Tag: reading passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The microelectronic revolution

[A]Vacuum tubes were a considerable advance on relay switches, but machines like the ENIAC were notoriously unreliable. The modern term for a problem that holds up a computer program is a “bug.” Popular legend has it that this word entered the vocabulary of computer programmers sometime in the 1950s when moths, attracted by the glowing lights of vacuum tubes, flew inside machines like the ENIAC, caused a short circuit, and brought work to a juddering halt. But there were other problems with vacuum tubes too. They consumed enormous amounts of power: the ENIAC used about 2000 times as much electricity as a modern laptop. And they took up huge amounts of space. Military needs were driving the development of machines like the ENIAC, but the sheer size of vacuum tubes had now become a real problem. ABC had used 300 vacuum tubes, Colossus had 2000, and the ENIAC had 18,000. The ENIAC’s designers had boasted that its calculating speed was “at least 500 times as great as that of any other existing computing machine.” But developing computers that were an order of magnitude more powerful still would have needed hundreds of thousands or even millions of vacuum tubes—which would have been far too costly, unwieldy, and unreliable. So a new technology was urgently required.

[B]The solution appeared in 1947 thanks to three physicists working at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs). John Bardeen (1908–1991), Walter Brattain (1902–1987), and William Shockley (1910–1989) were then helping Bell to develop new technology for the American public telephone system, so the electrical signals that carried phone calls could be amplified more easily and carried further. Shockley, who was leading the team, believed he could use semiconductors (materials such as germanium and silicon that allow electricity to flow through them only when they’ve been treated in special ways) to make a better form of amplifier than the vacuum tube. When his early experiments failed, he set Bardeen and Brattain to work on the task for him. Eventually, in December 1947, they created a new form of amplifier that became known as the point-contact transistor. Bell Labs credited Bardeen and Brattain with the transistor and awarded them a patent. This enraged Shockley and prompted him to invent an even better design, the junction transistor, which has formed the basis of most transistors ever since.

[C]Like vacuum tubes, transistors could be used as amplifiers or as switches. But they had several major advantages. They were a fraction the size of vacuum tubes (typically about as big as a pea), used no power at all unless they were in operation, and were virtually 100 percent reliable. The transistor was one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing and it earned its inventors the world’s greatest science prize, the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. By that time, however, the three men had already gone their separate ways. John Bardeen had begun pioneering research into superconductivity, which would earn him a second Nobel Prize in 1972. Walter Brattain moved to another part of Bell Labs.

[D]William Shockley decided to stick with the transistor, eventually forming his own corporation to develop it further. His decision would have extraordinary consequences for the computer industry. With a small amount of capital, Shockley set about hiring the best brains he could find in American universities, including young electrical engineer Robert Noyce (1927–1990) and research chemist Gordon Moore (1929–). It wasn’t long before Shockley’s idiosyncratic and bullying management style upset his workers. In 1956, eight of them—including Noyce and Moore—left Shockley Transistor to found a company of their own, Fairchild Semiconductor, just down the road. Thus began the growth of “Silicon Valley,” the part of California centered on Palo Alto, where many of the world’s leading computer and electronics companies have been based ever since.

[E]It was in Fairchild’s California building that the next breakthrough occurred—although, somewhat curiously, it also happened at exactly the same time in the Dallas laboratories of Texas Instruments. In Dallas, a young engineer from Kansas named Jack Kilby (1923–2005) was considering how to improve the transistor. Although transistors were a great advance on vacuum tubes, one key problem remained. Machines that used thousands of transistors still had to be hand wired to connect all these components together. That process was laborious, costly, and error prone. Wouldn’t it be better, Kilby reflected, if many transistors could be made in a single package? This prompted him to invent the “monolithic” integrated circuit (IC), a collection of transistors and other components that could be manufactured all at once, in a block, on the surface of a semiconductor. Kilby’s invention was another step forward, but it also had a drawback: the components in his integrated circuit still had to be connected by hand. While Kilby was making his breakthrough in Dallas, unknown to him, Robert Noyce was perfecting almost exactly the same idea at Fairchild in California. Noyce went one better, however: he found a way to include the connections between components in an integrated circuit, thus automating the entire process.

[F]Integrated circuits, as much as transistors, helped to shrink computers during the 1960s. In 1943, IBM boss Thomas Watson had reputedly quipped: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Just two decades later, the company and its competitors had installed around 25,000 large computer systems across the United States. As the 1960s wore on, integrated circuits became increasingly sophisticated and compact. Soon, engineers were speaking of large-scale integration (LSI), in which hundreds of components could be crammed onto a single chip, and then very large-scale integration (VLSI), when the same chip could contain thousands of components.

[G]The logical conclusion of all this miniaturization was that, someday, someone would be able to squeeze an entire computer onto a chip. In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild to establish a new company of their own. With integration very much in their minds, they called it Integrated Electronics or Intel for short. Originally they had planned to make memory chips, but when the company landed an order to make chips for a range of pocket calculators, history headed in a different direction. One of their engineers, Marcian Edward (Ted) Hoff (1937–), realized that instead of making a range of specialist chips for a range of calculators, he could make one chip that could be programmed to work in them all. Thus was born the general-purpose, single chip computer or microprocessor—and that brought about the next phase of the computer revolution.

Questions 1-8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in reading passage 1?

In boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE             if the statement agrees with the information.

FALSE           if the statement contradicts with the information.

NOT GIVEN  if there is no information on this.

1. Bug is used to talk about something that causes issues in the computer.
2. ENIAC used 1000 times more electricity as needed by the modern laptops.
3. The need for a new technology came because people got bored from the previous technology.
4. The junction transistor was invented by John Bardeen.
5. Transistors could be used only as amplifiers.
6. John Bardeen won a Nobel Prize in the year 1956 for introducing semiconductors.
7. Robert Noyce was a research chemist hired by William Shockley.
8. Silicon Valey is situated in Palo Alto.

Questions 9-13

Complete the sentences below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY for each answer.

•  Monolithic integrated circuits were being made by (9)________________.
• The development of integrated circuits led to (10)____________________ and (11)______________ integration.
• Integrated Electronics was founded by(12) ________________ and  (13) ____________.

ANSWERS

1. True

2. False

3. False

4. False

5. False

6. False

7. True

8.  True

9. Jack Kilby

10. large scale integration

11. very large scale

12. Robert Noyce

13. Gordon Moore

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SECTION TWO                                    QUESTIONS 15-22

Read the passage below and answer Questions 15-22 on the following page

On the very day that Greece received the first tranche of its new bailout from the European Union, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has decided to resign and call a general election, which will be held next month. Until then, the country will be led by a woman, Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou, the president of Greece’s Supreme Court. On the face of it, Tsipras’s move seems premature. In the next few months, his government has much to do in order to meet the terms of the bailout and persuade its creditors to consider giving Greece some much needed debt relief. The election will complicate that timetable and will, inevitably, create more uncertainty about where the country is going. But, despite the risks it involves, Tsipras’s gambit was necessary for broader democratic and political reasons. When Tsipras did a U-turn last month and accepted the harsh bailout terms imposed by Germany, he created a big split in his Syriza party, which took office in January. About a third of Syriza’s members of parliament voted against the deal or abstained. Since then, the government has been ruling with the support of its coalition partner, a right-wing populist party called Independent Greeks. But Tsipras was facing a likely parliamentary vote of no confidence, which he wasn’t certain to survive, and a formal schism with anti-bailout members of Syriza, who have been talking about setting up their own party. Rather than engaging his internal opposition, the Prime Minister has chosen to try and outflank them by calling a snap election, which he hopes will bestow him with a new mandate.

That is probably a smart move, and it will also give the Greek public an opportunity to register their feelings, once again, about the bailout package and its attendant continuation of austerity policies. When last consulted, in the “Oxi” referendum, on July 5th, the voters overwhelmingly rejected the bailout terms being demanded by the E.U. and the International Monetary Fund, only for Tsipras and his colleagues to accept a similar deal a couple of weeks later, under threat of Greece being ejected from the eurozone. The upcoming election will effectively be a referendum on Tsipras’s decision to accept more austerity and more international supervision of Greece’s economy. “The political landscape must clear up,” the energy minister Panos Skourletis, an ally of Tsipras, said on Thursday. “We need to know whether the government has or does not have a majority.”

Since Greece is a very divided country, an outright majority for Syriza is an unlikely outcome. In its January triumph, which left it as the largest party in parliament, it won just thirty-six per cent of the vote. This time around, at least some of Syriza’s supporters are likely to support its dissident faction, which is led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, who last week accused Tsipras of giving into an E.U. “dictatorship” and called for the creation of a new “united movement that will justify people’s desire for democracy and social justice.” It seems as though Lafazanis and his colleagues will campaign on the idea of taking Greece out of the eurozone and restoring the drachma, which, at least in theory, would give the government the leeway to pursue more expansionary monetary and fiscal policies.

This is a political debate Greece needs to have. For the past six months, some of Syriza’s supporters have been suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance. Perfectly understandably, they want an end to austerity policies; but they also want Greece to stay in the eurozone. If the dramatic showdown between Syriza and the country’s creditors demonstrated anything, it is that Greece and other E.U. debtor countries cannot have both of these things. Germany, with the support of the Benelux countries and many of the newer E.U. members from Eastern Europe, won’t allow it. In seeking reëlection, Tsipras, who, according to recent opinion polls, still retains a lot of popular support, will argue that he got the best deal possible. That’s what he did in his address to the nation on Thursday night.

It is now up to the critics of austerity, including Lafazanis and possibly even Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister whom my colleague Ian Parker profiled recently, to make the argument that an alternative set of policies, including a new Greek currency, is viable. If they proceed down this road, emphasizing the practicality of their program rather than simply criticizing Tsipras for capitulating, the election campaign could be interesting.

QUESTIONS 15-22

Do the following statements agree with the information in the passage?

In boxes 15-22 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                    if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE                  if the statement contradicts  the information

NOT GIVEN         if the information is not given in the passage

15. Greece will be led by a woman prime minister because the current one died.

16. The government of Tsipras was facing internal issues, however it managed to survive because of people’s support.

17. The demands of the bailout were rejected by everyone in Greece and has yet not been accepted.

18. Syrzia won a majority in the January elections.

19. Lafazanis are taking steps to take Greece out of euro zone, expecting to gain some monetary issues.

20. The debate proved that Germany won’t allow EU country that own money to have all the benefits.

21. The finance minister of Greece at present is Yanis Varoufakis.

22. The main task of the former finance minister is make alternative policies.

 

ANSWER

15. False

16.False

17.False

18. True

19. True

20. True

21. True

22. True

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