Read the passage: Tanvir opened a small mobile phone repair stall in a busy market in Chattogram three years ago. At first he charged the same price for every screen replacement, but he soon found that he was losing money on expensive models. He now keeps a printed list of prices for each brand and model, which he updates every month as the cost of spare parts changes. Customers can also choose between an original screen and a cheaper copy, and Tanvir explains the difference honestly before starting work. He gives a three-month guarantee on all original parts but only one month on copies. His honest explanations, he believes, are the main reason so many customers return and recommend him to friends.
Read the passage: A vaccine works by training the immune system to recognise a disease-causing germ without the person having to suffer the illness itself. It usually contains a weakened or killed form of the germ, or just a harmless piece of it. The body responds by making antibodies and special memory cells. If the real germ later invades, these cells recognise it and mount a rapid defence before it can cause serious harm. The idea dates back to 1796, when the English doctor Edward Jenner showed that material from cowpox sores could protect people against the far deadlier smallpox. Nearly two centuries later, after a worldwide vaccination campaign, smallpox became the first human disease ever to be declared eradicated.
Correct answerA. Vaccines prepare the body to fight germs, an idea that has had enormous success.
Read the passage: Last year the private company that runs buses on the main road of a small town in Sindh raised its fares by forty per cent, blaming higher diesel prices. Within a few months the buses, once crowded at every stop, were running half empty. Many office workers began sharing rickshaws, and several students bought second-hand motorbikes. Shopkeepers along the route complained that fewer customers were passing by. In March the company announced that it would cut fares back to just ten per cent above the old level and introduce a cheaper monthly pass for students. The manager said in an interview that the company had 'learnt a lesson' about its passengers.
Correct answerA. Many passengers will switch to other transport if fares rise too sharply.
Read the passage: Pasteurisation takes its name from the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who showed in the 1860s that gently heating wine could kill the microbes that made it turn sour. The same principle was later applied to milk, which can carry bacteria responsible for serious illnesses. In a common modern method, milk is heated to about seventy-two degrees Celsius for around fifteen seconds and then cooled quickly. This kills most harmful bacteria without boiling the milk or greatly changing its taste. Pasteurised milk still needs to be kept in a refrigerator, because the process does not destroy every microbe. It does, however, make the milk far safer to drink and allows it to stay fresh for several days longer.
Correct answerB. Preventing wine from turning sour
Read the passage: Nani, as everyone in the Ahmed household calls their grandmother, has always been frugal. She saves rubber bands from vegetable bundles, turns old saris into quilts and keeps a tin of buttons cut from worn-out shirts. When the family's ceiling fan stopped working, she refused to let her grandson buy a new one until a local mechanic had tried to repair it, which he did for a small fee. Her habits once embarrassed her grandchildren, who thought them old-fashioned. Recently, however, her granddaughter Mehreen studied environmental science at college and came home declaring that Nani had been practising 'reduce, reuse and recycle' long before anyone had invented the slogan.
Correct answerD. Careful to avoid waste and unnecessary spending
Read the passage: On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained flights in a powered aeroplane. The brothers ran a bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio, and had spent several years testing gliders and building their own wind tunnel to study wing shapes. On that cold, windy morning Orville piloted the first flight, which lasted about twelve seconds and covered roughly thirty-seven metres. The brothers took turns and made four flights that day. The longest, flown by Wilbur, lasted fifty-nine seconds. Few newspapers reported the achievement at first, and it was several years before the wider public fully appreciated what the Wrights had done.
Read the passage: Before her first-year exams at university in Islamabad, Zara stayed up until three in the morning for a week, drinking strong tea and rereading her notes. In the exam hall she found that facts she had studied the night before seemed to slip away, and her marks were lower than she had hoped. For the second-year exams she changed her approach. She began revising a month earlier, studied in short sessions with breaks, and made sure she slept at least seven hours every night. She also tested herself with practice questions rather than simply rereading. This time she felt calmer in the hall and remembered far more. Her results improved in every subject.
Correct answerA. Getting enough sleep probably helped her remember what she had studied.
Read the passage: Aluminium is one of the most valuable materials found in household rubbish. Producing new aluminium from bauxite ore requires enormous amounts of electricity, but melting down used cans and foil needs only around five per cent of that energy. Better still, aluminium can be recycled again and again without losing its strength or quality, so a drinks can thrown into a recycling bin today could be back on a shop shelf as a new can within a few months. Because scrap aluminium is so useful, collectors in many cities pay for it by weight. Despite this, large numbers of cans still end up buried in landfill sites, where the metal remains virtually unchanged for a very long time.
Read the passage: In many neighbourhoods of Pakistan, friends and relatives save money through an informal arrangement often called a committee. In one such group in Faisalabad, ten women each contribute five thousand rupees every month. Each month the full fifty thousand rupees goes to one member, chosen by drawing names, until everyone has received the sum once. No interest is charged or paid. Shazia, a schoolteacher, used her turn to buy a washing machine, while her neighbour Rukhsana paid her son's college fees. The system depends entirely on trust, since there is no written contract. Members say that the monthly meetings, where tea and gossip are shared, are almost as valuable as the money itself.
Read the passage: In 1941 a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral returned from a walk in the countryside to find his clothes and his dog's coat covered in burrs. Curious, he examined one under a microscope and saw that it was covered in tiny hooks that caught on anything with loops, such as fabric or fur. He wondered whether the same idea could be used to fasten things together. It took him years of experiments to find a way of making hooks and loops from nylon that were strong and could be produced cheaply. He eventually patented his invention in the 1950s and called it Velcro. Today it is used on shoes, bags, jackets, medical equipment and even in spacecraft.
Correct answerB. An everyday observation of nature led to a widely used invention.
Read the passage: Gurpreet farms six acres near Bathinda in Punjab. For years he flooded his fields with water pumped from a tube well, and each year he noticed the pump had to work harder as the water level underground dropped. Three years ago, with the help of a government subsidy, he installed drip irrigation on half his land. Thin pipes now deliver water directly to the roots of his vegetable plants. His electricity costs for pumping on that half have fallen, fewer weeds grow between the rows, and his yields have stayed the same or improved. Several neighbours who once laughed at the black pipes running across his fields have recently visited to ask how the system works.
Correct answerD. They have become interested in drip irrigation after seeing its results.
Read the passage: The human heart is a muscular pump about the size of a closed fist. It is divided into four chambers: two upper chambers called atria and two lower chambers called ventricles. The right side of the heart receives blood that has travelled around the body and given up much of its oxygen, then pumps it to the lungs. There the blood picks up fresh oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. The oxygen-rich blood returns to the left side of the heart, which pumps it out to the rest of the body. Valves between the chambers open and close with every beat, making sure that blood flows in only one direction. The familiar 'lub-dub' sound heard through a stethoscope is made by these valves closing.
Read the passage: When a honeybee forager discovers a rich patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs a movement known as the waggle dance. She runs in a straight line while shaking her body, then loops back and repeats the run. The angle of the straight run, measured against the vertical surface of the comb, tells her sisters the direction of the food relative to the sun. The length of time she spends waggling indicates how far away the flowers are, with longer runs signalling greater distances. The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch spent decades decoding this behaviour and shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work. His research showed that insects can pass on surprisingly precise information without sound or words.
Read the passage: In 1928 the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming returned from a holiday to find that one of his culture plates of bacteria had been contaminated by a mould. Around the mould was a clear ring where the bacteria had failed to grow. Fleming realised that the mould was releasing a substance that killed the bacteria, and he named it penicillin. However, he struggled to produce the substance in large, pure amounts, and for several years his discovery attracted little attention. It was only around 1940 that a team at Oxford, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, found ways to purify penicillin and test it on patients. By the end of the Second World War it was being made in large quantities and had saved many lives.
Correct answerB. A clear ring where bacteria had not grown
Read the passage: Ayesha runs a small tailoring shop in Multan. Last spring she replaced the twelve old tube lights in her workroom with LED panels, which cost her more than she had expected. Her brother told her she had wasted money. Over the following six months, however, she noticed that her monthly electricity bill had fallen steadily, even though she was working longer hours to finish wedding orders. She also no longer needed to call an electrician every few weeks to replace a flickering tube. By the end of the year Ayesha had calculated that the savings had already covered the price of the new lights. She now plans to replace the ceiling fans with energy-efficient models when she has saved enough.
Correct answerD. Her brother's view about the LED panels turned out to be mistaken.
Read the passage: Reef-building corals live in close partnership with tiny algae that dwell inside their tissues. The algae use sunlight to make food, sharing much of it with the coral, and they also give many corals their bright colours. When sea temperatures stay unusually high for several weeks, this partnership breaks down and the coral expels the algae. Without them, the coral's tissue becomes nearly transparent, and its white limestone skeleton shows through, a process called bleaching. A bleached coral is not necessarily dead. If the water cools in time, the algae can return and the coral may recover. If the heat persists, however, the weakened coral is likely to starve or fall victim to disease.
Read the passage: Many people throw away food simply because they misunderstand the dates printed on its packaging. In the United Kingdom, a 'use by' date appears on foods that spoil quickly, such as fresh meat, fish and ready meals. These foods should not be eaten after that date, even if they look and smell fine, because harmful bacteria may be present. A 'best before' date, by contrast, is about quality rather than safety. Biscuits, rice, tinned goods and many other items are usually safe to eat after their best before date, although they may have lost some flavour or crispness. Learning the difference between the two labels can help households save money and cut down on the large amount of edible food that ends up in the bin.
Correct answerD. To explain the difference between two kinds of date labels
Read the passage: Rahim, a bank clerk in Dhaka, used to spend nearly an hour each morning sitting in a rickshaw stuck in traffic. Six months ago he bought a second-hand bicycle for four thousand taka and began cycling the seven kilometres to work. At first his legs ached and he arrived sweaty, so he started keeping a fresh shirt in his office drawer. Now the journey takes him about twenty-five minutes. He has lost three kilograms, sleeps better and says he feels more alert during morning meetings. The only days he leaves the bicycle at home are during heavy monsoon downpours, when the roads near his house flood. Two of his colleagues have since asked him for advice on buying bicycles of their own.
Read the passage: Before the middle of the fifteenth century, most books in Europe were copied by hand, a slow process that made them rare and costly. Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz in Germany, began developing a printing system that combined several ideas. He cast individual letters in metal so that they could be arranged, inked and reused many times. He also used an oil-based ink that stuck well to metal and adapted a screw press of the kind used for pressing grapes. His famous Bible was completed in the mid-1450s. Within a few decades, printing shops had opened in many European cities, books became far cheaper, and new ideas could spread more quickly than ever before.
Correct answerC. Gutenberg's printing system made books cheaper and helped ideas spread.
Read the passage: Every evening Sunita buys vegetables from a market near her flat in Pune. In early winter she noticed that tomatoes, which had cost eighty rupees a kilogram during the monsoon, were selling for barely twenty. The seller explained that farmers in nearby districts had all harvested at the same time, and lorries full of tomatoes were arriving at the wholesale market every morning. Some traders, he added, were even leaving unsold crates beside the road. Sunita bought three kilograms and made a large batch of chutney to store in jars. She remembered that the previous year the same thing had happened, and that prices had climbed again by late spring.
Correct answerB. They tend to fall when the supply is much larger than usual.
