IELTSwithJurabek

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

The Summer of 2003

It was that summer, scientists now realise, when global warming at last made itself unmistakably felt. People in the Northern Hemisphere knew that summer 2003 was remarkable. Britain had record high temperatures; Europe had out-of-control forest fires, great rivers drying to a trickle and thousands of heat-related deaths. But how remarkable that summer was is only now becoming clear.

June, July and August were the warmest three months recorded in western and central Europe. And they were the warmest by a very long way. Like Britain, Portugal, Germany and Switzerland had record national highs. Over a great rectangular block stretching from west of Paris to northern Italy, taking in Switzerland and southern Germany, the average temperature for the summer months was 3.78 °C higher than the long-term norm, says the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, one of the world's leading institutions for monitoring and analysing temperature records. That might not seem a lot until you are aware of the usual pattern. But then you realise it is enormous. There is nothing like this in previous data. It is considered so exceptional that Professor Phil Jones, the unit's director, says openly - in a way that few scientists have done - that 2003's extreme temperatures may be directly attributed to global warming caused by human actions, rather than natural climate variations.

Meteorologists have hitherto contented themselves with the formula that recent high temperatures are 'consistent with predictions' of climate change. For the great block of the map in question, the unit has reliable temperature records dating back to 1781. Using as a baseline the average summer temperature between 1961 and 1990, departures from the temperature norm, 'anomalies', can easily be plotted.

Over the past 200 years, there have been at least half a dozen excess temperature anomalies approaching, or even exceeding, 2 °C. But there has been nothing remotely like that year, when the anomaly was nearly 4 °C. 'That is quite remarkable,' Professor Jones says. 'It's very unusual in a statistical sense. If this series had a normal statistical distribution you wouldn't get this number. The return period (i.e. how often it could be expected to recur) would be something like one in 1,000 years. If we look at an excess above the average of nearly 4 °C, then perhaps nearly 3 °C of that is natural variability, because we've seen that in past summers. But the final degree of it is likely to be due to global warming, caused by human action.'

That year's summer had in a sense been one that climate scientists had long been anticipating. Until then, the warming had been manifesting itself mainly in winters that were less cold rather than in summers that were much hotter. Last week, the UN predicted that winters were warming so quickly that some of Europe's lower-level ski resorts will die out.

But sooner or later the unprecedented hot summer was bound to come - and that year it did. Over a large swathe of the western part of the European continent, records were broken in all three months. It wasn't only monthly averages, but daily extremes and the lengths of spells above thresholds. National records were set in at least four countries.

One of the most dramatic features of the summer was the hot nights, especially in the first half of August. The high night-time temperatures were related to the 15,000 extra deaths in France during August, compared with previous years. They gradually increased during the first 12 days of the month, peaking at about 2,000 a day on August 12 and 13 and severely overloading the medical services. Then they dropped dramatically after August 14 when minimum temperatures fell by about 5 °C. The elderly were most affected - their death rate rose 70 per cent.

For Britain, the year as a whole is likely to be the warmest recorded. But despite the temperature record on August 10, the summer itself - defined as the June, July and August period - comes behind 1976 and 1995, when there were longer periods of intense heat. At the moment, the year is likely to be the third-hottest in the global temperature record (which goes back to 1856), behind 1998 and 2002. But when the records for October, November and December are collated, it might move into second place. The ten hottest years in the record have occurred since 1990.

Professor Jones is in no doubt about the astonishing nature of that year's European summer. 'The temperatures recorded that year were out of all proportion to the previous record,' he says. 'It was the warmest summer in the last 500 years and probably way beyond that. It was enormously exceptional.'

His colleagues at the Tyndall Centre are planning a study of it. 'It was a summer that had not been experienced before, either in terms of the temperature extremes that were reached, or the range and diversity of the effects of the extreme heat,' says the centre's executive director, Professor Mike Hulme. 'It will certainly have left its mark on a number of countries as to how they think and plan for climate change, much as the 2000 floods revolutionised the way the Government is thinking about flooding in the UK. The 2003 heatwave will have similar repercussions across Europe.'

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 on pages 8 and 9.

The art of deception

Do tiny changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies?

Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose, the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound sincere. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.

As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she had lied to him. So Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery 'micro-expressions': very rapid, intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.

Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan, and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our faces before we get the chance to stop them.

Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15,000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls 'naturals', have been able to do it. But given a little more training, Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know: since these tests were completed in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world), not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defence and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.

Most recently, Ekman's research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying, but why you might have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a 'human lie detector', even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes he was sceptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life's work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions: that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.

In the end though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer's manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80-90 per cent of the show is based on fact, and that's good enough for what is, after all, a drama, not a documentary.

Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become 'more credible' with the public, but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A 'true' lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn't a true liar. They're supposed to be deceiving you, it's part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.