Part 1
Read the text and answer questions 1–13.

WOODEN BUILDINGS

Using wood as a construction material for large buildings is an ancient practice. The 67-metre-high Sakyamuni Pagoda in China was constructed in 1056, while Japan’s Höryü-ji Temple is even older, dating from the 7th or 8th century. That these magnificent structures have survived for over a thousand years is evidence of wood’s strength and durability as a building material. Still today, 80% of houses in the USA are built of wood. In Australia the proportion is slightly smaller since stone is also a popular choice, particularly in the southern states, while in New Zealand the figure is more like 85%. Certainly, there are problems associated with wooden constructions: wood can rot when exposed to water and is said to be a fire risk. However, with modern technology these issues can be eliminated, which has led to a dramatic renewal of interest in wood as a building material in recent years.

Today, architects and engineers recognize the potential of wood not only for private homes but also for larger multi-storey offices and apartment blocks. In 2015, a 52.8-meter wooden tower block was constructed in Norway, then a world record for an apartment block, but this was soon surpassed by a 53-meter student dormitory at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Then came the 84-meter HoHo building in Vienna, home to a hotel, offices and apartments. Although the HoHo building has a concrete core, most of the structure, as well as the floors, are built of wood. Many of these advances have been made possible by research at the Technical Institute in Graz, Austria, where new engineering systems based on wood construction have been pioneered.

A good example of these techniques is found at the Wood Innovation and Design Centre at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. The first stage in the construction of the building saw large planks of Douglas fir being fastened to one another with glue, which these days can be stronger than nails or screws. This produced large heavy sheets of wooden material; these became the basic structural components for the building. These sheets then had to be precision cut to create the thousands of columns and beams necessary – the team employed lasers for this purpose. Once the cutting work was complete, all the wooden components were taken to the site for assembly. The building was constructed one storey at a time, layer upon layer, not unlike the system used to make a large cake. Once the eighth and final storey was completed, the building reached a height of 30 meters and became a notable landmark in its neighbourhood. And, of course, one of the great advantages of wood comes at the end of a building’s life, in around 100 years’ time. When the Wood Innovation and Design Centre eventually has to be demolished, it will be possible for its principal building material to be recycled, which is not usually practical with steel or concrete.

Other significant wooden buildings are to be found in locations around the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that the Höryü-ji Temple may be the oldest large wooden building in the world, Japanese engineers are at the forefront of this process. One thing that has been learned from maintaining the Höryü-ji Temple over many centuries is that it is often simpler to make major repairs to wooden structures than to those made of concrete and steel. Until quite recently, regulations in Japan have made the construction of very large wooden structures difficult. However, in recognition of new technologies, these are being relaxed by the government, with the result that ever more ambitious projects are being announced. Perhaps the most radical example is the proposed Sumitomo Tower, a skyscraper of 70 storeys to be built largely of wood in central Tokyo; its completion date is 2041.

Because wood is more flexible than steel, it has great potential in countries prone to earthquakes, such as Japan and New Zealand. Engineers in New Zealand believe that wood construction can significantly improve building safety in the event of a natural disaster, as has been demonstrated at the new Wynn Williams House. The wood has been left exposed inside the house to showcase how this type of construction provides attractive interiors as well. Another advantage of wood is that it is so light, particularly when compared to steel and concrete. In Australia, the benefits of lightweight have been taken advantage of in the city of Melbourne, where a large wooden library has been constructed directly beside the water, on land so soft that a heavier building would have been impossible. Furthermore, wood is advantageous even in extreme climates. In Finland, where winter temperatures can fall to -30°C, wood provides all the load-bearing structures for the Puukuokka Block but also guarantees excellent heat insulation as well.

As wood construction technologies continue to develop, it seems probable that architects and engineers will dream up ever more uses for this practical, flexible, and beautiful building material.

Part 2
Read the text and answer questions 14–26.

GOLD DUSTERS

They are the Earth’s pollinators and they come in more than 200,000 shapes and sizes

A
Row upon row, tomato plants stand in formation inside a greenhouse. To reproduce, most flowering plants depend on a third party to transfer pollen between their male and female parts. Some require extra encouragement to give up that golden dust. The tomato flower, for example, needs a violent shake, a vibration roughly equivalent to 30 times the pull of Earth’s gravity, explains Arizona entomologist Stephen Buchmann. Growers have tried numerous ways to rattle pollen from tomato blossoms. They have used shaking tables, air blowers and blasts of sound. But natural means seem to work better.

B
It is no surprise that nature’s design works best. What’s astonishing is the array of workers that do it: more than 200,000 individual animal species, by varying strategies, help the world’s 240,000 species of flowering plants make more flowers. Flies and beetles are the original pollinators, going back to when flowering plants first appeared 130 million years ago. As for bees, scientists have identified some 20,000 distinct species so far. Hummingbirds, butterflies, moths, wasps and ants are also up to the job. Even non-flying mammals do their part: sugar-loving opossums, some rainforest monkeys, and lemurs in Madagascar, all with nimble hands that tear open flower stalks and furry coats to which pollen sticks. Most surprising, some lizards, such as geckos, lap up nectar and pollen and then transport the stuff on their faces and feet as they forage onward.

C
All that messy diversity, unfortunately, is not well suited to the monocrops and mega- yields of modern commercial farmers. Before farms got so big, says conservation biologist Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, ‘we didn’t have to manage pollinators. They were all around because of the diverse landscapes. Now you need to bring in an army to get pollination done.’ The European honeybee was first imported to the US some 400 years ago. Now at least a hundred commercial crops rely almost entirely on managed honeybees, which beekeepers raise and rent out to tend to big farms. And although other species of bees are five to ten times more efficient, on a per-bee basis, at pollinating certain fruits, honeybees have bigger colonies, cover longer distances, and tolerate management and movement better than most insects. They’re not picky – they’ll spend their time on almost any crop. It’s tricky to calculate what their work is truly worth; some economists put it at more than $200 billion globally a year.

D
Industrial-scale farming, however, may be wearing down the system. Honeybees have suffered diseases and parasite infestations for as long as they’ve been managed, but in 2006 came an extreme blow. Around the world, bees began to disappear over the winter in massive numbers. Beekeepers would lift the lid of a hive and be amazed to find only the queen and a few stragglers, the worker bees gone. In the US, a third to half of all hives crashed; some beekeepers reported colony losses near 90 percent. The mysterious culprit was named colony collapse disorder (CCD) and it remains an annual menace – and an enigma.

E
When it first hit, many people, from agronomists to the public, assumed that our slathering of chemicals on agricultural fields was to blame for the mystery. Indeed, says Jeff Pettis of the USDA Bee Research Laboratory, ‘we do find more disease in bees that have been exposed to pesticides, even at low levels.’ But it is likely that CCD involves multiple stressors. Poor nutrition and chemical exposure, for instance, might wear down a bee’s immunities before a virus finishes the insect off. It’s hard to tease apart factors and outcomes, Pettis says. New studies reveal that fungicides – not previously thought toxic to bees – can interfere with microbes that break down pollen in the insects’ guts, affecting nutrient absorption and thus long-term health and longevity. Some findings pointed to viral and fungal pathogens working together. ‘I only wish we had a single agent causing all the declines,’ Pettis says, ’that would make our work much easier!

F
However, habitat loss and alteration, he says, are even more of a menace to pollinators than pathogens. Claire Kremen encourages farmers to cultivate the flora surrounding farmland to help solve habitat problems. ‘You can’t move the farm,’ she says, ‘but you can diversify what grows in its vicinity: along roads, even in tractor yards.’ Planting hedgerows and patches of native flowers that bloom at different times and seeding fields with multiple plant species rather than monocrops ‘not only is better for native pollinators, but it’s just better agriculture,’ she says. Pesticide-free wildflower havens, adds Buchmann, would also bolster populations of useful insects. Fortunately, too, ‘there are far more generalist plants than specialist plants, so there’s a lot of redundancy in pollination,’ Buchmann says. ‘Even if one pollinator drops out, there are often pretty good surrogates left to do the job.’ The key to keeping our gardens growing strong, he says, is letting that diversity thrive.

G
Take away that variety, and we’ll lose more than honey. ‘We wouldn’t starve,’ says Kremen. ‘But what we eat, and even what we wear – pollinators, after all, give us some of our cotton and flax – would be limited to crops whose pollen travels by other means. ‘In a sense,’ she says, ‘our lives would be dictated by the wind.’ It’s vital that we give pollinators more of what they need and less of what they don’t, and ease the burden on managed bees by letting native animals do their part, say scientists.

Part 3
Read the text and answer questions 27–40.

Is there more to video games than people realize?

Many people who spend a lot of time playing video games insist that they have helped them in areas like confidence-building, presentation skills and debating. Yet this way of thinking about video games can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the alien. This lack of awareness has become increasingly inappropriate, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big business indeed.

Recently, the British government released the Byron report on the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. The ensuing debate, however, has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions: the preachers of mental and moral decline, and the innovative game designers. In between are the gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

Susan Greenfield, a renowned neuroscientist, outlines her concerns in a new book. Every individual’s mind is the product of a brain that has been personalized by the sum total of their experiences; with an increasing quantity of our experiences from very early childhood taking place ‘on-screen’ rather than in the world, there is potentially a profound shift in the way children’s minds work. She suggests that the fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the Internet may inculcate a worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think of as healthy.

Greenfield’s prose is full of mixed metaphors and self-contradictions and is perhaps the worst enemy of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however many technophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the latest electronic media are at once domestic and work-related, their mobility blurring the boundaries between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront. A generational divide has opened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television, more alienating for those unfamiliar with new’ technologies, more absorbing for those who are. So how do our lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled?

Adam Martin, a lead programmer for an online games developer, says: ‘Computer games teach and people don’t even notice they’re being taught.’ But isn’t the kind of learning that goes on in games rather narrow? ‘A large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact that as you play you are mastering a set of challenges. But humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily through communication and experimentation, through answering the question “What if?’ Games excel at teaching this too.’

Steven Johnson’s thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art, but that the mean level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more intellectual engagement from consumers. Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity of their virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of the laws of such imaginary worlds has more in common with scientific methods than with a pointless addiction, while the complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds that of anything they might find at school.

Greenfield argues that there are ways of thinking that playing  video games simply cannot teach. She has a point. We should never forget, for instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the human imagination, and to give us the means of more fully expressing our situations in the world. Intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with an old-fashioned world of companionable pastimes than with a cyber future of lonely, isolated obsessives. Games in which friends and relations gather around a console to compete at activities are growing in popularity. The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.

These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products and lie within our control. This doesn’t mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, instinctive fear is an inappropriate response to a technology of any kind. So far, the dire predictions many traditionalists have made about the ‘death of old-fashioned narratives and imaginative thought at the hands of video games’ cannot be upheld. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the hands of interactive media. But literacy standards have failed to decline. Young people still enjoy sport, going out, and listening to music, And most research – including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US government suggests that even pre-teens are not in the habit of blurring game worlds and real worlds.

The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave little room for complacency. Richard Battle, a British writer and game researcher, says ‘Times change: accept it; embrace it.’ Just as, today, we have no living memories of a time before radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living experienced growing up without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we stand to lose and gain before it is too late.