READING PASSAGE 2

For people who like to keep poultry, ducks offer certain advantages over hens. Ducks are immune to some common diseases found in hens and are less vulnerable to others. Some breeds of duck produce bigger eggs than hens. In addition, ducks lay eggs over a longer season than do hens.

Poultry keepers with gardens have less to worry about if they keep ducks rather than hens because the former are less apt to dig up plants and destroy roots. While both hens and ducks benefit the garden by eating pests, hens are known to damage herb and grass beds. Ducks, on the other hand, will search for insects and snails more carefully. Only very delicate plans are at risk from the broad, webbed feet of ducks.

Like all waterbirds, ducks need access to water, and duck keepers typically provide this by building a pond. Something this large is not absolutely necessary, however; ducks need only to be able to dip their heads in the water to keep their nostrils clean. If a pond is provided, though, it is important to keep ducklings away from it until they are old enough to withstand the cool temperature of the water - about eight weeks.

When keeping ducks, one has to consider just how many the land will support. Generally the rule is 100 ducks per half hectare. If more than this proportion is introduced, there is a risk of compacting the soil, which can lead to muddy conditions for long periods as the rain is not easily absorbed into the ground.

While ducks offer many advantages over hens, they must be given a greater quantity of food, especially if regular eggs are desired. An adult duck will eat between 170 to 200 grams of food a day. If the ducks have access to grass and a pond, they will be able to find for themselves approximately 70% of their daily dietary requirements in warmer months but less than half that in colder times. Therefore, it is important that they be fed enough food, such as grain, every day.

Experienced duck keepers raise duckings every three years or so because it is after this period of time that ducks' egg-laying powers begin to seriously weaken. If the aim is to hatch duckings, keepers should be aware that not all ducks make good mothers, and that certain breeds of duck appear to be worse than others. The poor mothers abandon their eggs a few days after laying them. A sure way of making sure the rejected eggs hatch is to place them next to chicken eggs under a hen.

The eggs of ducks as food for humans have a mixed reputation. This is because of a number of cases of salmonella food poisoning in Europe in the 1970s.Although it was never conclusively shown that duck eggs were to blame, the egg-eating public stopped buying and many duck egg producers went bankrupt. Indeed, there is a risk of salmonella poisoning when ducks lay their eggs in damp conditions, such as on ground that is constantly wet, but the same can be said for the eggs of hens. And commercial duck egg production in France and England, where the outbreaks of salmonella poisoning took place, followed the same standards as those used in the hen egg industry, which experienced no salmonella problems. (Storage of eggs, whether those of hen or duck, can also be a factor in contamination. Studies have found that bacterial growth reaches potentially dangerous levels at storage temperatures of 5°C or greater.

The salmonella scare was over by the early 1980s, but, at least in smaller markets like Australia and New Zealand, few producers wished to risk investment in ducks for fear of problems. No large-scale commercial duck egg production exists in these countries. It has thus been left to small producers, and, more commonly, home duck keepers.

Complete the partial summary below: Choose ONE or TWO words from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

To prevent their ... (7) ... from getting dirty, ducks should have access to water. This may be provided by building a pond, but ducklings under ... (8) ... of age should be prevented from entering it because of the ... (9) ... of the water. If too many ducks are kept on a plot of land, the soil may eventually become ... (10) ... as a result of compaction. For this reason, it is advised that one limits the number of ducks per half hectare of land to 100.

Choose the appropriate letters (A-D) and write them in boxes 11-12 on your answer sheet.

You are advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 13-28 which are based on Reading Passage 2.

The Reading Passage 'Job Sharing' has 6 sections, A-F. Choose the most suitable headings for sections A, C, D, E and F from the list of headings at the top of the next page. Write the appropriate numbers (i-x) in boxes13-17 on your answer sheet.

N.B. There are more headings than sections so you will not use all of them.You may use any of the headings more than once.

List of headings

i Characteristics of job sharers

ii Employer acceptance of job sharing

iii Sharing work v. sharing jobs

iv Rejection of job sharing by industry

v Definition of job sharing

vi Finding a job share partner

vii Ingredients of successful job sharing

viii Creating employment through job sharing

ix Women sharing work

x Job sharers as bosses

Job sharing refers to situation in which two people divide the responsibility of one full-time job. The two people willingly act as part-time workers, enough hours between them to fulfill the duties of a full-time worker. If they each work half the job, for example, they each receive 50 per cent of the job's wages, its holidays and its other benefits. Of course, some job sharers take a smaller or larger share of the responsibilities of the position, receiving a lesser or greater share of the benefits.

Job sharing differs from conventional part-time work in that it is mainly (although not exclusively ) occurring in the more highly skilled and professional areas, which entail higher levels of responsibility and employee commitment . Until recently, these characteristics were not generally seen as compatible with anything less than full-time employment. Thus, the demands of job sharing are reciprocated by better pay and conditions and, ideally, more satisfaction than conventional part-time work.

Job sharing should not be confused with the term work sharing, which pertains to increasing the number of jobs by reducing the number of hours of each existing job ,thus offering more positions to the growing number of unemployed people. Job sharing, by contrast, is not designed to address unemployment problems; its focus, rather, is to provide well-paid work for skilled workers and professionals who want more free time for other pursuits.

As would be expected, women comprise the bulk of job sharers. A survey carried out in 1988 by Britain's Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) revealed that 78per cent of shares were female, the majority of whom were between the ages of 20 and 40 years of age. Subsequent studies have come up with similar results. Many of these women were re-entering the job market after having had children, but they chose not to seek part-time work because it would have meant reduced wages and lower status. Job sharing also offered an acceptable transition back into full-time work after a long absence.

Although job sharing is still seen as too radical by many companies, those that have chosen to experiment with it include large businesses with conservative reputations. One of Britain's major banks, the National Westminster Bank, for example, offers a limited number of shared positions intended to give long-serving employees a break from full-time work. British Telecom, meanwhile, maintains 25 shared posts because,according to its personnel department, 'some of the job sharers might otherwise have left the company and we are now able to retain them.' Two wide-ranging surveys carried out in the country in 1989 revealed the proportion of large and medium-sized private-sector businesses that allow job sharing to be between 16 and 25 per cent. Some 78 per cent of job sharers, however, work in public-sector jobs.

The types of jobs that are shared vary, but include positions that involve responsibility for many subordinates. Research into shared senior management positions suggests that even such high-pressure work can be shared between two people with little adjustment, provided the personalities and temperaments of the sharers are not vastly different from one another. A 1991 study of employees working under supervisory positions shared by two people showed that those who prefer such a situation do so for several reasons. Most prevalent were those who felt there was less bias in the evaluation of their work because having two assessments provided for a greater degree of fairness.

The necessity of close cooperation and collaboration when sharing a job with another person makes the actual work quite different from conventional one-position, one-position jobs. However, to ensure a greater chance that the partnership will succeed, each person needs to know the strengths, weaknesses and preferences of his or her partner before applying for a position. Moreover, there must be an equitable allocation of both routine tasks and interesting ones. In sum, for a position to be job-shared well, the two individuals must be well-matched and must treat each other as equals.

Complete the notes below for SECTION A. Choose ONE or TWO WORDS from the section for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.

Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 23-27 write:

26. Fewer job sharers are employed in the private sector than in the public sector.

Choose the appropriate letter A-D and write it in box 28 on your answer sheet.

You are advised to spend about 25 minutes on Questions 29-42 which are based on Reading Passage 3 (next page).

From the list below choose the most suitable title for the whole of Reading Passage 3. Write the appropriate letter A-D in box 29 on your answer sheet.

The renewed spread of malaria in recent years, particularly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, has been a cause of great concern to health workers and officials around the world. The global health community was once confident that the disease had been brought under control, with many successes in ridding large areas of malaria over the previous decades, but now increasingly large numbers of people are dying from the mosquito-borne ailment. Forty per cent of the world's population live in areas that are infected with malaria, and each year brings approximately 270 million new cases. Table 1 summarises recent distribution by geographic area.

The resurgence of malaria is occurring in several parts of the world. However, it is most acute in Africa, south of the Sahara Desert, where according to a 1993 World Health Organisation (WHO) report, between 1.4 and 2.8 million people, half of them children, now die each year from the disease. This is triple the annual number of people in the same region who die of AIDS. Actual numbers of malaria deaths may be even larger because the symptoms, such as chronic fever, are often mistaken for other, unrelated illnesses, such as influenza or pneumonia.

Table 1: Annual distribution of malaria infection, approximate, selected regions

Incidences of cerebral malaria, which is caused by Plasmodium falciparum, the more dangerous of the two main malaria parasites, have been responsible for the growing number of fatalities in East Africa since the late 1980s. When treatment using chloroquine, which in many cases is not even effective, is not available, victims of cerebral malaria may survive as little as 24 hours.

In the 1950s, sub-tropical regions in the United States, southern Europe and elsewhere were sprayed with DDT, which eliminated the malaria parasite where used appropriately but resulted in resistant mosquitoes where sprayed too often. In other parts of the world at this time, chloroquine was introduced as a means of preventing infection, and it was thought to be effective in bringing down the number of malaria cases until the 1970s, when chloroquine-resistant strains of the parasite began to appear. The resistance kept getting stronger as time went on, and in some areas, such as Malawi and Kenya, malaria is now no longer preventable with commonly used drugs.

Increasing urbanisation is also responsible for the renewed spread of malaria in Africa. Because the parasite is more commonly found in rural areas where mosquitoes can breed in large numbers, people who are raised there have a significantly higher immunity to it than those reared in the towns and cities. Indeed, 5% of children in the countryside die of malaria, and the many who survive it go on to become adults with a high degree of natural resistance. This is not the case with people living in urban areas; when such people go to visit relatives in the countryside, they are at a much higher risk of contracting malaria.

Health workers, discouraged by the diminishing effectiveness of malarial drugs, are seeking to promote physical barriers to infection rather than chemical ones. The concept of mosquito nets hung over beds to keep mosquitoes away is certainly not new, but recent efforts to improve them have led to some success in protecting people from malaria. In experiments in Gambia, the number of children dying from malaria has dropped 50% since using nets soaked in insecticide . To remain effective, the nets need to be re-soaked only twice a year, and no drugs need to be taken for prevention. The nets provide additional benefits to the families who use them in that they prevent other types of irritating insects from getting too close.

Whether or not mosquito nets would be effective on a large scale remains to be seen, as conditions vary from place to place. Some users complain it is too hot under the nets to be able to sleep. Furthermore, their cast limits the number of people who can take advantage of them.

Thus the search for a vaccine for malaria continues. Manuel Patarroyo, a medical researcher from Columbia, stated in 1993 that he had been successful in trying a new vaccine on some 20000 people in South America. Similar testing of the vaccine is being done in Africa, but health officials there are not convinced it will be effective because the rate at which new cases of malaria develops is many times higher than that in South America.

Although not a vaccine, arthemeter, derived from the Chinese herb qinghao, appears to offer an effective way of protecting people from malaria parasites. It proved to have tripled the effectiveness of chloroquine in research carried out in 1993 along the border of Thailand and Cambodia, an area not unlike sub-Saharan Africa in the strength of the parasite's resistance to conventional malarial drugs. There are plans for the new drug to be produced in China and marketed internationally by a French pharmaceutical company.

Use the information in Reading Passage 3 to indicate the relationship between the two items given for each question below. Classify them as:

Choose ONE phrase A-H from the list below to complete each key point. Write the appropriate letters A-H in boxes 36-38 on your answer sheet.

The information in the completed sentences should be an accurate summary of points made by the writer.

N.B. There are more phrases A-H than sentences so you will not use them all. You may use any phrase more than once.

Answer each of the following question using NUMBERS or NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS taken from Reading Passage 3. Write your answers in boxes 39-42 on your answer sheet.

39. Approximately how many children contract malaria each year in sub-Saharan Africa?

41. Identify ONE country in which conventional drugs are no longer effective in preventing malaria.