Test 4 - Tài liệu tổng hợp

Australian parrots and their adaptation to habitat change
Parrots are found across the tropic and in all southern hemisphere continents except Antarctica, but nowhere do
the display such a richness of diversity and form as in Australia. One- sixth of the world's 345 parrot species
are found there, and Australia has long been renowned for the number and variety of its parrots.
B In the 16th century, the German cartographer Mercator made a world map that included a place, somewhere
near present-day Australia, that he named Terra Psittacorum - the Land of Parrots - and the first European
settlers in Australia often referred to the country as Parrot Land. In 1865, the celebrated British naturalist and
wildlife artist John Gould said: "No group of birds gives Australia so tropical and benign an air as the
numerous species of this great family by which it is tenanted.
C Parrots are descendants of an ancient line. Due to their great diversity, and since most species inhabit Africa,
Australia and South America, it seems almost certain that parrots originated millions of years ago on the
ancient southern continent of Gondwana, before it broke up into the separate southern hemisphere continents
we know today. Much of Gondwana comprised vast rainforests intersected by huge slow-flowing rivers and
expansive lakes, but by eight million years ago, great changes were underway. The center of the continent of
Australia had begun to dry out, and the rainforests that once covered it gradually contracted to the continental
margins, where, to a limited extent, they still exist today.
D The creatures that remained in those shrinking rainforests had to adapt to the drier conditions or face
extinction. Reacting to these desperate circumstances, the parrot family, typically found in jungles in other
parts of the world, has populated some of Australia's harshest environments. The parrots spread from ancestral
forests through eucalypt woodlands to colonies the central deserts of Australia, and as a consequence they
diversified into a wide range of species with adaptations that reflect the many changes animals and plants had
to make to survive in these areas.
E These evolutionary pressures helped mould keratin, the substance from which breaks are made into a range
of tools capable of gathering the new food types favored by various species of parrot. The size of a parrot's
short, blunt beak and the length of that beak's do curved upper section are related to the type of food each
species eats. Some have comparatively long beaks that are perfect for extracting seeds from fruit; others have
broader and stronger beaks that are designed for cracking hard seeds.
F Differently shaped beaks are not the only adaptations that have been made during the developing relationship
between parrots and their food plants. Like all of Australia's many honey eating birds, the rainbow-coloured
lorikeets and the flowers on which they feed have long coevolved with features such as the shape and colour of
the flowers adapted to the bird's particular needs, and physical a example, red is the most I attractive colour to
birds, and thus flowers which depend on birds for pollination are more often red, and lorikeets' to gues have
bristles which help them to collect as much pollen as possible.
G Today, most of Australia's parrots inhabit woodland and open forest, and their numbers decline towards both
deserts and wetter areas. The majority are nomadic to some degree, moving around to take advantage of
feeding and breeding places. Two of the dry country parrots, the pink and grey galah and the pink, white and
yellow corella have expanded their ranges in recent years. They are among the species that have adapted well
to the changes brought about by European settlement forest telling created grasslands where galahs and corellas thrive.
H But other parrot species did not fare so well when their environments were altered. The clearing of large
areas of rainforest is probably responsible for the disappearance of the double-eyed fig parrot, and numbers of
ground parrots declined when a great part of their habitat was destroyed by the draining of coastal swamps.
Even some parrot species that benefited from forest clearing at first are now comforted by a shortage of nesting
sites due to further man-made changes.
I New conditions also sometimes favour an incoming species over one that originally inhabited the area. For
example, after farmers cleared large areas of forest on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia, the
island was colonised by galahs. They were soon going down holes and destroying black cockatoo eggs in order
to take the hole for their own use. Their success precipitated a partial collapse in the black cockatoo population
when the later lost the struggle for scarce nesting hollows.
J There may be no final answer to ensuring an equitable balance between parrot species. Nest box
programmers help ease the shortage of nesting sites in some places, but there are not enough, they are
expensive and they are not an adequate substitute by large, old trees, such as the habitat they represent and
nectar, pollen and seeds they provide. Competition between parrots for nest sites is a result of the changes we
humans have made to the Earth. We are the most widespread and dangerous competitors that parrots have ever
had to face, but we also have the knowledge and skill to maintain the wonderfully rich diversity of Australia's
parrots. All we need is the wild to do so. Questions 1-6
Reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-J in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet
1. An example of how one parrot species may survive at the expense of another 1
2. A description of how plants may adapt to attract birds 2
3. Example of two parrot species which benefited from changes to the environment 3
4. How the varied Australian landscape resulted in a great variety of parrot species 4
5. A reason why most parrot species are native to the southern hemisphere 5
6. An example of a parrot species which did not survive changes to its habitat 6 Questions 7-9
Choose the correct letter A, B, c, or D
Write the correct letter in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet
7. The writer believes that most parrot species
A. Move from Africa and South America to Australia
B. Had ancestors in either Africa, Australia or South America
C. Had ancestors in a continent which later split up
D. Came from a continent now covered by water
8. What does the Writer say about parrot's beak?
A. They are longer than those of other birds
B. They are made of a unique material
C. They are used more efficiently than those of other species
D. They are specially adapted to suit the diet
8. Which of the following is NOT mentioned by the writer as a disadvantage of nesting boxes? A. They cost too much
B. They need to be maintained
C. They provide only shelter, not food
D. They are too few of them Questions 11-13 Complete the summary below
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet Parrots in Australia
There are 345 varieties of parrot in existence and, of these, 10_________live in Australia. As early as
the 11___________ the mapmaker 12______________recognized that parrots lived in that part of the
world. 13_________ the famous painter of animals and birds, commented on the size and beauty of the Australian parrot family. Knowledge in medicine
A.What counts as knowledge? What do we mean when we say that we know something? What is the status of
different kinds of knowledge? In order to explore these questions, we are going to focus on one particular area of knowledge – medicine.
B. How do you know when you are ill? This may seem to be an absurd question. You know you are ill because
you feel ill; your body tells you that you are ill. You may know that you feel pain or discomfort but knowing
you are ill is a bit more complex. At times, people experience the symptoms of illness, but in fact, they are
simply tired or over-worked or they may just have a hangover. At other times, people may be suffering from a
disease and fail to be aware of the illness until it has reached a late stage in its development. So how do we
know we are ill, and what counts as knowledge?
C. Think about this example. You feel unwell. You have a bad cough and always seem to be tired. Perhaps it
could be stress at work, or maybe you should give up smoking. You feel worse. You visit the doctor who
listens to your chest and heart, takes your temperature and blood pressure, and then finally prescribes antibiotics for your cough.
D. Things do not improve but you struggle on thinking you should pull yourself together, perhaps things will
ease off at work soon. A return visit to your doctor shocks you. This time the doctor, drawing on years of
training and experience, diagnoses pneumonia. This means that you will need bed rest and a considerable time
off work. The scenario is transformed. Although you still have the same symptoms, you no longer think that
these are caused by pressure at work. You know have proof that you are ill. This is the result of the
combination of your own subjective experience and the diagnosis of someone who has the status of a medical
expert. You have a medically authenticated diagnosis and it appears that you are seriously ill; you know you
are ill and have the evidence upon which to base this knowledge.
E. This scenario shows many different sources of knowledge. For example, you decide to consult the doctor in
the first place because you feel unwell – this is personal knowledge about your own body. However, the
doctor’s expert diagnosis is based on experience and training, with sources of knowledge as diverse as other
experts, laboratory reports, medical textbooks and years of experience.
F. One source of knowledge is the experience of our own bodies; the personal knowledge we have of changes
that might be significant, as well as the subjective experiences are mediated by other forms of knowledge such
as the words we have available to describe our experience, and the common sense of our families and friends
as well as that drawn from popular culture. Over the past decade, for example, Western culture has seen a
significant emphasis on stress-related illness in the media. Reference to being ‘stressed out’ has become a
common response in daily exchanges in the workplace and has become part of popular common-sense
knowledge. It is thus not surprising that we might seek such an explanation of physical symptoms of discomfort.
G. We might also rely on the observations of others who know us. Comments from friends and family such as
‘you do look ill’ or ‘that’s a bad cough’ might be another source of knowledge. Complementary health
practices, such as holistic medicine, produce their own sets of knowledge upon which we might also draw in
deciding the nature and degree of our ill health and about possible treatments.
H. Perhaps the most influential and authoritative source of knowledge is the medical knowledge provided by
the general practitioner. We expect the doctor to have access to expert knowledge. This is socially sanctioned.
It would not be acceptable to notify our employer that we simply felt too unwell to turn up for work or that our
faith healer, astrologer, therapist or even our priest thought it was not a good idea. We need an expert medical
diagnosis in order to obtain the necessary certificate if we need to be off work for more than the statutory self-
certification period. The knowledge of the medical sciences is privileged in this respect in contemporary
Western culture. Medical practitioners are also seen as having the required expert knowledge that permits them
legally to prescribe drugs and treatment to which patients would not otherwise have access. However, there is a
range of different knowledge upon which we draw when making decisions about our own state of health.
I.However, there is more than existing knowledge in this little story; new knowledge is constructed within it.
Given the doctor’s medical training and background, she may hypothesize ‘is this now pneumonia?’ and then
proceed to look for evidence about it. She will use observations and instruments to assess the evidence and –
critically – interpret it in light of her training and experience. This results in new knowledge and new
experience both for you and for the doctor. This will then be added to the doctor’s medical knowledge and may
help in the future diagnosis of pneumonia. Questions 1-6 Complete the table
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet Source of knowledge Examples
Symptoms of a 1_________and tiredness Personal experience
Doctor’s measurement by taking 2_________and temperature
Common judgment from 3_________around you
Medical knowledge from the general 4_________ Scientific evidence
e.g. doctor’s medical 5_________
Examine the medical hypothesis with the previous drill and 6_________ Questions 7-14
The Reading Passage has nine paragraphs A-I
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 7-14 on your answer sheet.
7. the contrast between the nature of personal judgment and the nature of doctor’s diagnosis
8. a reference of culture about pressure
9. sick leave will not be permitted without the professional diagnosis
10. how doctors’ opinions are regarded in society
11. the illness of patients can become part of new knowledge
12. a description of knowledge drawn from non-specialized sources other than personal knowledge
13 . an example of collective judgment from personal experience and professional doctor
14. a reference that some people do not realize they are ill
Art to the aid of technology
What caricatures can teach us about facial recognition?
A Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and it is hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than
recognize faces. Just hours after birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike patterns. An adult brain
knows it is seeing a face within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over a second to realize that two different
pictures of a face, even if they are lit or rotated in very different ways, belong to the same person.
B Perhaps the most vivid illustration of our gift for recognition is the magic of caricature-the fact that the
sparest cartoon of a familiar face, even a single line dashed off in two seconds, can be identified by our brains
in an instant. It is often said that a good caricature looks more like a person than the person themselves. As it
happens, this notion, counterintuitive though it may sound, is actually supported by research. In the field of
vision science, there is even a term for this seeming paradox-the caricature effect-a phrase that hints at how our
brains misperceive faces as much as perceive them.
C Human faces are all built pretty much the same: two eyes above a nose that’s above a mouth, the features
varying from person to person generally by mere millimetres. So what our brains look for, according to vision
scientists, are the outlying features-those characteristics that deviate most from the ideal face we carry around
in our heads, the running average of every "visage" we have ever seen. We code each new face we encounter
not in absolute terms but in the several ways it differs markedly from the mean. In other words, we accentuate
what is most important for recognition and largely ignore what is not. Our perception fixates on the upturned
nose, the sunken eyes or the fleshy cheeks, making them loom larger. To better identify and remember people, we turn them into caricatures.
D Ten years ago, we all imagined that as soon as surveillance cameras had been equipped with the appropriate
software, the face of a crime suspect would stand out in a crowd. Like a thumbprint, its unique features and
configuration would offer a biometric key that could be immediately checked against any database of suspects.
But now a decade has passed, and face-recognition systems still perform miserably in real-world conditions.
Just recently, a couple who accidentally swapped passports at an airport in England sailed through electronic
gates that were supposed to match their faces to file photos.
E All this leads to an interesting question. What if, to secure our airports and national landmarks, we need to
learn more about caricature? After all, it's the skill of the caricaturist-the uncanny ability to quickly distill faces
down to their most salient features-that our computers most desperately need to acquire. Clearly, better
cameras and faster computers simply aren't going to be enough.
F At the University of Central Lancashire in England, Charlie Frowd, a senior lecturer in psychology, has used
insights from caricature to develop a better police-composite generator. His system, called EvoFIT, produces
animated caricatures, with each successive frame showing facial features that are more exaggerated than the
last. Frowd's research supports the idea that we all store memories as caricatures, but with our own personal
degree of amplification. So, as an animated composite depicts faces at varying stages of caricature, viewers
respond to the stage that is most recognizable to them. In tests, Frowd's technique has increased positive
identifications from as low as 3 percent to upwards of 30 percent.
G To achieve similar results in computer face recognition, scientists would need to model the artist’s genius
even more closely-a feat that might seem impossible if you listen to some of the artists describe their nearly
mystical acquisition of skills. Jason Seiler recounts how he trained his mind for years, beginning in middle
school, until he gained what he regards as nothing less than a second sight. ‘A lot of people think that
caricature is about picking out someone’s worst feature and exaggerating it as far as you can,' Seiler says.
'That’s wrong. Caricature is basically finding the truth. And then you push the truth.' Capturing a likeness, it
seems, has less to do with the depiction of individual features than with their placement in relationship to one
another. 'It's how the human brain recognizes a face. When the ratios between the features are correct, you see that face instantly.’
H Pawan Sinha. director of MIT's Sinha Laboratory for Vision Research, and one of the nation's most
innovative computer-vision researchers, contends that these simple, exaggerated drawings can be objectively
and systematically studied and that such work will lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of both human
and machine-based vision. His lab at MIT is preparing to computationally analyze hundreds of caricatures this
year, from dozens of different artists, with the hope of tapping their intuitive knowledge of what is and isn’t
crucial for recognition. He has named this endeavor the Hirschfeld Project, after the famous New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
I Quite simply, by analyzing sketches, Sinha lopes to pinpoint the recurring exaggerations in the caricatures
that most strongly correlate to particular ways that the original faces deviate from the norm. The results, he
believes, will ultimately produce a rank-ordered list of the 20 or so facial attributes that are most important for
recognition: 'It’s a recipe for how to encode the face,' he says. In preliminary tests, the lab has already isolated
important areas-for example, the ratio of the height of the forehead to the distance between the top of the nose and the mouth.
J On a given face, four of 20 such Hirschfeld attributes, as Sinha plans to call them, will be several standard
deviations greater than the mean; on another face, a different handful of attributes might exceed the norm. But
in all cases, it's the exaggerated areas of the face that hold the key. As matters stand today, an automated
system must compare its target faces against the millions of continually altering faces it encounters. But so far,
the software doesn't know what to look for amid this onslaught of variables. Armed with the Hirschfeld
attributes, Sinha hopes that computers can be trained to focus on the features most salient for recognition,
tuning out the others. ’Then.’ Sinha says, ’the sky is the limit’. Questions 1-6
Reading Passage has ten paragraphs, A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
You may use any letter more than once.
1. why we have mental images of faces that are essentially caricatures
2. mention of the length of time it can take to become a good caricaturist
3. an example of how unreliable current security systems can be
4. reference to the fact that we can match even a hastily drawn caricature to the person it represents
5. a summary of how the use of multiple caricatures has improved recognition rates in a particular field
6 . a comparison between facial recognition and another well-established form of identification Questions 7-10
Look at the following statements and the list of people, A-C, below.
Match each statement with the correct person.
7. A single caricature can be recognised straight away if the parts of the face are appropriately positioned.
8. An evaluation of the work of different caricaturists will provide new information about how we see faces.
9. People misunderstand what is involved in the design of a caricature.
10. When given a choice, people will have different views regarding which caricature best represents a particular person’s face. List of People A Charlie Frowd B Jason Seiler C Pawan Sinha Questions 11-13 Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Sinha’s Project
Sinha's aim in the project is to come up with a specific number of what he terms 11__________that are key to identification purposes.
He hopes these can be used to enable an 12__________to identify faces more quickly and more accurately.
In order to do this, his team must examine the most frequently 13__________features in a large number of cartoon faces.