Cambridge 9 Reading Test 3 - Answers With Explanation

1. "Language belongs to everyone, so most people feel they have a right to hold an opinion about it. And when opinions differ, emotions can run high" — YES.

2. "Arguments can start as easily over minor points of usage as over major policies of linguistic education" — feelings run equally strong over both, not more for education — NO.

3. "Linguistic factors influence how we judge personality, intelligence, social status, educational standards, job aptitude" — YES.

4. The passage discusses 18th-century grammar books' aims but never mentions their cost — NOT GIVEN.

5. "These attitudes are still with us, and they motivate a widespread concern that linguistic standards should be maintained" — YES.

6. Descriptivists aim "not to attempt the impossible tasks of evaluating language variation or halting language change" — YES.

7. "In the second half of the 18th century, we already find advocates of this view, such as Joseph Priestley" — descriptivism existed within, not only after, the 18th century — NO.

8. "Descriptive grammarians have been presented as people who do not care about standards... Prescriptive grammarians have been presented as blind adherents to a historical tradition" — both sides caricatured — YES.

9. Prescriptivism "is the view that one variety of language has an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be imposed" — matches H, prescriptivists.

10. Prescriptive grammarians rely on "'rules' of grammar" — matches F, rules.

11. The opposing view holds "it is the task of the grammarian to describe, not prescribe" — matches A, descriptivists.

12. Priestley insisted "the custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any language" — matches C, popular speech.

13. The passage traces prescriptivism through the 18th century to the rise of descriptivism and the modern opposition between them — a historical account of differing views of language.

14. Paragraph C: "The first station is expected to be installed off Lynmouth in Devon shortly to test the technology."

15. Paragraph E: power from the Alderney site "would be fed into the French Grid and be re-imported into Britain via the cable under the Channel."

16. Paragraph A: Britain "originally developed and then abandoned [wind power] for 20 years, allowing the Dutch to make it a major industry" — a previous attempt at alternative energy.

17. Paragraph C: "The technology for dealing with the hostile saline environment under the sea has been developed in the North Sea oil industry" — technology borrowed from another industry.

18–22. "The flows of water are predictable and constant" (A, reliability); "drastically reducing its carbon dioxide emissions" (D, air pollution) and enabling Britain to "close gas, coal and nuclear power plants" (E, closure of stations); undersea turbines "could become a big export earner" (F, national income); "the best sites are between islands or around heavily indented coasts" (J, particular coastline features).

23. Towers are "designed to be lifted out of the water for maintenance and to clean seaweed from the blades."

24. "Fish and other creatures are thought unlikely to be at risk from the relatively slow-turning blades."

25. "Cavitation, where low pressure behind a turning blade causes air bubbles."

26. "One technical difficulty is cavitation, where low pressure behind a turning blade causes air bubbles."

27. Paragraph D: "this rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication channel, and on its capacity" — factors affecting transmission.

28. Paragraph F: mobile phone texts "like 'I CN C U' show, it is often possible to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning" — omitting unnecessary information.

29. Paragraph B: "Shannon developed information theory, but shunned the resulting acclaim" — his attitude to fame.

30. Paragraph E: the bar code system "ensures supermarket check-out lasers can read the price even on, say, a crumpled bag of crisps" — a machine reading incomplete information.

31. Paragraph A gives the detailed Voyager 1 repair account: "NASA experts realised that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe forever."

32. Paragraph C: Shannon "set out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept of 'information'."

33. Voyager 1 "had sent back spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared out of the Solar System."

34. The probe "soared out of the Solar System on a one-way mission to the stars."

35. "Sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing" as the probe aged in deep space.

36. NASA's solution "was to get a message to Voyager 1 to instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts."

37. "By means of a radio dish belonging to NASA's Deep Space Network, the message was sent out into the depths of space."

38. "The most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether something is true or false" — TRUE.

39. "This rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication channel" — TRUE.

40. Turbo codes "come very close to Shannon's ultimate limit for the maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably" — nothing is said to exceed the limit Shannon predicted — FALSE.