The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

TEXT 3: Grabbing Water from Future Generations

The source of his wealth, he said, was a large water reservoir beside his house. And as we chatted, a tanker drew up on the road. The driver dropped a large pipe from his vehicle into the reservoir and began sucking up the contents.

Ponnusami explained: "I no longer grow crops, I farm water. The tankers come about ten times a day. I don't have to do anything except keep my reservoir full." To do that, he had drilled boreholes deep into the rocks beneath his fields, and inserted pumps that brought water to the surface 24 hours a day. He sold every tanker load for about four dollars. "It's a good living, and it's risk-free," he said. "While the water lasts."

A neighbor told me she does the same thing. Water mining was the local industry. But, she said, "every day the water is reducing. We drilled two new boreholes a few weeks ago and one has already failed."

Surely this is madness, I suggested. Why not go back to real farming before the wells run dry? "If everybody did that, it would be well and good," she agreed. "But they don't. We are all trying to make as much money as we can before the water runs out."

Ponnusami and his neighbors were selling water to dyeing and bleaching factories in Tirupur. The factories once got their water from a giant reservoir on southern India's biggest river, the Kaveri. But the Kaveri was now being pumped dry by farmers and industry farther upstream. The reservoir was nearly empty most of the year. So the factories had taken to buying up underground water from local farmers.

It is a trade that is growing all over India—and all over the world.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS BOOKLET.
Questions 16 through 20 (on your answer sheet circle the correct letter A, B, C, or D)

16. 
    Based on the article, the water farmers could be best described as:
    

B) Myopic

C) Forward-thinking

D) Superfluous

16. 
    What does Suresh Ponnusami’s neighbor think of water mining?
    

B) She thinks it would be better if the community went back to farming crops.

C) She thinks farming crops was a useless way to make money.

D) She thinks the money from water mining is irrelevant and everyone should farm crops.

16. 
    Why won’t people revert to farming the traditional things like crops, and using the water on their land to water them?
    

B) Because their neighbors would do it too.

C) Because the water is an easily replenished resource.

D) Because there is no demand for crops to be farmed.

16. 
    The mention of the Kaveri serves what purpose in this text?
    

B) To form a contrast between two situations with differing consequences

C) To imply future opportunities in the country

D) To suggest impending calamity for the country

16. 
    How does water farming relate to the title of the text?
    

B) Water farmers are grabbing the profits now, while there are profits to be made, without

considering what the selling of their water will do to the people of the future.

C) Water farmers are greedy and only want what is best for their future grandchildren.

D) Governments should regulate the amount of water farmed.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_wilkinson

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi-commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. Spread mainly by videos on the Internet, it has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill seekers and martial-arts adepts, who regard it as part extreme sport—its founder would like to see it included in the Olympics—and part grueling meditative pursuit. Movies like its daredevil qualities. A bracing parkour chase begins “Casino Royale,” the recent James Bond movie. It includes jumps from the boom of one tower crane to that of another, but parkour’s customary obstacles are walls, stairwells, fences, railings, and gaps between roofs—it is an urban rather than a pastoral pursuit. The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.

Parkour was created in Lisses, a medium prosperous suburb of Paris, in the early nineteen-nineties, by a reserved and restless teen-age boy named David Belle. His father, Raymond, who died in 1999, was an acrobat and a hero fireman. In 1969, he appeared in newspaper photographs hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter above Notre Dame. The night before, someone had hung a Vietcong flag on the cathedral’s tower. Raymond was lowered like a spider on a thread, and he grabbed the flag. David Belle is now thirty-three. He has an older brother, Jeff, who is also a fireman; they have the same father but different mothers. (A third brother died a few years ago, of an overdose.) David was raised by his mother’s father. On the few occasions when he tried to live with Raymond, their temperaments clashed. David’s grandfather told him stories about Raymond that revolved around his exploits—“Spider-Man stories and Tarzan stories,” David says—and left him wishing to emulate him. He wanted to be Spider-Man when he grew up.

A. Bannister

B. Balancing bar

C. Balcony

D. Gutter

22. 
    According to the text, where is parkour popular?
    

B. Shang Hai

C. Johannesburg

D. Toronto

22. 
    The goal of parkour, according to Wilkinson, is:
    

B. To promote physical fitness

C. To surmount everyday obstacles

D. To fight crime.

22. 
    In which of these places are you most likely to see parkour?
    

B. A national park.

C. An apartment building

D. An equestrian competition

22. 
    You could replace the phrase “dead run” with:
    

B. Jog

D. Sprint

TEXT 5: From “Babies Recognize Mother Tongue From Birth” by Breanna Draxler, Discover Magazine, 2013.

The researchers tested American and Swedish newborns between seven hours and three days old. Each baby was given a pacifier hooked up to a computer. When the baby sucked on the pacifier, it triggered the computer to produce a vowel sound—sometimes in English and sometimes in Swedish. The vowel sound was repeated until the baby stopped sucking. When the baby resumed sucking, a new vowel sound would start.

The sucking was used as a metric to determine the babies’ interest in each vowel sound. More interest meant more sucks, according to the study soon to be published in Acta Paediatrica. In both countries, babies sucked on the pacifier longer when they heard foreign vowel sounds as compared to those of their mom’s native language. The researchers suggest that this is because the babies already recognize the vowels from their mothers and were keen to learn new ones.

Hearing develops in a baby’s brain at around the 30th week of pregnancy, which leaves the last 10 weeks of gestation for babies to put that newfound ability to work. Baby brains are quick to learn, so a better understanding of these mechanisms may help researchers figure out how to improve the learning process for the rest of us.

22. 
    According to the article, scientists have new evidence that suggests that infants begin to recognize language:
    
    1. 
       About three months before birth.
       
    2. 
       About seven hours to three days after birth.
       
    3. 
       About three months after birth.
       
    4. 
       About 6 months after birth.
       

22. 
    For what purpose were Swedish and American babies most likely chosen for use in the study:
    
    1. 
       Swedish and American babies learn differently
       
    2. 
       Swedish and American parents treat their children differently
       
    3. 
       Swedish and English vowel sounds are different
       
    4. 
       Swedish and English languages are similar
       

22. 
    When hearing a vowel from a foreign language, activity on the pacifier increased for both groups of infants which indicates:
    
    1. 
       Abhorrence
       
    2. 
       Fascination
       
    3. 
       Apathy
       
    4. 
       Inundation
       

22. 
    What does “gestation” most nearly mean?
    
    1. 
       Deterioration
       
    2. 
       Activity
       
    3. 
       The process of hearing
       
    4. 
       Development
       

22. 
    Aside from learning about a baby’s profound ability to rapidly recognize and acquire language, why else is this study important, according to this author?
    
    1. 
       It’s an effective test of a modern pacifier product.
       
    2. 
       Studying accelerated learning in infants may shine light on advancing learning for adults.
       
    3. 
       It illustrates that all infants have the inclination to learn new languages.
       
    4. 
       It demonstrates that linguistics and cognitive science are linked.