LONDONS GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

UCL LANGUAGE CENTRE

UNIVERSITY PREPARATORY CERTIFICATES

Mock Reading Skills Examination

21st April 2009
2.15pm 4.15pm
Candidate Number:

INSTRUCTIONS
You have two hours to answer all the questions.
There are two texts in this examination.
Text 1 pages 2-6
Text 2 pages 7-10
You are strongly advised to organise your time carefully.
The use of dictionaries is not permitted

UPC Reading Text 1

(Total: 40 marks)

The following text is adapted from:

digital divide: A $100 laptop aims

Bridging the
to bring equal
technology opportunities to children in the developing world.
Clint Witchalls The Guardian
1

The British charity Citizens Online has an ambitious goal - they would like all

Para 1

schoolchildren in the UK to have their own laptop by 2010. Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT) boffins Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert and
Joseph Jacobson also share the mantra "one laptop per child", but they have a
5

much more ambitious plan: to provide 100m to 200m laptops to schoolchildren in

the developing world by the end of 2008. And how do they propose to do this?
By making them very cheap - $ 100 (53) per laptop, or $ 90 plus $ 10 for
"contingency or profit".
Having seen the changes that can be wrought with a bit of IT infrastructure,

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Para 2

Negroponte wants to do more to bridge the digital divide between rich and poor
by providing inexpensive computing to schoolchildren across the developing
world. Google and chip maker AMD have committed $ 2m each to the project,
and the MIT team is talking with Samsung, Motorola and News Corporation.
They hope to have the first working prototype ready by September 1 and samples

15

by the end of the year.

However, some people argue that the digital divide is a symptom of inequality,
Para 3
not the cause of it. What people in the developing world really need are water,
food, jobs, decent healthcare and sanitation.
"Laptops, as we know them, are a luxury," agrees Negroponte. "Education is not.
Para 4

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At $ 100, this is about learning and exploration, not giving kids costly tools and
toys. Almost anything, from healthcare to food to birth control, can be addressed
2

well, if not best, through education. The deeper divides are unequivocally
proportional to education. Peace will never happen as long as there is poverty.
Poverty can only be eliminated through education."
25

Papert, one of the world's leading theorists on child learning and inventor of the
educational Logo computer language, says it is important to think about savings

Para 5

as well as costs. "Getting information online saves the cost of printing textbooks,
and this is a case where what is cheaper is also better," he says. "A much bigger
saving is the cost of the books that every student should have been given but only
30

rich families could afford. . . The computer can serve as a library, a laboratory
and an art studio, saving the cost of these or making those that exist far more
effective."
Papert believes $ 100 laptops will also be invaluable resources for teachers, who
constantly need to relearn. "The days when a future teacher could be trained to do Para 6

35

everything that needs to be done in a career of teaching are over," he says. "The
world changes too fast."
So what will the children get for $ 100, considering a half-decent laptop can cost
10 times that much? The goal is to provide a laptop that does everything a

Para 7

conventional laptop can. It will have a 12in colour screen and run Linux and
40

other open source software. It will be Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled, with many USB
ports. The laptops will not have lots of storage space, and will not be hooked up
via a conventional local area networks, but will rely on mesh networks, where
one child's laptop will act as the print server, one the DVD player, and another
the mass storage device.

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The most expensive part of any laptop is the screen, so instead of using expensive
LCD displays, the MIT team is developing a flat rear-projection screen. The other Para 8

alternative is based on electronic ink, invented by Joseph Jacobson, also from

MIT. Screens are expected to cost less than $ 30.
The price of software also needs to be addressed. Negroponte says PCs are
50

"obese" with software and compares them to a large corporation, where half the

Para 9

people manage the other half. "A svelte Linux can do wonders for cost," he says.
But surely a svelte desktop is cheaper than a svelte laptop? Desktops can be
bolted down so no one can steal them, and you can repair one in a dusty shed
with nothing more than a screwdriver. Laptops, on the other hand, need a clean
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environment, a lot of IT knowledge and special tools to repair them.

While Negroponte agrees that desktops are cheaper, he says mobility is
important, especially when it comes to taking the computer home at night.

Para 10

"Recent experiments in Maine schools have shown the huge value of using a
laptop across all of one's studies, as well as for play," he says. "Bringing the
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laptop home engages the family."

Similar experiments in the UK had to be abandoned when it was found that
children who took laptops home after school became targets for muggers, but

Para 11

perhaps this will be less of a problem in rural China, which is Negroponte's first
potential customer.
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This is not the first attempt to bring cheap computing to the developing world many others have tried and failed. A $ 199 PC called iToaster was launched in
Para 12
June 1999, and flopped soon after. Netpliance's iOpener did the same, although
these were aimed at US users.
More recently, we have had the Simputer, a battery-powered handheld computer

70

developed by the Indian not-for-profit Simputer Trust, and the Personal Internet
Communicator (PIC), launched in October 2004 by AMD, which sells for $ 185.

Para 13

How many either of these will sell remains to be seen.

More successful are those who give reconditioned PCs to the developing world.
British charity Digital Links International has provided 15,000 computers to
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Para 14

Africa, a continent where less than 2% of children leave school having touched a
computer. The charity collects second-hand computers from corporations,
refurbishes them, and sells them to schools for about $ 45. This is done through
local distribution partners who provide training and support.
"Obviously the ability to pay for ICT equipment is the largest barrier to access in

80

developing countries, but there are other hurdles too," says Kate Woode,

Para 15

corporate development and donations coordinator for Digital Links. "This

includes electricity, as the supply is often erratic or nonexistent, and transport, as
often poor road quality results in a significant percentage of machines being
damaged en route.
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"There is also a lack of trained technicians, especially in schools. Without

sufficient training and support, IT equipment put in schools is often under

Para 16

utilised, and in some cases entirely redundant. Any meaningful roll-out of IT

hardware must be accompanied by training to have any impact. This is even more
important for open source software, as it is even more unfamiliar."
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But Negroponte is no ivory tower academic. He has had hands-on experience of

providing ICT to schoolchildren in poor rural communities. To get over the

Para 17

power hurdle, the MIT team is looking into what it calls "parasitic power" powering a laptop just by typing on the keys. The laptop will also be extremely
robust - "almost military grade," says Negroponte - and will be simple enough so
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that a child can repair it. Flash memory will be used instead of a hard drive as it
is much more durable. But Negroponte is unrepentant about using Linux and

OpenOffice: "Open source is key because it's perfect in keeping with the ethos of
a $ 100 people's computer."
The $ 100 laptop is still a concept, with many hurdles to overcome. But with
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more than nine out of 10 people in the world having no internet access, let's hope
the MIT team can succeed where so many others have failed.

UPC Reading Text 2

(Total 40 marks)

The following text is adapted from:

Are we still evolving?.

Editorial, New Scientist
6

Para 18

Questions about the evolution of modern humans must rank among the most

Para 1

intriguing in all science. Are we still evolving? If we are, what subtle pressures
are changing us? In which direction are they pushing us and what will we be like
in, say, 1000 years? Fascinating as these questions are, they are also
5

controversial, and the answers are likely to offend sensitivities over such things
as the relationship between genes and intelligence, or genes and "race". Equally,
negative memories of eugenics1 are never far away.
In the face of such fraught political questions, some biologists would prefer to

Para 2

believe that our evolution more or less stopped before the emergence of modern
10

humans some 50,000 years ago. That position is becoming increasingly difficult
to maintain, and it receives a further hammering from a study published this
week. It identifies human genes that have been selected for in the past 10,000
years: not just one or two genes, but more than 700.
Jonathan Pritchard and colleagues at the University of Chicago searched the

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Para 3

entire human genome for instances of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs),

single DNA bases that can vary between individuals. The closer SNPs are to one
another, the more likely they are to be inherited together, but over generations the
pattern of SNPs is disrupted by the genetic shuffling that takes place when sperm
and egg are created.

20

However, in genes that are being selected for, the pattern of SNPs is unusually
consistent across a population because there has been little time for them to be
reshuffled. What's more, the distance between SNP variations around these genes
provides a measure of how old they are. Pritchard's team found that all their
genes have evolved between about 6000 and 10,000 years ago (PLoS Biology,

The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective

breeding

Para 4

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vol 4, page e72).

So which genes have evolved? One group, which play a part in our sense of smell Para 5
and in fertility and reproduction, have been identified before from comparisons
with the chimpanzee genome. Some are familiar from other research, such as the
emergence of the lactase gene, which let adults digest milk.

30

Many more of the genes identified by the study were not previously known to be
Para 6
evolving, among them genes for skin pigmentation, skeletal development and
hair formation and patterning. Others govern food metabolism, most notably the
leptin receptor, which controls how fat is stored in our bodies. Brain function is
also on the list, with genes evolving for a susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease

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and for the receptor for GABA, the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter. In
some cases, however, the researchers couldn't identify the evolving gene or the
effect it had on people carrying it.
Pritchard and his team also found that not everyone was subject to the same

Para 7

selection pressures. They studied people from three populations: East Asians,
40

Europeans and Yoruba from Nigeria. These groups shared only about one-fifth of
the evolving genes. The other four-fifths were split more or less evenly between
the groups. In other words, the populations were evolving differently.
In general terms it is easy to see why some of Pritchard's genes might have

Para 8

evolved. After all, in the past 10,000 years, humans have experienced vast
45

changes in climate, habitat and diet. But the precise pressures generating genetic
change and the direction in which they have been pushing are still concealed.
Uncovering those pressures and their effects is likely to become a popular area of
research.
Of course, what we really want to know is whether selection pressures are

Para 9

50

changing us today, and if so how. While some argue that this is an impossible
task, we may be able to pinpoint changes that have taken place more recently
than thousands of years ago. Such results will come from gene banks containing
samples from tens of thousands of people. Being able to correlate diseases and
other traits with genes could provide insights into our evolution in just the past

55

few hundred years.

Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, has famously argued that

Para 10

natural selection is no longer important for humans. He points out that natural
selection works by ensuring that individuals whose genes are best adapted to the
prevailing environment are most likely to survive and reproduce. But, he says, in
60

the developed world, survival no longer depends on genes. "Just 500 years ago yesterday in evolutionary terms - a British baby had only a 50 per cent chance of
making it to reproductive age. Now, the figure is around 99 per cent," Jones says.
There is also a more level playing field in the reproduction game. "No longer, as
in the Middle Ages, do a few rich men have many children while many of those

65

in poverty are forced into the army or into monasteries," he says. Jones admits
that measuring reproductive success, particularly for men, can be difficult, but he
calculates that the changes in survival and reproduction rates have led to a
decrease of around 70 per cent in the opportunity for natural selection to act
today, compared with the time when our ancestors lived as peasant farmers.

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Combining research using gene banks and SNPs should provide a much clearer
view of the mechanisms underlying human evolution. If we can see where we
have come from, and know the sorts of pressures that change us and how, it
should be possible to have a good stab at saying how we are changing today.
Controversial or not, that is too intriguing an opportunity to pass up.

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Para 11

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