IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

The history of the Celtic language

A In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, a version of the Celtic language spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century BC. The tablet turned out to be one of the most important sources of words from this extinct language.

B Two researchers, geneticist Dr Peter Forster and linguist Dr Alfred Toth, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages. They say that Celtic became a language in its own right and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed. Then in the first century BC, the Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that their language, Latin, and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups: the Goidelic branch of Celtic, which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed mainly of Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall.

C Because languages change so fast, historical linguists have little faith in language trees that go back more than a few thousand years. Dr Forster has developed a new dating method for relating a group of languages, basing it on the tree-drawing techniques used to trace the evolutionary relationships among genes. The method will work on just a handful of words, a fortunate circumstance since only some 30 Gaulish words have known counterparts in all the other languages under study. Dr Forster and Dr Toth have used the method to draw up a tree relating the different branches of Celtic to one another and to other Indo-European languages like English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In a published article, they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe over 5,000 years ago, it split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English. Within Celtic, their tree shows that Gaulish, the mainland European version of the language, separated from its Goidelic and Brythonic cousins, much as might be expected from the facts of geography.

D The researchers' method even dates the points at which their language tree divides, although the dates have a wide range of possibility. They calculate that the Indo-European language initially fragmented in Europe around 8100 BC, plus or minus 1,900 years, and the divergence between the mainland European and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 BC, plus or minus 1,500 years. These dates are much earlier than previously estimated. "The traditional date of the Indo-European fragmentation has been 4000 BC for some time," said linguist Dr Merritt Ruhlen. He said the new method "seems pretty reasonable" and should be useful in tracing back the earlier history of the Indo-European language.

E Specialists have long debated which country was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and whether their language was spread by conquest or because its speakers were the first agriculturists whose methods and tongue were adopted by other populations. The second theory, that it was spread by agriculture, has been advocated by archaeologist Dr Colin Renfrew. Dr Forster, who works with Dr Renfrew, said in an interview that the suggested date 8100 BC for the arrival of Indo-European in Europe does seem to vindicate Renfrew's archaeological idea that the Indo-European languages were spread by farmers. Agriculture started to arrive in Europe from the Near East around 6000 BC, which is earlier than the traditional date proposed by linguists for the spread of Indo-European. This writing would fit with the lower end of Dr Forster's range of dates.

F Dr Forster said that his estimated date of 3200 BC for the arrival of Celtic speakers in the British Isles is also much earlier than the usual date, 600 BC, posited on the basis of archaeological evidence. Dr Forster and Dr Toth said their method of evaluating groups of languages against each other was similar to historical linguists, many of whom restrict their research to how words in only one single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his approach he said: "To be honest, they don't understand it, most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about." The method used by Dr Forster and Dr Toth has two parts. One is to draw a tree on the basis of carefully chosen words; the second is to date the splits in the tree by calibrating them with known historical events. This is similar to the way geneticists date their evolutionary trees by tying one or more branch points to known dates from the fossil record.

G Dr April McMahon, a linguist at the University of Sheffield in England, said that Dr Forster's method "seems to me to be a good start", and that it was reasonable to base a language family tree on just a handful of well-chosen words. She had less confidence in the dating method, she said, because language changes in an irregular way based on social factors like the size of the speaker's group and its degree of contact with others.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

The psychology of new product adoption

John Gourville explores the reasons why consumers don't always buy new products.

An American philosopher once said, "If a man can ... make a better mousetrap than his neighbor ... the world will make a beaten path to his door." If only marketing innovation was that simple. In today's marketplace, companies that successfully introduce new products are more likely to flourish than those that don't. However, businesses spend billions of dollars making better "mousetraps" only to find consumers rejecting them. Studies show that new products fail at the staggering rate of between 40% and 90%. In the US packaged goods industry, for example, companies introduce 30,000 new products every year, but 70% to 90% of them stay on store shelves for less than 12 months. According to one study, 47% of the start-up companies that pioneered new products later went out of business altogether.

Experts and novices alike tend to dismiss unsuccessful innovations as bad ideas that were destined to fail. But surely that's too simple an explanation. If these innovations were so misguided, why wasn't it obvious from the outset? Why don't consumers buy innovative products with distinct advantages over existing ones? To understand why new products fail we must delve into the psychology of behavior change.

Companies have long assumed that they have only to develop innovations that are objectively superior to existing products, and consumers will have sufficient incentive to purchase them. In the 1960s, communications scholar Everett Rogers called the concept "relative advantage" and identified it as the most critical driver of new-product adoption. Although compelling, the theory has one major flaw: it fails to capture the psychological biases that affect decision-making. In 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the reasons why individuals deviate from rational economic behavior. One of the cornerstones of that research, developed with psychologist Amos Tversky, is how individuals value choices in the marketplace. Kahneman and Tversky showed that our responses to the alternatives before us have four distinct characteristics.

First, people evaluate the attractiveness of an alternative based not on its objective or actual value, but on its subjective or perceived value. Second, consumers evaluate new products relative to the products they already own. Third, people view any improvements relative to this reference point and treat all shortcomings as losses. Fourth, and most important, losses have a far greater impact on people than similarly sized gains, a phenomenon that Kahneman and Tversky called "loss aversion". Loss aversion leads people to value products they already possess more than those that they don't. In other words, our desire to keep what we have is far greater than our desire to gain something new.

In a 1990 paper, behavioral economist Richard Thaler and his colleagues described a series of experiments they conducted to quantify this phenomenon. In one experiment, they gave coffee mugs to a group of people, the "Sellers", and asked at what price point, from $0.25 to $9.25, they would be willing to part with those mugs. The researchers then asked another group, the "Choosers", to whom they didn't give coffee mugs, to indicate whether they would choose the money or the mug at each price point. In objective terms, all the Sellers and the Choosers were in the same situation: they were choosing between a mug and a sum of money. In one trial the Sellers priced the mug at $7.12, on average, but the Choosers were willing to pay only $3.12. In another trial, the Sellers and the Choosers valued the mug at $7 and $3.50, respectively. Overall, the Sellers always demanded at least twice as much to give up the mugs as the Choosers would pay to obtain them.

In a 1989 paper, economist Jack Knetsch helped to explain why people tend to stick with what they have even if a better alternative exists, by providing a compelling demonstration of what is known as the "status quo bias". Knetsch asked one group of students to choose between an attractive coffee mug and a bar of Swiss chocolate. He gave a second group the coffee mugs but later allowed each student to exchange their mugs for a chocolate bar. Finally, Knetsch gave chocolate bars to a third group then later allowed them to exchange their bars for a mug. Of the students initially given a choice, 56% chose the mug and 44% chose the chocolate bar, indicating a near even split in preferences between the two products. Logically, therefore, about half of the students to whom Knetsch gave the coffee mug should have traded for the chocolate bar and vice versa. However, in reality, only 11% of the students with mugs and 10% of those with chocolate bars wanted to exchange their products. To approximately 90% of the students, giving up what they already had seemed like a painful loss and reduced their desire to trade.

Interestingly, most people seem oblivious to the existence of the behaviors implicit in these biases. In study after study, when researchers presented people with evidence that they had irrationally overvalued what they had, they were shocked, skeptical and more than a little defensive. These behavioral tendencies are universal, but awareness of them is not.

In a perfect world, companies would know that consumers irrationally overvalue incumbent products and would take that bias into account when launching innovations. But developers are also biased - in favor of new products. Having worked on a new product for years, developers operate in a world where their innovation is the reference point. They're convinced that the product works and they are keenly aware of the shortcomings of existing alternatives. Companies call those developers "product champions" or "believers", suggesting that they have embraced a world the rest of us haven't yet.