TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN
1.It is impossible these days to get a good job without a qualification from a respected institution. 2.Most people who upgrade their qualifications do so for the joy of learning. 3.In some jobs, the position you hold must be reapplied for. 4.Some parents spend extra on their children's education because of the prestige attached to certain schools 5.According to the text, students who performed bally at school used to be accepted by their classmates. 6.Employees who do not undertake extra study may find their salary decreased by employers. 7.Australians appear to have responded to the call by a former Prime Minister to become better
qualified1. 8.Australia's education system is equal to any in the world in the opinion of most educationists.
Reading Passage 1 below.
Right and left-handedness in humans
Why do humans, virtually alone among all animal species, display a distinct left or right handedness? Not even our closest relatives among the apes possess such
decided2 lateral3 asymmetry4, as psychologists call it. Yet about 90 per cent of every human population that has ever lived appears to have been right-handed. Professor Bryan Turner at Deakin University has studied the research literature on left-handedness and found that handedness goes with sidedness. So nine out of ten people are right-handed and eight are right-footed. He
noted5 that this
distinctive6 asymmetry in the human population is itself
systematic7. 'Humans think in categories: black and white, up and down, left and right. It's a system of signs that enables us to categorise
phenomena8 that are
essentially9 ambiguous.'
Research has shown that there is
genetic10 or inherited element to handedness. But while left-handedness tends to run in families, neither left nor right handers will automatically produce off-spring with the same handedness; in fact about 6 per cent of children with two right-handed parents will be left-handed. However, among two left-handed parents, perhaps 40 per cent of the children will also be left-handed. With one right and one left-handed parent, 15 to 20 per cent of the offspring will be lefthanded. Even among identical twins who have exactly the same
genes11, one in six pairs will differ in their handedness.
What then makes people left-handed if it is not simply genetic? Other factors must be at work and researchers have turned to the brain for clues. In the 1860s the French surgeon and
anthropologist12, Dr Paul Broca, made the
remarkable13 finding that patients who had lost their powers of speech as a result of a stroke (a blood
clot14 in the brain) had
paralysis15 of the right half of their body. He noted that since the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right half of the body, and
vice16 versa, the brain damage must have been in the brain's left hemisphere, Psychologists now believe that among right handed people, probably 95 per cent have their language centre in the left hemisphere, while 5 per cent have right-sided language, Left-handers, however,do not show the reverse pattern but instead a majority also Some 30 per cent have right hemisphere language.