The Daily Dose

Cambridge 18 | Test 4 | Passage 2 The Growth Mindset   Over the past century, a powerful idea has taken root in the educational landscape. The concept of intelligence as something innate has been supplanted by the idea that intelligence is not fixed, and that, with the right training, we can be the authors of our own cognitive capabilities. Psychologist Alfred Binet, the developer of the first int...

Cambridge 18 | Test 2 | Passage 2 Living with artificial intelligence   This has been the decade of AI, with one astonishing feat after another. A chess-playing AI that can defeat not only all human chess players, but also all previous human-programmed chess machines, after learning the game in just four hours? That’s yesterday’s news , what’s next? True, these prodigious accomplishments are all i...

as though (phrase) as it would be if You look as though you've been running a marathon!   millennium (noun) [countable] /mɪˈlen.i.əm/ a period of 1,000 years, or the time when a period of 1,000 years ends Imagine what the world will be like at the end of the next millennium.   astonishing (adjective) /əˈstɑː.nɪ.ʃɪŋ/ very surprising Her writing shows astonishing depth.   prior (adjective) [before n...

Cambridge 18 | Test 2 | Passage 3 An Ideal City The Renaissance marked the transition from the 15th century to modernity and took place after the spread of the plague in the 14th century, which caused a global crisis resulting in some 200 million deaths across Europe and Asia. Today, the world is on the cusp of a climate crisis, which is predicted to cause widespread displacement, extinctions and...

Cambridge 18 | Test 1 | Passage 3 Conquering Earth’s space junk problem Last year, commercial companies, military and civil departments and amateurs sent more than 400 satellites into orbit , over four times the yearly average in the previous decade. Numbers could rise even more sharply if leading space companies follow through on plans to deploy hundreds to thousands of large constellations of sa...

Cambridge 17 | Test 4 | Passage 3 Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the game as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded . Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old alreadystands out in the...

Cambridge 17 | Test 4 | Passage 2 Does education fuel economic growth? Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers , and this has implications for today. Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people—especially women and the...

Cambridge 17 | Test 3 | Passage 2 Palm Oil Palm oil is an edible oil derived from the fruit of the African palm tree, and is currently the most consumed vegetable oil in the world. It’s almost certainly in the soap we wash with in the morning, the sandwich we have for lunch, and the biscuits we snack on during the day. Why is palm oil so attractive for manufacturers? Primarily because its unique p...

Cambridge 17 | Test 2 | Passage 3 Insight or evolution?  Scientific discovery is popularly believed to result from the sheer genius of such intellectual stars as naturalist Charles Darwin and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Our view of such unique contributions to science often disregards the person’s prior experience and the efforts of their lesser-known predecessors. Conventional wisdom a...

Cambridge 17 | Test 1 | Passage 1 The development of the London underground railway In the first half of the 1800s, London’s population grew at an astonishing rate, and the central area became increasingly congested . In addition, the expansion of the overground railway network resulted in more and more passengers arriving in the capital. However, in 1846, a Royal Commission decided that the railw...

Cambridge 16 | Test 4 | Passage 1 Roman tunnels The Persians, who lived in present-day Iran, were one of the first civilizations to build tunnels that provided a reliable supply of water to human settlements in dry areas. In the early first millennium BCE, they introduced the qanat method of tunnel construction, which consisted of placing posts over a hill in a straight line, to ensure the tunnel...

Cambridge 16 | Test 2 | Passage 3 How to make wise decisions  One of the most reliable ways to support wisdom in our own day-to-day decisions is to look at scenarios from a third-party perspective, as though giving advice to a friend. Research suggests that when adopting a first-person viewpoint, we focus on “the focal features of the environment” and when we adopt a third-person “observer” viewpo...

Cambridge 16 | Test 1 | Passage 3 The future of work   According to a leading business consultancy, 3-14% of the global workforce will need to switch to a different occupation within the next 10-15 years, and all workers will need to adapt as their occupations evolve alongside increasingly capable machines. Automation or “embodied artificial intelligence” (AI)—is one aspect of the disruptive effec...

1. self-evident (adjective) /ˌself ˈevɪdənt/ obvious and needing no further proof or explanation e.g., It is self-evident that childhood experiences influence our adult behavior.   2. latest (adjective) /ˈleɪtɪst/ newest or most recent or modern I’m interested in all the latest fashions.   3. obsession (noun) [C or U] something or someone that you think about all the time    e.g., The kids have an...

Cambridge 16 | Test 1 | Passage 1 Why we need to protect polar bears  Polar bears are being increasingly threatened by the effects of climate change, but their disappearance could have far-reaching consequences. They are uniquely adapted to the extreme conditions of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures can reach -40°C. One reason for this is that they have up to 11 centimeters of fat underneath t...

Cambridge 15 | Test 3 | Passage 3 Why fairy tales are really scary tales People of every culture tell each other fairy tales but the same story often takes a variety of forms in different parts of the world. In the story of Little Red Riding Hood that European children are familiar with, a young girl on the way to see her grandmother meets a wolf and tells him where she is going. The wolf runs on...

Cambridge 15 | Test 2 | Passage 3 Having a laugh Humans start developing a sense of humor as early as six weeks old, when babies begin to laugh and smile in response to stimuli. Laughter is universal across all human cultures and even exists in some form in rats, chimps, and bonobos. Like other human emotions and expressions, laughter and humor provide psychological scientists with rich resources...

Cambridge 15 | Test 1 | Passage 2 Driverless Cars The automotive sector is well used to adapting to automation in manufacturing. The implementation of robotic car manufacture from the 1970s onwards led to significant cost savings and improvements in the reliability and flexibility of vehicle mass production. A new challenge to vehicle production is now on the horizon and, again, it comes from auto...

Cambridge 15 | Test 1 | Passage 1 Nutmeg – a valuable spice The nutmeg tree is a large evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia. Until the late 18th century, it only grew in one place in the world: a small group of islands in the Banda Sea. The tree is thickly branched with dense foliage of tough, dark green oval leaves, and produces small, yellow, bell-shaped flowers and pale yellow pear-shaped fr...

Cambridge 14 | Test 4 | Passage 2 Why zoos are good In my view, It is perfectly possible for many species of animals living in zoos or wildlife parks to have a quality of life as high as, or higher than, in the wild. Animals in good zoos get a varied and high-quality diet with all the supplements required, and any illnesses they might have will be treated. Their movement might be somewhat restrict...

Cambridge 14 | Test 2 | Passage 3 Why companies should welcome disorder New research suggests that our obsession with efficiency is misguided . The problem is not necessarily the management theories or strategies we use to organize our work; it’s the basic assumption we hold in approaching how we work. Here it’s the assumption that order is a necessary condition for productivity. This assumption h...

Cambridge 14 | Test 1 | Passage 1 The Importance of Children’s Play Whitebeard’s recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting children’s writing. “Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.” Children wrote longer and better-structured stories when the...

Cambridge 13 | Test 2 | Passage 3 Making the Most of Trends Many ignore trends in their innovation strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach and let competitors take the lead. At a minimum, such responses mean missed profit opportunities. At the extreme, they can jeopardize a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry. The purpose of this article is twofold: to spur ma...

Cambridge 13 | Test 2 | Passage 2 Oxytocin In almost half of the existing research results, oxytocin influenced only certain individuals or in certain circumstances. Where once researchers took no notice of such findings, now a more nuanced understanding of oxytocin’s effects is propelling investigations down new lines. The key to understanding what the hormone does lies in pinpointing its core fu...

Cambridge 13 | Test 1 | Passage 2 Why Being Bored is Useful  Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, believes that “all emotions are there for a reason, including boredom .” Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. “We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things.” In experiments published last year, Mann fou...