IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

NATURE'S USEFUL DESIGNS

A. What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Almost all living organisms are uniquely adapted to the environment in which they live so well that scientists study them in the hope of replicating their natural designs in technology. This process, called biomimetics, is the crossroads where nature and engineering meet.

B. Perhaps the best example of biomimetics is Velcro. In 1948 a Swiss scientist, George de Mestral, had trouble removing a plant's prickle which was stuck to his dog's fur, so he studied it under a microscope. Impressed by the stickiness of the prickle's hooks, he copied the design, engineering a fastener made of two pieces. One piece has stiff hooks like the prickle, while the other has soft loops that allow the hooks to stick. De Mestral named his invention Velcro - a combination of the words velour and crochet.

C. Andrew Parker, a research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, is a leading proponent of biomimetics. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes, studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anti-counterfeiting technique. He is working to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms and, with the British Ministry of Defense, to emulate their water-repellent properties. On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber, Parker noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. This feature is now being built into solar panels.

D. To Parker, every species, even those that have become extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. The metallic sheen and dazzling colors of certain birds derive not from pigments but from neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint and holograms on credit cards. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss, while a normal light bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat, and bombardier beetles have a highly effective combustion chamber that heats chemicals and fires them at predators.

E. For all nature's sophistication, many clever devices are made from simple substances like keratin, calcium carbonate, and silica, manipulated into structures of fantastic complexity and toughness. The abalone makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this substance into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor 3000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material's exceptional properties is critical to recreating it synthetically.

F. Though impressed by biological structures, Robert Cohen, an engineer at MIT, considers biology merely a starting point for innovation. The biological structure provides a clue to what is useful. But maybe you can do it better. He considers a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient; he wants to know whether they can be transformed into something with true utility in the real world.

G. Potentially one of the most useful embodiments of natural design is the bio-inspired robot, which could be deployed in places where people would be too conspicuous, bored to tears, or killed. Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations.

H. The key to making his micromechanical flying insect work, Fearing says, is not to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying. The fly's wing is driven by 20 muscles, some of which only fire every fifth wing beat. Some things are just too mysterious and complex to be able to replicate.

I. For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products, and arguably only one household word - Velcro. Some biomimetists blame industry, whose short-term expectations clash with time-consuming research. Others lament the difficulty in coordinating work among diverse academic and industrial disciplines. But the main reason biomimetics has not yet come of age is that, from an engineering standpoint, it is very hard to reproduce such intricate nano-puzzles. Nonetheless, the gap with nature is gradually closing.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

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. 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. Ekman looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. Suddenly, across just two frames of the film, he saw an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second. He termed his discovery micro-expression: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to conceal.

Over the next four decades, Ekman 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 essentially standard, regardless of language and culture. Expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our face before we stop them.

Fortunately for liars, most people fail to spot these fleeting signals. Of the 15000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls naturals, have been able to do it. But with training almost anyone can develop the skill. Since the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA and many other agencies, not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique. He has held workshops for lawyers, health professionals and jealous spouses, all wanting to know when someone is not being candid.

Most recently, Ekman's research has resulted in a television series about the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying, but why. Ekman was skeptical when the producer first approached him and would have stopped the project if he could. He feared the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. He was also concerned about unfair convictions, that someone not properly trained might sit on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty simply on the basis of a television programme.

In the end, he was won over because the series is unusual. It is the first time, as far as Ekman knows, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is deeply involved in the project, discussing plot ideas and checking five drafts of each script. He was impressed with the producer's 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 is good enough for a drama, not a documentary.

Ekman professes to have been a terrible liar since childhood 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 refused on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A true lie has two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and no notification that this is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player is not a true liar. They are supposed to deceive you. He prefers to focus on lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.