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Reading passage


Under the great Moghul emperors, artists emerged from their previous anonymity. They were allowed, for the first time, to sign their work, and even encouraged to include self-portraits in their paintings. And the artists‟ skills did not go unrewarded : one emperor even presented a favourite painter with an
elephant, the ultimate status symbol of the age. Yet little is known about the artists‟ lives. The more successful may have enjoyed an economic status similar to lower-level nobles. However, their simple dress in the self-portraits suggests that the rewards for many painters did not always match their unquestionable talent.


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Reading passage


Four years ago, Craig Keilburger, a Canadian boy then only 12 years old, founded Free the Children, a youth organisation aimed at ending child labour and encouraging youth involvement in community service. Since then, hundreds of local chapters have formed all over the world, participating in everything from letter-writing campaigns to programmes like “Rugmark”, a labelling system forcarpets made without child labour. Now 16, Keilburger has travelled extensively, meeting children from Pakistan to Brazil and giving speeches on child exploitation.



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Reading passage


The producer is the person who starts and controls the whole process of making a film. He may buy the film rights to a book or employ a scriptwriter to write a script. He employs all the staff, both technical and creative involved in the making of the film, including the director. He is also in control of the finances of the film, and it is his responsibility to see that the cost does not exceed the budget allowed. Unlike today, in the golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s and ‟40s, the famous names were the producers like David Selnnick and Samuel Goldwin, and not the directors.



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Reading passage


At present, there are only two people in the world who have undergone successful hand transplants. This operation has only recently been available and the second successful transplant was carried out in January, 1999. Since this operation, more than one hundred people have contacted the doctor who carried out the operation. Potential candidates are put through medical, psychiatric and psychological tests. Their medical histories are scrutinized. Moreover, they are bluntly told of the risks of the medication that suppresses the immune system. This is necessary to prevent the body from rejecting the foreign tissue in the new hand, which is taken from a dead body.



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Reading passage


One of the smallest of all mammals is the shrew, a mouse like creature with a head and body length of only 3.8 centimetres. All shrews are small, with dense, velvety fur, long tails, and tiny eyes and ears. Shrews have been called bloodthirsty, though the label is not entirely accurate because they must eat almost constantly to stay alive. The animal is believed to have a very high metabolic rate and cannot live more than a few hours without food. In the absence of normal prey, it will turn to cannibalism to survive. The shrew, or some closely related animal, can be found on every continent except Australia.
Since this tiny animal has a reputation for having a very bad temper, the adjective “shrewish” is sometimes used to describe a certain type of women.



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Reading passage


Over the past 30 years, children‟s consumption in Britain has increased dramatically. In the average family of two parents and two children, spending on toys and children‟s clothing has more than tripled, and spending on sweets, ice-cream and soft drinks has risen by one-third. Research has recently found that spending is around £3,000 per child per year. The growth in spending reflects higher living
standards, but it has been boosted by the efforts of the advertising industry. Campaigns directed straight at children account for much advertising expenditure. Most children in Britain over eight now have a television in the bedroom; on average, they watch 900 hours of TV a year, which is more than the 750 hours the average child is actually being taught in school. Thus a child could see at least 10,000 commercials a year.


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Reading passage


A movement called Jubilee 2000 is campaigning for Third World debt cancellation as a fitting way to mark the millennium. Launched two years ago, the group is now working in 42 countries, and is now supported by a large number of celebrities. Leaders of the group are harsh critics of the big creditors‟ role in the developing world. In Tanzania, for example, one child in six dies before the age of five due to the lack of proper health care, but the government spends four times more on paying the interest on its debts than on primary health care. Money needed for health and education programs goes instead to rich international creditors, whose billions have often supported corrupt elites.


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Reading passage


Palmistry is the practice of „reading hands‟, of gaining knowledge about personality, past individual history, and likely future events by examining the shape and size of the fingers and, most important, the lines and bumps on the palms themselves. There is some evidence that palmistry may have begun in the Stone Age. Hand outlines can be seen in black and red pigments on the walls of the ancient caves of Almira in Spain and in other European caves. Palmistry as it exists today probably had its origins in ancient India long before recorded history and found its way into western Europe through nomadic bands of Gypsies, who made contact with Europe in the 15th century.


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Reading passage

Aphids are tiny green insects that are a chronic pest for farmers. Spiders and ground beetles living along field margins can keep their numbers under control. But as fields have become larger, the spiders and beetles take longer to get to the middle of them, so farmers began using pesticides for a problem that was once controlled naturally. An insect ecologist came up with a new solution called “beetle banks”.
These are one metre-wide strips of grass planted at 100-metre intervals across the fields. After two years, there will be enough beetles and spiders in one beetle bank to eat 52 million aphids a week, and the farmer will get rid of aphids without using a single drop of pesticide.


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Reading passage

In the face of advancing Japanese troops during World War II, US and Filipino forces under General Douglas MacArthur abandoned Manila and retreated west to the Bataan Peninsula. Crippled by malaria, weakened from their decision to share their food rations with the civilians, and demoralised after MacArthur‟s departure for Australia, the surviving defenders surrendered when they became convinced that no outside help would arrive. What followed became known as the Bataan Death March. The Japanese led 55,000 American and Filipino prisoners on a brutal six-day, 120-mile trek to a prison in the Pampanga Province. Each day on the way ended with the slaughter of all prisoners too ill to continue.
More than half the captives died in this way and another 25% perished in the camp before the war ended.


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Reading passage

Contrary to common knowledge, the water, milk and meat of coconuts only begin the list of uses of this versatile tree. The outer husk of the ripe nuts contains fibres that, when separated, can be twisted into twine rope of amazing toughness. It is quite resistant to rot from dampness or seawater. Despite the advent of nails and screws, this rope continues to be widely used for binding together the timbers of houses and the parts of canoes, tools and the like. Expert craftsmen can make sizeable ropes, which, after use, become quite flexible. The inner shell of the ripe nut can be cut and carved into ladles, scrapers, combs and cups and will take a high polish. Furthermore, the sap of the coconut -1 can be fermented to make a pleasant tasting wine, while the fresh sap can be used as food for babies.


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Reading passage

The word alphabet is made up from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet – alpha and beta – and describes any group of symbols intended to represent the sounds used in speech. The letters of an alphabet can be assembled in thousands of different combinations to form words, and are therefore much more flexible than other symbols, such as pictograms or ideograms each of which can only stand for one particular object or idea. The origin of alphabets is obscure. Some scholars believe that the first true alphabets developed from Egyptian Hieroglyphics; others contend that the cuneiform scripts of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians hold the key.


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Reading passage


The Rhine is a European river which rises in the Swiss Alps and flows northward for a distance of 1320 kilometres, entering the North Sea just south of the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It is navigable all the way from the sea to Basle, Switzerland, and for this reason is of great commercial importance, serving the industrial region of Ruhr and such inland ports as Cologne, Manheim and Strasbourg. It is connected by canal with the Danube and the Rhone Its most famous stretch is the Rhine Gorge, the steep sides being given over to vineyards. Politically, too, the Rhine has played a big part in European history, providing a natural frontier between French speaking people to the west and Germanic peoples to the east.


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