Cambridge 5 Reading Test 3 - Answers With Explanation

1. Paragraph D describes the 380 Missouri families as "a cross-section of socio-economic status, age and family configurations", including single-parent, two-parent, and both-parents-working households — D.

2. Paragraph B's Harvard study explains "the human personality is formed during the first two years of life" and basic skills are learned "during the first three years" — B.

3. Paragraph C explains Headstart's disappointing results: children entered too late and "the parents were not involved" — C.

4. Paragraph E reports the Missouri results were "phenomenal", with children "significantly more advanced in language development" — E.

5. The Missouri programme's 380 families were a "cross-section of socio-economic status", unlike Headstart which specifically targeted "children of poorer families" — B.

6. Neither programme is described as continuing into elementary school — Headstart children simply "returned to the same disadvantaged home environment" each day, and Missouri was only evaluated up to age three — D.

7. "Despite substantial funding, [Headstart's] results have been disappointing" — it did not succeed in its aim — A.

8. Missouri's parent-educators gave home visits, child-development guidance, health check-ups, referrals, and group meetings — extensive parent support and training — B.

9. Headstart had "substantial funding" and nothing suggests Missouri lacked funds either — neither programme is described as underfunded — D.

10. Both Headstart and Missouri aimed to help young children "succeed in school" / get "the best possible start in life" — C.

11. Missouri three-year-olds performed "at the level of the top 15 to 20 per cent of their peers in... auditory comprehension, verbal ability and language ability" — TRUE.

12. "Traditional measures of 'risk', such as parents' age and education, or whether they were a single parent, bore little or no relationship to the measures of achievement" — the opposite of scoring less highly, so FALSE.

13. The passage says family stress "was not necessarily more common in poorer families", but never states richer families had higher stress — NOT GIVEN.

14. Paragraph B explains the Aswan dams now "hold back virtually all of the sediment that used to flow down the river" — interrupting a natural process, iv.

15. Paragraph D covers how Nile water "is diverted into more than 10,000 kilometres of irrigation canals", where sediment sinks instead of reaching the sea — effects of irrigation on sedimentation, i.

16. Paragraph E notes the delta's farms and fisheries, laden with waste, "account for much of Egypt's food supply" — the threat to food production, v.

17. Paragraph F discusses international concern over the "impact this situation could have on the whole Mediterranean coastal ecosystem" and long-term fixes — looking at the long-term impact, viii.

18. Paragraph A says eroded coastal land "used to be replaced by sediment brought down" — implying the erosion process itself long predates the dams, only now uncompensated — YES.

19. The passage never mentions predictions made before the dams were built — NOT GIVEN.

20. The dams were built "to provide electricity and irrigation, and to protect... Cairo... from annual flooding and drought", not to boost delta fertility — in fact fertile silt now piles up behind the dam instead — NO.

21. Stanley's Cairo samples showed the river "sometimes carries more than 850 grams of sediment per cubic metre of water — almost half of what it carried before the dams" — a relatively high, YES, level.

22. The passage never claims canal sediment causes flooding — NOT GIVEN.

23. Delta sediment is "added to fields by farmers or pumped with the water into the four large freshwater lagoons" — YES.

24. Frederic Siegel found "the increase in mercury, lead, copper and zinc" in the delta silt — pollutants, F.

25. "In the immediate future, Stanley believes that one solution would be to make artificial floods to flush out the delta waterways" — A.

26. "In the long term an alternative process such as desalination may have to be used to increase the amount of water available" — B.

27. Paragraph E describes HNC's system being used "to spot camouflaged vehicles on a battlefield" — a military application, E.

28. Paragraph B says 'artificial intelligence' named "a research programme that encompassed such previously disparate fields as operations research, cybernetics, logic and computer science" — B.

29. Paragraph A explains AI "re-entered public consciousness with the release of AI, a movie about a robot boy" — A.

30. Paragraph F links "the problem of information overload" from e-mail and web growth to opportunities for AI-based filtering — F.

31. Paragraph B states the term was "coined, at a conference in 1956" — B.

32. The passage lists the founding researchers but never says they had previously worked together — NOT GIVEN.

33. "Most researchers agree that AI peaked around 1985" — a high point, not a low point — FALSE.

34. No cost comparison between agent-technology and neural-network research is given — NOT GIVEN.

35. Technologies like "speech recognition, language translation and decision-support software... made it onto the market" — a degree of success, TRUE.

36. The "goal-posts" for what counted as AI kept moving as problems were solved and reclassified as non-AI — the target has changed since 1967, so FALSE.

37. HAL 9000 "encapsulated the optimism of the 1960s that intelligent computers would be widespread by 2001" — reflecting contemporary ideas, TRUE.

38. "There was undue optimism in the early 1980s," says Leake; "when people realised these were hard problems, there was retrenchment" — original expectations were unjustified, B.

39. Leake describes AI's shifting definition — "if it works, it can't be AI" — as damaging its reputation through changing perceptions, A.

40. Paragraph F notes investors "now looking for firms using clever technology, rather than just a clever business model" — a new investment priority, D.