READING MOCK TEST 5

READING PASSAGE 1
Hello Happiness!
Ask 100 people what would make them happy, and a sizeable majority would say “winning the
lottery.” Yet, if they won a vast fortune, within a year they would be back to their previous level
of happiness. The fact is that money has many uses, but more money does not mean more
happiness. Surveys carried out in recent years by leading psychologists and sociologists all
confirm that while individuals may increase their material wealth during the course of their
lifetime, this has no bearing on their well-being. And what is true for individuals can be applied
on a larger scale to the world population. Statistically, wealthier nations do not achieve higher
scores on the happiness-ometer than developing or underdeveloped nations. Once the basic
criteria of adequate shelter and nutrition are satisfied, increased wealth plays no significant role.
So why the obsession with getting rich? The answer, say, researchers, is simple. Call it jealousy,
competitiveness, or just keeping up with the Joneses, however, well we are doing, there is always
someone else who is doing better. Just as we acquire a new $25,000 car, our neighbour parks his
brand spanking new $40,000 set of wheels in his drive, causing us much consternation, but
fuelling us with new aspirations in the process. And so the cycle continues. Money, or material
wealth, maybe a prime mover, but it is not the foundation of our well-being.
If money isn’t the key to happiness, then, what is? In all 44 countries surveyed by a prominent
research centre, family life provided the greatest source of satisfaction. Married people live on
average three years longer and enjoy greater physical and psychological health than the
unmarried and, surprisingly, couples in a cohabitation relationship. Having a family enhances
well-being, and spending more time with one’s family helps even more. Social interaction
among families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, communities and religious groups correlates
strongly with subjective well-being. In fact, the degree of individuals’ social connections is the
best benchmark of their happiness.
Friendship is another major factor. Indeed, to return to the dollar-equals-happiness equation, in
one survey, having a friend converted into $50,000 worth of happiness, and confirms the well-
known phenomenon that loneliness can lead to depression. Work is another area central to well-
being, and certain features correlate highly with happiness. These include autonomy over how,
where, and at what pace work is done, trust between employer and employee, fair treatment, and
active participation in the making of decisions. Occupationally, happiness tends to be more
common among professionals and managers, that is, people who are in control of the work they
do, rather than subservient to their bosses. Inequality implies less control for those who are in a
weaker position, although there are more risks of losing their privileges for those in a stronger
position.
Control of one’s life, in general, is also key. Happiness is clearly correlated with the presence of
favourable events such as promotion or marriage, and the absence of troubles or bad luck such as
accidents, being laid off or conflicts. These events on their own signal the success or failure to
reach one’s goals, and therefore the control one has. On a national level, the more that
governments recognise individual preferences, the happier their citizens will be. Choice, and
citizens’ belief that they can affect the political process, increase subjective well-being.
Furthermore, evidence exists for an association between unhappiness and poor health: people
from underdeveloped countries are among the unhappiest in the world, and their life expectancy
has been falling steadily. People are more satisfied in societies which minimally restrict their
freedom of action, in other words, where they are in control rather than being controlled. Happy
people are characterised by the belief that they are able to control their situation, whereas
unhappy people tend to believe that they are a victim of fate. Happy people are also more
psychologically resilient, assertive and open to the experience.
But how good is the evidence for this alternative viewpoint then – that happiness, and not
financial status, contributes to good health, and long life? A study of nuns, spanning seven
decades, supports this theory. Autobiographies written by the nuns in their early 1920s were
scored for positive and negative emotions. Nuns expressing the most positive emotions lived on
average ten years longer than those expressing the least positive emotions. Happy people, it
seems, are much less likely to fall ill and die than unhappy people.
But what must we do to be happy? Experts cite the old maxim “be happy with what you’ve got.”
Look around you, they say, and identify the positive factors in your life. Concentrating on the
negative aspects of one’s life is a no-no, and so is worrying. Worrying is a negative thinking
habit that is nearly always about something that lies in the future. It seems, apparently, from our
cave-dwelling days, when we had to think on a day-to-day basis about how and where to find
food and warmth, for example. But in the modern world, worrying simply undermines our ability
to enjoy life in the present. More often than not, the things we worry about never come to pass
anyway. Just as important is not to dwell on the past – past mistakes, bad experiences, missed
opportunities and so on.
What else can we do? Well, engage in a loving relationship with another adult, and work hard to
sustain it. Try to plan frequent interactions with your family, friends and neighbours (in that
order). Make sure you’re not working so hard that you’ve no time left for personal relationships
and leisure. If you are, leave your job voluntarily to become self-employed, but don’t get sacked
– that’s more damaging to well-being than the loss of a spouse, and its effects last longer. In your
spare time, join a club, volunteer for community service, or take up religion.
If none of the above works, then vote for a political party with the same agenda as the King of
Bhutan, who announced that his nation’s objective is national happiness.

QUESTIONS 1-3
Choose THREE letters A-H.
Circle the correct letters, A-H, below
NB Your answers may be given in any order.
Which THREE of the following statements are true, according to the text?

A Money can bring misery.

B Wealthier nations place more emphasis on happiness than poorer ones.
C Securing a place to live is a basic human need.
D The desire for social status is a global phenomenon.
E An unmarried couple living together are less likely to be happy than a married couple.
F The less responsibility one has, the happier one is.
G Involvement in policymaking can increase well-being.
H Our prehistoric ancestors were happier than we are.
QUESTIONS 4-7
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet.

Money can buy you just about anything, but not, it seems happiness. Whether on a personal or
national 4……………………………, your bank balance won’t make you happier. Once the
basic criteria of a roof over your head and food on the table have been met, money ceases to play
a part. One of the most important factors in achieving happiness is the extent of our
social 5…………………………… – our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and so on.
Equally important is the amount of 6…………………………….. we have, either in our personal
life, working life, or even in our ability to influence the political 7…………………………. that
our country embarks on.

A episode B interaction C cooperation

D control E number F level
G course H conflict I limit

QUESTIONS 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 8-13 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
8 People from underdeveloped nations try to attain the same standard of living as those from
developed nations.
9 Seeing what others have makes people want to have it too.
10 The larger the family is, the happier the parents will probably be.
11 One’s attitude to life has no influence on one’s health.
12 Instinct can be a barrier to happiness.
13 Family and friends rank equally as sources of happiness.

READING PASSAGE 2
One Who Hopes
A
Language lovers, just like music lovers, enjoy a variety. For the latter, there’s Mozart, The
Rolling Stones and Beyonce. For the former, there’s English, French, Swahili, Urdu… the list is
endless. But what about those poor overworked students who find learning difficult, confusing
languages a drudge? Wouldn’t it put a smile on their faces if there were just one simple, the
easy-to-learn tongue that would cut their study time by years? Well, of course, it exists. It’s
called Esperanto, and it’s been around for more than 120 years. Esperanto is the most widely
spoken artificially constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro
Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published his Unua Libro in 1887.
The phrase itself means ‘one who hopes’. Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy and flexible
language as a universal second language to promote peace and international understanding.
B
Zamenhof, after ten years of developing his brain-child from the late 1870s to the early 1880s,
had the first Esperanto grammar published in Warsaw in July 1887. The number of speakers
grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian Empire and Eastern
Europe, then in Western Europe and the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years, speakers
of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals, but since 1905
world congresses have been held on five continents every year except during the two World
Wars. Latest estimates for the numbers of Esperanto speakers are around 2 million. Put in
percentage terms, that’s about 0.03% of the world’s population – no staggering figure,
comparatively speaking. One reason is that Esperanto has no official status in any country, but it
is an optional subject on the curriculum of several state education systems. It is widely estimated
that it can be learned in anywhere between a quarter to a twentieth of the time required for other
languages.

C
As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. Whilst
it is described as ‘a language lexically predominantly Romanic’, the phonology, grammar,
vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. For those of us
who are not naturally predisposed to tucking languages under our belts, it is an easy language to
learn. It has 5 vowels and 23 consonants. It has one simple way of conjugating all of its verbs.
Words are often made from many other roots, making the number of words which one must
memorise much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very
simple so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written word and vice-versa, and word order
follows a standard, logical pattern. Through prefixing and suffixing, Esperanto makes it easy to
identify words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, direct objects and so on, by means of easy-
to-spot endings. All this makes for easy language learning. What’s more, several research studies
demonstrate that studying Esperanto before another foreign language speeds up and improves the
learning of the other language. This is presumably because learning subsequent foreign
languages is easier than learning one’s first, while the use of a grammatically simple and
culturally flexible language like Esperanto softens the blow of learning one’s first foreign
language. In one study, a group of European high school students studied Esperanto for one year,
then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a
control group who had studied French for all four years.

D
Needless to say, the language has its critics. Some point to the Eastern European features of the
language as being harsh and difficult to pronounce and argue that Esperanto has an artificial feel
to it, without the flow of a natural tongue, and that by nature of its artificiality, it is impossible to
become emotionally involved with the language. Others cite its lack of cultural history,
indigenous literature – “no one has ever written a novel straight into Esperanto” – together with
its minimal vocabulary and its inability to express all the necessary philosophical, emotional and
psychological concepts.

E
The champions of Esperanto – Esperantists – disagree. They claim that it is a language in which
a great body of world literature has appeared in translation: in poetry, novels, literary journals,
and, to rebut the accusation that it is not a ‘real’ language, point out that it is frequently used at
international meetings which draw hundreds and thousands of participants. Moreover, on an
international scale, it is most useful – and fair – for neutral communication. That means that
communication through Esperanto does not give advantages to the members of any particular
people or culture, but provides an ethos of equality of rights, tolerance and true internationalism.

F
Esperantists further claim that Esperanto has the potential – was it universally taught for a year
or two throughout the world – to empower ordinary people to communicate effectively
worldwide on a scale that far exceeds that which is attainable today by only the most
linguistically brilliant among us. It offers the opportunity to improve communication in business,
diplomacy, scholarship and other fields so that those who speak many different native languages
will be able to participate fluently in international conferences and chat comfortably with each
other after the formal presentations are made. Nowadays that privilege is often restricted to
native speakers of English and those who have special talents and opportunities for learning
English as a foreign language.

G
What Esperanto does offer in concrete terms is the potential of saving billions of dollars which
are now being spent on translators and interpreters, billions which would be freed up to serve the
purposes of governments and organisations that spend so much of their resources to change
words from one language into the words of others. Take, for example, the enormously costly
conferences, meetings and documentation involved in the European Union parliamentary and
administrative procedures – all funded, essentially, by taxpayers. And instead of the World
Health Organisation, and all NGOs for that matter, devoting enormous sums to provide
interpreters and translations, they would be able to devote those huge amounts of money to
improve the health of stricken populations throughout the world.

QUESTIONS 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-G from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-ix in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
i A non-exclusive language
ii Fewer languages, more results
iii Language is personal
iv What’s fashionable in language
v From the written word to the spoken word
vi A real language
vii Harmony through language
viii The mechanics of a language
ix Lost in translation

Example Paragraph A Answer vii

14 Paragraph B
15 Paragraph C
16 Paragraph D
17 Paragraph E
18 Paragraph F
19 Paragraph G

QUESTIONS 20-22
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answer in box 20-22 on your answer sheet.
20 What advantage is there to learning Esperanto as one’s first foreign language?
A Its pronunciation rules follow those of most European languages.
B There are no grammar rules to learn.
C It can make the learning of other foreign languages less complicated.
D Its verbs are not conjugated.

21 What do its critics say of Esperanto?

A It is only used in artificial situations.
B It requires emotional involvement.
C It cannot translate works of literature.
D It lacks the depth of expression.

22 How could Esperanto help on a global level?

A It would eliminate the need for conferences.
B More aid money would reach those who need it.
C The world population would be speaking only one language.
D More funds could be made available for learning foreign languages.
QUESTIONS 23-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
23 Supporters of Esperanto say it gives everyone an equal voice.
24 Esperanto is the only artificially-constructed language.
25 Esperanto can be learned as part of a self-study course.
26 Esperanto can be used equally in formal and casual situations.

READING PASSAGE 3
LONG-TERM FORECAST: HOT AND DRY
A
Melting land ice in the Arctic is set to cause a global rise in sea levels, leading to disastrous
effects for both man and wildlife. Many species worldwide are threatened with extinction, and
low-lying islands and landmasses will disappear entirely. But the havoc wreaked by the effect of
greenhouse gases won’t be confined to just too much water, but the absence of it, as well. In
other words, desertification. A decrease in the total amount of rainfall in arid and semi-arid areas
could increase the total area of drylands worldwide, and thus the total amount of land potentially
at risk from desertification.

B
Desertification is officially recognised as land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid
areas resulting from various factors including climatic variations and human activities. This
degradation of formerly productive land is a complex process. It involves multiple causes, and it
proceeds at varying rates in different climates. Desertification may intensify a general climatic
trend, or initiate a change in local climate, both leading towards greater aridity. The more arid
conditions associated with desertification accelerate the depletion of vegetation and soils. Land
degradation occurs all over the world, but it is only referred to as desertification when it takes
place in drylands. This is because these areas are especially prone to more permanent damage as
different areas of degraded land spread and merge together to form desert-like conditions.

C
Global warming brought about by increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere is
expected to increase the variability of weather conditions and extreme events. Many dryland
areas face increasingly low and erratic rainfalls, coupled with soil erosion by wind and the
drying-up of water resources through increased regional temperatures. Deforestation can also
reduce rainfall in certain areas, increasing the threat of desertification. It is not yet possible,
despite sophisticated technology, to identify with an acceptable degree of reliability those parts
of the Earth where desertification will occur. Existing drylands, which cover over 40% of the
total land area of the world, most significantly in Africa and Asia, will probably be most at risk
from climate change. These areas already experience low rainfall, and any that falls is usually in
the form of short, erratic, high-intensity storms. In addition, such areas also suffer from land
degradation due to over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices.

D
It is a misconception that droughts cause desertification. Droughts are common in arid and semi-
arid lands. Well-managed lands can recover from drought when the rains return. Continued land
abuse during droughts, however, increases land degradation. Nor does desertification occur in
linear, easily definable patterns. Deserts advance erratically, forming patches on their borders.
Areas far from natural deserts can degrade quickly to barren soil, rock, or sand through poor land
management. The presence of a nearby desert has no direct relationship to desertification.
Unfortunately, an area undergoing desertification is brought to public attention only after the
process is well underway. Often little or no data are available to indicate the previous state of the
ecosystem or the rate of degradation. Scientists still question whether desertification, as a process
of global change, is permanent or how and when it can be halted or reversed.

E
But desertification will not be limited to the drylands of Africa and Asia. According to the
environmental organisation Greenpeace, the Mediterranean will suffer substantially, too. If
current trends in emissions of greenhouse gases continue, global temperatures are expected to
rise faster over the next century than over any time during the last 10,000 years. Significant
uncertainties surround predictions of regional climate changes, but it is likely that the
Mediterranean region will also warm significantly, increasing the frequency and severity of
droughts across the region. As the world warms, global sea levels will rise as oceans expand and
glaciers melt. Around much of the Mediterranean basin, sea levels could rise by close to 1m by
2100. As a result, some low-lying coastal areas would be lost through flooding or erosion, while
rivers and coastal aquifers would become saltier. The worst affected areas will be the Nile Delta,
Venice in Italy and Thessaloniki in Greece, two major cities where local subsidence means that
sea levels could rise by at least one-and-a-half times as much as elsewhere.

F
The consequences of all this say Greenpeace, are far-reaching, and the picture is a gloomy one.
Livestock production would suffer due to a deterioration in the quality of rangeland. Yields of
grains and other crops could decrease substantially across the Mediterranean region due to
increased frequency of drought. Crop production would be further threatened by increases in
competition for water and the prevalence of pests and diseases and land loss through
desertification and sea-level rise. The combination of heat and pollution would lead to an
upsurge in respiratory illness among urban populations, while extreme weather events could
increase death and injury rates. Water shortages and damaged infrastructure would increase the
risk of cholera and dysentery, while higher temperatures would increase the incidence of
infectious diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever. Serious social disruption could occur as
millions are forced from their homelands as a result of desertification, poor harvests and sea-
level rise, while international disputes over shared water resources could turn into conflict.

G
Future climate change could critically undermine efforts for sustainable development in the
Mediterranean region through its impacts on the environment and social and economic well-
being. While in many respects climate change exacerbates existing problems instead of creating
new ones, the sheer magnitude of the potential problem means it cannot be ignored. There is
some scope for adaptation, but the fact that many measures would be beneficial irrespective of
climate change suggests that radical changes in our policies and practices will be needed. It is
also vital that developed countries meet their obligations to assist adaptation in developing
countries through access to know-how and financial assistance. Ultimately, however, the long-
term sustainability of the Mediterranean region requires keeping climate change within tolerable
bounds. Current understanding of safe limits points to the need for prompt international
agreement – and action – to make the drastic cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases required to
stabilize atmospheric concentrations of these gases.

QUESTIONS 27-32
Complete the flow-chart below
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.
QUESTIONS 33-36
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

33 Human intervention is a potential solution to a potential disaster.

34 The rate of climate change is set to accelerate dramatically.
35 There is seldom enough information available in some areas to track how fast the effects of
climate change have happened in the past.
36 Desertification is attributable to a number of factors.
QUESTIONS 37-40
Complete the summary with the list of words A-I below.
Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
Climate change may have catastrophic effects on the human and animal world. As glaciers melt,
sea levels will rise, causing extensive flooding and land 37……………………………. Another
consequence of global warming is 38………………………….., which affects areas known
as 39………………………….. These areas are subject to irregular weather patterns but also
suffer from human intervention or neglect, such as inadequate or
inefficient 40………………………….. systems.

A irrigation B cooling C drylands

D cause E loss F abuse
G desertification H deserts I emission