READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The Innovation of Grocery Stores

A

At the beginning of the 20th century, grocery stores in the United States were full-service. A customer would ask a clerk behind the counter for specific items and the clerk would package the items, which were limited to dry goods. If they want to save some time, they have to ask a delivery boy or by themselves to send the note of what they want to buy to the grocery store first and then go to pay for the goods later. These grocery stores usually carried only one brand of each good. There were early chain stores, such as the A&P Stores, but these were all entirely full-service and very time-consuming.

B

In 1885, a Virginia boy named Clarence Saunders began working part-time as a clerk in a grocery store when he was 14 years old, and quit school when the shopkeeper offered him full-time work with room and board. Later he worked in an Alabama coke plant and in a Tennessee sawmill before he returned to the grocery business. By 1900, when he was nineteen years old, he was earning $30 a month as a salesman for a wholesale grocer. During his years working in the grocery stores, he found that it was very inconvenient and inefficient for people to buy things because more than a century ago, long before there were computers, shopping was done quite differently than it is today. Entering a store, the customer would approach the counter (or wait for a clerk to become available) and place an order, either verbally or, as was often the case for boys running errands, in the form of a note or list. While the customer waited, the clerk would more behind the counter and throughout the store, select the items on the list – some form shelves so high that long-handled grasping device had to be used – and bring them back to the counter to be tallied and bagged or boxed. The process might be expedited by the customer calling or sending in the order beforehand, or by the order being handled by a delivery boy on a bike, but otherwise, it did not vary greatly. Saunders, a flamboyant and innovative man, noticed that this method resulted in wasted time and expense, so he came up with an unheard-of solution that would revolutionize the entire grocery industry: he developed a way for shoppers to serve themselves.

C

So in 1902, he moved to Memphis where he developed his concept to form a grocery wholesale cooperative and a full-service grocery store. For his new “cafeteria grocery”, Saunders divided his grocery into three distinct areas: 1) A front “lobby” forming an entrance and exit and checkouts at the front. 2) A sales department, which was specially designed to allow customers to roam the aisles and select their own groceries. Removing unnecessary clerks, creating elaborate aisle displays, and rearranging the store to force customers to view all of the merchandise and over the shelving and cabinets units of sales department were “galleries” where supervisors were allowed to keep an eye on the customers while not disturbing them. 3) And another section of his store is the room only allowed for the clerks which were called the “stockroom” or “storage room” where large refrigerators were situated to keep fresh products from being perishable. The new format allowed multiple customers to shop at the same time and led to the previously unknown phenomenon of impulse shopping. Though this format of grocery market was drastically different from its competitors, the style became the standard for the modern grocery store and later supermarket.

D

On September 6, 1916, Saunders launched the self-service revolution in the USA by opening the first self-service Piggly Wiggly store, at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis, Tennessee, with its characteristic turnstile at the entrance. Customers paid cash and selected their own goods from the shelves. It was unlike any other grocery store of that time. Inside a Piggly Wiggly, shoppers were not at the mercy of shop clerks. They were free to roam the store, check out the merchandise and get what they needed with their own two hands and feet. Prices on items at Piggly Wiggly were clearly marked. No one pressured customers to buy milk or pickles. And the biggest benefit at the Piggly Wiggly was that shoppers saved money. Self-service was positive all around. “It’s good for both the consumer and retailer because it cuts costs,” noted George T. Haley, a professor at the University of New Haven and director of the Center for International Industry Competitiveness. “If you looked at the way grocery stores were run previous to Piggly Wiggly and Alpha Beta, what you find is that there was a tremendous amount of labor involved, and labor is a major expense.” Piggly Wiggly cut the fat.

E

Piggly Wiggly and the self-service concept took off. Saunders opened nine stores in the Memphis area within the first year of business. Consumers embraced the efficiency, the simplicity and most of all the lower food prices. Saunders soon patented his self-service concept and began franchising Piggly Wiggly stores. Thanks to the benefits of self-service and franchising, Piggly Wiggly ballooned to nearly 1,300 stores by 1923. Piggly Wiggle sold $100 million – worth $1.3 billion today – in groceries, making it the third-biggest grocery retailer in the nation. The company’s stock was even listed on the New York Stock Exchange, doubling from late 1922 to march 1923. Saunders had his hands all over Piggly Wiggly. He was instrumental in the design and layout of his stores. He even invented the turnstile.

F

However, Saunders was forced into bankruptcy in 1923 after a dramatic spat which the New York Stock Exchange and he went on to create the “Clarence Saunders sole-owner-of-my-name” chain, which went into bankruptcy.

G

Until the time of his death in October 1953, Saunders was developing plans for another automatic store system called the Foodelectric. But the store, which was to be located two blocks from the first Piggly Wiggly store, never opened. But his name was well-remembered along with the name Piggly Wiggly.

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

The Study of Chimpanzee Culture

A

After studying the similarities between chimpanzees and humans for years, researchers have recognised these resemblances run much deeper than anyone first thought in the latest decade. For instance, the nut cracking observed in the Tai Forest is not a simple chimpanzee behaviour, but a separate adaptation found only in that particular part of Africa, as well as a trait which is considered to be an expression of chimpanzee culture by biologists. These researchers frequently quote the word ‘culture’ to describe elementary animal behaviours, like the regional dialects of different species of songbirds, but it turns out that the rich and varied cultural traditions chimpanzees enjoyed rank secondly in complexity only to human traditions.

B

During the past two years, the major research group which studies chimpanzees collaborated unprecedentedly and documented some distinct cultural patterns, ranging from animals’ use of tools to their forms of communication and social customs. This emerging picture of chimpanzees affects how human beings ponder upon these amazing creatures. Also, it alters our conception of human uniqueness and shows us the extraordinary ability of our ancient ancestors to create cultures.

C

Although we know that Homo sapiens and Pan Troglodytes have coexisted for hundreds of millennia and their genetic similarities surpass 98 per cent, we still knew next to nothing about chimpanzee behaviour in the wild until 40 years ago. All this began to change in the 1960s when Toshisada Nishida of Kyoto University in Japan and renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall launched their studies of wild chimpanzees at two field sites in Tanzania. (Goodall’s research station at Gombe—the first of its kind—is more famous, but Nishida’s site at Mahale is the second oldest chimpanzee research site in the world.)

D

During these primary studies, as the chimpanzees became more and more accustomed to close observation, the remarkable discoveries emerged. Researchers witnessed a variety of unexpected behaviours, ranging from fashioning and using tools, hunting, meat eating, food sharing to lethal fights between members of neighbouring communities.

E

In 1973, 13 forms of tool use and 8 social activities which appeared to differ between the Gombe chimpanzees and chimpanzee species elsewhere were recorded by Goodall. She speculated that some variations shared what she referred to as a ‘cultural origin’. But what exactly did Goodall mean by ‘culture’? According to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, culture is defined as ‘the customs. . .and achievements of a particular time or people.’ The diversity of human cultures extends from technological variations to marriage rituals, from culinary habits to myths and legends. Of course, animals do not have myths and legends, but they do share the capacity to pass on behavioural traits from one generation to another, not through their genes but via learning. From biologists’ view, this is the fundamental criterion for a cultural trait—something can be learnt by observing the established skills of others and then passed on to following generations.

F

What are the implications for chimpanzees themselves? We must place a high value upon the tragic loss of chimpanzees, who are decimated just when finally we are coming to appreciate these astonishing animals more completely. The population of chimpanzees has plummeted and continued to fall due to illegal trapping, logging and, most recently, the bushmeat trade within the past century. The latter is particularly alarming because logging has driven roadways, which are now used to ship wild animal meat—including chimpanzee meat to consumers as far afield as Europe, into forests. Such destruction threatens not only the animals themselves but also a host of fascinatingly different ape cultures.

G

However, the cultural richness of the ape may contribute to its salvation. For example, the conservation efforts have already altered the attitudes of some local people. After several organisations showed videotapes illustrating the cognitive prowess of chimpanzees, one Zairian viewer was heard to exclaim, ‘Ah, this ape is so like me, I can no longer eat him.’

H

How did an international team of chimpanzee experts perform the most comprehensive survey of the animals ever attempted? Although scientists have been delving into chimpanzee culture for several decades, sometimes their studies contained a fatal defect. So far, most attempts to document cultural diversity among chimpanzees have solely relied upon officially published accounts of the behaviours reported at each research site. But this approach probably neglects a good deal of cultural variation for three reasons.

I

First, scientists normally don’t publish an extensive list of all the activities they do not see at a particular location. Yet this is the very information we need to know—which behaviours were and were not observed at each site. Second, there are many reports describing chimpanzee behaviours without expressing how common they are; without this information, we can’t determine whether a particular action was a transient phenomenon or a routine event that should be considered part of its culture. Finally, researchers’ description of potentially significant chimpanzee behaviours often lacks sufficient detail, which makes it difficult for scientists from other spots to report the presence or absence of the activities.

J

To tackle these problems, my colleague and I determined to take a new approach. We asked field researchers at each site to list all the behaviours which they suspected were local traditions. With this information, we assembled a comprehensive list of 65 candidates for cultural behaviours.

K

Then we distributed our list to team leaders at each site. They consulted with their colleagues and classified each behaviour regarding its occurrence or absence in the chimpanzee community. The major brackets contained customary behaviour (occurs in most or all of the able-bodied members of at least one age or sex class, such as all adult males), habitual (less common than customary but occurs repeatedly in several individuals), present (observed at the site but not habitual), absent (never seen), and unknown.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Quantitative Research in Education

Many education researchers used to work on the assumption that children experience different phases of development, and that they cannot execute the most advanced level of cognitive operation until they have reached the most advanced forms of cognitive process. For example, one researcher Piaget had a well-known experiment in which he asked the children to compare the amount of liquid in containers with different shapes. Those containers had the same capacity, but even when the young children were demonstrated that the same amount of fluid could be poured between the containers, many of them still believed one was larger than the other. Piaget concluded that the children were incapable of performing the logical task in figuring out that the two containers were the same size even though they had different shapes, because their cognitive development had not reached the necessary phase. Critics on his work, such as Donaldson, have questioned this interpretation. They point out the possibility that the children were just unwilling to play the experimenter’s game, or that they did not quite understand the question asked by the experimenter. These criticisms surely do state the facts, but more importantly, it suggests that experiments are social situations where interpersonal interactions take place. The implication here is that Piaget’s investigation and his attempts to replicate it are not solely about measuring the children’s capabilities of logical thinking, but also the degree to which they could understand the directions for them, their willingness to comply with these requirements, how well the experimenters did in communicating the requirements and in motivating those children, etc.

The same kinds of criticisms have been targeted to psychological and educational tests. For instance, Mehan argues that the subjects might interpret the test questions in a way different from that meant by the experimenter. In a language development test, researchers show children a picture of a medieval fortress, complete with moat, drawbridge, parapets and three initial consonants in it: D, C, and G. The children are required to circle the correct initial consonant for ‘castle’. The answer is C, but many kids choose D. When asked what the name of the building was, the children responded ‘Disneyland’. They adopted the reasoning line expected by the experimenter but got to the wrong substantive answer. The score sheet with the wrong answers does not include in it a child’s lack of reasoning capacity; it only records that the children gave a different answer rather than the one the tester expected.

Here we are constantly getting questions about how valid the measures are where the findings of the quantitative research are usually based. Some scholars such as Donaldson consider these as technical issues, which can be resolved through more rigorous experimentation. In contrast, others like Mehan reckon that the problems are not merely with particular experiments or tests, but they might legitimately jeopardise the validity of all researches of this type.

Meanwhile, there are also questions regarding the assumption in the logic of quantitative educational research that causes can be identified through physical and/or statistical manipulation of the variables. Critics argue that this does not take into consideration the nature of human social life by assuming it to be made up of static, mechanical causal relationships, while in reality, it includes complicated procedures of interpretation and negotiation, which do not come with determinate results. From this perspective, it is not clear that we can understand the pattern and mechanism behind people’s behaviours simply in terms of the casual relationships, which are the focuses of quantitative research. It is implied that social life is much more contextually variable and complex.

Such criticisms of quantitative educational research have also inspired more and more educational researchers to adopt qualitative methodologies during the last three or four decades. These researchers have steered away from measuring and manipulating variables experimentally or statistically. There are many forms of qualitative research, which is loosely illustrated by terms like ‘ethnography’, ‘case study’, ‘participant observation’, ‘life history’, ‘unstructured interviewing’, ‘discourse analysis’ and so on. Generally speaking, though, it has characteristics as follows:

Qualitative researches have an intensive focus on exploring the nature of certain phenomena in the field of education, instead of setting out to test hypotheses about them. It also inclines to deal with ‘unstructured data’, which refers to the kind of data that have not been coded during the collection process regarding a closed set of analytical categories. As a result, when engaging in observation, qualitative researchers use audio or video devices to record what happens or write in detail open-ended field-notes, instead of coding behaviour concerning a pre-determined set of categories, which is what quantitative researchers typically would do when conducting ‘systematic observation’. Similarly, in an interview, interviewers will ask open-ended questions instead of ones that require specific predefined answers of the kind typical, like in a postal questionnaire. Actually, qualitative interviews are often designed to resemble casual conversations.

The primary forms of data analysis include verbal description and explanations and involve explicit interpretations of both the meanings and functions of human behaviours. At most, quantification and statistical analysis only play a subordinate role. The sociology of education and evaluation studies were the two areas of educational research where-criticism of quantitative research and the development of qualitative methodologies initially emerged in the most intense way. A series of studies conducted by Lacey, Hargreaves and Lambert in a boys’ grammar school, a boys’ secondary modem school, and a girls’ grammar school in Britain in the 1960s marked the beginning of the trend towards qualitative research in the sociology of education. Researchers employed an ethnographic or participant observation approach, although they did also collect some quantitative data, for instance on friendship patterns among the students. These researchers observed lessons, interviewed both the teachers and the students, and made the most of school records. They studied the schools for a considerable amount of time and spent plenty of months gathering data and tracking changes over all these years.