SAIGON UNIVERSITY NAME: ………………………………………
FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT
MID-TERM READING TEST (B)
Time: 40 minutes
ANSWER SHEET
1 2 3 4 5 6
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25 26
READING PASSAGE 1 Questions 1-13
When it comes to celebrating the flavor of food, our mouth gets all the credit. But in reality, it is the nose
that knows.
No matter how much we talk about tasting our favorite flavours, relishing them really depends on a
combined input from our senses that we experience through mouth, tongue and nose. The taste,
texture, and feel of food are what we tend to focus on, but most important are the slight puffs of air as
we chew our food – what scientists call ‘retronasal smell‘.
Certainly, our mouths and tongues have taste buds, which are receptors for the five basic flavours:
sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, or what is more commonly referred to as savoury. But our tongues
are inaccurate instruments as far as flavour is concerned. They evolved to recognise only a few basic
tastes in order to quickly identify toxins, which in nature are often quite bitter or acidly sour.
All the complexity, nuance, and pleasure of flavor come from the sense of smell operating in the back of
the nose. It is there that a kind of alchemy occurs when we breathe up and out the passing whiffs of our
chewed food. Unlike a hound’s skull with its extra-long nose, which evolved specifically to detect external
smells, our noses have evolved to detect internal scents. Primates specialise in savouring the many
millions of flavour combinations that they can create for their mouths.
Taste without retronasal smell is not much help in recognising flavour. Smell has been the most poorly
understood of our senses and only recently has neuroscience, led by Yale University’s Gordon Shepherd,
begun to shed light on its workings. Shepherd has come up with the term ‘neuro-gastronomy‘ to link the
disciplines of food science, neurology, psychology, and anthropology with the savoury elements of
eating, one of the most enjoyed of human experiences.
In many ways, he is discovering that smell is rather like face recognition. The visual system detects
patterns of light and dark and, building on experience, the brain creates a spatial map. It uses this to
interpret the interrelationship of the patterns and draw conclusions that allow us to identify people and
places. In the same way, we use patterns and ratios to detect both new and familiar flavours. As we eat,
specialised receptors in the back of the nose detect the air molecules in our meals. From signals sent by
the receptors, the brain understands smells as complex spatial patterns. Using these, as well as input
from the other senses, it constructs the idea of specific flavours.
This ability to appreciate specific aromas turns out to be central to the pleasure we get from food, much
as our ability to recognise individuals is central to the pleasures of social life. The process is so embedded
in our brains that our sense of smell is critical to our enjoyment of life at large. Recent studies show that
people who lose the ability to smell become socially insecure, and their overall level of happiness
plummets.
Working out the role of smell in flavour interests food scientists, psychologists, and cooks alike. The
relatively new discipline of molecular gastronomy, especially, relies on understanding the mechanics of
aroma to manipulate flavour for maximum impact. In this discipline, chefs use their knowledge of the
chemical changes that take place during cooking to produce eating pleasures that go beyond the
“ordinary”.
However, whereas molecular gastronomy is concerned primarily with the food or “smell” molecules,
neuro-gastronomy is more focused on the receptor molecules and the brain’s spatial images for the
smell. Smell stimuli form what Shepherd terms “odour objects”, stored as memories, and these have a
direct link with our emotions. The brain creates images of unfamiliar smells by relating them to other
more familiar smells. Go back in history and this was part of our survival repertoire; like most animals, we
drew on our sense of smell, when visual information was scarce, to single out prey.
Thus the brain’s flavour-recognition system is a highly complex perceptual mechanism that puts all five
senses to work in various combinations. Visual and sound cues contribute, such as crunching, as does
touch, including the texture and feel of food on our lips and in our mouths. Then there are the taste
receptors, and finally, the smell, activated when we inhale. The engagement of our emotions can be
readily illustrated when we picture some of the wide-ranging facial expressions that are elicited by
various foods – many of them hard-wired into our brains at birth. Consider the response to the sharpness
of lemon and compare that with the face that is welcoming the smooth wonder of chocolate.
The flavour-sensing system, ever receptive to new combinations, helps to keep our brains active and
flexible. It also has the power to shape our desires and ultimately our bodies. On the horizon, we have
the positive application of neuro-gastronomy: manipulating flavour to curb our appetites.
Questions 1-5
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
1) According to scientists, the term ________ characterises the most critical factor in appreciating flavor.
2) ‘Savoury’ is better-known word for ___________
3) The tongue was originally developed to recognise the unpleasant taste of _____________
4) Human nasal cavities recognise ___________ much better than external ones.
5) Gordon Shepherd uses the word ‘neuro-gastronomy’ to draw together a number of _________ related
to the enjoyment of eating.
Questions 6-9
Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your reading answer sheet.
Face patterns of dark and light are the brain identifies facial recognition is key to
recognition used to put together a (6) ____ faces our enjoyment of (7) ____
Smell receptors recognise the brain identifies smell is key to our
the (8) ________ in food certain (9) ______ enjoyment of food
Questions 10-13
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your reading answer sheet.
10) In what form does the brain store ‘odor objects’?
11) When seeing was difficult, what did we use our sense of smell to find?
12) Which food item illustrates how flavor and positive emotion are linked?
13) What could be controlled in the future through flavor manipulation?
READING PASSAGE 2 Questions 14-26
A Chinese manufacturer has developed a method for producing 30-story, earthquake-resistant
skyscrapers that assemble in just 15 days.
A Broad Sustainable Building, also known as "Broad," was founded and is led by Zhang Yue. On January 1,
2012, a time-lapse film of the 30-story feat was made public. A clock in the bottom-right corner of the
screen displays the time as construction workers are seen scurrying about like gnats. A 100-meter-tall
tower known as the T30 will be built to overlook the Xiang River in Hunan in under 360 hours from an
empty plot. The Broad logo, a lowercase letter that wraps around itself in imitation of the @ symbol,
emerges on the screen when the camera circles the building overhead at the end of the video. The
business is currently franchising its technology to collaborators in Russia, Brazil, and India. The first
standardized skyscraper in the world is what it is offering, and Zhang hopes to make Broad the
McDonald's of the sustainable building sector with it. Zhang responds, "It's not a construction company,"
when asked why he chose to launch a business in the construction industry. It is a structural revolution.
B Broad has so far erected 16 structures in China and one more in Cancun. Two facilities in Hunan, about
an hour's drive from Broad Town, the expansive headquarters, are where they are made. The
components used to construct the skyscrapers' floors and ceilings have dimensions of 15.6 by 3.9 meters
and a depth of 45 cm. Each floor module is threaded with pipes and ducts for power, water, and garbage
while it is still in the factory. Additionally, the flooring of the client's choice is pre-installed on top. Two
modules are delivered to the construction site in standardized truckloads, each containing the required
columns, bolts, and equipment to connect them. When they go to the building, which is put together like
a set of toy Lego bricks, a crane lifts each part right to the top. Workers connect the pipes and cables
swiftly using the materials on the module. The distinctive column design incorporates tabs that bolt into
the floors above and below and diagonal bracing at either end. The last process is crane-slotting in the
outer walls and windows that are highly insulated. The outcome is by no means appealing, but the
technique is surprisingly safe and astonishingly quick.
C Zhang credits his inventiveness and outsider viewpoint on technology for his achievement. In the
1980s, Zhang was a student of art, but he quit the field in 1988 to develop Broad. The business originally
produced non-pressurized boilers. He built his fortune on boilers, according to Juliet Jiang, his senior vice
president. Although he could have continued his business, he realized the importance of nonelectric air
conditioning. She argues that by the end of the decade, China's economy had outgrown the country's
electrical grid. Power shortages were starting to pose a significant threat to growth. Large natural gas-
powered air conditioning (AC) machines might save energy costs, cut operating expenses, and provide
more dependable climate control for businesses. Today, Broad operates facilities in more than 70
nations, including some of the world's biggest structures and airports.
D The AC company of Zhang was booming in the past 20 years. But a number of things happened in
concert to alter his course. Zhang first became an environmentalist. The second occurred in 2008 when
an earthquake struck the Sichuan Province of China, resulting in the collapse of several shoddy
structures. He claims that in the beginning, he sought to persuade developers to retrofit existing
structures in order to make them more solid and sustainable, but he wasn't very successful. Zhang then
hired his own engineers and began investigating ways to create affordable, ecologically friendly buildings
that could survive earthquakes. After six months of investigation, Zhang had given up on using
conventional techniques. The expense of employing designers and specialists for each new construction
irritated him. He determined that moving the building to the factory was the best approach to reduce
expenses. However, Broad had to stray from accepted architectural practices in order to build a
skyscraper in a factory. It was necessary to change the load-bearing structure as a whole. Less concrete
was used in the floors to reduce the building's overall weight, which allowed for a reduction in structural
steel.
E Prefabricated and modular buildings are becoming more and more well-liked all around the world.
However, prefabricated and modular structures elsewhere are often low-rise. Only Broad uses these
techniques for buildings. Zhang believes that the environmental benefits alone are worth the effort. A
conventional high-rise will generate approximately 3,000 tons of construction debris, while a Broad
structure will generate only 25 tons, according to Broad's calculations. Broad structures consume no
water during construction, in contrast to traditional buildings, which use 5,000 tons of water.
Additionally, construction is less risky. The risk of injury can be reduced by installing elevator systems at
the factory, including the base, rails, and machine room. Additionally, Broad orders a finished elevator
car and drops it into the shaft using a crane rather than bringing it to the location in sections. The goal of
elevator manufacturers is to preinstall the doors in the future, entirely removing the possibility that a
worker could trip and fall. He claims that conventional construction is disorganized. "We moved
construction into the factory," the statement reads. Zhang claims that his structures will help address the
myriad issues facing the construction industry and that they will also be easier and less expensive to
create.
Question 14-18
Choose the correct headings for sections A-E from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-viii in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet
List of Headings
i. A joint enterprise project
ii Additional engineering successes 14) Section A __________
iii Looking at the overall advantages 15) Section B __________
iv A distinctive structure 16) Section C __________
v Traditional techniques have several advantages. 17) Section D __________
vi A shift in course 18) Section E __________
vii Worldwide brands that are comparable examples
viii Construction site and factory
Question 19-22
Label the diagram You can use ONLY ONE WORD to fill in the answer.
Question 23-26
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your reading answer sheet.
23. Zhang describes his company as a _______.
24. The very first goods produced by Broad were _______.
25. In China, _______ were impeding industrial development in the late 1980s.
26. Broad's AC units increase ______ along with power and cost advantages.
SAIGON UNIVERSITY NAME: ………………………………………
FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT
MID-TERM WRITING TEST (A)
Time: 60 minutes
Choose ONE of the following topics for your essay
1. Many people believe that parents are not as close to their children as they used to be. Suggest some
reasons why this could be true and explain its effects on children.
2. In many countries, people do not recycle their rubbish as much as they could. Why do you think this
is? What problems does it cause?
3. Vegetarian diet is bad for health.
4. The Facebook data breach is unethical, but it is not illegal.
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ANSWER KEY
Passage 1: The flavor of pleasure
Passage 2: High speed high rise
1 (retronasal) 2 Umami 3 toxins 4 internal 5 disciplines 6 spatial map
smell scents/internal
smells
7 social life 8 (air) 9 flavors/ 10 memories 11 prey 12 chocolate
molecules flavours
13 appetites 14 iv 15 viii 16 ii 17 vii 18 iii
19 factory 20 floor / 21 columns 22 concrete 23 structural 24 boilers
flooring revolution
25 power 26 climate
shortages control
