from the most delicate perfumes to cleaning products, sent an expedition to Madagascar in pursuit of some of nature’s most novel fragrances. With some simple technology, borrowed from the pollution monitoring industry, and a fair amount of ingenuity, the perfume hunters bagged 20 promising new aromas in the Madagascan rainforest. Each day the team set out from their “hotel”—a wooden hut lit by kerosene lamps, and trailed up and down paths and animal tracks, exploring the thick vegetation up to 10 meters on either side of the trail. Some smells came from obvious places, often big showy flowers within easy reach. Others were harder to pin down. “Often it was the very small flowers that were much more interesting,” says Clery. After the luxuriance of the rainforest, the little-known island of Nosy Hara was a stark, dry place—geologically and biologically very different from the mainland. “Apart from two beaches, the rest of the island is impenetrable, except by hacking through the bush,” says Clery. One of the biggest prizes here was a sweet-smelling sap weeping from the gnarled branches of some ancient shrubby trees in the parched interior. So far no one has been able to identify the plant.
With most flowers or fruits, the hunters used a technique originally designed to trap and identify air pollutants. The technique itself is relatively simple. A glass bell jar or flask is fitted over the flower. The fragrance molecules are trapped in this ‘headspace’ and can be extracted by pumping the air out over a series of filters which absorb different types of volatile molecules. Back home in the laboratory, the molecules are flushed out of the filters and injected into a gas chromatograph for analysis. If it is impossible to attach the headspace gear, hunters fix an absorbent probe close to the source of the smell. The probe looks something like a hypodermic syringe, except that the ‘needle’ is made of silicone rubber which soaks up molecules from the air. After a few hours, the hunters retract the rubber needle and seal the tube, keeping the odour molecules inside until they can be injected into the gas chromatograph in the laboratory.
Some of the most promising fragrances were those given off by resins that oozed from the bark of trees. Resins are the source of many traditional perfumes, including frankincense and myrrh. The most exciting resin came from a Calophyllum tree, which produces a strongly scented medicinal oil. The sap of this Calophyllum smelt rich and aromatic, a little like church incense. But it also smelt of something like fragrance industry has learnt to live without, castoreum, a substance extracted from the musk glands of beavers and once a key ingredient in many perfumes. The company does not use animal products any longer, but it was wonderful to find a tree with an animal smell.
The group also set out from the island to capture the smell of coral reefs. Odors that conjure up sun kissed seas are highly sought after by the perfume industry. “From the ocean, the only thing we have is seaweed, and that has a dark and heavy aroma. We hope to find something unique among the corals,” says Dir. The challenge for the hunters was to extract a smell from water rather than air. This was an opportunity to try Clery’s new “aquaspace” apparatus—a set of filters that work underwater. On Nosy Hara, jars were fixed over knobs of coral about 2 meters down and water pumped out over the absorbent filters. So what does coral smell like? “It’s a bit like lobster and crab,” says Clery. The team’s task now is to recreate the best of their captured smells. First they must identify the molecules that make up each fragrance. Some ingredients may be quite common chemicals. But some may be completely novel, or they may be too complex or expensive to make in the lab. The challenge then is to conjure up the fragrances with more readily available materials. “We can avoid the need to import plants from the rainforest by creating the smell with a different set of chemicals from those in the original material,” says Clery. “If we get it right, you can sniff the sample and it will transport you straight back to the moment you smelt it in the rainforest.”
- 15
One currently preferred spot to pick up plants for novel finding
- 16
A new task seems to be promising yet producing limited finding in fragrance source
- 17
The demanding conditions for fragrance to endure.
- 18
A substitute for substance no longer available to the perfume manufacture
- 19
Description of an outdoor expedition on land chasing new fragrances
- 20
Manufacturers can choose to use synthetic odours for the perfume nowadays.
- 21
Madagascar is chosen to be a place for hunting plants which are rare in other parts of the world.
- 22
Capturing the smell is one of the most important things for creating new aromas.
- 23
The technique the hunters used to trap fragrance molecules is totally out of their own ingenuity.
- 24
Most customers prefer the perfume made of substance extracted from the musk glands of animals.
- 25
A glass bell jar or flask is fitted over the flower; the fragrance molecules are trapped in this ______.
- 26
The molecules can be extracted by pumping the air out over a series of ______ which absorb different types of volatile molecules.
- 27
The absorbent probe looks like a hypodermic syringe, except that the ______ is made of silicone rubber which soaks up molecules from the air.
Reading Passage 3: Some views on the use of headphones
Whether wearing headphones at work, or in other areas of everyday life, is a good thing or a bad thing has generated a lot of research and opinion.
To visit a typical modern office today is to walk into a room with possibly a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and nearly all of them think it makes them better at their jobs. In survey after survey, people report with confidence that music makes them happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.
Scientists do not share this belief; they maintain that listening to music hurts people’s ability to recall other things they should be doing, and any pop song, loud or soft, reduces overall performance for both extroverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music that has lyrics to lower marks on concentration tests for college students, and other research has shown music with lyrics scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence has the best overall performance, it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” another reporter dryly concluded.
The question is therefore: if headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have them? One factor to consider is that countries like the USA have moved from a farming and manufacturing economy to a service economy, with an emphasis on jobs in offices that require higher levels of concentration, reflection and creativity. As an estimated 70 percent of office workers work in open-plan office spaces, it is more important to create one’s own enclosing bubble of sound. Lending strength to the argument for headphones at work is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and may even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety.
The story of headphones began in 1910, when the US Navy received an odd letter written in purple ink on blue-and-pink paper. The letter writer, an eccentric inventor and repairman named Nathaniel Baldwin, from the US state of Utah, made what at the time was an astonishing claim: he had built, in his kitchen, a new kind of headset that could amplify sound. This was an opportune invention for the Navy, which asked for a sound test and then enthusiastically adopted the headsets, later called headphones, and used them in World War I for naval radio communication.
The purpose of headphones is to concentrate a quiet and private sound in the ear of the listener, which is a radical departure from music’s social purpose in history. “Music, together with dance, co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding,” Nils L. Wallin and Björn Merker wrote in The Origins of Music. Songs don’t leave behind bones, but evidence of musical notation dates back to Sumeria, 3,500 years ago, and in 1995 archaeologists discovered a bone flute in southern Europe estimated to be 44,000 years old. If music evolved as a social glue for the species, as a way to make groups and keep them together, headphones have done what writing and literacy did for language – they made music private.
Author and columnist Stephen Marche wrote that separation from other people is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. It is “a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence,” he said. Americans are not alone in their desire for personal independence and privacy. Marche is right; wealth can buy – and modern technology can deliver – personal independence, and it is this that people have always sought.
Dr Michael Bull, an expert on personal music devices from the University of Sussex in the UK, has repeatedly made the larger point that personal music devices change how we relate to public spaces. Controlling our public spaces is more important now that more people are moving from the edges of cities to live in urban centres. “With the urban space, the more it’s inhabited, the safer you feel,” Bull says. “You feel safe if you can feel people there, but you don’t want to interact with them.” Headphones create shields for wearers, separating them from other people and their surroundings. Headphones have their own rules of good manners; they are like wearing a “Do not disturb” sign. We assume that people wearing them are busy and we should respect their privacy, so now people wear them to appear busy. In fact, it is now becoming quite common for people not to listen to anything at all, but just to wear headphones.
However, as pointed out at the beginning of this piece, although scientists have stated that headphones are bad for productivity, people still wear them at work. It is not just that headphones create privacy out of public areas, but also that music causes people to relax and reflect and pause. The outcome of relaxation, reflection and pausing at work won’t be captured in minute-to-minute productivity metrics. What must be considered is that in moments of extreme focus, our attention radiates outward, toward the problem, rather than inward, on how to solve the problem. However, with music “When our minds are at ease, we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward,” Jonah Lehrer wrote in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. “The answers have been there all along. We just weren’t listening.” In a crowded world, real estate is the ultimate scarce resource, and a headphone is a small invisible fence around our minds – making space, creating separation, and helping us listen to ourselves.
- 28
Young people are easily persuaded by surveys that listening to music is beneficial.
- 29
Different studies share the same conclusions about the desirability of working in silence.
- 30
Some doctors recommend wearing headphones to lower blood pressure.
- 31
Nathaniel Baldwin was a respected government researcher.
- 32
The effect of the invention of headphones is comparable to the effect of the invention of writing.
- 33
What does the writer suggest about a service economy?
- A. The work is mentally demanding
- B. It provides employment for younger workers
- C. It is a small part of a country's economy
- D. Workers have to live in urban centres
- 34
When the writer mentions the historical evidence for early music, he is
- A. emphasizing the diversity of musical forms
- B. expressing his frustration with the limited archaeological evidence uncovered
- C. lending support to the view that music has been important in human history
- D. creating a geographical map of the evolution of music
- 35
What does the writer say about the social effects of listening to music through headphones?
- A. It has caused a reduction in the number of people who listen to music
- B. It has increased people's participation in music events
- C. It has reduced the global variation of music styles
- D. It has changed the traditional role of music in society
- 36
What does the writer say about personal independence?
- A. Americans are unique in their desire for personal independence
- B. Personal independence is something that can be purchased
- C. Striving for personal independence is a recent phenomenon
- D. Personal independence destroys social connections
- 37
Why does the writer quote Jonah Lehrer in the last paragraph?
- A. To support the writer's own view
- B. To draw attention to an authoritative book about music
- C. To raise awareness of people's loss of listening skills
- D. To illustrate how music brings people closer to each other
- 38
Dr Michael Bull believes that listening to music through headphones has changed the ______ the wearers of headphones have with public spaces.
- A. courtesy
- B. relationship
- C. difficulty
- D. countryside
- E. suburbs
- F. language
- G. barriers
- H. obstacles
- I. disapproval
- 39
Living in the centre of cities is becoming popular, as people become less keen on living in the ______.
- 40
In densely populated city centres, headphones form ______ that isolate people from fellow citizens and from their environment.
- 41
Wearers of headphones are treated with ______ that other people do not receive.
Phiếu trả lời
Điền đáp án khi làm bài — kiểm tra kết quả ngay lập tức và lưu cục bộ, mọi câu sai sẽ vào nhật ký lỗi cùng bài học khắc phục.
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Lưu trên thiết bị này — không cần tài khoản. Đăng nhập ở trang tiến trình nếu muốn đồng bộ sang nơi khác.
Hiện đáp án
Đáp án
1. TRUE
2. FALSE
3. TRUE
4. TRUE
5. NOT GIVEN
6. A
7. C
8. D
9. anatomy
10. resistance
11. stress
12. hypertension
13. organs
14. soles
15. B
16. E
17. A
18. D
19. B
20. TRUE
21. TRUE
22. NOT GIVEN
23. FALSE
24. NOT GIVEN
25. headspace
26. filters
27. needle
28. NOT GIVEN
29. YES
30. NOT GIVEN
31. NO
32. YES
33. A
34. C
35. D
36. B
37. A
38. B
39. E
40. G
41. A