Reading Practice

Reading Practice Test 2

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.

The Innovation of Grocery Stores

A At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American grocery stores offered
comprehensive services: the customers would ask help from the people behind the
counters (called clerks) for the items they liked, and then the clerks would wrap the items
up. For the purpose of saving time, customers had to ask delivery boys or go in person to
send the lists of what they intended to buy to the stores in advance and then went to pay
for the goods later. Generally speaking, these grocery stores sold only one brand for
each item. Such early chain stores as A&P stores, although containing full services, were
very time-consuming and inefficient for the purchase.

B Bom in Virginia, Clarence Saunders left school at the age of 14 in 1895 to work first as a
clerk in a grocery store. During his working in the store, he found that it was very inefficient
for people to buy things there. Without the assistance of computers at that time, shopping
was performed in a quite backward way. Having noticed that this inconvenient shopping
mode could lead to tremendous consumption of time and money, Saunders, with great
enthusiasm and innovation, proposed an unprecedented solution—let the consumers do
self-service in the process of shopping—which might bring a thorough revolution to the
whole industry.
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C In 1902, Saunders moved to Memphis to put his perspective into practice, that is, to
establish a grocery wholesale cooperative. In his newly designed grocery store, he divided
the store into three different areas: ‘A front lobby’ served as an entrance, an exit, as well as
the checkouts at the front. ‘A sales department’ was deliberately designed to allow
customers to wander around the aisle and select their needed groceries. In this way, the
clerks would not do the unnecessary work but arrange more delicate aisle and shelves to
display the goods and enable the customers to browse through all the items. In the gallery
above the sales department, supervisors can monitor the customers without disturbing
them. ‘Stockroom’, where large fridges were placed to maintain fresh products, is another
section of his grocery store only for the staff to enter. Also, this new shopping design and
layout could accommodate more customers to go shopping simultaneously and even lead
to some unimaginable phenomena: impulse buying and later supermarket.

D On September 6, 1916, Saunders performed the self-service revolution in the USA by

opening the first Piggly Wiggly featured by the turnstile at the entrance store at 79
Jefferson Street in Memphis, Tennessee. Quite distinct from those in other grocery
stores, customers in Piggly Wiggly chose the goods on the shelves and paid the items all
by themselves. Inside the Piggly Wiggly, shoppers were not at the mercy of staff.
They were free to roam the store, check out the products and get what they needed by
their own hands. There, the items were clearly priced, and no one forced customers to buy
the things they did not need. As a matter of fact, the biggest benefit that the Piggly
Wiggly brought to customers was the money-saving effect. Self-service was optimistic for
the improvement. ‘It is good for both the consumer and retailer because it cuts costs,’
noted George T. Haley, a professor at the University of New Haven and director of the
Centre for International Industry Competitiveness, ‘if you look at the way in which
grocery stores (previous to Piggly Wiggly and Alpha Beta) were operated, what you can
find is that there are a great number of workers involved, and labour is a major expense.’
Fortunately, the chain stores such as Piggly Wiggly cut the fat.

E Piggly Wiggly and this kind of self-service stores soared at that time. In the first year,
Saunders opened nine branches in Memphis. Meanwhile, Saunders immediately applied a
patent for the self-service concept and began franchising Piggly Wiggly stores. Thanks to
the employment of self-service and franchising, the number of Piggly Wiggly
had increased to nearly 1,300 by 1923. Piggly Wiggly sold $100 million (worth $1.3
billion today) in groceries, which made it the third-biggest grocery retailer in the nation.
After that, this chain store experienced company listing on the New York Stock
Exchange, with the stocks doubling from late 1922 to March 1923. Saunders contributed
significantly to the perfect design and layout of grocery stores. In order to keep the flow
rate smooth, Saunders even invented the turnstile to replace the common entrance mode.

F Clarence Saunders died in 1953, leaving abundant legacies mainly symbolised by Piggly
Wiggly, the pattern of which spread extensively and lasted permanently.
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Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1 layout of Clarence Saunders’ store

2 a reference to a reduction by chain stores in labour costs

3 how Clarence Saunders’ idea had been carried out

4 how people used to shop before Clarence Saunders’ stores

opened

5 a description of economic success brought by Clarence

Saunders’s stores

Questions 6-10
Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.

Clarence Saunders’ first job was as 6 in a grocery store.

In Clarence Saunders’ store, people should pay for goods at a

7

Customers would be under surveillance at the 8

Another area in his store was called ' 9 ’, which was only
accessible to the internal staff.

In Clarence Saunders’ shopping design, much work was done by

10 .

Questions 11-13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D,

Write the correct letter in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.

11

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Why did Clarence Saunders want to propel the improvement of grocery stores at his
age?

A  He wanted to transfer business to retailing.

B  He thought it was profitable.

C  He thought this could enable customers’ life to be more convenient.

D  He wanted to create a new shop by himself.

The Piggly Wiggly store

12 was

A  located in Memphis Tennessee.

B  mainly featured in self-service.

C  initially very unpopular with customers.

D  developed with a pessimistic future.

Today, the main thing associated with Clarence Saunders is

13 that

A  a fully automatic store system opened soon near his first store.

B  his Piggly Wiggly store was very popular at that time.

C  his name was usually connected with Piggly Wiggly stores.

D  his name was printed together with that of his famous store.

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.

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The Study of Chimpanzee Culture
A After studying the similarities between chimpanzees and humans for years, researchers
have recognised these resemblances run much deeper than anyone first thought in
the latest decade. For instance, the nut cracking observed in the Tai Forest is not a
simple chimpanzee behaviour, but a separate adaptation found only in that particular part
of Africa, as well as a trait which is considered to be an expression of chimpanzee culture
by biologists. These researchers frequently quote the word ‘culture’ to describe
elementary animal behaviours, like the regional dialects of different species of songbirds,
but it turns out that the rich and varied cultural traditions chimpanzees enjoyed rank
secondly in complexity only to human traditions.

B During the past two years, the major research group which studies chimpanzees
collaborated unprecedentedly and documented some distinct cultural patterns, ranging
from animals’ use of tools to their forms of communication and social customs. This
emerging picture of chimpanzees affects how human beings ponder upon these amazing
creatures. Also, it alters our conception of human uniqueness and shows us the
extraordinary ability of our ancient ancestors to create cultures.

C Although we know that Homo sapiens and Pan Troglodytes have coexisted for
hundreds of millennia and their genetic similarities surpass 98 per cent, we still knew next
to nothing about chimpanzee behaviour in the wild until 40 years ago. All this began to
change in the 1960s when Toshisada Nishida of Kyoto University in Japan and renowned
British primatologist Jane Goodall launched their studies of wild chimpanzees at two field
sites in Tanzania. (Goodall’s research station at Gombe—the first of its kind—is more
famous, but Nishida’s site at Mahale is the second oldest chimpanzee research site in the
world.)

D During these primary studies, as the chimpanzees became more and more accustomed
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to close observation, the remarkable discoveries emerged. Researchers witnessed a
variety of unexpected behaviours, ranging from fashioning and using tools, hunting, meat
eating, food sharing to lethal fights between members of neighbouring communities.

E In 1973, 13 forms of tool use and 8 social activities which appeared to differ between the
Gombe chimpanzees and chimpanzee species elsewhere were recorded by Goodall.
She speculated that some variations shared what she referred to as a ‘cultural origin’. But
what exactly did Goodall mean by ‘culture’? According to the Oxford Encyclopedic
English Dictionary, culture is defined as ‘the customs. . .and achievements of a particular
time or people.’ The diversity of human cultures extends from technological variations to
marriage rituals, from culinary habits to myths and legends. Of course, animals do not
have myths and legends, but they do share the capacity to pass on behavioural traits from
one generation to another, not through their genes but via learning. From biologists’ view,
this is the fundamental criterion for a cultural trait—something can be learnt by observing
the established skills of others and then passed on to following generations.

F What are the implications for chimpanzees themselves? We must place a high value
upon the tragic loss of chimpanzees, who are decimated just when finally we are coming
to appreciate these astonishing animals more completely. The population of chimpanzees
has plummeted and continued to fall due to illegal trapping, logging and, most recently,
the bushmeat trade within the past century. The latter is particularly alarming because
logging has driven roadways, which are now used to ship wild animal meat—including
chimpanzee meat to consumers as far afield as Europe, into forests. Such destruction
threatens not only the animals themselves but also a host of fascinatingly different ape
cultures.

G However, the cultural richness of the ape may contribute to its salvation. For example,
the conservation efforts have already altered the attitudes of some local people. After
several organisations showed videotapes illustrating the cognitive prowess of
chimpanzees, one Zairian viewer was heard to exclaim, ‘Ah, this ape is so like me, I can
no longer eat him.’

H How did an international team of chimpanzee experts perform the most comprehensive
survey of the animals ever attempted? Although scientists have been delving into
chimpanzee culture for several decades, sometimes their studies contained a fatal defect.
So far, most attempts to document cultural diversity among chimpanzees have solely
relied upon officially published accounts of the behaviours reported at each research site.
But this approach probably neglects a good deal of cultural variation for three reasons.

I First, scientists normally don’t publish an extensive list of all the activities they do not see
at a particular location. Yet this is the very information we need to know—which
behaviours were and were not observed at each site. Second, there are many reports
describing chimpanzee behaviours without expressing how common they are; without this

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information, we can’t determine whether a particular action was a transient phenomenon
or a routine event that should be considered part of its culture. Finally, researchers’
description of potentially significant chimpanzee behaviours often lacks sufficient detail,
which makes it difficult for scientists from other spots to report the presence or absence of
the activities.

J To tackle these problems, my colleague and I determined to take a new approach. We

asked field researchers at each site to list all the behaviours which they suspected
were local traditions. With this information, we assembled a comprehensive list of 65
candidates for cultural behaviours.

K Then we distributed our list to team leaders at each site. They consulted with their
colleagues and classified each behaviour regarding its occurrence or absence in the
chimpanzee community. The major brackets contained customary behaviour (occurs in
most or all of the able-bodied members of at least one age or sex class, such as all adult
males), habitual (less common than customary but occurs repeatedly in several
individuals), present (observed at the site but not habitual), absent (never seen), and
unknown.

Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has eleven paragraphs, A-K.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14
an approach to research on chimpanzees culture that is only
based on official sources

15
mention of a new system designed by two scientists who aim to
solve the problem

16
reasons why previous research on ape culture is problematic

17
new classification of data observed or collected

18
an example showing that the tragic outcome of animals leads
to an indication of a change in local people’s attitude in the preservation

Questions 19-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet, write

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 TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

19
The research found that scientists can make chimpanzees
possess the same complex culture as human beings.

20
Humans and apes lived together long time ago and shared
most of their genetic substance.

21
Even Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall’s beginning
studies observed many surprising features of civilised behaviours among
chimpanzees.

22
Chimpanzees, like humans, have the ability to deliver
cultural behaviours mostly from genetic inheritance.

23
For decades, researchers have investigated chimpanzees by
data obtained from both unobserved and observed approaches.

Questions 24-27
Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet.

When did the unexpected discoveries of chimpanzee behaviour start?

24

Which country is the researching site of Toshisada Nishida and Jane Goodall?

25

What did the chimpanzee have to get used to in the initial study?

26

What term can be used to depict that Jane Goodall found the chimpanzees
in different regions used the different tools in 1973?

27

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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

Quantitative Research in Education

Many education researchers used to work on the assumption that children experience
different phases of development, and that they cannot execute the most advanced level of
cognitive operation until they have reached the most advanced forms of cognitive process.
For example, one researcher Piaget had a well-known experiment in which he asked the
children to compare the amount of liquid in containers with different shapes. Those
containers had the same capacity, but even when the young children were demonstrated
that the same amount of fluid could be poured between the containers, many of them still
believed one was larger than the other. Piaget concluded that the children were incapable
of performing the logical task in figuring out that the two containers were the same size
even though they had different shapes, because their cognitive development had not
reached the necessary phase. Critics on his work, such as Donaldson, have questioned
this interpretation. They point out the possibility that the children were just unwilling to play
the experimenter’s game, or that they did not quite understand the question asked by the
experimenter. These criticisms surely do state the facts, but more importantly, it suggests
that experiments are social situations where interpersonal interactions take place. The
implication here is that Piaget’s investigation and his attempts to replicate it are not solely
about measuring the children’s capabilities of logical thinking, but also the degree to which
they could understand the directions for them, their willingness to comply with these
requirements, how well the experimenters did in communicating the requirements and in
motivating those children, etc.

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The same kinds of criticisms have been targeted to psychological and educational tests.
For instance, Mehan argues that the subjects might interpret the test questions in a way
different from that meant by the experimenter. In a language development test,
researchers show children a picture of a medieval fortress, complete with moat,
drawbridge, parapets and three initial consonants in it: D, C, and G. The children are
required to circle the correct initial consonant for ‘castle’. The answer is C, but many kids
choose D. When asked what the name of the building was, the children responded
‘Disneyland’. They adopted the reasoning line expected by the experimenter but got to the
wrong substantive answer. The score sheet with the wrong answers does not include in it
a child’s lack of reasoning capacity; it only records that the children gave a different
answer rather than the one the tester expected.

Here we are constantly getting questions about how valid the measures are where the
findings of the quantitative research are usually based. Some scholars such as Donaldson
consider these as technical issues, which can be resolved through more rigorous
experimentation. In contrast, others like Mehan reckon that the problems are not merely
with particular experiments or tests, but they might legitimately jeopardise the validity of all
researches of this type.

Meanwhile, there are also questions regarding the assumption in the logic of quantitative
educational research that causes can be identified through physical and/or statistical
manipulation of the variables. Critics argue that this does not take into consideration the
nature of human social life by assuming it to be made up of static, mechanical causal
relationships, while in reality, it includes complicated procedures of interpretation and
negotiation, which do not come with determinate results. From this perspective, it is not
clear that we can understand the pattern and mechanism behind people’s behaviours
simply in terms of the casual relationships, which are the focuses of quantitative research.
It is implied that social life is much more contextually variable and complex.

Such criticisms of quantitative educational research have also inspired more and more
educational researchers to adopt qualitative methodologies during the last three or four
decades. These researchers have steered away from measuring and manipulating
variables experimentally or statistically. There are many forms of qualitative research,
which is loosely illustrated by terms like ‘ethnography’, ‘case study’, ‘participant
observation’, ‘life history’, ‘unstructured interviewing’, ‘discourse analysis’ and so on.
Generally speaking, though, it has characteristics as follows:

Qualitative researches have an intensive focus on exploring the nature of certain

phenomena in the field of education, instead of setting out to test hypotheses about them.
It also inclines to deal with ‘unstructured data’, which refers to the kind of data that have
not been coded during the collection process regarding a closed set of analytical
categories. As a result, when engaging in observation, qualitative researchers use audio

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or video devices to record what happens or write in detail open-ended field-notes, instead
of coding behaviour concerning a pre-determined set of categories, which is what
quantitative researchers typically would do when conducting ‘systematic observation’.
Similarly, in an interview, interviewers will ask open-ended questions instead of ones that
require specific predefined answers of the kind typical, like in a postal questionnaire.
Actually, qualitative interviews are often designed to resemble casual conversations.

The primary forms of data analysis include verbal description and explanations and involve
explicit interpretations of both the meanings and functions of human behaviours. At
most, quantification and statistical analysis only play a subordinate role. The sociology of
education and evaluation studies were the two areas of educational research where-
criticism of quantitative research and the development of qualitative methodologies initially
emerged in the most intense way. A series of studies conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves
and Lambert in a boys’ grammar school, a boys’ secondary modem school, and a girls’
grammar school in Britain in the 1960s marked the beginning of the trend towards
qualitative research in the sociology of education. Researchers employed an ethnographic
or participant observation approach, although they did also collect some quantitative data,
for instance on friendship patterns among the students. These researchers observed
lessons, interviewed both the teachers and the students, and made the most of school
records. They studied the schools for a considerable amount of time and spent plenty of
months gathering data and tracking changes over all these years.

Questions 28-32
Look at the following statements or descriptions (Questions28-32) and the list of
people below.

Match each statement or description with the correct person or people,A, B, C or D

Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Lists of People

A Piaget

B Mehan

C Donaldson

D Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert

28
A wrong answer indicates more of a child’s different
perspective than incompetence in reasoning.

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29
Logical reasoning involving in the experiment is beyond
children’s cognitive development.

30
Children’s reluctance to comply with the game rules or
miscommunication may be another explanation.

31
There is an indication of a scientific observation approach in
research.

32
There is a detail of flaw in experiments on children’s language
development.

Questions 33-36
Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

In Piaget’s experiment, he asked the children to distinguish the amount of

33 in different containers.

Subjects with the wrong answer more inclined to answer ‘ 34 ’

instead of their wrong answer D in Mehan’s question.

Some people criticised the result of Piaget experiment, but Donaldson thought the
flaw could be rectified by 35

Most qualitative researches conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert were

done in a 36

Questions 37-39
Choose THREE letters, A-F.

Write the correct letters in boxes 37-39 on your answer sheet.

The list below includes characteristics of the ‘qualitative research’.

Which THREE are mentioned by the writer of the passage?

A  Coding behaviour in terms of a predefined set of categories

B  Designing an interview as an easy conversation
C  Working with well-organised data in a closed set of analytical categories

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 D  Full of details instead of loads of data in questionnaires
E  Asking to give open-ended answers in questionnaires
F  Recording the researching situation and applying note-taking

Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

What is the main idea of the

40 passage?

A  to prove that quantitative research is most applicable to children’s

education

B  to illustrate the society lacks of deep comprehension of educational

approach

C  to explain the ideas of quantitative research and the characteristics of the

related criticisms

D  to imply qualitative research is a flawless method compared with

quantitative one

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 Solution:

1 C 2 D

3 C 4 A

5 E 6 (a) clerk

7 front lobby 8 gallery

9 stockroom 10 customers

11 C 12 B

13 C 14 H

15 J 16 I

17 K 18 G

19 NOT GIVEN 20 TRUE

21 TRUE 22 FALSE

23 FALSE 24 in the 1960s

25 Tanzania 26 close observation

27 cultural origin 28 B

29 A 30 C

31 D 32 B

33 liquid 34 Disneyland

35 rigorous experimentation 36 grammar school

37
39
B,D,E 40 C

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