Unit 45 – Stockholm Syndrome
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
The passage below has been adapted from Culture and Religion – Sharia Law, from the iMinds series.
At first glance two of the 1970’s most notorious bank robberies would seem to have nothing in common. They occurred eight months apart, for different motives, on opposite sides of the globe. But these two incidents would prove seminal to the development and understanding of a curious and once controversial psychological condition; Stockholm Syndrome.
More…Unit 46 – Tomoe Nage Instructional
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 4 minute 30 seconds
(This module is very similar to one that appeared on the March 2012 GAMSAT, which was themed on fishing and required students to interpret both text and illustrations together)
Adapted from ‘Judo Masterclass Techniques: Tomoe Nage’ by Katsuhiko Kashiwazaki
More…Unit 47 – Real Life & Celebs
Difficulty: Easy
Time: 7 minutes 30 seconds
The passage below is an adaptation of an article by journalist, Julian Norman, published in The Guardian in June 2012.
Seaweed. Marmite. No, egg whites. Or maybe grilled chicken. Actually, hang on, try a handful of unsalted nuts. No bread though. Bread is poison.
More…Unit 48 – Geometric Analogies
Difficulty: Very Hard
Time: 3 minutes
The segment below has been adapted from How To Solve It by George Polya.
Analogy is a sort of similarity. Similar objects agree with each other in some respect, analogous objects agree in certain relations of their respective parts.
More…Unit 49 – Multilingualism In The EU
Difficulty: Hard
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
The passage below is adapted from an article published on http://www.euractiv.com on 4th July 2012.
Jean Quatremer, a renowned French political journalist from the Daily Libération, complained about the official press statements accompanying the Commission’s economic recommendations to member states, published on 30 May.
More…Unit 50 – Hannibal Lecter’s Memory Palace
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
The passage below is an extract from Hannibal by Thomas Harris
The memory palace was a mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr. Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr. Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there. He has passed years among its exquisite collections, while his body lay bound on a violent ward with screams buzzing the steel bars like hell’s own harp.
More…Unit 51 – Comparing Songs About Ageing
Difficulty: Easy
Time: 6 minutes
Song 1: Help The Aged, by Pulp
Help the aged,
One time they were just like you,
Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue.
Help the aged,
Don’t just put them in a home,
Can’t have much fun when they’re all on their own.
Give a hand, if you can,
Try and help them to unwind.
Give them hope and give them comfort
’cause they’re running out of time.
Unit 52 – Synthetic Life Forms
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
The passage below has been adapted from an article by Clive Cookson originally published in the Financial Times, July 2012.
Craig Venter, king of the genome, has been uncharacteristically quiet for a couple of years since his laboratory created the world’s first synthetic life form, a microbe whose genes were made entirely from inanimate chemicals. Some critics downplayed Venter’s achievement in 2010 because he did not make a novel form of life. The project was a technical tour de force, a demonstration that scientists could move on from reading to writing genes, but it reproduced an existing microbe called Mycoplasma Mycoides, with just a few “watermarking” additions to distinguish its DNA from the natural bacterium.
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