Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

10 
Carry out research 
- do research
Example: Dr Carter is carrying out research on early Christian art.
11 
Collaborate (v) 
(C1) - to work with someone else for a special purpose 
Example: Two writers collaborated on the script for the film.
Example: A German company collaborated with a Swiss firm to develop the product.
12 
Refine (v) 
- to make something pure or improve something 
Example: Engineers spent many months refining the software.
13 
Potential -
1
) (n) 
(B2) someone’s or something’s ability to develop, achieve, or 
succeed
Example: You have the potential to reach the top o f your profession.
2) 
(adj) 
(B2) possible
Example: A number of potential buyers have expressed interest in the company.
14 
Incentive (n) 
(C2) - something that encourages a person to do something
Example: There is little incentive for people to leave their cars at home when public
transport remains so expensive.

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Day 4
You should spend about 20 minutes on 
Questions 1-13, 
which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
The World Wide Web from its origins
Science inspired the World Wide Web, and the Web has responded by changing science.
‘Information Management: A Proposal’. That was the bland title of a document written in 
March 1989 by a then little known computer scientist called Tim Berners-Lee, who was 
working at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva. His proposal, modestly 
called the World Wide Web, has achieved far more than anyone expected at the time.
In fact, the Web was invented to deal with a specific problem. In the late 1980s, CERN was 
planning one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever, the Large Hadron Collider” , or 
LHC. As the first few lines of the original proposal put it, ‘Many of the discussions of the 
future at CERN and the LHC end with the question “Yes, but how will we ever keep track of 
such a large project?” This proposal provides an answer to such questions.
The Web, as everyone now knows, has many more uses than the original idea of 
linking electronic documents about particle physics in laboratories around the world. But 
among all the changes it has brought about, from personal social networks to political 
campaigning, it has also transformed the business of doing science itself, as the man who 
invented it hoped it would.
It allows journals to be published online and links to be made from one paper to another.
It also permits professional scientists to recruit thousands of amateurs to give them a 
hand. One project of this type, called Galaxy Zoo, used these unpaid workers to classify 
one million images of galaxies into various types (spiral, elliptical and irregular). This 
project, which was intended to help astronomers understand how galaxies evolve, was so 
successful that a successor has now been launched, to classify the brightest quarter of a 
million of them in finer detail. People working for a more modest project called 
Herbaria@home examine scanned images of handwritten notes about old plants stored in 
British museums. This will allow them to track the changes in the distribution of species in 
response to climate change.
Another new scientific application of the Web is to use it as an experimental laboratory. It 
is allowing social scientists, in particular, to do things that were previously impossible. In 
one project, scientists made observations about the sizes of human social networks using 
data from Facebook. A second investigation of these networks, produced by Bernardo 
Huberman of HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard’s research arm in Palo Alto, California, looked at 
Twitter, a social networking website that allows people to post short messages to long lists 
of friends.

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Reading Passage 1
At first glance, the networks seemed enormous - the 300,000 Twitterers sampled had 
80 friends each, on average (those on Facebook had 120), but some listed up to 1,000. 
Closer statistical inspection, however, revealed that the majority of the messages were 
directed at a few specific friends. This showed that an individual’s active social network 
is far smaller than his ‘clan’. Dr Huberman has also helped uncover several laws of web 
surfing, including the number of times an average person will go from web page to web 
page on a given site before giving up, and the details of the ‘winner takes all’ phenomenon, 
whereby a few sites on a given subject attract most of the attention, and the rest get very 
little.
Scientists have been good at using the Web to carry out research. However, they have not 
been so effective at employing the latest web-based social-networking tools to open up 
scientific discussion and encourage more effective collaboration.
Journalists are now used to having their articles commented on by dozens of readers. 
Indeed, many bloggers develop and refine their essays as a result of these comments.
Yet although people have tried to have scientific research reviewed in the same way, most 
researchers only accept reviews from a few anonymous experts. When Nature, one of the 
world’s most respected scientific journals, experimented with open peer review in 2006, 
the results were disappointing. Only 5% of the authors it spoke to agreed to have their 
article posted for review on the Web - and their instinct turned out to be right, because 
almost half of the papers attracted no comments. Michael Nielsen, an expert on quantum 
computers, belongs to a new wave of scientist bloggers who want to change this. He 
thinks the reason for the lack of comments is that potential reviewers lack incentive.

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In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write