Buoys are marked with reflective material to assist in their detection by searchlight. Which statement is TRUE? ()
Forty-five fathoms is marked on the anchor chain by().
The helicopter deck of a ship must be marked with the units identification,appropriate aiming circles,and a continuous line on the perimeter which is().
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. The presumptions of policy makers
B. The impact of dual employment
C. The benefits of balanced responsibility
D. The unchanged role of the female parent
E. The experts’ view of the male parent’s role
F. Origins of anxiety in working mothers
PARENTING AND RESPONSIBILITY There are still significant gaps between women and men in terms of their involvement in family life, the tasks they perform and the responsibilities they take. Yet, at least in developed Western countries, both women and men express a desire for greater equality in family life. It is evident that in terms of attitudes and beliefs, the problem cannot simply be thought of in terms of women wanting men to share more equally and men being reluctant to do so. The challenge now is to develop policies and practices based on a presumption of shared responsibility between men and women, and a presumption that there are potential benefits for men and women, as well as for families and the community, if there is greater gender equality in the responsibilities and pleasures of family life. These are becoming key concerns of researchers, policy makers, community workers and, more importantly, family members themselves.
Despite the significant increase in the number of women with dependent children who are in the paid workforce, Australian research studies over the last 15 years are consistent in showing that divisions of labor for family work are very rigid indeed (Watson 1991). In terms of time, women perform approximately 90 percent of child care tasks and 70 percent of all family work, and only 14 percent of fathers are highly participant in terms of time spent on family work (Russell 1983). Demo and Acock (1993), in a recent US study, also found that women continue to perform a constant and major proportion of household labor (68 percent to 95 percent) across all family types (first marriage, divorced, step-family or never married), regardless of whether they are employed or non-employed in paid work.
Divisions of labor for family work are particularly problematic in families in which both parents are employed outside the home (dual-worker families). Employed mothers adjust their jobs and personal lives to accommodate family commitments more than employed fathers do. Mothers are less likely to work overtime and are more likely to take time off work to attend to children’s needs (Vanden Heuvel 1993). Mothers spend less time on personal leisure activities than their partners, a factor that often leads to resentment (Demo and Acock 1993).
The parental role is central to the stress-related anxiety reported by employed mothers, and a major contributor to such stress is their taking a greater role in child care (Vanden Heuvel 1993). Edgar and Glezer (1992) found that close to 90 percent of both husbands and wives agreed that the man should share equally in child care, yet 55 percent of husbands and wives claimed that the men actually did this. (These claims are despite the findings mentioned earlier that point to a much lower participation rate by fathers.) A mother’s wanting her partner to do more housework and child care is a better predictor of poor family adjustment than is actual time spent by fathers in these tasks (Demo and Acock 1993). It is this desire, together with its lack of fulfillment in most families, that bring about stress in the female parent.
Family therapists and social work researchers are increasingly defining family problems in terms of a lack of involvement and support from fathers and are concerned with difficulties involved in having fathers take responsibility for the solution of family and child behavior problems (Edgar and Glezer 1986). Yet, a father accepting responsibility for behavior problems is linked with positive outcomes.
Research studies lend strong support to the argument that there are benefits for families considering a change to a fairer or more equitable division of the pleasures and pains of family life. Greater equality in the performance of family work is associated with lower levels of family stress and higher self-esteem, better health, and higher marital satisfaction for mothers. There is also higher marital satisfaction for fathers, especially when they take more responsibility for the needs of their children—fathers are happier when they are more involved (Russell 1984).
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Vanishing topsoil influences farm productivities
B. Water is being polluted by chemical fertilisers
C. Advantages and disadvantages of fuel produced from crop residues
D. Environmental damages were even worsened by government policies
E. A modest cut in subsidies is adopted in some countries
F. Removal of certain subsidies achieves some positive results
All these activities may have damaging environmental impacts. For example, land clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertilizers and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread of monoculture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided some insurance against pests or diseases in future.
Soil erosion threatens the productivity of land in both rich and poor countries. The United States, where the most careful measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soil’s productivity. The country subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 percent of its cropped land to meadow or forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America.
Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports for farm output drive up the price of land. The annual value of these subsidies is immense: about $ 250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To increase the output of crops per acre, a farmer’s easiest option is to use more of the most readily available inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in Denmark in the period 1960 - 1985 and increased in the Netherlands by 150 percent. The quantity of pesticides applied has risen too: by 69 percent in 1975 - 1984 in Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 percent in the frequency of application in the three years from 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies. The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm support in1984. A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall compounded by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes). The removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past had been the principal causes of erosion. Farms began to diversify. The one kind of subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the environment was the subsidy to manage soil erosion.
In less enlightened countries, and in the European Union, the trend has been to reduce rather than eliminate subsidies, and to introduce new payments to encourage farmers to treat their land in environmentally friendlier ways, or to leave it fallow. It may sound strange but such payments need to be higher than the existing incentives for farmers to grow food crops. Farmers, however, dislike being paid to do nothing. In several countries they have become interested in the possibility of using fuel produced from crop residues either as a replacement for petrol (as ethanol) or as fuel for power stations (as biomass). Such fuels produce far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
They are therefore less likely to contribute to the greenhouse effect. But they are rarely competitive with fossil fuels unless subsidized- and growing them does no less environmental harm than other crops.
Which aid is NOT marked on a chart with a magenta circle? ()
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Decrease in food yields
B. Drop in yield affected by reduction in research
C. Pollution mining crops
D. Desperate situation for Asia
E. Population explosion compounds Asia’s problems
F. International commerce threatens Asian agriculture
WHY WE CAN’T AFFORD TO LET ASIA STARVE Among the problems afflicting a burgeoning world population, overcrowding, poverty and environmental degradation are combining to put at risk the very essence of our survival-food.
“If by the beginning of the next century we have failed to satisfy the very basic needs of the two billion very poor and four billion poor, life for the rest of us could be extremely risky and uncomfortable,” predicts Dr. Klaus Lampe of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. This is a highly threatening, even terrifying prediction for Asia, where 70 per cent of the world’s poor live but where reserves of good quality arable land have practically run out.
Although the world regards Asia as the focus of an economic and industrial miracle, without adequate supplies of food, Lampe says, chaos could easily result in many countries. And the impact will be felt widely throughout the region. In the 1990s alone, he says, the cities of Asia will be swollen by a further 500 million people—nearly equal to the population of the United States and European Community combined. “The only growing population in Asia is that of the poor. Prime productive land is being used for city expansion and building roads, while thousands of hectares are being taken out of production each year because of salinity or alkalinity.”
From the mid-1960s when the Green Revolution began, Asian food production doubled through a combination of highyielding crops, expanded farming area and greater intensification. From now on, growing enough food will depend almost entirely on increasing yield from the same, or smaller, area of land. However, a mysterious threat is emerging in the noticeably declining yields of rice from areas that have been most intensively farmed. Unless scientists can unravel why this is so, food output in Asia may actually stagnate at a time when population will double.
Such issues, Lampe argues, while seen as remote by many countries and international corporations, will strike at their economic base as well. Societies that are too poor or driven by internal strife and civil war will be bad for investment or as markets for goods. Pressure from a rising tide of environmental and political refugees may also be felt.
One significant factor undermining the agricultural economies of developing countries has been the farm trade war between the US and the EC. “We talk about environmental degradation and dangerous chemicals, yet spend billions of US dollars and ECUs producing things we don’t want which ruin local production systems and incomes for poor people,” Lampe says. And instead of developed countries helping struggling nations to develop sustainable food production systems, their policies tend to erode and destroy them.
When world grain prices are bad, farmers in Asia’s uplands turn from rice to cash crops to supplement failing incomes, or clear larger areas of rainforest with catastrophic environmental consequences within just a few years. Cleared rainforest soils are highly erosive; even where they are not, they rapidly become acid and toxic under intense cultivation and plants die, forcing the clearing of ever-larger areas.
Research at the IRRI has indicated that intensive rice production-growing two or three crops a year on the same land is showing signs of yield declines as great as 30 per cent. Evidence for this comes from as far a field as India, The Philippines and Indonesia. At the same time, agricultural research worldwide has been contracting as governments, non-government bodies and private donors reduce funding because of domestic economic pressures. This means, Lampe says, that at risk is the capacity to solve such problems as rice yield decline and research to breed the new generation of superyielding crops. Yet rice will be needed to feed more than half the human population—an estimated 4.5 billion out of 8.3 billion people by 2030.
Compared with the building of weapons of mass destruction or the mounting of space missions to Mars, Lampe says, the devising of sustainable farming systems has little political appeal to most governments: “To them I say: I hope you can sleep well at night.”
Life preservers must be marked with the().
Each of the nine squares in the grid marked A1 to C3 should incorporate all the lines and symbols which are shown in the squares of the same letter and number immediately above and to the left. One of the squares is incorrect. Which one is it?