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Reading test 14 1

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Applied Electrical Engineering (EE 213)

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IELTS reading test

(Book 14 test 1)

Reading passage 1

THE IMPORTANCE OF

CHILDREN’S PLAY

Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes, she’s creating an enchanting world. Although she isn’t aware of it, this fantasy is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for creativity and so it will have important repercussions in her adult life.

Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools with her younger brother. When she bosses him around as his ‘teacher’, she’s practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. Later on, when they tire of this and settle down with a board game, she’s learning about the need to follow rules and take turns with a partner.

‘Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,’ says Dr David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. ‘It

underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem- solving adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.’

Recognizing the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play- based learning have been developing since the 19th century.

But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play, pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. ‘The opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce,’ he says. Outdoor play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, as well as parents’ increased wish to protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis on ‘earlier is better’ which is leading to greater competition in academic learning and schools.

International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop policies concerned with children’s right to play, and to consider

implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.

‘The type of play we are interested in is child- initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable – but, as soon as you ask a five-year-old “to play”, then you as the researcher have intervened,’ explains Dr Sara Baker. ‘And we want to know what the long-term impact of play is. It’s a real challenge.’

Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little data on the impact it has on the child’s later life.

Now, thanks to the university’s new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.

‘A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children’s self-control,’ explains Baker. ‘This is our ability to develop awareness of our own thinking progresses – it influences how effectively we

go about undertaking challenging activities.’

In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she found that children with greater self-control solved problems more quickly when exploring an unfamiliar set- up requiring scientific reasoning. ‘This sort of evidence makes up think that giving children the chance to play will make them more successful problem-solvers in the long run.’

If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the researchers, it could be extremely significant for educational practices, because the ability to self- regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.

Gibson adds: ‘Playful behavior is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional development. In my previous research, I investigated how observing children at play can give us important clues about their well-being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.’

Whitebread’s recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting children’s writing.

‘Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.’ Children wrote longer and better-structured stories when they first played with dolls representing characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with Lego*, with similar results. ‘Many teachers commented that they had always previously had children saying they didn’t know what to write about. With the Lego building, however, not a single child said this through the whole year of the project.’

Whitebread, who directs PEDAL, trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1970s, when, as he describes, ‘the teaching of young children was largely a quiet backwater, untroubled by any serious intellectual debate or controversy.’ Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly debated topics such as school starting age.

‘Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It’s regarded as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with “work”. Let’s not lose sight of its benefits,

and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology. Let’s make sure children have a rich diet of play experiences.’

———————————-

  • Lego: coloured plastic building blocks and other pieces that can be joined together

Questions 1-

Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

Children’s play

Uses of children’s play

  • building a ‘magical kingdom’ may help develop 1 ................................. ......

  • board games involve 2 .................................. and turn-taking

Recent changes affecting children’s play

  • population of 3 .............................. have grown

  • opportunities for free play are limited due to

  • fear of 4 ....................................

Schimmelpennink seized this opportunity to present a more elaborate Witte Fietsenplan to the city council. ‘My idea was that the municipality of Amsterdam would distribute 10,000 white bikes over the city, for everyone to use,’ he explains. ‘I made serious calculations. It turned out that a white bicycle – per person, per kilometer – would cost the municipality only 10% of what it contributed to public transport per person per kilometer.’ Nevertheless, the council unanimously rejected the plan. ‘They said that the bicycle belongs to the past. They saw a glorious future for the car,’ says Schimmelpennink. But he was not in the least discouraged.

D

Schimmelpennink never stopped believing in bike- sharing, and in the mid-90s, two Danes asked for his help to set up a system in Copenhagen. The result was the world’s first large-scale bike-share programme. It worked on a deposit: ‘You dropped a coin in the bike and when you returned it, you got your money back.’ After setting up the Danish system, Schimmelpennink decided to try his luck again in the Netherlands – and this

time he succeeded in arousing the interest of the Dutch Ministry of Transport. ‘Times had changed,’ he recalls. ‘People had become more environmentally conscious, and the Danish experiment had proved that bike-sharing was a real possibility.’ A new Witte Fietsenplan was launched in 1999 in Amsterdam. However, riding a white bike was no longer free; it cost one guilder per trip and payment was made with a chip card developed by the Dutch bank Postbank. Schimmelpennink designed conspicuous, sturdy white bikes locked in special racks which could be opened with the chip card – the plan started with 250 bikes, distributed over five stations.

E

Theo Molenaar, who was a system designer for the project, worked alongside Schimmelpennink. ‘I remember when we were testing the bike racks, he announced that he had already designed better ones. But of course, we had to go through with the ones we had.’ The system, however, was prone to vandalism and theft. ‘After every weekend there would always be a couple of bikes missing,’ Molenaar says. ‘I really have no idea what

people did with them, because they could instantly be recognised as white bikes.’ But the biggest blow came when Postbank decided to abolish the chip card, because it wasn’t profitable. ‘That chip card was pivotal to the system,’ Molenaar says. ‘To continue the project we would have needed to set up another system, but the business partner had lost interest.’

F

Schimmelpennink was disappointed, but – characteristically – not for long. In 2002 he got a call from the French advertising corporation JC Decaux, who wanted to set up his bike- sharing scheme in Vienna. ‘That went really well. After Vienna, they set up a system in Lyon. Then in 2007, Paris followed. That was a decisive moment in the history of bike-sharing.’ The huge and unexpected success of the Parisian bike-sharing programme, which now boasts more than 20, bicycles, inspired cities all over the world to set up their own schemes, all modelled on Schimmelpennink’s. ‘It’s wonderful that this happened,’ he says. ‘But financially I didn’t really benefit from it, because I never filed for a patent.’

G

In Amsterdam today, 38% of all trips are made by bike and, along with Copenhagen, it is regarded as one of the two most cycle-friendly capitals in the world – but the city never got another Witte Fietsenplan. Molenaar believes this may be because everybody in Amsterdam already has a bike. Schimmelpennink, however, cannot see that this changes Amsterdam’s need for a bike- sharing scheme. ‘People who travel on the underground don’t carry their bikes around. But often they need additional transport to reach their final destination.’ Although he thinks it is strange that a city like Amsterdam does not have a successful bike-sharing scheme, he is optimistic about the future. ‘In the ‘60s we didn’t stand a chance because people were prepared to give their lives to keep cars in the city. But that mentality has totally changed. Today everybody longs for cities that are not dominated by cars.’

Questions 14-

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 a description of how people misused a bike- sharing scheme

15 an explanation of why a proposed bike-sharing scheme was turned down

16 a reference to a person being unable to profit their work

17 an explanation of the potential savings a bike- sharing scheme would bring

18 a reference to the problems a bike-sharing scheme was intended to solve

Questions 19-

Choose TWO letters, A-E Write the correct letters in boxes 19 and 20 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about the Amsterdam bike-sharing scheme of 1999?

A It was initially opposed by a government department.

B It failed when a partner in the scheme withdrew support.

C It aimed to be more successful than the Copenhagen scheme.

D It was made possible by a change in people’s attitudes.

E It attracted interest from a range of bike designers.

Questions 21-

Choose TWO letters, A-E Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements are made in the text about Amsterdam today?

A The majority of residents would like to prevent all cars from entering the city.

B There is little likelihood of the city having another bike- sharing scheme.

C More trips in the city are made by bike than by any other form of transport.

D A bike-sharing scheme would benefit residents who use public transport.

E The city has a reputation as a place that welcomes cyclists.

Questions 23-

Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

organizations can therefore enhance employee motivation and retention through the development and improvement of their working conditions. These conditions are inherently linked to the working environment.

While it seems likely that employees’ reactions to their job characteristics could be affected by a predisposition to view their work environment negatively, no evidence exists to support this hypothesis (Spector et al., 2000). However, given the opportunity, many people will find something to complain about in relation to their workplace (Poulston, 2009). There is a strong link between the perceptions of employees and particular factors of their work environment that are separate from the work itself, including company policies, salary and vacations.

Such conditions are particularly troubling for the luxury hotel market, where high-quality service, requiring a sophisticated approach to HRM, is recognized as a critical source of competitive advantage (Maroudas et al., 2008). In a real sense, the services of hotel employees represent their industry (Schneider and Bowen,

1993). This representation has commonly been limited to guest experiences. This suggests that there has been a dichotomy between the guest environment provided in luxury hotels and the working conditions of their employees.

It is therefore essential for hotel management to develop HRM practices that enable them to inspire and retain competent employees. This requires an understanding of what motivates employees at different levels of management and different stages of their careers (Enz and Siguaw, 2000). This implies that it is beneficial for hotel managers to understand what practices are most favorable to increase employee satisfaction and retention.

Herzberg (1966) proposes that people have two major types of needs, the first being extrinsic motivation factors relating to the context in which work is performed, rather than the work itself. These include working conditions and job security. When these factors are unfavorable, job dissatisfaction may result. Significantly, though, just fulfilling these needs does not result in satisfaction, but only in the reduction of

dissatisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008).

Employees also have intrinsic motivation needs or motivators, which include such factors as achievement and recognition. Unlike extrinsic factors, motivator factors may ideally result in job satisfaction (Maroudas et al., 2008). Herzberg’s (1966) theory discusses the need for a ‘balance’ of these two types of needs.

The impact of fun as a motivating factor at work has also been explored. For example, Tews, Michel and Stafford (2013) conducted a study focusing on staff from a chain of themed restaurants in the United States. It was found that fun activities had a favorable impact on performance and manager support for fun had a favorable impact in reducing turnover. Their findings support the view that fun may indeed have a beneficial effect, but the framing of that fun must be carefully aligned with both organizational goals and employee characteristics. ‘Managers must learn how to achieve the delicate balance of allowing employees the freedom to enjoy themselves at work while simultaneously high levels of performance’ (Tews et al., 2013).

Deery (2008) has recommended several actions that can be adopted at the organizational level to retain good staff as well as assist in balancing work and family life. Those particularly appropriate to the hospitality industry include allowing adequate breaks during the working day, staff functions that involve families, and providing health and well- being opportunities.

Questions 27-

Look at the following statements (Questions 27-31) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-F.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

27 Hotel managers need to know what would encourage good staff to remain.

28 The actions of managers may make staff feel they shouldn’t move to a different employer.

29 Little is done in the hospitality industry to help workers improve their skills.

30 Staff are less likely to change jobs if cooperation is encouraged.

31 Dissatisfaction with pay is not the only reason why hospitality workers change jobs.

List of Researchers

A Pfeffer B Lucas C Maroudas et al. D Ng and Sorensen E Enz and Siguaw F Deery

Questions 32-

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32 One reason for high staff turnover in the hospitality industry is poor morale.

33 Research has shown that staff have a tendency to dislike their workplace.

34 An improvement in working conditions and job

security makes staff satisfied with their jobs.

35 Staff should be allowed to choose when they take breaks during the working day.

Questions 36-

Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

Fun at work

Tews, Michel and Stafford carried out research on staff in an American chain of 36 ............................ They discovered that activities designed for staff to have fun improved their 37 ........................... , and that management involvement led to lower staff 38 ................................. They also found that the activities needed to fit with both the company’s 39 ........................... ..... and the 40 ............................... Of the staff. A balance was required between a degree of freedom and maintaining work standards.

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Reading test 14 1

Course: Applied Electrical Engineering (EE 213)

17 Documents
Students shared 17 documents in this course

University: Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology

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IELTS reading test
(Book 14 test 1)
Reading passage 1
THE IMPORTANCE OF
CHILDREN’S PLAY
Brick by brick, six-year-old
Alice is building a magical
kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale
turrets and fire-breathing
dragons, wicked witches and
gallant heroes, she’s creating
an enchanting world.
Although she isn’t aware of
it, this fantasy is helping her
take her first steps towards
her capacity for creativity
and so it will have important
repercussions in her adult
life.
Minutes later, Alice has
abandoned the kingdom in
favour of playing schools
with her younger brother.
When she bosses him around
as his ‘teacher’, she’s
practising how to regulate
her emotions through
pretence. Later on, when
they tire of this and settle
down with a board game,
she’s learning about the
need to follow rules and take
turns with a partner.
‘Play in all its rich variety is
one of the highest
achievements of the human
species,’ says Dr David
Whitebread from the Faculty
of Education at the University
of Cambridge, UK. ‘It
underpins how we develop
as intellectual, problem-
solving adults and is crucial
to our success as a highly
adaptable species.’
Recognizing the importance
of play is not new: over two
millennia ago, the Greek
philosopher Plato extolled its
virtues as a means of
developing skills for adult
life, and ideas about play-
based learning have been
developing since the 19th
century.
But we live in changing
times, and Whitebread is
mindful of a worldwide
decline in play, pointing out
that over half the people in
the world now live in cities.
‘The opportunities for free
play, which I experienced
almost every day of my
childhood, are becoming
increasingly scarce,’ he says.
Outdoor play is curtailed by
perceptions of risk to do with
traffic, as well as parents’
increased wish to protect
their children from being the
victims of crime, and by the
emphasis on ‘earlier is
better’ which is leading to
greater competition in
academic learning and
schools.
International bodies like the
United Nations and the
European Union have begun
to develop policies
concerned with children’s
right to play, and to consider
implications for leisure
facilities and educational
programmes. But what they
often lack is the evidence to
base policies on.
‘The type of play we are
interested in is child-
initiated, spontaneous and
unpredictable – but, as soon
as you ask a five-year-old “to
play”, then you as the
researcher have intervened,’
explains Dr Sara Baker. ‘And
we want to know what the
long-term impact of play is.
It’s a real challenge.’
Dr Jenny Gibson agrees,
pointing out that although
some of the steps in the
puzzle of how and why play
is important have been
looked at, there is very little
data on the impact it has on
the child’s later life.
Now, thanks to the
university’s new Centre for
Research on Play in
Education, Development and
Learning (PEDAL),
Whitebread, Baker, Gibson
and a team of researchers
hope to provide evidence on
the role played by play in
how a child develops.
‘A strong possibility is that
play supports the early
development of children’s
self-control,’ explains Baker.
‘This is our ability to develop
awareness of our own
thinking progresses – it
influences how effectively we

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