The way we travel around cities has a major impact on whether they are sustainable. Transportation is estimated to account for 30% of energy consumption in most of the world’s most developed nations, so lowering the need for energy-using vehicles is essential for decreasing the environmental impact of mobility. But as more and more people move to cities, it is important to think about other kinds of sustainable travel too. The ways we travel affect our physical and mental health, our social lives, our access to work and culture, and the air we breathe. Engineers are tasked with changing how we travel round cities through urban design, but the engineering industry still works on the assumptions that led to the creation of the energy-consuming transport systems we have now: the emphasis placed solely on efficiency, speed, and quantitative data. We need radical changes, to make it healthier, more enjoyable, and less environmentally damaging to travel around cities.
Dance might hold some of the answers. That is not to suggest everyone should dance their way to work, however healthy and happy it might make us, but rather that the techniques used by choreographers to experiment with and design movement in dance could provide engineers with tools to stimulate new ideas in city-making. Richard Sennett, an influential urbanist and sociologist who has transformed ideas about the way cities are made, argues that urban design has suffered from a separation between mind and body since the introduction of the architectural blueprint.
Whereas medieval builders improvised and adapted…
Questions 1–6
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
1.reference to an appealing way of using dance that the writer is not proposing
2.an example of a contrast between past and present approaches to building
Section 2
Reading Passage 2
Should We Try To Bring Extinct Species Back To Life?
The passenger pigeon was a legendary species. Flying in vast numbers across North America, with potentially many millions within a single flock, their migration was once one of nature’s great spectacles. Sadly, the passenger pigeon’s existence came to an end on 1 September 1914, when the last living specimen died at Cincinnati Zoo. Geneticist Ben Novak is lead researcher on an ambitious project which now aims to bring the bird back to life through a process known as ‘de-extinction’. The basic premise involves using cloning technology to turn the DNA of extinct animals into a fertilised embryo, which is carried by the nearest relative still in existence – in this case, the abundant band-tailed pigeon – before being born as a living, breathing animal. Passenger pigeons are one of the pioneering species in this field, but they are far from the only ones on which this cutting-edge technology is being trialled.
In Australia, the thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, is another extinct creature which genetic scientists are striving to bring back to life. ‘There is no carnivore now in Tasmania that fills the niche which thylacines once occupied,’ explains Michael Archer of the University of New South Wales. He points out that in the decades since the thylacine went extinct, there has been a spread in a ‘dangerously debilitating’ facial tumour syndrome which threatens the existence of the Tasmanian devils, the island’s other notorious resident. Thylacines would have prevented this spread because they would have killed significant numbers of Tasmanian devils. ‘If…
Questions 14–17
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
14.a reference to how further disappearance of multiple species could be avoided.
The findings of psychological scientists reveal the importance of humour
Humans start developing a sense of humour as early as six weeks old, when babies begin to laugh and smile in response to stimuli. Laughter is universal across all human cultures and even exists in some form in rats, chimps, and bonobos. Like other human emotions and expressions, laughter and humour provide psychological scientists with rich resources for studying human psychology, ranging from the development of language to the neuroscience of social perception.
Theories focusing on the evolution of laughter point to it as an important adaptation for social communication. Take, for example, the recorded laughter in TV comedy shows. Back in 1950, US sound engineer Charley Douglass hated dealing with the unpredictable laughter of live audiences, so started recording his own ‘laugh tracks’. These were intended to help people at home feel like they were in a social situation, such as a crowded theatre. Douglass even recorded various types of laughter, as well as mixtures of laugher from men, women, and children. In doing so, he picked up on a quality of laughter that is now interesting researchers: a simple ‘haha’ communicates a remarkable amount of socially relevant information.
In one study conducted in 2016, samples of laughter from pairs of English-speaking students were recorded at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A team made up of more than 30 psychological scientists, anthropologists, and biologists then played these recording to listeners from 24 diverse societies, from indigenous…
Questions 27–31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
27.When referring to laughter in the first paragraphs, the writer emphasises
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Answers & explanations
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40 answers3 explanations open
1
B
The correct answer is 'B' as the paragraph mentioned doesn't support the idea of utilizing dance for commuting, contrasting it with the idea of employing choreographic techniques for urban planning instead. This paragraph offers a perspective different from the writer's suggestion about dancing to work.
2
C
The correct answer is C because in paragraph C, the passage explores the contrast between medieval builders who relied on hands-on experience and knowledge of materials with modern design processes that rely on technology and disconnect designers from the actual building process.
3
F
The correct answer is indeed F because the excerpt explicitly states that choreography, despite not being an obvious choice, shares the aim with engineering of designing movement patterns within spatial constraints.
4
D
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5
E
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6
A
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7
safety
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8
traffic
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9
carriageway
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10
mobile
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11
dangerous
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12
communities
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13
healthy
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14
F
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15
A
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16
D
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17
A
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18
genetic traits
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19
heat loss
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20
ears
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21
fat / insulating fat
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22
emissions / carbon emissions
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23
B
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24
C
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25
A
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26
C
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27
C
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28
A
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29
B
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30
B
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31
D
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32
F
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33
H
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34
C
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35
D
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36
E
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37
NOT GIVEN
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38
TRUE
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39
FALSE
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40
FALSE
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Understand why, not only what.
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