Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then
gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs
to mind?
Most
people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's
eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which
some people are unable to visualise mental images.
Niel
Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind's eye. He knew he was
different even in childhood. "My stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told
me to count sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I
couldn't," he says. "I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences,
there was nothing to count."
Our
memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at
school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are
"terrible", but he is very good at remembering facts. And, like
others with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces. Yet he does not see
aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life.
Mind's eye blind
Ironically,
Niel now works in a bookshop, although he largely sticks to the non-fiction
aisles. His condition begs the question what is going on inside his
picture-less mind. I asked him what happens when he tries to picture his
fiancee. "This is the hardest thing to describe, what happens in my head
when I think about things," he says. "When I think about my fiancee
there is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has
her hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not describing an image I am
looking at, I'm remembering features about her, that's the strangest thing and
maybe that is a source of some regret."
The
response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird." But
while Niel is very relaxed about his inability to picture things, it is often a
cause of distress for others. One person who took part in a study into
aphantasia said he had started to feel "isolated" and
"alone" after discovering that other people could see images in their
heads. Being unable to reminisce about his mother years after her death led to
him being "extremely distraught".
The super-visualiser
At the
other end of the spectrum is children's book illustrator, Lauren Beard, whose
work on the Fairytale Hairdresser series will be familiar to many
six-year-olds. Her career relies on the vivid images that leap into her mind's
eye when she reads text from her author. When I met her in her box-room studio
in Manchester, she was working on a dramatic scene in the next book. The text
describes a baby perilously climbing onto a chandelier.
"Straightaway
I can visualise this grand glass chandelier in some sort of French kind of
ballroom, and the little baby just swinging off it and really heavy thick
curtains," she says. "I think I have a strong imagination, so I can
create the world and then keep adding to it so it gets sort of bigger and
bigger in my mind and the characters too they sort of evolve. I couldn't really
imagine what it's like to not imagine, I think it must be a bit of a shame
really."
Not
many people have mental imagery as vibrant as Lauren or as blank as Niel. They
are the two extremes of visualisation. Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and
behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people
with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the
University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the
journal Cortex.
Prof
Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really
delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they
have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that
they find hard to convey to others." How we imagine is clearly very
subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But
Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able
to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the
ability to think in images after a brain injury.
He is
adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up
to one in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important
difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with
imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to
time, it's a variability of human experience."
Началоформы
Questions 1–5
Do the following statements agree with the information in the
IELTS reading text?
In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write
1. Aphantasia is a condition, which describes people, for whom
it is hard to visualise mental images.
2. Niel Kenmuir was unable to count sheep in his head.
3. People with aphantasia struggle to remember personal traits and
clothes of different people.
4. Niel regrets that he cannot portray an image of his fiancee in his
mind.
5. Inability to picture things in someone's head is often a cause of
distress for a person.
6. All people with aphantasia start to feel 'isolated' or 'alone' at
some point of their lives.
7. Lauren Beard's career depends on her imagination.
8. The author met Lauren Beard when she was working on a comedy scene
in her next book.
Questions 9–13
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for
each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer
sheet.
9. Only a small fraction of people have imagination as ….as
Lauren does.
10. Hyperphantasia is ….to aphantasia.
11.There are a lot of subjectivity in comparing people's imagination
- somebody's vivid scene could be another person's ….
12. Prof Zeman is …. that aphantasia is not an illness.
13. Many people spend their lives with …somewhere in the
mind's eye.
Life lessons from villains, crooks and gangsters
(A) A
notorious Mexican drug baron’s audacious escape from prison in July doesn’t, at
first, appear to have much to teach corporate boards. But some in the
business world suggest otherwise. Beyond the morally reprehensible side of
criminals' work, some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer
hackers, pirates and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate
corporations a thing or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.
(B) Far
from encouraging illegality, these gurus argue that – in the same way big
corporations sometimes emulate start-ups – business leaders could learn from
the underworld about flexibility, innovation and the ability to pivot quickly.
“There is a nimbleness to criminal organisations that legacy corporations [with
large, complex layers of management] don’t have,” said Marc Goodman, head of
the Future Crimes Institute and global cyber-crime advisor. While traditional
businesses focus on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent
them. “For criminals, the sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to
think much, much bigger.”
(C) Joaquin
Guzman, the head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, for instance, slipped out
of his prison cell through a tiny hole in his shower that led to a mile-long
tunnel fitted with lights and ventilation. Making a break for it required
creative thinking, long-term planning and perseverance – essential skills
similar to those needed to achieve success in big business.
(D) While
Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy,
Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as
to how criminal groups endure. Some cartels stay in business despite multiple
efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of
dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely
believes there’s a lesson in longevity here. One strategy he underlined was how
the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico
and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a
vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a
catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.
(E) By
contrast, many legitimate businesses fail because they hesitate to adapt
quickly to changing market winds. One high-profile example is movie and game
rental company Blockbuster, which didn’t keep up with the market and lost
business to mail order video rentals and streaming technologies. The brand has
all but faded from view. Liddell argues the difference between the two
groups is that criminal organisations often have improvisation encoded into
their daily behaviour, while larger companies think of innovation as a set
process. “This is a leadership challenge,” said Liddell. “How well companies
innovate and organise is a reflection of leadership.”
Left-field
thinking
(F) Cash-strapped
start-ups also use unorthodox strategies to problem solve and build their
businesses up from scratch. This creativity and innovation is often borne out
of necessity, such as tight budgets. Both criminals and start-up founders
“question authority, act outside the system and see new and clever ways of
doing things,” said Goodman. “Either they become Elon Musk or El Chapo.” And,
some entrepreneurs aren’t even afraid to operate in legal grey areas in their
effort to disrupt the marketplace. The co-founders of music streaming service
Napster, for example, knowingly broke music copyright rules with their first
online file sharing service, but their technology paved the way for legal
innovation as regulators caught up.
(G) Goodman
and others believe thinking hard about problem solving before worrying about
restrictions could prevent established companies falling victim to rivals less
constrained by tradition. In their book The Misfit Economy, Alexa Clay and Kyra
Maya Phillips examine how individuals can apply that mindset to become more
innovative and entrepreneurial within corporate structures. They studied not
just violent criminals like Somali pirates, but others who break the rules in
order to find creative solutions to their business problems, such as people
living in the slums of Mumbai or computer hackers. They picked out five common
traits among this group: the ability to hustle, pivot, provoke, hack and
copycat.
(H) Clay
gives a Saudi entrepreneur named Walid Abdul-Wahab as a prime example.
Abdul-Wahab worked with Amish farmers to bring camel milk to American consumers
even before US regulators approved it. Through perseverance, he eventually
found a network of Amish camel milk farmers and started selling the product via
social media. Now his company, Desert Farms, sells to giant mainstream
retailers like Whole Foods Market. Those on the fringe don’t always have the
option of traditional, corporate jobs and that forces them to think more
creatively about how to make a living, Clay said. They must develop grit and
resilience in order to last outside the cushy confines of cubicle life. “In
many cases scarcity is the mother of invention,” Clay said.
Начало
формы
Questions 14-21
Reading Passage 2 has eight
paragraphs A-H. Match the headings below with the paragraphs.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 14-21 on
your answer sheet.
14. Jailbreak
with creative thinking
15. Five
common traits among rule-breakers
16. Comparison
between criminals and traditional businessmen
17. Can
drug baron's espace teach legitimate corporations?
18. Great
entrepreneur
19. How
criminal groups deceive the law
20. The
difference between legal and illegal organisations
21. Similarity
between criminals and start-up founders
Questions 22–25 Complete
the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from
the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in
boxes 22–25 on your answer sheet.
22. To
escape from a prison, Joaquin Guzman had to use such traits as creative
thinking, long-term planning and…..
23. The
Sinaloa cartel built a grand underground tunnel and even used a…. to avoid
the fence.
24. The
main difference between two groups is that criminals, unlike large
corporations, often have encoded into their daily life.
25. Due to
being persuasive, Walid Abdul-Wahab found a… of Amish camel milk farmers.
Question 26 Choose
the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
26. The
main goal of this article is to:
A Show different ways of
illegal activity B Give
an overview of various criminals and their gangs
C Draw a comparison
between legal and illegal business, providing examples
D Justify criminals with
creative thinkingКонецформы
Britain needs strong TV industry
Comedy
writer Armando Iannucci has called for an industry-wide defence of the BBC and
British programme-makers. "The Thick of It" creator
made his remarks in the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
"It's
more important than ever that we have more strong, popular channels... that act
as beacons, drawing audiences to the best content," he said. Speaking
earlier, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale rejected suggestions that he
wanted to dismantle the BBC.
'Champion
supporters'
Iannucci
co-wrote "I'm Alan Partridge", wrote the movie "In
the Loop" and created and wrote the hit "HBO" and "Sky
Atlantic show Veep". He delivered the 40th annual MacTaggart Lecture,
which has previously been given by Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, former BBC
director general Greg Dyke, Jeremy Paxman and Rupert Murdoch. Iannucci said:
"Faced with a global audience, British television needs its champion
supporters."
He
continued his praise for British programming by saying the global success of
American TV shows had come about because they were emulating British
television. "The best US shows are modelling themselves on what used to
make British TV so world-beating," he said. "US prime-time schedules
are now littered with those quirky formats from the UK - the "Who
Do You Think You Are"'s and the variants on "Strictly
Come Dancing" - as well as the single-camera non-audience sitcom,
which we brought into the mainstream first. We have changed international
viewing for the better."
With
the renewal of the BBC's royal charter approaching, Iannucci also praised the
corporation. He said: "If public service broadcasting - one of the best
things we've ever done creatively as a country - if it was a car industry, our
ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts,
boasting of the British jobs that would bring." In July, the government
issued a green paper setting out issues that will be explored during
negotiations over the future of the BBC, including the broadcaster's size, its
funding and governance.
Primarily
Mr Whittingdale wanted to appoint a panel of five people, but finally he
invited two more people to advise on the channer renewal, namely former Channel
4 boss Dawn Airey and journalism professor Stewart Purvis, a former
editor-in-chief of ITN. Iannucci bemoaned the lack of "creatives"
involved in the discussions.
"When
the media, communications and information industries make up nearly 8% our GDP,
larger than the car and oil and gas industries put together, we need to be
heard, as those industries are heard. But when I see the panel of experts
who've been asked by the culture secretary to take a root and branch look at
the BBC, I don't see anyone who is a part of that cast and crew list. I see
executives, media owners, industry gurus, all talented people - but not a
single person who's made a classic and enduring television show."
'Don't
be modest'
Iannucci
suggested one way of easing the strain on the licence fee was "by pushing
ourselves more commercially abroad".
"Use
the BBC's name, one of the most recognised brands in the world," he said.
"And use the reputation of British television across all networks, to
capitalise financially oversees. Be more aggressive in selling our shows,
through advertising, through proper international subscription channels,
freeing up BBC Worldwide to be fully commercial, whatever it takes.
"Frankly,
don't be icky and modest about making money, let's monetise the bezeesus Mary
and Joseph out of our programmes abroad so that money can come back, take some
pressure off the licence fee at home and be invested in even more ambitious
quality shows, that can only add to our value."
Mr
Whittingdale, who was interviewed by ITV News' Alastair Stewart at the
festival, said he wanted an open debate about whether the corporation should do
everything it has done in the past. He said he had a slight sense that
people who rushed to defend the BBC were "trying to have an argument
that's never been started".
"Whatever
my view is, I don't determine what programmes the BBC should show," he
added. "That's the job of the BBC." Mr Whittingdale said any
speculation that the Conservative Party had always wanted to change the BBC due
to issues such as its editorial line was "absolute nonsense".
Началоформы
Questions 27-31
Do the following statements
agree with the information in the IELTS reading text? In boxes 27–31 on
your answer sheet, write
27. Armando
Iannucci expressed a need of having more popular channels.
28. John
Whittingdale wanted to dismantle the BBC.
29. Iannucci
delivered the 30th annual MacTaggart Lecture.
30. Ianucci
believes that British television has contributed to the success of American
TV-shows.
31. There
have been negotiations over the future of the BBC in July.
Questions 36–40. Complete
the summary below. Write your answers in boxes 37–40 on
your answer sheet.
Easing
the strain on the licence fees
Iannucci recommended
increasing BBC's profit by pushing ourselves more 36….He suggests
being more aggressive in selling British shows, through advertising and proper
international 37… Also, he invokes producers to stop
being 38…. and modest about making money and invest into
even 39… quality shows. However, Mr Whittingdale denied any 40.
… that the Conservative Party had always wanted to change the BBC because
of its editorial line.
Конецформы
Конецформы
Sea monsters are the stuff of legend - lurking not just in the
depths of the oceans, but also the darker corners of our minds. What is it that
draws us to these creatures?
"This inhuman place makes human monsters," wrote Stephen King in his
novel The Shining. Many academics agree that monsters lurk in the deepest
recesses, they prowl through our ancestral minds appearing in the half-light,
under the bed - or at the bottom of the sea.
"They don't really exist, but they play a huge role in our mindscapes, in
our dreams, stories, nightmares, myths and so on," says Matthias Classen,
assistant professor of literature and media at Aarhus University in Denmark,
who studies monsters in literature. "Monsters say something about human
psychology, not the world."
One
Norse legend talks of the Kraken, a deep sea creature that was the curse of
fishermen. If sailors found a place with many fish, most likely it was the
monster that was driving them to the surface. If it saw the ship it would pluck
the hapless sailors from the boat and drag them to a watery grave.
This
terrifying legend occupied the mind and pen of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson
too. In his short 1830 poem The Kraken he wrote: "Below the thunders of
the upper deep, / Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless,
uninvaded sleep / The Kraken sleepeth."
The
deeper we travel into the ocean, the deeper we delve into our own psyche. And
when we can go no further - there lurks the Kraken.
Most
likely the Kraken is based on a real creature - the giant squid. The huge
mollusc takes pride of place as the personification of the terrors of the deep
sea. Sailors would have encountered it at the surface, dying, and probably
thrashing about. It would have made a weird sight, "about the most alien
thing you can imagine," says Edith Widder, CEO at the Ocean Research and
Conservation Association.
"It has eight lashing arms and two slashing tentacles growing straight out
of its head and it's got serrated suckers that can latch on to the slimiest of
prey and it's got a parrot beak that can rip flesh. It's got an eye the size of
your head, it's got a jet propulsion system and three hearts that pump blue
blood."
The
giant squid continued to dominate stories of sea monsters with the famous 1870
novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. Verne's submarine
fantasy is a classic story of puny man against a gigantic squid.
The
monster needed no embellishment - this creature was scary enough, and Verne
incorporated as much fact as possible into the story, says Emily Alder from
Edinburgh Napier University. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and
another contemporaneous book, Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, both tried to
represent the giant squid as they might have been actual zoological animals,
much more taking the squid as a biological creature than a mythical
creature." It was a given that the squid was vicious and would readily attack
humans given the chance.
That
myth wasn't busted until 2012, when Edith Widder and her colleagues were the
first people to successfully film giant squid under water and see first-hand
the true character of the monster of the deep. They realised previous attempts
to film squid had failed because the bright lights and noisy thrusters on
submersibles had frightened them away.
By
quietening down the engines and using bioluminescence to attract it, they
managed to see this most extraordinary animal in its natural habitat. It
serenely glided into view, its body rippled with metallic colours of bronze and
silver. Its huge, intelligent eye watched the submarine warily as it delicately
picked at the bait with its beak. It was balletic and mesmeric. It could not
have been further from the gnashing, human-destroying creature of myth and
literature. In reality this is a gentle giant that is easily scared and pecks
at its food.
Another giant squid lies peacefully in the Natural History Museum in London, in
the Spirit Room, where it is preserved in a huge glass case. In 2004 it was
caught in a fishing net off the Falkland Islands and died at the surface. The
crew immediately froze its body and it was sent to be preserved in the museum
by the Curator of Molluscs, Jon Ablett. It is called Archie, an affectionate
short version of its Latin name Architeuthis dux. It is the longest preserved
specimen of a giant squid in the world.
"It really has brought science to life for many people," says Ablett.
"Sometimes I feel a bit overshadowed by Archie, most of my work is on
slugs and snails but unfortunately most people don't want to talk about
that!"
And
so today we can watch Archie's graceful relative on film and stare Archie
herself (she is a female) eye-to-eye in a museum. But have we finally slain the
monster of the deep? Now we know there is nothing to be afraid of, can the
Kraken finally be laid to rest? Probably not says Classen. "We humans are
afraid of the strangest things. They don't need to be realistic. There's no
indication that enlightenment and scientific progress has banished the monsters
from the shadows of our imaginations. We will continue to be afraid of very strange
things, including probably sea monsters."
Indeed we are. The Kraken made a fearsome appearance in the blockbuster series
Pirates of the Caribbean. It forced Captain Jack Sparrow to face his demons in
a terrifying face-to-face encounter. Pirates needed the monstrous Kraken,
nothing else would do. Or, as the German film director Werner Herzog put it,
"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be
like sleep without dreams."
Началоформы
1.Matthias Classen is unsure about the possibility of monster's
existence.
2.Kraken is probably based on an imaginary animal.
3.Previous attempts on filming the squid had failed due to the fact
that the creature was scared.
4.Giant squid was caught alive in 2004 and brought to the
museum.
5.Jon Ablett admits that he likes Archie.
6.According to Classen, people can be scared both by imaginary and
real monsters.
7.Werner Herzog suggests that Kraken is essential to the
ocean.
13. According
to the Victor Hugo's novel, the squid would if
he had such opportunity.
14. The
real squid appeared to be and .
15. Archie
must be the of its kind on Earth.
16. We are
able to encounter the Kraken's in
a movie franchise.
The atom bomb was one of the
defining inventions of the 20th Century. So how did science fiction writer HG
Wells predict its invention three decades before the first detonations?
(A) Imagine
you're the greatest fantasy writer of your age. One day you dream up the idea
of a bomb of infinite power. You call it the "atomic bomb". HG Wells
first imagined a uranium-based hand grenade that "would continue to
explode indefinitely" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. He even
thought it would be dropped from planes. What he couldn't predict was how a
strange conjunction of his friends and acquaintances - notably Winston
Churchill, who'd read all Wells's novels twice, and the physicist Leo Szilard -
would turn the idea from fantasy to reality, leaving them deeply tormented by
the scale of destructive power that it unleashed.
(B) The
story of the atom bomb starts in the Edwardian age, when scientists such as
Ernest Rutherford were grappling with a new way of conceiving the physical
world. The idea was that solid elements might be made up of tiny particles in
atoms. "When it became apparent that the Rutherford atom had a dense
nucleus, there was a sense that it was like a coiled spring," says Andrew
Nahum, curator of the Science Museum's Churchill's Scientists exhibition. Wells
was fascinated with the new discoveries. He had a track record of predicting
technological innovations. Winston Churchill credited Wells for coming up with
the idea of using aeroplanes and tanks in combat ahead of World War One.
(C) The two men met and discussed ideas over the decades, especially
as Churchill, a highly popular writer himself, spent the interwar years out of
political power, contemplating the rising instability of Europe. Churchill
grasped the danger of technology running ahead of human maturity, penning a
1924 article in the Pall Mall Gazette called "Shall we all commit
suicide?". In the article, Churchill wrote: "Might a bomb no bigger
than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of
buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and
blast a township at a stroke?" This idea of the orange-sized bomb is
credited by Graham Farmelo, author of Churchill's Bomb, directly to the imagery
of The World Set Free.
(D) By
1932 British scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom for the first time
by artificial means, although some believed it couldn't produce huge amounts of
energy. But the same year the Hungarian emigre physicist Leo Szilard read The
World Set Free. Szilard believed that the splitting of the atom could produce
vast energy. He later wrote that Wells showed him "what the liberation of
atomic energy on a large scale would mean". Szilard suddenly came up with
the answer in September 1933 - the chain reaction - while watching the traffic
lights turn green in Russell Square in London. He wrote: "It suddenly
occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and
which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if
assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain
reaction."
(E) In
that eureka moment, Szilard also felt great fear - of how a bustling city like
London and all its inhabitants could be destroyed in an instant as he reflected
in his memoir published in 1968:
"Knowing what it would mean - and I knew because I had read HG Wells - I
did not want this patent to become public." The Nazis were on the rise and
Szilard was deeply anxious about who else might be working on the chain
reaction theory and an atomic Bomb. Wells's novel Things To Come, turned into a
1936 film, The Shape of Things to Come, accurately predicted aerial bombardment
and an imminent devastating world war. In 1939 Szilard drafted the letter
Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt warning America that Germany was
stockpiling uranium. The Manhattan Project was born.
(F) Szilard
and several British scientists worked on it with the US military's massive
financial backing. Britons and Americans worked alongside each other in
"silos" - each team unaware of how their work fitted together. They
ended up moving on from the original enriched uranium "gun" method,
which had been conceived in Britain, to create a plutonium implosion weapon
instead. Szilard campaigned for a demonstration bomb test in front of the
Japanese ambassador to give them a chance to surrender. He was horrified that
it was instead dropped on a city. In 1945 Churchill was beaten in the general
election and in another shock, the US government passed the 1946 McMahon Act,
shutting Britain out of access to the atomic technology it had helped create.
William Penney, one of the returning Los Alamos physicists, led the team
charged by Prime Minister Clement Atlee with somehow putting together their
individual pieces of the puzzle to create a British bomb on a fraction of the
American budget.
(G) "It
was a huge intellectual feat," Andrew Nahum observes. "Essentially
they reworked the calculations that they'd been doing in Los Alamos. They had
the services of Klaus Fuchs, who [later] turned out to be an atom spy passing
information to the Soviet Union, but he also had a phenomenal memory."
Another British physicist, Patrick Blackett, who discussed the Bomb after the
war with a German scientist in captivity, observed that there were no real
secrets. According to Nahum he said: "It's a bit like making an omelette.
Not everyone can make a good one."When Churchill was re-elected in 1951 he
"found an almost complete weapon ready to test and was puzzled and
fascinated by how Atlee had buried the costs in the budget", says Nahum.
"He was very conflicted about whether to go ahead with the test and wrote
about whether we should have 'the art and not the article'. Meaning should it
be enough to have the capability… [rather] than to have a dangerous weapon in
the armoury."
(H) Churchill
was convinced to go ahead with the test, but the much more powerful hydrogen
bomb developed three years later worried him greatly.HG Wells died in 1946. He
had been working on a film sequel to The Shape of Things To Come that was to
include his concerns about the now-realised atomic bomb he'd first imagined.
But it was never made. Towards the end of his life, says Nahum, Wells's
friendship with Churchill "cooled a little". "Wells considered
Churchill as an enlightened but tarnished member of the ruling classes."
And Churchill had little time for Wells's increasingly fanciful socialist
utopian ideas.
(I) Wells
believed technocrats and scientists would ultimately run a peaceful new world
order like in The Shape of Things To Come, even if global war destroyed the
world as we knew it first. Churchill, a former soldier, believed in the lessons
of history and saw diplomacy as the only way to keep mankind from
self-destruction in the atomic age. Wells's scientist acquaintance Leo Szilard
stayed in America and campaigned for civilian control of atomic energy, equally
pessimistic about Wells's idea of a bold new scientist-led world order. If
anything Szilard was tormented by the power he had helped unleash. In 1950, he
predicted a cobalt bomb that would destroy all life on the planet. In Britain,
the legacy of the Bomb was a remarkable period of elite scientific innovation
as the many scientists who had worked on weaponry or radar returned to their
civilian labs. They gave us the first commercial jet airliner, the Comet,
near-supersonic aircraft and rockets, highly engineered computers, and the
Jodrell Bank giant moveable radio telescope.
(J) The
latter had nearly ended the career of its champion, physicist Bernard Lovell,
with its huge costs, until the 1957 launch of Sputnik, when it emerged that
Jodrell Bank had the only device in the West that could track it. Nahum says
Lovell reflected that "during the war the question was never what will
something cost. The question was only can you do it and how soon can we have
it? And that was the spirit he took into his peacetime science." Austerity
and the tiny size of the British market, compared with America, were to scupper
those dreams. But though the Bomb created a new terror, for a few years at
least, Britain saw a vision of a benign atomic future, too and believed it
could be the shape of things to come.
Reading
Passage 2 has ten paragraphs, A–J. Which paragraph
contains the following information?
Write
the correct letter, A–J, in boxes 17–25 on your answer sheet. Note
that one paragraph is not used.
17. Scientific
success
18. Worsening
relations
19. The
dawn of the new project
20. Churchill's
confusion
21. Different
perspectives
22. Horrifying
prediction
23. Leaving
Britain behind the project
24. Long-term
discussion
25. New
idea
As More Tech Start-Ups Stay
Private, So Does the Money
Not
long ago, if you were a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering
start-up idea, there was a good chance you spent much of your waking life
working toward a single business milestone: taking your company public.
Though luminaries of the tech industry have always expressed skepticism and
even hostility toward the finance industry, tech’s dirty secret was that it
looked to Wall Street and the ritual of a public offering for affirmation — not
to mention wealth.
But
something strange has happened in the last couple of years: The initial public
offering of stock has become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their
employees across Silicon Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main
goal. Instead, many founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be
postponed as long as possible because it comes with more problems than
benefits.
“If
you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my
company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my
business,” said Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up
that organizes and sells information about the start-up market. “That’s
actually terrifying to me.
Silicon Valley’s sudden distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall
Street’s skepticism of new tech stocks — may be the single most important
psychological shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords
start-up executives the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps
them avoid the quarterly earnings treadmill.
It
also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom:
using traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies.
Investors have been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has
slowed. They have been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public
last year, because it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily,
which went public last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for
future sales.
Scott
Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz,
and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention
start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually
high valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable
for 14 years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.
That
unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular
investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are,
aren’t as likely to get washed out.
Private investors, on the other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns
— the Silicon Valley jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a
billion dollars. If many of those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape
unharmed, because losses will be confined to venture capitalists and hedge
funds that have begun to buy into tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and
their employees.
The
reluctance — and sometimes inability — to go public is spurring the unicorns.
By relying on private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get more
runway to figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance into
the public markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and
several other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some
cases billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public
offering.
“These companies are going public, just in the private market,” Dan Levitan,
the managing partner of the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He
means that in many cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would
have bought shares in these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into
late-stage private rounds. There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of
obtaining private money in place of a public offering: It’s called a “private
I.P.O.”
The
delay in I.P.O.s has altered how some venture capital firms do business. Rather
than waiting for an initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells
its stake in a start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made
about 100 times its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was
only possible after an I.P.O.
But
there is also a downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the
unicorns do eventually go public and begin to soar — or whatever it is that
fantastical horned beasts tend to do when they’re healthy — the biggest winners
will be the private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.
It
used to be that public investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial
offering could earn historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its
I.P.O. in 1997, you would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000
in Microsoft in 1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors
today are unlikely to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the
time tech companies come to the market, the biggest gains have already been
extracted by private backers.
Just
53 technology companies went public in 2014, which is around the median since
1980, but far fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when
hundreds of tech companies went public annually, according to statistics
maintained by Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida.
Today’s companies are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company
hitting the markets was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years
for tech I.P.O.s since 1980.
Over
the last few weeks, I’ve asked several founders and investors why they’re
waiting; few were willing to speak on the record about their own companies, but
their answers all amounted to “What’s the point?”
Initial public offerings were also ways to compensate employees and founders
who owned lots of stock, but there are now novel mechanisms — such as selling
shares on a secondary market — for insiders to cash in on some of their shares
in private companies. Still, some observers cautioned that the new trend may be
a bad deal for employees who aren’t given much information about the company’s
performance.
“One
thing employees may be confused about is when companies tell them, ‘We’re
basically doing a private I.P.O.,’ it might make them feel like there’s less
risk than there really is,” said Ms. Morrill of Mattermark. But she said it was
hard to persuade people that their paper gains may never materialize. “The
Kool-Aid is really strong,” she said.
If
the delay in I.P.O.s becomes a normal condition for Silicon Valley, some
observers say tech companies may need to consider new forms of compensation for
workers. “We probably need to fundamentally rethink how do private companies
compensate employees, because that’s going to be an issue,” said Mr. Kupor, of
Andreessen Horowitz.
During a recent presentation for Andreessen Horowitz’s limited partners — the
institutions that give money to the venture firm — Marc Andreessen, the firm’s
co-founder, told the journalist Dan Primack that he had never seen a sharper
divergence in how investors treat public- and private-company chief executives.
“They tell the public C.E.O., ‘Give us the money back this quarter,’ and they
tell the private C.E.O., ‘No problem, go for 10 years,’ ” Mr. Andreessen
said.
At
some point this tension will be resolved. “Private valuations will not forever
be higher than public valuations,” said Mr. Levitan, of Maveron. “So the
question is, Will private markets capitulate and go down or will public markets
go up?”
If
the private investors are wrong, employees, founders and a lot of hedge funds
could be in for a reckoning. But if they’re right, it will be you and me
wearing the frown — the public investors who missed out on the next big thing.
Questions
32–36
Complete
the sentences below.
Write ONLY
ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32. Skepticism
was always expected by the…of tech industry.
33. The
new aversion to initial offerings has its… .
34. Selling
shares on a secondary market is considered a… mechanism.
35. Workers'
compensation might be an…. .
36. The
public investors who failed to participate in the next big thing might be the
ones wearing the… .
Questions
37–40
Do the
following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
37. Private
investors are bearing most of the risk.
38. Not
many investors were willing to speak on the record.
39. The
typical tech company hitting the markets in 1990s was 5 years
old.
40. Marc
Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, expressed amazement with divergency in
how investors treat public.
Конецформы
The students’ problem
(A) The
college and university accommodation crisis in Ireland has become ‘so chronic’
that students are being forced to sleep rough, share a bed with strangers – or
give up on studying altogether.
(B) The
deputy president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Kevin Donoghue, said the
problem has become particularly acute in Dublin. He told the Irish Mirror:
“Students are so desperate, they’re not just paying through the nose to share
rooms – they’re paying to share a bed with complete strangers. It reached
crisis point last year and it’s only getting worse. “We’ve heard of students
sleeping rough; on sofas, floors and in their cars and I have to stress there’s
no student in the country that hasn’t been touched by this crisis. “Commutes –
which would once have been considered ridiculous – are now normal, whether
that’s by bus, train or car and those who drive often end up sleeping in their
car if they’ve an early start the next morning.”
(C) Worry
is increasing over the problems facing Ireland's 200,000 students as the number
increases over the next 15 years. With 165,000 full-time students in Ireland –
and that figure expected to increase to around 200,000 within the next 15 years
–fears remain that there aren’t enough properties to accommodate current
numbers.
(D) Mr.
Donoghue added: “The lack of places to live is actually forcing school-leavers
out of college altogether. Either they don’t go in the first place or end up
having to drop out because they can’t get a room and commuting is just too
expensive, stressful and difficult.”
(E) Claims
have emerged from the country that some students have been forced to sleep in
cars, or out on the streets, because of the enormous increases to rent in the
capital. Those who have been lucky enough to find a place to live have had to
do so ‘blind’ by paying for accommodation, months in advance, they haven’t even
seen just so they will have a roof over their head over the coming year.
(F) According
to the Irish Independent, it’s the ‘Google effect’ which is to blame. As Google
and other blue-chip companies open offices in and around Dublin’s docklands
area, which are ‘on the doorstep of the city’, international professionals have
been flocking to the area which will boast 2,600 more apartments, on 50 acres
of undeveloped land, over the next three to 10 years.
(G) Rent
in the area soared by 15 per cent last year and a two-bedroom apartment
overlooking the Grand Canal costs €2,100 (£1,500) per month to rent. Another
two-bedroom apartment at Hanover Dock costs €2,350 (almost £1,700) with a
three-bedroom penthouse – measuring some 136 square metres – sits at €4,500
(£3,200) per month in rent.
(H) Ireland’s
Higher Education Authority admitted this was the first time they had seen
circumstances ‘so extreme’ and the Fianna Fáil party leader, Michael Martin,
urged on the Government to intervene. He said: “It is very worrying that all of
the progress in opening up access to higher education in the last decade –
particularly for the working poor – is being derailed because of an entirely
foreseeable accommodation crisis.
Начало формы
Questions 1-8
Reading Passage 1 has eight
paragraphs, A–H.
Choose the most suitable
paragraph headings from the list of headings and write the correct
letter, A–H, in boxes 1–8 on your answer sheet.
1. Cons
of the commuting
2. Thing
that students have to go through
3. Commutes
have become common in Ireland nowadays
4. Danger
of the overflow
5. Cause
of the problems
6. Pricing
data
7. Regression
8. Eyeless
choice
Questions 9–14
Do the following statements
agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
9. The
accommodation problem in Ireland is especially bad in Dublin.
10. Commutes
are considered ridiculous.
11. The
number of students in Ireland is not likely to increase in the
future.
12. Due to
the opening of the new offices around Dublin, the number of local restaurants
will go up significantly over the next 3 to 10 years.
13. The
rent price went up by 15% last year.
14. Michael
Martin stated that crisis could have been omitted if the government reacted
properly.
Конецформы
The science of sleep
We spend a
third of our lives doing it. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret
Thatcher got by on four hours a night. Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time.
So why do we
sleep? This is a question that has baffled scientists for centuries and the
answer is, no one is really sure. Some believe that sleep gives the body a
chance to recuperate from the day's activities but in reality, the amount of
energy saved by sleeping for even eight hours is miniscule - about 50 kCal, the
same amount of energy in a piece of toast.
With continued
lack of sufficient sleep, the part of the brain that controls language, memory,
planning and sense of time is severely affected, practically shutting down. In
fact, 17 hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent
to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). This is the legal
drink driving limit in the UK.
Research also
shows that sleep-deprived individuals often have difficulty in responding to
rapidly changing situations and making rational judgements. In real life
situations, the consequences are grave and lack of sleep is said to have been
be a contributory factor to a number of international disasters such as Exxon
Valdez, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Challenger shuttle
explosion.
Sleep
deprivation not only has a major impact on cognitive functioning but also on
emotional and physical health. Disorders such as sleep apnoea which result in
excessive daytime sleepiness have been linked to stress and high blood
pressure. Research has also suggested that sleep loss may increase the risk of
obesity because chemicals and hormones that play a key role in controlling
appetite and weight gain are released during sleep.
What happens
when we sleep?
What happens
every time we get a bit of shut eye? Sleep occurs in a recurring cycle of 90 to
110 minutes and is divided into two categories: non-REM (which is further split
into four stages) and REM sleep.
Non-REM sleep
Stage one: Light Sleep
During the
first stage of sleep, we're half awake and half asleep. Our muscle activity
slows down and slight twitching may occur. This is a period of light sleep,
meaning we can be awakened easily at this stage.
Stage two:
True Sleep
Within ten
minutes of light sleep, we enter stage two, which lasts around 20 minutes. The
breathing pattern and heart rate start to slow down. This period accounts for
the largest part of human sleep.
Stages three
and four: Deep Sleep
During stage
three, the brain begins to produce delta waves, a type of wave that is large
(high amplitude) and slow (low frequency). Breathing and heart rate are at
their lowest levels.
Stage four is
characterised by rhythmic breathing and limited muscle activity. If we are
awakened during deep sleep we do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy
and disoriented for several minutes after waking up. Some children experience
bed-wetting, night terrors, or sleepwalking during this stage.
REM sleep
The first rapid
eye movement (REM) period usually begins about 70 to 90 minutes after we fall
asleep. We have around three to five REM episodes a night.
Although we
are not conscious, the brain is very active - often more so than when we are
awake. This is the period when most dreams occur. Our eyes dart around (hence
the name), our breathing rate and blood pressure rise. However, our bodies are
effectively paralysed, said to be nature's way of preventing us from acting out
our dreams.
After REM
sleep, the whole cycle begins again.
How much sleep
is required?
There is no
set amount of time that everyone needs to sleep, since it varies from person to
person. Results from the sleep profiler indicate that people like to sleep
anywhere between 5 and 11 hours, with the average being 7.75 hours.
Jim Horne from
Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre has a simple answer though:
"The amount of sleep we require is what we need not to be sleepy in the
daytime."
Even animals
require varied amounts of sleep:
Species
Average total sleep time per day
Python
18
hrs
Tiger
15.8
hrs
Cat
12.1
hrs
Chimpanzee
9.7
hrs
Sheep
3.8
hrs
African
elephant
3.3
hrs
Giraffe
1.9
hr
The current
world record for the longest period without sleep is 11 days, set by Randy
Gardner in 1965. Four days into the research, he began hallucinating. This was
followed by a delusion where he thought he was a famous footballer.
Surprisingly, Randy was actually functioning quite well at the end of his
research and he could still beat the scientist at pinball.
As More Tech Start-Ups Stay
Private, So Does the Money
Not
long ago, if you were a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering
start-up idea, there was a good chance you spent much of your waking life
working toward a single business milestone: taking your company public.
Though luminaries of the tech industry have always expressed skepticism and
even hostility toward the finance industry, tech’s dirty secret was that it
looked to Wall Street and the ritual of a public offering for affirmation — not
to mention wealth.
But
something strange has happened in the last couple of years: The initial public
offering of stock has become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their
employees across Silicon Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main
goal. Instead, many founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be
postponed as long as possible because it comes with more problems than
benefits.
“If
you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my
company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my
business,” said Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up
that organizes and sells information about the start-up market. “That’s
actually terrifying to me.
Silicon Valley’s sudden distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall
Street’s skepticism of new tech stocks — may be the single most important
psychological shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords
start-up executives the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps
them avoid the quarterly earnings treadmill.
It
also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom:
using traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies.
Investors have been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has
slowed. They have been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public
last year, because it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily,
which went public last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for
future sales.
Scott
Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz,
and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention
start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually
high valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable
for 14 years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.
That
unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular
investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are,
aren’t as likely to get washed out.
Private investors, on the other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns
— the Silicon Valley jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a
billion dollars. If many of those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape
unharmed, because losses will be confined to venture capitalists and hedge
funds that have begun to buy into tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and
their employees.
The
reluctance — and sometimes inability — to go public is spurring the unicorns.
By relying on private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get more
runway to figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance into
the public markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and
several other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some
cases billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public
offering.
“These companies are going public, just in the private market,” Dan Levitan,
the managing partner of the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He
means that in many cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would
have bought shares in these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into
late-stage private rounds. There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of
obtaining private money in place of a public offering: It’s called a “private
I.P.O.”
The
delay in I.P.O.s has altered how some venture capital firms do business. Rather
than waiting for an initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells
its stake in a start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made
about 100 times its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was
only possible after an I.P.O.
But
there is also a downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the
unicorns do eventually go public and begin to soar — or whatever it is that
fantastical horned beasts tend to do when they’re healthy — the biggest winners
will be the private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.
It
used to be that public investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial
offering could earn historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its
I.P.O. in 1997, you would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000
in Microsoft in 1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors
today are unlikely to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the
time tech companies come to the market, the biggest gains have already been
extracted by private backers.
Just
53 technology companies went public in 2014, which is around the median since
1980, but far fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when
hundreds of tech companies went public annually, according to statistics
maintained by Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida.
Today’s companies are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company
hitting the markets was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years
for tech I.P.O.s since 1980.
Over
the last few weeks, I’ve asked several founders and investors why they’re
waiting; few were willing to speak on the record about their own companies, but
their answers all amounted to “What’s the point?”
Initial public offerings were also ways to compensate employees and founders
who owned lots of stock, but there are now novel mechanisms — such as selling
shares on a secondary market — for insiders to cash in on some of their shares
in private companies. Still, some observers cautioned that the new trend may be
a bad deal for employees who aren’t given much information about the company’s
performance.
“One
thing employees may be confused about is when companies tell them, ‘We’re
basically doing a private I.P.O.,’ it might make them feel like there’s less
risk than there really is,” said Ms. Morrill of Mattermark. But she said it was
hard to persuade people that their paper gains may never materialize. “The
Kool-Aid is really strong,” she said.
If
the delay in I.P.O.s becomes a normal condition for Silicon Valley, some
observers say tech companies may need to consider new forms of compensation for
workers. “We probably need to fundamentally rethink how do private companies
compensate employees, because that’s going to be an issue,” said Mr. Kupor, of
Andreessen Horowitz.
During a recent presentation for Andreessen Horowitz’s limited partners — the
institutions that give money to the venture firm — Marc Andreessen, the firm’s
co-founder, told the journalist Dan Primack that he had never seen a sharper
divergence in how investors treat public- and private-company chief executives.
“They tell the public C.E.O., ‘Give us the money back this quarter,’ and they
tell the private C.E.O., ‘No problem, go for 10 years,’ ” Mr. Andreessen
said.
At
some point this tension will be resolved. “Private valuations will not forever
be higher than public valuations,” said Mr. Levitan, of Maveron. “So the
question is, Will private markets capitulate and go down or will public markets
go up?”
If
the private investors are wrong, employees, founders and a lot of hedge funds
could be in for a reckoning. But if they’re right, it will be you and me
wearing the frown — the public investors who missed out on the next big thing.
Questions
32–36
32. Skepticism
was always expected by the of
tech industry.
33. The
new aversion to initial offerings has its .
34. Selling
shares on a secondary market is considered a mechanism.
35. Workers'
compensation might be an .
36. The
public investors who failed to participate in the next big thing might be the
ones wearing the .
37. Private investors are bearing most of the
risk.
38. Not
many investors were willing to speak on the record.
39. The
typical tech company hitting the markets in 1990s was 5 years
old.
40. Marc
Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, expressed amazement with divergency in
how investors treat public.
Настоящий материал опубликован пользователем Салихова Раъно Бахрановна. Инфоурок является
информационным посредником и предоставляет пользователям возможность размещать на сайте
методические материалы. Всю ответственность за опубликованные материалы, содержащиеся в них
сведения, а также за соблюдение авторских прав несут пользователи, загрузившие материал на сайт
Если Вы считаете, что материал нарушает авторские права либо по каким-то другим причинам должен быть удален с
сайта, Вы можете оставить жалобу на материал.
К данной скидке мы можем добавить скидку Вашего образовательного учреждения (она зависит от того,
сколько Ваших коллег прошло курсы "Инфоурок")
В настоящий момент дополнительные накопительные скидки (от 2% до 25%) предоставляются
63.373 образовательным учреждениям .
Чтобы узнать, какая скидка действует для всех сотрудников Вашего образовательного учреждения, войдите в
свой
личный кабинет "Инфоурок".
К данной скидке мы можем добавить скидку Вашего образовательного учреждения (она зависит от того,
сколько Ваших коллег прошло курсы "Инфоурок")
В настоящий момент дополнительные накопительные скидки (от 2% до 25%) предоставляются
63.373 образовательным учреждениям .
Чтобы узнать, какая скидка действует для всех сотрудников Вашего образовательного учреждения, войдите в
свой
личный кабинет "Инфоурок".
К данной скидке мы можем добавить скидку Вашего образовательного учреждения (она зависит от того,
сколько Ваших коллег прошло курсы "Инфоурок")
В настоящий момент дополнительные накопительные скидки (от 2% до 25%) предоставляются
63.373 образовательным учреждениям .
Чтобы узнать, какая скидка действует для всех сотрудников Вашего образовательного учреждения, войдите в
свой
личный кабинет "Инфоурок".
Оставьте свой комментарий
Авторизуйтесь, чтобы задавать вопросы.