Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

11
To advocate (v) 
(C2) - to publicly support or suggest an idea, development, or way of 
doing something.
Example: He advocates the return o f capital punishment.
12
Commonplace (adj) 
- happening often or often seen or experienced and so not 
considered to be special.

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Example: Electric cars are increasingly commonplace.
13 
To incur (v) 
(C2) - to experience something, usually something unpleasant, as a result 
of actions you have taken.
Example: We incurred heavy expenses to repair the poor work done by the builder.
14 
Cub (n) 
- a young lion, bear, wolf, etc.
15 
Facilitate (v) 
(C1) - to make something possible or easier.
Example: To facilitate learning, each class is no larger than 30 students.
16 
Evolve (v) 
(C1) - to develop gradually, or to cause something or someone to develop 
gradually.
Example: The company has evolved over the years into a multi-million dollar
organization.
17 
Constraint (n) 
(C2) - something that controls what you do by keeping you within 
particular limits.
Example: Financial constraints on the company are preventing them from employing
new staff.

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Day 16
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Ants Could Teach Ants
The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. 
Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a tabletop 
foraging for food -and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, 
followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that along the route, presumably 
to memorize land- marks. Once a follower got its bearings, it tapped the leader with its 
antennae, prompting the lesson to literally proceed to the next step. The ants were only 
looking for food but the researchers said the careful way the leaders led followers -thereby 
turning them into leaders in their own right -marked the Temnothorax albipennis ant as the 
very first example of a non-human animal exhibiting teaching behavior.
“Tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human 
animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil,” remarks Nigel 
Franks, professor of animal behavior and ecology, whose paper on the ant educators was 
published last week in the journal Nature.
No sooner was the paper published, of course, than another educator questioned it.
Marc Hauser, a psychologist and biologist and one of the scientists who came up with 
the definition of teaching, said it was unclear whether the ants had learned a new skill or 
merely acquired new information.
Later, Franks took a further study and found that there were even races between leaders. 
With the guidance of leaders, ants could find food faster. But the help comes at a cost 
for the leader, who normally would have reached the food about four times faster if not 
hampered by a follower. This means the hypothesis that the leaders deliberately slowed 
down in order to pass the skills on to the followers seems potentially valid. His ideas were 
advocated by the students who carried out the video project with him.
Opposing views still arose, however. Hauser noted that mere communication of 
information is commonplace in the animal world. Consider a species, for example, that 
uses alarm calls to warn fellow members about the presence of a predator. Sounding the 
alarm can be costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. 
But it allows others to flee to safety. “Would you call this teaching?” wrote Hauser. “The 
caller incurs a cost. The naive animals gain a benefit and new knowledge that better 
enables them to learn about the predator’s location than if the caller had not called. This 
happens throughout the animal kingdom, but we don’t call it teaching, even though it is 
clearly transfer of information.”

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Reading Passage 1
Tim Caro, a zoologist, presented two cases of animal communication. He found that 
cheetah mothers that take their cubs along on hunts gradually allow their cubs to do more 
of the hunting -going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat 
to merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off. At one level, such behavior 
might be called teaching -except the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but 
merely facilitating various stages of learning. In another instance, birds watching other 
birds using a stick to locate food such as insects and so on, are observed to do the same 
thing themselves while finding food later.
Psychologists study animal behavior in part to understand the evolutionary roots of human 
behavior, Hauser said. The challenge in understanding whether other animals truly teach 
one another, he added, is that human teaching involves a “theory of mind” -teachers are 
aware that students don’t know something. He questioned whether Franks’s leader ants 
really knew that the follower ants were ignorant. Could they simply have been following 
an instinctive rule to proceed when the followers tapped them on the legs or abdomen? 
And did leaders that led the way to food -only to find that it had been removed by the 
experimenter -incur the wrath of followers? That, Hauser said, would suggest that the 
follower ant actually knew the leader was more knowledgeable and not merely following an 
instinctive routine itself.
The controversy went on, and for a good reason. The occurrence of teaching in ants, 
if proven to be true, indicates that teaching can evolve in animals with tiny brains. It is 
probably the value of information in social animals that determines when teaching will 
evolve rather than the constraints of brain size.
Bennett Galef Jr., a psychologist who studies animal behavior and social learning at 
McMaster University in Canada, maintained that ants were unlikely to have a “theory 
of mind” -meaning that leader and followers may well have been following instinctive 
routines that were not based on an understanding of what was happening in another 
ant’s brain. He warned that scientists may be barking up the wrong tree when they look 
not only for examples of humanlike behavior among other animals but humanlike thinking 
that underlies such behavior. Animals may behave in ways similar to humans without a 
similar cognitive system, he said, so the behavior is not necessarily a good guide into how 
humans came to think the way they do.

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Look at the following statements (Questions 1-5) and the list of people in the box below.
Match each statement with the correct person, А, В, С or D.
Write the correct letter, А, В, С or D, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1
Animals could use objects to locate food.
2 
Ants show two-way, interactive teaching behaviors.
3 
It is risky to say ants can teach other ants like human beings do.
4
Ant leadership makes finding food faster.
5 
Communication between ants is not entirely teaching.
Day 16
Questions 1-5