Cambridge 18 Reading Test 4 - Answers With Explanation

1. Paragraph D lists "installing drainage paths, meeting health and safety requirements... planning restrictions and disruption from regular activities" as hurdles before installation.

2. Paragraph C: "Toronto, Canada, has policies dating from the 1990s, encouraging the development of urban farms on rooftops."

3. Paragraph E: "The success stories need to be studied and replicated elsewhere, to make green, blue, brown and food-producing roofs the norm."

4. Paragraph B: green roofs "can integrate with 'living walls'" and "can be integrated with drainage systems on the ground, such as street trees."

5. Paragraph D: "To convince investors and developers that installing green roofs is worthwhile, economic arguments are still the most important."

6. Green roofs bring "saving on energy costs, mitigating the risk of floods, making habitats for urban wildlife."

7. The passage mentions "growing food" as one of the wide-ranging benefits of green roofs.

8. "Doctors are increasingly prescribing time spent gardening outdoors for patients dealing with anxiety and depression."

9. "Access to even the most basic green spaces can provide a better quality of life for dementia sufferers and help people avoid obesity."

10–11. Newer buildings can "keep enough water at roof height and distribute it right across the rooftop" (greater water-storage capacity) and, being able to hold more weight, "makes it easier to grow a greater variety of plants, since the soil can be deeper" (more plant types).

12–13. "'Brown roofs' which are wilder in nature and maximise biodiversity" (habitats for species) and "combinations of green roofs with solar panels" (generating power from a sustainable source).

14. The paragraph traces the move from Binet's 19th-century view of fixed intelligence to Dewey's early-20th-century argument that "every child's intelligence could be developed" — a timeline of when views changed.

15. Growth mindset teaching is about "coaxing students away from seeing failure as an indication of their ability, and towards seeing it as a chance to improve that ability" — building belief in their capacity to succeed.

16. Students praised for intelligence "took on fewer challenges after failing at a task, apparently to avoid the appearance of low ability" — they hold back rather than risk failure.

17. Andrew Gelman "has argued that many studies suffer from small sample sizes and questionable statistical methods" — a methodology critique.

18. Dweck "argues that her work has been misunderstood and misapplied in a range of ways."

19. Binet is grouped with "19th-century scientists who held that earlier view" — intelligence as innate and fixed.

20. Yeager and Walton "claim that interventions should be delivered in a subtle way" since a visible intervention "could undo its intended effects" — done without students noticing.

21. Dweck says: "'For me the growth mindset is a tool for learning and improvement. It's not just a vehicle for making children feel good.'"

22. Timothy Bates: "'Kids with the growth mindset aren't getting better grades, either before or after our intervention study.'"

23. "She deserves great credit for responding to it and adapting her work accordingly" — YES.

24. "The actual effect of achievement on self-perception is stronger than the other way round" — achievement drives self-perception more than the reverse — NO.

25. The passage discusses the evidence itself but never mentions how the media covered it — NOT GIVEN.

26. "Motivational posters and talks are often a waste of time, and might well give students a deluded notion of what success actually means" — YES.

27. The theory "was the focus of an international controversy in his lifetime and for some years after his death" — YES.

28. The passage never mentions any publications that defended the fixed-continents view — NOT GIVEN.

29. Wegener used "evidence from a large number of sciences including geology, geophysics, paleontology, and climatology" — a wide range, not limited — NO.

30. "Plate tectonics is in many respects quite different from Wegener's proposal" — NO.

31. Greene writes that this fact was "one of the most intriguing things about him for me" — his own view as the biographer.

32. "He trained as an astronomer and pursued a career in atmospheric physics" — his professional interests.

33. "He was not an 'unknown'" by 1912, thanks to earlier achievements — modest fame.

34. "In 1906 he had set a world record (with his brother Kurt) for time aloft in a hot-air balloon: 52 hours."

35. "He had taken part in a highly publicized and extremely dangerous expedition to the coast of northeast Greenland."

36. He "made a name for himself amongst a small circle of meteorologists and atmospheric physicists in Germany."

37. Greene writes that "the parts do not make as much sense on their own as do all of his activities taken together," urging readers to experience the whole book, not just isolated chapters.

38. "He was not active... in scientific societies, and did not seek to find influence or advance his ideas through professional contacts and politics" — not an ambitious networker.

39. "The more such material a scientist leaves behind, the easier it is to write a biography... Wegener left comparatively little behind" — other well-documented scientists are easier subjects.

40. Greene closes by noting some of what Wegener "set out to do were beyond his power to accomplish" — limits on how much control anyone has over their own life.