Reading Passage 1-DVDs

Questions 1 – 14
Read the text and answer Questions 1 – 7

The first DVD player hit the market in March 1997.

A DVD is very similar to a CD, but it has a much larger data capacity. A standard DVD holds about seven times more data than a CD does. This huge capacity means that a DVD has enough room to store a full-length, MPEG-2 encoded movie, as well as a lot of other information.

Here are the typical contents of a DVD movie:
· Up to 133 minutes of high-resolution video, in letterbox or pan-and-scan format, with 720 dots of
horizontal resolution (The video compression ratio is typically 40:1 using MPEG-2 compression.)
· Soundtrack presented in up to eight languages using 5.1 channel Dolby digital surround sound
· Subtitles in up to 32 languages

DVD can also be used to store almost eight hours of CD-quality music per side.
The format offers many advantages over VHS tapes:
· DVD picture quality is better, and many DVDs have Dolby Digital or DTS sound, which is much closer to the sound you experience in a movie theater.
· Many DVD movies have an on-screen index, where the creator of the DVD has labeled many of the significant parts of the movie, sometimes with a picture. With your remote, if you select the part of the movie you want to view, the DVD player will take you right to that part, with no need to rewind or fast-forward.
· DVD players are compatible with audio CDs
· Some DVD movies have both the letterbox format, which fits wide-screen TVs, and the standard TV size format, so you can choose which way you want to watch the movie.
· DVD movies may have several soundtracks on them, and they may provide subtitles in different languages. Foreign movies may give you the choice between the version dubbed into your language, or the original soundtrack with subtitles in your language.

 

Read the text and answer Questions 8 – 14

Broadband Providers

A Dodo Australia has provided Australian consumers with fantastic Internet and Telephony solutions for over five years. Dodo’s range of residential products includes Mobile, Home Phone, ADSL Broadband and Dial-up Internet. Dodo is proudly Australian owned and now is one of Australia’s most recognised brands for providing a reliable service at a cheap price. Dodo’s provides nation-wide access across the country and their technical support operates at 24 hours a day 7 days per week. Dodo is committed to providing telecommunication services at low prices, so give ’em the bird and join Dodo today.

B Think Mobile is a subsidiary of Pivotel Group, one of Australia’s five licensed mobile telecommunications carriers. Pivotel Group is an Australian-owned private company based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, with local telecommunications infrastructure assets worth over $70m. Pivotel Group companies offer Satellite and Cellular handsets that can provide service throughout Australia and its territorial waters, GSM mobile phones and services, bulk messaging capabilities through its own text messaging infrastructure, and ‘white labeled’ call centre services. Customers include various State and Federal government departments, major corporates, small to medium enterprise, and consumers. Think Mobile was launched in 2005 as a differentiated GSM mobile service provider. The focus is on winning over customers with their exceptional value, service and easy to understand call charges. Rates are a low 12 cents per 30 sec on the Think Simple 12 Plans. Since their launch, Think Mobile have been awarded 6 medals from the prestigious Money Magazine Best of the Best awards. Including two Gold medals in 2008 and 2009 for the Think Simple 12 Plans. In addition to the Simple 12 Plans, Think Mobile offers competitive Cap Plans and offers a Data plan.

C EFTel Limited is one of Australia’s largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs). EFTel offers a range of services including: DSL, satellite and dial-up Internet access, web hosting and telephony services to the retail and wholesale telecommunications markets. EFTel’s services are delivered through a nationwide network of Points of Presence in all capital cities, as well
as regional areas around Australia. The network architecture and technology allows for the supply of voice, data or video services simultaneously, giving the capability to supply local and long distance calls, high-speed data, Internet and video conferencing services to its customers.

D iPrimus, a leading provider of broadband and telephone services, has been delivering great value to Australians for over 12 years. Since entering the market in Australia in 1997, Primus has been a frontrunner in ensuring the benefits of competition are passed to customers through lower prices and improved services.With one of the largest and fastest broadband networks in Australia, we’ll give you the speed you need!

E gotalk group of companies have revenues of over $160 Million and employs over 400 people throughout Australia and New Zealand. Operational since mid 2002 and 100% Australian owned, gotalk has experienced exceptional growth in predominately the residential market but also the SME business market. gotalk’s operational centre is located on the Gold Coast with Corporate offices in Sydney, Melbourne andAuckland. Their growth has been supported by both organic sales and also a large number of Acquisitions.
Through sister Company CardCall they support over 25,000 retailer partners delivering a range of gotalk prepaid services.
gotalk offers home and business users a full range of telecommunications services on a single invoice. Services include fixed line (home phone or business lines), GSM Mobile, Internet (Dial Up and Broadband), phonecards and most recently Broadband Voice (VoIP).

F Virgin Mobile Australia launched on 31 October 2000 and employs over 300 people. They have over 600,000 customers, their products are sold in heaps of retails outlets throughout Australia, and provide mobile coverage to over 96% of the Australian population using the Optus network. Like all Virgin companies, they strive to be the ‘customer champion’, which in the mobile business means providing an easy-to-understand service that is great value for money. You can even call 13 33 23 to speak to
a real human being (!), or visit www.virginmobile.com.au 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – either way, if you want to buy, delivery is FREE in Oz!

Reading Passage 2 – Your Future Mobile Phone

Questions 15 – 27
Read the text and answer Questions 15 – 21

It is 2025. Your mobile is now much more than just a communication device – more like a remote control for your life. You still call it a “mobile” from habit, but it is an organiser, entertainment device, payment device and security centre, all developed and manufactured by engineers. On a typical day it will start work even before you wake. Because it knows your travel schedule it can check for problems on the roads or with the trains and adjust the time it wakes you up accordingly, giving you the best route into work. It can control your home, re-programming the central heating if you need to get up earlier and providing a remote alert if the home security system is triggered. It is your payment system – just by placing the phone near a sensor on a barrier, like the Oyster card readers in use on London transport, you can pay for tickets for journeys or buy items in shops. With an understanding of location, the mobile can also provide directions, or even alert the user to friends or family in the vicinity.
It is your entertainment centre when away from home. As well as holding all your music files, as some phones today are able to do, it will work with your home entertainment system while you sleep to find programmes that will interest you and download them as a podcast to watch on the train or in other spare moments.
It will intelligently work out what to do with incoming phone calls and messages. Because it knows your diary it will also know, for example, to direct voice calls to voicemail when you are in a meeting, perhaps providing a discrete text summary of the caller and the nature of their call.
With its understanding of almost all aspects of your life, many new services become possible. For example, a “Good Food” meal planning service could send daily suggestions for your evening meal based on learned preferences, previous selections made and the likely contents of your refrigerator. The latter might work by uploading the bill from the weekly grocery shop and then removing those items it deduces have been used for meals earlier in the week.
Leaving home without your mobile, bad enough already, will become rather like leaving home without your wallet, keys, music player and mobile all at once – quite unthinkable. And in the nicest, most helpful ways, your mobile will guide you through life.
So what will this apparently massive change in our relationships with our mobiles require in the way of new technology or extra expenditure? Actually, surprisingly little. Now that we have widespread cellular coverage, with high-speed data networks in many homes, offices and points of congregation such as coffee shops, we have all we need to get signal to the mobile.
What we do need is better mobiles and more intelligence. Mobiles will continue to get steadily better, with higher resolution touch-screens, speech recognition that really works and much greater memory and storage capabilities. Increasingly intelligent software will be running on these mobiles, and also on home and wide-area networks, able to learn behavior, predict needs and integrate with a growing number of databases, such as transport updates from major providers. So, instead of the train company just sending you a text to tell you of delays, your mobile will analyse it in conjunction with your travel plans and modify those plans if needs be.
This evolution will be a slow but steady one as every few years mobiles get slightly better, intelligent software evolves and the various providers of all the necessary input data – such as transport organisations and shops
– gradually make the data available in formats that become increasingly useful.
Ten years ago the mobile was purely a device for making voice calls. Now it is a camera, MP3 player, organiser and texting device. This is only the start of an evolution that will turn it into our trusted and indispensable companion in life.

 

Read the text and answer Questions 22 – 27

Dawn of the age of the robot

The robots are coming. The second decade of the 21st century will see the rise of a mechanised army that will revolutionise private and public life just as radically as the internet and social media have shaken up the past 10 years. Or so says Marina Gorbis, futurologist and head of Californian thinktank The Institute for the Future.
The IFTF is one of the world’s most venerable thinktanks and has been plotting the course of the future for corporate and government clients since it was spun off from the RAND Corporation in 1968.
Gorbis says robots will increasingly dominate everything from the way we fight wars to our work lives and even how we organise our kitchens.
Robots are likely to prompt a political storm to equal the row over immigration as they increasingly replace workers, says Gorbis. But it’s not all bad news. “When IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov people said that’s it, computers are smarter than people,” she says. “But it didn’t mean that at all. It means they are processing things faster not that they are thinking better.” Working together she believes robots and humans will be able to create a world of new possibilities impossible before our new industrial revolution.
Gorbis says the robots are already here. The US military is backing the development of a four legged mechanical pack-carrying robot, called the BigDogs. Guided by its own sensors BigDog can navigate treacherous terrain carrying 150kg on its back. In the air robot drones are stalking targets in Afghanistan, remote controlled helicopters are ferrying supplies.
Military technology from the Roman road to the internet has a habit of hitting the mainstream, and robots are already spreading their influence. Robots may soon do building work. The University of Southern California has developed a system called Contour Crafting that allows machines to construct buildings in layers guided by computers. The system can reduce construction times and costs by 75%, according to USC. In South Korea robots assist teachers in language classes, repeating words and phrases over and over and assessing how well they are parroted back. Google is working on cars that drive themselves. “What is that other than a robot,” says Gorbis. Amazon and shoe retailer Zappos’ huge warehouses are organised by an army of squat orange robots designed by Kiva Systems. Inevitably the rise of the robots will put people out of work. Gorbis believes that this and other trends will mean unemployment will remain around 10% in many parts of the developed world over the coming years. “We are in transition. It is similar to when we mechanised agriculture. After that we went through a period of high unemployment as people transitioned to new kinds of jobs. People learned to do other things,” she
says. There is potential for a huge backlash. “But once a technology is invented, it is very rare that it disappears.
You can delay the introduction but it is going to be used. If someone can produce something cheaper and faster, you are competing in that environment.”
Robots get a bad press. With a few cute exceptions the robot has been an evil character in movies going back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. In Japan and Korea, where many of the great robot innovators are likely to come from, attitudes are more positive. Gorbis says there had been some speculation that the Japanese were more attuned to robots because they would rather mechanise than import foreign labour. “I’m not sure that’s true. Whatever the case, there is a fascination with technology. And more political support. In a small aging population perhaps of necessity you think of machines as your labour force,” she says. We too are likely to take on more robotic features, she believes. “We have been modifying ourselves with technology forever, with eyeglasses, cochlear implants. We are going to see more of that. Sensors are going to be on our bodies, in our bodies letting us and others know what we are doing, what is going on with our health. All kinds of applications we haven’t even thought of yet.” Gorbis says she is often asked if the future is arriving faster than ever. “I’m not sure that it is,” she says. “We know more, we have access to more information but if you lived during the period of electrification or the
building of railroads, I’m sure you really felt the pace of change too. It’s all relative.” With all this information being bombarded at us it so no wonder that people worry, she said. “I feel schizophrenic myself. Half the time I feel really depressed when I look at say climate change or the potential to misuse technology. But then I get really excited about how we are reinventing ourselves through technology.”

 

Reading Passage 3 – Only humans allowed

Questions 28 – 40
Read the text and answer Questions 28 – 40

A On the internet, goes the old joke, nobody knows you’re a dog. This is untrue, of course. There are many situations where internet users are required to prove that they are human-not because they might be dogs, but because they might be nefarious pieces of software trying to gain access to things. That is why, when you try to post a message on a blog, sign up with a new website or make a purchase online, you will often be asked to examine an image of mangled text and type the letters into a box. Because humans are much better at pattern recognition than software, these online puzzles-called CAPTCHAs-can help prevent spammers from using software to automate the creation of large numbers of bogus e-mail accounts, for example.

B Unlike a user login, which proves a specific identity, CAPTCHAs merely show that “there’s really a human on the other end”, says Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the people responsible for the ubiquity of these puzzles. Together with Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, Dr von Ahn coined the term CAPTCHA (which stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) in a paper published in 2000.

C But how secure are CAPTCHAs? Spammers stepped up their efforts to automate the solving of CAPTCHAs last year, and in recent months a series of cracks have prompted both Microsoft and Google to tweak the CAPTCHA systems that protect their web-based mail services. “We modify our CAPTCHAs when we detect new abuse trends,” says Macduff Hughes, engineering director at Google. Jeff Yan, a computer scientist at Newcastle University, is one of many researchers interested in cracking CAPTCHAs. Since the bad guys are already doing it, he told a spam-fighting conference in Amsterdam in June, the good guys should do it too, in order to develop more secure designs.

D That CAPTCHAs work at all illuminates a failing in artificial-intelligence research, says Henry Baird, a computer scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and an expert in the design of text-recognition systems. Reading mangled text is an everyday skill for most people, yet machines still find it difficult.

E The human ability to recognise text as it becomes more and more distorted is remarkably resilient, says Gordon Legge at the University of Minnesota. He is a researcher in the field of psychophysics-the study of the perception of stimuli. But there is a limit. Just try reading small text in poor light, or flicking through an early issue of Wired. “You hit a point quite close to your acuity limit and suddenly your performance crashes,” says Dr Legge. This means designers of CAPTCHAs cannot simply increase the amount of distortion to foil attackers. Instead they must mangle text in new ways when attackers figure out how to cope with existing distortions.

F Mr Hughes, along with many others in the field, thinks the lifespan of text-based CAPTCHAs is limited. Dr von Ahn thinks it will be possible for software to break text CAPTCHAs most of the time within five years. A new way to verify that internet users are indeed human will then be needed. But if CAPTCHAs are broken it might not be a bad thing, because it would signal a breakthrough in machine vision that would, for example, make automated book-scanners far more accurate.

G Looking at things the other way around, a CAPTCHA system based on words that machines cannot read ought to be uncrackable. And that does indeed seem to be the case for ReCAPTCHA, a system launched by Dr von Ahn and his colleagues two years ago. It derives its source materials from the scanning in of old books and newspapers, many of them from the 19th century. The scanners regularly encounter difficult words (those for which two different character-recognition algorithms produce different transliterations). Such words are used to generate a CAPTCHA by combining them with a known word, skewing the image and adding extra lines to make the words harder to read. The image is then presented as a CAPTCHA in the usual way.

H If the known word is entered correctly, the unknown word is also assumed to have been typed in correctly, and access is granted. Each unknown word is presented as a CAPTCHA several times, to different users, to ensure that it has been read correctly. As a result, people solving CAPTCHA puzzles help with the digitisation of books and newspapers.

I Even better, the system has proved to be far better at resisting attacks than other types of CAPTCHA. “ReCAPTCHA is virtually immune by design, since it selects words that have resisted the best text-recognition algorithms available,” says John Douceur, a member of a team at Microsoft that has built a CAPTCHA-like system called Asirra. The ReCAPTCHA team has a member whose sole job is to break the system, says Dr von Ahn, and so far he has been unsuccessful. Whenever the in-house attacker appears to be making progress, the team responds by adding new distortions to the puzzles.

J Even so, researchers are already looking beyond text-based CAPTCHAs. Dr von Ahn’s team has devised two image-based schemes, called SQUIGL-PIX and ESP-PIX, which rely on the human ability to recognise particular elements of images. Microsoft’s Asirra system presents users with images of several dogs and cats and asks them to identify just the dogs or cats. Google has a scheme in which the user must rotate an image of an object (a teapot, say) to make it the right way up. This is easy for a human, but not for a computer.

K The biggest flaw with all CAPTCHA systems is that they are, by definition, susceptible to attack by humans who are paid to solve them. Teams of people based in developing countries can be hired online for $3 per 1,000 CAPTCHAs solved. Several forums exist both to offer such services and parcel out jobs. But not all attackers are willing to pay even this small sum; whether it is worth doing so depends on how much revenue their activities bring in. “If the benefit a spammer is getting from obtaining an e-mail account is less than $3 per 1,000, then CAPTCHA is doing a perfect job,” says Dr von Ahn.