Tài liệu tiếng anh .Reading_Matching headings_Gap-filling_True False

Passage 1: The secret of staying young
Pheidole dentata, a native ant of the south-eastern U. S. , isn’t immortal. But
scientists have found that it doesn’t seem to show any signs of aging. Old workers
ants can do everything just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as
sharp. ‘We get a picture that these ants really don’t decline,’ says Ysabel Giraldo,
who studies the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University.
Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. Naked mole rats can live for
almost 30 years and stay fit for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even
when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate
with age just like people do. Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that
usually live in highly organized colonies. ‘It’s this social complexity that makes P.
dentata useful for studying aging in people,’ says Giraldo, now at the California
Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been
connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice,
worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives.
In the lab, P. dentata worker ants typically live for around 140 days. Giraldo focused
on ants at four age ranges: 20 to 22 days, 45 to 47 days, 95 to 97 days and 120 to
122 days. Unlike all previous studies, which only estimated how old the ants were,
her work tracked the ants from the time the pupae became adults, so she knew their
exact ages. Then she put them through a range of tests.
Giraldo watched how well the ants took care of the young of the colony, recording
how often each ant attended to, carried and fed them. She compared how well
20-day-old and 95-day-old ants followed the telltale scent that the insects usually
leave to mark a trail to food. She tested how ants responded to light and also
measured how active they were by counting how often ants in a small dish walked
across a line. And she experimented with how ants react to live prey: a tethered fruit
fly. Giraldo expected the older ants to perform poorly in all these tasks. But the
elderly insects were all good caretakers and trail-followers – the 95-day-old ants
could track the scent even longer than their younger counterparts. They all
responded to light well, and the older ants were more active. And when it came to
reacting to prey, the older ants attacked the poor fruit fly just as aggressively as the
young ones did, flaring their mandibles or pulling at the fly’s legs.
Then Giraldo compared the brains of 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants, identifying any
cells that were close to death. She saw no major differences with age, nor was there
any difference in the location of the dying cells, showing that age didn’t seem to
affect specific brain functions. Ants and other insects have structures in their brains
called mushroom bodies, which are important for processing information, learning
and memory. She also wanted to see Giraldoif aging affects the density of synaptic
complexes within these structures – regions where neurons come together. Again,
the answer was no. What was more, the old ants didn’t experience any drop in the
levels of either serotonin or dopamine – brain chemicals whose decline often
coincides with aging. In humans, for example, a decrease in serotonin has been
linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
‘This is the first time anyone has looked at both behavioral and neural changes in
these ants so thoroughly,’ says Giraldo, who recently published the findings in the
Proceeding of the Royal Society B. Scientists have looked at some similar aspects in
bees, but the results of recent bee studies were mixed – some studies showed
age-related declines, which biologists call senescence, and others didn’t. ‘For now,
the study raises more questions than it answers,’ Giraldo says, ‘including how P.
dentata stays in such good shape. ’
Also, if the ants don’t deteriorate with age, why do they die at all? Out in the wild, the
ants probably don’t live for a full 140 days thanks to predators, disease and just
being in an environment that’s much harsher than the comforts of the lab. ‘The lucky
ants that do live into old age may suffer a steep decline just before dying,’ Giraldo
says, but she can’t say for sure because her study wasn’t designed to follow an ant’s final moments.
‘It will be important to extend these findings to other species of social insects,’ says
Gene E. Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. This ant might be unique, or it might represent a broader
pattern among other social bugs with possible clues to the science of aging in larger
animals. Either way, it seems that for these ants, age really doesn’t matter. Questions 1-8
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each
answer. Write your answer in boxes 1 - 8 on your answer sheet. Ysabel Giraldo’s research
Focused on a total of …………………… different age groups of ants, analyzing Behaviour:
• how well ants looked after their ……………………
• their ability to locate …………………… using a scent trail
• the effect that …………………… had on them
• how …………………… they attacked prey Brains:
• comparison between age and the …………………… of dying cells in the brains of ants
• condition of synaptic complexes (areas in which …………………… meet) in the
brain’s ‘mushroom bodies’
• level of two …………………… in the brain associated with ageing Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
9 Pheidole dentata ants are the only known animals which remain active for almost their whole lives.
10 Ysabel Giraldo was the first person to study Pheidole dentata ants using precise
data about the insects’ ages.
11 The ants in Giraldo’s experiments behaved as she had predicted that they would.
12 The recent studies of bees used different methods of measuring age-related decline.
13 Pheidole dentata ants kept in laboratory conditions tend to live longer lives.
Passage 2: Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too
This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought
A. We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time
stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel
better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult.
For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy,
depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is
always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless
counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the
University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us
to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection,
boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.
B. By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his
team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct
types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be
plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal,
and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the
feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of
boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is
‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative
emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t
engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to
be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.
C. Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes
further. ‘All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has
found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but
in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments
published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by
copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative
ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that
a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander.
In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.
D. Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t
convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In
my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily
mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical
pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause
pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if
allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our
‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which
makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the
situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world
and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps
most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to
state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.
E. Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early
days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom
proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by
pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity,
are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has
detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to
boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their
career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill – it’s the
things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it
before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers,
they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that it’s
boring and get stuck in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it
by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.
F. Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected
lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is
a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So
instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones
alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way. 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 The productive outcomes that may result from boredom
ii What teachers can do to prevent boredom
iii A new explanation and a new cure for boredom
iv Problems with a scientific approach to boredom
v A potential danger arising from boredom
vi Creating a system of classification for feelings of boredom
vii Age groups most affected by boredom
viii Identifying those most affected by boredom 14 Paragraph A 15 Paragraph B 16 Paragraph C 17 Paragraph D 18 Paragraph E 19 Paragraph F Questions 20-23:
Look at the following people (Questions 20-23) and the list of ideas below.
Match each person with the correct idea, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet. List of Ideas A
The way we live today may encourage boredom. B
One sort of boredom is worse than all the others. C
Levels of boredom may fall in the future. D
Trying to cope with boredom can increase its negative effects. E
Boredom may encourage us to avoid an unpleasant experience. 20 Peter Toohey 21 Thomas Goetz 22 John Eastwood 23 Francoise Wemelsfelder Questions 24-26 Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Responses to boredom
For John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot
24……………………………, due to a failure in what he calls the ‘attention system’, and as a
result they become frustrated and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom
25……………………….. is an important aim in life may have problems in coping with
boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic of 26……………………….. can generally cope with it. Passage 3: Frozen Food
A US perspective on the development of the frozen food industry
At some point in history, humans discovered that ice preserved food. There is
evidence that winter ice was stored to preserve food in the summer as far back as
10,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago, the inhabitants of South America’s
Andean mountains had a unique means of conserving potatoes for later
consumption. They froze them overnight, then trampled them to squeeze out the
moisture, then dried them in the sun. This preserved their nutritional value—if not their aesthetic appeal.
Natural ice remained the main form of refrigeration until late in the 19th century. In
the early 1800s, ship owners from Boston, USA, had enormous blocks of Arctic ice
towed all over the Atlantic for the purpose of food preservation. In 1851, railroads
first began putting blocks of ice in insulated rail cars to send butter from Ogdensburg, New York, to Boston.
Finally, in 1870, Australian inventors found a way to make ’mechanical ice’. They
used a compressor to force a gas - ammonia at first and later Freon—through a
condenser. The compressed gas gave up some of its heat as it moved through the
condenser. Then the gas was released quickly into a low-pressure evaporator coil
where it became liquid and cold. Air was blown over the evaporator coil and then this
cooled air passed into an insulated compartment, lowering its temperature to freezing point.
Initially, this process was invented to keep Australian beer cool even in hot weather.
But Australian cattlemen were quick to realize that, if they could put this new
invention on a ship, they could export meat across the oceans. In 1880, a shipment
of Australian beef and mutton was sent, frozen, to England. While the food frozen
this way was still palatable, there was some deterioration. During the freezing
process, crystals formed within the cells of the food, and when the ice expanded and
the cells burst, this spoilt the flavor and texture of the food.
The modern frozen food industry began with the indigenous Inuit people of Canada.
In 1912, a biology student in Massachusetts, USA, named Clarence Birdseye, ran
out of money and went to Labrador in Canada to trap and trade furs. While he was
there, he became fascinated with how the Inuit would quickly freeze fish in the Arctic
air. The fish looked and tasted fresh even months later.
Birdseye returned to the USA in 1917 and began developing mechanical freezers
capable of quick-freezing food. Birdseye methodically kept inventing better freezers
and gradually built a business selling frozen fish from Gloucester, Massachusetts. In
1929, his business was sold and became General Foods, but he stayed with the
company as director of research, and his division continued to innovate.
Birdseye was responsible for several key innovations that made the frozen food
industry possible. He developed quick-freezing techniques that reduced the damage
that crystals caused, as well as the technique of freezing the product in the package
it was to be sold in. He also introduced the use of cellophane, the first transparent
material for food packaging, which allowed consumers to see the quality of the
product. Birdseye products also came in convenient size packages that could be
prepared with a minimum of effort.
But there were still obstacles. In the 1930s, few grocery stores could afford to buy
freezers for a market that wasn’t established yet. So, Birdseye leased inexpensive
freezer cases to them. He also leased insulated railroad cars so that he could ship
his products nationwide. However, few consumers had freezers large enough or
efficient enough to take advantage of the products.
Sales increased in the early 1940s, when World War II gave a boost to the frozen
food industry because tin was being used for munitions. Canned foods were rationed
to save tin for the war effort, while frozen foods were abundant and cheap. Finally, by
the 1950s, refrigerator technology had developed far enough to make these
appliances affordable for the average family. By 1953, 33 million US families owned
a refrigerator, and manufacturers were gradually increasing the size of the freezer compartments in them.
1950s families were also looking for convenience at mealtimes, so the moment was
right for the arrival of the ’TV Dinner’. Swanson Foods was a large, nationally
recognized producer of canned and frozen poultry. In 1954, the company adapted
some of Birdseye’s freezing techniques, and with the help of a clever name and a
huge advertising budget, it launched the first ’TV Dinner’. This consisted of frozen
turkey, potatoes and vegetables served in the same segmented aluminum tray that
was used by airlines. The product was an instant success. Within a year, Swanson
had sold 13 million TV dinners. American consumers couldn’t resist the combination
of a trusted brand name, a single-serving package and the convenience of a meal
that could be ready after only 25 minutes in a hot oven. By 1959, Americans were
spending $2.7 billion annually on frozen foods, and half a billion of that was spent on
ready-prepared meals such as the TV Dinner.
Today, the US frozen food industry has a turnover of over $67 billion annually, with
$26.6 billion of that sold to consumers for home consumption. The remaining $40
billion in frozen food sales come through restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals and
schools, and that represents a third of the total food service sales. Questions 1-7
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The history of frozen food
2,000 years ago, South America
● People conserved the nutritional value of …………………… using a method of freezing then drying. 1851, USA
● …………………… was kept cool by ice during transportation in specially adapted trains. 1880, Australia
● Two kinds of …………………… were the first frozen food shipped to England. 1917 onwards, USA
● Clarence Birdseye introduced innovations including:
● quick-freezing methods, so that …………………… did not spoil the food.
● packaging products with …………………… , so the product was visible. Early 1940s, USA
● Frozen food became popular because of a shortage of …………………… 1950s, USA
● A large number of homes now had a …………………… Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? Write TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
8 The ice transportation business made some Boston ship owners very wealthy in the early 1800s.
9 A disadvantage of the freezing process invented in Australia was that it affected the taste of food.
10 Clarence Birdseye travelled to Labrador in order to learn how the Inuit people froze fish.
11 Swanson Foods invested a great deal of money in the promotion of the TV Dinner.
12 Swanson Foods developed a new style of container for the launch of the TV Dinner.
13 The US frozen food industry is currently the largest in the world.
Document Outline

• Passage 1: The secret of staying young
  • Ysabel Giraldo’s research
  • Behaviour:
  • Brains:
• Passage 2: Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too
  • Responses to boredom
• Passage 3: Frozen Food
  • The history of frozen food
  • 2,000 years ago, South America
  • 1851, USA
  • 1880, Australia
  • 1917 onwards, USA
  • Early 1940s, USA
  • 1950s, USA