RJR-03

READING PASSAGE 1

The future of getting around in cities- PRT vs RUF

THIS is ludicrous! We can talk to people anywhere in the world or fly to meet them in a
few hours. We can even send probes to other planets. But when it comes to getting
around our cities, we depend on systems that have scarcely changed since the days of
Gottlieb Daimler.

In recent years, the pollution belched out by millions of vehicles has dominated the
debate about transport. The problem has even persuaded California - that home of car
culture - to curb traffic growth. But no matter how green they become, cars are unlikely
to get us around crowded cities any faster. And persuading people to use trains and
buses will always be an uphill struggle. Cars, after all, are popular for very good
reasons, as anyone with small children or heavy shopping knows.

So politicians should be trying to lure people out of their cars, not forcing them out.
There's certainly no shortage of alternatives. Perhaps the most attractive is the concept
known as personal rapid transit (PRT), independently invented in the US and Europe in
the 1950s.

The idea is to go to one of many stations and hop into a computer-controlled car, which
can whisk you to your destination along a network of guideways. You wouldn't have to
share your space with strangers, and with no traffic lights, pedestrians or parked cars to
slow things down, PRT guideways can carry far more traffic, nonstop, than any inner
city road.

It's a wonderful vision, but the odds are stacked against PRT for a number of reasons.
The first cars ran on existing roads, and it was only after they became popular – and
after governments started earning revenue from them, that a road network designed
specifically for motor vehicles was built. With PRT, the infrastructure would have to
come first and that would cost megabucks. What's more, any transport system that
threatened the car's dominance would be up against all those with a stake in
maintaining the status quo, from private car owners to manufacturers and oil
multinationals. Even if PRTs were spectacularly successful in trials, it might not make
much difference. Superior technology doesn't always triumph, as the VHS versus
Betamax and Windows versus Apple Mac battles showed.

But "dual-mode" systems might just succeed where PRT seems doomed to fail. The
Danish RUF system envisaged by Palle Jensen, for example, resembles PRT but with
one key difference: vehicles have wheels as well as a slot allowing them to travel on a
monorail, so they can drive off the rail onto a normal road. Once on a road, the
occupant would take over from the computer, and the RUF vehicle - the term comes
from a Danish saying meaning to "go fast" - would become an electric car.
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Build a fast network of guideways in a busy city centre and people would have a strong
incentive not just to use public RUF vehicles, but also to buy their own dual-mode
vehicle. Commuters could drive onto the guideway, sit back and read as they are
chauffeured into the city. At work, they would jump out, leaving their vehicles to park
themselves. Unlike PRT, such a system could grow organically, as each network would
serve a large area around it and people nearby could buy into it. And a dual-mode
system might even win the support of car manufacturers, who could easily switch to
producing dual-mode vehicles.

Of course, creating a new transport system will not be cheap or easy. But unlike adding
a dedicated bus lane here or extending the underground railway there, an I nnovative
system such as Jensen's could transform cities.

And it's not just a matter of saving a few minutes a day. According to the Red Cross,
more than 30 million people have died in road accidents in the past century, three times
the number killed in the First World War and the annual death toll is rising. And what's
more, the Red Cross believes road accidents will become the third biggest cause of
death and disability by 2020, ahead of diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Surely
we can find a better way to get around.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1 City transport developed slower than other means of communication.

2 The pollution caused by city transport has been largely ignored.
3 Most states in America have taken actions to reduce vehicle growth.
4 Public transport is particularly difficult to use on steep hills.
5 Private cars are much more convenient for those who tend to buy a lot of things
during shopping.
6 Government should impose compulsory restrictions on car use.

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Questions 7-12

Classify the following descriptions as referring to

A PRT only
B RUF only
C both PRT and RUF
Write the correct letter, A, B, or C in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet.

7 It is likely to be resisted by both individuals and manufacturers.

8 It can run at high speed in cities.

9 It is not necessary to share with the general public.

10 It is always controlled by a computer.

11 It can run on existing roads.

12 It can be bought by private buyers.

Question 13

Choose THREE letters, A-G.

Which THREE of the following are advantages of the new transport system?

A. economy
B. space
C. low pollution
D. suitability for families
E. speed
F. safety

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READING PASSAGE 2

Seed Hunting
With a quarter of the world’s plants set to vanish within the next 50 years, Dough
Alexander reports on the scientists working against the clock to preserve the Earth’s
botanical heritage. They travel the four corners of the globe, scouring jungles, forests
and savannas. But they’re not looking for ancient artefacts, lost treasure or
undiscovered tombs. Just pods. It may lack the romantic allure of archaeology or the
whiff of danger that accompanies going after a big game, but seed hunting is an
increasingly serious business. Some seek seeds for profit-hunters in the employ of
biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical companies and private corporations on the lookout
for species that will yield the drugs or crops of the future. Others collect to conserve,
working to halt the sad slide into extinction facing so many plant species.

Among the pioneers of this botanical treasure hunt was John Tradescant, an English
royal gardener who brought back plants and seeds from his journeys abroad in the early
1600s. Later, the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks – who was the first director of the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and travelled with Captain James Cook on his voyages
near the end of the 18th century – was so driven to expand his collections that he sent
botanists around the world at his own expense.

Those heady days of exploration and discovery may be over, but they have been
replaced by a pressing need to preserve our natural history for the future. This modern
mission drives hunters such as Dr Michiel van Slageren, a good-natured Dutchman who
often sports a wide-brimmed hat in the field – he could easily be mistaken for the
cinematic hero Indiana Jones. He and three other seed hunters work at the Millennium
Seed Bank, an 80 million [pounds sterling] international conservation project that aims
to protect the world’s most endangered wild plant species.

The group’s headquarters are in a modern glass-and-concrete structure on a 200

hectare Estate at Wakehurst Place in the West Sussex countryside. Within its
underground vaults are 260 million dried seeds from 122 countries, all stored at -20
Celsius to survive for centuries. Among the 5,100 species represented are virtually all of
Britain’s 1,400 native seed-bearing plants, the most complete such collection of any
country’s flora.

Overseen by the Royal botanic gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank is the world’s
largest wild-plant depository. It aims to collect 24,000 species by 2010. The reason is
simple: thanks to humanity’s effort, an estimated 25 per cent of the world’s plants are on
the verge of extinction and may vanish within 50 years. We’re currently responsible for
habitat destruction on an unprecedented scale, and during the past 400 years, plant
species extinction rates have been about 70 times greater than those indicated by the

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geological record as being ‘normal’. Experts predict that during the next 50 years further
one billion hectares of wilderness will be converted to farmland in developing countries
alone.

The implications of this loss are enormous. Besides providing staple food crops, plants
are a source of many machines and the principal supply of fuel and building materials in
many parts of the world. They also protect soil and help regulate the climate. Yet,
across the globe, plant species are being driven to extinction before their potential
benefits are discovered.

The world Conservation Union has listed 5,714 threatened species is sure to be much
higher. In the UK alone, 300 wild plant species are classified as endangered. The
Millennium Seed Bank aims to ensure that even if a plant becomes extinct in the wild, it
won’t be lost forever. Stored seeds can be used to help restore damaged or destroyed
the environment or in scientific research to find new benefits for society- in medicine,
agriculture or local industry- that would otherwise be lost.

Seed banks are an insurance policy to protect the world’s plant heritage for the future,
explains Dr Paul Smith, another Kew seed hunter. “Seed conservation techniques were
originally developed by farmers,” he says. “Storage is the basis of what we do,
conserving seeds until you can use them just as in farming,” Smith says there’s no
reason why any plant species should become extinct, given today’s technology. But he
admits that the biggest challenge is finding, naming and categorizing all the world’s
plants. And someone has to gather these seeds before it’s too late. “There aren’t a lot of
people out there doing this,” he says. “The key is to know the flora from a particular
area, and that knowledge takes years to acquire.”

There are about 1,470 seedbanks scattered around the globe, with a combined total of
5.4 million samples, of which perhaps two million are distinct non-duplicates. Most
preserve genetic material for agriculture use in order to ensure crop diversity; others
aim to conserve wild species, although only 15 per cent of all banked plants is wild.

Many seed banks are themselves under threat due to a lack of funds. Last year,
Imperial College, London, examined crop collections from 151 countries and found that
while the number of plant samples had increased in two-thirds of the countries, the
budget had been cut in a quarter and remained static in another 35 per cent. The UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organization and the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research has since set up the Global Conservation Trust, which aims to
raise the US $260 million to protect seed banks in perpetuity.

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Questions 14-18

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage 2,

Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Some people collect seeds for the purpose of protecting certain species from
14………………………; others collect seeds for their ability to produce 15………………..
They are called seed hunters. The 16………………………. of them included both
gardeners and botanists, such as 17…………………….., who financially supported
collectors out of his own pocket. The seeds collected are usually stored in seed banks,
one of which is the famous millennium seed bank, where seeds are all stored in the
18 ……………………… at a low temperature.

Questions 19-24
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 19-24 on your 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

19. The purpose of collecting seeds now is different from the past.
20. The millennium seed bank is one of the earliest seed banks.
21. One of the major threats for plant species extinction is farmland expansion into
wildness.
22. The approach that scientists apply to store seeds is similar to that used by farmers.
23. Technological development is the only hope to save plant species.
24. The works of seed conservation are often limited by financial problems.

Questions 25-26
Choose the correct letter, A-E.
Write your answers in boxes 25, 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are provided by plants to the human?

A food
B fuels
C clothes
D energy
E commercial products

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READING PASSAGE 3
Calculating the Risk
How do we judge whether it is right to go ahead with a new technology? Apply the
precautionary principle properly and you won't go far wrong, says Colin Tudge.

Section 1
As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate on scientific progress, "Panic attack:
interrogating our obsession with risk" did not bode well. Held last week at the Royal
Institution in London, the event brought together scientists from across the world to ask
why society is so obsessed with risk and to call for a "more rational" approach. "We
seem to be organising society around the grandmotherly maxim of 'better safe than
sorry'," exclaimed Spiked, the online publication that organized the event. "What are the
consequences of this overbearing concern with risks?"

The debate was preceded by a survey of 40 scientists who were invited to describe how
awful our lives would be if the "precautionary principle" had been allowed to prevail in
the past. Their response was: no heart surgery or antibiotics, and hardly any drugs at
all; no aeroplanes, bicycles or high-voltage power grids; no pasteurization, pesticides or
bio-technology; no quantum mechanics; no wheel; no "discovery" of America. In short,
their message was: no risk, no gain.

They have absolutely missed the point. The precautionary principle is a subtle idea. It
has various forms, but all of them generally include some notion of cost effectiveness.
Thus the point is not simply to ban things that are not known to be absolutely safe.
Rather, it says: "Of course you can make no progress without risk. But if there is no
obvious gain from taking the risk, then don't take it."

Clearly, all the technologies listed by the 40 well-chosen savants were innately risky at
their inception, as all technologies are. But all of them would have received the green
light under the precautionary principle because they all had the potential to offer
tremendous benefits — the solutions to very big problems — if only the snags could be
overcome.

If the precautionary principle had been in place, the scientists tell us, we would not have
antibiotics. But of course we would — if the version of the principle that sensible people
now understand had been applied. When penicillin was discovered in the 1920s,
infective bacteria were laying waste to the world. Children died from diphtheria and
whooping cough, every open drain brought the threat of typhoid, and any wound could
lead to septicaemia and even gangrene.

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Penicillin was turned into a practical drug during the Second World War, when the many
pestilences that result from war threatened to kill more people than the bombs. Of
course antibiotics were a priority. Of course the risks, such as they could be perceived,
were worth taking.

And so with the other items on the scientists' list: electric light bulbs, blood transfusions,
CAT scans, knives, the measles vaccine — the precautionary principle would have
prevented all of them, they tell us. But this is just plain wrong. If the precautionary
principle had been applied properly, all these creations would have passed muster,
because all offered incomparable advantages compared to the risks perceived at the
time.

Section 2
Another issue is at stake here. Statistics are not the only concept people use when
weighing up risk. Human beings, subtle and evolved creatures that we are, do not
survive to three score years and ten simply by thinking like pocket calculators. A crucial
issue is consumer's choice. In deciding whether to pursue the development of a new
technology, the consumer's right to choose should be considered alongside
considerations of risk and benefit. Clearly, skiing is more dangerous than genetically
modified tomatoes. But people who ski choose to do so; they do not have skiing thrust
upon them by portentous experts of the kind who now feel they have the right to
reconstruct our crops. Even with skiing, there is the matter of cost effectiveness to
consider: skiing, I am told, is exhilarating. Where is the exhilaration in GM soya?

Indeed, in contrast to all the other items on Spiked's list, GM crops stand out as an
example of a technology whose benefits are far from clear. Some of the risks can at
least be defined. But in the present economic climate, the benefits that might accrue
from them seem dubious. Promoters of GM crops believe that the future population of
the world cannot be fed without them. That is untrue. The crops that really matter are
wheat and rice, and there is no GM research in the pipeline that will seriously affect the
yield of either. GM is used to make production cheaper and hence more profitable,
which is an extremely questionable ambition.

The precautionary principle provides the world with a very important safeguard. If it had
been in place in the past, it might, for example, have prevented insouciant miners from
polluting major rivers with mercury. We have come to a sorry pass when scientists, who
should above all be dispassionate scholars, feel they should misrepresent such a
principle for the purposes of commercial and political propaganda. People at large
continue to mistrust science and the high technologies it produces, partly because they
doubt the wisdom of scientists. On such evidence as this, these doubts are fully
justified.

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Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

27. The title of the debate is not unbiased.

28. All the scientists invited to the debate were from the field of medicine.
29. The message those scientists who conducted the survey were sending was
people shouldn't take risks.
30. All the listed technologies are riskier than other technologies.
31. It is worth taking the risks to invent antibiotics.
32. All the other inventions on the list were also judged by the precautionary
principle.

Questions 33-39
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the
passage. Write your answers in boxes 33-39 on your answer sheet.

When applying precautionary principle to decide whether to invent a new technology,

people should also take into consideration of the 33…………, along with the usual
consideration of 34…………. For example, though risky and dangerous enough, people
still enjoy 35………………for the excitement it provides. On the other hand, experts
believe the future population desperately needs 36……………..inspite of their undefined
risks. However, the researches conducted so far have not been directed towards
increasing the yield of 37………………, but to reduce the cost of 38………….and to
bring more profit out of it. In the end, such selfish use of precautionary principle for
business and political gain has often led people to 39……………..science for they
believe scientists are not to be trusted.

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Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answer in box 40 on your
answer sheet.

What is the main theme of the passage?

A. People have the right to doubt science and technologies.

B. The precautionary principle could have prevented the development of
Science and technology.
C. There are not enough people who truly understand the precautionary
principle.
D. The precautionary principle bids us to take risks at all costs.

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