Matching Endings, Headings, and Summary Completion

The effects of global warming will indeed be global, which is why no nation can afford to ignore it. Europe is currently consuming the world's resources, and producing pollution, at twice the global average, although still well below US levels. Research suggests that its mountains and southern lands will be the hardest hit by climate change. Ten percent of Alpine glaciers disappeared during the summer of 2003 alone, and at current rates 75 percent of Switzerland's glaciers will have melted by 2050. Snow lines are getting higher, and less snow is being stored through the year. This will seriously affect hydroelectric power stations, and more obviously the skiing industry.

Some Mediterranean cities are already intolerably hot and polluted in the summer, but this will get worse, and there will be an increase in forest fires and water shortages. Farmers in the north would benefit, at least for a time, from being able to grow crops which are normally grown in the south, but they are also likely to suffer much less predictable weather and a greater risk of flooding. With increased summer heat, limited water supplies and arid lands, the Mediterranean region may be increasingly abandoned as millions of people move north. This will instantly create enormous new social and political pressures.

Most scientists and environmentalists agree that we must act straight away to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Everyone has a responsibility to reduce their own carbon footprint. They can do this by using less energy. They can also use more efficient and, ideally, renewable energy such as solar, wind and tidal, and lead less polluting lifestyles. This means not only driving cars less, or not at all, but also cutting back on air travel.

In 1840, the United Kingdom introduced the penny black, the first adhesive postage stamp issued anywhere in the world. For many years the postal service in the U.K. had been a very expensive service for ordinary people to use. The costs were prohibitive, a single letter sometimes costing a working person's full day's wage.

There were moves for postal reform for many years, until eventually these moves started gathering force through the attention of many, amongst whom Rowland Hill is the best known, and Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, was instrumental.

The Penny Postage Bill was passed by Parliament on 17 August 1839. Some basic elements of the plan were the lowering of postage rates for basic letters to one penny, the removal of certain idiosyncrasies, that prepayment would become normal, and the availability of printed envelopes, letter sheets, and labels to show prepayment.

A bookseller and printer from Dundee, James Chalmers, holds a strong claim to be the actual inventor of the adhesive postage stamp. He is said to have printed samples of his idea for printed gummed labels in August 1834.

The new stamps went on sale on 1st May 1840 and were valid for postage from 6th May 1840. The labels were well-received and admired; the Mulready design was lambasted and ridiculed.

The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp. Eleven different printing plates were used, and it is possible in almost every case to work out which plate any individual stamp was printed from by a few characteristics.

Every penny black stamp has letters in the lower two corners. These identify what sheet position the stamp occupied. The left square letter shows which horizontal row the stamp was in and the right square letter indicates the vertical column.

There were 68,158,080 penny blacks issued, and even with only a 2% survival rate, there are likely to be about 1.3 million still in existence.

From the collector's perspective, the physical condition of the stamp matters. Any fault such as a thin, tear, crease, or stain will lower the value, and the number, size, and regularity of the margins make a big difference to value.

The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score.

Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? This is a question at the very core of humanity, says Geraint Wiggins.

To some extent, we are all familiar with computerised art. Consider Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in major galleries. Aaron can paint on canvas on its own, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer's own creative ideas.

Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to make sure his creation does not attract the same criticism. Unlike earlier artists such as Aaron, the Painting Fool only needs minimal direction and can come up with its own concepts by going online for material. Colton argues that reactions to software-produced art often arise from double standards.

Composer David Cope invented Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI. EMI created compositions in Cope's style and in the style of revered classical composers. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts into thinking they were hearing genuine Bach.

Some critics blasted Cope's work as pseudoscience, and condemned him for his deliberately vague explanation of how the software worked. Douglas Hofstadter said EMI created replicas which still rely completely on the original artist's creative impulses. When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged.

A study by David Moffat asked expert musicians and non-experts to assess six compositions. Participants were not told beforehand whether the tunes were composed by humans or computers, but were asked to guess and rate how much they liked each one.

Paul Bloom suggests that part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind the work. Colton thinks that when people experience art, they wonder what the artist might have been thinking. With computers producing art, this speculation is cut short, but as technology becomes more complex, finding those greater depths could become possible.

Jacqui and Pete Baker set up their marketing agency, JPB, five years ago. At first it was just the two of them, but they took on a part-time office administrator six months later to keep the paperwork up to date. Their first customers were personal contacts, and after that, word-of-mouth brought new customers to their door.

A. Some years ago, several theoretical physicists began publishing papers on traffic flow in publications normally read by traffic engineers. They simulated the movement of vehicles on a highway using equations that describe how gas molecules move, then modified the equations to account for driver behaviour. The moving-gas model of traffic reproduced many phenomena seen in real-world traffic. The strangest implication was that congestion can arise completely spontaneously.

B. This showed similarities to chaos theory. In any complex interacting system made of many parts, tiny variations in one part can grow in huge but unpredictable ways. Helbing and Kerner see traffic as a complex interacting system. They found that a small fluctuation in traffic density can act like a speck of dust causing a sudden change from freely moving traffic to synchronized traffic.

C. The physicists have challenged proposals to set a maximum capacity for vehicles on highways. They argue that it may be necessary to time each vehicle's entry onto a highway precisely and perhaps directly regulate the speed and spacing of individual cars with central computers and sensors.

D. Research into traffic control is generally centred in civil engineering departments, and the theories of the physicists have been greeted with skepticism. Civil engineers favour practical explanations and believe congestion is often the result of poor road construction.

E. James Banks suggested that sudden slowdowns may have less to do with chaos theory than with driver psychology. As traffic gets heavier and the passing lane gets more crowded, aggressive drivers move to other lanes, and braking shock waves travel backwards through traffic.

A. Mongolia usually evokes images of nomadic herdsmen, but along the western border with Russia, the Altai Mountains have long produced reports of a mysterious human-like creature called an almas. Old accounts describe almas as similar in height to modern Mongolians, hairy, with massive jaws, receding chins and prominent eyebrow ridges.

B. The earliest description of an almas appears in the memoirs of Hans Schiltberger, who was taken prisoner in the early 1400s and sent eastward to serve a Mongol prince. His account mentions wild people in the mountains and also mentions the Przewalski horse, giving the account some credibility.

C. A few scientists have suggested that the almas is or was a real creature, possibly a remnant population of hominids such as Homo erectus or Neanderthals. Occasional finds of hair, skulls or droppings have so far proved to be human or from known animals.

D. Many accounts of almases seem tied up with Mongolia's pre-communist Buddhism. There are descriptions of monasteries with almas artefacts, but communist purges in the 1930s led to the destruction of most monasteries and these artefacts disappeared.

E. One possible explanation is that almas folklore was imported alongside Tibetan Buddhism from the Himalayas. Religious travellers to Lhasa would have heard tales of yetis and seen supposed yeti artefacts in monasteries.

F. Two recent scientific discoveries give the remnant hominid theory a boost: Homo floresiensis and a female finger bone found in a cave in the Siberian section of the Altai Mountains, later announced to be from a previously unknown hominid species.

The instructions accompanying do-it-yourself products are regularly cited as a source of unnecessary expense or frustration. Few companies seem to test their instructions by having them followed by a first-time user. Often, essential information is omitted, steps in the construction process are taken for granted, and some degree of special knowledge is assumed. This is especially worrying in any field where failure to follow correct procedures can be dangerous.

Objections to material in plain English have come mainly from the legal profession. Lawyers point to the risk of ambiguity inherent in the use of everyday language for legal or official documents, and draw attention to the need for confidence in legal formulations, which can come only from using language that has been tested in courts over the course of centuries.

Similarly, professionals in several different fields have defended their use of technical and complex language as being the most precise means of expressing technical or complex ideas. This is undoubtedly true: scientists, doctors, bankers and others need their jargon in order to communicate with each other succinctly and unambiguously. But when it comes to addressing the non-specialist consumer, different criteria must apply.

Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of positive psychology, has proclaimed that happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. For Layard and others like him, the goal of government is to foster an environment of shared prosperity, and positive psychology may indicate the way.

This style of thinking has roots in the work of philosopher Jeremy Bentham. For Bentham, it was apparent that happiness and the lack of misery constitute the human good. Modern proponents of positive psychology often follow in his footsteps while ignoring much previous ethical reflection.

William Davies points out that assuming happiness is the prime self-evident good restricts moral analysis. Davies recognises Bentham as much more than a philosopher. In the 1790s, Bentham proposed a printing machine that could generate unforgeable banknotes and suggested that government departments be interlinked by a system of conversation tubes. To preserve food, he designed a frigidarium. His famous Panopticon prison plan allowed inmates to be constantly monitored.

Bentham also established the science of happiness. If happiness is to be considered a science, it must be quantified. Bentham proposed that pleasure might be measured by heart rate or by the value of money.

The Happiness Industry explains how the pursuit of a science of pleasure has merged with business. It describes the redefining of economic concerns as psychological conditions and the influence of management studies and advertising.

Modern industrial nations seem to require the potential for ever-increasing happiness to keep people motivated in their work. But the idea that authorities should be in charge of fostering happiness is always hazardous to people's freedom.

Almost every child in the world enjoys playing. Researchers and educators perceive that children's communal, intellectual, physical, and behavioural development all benefit from play. Playing was recognised as a fundamental right by the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights in 1989.

Although experts continue to argue for the importance of play, the actual time children spend playing has declined. Academic pressure, test preparation and educational toys have created a false opposition between play and learning.

Definitions of play differ, but most concepts focus on key characteristics. Play is gratifying, substantially motivated by pleasure, process-focused, freely chosen, actively engaging and often make-believe.

Work, unlike play, is usually not considered joyful and is goal-oriented. However, hybrid forms of work and play can provide optimal learning environments when children are motivated and adults guide them.

A recent study suggests that adults may help children's learning while keeping a lighthearted approach in interactions known as guided play. Adults can enrich the environment, join as co-players, ask insightful questions, comment on discoveries, or promote further investigation.

In a child-centred approach to playful learning, both free and guided play are vital. Free play provides the child with true autonomy, whereas guided play allows parents and educators to provide targeted learning experiences.