Ielts Reading CAM 8 TEST 3 – Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers Seldom is the weather more – Studocu

Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers

Seldom is the weather more dramatic than when thunderstorms strike. Their
electrical fury inflicts death or serious injury on around 500 people each year
in the United States alone. As the clouds roll in, a leisurely round of golf can
become a terrifying dice with death – out in the open, a lone golfer may be a
lightning bolt’s most inviting target. And there is damage to property too.
Lightning damage costs American power companies more than $100 million
a year.

But researchers in the United States and Japan are planning to hit back.
Already in laboratory trials they have tested strategies for neutralising the
power of thunderstorms, and this winter they will brave real storms,
equipped with an armoury of lasers that they will be pointing towards the
heavens to discharge thunderclouds before lightning can strike.

The idea of forcing storm clouds to discharge their lightning on command is
not new. In the early 1960s, researchers tried firing rockets trailing wires into
thunderclouds to set up an easy discharge path for the huge electric charges
that these clouds generate. The technique survives to this day at a test site
in Florida run by the University of Florida, with support from the Electrical
Power Research Institute (EPRI), based in California. EPRI, which is funded by
power companies, is looking at ways to protect the United States’ power grid
from lightning strikes. ‘We can cause the lightning to strike where we want it
to using rockets,’ says Ralph Bernstein, manager of lightning projects at
EPRI. The rocket site is providing precise measurements of lightning voltages
and allowing engineers to check how electrical equipment bears up.

Bad behaviour

But while rockets are fine for research, they cannot provide the protection
from lightning strikes that everyone is looking for. The rockets cost around
$1,200 each, can only be fired at a limited frequency and their failure rate is
about 40 per cent. And even when they do trigger lightning, things still do
not always go according to plan. ‘Lightning is not perfectly well behaved,’
says Bernstein. ‘Occasionally, it will take a branch and go someplace it
wasn’t supposed to go.’

And anyway, who would want to fire streams of rockets in a populated area?
‘What goes up must come down,’ points out Jean-Claude Diels of the
University of New Mexico. Diels is leading a project, which is backed by EPRI,
to try to use lasers to discharge lightning safely- and safety is a basic

requirement since no one wants to put themselves or their expensive
equipment at risk. With around $500,000 invested so far, a promising
system is just emerging from the laboratory.

The idea began some 20 years ago, when high-powered lasers were
revealing their ability to extract electrons out of atoms and create ions. If a
laser could generate a line of ionisation in the air all the way up to a storm
cloud, this conducting path could be used to guide lightning to Earth, before
the electric field becomes strong enough to break down the air in an
uncontrollable surge. To stop the laser itself being struck, it would not be
pointed straight at the clouds. Instead it would be directed at a mirror, and
from there into the sky. The mirror would be protected by placing lightning
conductors close by. Ideally, the cloudzapper (gun) would be cheap enough
to be installed around all key power installations, and portable enough to be
taken to international sporting events to beam up at brewing storm clouds.

A stumbling block

However, there is still a big stumbling block. The laser is no nifty portable:
it’s a monster that takes up a whole room. Diels is trying to cut down the
size and says that a laser around the size of a small table is in the offing. He
plans to test this more manageable system on live thunderclouds next
summer. Bernstein says that Diels’s system is attracting lots of interest from
the power companies.

But they have not yet come up with the $5 million that EPRI says will be
needed to develop a commercial system, by making the lasers yet smaller
and cheaper. I cannot say I have money yet, but I’m working on it,’ says
Bernstein. He reckons that the forthcoming field tests will be the turning
point – and he’s hoping for good news. Bernstein predicts ‘an avalanche of
interest and support’ if all goes well. He expects to see cloud-zappers
eventually costing $50,000 to $100,000 each.

Other scientists could also benefit. With a lightning ‘switch’ at their
fingertips, materials scientists could find out what happens when mighty
currents meet matter. Diels also hopes to see the birth of ‘interactive
meteorology’ – not just forecasting the weather but controlling it. ‘If we could
discharge clouds, we might affect the weather,’ he says.

And perhaps, says Diels, we’ll be able to confront some other meteorological
menaces. ‘We think we could prevent hail by inducing lightning,’ he says.
Thunder, the shock wave that comes from a lightning flash, is thought to be
the trigger for the torrential rain that is typical of storms. A laser thunder
factory could shake the moisture out of clouds, perhaps preventing the

Questions 4-

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 4-6 on your answer sheet.

EPRI receives financial support from 4 …………………

The advantage of the technique being developed by Diels is that it can be
used

5 …………………

The main difficulty associated with using the laser equipment is related to its

6 …………………

Questions 7-

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.

Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

In this method, a laser is used to create a line of ionisation by removing
electrons from 7 ………………… This laser is then directed at 8 ………………… in
order to control electrical charges, a method which is less dangerous than
using 9 ………………… As a protection for the lasers, the beams are aimed
firstly at 10 ………………….

A cloud-zappers B atoms C storm clouds

D mirrors E technique F ions
G rockets Hconductors I thunder

Questions 11-

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 1?

In boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about
this

11 ………………… Power companies have given Diels enough money to
develop his laser.

12 ………………… Obtaining money to improve the lasers will depend on
tests in real storms.

13 ………………… Weather forecasters are intensely interested in Diels’s
system.

The Nature of Genius

There has always been ari interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word
‘genius’, from the Latin gens (= family) and the term ‘genius’, meaning
‘begetter’, comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the
family. In its earliest form, genius was concerned with the ability of the head
of the family, the paterfamilias, to perpetuate himself. Gradually, genius
came to represent a person’s characteristics and thence an individual’s
highest attributes derived from his ‘genius’ or guiding spirit. Today, people
still look to stars or genes, astrology or genetics, in the hope of finding the
source of exceptional abilities or personal characteristics.

The concept of genius and of gifts has become part of our folk culture, and
attitudes are ambivalent towards them. We envy the gifted and mistrust
them. In the mythology of giftedness, it is popularly believed that if people
are talented in one area, they must be defective in another, that intellectuals
are impractical, that prodigies burn too brightly too soon and burn out, that
gifted people are eccentric, that they are physical weaklings, that there’s a
thin line between genius and madness, that genius runs in families, that the
gifted are so clever they don’t need special help, that giftedness is the same
as having a high IQ, that some races are more intelligent or musical or
mathematical than others, that genius goes unrecognised and unrewarded,
that adversity makes men wise or that people with gifts have a responsibility
to use them. Language has been enriched with such terms as ‘highbrow’,
‘egghead’, ‘blue-stocking’, ‘wiseacre’, ‘know-all’, ‘boffin’ and, for many,
‘intellectual’ is a term of denigration.

discoveries of scientists like Kepler or Einstein become the commonplace
knowledge of schoolchildren and the once outrageous shapes and colours of
an artist like Paul Klee so soon appear on the fabrics we wear. This does not
minimise the supremacy of their achievements, which outstrip our own as
the sub-four-minute milers outstrip our jogging.

To think of geniuses and the gifted as having uniquely different brains is only
reasonable If we accept that each human brain is uniquely different. The
purpose of instruction is to make US even more different from one another,
and in the process of being educated we can learn from the achievements of
those more gifted than ourselves. But before we try to emulate geniuses or
encourage our children to do so we should note that some of the things we
learn from them may prove unpalatable. We may envy their achievements
and fame, but we should also recognise the price they may have paid in
terms of perseverance, single-mindedness, dedication, restrictions on their
personal lives, the demands upon their energies and time, and how often
they had to display great courage to preserve their integrity or to make their
way to the top.

Genius and giftedness are relative descriptive terms of no real substance. We
may, at best, give them some precision by defining them and placing them
in a context but, whatever we do, we should never delude ourselves into
believing that gifted children or geniuses are different from the rest of
humanity, save in the degree to which they have developed the performance
of their abilities.

Questions 1-

Choose FIVE letters, A-K.

Write the correct letters in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet

NB Your answers may be given in any order.

Below are listed some popular beliefs about genius and giftedness.

Which FIVE of these beliefs are reported by the writer of the text?

A Truly gifted people are talented in all areas.

B The talents of geniuses are soon exhausted.

C Gifted people should use their gifts.

D A genius appears once in every generation.

E Genius can be easily destroyed by discouragement.

F Genius is inherited.

G Gifted people are very hard to live with.

H People never appreciate true genius.

I Geniuses are natural leaders.

J Gifted people develop their greatness through difficulties.

K Genius will always reveal itself.

Questions 6-

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 2?

In boxes 6-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

6 ………………… Nineteenth-century studies of the nature of genius failed to
take into account the uniqueness of the person’s upbringing.

7 ………………… Nineteenth-century studies of genius lacked both objectivity
and a proper scientific approach.

8 ………………… A true genius has general powers capable of excellence in
any area.

9 ………………… The skills of ordinary individuals are in essence the same as
the skills of prodigies.

10 ………………… The ease with which truly great ideas are accepted and
taken for granted fails to lessen their significance.

11 ………………… Giftedness and genius deserve proper scientific research
into their true nature so that all talent may be retained for the human race.

continuously flows. Destruction of old material and formation of new material
are thus in permanent dynamic equilibrium. The material of which the
organism is formed changes continuously. Thus our bodies continuously
exchange old substance for new, just like a spring which more or less
maintains its form and movement, but in which the water molecules are
always different.

C

Thus ageing and death should not be seen as inevitable, particularly as the
organism possesses many mechanisms for repair. It is not, in principle,
necessary for a biological system to age and die. Nevertheless, a restricted
life span, ageing, and then death are basic characteristics of life. The reason
for this is easy to recognise: in nature, the existent organisms either adapt
or are regularly replaced by new types. Because of changes in the genetic
material (mutations) these have new characteristics and in the course of
their individual lives they are tested for optimal or better adaptation to the
environmental conditions. Immortality would disturb this system – it needs
room for new and better life. This is the basic problem of evolution.

D

Every organism has a life span which is highly characteristic. There are
striking differences in life span between different species, but within one
species the parameter is relatively constant. For example, the average
duration of human life has hardly changed in thousands of years. Although
more and more people attain an advanced age as a result of developments
in medical care and better nutrition, the characteristic upper limit for most
remains 80 years. A further argument against the simple wear and tear
theory is the observation that the time within which organisms age lies
between a few days (even a few hours for unicellular organisms) and several
thousand years, as with mammoth trees.

E

If a life span is a genetically determined biological characteristic, it is
logically necessary to propose the existence of an internal clock, which in
some way measures and controls the ageing process and which finally
determines death as the last step in a fixed programme. Like the life span,
the metabolic rate has for different organisms a fixed mathematical
relationship to the body mass. In comparison to the life span this
relationship is ‘inverted’: the larger the organism the lower its metabolic
rate. Again this relationship is valid not only for birds, but also, similarly on

average within the systematic unit, for all other organisms (plants, animals,
unicellular organisms).

F

Animals which behave ‘frugally’ with energy become particularly old, for
example, crocodiles and tortoises. Parrots and birds of prey are often held
chained up. Thus they are not able to ‘experience life’ and so they attain a
high life span in captivity. Animals which save energy by hibernation or
lethargy (e. bats or hedgehogs) live much longer than those which are
always active. The metabolic rate of mice can be reduced by a very low
consumption of food (hunger diet). They then may live twice as long as their
well fed comrades. Women become distinctly (about 10 per cent) older than
men. If you examine the metabolic rates of the two sexes you establish that
the higher male metabolic rate roughly accounts for the lower male life
span. That means that they live life ‘energetically’ – more intensively, but
not for as long.

G

It follows from the above that sparing use of energy reserves should tend to
extend life. Extreme high performance sports may lead to optimal
cardiovascular performance, but they quite certainly do not prolong life.
Relaxation lowers metabolic rate, as does adequate sleep and in general an
equable and balanced personality. Each of us can develop his or her own
‘energy saving programme’ with a little self-observation, critical self-control
and, above all, logical consistency. Experience will show that to live in this
way not only increases the life span but is also very healthy. This final aspect
should not be forgotten.

Questions 1-

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-G from the list of headings
below.

Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i The biological clock
ii Why dying is beneficial

• 10 ………………… would pose a serious problem for the theory of evolution

Questions 11-

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading
Passage 3?

In boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about
this

11 ………………… The wear and tear theory applies to both artificial objects
and biological systems.

12 ………………… In principle, it is possible for a biological system to
become older without ageing.

13 ………………… Within seven years, about 90 per cent of a human body is
replaced as new.

14 ………………… Conserving energy may help to extend a human’s life.