Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

Consistent (adj) (C2) 
- always happening or behaving in a similar way.
Example: The president has been remarkably consistent on economic issues.

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Expose somebody to something 
- introduce someone to a subject or area of 
knowledge; to make it likely that someone will experience something harmful or 
unpleasant.
Example: Students were exposed to statistics in high school
Example: About 800,000 children are exposed to poisons each year

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Day 20
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
Questions 14-17
Reading Passage 2 has four sections, 
A-D.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list o f headings below.
Write the correct number, i-vii, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i
A possible explanation
ii
Why names of objects are unhelpful
iii
Checking out the theory
iv
A curious state of affairs
V
The need to look at how words are formed
vi
How age impacts on learning colours
vii
Some unsurprising data
14
Section 
A
15
Section 
В
16
Section С
17
Section 
D

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Reading Passage 2
Learning color words
Young children struggle with color concepts, and the reason for this may have something
to do with how we use the words that describe them.
A 
In the course of the first few years of their lives, children who are brought up in 
English-speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words. Words 
for objects, actions, emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world quickly 
become part of their infant repertoire. For some reason, however, when it comes 
to learning color words, the same children perform very badly. At the age of four 
months, babies can distinguish between basic color categories. Yet it turns out they 
do this in much the same way as blind children. “Blue” and “yellow” appear in older 
children’s expressive language in answer to questions such as “What color is this?”, 
but their mapping of objects to individual colors is haphazard and interchangeable. If 
shown a blue cup and asked about its color, typical two-year-olds seem as likely to 
come up with “red” as “blue.” Even after hundreds of training trials, children as old as 
four may still end up being unable to accurately sort objects by color.
В 
In an effort to work out why this is, cognitive scientists at Stanford University in
California hypothesized that children’s incompetence at color-word learning may be 
directly linked to the way these words are used in English. While word order for color 
adjectives varies, they are used overwhelmingly in pre-nominal position (e.g. “blue 
cup”); in other words, the adjective comes before the noun it is describing. This is in 
contrast to post-nominal position (e.g. “The cup is blue”) where the adjective comes 
after the noun. It seems that the difficulty children have may not be caused by any 
unique property of color, or indeed, of the world. Rather, it may simply come down to 
the challenge of having to make predictions from color words to the objects they refer 
to, instead of being able to make predictions from the world of objects to the color 
words.
To illustrate, the word “chair” has a meaning that applies to the somewhat varied set 
of entities in the world that people use for sitting on. Chairs have features, such as 
arms and legs and backs, that are combined to some degree in a systematic way; 
they turn up in a range of chairs of different shapes, sizes, and ages. It could be 
said that children learn to narrow down the set of cues that make up a chair and in 
this way they learn the concept associated with that word. On the other hand, color 
words tend to be unique and not bound to other specific co-occurring features; there 
is nothing systematic about color words to help cue their meaning. In the speech that 
adults direct at children, color adjectives occur pre-nominally (“blue cup”) around 70 
percent of the time. This suggests that most of what children hear from adults will, in 
fact, be unhelpful in learning what color words refer to.
С 
To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 41 English children aged 
between 23 and 29 months and carried out a three-phase experiment. It consisted of 
a pre-test, followed by training in the use of color words, and finally a post-test that 
was identical to the pre-test. The pre- and post-test materials comprised six objects 
that were novel to the children. There were three examples of each object in each of

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Day 20
three colors-red, yellow, and blue. The objects were presented on trays, and in both 
tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to requests in which 
the color word was either a prenominal (“Which is the red one?”) or a post-nominal 
(“Which one is red?”).
In the training, the children were introduced to a “magic bucket” containing five sets 
of items familiar to 26-month-olds (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) 
in each of the three colors. The training was set up so that half the children were 
presented with the items one by one and heard them labelled with color words used 
pre-nominally (“This is a red crayon”), while the other half were introduced to the 
same items described with a post-nominal color word (“This crayon is red”). After the 
training, the children repeated the selection task on the unknown items in the post­
test. To assess the quality of children’s understanding of the color words, and the 
effect of each type of training, correct choices on items that were consistent across 
the pre- and post-tests were used to measure children’s color knowledge.
D 
Individual analysis of pre- and post-test data, which confirmed parental vocabulary 
reports, showed the children had at least some knowledge of the three colour 
words: they averaged two out of three correct choices in response to both pre- and 
post-nominal question types, which, it has been pointed out, is better than chance. 
When children’s responses to the question types were assessed independently, 
performance was at its most consistent when children were both trained and tested 
on post-nominal adjectives, and worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and 
tested on post-nominal adjectives. Only children who had been trained with post- 
nominal color-word presentation and then tested with post-nominal question types 
were significantly more accurate than chance. Comparing the pre- and post-test 
scores across each condition revealed a significant decline in performance when 
children were both pre and post-tested with questions that placed the color words 
pre-nominally.
As predicted, when children are exposed to color adjectives in post-nominal position, 
they learn them rapidly (after just five training trials per color); when they are 
presented with them pre-nominally, as English overwhelmingly tends to do, children 
show no signs of learning.

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Reading Passage 2
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer
Write your answers in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.
The Hypothesis Children learn many words quite quickly but their ability to learn colour
words takes longer than expected. In fact, despite 1 8 .............. , many four-year-olds still
struggle to arrange objects into colour categories. Scientists have hypothesised that this is
due to the