Bamboo, a wonder plant

The wonder plant with an uncertain future: more than a billion people rely on bamboo for either their shelter or
income, while many endangered species depend on it for their survival. Despite its apparent abundance, a new
report says that species of bamboo may be under serious threat.
A. Every year, during the rainy season, the mountain gorillas of Central Africa migrate to the foothills and lower
slopes of the Virunga Mountains to graze on bamboo. For the 650 0r so that remain in the wild, it’s a vital food
source. Although there are at almost 150 types of plant, as well as various insects and other invertebrates,
bamboo accounts for up t0 90 percent of their diet at this time of year. Without it, says Ian Redmond, chairman
of the Ape Alliance, their chances of survival would be reduced significantly. Gorillas aren’t the only locals keen
on bamboo. For the people who live close to the Virungas, it’s a valuable and versatile raw material used for
building houses and making household items such as mats and baskets. But in the past 100 years or so, resources
have come under increasing pressure as populations have exploded and large areas of bamboo forest have been
cleared to make way for farms and commercial plantations.
B. Sadly, this isn’t an isolated story. All over the world, the ranges of many bamboo species appear to be
shrinking, endangering the people and animals that depend upon them. But despite bamboo’s importance, we
know surprisingly little about it. A recent report published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the
Inter-national Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR) has revealed just how profound is our ignorance of
global bamboo resources, particularly in relation to conservation. There are almost 1,600 recognized species of
bamboo, but the report concentrated on the 1,200 or so woody varieties distinguished by the strong stems, or
culms, that most people associate with this versatile plant. Of these, only 38 ‘priority species’ identified for their
commercial value have been the subject of any real scientific research, and this has focused mostly on matters
relating to their viability as a commodity. This problem isn’t confined to bamboo. Compared to the work carried
out on animals, the science of assessing the conservation status of plants is still in its infancy. “People have only
started looking hard at this during the past 10-15 years, and only now are they getting a handle on how to go
about it systematically,” says Dr. Valerie Kapos, one of the report’s authors and a senior adviser in forest ecology
and conservation to the UNEP.
C. Bamboo is a type of grass. It comes in a wide variety of forms, ranging in height from 30 centimeters to more
than 40 meters. It is also the world’s fastest-growing woody plant; some species can grow more than a meter in a
day. Bamboo’s ecological role extends beyond providing food and habitat for animals. Bamboo tends to grow in
stands made up of groups of individual plants that grow from root systems known as rhizomes. Its extensive
rhizome systems, which tie in the top layers of the soil, are crucial in preventing soil erosion. And there is
growing evidence that bamboo plays an important part in determining forest structure and dynamics. “Bamboo’s
pattern of mass flowering and mass death leaves behind large areas of dry biomass that attract wildfire,” says
Kapos. “When these burn, they create patches of open ground within the forest far bigger than would be left by a
fallen tree.”Patchiness helps to preserve diversity because certain plant species do better during the early stages
of regeneration when there are gaps in the canopy.
D. However, bamboo’s most immediate significance lies in its economic value. Modern processing techniques
mean that it can be used in a variety of ways, for example, as flooring and laminates. One of the fastest growing
bamboo products is paper-25 percent of paper produced in India is made from bamboo fiber, and in Brazil,
100,000 hectares of bamboo are grown for its production. Of course, bamboo’s main function has always been in
domestic applications, and as a locally traded commodity it’s worth about $4.5billion annually. Because of its
versatility, flexibility and strength (its tensile strength compares to that of some steel), it has traditionally been
used in construction. Today, more than one billion people worldwide live in bamboo houses. Bamboo is often the
only readily available raw material for people in many developing countries, says Chris Stapleton, a research
associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “Bamboo can be harvested from forest areas or grown quickly
elsewhere, and then converted simply without expensive machinery or facilities,” he says. “In this way, it
contributes substantially to poverty alleviation and wealth creation.”
E. Given bamboo’s value in economic and ecological terms, the picture painted by theUNEP report is all the
more worrying. But keen horticulturists will spot an apparent contradiction here. Those who’ve followed the
recent vogue for cultivating exotic species in their gardens will point out that if it isn’t kept in check, bamboo can
cause real problems. “In a lot of places, the people who live with bamboo don’t perceive it as being endangered
in any way,” says Kapos. “In fact, a lot of bamboo species are actually very invasive if they’ve been introduced.”
So why are so many species endangered? There are two separate issues here, says Ray Townsend, vice president
of the British Bamboo Society and arboretum manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “Some plants are
threatened because they can’t survive in the habitat-they aren’t strong enough or there aren’t enough of them,
perhaps. But bamboo can take care of itself-it is strong enough to survive if left alone. What is under threat is its
habitat.” It is the physical disturbance that is the threat to bamboo, says Kapos. “When forest goes, it is converted
into something else: there isn’t anywhere for forest plants such as bamboo to grow if you create a cattle pasture.”
F. Around the world, bamboo species are routinely protected as part of forest eco-systems in national parks and
reserves, but there is next to nothing that protects bamboo in the wild for its own sake. However, some small
steps are being taken to address this situation. The UNEP-INBAR report will help conservationists to establish
effective measures aimed at protecting valuable wild bamboo species. Townsend, too, sees the UNEP report as
an important step forward in promoting the cause of bamboo conservation. “Until now, bamboo has been
perceived as a second-class plant. When you talk about places such as the Amazon, everyone always thinks about
the hardwoods. Of course these are significant, but there is a tendency to overlook the plants they are associated
with, which are often bamboo species. In many ways, it is the most important plant known to man. I can’t think
of another plant that is used so much and is so commercially important in so many countries.” He believes that
the most important first step is to get scientists into the field. “We need to go out there, look at these plants and
see how they survive and then use that information to conserve them for the future.”
Questions 1-7
Reading Passage I has six sections A-F.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet
NB You may use any letter more than once
1. Comparison of bamboo with other plant species
2. Commercial products of bamboo
3. Limited extent of existing research
4. A human development that destroyed large areas of bamboo
5. How bamboos are put to a variety of uses
6. An explanation of how bamboo can help the survival of a range of plants
7. The methods used to study bamboo
Questions 8-11
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-D) with opinions or deeds below.
Write the appropriate letters A-D in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet.
NB you may use any letter more than once
A. Ian Redmond
B. Ray Townsend
C. Chris Stapleton
8. Destroying bamboo jeopardizes to wildlife.
9. People have very confined knowledge of bamboo.
10. 1Some people do not think that bamboo is endangered.
11. Bamboo has loads of commercial potentials.
Questions 12-13
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet
12. What environmental problem does the unique root system of bamboo prevent?
13. Which bamboo product is experiencing market expansion?

Renewable Energy
An insight into the progress in renewable energy research
A. The race is on for the ultimate goal of renewable energy: electricity production at prices that are competitive
with coal-fired power stations, but without coal’s pollution. Some new technologies are aiming to be the first to
push coal from its position as Australia’s chief source of electricity.
B. At the moment the front-runner in renewable energy is wind technology. According to Peter Bergin of
Australian Hydro, one of Australia’s leading wind energy companies, there have been no dramatic changes in
windmill design for many years, but the cumulative effects of numerous small improvements have had a major
impact on cost. ‘We’re reaping the benefits of 30 years of research in Europe, without have to make the same
mistakes that they did,’ Mr Bergin says.
C. Electricity can be produced from coal at around 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, but only if the environmental costs
are ignored. ‘Australia has the second cheapest electricity in the world, and this makes it difficult for renewable
to compete,’ says Richard Hunter of the Australian Ecogeneration Association (AEA). Nevertheless, the AEA
reports: ‘The production cost of a kilowatt-hour of wind power is one-fifth of what it was 20 years ago,’ or
around 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
D. Australian Hydro has dozens of wind monitoring stations across Australia as part of its aim to become
Australia’s pre-eminent renewable energy company. Despite all these developments, wind power remains one of
the few forms of alternative energy where Australia is nowhere near the global cutting edge, mostly just
replicating European designs.
E. While wind may currently lead the way, some consider a number of technologies under development have
more potential. In several cases, Australia is at the forefront of global research in the area. Some of them are very
site-specific, ensuring that they may never become dominant market players. On the other hand, these newer
developments are capable of providing more reliable power, avoiding the major criticism of windmills – the need
for back-up on a calm day.
F. One such development uses hot, dry rocks. Deep beneath South Australia, radiation from elements contained
in granite heats the rocks. Layers of insulating sedimentation raise the temperatures in some location to 250°
centigrade. An Australian firm, Geoenergy, is proposing to pump water 3.5 kilometres into the earth, where it
will travel through tiny fissures in the granite, heating up as it goes until it escapes as steam through another
drilled hole.
G. No greenhouse gases are produced, but the system needs some additional features if it is to be
environmentally friendly. Dr Prue Chopra, a geophysicist at the Australian National University and one of the
founders of Geoenergy, note that the steam will bring with it radon gas, along through a heat exchanger and then
sent back underground for another cycle. Technically speaking, hot dry rocks are not a renewable source of
energy. However, the Australian source is so large it could supply the entire country’s needs for thousands of
years at current rates of consumption.
H. Two other proposals for very different ways to harness sun and wind energy have surfaced recently. Progress
continues with Australian company EnviroPower’s plans for Australia’s first solar chimney near Mildura, in
Victoria. Under this scheme, a tall tower will draw hot air from a greenhouse built to cover the surrounding 5
km². As the air rises, it will drive a turbine* to produce electricity. The solar tower combines three very old
technologies – the chimney, the turbine and the greenhouse – to produce something quite new. It is this reliance
on proven engineering principles that led Enviropower’s CEO, Richard Davies, to state: There is no doubt this
technology will work, none at all.’
I. This year, Enviropower recognized that the quality of sunlight in the Mildura district will require a
substantially larger collecting area than was previously thought. However, spokesperson kay Firth says that a
new location closer to Mildura will enable Enviropower to balance the increased costs with extra revenue.
Besides saving in transmission costs, the new site ‘will mean increased revenue from tourism and use of power
for telecommunications. We’ll also be able to use the outer 500 metres for agribusiness.’ Wind speeds closer to
the tower will be too high for farming.
J. Another Australian company, Wavetech, is achieving success with ways of harvesting the energy in waves.
Wavetech’s invention uses a curved surface to push waves into a chamber, where the flowing water column
pushes air back and forth through a turbine. Wavetech was created when Dr Tim Devine offered the idea to the
world leader in wave generator manufacturers, who rather surprisingly rejected it. Dr Devine responded by
establishing Wavetech and making a number of other improvements to generator design. Wavetech claims that,
at appropriate sites, ‘the cost of electricity produced with our technology should be below 4 cents per kilowatt-
hour.
K. The diversity of forms of greenhouse – friendly energy under development in Australia is remarkable.
However, support on a national level is disappointing. According to Richard Hunter of the AEA, ‘Australia has
huge potential for wind, sun and wave technology. We should really be at the forefront, but the reality is we are a
long way behind.’
Questions 14-20
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSEif the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
14. In Australia, alternative energies are less expensive than conventional electricity.
15. Geoenergy needs to adapt its system to make it less harmful to the environment.
16. Dr Prue Chopra has studied the effects of radon gas on the environment.
17. Hot, dry rocks could provide enough power for the whole of Australia.
18. The new Enviropower facility will keep tourists away.
19. Wavetech was established when its founders were turned down by another company.
20. According to AEA, Australia is a world leader in developing renewable energy.
Questions 21-26
Look at the following statements (Questions 21-26) and the list of companies below.
Match each statement with the correct company, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
21. During the process, harmful substances are prevented from escaping. List of Companies
22. Water is used to force air through a special device. A. Australian Hydro
23. 1Techniques used by other countries are being copied. B. Geoenergy
 24. The system can provide services other than energy production. C. Enviropower
25. It is planned to force water deep under the ground. D. Wavetech
26. Original estimates for part of the project have been revised.

Inside the mind of a fan: How watching sport affects the brain
A. At about the same time that the poet Homer invented the epic here, the ancient Greeks started a festival in
which men competed in a single race, about 200 metres long. The winner received a branch of wild olives. The
Greeks called this celebration the Olympics. Through the ancient sprint remains, today the Olympics are far more
than that. Indeed, the Games seem to celebrate the dream of progress as embodied in the human form. That the
Games are intoxicating to watch is beyond question. During the Athens Olympics in 2004, 3.4 billion people,
half the world, watched them on television. Certainly, being a spectator is a thrilling experience: but why?
B. In 1996, three Italian neuroscientists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Forgassi and Vittorio Gallese, examined
the premotor cortex of monkeys. The discovered that inside these primate brains there were groups of cells that
‘store vocabularies of motor actions’. Just as there are grammars of movement. These networks of cells are the
bodily ‘sentences’ we use every day, the ones our brain has chosen to retain and refine. Think, for example,
about a golf swing. To those who have only watched the Master’s Tournament on TV, golfing seems easy. To the
novice, however, the skill of casting a smooth arc with a lop-side metal stick is virtually impossible. This is
because most novices swing with their consciousness, using an area of brain next to the premotor cortex. To the
expert, on the other hand, a perfectly balanced stroke is second nature. For him, the motor action has become
memorized, and the movements are embedded in the neurons of his premotor cortex. He hits the ball with the
tranquility of his perfected autopilot.
C. These neurons in the premotor cortex, besides explaining why certain athletes seem to possess almost
unbelievable levels of skill, have an even more amazing characteristic, one that caused Rizzolatti, Fogassi and
Gallese to give them the lofty title ‘mirror neurons’. They note, The main functional characteristic of mirror
neurons is that they become active both when the monkey performs a particular action (for example, grasping an
object or holding it) and, astonishingly, when it sees another individual performing a similar action.’ Humans
have an even more elaborate mirror neuron system. These peculiar cells mirror, inside the brain, the outside
world: they enable us to internalize the actions of another. In order to be activated, though, these cells require
what the scientists call ‘goal-orientated movements’. If we are staring at a photograph, a fixed image of a runner
mid-stride, our mirror neurons are totally silent. They only fire when the runner is active: running, moving or
sprinting.
D. What these electrophysiological studies indicate is that when we watch a golfer or a runner in action, the
mirror neurons in our own premotor cortex light up as if we were the ones competing. This phenomenon of
neural mirror was first discovered in 1954, when two French physiologists, Gastaut and Berf, found that the
brains of humans vibrate with two distinct wavelengths, alpha and mu. The mu system is involved in neural
mirroring. It is active when your bodies are still, and disappears whenever we do something active, like playing a
sport or changing the TV channel. The surprising fact is that the mu signal is also quiet when we watch someone
else being active, as on TV, these results are the effect of mirror neurons.
E. Rizzolatti, Fogassi and Gallese call the idea for mirror neurons the ‘direct matching hypothesis’. They believe
that we only understand the movement of sports stars when we ‘map the visual representation of the observed
action onto our motor representation of the same action’. According to this theory, watching an Olympic athlete
‘causes the motor system of the observer to resonate. The “motor knowledge” of the observer is used to
understand the observed action.’ But mirror neurons are more than just the neural basis for our attitude to sport. It
turns out that watching a great golfer makes us better golfers, and watching a great sprinter actually makes us run
faster. This ability to learn by watching is a crucial skill. From the acquisition of language as infants to learning
facial expressions, mimesis (copying) is an essential part of being conscious. The best athletes are those with a
premotor cortex capable of imagining the movements of victory, together with the physical properties to make
those movements real.
F. But how many of us regularly watch sports in order to be a better athlete? Rather, we watch sport for the
feeling, the human drama. This feeling also derives from mirror neurons. By letting spectators share in the
motions of victory, they also allow us to share in its feelings. This is because they are directly connected to the
amygdale, one of the main brain regions involved in emotion. During the Olympics, the mirror neurons of whole
nations will be electrically identical, their athletes causing spectators to feel, just for a second or two, the same
thing. Watching sports brings people together. Most of us will never run a mile in under four minutes, or hit a
home run. Our consolation comes in watching, when we gather around the TV, we all feel, just for a moment,
what it is to do something perfectly.
Questions 27-32
Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
27. an explanation of why watching sport may be emotionally satisfying
28. an explanation of why beginners find sporting tasks difficult
29. a factor that needs to combine with mirroring to attain sporting excellence
30. a comparison of human and animal mirror neurons
31. the first discovery of brain activity related to mirror neurons
32. a claim linking observation to improvement in performance
Questions 33-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 33-35 on your answer sheet.
33. The writer uses the term ‘grammar of movement’ to mean
A. a level of sporting skill.
B. a system of words about movement.
C. a pattern of connected cells.
D. a type of golf swing.
34. The writer states that expert players perform their actions
A. without conscious thought.
B. by planning each phase of movement.
C. without regular practice.
D. by thinking about the actions of others.
35. The writer states that the most common motive for watching sport is to
A. improve personal performance.
B. feel linked with people of different nationalities.
C. experience strong positive emotions.
D. realize what skill consists of.
Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in the Reading Passage?
In boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement is true
NO if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
36. Inexpert sports players are too aware of what they are doing.
37. Monkeys have a more complex mirror neuron system than humans.
38. Looking at a photograph can activate mirror neurons.
39. Gastaut and Bert were both researchers and sports players.
40. The mu system is at rest when we are engaged in an activity.