Day 26

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.

Last man standing

Some 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens beat other hominids to become the only
surviving species. Kate Ravilious reveals how we did it.

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A Today, there are over seven billion people living on Earth. No other species has
exerted as much influence over the planet as us. But turn the clock back 80,000

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years and we were one of a number of species roaming the Earth.Our own
species, Homo sapiens (Latin for ‘wise man’), was most successful in Africa. In
western Eurasia, the Neanderthals dominated, while Homo erectus may have
lived in Indonesia. Meanwhile, an unusual finger bone and tooth, discovered in
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Denisova cave in Siberia in 2008, have led scientists to believe that yet another
human population – the Denisovans – may also have been widespread across
Asia. Somewhere along the line, these other human species died out, leaving
Homo sapiens as the sole survivor. So what made us the winners in the battle for
survival?

B Some 74,000 years ago, the Toba ‘supervolcano’ on the Indonesian island of
Sumatra erupted. The scale of the event was so great that ash from the eruption
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was flung as far as eastern India, more than 2,000 kilometers away. Oxford
archaeologist Mike Petraglia and his team have uncovered thousands of stone
tools buried underneath the Toba ash. The mix of hand axes and spear tips have
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led Petraglia to speculate that Homo sapiens and Homo erectus were both living
in eastern India prior to the Toba eruption. Based on careful examination of the
tools and dating of the sediment layers where they were found, Petraglia and his
team suggest that Homo sapiens arrived in eastern India around 78,000 years
ago, migrating out of Africa and across Arabia during a favourable climate period.
After their arrival, the simple tools belonging to Homo erectus seemed to lessen
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in number and eventually disappear completely. ‘We think that Homo sapiens had
a more efficient hunting technology, which could have given them the edge,’ says
Petraglia. ‘Whether the eruption of Toba also played a role in the extinction of the
Homo erectus-like species is unclear to us.’

C Some 45,000 years later, another fight for survival took place. This time, the
location was Europe and the protagonists were another species, the Neanderthals.
They were a highly successful species that dominated the European landscape for
300,000 years. Yet within just a few thousand years of the arrival of Homo sapiens,
their numbers plummeted. They eventually disappeared from the landscape
around 30,000 years ago, with their last known refuge being southern Iberia,
including Gibraltar. Initially, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived alongside each

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otherand had no reason to compete. But then Europe’s climate swung into a cold,
inhospitable, dry phase. ‘Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations had to retreat
to refugia (pockets of habitable land). This heightened competition between the two
groups,’ explains Chris Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in
London.

D Both species were strong and stockier than the average human today, but
Neanderthals were particularly robust. ‘Their skeletons show that they had broad
shoulders and thick necks,’ says Stringer. ‘Homo sapiens, on the other hand, had
longer forearms, which undoubtedly enabled them to throw a spear from some
distance, with less danger and using relatively little energy,’ explains Stringer. This
long-range ability may have given Homo sapiens an advantage in hunting. When

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it came to keeping warm, Homo sapiens had another skill: weaving and sewing.
Archaeologists have uncovered simple needles fashioned from ivory and bone
alongside Homo sapiens, dating as far back as 35,000 years ago. ‘Using this

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technology, we could use animal skins to make ourselves tents, warm clothes and
fur boots,’ says Stringer. In contrast, Neanderthals never seemed to master sewing
skills, instead relying on pinning skins together with thorns.
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E A thirst for exploration provided Homo sapiens with another significant advantage
over Neanderthals. Objects such as shell beads and flint tools, discovered many
miles from their source, show that our ancestors travelled over large distances, in
order to barter and exchange useful materials, and share ideas and knowledge. By
contrast, Neanderthals tended to keep themselves to themselves, living in small
groups. They misdirected their energies by only gathering resources from their
immediate surroundings and perhaps failing to discover new technologies outside
their territory.
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F Some of these differences in behavior may have emerged because the two species
thought in different ways. By comparing skull shapes, archaeologists have shown
that Homo sapiens had a more developed temporal lobe – the regions at the side
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of the brain, associated with listening, language and long-term memory. ‘We think
that Homo sapiens had a significantly more complex language than Neanderthals
and were able to comprehend and discuss concepts such as the distant past and
future,’ says Stringer. Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York,
has recently suggested that Homo sapiens may also have had a greater diversity
of brain types than Neanderthals. ‘Our research indicates that high-precision tools,
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new hunting technologies and the development of symbolic communication may all
have come about because they were willing to include people with “different” minds
and specialised roles in their society,’ she explains. ‘We see similar kinds of injuries
on male and female Neanderthal skeletons, implying there was no such division of
labour,’ says Spikins.

G Thus by around 30,000 years ago, many talents and traits were well established
in Homo sapiens societies but still absent from Neanderthal communities. Stringer
thinks that the Neanderthals were just living in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘They had to compete with Homo sapiens during a phase of very unstable climate
across Europe. During each rapid climate fluctuation, they may have suffered

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greater losses of people than Homo sapiens, and thus were slowly worn down,’ he
says. If the climate had remained stable throughout, they might still be here.”

Questions 14–18

The Reading passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.

14

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a comparison of a range of physical features of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens

15 reference to items that were once used for trade

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16 mention of evidence for the existence of a previously unknown human species

17 mention of the part played by ill fortune in the downfall of Neanderthal society

18 reference to the final geographical location of Neanderthals

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Questions 19–22

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
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Write your answers in boxes 19–22 on your answer sheet.

19 Analysis of stone tools and …………… has enabled Petraglia’s team to put
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forward an arrival date for Homo sapiens in eastern India.

20 Homo sapiens used both …………… to make sewing implements.

21 The territorial nature of Neanderthals may have limited their ability to acquire
resources and ……………
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22 Archaeologists examined …………… in order to get an insight into Neanderthal

and Homo sapiens’ capacity for language and thought.

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Questions 23–26

Look at the following statements and the list of researchers, A–C, below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher.

Write the correct letter, A–C, in boxes 23–26 on your answer sheet.

23 No evidence can be found to suggest that Neanderthal communities allocated

tasks to different members.

24 Homo sapiens may have been able to plan ahead.

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25 Scientists cannot be sure whether a sudden natural disaster contributed to the
loss of a human species.

26 Environmental conditions restricted the areas where Homo sapiens and

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Neanderthals could live.
ZO List of Researchers

A Mike Petraglia
B Chris Stringer
C Penny Spikins
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+97 130 68 22 @ieltszone_uz

 Day 27
READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

The new way to be a fifth-grader

by Clive Thompson
Khan Academy is changing the rules of education.

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I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth-grader is
pondering. It’s a trigonometry problem. Carpenter, a serious-faced ten-year-old, pauses

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for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” The computer tells him that he’s
correct. “It took a while for me to work it out,” he admits sheepishly. The software then
generates another problem, followed by another, until eventually he’s done ten in a row.
Last November, his teacher, Kami Thordarson, began using Khan Academy in her
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class. It is an educational website on which students can watch some 2,400 videos.
The videos are anything but sophisticated. At seven to 14 minutes long, they consist
of a voiceover by the site’s founder, Salman Khan, chattily describing a mathematical
concept or explaining how to solve a problem, while his hand-scribbled formulas and
diagrams appear on screen. As a student, you can review a video as many times as
you want, scrolling back several times over puzzling parts and fast-forwarding through
the boring bits you already know. Once you’ve mastered a video, you can move on to
the next one.
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Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to

her normal instruction. But it quickly became far more than that. She is now on her way
to “flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with
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Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then in class, they focus on working
on the problem areas together. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so
that lectures are viewed in the children’s own time and homework is done at school. It
sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this reversal makes (line 40*) sense when you
think about it. It is when they are doing homework that students are really grappling
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with a subject and are most likely to want someone to talk to. And Khan Academy
provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets them see the instant a student
gets stuck.
For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching
to the “middle” of the class. They stand at the whiteboard trying to get 25 or more
students to learn at the same pace. Advanced students get bored and tune out, lagging
ones get lost and tune out, and pretty soon half the class is not paying attention. Since
the rise of personal computers in the 1980s, educators have hoped that technology
could save the day by offering lessons tailored to each child. Schools have spent
millions of dollars on sophisticated classroom technology, but the effort has been in
vain. The one-to-one instruction it requires is, after all, prohibitively expensive. What

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country can afford such a luxury?

Khan never intended to overhaul the school curricula and he doesn’t have a consistent,
comprehensive plan for doing so. Nevertheless, some of his fans believe that he has
stumbled onto the solution to education’s middle-of-the-class mediocrity. Most notable
among them is Bill Gates, whose foundation has invested $1.5 million in Khan’s site.
Students have pointed out that Khan is particularly good at explaining all the hidden,
small steps in math problems – steps that teachers often gloss over. He has an
uncanny ability to inhabit the mind of someone who doesn’t already understand
something.
However, not all educators are enamoured with Khan and his site. Gary Stager, a
long-time educational consultant and advocate of laptops in classrooms, thinks Khan

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Academy is not innovative at all. The videos and software modules, he contends, are
just a high-tech version of the outdated teaching techniques–lecturing and drilling.
Schools have become “joyless test-prep factories,” he says, and Khan Academy caters

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to this dismal trend.
As Sylvia Martinez, president of an organization focusing on technology in the
classroom, puts it, “The things they’re doing are really just rote.” Flipping the classroom
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isn’t an entirely new idea, Martinez says, and she doubts that it would work for the
majority of pupils: “I’m sorry, but if they can’t understand the lecture in a classroom,
they’re not going to grasp it better when it’s done through a video at home.”
Another limitation of Khan’s site is that the drilling software can only handle questions
where the answers are unambiguously right or wrong, like math or chemistry; Khan
has relatively few videos on messier, grey-area subjects like history. Khan and Gates
admit there is no easy way to automate the teaching of writing–even though it is just as
critical as math.
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Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it is not clear
that schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of
students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan
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Academy, you wind up with a ten-year-old who has already mastered high-school
physics? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who have seen
Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could
modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”
Khan’s success has injected him into the heated wars over school reform. Reformers
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today, by and large, believe student success should be carefully tested, with teachers
and principals receiving better pay if their students advance more quickly. In essence,
Khan doesn’t want to change the way institutions teach; he wants to change how
people learn, whether they’re in a private school or a public school–or for that matter,
whether they’re a student or an adult trying to self-educate in Ohio, Brazil, Russia, or
India. One member of Khan’s staff is spearheading a drive to translate the videos into
ten major languages. It’s classic start-up logic: do something novel, do it with speed,
and the people who love it will find you.

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Questions 27–31

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet.

27 What do you learn about the student in the first paragraph?

A He has not used the maths software before.

B He did not expect his answer to the problem to be correct.
C He was not initially doing the right maths problem.
D He did not immediately know how to solve the maths problem.

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28 What does the writer say about the content of the Khan Academy videos?

A They have been produced in a professional manner.

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B They include a mix of verbal and visual features.
C Some of the maths problems are too easy.
D Some of the explanations are too brief.
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29 What does this reversal refer to in line 40*?

A going back to spending fewer hours in school

B students being asked to explain answers to teachers
C swapping the activities done in the class and at home
D the sudden improvement in students’ maths performance

30 What does the writer say about teaching to the ‘middle’ of the class?
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A Teachers become too concerned about weaker students.

B Technology has not until now provided a solution to the problem.
C Educators have been unwilling to deal with the issues.
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D Students in this category quickly become bored.

31 Students praise Khan’s videos because they

A show the extent of his mathematical knowledge.

B deal with a huge range of maths problems.
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C provide teaching at different ability levels.

D cover details that are often omitted in class.

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Questions 32–36

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the reading passage?

In boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32 Thordarson’s first impressions of how she would use Khan Academy turned out to
be wrong.

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33 Khan wished to completely change the way courses are taught in schools.

34 School grade levels are based on the idea of students progressing at different

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rates.

35 Some principals have invited Khan into their schools to address students.

36 Khan has given advice to other people involved in start-up projects.

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Questions 37–40

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G, below.

Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet.

37 Bill Gates thinks Khan Academy

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38 According to Gary Stager, Khan Academy

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39 Sylvia Martinez regrets that Khan Academy

40 Ben Kamens has been told that Khan Academy

A is only suited to subjects where questions have exact answers.

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B can teach both the strongest and the weakest pupils in a class.
C means the teaching of other school subjects will have to be changed.
D only prepares students to pass exams.
E could cause student achievement to improve too quickly.
F requires all students to own the necessary technology.
G is unlikely to have a successful outcome for most students.

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