IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

A UNIQUE GOLDEN TEXTILE

14 A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce this golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

15 Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric which is chemically related to nylon. It is very tough and durable and used in bullet-proof vests. Kevlar is also resistant to wear, tear, and heat and has absolutely no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar's aramid filaments, and greater than that of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand of spider silk long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams. Spider silk is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 per cent of its length without breaking. It can hold its strength below -40C. This gives it a very high toughness, which equals that of commercial fibers.

16 Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce. Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other's heads when housed together. According to Peers, there is scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk to apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 per cent of the properties of natural spider silk.

17 Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboue, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboue built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them. The spiders were temporarily restrained, their silk extracted, and then let go. Peers managed to build a replica of this 24-spider silking machine that was used at the turn of the century, said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. "When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out," Godley said.

18 But to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their plan. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are overwhelming. To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June. Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been silked, they were released back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk.

19 Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk is not very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk, or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical product, or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria or even cows and goats to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful. Part of the reason it is so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein produced by a special gland in the spider's abdomen. Using their spinneret, spiders apply force to rearrange the protein's molecular structure and transform it into solid silk. When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we are talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a transformation from liquid to solid, said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, Ohio, US, who was not involved in creating the textile. Scientists simply cannot replicate the efficiency with which a spider produces silk. Every year we are getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we are not there yet.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

THE POWER OF PERSUASION

A New Zealand restaurateur assesses some recent research from the USA

Some scientists peer at things through high-powered telescopes, others tempt rats through mazes, or mix bubbling fluids in glass beakers. Then there is Robert Cialdini, whose unorthodox research involves such mundane items as towels and chocolates. Nonetheless, Cialdini believes he is discovering important insights into how society works, because he is conducting research into why some people are more persuasive than others.

Cialdini hopes that, by applying a little science, we should all be able to get our own way more often. This is in part a personal quest with its origins in his own experience: Cialdini claims that for his whole life he has been easy prey for salespeople and fundraisers who have managed to persuade him to buy things he did not want or give to charities he had never heard of. Finding that experiments on the psychology of persuasion were telling only a part of the story, Cialdini began to probe influence in the real world, enrolling in sales-training programmes. In this way, he believes he learned first hand a great deal about how to sell automobiles from a car lot, insurance from an office, and even encyclopaedias door to door. Most recently his research has involved the now famous experiments with towels. Many hotels leave a little card in each bathroom asking guests to reuse towels and thus conserve water and reduce pollution. Cialdini and his colleagues wanted to test the relative effectiveness of different text on those cards. Could hotels best motivate their guests to co-operate simply because it would help save the planet, or were other factors more compelling?

To test this, the researchers redesigned the cards, replacing the environmental message with the simple (and truthful) statement that the majority of guests at the hotel had reused their towel at least once. Those guests who received this message were found to be 26% more likely to reuse their towel than those given the original message, and 74% more likely than those receiving no message at all.

This was just one study that has enabled Cialdini to identify his Six Principles of Persuasion. The phenomenon revealed by the towel experiment he calls "social proof": the idea that our decisions are influenced by what other people like us are doing. More perniciously, social proof is the force underpinning some people's anxiety not to be left behind by their neighbours, thus the desire for a bigger house or a faster car. A further principle, which he names "reciprocity", was tested in a restaurant by measuring how patrons would respond to after-dinner chocolates. When the chocolates were dropped individually in front of each diner, tips went up 14%. This is reciprocity in action: we want to return favours done to us, often without bothering to accurately calculate whether what we are giving is proportionate to what we have received.

Cialdini's research has established four more such principles. "Scarcity" is the idea that people want more of things they can have less of, a notion that advertisers ruthlessly exploit - limit of four per customer. Parents can also make use of scarcity by telling their little ones that this is a very unusual chance so they should seize it immediately. The principle of "authority" states that we trust people who know what they are talking about. Cialdini maintains that many professionals don't display their credentials, fearing it is boastful or arrogant to publicise their expertise. The principle he labels "consistency" suggests that we want to act in ways that are consistent with undertakings we have already made. For example, if you are soliciting charitable donations, first ask colleagues if they think they will sponsor you. Later, return with a sponsorship form to those who said yes and remind them of their earlier undertaking. The final principle is "likeness": we are more easily persuaded by those who seem similar to ourselves. In one study, people were sent survey forms and asked to return them to a named researcher. When the researcher falsely identified herself with a similar name, surveys were twice as likely to be completed.

Many of Cialdini's claims about persuasion are just that - highly persuasive - and I can readily see evidence for some of them in my own workplace. But Cialdini's experiments were conducted in the United States and I wonder how well all of his findings can be applied here in New Zealand or elsewhere around the world. For instance, I do understand the general principle of "reciprocity" but cannot imagine New Zealand waiting staff using his cynical chocolate trick in their restaurants because the culture of tipping in this country is so different. But it is true that the way to a diner's heart is to give them something they are not expecting in the way of service and in this country reciprocation would more likely take the form of a return visit to the restaurant and not a tip. It may be that age is also a factor and that different generations would react differently to, say, the "consistency" principle. I suspect that younger people in this country would respond quite positively to this sort of approach, whereas their parents might be put off by any hint of a hard sell. Perhaps in the end we must accept that some of us are simply born with more persuasion skills than others and that we have less control over such matters than Cialdini might like to think.