IELTSwithJurabek

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

The fashion industry's evolution

List of Headings

A 14 The fashion industry is a multibillion-dollar global enterprise devoted to the business of making and selling clothes. It encompasses all types of garments, from designer fashions to ordinary everyday clothing. Because data on the industry are typically reported for national economies, and expressed in terms of its many separate sectors, total figures for world production of textiles and clothing are difficult to obtain. However, by any measure, the industry accounts for a significant share of world economic output.

B 15 The fashion industry is a product of the modern age. Prior to the mid-19th century, virtually all clothing was handmade for individuals, either as home production or on order from dressmakers and tailors. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of new technologies such as the sewing machine, the development of the factory system of production, and the growth of department stores and other retail outlets, clothing had increasingly come to be mass-produced in standard sizes, and sold at fixed prices. Although the fashion industry developed first in Europe, today it is highly globalised, with garments often designed in one country, manufactured in another, and sold in a third. For example, an American fashion company might source fabric in China and have the clothes manufactured in Vietnam, finished in Italy, and shipped to a warehouse in the United States for distribution to retail outlets internationally.

C 16 One of the first accomplishments of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century was the partial automation of the spinning and weaving of wool, cotton, silk and other natural fibres. Today, these processes are highly automated and carried out by computer-controlled, high-speed machinery, and fabrics made from both natural fibres and synthetic fibres (such as nylon, acrylic, and polyester) are produced. A growing interest in sustainable fashion (or 'eco-fashion') has led to greater use of environmentally friendly fibres, such as hemp. In addition, high-tech synthetic fabrics offer such properties as moisture absorption, stain resistance, retention or dissipation of body heat, and protection against fire, weapons, cold, ultraviolet radiation, and other hazards. Fabrics are also produced with a wide range of visual effects through dyeing, weaving, printing, and other processes. Together with fashion forecasters, fabric manufacturers work well in advance of the clothing production cycle, to create fabrics with colours, textures, and other qualities that anticipate consumer demand.

D 17 Historically, very few fashion designers have become famous brands such as Coco Chanel or Calvin Klein, who have been responsible for prestigious high-fashion collections. These designers are influential in the fashion world, but, contrary to popular belief, they do not dictate new fashions; rather, they endeavour to design clothes that will meet consumer demand. The vast majority of designers work in anonymity for manufacturers, as part of design teams, adapting designs into marketable garments for average consumers. They draw inspiration from a wide range of sources, including film and television costumes, street clothing, and active sportswear. The fashion industry's traditional design methods, such as paper sketches and the draping of fabric on mannequins, have been supplemented or replaced by computer-assisted design techniques. These allow designers to rapidly make changes to a proposed design, and instantaneously share the proposed changes with colleagues - whether they are in the next room or on another continent.

E 18 An important stage in garment production is the translation of the clothing design into templates, in a range of sizes, for cutting the cloth. Because the proportions of the human body change with increases or decreases in weight, templates cannot simply be scaled up or down. Template making was traditionally a highly skilled profession. Today, despite innovations in computer programming, designs in larger sizes are difficult to adjust for every body shape. Whatever the size, the template - whether drawn on paper or programmed as a set of computer instructions - determines how fabric is cut into the pieces that will be joined to make a garment. For all but the most expensive clothing, fabric cutting is accomplished by computer-guided knives or high-intensity lasers that can cut many layers of fabric at once.

F 19 The next stage of production is the assembly process. Some companies use their own production facilities for some or all of the manufacturing process, but the majority rely on separately owned manufacturing firms or contractors to produce garments to their specifications. In the field of women's clothing, manufacturers typically produce several product lines a year, which they deliver to retailers on predetermined dates. Technological innovation, including the development of computer-guided machinery, has resulted in the automation of some stages of assembly. Nevertheless, the fundamental process of sewing remains labour-intensive. In the late 20th century, China emerged as the world's largest producer of clothing because of its low labour costs and highly disciplined workforce. Assembled items then go through various processes collectively known as 'finishing'. These include the addition of decorative elements, fasteners, brand-name labels, and other labels (often legally required) specifying fibre content, laundry instructions, and country of manufacture. Finished items are then pressed and packed for shipment.

G 20 For much of the period following World War II, trade in textiles and garments was strictly regulated by purchasing countries, which imposed quotas and tariffs. Since the 1980s, these protectionist measures, which were intended (ultimately without success) to prevent textile and clothing production from moving from high-wage to low-wage countries, have gradually been abandoned. They have been replaced by a free-trade approach, under the regulatory control of global organisations. The advent of metal shipping containers and relatively inexpensive air freight have also made it possible for production to be closely tied to market conditions, even across globe-spanning distances.

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

Thinking for themselves

Some insights into animal intelligence

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg brought Alex, a one-year-old African gray parrot, into her lab at Harvard University to teach him to reproduce the sounds of English. At that time most scientists considered animals mere machines, lacking the ability to think in a rational way or feel emotions as humans do. 'I wasn't trying to see if Alex could learn a human language,' said Pepperberg. 'My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.' Given that Alex's brain was the size of a walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg's study would be futile.

But by the time Alex died in 2007, he knew 150 words, could count, do simple arithmetic, and distinguish between objects according to shape, color, and material. Many of Alex's skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of 'same' and 'different', are generally ascribed only to higher mammals. But parrots, like higher apes (and humans), live in complex societies, and need to monitor changing relationships and environments.

'They need to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe,' Pepperberg noted. They need to categorize things - what's edible, what isn't - and to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock. For a long-lived bird, you can't do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved.'

Just how easily mental skills can be acquired is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. For abstract thinking, humans employ symbols, letting one thing stand for another. And Juliane Kaminski, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, believes that dogs can do this too. In 2008, Kaminski and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann conducted an experiment with a border collie. The dog successfully selected and brought her owner toys which she had never seen before, prompted only by a picture of each toy.

Creativity is another skill which seems to have evolved in humans and animals alike. 'People were initially surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools,' says behavioral ecologist Alex Kacelnik. 'But then people thought, "Well, they share our ancestry - of course they're smart." Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds.' New Caledonian crows, for example, use their beaks and claws to fashion tools to poke out grubs from palm trees. 'But the problem is we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds - our last common ancestor was a reptile living over 300 million years ago.'

Kacelnik and his researchers at Oxford University were particularly impressed with the ingenuity of one of the crows - Betty, a wild-caught female. In one experiment, Betty successfully selected a hook-shaped wire to get a piece of meat from a glass tube.

Then, when another bird unexpectedly stole the hook, Betty took a straight piece of wire, shaped it into a hook, and retrieved the food. This was the first time Betty had seen a piece of wire like this, Kacelnik says, 'is a major kind of cognitive sophistication.'

We are clearly not alone in our ability to invent or plan - or even to plot and lie. Studies show that western scrub jays can guess another bird's intentions and act on that knowledge. A jay knows that if another jay watches it hide a nut, there's a chance it will be stolen. So the first jay will return to move the nut when the other jay is gone. 'It's some of the best evidence so far of experience projection in another species,' says Nicky Clayton of Cambridge University. What's more, the jays seem to know how long ago they hid a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils.

Human cognitive psychologists call this ability 'episodic memory' and argue that it only exists in species that can mentally travel back in time. They believe that animals cannot distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Such skepticism is a challenge for Clayton. 'We have good evidence that jays remember specific hiding events, which is the original definition of episodic memory. But now the goalposts have moved. Whenever we find a mental skill in a species that is reminiscent of human ability, the human cognition scientists change the definition.'

Cognitive psychologist Louis Herman has spent decades studying bottlenose dolphins. These intelligent mammals are highly interactive, social and cosmopolitan, living in subpolar to tropical environments worldwide. Among the many skills exhibited by Herman's dolphins is the ability to imitate the motor behaviors of instructors. If a trainer bent backward and lifted a leg, the dolphin would turn on its back and lift its tail in the air. This requires the imitator to form a mental image of the other individual's body, then adjust its own body accordingly - actions that imply an awareness of one's self, an ability once seen as the sole preserve of humans.

What Herman finds fascinating is that these aquatic creatures diverged from primates millions of years ago. That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect. 'We don't share their biology or ecology, but do share the need to establish life-long bonds and alliances. This appears to be the likely common driving force.'