IESOL Reading – Sample Paper 1

Fear of wrong social priorities

I am a scientist. I design and construct robots. Being a 0) scientist, though, doesn't absolve me of my humanity. I must, at some level, reconnect with my hopes and fears. As a moral and political being, I have to consider the potential ____ of my work and its potential effects on society.

As researchers, and as a society, we have not yet come up with a clear idea of what we want robots to do or become. In part, of course, this is because we don't yet know what they are capable of. But we do need to decide what the desired ____ of advanced robotics is.

One big area people are paying attention to is employment. Robots are already doing physical work like welding car parts together. One day soon they may also do cognitive tasks we once thought were uniquely human. Self-driving cars could replace taxi drivers; self-flying planes could replace pilots.

____ getting medical aid in an emergency room staffed by potentially overtired doctors, patients could get an examination and diagnosis from an expert system with instant access to all medical knowledge ever collected – and get surgery performed by a tireless robot with a perfectly steady "hand." Legal advice could come from an all-knowing legal ____; investment advice could come from a market-prediction system.

Perhaps one day, all human jobs will be done by machines. Even my own job could be done faster, by a large number of machines tirelessly researching how to make even smarter machines.

In our current society, automation pushes people out of jobs, making the people who own the ____ richer and everyone else poorer. That is not a scientific issue; it is a political and socio-economic problem that we as a society must solve. My research will not change that, though my political self – together with the rest of humanity – may be able to create circumstances in which robots become broadly beneficial instead of increasing the ____ between the one percent and the rest of us.

Super-Nutritious Fruit and Vegetables

To all the reasons you might choose to grow one vegetable variety over another - appearance, flavour, yield, pest resistance, or regional adaptation - now you can add enhanced nutrition. The vegetables you'll read about here aren't just good for you. They've been bred to be better for you.

As nutrition research makes clearer each year, good foods are the best way to supply nutrients to our bodies. So naturally a vegetable's nutrient content is becoming an important measure of its value. Research is also showing that fruits and vegetables provide us with important disease-fighting chemicals. So it makes sense that plant breeders would focus on making vegetables even healthier. Needless to say, home gardeners are best positioned to take advantage of these breeding advances. None of these varieties are any more difficult to cultivate than older ones and most are readily available.

Researchers have gradually increased carotene levels over the years, says Phil Simon, a plant geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As recently as 1980, a typical hybrid carrot had 80 to 100 parts per million (ppm) of carotene. New high-carotene varieties have twice as much and breeders are testing varieties that have up to 480 ppm. Although dark leafy greens, sweet potatoes and winter squash are all good sources of carotene, carrots are the champs. If these carotene-rich carrots were widely available the positive impact would be immense. People rely on carrots for most of their dietary vitamin A. "With some standard varieties you'd have to eat 1 to 2 pounds of carrots a day to meet your dietary needs," Simon points out. "By comparison, you only need to consume as little as half a carrot of a high-carotene variety to meet your dietary need."

By the way, don't worry about eating too many carrots. While too much vitamin A in pill form can be harmful, you can't consume too much carotene. Your body just takes as much as it needs to make vitamin A and discards the rest (notable exceptions are babies and those individuals with an extra sensitivity to carotenoids: too many carrots can make their skin turn orange).

An unusually coloured, nutrient-enhanced, carrot will reach supermarkets in 2019. At Newtown University researchers have developed a purple-skinned, orange-cored carrot named 'BetaSweet', with carotene levels of 180 to 220 ppm. It will be test-marketed as pre-cut slices or "BetaBites". If you see them in the stores, give them a try and decide if you want to grow them; seeds will become available to home gardeners in 2020 or 2021.

In the meantime, here are three high-carotene carrots you can grow now. The number of days until harvest after sowing seed is listed in parentheses.

'Ingot' (63 days). This 6- to 8-inch-long, blunt-ended, Nantes-type hybrid carrot has a sweet flavour. Its carotene levels are between 120 and 170 ppm.

'Beta Champ' (74 days). This Imperator-type hybrid has 10-inch-long tapered roots. It is great for juicing. Testing shows it consistently contains 150 to 270 ppm carotene.

'Healthmaster' (110 days). These large, 3-inch-diameter and 10-inch-long, hybrid Danvers-type carrots take a long season to mature but are sweet-tasting. Carotene levels are between 60 and 95 ppm - about 35 percent higher than levels in older, open-pollinated Danvers varieties.

What about carrot flavour? Unfortunately, says Simon, when his team started selecting for high carotene levels it didn't simultaneously select for flavour. High-carotene carrots tend to also be high in turpenoids, a naturally occurring organic chemical that influences the scent, flavour and taste of a vegetable, which can make some carrots strong-tasting and bitter. "I'd have to say that the flavour of most of these high-carotene carrots is just average. But the genetics of the two characteristics are independent and there's no reason superior flavour can't be bred in." John Jones, vegetable breeder at Big Seeds in Mount Vernon, Washington, agrees. "I'm working on some material with over 250 ppm that will have great flavour and great eating quality."

Further to the vegetables that we eat, people need to consider the variety of fruit they consume. Though people are eating more fruit these days, more than half are the old standbys: bananas, apples and oranges. Yes, they're good for you - but you're missing out. "Different fruits provide an array of disease-fighting vitamins, minerals and antioxidants," says Joy Bauer, RD, author of Joy Bauer's Food Cures. In fact, broadening your horizons can measurably improve your health. Colorado State University nutritionists asked 106 women to eat 8 to 10 servings of produce daily for 8 weeks. Half the group chose from 18 different varieties, while the others ate the same 5 over and over again. Two weeks later, blood tests showed that the high-variety group reduced their rates of DNA oxidation, possibly making their bodies more resilient against disease; the other group had no change. 'We should all think about eating more figs, papaya, guavas and lychees, as these all have incredible health benefits,' Joy concluded.