Describing trends for Task 1

Section 1

Reading Passage 3

Ford – driving innovation

A: In 1913 an American industrialist named Henry Ford employed an innovative system in his factory that changed the nature of American industry forever – the production line. Instead of a group of workers constructing a complete product, Ford’s production-line techniques relied on machine parts being moved around the factory on a conveyor belt, passing each employee who had a single task to perform before the component moved down the line. This saved time in that employees were not required to move around, collect materials or change tools; they simply stood in one place and repeated the same procedure over and over again until the end of their shift. In this way, Ford was able to mass produce the now famous Model-T car for only 10% of traditional labour costs.

B: Working on a production line was monotonous work, undoubtedly, but it was not in the production line alone that Ford was something of a pioneer. In 1913 the average hourly rate for unskilled labour was under $2.50 and for such low wages and repetitive work, the labour turnover in Ford’s factory was high, with many employees lasting less than a month. In order to combat this problem, he took a step that was condemned by other industrialists of the time, fearful that they would lose their own workforce – he raised wages to $5 an hour. The benefits were twofold. Not only did Ford now have a stable and eager workforce, he also had potential customers. It was his intention ‘to build a motorcar for the great multitude’, and the Model-T car was one of the cheapest cars on the market at the time. At $5 an hour, many of his employees now found themselves in a position to feasibly afford a car of their own. Ford’s production practices meant that production time was reduced from 14 hours to a mere 93 minutes. In 1914 company profits were $30 million, yet just two years later this figure had doubled. Until 1927 when the last Model-T rolled off the production line, the company produced and sold about 15 million cars.

C: Although Ford was without doubt successful, times changed and the company began losing its edge. One problem came from the labour force. Ford was a demanding employer who insisted that the majority of his staff remained on their feet during their shift. One error meant that the whole production line was often kept waiting, and Ford felt that workers were more attentive standing than sitting. Yet the 1930s saw some radical changes in the relationships between employer and employee, as an increasing number of industries were forming Labour Unions. Ford flatly refused to get involved, employing spies in the workplace to sabotage any plans for a union within his factories. Eventually a strike in the early 1940s forced Ford to deal with unions. Another example of Ford being unable to adapt came from his unwillingness to branch out. Ford’s competitors began operating the same systems and practices, but also introduced the variety Ford was lacking. The Model-T had remained essentially the same, even down to the colour, and by the time he realised his error, he had already lost his pre-eminence in the industry. Subsequent involvement in aeroplane manufacturing, politics and publishing was a failure. Leaving the company to his grandson in 1945, he died two years later leaving an inheritance estimated at $700 million.

D: Yet the legacy of Fordism lives on. The development of mass production transformed the organisation of work in a number of important ways. Tasks were minutely subdivided and performed by unskilled workers, or at least semiskilled workers, since much of the skill was built into the machine. Second, manufacturing concerns grew to such a size that a large hierarchy of supervisors and managers became necessary. Third, the increasing complexity of operations required employment of a large management staff of accountants, engineers, chemists, and, later, social psychologists, in addition to a large distribution and sales force. Mass production also heightened the trend towards an international division of labour. The huge new factories often needed raw materials from abroad, while saturation of national markets led to a search for customers overseas. Thus, some countries became exporters of raw materials and importers of finished goods, while others did the reverse.

E: In the 1970s and ’80s some countries, particularly in Asia and South America, that had hitherto been largely agricultural and that had imported manufactured goods, began industrialising. The skills needed by workers on assembly-line tasks required little training, and standards of living in these developing countries were so low that wages could be kept below those of the already industrialised nations. Many large manufacturers in the United States and elsewhere therefore began ‘outsourcing’ – that is, having parts made or whole products assembled in developing nations. Consequently, those countries are rapidly becoming integrated into the world economic community.

Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28 – 40 which are based on Reading Passage 3.

Questions 28 -32

Choose the most suitable headings for Paragraphs A-E from the list below. Use each heading once only.

List of headings

1. Effect on modern industry
2. New payment procedures
3. Labour problems
4. The Model-T
5. Creating a market
6. Revolutionary production techniques
7. The Ford family today
8. Impact on the global economy
9. Overseas competition

28. Paragraph A

29. Paragraph B

30. Paragraph C

31. Paragraph D

32. Paragraph E

Questions 33 -37

Answer the following questions using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

33. What was used to move parts around the factory under Ford’s production techniques?

34. What did Ford reduce by 90% compared with more traditional methods of the time?

35. When was the last Model-T Ford produced?

36. What did Ford unsuccessfully oppose the organisation of?

37. What is the name given to the principles of mass production and associated practices?

Questions 38 – 40

Complete the following summary using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS FROM THE TEXT.

One of the long-term effects of Ford’s business practices was that many developing countries became industrialised as a result of (38) . For those working in the factory, the skills for (39) were easily acquired and (40) was minimal.

Reading Passage 3

DWARF PLANET

The Discovery, Classification and Exploration of Pluto

A: On the 14th of July, 2015, a NASA deep space probe called New Horizons flew through the Pluto system in the Kuiper belt, located almost 6 billion kilometres from our sun, gathering high resolution photographs of the dwarf planet and its moons. Scientifically, the aims of the New Horizons mission were to provide experts on Earth with greater detail regarding the geomorphology, atmosphere, magnetosphere and surface composition of Pluto. As well as cameras for high resolution imagery, the spacecraft used an array of on-board scientific equipment to obtain information, including remote sensors, radio transmitters, computer subsystems, a large satellite dish and a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

B: Pluto was discovered in February, 1930, by the American Charles Tombaugh, a young self-taught astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Tombaugh, then in his early twenties, detected the existence of the planet by examining anomalies in photographic plates with the aid of a special viewing apparatus known as a blink microscope. His discovery soon made worldwide news headlines, and on the 25th of May, 1930, the members of the Lowell Observatory chose the name of Pluto for the ninth planet in the Solar System by unanimous vote. The name itself comes from that of the Roman god of the underworld, and was suggested by a schoolgirl living in England, whose uncle, a retired university librarian, had passed on her suggestion through academic acquaintances. It has been rumoured that Pluto’s discovery served as inspiration for Walt Disney’s canine character of the same name. There is, however, no question surrounding the naming of the element plutonium, which was named after the planet following the creation of the former by a team of scientists at the University of California in the early 1940s.

C: The estimated mass of Pluto was steadily revised downwards in the decades following its discovery, and was not accurately calculated until 1978, the same year in which Charon, the largest of the planet’s five moons, was discovered by the United States Naval Observatory astronomer James Christy. While the original estimate of Pluto’s mass had been seven times that of Earth, Christy and his colleague, Robert Harrington, compared Charon’s orbital period and size with those of Pluto, estimating the planet’s mass to be approximately 0.2 per cent that of the earth. A pair of smaller satellites, Nix and Hydra, was subsequently identified in 2005, with the final two of Pluto’s known moons, named Kerberos and Styx, being discovered in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

D: However, in spite of having been regarded as the ninth planet in the solar system for more than fifty years, Pluto’s status and classification began to come into question towards the close of the twentieth century. Initially, this was due to the fact that during the nineties a number of objects, made of rock and ice and of a similar size to Pluto, were discovered lying within the Kuiper belt, a circumstellar disc, in many ways resembling a gigantic asteroid belt, at the edge of the Solar System beyond Neptune. The first of these new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) was identified in 1992 by a pair of astronomers, David Jewitt and Jane Luu, working out of the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. Many more Kuiper Belt Objects were found in the years that followed, making Pluto’s official status as a planet increasingly controversial among many in the scientific community. While Pluto remains, at present, the largest of the known trans-Neptunian objects located in the Kuiper belt, the discovery in 2005 of a minor planet with a greater mass, Eris, in an outlying region of the Kuiper belt known as the scattered disc, prompted the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to create a formal definition of the term “planet” that excluded Pluto.

E: When the New Horizons interplanetary space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in January, 2006, its primary mission was to voyage to Pluto, at that time the only remaining unexplored planet in the Solar System. However, in August of the same year, at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) held in the Czech Republic, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet on account of the fact that it did not meet one of the three formal conditions required to be classed as a planet. According to the official definition of the IAU, a planet must be in orbit around the sun and have sufficient mass both for its own gravity to make it spherical in shape and to have cleared the area around its orbit of smaller objects. Failing to meet the third of these criteria, Pluto was classified as a “dwarf planet”. While the decision of the IAU to reduce the number of planets in the Solar System from nine to eight has received its fair share of both praise and criticism, the definition of Pluto as a dwarf planet, while controversial, remains in use. Today, there are five known bodies in the Solar System that have been recognised by the IAU as dwarf planets. In addition to Pluto, these are Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. At the same time, it has been estimated that there may be hundreds more as yet undiscovered and unclassified dwarf planets throughout the Solar System.

F: The high resolution images of Pluto made during the New Horizons close flyby of the planet and beamed back to Earth from across the Solar System have revealed a unique terrain. Far from being a flat, dead world, the rocky dwarf planet’s surface contains a multitude of varied, complex landscapes, ranging from oddly-textured ridges with the appearance of tree bark or dragon scales, ice cliffs, valleys and mountains and frozen lakes and oceans to heavily cratered and pitted plains. Experts theorise that, in addition to the impact of other space bodies colliding with the planet, the majority of its terrain has been shaped by a combination of ice sublimation and tectonic forces. While still awaiting official approval from the International Astronomical Union, names for a number of Pluto’s regions and topographical features have already been proposed by the New Horizons discovery team in consultation with the general public, including Tombaugh Regio, the Brass Knuckles, Tartarus Dorsa and Cthulhu Regio, the latter named after a fictional deity from the works of American author H.P. Lovecraft.

G: Irrespective of its official present classification as a dwarf planet, the New Horizons reconnaissance of Pluto provides a wealth of knowledge and data regarding the last major body in the Solar System not previously visited by a space probe. While the planet, spacecraft and New Horizons team may be comparatively small, the mission to the Pluto system not only represents the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of preparation on Earth, but also the beginning of a new chapter in space exploration at the edge of the Solar System and beyond.

Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27 – 40 which are based on Reading Passage 3.

Questions 27 – 32

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 27 – 32 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

27. The majority of Pluto’s terrain was formed by collisions with other space bodies.

28. Pluto is the name of a Disney character.

29. The New Horizons space probe has travelled beyond the Solar System.

30. Styx was discovered in 2011.

31. Pluto lies within the Kuiper belt.

32. Eris has insufficient mass to clear its orbit of smaller objects.

Questions 33 – 37

Complete the sentences below.

Choose TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 33 – 37 on your answer sheet.

33. Charles Tombaugh used a piece of specialist equipment called a .

34. Pluto’s largest satellite was discovered by .

35. Eris is located in an area of the Kuiper belt called the .

36. The International Astronomical Union came up with a formal definition for planets at a meeting held in the .

37. The name of one area on the surface of Pluto, called , was inspired by the creation of a particular writer.

Questions 38 – 40

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A – G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A – G in boxes 38 – 40 on your answer sheet.

38. The significance of the New Horizons mission.

39. The technological equipment on board New Horizons.

40. The number of dwarf planets