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READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below

The Flavor of Pleasure

When it comes to celebrating the flavor of food, our mouth gets all the credit. But in
truth, it is the nose that knows.
No matter how much we talk about tasting our favorite flavors, relishing them really depends on a
combined input from our senses that we experience through mouth, tongue and nose. The taste,
texture, and feel of food are what we tend to focus on, but most important are the slight puffs of air as
we chew our food - what scientists call 'retronasal smell'.

Certainly, our mouths and tongues have taste buds, which are receptors tor the five basic flavors:
sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, or what is more commonly referred to as savory. But our
tongues are inaccurate instruments as far as flavor is concerned. They evolved to recognise only a few
basic tastes in order to quickly identify toxins, which in nature are often quite bitter or acidly sour.

All the complexity, nuance, and pleasure of flavor come from the sense of smell operating in the back
of the nose. It is there that a kind or alchemy occurs when we breathe up and out the passing whiffs of
our chewed food. Unlike a hound's skull with its extra long nose, which evolved specifically to detect
external smells, our noses have evolved to detect internal scents. Primates specialise in savoring the
many millions of flavor combinations that they can create for their mouths.

Taste without retronasal smell is not much help in recognising flavor. Smell has been the most poorly
understood of our senses, and only recently has neuroscience, led by Yale University's Gordon
Shepherd, begun to shed light on its workings. Shepherd has come up with the term
'neurogastronomy' to link the disciplines of food science, neurology, psychology, and anthropology
with the savory elements of eating, one of the most enjoyed of human experiences.

In many ways, he is discovering that smell is rather like face recognition. The visual system detects
patterns of light and dark and, building on experience, the brain creates a spatial map. It uses this to
interpret the interrelationship of the patterns and draw conclusions that allow us to identify people and
places. In the same way, we use patterns and ratios to detect both new and familiar flavors. As we eat,
specialised receptors in the back of the nose detect the air molecules in our meals. From signals sent
by the receptors, the brain understands smells as complex spatial patterns. Using these, as well as
input from the other senses, it constructs the idea of specific flavors.

This ability to appreciate specific aromas turns out to be central to the pleasure we get from food,
much as our ability to recognise individuals is central to the pleasures of social life. The process is so
embedded in our brains that our sense of smell is critical to our enjoyment of life at large. Recent
studies show that people who lose the ability to smell become socially insecure, and their overall level
of happiness plummets.

Working out the role of smell in flavor interests food scientists, psychologists, and cooks alike. The
relatively new discipline of molecular gastronomy, especially, relies on understanding the mechanics
of aroma to manipulate flavor for maximum impact. In this discipline, chefs use their knowledge of

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the chemical changes that take place during cooking to produce eating pleasures that go beyond the
'ordinary'.

However, whereas molecular gastronomy is concerned primarily with the food or 'smell' molecules,
neurogastronomy is more focused on the receptor molecules and the brain's spatial images for smell.
Smell stimuli form what Shepherd terms 'odor objects', stored as memories, and these have a direct
link with our emotions. The brain creates images of unfamiliar smells by relating them to other more
familiar smells. Go back in history and this was part of our survival repertoire; like most animals, we
drew on our sense of smell, when visual information was scarce, to single out prey.

Thus the brain's flavor-recognition system is a highly complex perceptual mechanism that puts all five
senses to work in various combinations. Visual and sound cues contribute, such as crunching, as does
touch, including the texture and feel of food on our lips and in our mouths. Then there are the taste
receptors, and finally, the smell, activated when we inhale. The engagement of our emotions can be
readily illustrated when we picture some of the wide­ranging facial expressions that are elicited by
various foods - many of them hard-wired into our brains at birth. Consider the response to the
sharpness of a lemon and compare that with the face that is welcoming the smooth wonder of
chocolate.

The flavor-sensing system, ever receptive to new combinations, helps to keep our brains active and
flexible. It also has the power to shape our desires and ultimately our bodies. On the horizon we have
the positive application of neurogastronomy: manipulating flavor to curb our appetites.

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Questions 1 - 5

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

1 According to scientists, the term ………………… characterizes the most critical

factor in appreciating flavor.

2 ‘Savory’ is a better known word for …………………

3 The tongue was originally developed to recognize the unpleasant taste of

…………………

4 Human nasal cavities recognize ………………… much better than external ones.

5 Gordon Shepherd uses the word ‘neurogastronomy’ to draw together a number of

………………… related to the enjoyment of eating.

Questions 6 - 9

Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

Face patterns of dark and facial recognition is

recognition light are used to put key to our enjoyment
the brain identifies faces
together a 6 of 7 …………………
…………………

Smell receptors recognise the the brain identifies certain smell is key to our
8 ………………… in 9 ………………… enjoyment of food
food

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Questions 10 - 13

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the text for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

10 In what form does the brain store ‘odor objects’?

11 When seeing was difficult, what did we use our sense of smell to find?

12 Which food item illustrates how flavour and positive emotion are linked?

13 What could be controlled in the future through flavor manipulation?

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READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below

Questions 14 - 19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings (i-ix) below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Tackling the issue using a different approach
ii A significant improvement on last time
iii How robots can save human lives
iv Examples of robots at work
v Not what it seemed to be
vi Why timescales are impossible to predict
vii The reason why robots rarely move
viii Following the pattern of an earlier development
ix The ethical issues of robotics

14 Paragraph A

15 Paragraph B

16 Paragraph C

17 Paragraph D

18 Paragraph E

19 Paragraph F

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Dawn of the robots

They’re already here – driving cars, vacuuming carpets and feeding hospital patients. They may not
be walking, talking, human-like sentient beings, but they are clever… and a little creepy.

A At first sight it looked like a typical suburban road accident. A Land Rover approached a
Chevy Tahoe estate car that had stopped at a kerb; the Land Rover pulled out and tried to pass the
Tahoe just as it started off again. There was a crack of fenders and the sound of paintwork being
scraped, the kind of minor mishap that occurs on roads thousands of times every day. Normally
drivers get out, gesticulate, exchange insurance details and then drive off. But not on this occasion.
No one got out of the cars for the simple reason that they had no humans inside them; the Tahoe and
Land Rover were being controlled by computers competing in November's DARPA (the U.S. Defence
Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge.

B The idea that machines could perform to such standards is startling. Driving is a complex task
that takes humans a long time to perfect. Yet here, each car had its on-board computer loaded with a
digital map and route plans, and was instructed to negotiate busy roads; differentiate between
pedestrians and stationary objects; determine whether other vehicles were parked or moving off; and
handle various parking manoeuvres, which robots turn out to be unexpectedly adept at. Even more
striking was the fact that the collision between the robot Land Rover built by researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the 'Tahoe, fitted out by Cornell University Artificial
Intelligence (AI) experts, was the only scrape in the entire competition. Yet only three years earlier, at
DARPA's previous driverless car race, every robot competitor - directed to navigate across a stretch of
open desert - either crashed or seized up before getting near the finishing line.

C It is a remarkable transition that has clear implications for the car of the future. More
importantly, it demonstrates how robotics sciences and Artificial Intelligence have progressed in the
past few years - a point stressed by Bill Gates, the Microsoft boss who is a convert to these causes.
'The robotics industry is developing in much the same way the computer business did 30 years ago,'
he argues. As he points out, electronics companies make toys that mimic pets and children with
increasing sophistication. 'I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly
ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives,' says Gates. 'We may be on the verge of a new era, when the
PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where
we are not physically present.'

D What is the potential for robots and computers in the near future? 'The fact is we still have a
way to go before real robots catch up with their science fiction counterparts,' Gates says. So what are
the stumbling blocks? One key difficulty is getting robots to know their place. This has nothing to do
with class or etiquette, but concerns the simple issue of positioning. Humans orient themselves with
other objects in a room very easily. Robots find the task almost impossible. 'Even something as simple
as telling the difference between an open door and a window can be tricky for a robot,' says Gates.
This has, until recently, reduced robots to fairly static and cumbersome roles.

E For a long time, researchers tried to get round the problem by attempting to re-create the
visual processing that goes on in the human cortex. However, that challenges has proved to be
singularly exacting and complex. So scientists have turned to simpler alternatives: 'We have become
far more pragmatic in our work,' says Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the
University of Bristol in England and associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

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'We are no longer trying to re-create human functions. Instead, we are looking for simpler solutions
with basic electronic sensors, for example.' This approach is exemplified by vacuuming robots such as
the Electrolux Trilobites. The Trilobite scuttles around home emitting ultrasound signals to create
maps of rooms, which are remembered for future cleaning. Technology like this is now changing the
face of robotics, says philosopher Ron Chrisley, director of the Center for Research in Cognitive
Science at the University of Sussex in England.

F Last year, a new Hong Kong restaurant, Robot Kitchen, opened with a couple of sensor-laden
humanoid machines directing customers to their seats. Each possesses a touch-screen on which orders
can be keyed in. The robot then returns with the correct dishes. In Japan, University of Tokyo
researchers recently unveiled a kitchen 'android' that could wash dishes, pour tea and make a few
limited meals. The ultimate aim is to provide robot home helpers for the sick and the elderly, a key
concern in a country like Japan where 22 per cent of the population is 65 or older. Over US$1 billion
a year is spent on research into robots that will be able to care for the elderly. 'Robots first learn basic
competence - how to move around a house without bumping into things. Then we can think about
teaching them how to interact with humans,' Chrisley said. Machines such as these take researchers
into the field of socialised robotics: how to make robots act in a way that does not scare or offend
individuals. 'We need to study how robots should approach people, how they should appear. That is
going to be a key area for future research,' adds Chrisley.

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Questions 20 - 23

Look at the following statements (Questions 20-23) and the list of people below.

Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, or C.

Write the correct letter in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once

A Bill Gates

B Nello Cristianini

C Ron Chrisley

20 An important concern for scientists is to ensure that robots do not seem frightening.

21 We have stopped trying to enable robots to perceive objects as humans do.

22 It will take considerable time for modern robots to match the ones we have created in
films and books.

23 We need to enable robots to move freely before we think about trying to communicate
with them.

Questions 24-26

Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Robot features
DARPA race cars: 24 ………………… provides maps and plans for route
Electrolux Trilobite: builds an image of a room by sending out 25 …………………
Robot Kitchen humanoids: have a 26 ………………… to take orders

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