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14.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	THE DAY I GAVE UP SMOKING I thought everyone would be pleased, but one of my colleagues was absolutely furious. 'What do you mean?' she raged. 'If it was that easy, why didn't you stop years ago?' I suppose my inability to explain how one afternoon I had been a packet-a-day, life-long smoker, and four hours later I was not, was faintly irritating. I find it curious myself. The stop-smoking session was an interesting mixture of group therapy and hypnotherapy and it took place exactly two months and three weeks ago. I had not intended to stop and I did not even particularly want to. For one thing, I wholly resented the remorseless pressure from the anti-smoking mob - and I still do. For another, I had low blood pressure and a long-living and healthy family. I did not cough or feel unwell and threw off colds more easily, it seemed to me, than friends with consciously healthier lifestyles. On that unexceptional Thursday afternoon, I had simply gone along to the Birmingham session of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking to write an article about other people trying to give up. 'I shan't be trying to stop myself, it wouldn't be fair,' I announced firmly. 'Since my motivation for being here is writing, not stopping, it would not be right to expect your method to work on me.' I could not have been more reasonable. After all, I positively enjoyed smoking. It gave me real pleasure. I thought the counsellor looked at me rather knowingly. We were encouraged to smoke as much as we wished and most of the afternoon was conducted in a room so smoke-filled that we had to open the windows. I noticed with interest that when I was told to smoke I was reluctant to do so -- and so were the others. I suppose what happened was that the stop-smoking messages made intellectual sense. Just as smoking itself had become a challenge in the face of opposition, so the notion of stopping began to feel attractive. The possibility of not being a smoker was beginning to make me feel powerful. It was a secret feeling that had nothing to do with anyone except myself. Could I also conquer the world? In many senses, it was easy. The physical craving, the pangs of desire for nicotine, in just the same place where you feel hunger, faded after a minute or two and I experienced them over only four or five days. The one activity - my work - that I thought would be the most difficult to accomplish without cigarettes did not cause a single problem. I had really believed that I would not be able to work to deadlines unassisted by nicotine and that for the first time ever I would fail to write a story to order. Surprisingly, pottering around at home on weekend mornings proved to be the most difficult thing - and it still is. I am increasingly coming to the view dat for me smoking had a great deal to do with displacing boredom; having a cigarette was an activity in itself. Yes, I do miss my cigarettes, but not too much. Each 'new' experience as a non-smoker has to be addressed - eating out, waiting for an aeroplane, booking into a hotel, a theatre interval. All are key moments in which I would have previously smoked cigarettes.
15.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Tapping into a food supply In the forests of Madagascar there lives a primate with a lifestyle remarkably like a woodpecker's. Both the woodpecker and the primate, the rare and elusive aye-aye, bore through wood and probe cavities beneath the surface in their search for insect larvae. The woodpecker, of course, uses its beak for chiselling into the wood and its long tongue to extract its prey; the aye-aye, on the other hand, uses its incisor teeth to gnaw its way in and its narrow, elongated third finger to probe and scoop. Though the aye-aye's strange way of feeding was first described over a hundred years ago, scientists have only now discovered how it locates the insects hidden inside the wood. Dr Carl Erickson, of Duke University's Primate Center, has been investigating the hunting skills of two captive males, Nosferatu and Poe, a female, Samantha, and her infant daughter, Annabelle (Animal Behaviour, vol. 41 pp. 793-802). He first tested whether they found insects just by looking for the telltale visual signs of their presence. For example, holes on the surface might indicate sites where female insects had entered the wood and laid their eggs. Dr Erickson presented the aye-ayes with logs in which he had drilled several narrow holes. Some holes led to cavities containing mealworms while others were blank dead-ends. The aye-ayes went straight for the cavities with food, gnawing through the wood and clearly not requiring the visual clues of surface holes. Perhaps the aye-ayes were locating the mealworms by their smell or the sounds they were making. But further tests showed that they didn't use these clues either. Logs in which the smell of the insects was prevented from leaking out presented no problem, and the aye-ayes also located dead (and therefore silent) mealworms. If they weren't seeing, smelling or hearing the insects, how were the aye-ayes able to find them? Dr Erickson discovered that they would gnaw down to empty cavities as well as those containing mealworms. They could apparently sense the cavity itself. When searching for food, an aye-aye taps the surface of the wood with its middle finger and brings its exceptionally large ears forward, focusing them at a point in front of its nose. Dr Erickson suggests that the animal is echo-locating, listening and perhaps feeling for reverberations of the taps that indicate a hollow space below. It can probably also hear the rustle of insects, which might move when disturbed by the tapping from above. The theory that the aye-aye takes the place of woodpeckers in the woodpecker-free forests of Madagascar is an attractive one. But there are birds, such as the Sickle-billed and Nuthatch Vangas, which do probe for or glean insects from wood, and so the woodpecker niche may not be vacant. Not only can the aye-aye be regarded as a woodpecker and an echo-locating bat rolled into one, but it also behaves like a squirrel (indeed, it was originally classified as one). Its incisors grow continuously like a squirrel's, and it has recently been observed in the wild gnawing through the shells of nuts, and extracting the meat of the nut with its elongated finger.
16.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	THEATRE CHARLES SPENCER A. Tamburlaine the Great Marlowe's ten-act epic about the all-conquering warrior can seem never-ending, but it emerges as one of the most thrilling nights of the year in Terry Hands' staging. He has hacked great chunks from the text and offers a production that combines the glories of Marlowe's play with an exhilarating speed and physicality. Antony Sher is in terrific form in the title role, somersaulting from the balcony, sliding down a rope head-first as he delivers a speech, demanding and getting the audience's complete attention as his eyes glint with a mad lust for power and glory. Great stuff. Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (01789 295623) B. Women Laughing Welcome London transfer for the late Michael Wall's fine play, seen at the Manchester Royal Exchange in May. The first act creates an atmosphere of unsettling menace as two married couples chat on a sunny suburban lawn. In the second half the location shifts and the piece becomes a powerful, compassionate study of the devastating effects of illness. The British theatre lost a talent of great promise when Wall died at the tragically early age of 44. Royal Court Theatre, London SW1 (0207 730 1745) C. Amphibians Billy Roche is the latest in the long line of Irish dramatists to have enriched the English stage. All his plays to date have been set in his native Wexford, and this latest piece explores the decline of the fishing industry with his usual mixture of rich characterisation, painful emotion and sudden moments of quirky humour. The play sprawls a bit aimlessly at times, but builds to a blistering climax. Barbican 3 Pit Theatre, London EC2 (0207 638 8891) D. Murder by Misadventure Traditional thriller involving our old friend, 'the perfect murder'. This time it is Gerald Harper and William Gaunt who play the crime-writing partnership intent on killing each other, and though its all rather familiar stuff; the twists and turns are handled with ingenuity. Whitehall Theatre, London SW1 (0207 867 1119) E. The Alchemist Young director Sam Mendes finds the gold in Jonson's great comedy of 17th-century confidence tricksters. First seen at the Swan in Stratford last year, the show works just as well on the Barbican's main stage, with Jonathan Hyde, David Bradley and Joanne Pearce repeating their fine performances as the wicked trio of con-artists. Barbican Theatre, London EC2 (0207 638 8891) F. The Madras House Peter James' production of Harley Granville Barkers rich, panoramic comedy about fashion and the position of women in Edwardian society transfers to London after its success at the Edinburgh Festival. The staging is stylish, the acting excellent, the play itself an unjustly neglected classic. Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London W6 (0208 741 2311) G. Dreams from a summer house This delightful new musical finds playwright Alan Ayckbourn in unusually benign form as he relocates the Beauty and the Beast story deep in the heart of London suburbia. A lush score by John Pattison and an unashamedly schmaltzy celebration of romantic love combine to make this good-hearted show a real winner. London impresarios looking for a hit should board the next train to Scarborough. Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (01 723 370541) H. The Merry Wives of Windsor David Thacker's lacklustre production of Shakespeare's most farcical comedy came perilously close to being awarded the dreaded thumbs-down symbol, but this disappointing, crudely designed show is redeemed by first-rate comic performances from Ron Cook as the French physician Dr Caius and Anton Lesser as the explosively jealous husband, Ford. Almost everyone else looks faintly embarrassed, as well they might. Shakespeare Theatre, Stragford-upon-Avon (01789 295623) I. The Voysey Inheritance Another major Granville Barker revival, now touring the regions. This story of an apparently respectable solicitor who bequeaths a corrupt financial legacy to his son results in a marvellous play. Apollo Theatre, Oxford (01865 244544)
17.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	REMOTE HOTELS A. INDIA GIIANERAO HOTEL, RAJASTHAN Ghanerao Hotel sits at the edge of the Aravalli Hills in a small rural village dominated by craftsmen. It mixes English country-house tranquillity with Indian symbolism. The Ghanerao family have lived there for 400 years and today, Sajjan Singh and his wife have opened their home to paying guests. The facilities are basic, with hot water arriving by bucket, but the spartan aspects of life at Ghanerao just add to its appeal. B. NEW ZEALAND HERMITAGE HOTEL, MOUNT COOK One of my favourite hotels is the Hermitage Hotel on New Zcaland's South Island which I came across by chance when I was climbing. We had been flown up to near the top of a glacier and had climbed to the peak and then had to walk all the way down. When we finally reached the bottom, to my astonishment, there was this hotel. It was on its own in the most stupendously beautiful countryside, very wild and very high up. To come down the mountain battered and exhausted and find yourself in extreme luxury, with a man playing Cole Porter on the piano, was extraordinary. C. MAURITIUS BEACI ICOMBER PARADIS HOTEL On the south-west of Mauritius, the Paradis Hotel is isolated on its own peninsula in one of the quietest corners of the island. If you drive from here, the road winds along the coast past beaches with no-one on them but fishermen. The hotel isn't small and there are plenty of takers for the free watersports, but you can easily escape from all the other people along nine kilometres of private beach; you have only to swim a few yards out into the Indian Ocean and you can barely see the hotel for palm trees. Sit on the beach in the evening when everyone has gone and as the light drains from the sky you'll feel far away from everything. D. ST LUCIA LADERA HOTEL, ST LUCIA The Ladera Hotel in St Lucia has one of the Caribbean's most dramatic settings. Quiet and far off the beaten track, it stands at an altitude of 1,000 feet, its open rooms looking out between the twin peaks of the Pitons to the Caribbean Sea some view first thing in the morning! The style is colonial, with furniture in mahogany and greenheart wood, and four-poster beds screened with muslin netting. E. TURKEY THE SPLENDID HOTEL, INSTANBUL This hotel, on Buyukada in the Princes Islands is the perfect place to escape the noise of Istanbul. The islands are only an hour by boat, and are simply idyllic. There are no cars, only horse-drawn carriages and fabulous twenties wooden architecture. The islands are a cross between Key West and the Old South, and the landmark building is the Splendid. All in wood, painted white with red domes, it's a copy of a turn-of-the-century hotel on the French Riviera. Today it's a little run down, but has lost none of its charm. F. FRANCE CHATEAU D'ETOGES, EPERNAY In the tiny village of Etoges, in the heart of Champagne, is a beautiful seventeenth century chateau. Surrounded by a moat with two swans, the chateau, until recently a family home, has 20 rooms which are all different, some with four-poster beds - one even has a large billiard table. There are special weekend rates for two nights with breakfast and dinner plus complimentary champagne (their own brand - if you want to take some home). G. KENYA THE FAIRVIEW HOTEL, NAIROBI The Fairview is that rare bird in Africa - a comfortable hotel that hasn't decked itself out in feathers of upmarket gloss and tasteless luxury. It's an indispensable staging post, always full of travellers recuperating from one safari and planning the next. Overnight guests have been known to arrive, take one look at the gardens, the bedrooms and the dining-hall menu, and decide on the spot to stay for a week. There are even apartments set aside specially for those who make up their minds to settle in for a few months. The hotel's leafy acres and scattered buildings are laid out on Nairobi Hill, a world away from the overhead bustle of the city centre. I don't know of any better place to sit and watch the sudden African sunset, sipping draught beer and looking forward to a hearty dinner - braised zebra and two veg, following by jelly trifle. H. ITALY HOTEL SPLENDIDO, PORTOFINO The Duke of Windsor was the first to sign the visitors hook at the Hotel Splendido. Ever since, a galaxy of the fabulous has drifted in and out of the hotel's portals to play, stay and be seen: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Nowadays, you are more likely to find yourself in the company of a soft drinks billionaire or a rubber-tyre heiress. But this old Monastery-turned-villa-turned-hotel is still, as its name suggests, quite splendid and there is enough reflected glamour to perk up any weekend break. Deliciously simple food in the restaurant and the finest Persian rugs and homemade pasta.
18.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Life was getting out of hand Susan Harr unplugs her gadgets and rediscovers the joys of manual labour. Everyone is in love with technology. It gives us all those marvellous gadgets that make life easier and leave us so much more time to do other things. A gradual, though not particularly subtle, form of brainwashing has persuaded us that technology rules, and that it is OK. These implications are obvious. The movement of my fingers uses nothing from the previous power supply being eaten up by our greedy race. A craft executed by hand does not pollute the environment. However, a recent unhappy experience with my malfunctioning word processor - a PS48 call-out fee, a labour charge of PS15 per quarter of an hour, plus parts and replacements costs - has confirmed a suspicion that gadgets are often not worth the expense or the trouble. Are we as dependent on technology as we imagine? Bit by bit, I have been letting the household technology fall by the wayside as its natural and often short life expires. This makes me wonder just what 'time' technology gives us. The time to take up more activities for which we must buy more gadgets? If so, hats off to the marketing experts: but I think they are conning us. So when the thing started making curious noises, which continued even when it was disconnected by a puzzled service agent, I abandoned it to the backyard, where it whispers damply to itself like some robot ghost. I am not tied to a noisy, whirring machine, with my head bent and my back turned on the world, and I can take my time over the garment. In any case, I was always slightly alarmed by those electric machines that dash across the fabric towards your fingers. Best of all, I can pop the whole lot into a carrier bag and take it with me wherever I go. Of course, there are some gadgets I would not like to be without. A year living without a washing machine convinced me of the value of the electric washtub. But there are others whose loss has brought unexpected delight. Feeling that we were becoming too apt to collapse in front of the television, or slot in a video, I sent back the rented colour equipment and we returned to the small black-and-white portable. It is a real strain on the eyes and concentrates the mind on what is really worth watching. We now spend a lot more time walking the dog (who never liked television anyway), reading, talking or pursuing other hobbies. One of these, in my own case, is sewing; and here is another gadget that went by the board. My old Singer sewing machine is now an ornamental plant table, and as l cannot afford to replace it, I have taken to sewing by hand. We have come to believe that we could not do without it, and if we do resist the notion that our lives would be unmanageable without the appliances of science we certainly do not want to relinquish them. Pity the generations whose lives were blighted by tedious and blister inducing toil. Even our brains are relieved of exertion by computers that not only perform miraculous calculations with amazing speed but now provide entertainment. In fact, the time I now spend placidly stitching is anything but tedious, and the advantages are numerous. For a start, I can sew and listen to the radio - another rediscovered pleasure - or I can talk with family and friends. If it is a simple task, I can watch the programmes I do want to see on television, and alleviate my puritanical guilt at sitting in front of the box by doing something useful at the same time. And what a lovely, cosy feeling it is to sit by the fire and sew with a pot of tea for company. Quite wrongly, I had tended to think with horror of the women who sewed elaborate garments, robes, linen and household items by hand. I thought of those long hours, the strain on the eyes and so on. There is a wonderfully soothing quality about executing a craft by hand, a great satisfaction in watching one's work become neater, more assured. I find things get done surprisingly quickly, and the pace of life suddenly slows down to the rhythm of my own hands. I am also freed from one of the most detestable aspects of late 20th century life the need to rush to finish an activity so that I can rush to the next. Meanwhile I have regained control of my sink, where I plunge my hands into the suds and daydream while doing the washing up agreeable, if temporarily forgotten, activity. The result of all this brooding is that I now prowl the house with a speculative eye. Do we really need the freezer, the microwave oven, that powered lawnmower? Come to think of it, we could save an awful lot of money by doing without electric lights!
19.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Ordinary people, ordinary lives Most of us have photographs of our grandparents, but how many of us know what their lives were like, the sort of people they were in their youth? The glimpses rare diaries give us are frustratingly incomplete, family anecdotes only half remembered. And what will our grandchildren know about us? We often intend to write things down, but never get round to it. We may leave videos rather than photographs, but the images will remain two-dimensional. Hannah Renier has come up with an answer: she writes other people's autobiographies, producing a hardback book of at least 20,000 words -- with illustrations if required - a chronicle not of the famous, but of the ordinary. The idea came to her when she talked to members of her family and realised how much of the past that was part of her own life was disappearing. "When I started I didn't take it nearly so seriously as I do now, having met people who genuinely will talk and have led interesting lives," she says. "They would say they are doing it for their children or for posterity, but they are getting quite a lot out of it themselves. They enjoy doing it." The assurance of confidentiality encourages her subjects to overcome any instinct of self-censorship. "I had the confidence to be honest," says a 62-year-old man who made and lost one fortune before making another. "I was surprised at what came out. There were things that hurt, like my divorce, and the pain was still there." "I did it for my family, so that perhaps they could learn something, but I have not yet let my children - who are in their thirties - read it. They were hurt by things in my life and there are a lot of details which I don't feel I want them to know at the moment. If they insist, I'll let them. But I think I'd rather they read it after I was dead." He also recognised patterns laid down in childhood, which showed themselves in repeatedly making the same mistakes. It is something Ms Renier has detected in other people. "It's amazing how many people really have been conditioned by their parents," she says. "The injunctions and encouragements that were laid down in childhood have effects for the rest of their lives. They become caught in repeating patterns of behaviour. They marry the sort of people of whom their parents approved -- or go in the opposite direction as a sort of rebellion." "A lot of disappointments come out. Sixty years later they still are regretting or resenting things that were never resolved with their parents. There is no age of reason. If people had hang-ups in their youth, they still have them in middle age. They live their lives in an attempt to impress a parent who wasn't impressed and if that fails some of them seem to be seeking permission to say 'I can't stand my mother'." Recorder rather than inquisitor, Ms Renier keeps her distance. "It's not for public consumption and I'm not there as a very nosy person. People have got carried away and told me something, then said, 'I'm not sure if that ought to go in'. I put it in anyway - they can remove things when they see the draft. But generally people want to be honest, warts and all." "It's not vanity publishing, it's not people saying 'Gosh, I've had such an interesting life the world's got to know about it.' Things are moving much faster than at any time in history and we are losing sight of what happened in the past. It's a way of giving roots. We need some sort of link to our ancestors because people don't sit around in an extended family any more. People want a little immortality." Each book involves up to 30 hours of taped interviews which Ms Renier uses as the basis to write the life story, rearranging the chronology and interpreting. Modern technology allows her to produce everything except the binding with its gold lettering: choose your own colour of library buckram, pick your own title. Fascinating to the private audience at which each book is aimed, the results are obviously not of the dirt-at-any-cost school of life story. Ms Renier organises her material logically and writes well, the final content is as good as its subject. The hook that emerges does not look like a cheap product - and carries a price tag of nearly PS3,000, with extra copies at PS25 each. She receives about 10 inquiries a week, but the cost - inevitable with the time involved -- clearly deters many people. "I thought it would be a more downmarket product than it is," she says. "But the people I've done have all been county types, readers of Harpers & Queen, which is one of the magazines where I advertise. They're the sort of people who at one time would have had their portraits painted to leave to their descendants."
2.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	WEATHERVANE MAKER THE MAKING of weathervanes is an ancient skill, going back to early Egyptian times. Today the craft is still very much alive in the workshop that Graham Smith has set up. He is one of the few people in the country who make hand-cut weathervanes. Graham's designs are individually created and tailored to the specific requirements of his customers. 'That way I can produce a unique personalised item,' he explains. 'A lot of my customers are women buying presents for their husbands. They want a distinctive gift that represents the man's business or leisure interests.' It's all a far cry from the traditional cockerel, the most common design for weathervanes. It was not a cockerel but a witch on a broomstick that featured on the first weathervane Graham ever made. Friends admired his surprise present for his wife and began asking him to make vanes for them. 'I realised that when it came to subjects that could be made into them, the possibilities were limitless,' he says. Graham decided to concentrate his efforts on a weathervane business. He had sewed an apprenticeship as a precision engineer and had worked in that trade for 15 years when he and his wife, Liz, agreed to swap roles - she went out to work as an architectural assistant and he stayed at home to look after the children and build up the business. That was five years ago and he has no regrets about his new direction. 'My previous work didn't have an artistic element to it, whereas this is exciting and creative,' he says. 'I really enjoy the design side.' Graham has now perfected over 100 original designs. He works to very fine detail, always seeking approval for the design of the silhouette from the customer before proceeding with the hand-cutting. Graham also keeps plenty of traditional designs in stock, since they prove as popular as the one-offs. 'It seems that people are attracted to hand-crafting,' Graham says. 'They welcome the opportunity to acquire something a little bit different.' Graham has no plans for expansion, as he wants to keep the business as a rural craft. 'I have found my place in the market. People love the individuality and I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing a nondescript shape turn into something almost lifelike,' he says. 'For centuries, weathervanes have kept communities in touch with the elements signalling those shifts in wind direction that bring about changes in the weather,' he explains. 'And nowadays, with more and more people moving to the country, individuals want to put an exclusive finishing touch to their properties. It has been a boost to crafts like mine.' Graham has become increasingly busy, supplying flat-packed weathervanes to clients worldwide. American and Danish buyers in particular are showing interest. 'Pricing,' he explains, 'depends on the intricacy of the design.' His most recent request was for a curly-coated dog. Whatever the occasion, Graham can create a gift with a difference.
20.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Take Five Careers Rebecca Cripps meets five women who discuss their different professions: the highlights, the drawbacks and their typical working day. A. THE BRAIN SURGEON Name: Anne Age: 34 ANNE'S DAY "I get up at 6.30am, go the gym at 7am, get to work by 8am and start operating at 8.30am. I operate all Monday and Wednesday, as well as some Friday afternoons. Most standard head operations take three hours, but some operations take all day. I've worked ten hours straight through on occasion without eating or going to the loo. Deciding when to operate, and what to do, can be stressful. I don't feel particularly stressed when operating, but sometimes I worry about what I'm going to do the next day. Brain surgery tends to be a last resort for a patient, but when it works it's tremendous, and more than makes up for the unsuccessful times. From 10am to 1pm I hold an out-patients' clinic, when I explain the operations. I enjoy this and find it quite easy to talk to the patients. If they get upset, I comfort them, but time pressure can make this difficult. I leave work between 6pm and 8pm. Some nights and weekends I'm on call, and I always carry my bleeper. On holidays, I worry for the first three days about the people I've left behind, and at night I dream I'm operating. I'm hopeless at switching off." B. THE SENIOR DESIGNER Name: Marita Age: 31 MARITA'S DAY "I get up at Z45am, leave the house by 8.20am, take the train to work and arrive at 9.15am. At 10.30am on Monday we meet to discuss what were doing, any problems or whether anyone needs help. We work in teams - in my team there are three senior designers, a company partner who oversees everything, and a junior designer. The work usually involves ten to fifteen per cent design: the rest is production. I'll be given a brief by the client - with luck the company will have clear ideas about what they want to say, their target market and the form of the project. I then spend three or four weeks designing, researching and developing the project. After this I present my ideas to the client and once they've agreed to them, we work out estimates and budgets, and I start commissioning photographers and illustrators. I liaise with the printers and make sure the needs of the job are being met, and on time. I spend a lot of time managing people. I have to be able to communicate with a broad range of people, and briefing them correctly is essential. When their work comes in, I assemble everything and send it to the printers. Keeping several jobs going at once can send stress levels sky-high. Deadlines are always looming, and no day has a set structure. Lunch is at 1pm for an hour, when we try to get out to the pub. Otherwise I have sandwiches and work through. It's a great feeling if the client gives a good response to the designs you've done and you know the project has worked; it's a great disappointment when you've worked really hard and the job gets rejected. I get home at 7.30pm at the earliest; often it's 8.30pm and sometimes much later. I find it hard to unwind when I get back, especially if I'm very busy." C. THE CHAUFFEUR Name: Linda Age: 42 LINDA'S DAY "I get up at about 7am most days, but two or three mornings a week I meet a long-haul flight from Heathrow or Gatwick and get up between 4.30am and 5am. At 10.30 or 11am I might go for a bike ride, or swim. Because chauffeuring is a sedentary job, I have to watch my diet and exercise quite carefully. I usually have a big breakfast, though, and just have snacks during the day. People often ask me to recommend restaurants, nightclubs or shops, so I have to know my way around. Luckily, a lot of the jobs are pre-booked, so I get a chance to look routes up beforehand. Not everyone is polite. Some passengers are anti-social, some arrogant, some downright rude. But most of the time people are very well behaved and I've built up a good rapport with my regular clients. There are times when I hear a conversation in the car and have to make sure my eyes are firmly on the road and my ears shut. Sometimes the press have tried to make me talk about clients I've carried, but I won't. I work a seven-day week, up to fifteen hours a day. I have to be careful not to get too tired. I try to get to bed by 11pm." D. THE LANDSCAPE GARDENER Name: Tracy Age: 27 TRACY'S DAY "I get up at about 7am, leave the house at 7.30am and get to my first job. My assistant and I spend most of our time maintaining gardens we originally designed and landscaped. We do a few commercial jobs but most of our work is in private gardens. We spend about an hour and a half at each house. At about 11am we get hungry and go to a local cafe for a big breakfast. I often look at my watch and wish it was earlier and that time didn't pass so quickly. In summer I may work until 10pm; in winter until 4.30pm. The business office is at home, so when I get back I listen to any messages and respond to any calls. If someone wants their garden landscaped, I'll usually arrange a consultation with them in the evening - at about 7pm or 8pm. We specialise in using old materials, such as old bricks and unusual plants, to make gardens look as if they were built a long time ago. But sometimes people have a set idea of what they want, and it can be pretty horrible. Still, its very satisfying when we do a complete landscape from start to finish and then see all the blooms come out. It's hard to relax in the evenings because I can always hear the business line when it rings. I never have any trouble sleeping because the work I do is so physical that I'm always exhausted at the end of the day. I wouldn't say I'm very strong, but I'm fit. Physically, it's a very tough job, but it does let your imagination run wild." E. THE CIVIL ENGINEER Name: Zena Age: 27 ZENA'S DAY "I arrive at the site by 8.30am. I'm assistant resident engineer at the site, so I'm looking after the building of a couple of bridges and a retaining wall - which prevents people driving off the road into a quarry. I check that the contractors are working to the schedule and specifications, with correct safety systems and minimum environmental impact. I help to co-ordinate the site professionals and find solutions to any problems. The contractors start work at 6am, so my first task is to find out from the clerk of works what's been going on since I left the night before. The rest of the day is a reaction to whatever he tells me. Usually there's some paperwork from the contractors to look at, or there might be design queries to answer. Lunch is usually for half an hour between 2pm and 2.30pm, but I tend to grab things to eat as I go along. The contractors have set mealtimes and when they're off eating it's easier to check things on site. Because we're checking their work it can cause conflict, so our relationship has to be as open as possible. I see the duty resident engineer once a day. However, if something really important comes up I don't wait to tell them before I act. I usually leave the site at about 6pm and Im on call all the time.
21.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Hide and Seek Yvonne Coppard Emma and her friends are pursuing a holiday game -- surveillance of a suspicious bookshop -- when she realises that one of its rare customers is her Uncle Jim. He callously draws her into a web of deceit and crime, manipulating her affection for him and attempting to alienate her from her friends, whose characters are persuasively drawn by Coppard. When Emma finds her life in danger, things take a dark and compelling turn - her confinement in the cellar of a derelict house is stunningly handled. This book reveals the minutiae of family life, the bonds of childhood friendship and warns that adults aren't always the protectors they ought to be. A vital and convincing read. Backtrack Peter Hunt Two teenagers, 'peasant' Jack and Rill, a boarder at a posh girls school, join forces on realising that relatives of both were involved in an apparently inexplicable 1915 train accident, in which eight people died. Varied viewpoints and documents -- maps, first-hand accounts, hurt records, railway histories -- throw an ever-changing light on the incident, so that the reader works as hard as the two protagonists to understand what happened and why. A clever, complex novel which rewards close attention. Pigeon Summer Ann Turnbull Mary Dyer doesn't really fit into her family or male-dominated culture; for one thing, she, a girl, loves her father's racing pigeons and when he must go away to find work, Mary knows enough to carry on managing the loft and winning prizes, despite increasing conflict with her harassed mother. Set believably in 1930, this readable tale has a sound basic message that 'There are different kinds of cleverness', which can't be bad. Thoughtful readers should find satisfaction here. Yaxley's Cat Robert Westall Unusually, Robert Westall uses the viewpoint of a mature woman for this chilling story of rural prejudice and persecution. Rose, to escape from her materialistic life and her smug husband, rents Sepp Yaxley's cottage with her two children. A ferocious cat, and bizarre items found in cupboards, reveal the answer to why Yaxley disappeared, but the newcomers' presence arouses local hostility to the point where their own lives are at risk. By the end, the threatening violence is controlled, but Rose feels just as dismayed by the methodical ruthlessness of her teenage son. Utterly gripping. Someone's Mother is Missing Harry Mazer At the poor, shambling, noisy end of the family there's Sam - fat, overtalkative and awed by his supercool and sophisticated cousin, Lisa, from the apparently rich end of the clan. When Lisa's privileged world crumbles, it's Sam who helps her to find some balance, out of which both gain a better sense of reality and the value of family. The pace is slightly slow in parts but there's a gentle humour and the developing closeness of the two teenagers is convincingly handled. It could be interesting to both boys and girls, which is a bit of a rarity. Stanley's Aquarium Barry Faville Barry Faville writes with assurance and humour, vividly evoking his New Zealand setting and creating an intelligent and likeable first-person narrator. Robbie takes a jon gardening for elderly Stanley, finding him at first fascinating and later repellent; when she finds out what he keeps in his aquarium and what he plans to do with them, the book takes 'thrillerish' twist without losing its sharp insight into character and relationships. Unusual and compelling. Dodger Libby Gleeson A painful, sad story where the troubled personal relationships plus the stormy school life of Mick are told though a skilful blend of flashback, a teacher's letters to a friend, the boys own notes and sympathetic narrative. Coming to terms with the negative expectations of others and his own poor sense of self-worth is achieved through a role in a school play and by an impressively sensitive first-year teacher. Highly recommended, even though it's truly an agonising read, especially at the end.
22.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	NATURAL TALENTS In the mere seven million years since we humans separated from chimpanzees, we haven't had time to develop any differences: genetically we're still more than 98 per cent identical to chimps. On this grand evolutionary scale, whatever it is that separates humans from animals is a very recent development. Our biological history implies that our physical capacity for making art (whatever changes were needed in the human physique, brain, and sense organs) and anything else we consider uniquely human must be due to just a tiny fraction of our genes. That's a large burden to place on a relative handful of genes. It should come as no surprise, then, that modern studies of animal behaviour have been shrinking the list of attributes once considered uniquely human, so that most differences between us and animals now appear to be only matters of degree. For example, tools are used not only by humans but also by wild chimpanzees (which use sticks as eating utensils and weapons), and sea otters (which crack open clams with rocks). As for language, monkeys have a simple one, with separate warning sounds for 'leopard', 'eagle' and 'snake'. These discoveries leave us with few absolute differences, other than art, between ourselves and animals. But if human art sprang from a unique genetic endowment, isn't it strange that our ancestors dispensed with it for at least the first 6.9 million of the 7 million years since they diverged from chimps? The earliest art forms may well have been wood carvings or body painting. But if they were, we wouldn't know it, because those materials don't get preserved. Not until the Cro-Magnons, beginning around 35,000 years ago, do we have unequivocal evidence for a distinctly human art, in the form of the famous cave paintings, statues, necklaces and musical instruments. If we're going to insist that our recent creative burst finally does set us apart, then in what ways do we claim that our art differs from the superficially similar works of animals? Three supposed distinctions are often put forward: human art is non-utilitarian, it's made for aesthetic pleasure and it's transmitted by learning rather than by genes. Let's scrutinise these claims. First, as Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless". The implicit meaning a biologist sees behind this quip is that human an doesn't help us survive or pass on our genes -- the evident functions of most animal behaviours. Of course, much human an is utilitarian in the sense that the artist communicates something to fellow humans, but transmitting one's thoughts or feelings isn't the same as passing on one's genes. In contrast, birdsong serves the obvious functions of defending a territory or wooing a mate, and thereby transmitting genes. By this criterion human art does seem different. The second claim -- that only human art not is motivated by aesthetic pleasure -- also seems plausible. While we can't ask robins whether they enjoy the form or beauty of their songs, it's suspicious that they sing mainly during the breeding season. Hence they're probably not singing just for aesthetic pleasure. Again, by this criterion human art seems unique. As for human art's third distinction -- that it's a learned rather than an instinctive activity -- each human group does have distinctive art styles that surely are learned. For example, it's easy to distinguish typical songs being sung today in Tokyo and in Paris. But those stylistic differences aren't wired into the singers genes. The French and Japanese often visit each other's cities and can learn each other's songs. In contrast, some species of birds inherit the ability to produce the particular song of their species. Each of those birds would sing the right song even if it had never heard the tune. It's as if a French baby adopted by Japanese parents, flown in infancy to Tokyo and educated there, began to sing the French national anthem spontaneously. The role of learning in human art is also clear in how quickly our an styles change. Roman authors described geese honking 2,000 years ago, as geese still do today. But humans innovate so rapidly that even a casual museum-goer would recognise almost any twentieth century painting as having been made later than, say, the Mona Lisa. Connoisseurs can do better, of course. When shown a work with which they are not familiar, they can often identify not only when it was painted but who painted it. Yet even connoisseurs would mistake the identity of two mid-twentieth century artists named Congo and Betsy. If judged only by their works, they would probably be identified as lesser-known abstract expressionists. In fact the painters were chimpanzees. Congo did up to 33 paintings and drawings in one day, apparently for his own satisfaction, and threw a tantrum when his pencil was taken away. Congo and Betsy were honoured by a two-chimp show of their paintings in 1957 at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. What's more, most of the paintings available at that show sold; plenty of human artists can't make that boast. These paintings by our closest relatives, then, do start to blur some distinctions between human art and animal activities. Like human paintings, the ape paintings served no narrow utilitarian functions; they were produced not for material regard but only for the painter's satisfaction. You might object that human art is still different because most human artists intend their art as a means of communication. The apes, on the other hand, were so indifferent to communicating with other apes that they just discarded their paintings. But that objection doesn't strike me as fatal, since even some human art that later became famous was created by artists for their private satisfaction.
23.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Young Masters Age is against Bobby Fischer as he seeks again to re-establish himself. Chess is more than ever a young man's game. After 20 years of self-imposed exile, Mr Bobby Fischer has returned to chess and is playing his old adversary Boris Spassky. Mr Fischer's victory in the first game was a masterpiece, simple but profound. But, as subsequent games have shown, this balding, bearded chess player is not the man of 1972. He is 49 years old, out of practice and out of shape. Mr Spassky is even older. Chess has also changed a lot over the past two decades. A new era of professionalism was born out of Mr Fischer's own popularisation of the game. The rise of the professional chess circuit has seen the competitive aspect of the game overtake the scientific and artistic. The sole aim of the modern master is to win. In international chess, a player's nerves and stamina are as crucial as his intellect and wisdom. The pressure of the game has always been intense: a chess clock is used to ensure that each player completes the stipulated number of moves in the allotted time - failure to do so results in immediate loss of the game. But now the playing sessions themselves are becoming longer, and many games are played without a break. The increased pressure has swung the pendulum in youth's favour. Over the past 30 years, each new world champion has been younger than his predecessor. It is significant that, of the world's ten highest-ranked players, eight are under 30. Nor is it only the way the game is played that has changed. Much of modern chess is played off the board - and not just the battle for psychological advantage that Mr Fischer wages so well. Every professional must now take seriously his pre-match preparation, not least because the age of computer databases has had a profound impact on chess. A small portable computer can hold one million chess games, and give instant access to hundreds of games of a prospective opponent. In one recent contest, each of the protagonists employed large teams of assistants to work round the clock searching for flaws in the other's repertoire. The opening stages of a chess game are now analysed to near exhaustion. Simply being better prepared in chess opening can be the deciding factor in the game. The chess world today boasts more first-rate players than at any stage in its history. Hundreds of grandmasters chase modest prize money the world over. Success demands physical as well as mental exertion. A single game may last up to eight hours. For the chess master this period represents a ceaseless struggle. A lapse in concentration can mean disaster. So the adversaries are always in a state of nervous tension. The presence of the chess clock adds to the tension. The climax of the game is often a furious 'time scramble'. When this occurs, each player has only seconds to make several moves or face instant forfeiture. With minds racing and hands twitching, the masters blitz out their moves and press their clocks with a co-ordination that any athlete would admire. Such moments are not for reflective intellectuals. The game descends into a primeval struggle in which nerves, tenacity and an overwhelming will to win separate victor from vanquished. At the top level of chess, the pain of losing is unbearable. Winning brings immense satisfaction and a chance to recover from the nerves and exhaustion. But one victory is not enough to win a tournament. The chess master must be ready for the struggle the next day. Most chess competitions last for 9-11 days, with play on every day, and there is an all-year-round tournament circuit. World championship matches are even more exacting. The 1984 encounter between Anatoli Karpov and Gary Kasparov in Moscow had to be aborted after several months on the grounds of mutual exhaustion. Mr Karpov had shed around two stone (10kg) in weight. Can Mr Fischer defy these odds? He once declared "All I want to do, ever, is play chess." This sentiment made his exodus from the chess world after 1972 seem even more inexplicable. But in some respects it was a fitting end to his story. It immortalised Bobby Fischer. If he has come back for the money, he is onto a good thing. Whatever happens in his match with Mr Spassky, each will end up several million dollars richer. But if Mr Fischer has returned in the sincere belief that he can show he is still the best player in the world, the final result could be heartbreaking.
24.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	A. The University Museum of Classical Archaeology The Museum of Classical Archaeology is one of the few surviving collections of casts of Greek and Roman sculpture in the world, comprising over six hundred works. The first thing to remember about the collection is that nothing here is genuine. All the sculptures are accurate replicas cast from the originals, mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Museum is housed in a purpose-built gallery with excellent natural light. The advantages of plaster casts are many: groups of sculptures originally set up together but now split between various museums all over Europe can be viewed together as originally intended. Nearly all the most celebrated works of Greek and Roman sculpture can be viewed in one afternoon. B. Cambridge Darkroom Cambridge Darkroom is a centre for photography with community darkrooms and a gallery showing a varied exhibition of photography and related media. We regularly run courses and workshops for people of all ages and abilities, including our popular Beginner's Course, a shorter Induction Course and Master Classes with invited photographers. We have a membership scheme whereby all our members can use our darkrooms. We also encourage young photographers (aged 12 to 16) to develop their skills with our Young Members scheme, led by our resident photographer. We stock photographic books and an magazines and carry a full range of photographic materials. C. Sedgwick Museum of Geology The Sedgwick Museum houses a magnificent collection of fossil animals and plants, rocks and minerals of all geological ages, and from all parts of the world. It also houses Britain's oldest intact geological collection, that of Dr John Woodward (1665-1728). It includes nearly 10,000 rare and interesting specimens stored in their original early 18th century cabinets. Adam Sedgwick was Professor of Geology and keeper of the Woodwardian collection. Throughout his long life, he added enormously to the collections, laying the foundations of a truly outstanding museum. The collection is arranged by geological age so that the major changes in life on Earth can be traced through time. The new Whewell Gallery houses the beautiful minerals and gems of the collection. The displays are accompanied by full explanatory labels to explain both their nature and modern use. D. The Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs There are over 400,000 oblique and vertical air photographs in the collection, taken by members of the university's staff over the past 45 years. The University has its own aircraft based at Cambridge Airport and undertakes photographic work throughout Great Britain. The photographs are of considerable general interest as a detailed, year-by-year record of the landscape, showing both the natural environment and the effects of human activity from prehistoric times to the present day. There is a small display in the entrance hall and the knowledgeable library staff will be happy to deal with canicular enquiries. The photographs cannot be borrowed but copies can normally be purchased. These are made to order and ordinarily take about a month. E. Cambridge Medieval Brass Rubbing Centre Cambridge Brass Rubbing Centre, the second oldest and longest surviving centre in the world, is one of the regions most unusual tourist attractions. Hours of enjoyment are to be had creating wall hangings by rubbing one of over a hundred different brass plates off tombs of medieval knights and ladies. By formulating resin copies, known as facsimiles, the centre has made it possible to preserve the originals and still make brass rubbing an accessible pastime to all. The brass plates, as an alternative means of memorial to the tomb statue, spread from Germany across medieval Europe and Scandinavia. Through various revolutions most of the beautiful brasses were destroyed. The vast majority of remaining brasses are to be found in Britain and the widest range of examples can be seen at the Cambridge Centre.
25.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Great sports Women on a winning streak To excel in any sport is hard enough, even far men, but women have to be twice as tough. Training and competition leave little time for a normal life, so sacrifices must be made. But against all the odds they are beating prejudice and breaking records. Here, we talk to just a haw brilliant British sportswomen who are achieving their goals. A. Jill, 27, skier "It's a great feeling to fly through the air and land cleanly, but it can be scary. Sometimes you don't feel well or it's windy and you can't see, but you just get on with it. It's not easy to have a career outside skiing because we train for ten months of the year. You give up a lot of your social life and friends. But it was my choice. There are six men and three women in the British team. We all compete on the same courses at the same competitions and get treated the same - it's a young sport." B. Caroline, 22, cyclist "Two years ago I borrowed a bike to take part in a charity race. I won overall just because I cycled faster than everyone else, which was amazing because I'd never cycled before! I'm well paid as a pro, and cycling has lots of potential in terms of endorsements. However, I know I'm not ugly and it worries me that people may think I've got where I am because of how I look, not because I'm the best cyclist. So I tend to concentrate on the cycling at the moment, rather than earning money I do at least four hours' training every day on the bike, plus some stretching exercises, swimming and running. My boyfriend's a cyclist as well, so he knows the time you have to put into it -- it would be impossible otherwise." C. Annabel, 26, rower "Rowing is hard for girls to get into because very few girls' schools do it. So most don't start till they're 19 or 20 which makes it harder to succeed at an international level. Also, you usually have coaches who only stay a year or so. There's no continuity so the women's squad is basically a shambles. But it's great fun and I love being fit, plus there's a good social life." D. Ffyona, 24, long distance walker "At 13 I dreamed of walking around the world -- I didn't know just how big it was then! But Britain was too claustrophobic, too safe. I was very headstrong; I hated anyone having control over me. Now I am more tactful. Each walk has been different. The walk across Australia was the worst experience I've ever had as far as pain is concerned. I was doing 50 miles and 21 hours each day with three hours sleep in high temperatures and walking with 15 blisters on each foot. But I got the record! I had to, because my sponsorship money was going to run out after 95 days. Men think that women are more likely to fail, so sponsoring them is always seen as a higher risk." E. Lisa, 26, saloon car racer "Some men have huge egos when they're driving - you see it on motorways. When I'm doing well, they don't talk to me. Being a woman has its disadvantages. When I get to a corner, the men think 'I've got to beat her', so I've had a lot of knocks! You have to be naturally competitive and aggressive. It's very difficult to earn any money and what I do make goes back into the sport. Women have been racing since the twenties and have always been classed as eccentrics. It's great that there are now more and more women taking up racing every year. For me, the appeal of saloon car racing is aiming for perfection always trying to get round with a perfect lap." F. Alison, 28, triathlete "I get up at 5.30 three mornings a week to swim. I need Tuesday and Thursday mornings to catch up on my sleep. In the evening I just cycle or run. Yes, I do fall asleep at my desk sometimes! There is a lot of nervous build-up beforehand and when you're racing you really push yourself - you don't feel good if you don't. Several times I've asked myself why I do it. The answer is a) I'm happier when I keep fit, b) I'm a slob at heart and if I didn't make myself do this I'd really be one, c) racing is very social. Men and women usually compete together but when an event is given coverage in the press, 90 per cent of the article will explain the men's event and 10 per cent will say, 'Oh, by the way, so-and-so won the women's event'. The prize money isn't as good either, of course. But now we've formed an International Triathlon Women's Commission, so we're working on it."
26.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Sea, Ice & Rock Mountaineer Chris Bonnington (58) is best known for scaling the summit of Everest in 1985. He has also pioneered routes in Britain and the Alps and written many books, including Quest for Adventure and Everest the Hard Way. Robin Knox-Johnston (53) began his sea career in the Merchant Navy. In 1968-9 he was the first to circumnavigate the world single-handed, in his yacht Sunhaili. He broke the transatlantic record, taking 10 days to reach the Lizard from New York. The two teamed up to sail and climb in Greenland, recording the trip in their new book: Sea, Ice and Rock. In 1979 I was working on Quest for Adventure, a study of post-war adventure. I called Robin to ask for an interview and he said would I like to join him for a sail. I could show him some climbing techniques and he could show me the rudiments of sailing. It was the first time I'd been on a yacht. We sailed for a while and then anchored. Robin's wife and daughter stayed on the boat and we paddled to the shore to exercise Robin's skills at climbing. The route was quite difficult and I was impressed at how steady Robin was in tricky conditions. He just padded quietly along. After a bit we I arrived at this huge drop. I asked Robin if he had ever climbed before. He hadn't, so I showed him. When I had finished, Robin very politely asked if he could go down the way he climbed down ropes on his boat. He was used to using his arms, I wanted him to use his legs. I wasn't too happy about it, but he lowered himself down quite safely. It was during that trip to Skye that Robin and I built the foundation of a very real friendship. His proposal that we should combine our skills on a joint trip to Greenland was just an extension, on a rather grand scale, of our voyage to Skye. Robin impressed me immensely as a leader. Traditionally, the skipper makes all the decisions. But Robin made a point of consulting everyone first. Most of the time, nobody dared to advise him, but it was nice to feel you were part of the decision-making process. To be frank, I found the sailing trying and very boring. The moments of crisis which we had on the way back were easy to deal with: the adrenaline pumps and you get all worked up. The bit I found difficult was spending day after day in the middle of the sea. I am a land-lover and not really a do-it-yourself type of person. Robin, in contrast, is a natural sailor and seemed to enjoy tinkering with the engine or mending the lavatory. I was aware that Robin didn't really need me. To be honest, I felt a bit useless at times; I found that very trying. The crew was also packed very close together: six people on a 32ft yacht, designed to sleep four. At least when you're on a mountain expedition you have a chance to get away from each other. When we reached Greenland and it was my turn to 'lead' the expedition, I found it difficult taking responsibility for Robin's life. There were many instances climbing together when if Robin had fallen, he could have pulled me off with him. I had to watch for that constantly. I underestimated how difficult the Cathedral -- Greenland's highest mountain - would be. Robin isn't a natural climber, which made his efforts even more impressive. The first time we tried to reach the pinnacle, we were on the go for 24 hours. On the way down we were dropping asleep on 50 degree slopes, 1,500 feet above the ground. Robin went to hell and back, but he totally put his confidence in me. He just followed. When it got too difficult and I realised wed have to turn back, he accepted it. I also knew that Robin was worried about the boat: whether we'd be able to get it through the ice, whether it was in one piece. Yet he was all in favour of us having another go at climbing the mountain. The only time there was a near-crisis in our relationship was on the yacht on the way home. We were taking it in turns to be on watch. I was supposed to get up at 4 am for my shift, but Robin decided not to wake me. He felt he could do it himself. The previous night I'd almost dropped asleep. I felt that he didn't trust me - I felt insecure, and I said so. Robin immediately reassured me that I'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. While we enjoyed the Skye trip, we didn't really know each other until the end of the Greenland expedition. I found that underneath his bluff exterior, Robin was a kind-beaned, sensitive person.
27.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	POWER DRESSING EVERY SUMMER, the peacocks that roam free within Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire expose their magnificent trains to the critical and often disdainful gaze of the hens. They re-enact the mystery that tormented Charles Darwin to his dying day: how in this competitive world, where nature as Tennyson said - is red in tooth and claw, could birds have evolved such an obvious extravagance? How do they get away with it? The zoologist Marion Petrie and her colleagues of the Open University are now exploiting the quasi-wild conditions of Whipsnade to try, a century after Darwin's death, to settle the matter. Darwin argued that living creatures came to be the way they are by evolution, rather than by special creation, and that the principal mechanism of evolution was natural selection. That is, in a crowded and hence competitive world, the individuals best suited to the circumstances - the 'fittest' - are the most likely to survive and have offspring. But the implication is that fittest would generally mean toughest, swiftest, cleverest, most alert. The peacocks tail, by contrast, was at best a waste of space and in practice a severe encumbrance, and Darwin felt obliged to invoke what he felt was a separate mechanism of evolution, which he called 'sexual selection'. The driving mechanism was simply that females liked -- in his words - 'beauty for beauty's sake'. But Darwin's friend and collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace, though in many ways more 'romantic' than Darwin, was in others even more Darwinian. 'Beauty for beauty's sake' he wanted nothing of. If peahens chose cocks with the showiest trains, he felt, then it must be that they knew what they were about. The cocks must have some other quality, which was not necessarily obvious to the human observer, but which the hens themselves could appreciate. According to Wallace, then, the train was not an end in itself, but an advertisement for some genuine contribution to survival. Now, 100 years later, the wrangle is still unresolved, for the natural behaviour of peafowl is much harder to study than might be imagined. But 200 birds at Whipsnade, which live like wild birds yet are used to human beings, offer unique opportunities for study. Marion Petrie and her colleagues at Whipsnade have identified two main questions. First, is the premise correct - do peahens really choose the males with the showiest trains? And, secondly, do the peacocks with the showiest trains have some extra, genuinely advantageous quality, as Wallace supposed, or is it really all show, as Darwin felt? In practice, the mature cocks display in groups at a number of sites around Whipsnade, and the hens judge one against the other. Long observation from hides, backed up by photographs, suggests that the hens really do like the showiest males. What seems to count is the number of eye-spots on the train, which is related to its length; the cocks with the most eye-spots do indeed attract the most mates. But whether the males with the best trains are also 'better' in other ways remains to be pinned down. William Hamilton of Oxford University has put forward the hypothesis that showy male birds in general, of whatever species, are the most parasite-free, and that their plumage advertises their disease-free state. There is evidence that this is so in other birds. But Dr Petrie and her colleagues have not been able to assess the internal parasites in the Whipsnade peacocks to test this hypothesis. This year, however, she is comparing the offspring of cocks that have in the past proved attractive to hens with the offspring of cocks that hens find unattractive. Do the children of the attractive cocks grow faster? Are they more healthy? If so, then the females' choice will be seen to be utilitarian after all, just as Wallace predicted. There is a final twist to this continuing story. The great mathematician and biologist R A Fisher in the thirties proposed what has become known as 'Fisher's Runaway'. Just suppose, for example, that for whatever reason - perhaps for a sound 'Wallacian' reason a female first picks a male with a slightly better tail than the rest. The sons of that mating will inherit their father's tail, and the daughters will inherit their mother's predilection for long tails. This is how the runaway begins. Within each generation, the males with the longest tails will get most mates and leave most offspring, and the females predilection for long tails will increase commensurately. Modern computer models show that such a feedback mechanism would alone be enough to produce a peacocks tail. Oddly, too, this would vindicate Darwin's apparently fanciful notion - once the process gets going, the females would indeed be selecting 'beauty for beauty's sake'.
28.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Ancient Chinese medicine in the West? Acupuncture is two thousand years old. It comes from the traditional Chinese system of medicine that includes herbalism, massage, diet, manipulation and exercise. It is used to treat many different conditions, but acupuncture's role in treating pain has received most attention by doctors in the West. Some GPs, midwives and physios use it regularly for pain relief. A. What's it all about? Traditional Chinese medicine sees health as a state in which the energy of the mind, body and spirit are in harmony. According to the theory, energy or Qi (pronounced chee) flows around the body along lines called meridians. There are twelve main meridians, each linked to an internal organ, and lots of tiny meridians take Qi to every cell. When the flow of Oi is upset, blocked or weakened, the body is said to be out of balance: weakness or illness may result. During a consultation with a traditional acupuncturist, he or she will try to find where imbalances occur in the Qi. This is done by feeling pulses on your wrist, examining your tongue and assessing your general appearance. He or she will ask about your medical history, current health, general well-being, state of mind, and your eating and sleeping habits. An acupuncturist uses fine needles inserted into the skin. He or she may also apply warmth from smouldering herbs or pressure at points on meridians, to stimulate the flow of Qi. B. Over three hundred points The points used for acupuncture are related to meridians so won't necessarily be near the site of the complaint. People often say they feel a not unpleasant dull ache or tingling sensation when the needle is gently manipulated. This is either done by hand or by attaching the needle to an electro-acupuncture machine. Acupuncturists say this sensation shows the needle has reached the Qi in a meridian. There are over three hundred points on the main meridians, with hundreds more elsewhere that are used less often. C. Science tells us how Without accepting the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, doctors here have accepted that acupuncture can work for pain relief. This is because they have been able to provide scientific explanations of how it might work. For example: * It has been suggested that stimulating particular nerves blocks pain signals and stops them from reaching the brain. * Some scientists believe that stimulating acupuncture points releases natural pain-relieving substances (endorphins). D. What type of pain can be treated? Many people with chronic long-term pain turn to acupuncture as a last resort. Back pain, spots injuries, arthritis, headaches and migraine and post-operative pain are commonly treated with acupuncture. Other types of pain which acupuncturists claim to treat include menstrual pain, facial nerve pain and pain suffered by terminally ill people. E. Modern use for an ancient treatment Although acupuncture has been used in China for over 2,000 years, one development has been rather more recent. The use of acupuncture instead of anaesthesia during surgery only started in the 1950s. It was this that helped to convince some doctors outside China that there was more to acupuncture than mind over matter. In China today, acupuncture is used during all sorts of operations, from tonsillectomies to caesareans, and is even used in open heart surgery. Needles may be used alone, with electrical stimulation or with drugs. It's claimed that the pain is more or less eliminated, but it varies from person to person. It's hard to imagine many of us finding the option of lying awake on the operating table very attractive. But acupuncturists say that acupuncture anaesthesia involves none of the side-effects of conventional anaesthetics (e.g. nausea), and you recover from it more quickly. F. Always effective As with most complementary therapies, clinical trials to evaluate acupuncture are difficult to run. But trials that have been done have shown that 50 to 80 per cent of people find acupuncture effective for chronic pain. Acupuncturists generally quote a similar success rate. They accept that it won't work for everyone and that people vary in their responsiveness. Traditional acupuncturists say that for chronic long-term pain it will usually take between six and seven visits for people to feel real relief. But some improvement should be felt after just two or three visits. G. A different approach to pain But Western and Chinese medicine view pain rather differently. Like most alternative therapists, an acupuncturist views his or her patient in a holistic way. This means not just focusing on specific symptoms. An acupuncturist spends a long time making a diagnosis, trying to find underlying weaknesses in the Oi. He or she will also want to know what external factors are causing the pain. For instance, is the pain worse in the cold, heat, damp or wind? Does it feel sharp, dull, throbbing, constant or burning? These are seen as important factors in deciding how acupuncture can be used to treat the pain. It's unlikely that your average medical doctor would take such things into account, isn't it? H. Traditional or not? Some medical professionals do have traditional acupuncture training. Others - including many GPs who practise acupuncture reject traditional Chinese theory and subscribe to scientific explanations. But many traditional acupuncturists believe that only by applying traditional Chinese medicine is it possible to bring about deep changes that lead to a longer cure - something that is very difficult to assess in trials. Care should always be taken in choosing an acupuncturist, who should refer you to a medical doctor for funner investigation if necessary.
29.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	BOOK A Steve Martin's Compelling Evidence is compelling indeed. The narrator, a lawyer struggling to build a new practice after being forced to leave a high- powered law firm, finds himself manoeuvred into defending his boss's wife when she is tried for her husbands murder. The trial scenes are riveting, with the outcome in doubt right up to the verdict, and a really unexpected twist in the final pages. This is a terrific debut into a crowded genre. BOOK B Curtains for the Cardinal begins with a bang, and plunges the charismatic Sigismondo, troubleshooter for the aristocracy of the Italian Renaissance, into a turmoil of politics, clerical intrigue and high-wodety murder from which we are always confident he will emerge unscathed to disclose the guilty parties. The plot is convoluted and the book is about 50 pages overweight, but it is still great stuff. BOOK C File Under: Deceased introduces a refreshingly different new detective from a first novelist, Sarah Lacey. Leah Hunter is a tax inspector, ideally positioned, it seems, for a bit of investigating when a strange man falls dead at her feet. Undaunted by attacks from various quarters - perhaps tax inspectors are used to this sort of thing - and the disapproval of her handsome local detective sergeant, gutsy, versatile Leah is a winner in every way. BOOK D Double Deuce by Robert B. Parker sets that most literate of private investigators, Spenser, the job of assisting his friend Hawk to clear drug dealers out of a deprived estate in rundown Boston. The slick dialogue comes almost as fast as the bullets, but there are few corpses and more philosophy than usual. High-quality entertainment, as always from Parker. BOOK E False Prophet by Faye Kellermann, features her usual pair of detectives, Pete Decker and Marge Dunn, investigating an attack and burglary at the house of a legendary film star's daughter. The author's easy writing style and eye for odd human behaviour make this an entertaining mystery. BOOK F Husband and wife, Diane Henry and Nicholas Horrock, write as a team. Blood Red, Snow White features another lawyer, another female client, but the action is all outside the courtroom and the defender finds himself becoming the victim as the plot unravels. All the classic ingredients of romance, money and violence are mixed efficiently to produce an engrossing suspense novel. BOOK G Dead for a Ducat by Simon Shaw presents actor Philip Fletcher in a new role, that of intended victim. The hilarious collection of characters are brought together to film the story of Robin Hood, but Philip isn't the only person to feel this is not the way his career should be developing. Simon Shaw never fails to entertain, but in moving his star actor from black comedy to farce, he gives a performance below his usual high standard. BOOK H Fall Down Easy is Lawrence Gough's best book for some time. Canadian police hunt a versatile bank robber who preys on female bank tellers. The slow, expertly-paced build-up of tension and the portrayal of the clever, disturbed robber raise this way above the average detective novel.
3.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	With the trees, I planted my stake in New Zealand JONATHON PORRITT TALKS TO DANNY DANZIGER Jonallum Porritt is the author of Seeing Green - The Politics ofEcology'. I HAD a most peculiar period of my life when I didn't have any summers. I went out to New Zealand every summer here, which is the New Zealand winter, and so I had nine winters on the trot, which was great, because I like winter. My parents came up with this idea of buying a small plot of land which 'the kids', my brother, sister and I, could look after. Mother said, 'If you can take the time and trouble to plant it with trees then you can have it.' The idea was that we would always have a stake in New Zealand, which is a lovely idea as my father was actually brought up there. And they found a plot of land about 20 miles north of Auckland in a place called Rangitoupuni. It's rather poor land, really, but it's quite good for planting trees on. I've always been very keen and enthusiastic about land. I'd spent a year in Australia working on sheep stations and helping out in different farming jobs, and so the idea of planting trees sounded like a very nice idea, and I was immediately keen. I think the rest of the family got enthusiastic as we went along. I started planting in 1968, and by the end of 1972 between the three of us we'd planted the whole 70 acres. In New Zealand in 1968 it was one of those winters. It rained an awful lot, endlessly in fact, and in a way it's idiotic to think back on it as such an immensely happy time as it rained pretty well most days that we were planting, and I don't suppose I've ever been wetter or colder for such a prolonged period. There was a moment of truth every morning: getting ready for the next planting session. Coming out of the Land Rover relatively warm and dry, with the rain coming down, and your anorak still clammy from the day before, boots still sodden, hands fumbling with slippery laces. 'The brain begins to take over and to allow for all sorts of strange thoughts, ideas and reflections about life.' In that first year I had a guy to work with me who was an experienced tree-planter, which was very helpful as I'd never planted trees seriously before all this. You have a planting bag around your neck which you fill with as many trees as you possibly can, and when your bag is full it's a nightmare, and it's only as it gets lighter that life gets easier. In a way, the most difficult bit of the entire operation was getting the lines straight. You work out what spacing you're going to plant the trees at, and then you line up a series of three poles across as long a trajectory as you can get, and those poles then determine your lines. Once you're in line, you just plant all the way down the line till you get to the end, turn around and come back again. I enjoy hard physical work, and it certainly made me fit. After a certain point you can plant trees almost on automatic, you become used to a rhythm, and you use the minimum number of spade strokes that you need to get the hole in the ground. The rhythm is something that everybody tells you about and, of course, it's true of many agricultural jobs that you actually have to train the body into a series of quite standardised moves, and then it becomes immensely easy: so you develop an absolutely regular process of taking the tree out of the bag, digging a hole, putting it in the ground, stamping it in, and moving on. Mentally, it's very interesting. The brain begins to take over and to allow for all sorts of strange thoughts and ideas and reflections about life - a lot of my thinking about the natural world and our place in it, all of those things that have since dominated my life, first began to pop through my head in those days. I've been back to New Zealand four times since then and watched the trees gradually grow, which has been very satisfying when you actually planted the things and you do then have a kind of stake in what happens and how they prosper. I always dread reading in the newspapers stories of another high wind in New Zealand, or Worst Drought Ever Hits New Zealand. Such headlines make me feel extremely apprehensive. However, it worked out extremely well and those trees are now 20 years old, and in good fettle. The only postscript I should add is that I took a term off from teaching, and I went back there in 1984, completely on my own for three months. And I wrote my first book there, Seeing Green. There's a little cabin on the tree farm which is fantastically basic, just a bed, a table and a chair. In the mornings I would do my writing; in the afternoons I would go off and prune the trees, and then do research in the evenings. The connection between me and that area is still immensely strong. In many respects it's the place that I feel most closely identified with in terms of that link between people and the earth: it's a most powerful bond.
30.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The long-distance runner Richard Nerurkar, one of Britain's top 10,000-metre runners, visits the Kenyans' high-altitude training camp. Ten miles south of the equator, a sony mountain track leads off the quiet metalled road from Nairobi. The track marks the start of the trek up Kenya's highest peak, the glacier-capped Mount Kenya. This gorgeous, if lonely and isolated, spot is Nanyuk: for the past three years it has been my base for mid-winter altitude training in Kenya's Central Highlands. But not once on those trips had I trained with Kenyan runners on their home soil. On my fourth and most recent winter training trip to Kenya, however, I broke a personal tradition. I both competed in my first-ever race in Kenya's oxygen-thin air and stayed at Kenya's national team training camp, which is where the country's top runners prepare for their annual assault on the World Cross-Country Team Championships. I was invited by Kenya's national team coach when I finished fifth - behind three Kenyans and a Moroccan - in the World Championship 1O,000 meters race. It was an opponunity not to be missed. Training at high altitude produces more red blood cells, which improves oxygen-carrying capacity. These benefits have been borne out by the successes of generations of Kenyan runners. My first African race - which came before my spell at the Kenyan team training camp - was also a first for the whole continent. Held in Nairobi, it was the first-ever international cross-country race to be held on African soil. If nothing else, it was a humbling experience. Of the 41 runners who finished ahead of me, all but 3 were Kenyan. And I honestly felt I hadn't had a bad race! However, I don't believe Kenyan success can entirely be put down to the altitude factor. Kenyan runners are also noted for their refreshingly uncomplicated approach to the sport. While their running style is seemingly effortless, their diet simple and their manner of conversation relaxed, they also seem to love competing. But the least discussed aspect of the puzzle of Kenyan success was perhaps the most basic: how do they train? My stay with the Kenyan runners at their team training camp soon provided the answers. The national team training camp is at St Mark's College, 6,200 feet up the southern slope of Mt Kenya, surrounded by beautiful playing fields and dense tropical vegetation. It's a fairly basic affair, though: there are few comforts. The athletes live among the college's regular students and are housed six to a room in cinder-block dormitories. The athletes' days at the camp are dominated by three work-outs: a leisurely early-morning run, interval training at mid-morning, followed by a steady run in the late afternoon. The daily regime began at six. We crawled from our bunks and assembled to be briefed by the coaches for the morning run. "Run easy, you have a hard job today", we were warned as we left by the coach who'd invited me. The total distance covered each day was about 40 kilometres - a little short of a marathon distance. The only exception was Sunday, with just the one scheduled run of 20 kilometres, which certainly came as a welcome respite from the rest of the week's three daily work-outs. Running apart, life was complication-free. A splash of water on the face and a brush of the teeth sufficed for pre-breakfast preparations. Breakfast itself consisted of tea, bread and boiled eggs, taken in a sparsely-lit, small dining area. Lunch and dinner both had a similar menu: ugali (a maize dish), stew, cabbage or spinach and tea. When the day's running was over, in the early evening, we would pile into a car and drive down to bathe properly in one of the many streams that run off from Mt Kenya's shrinking glaciers. By the time I left the camp, I was even more appreciative of Kenyan success. That success just can't be attributed to genetics or upbringing or altitude alone. I couldn't stop myself pondering upon a rather different explanation: that the purity and simplicity of the mountainside lifestyle, these gruelling work-outs and this passion for success, perhaps these are the secrets, perhaps these are the real reasons behind Kenya's rise to the top of world distance running.
31.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	ECCENTRICS An eccentric is by definition someone whose behaviour is abnormal, someone who refuses to conform to the accepted norms of his society. This, of course, immediately begs the question, "What is normal?" Most of us, after all, have our quirks and oddities. It may be a passion for entering newspaper competitions, a compulsion for collecting beer mats, a tendency to write indignant letters to the press on every conceivable subject. Eccentricity is the assertion of our individuality. Within most of us that urge is constantly in conflict with the contrary force. It is as though in the depths of our psyche we have two locomotives head-to-head on the same track, pushing against each other. One is called individualism and the other conformity and in most of us it is conformity that is the more powerful. The desire to be accepted, loved, appreciated, to feel at one with our fellows, is stronger than the desire to stand out in the crowd, to be our own man, to do our own thing. Notice, for example, how people who have unusual hobbies, strong opinions, or unconventional behaviour, tend to congregate. They form clubs, hold meetings, and organise rallies where they can get together and discuss their common enthusiasms or problems. The important word is 'common'. They look for other people with whom they can share what in the normal run of events is regarded by relatives, friends and neighbours as an oddity. A crowd, even a small crowd, is reassuring. Probably all of us recognise a tension within ourselves between the two forces of individualism and conformity, for at the same time that most of us are going with the crowd, we tend to resent any suggestion that this is what we are doing. We feel a self-conscious need to assert our individuality as when the belligerent man at the bar informs his small audience, "Well, I say what I think." Or the wary stranger to whom we have just been introduced announces, "You must take me as you find me. I don't stand on ceremony." Any of us can, at any time, reverse this trend. We can stoke the boiler of individualism, assert our own personality. Many people have made it to the top in their chosen professions, basically by doing just that. One example is Bob Dylan, the American singer, who has gone on record as saying, "When you feel in your gut what you are doing and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folk. But that self-conscious assertion of individuality is not eccentricity, at least not in the early stages. When a pop singer deliberately wears bizarre clothes to gain publicity, or a society hostess makes outrageous comments about her guests in order to get herself noticed in the gossip columns, that is not eccentricity. However, if the pop star and the society hostess perpetuate such activities until they become a part of themselves, until they are no longer able to return to what most of us consider 'normal behaviour', then they certainly would qualify. For the most important ingredient of eccentricity is its naturalness. Eccentrics are not people who deliberately try to be odd, they simply are odd. The true eccentric is not merely indifferent to public opinion, he is scarcely conscious at all. He simply does what he does, because of who he is. And this marks the eccentric as essentially different from, for example, enthusiasts, practical jokers, brilliant criminals, exhibitionists and recluses. These people are all very conscious of the world around them. Much of what they do, they do in reaction to the world in which they live. Some wish to make an impression on society, some wish to escape from society, but all are very much aware of society. The eccentric alone goes on his merry way regardless.
32.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Photographing People People are the most interesting of all subjects. A photograph with someone in it is almost always more compelling than the same shot without the human interest. People are also the most difficult subjects to photograph well. Apart from the technical and artistic considerations, the photographer has to be conscious of actions, gestures and expressions. And often the presence of the camera itself can have a disastrous effect on these. A. GROUPING PEOPLE Avoid straight lines in group shots. Ask people to stand at different angles and distances and if possible on different levels. Otherwise, have some of the group sitting or kneeling at the front so that you can see all the faces, or raise your own viewpoint. B. POSING FOR PICTURES People seldom act naturally in front of the camera. Often they stiffen up and the pose becomes rather wooden. Relax your subject by helping him to find a comfortable position. You might suggest he folds his hands or puts them in his pockets. C. THE RIGHT APPROACH Never try to pretend that you are not taking a picture of someone when it is clear that you are as this only creates tension and even hostility. Most people will agree to have their picture taken - perhaps after some initial protestations - and are quite flattered by it. But they are likely to become rather self-conscious and you may need to direct them. A picture can be spoiled by the fact that the subject is looking rather aimlessly out of the picture so that the interest lies elsewhere. D. EYE CONTACT A picture gains immediate impact if the subject appears to be looking at the viewer of the picture. Ask your subject to look into the lens - not necessarily to smile as well -- and this is the effect you will get. The subject may not be able to do this for too long: he may become self-conscious or be distracted by someone nearby. So remind him once more, just before you release the shutter. Or try saying something funny or unexpected as you take the shot for a genuine reaction rather than a meaningless stare. E. CANDID CONCENTRATION An alternative to direct eye contact is for the subject to concentrate on something within the picture area. Your subject might find this easier to do, and the viewer can follow the attention to another part of the picture. You get the impression that you are observing the subject unnoticed. Candid shots have a special fascination and the subject's expression is vital to the picture. F. EXPRESSIONS AND GESTURES Expressions and the gestures that go with them tell us more about the subject of a photograph than anything else. Even if he is obviously badly treated and hungry, a laughing child provokes a smile from the viewer, whereas a sad expression produces a sympathetic sadness in the viewer, however apparently comfortable the subject may be. Look for familiar expressions for your portraits: shrugs, winks, anger, tears, thumbs-up, fist-clenching and so on. They are an instant visual language. G. SITUATION INTEREST Though shots which isolate a figure or face prominently have great impact, the subject's background or environment can add extra interest and information about the subject. When using a background in this way, try to exclude details that are not relevant to the subject or blur them by focusing selectively. Make sure that the subject is not overwhelmed by the background - a wide-angle lens will make your subject appear relatively larger by comparison with the background. H. INTERACTION Wherever two or more people are talking, arguing, haggling, joking or working together, there are opportunities for good pictures. Couples make appealing shots; so do mothers and babies, teachers and children or teams of people working or playing a sport. Look out especially for contact between the subjects - either eye-contact or physical contact, like a protective hand on the arm or a handshake. Or show how one is reacting to another by waiting for an animated expression or telling gesture. I. PEOPLE AND PLACES Many pictures of people are taken on holiday or during an outing - partly to show the place they were visiting. A little care will greatly improve this type of picture. To show people against a relevant background, use a standard or a wide-angle lens and move far enough back to get the whole building (or mountain, or lake) in the frame. Ask your subjects to come fairly close to the camera and compose the picture so that the group forms a foreground interest without obscuring the background. If you can find a slightly elevated camera position, this will be far easier to do. A good picture will show a balance between the subjects and the place they were visiting, so that both claim an equal share of the viewer's attention. J. TO POSE OR NOT TO POSE? In answer to this question, first decide why you want to take the picture. If you are taking a picture to remember someone by someone you may have met briefly on holiday, for example - then you will want a good clear picture and it would be worth asking the subject to pose against a well-chosen background. Pictures of the family, on the other hand, can be very tedious if they are a succession of formal poses in front of places of interest. Candid pictures of events as they happen are far more lively, and you are more likely to get unselfconscious shots when you know the subject well. A picture taken on the spur of the moment will jog the family memory in future years far better than a posed portrait.
33.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	New In Paperback A. The career of citizen Tristan Smith, set in the fictional republic of Efica, is an extraordinary parable of human power, history and humour. In a feat of considerable literary skill, the author has created a world with its own history, traditions and customs. The book is notable also for its humour, and for the author's unique vision, which is here combined with his penetrating psychological insight in a novel which is difficult but rewarding. B. Harriet is poised and middle-class, with an architect husband and her own business. Ordinarily, she would never have met Sheila, a traditional working-class woman who looks after her ageing father and has brought up her grandson, Leo, since he was three. Their lives are shattered when the teenage Leo viciously attacks Harriets son, Joe, in the street. After the court case both boys refuse to talk about what happened. Leo, who had been a model pupil and had never been involved in a fight before, will not explain what came over him, while Joe recovers physically but becomes withdrawn. Harriet is tortured by the effect on her son and ministering to him takes over her life. Sheila is so wracked with guilt that she requests a meeting - from which their unusual friendship grows. The great strength of the author has always been in depicting how people react to upheaval in their lives. He also captures the mothers sense that, no matter how hard she tries, she can never do enough. C. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this book follows the fortunes of one of the most isolated of the Scottish Orkney islands and its inhabitants over a long and uneventful rural history. The book sets this narrative against pertinent moments in Scottish history, as vividly imagined in the daydreams of the young protagonist, Throfinn Ragnarson, who disappears abruptly at one point in the book, only to return after the Second World War, having now learnt to appreciate the simplicity of his worthy ancestors lives. D. Following his recent blockbuster success, the author has produced a sequel resonant with the same gentle irony and acid observations of family life which made its predecessor so appealing. Fifteen years after her daughter's death, Aurora Greenway approaches her seventies with her spirited companion, Rosie Sunlap. Aurora's approach to life remains the same winning combination of vanity, charm and reluctant kindness, and Rosie provides an ally in her continuing and highly enjoyable manipulation of both suitors and friends. By the end of the book, Aurora is forced to acknowledge the passage of time that brings a new generation to centre stage. The author is skilful at exposing the haunting sadness that hovers beneath the seeming ordinariness of life. He is attuned more to the shadows than the bright lights of human activity and identifies the randomness of events. E. Six disparate people are brought together by millionaire Logan Urquhart to sail around the islands of the South Pacific in his yacht, the Ardent Spirit. With her awe-inspiring mastery of descriptive language, the author charts the personal voyages of self-discovery with which each of these mariners prepares to return home, their own spirits quickened and made ardent by the experience of life adrift on 'the desert cities of waves'. The author uses startling images to convey her themes of memory and awareness. Those images are both alienating and illuminating.
34.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The day I drew Picasso Richard Cork recalls how, as an 78-year-old student, he came face-to-face with one of the most revered artists of the century. Even seen at a distance, eating his lunch at an open-air restaurant in Cannes harbour, Picasso was instantly recognisable. I was an I8-year-old student, filling in time before university by travelling round Europe and Morocco in a battered and unreliable van. Having run out of money, I found a boat-painting job on the waterfront. But I spent much of the time drawing, and was lucky enough to be carrying an ample sketchbook when my encounter with the octogenarian artist took place. Picasso was known to be a fairly reclusive figure who spent most of his time shut away working high in the hills. So I was doubly astonished to find him seated at a table with his wife, Jacqueline, and three companions. Without my friend's prompting, I would never have dared to walk over and ask for his signature. Nor did I imagine, as I nervously introduced myself and offered my sketchbook, that he would comply. But my request was generously granted. Taking the large sheet I passed over, Picasso inscribed his name across the top of the paper. Then, as if unable to resist the blankness below, he added an exuberant linear flourish on the rest of the page. But Pcasso's art, even at its least representational, was usually anchored in observed reality. So the curves may well refer to a cloud, the wind-rippled sea or the shape assumed by Cannes harbour, dominating his lunchtime vantage point. Delighted, I thanked him and embarked on a halting conversation. Since Picasso's English was even poorer than my French, an extravagantly dressed American woman at the table acted as our interpreter. She kept describing him as the Maestro, and it was difficult to combat her gushing interjections. But I did manage to tell Picasso of my voracious interest in art and my admiration for his work. After a while, I resumed to the boat and proudly displayed the fruit of my visit. But the friend who had encouraged me to introduce myself to Picasso could see that the lunch party was still in progress. 'Is that all?' he asked, looking at the signature. 'Why on earth don't you go back and make the most of it? You won't get a chance like this again - and he probably wouldn't mind if you drew his portrait.' Sketchbook under arm, I returned to Picasso's table. I thought it wise not to ask him whether he'd mind having his portrait drawn: a refusal at this stage might have wrecked the whole delicate enterprise. So I simply stood by the table, propped my pad against an ironwork screen, got out a stick of crayon and stayed to draw. Once he noticed, Picasso grinned like an imp and made my task wickedly difficult. He acted out a range of expressions, both ridiculous and macabre - rolling his eyes, sticking out his tongue and brandishing his hand in fantastical shapes on either side of his forehead. The entire performance was carried out with the gusto of an instinctive clown. I was tempted to give up the struggle, but the sheer high spirits of my playful sitter seemed tantamount to a challenge. However obstructive his antics, I felt that he was testing my persistence, in order, perhaps, to discover the true extent of my determination. As if to bear this out, Picasso at last relented and lapsed into repose. For a few extraordinary minutes, he deliberately gave me the chance to study him without impediment. I noticed how tough and alert he appeared, still taut in a blue-and-white striped jersey. As compact as a wrestler, the deeply tanned figure resembled an athletic 60-year-old rather than a man who would soon be celebrating his 84th birthday. I marvelled at the youthfulness of his clear, dark eyes, set with startling intensity in features remarkably unencumbered by the folds of slack flesh on so many elderly faces. The eyes were mesmerising, and I tried to give them the necessary forcefulness. After fastening themselves on whatever they wanted to scrutinise, they did not blink until the unwavering gaze moved elsewhere. He also seemed curiously removed and alone, even though there was plenty of company nearby. His engaging burst of buffoonery could not disguise an underlying gravity of spirit. Content to let his friends do most of the talking, he sat in a very private and absorbed silence, pursuing his own isolated interests undisturbed. When the American lady told me that the Maestro wanted to see his portrait, I became embarrassed and replied that it wasn't good enough to show him. Picasso insisted, however, and after I passed my sketchbook over, he gave my efforts a generous nod. Then, to my astonishment, he announced that it was now his turn. I lost no time in giving him my crayon, and his hand applied a few swift, decisive strokes to the paper. In a matter of seconds, with beguiling assurance, he outlined a bearded face below the head which had taken me so many anxious minutes to produce. He handed the pad back, and there was a drawing blithely at odds with my dogged strivings. Picasso had moved one eye onto my nose, and summarised my smile in a single, irresistibly vivacious line. I looked like a creature who had strayed from one of his more lighthearted mythological compositions. Perhaps he saw me as an intruder from another world, peering in at him with all the gauche curiosity of a young man amazed to find himself face-to-face with an artist he venerated. I thanked Picasso, and asked him if he would be kind enough to sign the drawing. After consultation, the American explained that the Maestro says you already have his signature. So there were limits to the generosity he was prepared to bestow on me! All the same, I look back now and wonder at my good fortune. Meeting Picasso and, more important, receiving his attention meant an enormous amount to me.
35.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	P. D. James Barbara Michaels meets the acclaimed crime writer, whose innocent exterior hides a complex and brilliant imagination. Best-selling crime writer P.D. James - the initials stand for Phyllis Dorothy - exudes an air of quiet authority. It is easy to envisage her, had she not become a creator of detective stories with more twists and turns than a spiral staircase, as a headmistress of a girls' school. But it is soon apparent from what she says that the authoritative mien is, in fact, a cloak for shyness. She reluctantly admits that Adam Dalgliesh, the detective in her novels, 'is, I suppose, modelled on myself - or rather, the way I would have turned out if I had been a man'. Dalgliesh prefers to unravel the complexities of crimes solo, as does his creator. 'I need time on my own, particularly when I am writing. I can write more or less anywhere as long as I have total privacy.' She is too modest to concur with the view that she is Britain's best-known crime writer, even though her books - 12 major detective novels - are read avidly by millions all over the world. She herself is a great fan of the works of close friend Ruth Rendell. 'I particularly enjoy her psychological works, written under the name of Barbara Vine.' Books beside her bed are most likely to be by women writers such as Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner and Penelope Lively, although not to the total exclusion of male authors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, whom she considers to have been the greatest novelists of their generation. Success came to P.D. James late in life. Now in her seventies, she was 42 when her first crime novel, Cover Her Face, was published. Born in Oxford, the eldest of three children, Phyllis grew up mainly in Cambridge, where her family moved when she was 11 years old. 'I met my husband there - he was a student at the university, and I have always loved the place. That is why I chose it as the setting for An Unsuitable Job For A Woman.' Reluctantly, she reveals that from a promising start, life has been hard, even tragic at times. Her Irish doctor husband, Connor Bantry White, returned from the Second World War, during which he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, a very sick man. 'I had to work long hours to support him and our two young daughters, Clare and Jane. The ideas were teeming in my head, but I could do practically nothing about it - I simply hadn't the time. My husband's parents, however, were marvellous, and took my daughters under their wing, giving them a sense of security throughout those difficult years.' While working full-time in administration for the National Health Service, she made good use of her enviable organisational skills. At one point, five psychiatric outpatients' clinics came under her jurisdiction. Then followed 11 years at the Home Office, first in the Police Department, doing administration for forensic science research, and then in the Criminal Law section, in the juvenile crime division. It was while working in forensic science that she became 'quite accustomed' to the sight of corpses. But it was not fascination with death itself that inspired her. 'It was, rather, the shape and construction involved in the writing of a crime novel that appealed. I have always enjoyed reading detective stories, and I always knew that I wanted to be a writer.' 'I didn't want to use the traumatic events of my own life in a work of fiction. The writing of a detective story appealed as a wonderful apprenticeship for someone setting out to be a serious novelist, and it was suitably remove from my own experience. As I went on, I became increasingly aware that one could stay within the constraints and indeed within the so-called formula of the classic detective story and still write a good, serious and revealing novel about human beings. Writing detective stories', she says, 'is a way of bringing order out of disorder. The solution of a crime confirms the sanctity of life - even If that life ls unlovable. Nobody really likes violence.'
36.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	We changed lives for a day! Have you ever dreamed about swapping lives with someone else for a day? Perhaps you think it would be more fun to do something quite different for a change? We fixed it for four people - read how it went. Amanda (23), a young mother with two daughters, swapped lives with her friend Cindy (30), who works as a waitress at a glitzy London restaurant and entertainment complex. A. Amanda's story I'd never been inside anywhere remotely like it before. I couldn't believe how dark and noisy it was - there were so many people and such a brilliant atmosphere. It was all a far cry from my home town and, to he honest, I wasn't sure I'd survive! Being a mother is definitely a busy job - but this was something else! I had just fifteen minutes to learn how to carry a tray of drinks at shoulder height with one hand. The other waitresses made it look so simple, but just as I was getting the hang of it, the drinks started to slide off the tray and crashed on to the floor, splattering cocktails everywhere. I was so embarrassed, but all the other waitresses laughed. Everyone makes a fool of themselves at first! By opening time at 11.30 am, a queue had already formed outside and I began to feel really nervous. I was worried about how I'd remember all the orders, but that, at least, wasn't a problem because everything was automated. After a couple of hours my feet really ached and I couldn't get used to the constant loud music. Every time a customer spoke to me I had to say 'Pardon?', which was so embarrassing! By the end of my shift at 5 pm, I was totally exhausted and longed to soak my feet in a bowl of hot water. I couldn't believe it when one of the waitresses told me it had been a 'quiet' day! I never realised how tiring waitressing would be. I've always thought it was a job for shrinking violets, but in fact you definitely need to be quite bubbly, as well having the ability to keep a cool head and deal with what is known in the trade as a 'high-volume experience' - in other words, lots of customers! I'm really quite shy and I don't think I could cope on a Saturday night, when it gets chaotically busy. I wasn't too impressed with the pay either. Unfortunately, I must have been a lousy waitress because even the rich Americans didn't tip me a bean! I must admit I was very glad to get back to my children. It seems quite easy after waitressing! B. Cindy's story I was feeling quite apprehensive about being a 'mum' for the day, but I was looking forward to it, too. I'd been warned the girls were cheeky, but in my ignorance I thought I could handle it. Little did I know! As Amanda left to make her way to the restaurant, I had to get the two girls dressed and fed. After dropping off Sophie at school and Katie at nursery I thought I'd have three hours of peace. Wrong! A note from Amanda reminded me that I still had to make the beds, clean the house and do the washing. At 1 pm I picked up Katie, whizzed around the supermarket and then took her home for lunch. But it was when I brought Sophie home from school that the real trouble started. They turned the settee into a trampoline and played a game which involved screaming as loudly as they possibly could! I decided to take the laid-back approach, imagining they'd soon get worn out. Wrong again. I thought I had a fair amount of stamina, but they beat me, hands down! After much persuasion, I managed to get them into bed by about 8 pm, but then the fun and games started! How many glasses of water can a child drink, for heaven's sake? Of course, I realised it was just a ploy so they could come downstairs and watch television, but it was exhausting to spend all evening negotiating deals with them. I never realised how tiring it could be looking after two small children. You don't get a second to think about yourself - and the sheer sense of responsibility is overwhelming. Even so, I really enjoyed the day. Rosemary (42) runs a dairy farm. She swapped with Hilary (30), a teacher at a primary school. C. Rosemary's story On the farm, I have to get up at 5.30 am so sleeping in until 7 was pure luxury! But I dithered for ages about how to look. I could hardly turn up in overalls and boots, could I? Looking at a sea of faces -- about 400 pupils -- at assembly, I hoped I melted into the background and that my fresh complexion didn't make me stand out as being straight off the farm. After that it was time for a maths class. The children worked in small groups, using workcards graded according to difficulty - rather different from when I was at school and we had to recite tables in unison! Then I helped out with a nature project - identifying and feeding species of snails. By lunchtime I was exhausted and looking forward to an hour's break, but the teachers only have about five minutes to eat their meal. There's so much to do before classes start again. I attended a staff meeting about reports and couldn't avoid getting roped in to help with athletics trials. Alter lunch there was a silent reading lesson (bliss!) and then a French lesson in the video room. This was great fun because all the children wanted to practise on me, which really showed up my rusty French. Finally we moved on to the school hall for Physical Education. I was drained by now, but the children seemed to have inexhaustible energy. The hardest part of the job was standing up in front of the class and speaking - even for just two minutes, it's daunting. Teachers may get more holidays a year, but I think I'll stick to farming, anyway! D. Hilary's story I arrived at White House Farm at 8.30 am, bright and early, only to discover that Rosemary had been up for three hours! Rosemary's 280-acre farm has 100 Jersey cows, 15 calves and heifers and about 800 ewes! As well as milk, she manufactures ice-cream, yoghurt and cream, which is sold in shops, restaurants and at tourist attractions. I spent most of the morning in the ice-cream parlour, bottling milk into plastic litre containers, squeezing ice-cream from a machine into cartons and sticking on labels. It was difficult to stop myself dipping my fingers into the goodies! At lunchtime it was time to inspect the sheep. I drove over to one of the fields and picked up a ewe which had fallen over. If the sheep are left for more than 12 hours once they have fallen over they could die, so they have to he checked every day. What a nightmare it must be in winter! Alter feeding the calves, I started the milking. The process took an exhausting two-and-a-half hours. And Rosemary does this twice a day, starting at 6 am, seven days a week, 365 days a year! I found it quite a lonely day. I was surprised how much I missed the children - animals don't answer back! The worst aspect of the job is not being able to get away from work. The cows always have to be milked twice a day, so it's really difficult to plan any time off. Rosemary will only get about three days' holiday this year. Farming seems romantic but the reality is very different. The income is irregular and I'd hate to be at the mercy of the weather.
37.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	DO REVIEWS SELL BOOKS? We asked five leading British publishers about the effect of the reviews of a book on its commercial success. Here is what they said. Publisher A Reviews are absolutely key for publishers - the first part of the newspaper we turn to. The Book Marketing Council found some years ago that when questioned on why they had bought a particular hook, more people cited reviews than any other prompting influence (advertisements, word of mouth, bookshop display, etc.). Authors' responses to reviews are slightly different from publishers. Both are devastated by no reviews, but publishers are usually more equable about the had reviews, judging that column inches are what matter and that a combination of denunciation and ecstatic praise can actually create sales as readers decide to judge for themselves. Publishers probably get the most pleasure from a review which precisely echoes their own response to a book - they are often the first 'reader'. Publisher B While publishers and the press fairly obviously have a common interest in the nature of book review pages, one also needs to remember that their requirements substantially differ: a newspaper or magazine needs to provide its readers with appropriately entertaining material; a publishing house wants to see books, preferably its own, reviewed, preferably favourably. Without any question, book reviewing is 'better' -- more diverse, less elitist -- than 40 years ago, when I began reading review pages. That said, there is still a long-grumbled-about tendency to neglect the book medium read by a majority -- namely paperbacks. The weekly roundups aren't really adequate even if conscientiously done. And even original paperbacks only rarely receive serious coverage. But publishers shouldn't complain too much. Like readers and writers, they need reviews, which after all are an economical way of getting a book and an author known. There is no question that a lively account of a new book by a trusted name can generate sales even more if there are several of them. Fame is what puts a book into the hands of readers. Publisher C Reviews are the oxygen of literary publishing; without them, we would be cut off from an essential life-source. Because the books we publish are generally not by 'brand-name' authors, whose books sell with or without reviews, and because we seldom advertise, we depend on the space given to our books by literary editors. When the reviews are favourable, of course, they are worth infinitely more than any advertisement. The reader knows that the good review is not influenced by the publisher's marketing budget: it is the voice of reason, and there is no doubt that it helps to sell books. Publishers themselves often claim that they look for size rather than content in reviews. The actual effect of reviews on sales is the inscrutable heart of the whole business. Good reviews can launch a book and a career and occasionally lift sales into the stratosphere: but never entirely on their own. There has to be some fusion with other elements -- a word-of-mouth network of recommendation, a robust response from the book trade, clever marketing. Publisher D The relationship in Britain between publishing and reviewing? I wish I knew! In the United States it's simple: the New York Times can make or break a book with a single review. Here, though, the people in the bookshops often don't appear to take much notice of them. It sometimes takes 20 years of consistently outstanding reviews for people to start reading a good writer's work. Yet some of the most dismally received books, or books not yet reviewed, are the biggest sellers of all. So it's all very unpredictable, though non-action is less so. Mind you, non-fiction does allow reviewers to indulge themselves by telling us what they know about the subject of the book under review rather than about the book itself. Publisher E Of course, all publishers and all writers dream of long, uniformly laudatory reviews. But do they sell books? I once published a biography. The reviews were everything I could have craved. The book was a flop -- because everyone thought that, by reading the lengthy reviews, they need not buy the book. Does the name of the reviewer make a difference? Thirty years ago, if certain reviewers praised a book, the public seemed to take note and obey their recommendations. These days, it is as much the choice of an unexpected reviewer, or the sheer power or wit or originality of the review, which urges the prospective buyer into the bookshop.
38.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Chewing gum culture It's fashionable, classless and Americans chew 12 million sticks of it a day. Discover how an ancient custom became big business. Chewing gum contains fewer than ten calories per stick, but it is classified as a food and must therefore conform to the standards of the American Food and Drug Administration. Today's gum is largely synthetic, with added pine resins and softeners which help to hold the flavour and improve the texture. This was not always the case, though. The ancient Greeks chewed a gum-like resin obtained from the bark of the mastic tree, a shrub found mainly in Greece and Turkey. Grecian women, especially, favoured mastic gum to clean their teeth and sweeten their breath. American colonists followed the example of the Amero-Indians of New England and chewed the resin that formed on spruce trees when the bark was cut. Lumps of spruce for chewing were sold in the eastern United States in the early 1800s making it the first commercial chewing gum in the country. Modern chewing gum has its origins in the late 1860s with the discovery of chicle, a milky substance obtained from the sapodilla tree of the Central American rainforest. Gum made from this resulted in a smoother, more satisfying and more elastic chew, and soon a whole industry was born based on this product. Yet repeated attempts to cultivate sapodilla commercially have failed. As the chewing gum market has grown, synthetic alternatives have had to be developed. Today the few remaining chicle gatherers, chicleros, eke out a meagre and dangerous living, trekking for miles to tap scattered sapodilla in near-100% humidity. Conditions are appalling: highly poisonous snakes lurk ready to pounce and insects abound. Most alarming is the unpleasant little chicle fly that likes to lodge its eggs in the tappers ears and nose. Braving these hazards, barefooted and with only a rope and an axe, an experienced chiclero will shin a mature tree in minutes to cut a path in the bark for the white sap to flow down to a bag below. Each chiclero must carry the liquid on his back to a forest camp, where it is boiled until sticky and made into bricks. Life at the camp is no picnic either, with a monotonous and often deficient maize-based diet washed down by a local alcohol distilled from sugar cane. Yet, punishing though this working environment is, the remaining chicleros fear for their livelihood. Not so long ago, the United States alone imported 7,000 tonnes of chicle a year from Central America. Last year just 200 tonnes were tapped in the whole of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. As chewing gum sales have soared, so the manufacturers have turned to synthetics to reduce costs and meet demands. Meanwhile, the world's gum producers are finding ingenious ways of marketing their products. In addition to all the claims made for gum - it helps you relax, peps you up and eases tension (soldiers during both world wars were regularly supplied with gum) - gums greatest claim is that it reduces tooth decay. Plaque acid, which forms when we eat, causes this. Our saliva, which neutralises the acid and supplies minerals such as calcium, phosphate and fluoride, is the body's natural defence. Gum manufacturers say 20 minutes of chewing can increase your salivary flow. Research continues on new textures and flavours. Glycerine and other vegetable oil products are now used to blend the gum base. Most new flavours are artificial - but some flavours still need natural assistance. In addition, one hundred and thirty-seven square kilometres of America is devoted entirely to producing the mint that is used in the two most popular chewing gums in the world.
39.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	An awfully big adventure The Taklamakan Desert in western China is one of the last unexplored places on earth. It is also one of the most dangerous. Charles Blackmore crossed it, and lived to tell the tale. There are very few big adventures left and very few heroes. Children's stories used to specialise in them -- courageous explorers with sunburnt, leathery skin and eyes narrowed by straining to see into far horizons on their journeys into the unknown. These days you no longer find such people in fiction, let alone in real life. Or so I thought until I met Charles Blackmore. Blackmore's great adventure consisted of leading an expedition across one of the last unexplored places on earth, the Taklamakan Desert in western China. Its name means 'once entered you never come out', but local people call it the Desert of Death. He recalled the dangers and exhilaration of that amazing trek, in the calm atmosphere of his family home. The team he led was composed of four Britons (one of them the party's medical officer), an American photographer, four Chinese (all experts on the area), 30 camels and six camel handlers. It later turned out that the camel handlers had never worked with camels before, but were long-distance lorry drivers: a misunderstanding that could have cost everyone their lives and certainly jeopardised the expedition's success. This mixed bunch set out to cross 1,200 kilometres of the world's least hospitable desert and Charles Blackmore has written a mesmerising account of their journey. At the time, he was about to leave the Army after 14 happy years. He launched the expedition for fun, to fill a gap in his life, to prove something. 'I had always assumed I'd spend my whole life in the Army. I had been offered promotion but suddenly I felt I wanted to see who Charles Blackmore really was, outside all that. It was a tremendous gamble. Tina, my wife, was very worried that I wouldn't come back as nobody had ever done that route; we went into it blind. In the event, it took 59 days to cross from west to east, and the desert was very kind to us.' Anyone reading his extraordinary account of that crossing will wonder at the use of the word 'kind'. The team suffered unspeakable hardships: dysentery; extremes of temperature; severe thirst and dehydration; the loss of part of their precious water supply. 'But', Blackmore explains, 'when we were at the limits of our own endurance and the camels had gone without water for seven days, we managed to find some. We didn't experience the Taklamakan's legendary sandstorms. And we never hit the raw, biting desert cold that would have totally immobilised us. That's not to say that we weren't fighting against hurdles the whole time. The fine sand got into everything, especially blisters and wounds. The high dunes were torture to climb, for us and for the heavily laden camels, which often rolled over onto us. 'What drove me on more than anything else was the need to survive. We had no contingency plan. Neither our budget no time allowed one. No aircraft ever flew over us. Once we got into the sandhills we were completely on our own. 'I knew I had the mental stamina for the trip but I was very scared of my physical ability to do it. I remember day one -- we sat at the edge of the desert and it was such an inferno that you couldn't breathe. I thought, "We've got to do it now!" At that moment I was a very scared man.' If it was like that at the beginning, how did they feel towards the end? 'When you've walked for 1,000 kilometres you're not going to duck out. You've endured so much; you've got so much behind you. We were very thin, but very muscular and sinewy despite our physical exhaustion. My body was well-toned and my legs were like pistons. I could walk over anything.' Midway through the book, Blackmore went on to describe lying in the desert gazing up at a full moon, thinking of his family. How conscious was he of the ordeal it must have been for them? 'Inside me there's someone trying to find peace with himself. When I have doubts about myself now, I go back to the image of the desert and think, well, we managed to pull that together. As a personal achievements, I feel prouder of that expedition than of anything else I've dine. Yet in terms of a lifetime's achievement, I think of my family and the happiness we share -- against that yardstick, the desert does not measure up, does not compare.' Has Charles Blackmore found peace? 'I yearn for the challenge -- for the open spaces -- the resolve of it all. We were buoyed up by the sense of purpose. I find it difficult now to be part of the uniformity of modern life.'
4.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Explore Worldwide - small groups leave few footprints Explore Worldwide is right in the forefront of adventure travel with trips designed for people who want to get more out of their holiday than just a beach. Our emphasis is on travel to new and unusual destinations, coupled with interesting and original itineraries. Our brochure contains over 100 original adventures - tours, treks, safaris and expeditions - in more than 60 countries around the world. Most trips last from 1-4 weeks. Small Groups Averaging 16 people. Small informal groups, expertly led. Giving you a real opportunity to discover more about the places we visit for yourself. More personal involvement brings you closer to the local scene and the local peoples. A stimulating experience for all travellers. Different Modes of Travel Many different kinds of transport are used. Often on the same trip. We travel by chartered coach or local bus, by train, expedition vehicle, minibus, boat, canoe, raft, camel, light plane etc. And often on foot. Each trip takes on the character of the local terrain. Who Travels with Explore? Interesting people with the resilience to tackle new situations and get the most out of an original adventure. Mainly from the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the States. All our trips are designed to be within the capabilities of almost anyone who enjoys good health, is reasonably fit, and above all adaptable. The majority are aged between 25 and 55. About half are couples. The rest are enterprising individuals travelling alone. Activities and Interests It's not easy to describe Explore Worldwide. Each trip is completely unique. So we have divided our worldwide adventures into 8 different categories, describing some of the main activities and interests. Each category represents a special highlight that is an integral part of a particular tour, and of course trips have several different highlights. However, please bear in mind that many other factors contribute to the success of all our trips as a whole. Unique places, unusual encounters, strange customs, unpredictable events, personal involvement - all play their part in the full enjoyment of your holiday. Cultural/Adventure Almost all the trips in our brochure have a strong cultural feeling. But a certain number of tours have this as their primary emphasis, focusing closely on local cultures, ethnic peoples and classic sites. For example, anyone looking for destinations of outstanding cultural and historical interest should consider our trips in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Greece, India, Bhutan, Thailand, China, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala and Belize - to mention a few of the places featured in our programme! Short day walks of 2-4 hours to visit unusual or off-the-tourist-track sites are often an integral part of our trips. Wildlife and Natural History Our wildlife safaris visit many of the world's greatest game parks and offer a thrilling encounter with animals in their natural state. Choose from dozens of remarkable destinations. In Africa, for example, you often have the freedom to step outside your safari vehicle and tackle the wild terrain for yourself. You could track the rare silver-back mountain gorilla in Zaire, go bush walking with tribal guides in Uganda, climb Mount Kenya, ride a canoe on the Zambezi River or a traditional mokoro in the Okavango Delta. Most African safaris camp, and full camping equipment is provided. A few offer hotel and lodge accommodation throughout. Elsewhere, in Asia and South America, on trips which include game viewing - say, our tiger safari in India - we usually stay in hotels, resthouses and jungle lodges. In Darwin's famous Galapagos Islands we live aboard a small motor yacht. Ethnic Encounters A special highlight of an Explore Worldwide adventure is the opportunity it offers to meet ethnic or tribal peoples. These could be the 'Blue Men' or Tuareg of the Central Sahara, the Maya of Mexico, or the colourful Huli of Papua New Guinea. Some, like the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, are nomadic wanderers. Others, like the pygmies of the Ituri Forest, are hunter-gatherers; or dry rice farmers like the friendly hilltribe peoples of Northern Thailand. Many are often part of an 'Old World' culture. Their societies are often under serious threat from unscrupulous exploiters. We travel in small groups only. Our aim is to help spread tolerance and understanding between different races and peoples, with the minimum of culture and environmental disturbance. Easy/Moderate Hiking Many trips include a few days' easy walking through open countryside, based on rented or hotel accommodation; also village-to-village hiking which involves some trail walking with the prospect of overnighting along the way in private houses or basic village huts. You'll find such trips in Spain's Sierra Nevada, in Provence, Tuscany, Crete, Corsica, Greece, Morocco, Turkey, Bulgaria, Thailand, Bhutan, Nepal, Venezuela, and many other Explore Worldwide destinations. On long distance walks involving more than one day, all your main luggage is transported by a separate vehicle, or carried by porters or pack animals. You simply bring a daypack for your personal gear. Major Treks A limited number of major treks are offered for strong mountain walkers. These sometimes involve walking at elevations over 10,000 feet, with substantial altitude gains and losses during a single day. We may lodge with the local people or rough-camp in the world's great mountain ranges like the Atlas, Kackar, Himalayas and Andes. Or we use a mixture of well-appointed camp-sites and alpine chalets in more sophisticated mountain areas such as the Alps. Such trips usually involve support vehicles, porterage or pack animals. We rarely backpack or carry heavy gear. Wilderness Experience Discovering one of the world's remote wilderness areas is a thrilling and memorable experience - perhaps the ultimate travel adventure. Such places have a strong fascination for the intrepid traveller, holding out the prospect of exotic new horizons. We explore the haunting beauty of the Amazon Rainforest and experience the powerful mystique of the Sahara, Great Thor, Namib and Gobi Deserts. They offer a chance to participate in an adventure few people could ever dream of. Sailtreks/Seatreks These are among the most original and relaxing holidays in our brochure. We charter local boats and journey by traditional felucca sailboat through Upper Egypt; we utilise gulets (wooden motor yachts) in Turkey and island-to-island ferries in countries like Greece and Thailand. Our 2-masted schooner explores the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago, while a small motor yacht is chartered to cruise among the unique wildlife habitats of the Galapagos. Raft and River Journeys River journeys can last from a few hours to several days, and range from 2-person inflatables which participants paddle themselves (on the Dordogne River, for example) to all the fun, thrills and excitement of whitewater railing navigated by skilled oarsmen (such as on Peru's beautiful Urubamba River or the wild Trisuli River in Nepal). No previous experience is necessary and the appropriate safety skills are quickly learned. Our river trips in India, Africa and the Amazon offer us a unique insight into the fertile margins and exotic jungles.
40.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Careers Six people talk about their typical working day A. Credit Card Executive I get up at 6 am to arrive at the office around 7.30 am. I manage all the customer development programmes for our regular credit card users. My responsibilities include the launch and management of the Membership Rewards scheme in the major European markets. I have to keep in touch with existing card users, acquire new ones and build relationships with partner companies. I use the first 45 minutes to organise my day and then I respond to any e-mail messages. I manage all the advertising for the membership programme across Europe, so I meet with our marketing staff and the advertising agencies to establish a strategy and work on future developments. I have meetings scheduled for most of the day, but at all other times I make sure I keep my door open for anyone to come and ask me questions. There are nine customer service units around Europe and I have to travel to the different markets once or twice a week to discuss issues that come up. When I'm in London, I leave work between 6.30 pm and 7.00 pm. B. Record Company Executive I get to work for 10.00 am and go through the post - between ten and twenty demonstration tapes a day, letters from producers and information about concerts, as well as invoices from session musicians and studios. The phone starts ringing at about 10.30 am - producers, publishers and so on, and there are meetings arranged throughout the day to talk about campaigns or projects for a particular artist. This might involve the press, marketing and the managing director. When I listen to demo tapes I am very aware that people are bringing in their life's work, so I try to be constructive. I instinctively know if the sound is appropriate for our record label. Once I've signed a band, we start on the first album - choosing the songs, producer, and additional musicians. Then I have to communicate my vision of the album to the rest of the company for marketing and selling. I also oversee budgets and spending. I leave work at 7.00 pm at the earliest and most evenings I go to gigs - sometimes I see as many as five new groups a night. Sometimes after a gig I'll visit an artist in the studio. Most of my socialising evolves around my work. I often don't get home until 1.00 am - when I put on a record to help me wind down. C. Sales Director I get up at 8.00 am and drive to work to arrive at 9.30 am. I open the post, look through the diary to check if we're going to see any clients that day, then wait and see who turns up. I love taking people round the showrooms - there's nothing better than reaching an agreement with someone, selling them a piece of furniture and knowing it's going to a good home. We sell antiques from PS1,000 to PS6,000 and buy from the London salerooms, country house sales, our private clients and overseas. A lot of what we buy needs restoration. We have a full-time restorer in the shop, and I spend a lot of time liaising with gilders, picture framers and paper repairers. I read the Antiques Trade Gazette while I drink coffee at odd moments, to keep in touch with what's going on in the business, and I often pop into the Victoria and Albert museum to compare furniture. I do the accounts one day every month and every three months I do the tax returns. At 5.30 pm I go home. It usually takes me about an hour to switch off. D. Air Traffic Controller I work a set shift pattern, and when I'm on an early shift I leave the house at 6.00 am. At 7.00 am I relieve the night shift and take over one of the four control positions in the tower. We have a rotating timetable, which means that I work for about an hour and a half at one of the stations, go off for half an hour and then come back to a different station. The air traffic controllers, a supervisor and the watch manager all sit near to each other and work as a team, controlling the aircraft movements. In winter we deal with about 1,000 movements a day, and even more in summer. Night shifts are much quieter, and I usually get a chance to read up on new air traffic requirements between 12 and 4.00 am. It's important to be really switched on in this job, so even if I'm only a bit under the weather I have no qualms about being off sick. I find the work quite stressful and it can take a while to wind down at the end of a shift. Eventually I'd like to be watch manager, and then maybe even general manager of the airport. E. Shop Manager If I'm on an early shift, I leave the house by 8.00 am. The first thing I do is get the electronic point-of-sale system up and running. I always make sure there's someone to watch the till and I co-ordinate people's lunches and breaks. I spend the morning helping customers, finding and ordering books for them. I enjoy serving customers, although it can be a bit annoying if they come in waving reviews and expect you to run around gathering a pile of books for them. Between 2.00 pm and 4.00 pm most weekdays, publishers' reps come into the shop and I spend some time discussing new titles for the months ahead. I have to consider how many, if any, of a particular title the shop is likely to sell. When we want to feature a new title, it's essential that I make sure it's delivered in time. The early shift finishes at 5.45 pm. Two days a week I do a late shift, and then I close down the computer system, lock up and go home. F. Financial Analyst I listen to the news at 7.00 am, then get up and take a taxi to arrive at work at 8.45 am. First I get in touch with our freelance reporters to find out what is happening in the region I'm responsible for. I assess financial risk for multi-national companies operating abroad, so it is my job to try to warn clients well in advance of anything that could go wrong in that country. I provide three services: an on-line executive preview, or newsflash; a security forecast, which is an extended preview plus a forecast for the next six months; and a travel information security guide. From 9.15 am to 9.30 am I meet with our editors to discuss the stories I'm going to follow. My first executive preview has to be on-line by 10.00 am and my second deadline is 11.00 am, so I have to be quick chasing up stories. I type them, send them through to my editor, who edits and approves them, then I re-check and make any necessary alterations before they go through the system. I travel to Africa about three times a year, to report on specific events or just to keep up with what is happening. I leave work at around 6.00 pm. It's quite difficult to switch off and most evenings I'm still awake at 1.00 am.
41.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Is your office working ok? Fresh air and the right chairs are the key to a happy, healthy workforce, according to a new survey. We went to four contrasting offices, to find out how healthy and happy they were as working environments. On our expert panel were a building health consultant; an ergonomist, who studies people's working conditions; and an occupational psychologist. Here are their verdicts. Office A. Advertising Agency Building Health Consultant: This office is about as simple as it could possibly be; no central heating, no mechanical ventilation, windows opening straight onto the street. It is difficult to see why this space works but the occupants who are part of a small, dynamic team, appear to have few complaints. They adapt to the changing seasons by opening doors and roof panels or switching on electric radiators -- pretty much, perhaps, as they do in their own homes. This may be the key: a team of seven people have crated a happy, homely working environment and do not have to put up with any externally imposed bureaucracy. Ergonomist: The furniture here has evolved; no two pieces match. Much of it actually creates bad working postures. Chairs are old, most aren't adjustable and many are broken. Although in that way this environment is poor, the personnel have a varied work schedule, which they control -- office work, out meeting clients, making presentations, and so on. This variety reduces the risk of fatigue, boredom and muscular problems. Occupational Psychologist: Staff are delighted with the variety of work and the versatility of the office space. They said their office was 'just the right size' -- small enough to know what colleagues are doing, large enough to be able to be on your own and focus on personal work. I found the office attractive and fun, simultaneously conveying images of efficiency and creativity. Office B. News Service Building Health Consultant: While the office may not be very exciting, it appears comfortable and is not disliked by the staff. The air quality and general maintenance standards appear to be good. This is helped by a No Smoking policy. Ergonomist: I was not surprised to learn that the company had already employed the services of an ergonomist. Chairs are excellent, lighting and computer equipment are good. Space provision is good, although the layout could be improved. But the environments is impersonal and unstimulating, with grey, bare walls. Occupational Psychologist: Walls are bare apart from year planners and a poster describing maternity rights. Most staff have been there for at least five years and relationships are satisfactory. The office could be improved if the desks were positioned to make the sharing of information easier. Proof of success or information on forthcoming projects could be displayed on the walls. Office C. Bank Building Health Consultant: An office that produces mixed reactions from those working in it. The feeling inside is akin to being in a glass case, viewed by, and viewing, countless similar exhibits. Despite a mix of smokers and non-smokers in a relatively small space, the air did not appear to be stale. Even standing only 1.5 metres away from a smoker, it was not possible to smell his cigarette. Ergonomist: The office area is, sadly, very standard and totally uninspiring. The desks are adequate, but only just. Not all the chairs being used for computer operation conform to requirements but this is user choice. Computer screens are often on small desk units with lowered keyboard shelves; this is no longer considered appropriate for modern equipment. Occupational Psychologist: Staff are mutually supportive and well served by technology. Numerous communications awards are on display. The wood coloured panelling and brown carpet give a slightly sombre effect. The office is a buzz of activity. Office D. Newspaper Building Health Consultant: It is difficult to say anything good about this building. The air-conditioning control is very crude, resulting in large variations in temperature. The space is cluttered and most people have inadequate desk space. The office is very dusty -- there are plenty of places for dust to lodge. The shed-type roof also collects dust, which, if disturbed, showers those sitting below. Ergonomist: The furniture would be more at home in a carpentry workshop than in a high-tech industry. Most of the chairs are of little value to keyboard users, particularly those who are shorter than about 1.75 m. Many chairs are old, lack suitable adjustment and have armrests that prevent the user from getting sufficiently close to the desk. Occupational Psychologist: Old brown chairs, soiled carpets, dust and dirt everywhere. A lot of scope for improvement -- the place needs a good tidy-up, individual success could be more recognised, air conditioning needs to be improved immediately -- there are so many smokers. Few conversations were going on when we visited; everybody seemed stressed and driven by deadlines. The company needs to adopt a policy of team-working.
42.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Plugging in the home Georgina McGuiness had taken a long career break from journalism and she felt out of touch with the changes brought about by technology. She recounts here how she was able to transform the family home into an efficient workplace. The Christmas before last I turned 37 and realised that time was running out if I wanted to resurrect a career in journalism - which I believed had been washed down the plug-hole ... the technological plug-hole. A quick glance at my curriculum vitae showed that I was shamefully stuck in the 1980s, when a piece of carbon wedged in between several sheets of paper in a typewriter was the state of the art. It seemed that only a madman would let me loose on a computer in his newsroom. And why did most of the jobs advertised ask for experience in desktop publishing - which I didn't have? I thought I had a better chance of hosting a seminar in nuclear physics than attempting to lay out a page on a computer. I was the family technophobe; even pocket calculators were a mystery to me and I still don't know how to use the timer on the video. Clearly, there was a gaping hole in what was left of my career and I had to act quickly. Leaving home before the children did would be fraught with obstacles, or so I thought until I entered a competition in a local newspaper. Like a success story you read or hear about that only ever happens to other people, my family and I won a computer package. Supplied with a laptop computer to free my husband from his desk, and a personal computer for us all, we dived in at the deep end into a strange new world and terms such as cyberspace, Internet and surfing became commonplace in our vocabulary. We took to chatting like old pals via the Internet to strangers around the world. The children forsook the television and I set up a mini-office in a corner of the kitchen with a telephone-answering facility, a fax machine, a CD-ROM, and a modem linking me into the information superhighway. I had everything I would need for working from home - and I could still manage to take the children to school. They were confident with computers from the start, already well versed in them from school. I was much more hesitant, convinced that all my work would disappear without trace if I pressed the wrong button. I could not have been more wrong. Though far from being adroit, I did manage to learn the basic skills I needed - il was all so logical, easy and idiot-proof. And, like everything that you persevere with, you learn a little more each day. I recently began freelancing for a magazine, contributing about two articles a month, and I have become smug in the knowledge that I have the best of two worlds. So how has the computer helped me? Since my schooldays I have always worked at a desk that can only be described as a chaotic mess. Consequently, I was always losing scraps of paper containing vital bits of information. The computer has transformed me into an organised worker, particularly when it comes to office administration. Spreadsheets help keep a record of income and expenses, and pre-formatted invoices and letterheads have saved me a lol of time and effort. For a journalist, getting on-line with the Internet means I can research stories, ask for further information on the bulletin board in the journalism or publishing forums and even discuss the pros and cons of working from home with people from all over the world. If all this sounds too good to be true, there is a dark side to computing from home. You can be in isolation from physical human contact. There are the distractions of putting urgent jobs about the house first, and when the children are home there are power struggles in our house over whose turn it is to use the computer. However, there is a growing band of people who have recently bought multi-media PCs, not just for the educational, leisure and entertainment facilities. In my street alone there appears to be a new type of technical cottage industry evolving from the sheer convenience of not having to join the commuter struggle into the city each day. So what characterises home workers as we move into the next century? A report entitled PC Usage in UK Homes provides the following profile of the millennium computer user: 38 and well educated; 93% own a personal computer and 32% have a CD-ROM device; 38% have a laser printer and 50% a modem. Taking this into account, I seem to be well ahead of schedule. And who knows, one day I might be e-mailing a column to a newspaper in Melbourne or, better still, publishing my own magazine from home. It seems the sky, or should I say cyberspace is the limit.
43.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Solar Survivor Charles Clover ventures inside Britain's most environmentally-friendly home. Southwell in Nottinghamshire is full of surprises. The first is Britain's least-known ancient cathedral, Southwell Minster, celebrated by writers of an environmental disposition for the pagan figures of 'green' men which medieval craftsmen carved into the decoration in its thirteenth-century chapter house. The second, appropriately enough, is Britain's greenest dwelling, the 'autonomous house', designed and built by Robert and Brenda Vale. The Vales use rainwater for washing and drinking, recycle their sewage into garden compost and heat their house with waste heat from electrical appliances and their own body heat, together with that of their three teenage children and their two cats, Edison and Faraday. You could easily miss the traditional-looking house, roofed with clay pantiles, on a verdant corner plot 300 yards from the Minster. It was designed to echo the burnt-orange brick of the town's nineteenth-century buildings and won approval from the planners even though it is in a conservation area. Ring the solar-powered doorbell and there is total silence. The house is super-insulated, with krypton-filled triple-glazed windows, which means that you do not hear a sound inside. Once inside and with your shoes off (at Robert's insistence), there is a monastic stillness. It is a sunny summer's day, the windows are closed and the conservatory is doing its normal job of warming the air before it ventilates the house. Vale apologises and moves through the house, opening ingenious ventilation shafts and windows. You need to create draughts because draught-proofing is everywhere: even Edison and Faraday have their own air-locked miniature door. The Vales, who teach architecture at Nottingham University, were serious about the environment long before it hit the political agenda. They wrote a book on green architecture back in the 1970s, The Autonomous House. They began by designing a building which emitted no carbon dioxide. Then they got carried away and decided to do without mains water as well. They designed composting earth closets, lowered rainwater tanks into the cellar, and specified copper gutters to protect the drinking water, which they pass through two filters before use. Water from washing runs into the garden (the Vales don't have a dishwasher because they believe it is morally unacceptable to use strong detergents). Most details have a similar statement in mind. 'We wanted people to see that it was possible to design a house which would be far less detrimental to the environment, without having to live in the dark,' says Robert. 'It would not be medieval.' The house's only medieval aspect is aesthetic: the hall, which includes the hearth and the staircase, rises the full height of the building. The Vales pay no water bills. And last winter the house used only nine units of electricity a day costing about 70p -- which is roughly what other four bedroomed houses use on top of heating. Soon it will use even less, when PS20,000 worth of solar water heating panels and generating equipment arrive and are erected in the garden. The house will draw electricity from the mains supply for cooking and running the appliances, but will generate a surplus of electricity. There will even be enough, one day, to charge an electric car. The only heating is a small wood-burning stove in the hall, which the Vales claim not to use except in the very coldest winter. So is it warm in winter? One night in February when I happened to call on him, Robert was sitting reading. It was too warm to light the fire, he said. The room temperature on the first floor was 18C, less than the generally expected temperature of living areas, but entirely comfortable, he claimed, because there are no draughts, no radiant heat loss, since everything you touch is at the same temperature. Perceived temperature depends on these factors. An Edwardian lady in the early years of the twentieth century was entirely comfortable at 12.5C, he says, because of the insulation provided by her clothing. Those people who live in pre-1900 housing, he suggests, should simply go back to living as people did then. Somehow, it is difficult to think of this idea catching on. The house's secret is that it is low-tech and there is little to go wrong. Almost everything was obtained from a builder's merchant and installed by local craftsmen. This made the house cheap to build -- it cost the same price per square metre as low-cost housing for rent. Not surprisingly, the commercial building companies are determinedly resisting this idea.
44.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	RETREAT, RELAX, RECHARGE Health farms and country house hotels offering spa facilities report that business is booming. We asked five journalists to check out some of the places that are available. A. HENLOW GRANGE I welcomed the opportunity to go to Henlow Grange for six days as I was tired and needed to relax. My room in the main part of the huge 18th-century house was the most comfortable possible and I was instantly soothed. On Day One I did nothing and slept lots. But from Day Two I started going to body conditioning and doing as many classes as I could (stretch and tone, yoga, body alignment, to name but a few). All the instructors are highly trained. I couldn't believe how supple I began to feel as the week progressed. They have every possible treatment, including aromatherapy (I've never been so relaxed), seaweed baths, manicures, and pedicures. The facial, which lasts for an hour, really does make you feel like a new person. The staff in the treatment rooms deserve a bouquet. T hey couldn't have been friendlier, nicer or more professional. The whole atmosphere is one of vitality and enthusiasm. Henlow are planning a major refurbishment this year, which will include a half-size Olympic swimming pool and a Light Diet Room. Bicycles are available and you can ride around the grounds. If you're not feeling energetic and the weather's on your side, grab a magazine or enjoy a peaceful walk in the garden. During my stay, my mood improved and so did my appetite. l left feeling wonderful and full of energy, which lasted for ages. I'm definitely due another visit. This is the perfect break for the stressed working woman. Save Room 5 for me! Marcella D'Argy Smith B. SHRUBLAND HALL The calm and relaxing atmosphere of this stately home was evident from the moment I climbed the vast staircase into the reception area. The Hall has an impressively decorated library, a charming conservatory and lots of space, so you don't have to speak to anyone if you don't want to. On arrival everybody is given a medical, which includes an examination and a check on weight and blood pressure. We were all called patients, which I found a bit disquieting as I'm in good health. However, I was impressed that a shoulder problem discovered in the examination was immediately passed on to the fitness instructor and we worked on it in the group workshops and also in an extra session of individual instruction. Each patient is given a specific diet to follow. Although I lost weight without fasting, I was still hungry enough to develop a fierce headache on the second day. A typical daily menu for me was a breakfast of grapefruit and honey, hot lemon and boiled water; a choice of salads for lunch; and a mixture of exotic fruit, yoghurt and a flask of hot broth for supper. If you're not fasting or on a light diet, then you'll eat in the main dining hall, where the food is tasty and nicely presented, so you needn't suffer too much! You have a massage or water therapy on alternate days. All extra treatments are competitively priced. Liz Gregory C. CAREYS MANOR Careys is not a health farm and doesn't pretend to be. It's a fine old manor farm with inviting log fires and a spacious lounge. If you're counting calories, you'll have to miss out on the gourmet food. Rich sauces and delightful creamy confections are conjured up by the French chef. It's a good job the hotel has a fully-equipped gym and soft-water pool so I could work off some of the tempting indulgences. (You can opt for a 'health-conscious' diet if you really want to lose weight.) There is a spa bath, steam room, Swiss shower, sauna and treatment rooms. A big attraction is the sports injury clinic. I got an expert opinion on an old, sometimes painful, shoulder injury. The physiotherapist recommended good posture, remedial exercises and massage. Carey's manages to be comfortable and luxurious, laid-back and sedate. If you want to break out, there is great surrounding countryside to explore. Beverly D'Silva D. CLIVEDEN Cliveden is a majestic country home and is also a five-star hotel that treats its guests like royalty. It offers health and beauty treatments, a well-equipped gym, saunas, swimming pool, tennis, horse riding, and much more. There are stunning woodland walks and gardens around the 376-acre National Trust estate. And there's Waldo's, a highly-acclaimed restaurant with dishes to make you clutch your stomach. In ecstasy. It took me half an hour to read the dinner menu; the choice was staggering. The meal was wonderful, especially the sticky-toffee pudding with banana ice-cream. I climbed into bed a happy woman! Next morning I dutifully spent a few hours in the gym playing with exercise equipment to burn off a few calories in time for my next meal. In the Pavilion I enjoyed a facial with gentle heat and essential oils. Then I had an aromatherapy massage. I thought of all the other reports my fellow journalists would make, about fitness assessments, workouts, and beauty treatments to tone and firm the body. Cliveden has all these if you want to use them -- before indulging yourself at Waldo's. Kay Letch E. SPRINGS HYDRO The best and the worst thing about Springs Hydro is the carrot cake. The best because it really is the most delicious I've ever tasted. The worst, because it's a huge slab of 360 calories, which sets you back if you want to lose weight. You have been warned! The second best thing is the fabulous aromatherapy massage. I chose the relaxing oils blend, dropped off to sleep twice during the massage, floated back to my room and had my most refreshing night's sleep in years. The premises are modern and purpose-built, efficiently run, with up-to-the-minute facilities and luxurious bedrooms. There are plenty of therapists and beauty rooms so there's little difficulty in scheduling appointments. A variety of treatments are on offer, from manicures and pedicures to deep-cleansing facials and body treatments. The guests are an eclectic mix -- from entire football teams to mums and daughters, best friends and singles. Ideally, I would have a break here about once a month. Eve Cameron
45.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Career Power Get the leading edge - motivate yourself to take full control at work. A. What makes a good leader? A leader is one who inspires, an agent of change, a developer who shows the way forward. Leadership is not about breeding or height - taller being better, as the early theorists believed. It's not simply about intelligence, either. Pat Dixon, author of the book Making the Difference: Women and Men in the Workplace, says that leadership is about 'making things happen through people who are as enhuastic and interested as you are'. Enthusiasm is a key element and, to convey it and encourage it in others, a good leader should be able to speak out articulately and with conviction. 'It's having the confidence to say "I believe" instead of "I think", maintains Dixon. B. John van Maurik, director of a Leadership in Management course, says, 'Most people have a far greater potential for leadership than they realise. The process of becoming a leader is recognising those latent talents, developing them and using them.' In one sense, we are all born leaders - we just need the right circumstances in which to flourish. While it's quite easy to recognise leadership in the grand sense -- be it in the form of figures like Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Ghandi or even Richard Branson - it may be more difficult to relate it to our own workplace. And yet this quality is now regarded as the cornerstone of effective management. C. Consider the best and worst boss you've ever had. They may have been equally good at setting objectives, meeting deadlines and budgets. But what about how they achieved them? The best leader will have motivated you and may have given you support. The worst leader would have made you feel like a small cog in the corporate machinery and kept information from you, and then when things went wrong would have reacted as if it were your fault. The first led (very well); the second simply managed (very badly). D. Leaders and managers can be seen as different animals. Managers tend to enjoy working according to set boundaries. Leaders create their own horizons. 'A good manager can keep even an inefficient company running relatively smoothly,' writes Micheal Shea, the author of Leadership Rules. 'But a good leader can transform a demoralised organisation - whether it's a company, a football team or a nation.' E. Whether you're the boss or a middle manager, you can benefit from improving your leadership skills. There are definite lessons to be learnt: * Leadership is something we do best when we choose to do it. So find out where your passions and convictions lie. Next time you feel inspired to lead, harness the energy it gives you and act on it. * Start thinking of yourself as a leader. Your ability to lead is a powerful part of you. Recognise it. * Collaboration can be fine, but there will be times when firm leadership is required. Experiment with your style. If you are a natural transactor, try being the negotiator. If you always ask for the views of others, try taking the lead. Watch how the outcome is changed by this change in you. * You have to set goals, then beat them. Look at the demands of your job and define those where being a leader will greatly enhance your effectiveness and career prospects. F. * Leadership does not simply happen. It can only develop from actually taking the lead, from taking risks and learning from mistakes. Learn how to delegate and motivate; organise and chastise; praise and raise. * Don't assume that your way of leading will immediately win over colleagues. It may even alienate them. Keep working on your communication skills. You don't have to be liked - but your ideas and accomplishments do. * Be visible and accessible to those who are important. But bear in mind * You don't have to lead all the time. Be clear on where your contribution is vital and how you can help others to develop as leaders.
46.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Science flying in the face of gravity Journalist Tom Mumford joins students using weightlessness to test their theories. It looked like just another aircraft from the outside. The pilot told his young passengers that it was built in 1964, a Boeing KC-135 refuelling tanker, based on the Boeing 707 passenger craft. But appearances were deceptive and the 13 students from Europe and America who boarded were in for the flight of their lives. Inside, it had become a long white tunnel. There were almost no windows, but it was eerily illuminated by lights along the padded walls. Most of the seats had been ripped out, apart from a few at the back, where the pale-faced, budding scientists took their places with the air of condemned men. For 12 months, they had competed with other students from across the continent to participate in the flight. The challenge, offered by the European Space Agency, had been to suggest imaginative experiments to be conducted in weightless conditions. Those with the best ideas won a place on this unusual flight, which is best described as the most extraordinary roller-coaster ride yet devised. For the next two hours the Boeing's flight would resemble that of an enormous bird which had lost its reason, shooting upwards towards the heavens before hurtling towards Earth. The intention was to achieve a kind of state of grace at the top of each curve. As the pilot cuts the engines at 3,000 metres, the aircraft throws itself still higher by virtue of its own momentum before gravity takes over and it plummets earthwards again. In the few silent seconds between ascending and falling, the aircraft and everything inside it become weightless, and the 13 students would, in theory, feel themselves closer to the moon than the Earth. The aircraft took off smoothly enough, but any lingering illusions the young scientists and I had that we were on anything like a scheduled passenger service were quickly dispelled when the pilot put the Boeing into a 45-degree climb which lasted around 20 seconds. The engines strained wildly, blood drained from our heads, and bodies were scattered across the cabin floor. Then the engines cut out and the transition to weightlessness was nearly instantaneous. For 20 seconds we conducted a ghostly dance in the unreal silence:the floor had become a vast trampoline, and one footstep was enough to launch us headlong towards the ceiling. We floated aimlessly; the idea of going anywhere was itself confusing. Left or right, up or down, no longer had any meaning. Only gravity, by rooting us somewhere, permits us to appreciate the possibility of going somewhere else. After ten seconds of freefall descent, the pilot pulled the aircraft out of its nose dive. The return of gravity was less immediate than its loss, but was still sudden enough to ensure that some of the students came down with a bump. Our first curve completed, there were those who turned green at the thought of the 29 to follow. Thirty curves added up to ten minutes 'space time' for experiments and the Dutch students were soon studying the movements of Leonardo, their robotic cat, hoping to discover how it is that cats always land on their feet. At the appropriate moment the device they had built to investigate this was released, floating belly-up, and one of the students succeeded in turning it belly-down with radio-controlled movements. The next curve was nearly its last, however, when another student landed on top of it during a less well managed return to gravitational pull. Next to the slightly stunned acrobatic robocat, a German team from the University of Aachen investigated how the quality of joins in metal is affected by the absence of gravity, with an eye to the construction of tomorrow's space stations. Another team of students, from Utah State University, examined the possibility of creating solar sails from thin liquid films hardened in ultra-violet sunlight. Their flight was spent attempting to produce the films under microgravity. They believe that once the process is perfected, satellites could be equipped with solar sails that use the sun's radiation just as a yacht's sails use the wind. After two hours spent swinging between heaven and Earth, that morning's breakfast felt unstable, but the predominant sensation was exhilaration, not nausea. This was a feeling that would stay with us for a long time. 'It was an unforgettable experience,' said one of the students. 'I was already aiming to become an astronaut, but now I want to even more.'
47.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Hotel Inspector Sue Brown judges hotels for a living. Christopher Middleton watched her in action. One minute into the annual inspection and things are already going wrong for the Globe Hotel. Not that they know it yet. The receptionist reciting room rates over the phone to a potential guest is still blissfully unaware of the identity of the real guest she is doggedly ignoring. 'Hasn't even acknowledged us,' Sue Brown says out of the corner of her mouth. 'Very poor.' It is a classic arrival-phase error, and one that Sue has encountered scores of times in her 11 years as an inspector. 'But this isn't an ordinary three-star place,' she protests. 'It has three red stars, and I would expect better.' To be the possessor of red stars means that the Globe is rated among the top 130 of the 4,000 listed in the hotel guide published by the organisation she works for. However, even before our frosty welcome, a chill has entered the air. Access from the car park has been via an unmanned door, operated by an impersonal buzzer, followed by a long, twisting, deserted corridor leading to the hotel entrance. 'Again, not what I had expected,' says Sue. Could things get worse? They could. 'We seem to have no record of your booking,' announces the receptionist, in her best sing-song how-may-I-help-you voice. It turns out that a dozen of the hotel's 15 rooms are unoccupied that night. One is on the top floor. It is not to the inspector's taste: stuffiness is one criticism, the other is a gaping panel at the back of the wardrobe, behind which is a large hole in the wall. When she began her inspecting career, she named an early reputation for toughness. 'The Woman in Black, I was known as,' she recalls, 'which was funny, because I never used to wear black. And I've never been too tough.' Not that you would know it the next morning when, after paying her bill, she suddenly reveals her identity to the Globe's general manager, Robin Greaves. From the look on his face, her arrival has caused terror. Even before she says anything else, he expresses abject apologies for the unpleasant smell in the main lounge. 'We think there's a blocks drain there,' he sighs. 'The whole floor will probably have to come up.` Sue gently suggests that as well as sorting out the plumbing, he might also prevail upon his staff not to usher guests into the room so readily. 'Best, perhaps, to steer them to the other lounge.' she says. Greaves nods with glum enthusiasm and gamely takes notes. He has been at the Globe for only five months, and you can see him struggling to believe Sue when she says that this dissection of the hotel can only be for the good of the place in the long run. Not that it's all on the negative side. Singled out for commendation are Emma, the assistant manager, and Trudy, the young waitress, who dished out a sheaf of notes about the building's 400-year history. Dinner, too, has done enough to maintain the hotel's two-rosette food rating, thereby encouraging Greaves to push his luck a bit. 'So what do we have to do to get three rosettes?' he enquires. Sue's suggestions include: 'Not serve a pudding that collapses.' The brief flicker of light in Greaves' eyes goes out. It is Sue Brown's unenviable job to voice the complaints the rest of us more cowardly consumers do not have the courage to articulate. 'Sometimes one can be treading on very delicate ground. I remember, in one case, a woman rang to complain I'd got her son the sack. All I could say was the truth, which was that he'd served me apple pie with his fingers.' Comeback letters involve spurious allegations of everything, from a superior attitude to demanding bribes. 'You come to expect it after a while, but it hurts every time,' she says. Sue is required not just to relate her findings to the hotelier verbally, but also to send them a full written report. They are, after all, paying for the privilege of her putting them straight. (There is an annual fee for inclusion in the guide.) Nevertheless, being singled out for red-star treatment makes it more than worthwhile. So it is reassuring for Greaves to hear that Sue is not going to recommend that the Globe be stripped of its red stars. That is the good news. The bad is that another inspector will be back in the course of the next two months to make sure that everything has been put right. 'Good,' smiles Greaves unconvincingly. 'We'll look forward to that.'
48.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Seven Up Mountaineer Doug Scott shares with his readers the mystical experience of conquering the highest peak on each continent: the Seven Summits. My quest to climb the Seven Summits came late in life. I will take them in the order of my climbing them. A. Mt. Everest, Asia (8,848m) We were in a snow cave 91m below the summit when my climbing partner, Dougal Haston, began a conversation with Dave Clark, our Equipment Officer, about the relative merits of various sleeping bags. I thought this was strange, as only Dougal and I were present. Putting this down to oxygen deprivation, I then found myself talking to my feet. Already the cold was getting into the balls of my feet and I recalled other climbers who had lost fingers and toes from frostbite. It wasn't survival that was worrying us so much as the quality of our survival. Over the next two days I relived our time spent on the summit ridge. I realised that I couldn't have been there with a better man than Dougal Hatton. He inspired great confidence in me and by now I was climbing with a calm presentiment mat somehow or other it was all going to work out. I realised I had to get a better rhythm going in order to reach the summit - which is what I did. B. Mt. McKinley, North America (6,194m) This mountain is regarded as the most treacherous in the world. In April 1976 Dougal and I arrived at the Kahiltna Glacier and spent four days humping equipment and food up to the base. Only after the first day of climbing did we realise the enormity of our undertaking. On the lower face we followed a route put up in 1967, but at half height we pursued a new route, as planned, heading directly for the upper snow basin and the summit. We decided to climb 'alpine style', with our equipment and food on our backs. It would be the first time a major new route had been climbed here in such a way. We climbed up the compressed snow of an avalanche scar to camp under a rocky cliff and by the third day my sleeping bag was sodden. We spent the third night on a windswept ridge; by now we were both suffering. Mt. McKinley, because the air pressure in the polar regions is lower, has an impact on the body out of all proportion to its altitude. It seemed to us that we were up at around 7,000m, instead of 6,100m. We packed our bags and finally staggered onto the summit and down the other side, triumphant. C. Kilimanjaro, Africa (5,89Sm) In September 1976, Paul Braithwaite and I flew to Nairobi with the intention of climbing Mt. Kenya. It was though the unexpected offer of a free ride to the Tanzanian side of Kilimanjaro that we came to climb Africa's highest mountain. On our approach we got ourselves lost in the dense jungles of the lower slopes. Our situation became serious because water is scarce. On the second day we came across luminous arrows painted on trees and a trail of rubbish which brought us to a rock pool. Never before had I been so pleased to find rubbish on a mountain. We attempted a direct start to the breach wall, which is a 305m-high icicle. After a deluge of falling rock and ice we prudently retired and opted instead for the Umbwe route to gain the surrealistic summit. D. Aconcagua, South America (6,960m) The original and now standard route up Aconcagua is little more than a walk. In January 1992, I arrived with my wife, Sharu, at Punta del Inca and was pleasantly surprised to meet fellow mountaineer and guide, Phil Erscheler. He was taking a party up the mountain via the Polish Glacier, away from the busy standard route, and suggested that we go with them. After three days of sitting out bad weather, we left base camp. The Polish Glacier stretching up to the summit had been swept by vicious winds and glistened with pure ice. With a time limit to get back to Buenos Aires for our flight, we decided to miss out on the glacier. Instead we went across the north ridges towards the standard route and joined the large number of people wandering along the path. The wind was strong as we walked the last few metres to the summit and just before it got dark we camped outside the refuge. Back at base camp we met eight members of the Jakarta Mountaineering Club. They were planning to climb the Seven Summits and felt, when they learnt that I had already climbed four, that I should do me same. This was the first time I had seriously thought about such goal-orientation -- something I had previously tried to avoid. E. Vinson Massif, Antarctica (4,897m) When I learnt that climbing Vinson Massif was just a matter of guiding enough people in order to finance the cost of getting there, attempting all of the Seven Summits became a reality. Our team left Britain towards the end of November 1992 and travelled the thousands of kilometres to the South Pole. At this time of the year the sun is always well above the horizon, throughout the day and night, and when the wind stops blowing it is utterly quiet. As in other polar regions, in the keen, clean air, there is such an invigorating atmosphere that the spirits are raised just by being there. On December 7 we left camp and headed off towards the summit. Against expectations, with winds gusting at around 80 kms per hour and temperatures below minus 50degC, we all got to the top within 8 hours. Our elation was somewhat tempered by visibility being down to just a few metres in the storm. F. Elbrus, Europe (5,633m) Our team assembled in St Petersburg during the early summer of 1994. On our arrival at the settlement of Terskol, beneath Elbrus, a commission was demanded from our guide for bringing foreigners into the valley, though this was later waived. After a few days' acclimatising, the group set off up Elbrus by cableway to 3,900m. From there we walked to the refuge at 4,200m. Two days later, the wind buffered us as we crossed open slopes, some of them glassy ice. By mid- afternoon we reached what we thought was the summit. But we found there was another kilometre-long ridge to the actual summit. As night fell, we returned to the refuge and the next day descended this, fortunately extinct, volcano. G. Carstensz Pyramid, Australasia (4,883m) On our expedition to Carstensz we hoped not only to establish a new route but to spend as much time as possible with the aboriginal Dani people. The largest gold mine in the world is cutting into the mountain, regarded as sacred by the local tribespeople. We had been warned that we might be taken hostage or even killed by bandits but, undeterred, we left our hut by mid-morning and walked down winding lanes towards the jungle. On May 12 we stayed climbing. The weather improved and two of the team hared ahead. We were slower, since Sham was filming. Climbing in rock shoes, we reached the summit by 11 am. I was given a standing ovation on this, my seventh summit. Mission accomplished!
49.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Three theories about sleep People spend about one-third of their lives asleep. It seems certain, therefore, that sleep has a vital function. However, what that function might be is still in debate. Scientists are far from being in agreement about precisely why so much of our precious time is given over to sleep. There seem to be three main theories. The most popular states that the functions and purposes of sleep are primarily physiological. It claims that we sleep in order to maintain the health of our body. In other words, biological processes work hard as we sleep to repair any damage done during the day and to restore ourselves to full efficiency. However, a second theory places more emphasis on the learning benefits of sleep. This theory holds that sleep allows us to process the information that we acquire during the day, and asserts that, without sleep, learning would not take place. A third popular theory is based on ideas about energy, saying that we need periods of sleep in order to, in a sense, recharge our batteries and so have an adequate supply of energy for the coming day.
5.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The pen is mightier than the psychoanalyst The study of handwriting to reveal a person's character is gaining support If you applied for a job in some countries, you would almost certainly be asked for a sample of your handwriting. And it would be the handwriting, as much as anything else, that would determine your suitability for the job. Handwriting analysis, or graphology, is accepted as a genuine science in many countries. Researchers say it can be a useful tool in indicating certain illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer, and can reveal psychological states and emotional disturbances. Handwriting analysis is increasingly being used for vocational guidance and as an adjunct to interviews. Many big companies now employ graphologists to analyse the handwriting of potential candidates for key jobs. But most doctors and psychiatrists remain dubious about the value of graphology. Patricia Marne, a professional graphologist for more than 20 years, argues that they should take it more seriously. She believes that handwriting can indicate psychological characteristics as well as certain medical conditions. She says: 'Handwriting is a powerful indicator of social class and intelligence. But more than that, it can be used to assess mental ability and potential, whether a person should concentrate on arts or sciences, and whether they have a devious or open character.' According to Ms Marne, graphology can be particularly useful in assessing possible criminal tendencies: 'Criminals all have disturbed handwriting, mostly illiterate and poorly-shaped. Most criminals come from deprived backgrounds and have arrested emotional development. This often shows up in unusually childish handwriting and in going over letters several times. The person behind the handwriting: examples analysed by graphologist Patricia Marne. 'I can tell whether people are honest, manipulators, or reliable employees.' 'Young male offenders frequently have very high ascenders, indicating that they live in a world of fantasy and dream of making it big. Graphologists can tell whether violence is about to erupt, whether the writer is under unbearable pressure, and whether there are psychopathic tendencies. Handwriting can be used to predict would-be suicides.' Heart and lung problems can also show up, she says. 'You can't make a diagnosis from one sample, unless the writing is obviously shaky or disturbed. But if over a period of time it changes or becomes disjointed, if there's a break in the signature which did not exist previously, that could be a sign that something quite serious has occurred.' A severe emotional upset can also show up in a temporarily altered signature, she maintains. Ms Marne says handwriting can be used to reveal other psychological characteristics. People with writing in which letters form 'threads' instead of being individually forms are, apparently, devious and clever. Those who write mainly in capitals are trying to conceal their true selves from others. Very light pressure indicates sensitivity and lack of vitality. Originality in handwriting - how far the writer has deviated from copybook script - indicates confidence and artistic ability. Disconnected writing is the cardinal sign of the loner. Very small signatures indicate inhibition and an inferiority complex; circles over the 'i' are a bid for attention, and crossing the 't' heavily over the whole word is a sign of intolerance and a patronising attitude. Ms Marne says it takes six years of study and experience to be able to analyse handwriting accurately, and this has to be combined with empathy and intuition. She feels that more research is needed to put graphology on a proper scientific footing. This will happen soon, she believes. 'It's actually far more accurate than psychoanalysis, as you can tell the whole history of the person, including all their emotional crises, without asking them questions to which they may give wrong answers.' Interesting as all this may sound, there is little hard evidence to support such claims. Some psychiatrists are highly critical of them. Handwriting, they say, is a product of education, artistic ability and the type of writing taught - and has no other significance.
50.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Hedgehogs A hedgehog is a small mammal characterised by the sharp spines which cover its body. The hedgehogs are found in many different parts of the world, none is native to either America or Australia. All species of hedgehog share the ability to roll into a tight ball when attacked, so that their spines point outwards. The effectiveness of this as a defence mechanism, depends, of course, on the number of spines the hedgehog has. Some desert hedgehogs have evolved to carry out weight, and consequently, they have fewer spines and are thus more likely to attempt to run into their attacker, using their ball rolling ability as a last resort. Hedgehogs are primarily nocturnal and sleep for much of the day, either under cover of bushes or in a hole in the ground. Despite the fact that all hedgehogs can hibernate, not all choose to do so; in suitable conditions, some will stay awake all year round.
51.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The camera never lies Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, believed himself to be a rational man, a scientist even. But in 1920, when he saw photographs of fairies taken in a garden setting, he thought he was seeing scientific proof that these tiny creatures really existed. He published the photographs alongside an article he wrote, acknowledging fairies as supernatural wonders. It was not until 1939 that the two ladies who took the photos admitted these were fake. They simply cut out pictures of fairies from a book and arranged them among flowers. The results are undeniably beautiful. But the simplicity of the trick undermines a basic principle of photography, that the camera cannot lie. But it can, and always could. Today, we are used to computer software enabling us to rework our digital images and it is a myth that photography ever had a true age of innocence. From the moment cameras began capturing reality, that reality was being altered.
52.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Should the media earn money from content they don't own? Although digital cameras and camera phones have made it easier to capture newsworthy events, it is social media that have revolutionised citizen photography. With news regularly breaking on social networks, some journalists are now turning to them as sources of images as fast-moving events occur. Unfortunately, some reporters have published user-generated content (UGC) without permission. Despite official guidance that images posted on social media can be used without permission if there are exceptional circumstances or strong public interest, debate continues about whether this is ethical. With research indicating that around one in ten people would film or photograph a news event, it is clear that UGC has a major role to play in the future of the media. However, if the media is to prevent its relationship with the public from souring, steps must be taken to ensure that people are properly rewarded for their work and that permission is always sought.
53.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Volunteer tourism Four academic writers discuss the topic of international voluntary work. A. It is hard to argue that the actual contribution to development amounts to a great deal directly. Whilst volunteer tourists can get involved in building homes or schools, they have usually paid a significant fee for the opportunity to be involved in this work: money that, if donated to a local community directly, could potentially pay for a greater amount of labour than the individual volunteer could ever hope to provide. This is especially so in the case of gap years, in which the level of technical skill or professional experience required of volunteers is negligible. Hence, it is unsurprising that many academic studies allude to the moral issue of whether gap year volunteering is principally motivated by altruism - a desire to benefit the society visited - or whether young people aim to generate 'cultural capital' which benefits them in their careers. However, the projects may play a role in developing people who will, in the course of their careers and lives, act ethically in favour of those less well-off. B. Volunteering may lead to greater international understanding; enhanced ability to solve conflicts; widespread and democratic participation in global affairs through global civic society organisations; and growth of international social networks among ordinary people. In this scenario, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, an outcome where benefits accrue to volunteers and host communities, and contribute to the global greater good. However, if volunteering is largely limited to individuals of means from wealthier areas of the world, it may give these privileged volunteers an international perspective, and a career boost, but it will do little for people and communities who currently lack access to international voluntary work. Those who volunteer will continue to reap its benefits, using host organisations and host communities as a rung on the ladder of personal advancement. C. At its worst, international volunteering can be imperialist, paternalistic charity, volunteer tourism, or a self-serving quest for career and personal development on the part of well-off Westerners. Or it can be straightforward provision of technical assistance for international development. At its best, international volunteering brings benefits (and costs) to individual volunteers and the organisations within which they work, at the same time as providing the space for an exchange of technical skills, knowledge, and cross-cultural experience in developing communities. Most significantly, volunteering can raise awareness of, and a lifelong commitment to combating, existing unequal power relations and deep-seated causes of poverty, injustice, and unsustainable development. D. Volunteer tourism seems to fit well with the growth of life strategies to help others. Such limited strategies, aimed at a humble 'making a difference', can appear positive and attractive in an anti-political climate. The personal element appears positive - it bypasses big government and eschews big business. Yet it also bypasses the democratic imperative of representative government and reduces development to individual acts of charity, most often ones that seek to work around rather than transform the situations of poor, rural societies. Cynicism at the act of volunteering is certainly misplaced. The act of volunteer tourism may involve only simple, commendable charity. However, where volunteer tourism is talked up as sustainable development and the marketing of the gap-year companies merges into development thinking, this is symptomatic of a degradation of the discourse of development. The politics of volunteer tourism represents a retreat from a social understanding of global inequalities and the poverty lived by so many in the developing word.
54.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The end of print may take some time Peter Preston Transition. It's a pleasant word and a calming concept. Change may frighten some and challenge others. But transition means going surely and sweetly from somewhere present to somewhere future. Unless, that is, it is newspapers' 'transition' to the online world, an uncertain and highly uncomfortable process - because, frankly, it may not be a process at all. But surely (you say) it is bound to happen eventually. Everybody knows that print newspaper sales are plummeting while visits to the same papers' websites keep on soaring. Just look at the latest print circulation figures. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year, but their websites go ever higher. All of which may well be true, depending on timing, demography, geography and more. After all, everyone - from web academics to print analysts - says so. Yet pause for a while and count a few little things that don't quite fit. So if sales in that area have fallen so little, perhaps the crisis mostly affects newspapers? Yet again, though, the messages are oddly mixed. The latest survey of trends by the World Association of Newspapers shows that global circulation rose 1.1% last year (to 512 million copies a day). Sales in the West dropped back but Asia more than made up the difference. As for news and current affairs magazines - which you'd expect to find in the eye of the digital storm - they had a 5.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many showed rapid growth. You can discover a similar phenomenon when it comes to books. Kindle and similar e-readers are booming, with sales up massively this year. The apparent first step of transition couldn't be clearer. Yet, when booksellers examined the value of the physical books they sold over the last six months, they found it just 0.4% down. Screen or paper, then? It wasn't one or the other: it was both. Tales like these of young people abandoning newspaper-reading are wildly exaggerated. Turn to the latest National Readership Survey figures and you'll find nearly 5,000,000 people aged between 15 and 35 following the main national dailies. And even within Europe, different countries have different stories to tell. There's Britain, with a 10.8% drop in recent years (and a 19.6% fall for quality papers), but in Germany the decline has only been 7% all round - with a mere 0.8% lost to quality titles. And France shows only a 3.1% fall (0.8% at the quality end of the market). Such varying national trends may well reflect a situation far more complicated than the prophets of digital revolution assume. America's media analysts used to argue that booming online advertising revenues would pay for change and, along with lower production costs, make online newspapers a natural success. But now, with digital advertisements on newspaper sites actually dropping back, such assumptions seem like history. Already 360 US papers - including most of the biggest and best - have built paywalls around their products. However, the best way of attracting a paying readership appears to be a deal that offers the print copy and digital access as some kind of joint package. In other words, print is also a crucial tool in selling internet subscriptions. And its advertising rates raise between nine and ten times more money than online. Of course this huge difference isn't good news for newspaper companies, as maintaining both an active website and an active print edition is difficult, complex and expensive. But newspaper brands still have much of their high profile in print; adrift on the web, the job of just being noticed becomes far harder.
55.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Sound the Alarm Stuart Harris reports Many of us listen to the radio when we get up in the morning and most of us also require some external means to persuade us to get out of bed. Thus we have the clock radio. But how do you pick a good one? Our panel, which consisted of myself plus the inventor Tom Granger and the broadcaster Paul Bridges, tested five currently available. The 'dual alarm function' that is advertised with this model does not allow you, as I first supposed, to be woken by the buzzer, snooze a while and then finally be driven out of bed. The instruction booklet advises you to use this function to set two different wake-up times, one for work days and one for weekends, but whose life is programmed to this extent? Since this model costs more or less the same as the second model tested, the inclusion of a cassette player is quite a bargain - you can fall asleep to your own soothing tapes and wake up to a day without news. We all thought the quality of the radio excellent, too - if only the whole thing was smaller. It's as big as a rugby ball. Paul Bridges said, 'Any clock radio I buy has to leave enough space on the bedside table for my keys, wallet, glasses and telephone. Anyway, I'm completely paranoid and always book a wake-up call in case the alarm doesn't go off.' This model was voted best in the beauty stakes and overall winner. Paul Bridges declared himself 'in love with it', although the clock on the one he tested 'kept getting stuck at 16.00'. I was fascinated by the digital display, with its classy grey numbers on a gentle green background. The wide snooze bar means you can tap it on the edge with your eyes shut. Unfortunately, the smooth undulations and tactile buttons, like pebbles on the beach, encouraged me to run my fingers over them as if they were keys on a piano, which proved my undoing when I finally looked at the SO-page instruction booklet. The clock has a self-power back-up so you don't have to reset it if someone unceremoniously pulls the plug out in order to use a hairdryer or the vacuum cleaner; this met with unanimous approval. However, we all found it a technical feat to set up - though completing the learning curve made us feel 'cool' and sophisticated. Tom Granger described this model with its extra built- in lamp as 'unbelievably tacky' in the way it's made. 'You have to wrench the funny light out of its socket to get it to work, which makes me wonder about the quality of the rest of it.' He complained that he had to read the instruction booklet twice before he could get it to work; the clock kept leaping from 12.00 to 02.00 so he had to go round again. The light was certainly hard to position; you would never be able to read by it - it only shines on the clock, which is illuminated anyway. Paul Bridges said he was 'very tickled' by the lamp idea but agreed that the radio was hard to tune. The buzzer is reminiscent of 'action stations' on a submarine and made me feel like hurling the whole thing across the bedroom. Interestingly, however, this model is the third most popular on the market. Clearly aimed at young people, with its brightly coloured casing and matching bootlace strap, this one appealed to the child in Tom Granger and me. 'I would choose this one because it doesn't disappear into the background like the others,' he said. In fact, the traditional design of the controls made it the only one we managed to set up without reading the instruction booklet. Too bad the alarm is allowed a hilarious 20- minute margin for error; the manual notes, 'the alarm may sound about 10 minutes earlier or later than the pre-set time'. Paul Bridges scoffed at such a notion, adding that this model was 'terribly fiddly' and, indeed, 'completely useless'. The simplest and cheapest of all the models tested, this scored points with Tom Granger because it 'seemed very standard and took up little space', but also because it has old-fashioned dial tuning. 'It's more intuitive to set up. With modern push-button tuning you're never really sure if you've pressed all the buttons in the right order so you can't have confidence that the thing will actually work.' He accepted, however, that manufacturers had been obliged to improve the quality of radios because of the advent of button-tuning. I thought the tuning rather crude, as did Paul Bridges, but we agreed that the radio quality was fine. The buzzer on this model certainly works; it succeeded in getting me out of bed in just two beeps!
56.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Margaret and her liquid assets Margaret Wilkins is said to have a 'sixth sense'. She can hold a forked hazel rod above the ground and detect water. She is increasingly in demand by farmers whose wells have dried up. Together with her husband, Margaret Wilkins runs a well-drilling business, using technology such as drilling rigs and air-compressed hammers. But when it comes to locating water, she needs nothing more than a forked hazel stick. The couple's success rate is higher than 90 per cent. Dowsing - the ability to locate water, minerals and lost objects underground - is a so-called 'sixth sense'. There are many theories about how it is done, ranging from the physical, such as magnetism, to the spiritual. One of the most credible is based on the knowledge that everything on this planet vibrates, water more than other matter. It is suggested that dowsers have an acute ability to sense vibrations while standing on the Earth's surface; some dowsers say that they can 'sense' water, others that they can smell it, smell being the most acute sense. For the Wilkins, the drought years of recent times have been busy, with an almost six-week-long waiting list at one stage. Most of Margaret's customers are farmers with wells that have dried up: 'We will see customers only once in a lifetime because wells last for a long time.' Other customers own remote cottages or barns, now holiday homes, where the expense of running water pipes for great distances is prohibitive. Others are golf-course developers with clubhouse facilities to build. Margaret tries to locate water between 50 and 70 metres down. 'You can't drill a well where there is the slightest risk of farm or other waste getting into the water supply. The water we locate is running in fissures of impervious rock and, as long as we bring the water straight up, it should give a good clean supply, though Cornwall is rich in minerals so you have to watch out for iron.' Another necessity is electricity to drive the pump; this is too expensive to run across miles of fields so ideally the well should be near to existing power supplies. After considering all this, Margaret can start to look for water. On large areas, such as golf courses, she begins with a map of the area and a pendulum. 'I hold the pendulum still and gently move it over the map. It will swing when it is suspended over an area where there is water.' After the map has indicated likely areas, Margaret walks over the fields with a hazel stick, forked and equal in length and width each side. 'Once I'm above water I get a peculiar feeling; I reel slightly. When it subsides I use the stick to locate the exact spot where we should drill.' Gripping the two forks of the stick with both hands, she eases them outwards slightly to give tension. 'When water is immediately below, the straight part of the stick rises up. It's vital to drill exactly where the stick says. A fraction the wrong way, and you can miss the waterline altogether. My husband will dowse the same area as me; usually, not always, we agree on the precise place to drill. If we disagree, we won't drill and will keep looking until we do agree.' Margaret Wilkins is not in isolation, carrying out some curious old tradition down in the west of England. Anthropologists and writers have long been fascinated by this inexplicable intuition. Margaret calls it an 'intuitive perception of the environment' and that is the closest we can get to understanding why she locates water so accurately. If she did not have this 'sixth sense', how else could the family live off their well-drilling business year after year?
57.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	I may be too old for this lark, but here goes! At 34, Tim Pozzi has left a good job to go backpacking. He ponders what has made him -- and others of hi sage -- take the plunge. This summer, I quit my job and resolved to rent out my flat and go travelling in South East Asia for a yeaL You might think I'm lucky, but I'm 34 years old, and I'm nervous. It's not as if I haven't done the travelling thing before. After university, I spent two years backpacking around North and South America, and when I returned. was determined to do it again some day, But you know how it is ... I fell in love, embarked on a career, bought a Hat and got used to earning a salary. But I gradually realised I had been sacrificing my own sense of worth for my salary. When I handed in that letter of resignation, it felt as though I'd taken charge of my life again. I now have no tics. Many of my friends are now married with children and, while they wouldn't swap places with me, they envy me my lack of responsibilities. I'm no longer in a relationship, and I have no burning career ambitions. I feel almost obliged to make the most of that freedom - if only for my friends' sake! Why am I so nervous? In the first place, 1t's a question of making the necessary arrangements. How could I bear to have someone else living in my home? And how would I go about organising the letting? And apart from anything else, I had to decide where to go. T'm a shocking procrastinator. and am already several weeks behind my intended schedule. 'Might as well enjoy the summer in England,' I told myself. Then, 'Why not hang around for the start of the football season?' Severing emotional ties makes it even more difficult. I'm putting it off because, deep down, I wonder if I can still cope with backpacking. Will I be able to readjust to a more basic wav of life? Will I feel out of place among a community of backpackers fresh out of school and university? Perhaps not. I've discovered it's increasingly common for Britons in their late twenties and thirties to want to disentangle themselves from the lives they've made for themselves and head ofT for foreign climes. Jennifer Cox, of Lonely Planet guidebook publishers, identifies a growing awareness that adventure is there for the raking: 'The penny's dropped. The sort of people who always say "I wish I'd had that opportunity" are realising that they can have it any time they want. They just have to be brave enough and organised enough and confident enough to do it.' 1-'0I' Danny, a 30-year-old accountant, and his girlfriend Tammy, a 28-year-old teacher, it's a chance to have a final fling before settling down. They have bought 'I round-the-world ticket for a year. 'I'm prepared to sacrifice job security to have the trip,' says Danny. 'There's always a niggling thought at the back of your mind that. "OK, I'm not moving up the career ladder, I'm going to be in the same position I was in before when I come back," but I think it's a risk you have to take, When I left the office, I threw my calculator into the river as a ceremonial act of defiance!' For Matt, who'd just got out of the Army, the year he spent travelling amounted to a period of metamorphosis. 'When you're in the military, there's a set wav of doing things, a pattern to the way you approach problems. I went away because I really needed to temper this, and get rid of this approach in some cases, in order to have a reasonable existence as a civilian.' While there are as many reasons to go travelling at my time of life as there are travellers, there do seem to be common factors. 'We have a much more flexible workforce today,' says Angela Baron of the Institute of Personnel Development. 'There are more people working on short-term contracts and so if your contract's just come to an end you've got nothing to lose.' Larger companies are even adopting career-break policies. 'If you've spent a lot of time and money training someone, it's nice to know they're coming back at some point rather than going to work for a competitor.' For Dan Hiscocks, managing director of Travellerseye, a publishing company that specialises in the tales of 'ordinary' travellers, an increasing number of thirty-somethings are taking stock of their lives. 'If you're nor happy doing what you're doing - and many people aren't - it's no longer a question of just seeing it through. Now people are aware that opportunities exist and that a job isn't "for life" any more. Travel offers a chance to reassess, to take a step back and think about your life.' Is giving in to wanderlust just another example of my generation's inability to come to terms with adulthood? Jennifer Cox thinks nor. 'It's a sign of a better educated, more stable society when we're less concerned with paving the bills than wanting to live a balanced life. We're actually taking the time to ask "Is this what I want?" Ben, a 32-year-old picture researcher heading off to Central America for a year , does nor believe he's running away. 'It's more a case of running towards something. It's trying to grab some things that I want for myself' But he does feel some trepidation. 'It's the thought of what I'm leaving behind, that comfortable routine - just the act of going into the office every day. saying "hi" to everyone and sitting down with a cup of coffee.' I share Ben's reservations about leaving behind an ordered life with few challenges and I'm nor sure I'd be making this journey if [ hadn't found my boss so intolerable. As Jennifer Cox points out: 'This is fairly typical. There's often a catalyst. like the break-up of a relationship or the loss of a job. Such an event can push people to go and do it.' It may have taken a helpful kick up the backside to get me moving, but I'm now approaching the next 12 months with a mounting sense of excitement. Whatever the outcome, I'll be able to take satisfaction in having grabbed life by the horns. And in that I'm sure I speak for all of us ageing backpackers.
58.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Natural Books We invited four leading naturalists to tell us about the wildlife classic that has influenced them most. A Geoffrey Lean At least it wasn't hard to choose the author. As an environmental journalist, one advantage of longevity is that I have had the chance to meet some of the giants who pioneered thinking in the field. Of these, none stood, indeed, still stands, taller than a small, frail woman, Barbara Ward. I can't think of anyone else more at the heart of environmental issues in post-war Europe. She has synthesised her experience of various environmental movements into her own compelling philosophy. Unwillingly 'volunteered' to cover the field, I found, as a young journalist, that she, more than anyone, made it all make sense. Picking the book was much harder. It could have been Only One Earth or Progress for a Small Planet. But despite its title (which sounded old-fashioned, even in 1976), The Home of Man is, to me, Barbara's most important book. Its focus is on the explosive growth of the world's cities, but its canvas is the great themes to which she devoted her life. It is as eloquent and as impassioned a plea as exists for what we would now call 'sustainable human development'. In the hundreds of books I have read since, I have yet to meet its equal. B Linda Bennett When I open the pages of Signals for Survival by Niko Tinbergen, I can hear the long calls of herring gulls, recall the smell of the guano in the hot sun and visualise the general hullabaloo of the colony. This book explains superbly, through words and pictures, the fascinating world of animal communication. Read Signals for Survival and then watch any gull colony, and the frenzy of activity changes from apparent chaos to a highly efficient social structure. You can see which birds are partners, where the boundaries are and, later on in the season, whole families can be recognised. A distinguished behaviourist, Niko Tinbergen came from that rare breed of academics who wish to explain their findings to the layperson. His collaboration in this book with one of this century's most talented wildlife artists, Eric Ennion, was inspirational and has produced a book of interest to anyone with a love of wildlife. His spontaneous style of painting came from years of watching and understanding birds. With just a minimal amount of line and colour, he brings to life how one gull is an aggressor, how another shows appeasement. This is the art of a true field naturalist. C Lee Durrell Most definitely, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is the book that has had the greatest influence on my life. Beyond the obvious reason that it ultimately led me to a wonderful husband, and an exciting career in conservation, this extraordinary book once and for all defined my devotion to the natural world. I was doing research work into animal vocalisations in Madagascar when I first read the book. I had been there two years and was discouraged by the number of setbacks I was encountering but when, at the end of the day, I opened My Family and Other Animals to where I had left off the night before, the world became a brighter place. Animals, people, joy and beauty inextricably woven together - a microcosm of a world worth saving. Many people say that our species is the worst because of the terrible things we have done to the others. But I like to think back to Gerald as a boy in My Family and Other Animals, looking at the world's inhabitants as a whole, a family whose members, be they good, bad or indifferent, are nevertheless so intertwined as to be inseparable. And that is a concept we all need to grasp. D Bruce Pearson A copy of The Shell Bird Book, by James Fisher, found its way into my school library shortly after it was first published in 1966. I was drawn to it at once, especially to the 48 colour plates of birds by Eric Ennion, painted, as the jacket puts it, ... with particular skill and charm'. It was those Ennion images which captured my attention. I already had copies of other bird books and had spent several holidays learning to identify birds. They encouraged me to begin sketching what I saw as an aid to identification. But in The Shell Bird Book there was so much more to feast on. As well as the glorious Ennion paintings, there were chapters on migrants and migration, a review of the history of birds in Britain, and, best of all, a chapter on birds in music, literature and art. It was the broad span of ornithological information and the exciting images that steered me towards being more of a generalist in my appreciation of birds and the natural world. The book made it clear that my emotional and creative response to nature was as valid and as possible as a rational and scientific one. And, as art was a stronger subject for me than maths or physics, I began to see a door opening for me
59.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Tartan Museum The modern, cheese-wedge buildings of Scotland's national museum contrast sharply with its historic Edinburgh location. But would its contents be as striking? Sally Varlow went to visit the museum just before it opened. You cannot miss it. At first it was only the outside of the new Museum of Scotland that was unmissable, stuck on the corner of Chambers Street in Edinburgh, with its huge, yellow sandstone tower and cheese-wedge buildings, topped by a hulk of a hanging garden. Last winter the building was greeted with a mix of modernist architectural applause ('masterpiece', 'stunning'), cautious approval ('striking') and outright hostility. This winter, now that the inside is almost ready for the opening, the exhibitions themselves look set for a similar fate. Forget the does-it-tell-a-nation's-story, is-it-chronological debate. The answers are definitely yes; it is a many-splendoured dream-coat of stories, each hung about a precious historic object, and there is an outline timescale that helps visitors get their bearings but does not strait-jacket the displays. And no, it does not let its lovely national treasures - such as Mary Queen of Scots' jewels and the Holyrood chapel silver- get swamped in national pride. The real issue here. assuming that the collections are properly preserved. is whether people will find the museum interesting enough to come back. Dr David Clarke. the head of exhibitions, insists that a visit should be a pleasurable. visual experience, and that it is designed not for specialists but for those with little prior knowledge. Despite this liberalism. Clarke is a convincing purist when it comes to what is on show. Mock-ups and scenes from the past that rely heavily on imagination are out. For Clarke. they are tantamount to 'giving a complete statement of certainty about what the past was like. which '. he explains, 'would be wrong. The public deserves the truth.' The result is that, at this museum. what you see is what the experts know. But the question for today's visitor is whether the objects' stories can be told vividly enough merely with explanation panels. captions and multi-media interpretation and using barely 30 computers in total around the museum. Less than three days before the opening, it is still difficult to be sure. Some impressions are clear. though. and it is not just the panoramic views of Edinburgh Castle that take your breath away. Step inside and what immediately hits you is the sequence of spaces. Galleries open one into another. different sizes, different shapes. all with pale walls that are wood- panelled to look like large blocks of stone and inset with deep display cases. Shafts of daylight stream through arrow-slit windows and cascade down from the roof lights. There is room to ponder and enjoy every item on display. Thanks to the 12-member Junior board. set up three years ago with 9- to l2-year-olds drawn from all over Scotland, the museum also has a Discovery Centre. What the group really wanted was to be able to ride through the displays. Dr Clarke admits. They lost that one, but won a dedicated children's hands-on centre in what should have been the temporary exhibition gallery. As a result. the Twentieth Century gallery, on the top floor. is the only temporary exhibition. Due to change after three years, it is a hotchpotch of objects chosen by Scottish people and other personalities as the items that have had most impact on life in Scotland in the twentieth century. The Prime Minister's suggestion was an electric guitar. Others went for televisions. Thermos flasks and favourite toys. Although the idea is fun. somehow it feels like a lightweight solution that has floated up to the top of the building. not a proper attempt to address serious issues. It may seem less frothy when the computerised bank of personal reasons and recollections goes live next week. Overall. Dr Clarke seems right when he suggests that 'objects open windows on the past more vividly than anything else'. As for the modernist architecture: it works brilliantly from the inside and the top, but whether it is in the right location is another matter.
6.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	A trumpet isn't just for Christmas... It is strange how many musicians, even leading ones, come from homes without music. Out of the blue, Hakan Hardenberger, the only son of totally unmusical parents in a country district of southern Sweden, has at the age of 30 established himself as unique among the world's trumpet-players today. His records are continually opening up new repertory, not just concertos by long-neglected composers of the baroque and classical periods, but new works too. When you meet him, bright-eyed and good-looking, he seems even younger than his years, as fresh and open in his manner as the sound of the trumpet. Recently in one of London's premier concert halls he played the Hummel Trumpet Concerto, something of a party-piece for him, while on television a whole feature was devoted to his work and development, filmed both here and in Sweden. Born near Malmo, he owes his career to the accident of a Christmas present when he was only eight. His father, unmusical but liking Louis Armstrong's playing, had the idea of giving his only son a trumpet. Being a serious man, he didn't pick a toy trumpet, but took advice and bought a genuine grown-up instrument. The success of the gift was instant. The boy never stopped playing. His mother managed to contact the second trumpet-player in the Malmo Symphony Orchestra, whom she persuaded to give her son lessons. Bo Nilsson was an up-and-coming musician, and at once spotted natural talent. Hardenberger consistently blesses his luck to have got such a teacher right from the start, one who was himself so obsessed with the trumpet and trumpet-playing that he would search out and contact players all over the world, and as a 'trumpet fanatic' was 'always looking for another mouthpiece'. There the mature Hardenberger has to draw a line between himself and his teacher. 'The trumpet is so primitive an instrument,' he explains, 'that you can't build a trumpet that is acoustically perfect. Whatever you do, it will have imperfections. Besides, you can't find two mouthpieces exactly the same. To me it is a matter of getting to know the imperfections and making a relationship with them.' From the very start Hardenberger seems to have had the gift of finding the right compromise, and making that relationship. Without any sense of boasting, he explains that even in his boyhood years the characteristic Hardenberger sound was already recognisable, 'the first thing I acquired'. And unlike the great British contender among virtuoso trumpet-players, John Wallace, who developed originally from a brass-band background and then through working in orchestras, Hardenberger has always thought of himself as a solo artist pure and simple. From early boyhood he had as a role-model the French trumpeter, Maurice Andre, another player who bypassed the orchestra. The boy bought all his records, and idolised him. His parents gave him every chance to practise, and went along with his ambition to make trumpet-playing a career. It was then a question of where, at 15, he should be sent to study. America, Bo Nilsson's first choice, was thought to be too far away and too dangerous, which meant that he went instead at the age of 16 to study in Paris with Pierre Thibaud. Thibaud confirmed his prejudice against going into an orchestra, saying that 'Playing in the orchestra is like digging in the garden.' He was objective enough about himself to know that he played the trumpet better than others of his age, but it was only at the end of the first competition he entered, at the age of 17 during his first year in Paris, that he came to realise that in addition he had a particular gift of communicating. Thibaud suggested that he should enter the competition just for experience. Hardenberger learned the pieces for the first round only, but he won through to the second. Luckily he already knew most of the pieces in that round too, but on getting through to the final he was faced with a concerto that had already daunted him. He didn't win first prize that time, but he enjoyed the performance, realising that though he 'played like a pig', people did listen to him. Quoted like that, Hardenberger's realism about his work and his career may sound arrogant, but that would be a totally false impression. Thoughtfully he refuses to try and analyse what such a gift of communication might consist of, as 'You risk destroying it in trying to explain. The power of the music lies in the fact that it can always move people.'
60.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Fame and Fortune Imogen Edwards-Jones interviews some of the new British talent, from poet to pop star, heading for the top A Nick Grosso, in his early 30s, is the author of three critically acclaimed plays. He is currently adapting his first play, Peaches, into a screenplay. 'It's low budget but we don't know how low,' he explains. 'It certainly won't be over PS30 million, but then it could be 30 quid.' Although obviously gifted, the most extraordinary thing about Nick is that before he wrote Peaches he had never been to or read a play in his life, 'When I wrote the play, I never even imagined it would get put on,' he says. 'It's set in a car. I probably wouldn't do that now because I know the logistical problems. I knew absolutely nothing then.' He left school at 16, only to return a year later, After A-levels, he enrolled at the Young People's Theatre, 'I realised I wanted to write for actors. I wanted my writing to be heard rather than read because of the rhythm and rhyme,' he says, 'Suddenly I was surrounded by like-minded people. It was the first time I'd been in an educational environment and actually enjoyed myself. It was very stimulating.' B Comedian Simon Pegg, 28, has come a long way in his career since studying drama at Bristol University. He is currently writing a television comedy series, and has just finished a punishing tour around the country with comedy star Steve Coogan, He's always worked hard, Even as far back as Bristol, he was honing his art in comedy clubs. 'It was very theoretical at university,' remembers Simon, 'It made me realise I didn't want to be a straight actor and that I'd always been more interested in comedy, People think that comedy is the hardest job in the world and it really isn't. If you've got the courage and you've got good material, it's a wonderful thing to make people laugh.' He has performed with the comic am Funny Business, but his relationship with Steve Coogan that has proved the most fruitful. 'He saw my show and, as I was a huge fan of his, he could probably see me mimicking him,' admits Simon. 'It was comedy clubs. 'It was very theoretical at university.' remembers Simon, 'It made me realise I didn't want to be a straight actor and that I'd always been more interested in comedy. People think that comedy is the hardest job in the world and it really isn't. If you've got the courage and you've got good material, it's a wonderful thing to make people laugh.' C Ciaran McMenamin, 24, came to the public's attention when he disco-danced into their living rooms as the lead in the series The Young Person's Guide To Becoming A Rock Star, The critical reaction was extremely positive and his subsequent rise has been meteoric. 'It's been a really good showcase for me,' he says with a smile, 'I'm now in a situation where I can pick and choose what I do, which is what I've always wanted.' It is an unusually comfortable position to be in, especially when you consider that he has only just graduated, But glance at Ciaran's early career, and it's obvious such recognition was always on the cards. Encouraged by his mother, he went from playing lead roles at school to the Ulster Youth Theatre, where he stayed for four years, 'Basically I was using acting as an excuse not to do homework,' laughs Ciaran. 'But I suddenly decided I wanted to make a go of it because I had a knack for it, and a passion for it.' Now he is more or less sitting back and waiting for the plaudits to roll in - but ask him what he thinks of the fame game and he suddenly becomes pensive, 'When you're 18, you think you'll love the photos and the interviews but you soon realise it's not what you're acting for. It's not about that, It's about getting respect for doing good work.' D Neil Taylor, 25, is the lead singer in the pop band Matrix, which has just signed a three- album deal with Domino Records, Neil and the other half of Matrix, Rick Brown, are already tipped to be huge when their single, Chimera, is released shortly, 'The record company's idea of good sales is very different to mine,' he says, 'They're talking smash hit, but I've no idea, For me, if two people buy it, I'll be happy.' Unlike so many new pop sensations, Neil has actually worked very hard for his success, He left school at 16 and has been trying to break into the music business ever since, 'It's funny how things happen,' he says, 'I'd been slogging away doing student gigs for eight years and I was starting to get a bit jaded, I was just about to give up when this happened.' By 'this' he means meeting Rick Brown, who already had contacts at Domino, and forming Matrix, It couldn't have happened at a better time, 'There were times when I was thoroughly depressed - and I've been in some atrocious bands, But hopefully it will all have been worth it.' E Poet and author Stephen Richards is 27 years old and has won more prizes, awards and academic honours than anyone twice his age, He is already well known on the poetry circuit, where he has been touring and giving several readings a week for the past six years, Now his first novel, Hidden, will be published in March, 'It's a story of obsessive love. It was a very strong idea that I couldn't do as a poem.' Stephen was a huge fan of creative writing at school, but became disenchanted with education later on, 'I decided not to go to university but it wasn't until I became very bored with stuffing envelopes at a theatre that I decided I should.' After university, he published his first work, a children's book, in 1992, 'I don't think my parents expected me to be a writer - they always thought I'd be a reader because that's all I did as a child.' With his poetry receiving such critical acclaim, his move into novels is indeed brave. 'There's a framework with my poetry and less scope for me to do something hideously wrong,' he explains. 'Because a novel can be any length of words, there are more words that could be bad words. My main ambition is not to get into a pattern where I'm just churning stuff out without worrying about the quality.'
61.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Emotional Intelligence - The Key to Success Daniel Goleman examines the 'people skills' that are essential for a place at the top of your profession A The rules for work are changing, We are being judged by a new yardstick - not just by how clever we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other. This yardstick is increasingly used in choosing who will be hired and who will not, who will be passed over and who will not. The new rules can he used to indicate who is likely to become a star performer and who is more prone to mediocrity. And, no matter what field we work in currently, they measure the trait- that are crucial to our marketability for future jobs, These rules have little to do with what we were told at school was important. The ability to do well in examinations is largely irrelevant to this standard. The new measure takes it for granted that we all have enough intellectual ability and technical knowhow to do our jobs. It focuses instead on social skills and personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness - the 'people skills' that make up what is now commonly referred to as emotional intelligence. B In a time when few guarantees of job security have led to the very concept of a 'job' being rapidly replaced by 'portable skills', personal qualities begin to play an important role in the workplace. Talked about loosely for decades under a variety of names, from 'character' and 'personality' to 'soft skills', there is, at last, a more precise understanding of these human talents as well as a new name tor them. 'Emotional intelligence' is generally defined as the ability to monitor and regulate one's own and others' feelings, and to use feelings to guide thought and action. In our work-life it comprises basic elements: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and adeptness in social relationships. There is a common assumption that it simply means 'being nice', However, at strategic moments it may demand not 'being nice', but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with the uncomfortable truth. Nor does emotional intelligence mean giving free rein to feelings - 'letting it all hang out'. Rather, it means managing feeling so that they are expressed appropriately and effectively, enabling people to work together smoothly towards their common goal. C More and more businesses are seeing that encouraging emotional intelligence skills is a viral component of management philosophy. And the less straightforward the job, the more emotional intelligence matters - if only because a deficiency in these abilities can hinder the use of whatever technical expertise or intellect a person may have. There are many examples of people who have risen to the top notwithstanding flaws in emotional intelligence, but as work becomes more complex and collaborative, companies where people work together best have a competitive edge. In the new workplace, with its emphasis on teamwork and a strong customer orientation, this crucial set of emotional competencies is becoming increasingly essential for excellence in every job and in every part of the world. D Whereas one's IQ undergoes few changes, emotional intelligence continues to develop as we go through life and learn from our experiences: our competence in it can keep growing. In fact, studies that have measured people's emotional intelligence through the years show that most people grow more adept at handling their own emotions and impulses, at motivating themselves and at honing their empathy and social adroitness. There is an old-fashioned word for this growth in emotional intelligence: maturity. Not only can emotional intelligence be learnt, but individually we can add these skills to our tool kit for survival. This is especially relevant at a time when it seems a contradiction to put the words 'job' and 'stability' together. Emotional intelligence is no magic formula for uncompetitive organisations, no guarantee of more market share or a healthier bottom line. But if the human ingredient is ignored, then nothing else works as well as it might.
62.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Cabinet-Maker Charles Hurst makes a living from perfectly crafted furniture Joanna Watt meets him Charles Hurst gives the impression of being a man in a hurry. I arrive at his workshop, tucked under a railway arch in East London, and am greeted with a quick handshake and the words: 'Well, fire away then!' Whether this brusqueness is real or a front hiding a shy streak is not immediately apparent. But a glance around the workshop reveals that Hurst is obviously busy, with good reason not to waste a minute of his time. The arched space is full of half-made pieces of furniture and planks of wood in an amazing array of natural colours. Hurst has been a cabinet-maker for ten years and has built up a very nice reputation for himself. His order book is always full for several months in advance, despite the fact that he does not really promote himself. Word has spread that if you want a decent cupboard or table, bookcase or kitchen units, Hurst is your man. Of course, finding a furniture-maker is not that taxing a task. Wherever you live in the countryside, the craft is alive and well. But finding a cabinet- maker who prides himself on making beautifully crafted furniture with clean, simple lines is less easy. 'There are few real cabinet-makers now. People call themselves furniture-makers,' Hurst says wearily. As a craftsman who sets himself exacting standards, he is continually disappointed by some contemporary furniture. 'I am amazed by what some furniture-makers get away with, and saddened by what people will put up with.' He rails against shoddy, mass-produced furniture, and craftsmen who churn out second-rate pieces. Such a quest for perfection is obviously a key to Hurst's success. That and his talent. This man is not coy about his ability. Indeed, his blatant self- confidence is as surprising as his initial brusque manner. 'I have a huge natural ability,' he says, with a deadpan expression. 'I have always been good at making things.' If it were not for the self-deprecating mood into which he slipped towards the end of our interview, I would have believed his conceit to be wholly genuine. Hurst is self-taught. So how did he learn his craft? 'I asked the right questions and picked it all up,' he says nonchalantly. Almost all of his commissions come from private individuals ('l used to do some commercial work for companies but it was soul-destroying'). Some clients have returned time and again. 'You end up doing the whole of their house. That is very satisfying.' But he is honest enough to admit that relationships with clients do not always run smoothly. 'The most infuriating clients are those who don't know what they want, and then decide they do when it's too late ... my favourite clients are the exacting ones.' If Hurst has every reason to be pleased with himself, he is also gracious in his praise for others - where it is due. With a sudden shot of modesty, he says: 'There are people far better than me. I can admire other people. After all, I wasn't trained at Parnham' (the leading college of furniture design). However, he is also unremittingly critical of those craftsmen who 'are trying to be artists and take a year to make one piece.' He also has little time for degree shows, in which students exhibit their work but at the same time are 'trying to make fashion statements. That can be pretentious. A piece of furniture is not about making a statement. It has to be something that people really can use.' Confident Hurst may be, even brusque, but you could never call him or his work pretentious. Indeed, his parting shot displays a welcome down- to-earth approach to his craft and a streak of humility strangely at odds with his earlier self- confidence. 'After all, I am only making furniture,' he says as I make my exit.
63.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Dorothy who? The only British woman scientist to win the Nobel prize should be a household name in her own country, says Georgina Ferry, but she is little known For the past four years, I have been subjecting friends and acquaintances to the Dorothy Hodgkin test. It's very simple: when asked what I am working on, I tell them I am writing the first biography of Dorothy Hodgkin. If their eyes light up, and they say things like 'Surely there's one already!' they have passed. Why should people in Britain know about Dorothy Hodgkin? The fact that she is the only British woman scientist to have won a Nobel prize ought to be enough. Anyone who held the same distinction in literature would be a household name. But Hodgkin, who died in 1994, was a remarkable individual by any standards, as many-faceted as the crystals she studied. Her life reflects some of the greatest upheavals of the 20th century: among them, the advancement of women's education and the globalisation of science. When I began my research, I set out to read some scientific biographies. One of Hodgkin's friends recommended a new biography of Linus Pauling. Pauling was a close friend and contemporary of Hodgkin, worked in the same branch of science and shared a commitment to campaigning against nuclear weapons. I hurried to the main bookshop in the university town where I live, only to discover that not a single biography of Pauling was on the shelves. I now realise I was naive to be surprised that Pauling was not deemed sufficiently interesting to British readers, even though he was the most influential chemist of the 20th century and a winner of Nobel prizes for both chemistry and peace. Even scientists themselves have doubted the value of the scientific biography. 'The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading', wrote the late Peter Medawar, another Nobel laureate, who laid most of the scientific groundwork that now makes organ transplants possible. If scientists propagate this negative view, it is hardly surprising if publishers and booksellers share it. Treating scientists differently from everybody else as biographical subjects is one of the outstanding symptoms of the 'two cultures' mentality, the belief that there is an unbridgeable divide of understanding between the arts and sciences, still prevalent in the literary world. Few but the towering giants of science make it into the biography sections of bookshops. Of course it is nonsense to say scientists, as a group, lead less interesting lives than artists and writers, or actors, or politicians. For some, the fastidiousness involved in maintaining scientific credibility extends to any kind of media appearance. A leading geneticist once told me he was happy to be interviewed about his work, but did not want to be quoted directly or photographed, because he did not want to be perceived as 'self-promoting'. The avoidance of the personal conveys a false impression of the enterprise of science that discourages young people from joining in, and fosters more public suspicion than it dispels. Fortunately, gaps are appearing in the smokescreen. Contemporary scientists now regularly appear in the public eye in contexts other than the straightforward scientific interview. For instance, Professor Richard Dawkins presents prizes to winners of a TV quiz, and geneticist Steve Jones advertises cars on television. No doubt these activities have raised eyebrows in laboratories but they have done more to make scientists recognisable as people than any number of academic papers. The publishing world is also undergoing a transformation. Scientific biographies and autobiographies, if they appeared at all, used to be rather scholarly but dull and over- reverent. The life which the scientist in question led outside work marriage, children, things most people regard as fairly central to their existence - was often dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. That changed with Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?, the hilarious and affecting memoir of a man who also happened to be one of the century's greatest theoretical physicists. More recently, even the greatest names in science, such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie have been allowed to appear with all their flaws clearly visible. To the reader, it does not matter that Einstein's relationship with his family is 'irrelevant' to his General Theory of Relativity. The question of how creative genius copes with emotional ups and downs, trivial practicalities, the social demands of ordinary life, is absorbing in its own right. Dorothy Hodgkin was devoted to her scientific work. Her most important successes were solving the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12, which won her the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964, and of insulin, which her group solved in 1969. In each case she pushed the technique into realms of complexity others deemed unreachable at the time. But she also had three children to whom she was devoted and was married to a frequently absent husband with a career as a historian. Her personal life is not strictly relevant to her work as a scientist, but surely we can all learn from her capacity to unite the disparate threads of her life into a coherent whole. There is much in her life of universal interest, but it would be disloyal of me to imply that this does not include the science itself. Scientific inquiry was the passion of Hodgkin's life, as it has to be for any successful scientist. How to communicate the nature of this passion is the hardest task for the scientific biographer. Most readers are not equipped with enough fundamental scientific concepts to grasp more complex ideas without a lot of explanation. Understanding scientific ideas is not really any more difficult than reading Shakespeare or learning a foreign language - it just takes application. It is sad to think that educated people, who would be embarrassed if they fail to recognise the name of some distinguished literary or artistic figure, continue to live in happy ignorance of the rich heritage represented by scientists such as Dorothy Hodgkin.
64.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Films on video Film critic Nick James reviews some recent releases A Abyss Long before Titanic, director James Cameron made this sweaty, claustrophobic Cold War thriller about oil riggers and navy experts trying to rescue a nuclear submarine stranded many miles beneath water The banter and self-deprecating bravery of foreman Bud and his men rekindle memories of similarly laconic heroes In movies directed by Howard Hawks. Production design and special effects are hugely impressive. It's only the dialogue and characterisation that creak For all the craftsmanship which goes Into the film-making, the story Itself IS strictly B-movie material. B The Thin Red Line The video release of this version of the James Jones novel about the battle for Guadalcanal directed by Andrew Marton makes a fascinating counterpart to Terrence Malick's new film. Whereas Malick's approach IS mystical and poetic, Marton made a much more conventional war movie. albeit one that is often truer to the book. He concentrated on a single soldier, and on his relationship with his abrasive sergeant. Malick's film IS Infinitely richer and more complex, but Marton's version has ItS moments. The flashback sequence, In which the soldier dreams of the wife he longs for, is handled with a harshness which arguably works better than Malick's soft-focus Imagery of the woman on the swing. C On Guard Loosely based on Paul Feval's 1875 novel, this corny but highly watchable swashbuckler IS a cut above most musketeer adventures It has a consummate villain In Fabrice Luchini's clammy politician, orchestrating death and destruction behind the scenes Vincent Perez makes an exuberant (If rather short-lived) hero, and while Daniel Auteuil is perhaps too moody a presence for a romp like this, he too has his moments as an acrobat-turned-swordsman. The film-makers peddle costume-drama cliches with so much Wit and sparkle It never seems to matter. D Character A handsome but dour tale, set In turn-of-the-century Rotterdam. The excessively detailed production and costume design leave the film looking like a museum piece. Taking his cue from the surroundings, Jan Decleir is endlessly morose as the brutal bailiff Dreverhaven, who behaves ruthlessly when evICting tenants. HIS antagonistic relationship with his son IS at the core of the story, but the film-makers seem too busy laYing on the period detail to do Justice to the dark and vicious parable. E The Good, the Bad and the Ugly This digitally re-mastered video re-release shows off director Leone's craftsmanship to ItS best advantage. The sound editing, in particular, stands out every footstep, creaking floorboard or barking dog registers loud and clear. The storytelling IS relentlessly cruel and whenever there's a lull, It only takes a burst of Morricone's magnificent music to quicken the pulse On a moral level, there Isn't much to distinguish between the good (Clint Eastwood), the bad (Lee van Cleef) and the ugly (Ell Wallach), all of whom seem equally unscrupulous as they maraud across the post- Civil War West. F The Longest Day 'Forty-eight International stars' trumpets the publicity for this three-hour Darryl Zanuck war epic. With four directors and 23,000 extras as well, this is one pudding which is definitely over-egged The early sequences, in which the battle-hardened veterans walt for confirmation of when the invasion will happen, drag as much for the audience as for the soldiers. On a logistical level (If not an aesthetic one), this is an impressive enough feat but it cries out for the big screen Panned and scanned on video, It is inevitably a diminished experience.
65.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Under Sarah's Spell Sarah Janson is a trompe-l'oeil artist whose paintings are designed to deceive the eye by creating the illusion of reality. Here she is interviewed by Joanna Watt There cannot he many artists who l10 not sign their work unless they are asked to. Sarah Janson, a trompe-l'oeil artist, is one. She is not remotely interested in the concept of the artist as creator, let alone that of the artist as genius: 'It's not the artist who is important, but the work,' she states. Janson is so self-deprecating that she would almost like you to believe that her trompe-l'oeil works paint themselves. All of which does not bode well for a magazine interview. 'I just don't like to shout about myself,' she says, and then covers her face in horror when asked if she minds being photographed for the feature, Cut to her sitting room 30 minutes later (a wonderful space in a Hock of artists' studios in London, filled with paintings and drawings) and you find two women bent double with hysteria. Her confidence gained, the interview becomes a fascinating, amusing (and sometimes hilarious) encounter. Janson has been a trompe-l'oeil artist for sixteen years, after two years' solid drawing at art school ('the best training any artist can ever have'}, a degree in graphic illustration and a stint at a publishing house. But illustration never really satisfied her, and she joined a specialist decorator, Jim Smart ('one of the best in his day'). Smart asked her to do one trompe-l'oeil, and that was it. 'Suddenly my interest got channelled,' she says, She left to set up on her own, 'not really knowing where I was going, hut feeling that I was on the road to somewhere.' Her instinct was right. Janson's observational skills and fascination with detail (gained through illustrating) proved essential qualities for a trompe-l'oeil artist. 'People often ask me where they can learn trompe-l'oeil. But no one can teach you. Trompe-l'oeil is the school of life. It's all about observation.' She insists (in that self-deprecating way) that she is still learning. 'The moment you think that you've mastered a field you might as well give up.' She is also brutally honest about her 'failings' ('I can't paint bread; it always looks like grey concrete') and is frank about her mathematical abilities. Faced with a huge commission for the domed chapel ceiling at Lulworth Castle, she became totally confused when calculating measurements. 'I thought to myself, "You're not Michelangelo. Who do you think you are?"' This habit of self-questioning and a reluctance to openly acknowledge her skills has spawned an oddly distanced attitude to her talent. Janson often speaks in the third person: 'When I finished that ceiling, I thought, "Well I didn't do it, she did".' Of course, her trompe-l'oeil schemes can speak for themselves. Janson's work is in a league of its own, far above those who have jumped on the bandwagon (the art of trompe-l'oeil has experienced something of a revival, hut not with entirely satisfactory results) and she has a string of major corporate and private commissions behind her. Much of her work is inspired by architecture or made for architectural settings. There is the trompe-l'oeil dining room for one client, based on the facade of a Venetian palazzo, and the painting at the end of a corridor in a Hat, which gives the illusion that you can step into two further rooms. There is always a danger with trompe-l'oeil, though, that once you get the joke, your attention is lost, something of which Janson is acutely aware. 'Trompe-l'oeil has to do two things. First, it must draw you in; it's got to trick you. Secondly, it has to hold you and then engage your imagination. That is the most important part.' While trompe-l'oeil has to be clever, it must also, Janson believes, be personal to the client. 'I love the interaction with clients; hat is where the ideas arc horn,' she says. 'Without the rapport, the job of creating a trompe-l'oeil scheme becomes rather difficult. Some clients have firm ideas about what they want; others do not. You have to he willing to listen. You have to get inside a client's imagination.' Many have become friends, nut least because Janson practically lives with them if she works on site. Janson is generous in praise of her clients. 'I am very grateful for the mad ones who have let me loose on their walls.' she confesses. And, they too, seem delighted with her, which is why she is constantly busy - despite her inclination to play down her talent. 'I really don't like to shout about myself,' she repeats at the end. 'Like my work, I am very restrained. I don't want it to shout. You become bored with things that shout.' True, perhaps, hut you could never really become bored with Janson or her work. It certainly deserves to become better known, and I am prepared to incur her wrath while I blow her trumpet.
66.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	THE BOAT OF MY DREAMS The best boat design should combine old and new, says Tom Cunliffe. And he put it into practice in his own craft, 'The Westerman'. This week. the Summer Boat Show in London is resplendent with fine yachts, bristling with new technology. Nearly all are descendants of the hull-shape revolution that took place 25 years ago. By contrast, my own lies quietly on a tidal creek off the south coast. She was designed last year but, seeing her, you might imagine her to be 100 years old and think that her owner must be some kind of lost-soul romantic. Perhaps I am, though I doubt it. This boat has benefited from all the magic of old-fashioned boat design, but it would have been a much harder job without the advances of modern know-how. It has to be said, however, that despite being an indispensable tool in current design methods and boat-building practice, sophisticated technology frequently insulates crews from the harsh realities of maritime life. These are often the very realities they hoped to rediscover by going to sea in the first place. It's not that I'm suggesting that sailors should go back to enduring every hardship. It's always been important to me that my boats have a coal stove for warmth and dryness and cosy berths for sleeping. But why go cruising at all if every sail sets and furls itself? The occasional battle with flapping canvas is surely part of a seaman's life. And for what purpose should we abandon common sense and move our steering positions from the security of the aft end to some vulnerable perch half-way to the bow? The sad answer is that this creates a cabin like that of an ocean liner, with space for a bed larger than the one at home. For me a boat should always be a boat and not a cottage on the water. When I bought an earlier boat, Hirta, in which I circumnavigated Britain for a TV race series, the previous owner observed that she had every comfort, but no luxury. During my long relationship with her, Hirta taught me how wise he was. Her sails were heavy, and she had no pumped water, no electricity to speak of, no fridge, no central heating, no winches, and absolutely no electronics, especially in the navigation department, yet she was the kindest, easiest boat that I have ever sailed at sea. Back on land, however, it is a sad fact that the very antiquity of classic boats means that they need a lot of looking after. When I had a bad injury to my back, I realised that my IS-year love affair with her had to end. Searching for a younger replacement produced no credible contenders, so I decided to build a new boat from scratch. The Westerman has never disappointed me. Although Nigel Irens, the designer, and Ed Burnett, his right-hand man, are adept with computer-assisted design programs, Irens initially drew this boat on a paper napkin, and only later transferred his ideas to the computer. After this had generated a set of lines, he carved a model, just as boatyards did in the days of sail. Together we considered the primary embryonic vessel, then fed the design back into the electronic box for modification. The next version was nearly right and by the time the final one appeared, the form was perfect. The completed boat has now crossed the North Atlantic and has won four out of her first six racing starts, Her appearance is ageless, her motion at sea is a pleasure and her accommodation, much of it in reclaimed pitch pine, emanates an atmosphere of deep peace. Maybe this is because she was drawn purely as a sailing craft, without reference to any furniture we might put into her. That is the well-tried method of the sea. In her timeless serenity, she is the living proof that it works; that there is no need to follow current fashions to find satisfaction. and that sometimes it pays to listen to the lessons of history. Constructed in timber treated with a penetrating glue, she is totally impervious to water. Thus she has all the benefits of a glass fibre boat yet looks like, feels like and sails like the real thing.
67.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	In search of true north - and the man behind Halley's comet Dr Toby Clark, a researcher at the British Geological Survey, aims to retrace Sir Edmund Halley's quest to chart compass variations. Anjana Ahuja reports. Astronomer Sir Edmund Halley (1656-1742) is best known for the comet that bears his name. Yet one of his greatest accomplishments, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was to chart, using calculations made on his sea voyages on the warship Paramore, the 'variations of the compass'. These variations are now known as 'declination', that is, the angle between magnetic north and true geographical north. Without it, sailors were unable to correct their compasses. It was therefore impossible to deduce longitude precisely and navigate the oceans. So it was that Halley, one of only two men in the land at that time paid to conduct scientific research, set sail for the Cape Verde Islands with the grand plan of charting declination in the North and South Atlantic. The trip was quickly aborted because of crew insubordination, but Halley returned to the seas a second time. This voyage took him and his crew to Rio de Janeiro, down past South Georgia, up again to Newfoundland and back to England. From these travels Halley published, in 170I, a 'New and Correct Chart shewing the Variations of the Compasse in the Western and Southern Oceans'. More sophisticated successors to this primitive cartographic effort proved indispensable to seamen for more than a century, before a slow change in the terrestrial magnetic field rendered them inaccurate. If all goes well, Halley's accomplishments will be celebrated once again. Dr Clark, himself a keen sailor, plans to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of Halley's trip by retracing the route of the Paramore. PS70,000 will have to be raised before he embarks, and Sir Vivian Fuchs, who led the first cross-Antarctica expedition, is providing support for his efforts to do this. Dr Clark became fascinated by Halley during a two-year posting to Halley Station in Antarctica, where he read biographies of the great scientist. 'Halley led a remarkable life: Dr Clark says. 'He was not only a respected scientist but also led expeditions. He was not just an astronomer but also did research in geophysics. While he was Astronomer Royal, he mapped the positions of the stars, and also found time for other interests.' It was during this period that Halley developed a diving bell and also advised Sir Isaac Newton during his writing of Principia Mathematica, the foundation of classical physics. Recreating the voyage, Dr Clark says, will afford Halley the recognition he deserves. The projected expedition, which he has entitled 'In the Wake of the Paramore', will also have scientific merit. It will involve making the measurements that Halley made, but with far more precise instruments. These measurements need to be updated because the terrestrial magnetic field is slowly but constantly changing. The data collected should help to refine the existing mathematical model of Earth's magnetic field, called the international geomagnetic reference field. 'It is common to measure the size but not the direction of the magnetic field. That's because you need to know true north to measure the direction,' says Dr Clark. 'On our expedition we can use global positioning satellites to determine that.' The British Geological Survey and the United States Navy have offered to supply instruments. By chance, a Danish satellite will be taking similar measurements over the globe. Dr Clark hopes that his measurements will plug any gaps in its coverage of the Atlantic Ocean and, he points out, it is also useful to have ground-based measurements as a comparison. It is easy to forget just how significant Halley's Atlantic journey really was. It was the first dedicated scientific expedition on the seas and Halley became the first civilian who was appointed naval captain to pursue what many regarded as an obsession with declination. Does Dr Clark possess the credentials to make his parallel voyage a success? As well as spending two years in Antarctica and working in the geomagnetic group at the British Geological Survey, he has already sailed the 13,000 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro to England. He envisages that the expedition will be completed in four stages, with four different crews. And does he share Halley's obsessive trait? 'I am prepared to give up my life for eight months to do this, so I suppose some people might think I'm obsessed. But I wouldn't want to sail across the Atlantic again without a good reason. Halley, and his fascinating life, have given me a real sense of purpose.'
68.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Beginner Takes All Even before it was published, The Horse Whisperer was the hottest book of the year. A first novel by British screenwriter Nicholas Evans, it has earned its author record-breaking sums. He talks here about his inspiration and his triumph The first months of the year were not kind to Nicholas Evans, screenwriter, producer and aspiring director. The year began badly when Life and Limb, a film project he had been working on for months, fell through 'almost overnight'. His disappointment mingled with stomach-churning worry: it had been two years since he had earned any money and the promise of that film had been the only buffer between him and an increasingly irate bank manager. A wise man, finding himself in Evans' position, would have got a job. He could have gone back to being a television executive, or begun a television project that had been on hold. Instead, he made a decision that most people, Evans included, would consider insane. He bought a ticket to America and set off for three months to research his first novel. Although he was acting very much on impulse, the seeds for the story had been with him for some time, sown by a farrier he met on Dartmoor while staying with a friend. The farrier had told him the story of a docile horse that had turned, no one knew why, into a fiend. Its owners were desperate until they heard of a gypsy who, simply by talking to the animal, transformed its temperament in a matter of hours. Such men, the farrier said, were known as 'horse whisperers'. Evans' imagination was captured. He began researching the subject with a view to writing a screenplay - he was, after all, a film-maker. But disillusionment with the film world following the demise of Life and Limb prompted him to write the story as a book. And so throughout the spring he drove across the US, stopping at ranches and learning about horses and the men who work with them. 'It was a funny time,' he says now. 'I was observing people, but essentially [ was alone and I really felt as though my life was falling apart. ['d tried for ten years to make a go of it as a film-maker, and here 1was, hugely in debt and wondering how [ was going to feed the children, and thinking maybe it was all just folly.' He thought that again towards the end of August, by which time he had returned home and written the first half of the book. 'At that point the bank manager was getting really very heavy with us, and I needed to know whether it was worth going on. I plucked up the courage to show it to a friend who was a literary agent; he read it and said it was "fine".' When pushed, he ventured that Evans might get $30,000 as an advance on the book. 'I had in mind how much 1 needed to payoff a bit of the overdraft and keep us going, and it was more than that. ['d spent seven months on The Horse Whisperer, and there were at least another two to go. $30,000 was a really difficult figure. I was also advised to write a 12-page synopsis of the remainder of the book.' In October. together with the first two hundred pages of the novel. this was sent to seven UK publishers on the eve of their departure for the annual spending spree at the internationally renowned Frankfurt Book Fair. Within days his agent was on the telephone to report that he had just turned down the first offer of $75,000. 'I said, "You what?" And he said, "It's OK, I just sense something is happening". ' The events that followed have become publishing history. Within a week - a week of hotly contested auctions - the novel had been sold to Transworld Publications in the UK for 5550,000 and to Delacorte in the US for 53.I5 million, both record-breaking advances for a first novel. 'We couldn't believe it; we sat there with our jaws gaping. W e'd never sent the manuscript to New York, we still don't know how it got there,' Evans says. Nor did they send it to Hollywood, but within that same week the major studios were fighting over it. 'My agent in the UK wisely involved an agent over there and when he phoned us to say, "I think we can get $3 million outright," we laughed in disbelief.' As they all agreed to this sum, it was decided that they should each 'pitch' to Evans. And so, one night in October, he sat in his study while four great film-makers rang, one after the other, to beg for the privilege of paying 53 million for an unfinished novel. Evans told me all this as we sat drinking coffee on a wooden verandah perched above the leafy garden of his home. He said that he had since turned down an offer to write the screenplay of Tile Horse Whisperer. 'It's all been such a fairy tale so far. I don't want to spoil it. Writing at that level is a very tough business, and I don't want to become an employee of these people who I like and who have paid me so much money. I'd hate to find myself writing a draft or two and then have them say, "Thanks Nick, but now we'll bring in so-and-so". ' He would be involved, he said, but at arm's length. The success of his novel had inevitably brought forth the offer of new backing for Life and Limb, but he was no longer sure that he wanted to make it. 'I think that I would be foolish not to write another novel,' he said.
7.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Hit and miss of mass marketing AS ALMOST everyone knows, advertising is in the doldrums. It isn't just the recession. Advertising started to plummet early in 1989, well before the recession really began to bite. Advertising's problems are more fundamental, and the decline is worldwide. The unhappy truth is that advertising has failed to keep up with the pace of economic change. Advertisers like to think in terms of mass markets and mass media, but as brands and media have proliferated, target markets have fragmented. Even campaigns for major brands ought to be targeted at minority audiences, but they rarely are. That is the principal way in which advertising has gone astray. Think about your own shopping habits. If you visit a supermarket you may leave with 30, 40 or perhaps 50 items listed on your check-out bill, the average number of items of all kinds purchased per visit of all kinds. Many of these will not be advertised brands; some others will be multiple purchases of the same brand. At a maximum you will have bought a handful of advertised brands from the 15,000 lines on sale in the store. Over a year you are unlikely to buy more than a few hundred brands. Consumer durables? Perhaps a dozen a year. Cars? If yours is a new car, the statistical likelihood is that it is supplied by your employer. If it isn't, you only buy one every three years. And though it may seem otherwise, you do not buy that many clothes either, and most of them will not be advertised brands. Even when you throw in confectionery, medicines, hardware, all the services you can think of, it is virtually certain you do not buy more than 400 different brands a year. Compare that figure with the 32,500 branded goods and services that, according to Media Register, are advertised. Let's ignore the 23,000 which spend less than PS50,000 a year, and concentrate on the 9,500 brands that Media Register Individually lists and analyses. Mr and Mrs Average have bought 400 of that 9,500, and not all because of their advertising. That's about 4 per cent. So you can forget that naive claim usually attributed to Lord Leverhulme: 'Half of my advertising is wasted but I've no way of knowing which half.' You could say that 96 per cent of all advertising is wasted, but nobody knows which 96 per cent. When you're watching TV tonight, count how many of the commercials are for brands you buy or are likely to buy in the future. For most people the figure seems to be about one in 16 (6 per cent) so the commercials for the other 15 (94 per cent) are, on the face of it, wasted. You probably think you're a special case, that you are impervious to advertising. Almost everyone thinks the same. But you aren't and they aren't. The truth is nobody buys most of the brands they see advertised. Waste is inherent in the use of media for advertising. The notion that every reader of a publication or every viewer of a commercial break might immediately rush out and buy all or even many of the brands advertised is ludicrous. People register only a tiny number of advertisements they see and ignore the rest, so waste cannot be avoided. That does not mean advertising isn't cost-effective. Millions of advertisements have proved it is. Advertising has to communicate with large numbers of people to reach the relevant minority, because the advertiser cannot know, in advance, exactly which individuals will respond to his blandishments. Media advertising works, despite its much publicised expense, because it is a cheap means of mass communication. Nonetheless, all waste is gruesome. With smart targeting the advertiser can minimise the wastage by increasing the percentage of readers or viewers who will respond; but he can never know precisely who will respond. Even the most accurate and finely tuned direct mail-shot never achieves a 100 per cent response. This is one of the fundamental differences between the use of media and face-to-face selling. It is possible, just, to envisage a salesman scoring with every prospective client he speaks to. The same could never happen when media are used. If the advertiser knew exactly which people were going to respond there would be no point in using media at all. The advertiser could communicate with them directly. This is as true of Birth, Marriage and Death notices as it is of soft drink commercials. Any advertiser who can net one million new customers (2 per cent of the adult population) is doing well. Of soap powder, the two top-selling brands in supermarkets would be delighted with a million extra customers. So that any advertising campaign, for any product (or any political party for that matter) which could win over 2 per cent of the population would be outstandingly successful: and that, as I began by saying, is but a tiny minority of the population. The most cost-effective way to reach them may be the use of mass media, but if advertising is to get going again its message will need to be more tightly targeted than ever before.
8.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C1	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	A history of the apple Apples have been with us since the dawn of recorded time, in countless varieties of colour, shape and size. But the late twentieth century is in danger of squandering its heritage. Prehistoric wilding 8,000 BC Human beings have been munching apples since prehistoric times. They spat out apple-pips in neolithic Britain. And 10,000 years ago they left apple remains to carbonise around their Swiss and Italian lakeside homes. In Switzerland and in the regions adjoining the Caucasus mountains, ancient humans even appear to have dry-stored apple-halves for winter. But these were wild crab apples, tiny wizened fruit which, in Ancient Britain came to be known as 'windings'. They had little in common with the apples we know today. Norman knowledge 1000 AD From the Romans the French learned great fruit-growing skills which were developed in the monasteries. This knowledge, which included expel cider-making, was taken to Britain from Roman times, like the dessert apple, Decio - drought to have been introduced by the Roman general, Etio. But most Roman varieties were unsuitable for the British climate and the Norman varieties rapidly took precedence. British monks continued experimenting and developing new apples, and it is from these varieties that Western apples are largely descended. Mediaeval favourites 1200 Several kinds of apples became established in Britain during the thirteenth century. The Old English Pearmain, recorded in 1204 and so named because of its pear-like shape, was the main dessert apple until well into the eighteenth century. Its cooking panner was the Costard, which was sold in the markets of Oxford from 1296 until the end of the seventeenth century and gave us the word 'costermonger' - meaning someone who sells fruit and vegetables in the street. But prosperity declined as the country was hit by successive droughts, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses. Fewer apples were produced and more were imported. This went on until the sixteenth century when Henry VIII ordered his chief fruiterer, Richard Harris, to visit France and learn about apple cultivation. Harris returned with a 'great store of grafts' including the famous Pippins, from which he grew the first ever modern-style orchard at Teynham in Kent. Settler treasure 1750 By the seventeenth century apples were so popular in Britain that the first settlers who sailed to Canada, Australia, die US, South Africa and New Zealand took apples and apple-pips with them, counting these among their most treasured possessions. Captain Bligh of the Bounty took the first apples to Australia; Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of Cape Settlement, took them to South Africa and the Pilgrim Fathers who boarded the Mayflower carried them to America. In North America the most famous apple-planter was john Chapman, or 'Johnny Appleseed'. Born in 1774, he planted seedling nurseries from Pennsylvania in the east through Ohio into Indiana in the west. The Indians regarded him as a medicine man and his apple-tree enthusiasm, odd clothing and religious devotion - he distributed religious tracts tom in pans for widespread circulation - stayed many folktales. He was said, for example, to be so kind to Gods creatures that he even slept with bears. Modem Delicious 1850 About this time in Iowa, a Quaker farmer called Jesse Hiatt discovered something sprouting from the roots of a dead tree. The shoot grew into an apple tree bearing a totally new apple which Hiatt named 'Hawkey'. He sent it to a fruit show and on biting into one the judge exclaimed 'Delicious, delicious!'. In 1895 the apple was introduced to the trade as a 'Delicious' and became one of the most widely grown apples in the world. Granny Smith 1850 Another of the most famous modern apples was discovered in Australia by Maria Anne Smith. The daughter of transported convicts, Maria was fiercely independent, rejecting both the criminal life of her parents and the bureaucratic hypocrisy of the colonial administration. She worked as a midwife in the small township of Eastwood in New South Wales, where she was known as 'Granny-Smith' because she took on responsibility for maintaining the farm and orchard, which was the family's main source of income. One day in 1868 she found a small tree pushing its way through a pile of discarded fruit. She transplanted it and before long was harvesting the world's first major crop of green apples, soon to be famous all over the world. When asked how the tree came about she said, 'Well, it's just like God to make something useful out of what we think is rubbish' - a comment which referred not only to the fruit but also her own convict origins. Uniformity ales 1950 Apples are now grown all over the world from Himachal Pradesh in northern India to small luxury orchards throughout Africa. Most, though, are grown commercially and come from just half a dozen varieties - usually chosen for their red skin or because they travel well rather than because they taste good. A plague of uniformity is sweeping the world, numbing the tastebuds and reducing the gene pool. While amateur gardeners in the UK have kept many old apple varieties alive, the US has lost forever most of the apples it had 100 years ago. But consumers are starting to demand more variety. We can't leave the responsibility of saving diversity in our apples - or any other food - up to the random selections of amateur gardeners. We must insist on a world where natural diversity is valued and protected for the benefit of all.
1.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Vancouver In the last ten years or so, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have taken up residence in Vancouver, in western Canada. To relax in the evening, residents stroll down the city streets and, if you join them, you are likely to overhear a different language at almost every other step. People come to Vancouver for its mild climate, its wonderful setting between the ocean and the mountains, its clean and safe environment and its educational and job opportunities. And much as some may grumble about the speed at which new buildings have sprung up, there's no doubt that the new arrivals and flourishing tourism industry have helped fuel an urban renaissance. Locals once referred to Vancouver as 'Terminal City' because of the city's role as a terminus or gateway to all other places. Though the name has fallen slightly out of favour, Vancouver is more a gateway than ever. Putting Pen to Paper Journalists like myself are usually poor letter-writers. I have heard it said that this is because of the instinctive distaste we feel at writing something we are not going to be paid for, but I cannot believe we have quite such mercenary characters. It is more probably that since in our work, we are always striving to get the greatest possible effect, the essential spontaneity of a letter escapes us. The real creative artist, who does not consciously work on the effect at all (though he may rewrite a passage dozens of times), does not have this problem. I believe that it is in this inherent grasp of the effect of his words that there lies the only sure test of the real artist. When Shakespeare wrote some of his famous lines he surely never thought consciously that it was the contrast between polysyllables that made them so effective, as well as showing him to be a great writer. Supermarket Opening The opening of a new supermarket used to be a bit of an event in Britain. You could always rely on a soap star, a disc jockey or a minor member of the royal family to come down and cut the ribbon. Now it seems that new branches are popping up every day in many areas and so the poor old celebrity has become superfluous. Why pay a famous person when any Tom, Dick or Harry will open it for nothing? Last week, waiting pensioners didn't care who opened the new branch of Superbuy, so long as they were at the front. According to one prospective customer who knew someone who worked there, the first five men over the threshold would be getting a bottle of aftershave, and the first five women, a bunch of flowers. This snippet of information quickly swept through the crowd, instilling feelings of smug superiority among those at the front, and envy from the latecomers.
10.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Philadelphia Avenue I headed down Philadelphia Avenue on the odd-numbered side. The dusk had deepened, the humidity thickened into a palpable, prickly drizzle that lent my walk a heightened feeling of sheltered stealth. I knew this side of the street from the dawn of consciousness; our neighbours the Matzes and the Pritchards, and Han Kieffer's grocery store, and the Kring's and the Pottses' houses where my first playmates, all girls, lived. These houses down the street, though not every inhabitant was known by name to me, had each been as distinct to my childish awareness as the little troughs in the cement which led rain from their roof gutters out through the sidewalk to the street, and which punctuated my progress on roller skates or on my scooter. As the street sloped downward, there was a just-perceptible descent in the social scale as well: the porches got lower to the ground, and the front yards became exiguous. Over the years, there had been changes: wooden porch banisters and pillars had been replaced by wrought iron, in a vaguely Southern or Spanish style. Throughout Shillington, not only had houses I remembered as homes become stores but, stranger still, stores - Pep Conrad's up on Franklin and Second, Han Kieffer's here - had reverted to being homes. How had the residents divided up those open, shelved spaces? How did they live with all those ghostly aromas of merchandise? Bachelor Fads Furniture designer Rick Gilbert's flat is a former curtain warehouse. It has the conventional features of the classic loft space, in this instance, exposed brickwork and gigantic doors, through which curtains were once hoisted from trains on the adjacent railway track. But Gilbert was adamant that he didn't want a brutally empty, open-plan space - for practical as much as aesthetic reasons. 'In my last place, living and working spaces were integrated. It was hard to switch off or start work in full view of the living area.' Refusing to conform to the loft-dwelling convention of open-plan living, he broke up the space near the entrance with a giant snaking sheet of corrugated plastic. 'It hides the office, creates a hallway, and guides the eye to the kitchen in the middle of the flat. I wanted the kitchen to be a neutral zone, where I can either cook dinner for friends or make coffee for clients.' To offset the synthetic look of his plastic screen and stainless steel kitchen, Gilbert laid the floors with a light wood. And while his futuristic chairs and sofas litter the flat, its also stuffed with rather more sentimental and homely furniture, given to him by his parents or bought from markets. Bruce Chatwin To escape or to explore? The spur behind Bice Chatwin's absurdly romantic nomadic existence has become something of a literary conundrum. Chatwin's life and art were strewn with secrets, subtle resonances and, it must be said, lies. But he was, for all that, a brilliant and unique writer. His first book, In Patagonia, published in 1977, is an awesome exercise in imagination. A travel book that reinvented travel writing, it has the animation of a thriller, the sparkle of romantic fiction and the irrepressible insight of truly extraordinary literature. Of course, even with this book, Chatwin cloaked fact with concoction; when sketching individuals and incidents, he would adjust, if not abandon, objective reality for the sake of a better twist to an anecdote, or a clean cut to the heart of what the book somehow seemed to suggest - that through travel it was possible to discover whole histories that had been lived out as if solely to excite and fascinate future explorers. Swimming The warm rain tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house and took shelter in the pool. Breaststroking up and down, I nosed along, eyes just at water level. Each raindrop exploded in a momentary, bouncing fountain that turned into a bubble and burst. The best moments were when the storm intensified, drowning birdsong, and a haze rose off the water as though the pool itself were rising to meet the lowering sky. It was at the height of this drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim through Britain began to form itself. I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger pacing its cage. Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially 'interpreted'. There is something about all this that is tuning the reality of things into visual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things. A swimming journey would give me access to that pan of our world which, like darkness, misty woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery.
11.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Online Literary Criticism For All Do-it-yourself literary criticism: more than just harmless fun? From the outset, the idea of open access to the Internet was one of its guiding principles. In theory, anyone could publish a manifesto or broadcast a music channel on the Internet. In practice, however, a certain amount of technical know-how was required, at least in the early years. However, there was at least one field, previously restricted to the few, that was genuinely opened up to the masses. By visiting the pages of Amazon.com, the first popular online bookshop, anyone was able to try their hand at literary criticism. Amazon's egalitarian approach to book reviews -- namely, that anyone could say what they liked about anything and award it up to five stars - looked, on the face of it, a brilliant idea. Each book had its own page on Amazon's site, and whenever a reader submitted a new review, it appeared automatically. This meant that Amazon got to fill its pages with free reviews, and potential buyers of a book could see what other readers thought of it, for better or worse, rather than reading just the blurb from the publisher and the views of professional critics. Other online bookstores which also operated as large bricks-and-mortar bookshop chains provided similar features. But as the largest player, with over 80% of the online market, Amazon initially had the most customers, attracted by far the greatest number of reviews and, accordingly, encountered the most funny business. For this critical free-for-all lent itself to subversion of various subtle and not-so-subtle kinds. Thousands of reviews were submitted each day - Amazon would not say exactly how many - so it was impractical to vet them all. Instead, a team of editors scoured the site, checking that reviews conformed to the company's guidelines. Single-word reviews, for instance, or personal attacks on the author, were not allowed. Nor were reviews that contained obscenities, gave away the ending, or referred to other reviews. Ultimately, however, the reviewers were anonymous (they were not required to give their real names) and offending reviews were removed only if Amazon checkers noticed them. So there was plenty of scope for mischief. For example, there was nothing to stop writers giving their own books glowing reviews. One writer, Lev Grossman, was so mortified by the bad reviews that readers gave his first novel ('infantile trash', 'puerile pap') that he submitted several anonymous ones of his own ('hilarious', 'fabulous') to redress the balance. His ruse succeeded until he wrote an article detailing his deception. The fake reviews were promptly removed. Authors were, in fact, provided with their own way to hold forth: by clicking on a link marked 'I am the Author, and I wish to comment on my book.' Most authors who used this feature posted jolly messages expressing their desire that browsers would buy, and enjoy, the book in question. A few even gave their email addresses, thus inviting readers to communicate directly. Yet authors who posted messages knew that while Amazon did vet them, it did not check that they really came from the author. An exception to this was made in the case of big names. A little-known writer submitted an authors comment, purporting to be from John Updike, in which he admitted to being a 'talented but ultimately over-hyped middlebrow author'. Unsurprisingly, it was deemed a fake and was removed. Still, the fur really began to fly as a result of postings from readers, not writers. When James McElroy's We've Got Spirit, which documented a year in the life of a small-town cheerleading team, was published, it was well received by the mainstream press. But many of the people mentioned in it felt betrayed, and the books page on Amazon was an obvious outlet for their anger. Dozens of highly critical reviews were submitted - only to vanish a few days later. Despite this episode, as far as Amazon was concerned, the fact that so many people were prepared to invest so much time reading and writing reviews was simply good for business. As readers' reviews were supposed to be a 'forum to talk about a book' rather than a chat room, a particularly close eye was kept on bestselling books, to ensure that all reviews played by the rules. This meant that the best place to post a silly review was on a page devoted to a less well-known book. The Story about Ping, a classic children's work that tells the story of a duck called Ping, was the inspiration for much geek humour, because 'ping' also happened to be the name of a software utility used to measure the degree of congestion on the Internet. One lengthy review constructed an elaborate analogy between the books plot and the architecture of the Internet, and concluded that the book provided a 'good high-level overview' of basic networking concepts. Such silliness was, however, the exception rather than the rule. The striking thing about the vast majority of reader reviews at Amazon.com was how seriously their contributors took them. And overall the reviews collectively provided a remarkably accurate indication of whether or not a particular set of goods was worth buying. The writer George Orwell once complained that 'reviewing too many books involved constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever'. All the more reason, then, to regard the democratisation of the process as a good thing.
12.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Photography Over the past one and a half centuries, photography has been used to record all aspects of human life and activity. During this relatively short history, the medium has expanded its capabilities in the recording of time and space, thus allowing human vision to be able to view the fleeting moment or to visualise both the vast and the minuscule. It has brought us images from remote areas of the world, distant parts of the solar system, as well as the social complexities and crises of modern life. Indeed, the photographic medium has provided one of the most important and influential means of expressing the human condition. Nonetheless, the recording of events by means of the visual image has a much longer history. The earliest creations of pictorial recording go as far back as the Upper Palaeolithic period of about 35,000 years ago. And although we cannot be sure of the exact purposes of the early cave paintings - whether they record the 'actual' events of hunting, whether they functioned as sympathetic magic to encourage the increase of animals for hunting, whether they had a role as religious icons, or if they were made simply to enliven and brighten domestic activities - pictorial images seem to be inextricably linked to human culture as we understand it. Throughout the history of visual representation, questions have been raised concerning the supposed accuracy (or otherwise) of the visual image, as well as its status in society. The popular notion that 'seeing is believing' had always afforded special status to the visual image. So when the technology was invented, in the form of photography, the social and cultural impact was immense. In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of photography appeared to offer the promise of 'automatically' providing a truthful visual record. It was seen not only as the culmination of Western visual representation but, quite simply, the camera, functioning in much the same way as the human eye, was regarded as a machine which could provide a fixed image. And this image was considered to be a very close approximation to that which we actually see. The chemical fixing of the image enabled the capture of what might be considered a natural phenomenon: the camera image. At the same time, the photographic image was held to be an achievement of sophisticated culture and produced the type of image that artists had struggled throughout the centuries to acquire the manual, visual and conceptual skills to create. It may seem a further irony that, because of the cameras perceived realism in its ability to replicate visual perception, it was assumed that all peoples would 'naturally' be able to understand photographs. This gave rise to the question of whether photography constituted a 'universal language'. For example, in 1933 this view had been expressed in a series of radio broadcasts by photographer August Sander: 'Even the most isolated Bushman could understand a photograph of the heavens -- whether it showed the sun and moon or the constellations.' However, in the face of the rapid increase in global communications which characterised the latter part of the twentieth century, we do at least need to ask to what extent the photographic image can penetrate through cultural differences in understanding. Or is photography as bound by cultural conventions as any other form of communication, such as language? Is it possible that our familiarity with the photographic image has bred our current contempt for the intricacies and subtle methods that characterise the medium's ability to transmit its vivid impressions of 'reality'? Photography is regarded quite naturally as offering such convincing forms of pictorial evidence that this process of communication often seems to render the medium totally transparent, blurring the distinction between our perception of the environment and its photographic representations. It is the most natural thing in the world for someone to open their wallet and produce a photograph saying 'this is my grandson'. Ever since its invention in 1839, the technology of photography and the attitudes towards the medium by its practitioners have changed radically. This may partly be attributed to photography gradually moving into what might be termed 'mythic time' - its initial role as a nineteenth-century record-keeper has now moved beyond the human scale and photographic images, once immediate and close to photographer and subject alike, have now passed out of living memory. The passage of time has transformed the photograph from a memory aid into an historical document, one which often reveals as much (if not more) about the individuals and society which produced the image as it does about its subject. I hope to show that the camera is not merely a mute, passive chronicler of events, and that photography does not just passively reflect culture, but can provide the vision and impetus that promote social and political change and development. For example, it is difficult to imagine the cultural changes of the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century without recognising the central role of the development of perspective in bringing about new visual means of representation. Similarly, photography has made a major contribution to the bringing about of the media culture that characterises our own era, while at the same time it has assumed the ironic role of bringing the harsh realities of the world to the coffee-table.
13.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Clutter Sometimes it seems that no matter how many possessions you have, you never feel secure. While it is reasonable to have a basic nesting instinct and create a home which meets your needs, there is a point where the motivation for acquiring things gets out of control. Modern advertising is moreover deliberately designed to play on our insecurities.If you don't have one of these you will be a lesser human being is one of the consistent underlying messages we receive. To discover just how much you are influenced, I challenge you to try not to read any advertising billboards next time you go down the street. These multi-million dollar messages relentlessly condition us in very persuasive ways without our ever realising it. We are bombarded by them - television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, tee shirts, the internet, you name it - all encouraging us to buy, buy, buy. Caves Research establishments and university departments around the world have invested years of research time in all aspects of caves, mainly their origins, their hydrology and their biology. Caves constitute a small but rather mysterious component of the natural environment - as such they arouse our curiosity and challenge our desire for knowledge, and consequently have had a considerable amount of research effort devoted to them. Furthermore, because of their presence as natural phenomena, they have had a long history of study, which has been intensified in those parts of the world where caves have had a direct effect on our way of life. However, the physical agility required to visit many caves means that cave research has been less in the hands of the learned professors than in most other scientific fields. Indeed there is a considerable, perhaps unique, overlap between the professional, scientific study of caves and the amateur studies carried out by those who mainly visit caves for sport. Weather Watch Countless observant people without any instruments other than their own senses originally laid the foundations of meteorology, which has progressed since the 17th century into the highly technical science of today. Satellites and electronic instruments relay endless weather information to us with the minimum of delay, computers solve in minutes abstruse mathematical sums at a speed beyond the capability of the human brain. Meteorological theory is peppered with long words which have little meaning to the non-professional. It sometimes seems there is no room left for simple weather wisdom, but nothing could be further from the truth. Human experience is still the vital ingredient which translates computed data into weather forecasts. Human observations can still provide unusual evidence which is of great help to professionals who are trying to unravel the mysteries of the atmosphere.
14.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Art In modern times - more and more over the course of the last two hundred years - we have come to speak as though every artist had to rebel against the art of his contemporaries. Art is praised in terms of being unique, revolutionary, shocking even. We feel good about admiring the artist whose work no one appreciated a hundred years ago. But when we get to the art of our own day, we get cold feet and say that an artist has gone too far, that what he does can no longer be called art. Or, rather, the media say it for us. And, on the whole, we agree because we expect to be puzzled by art's insistent newness - so much so that we do not notice the old themes, methods and also virtues that the art of our own time is full of. We require artists to be separate from the rest of us, figures with special talents and drive, so vigorous that conventions cannot contain them. Previous ages went to artists with commissions: people needed art for specific purposes, and it was part of their ordinary life. Today we leave artists to their own devices and get rather cross with them if they want to come down out of the clouds. Picture This I am going to describe a situation, and then ask a crucial question about it. I hope it doesn't strike you as unduly gnomic. But if it does, that's modern art for you. Here's the situation. An artist chooses a piece of text in an art book. The text considers the diversity of pictures. 'What are they all about?' it asks dumbly, before deciding, even more dumbly: 'There is no end, in fact, to the number of different kinds of pictures.' Okay, this is kiddy-language, and so far all it has betrayed is kiddy-thinking. But stick with me, all you adults out there. The situation is about to complicate itself. Having settled on his text, the man then asks someone else to make a canvas for him, to stretch it and prime it, and then to take it along to a sign painter. He asks the sign painter to write the chosen text on the canvas. And he gives the sign painter specific instructions not to attempt anything flashy or charming with the lettering. The sign painter does all this. On a white canvas, in simple black letters, he writes the chosen text. So my crucial question is this: is the finished product a painting? Underground Encounters At the Mercury Gallery, London until 26th June It is an unspoken rule of commercial success as a painter that once you have developed a profitable line in one genre, you stick to it. Collectors expect an artist to diligently mine the same seam, and attempts to strike out in a new direction are usually met at best with indignation and the feeling that the artist has let the public down. Why this should be I'm not entirely sure. Gallery owners obviously prefer safe bets, and perhaps the art-buying public is insecure and needs the comfort of continuity. A few artists break the mould and get away with it. Picasso and Hockney are two prime examples. Eric Rimmington is another artist who is now gamely running contrary to form, and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off. His new show takes the daring step of swapping the pristine still lifes which have made his name for paintings of the world of the London Underground. Railways hold a peculiar charm for Rimmington. From drawings made in the 1980s of the railway land of Londons Kings Cross Station, it was a logical step to go beneath the ground and look at what was happening below. The sketches have provided the material for Underground Encounters, an exhibition of 40 paintings and drawings which convey the curious magic of this sunken world designed for a population in transit. Extract from a novel I have escaped to this island with a few books. I do not know why I use the word 'escape'. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way. Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this - that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold - the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?
15.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Garbage in, garbage out Charging families for each bag of rubbish they produce seems environmentally sound and economically sensible. It may not be. Some rituals of modern domestic living vary little throughout the developed world. One such is the municipal refuse collection: at regular intervals, rubbish bags or the contents of rubbish bins disappear into the bowels of a special lorry and are carried away to the local tip. To economists, this ceremony is peculiar, because in most places it is free. Yes, households pay for the service out of local taxes but the family that fills four bins with rubbish each week pays no more than the elderly couple that fills one. Yet the cost of rubbish disposal is not zero at all. The more rubbish people throw away, the more rubbish collectors and trucks are needed, and the more the local authorities have to pay in landfill and tipping fees. This looks like the most basic of economic problems: if rubbish disposal is free, people will produce too much rubbish. The obvious solution is to make households pay the marginal cost of disposing of their waste. That will give them an incentive to throw out less and recycle more (assuming that local governments provide collection points for suitable materials). But as Don Fullerton and Thomas Kinnaman, two American economists, have found, what appears to be the logical approach to an everyday problem has surprisingly intricate and sometimes disappointing results. Research focused on several American towns and cities which, in the past few years, have started charging households for generating rubbish. The commonest system is to sell stickers or tags which householders attach to rubbish bags or cans. Only bags with these labels are picked up in the weekly collection. In a paper published last year Messrs Fullerton and Kinnaman concentrated on the effects of one such scheme, introduced in July 1992 in Charlottesville, Virginia, a town of about 40,000 people. Residents were charged 80 cents for each tagged bag of rubbish. This may sound like sensible use of market forces. In fact, the authors conclude, the schemes benefits did not cover the cost of printing materials, the commissions to sellers and the wages of the people running the scheme. True, the number of bags or cans did fall sharply, by 37%. But this was largely thanks to the 'Seattle stomp', a frantic dance first noticed when that distant city introduced rubbish pricing. Rather than buy more tags, people simply crammed more garbage - about 40% more -- into each container by jumping on it if necessary. As we all know, such compacting is done better by machines at landfill sites than by individuals, however enthusiastically. The weight of rubbish collected (a better indicator of disposal costs than volume) fell by a modest 14% in Charlottesville. In 25 other Virginian cities where no pricing scheme was in place, and which were used as a rough-and-ready control group, it fell by 3.5% in any case. Less pleasing still, some people resorted to illegal dumping rather than pay to have their rubbish removed. This is hard to measure directly but the authors guess that illegal dumping may account for 30-40% of the reduction in collected rubbish. The one bright spot in the whole experience seems to have been a 15% increase in the weight of materials recycled, suggesting that people chose to recycle (which is free) rather than pay to have their refuse carted away. But the fee may have little to do with the growth in recycling, as many citizens were already participating in Charlottesville's voluntary scheme. In a more recent study, Messrs Fullerton and Kinnaman explore the economics of rubbish in more detail. One conclusion from this broader study is that pricing does reduce the weight of rubbish - but not by much. On average, a 10% increase in sticker prices cuts quantity only by 0.3%. This figure is lower than in other studies covering fewer towns, but is it so surprising? To reduce their output of rubbish by a lot, people would have to buy less of just about everything. A tax of a few cents on the week's garbage seems unlikely to make much difference. If that's the case, it seems worth considering whether other factors, such as income and education, matter every bit as much as price. In richer towns, for example, people throw out more rubbish than in poorer ones and they have less time for recycling. Should we conclude that the idea of charging households for the rubbish they produce is daft? Not at all: free disposal after all is surely too cheap. But the effects of seemingly simple policies are often complex. Intricate economic models are often needed to sort them out. And sometimes, the results of this rummaging do not smell sweet.
16.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	MUSIC AND THEATRE Up until quite recently, I would have said that opera is first and foremost theatre. Not any more. After a brief spell working at u national opera house, I learned that opera is, in fact, only secondly theatre. The music comes first. That's as it should be, of course. But I come from a different world, the world of the theatre, where the word and the actor speaking it have primacy, where there is nobody out front directing the action once the event is under way, and where performer and audience (mostly) speak the same language. At any musical performance, whether in concert hall or opera house, there will generally be a substantial minority of people who, like me, have little technical or academic understanding of music. Some of them will be aware of, possibly even embarrassed by, how much they don't know. Most will be awestruck by the skill of the performers. A dazzling coloratura or an impeccable string section are easy to admire. Even a moderately good musician is showing us the results of years of punishingly hard work. Being in the audience for top-class music is not unlike watching an athletics match - we know athletes are doing something broadly similar to what we do when running for a bus, but we also recognise by how much it excess our best efforts. Theatre audiences by contrast, come with a different set of expectations. In the main they do not understand the nature of an actor's skill and are not particularly awed by an activity which, a lot of the time, appears to be very close to what they could do themselves. They are not usually impressed when an actor completes a long and difficult speech (although 'how do you learn all those lines?' is the question every actor gets asked). None of this means that theatre audiences are more generous or less demanding than their counterparts in the concert hall, indeed quite a lot of them are the same people. What perhaps it does mean is that audiences and performer meet on more equal terms in the theatre than elsewhere, no matter how challenging the material or spectacular the event. The question is, does music need to learn anything from the theatre about this relationship? I would say yes, partly because I have seen how a different approach can transform the concert-goers experience. Music in live performance is inherently theatrical, full of passion, humour, melancholy, intimacy, grandeur, vulnerable to the possibility that something will go unexpectedly wrong, reaching into the imagination of the listener not just as an individual but as part of a collective. The conventions which still largely dominate music presentation, including strict dress codes and an exaggerated deference to the status of conductors and soloists, emphasise the difference between players and listeners in a way which often feels uncomfortably hierarchical. On the other hand, the tendency of contemporary music audiences to interrupt the momentum of performance by applauding between movements or after a canicular piece of virtuosity, while it is often a spontaneous expression of appreciation, can also be insensitive to the dramatic integrity of the whole work. Is there anything to be done? Of course a huge amount is being done. Pioneering work is going on all over the country to encourage new audiences into concert halls and opera houses, and to break down the barriers that make people feel that 'serious' music is not for them. I remember a remarkable event, the staging of Jonathan Dove's community opera In Search of Angels, which followed the action from location to location within a cathedral and then out into the town. It was a musical experience of the highest order, in which the skills, and the generosity, of the professional musicians were absolutely central and it was also life-changing for many of the audience, who were not just there to see and hear but also to contribute directly. Perhaps what I yearn for in music is a bit more of the risk and radicalism that theatre at its best can display. Sometimes it can come from the use of unfamiliar or challenging locations, where normal expectations are disrupted. This can have startling effects on performer and audience alike. Comforts may have to be foregone, perhaps the acoustic isn't great, maybe it's a bit cold, but theatre audiences have learned to be intrepid as they follow artists into the most unpromising spaces. I accept that most plays get put on in a pretty uncontroversial way, not greatly different from what happens in a conmen hall. However I remain convinced that something can and should happen to change the conventions of music-going. The only authority I can claim is that of the enthusiast: I love, and live by, the theatre and I spend as much time (and money) as I can going to hear music. I want them both to thrive, and for more and more people to get the pleasure I get from being the audience.
17.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Air-conditioning There is a chill in the air at Cannons Gym, a favourite lunch-time haunt for City of London workers. To deal with this summer's unusually high temperatures, the fitness centre has gone overboard with the air-conditioning. So much so, in fact, that at quiet times, the gym feels like somewhere in the Arctic. This is just one example of how the modern world casually misuses air-conditioning. It has become a central feature of work and play, a potent symbol of the ability of humanity to control the climate, or at least modify it. Many air-conditioned buildings, however, could employ other methods of cooling. They could take advantage of daylight and natural ventilation and have thicker walls that absorb less heat during the day and radiate it away at night. These measures may sound obvious, but they can have telling results and would considerably reduce the need for air-conditioning. Sundials It is surely more than coincidence that the beginning of a new millennium is being accompanied by renewed interest in sundials: instruments used to measure time according to the position of the sun. A hundred years ago, they were a vital time-keeping device, essential for anyone who hoped to keep their clocks working accurately. Then, as clocks and watches became more sophisticated and reliable, the sundial was relegated to the status of garden ornament - a romantic and intriguing ornament, but nonetheless an anachronism, in a brave new technological age. Now the clock has been turned back and they are again being taken seriously. David Harber, a sundial maker, believes that their appeal lies in their direct link with the planets. He says that when he delivers one, there is a moment of magic when it starts working. They are still, calm, romantic objects that remind us of our place in the cosmos. Paint Your Own China My image of china-painting stemmed from a visit, long ago, to an arts and crafts exhibition where stern-looking grey-haired ladies demonstrated how to cover a teacup with delicate flowers using a series of deft brushstrokes. The spectacle was riveting, because each stroke formed a perfect petal or leaf. Their hands never wobbled, the paint never smudged, and the observer might have concluded that these women had either been practising their art for decades or had been born with an extraordinary talent for steady precision. Mindful of this experience, I wondered what kind of people would have the courage to enrol on a course in china-painting. Would even the beginners display an intuitive artistry? In fact, the atmosphere turned out to be far from intimidating. The students were all there to have fun and not even the tutor wanted to paint petals on teacups with the robotic rapidity I had remembered.
18.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Lure of the Kitchen When I was at university I decided I wanted to be a chef. Among my contemporaries, this was an unusual choice. Cooking was not one of the plum jobs that most of us wanted. It is, on the face of it, an unattractive profession. Chefs lead notoriously harsh lives: the work is long, pressured, menial - and badly paid. But such considerations didn't put me off. I was unhappy at university. The work was hard; the social scene was insular and self-important. Being a chef seemed the perfect antidote to intellectual and social posturing. It promised a seriousness and integrity lacking in my college life. But my desire to cook was not simply a reaction to being a student. It also expressed an aesthetic ideal. My first glimpse of this ideal came when I ate a meal at a famous London restaurant. It was a revelation. I still clearly remember my starter. I finished that meal wanting to prostrate myself weeping, at the feet of the chef who had made it. I felt warm and airy for days afterwards. After this, I developed an intense desire to uncover the secrets of this strange, fabulous art. I transformed my student life into an extended preparation for my assault on the culinary world. My history degree became a hollow pretence, distracting me from my true course. I acquired my real education haphazardly and deficiently by reading cookbooks, roaming markets and delicatessens and preparing extravagant meals. Extract from a novel The school's swimming instructor was an ex-drill sergeant, small and muscle-bound, with tattooed arms. When I asked him to teach me how to dive, he told me to sit on the pools edge, put my hands above my head and roll forwards, pushing myself off with my feet. I practised that manoeuvre until the hour was up. The next visit, he got me standing upright, and diving off the edge. The instructor was a martinet and every time I surfaced he looked at me with distaste: 'Don't look down, look up!' 'Keep your legs straight.' 'Point your toes I said!' The next week, I went up onto the high board. It was a fixed board and its front edge bent slightly downward. It seemed outrageously high as I stood there, trying to work up my courage. Gradually the echoing voices disappeared and I felt as if I were cocooned in silence. I waved my arms vaguely in the way I'd been taught, tried to look up, not down, and launched myself into space. For a brief moment, I was flying. When I hit the water, I crumpled ignominiously, and my legs were all over the place. The instructor looked at me with contempt and shook his head. But even he could not diminish my euphoria. That's what they mean by 'free as a bird', I thought. The Traveller To those of us for whom a comfortable bed, running water and the probability of living at least until tomorrow are of prime importance, the phenomenon of the traveller appears as incomprehensible as it is intriguing. Here are people who have succumbed to the treacherous seduction of the unknown, who actually choose to put their lives at risk by climbing the sheer and icy face of an avalanche-ridden mountain; who sail alone in frail craft through towering seas; who will eat maggots and river insects if nothing more palatable is on offer and who can live, day and night for months on end, in the shadow and the promise of the unknown. It is easy to dismiss such people as oddities - as indeed they are - to be relegated to the ranks of the truly eccentric: hermits, freefall divers or indeed writers. That they exist cannot be denied, but the strange, uncomfortable world they occupy lies well outside our everyday experience and can be dismissed, we tell ourselves, as an irrelevancy. We can shrug our shoulders and return thankfully to our world of microwave ovens and answerphones, glad that the only risks to our own health are predictable ones such as making a suicidal dash across a city street. SAILING Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. His overriding reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate. Raban's little boat carries an electronic device that instantly gives mariners their position to within a few metres, anywhere on the earth's surface. Strongly as he approves of this instrument, there is more than a touch of primitivism in Raban's attitude to other sea-faring aids. He thinks the invention of the compass was a disaster, causing a 'fundamental rift in the relationship between man and sea'. Raban maintains that since it came into use, perhaps a thousand years ago, it has become the main object of the steersman's gaze, with the result that he no longer has to study the waves and feel the sea. And the ocean, once a place with all sorts of things going on in it, is now reduced to a mere space. Since his job is merely to keep steady on a course, the helmsman can be replaced for long stretches by an autopilot. This may be why Raban had time to look so carefully at the waves.
19.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Work Theodore Zeldin looks at how our working life could change. Are you as respected and appreciated as you deserve? Success in a career is no longer enough. Every profession is complaining that it is not properly valued or understood, and even among individuals who have won eminence, there is often bitterness behind the fame. Loving your work, until recently, was enough to make you a member of an envied minority. But now you have to ask yourself what your job is doing to you as a person, to your mind, character and relationships. This question is crucial. For however brilliant your skills, if they make you a bore, unable to converse with those outside your speciality, if you are so busy with detail that you have no time to acquire wisdom or exercise your imagination or humour, then no amount of status or financial reward will compensate for your inadequacy as a human being. To counter this, I am trying to discover how work could have the fulfilment of these aspirations as its first priority - instead of treating us as clay to be moulded to suit industrial purposes - and how it could be reconceived to suit us all, both women and men. It would have to be not just a way of creating wealth, but a worthwhile style of life, a path to a fuller existence, to the discovery of unsuspected talents and to a wider variety of human contacts. However, this remodelling would not mean abolishing unemployment. This is too simple a goal, because the more people are educated, the more they demand jobs that are life-enhancing, interesting and useful. A lifetime of work has to be seen as a work of art, with the fulfilled individual at its centre. Even the middle-class professions, however, no longer have the liberating appeal they once had. Doctors are often more stressed than their patients and complain about the failure of clinical medicine. Accountants, despite unprecedented influence, are troubled by doubts about their profession's ethics. Most architects never get the chance to exercise their imaginations freely. Administrators are paralysed by their own bureaucracy. The middle managers, who once gloried in their status, are, as a European study reveals, losing their conviction. Meanwhile, the business corporations and public institutions in which these people work are slimming. The panaceas of decentralised decision-making, increasing skills and performance-related rewards have not succeeded in winning commitment from employees. In Britain, only 8 per cent of employees 'are strongly of the view that their values and those of their organisations are very similar'. I have embarked on an investigation of a wide range of occupations, one by one, to see how each shapes and sometimes destroys those in it. I have studied how the notion of what humans are capable of has been expanded in different civilisations, and how courage can be manufactured. I have applied my method to the major preoccupations of our time - happiness, love, friendship and respect. Having looked at those areas, I am now focusing on the search for more satisfying ways of earning a living. There is no shortage of experts devoting themselves to prolonging the life and increasing the income of corporations and institutions. But auditing our finances is not enough: we need to make an audit of ourselves as human beings too, and discover with what sort of people we want to spend our lives. How many of us can say that we are fully alive at work? How many of us are really part-time slaves - theoretically having the right to escape from our drudgery, but in reality virtual prisoners of our qualifications and careers, used as instruments by others, working not so that we might become better people, but because we can see no other option? Take hotel workers as an example, since 10 per cent of the working population is now in the 'hospitality industry'. The amount of unused potential is unbelievable. Many highly intelligent and lively people put up with low prestige, low salaries and long hours. This is because there has been no serious rethinking of what a hotel is since the days of the Ritz, with its nineteenth-century idea of luxury. A hotel is not just a place where travellers sleep, but a United Nations in miniature. People from all over the world meet at hotels, though they usually pass each other in silence. A large proportion of hotel staff are foreigners too, keen to learn a new language and discover a new civilisation, but they have the most superficial relations with their guests. Hotels could be cultural centres, active intermediaries between the guest and the city, genuine hosts bringing together people who have not met. Hoteliers could use the knowledge of the many students they employ, instead of giving them only menial tasks. If they paid closer attention to their staff's deepest ambitions, they would realise that there were many other services that hotels could provide. But they are restrained by the accountants, who say that firms, in order to maximise their profits, should concentrate on one core activity. The time has come to rethink what this term denotes - from a human, not just a financial angle - and to move on from traditional categorisations. For me, work is a relationship. Now that many people are not content with relations based on obedience, and regard work as an assertion of independence or temperament, they must be given a chance to design their own jobs, and choose their own colleagues, even their customers, within the limits of practicality and profitability. This means that they have to know how to converse across the boundaries of professional jargon, with minds that may at first seem quite alien. Everybody is clear about the importance of communication, but it is a very different thing from conversation, and traditional conversation is very different from the new kind of conversation which people feel the lack of today. This is a more intimate encounter, which creates a bond of respect between the participants, and is valued as a way of getting inside another person's skin, with the likelihood that one will be changed by the experience. It is more than a relaxation, because it is the most effective means of establishing equality. Every time you have a conversation which achieves that, the world is changed by a minute amount.
2.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Screen Learning A few days ago I noticed my six-year-old eating noodles in a funny way. He was pulling them up with his teeth while trying to look fierce. 'I'm a little dinosaur,' he said. He was play-acting a scene from a recent TV programme, so I quizzed him about what he remembered about dinosaurs. The answer was, not a lot. There is a modish rush to embrace internet and computer learning, but is learning via a screen a good method? One writer tells how he tried out an interactive programme with his son. The father diligently read the words while the son fiddled with the pictures. 'Had he spent ten minutes in front of a book, he might possibly have learned something,' said his father. Television, as my son and his noodles demonstrate, is an impressionistic, suggestive medium. Research about television and learning shows that learning goes on in a learning environment where dialogue is taking place with teachers or parents. It needs to be mediated. There is nothing wrong with harnessing new technology to teach our children, but there is still a big role for formal education. Hollywood By 1918, four-fifths of the film-making capacity of the world had relocated to Hollywood. Locals disapproved, seeing their suburb of Los Angeles infected by these new vulgarians. But in the end snobbery yielded to the true American value, success. And success is the box-office gross. Hollywood knows a good film when it sees one: one that may make a star, but must make somebody's fortune. In less than a century, Hollywood has grown from a toffee-nosed village to a town as famous as New York, Rome or Paris. And physically, of course, it has changed beyond recognition: a century ago, you would walk through orange groves to the village store. Yet in a way, it is still a village - parochial, with limited horizons - just a little bit of Los Angeles. For all who live and work in it, there is one topic of conversation - films: how much they have made, who is dating whom, who's been stabbed in the back, who is 'attached' to which project. Those who have been successful often try to get away: to work there, but live somewhere else. Yet it is still the one place in the world to which almost everyone who is anyone in show-business (and plenty who agent) eventually gravitates. Photography Photography was invented by nineteenth century artists as an art form for their own purposes. These men were seeking a lasting, literal record of their visual surroundings and they found it. The new combination of illumination, lens, shutter, and flat surface coated with chemicals sensitive to light produced images more lasting, more convincing in their reality, and more richly detailed than painters could produce manually in weeks and months of effort. This alone was enough to throw consternation into the ranks of fellow artists; and, after their first reaction of pleasure in a new kind of image, art critics rallied with the haughty charge that photography was not, and could not be, an art. The actual world in which we live had too strong a grip on photography, they said, and pictures so dependent upon mechanical means could not be called acts of man's creative imagination. Despite the critics, photographers knew that they had found a new art form, a new mode of expression. They used the new tools as other artists before and after them have used brush and pencil - to interpret the world, to present a vision of nature and its structure as well as the things and the people in it. Book Illustration During the black-and-white era of book illustration it was axiomatic that each and every children's book called for some form of illustration. This extended to the large category of novels for the upper reading ages, which was to suffer progressive attrition as print runs shortened. The level of activity in all areas of children's publishing remained considerable, but it was run predominantly as a low-budget operation for most of the period and as such encouraged a fair amount of routine and mediocre work, although the finest artists seldom submitted less than their professional best. Therefore, the black-and-white archive is part junk shop, part treasure house, a wonderful place for research or for browsing, and one in which to make immediate finds or to begin to re-evaluate a fertile artistic period. The real treasures are bound to return to public display, whether enduringly through reissues of individual titles and new publications about the artists who illustrated them - or from time to time in the form of exhibitions of original books and drawings. There are signs that, after a period of neglect, this is starting to happen and the familiar processes of stylistic rehabilitation can be seen to be at work. In due course, an enterprising publisher will doubtlessly see the potential for a series of classic children's book illustrations from this period either in facsimile reprint, or in freshly-designed editions using the original artwork where it survives.
20.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Writing Reviews Frank Kermode examines the craft of review-writing from a practitioner's point of view. Most reviews are written and circulated under conditions which ensure that they have a very short active life. There are deadlines, there are restrictions, normally quite severe, on their length; and when published they claim houseroom only for as long as the newspaper they are printed in - a day or a week, at most a month. Moreover, the literary status of reviews tends to be settled by their ephemerality. It is usually supposed, not only by the public but, quite often, by the writers themselves, that reviewing is work that nobody would do if there weren't some reason -- shortage of cash would he cited most often, though another good reason is that you can't work all day on a novel or a 'serious' book of any sort - which prevents them from occupying their time with something more valuable. Yet reviewing is a skilled and multi-faceted job. It is one thing to be bright, brisk and summarily fair in the six or eight hundred words of an ordinary newspaper review, quite another to control, without looseness of argument, the six or eight thousand words sometimes allowed by international journals. And the fifteen hundred words of a leading piece in the weekly magazines present some of the problems of both short and long. Not that length is the only consideration. For one thing, the reviewer obviously needs to think about the probable audience, the weekend skimmer at one end of the scale, the person already interested enough in the subject to tackle a serious review-article at the other. Finally, a reviewer needs to know quite a bit about quite a number of things; and must be able to write prose that intelligent people can understand and enjoy. It follows almost infallibly that the reviewer will be somebody who writes other things besides reviews. The American novelist Johh Updike, who rather looks down on criticism -- 'hugging the shore' he calls it - nevertheless enjoys some coastal reviewing in the intervals between his transoceanic novel-writing. Understandably reluctant to allow even his less ambitious voyages to go without any permanent record, he gathers together his every review, however short, into volumes with mildly self-deprecating titles. It might be thought that lesser persons should accept ephemerality as the penalty appropriate to their coastal caution, but it is hand to see why, if they can get away with it, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the measure of permanence, and the measure of vanity, proper to their station, especially if they believe that some of their best writing has been 'buried' in reviews. I admit to feeling this about my own work. My own principal occupation has been academic, and most of my 'serious' books are recognisably academic products, the sort of thing professors like, and are expected to do as part of their jobs. However, the English-speaking world (I think fortunately) acknowledges nothing comparable to the sharp distinction people from other cultures make between reviewing and literary study -- and so with us it is quite usual for the same people to do both. The days are gone when other academics reviled reviewer-professors for unseemly self-display, or waste of academic time, or betrayal of the dignity of their institutions. And complaints from non-professors, to the effect that the professors are taking the bread out of their mouths, are also less common than they were, partly because there is so much more reviewing nowadays that practically everyone can have some, partly, no doubt, because the bread is often such a meagre ration. My own view is that these arrangements are good for both readers -- since they can be fairly certain the reviewer has at least some idea what he is talking about -- and professors, if only because the work helps to keep them sane. It also reminds them that they have a duty, easily neglected, to make themselves intelligible to non-professors. When talking among themselves they may feel some need to be impressively arcane, but when addressing intelligent non-professors they need to make sure they are communicating effectively. Finally, it is clear that for a variety of reasons, and despite all that can be said to dignify it, reviewing must be a secondary occupation. It is something you can only do well enough if you are also doing something else well enough.
21.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Sand Much as I admire sands miraculous ability to be transformed into useful objects like glass and concrete, I am not a great fan of it in its natural state. To me it is primarily a hostile barrier that stands between a seaside car park and the water itself. It blows in your face, gets in your sandwiches, and swallows vital objects like car keys and coins. When you are wet it adheres to you like 'stucco', and cannot be shifted, even with a fireman's hose. But, and here's the strange thing, the moment you step onto a beach towel, climb into a car or walk across a recently vacuumed carpet, it pours off you. For days afterwards, you tip mysteriously undiminishing piles of it onto the floor every time you take on your shoes, and spray the vicinity with lots more when you peel off your socks. Sand stays with you for longer than many contagious diseases. No, you can keep sand, as far as I am concerned. Lock and Key The search for a safe home, for privacy and security, has existed ever since human beings first built a permanent homestead. The rope-lifted beam behind the door may have given way to an electronic lock triggered by a plastic card with more combinations than there are atoms in the universe, but the urge to shut out the 'bad guys' remains. The appeal of a lock and key is, to some extent, psychological. Recently, various companies have experimented with computerised locking systems, where smart cards, swiped through a 'reader', control electronic locks by means of a digital command. But people don't like them. You may be prepared to put up with it at work, but at home, everyone wants the reassurance of turning a physical key in a lock. As a result, when one locksmith company developed a new electronic system, they made sure they incorporated a proper metal key into the device. Modern Art I was nervous about visiting the new Tate Modern gallery as, like many people, I can make head nor tail of modern art. I know I quite like some of it, furry things in particular, neon light sculptures and massive photographs. Perhaps if I were better informed about it, I'd have an opinion on more things. There again, yours not meant to set about it in a school-essay way. The point is not to grasp art, but to let it communicate with you. This is a splendid idea but one that never worked for me in practice. But this new gallery has tried to give the visitor a genuine insight into the whys and wherefores of the works. The first thing I noticed were the labels, proper labels that set a work in context and actually told you what it was trying to say. Instead of staring blankly at the pictures as I used to, these nuggets of information helped me understand.
22.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Observing Lions In the popular imagination, lions hunting for food present a marvel of group choreography: in the dying light of sunset, a band of stealthy cats springs forth from the shadows like trained assassins and surrounds its unsuspecting prey. The lions seem to be archetypal social animals, rising above petty dissension to work together towards a common goal - in this case, their next meal. But after spending many years observing these creatures in the wild, we have acquired a less exalted view. When we started our research in 1978, we hoped to discover why lions teamed up to hunt, rear cubs and among other things, scare off rivals with chorused roars. If the ultimate success of an animals behaviour is measured by its lifetime production of surviving offspring, then cooperation does not necessarily pay: if an animal is too generous, its companions benefit at its expense. Why, then, did not the evolutionary rules of genetic self-interest seem to apply to lions? We confidently assumed that we would be able to resolve that issue in two to three years. But lions are supremely adept at doing nothing. To the list of inert noble gases, including krypton, argon and neon, we would add lion. Thus it has taken a variety of research measures to uncover clues about the cats behaviour. Because wild lions can live up to 18 years, the answers to our questions are only now becoming clear. Pop Music Review The release of Bedrock's third album was more than just a landmark in the career of a talented but hitherto precarious band. New Life launched a movement that effectively redesigned the specification of rock music in this country for the rest of the decade. Out went the earnest angst, plain-shirted drabness and overdriven guitars of a previous era; in came a lighter blend of melodious homegrown styles. A mix of social observation and strident anger mingled easily here with the sound of fairground organs and northern brass bands. Humour and irony were well to the fore, as were the voices that felt no need to disguise their origins. The album showed Bedrock to be skilful magpie collectors and observers, and a cunningly versatile team of songwriters. At their most obvious, they went larkily after traditional English preoccupations such as sunbathing and Sunday afternoons. But the album's real strength lay in the gentle melancholy depths it plumbed on tracks such as 'So Low', a gorgeous unfurling tune loosely hung around the theme of meteorology, and 'To the Brink', a ballad that allowed no smirking at the back. The beauty of New Life is its consistently sky-high quality - 16 tracks with absolutely no filler remains an unsurpassed record in the era of loiteringly long CDs. Extract from an autobiography As a child I was always fascinated by stories of 'The Sibyl', those mysteriously wise women who wielded such influence in the ancient world. To begin with, I only knew of the existence of one who appeared in a tale my mother had told me. An old woman of Cumae offered Tarquin, King of Rome, nine books for 300 gold pieces. He refused and she burnt three of them, offering him six for the same price. When he refused, she again burnt three books. He bought the remaining three for the full 300 gold pieces. I realised even then that there was a profound truth hidden in the story - a lesson in salesmanship and in life. I was sometimes a lonely only child. I used to ask to play with other children and be refused. My mother told me to do something so interesting that all the other kids would beg to join me. It worked. It was another lesson that I've never forgotten. When I was given the chance to write a travel book, I had to look for something that I could bear to find out about, something that was relevant to my life. I'm a reluctant traveller - at the first opportunity I sent my editor a very long list of places I wasn't prepared to go to. When it comes down to it, I'm only interested in ruins, because the travel I like is the travel of the mind through time. What becomes of your manuscript? When you submit your manuscript it will most likely join a heap waiting for someone to sort and sift before it topples over - the so-called slush pile. The someone is usually either the editorial department junior (i.e. under 18) or an old hand who comes in a couple of mornings a week and is paid by the hour. Neither of these has much influence, but they are basically on your side and out to discover something original - the junior to make his or her name and acquire an author of their own if they are lucky, the old hand to justify continuing freelance employment. If they think your novel is promising, they will pass it on to a more senior editor and eventually it will surface at an acquisition meeting. The championing editor will not only have to justify accepting your novel on the grounds of intrinsic merit and potential sales, but also say whether you as an author seem to be a long-term prospect (which you will have assured them of in your letter). Also the question is raised of how promotable you are likely to be - an important factor - when a new novel needs all the help it can get. To this end, publishers often like to meet a potential author before clinching the offer.
23.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Enough Sleep? Tiredness, it is often claimed, has become the modern condition. As the richer, busier countries have grown, so sleeplessness and anxiety have also grown in the popular psyche. Research in the USA has found 40 million Americans to be chronically affected, and some recent best-selling novels in Britain have featured insomniacs as protagonists, or sleep-research laboratories as their settings. Part of this interest is in sleep in general: in its rhythms, its uses and in problems with sleeping. But a central preoccupation remains. 'People need more sleep,' says one leading sleep researcher. 'People cut back on sleep when they're busy. They get up too early to avoid the rush hour.' Recently, a sleep researcher tried an experiment. He offered his subjects the opposite of the modern routine. 'I allowed them to sleep for up to 14 hours a night for a month. It took them three weeks to reach an equilibrium of eight-and-a-quarter hours. That indicates a great rebound of sleep - sleep that they hadn't been getting!' In Europe, such propositions are perhaps most thoroughly tested in a small unassuming building on a university campus in the English Midlands. The university sleep research laboratory has investigated, among many subjects, the effects of fatigue on sailors, the effects of airpot noise on sleepers, and the dangers of motorway driving for flagging drivers. For guinea pigs, they advertise in the student newspapers. Subjects are picked up by taxi, paid PS5 an hour, and asked to adjust their sleeping patterns according to instructions. Dr Louise Reyner provides reassurance: 'Some people are quite worried, because you're putting electrodes on their heads, and they think you can see what they're dreaming or thinking.' In fact, the laboratory's interest is more physical. In a darkened room stands a motorway simulator, the front section of car facing a wide projection screen. The subjects are always told to arrive at 2pm, in the body's natural mid-afternoon lull, after a short night's sleep or no sleep at all. The projector is switched on and they are asked to drive, while answering questions. An endless road rolls ahead, sunlight glares; and the air is warm. The young men all deny they are going to fall asleep. Dr Reyner has a video recording of one trying not to. At first the person at the wheel is very upright, wet and bleary eyes determinedly fixed on the windscreen. Then he begins to blink briefly, every now and again; then for longer, and more often, with a slight drop of the head. Each nod grows heavier than the last. The blinks become a 10-second blackout. Every time, he jerks awake as if nothing has happened. But the car, by the second or third occasion, has shot off the carriageway. A coffee might have helped. Two cups, Dr Reyner says, even after no sleep at all, can make you a safe driver for half an hour or more. She recommends a whole basket of alertness products: tablets, energy drinks, caffeinated chewing gum. Shift workers, she is quite sure, could probably use them. But apart from these findings, what else do know about human sleep with any kind of certainty? It is known that humans sleep, like other mammals, according to a daily cycle. Once asleep, they switch between four different stages of unconsciousness, from stage one sleep, the shallowest, to stage four, the deepest. When dreams occur, which is usually during the lightest sleep, the brain paralyses the body except for the hands and eyelids, thus preventing injuries. Beyond this, certainties blur into theories. It is often suggested, for example, that sleep repairs body tissue, or restores muscles, or rests the frontal section of the brain that controls speech and creativity. But all of this may happen more quickly during relaxed wakefulness, so no one is really sure. However, there is a strong degree of certainty among scientists that women seep for half an hour longer than men, and that older people require less sleep, though they don't know why. When asked what sleep is for, some sleep researchers reply in cosmic terms: 'Sleep is a tactic to travel through time without injury.' Moreover, people may have had different sleep patterns in the past. A history professor has investigated nocturnal British life between 1500 and 1850 and discovered that sleeping routines were very different. People went to bed at nine or ten, then woke up after midnight, after what they called their 'first sleep', stayed awake for an hour, and then had their 'morning sleep'. The interlude was a haven for reflection, remembering dreams, or even night-time thieving. The poorest were the greatest beneficiaries of this quiet time, fleetingly freed from the constraints and labours that ruled their day-time existence. By the 17th century, however, as artificial light became more common, the rich began to switch to the more concentrated, and economically more efficient, mode of recuperation that we follow today. Two centuries later, the industrial revolution pushed back the dusk for everyone except some country-dwellers, by making most people work longer hours in lighted buildings. Yet beyond Europe and America, the old pattern was widespread until quite recently, and according to a leading anthropologist, in some non-western settings there are still no rigid bedtimes. People go to bed for a few hours, and then get up again. The idea of a night's solid sleep does not apply. For certain tribal societies, human and animal noises and the need to supervise the fire and watch out for predators combine to make continuous sleep impossible. It seems that people all round the world are badly in need of sleep.
24.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	BROADCASTING: The Social Shaping of a Technology 'Broadcasting' originally meant sowing seeds broadly, by hand. It is, in other words, not only an agricultural metaphor, it is also one of optimistic modernism. It is about planned growth in the widest possible circles, the production, if the conditions are right, of a rich harvest. The metaphor presupposes a bucket of seeds at the centre of the activity, i.e. the existence of centralised resources intended and suited for spreading - and reproduction. The question to be looked into is why a new technology that transmitted words and pictures electronically was organised in a way that made this agricultural metaphor seem adequate. Since television as a technology is related to various two-way forms of communication, such as the telegraph and the telephone, it is all the more striking that, from its very early days, it was envisaged as a centralised 'mass' medium. However, transmission to private homes from some centralised unit was simply in keeping with both socio-economic structures and the dominant ways of life in modern and modernising societies. Attempts or experiments with other forms of organisation in the long run remained just that - attempts and experiments. Two little-known, distinct alternatives deserve mentioning since they highlight what television might have been - in a different social context. Experiments with two-way television as a possible replacement for the ordinary telephone were followed up, so to speak, by radio amateurs in Britain in the early 1930s. Various popular science journals, such as Radio News, had detailed articles about how to construct television transmitters and receivers and, throughout the 1930s, experimenting amateurs were active in many parts of the country. But Big Business, represented by the British Radio Manufacturers Association, in 1938 agreed upon standards for television equipment and channel regulations which drove the grass-roots activists out. And so there passed, at least in Britain, the historical 'moment' for a counter-cultural development of television as a widely diffused, grass-roots, egalitarian form of communication. Broadcasting in some form was, however, tied not only to strong economic interests, but also to the deep structures of modern societies. In spite of the activities of TV amateurs, television was also primarily a medium for theatrical exhibition in the USA in the early 1930s, and as such often thought to be a potential competitor of the film industry. In fact, television was throughout the 19030s predominantly watched in public settings also outside of the USA. For example, in Britain, public viewing of television was the way in which most early audiences actually experienced the medium and this was even more the case in Germany. While the vision of grass-roots or amateur, two-way television was quite obviously doomed to a very marginal position at the very best, television systems largely based on collective public reception were in fact operating in several countries in the 1930s and may, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen as having presented more of a threat to the domestication of the medium. But it was a threat that was not to materialise. Manufacturers saw the possibilities for mass sales of domestic sets as soon as the price could be reduced, and given the division and relation between the public and private domains fundamental to modernity, centralised broadcasting to a dispersed domestic audience was clearly the most adequate organisation of the medium. As working-class people achieved improved standards of living and entered 'consumer' society from about the 1920s onwards, the dreams of the home as a fully equipped centre for entertainment and diverse cultural experiences became realisable for the majority of inhabitants of Western nation-states. And all of this is now also happening on a global scale. There is a clear relationship between the basic processes of social modernisation and the dominant structures of broadcasting. While social and economic modernisation meant increasing centralisation and concentration of capital and political power, the break-up of traditional communities produced new ways of life. Mobility was both social and geographical, and both forms implied that individuals and households were, both literally and metaphorically, 'on the move' in ways that left them relatively isolated compared to people in much more stable early communities. Centralised broadcasting was both an answer to the need felt by central government to reach all citizens with important information efficiently, and a highly useful instrument in the production of the harmonising, stabilising 'imagined community' of the nation-state. The pervasiveness of these structured processes and interests rendered broadcasting the 'naturally' victorious organisation of both radio and television. What is left out here is the more positive view of broadcasting as a social form suitable also for democracy. In the formation of broadcasting policies between the World Wars, the interest in broadcasting as a means of securing equal access to resources necessary for conscious, informed and autonomous participation in political, social and cultural life played a very important role in many countries. Of course television is changing, and there is the risk that the very term broadcasting becomes outmoded or at least inadequate. In which case, this metaphor will be seen only as referring to a particular organisation of audio-visual technology during a certain centralised phase of social modernisation.
25.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Metals It may have been a wish for self-adornment that aroused the interest of Stone Age people in metals. Sitting by the side of a river, waiting for a fish to come within a spears throw, or just idling away a moment, one of our early ancestors might have happened upon a shiny yellow pebble and plucked it off the river bed. It did not have the feel of stone, but it was attractive. In such a way, one could conjecture that gold entered the lives of primitive people. Given the malleability of the metal, it very soon became a much sought-after material. Copper may also have been discovered by accident, and once the value of copper tools was realised, the search for its ores and for ways of getting the copper out of them was pursued with vigour. Thus, metalworking was added to our ancestors' battery of life-enhancing accomplishments. St Ives There was silence as we lugged our bags down the winding, cobbled lane that led to the heart of town, bent double against the force eight gale and trying in vain to avoid the icy waves that smashed over the promenade. There was no one on the streets and the shutters in every cottage on the waterfront were bolted tight against the battering. We had watched the weather worsen as we chugged into St Ives on the tiny single-track railway. As the ominous grey skies closed in, visiting Cornwall in the off-season - without a car - no longer seemed such a good idea. I had lured my friend into joining me with the promise of walks along the beautiful Cornish coast, and snug evenings, toasting ourselves before open fires. Computer Modelling The problem with studying the past is that it is past. The people who prospered in times of peace and plenty and struggled through conflict and drought are long dead. The forces that drove them to settle here or move there, that brought them together as families and clans, villages and cities, have faded from memory. Archaeology provides hints and clues, but we cannot test our hypotheses with experiments on cultures living or dead. We cannot rewind the tape and watch a replay of the past. Then again, perhaps we can. Computer modelling allows us to recreate prehistoric landscapes and environments and populate them with virtual communities - digital creations with some of the needs, independence and capabilities of real-world humans. We can establish rules of conduct and replicate social units. Then we can turn down the rainfall - or turn up the population - and watch how this cyber-culture and its artificial people react.
26.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	How to Write Poetry Telling people how to write poetry is a bit like frolicking through a minefield: spontaneity is the order of the day, but one false step and a dozen certainties will blow up in your face. Setting oneself up as a know-all is dangerous, so I have decided to side-step the whole issue by saying that, for someone just beginning to write, no advice can be a substitute for abundant reading, extensive writing, and the freeing of the imagination and spirit in whatever way seems fruitful, barring total anarchy. Some people need their life to be reasonably secure before a poem will come; others can write their way out of misery. Some write to a timetable: others wait for some moment of crystallisation, a brainwave or slow dawning. All are right, providing they are not echoing some prescriptive score. And it's this finding of a tune which is important, hearing the still small voice inside yourself and feeding it, and watering it, and letting it out for air from time to time; one day it'll be old enough to take care of itself. The Short Story In the short story there is no room for overcrowding with too many characters, slabs of lengthy narrative, prolonged reminiscence or retrospection. Flashbacks must be fleeting, and only used if there is no other way to throw light on an issue. One effective way to do this is through a flash of memory in the leading character's mind; the recollection or reminder of an incident or scene, which stirred the current conflict. Such a recollection can get the story on its way or take it a big step forward at a crucial moment, but never at any time must it be allowed to put a brake on the action. In this respect, dialogue is more useful than many aspiring authors realise. Two voices in discussion can reveal two sides of a question in far less time than it takes to explain it from only one person's viewpoint. It also avoids unnecessary wordage and holds or increases a reader's interest. Overwriting can kill a short story from the start, but this doesn't mean that brevity must reduce it to the level of a synopsis. Conflict and action must be as well sustained in a short story as in a novel, but in the short story the art lies in making every word count in a compact space. Screenplays Anyone who knows how to play chess will understand how to write a screenplay for a film. Most chess players stumble from beginning to end. We don't know much, but we know enough to play. We move without really knowing what's going to happen further on in the game. Maybe we can see one or two moves ahead, and, if we can, were pleased by our uncanny ability to see even that far ahead. Better than the days when we couldst see ahead at all - when we were playing blindly. Over time, as we learned more about playing chess, we made a startling revelation: chess depends more upon long-term strategy than upon short-term tactics. Up till then, we'd been happy with a rather short-sighted approach. Suddenly, we became aware of 'the big picture'. We began to see the game as a whole, not just a series of individual moves. And once we saw the game as a whole, we began to see patterns emerge in the play. Gambits, they call them. And the patterns have names, such as openings, middle games and end games. In chess, as in screenplay writing, the more often you play, the more aware you become of its complexities. Looking at Writing 'Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write'. More than a century ago, Charles Darwin got it right: language is a human instinct, but written language is not. Language is found in all societies, present and past. Although languages change, they do not improve: English is no more complex than the languages of Stone Age tribes; modern English is not an advance of Old English. All healthy children master their language without lessons or corrections. When children are thrown together without a usable language, they invent one of their own. Compare all this with writing. Writing systems have been invented only infrequently in history. They originated only in a few complex civilisations and they started off code and slowly improved over the millennia. Until recently, most children never learned to read or write; even with today's universal education, many children struggle and fail. A group of children is no more likely to invent an alphabet than it is to invent the internal combustion engine. Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. We need to understand how the contraption called writing works, how the minds of the children work, how to get the two to mesh.
27.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	The Heat is On We've all heard of global warming, but just how much warmer will the earth get and how will it affect our lives? Almost everyone has some idea of what global warming is all about, but no one is quite sure about its consequences. A warmer climate is likely to mean changes to the weather in all parts of the world. And since the atmosphere is intimately linked every aspect of the planet on which we live, any changes to climate will have significant knock-on effects for plants and animals, as well as water and soils. We humans have learned to use such natural resources to our advantage, enabling us to produce food, build great cities and support six billion members of the human race. Any changes to these resources have to be taken seriously. The problem we have is knowing just how the world will change, and what is causing these changes. There is no doubt, for example, that over the last 100 years or so, human action has significantly increased the atmospheric concentrations of several gases -- which are closely related to global temperature. It seems likely that these increased concentrations, which are set to continue building up in the near future, are already affecting global climate, but our poor knowledge and understanding of the global heat balance make the current and future situations uncertain. What we do know is that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have fluctuated in close harmony with global temperatures over the past 40,000 years. This would indicate that the two are almost certainly related. Evidence gleaned from a range of sources suggests that our planet has warmed at the surface by about 6C over the past century. Most scientists think that this trend is unlikely to be natural in origin and is, in part, a result of human pollution of the atmosphere. A lot of research has gone into predicting the conditions that will result from higher global temperatures. Most of this research uses computer programs known as general circulation models, or GCMs. They run on powerful computers, use fundamental laws of physics and chemistry to analyse the interaction of temperature, pressure, solar radiation and other climatic factors to predict climatic condition for the past, present or future. Unfortunately, they are simplifications of the real would and have numerous deficiencies. Their results are only approximate and they are also slow to run and expensive to use. Part of the problem is that we do not understand fully all the processes of the climatic system, although we do realise its complexity. Despite these research difficulties, most people agree on perhaps the most important aspect of climatic change from the viewpoint of contemporary human societies: the rate of change will be faster than anything we have previously experienced. In this case, the approximate predictions produced by GCMs are being used to gain some insight into the nature and conditions of the world that we will inhabit over the next few generations. Currently, they suggest that the average annual global surface temperature will increase by between 1C and 3.5C by the year 2100; that the average sea level around the world will rise by 15-95 cm; and that changes in the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation will occur. Scientists also expect extreme weather conditions, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts, to become more frequent in some places. These forecasts should leave us in little doubt about the potential impact of climatic change on the natural environment and humans. Changes in climate have the potential to affect the geographical locations of ecological systems, such as forests and grasslands, the mix of species they contain and their ability to provide the various benefits on which societies depend for their continued existence. Thus, the whole range of resources on which we rely is sensitive to changes in climate. This includes food production, water resources and human settlements. The effects, some of which are potentially irreversible, are likely to be unfavourable in many areas. But this would not be true for all. In fact, some climate change impacts will probably be beneficial. Scientists in some countries have already identified useful environmental trends that are closely linked to the warming that has occurred to date. In Australia, for example, research has shown that the average yield of wheat has increased by about 0.5 tonnes per hectare since 1952, and climate trends have played a significant part in this greater food production. The most important climatic factor observed in this case was the rise, in recent decades, of the minimum temperature. Among other things, the warmer temperatures have meant fewer frosts, and this has caused less damage to harvests. However, many of the predicted effects of future climate warming are far from beneficial. Relatively small changes in climate can influence the availability of water, either due to long-term dying of the climate or by increasing the frequency of droughts. Associated problems are likely to arise first in arid and semi-arid regions and more humid areas where demand or pollution have already created shortages. The Mediterranean Basin is one example of this and in recent decades decreasing trends in precipitation totals have already been identified in western-central parts of the basin as well as marked changes in seasonality. A clear tendency for rainfall to be concentrated into a shorter period of the year has been noted in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, with the proportion of annual rainfall falling in autumn and winter, increasing at the expense of spring totals. A further undesirable effect is likely to be changes to glacial processes. This will impact on glacier ice, ground ice and sea ice, which in turn will affect vegetation, wildlife habitats and human structures and facilities. Indeed, there is a strong possibility that the Arctic's ice cover will melt completely, making marine transport and oil and gas exploration easier but increasing the danger from icebergs. But probably the most dramatic and visible effect of global warming is the twenty-first or 'greenhouse' century will be the rise in sea levels. This will be caused by the thermal expansion of the ocean -- warmer water occupies a greater volume than cold water -- and the added input from melting ice. With scientists calculating that about half of the world's population live in coastal zones, the consequences of rising sea levels are potentially very severe. Increased flooding and inundation are the most obvious results, with London, New York and Tokyo being just a few of the candidates for significant disruption. Huge numbers of people stand to lose their homes and livelihoods and this could produce many millions of environmental refugees. Arguably the most severe consequences would be experienced by several small, low-lying island states, since entire countries could cease to exist if worst-case scenarios are realised. The consequences would be devastating, not only for the people and culture of these islands, but also for the countries that would need to accommodate those who had been displaced.
28.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Maps The purpose of a map is to express graphically the relations of points and features on the earth's surface to each other. These are determined by distance and direction. In early times distance wha often expressed in units of time, for example 'so many hours' march' or 'a day's journey by river', but such measurements gave more information about the relative ease of crossing the local terrains than they did about actual distance. The other element is direction, but for the ordinary traveller, whose main concern was 'Where do I go from here?' and 'How far away is it?', the accurate representation of direction was not of primary importance. Partly for this reason, written itineraries for a long time rivalled maps. Even today, certain types of maps, for example those showing railway systems, may make little attempt to show true directions. Similarly, conspicuous landmarks along a route were at first indicated by signs, realistic or conventional, and varied in size to indicate their importance. Clearly the conventions employed varied with the purpose of the map, and also from place to place, so that in studying early maps the first essential is to understand the particular convention employed. The history of cartography is largely that of the increase in the accuracy with which these elements of distance and direction are determined and in the comprehensiveness of the map content. In this development, cartography has called in other sciences to its aid. For example, instead of determining direction by observing the position of a shadow at midday, or of a constellation in the night sky, or even of a steady wind, use was made of terrestrial magnetism through the magnetic compass, and instruments were evolved which enabled horizontal angles to be calculated with great accuracy. The application of astronomical concepts, and the extension of the knowledge of the world through exploration, encouraged attempts to map the known world. Then astronomers discovered that the earth is not a perfect sphere, but is flattened slightly at the poles, which introduced further refinements into the mapping of large areas. Meanwhile, the demands being made of the map maker were shifting significantly. The traveller or the merchant ceased to be the sole user of maps. The soldier, especially after the introduction of artillery, and the problems of range, field of fire, and dead ground which it raised, demanded an accurate representation of the surface features, in place of the earlier conventional or pictorial delineation, and a solution in any degree satisfactory was not reached until the contour was invented. Then there was the archaeologist, the historian and, much later, the modern geographer, each with their own special requirements. In order to address these, the present-day cartographer has had to evolve methods of mapping all kinds of 'distributions', from geological strata and climatic regimes to land use. It is the present widespread recognition of the value of the map in the co-ordination and interpretation of phenomena in many sciences that has led to what may truly be called a modern renaissance o cartography. It would be misleading of me to represent the stages summarily sketched above as being either continuous or consecutive. There have been periods of retrogression or stagnation, broken by others of rapid development, during which outmoded ideas have held their place beside the new. Again, cartographers have constantly realised the theoretical basis for progress, but have had to wait for technical improvement in their instruments before they could apply their new ideas. Since the easiest way to make a map is to copy an old one, and considerable capital has often been locked up in printing places or stock map publishers have often been resistant to new ideas. Consequently, maps must never be accepted uncritically as evidence of contemporary knowledge and technique. Clearly, the maps, many thousands in number, which have come down to us today, are the results of much human work and thought. They constitute therefore an invaluable record for the students of man's past. It is above all this aspect that makes the study of historical cartography so fascinating and so instructive.
29.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Surviving in a Foreign Land I have been welcomed warmly. It's a sociable and well-provisioned base camp in a very, very isolated place. At any one time, there are some forty odd souls - scientists, students, weathermen, satellite trackers -- in a close-knit community where everyone mucks in. My school French is proving adequate - just -- to communicate, but not to chat or banter. I miss the nuances, and my phrasebook is useless at breakfast. There is no practical problem for me in this, but initially there was a problem of self-confidence. I found myself slightly dreading mealtimes. I would hang back, worried about which table to choose terrified at the silence which fell when I spoke, anxious in a way I cannot remember since the first weeks of school. I still grin inanely, or panic when people talk to me. I suspect the cause of this occasional depression is nothing to do with loss of company or communication, it's because I've lost the social predominance which my own gift of the gab has always afforded me. Elliot When I first met Elliot, I was just a young author like any other and he took no notice of me. He never forgot a face though, and when I ran across him here or there he shook hands with me cordially, but showed no desire to further our acquaintance; and if I saw him at the opera, say, he being with a person of high rank, he was inclined not to catch sight of me. But then I happened to make a somewhat startling success as a playwright, and presently I became aware that Elliot regarded me with a warmer feeling. One day, I received a note from him asking me to lunch and I conceived the notion that he was trying me out. But from then on, since my success had brought me many new friends, I began to see him more frequently. Alfred Hitchcock The film director Alfred Hitchcock always insisted that he didn't care about the subject matter of his films, or indeed about the acting, but that he did care about the photography and the soundtrack and all the technical ingredients. For Hitchcock, it wasn't a message that stirred the audience, nor was it a great performance, he believed that people are aroused by pure film, irrespective of their cultural background. Therefore, if a picture is designed correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience should scream at the same moment as the Indian audience. Hitchcock's self-appraisal was always precise, rational, deceptively unanswerable, he was a man of reason and a craftsman of genius who liked to hear an audience scream. He didn't deal in speculation, abstraction or intellectual allusion, and his assessment of his own screen characters was not exploratory. He set his sights on film, pure film, and the most dispassionate, mathematically calculable beauty of what a strip of film can be made to do to an audience.
3.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	In those days the council houses stretched all over the western side of the city: row after row of huddled, dingy dwellings in orange half-brick or pale white stucco. In summer the chemicals from the May and Baker factory two miles away came and hung round the doors and gardens with an indescribable smell of sulphur, and the most common sight in that part of Norwich early in the morning was a paperboy wrinkling his nose in disgust as he negotiated somebody's front path. Most of this early life I've forgotten. But there is a memory of sitting, or perhaps balancing, at any rate precariously, on some vantage point near an upstairs window, and looking at the houses as they faded away into the distance. Later on there are other phantoms - faces that I can't put names to, my mother, ironing towels in the back room of a house that I don't think was ours, snow falling over the turrets of the great mansion at Earlham. That my mother should intrude into these early memories is no surprise. I remember her as a small, precise and nearly always angry woman, the source of whose anger I never quite understood, and consequently couldn't do anything to appease. Even as a child, though, accompanying her to the small shops in Bunnett Square or on longer excursions into the city, I'm sure that I had some notion of the oddity of her personality. She was, for instance, quite the most solitary person I have ever known, as alone in a room full of people as on a moor. To this solitariness was added a fanatic adhesion to a kind of propriety uncommon on the West Earlham estate, which occasionally broke out in furious spring-cleanings or handwashings and instructions to 'behave proper'. As a moral code this was completely beyond my comprehension: even now I'm not sure that I understand it. To particularise, it meant not straying into neighbours' gardens or jeopardising their rose bushes as you walked down the street; it meant sitting for long half-hours in a silent dining room, with your hands folded across your chest, listening to radio programmes that my mother liked; it meant - oh, a hundred proscriptions and prohibitions. In time other figures emerged onto these stern early scenes. For all her solitariness, my mother wasn't without her cronies. There was Mrs Buddery, who was fixated on the Royal Family, Mrs Winall, who said exactly nothing, except for grunts supporting the main speaker, and Mrs Laband - livelier than the others, and of whom they vaguely disapproved. It was only later that I comprehended what poor company this trio was, they formed a depressed and depressing sisterhood, a little dribble of inconsequent talk about bad legs, the cold weather and the perils of ingrate children, a category in which I nearly always felt myself included. Looking back, it was as if a giant paperweight, composed of the West Earlham houses, my mother and her cronies, the obligation to 'behave proper', lay across my shoulders, and that it was my duty immediately to grow up and start the work of prising it free. This was easier said than done. Growing up in West Earlham at this time followed a well-regulated pattern. Until you were five you simply sat at home and got under your parents feet (I can remember awful aimless days, when I must have been about four, playing on a rug in the front room while my mother sat frostily in an armchair). Then, the September after your fifth birthday, you were packed off to Avenue Road infants school half a mile away in the direction of the city. The lucky few had a mother with a rickety bike and a child seat - these were extraordinary contraptions in cast-iron with improvised safety-straps. As far as I recall, my mother consigned me to the care of other children in the street for this journey. If I remember anything about these early years it's the summer holidays, those days when you caught occasional glimpses of the world that existed outside West Earlham: a vague old man who lived next door to Mrs Buddery and told stories about his time in the Merchant Navy; a charity fete, once, held at a house far away in Christchurch Road, where a motherly woman doled out lemonade and tried to get me interested in something called the League of Pity - a kind of junior charity, I think - only for my mother, to whom subsequent application was made, to dismiss the scheme on the grounds that its organisers were 'only after your money'. Mercenary motives were a familiar theme of my mother's conversation, and politicians my mother held in the deepest contempt of all. If she thought of the House of Commons - and I am not sure if her mind was capable of such an unprecedented leap of the imagination - it was as a kind of opulent post office where plutocrats ripped open letters stuffed with five pound notes sent in by a credulous public. No doubt I exaggerate. No doubt I ignore her virtues and magnify her frailties. But there was precious little milk of human kindness in my mother, it had all been sucked out of her, sucked out and thrown away. To do my mother justice she wasn't unconscious of her role as the guardian of my education. On Sundays occasionally, she would take me - in my 'good clothes' - on the 85 bus to the Norwich Castle Museum. Here, hand-in-hand, suspicious, but mindful of the free admission, we would parade through roomfuls of paintings by the Norwich School of Artists. My mother wasn't, it must be known, altogether averse to this recreation, and eventually almost got to have opinions on the various subjects presented for her edification. I can remember her stopping once in front of a fine study of a Roman soldier in full battle gear to remark, 'Well, I wouldn't like to meet him on a dark night!' I recall this as a solitary instance of my mother attempting to make a joke.
30.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	0ral History The growing trend for historians to rely on oral evidence is not without its problems. It is naive to suppose that someone's testimony represents a pure distillation of past experience, for in an interview each party is affected by the other. It is the historian who selects the informant and indicates the area of interest; and even if he or she asks no questions and merely listens, the presence of an outsider affects the atmosphere in which the informant recalls the past and talks about it. The end product is conditioned both by the historian's social position vis-a-vis the informant, and by the terms in which he or she has learnt to analyse the past and which may well be communicated to the informant. In other words, historians must accept responsibility for their share in creating new evidence. But the difficulties are far from over when the historian is removed from the scene. For not even the informant is in direct touch with the past. His or her memories may be contaminated by what has been absorbed from other sources (especially the media); they may be overlaid by nostalgia ('times were good then'), or distorted by a sense of grievance about deprivation in childhood, which only took root in later life. To anyone listening, the feelings and attitudes are often what lends conviction to the testimony, yet they may be the emotional residue of later events rather than the period in question. Animal Science There are two main approaches to animal science - the physiological and the whole animal. Physiologists are mainly interested in how the body works, that is, in how the nerves, muscles and sense organs are coordinated to produce complex behaviour. Those taking the 'whole animal' approach, although they are often interested in the mechanisms of 'behaviour', study the behaviour of the intact animal and the factors that affect it. Within the 'whole animal' approach, a distinction is often made between psychologists and ethologists. Psychologists have traditionally worked in laboratories on the learning abilities of a restricted range of species, mainly rats and pigeons. Ethologists have been more concerned with the naturally occurring, unlearnt behaviour of animals, often in their wild habitats. Although this distinction still exists to some extent, there is now a fruitful coming together of the two. Among these types, it is the physiologists who like to emphasise that their methods are the more fundamental. However, even if we knew how every nerve cell operated in the performance of some pattern of behaviour, this would not remove the need for us to study it at a behavioural level also. Behaviour has its own organisation and its own units mat we must use for its study. Trying to describe the nest-building behaviour of a bird in terms of the actions of individual nerve cells would be like trying to read a page of a book with a high-powered microscope. The Social Sciences A problem facing all students who come to study a social science for the first time is that they must do two things simultaneously. They must familiarise themselves with the substance or content of their new subject and, at the same time, they must learn the methodology of the subject. That is, they must become familiar not only with the knowledge and research findings which fill the textbooks but also with the methods by which the knowledge is obtained and organised, that is with the logical basis of the subject itself. The two elements are not separate; they are very closely related. Because we are all familiar with social life through our everyday experiences we may feel that the social sciences are very largely a matter of common-sense. But, as a look at any textbook will quickly indicate, though each of the social sciences is concerned with people in society, each discipline goes beyond common-sense understanding. Each discipline focuses on a particular aspect of social life, each uses particular methods of study and each employs its own set of concepts. It is this set of concepts, the most basic ideas in a subject, which constitutes the 'logical basis of the subject', which enables the social scientist to go beyond everyday common-sense and which distinguishes one discipline from another. Classical Architecture To the classical world, that of Ancient Greece and Rome, architecture meant much more than the mere construction of buildings. 'Architecture', says the Roman architect Vitruvius, 'consists of Order, and of Arrangement, and of Proportion and Symmetry and Propriety and Distribution.' For several of these terms he gives a Greek equivalent: his definitions probably derived from an earlier Greek authority whose writings are lost to us. Utility and Function are not part of this definition, though in his book Vitruvius does go on to describe the best form and arrangements for different purposes of structure; but here, at the beginning, the aesthetic emphasis, architecture as an art, has priority. The origins of classical architecture are complex. There was obviously a long prehistory of basic construction, of hut habitations simple in form and material, both in Greece and Italy, which did not match up to Vitruvius' artistic requirements. Though these were, by definition, inartistic they nevertheless contributed an essential element of form, which persisted into the later sophisticated architectural concepts. However orate it may appear from the outside, in essence the classical temple is a simple, single-roomed hut.
31.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Music - The Challenge Ahead Technological advances continue to transform our lives at work, at home and in our leisure activities. Susan Hallam discusses their impact on music in Britain. In the latter part of the 20th century, we saw a rapid increase in the opportunities available for listening to music through radio, TV, records, tapes, CDs, videos and a rapidly developing range of multi-media techniques. Along with this, there has been a decline in the performance of live music and in the full-time employment opportunities for professional musicians. There seems little doubt that the widening access to music is likely to continue, fulfilling as it does so many human needs. On a national level, no major state occasion is without music. For individuals, it provides opportunities for numerous activities, formal and informal. Indeed, a society without music is surely unthinkable and it seems that the issue is not whether there will be music in the 21st century but what the nature of that music will be, and also whether there will be a continued perceived need for people to learn to play musical instruments. I would respond to the latter question on a positive note. The music industry is one of the major generators of income in Britain and musical skill and talent will continue to be important in preparing individuals to work in a variety of professions, in particular those related to the media. In addition to its vocational significance, there is a growing body of evidence that playing an instrument may be beneficial to the development of skills at an earlier stage. Research in the USA has suggested that listening to or actively making music has a direct positive effect on spatial reasoning, one aspect of the measurement of intelligence. While these results are still to be successfully replicated, other data from Europe has indicated that an increase in group music lessons can have positive effects on social relationships in school and on concentration in young children and those with behavioural difficulties. Taking the idea behind such findings one step further, current research is investigating to what extent playing an instrument may even encourage the development of transferable skills. For instance, the need to practise regularly may assist in the acquisition of good study habits and focused concentration, playing in concerts may encourage habits of punctuality and good organisation. For all these reasons, there is likely to be a continuing demand for instrumental teaching in the short term. What about the longer term picture? Is there likely to be a shift in focus and, if so, what direction will it take? While there are many possible scenarios, I believe that two possibilities are likely. Firstly, the kinds of music to which people will listen will become more diverse. New genres will develop which will integrate different styles. Secondly, there will be an increase in the use of technology to compose and perform music. This will widen access to composition as there will be less reliance on technical skill but at the same time, it is likely to further reduce the need for live performance and musicians whose role is solely related to it. Developing in parallel with this trend is a likely increase in the number of people, across the whole age range, who wish to actively participate in music making. Such activities are likely to be community based and will reflect the musical traditions of that community whatever they may be. If this vision of the future is to be realised, what does the music profession need to do in preparation? The focus of instrumental tuition will need to change. Ways will need to be found to enable more people to learn to play a range of instruments, throughout their life span. As a result, the impact on the instrumental curriculum and the measures used to assess progress through it will be such that they will need to adapt to maintain their relevance for a broader sector of the population. Ultimately, they will need to encompass a wider range of musical skills. Crucial to the success of the process will be the training of musicians. They will need to be able to motivate, inspire and teach learners of all ages, develop skills for working with large and diverse groups and acquire the communication, social, entrepreneurial and management skills necessary for community work. This represents a fundamental change from traditional practice and it will be accompanied by the need to respond to demands for public accountability. Viewed positively, this should provide an opportunity for all those involved in music education to demonstrate the high quality of music tuition available. Finally, we need to strive towards raising the profile of music itself. Music plays a crucial role in our lives but all too often it is taken for granted. Those involved in the music profession at all levels need to work actively together to ensure that this changes.
32.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	'You don't take sugar, do you? shouted his secretary, not so much asking a question as stating a fact - as well she might, because she had been making Lancelot cups of coffee for many months. Her excuse for forgetting such things was that he wasn't normally supposed to be there. Actually nowadays he was usually there all the time, having discovered that to take up his proprietorial privilege of staying away was tantamount to opening the floodgates. Not for the first time he pondered the easy, imperceptibly divided stages by which he had progressed from valued counsellor, meeting authors and playwrights over lunch at carefully planned planning meetings complete with agenda, to hapless dogsbody moving one step ahead of catastrophe, with nowhere to park when he arrived at work in the mornings. 'This came,' she yelled, vaguely waving a manila folder before putting it down in front of him. 'From that chap in Los Angeles. You said you wanted to see it.' A typed label said: 'A World History of the Short, by Ian Cuthbert.' Just under that it said 'An Expanded Synopsis'. Lancelot did not want to see that word 'synopsis'. At the very least he wanted to see a label saying 'A First Draft'. Lancelot had already seen a synopsis of this book and did not really want to see another, however heavily revised. Ian Cuthbert had been given an advance of several thousands of pounds for this book during the initial flurry of activity when Lancelot had bought the firm. One of several old friends from whom Lancelot had made the capital error of commissioning books, Ian Cuthbert was a particularly flagrant proof that in such circumstances the possessor of a wayward temperament, far from nerving himself to behave more predictably for friendship's sake, will actually become less 'pindownable' than ever. Lancelot skipped the blurb come preamble which he had read for what seemed like the hundredth time and sampled the synopsis proper. There was scarcely a phrase that he did not recognise at a glance. He closed the folder and shifted it to one side. Plainly at this rate Ian's manuscript would never be forthcoming. As well as almost wholly lacking the brilliance for which its author was supposed to be famous, the synopsis, under its doggedly frolicsome tone, had the unmistakable dead ring of a lost conviction. Lancelot remembered tales of a famous author-about-town whose last book, published incomplete after his death, had been coaxed from him chapter by chapter, one payment at a time. But in that case, the payments were fractions of a hypothetical advance which had never been given in the first place. Ian's advance had been enormous; a blatant reversal of the sound business principle by which authors must deliver a manuscript now in order to be paid with inflated currency later. Lancelot, who had read modern languages at Oxford, could remember the day when Ian Cuthbert had been the most promising talent in a Cambridge so full of promise that it had made everywhere else feel provincial. Ian's contemporaries had plotted to take over the British theatre and in a remarkably short time they had actually done so. But their mental energy had seemed like indolence when you looked at Ian. He had worn his overcoat like a cape and talked about what one very famous French writer had said as if he had been there to overhear it. Yet for some reason, the whole frostily coruscating galaxy of Ian's creative intellect had remained locked in its closet. While less gifted deviants came out and conquered, Ian went further in. At the height of his influence as a literary taste-maker he was already notoriously difficult to deal with. Officially appointed by the relevant public agency to edit a comprehensive magazine of the arts, he was like a general with a million tons of equipment pinned down on the beach by nothing except an excess of opportunity. The magazine used up the budget for a dozen issues without appearing once. Similarly, his thrice-renewed three-year contract with one of the fashion magazines engendered little except legends about the size of his emolument, which was increased from generosity to extravagance in an attempt to make him produce more, and then from extravagance to munificence in an attempt to make him produce anything. At the editorial working breakfasts - there were always at least two of the titled photographers present to capture the scene for posterity - Ian spat witty venom through clenched teeth, and poured nitric acid on other people's ideas. Ten years later, he could scarcely be depended upon to turn up for his own funeral. Lancelot was on the verge of admitting to himself that 'A World History of the Short' had been a mistake from its inception.
33.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Einstein Stop anyone in the street and ask them to name a scientist, and the chances are they'll think of Albert Einstein. His face is used to advertise products with intellectual connotations, from computers to encyclopaedias. Most people know little of what Einstein did, except that he developed some mysterious theories under the heading 'relativity', which are famous for being incomprehensible, and for coming up with bizarre predictions that run counter to everyday experience. Einstein was part of a gigantic leap forward in scientific thinking, an intellectual revolution that heralded the birth of twentieth century science. Physicists and mathematicians were trying to create a new, more rational description of the universe by studying relationships between matter and the forces of nature. Einstein made his profound and far-reaching contributions simply by looking again at the nature of the fundamentals: time, space, matter and energy. Previous descriptions had depended on Isaac Newton's view of a universe in which stars and planets moved in an absolute framework of space and time. Einstein overthrew this notion, saying that time and space were not absolute but relative. Young Readers Throughout our childhoods, Lydia and I distrusted any prize-winning book because we knew it would be worthy; and for 'worthy', read 'boring', we thought. While our mother had been inclined to abhor our philistinism in tones of despising innuendo, our father would cheerfully dish us out tenpences, chapter by chapter, as inducements to make us cast our eyes over the occasional improving volume. Or he would slip the odd superior book in amongst our Christmas and birthday presents, labelled in bold marker pen, 'This Book is NOT Literature'. Though we dismissed most of his offerings as 'boys' books', he did, in this way, expose us to some shorter works of decent fiction and, just once, to a well-known anthology of verse. Language 'The origin of human language is truly secret and marvellous', wrote Jacob Grimm in 1851. The marvellous secret has long proved a launch pad for strange ideas. 'Primitive man was likely to make sounds like "meuh" when sensing danger,' claimed Charles Caller in 1928. "Meuh" has a plaintive sound. The human who wandered over a hostile land inhabited by awesome beasts uttered desperate noises, and languages have preserved some echo of his lamentation such as malaria meaning "fever" or the Latin mors meaning "death". Faced with such weird speculations, many avoided the topic, regarding it as a playground for cranks, but recently, language origin and evolution have become key research areas. Language probably developed in East Africa, around 100,000 years ago. In the main speech was used for friendly interaction, and was an important tool in power struggles. Information-swapping was probably not an important original role - contrary to the views of philosopher John Locke, who spoke of language as a 'great conduit' for conveying knowledge.
34.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Vervet monkeys Cheney and Seyfarth describe how one day the dominant male in the group of vervet monkeys they were studying noticed a strange male hanging around in a neighbouring grove of trees. The stranger's intentions were quite obvious: he was sizing up the group in order to join it. If he succeeded, it was more than likely that the incumbent male would be ousted from his position of privilege. With the vervet equivalent of a stroke of genius, the male hit on the ideal ploy to keep the stranger away from his group. As soon as the strange male descended from the grove of trees to try to cross the open ground that separated his grove from the one in which the group was feeding, he gave an alarm call that vervets use to signal the sighting of a leopard nearby. The stranger shot back into the safety of his trees. As the day wore on, this was repeated every time the stranger made a move in the groups direction. All was going swimmingly until the male made a crucial mistake: after successfully using the ploy several times, he gave the leopard alarm call while himself nonchalantly walking across open ground. What Cats Catch In a recent survey, people in the 173-household English village of Felmersham collected their cats' prey. Over one year their seventy cats produced over 1,000 prey items. A professor in America saw these figures and worked out that on this basis the cat population of Britain must be killing 100 million birds and small mammals each year! The mesmeric effect of big numbers seems to have stultified reason. It is not realistic just to multiply the number of catches of these rural cats by the entire cat population of Britain. Most cats are town cats with small ranges, and catch fewer items of prey than the cats in this survey. The key question should have been this: are the numbers sustainable? The answer would seem to be yes. In winter many householders feed birds, while garden trees and buildings provide nesting sites, and in this way the bird population is kept at well above 'natural' levels. The survey found that the cat is a significant predator, but not that it is devastating Britain's bird population. Buffalo's Day The buffaloes are, as it were, the marshman's lifeline, and they are cherished accordingly. At each dawn the buffaloes, who have been sleeping on the buffalo platform or quite frequently round the fire with their owners, leave, infinitely slowly and wearily, their wallowing progress continually punctuated with despairing groans, for the distant reed beds beyond the open water. For a long time they stand on the edge of the platform, groaning to each other of the infinite fatigue of the coming day, until at last the leader takes a ponderous pace forward and subsides into the water. Once in the water a deep lassitude once more descends upon the party, as if they had by now forgotten their intention and they may wallow there with low notes of complaint for many minutes. The movements that at length remove them from the immediate vicinity of the house are so gradual as to pass practically unnoticed, but finally they are swimming, so low in the water that their noses seem held above it by a last effort of ebbing strength, their rolling eyes proclaiming that this is the end at last and that they are drowning. So, patient and protesting and more or less submerged, they spend the day among the reeds and the bulrushes, grazing leisurely upon such green shoots as their antediluvian heads may find at eye level. PICASSO, Pablo The soles 1940 Oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Picasso tended to paint those things that surrounded him, and in the early spring of 1940, he painted several fish still lifes while he was staying in the fishing port of Royan. The ostensible subject of the painting is a fishmonger's slab with a crab, and a pair of scales containing two or three soles. In spite of their predicament these sea creatures look very much still alive. It is not very easy to read the painting because Picasso has treated the composition in terms of a flat pattern of overlapping and interlocking transparent planes. This, the thin delicately brushed paint, and the cool, undemonstrative colours give the painting the appearance of an underwater world of slow-moving calm and harmony. But this is disturbed by what seems to be an impending battle between the fish, baring their teeth, and the crab, with its open claws. Those sharp, pointed forms are echoed by the scales. Even the chain going round one of the fish takes on a more sinister aspect. There is an undercurrent of menace and barely suppressed violence that gives the picture a symbolic edge.
35.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	TIM RICE I was ushered into the young man's drawing room, an oasis of cultured sanity surrounded by what appeared to be a quite shambolic cluster of rooms in which the less enterprising members of the family operated. Moving from the kitchen to his parlour was an upgrade from economy to business class. Here was the largest collection of records I had ever seen, the first stereo record player and tuner I had come across and the astonishing evidence that a teenager existed who had spent money on Georgian wine glasses, pictures and furniture. His name was Andrew Lloyd Webber. He had won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history, and he had nine months to kill before going up, during which time he intended to become England's answer to the composer Richard Rodgers. My own ambitions were just as insane as his, I wanted to be a pop star, for all the healthy reasons women, money and fame. The difference between Andrew and myself was that my dreams were never life or death to me, though it's easy to say that now. They might have become so had I failed. Consequently, when Andrew suggested a completely new insane ambition for me, i.e. to become as famous a lyricist as Oscar Hammerstein, I had no qualms about giving it a go. This was partly because within ten minutes of our introduction, he was at the piano and had played me three tunes he had composed -- I could tell that he was good. Very good. As he confidently continued to bash out selections from some of the many shows he had written and produced at school, I was reminded of many of the best show albums from my parents LP collection. He needed a new lyricist for the outside world. I had little to impress him with in return, other than instant praise for his music and a bona fide, actually released, seven-inch single of a song I had written (both words and music) with which an unknown pop group had dealt the final blow to their moribund career by recording three months previously. We parted, promising to meet again and to write something together. I was still more interested in the charts than in the West End theatre, but told myself on the bus back to my flat that I had just met somebody of rare ability and determination, and I would be mad to miss out on being a sidekick to a chap who was clearly going to take the musical theatre by storm, probably by next week. And even if the two of us failed to challenge the top musical composers successfully, then we could try to knock the Beatles and Rolling Stones off their perches later, in the summer. The Everly Brothers had just made a comeback and would clearly be in need of some new material. The next day, back at my desk in the office where I was training to become a solicitor, the brief certainty I had enjoyed of a life in show business with Andrew Lloyd Webber had faded somewhat. I would of course continue to keep an eye on the small ads in Melody Maker for groups needing a vocalist, and would turn out a few more three-chord songs tailored not to expose the limitations of my voice, but it was still odds-on that eventually I would stagger through my exams and wind up a respectable lawyer by the time I was twenty-five. By then I would have surely grown out of pop music as my father had confidently predicted I would by the time I was twenty-one. This was worrying - if he was right I only had a few more months of enjoying it. But in the meantime I felt I had nothing to lose by seeing Andrew again. It would be fun to go and see a musical with him, to write words that aped musical lyricists rather than pop stars. And Andrew was a fascinating individual who talked of Good Food Guides and Victorian architecture, besides supporting Leyton Orient football team. I wasn't convinced by the idea for a musical that he had been working on for the past year, but in 1965 I was rarely convinced about anything. His talent was beyond question and he claimed to have all the contacts. I was soon back in his drawing room. The idea was the life of Dr Thomas Barnardo, the nineteenth century philanthropist who founded the orphanages that bear his name. His story was a worthy one indeed, but not one that truly fired my imagination. The hero was too squeaky-clean, at least in Andrew's version of his life, and the enterprise was unoriginal in both conception and execution, owing far too much to Lionel Bart's hit show, Oliver. On the other hand, Andrew's conviction of his score's precocious brilliance was infectious and not totally unjustified. What did I know about musicals? As David Land, later to be my agent for over a quarter of a century, memorably (and repeatedly) said, if there's a demand for one hamburger bar on the block, there is room for two. We could be the second hamburger joint. I set to work with enormous enthusiasm, in particular for those songs that were intended to be funny. Andrew outlined the plot, played me the tunes and in many instances gave me the title as well, most of which had presumably been thought up by his ex-wordsmith school pal who had already had a go. I skipped a day at the solicitors office, faking illness, to write my first batch of theatrical lyrics. I did not know it that day but I had changed careers.
36.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	I chose this place to live, believing I would find anonymity among those who did not care if the plaster and glass and paintwork of rented houses splintered and decayed, who were not reproached by gardens gone to seed and rotting sofas. In that hope, as in most things, I was proved wrong. People in the shops, who are living their real lives, even if you aren't, soon start to recognise you. Next door's lull-blown roses pouring over the fence are persistent reminders that the gardens were loved once. Usually, I stay inside trying to forget that there is a summer going on out there, but tonight, I am watching the swifts flying in the transparent space between the treetops and roofs. I have cut back rosemary and lemon balm to make a space for a chair and my arms and hands are tingling with stings and scratches. It is a narrow London garden, where plants must grow tall or sprawling to survive. 'Been doing a spot of clearing, I see.' It's my upstairs neighbour, Jaz, leaning out of the window, the author of several unpublished manuscripts I am sometimes called upon to dissemble about in my capacity as an English teacher. I have a copy of the latest in my possession now. 'How's the work going, Jaz?' 'For goodness sake. In no other profession is one called on to account for oneself a thousand times a day by every Tom, Dick or Harry.' Her voice tails off, then rallies. 'Tell you what, Ann, I've got something to drink in the fridge. I'll bring it down.' I don't want Jaz in the garden, and I see now, dully, that it looks mangled and bereft. The only access to this garden is through my flat and Jaz is banging on my door. 'So, you're on holiday now, you jammy so-and-so.' She sprawls, in shorts and vest, on the chair while I drop a cushion onto what had once been a little lawn. 'Cheers,' she says in her delusion of youth, 'I should've gone into teaching - a writer doesn't have holidays. Still, you know what they say, those who can, do, those who can't, teach.' And there are those who can neither write nor teach. 'So, what plans for the hols?' All my postponed dread of the school year's ending engulfs me. Empty days. Hot pavements blobbed with melting chewing gum. The walk down to the shops and back. The little park with its fountain, and loneliness sitting beside me on the bench. 'Actually, I'm going down to Stonebridge tomorrow. I've been meaning to ask you if you'd feed the cats.' My heart starts racing as I speak. 'Of course I will,' Jaz says. 'If I'm around,' knowing, as I did, that she would be. 'So where will you stay? Some bijou B and B?' 'No. I'll be staying with my oldest friend, Ruby, at the Rising Sun. We've known each other since we were eight.' It isn't true that I shall stay there, but then I spend my life dealing with fiction of one sort or another. 'Going back to your roots. So what do you think of it so far? My opus?' My silence on the subject has forced Jaz to enquire about her manuscript, The Cruelty of Red Vans, which lies half-heartedly half-read on my desk. I like the title and tell her so. I can see how red vans could be cruel, always bringing presents and mall-order goodies to other houses and delivering returned manuscripts in silly bags to hers. Something prompts me to speak honestly for once. 'Let me give you a little tip, dear,' I begin. 'What?' She is affronted. 'Try writing about nice people for a change, pretty people who at least aspire to being good: a touch less solipsism, a bit more fiction...' 'Teachers!' Jaz is a mutinous schoolgirl about to snatch back a poorly marked essay. 'I myself keep a journal, I have for years, in which I write down something good, however small or trivial, about each day.' My words sound as prissy as my old-fashioned print dress. 'Keep a journal! Nice people! Get a life, Ann.' Oh, I've got a life. I've got my work, and I go out sometimes and fly home again, sitting on the tube with my nose in a book. When at last we go inside, my calm kitchen gives a moment's reassurance, then out of the blue comes the image of my school geography teacher Miss Tarrantine, who must have been about the age I am now, closing an ancient reptilian eyelid in a monstrous wink as she tells us, 'I've had my moments.' We nearly died.
37.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Paul Simon Rock and roll in the 1950s was primarily a youth cult, but its lasting importance lay in the seismic impact it had on the middle class and the middle-aged. It also paved the way for the next generation of rock idols, who listened to it awestruck and aware that this strange, unsettling sound would somehow, irrevocably, be linked with their destinies. For Paul Simon, as for other youngsters in the US, the chief opportunity for hearing this new and invigorating type of music that was sweeping the country was courtesy of Alan Freed's radio show, Moondog Rock'n'Roll Party. Freed's show was required listening for a whole generation of fledgling rock idols. Like the young John Lennon, 3,000 miles away in Liverpool, with his ear glued to Radio Luxembourg - the only European outlet for the new rock and roll - Paul Simon was fascinated by the sounds pouring from Freed's show, and prepared himself for the next big step for a rock and roll obsessed teenager, the switch from listening to others' music to making his own. Snow No path was visible, but I thought that I would be all right if I walked with due caution. The wind hammered down from the heights, knocking me over as I slid and slithered on the slippery ice. Suddenly the innocent-looking snow gave way beneath me. I dropped, startled, into a hole some four feet deep. The snow had formed a roof over the gap between two rocks, melting away to leave nothing but a thin crust through which I had plunged. I hauled myself out, shaken and unnerved, wondering what I would have done if the hole had been thirty feet deep. I sat back against the top of a pine tree that protruded from the snow to take stock of the situation. In an hour I had covered about half a mile. It was perfectly clear that I would have to abandon my plan. Qualitative Research There are now numerous books which attempt to give guidance to researchers about qualitative research. While much has been written about the collection of data, the books are often silent about the processes and procedures associated with data analysis. Indeed, much mystery surrounds the way researchers analyse their data. Accordingly, we invited a range of social scientists who have engaged in qualitative projects to discuss the approaches that they used. The idea was to share insight and understanding of the process of qualitative data analysis rather than to produce a guidebook for the intending researcher. Such a task involves a process of demystification, of making implicit procedures more explicit. While this may sound straightforward, we have found it far from simple. We have therefore given our contributors the opportunity to present their work in a range of styles, which include autobiographical narratives and more impersonal forms.
38.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Self-help books Dione Reverend was a mere editor at Random House in New York when she first saw a manuscript by an unknown pop psychologist, Dr John Gray. 'I took one look at the title and knew it would be a number one bestseller,' she says, chuckling, and she was right. The desperately understanding Dr Gray is now a multimillionaire and Diane Reverend has her own company. Dr Gray's slim volume on how to bridge communication gaps between the sexes is the unofficial mascot of a huge and expanding self-help industry that may, as its insiders claim, answer some of American's myriad yearnings for betterment. It also feeds off those yearnings, creates hundreds more and - not incidentally - props up the entire world of New York publishing. As Britain is learning, the genre can fill entire polls with tomes os quackish and histrionic as their covers - but there are worse. For every self-help title published, thousands are rejected as too derivative or specialised. This is no small mercy. As a new breed of heavyweight editor-cum-ogent goes looking for the next lightweight blockbuster, prose style is the lost thing on anybody's mind. Marketability is everything. 'How promotable is the author? What's the "hook'? Is it universal enough?' Ms Reverend rattles off the key questions, then admits: 'If someone comes to me with a really catchy title, that's two thirds of the battle won. You know you can reach people.' Autobiographies There has to be a tacit understanding, a pact, between an autobiographer and reader that the truth is being told. Such at pact is, I would guess, rarely observed to the full. There are many reasons why the writer should lapse. There may be actions or thoughts which he feels it is simply too shameful to make public. There may be things he decides against putting down on paper because (as he rationalises) they are not important enough. There are also more complex and interesting reasons for surreptitiously breaking the pact. The autobiographer may decide that the ultimate goal of the work, the truth about himself, can be served by inventing stories that encapsulate the truth more neatly, more pointedly than strict adherence to the facts ever could. Or he may break the pact by deciding, from the beginning, never to adhere to it. He may call his book an autobiography simply in order to create a positive balance of credulity in the reader's mind that will be extremely convenient for him in his storytelling, and which, in the case of his more naive readers, may not be exhausted even by the time the story ends, so that these readers will go away thinking they have read a true history, when they have read nothing but a fiction. All of which can be done in no particular spirit of cynicism. Dashiell Hammett's detective stories Students of the detective story have explained the flourishing of this genre as an expression of the conflicts of late nineteenth and early twentieth century society. The detective story is essentially an allegory. The crime is a symbolic enactment of some innate human impulse of lust or greed, and its solution, at least in the traditional story, represents the reintegration of the personality with society, its lawless impulses quelled so that society can again function smoothly. In Hammett's peculiar version, society is returned to its former state, but that itself is shown to be corrupt and false. The hunter and the hunted in Hammett's tales are two aspects of the same personality. The private eye and his prey understand each other and are, in a strange way, comfortable with each other. The private eye has a foot in each camp. From the point of view of the criminal he is a bit too straight, and from that of the law a bit too seedy. He is at once a crook and a competitor. The mission of the private eye is sometimes tempered by his sense of complicity, and sometimes his punitive zeal is intensified by his anxiety about this ambiguity. SCIENCE WRITING Today's greatest scientific essayist is Stephen Jay Gould. To discuss that art and hear his advice, I met him in an unfamiliar milieu: at the Grand Hotel (where he was staying while promoting his new book). Neither of us, it has to be said, felt much at home. As for writing a piece set in surroundings of such lifeless self-aggrandisement, Gould said: 'I couldn't do it: Trollope might but he knew the culture. And knowing the culture is central to being a successful writer. Science, for example, is a civilisation of its own. As a result, only scientists can make a good job of presenting it. If you don't live in the community and don't understand its rules, you are crippled from the start.' One of Gould's axioms is: never write down to the reader. 'Make no concessions,' he says. 'You can simplify the language but must never adulterate it. Above all, you cannot simplify the argument. Once readers notice that they are being patronised, your piece is dead.'
39.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Advertising on trial If you work for an advertising agency, the early years of the 1990s may well have been the toughest of your professional life. The recession in business was bad enough. It was longer, deeper and more severe than anticipated by even the most pessimistic, hitting industrialised nations as hard as anything else for thirty years. In Britain, it meant in 1991 alone that while gross domestic product (GDP) declined, interest rates remained punitively high, consumer spending on almost everything other than staples fell, more than half a million people lost their jobs, and some 75,000 homes were repossessed. Every single business in the country was affected, some - the vehicle and building trades - finding themselves 30 per cent down. A lot of people - a lot of companies - in a lot of countries suffered. Of course, advertising people are scarcely unique in losing their jobs in such difficult times, but of all those still in employment, they often feel particularly under pressure. Seen, as they are, to spearhead efforts to support the bottom line, they suppose themselves to be under close enough scrutiny from their colleagues, let alone their bosses. Moreover, they are also faced with the very considerable problem of increasingly being asked to do their ever more difficult jobs with smaller and smaller budgets. They have been told that less must be more. And yet, alongside these psychological and financial imperatives lies an almost paradoxical rise in the perceived importance of the marketing process. The notion that companies should be making sure they are producing services and goods that their customers want, as opposed to merely what it is convenient for them to provide, is not a new one. Still, it's scarcely unfair to say that it has been only over the past ten or fifteen years that many companies seem to have put the idea intentionally, rather than fortuitously, into practice. The consequences have been that marketing activities have at last begun to be given the attention they deserve by management, that these people have acquired a little learning about the subject, and that a few brands have actually begun to be genuinely marketed. All these things have pleasingly increased the status of marketing people, while simultaneously adding to their burden. Marketing is increasingly regarded as that which it is not: a universal panacea. With approximately half of most marketing budgets being spent on advertising, there's some truth in saying that the buck then stops with the ad-people. It is certainly true that if the 80s was the decade in which advertising never had it so good, the start of the 90s saw the industry enduring its worst downturn for a generation. This was, of course, partly a direct consequence of the economic climate at the time. However, there was also evidence of more deep-seated change which would not simply be waved away as, and when, economic prospects brightened. The fact was that while this recession naturally caused potential clients to review, reconsider and often cut their budgets at the time, it also made them examine more closely than ever before the economics of advertising. And, generally, in the absence of concrete, convincing and quantitative evidence to the contrary, they had to conclude that the benefits of advertising might be questionable. At a time when enthusiasm to account for every dollar spent was naturally high, it was simply not clear enough to many client companies exactly what they were getting for the large sums of money they were spending, exactly what return they were seeing on their investment. Advertising - ever a business to excite the suspicions of the sceptic - was, as a consequence, more than ever before on trial. Thus, client companies almost everywhere took the view of one of their leaders quoted in the British trade magazine Campaign: 'We want better strategies, better targeting, better creativity, better media placement, better thinking. We aim to ensure we get advertising agencies' best people on our business and then ensure they are motivated to work their fingers to the bone, producing outstanding work for us.' Now, while none of this should elicit sympathy for a thoroughly tough business, it does mean that many of those advertising people still in work continue to face precisely the same problems as their clients: how to do more with less. If this is, in itself, sufficiently trying, a number of other factors have made the production of effective advertising particularly difficult. Some of these are a direct consequence of the recession discussed earlier: the controversy over production costs, and the disinclination to take the sort of risks that are ironically often the essence of good advertising. Other events would have happened irrespective of local or global economic conditions. These include, for example, the dramatic demographic changes facing much of the West, the burgeoning power of the retailer, the changing needs and desires of consumers, the rise of sponsorship, the increasingly onerous legal restrictions on advertising. And, of course, for some companies there is the new challenge of advertising abroad. Together with the economic situation, it is these matters which have forced many of those responsible for advertising to revisit Lord Leverhulme's commonplace that: 'Only half my advertising works. The trouble is I don't know which half.' Because now more than ever before, the pressure is on to increase the proportion of advertising that works. It is not terribly surprising that, at the moment, help for those who want or need to do just that is far from freely available. Generally, companies and the advertising agencies they use have been far too busy simply coping with these circumstances to wish to talk or write about them, while those that have succeeded in keeping their heads above water are often understandably anxious to keep the secrets of their success to themselves. This means that while conferences and seminars may provide some useful information, the books currently available on advertising, and how to do it, really don't. Those that are available tend to treat the process of producing advertising with too much respect. To give the impression that the work advertising agencies produce is invariably of the highest quality, deeply considered and remarkable value for money, is neither true nor likely to help those employees of the client company who are ultimately responsible.
4.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	POETRY RECITALS At any given time in history the literary scene will seem confused to those who are living through it, and it is the selectivity of posterity that makes the pattern and orders of eminence appear clearly defined to the retrospective view. It is fairly safe to say that, at the present time, there is an especially bewildering complexity of poetic tendencies, of kinds of poetry being written, of warring factions, of ways of presenting, criticising and teaching poetry, and of conflicting beliefs about the role of the poet in society. Very broadly speaking, the present debate in contemporary poetry concerns the reciprocal mistrust and disapproval shown by the seriously committed 'literary' writers, whose poems are intended to be printed and read on the page, and the 'popular', performing poets who, while they will probably publish their verses in magazines and collections, are happier declaiming them to an audience. Of course, this division is far from absolute. The practice of promoting public poetry readings has been steadily increasing over the past twenty years or so, in many different forms. Small literary societies in provincial towns conduct them in village halls or the sitting rooms of their members; schools and colleges invite poets to read and talk to audiences of students; arts festivals often advertise poetry readings by well-known authors on their programmes. The consequences of all these events, and of poets being more or less obliged to become public performers, are manifold and of uncertain benefit to them as mists. For the 'pop' poets, whose work has been composed expressly for the purpose of recital to live audiences, the issue is plain. They can only profit from public performance. Their verses are often very simple in both form and content, and can be assimilated at a single hearing; it is on the printed page that the deficiencies of thought, technique and imagination become clear. Poets who are dedicated to their craft, and are doing their best to continue and develop what is finest in the traditions of poetry - which involves compressing the maximum amount of passion, thought, wit and vision into the smallest possible space and achieving rhythmic effects of great variety and subtlety -- are unlikely to be appreciated by an audience which is probably encountering their work for the first time. The danger here is, not that they will be tempted to emulate the content and style of the entertainers, but that they might, in the effort to achieve instant communication, read only their most readily accessible work which is quite likely to be their slightest and least characteristic. Attendance at poetry reading cannot be a substitute for reading poetry on the page, though it can be an enjoyable and instructive adjunct. To hear good poets read their work aloud, even if they are not accomplished public speakers, is a valuable guide as to where the precise emphases are to be placed, but it is desirable that the audience should either follow the reading with the text before them or have a prior knowledge of the poems being spoken. The principal justification for popular recitals of poetry, where the readings are sometimes interspersed with musical items (jazz and poetry used to be a very popular mixture), is that audiences will come to associate poetry with pleasure and not feel that it is an art available only to an initiated minority.
40.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Ralph unlocked the door to his let and as he entered the dark, motionless hall experienced that momentary qualm of ownership which even after three years still lightly besieged him sometimes when he returned alone at the end of the day. When he had first bought the flat, he used to come home in an eager, questioning mood - often as early as he could -- wondering what it had been doing during the hours he had been away. It had represented a form of welcome to him, a region in which his focus was undisputed and reliable. He supposed that he should have worried about intruders or burst drains in that moment of reunion, but his flat had always been sitting waiting for him with an expression of independence or of neglect, depending on whether he'd left it tidy or not. In the end he had begun to regard it merely as another cloistered annexe of himself, a space into which the stuffy chambers of his heart and head had gradually overspilled their contents. He had grown impatient with its inability to be transformed. There was, of course, the small, angular puddle of letters which sometimes gathered by the door and the red eye of the answering machine which could occasionally be found resuscitated and blinking with life when he returned. And he was grateful that the glassy eyes of his windows hadn't been smashed nor the contents ravished with violence, mind you, he wondered what the flat would look like afterwards. From the dreary distance of his shabby third-floor office on the Holloway Road, Ralph often looked forward to his three or four solitary evenings at home each week. Once he had fled the fabricated world of the office and felt the memory of himself begin patchily to return on his bus journey home, he no longer needed to be on his own, a fact which seemed continually to elude him in his social calculations. Sitting exposed at his desk he would crave isolation, unlimited time alone amongst his possessions, but the relief of escape drained him and he would vainly wait for some sense of selfhood to return. Instead, there was merely a resounding emptiness, which made him suspect during his long hours of loneliness that the alien exercise of doing work which did not suit him had forced him to change, moving him further and further from what he liked to think of as himself. He would often read or listen to music as the night deepened outside, familiar habits which now, however, he would find himself asking for whom or what he did them. His points of reference had grown dim, his signposts muddied: sensations and ideas would arrive and then get lost, circulating around the junctions of his mind, unable to find a connection. There had been a time, he supposed, when he had not felt this powerless, when, had he but perceived his own worth, he might have escaped; but he had been so eager to fix himself up with something that he had been swept along by this great desire for something, and he had followed the first course which presented itself as if it had been ordained that he should do so. He had tried, of course, after he left university, to formulate some plan for his own betterment, but it hadn't really surprised him to find, when he searched himself for ambition, merely the desire unobtrusively to survive. He had applied for the types of jobs which had become familiar to him though the talk of his peers, had latched himself wearily on to their futures and jogged behind as they rushed towards them, unable to imagine that he might be put to some use which would manufacture as its by-product his own happiness. He had attended his only interview gratefully, and in the fever of examination did not think to test the position - an inexplicit editorial role on a free local newspaper for its own merits. Relieved at having pulled off twenty minutes of pleasant conversation with Neil, his boss, he had not considered the future of lengthy encounters by which he was now daily assaulted. Neil had offered him the job there and then, telling him he was the only graduate who had applied; a revelation which at the time Ralph had obscurely taken as a compliment.
41.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Art on TV Why is it that television so consistently fails when it comes to programmes about the visual arts? Painting and sculpture should be natural subjects for the camera, which has the ability to show a whole work of art, then move in close to examine the details. Yet I can think of few series on television that have managed to convey both the pleasure and complexity of looking at them. A good example of what goes wrong can be seen in Robert Hughes's eight part survey of American art, American Visions. Hughes is a critic you can trust, he has a personality that commands attention and he has been given nearly eight hours in which to introduce British audiences to a school of art that British galleries have totally ignored. I had expected the series to focus on great works of art. What I got instead was one about the way American history and culture are reflected in its art and architecture. Dealing in Metals For 20 years I worked as an international metals dealer and gained something of a reputation as a speculator. Metals are regulated far less than other markets. With a bit of luck, a willingness to take a risk and a good understanding of how the market works, it's possible to make a lot of money. Risk-taking is part and parcel of the industry. The buccaneering culture fits nicely with a free-market global economy. But now the free-trade economists who claimed the market itself would maintain the price of scarce metals have found the opposite is happening. More minerals are being extracted and the cost of raw materials is decreasing. Taking inflation into account, the prices of most metals are about half of what they were 20 years ago. Recently, I was asked to look into allegations made against one of the multinational conglomerates that benefit from these cheap raw materials. Extract from a Holiday Brochure Abaco and its off-shore cays are part of the 700 islands of the Bahamas that stretch from Florida past the Tropic of Cancer, to Cuba. Each one has its own personality, each one has something to offer. The key to getting anywhere in the islands and cays of Abaco is a boat. If you don't get one thrown in with the room don't worry. Be happy. There are ferries galore. And water-taxis. Or, there are plenty of boats to rent if you prefer to go under your own steam. But sailing is the most popular mode of transport here. Abaco is nicknamed 'The Sailing Capital of the World' for good reason. Those calm, naturally protected waters are also a paradise for fishing, diving, snorkelling and swimming. The cays and their beaches stretch for 200 miles like a string of pearls. It's not only at sea that gems can be found. At night it's the lights of the restaurants and cafes of Hope Town and Green Turtle Cay that sparkle.
42.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Food There is something very elemental and satisfying about our relationship with food. I know I may be preaching to the converted, because presumably people keen on cooking buy cookery books like this one, but so often we imagine that, unless it is some special occasion or an especially elaborate dish, it is hardly worth attempting. Not so. Just by throwing a few roughly chopped carrots, a leek, some celery and a few herbs into water you will get the most delicious soup. This is much more satisfying than buying a packet or opening a tin. Instead of buying an over-sweet chocolate mousse full of preservatives, emulsifiers and additives, in five minutes you can turn out the most delicious confection that both grown-ups and children will love. Cooking is also an offering, and it is a gesture of care and love to bring once own creation, however humble or simple, to the table. Sharing food is so rich in symbolism, of our deepest human needs, that it is hardly surprising all our festivities and celebrations take place around tables, be they birthdays, anniversaries, engagements or whatever! No one would have a takeaway for a wedding or anniversary party! Nor would many people wish to have a business deal discussed over tinned soup. In the Elevator This morning, Alistair had made a stab at straightening up his office, but correspondence still littered every surface. Quarterly tax forms, state and federal, bulged out of desk drawers and cardboard boxes, all waiting on a day when he was in the filing mode. And then there was all the added paperwork that went along with owning an apartment building. The hundred-odd books and a few years' worth of journals were only in proximity to the new bookshelves. As the elevator bore him closer to his floor, he knew that Mallory would be on time for their appointment. She would be knocking on the door of his empty office on the hour, not a second before or after. She was as compulsive about time as she was about neatness. How would she react to the mess? She might assume he'd been vandalised. He could walk in behind her and feign shock. Mrs Wilson, his cleaning woman, had arrived while he was scrambling around on the floor, trying desperately to clear a few square feet of the carpet. Putting his head out of the office door as she was turning her key in the lock of his apartment, he had smiled at her, his eyes filled with hope. Her own eyes had turned hard. Fat chance I'm going in there, said the back of her head as she had disappeared into his residence, which was her territory and all that she might be held accountable for. He knew Mrs Wilson believed him to be a visitor from somewhere else, perhaps some point straight up, miles out, but nowhere on the surface of her own earth, which was square and shaped by the streets of Brooklyn. KAREN It was a simple desire - not to be like her mother - that led Karen to create her own story, her own mythology, a mythology of difference and strength. Tn the tale that she constructed for herself, there were significant moments in her progress; such as the day she was twelve years old and her brother quick-swung a golf club behind him and hit her full in the eye. At the first moment of impact, she was convinced of immediate blindness. But the bone hod protected her, as the doctor from the high-walled house later assured her. The golf club had clean missed the eye and she was left with only a few stitches that healed to a pole drawing of past suffering. When she opened her eyes in the doctor's white-walled consulting room, overlooking the tennis courts, ond saw her mother clear before her, muttering predictably and paradoxically about both miracles and small mercies, she knew that she was saved for some purpose. Miss Fogerty Miss Fogerty, returning briskly to her duties across the wet grass of the village green, was both excited and saddened by the scene she had just witnessed. It is always exhilarating to be the first to know something of note, particularly in a small community, and Miss Fogerty's quiet life held little excitement. On the other hand, her grief for Dr Bailey's condition was overwhelming. He has attended her for many years and she remembered with gratitude his concern for her annual bouts of laryngitis which were, fortunately, about the only troubles for which she had to consult him. His most valuable quality, Miss Fogerty considered, was his making one feel that there was always plenty of time, and that he truly wished to hear about his patients' fears and perplexities. It was this quality, above all others, which had so endeared the good doctor to the village and its environs. He had always been prepared to give -- of his time, of his knowledge, and of his humour. His reward had been outstanding loyalty and affection.
43.txt	en	cambridge-exams	document-level	reference	C2	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	THE WELL I had read somewhere that from a sufficiently deep hole, one could see the stars, if the day were clear. I had persuaded you to help me with my scheme; you watched, eyes wide, fist to mouth, as I winched up the well bucket, steadied it on the wall and then climbed in. I told you to let me down. I had not thought to allow for the bucket's much increased weight, your lack of strength or inclination to just stand back and let what would happen, happen. You held the handle, taking some of the strain as I pushed the bucket off the side of the well's stone surround. Freed of the wall's support, I plunged immediately. You gave a little shriek and made one attempt to brake the handle, then you let it go. I fell into the well. I cracked my head. It did not occur to me then that I had succeeded, in a sense, in my plan. What I saw were lights, strange, inchoate and bizarre. It was only later that I connected the visual symptoms of that fall and impact with the stylised stars and planets I was used to seeing drawn in a cartoon panel whenever a comic character suffered a similar whack. At the time I was at first just dazed, then frightened, then relieved, then finally both angry at you for letting me fall and afraid of what Mother would say. You called down, asking if I was all right. I opened my mouth to shout, and then you called again, a note of rising panic in your voice, and with those words stopped mine in my throat. I lay still, eyelids cracked enough to watch you through the foliage of lashes. You disappeared, calling out for help. I waited a moment, then quickly hauled and pushed my way to the top, then pulled myself over the edge and landed on the courtyard cobbles. I could hear raised, alarmed voices coming from the castle's main door. I ran the opposite way, down to the passage leading to the moat bridge, and hid in the shadows there. Mother and Father both appeared along with you and old Arthur; Mother shrieked, flapping her hands. Father shouted and told Arthur to haul on the winch handle. You stood back, looking pale and shocked, watching. I was bowed in the shadows. A fire of fierce elation filled me. Then I saw the line of drops I'd left, from the well to where I now stood. I looked in horror at the spots, dark coins of dirty well water fallen from my soaking clothes on to the dry, grey cobbles. At my feet, in the darkness, the water had formed a little pool. I looked back into the courtyard, to where Father was now shining a flashlight down into the well and peering into the gloom. The drops I had left shone in the sunlight. I could not believe that nobody had seen them. Mother was screaming hysterically now, a sharp, jarring noise that I had never heard before. It shook my soul, suffused my conscience. What was I to do? I had had my revenge on you, but where did I go from here? This had quickly become more serious than I'd anticipated, escalating with dizzying rapidity from a great prank born of a brilliant brainwave to something that would not be put to rest without some serious, painful and lasting punishment being inflicted on somebody, almost certainly myself. I cursed myself for not thinking this through. From crafty plan, to downfall, to wheeze, to calamity; all in a few minutes. The plan came to me like a lifebelt to a drowning man. I gathered all my courage and left my hiding place, coming staggering out and blinking. I cried out faintly, one hand to my brow, then yelled out a little louder when my first cry went unheeded. I stumbled on a little further, then collapsed dramatically on the cobbles. Sitting up, comforted, my head in my weeping mother's bosom, I went 'Phew' and said 'Oh dear' and smiled bravely and claimed that I had found a secret tunnel from the bottom of the well to the moat, and crawled and swum along it until I got out, climbed up the bridge and tottered, exhausted, through the passageway. To this day I think I was almost getting away with it until Father appeared squatting in front of me. He had me repeat my story. I did so, hesitating. His eyes narrowed. Thinking I was plugging a gap, in fact only adding another log to my pyre, I said that the secret passage had fallen in after me; there wouldn't be any point in, say, sending somebody down to look for it. In fact the whole well was dangerous. I'd barely escaped with my life. I looked into my father's eyes and it was like looking into a dark tunnel with no stars at the end. It was as though he was seeing me for the first time, and as though I was looking down a secret passage through time, to an adult perspective, to the way the world and cocky, lying children's stories would look to me when I was his age. My words died in my throat. 'Don't be ridiculous, boy,' he said, investing more contempt in those few words than I'd have thought a whole language capable of conveying. He rose smoothly to his feet and walked away. Arthur looked down at me, his expression regretful and troubled, shaking his head or looking like he wanted to, not because I had had a terrifying adventure and then been unjustly disbelieved by my own father, but because he too could see through my forlorn and hapless lie, and worried for the soul, the character, the future moral standing of any child so shameless - and so incompetent - in its too easily resorted-to lying. In that pity was a rebuke as severe and wounding as that my father had administered, and in as much that it confirmed that this was the mature judgement of my actions and my father's, not some aberration I might be able to discount or ignore, it affected me even more profoundly.

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