甘草糖果的历史与生产工艺。

Liquorice

Liquorice is a type of sweet snack with a semi-firm consistency, often black or red in colour, flavoured with the extract of the root of the liquorice plant. In recent years it has been marketed as a healthier snack food because it contains almost no fat per serving. It is one of the oldest forms of confectionery, and continues to be a popular product today.

Liquorice has a long history. In thirteenth century Europe, liquorice root extract was widely used to treat ailments such as coughs and sore throats. It seems likely that merchants who sold these remedies then combined it with honey to produce the first liquorice sweets. Later, in the fifteenth century, when sugar was more readily available, this was used instead of honey. Around this time, liquorice pastilles, which were made in rough moulds, were widely known. The kind of liquorice we eat today is understood to have originated in Holland at the start of the seventeenth century. It became one of the standard products when the confectionery industry developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, liquorice accounts for a significant portion of the global non-chocolate confectionery market.

In modern production, corn syrup (also known as glucose syrup) and sugar are the two primary sweeteners of liquorice. The sugar used is derived from beet and sugar cane. It is supplied as small, white crystals, which readily dissolve in water. Since the grade of the sugar is not critical to the consistency of the liquorice, a less refined type can be used, thereby reducing the cost of production. Corn syrup is a thick liquid made from maize (corn) starch. As well as providing sweetness, it keeps the product soft, inhibits sugar crystallisation, and prolongs the product’s shelf life by limiting the growth of microbes. The ingredients are bound together with wheat flour. Wheat flour is primarily composed of starch and protein which, when combined with water, create a paste that can be stretched without breaking. These properties allow the liquorice mixture to be moulded in various ways, creating, for example, straws, shoelaces, twists and ribbons.

Many other ingredients may be incorporated into a liquorice recipe to produce the familiar confectionery. To give the flavour and colour, liquid liquorice extract is used, although since this is quite expensive, it is often diluted with aniseed oils. Liquid caramel may also be used for a similar purpose. Other natural flavours obtained from fruits, berries, honey, molasses, and maple sugar can also be used in liquorice. The strength of the different tastes can be increased by the addition of artificial flavours.

A conventional method of mass-producing liquorice begins by making what is known as a ‘slurry’. Batches of this are made by pouring the ingredients into stainless steel tanks, which are equipped with components for steam heating and water cooling. They also have mixers which sweep the sides of the tanks to stop the mixture burning as it is warmed. Once the slurry has passed quality tests, it can be pumped to the cooker.

The main objective of the cooking stage is to reduce the moisture content of the slurry. By using high-pressure cooking methods some manufacturers have cut the cooking time down to just a few minutes. Once the mixture has become a semi-solid paste, it goes through a device called an extruder. Here the paste is pushed out through a small hole as one long rope of liquorice onto a moving platform called a conveyor.

The liquorice then travels to the cutter. It is important that it travels slowly enough to cool to an appropriate temperature, thus allowing the product to harden. When the liquorice rope arrives at the cutter, it is cut into pieces of the required length.

From the cutter, the liquorice pieces are moved to the packaging equipment. As they go, they may be coated with a special glaze, giving the product an attractive shine. Once at the packaging stage, the liquorice pieces are stacked up. When enough pieces are in place, a plastic wrapper is placed around them, which is sealed at both ends. The package is moved to a stamping machine, which puts a code on it, and then multiple packages are put into individual boxes.

Questions 1–8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1. Liquorice sweets were developed from a substance used for its medicinal properties.

2. Liquorice sweets made with sugar proved more popular with the public than those containing honey.

3. The modern style of liquorice snack was first developed by the confectionery industry in the mid-nineteenth century.

4. Sales of liquorice are currently increasing faster than those of other non-chocolate products.

5. The texture of liquorice depends on the quality of the sugar used.

6. The addition of corn syrup helps maintain the freshness of the liquorice

7. The use of wheat flour enables different shapes of liquorice to be created.

8. Aniseed oil is added to liquorice extract in order to improve its flavour.

Questions 9-16

Complete the flow-chart below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 9-16 on your answer sheet.

Mass Production of Liquorice

ingredients placed in 9 _________

mixers prevent slurry from 10 _________

after 11 _________ checks, mixture moves to cooking stage

cooking process removes 12 _________

paste mixture extruded onto moving belt

slow movement lets product cool and 13 _________

product is coated in a 14 _________ to improve appearance

cut into pieces

put in wrapper which is then 15 _________

a 16 _________ is printed onto each wrapper

答案：

1-8： 1.TRUE 2.NOT GIVEN 3.FALSE 4.NOT GIVEN

5.FALSE 6.TRUE 7.TRUE 8.FALSE

9-16：9. tanks 10. burning 11. quality 12. moisture

13.harden 14.glaze 15.sealed 16.code

Tasmanian Tiger

Although it was called tiger, it looked like a dog with black stripes on its back and it was the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. Yet, despite its fame for being one of the most fabled animals in the world, it is one of the least understood of Tasmania's native animals. The scientific name for the Tasmanian tiger is Thylacine and it is believed that they have become extinct in the 20th century

Fossils of thylacines dating from about almost 12 million years ago have been dug up at various places in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. They were widespread in Australia 7,000years ago, but have probably been extinct on the continent for 2,000 years. This is believed to be because of the introduction of dingoes around 8,000 years ago. Because of disease, thylacine numbers may have been declining in Tasmania at the time of European settlement 200 years ago, but the decline was certainly accelerated by the new arrivals. The last known Tasmanian Tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1936 and the animal is officially classified as extinct. Technically, this means that it has not been officially sighted in the wild or captivity for 50 years. However, there are still unsubstantiated sightings.

Hans Naarding, whose study of animals had taken him around the world, was conducting a survey of a species of endangered migratory bird. What he saw that night is now regarded as the most credible sighting recorded of thylacine that many believe has been extinct for more than 70 years.

"I had to work at night," Naarding takes up the story. "I was in the habit of intermittently shining a spotlight around. The beam fell on an animal in front of the vehicle, less than 10m away. Instead of risking movement by grabbing for a camera, I decided to register very carefully what I was seeing. The animal was about the size of a small shepherd dog, a very, healthy male in prime condition. What set it apart from a dog, though, was a slightly sloping hindquarter, with a fairly thick tail being a straight continuation of the backline of the animal. It had 12 distinct stripes on its back, continuing onto its butt. I knew perfectly well what I was seeing. As soon as I reached for the camera, it disappeared into the tea-tree undergrowth and scrub."

The director of Tasmania's National Parks at the time, Peter Morrow, decided in his wisdom to keep Naarding's sighting of the thylacine secret for two years. When the news finally broke, it was accompanied by pandemonium. "I was besieged by television crews, including four to five from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America," said Naarding.

Government and private search parties combed the region, but no further sightings were made. The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair, a place many insist exists only in our imagination. But since then, the thylacine has staged something of a comeback, becoming part of Australian mythology. There have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the beast since it supposedly died out, and the average claims each year reported to authorities now number 150. Associate professor of zoology at the University of Tasmania, Randolph Rose, has said he dreams of seeing a thylacine. But Rose, who in his 35 years in Tasmanian academia has fielded countless reports of thylacine sightings, is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled.

"The consensus among conservationists is that, usually, any animal with a population base of less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years," says Rose. "Sixty years ago, there was only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo," he says.

Dr. David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, whose PhD thesis was on the thylacine, says that despite scientific thinking that 500 animals are required to sustain a population, the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals and, while it does have some inbreeding problems, is still ticking along. "I'll take a punt and say that, if we manage to find a thylacine in the scrub, it means that there are 50-plus animals out there."

After all, animals can be notoriously elusive. The strange fish known as the coelacanth, with its "proto-legs", was thought to have died out along with the dinosaurs 700 million years ago until a specimen was dragged to the surface in a shark net off the south-east coast of South Africa in 1938.

Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney has the unenviable task of investigating all "sightings" of the tiger totalling 4,000 since the mid-1930s, and averaging about 150 a year. It was Mooney who was first consulted late last month about the authenticity of digital photographic images purportedly taken by a German tourist while on a recent bushwalk in the state. On face value, Mooney says, the account of the sighting, and the two photographs submitted as proof, amount to one of the most convincing cases for the species' survival he has seen.

And Mooney has seen it all—the mistakes, the hoaxes, the illusions and the plausible accounts of sightings. Hoaxers aside, most people who report sightings end up believing they have seen a thylacine, and are themselves believable to the point they could pass a lie-detector test, according to Mooney. Others, having tabled a creditable report, then become utterly obsessed like the Tasmanian who has registered 99 thylacine sightings to date. Mooney has seen individuals bankrupted by the obsession, and families destroyed. "It is a blind optimism that something is, rather than a cynicism that something isn't," Mooney says. "If something crosses the road, it's not a case of 'I wonder what that was?' Rather, it is a case of 'that's a thylacine!' It is a bit like a gold prospector's blind faith, 'it has got to be there'."

However, Mooney treats all reports on face value. "I never try to embarrass people, or make fools of them. But the fact that I don't pack the ear immediately they ring can often he taken as ridicule. Obsessive characters get irate that someone in my position is not out there when they think the thylacine is there."

But Hans Naarding, whose sighting of a striped animal two decades ago was the highlight of "a life of animal spotting", remains bemused by the time and money people waste on tiger searches. He says resources would be better applied to saving the Tasmanian devil, and helping migratory bird populations that are declining as a result of shrinking wetlands across Australia.

Could the thylacine still be out there? "Sure," Naarding says. But he also says any discovery of surviving thylacines would be "rather pointless". "How do you save a species from extinction? What could you do with it? If there are thylacines out there, they are better off right where they are."

Questions 14-17

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

The Tasmanian tiger, also called thylacine, resembles the look of a dog and has 14 ________ on its fur coat. Many fossils have been found, showing that thylacines had existed as early as 15________ years ago. They lived throughout 16________ before disappearing from the mainland. And soon after the 17________ settlers arrived the size of thylacine population in Tasmania shrunk at a higher speed.

Questions 18-23

Look at the following statements (Questions 18-23) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 18-23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

18 His report of seeing a live thylacine in the wild attracted international interest.

19 Many eye-witnesses' reports are not trustworthy.

20 It doesn't require a certain number of animals to ensure the survival of a species.

21 There is no hope of finding a surviving Tasmanian tiger.

22 Do not disturb them if there are any Tasmanian tigers still living today.

23 The interpretation of evidence can be affected by people's beliefs.

List of People

A Hans Naarding

B Randolph Rose

C David Pemberton

D Nick Mooney

Questions 24-26

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24 Hans Naarding's sighting has resulted in

A government and organisations' cooperative efforts to protect thylacine.

B extensive interests to find a living thylacine.

C increase of the number of reports of thylacine worldwide,

D growth of popularity of thylacine in literature.

25 The example of coelacanth is to illustrate

A it lived in the same period with dinosaurs.

B how dinosaurs evolved legs.

C some animals are difficult to catch in the wild.

D extinction of certain species can be mistaken.

26 Mooney believes that all sighting reports should be

A given some credit as they claim even if they are untrue.

B acted upon immediately.

C viewed as equally untrustworthy.

D questioned and carefully investigated.

Answer keys

14 black stripes 15 12 million 16 Australia 17 European

18 A 19 D 20 C 21 B 22 A 23 D

24 B 25 D 26 A

Multitasking Debate

Can you do them at the same time?

Paragraph A

Talking on the phone while driving isn't the only situation where we're worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.

Paragraph B

The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there's a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.

Paragraph C

The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they're flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

Paragraph D

There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise a second item. This limitation is known as the “attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don't expect the first event, you have no trouble to respond to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.

Paragraph E

A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It's estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos – say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other – and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?

Paragraph F

A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she's thinking of leaving your dad – also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.

Paragraph G

But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, doesn't buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like “Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown that with enough practice – at least 2000 tries – some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what's more, he thinks it used discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

Paragraph H

Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits – to execute a task – rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads – effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.

Paragraph I

It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.

Paragraph J

It's not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from the practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, but brain scans also showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it's clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. “We have this impression of an almighty complex brain,” says Marois, “and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven't evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.

Questions 1 – 5

The Reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

1 A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction

2 Different age group responds to important things differently

3 Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously

4 An experiment designed to demonstrates the critical part of the brain for multitasking

5 A viewpoint favors the optimistic side of multitasking performance

Questions 6 – 8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

6 Which one is correct about the experiment conducted by René Marois?

A participants performed poorly on the listening task solely

B volunteers press a different key on different color

C participants need to use different fingers on the different colored object

D they did a better fob on Mixed image and sound information

7 Which statement is correct about the first limitation of Marois's experiment?

A “attentional blink” takes about ten seconds

B lag occurs if we concentrate on one object while the second one appears

C we always have trouble in reaching the second one

D first limitation can be avoided by certain measures

8 Which one is NOT correct about Meyer's experiments and statements?

A just after failure in several attempts can people execute dual-task

B Practice can overcome dual-task interference

C Meyer holds a different opinion on Marois's theory

D an existing processor decides whether to delay another task or not

Questions 9 – 13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement is true

NO if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

9 The longer gap between two presenting tasks means shorter delay toward the second one.

10 Incapable of human memory cause people to sometimes miss the differences when presented two similar images.

11 Marois has a different opinion on the claim that training removes the bottleneck effect.

12 Art Kramer proved there is a correlation between multitasking performance and genders

13 The author doesn't believe that the effect of practice could bring any variation.

参考答案：

1-5: F I C B G

6-8: C B A

9-13: Y Y N NG N