Reading IELTS Test Overview & Sentence Completion

Chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor. Analysis of the teeth of these common ancestors provides strong evidence that they had a variable diet of both plant and animal foods. The plant foods would have included fruits, seeds, grasses and roots, while animal foods would have included worms, insects, and possibly some found or hunted meats. It is important to understand that, although the common ancestors of ourselves and chimpanzees lived several million years ago, they must have been very well adapted to their environment, otherwise they would have quickly become extinct. In addition, because we know our more recent ancestors hunted meat, and because chimpanzees do hunt meat on occasion, it is reasonable to suppose that our common ancestors behaved in the same way.

Two key changes took place when our human ancestors first moved away from the chimpanzees: how they foraged for food, and what they ate. Significant changes in the climate at that time would have affected the whole environment and landscapes, causing our ancestors to adapt their diet so they could exist more efficiently in their new surroundings. A result of this may have been the division of work between male and female, the young and the old. From what we know about modern hunter-gatherers, as well as chimpanzees, it is the males that form the hunting parties. This leaves the females and the young to remain at, or near the home base. So until very recently, the males would have spent their days hunting, while the females, the children and the elderly participated in food gathering and food preparation. Roots, for example, needed digging, and usually had to be crushed, soaked and cooked to remove poisons and improve their quality.

The marriage of Pierre and Marie Curie in 1895 marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance. Following Henri Becquerel's discovery in 1896 of a new phenomenon, which Marie later called radioactivity, Marie Curie decided to find out if the radioactivity discovered in uranium was to be found in other elements. She discovered that this was true for thorium. Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose radioactivity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem, and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium.

While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state. This was achieved with the help of the chemist Andre-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie's pupils. Based on the results of this research, Marie Curie received her Doctorate of Science, and in 1903 Marie and Pierre shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The births of Marie's two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 failed to interrupt her scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure for girls in Sevres, France, and introduced a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

The sudden death of her husband in 1906 was a bitter blow to Marie Curie, but was also a turning point in her career. Henceforth she was to devote all her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken. On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband's death, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the isolation of a pure form of radium.

During World War I, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irene, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography, including the mobile units which came to be known as Little Curies, used for the treatment of wounded soldiers. In 1918 the Radium Institute, whose staff Irene had joined, began to operate in earnest, and became a centre for nuclear physics and chemistry.

In 1921, accompanied by her two daughters, Marie Curie made a triumphant journey to the United States to raise funds for research on radium. Women there presented her with a gram of radium for her campaign. Marie also gave lectures in Belgium, Brazil, Spain and Czechoslovakia and had the satisfaction of seeing the development of the Curie Foundation in Paris and the inauguration in 1932 in Warsaw of the Radium Institute, where her sister Bronia became director.

One of Marie Curie's outstanding achievements was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only to treat illness but also to maintain an abundant supply for research. The existence in Paris at the Radium Institute of a stock of 1.5 grams of radium made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments undertaken in the years around 1930. This work prepared the way for the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick and, above all, for the discovery in 1934 by Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie of artificial radioactivity. A few months after this discovery, Marie Curie died as a result of leukaemia caused by exposure to radiation.

Her contribution to physics had been immense, not only in her own work, the importance of which had been demonstrated by her two Nobel Prizes, but because of her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists.

Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes, she is creating an enchanting world. Although she is not aware of it, this fantasy is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for creativity and so it will have important repercussions in her adult life.

Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools with her younger brother. When she bosses him around as his teacher, she is practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. Later on, when they tire of this and settle down with a board game, she is learning about the need to follow rules and take turns with a partner.

Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species, says Dr David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.

Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the 19th century.

But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play, pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. The opportunities for free play are becoming increasingly scarce. Outdoor play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, parents' increased wish to protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis on earlier is better, which is leading to greater competition in academic learning and schools.

International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop policies concerned with children's right to play and to consider implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.

The type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable, explains Dr Sara Baker. We want to know what the long-term impact of play is. It is a real challenge.

Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little data on the impact it has on the child's later life.

Now, thanks to the university's new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning, Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.

A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children's self-control. This is the ability to develop awareness of our own thinking processes and it influences how effectively we go about undertaking challenging activities.

If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, it could be extremely significant for educational practices, because the ability to self-regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.

Gibson adds that playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional development. Observing children at play can give important clues about their well-being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

Whitebread's recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting children's writing. Children wrote longer and better-structured stories when they first played with dolls representing characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with Lego, with similar results.

Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It is regarded as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with work. Let us not lose sight of its benefits and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology.