READING FILL IN THE BLACKS

16) It seems we live in a bizarre Universe. One of the

greatest mysteries in the whole of science is the prospect
that 75% of the Universe is made up from a mysterious
1_____known as ‘Dark Energy’, which causes an
acceleration of the cosmic expansion. Since a further
21% of the Universe is made up from invisible ‘Cold Dark
Matter’ that can only be 2_____through its gravitational
effects, the ordinary atomic matter making up the rest is
apparently only 4% of the total cosmic budget.
These 3_____require a shift in our perception as great as
that made after Copernicus’s 4______that the Earth
moves around the Sun. This lecture will start by reviewing
the chequered history of Dark Energy, not only since
Einstein's proposal for a similar entity in 1917, but by
tracing the concept back to Newton's ideas. This lecture
will 5_____the current evidence for Dark Energy and
future surveys in which UCL is heavily involved: the "Dark
Energy Survey", the Hubble Space Telescope and the
proposed Euclid space mission.

DETECTED, REVELATION, SUMMARISE, SUBSTANCE,

DISCOVERIES
17) You may well ask why science did not warn us of
global warming sooner; I think that there are several
reasons. We were from the 1970s until the end of the
century 1_____by the important global problem of
stratospheric 2_____depletion, which we knew was
manageable. We threw all our efforts into it and
succeeded but had little time to spend on climate
change. Climate science was also neglected because
twentieth-century science failed to 3_____the true nature
of Earth as a 4_____self-regulating entity. Biologists were
so carried away by Darwin’s great vision that they failed
to see that living things were tightly coupled to their
material environment and that evolution concerns the
whole Earth system with living organisms an 5______part
of it. Earth is not the Goldilocks planet of the solar system
sitting at the right place for life. It was in this favorable
state some two billion years ago but now our planet has
to work hard, against ever increasing heat from the Sun,
to keep itself 6_____. We have chosen the worst of times
to add to its difficulties.

RECOGNIZE, HABITABLE, DISTRACTED, RESPONSIVE,

OZONE, INTEGRAL

2
18) A dog may be man's best friend. But man is not
always a dog's. Over the centuries 1_____breeding has
pulled at the canine body shape to produce what is
often a grotesque distortion of the underlying wolf.
Indeed, some of these distortions are, when found in
people, regarded as 2_____.
Dog breeding does, though, offer a chance to those
who would like to understand how body shape is
controlled. The 3_____of pedigree pooches is well
recorded, their generation time is short and their
4_____size reasonably large, so there is plenty of material
to work with.5_____, breeds are, by definition, inbred, and
this simplifies genetic analysis. Those such as Elaine
Ostrander, of America's National Human Genome
Research Institute, who wish to identify the genetic basis
of the features of particular pedigrees thus have an ideal
6______animal.

PATHOLOGIES, EXPERIMENTAL, SELECTIVE, LITTER,

ANCESTRY, MOREOVER

19) Never has the carbon footprint of multi-national

corporations been under such intense scrutiny. Inter-city
train journeys and long-haul flights to 1_____face-to-face

3
business meetings contribute significantly to greenhouse
gases and the resulting 2_____on the environment.
The Anglo-US company Teliris has introduced a new
video-conferencing technology and partnered with the
Carbon Neutral Company, enabling corporate outfits to
become more environmentally responsible. The
innovation allows simulated face-to-face meetings to be
held across continents without the time 3_____or
environmental burden of international travel.
Previous designs have enabled video-conferencing on a
point-to-point, dual-location basis. The firm's VirtuaLive
technology, however, can bring people together from
up to five separate locations anywhere in the world -
with 4______transmission quality.

STRAIN, CONDUCT, UNRIVALLED, PRESSURE

20) One city will start to attract the 1_____of public

and/or private investment. This could be due to
2_____advantage or political decisions. This in turn will
3_____further investment due to the multiplier effect and
4_____rural to urban migration. The investment in this city
will be at the 5_____of other cities.

SIGNIFICANT, EXPENSE, MAJORITY, STIMULATE, NATURAL

4
21) No one in Parliament would know better than Peter
Garrett what largesse copyright can confer so it may
seem right that he should announce a royalty for artists,
amounting to 5 per cent of all sales after the original one,
which can go on giving to their families for as much as
150 years. But that ignores the truth that copyright law is
a scandal, recently 1_____by the Free Trade Agreement
with the US which required extension of copyright to 70
years after death.
Is it scandalous that really valuable copyrights end up in
the ownership of corporations (although Agatha
Christie's no-doubt worthy great-grandchildren are still
2______the benefits of West End success for her
whodunnits and members of the Garrick Club enjoy the
continuing fruits of A.A. Milne's Christopher Robin books)?
No. The 3_____is that bien pensants politicians have
attempted to appear cultured by creating private assets
which depend on an act of Parliament for their existence
and by giving away much more in value than any public
benefit could4______. In doing so they have betrayed our
trust.

SCANDAL, JUSTIFY, EXACERBATED, REAPING

5
22) Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a
total stranger -- or so says a new study from Harvard
University, which shows that another person's experience
is often more 1_____than your own best guess.
The study, which appears in the current issue of Science,
was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at
Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on
Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and
Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the
University of Virginia. "If you want to know how much you
will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how
much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything
about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "Rather than
closing our eyes and 2______the future, we should
examine the experience of those who have been there."
Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and
behavioral economics has shown that people have
difficulty predicting what they will like and how much
they will like it, which 3_____them to make a wide variety
of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at 4______the
accuracy with which people imagine future events have
been generally unsuccessful.

6
LEADS, INFORMATIVE, IMPROVING, IMAGINING

23) Richard Morris, of the school of accounting at the

University of NSW, which requires an entrance score in
the top 5 per cent of students, says attendance has
been a problem since the late 1990s.
"Sometimes in the lectures we've only got about one-
third of students enrolled attending," he said. "It definitely
is a problem. If you don't turn up to class you're missing
out on the whole richness of the 1_____: you don't think a
whole lot, you don't engage in debates with other
students - or with your teachers."
It is not all gloom, said Professor John Dearn, a Pro Vice-
Chancellor at the University of Canberra, who said the
internet was 2_____the way students access and use
information."It is strange that despite all the evidence as
to their ineffectiveness, 3______lectures seem to persist in
our universities."

TRANSFORMING, TRADITIONAL, EXPERIENCE

24) The precise relationship between fiction and life has
been debated extensively. 1_____modern critics agree
that, whatever its apparent factual content or
verisimilitude, fiction is finally to be regarded as a
7
structured imitation of life and should not be confused
with a literal 2_____of life itself. While fiction is a work of
the imagination rather than 3____, it can also be based
closely on real events, sometimes experienced by the
author. In a work of fiction, the author is not the same as
the narrator, the voice that tells the story. Authors
maintain a distance from their characters. Sometimes
that distance is obvious for instance, if a male writer tells
a story from the point of view of a female character.
Other times it is not so obvious, especially if we know
something of the author’s life and there are clear
connections between the story and the author s life. The
writer of fiction is free to choose his or her subject matter
and is free to invent, select, and 4_____fictional elements
to 5_____his or her purpose. The elements of fiction are
the different components that make up a work of fiction.
All literature explores a theme or significant truth
expressed in various elements such as character, plot,
setting, point of view, style, and tone that are essential
and specific to each work of fiction. 6____of these
elements bind a literary work into a consistent whole and
give it unity. Understanding these elements can help the
reader gain insight 7_____life, human motives, and
experience. Such insight is one of the principal 8_____of
an effective work of fiction; when readers are able to
perceive it, they develop a sense of literary judgment
8
that is capable of enriching their lives. The following
sections describe elements that should be considered in
the 9_____of fiction.

aims, All, Achieve, TRANSCRIPTION, arrange, about,

MOST, analysis, REALITY

25) A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls

Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located
thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in
their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were by far the
largest, most prosperous, most technologically
advanced farms in their 1_____districts. In particular,
each was centered around a magnificent state-of-the-
art barn for 2______and milking cows. Those structures,
both neatly 3_____into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls,
dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their
cows 4_____outdoors in lush pastures during the summer,
produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer
for feeding the cows through the winter, and 5_____their
production of summer fodder and winter hay by
irrigating their fields.

SHELTERING, GRAZE, RESPECTIVE, INCREASED, DIVIDED