READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Multitasks

A
Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multi-taskers. Multitasks are able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus. However, Thomas Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really do multiple things simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music, but in reality, the brain can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will cause you to ignore some of the words of the music. When people think they are accomplishing two different tasks efficiently, what they are really doing is dividing their focus. While listening to music, people become less able to focus on their surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when we talk with friends and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to someone else talk, or maybe they are reading a text on their smart phone and don't hear what you are saying. Lehman called this phenomenon “email voice”.

B
The world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smart-phone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more people than ever, even inventions such as the cordless phone have increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up, and chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.

C
Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species, He found that for humans, the size of this part constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs, and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimulants to his subjects in a wax that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients' heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.

D
Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment, Meyer found that when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person focused on a single task one at a time.

E
People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his subjects. He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly every 11 minutes people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be interrupted by outside sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no reason at all, check a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. He suggested that the average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time.

F
So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As it matters of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic. No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cell-phones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction. Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking. 

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

The Robbers Cave Study

A review of a famous study into group behaviour

Group self-centredness seems to occur the minute people are divided into groups. It doesn't matter what the group is, or on what basis it was formed, we perceive the group we belong to as being superior to other groups and we develop an 'in-group' bias.

Probably one of the most famous pieces of research looking at group behaviour was a field study conducted by Sherif in 1956. This study involved 22 boys aged between 11 and 12, who were divided into two groups. The groups were roughly matched in terms of sporting ability, camping experience and general popularity among their peers. Their parents were told that they were going to a three-week summer camp to see how well they would work alongside other boys when put into different teams. The parents were also told that the boys would not be allowed to be visited during that time, but would be able to go home if they wanted to. It was intended that the data for the study would be collected by participant observers.

At first, neither set of boys knew of the existence of the other set. They were taken to their respective campsites, which were located on a 200-acre, densely wooded area in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The first week was spent doing a variety of activities, such as pitching tents and cooking. During this week, the two groups seemed to develop different group norms, one group being more 'tough' than the other, from which two boys went home early, as they were homesick. The groups were given a set of caps and t-shirts, and gave themselves names: the 'Eagles' and the 'Rattlers' (the latter being the tougher group).

At the end of the first week, they became aware of each other's existence by finding litter left by the other group or overhearing voices. Sherif noticed that already the groups had started to refer to the other group as 'them' and their group as 'us'. This marked the beginning of phase two of the experiment.

The groups were told that they were going to take part in a 'Grand Tournament', which involved 10 different sporting events, and they were shown the prizes for winning. The tournament was also to include in the final scores points which would be awarded for other activities, such as how tidy the cabins were kept. These scores were displayed on big scoreboards in what now became a joint hall where the two groups ate their meals together. This was necessary so the two groups would think they were on almost equal scores in the time leading up to the final event, which would increase the sense of competition. Needless to say, these scores were manipulated by the experimenters.

In order to check how high the levels of group self-centredness were in the groups at this time, a number of tasks were set up which involved the groups rating their own members and members of the other group. Each time group members rated the boys in their own group much better at the tasks than the other boys, even though there was no real difference between them. They were also asked to rate all others in terms of how desirable they were as friends, and 93 per cent of friendship preferences were in-group preferences.

When the tournament started, the first game was basketball. The group that was thought to be less tough lost the game and claimed that they had lost only because the other group were bigger and older than they were. The Eagles won the next ball game and then were said to be cheating in the tug-of-war. This resulted in visits by both groups to each other's cabins over the course of the next 24 hours, where they ripped the mosquito nets, turned over the beds and generally made a mess. The Eagles devised a new weapon in the conflict which consisted of 'rocks in socks' and so it went on. Eventually, the Eagles won the tournament (with some help from the experimenters) and it was time for phase three to begin.

Research has suggested that the best way to reduce group conflict is by non-competitive contact. This required two conditions: that the groups had equal status and that they had a common goal to work towards. This was exactly what Sherif engineered. There were actually seven situations organised which gave the groups equal status contact; these were things like having meals together or watching films together. The meals resulted in food fights; the films were enjoyed by both groups sitting totally apart from each other.

The other situations, where the groups had to work for common goals, had a much better outcome. These included raising money to go and see a film and solving problems, such as one with the water supply. The final common goal was a visit by truck to Cedar Lake to camp there before the end of the holiday. In this situation, although both groups travelled in separate trucks, another problem-solving situation arose when one of the trucks became stuck. All the boys joined in, using one of the tug-of-war ropes to help move it. At this point the group boundaries were beginning to disappear. On the final day, when they were due to return home, the boys themselves suggested that they travel in one bus and sat in friendship groups rather than as Eagles and Rattlers.