IELTSwithJurabek

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on pages 7 and 8.

The attraction of video games

The world's love of video games has much to do with people's desires and motives.

14 A Video games, it is often claimed, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have been trying to correct for many years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed in the media, games are often dismissed as irresponsible, unimportant byproducts of the broader digital revolution.

But a growing number of experts disagree. This is, after all, an entertainment medium that worldwide makes $50bn a year. Using ideas from psychology and sociology, theorists and designers suggest that our love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our most basic desires and motivations.

Game design has become big business and has led to the creation of a multitude of companies. 'The industry attitude toward training has changed radically,' says prominent game researcher Jesper Juul. 'I recall hearing professionals claim that game design was a strange and unteachable art, but now this attitude has mostly faded.' Designing video games is increasingly recognised as a valid field of university study throughout the world.

15 B Central to an understanding of games is the theory that games are fun because they teach us in a way that our brains prefer, that is, through systems and puzzles. Raph Koster, designer of multiplayer fantasy games, points out that an effective learning environment is one in which failure is acceptable, even welcomed. Accordingly, Koster says that in games, the player enters into a situation where the rules of the real world don't apply - and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. When gaming, people feel free to try things and to learn, and not worry about what might happen.

Consistently, Koster says, the best games are the ones that provide us with interesting tools such as weapons or magic, and allow us to experiment with them. For example, in one early game, players are given the ability to jump, and can practise this for as long as they like, but to get to the next stage they need to master this ability so they can leap over an enemy and onto a platform.

'Games allow us to create these little systems where learning is controlled really brilliantly,' says Margaret Robertson, director at a London-based game design company. 'Something we don't talk about is that, actually, one of the strengths of games is the vague sense of disapproval that still surrounds them - they feel like something that's forbidden!' And that can, of course, be very exciting.

16 C Another important element in the popularity of games is the player's ability to determine what happens. Games tap into our need to have direction; this is very obvious in games where we shape the lives of virtual humans, but it's becoming a vital element of action adventures too. 'Games are increasingly complex systems,' says Dan Pinchbeck, an experimental game designer. 'There's an emphasis on the pleasure of choosing and planning. We've moved quite dramatically away from the very first video games. These games mostly involved the player merely reacting to events. But games then became more about approaching a situation and making a plan depending on your preferred play style.'

17 D Many studios design their games around reward systems. 'A good game will have progression at the end of each level, but it will also provide surprise rewards halfway through,' says Ben Weedon, a games studio consultant. 'In a game, you're essentially pressing the same buttons and doing the same things over and over again, so you need those occasional surprises to stay motivated.'

18 E Games have constantly evolved over the years and continue to do so right up to the present. Now, incorporating a narrative structure into a game is becoming increasingly important. Many games have adopted Hollywood's three-act structure, which is designed to maintain our loyalty to a particular game.

As in many films, a short final act is often used to give a sense of acceleration towards a preferably startling climax. Opening levels of games are also short, because this flatters us into thinking we're making good progress, whereas the middle levels are more extensive.

19 F Games even tap into our friendships. The rise of multiplayer gaming means that gaming increasingly involves social interaction. And other businesses are taking notice and using this as an element in advertising their brands. Then there's the new concept of 'gamification', in which websites and smartphone apps are being designed like games, with high scores and achievement points to keep customers entertained. Research estimates that businesses spent more than $100m worldwide on gamification projects last year, a figure predicted to rise to $1.6bn in the next four years.

So, in fact, games aren't just an insignificant fad, as some people might suggest. They fulfil intrinsic human needs, whether we are conscious of it or not. The loop of learning, control and rewards is at the heart of something very important, and very attractive.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

The facility for verbal language

Apes may learn to communicate with humans, but what are the differences between this and true human speech?

A Animal language works through rather limited vocabularies of calls, postures and sometimes scents that appear to convey concrete meanings. Konrad Lorenz, the great ethologist, has paraphrased the most universal animal signal as: 'I am here; where are you?' Animals clearly remember the past and sometimes plot elaborately to manipulate the behavior of others in their social group. Monkeys have been observed to give an alarm call, indicating that a predator is near when it is not, in order to distract other monkeys from a favorite food source. However, non-human animals apparently cannot discuss the distant past, the remote future, or abstract or hypothetical ideas.

B True or full language must include two specific categories of words, according to linguist Derek Bickerton. First there are those words that refer to concrete objects, perceptible attributes, and real actions - what linguists call 'lexical items'. At least some animals use lexical items in their language. In addition, true or full language includes a number of words that are primarily relational, numerical, referential, temporal, directional, and so on - which linguists call 'grammatical items'. It is the grammatical items that allow us to generate sentences and to understand a single sentence without confusing our listeners; they eliminate ambiguities or, as linguists say, they 'disambiguate our utterances'.

C In contrast to full language users, individuals who have missed the opportunity to learn language normally, and indeed apes who have undergone considerable training, all use much simplified language. There is only one tense, the present tense. Moreover, grammatical items are rudimentary or often completely absent. This restricted or 'bare bones' language is what Bickerton calls proto-language. He believes it is the first means of verbal communication that we learn as children and is probably a fair approximation of the first means of verbal communication that we developed evolutionarily too. It is the form of language that we share with a few talented and trained apes. Bickerton suggests that proto-language is a robust if limited means of communication that survives even horrendous deprivation. It is the fallback rudimentary type of language also used by people fully adept in one language who are trying to express themselves in another; thus, proto-language lies at the root of pidgin language. Proto-language is the sort of language we can readily envision as developing by small increments into the exact and elaborate verbal communication that marks out human utterances today.

D Bickerton argues that proto-language and full language are two systems separated not only by their modes of expression but also by their genesis. In his view, proto-language and true language developed independently to serve different purposes, and they probably have different neurological bases. This is why proto-language does not become full language as the speaker matures or learns more. A trained ape, for example, does not suffer from arrested development of language; it is capable of fully developed proto-language but will never develop the other system that is full language. Under normal conditions, proto-language is supplemented and eventually supplanted by full language in humans.

E Why have apes failed to learn full language? It is not because they are physically ill-adapted for speech (which they are), nor is it because they cannot grasp the use of symbols. Experiments conducted by Allen and Beatrice Gardiner, working with a chimpanzee called Washoe, by Penny Patterson with the gorilla Koko, and by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh with the pygmy chimp named Kanzi have all demonstrated that apes have an impressive ability to learn symbols. Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi has effectively demolished the criticism that ape language was a product of wishful thinking on the researchers' part. Clearly, apes exposed to appropriate language opportunities learn to combine symbols into multi-word utterances and to participate in meaningful dialogues. The problem, according to Bickerton, is that apes do not have the elaborate representational system that humans possess and so they never progress from proto-language to full language. There is an absolute limit to the complexities of their utterances, a limit that is both grammatical and conceptual.

F Bickerton hypothesizes that proto-language developed as a communication system, based on the neurological template that we share with apes. However, he believes that the neurological basis for full language evolved as a complex system for taking in sensory information about the environment, processing it, storing it, and perhaps evaluating it as a basis for future actions. The basis for full language, argues Bickerton, was a sort of mapping function, a means of representing the world internally. While all creatures map their world to some extent, humans have developed a stunningly intricate representational system that far exceeds that of other organisms in complexity and subtlety. In order to make a highly detailed and accurate map, one that changes minute by minute as new information is added, we interpose a tremendous amount of mental processing between the experience and our mental representation of it. This permits us to think about circumstances or events that are not occurring and may never occur. Without a detailed mental symbol that represents yourself, you cannot think about yourself in any complex way. Apes seem to have only a rudimentary sense of self and a limited degree of consciousness, and they lack the elaborate representational system that would enable them to develop truly complex thoughts and full language.