Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

Superficial (adj) 
(C2) - not complete and involving only the most obvious things. 
Example: The documentary’s analysis o f the issues was very superficial.
for each person:

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Day 18
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
The Ingenuity gap
In this book introduction the author explains what he means by ‘ingenuity’ and discusses 
the factors that influence the requirement for and provision of new ideas in today’s society.
Ingenuity as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers 
or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and 
social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments. How much and 
what kinds of ingenuity a society requires depends on a range of factors, including the 
society’s goals and the circumstances within which it must achieve those goals—whether it 
has a young population or an ageing one, an abundance of natural resources or a scarcity 
of them, an easy climate or a punishing one, whatever the case may be.
How much and what kinds of ingenuity a society supplies also depends on many factors, 
such as the nature of human inventiveness and understanding, the rewards an economy 
gives to the producers of useful knowledge, and the strength of political opposition to 
social and institutional reforms.
A good supply of the right kinds of ingenuity is essential, but it isn’t, of course, enough by 
itself. We know that the creation of wealth, for example, depends not only on an adequate 
supply of useful ideas but also on the availability of other, more conventional factors of 
production, like capital and labor. Similarly, prosperity, stability and justice usually depend 
on the resolution, or at least the containment, of major political struggles over wealth and 
power.
The past century’s countless incremental changes in our societies around the planet, in 
our technologies and our interactions with our surrounding natural environment, have 
accumulated to create a qualitatively new world.
Because these changes have accumulated slowly, it’s often hard for us to recognize how 
profound and sweeping they’ve been. They include far larger and denser populations; 
much higher per capita consumption of natural resources; and far better and more widely 
available technologies for the movement of people, materials, and especially information.
In combination, these changes have sharply increased the density, intensity, and pace of 
our interactions with each other; they have greatly increased the burden we place on our 
natural environment; and they have helped shift power from national and international 
institutions to individuals in subgroups, such as political special interests and ethnic 
factions. The management of our relationship with the new world requires immense and 
ever-increasing amounts of social and technical ingenuity.

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Reading Passage 3
When we enhance the performance of any system, from our cars to the planet’s network 
of financial institutions, we tend to make it more complex. Many of the natural systems 
critical to our well-being, like the global climate and the oceans, are extraordinarily 
complex, to begin with. We often can’t predict or manage the behavior of complex systems 
with much precision, because they are often very sensitive to the smallest of changes 
and perturbations, and their behavior can flip from one mode to another suddenly and 
dramatically. Over the last 100 years as the human-made and natural systems we depend 
upon have become more complex, and as our demands on them have increased, the 
institutions and technologies we use to manage them must become more complex too, 
which further boosts our requirement for ingenuity.
However, we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply of ingenuity always 
increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: while it’s true that necessity is often 
the mother of invention, we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing when 
and where we need it. In many cases, the complexity and speed of operation of today’s 
vital economic, social, and ecological systems exceed the human brain’s grasp. Not many 
of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They 
remain fraught with countless “unknown unknowns,” which makes it hard to supply the 
ingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems.
In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the 
ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, the crush of information in our 
everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on 
critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial.
Modern markets and science are an important part of the story of how we supply ingenuity. 
Markets are critically important because they give entrepreneurs an incentive to produce 
knowledge. As for science, although it seems to face no theoretical limits, at least in the 
foreseeable future, practical constraints often slow its progress. The cost of scientific 
research tends to increase as it delves deeper into nature.
And science’s rate of advance depends on the characteristics of the natural phenomena 
it investigates, simply because some phenomena area intrinsically harder to understand 
than others, so the production of useful new knowledge in these areas can be very slow.
Consequently, there is often a critical time lag between the recognition between a 
problem and the delivery of sufficient ingenuity, in the form of technologies, to solve that 
problem. Progress in the social sciences is especially slow, for reasons we don’t yet 
fully understand; but we desperately need better social scientific knowledge to build the 
sophisticated institutions today’s world demands.

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Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A -F , below
Write the correct letter, A -F, in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.
27 
The author’s definition of ingenuity
28 
The type of ingenuity required by a society
29 
The creation of wealth
30 
The stability of a society
Day 18
Questions 27-30
A 
does not depend on ingenuity alone.
В 
depends on the successful management of certain disputes.
С 
has often been misunderstood.
D 
is not limited to the creation of new inventions.
E 
frequently increases in accordance with the material successes achieved.
F 
is linked to factors such as the weather.
Questions 31-33
Choose the correct letter, А, В, С or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 31-33 on your answer sheet.
31 
What point does the author make about the incremental changes of the last century?
A 
Their effect on the environment has been positive.
В 
They have not affected all parts of the world.
С 
Their significance may not be noticed.
D 
They have had less impact than those of previous centuries.
32 
According to the author, one effect of the combined changes is that life has become
A 
easier.
В 
faster.
С 
more interesting.
D 
more enjoyable.

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Reading Passage 3
33 
What observation does the author make about complex natural systems?