Olympiad - 11th Grade - Reading

Artist Peter Fuller talks about his hobby There’s a popular idea that artists are not supposed to be into sport, but mountain biking is a huge part of my life. It gets me out of my studio, and into the countryside. But more importantly, racing along as fast as you can leaves you no time to worry about anything that’s going on in your life. You’re too busy concentrating on not crashing. The only things you pay attention to are the pain in your legs and the rocks on the path in front of you. I’m in my sixties now, but I started cycling when I was a kid. In the summer my friends and I would ride our bikes into the woods and see who was brave enough to go down steep hills, or do big jumps. The bikes we had then weren’t built for that, and often broke, so I used to draw pictures of bikes with thick tyres that would be strong enough for what we were doing. They looked just like modern mountain bikes. However, it wasn’t until many years later that someone actually invented one. By the 1980s, they were everywhere. At that time I was into skateboarding. I did that for a decade until falling off on to hard surfaces started to hurt too much. Mountain biking seemed a fairy safe way to keep fit, so I took that up instead. I made a lot of friends, and got involved in racing, which gave me a reason to train hard. I wanted to find out just how fit and fast I could get, which turned out to be fairly quick. I even won a couple of local races. In the end I stopped racing, mainly because I knew what it could mean to my career if I had a bad crash. But I still like to do a three-hour mountain bike ride every week. And if I’m out cycling in the hills and see a rider ahead, I have to beat them to the top. As I go past I imagine how surprised they would be if they knew how old I am. Peter enjoys mountain biking because ....

Peter says he returned to cycling after several years ...

In his childhood Peter Fuller ...

What does Peter say about cycling during his childhood?

How does Peter feel about cycling now?

Subway music in Washington DC Most of us who live in a city know what it means to spend thirty minutes in the subway rushing through corridors and then trying to get into terribly crowded trains. Well, this morning was different. A guy stopped at one of the entrances to the station and played six beautiful Bach pieces for about forty-five minutes. Three minutes after he started, a man noticed him and stopped for a few seconds. A minute later the musician received his first one-dollar tip. The person who was most interested was a three-year-old boy, who really wanted to listen. His mother didn’t let him stay very long though. In the forty-five minutes, one thousand and ninety-seven people passed by and only six stopped. The violinist collected thirty-two dollars. When he finished playing, nobody noticed it and nobody knew that he was Joshua Bell, one of the best soloists in the world. He was playing a violin worth 3.5 million dollars and had played in a concert two days before where people paid an average of a hundred dollars for their seats. The aim of this real-life experiment was twofold. The organizers, including the performer, were eager to get answers to a few philosophic questions. Can we notice beauty in a common place and at a rather unusual hour? Do we recognize genius in an unexpected situation? And the most troubling question of all: if we miss Joshua Bell playing Bach just because we are not in Carnegie Hall, how many other things do we miss? The underground is a busy place in the morning.

One morning the passengers could hear beautiful piano music.

The improvised concert lasted for about three quarters of an hour.

Half a dozen Bach pieces were performed.

A little boy was one of the most involved listeners.

Nearly a thousand people passed that place within forty-five minutes.

There were quite a number of people who stopped and listened.

On that morning a world-famous violinist acted as a busker.

Joshua Bell’s regular job is poorly paid.

The unusual performance was actually a social experiment.

The scientific method Every year in the spring, large numbers of frogs appear in the mud near the river Nile. They aren’t there in dry weather, so in the past ancient Egyptians used to believe that the mud produced frogs. The problem is they didn’t test their belief scientifically. The first step in the scientific method is to observe the world around you. For example, Newton noticed that an apple fell down, not up. The Egyptians did this part alright; they observed the frogs. Step two is to ask yourself a question based on your observations. ‘Why does the apple go down?” “Where do the frogs come from?” And then think of a hypothesis: a possible answer. “Objects are pulled to the ground by an invisible force.” “Mud produces frogs.” The Egyptians did this too. But it isn’t enough just to think of an answer to a question and believe it’s true. You have to discover some evidence that confirms your hypothesis. So, the next step in the scientific method is to test your ideas with experiments and more observations. Galileo believed that two objects with different masses would fall at the same rate. So, the story goes, he carried out an experiment. He dropped a heavy ball and a light ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and confirmed his belief. The Egyptians never did any experiments on their mud-frog hypothesis, so they never found out it was false. If you do an experiment only once, you may make a mistake. So repeat your experiment to make sure you get the same results, and analyse your findings statistically to check they’re significant. Then make any necessary changes to your hypothesis and conduct more experiments. Carefully record everything you do so other scientists can duplicate your work and check your conclusions. A hypothesis with lots of experimental evidence becomes a theory. A theory which has been confirmed many times is a scientific law. The great thing about hypotheses, theories and laws is that you can use them to make predictions. The law of gravity predicts that astronauts should float in space. And they do. Chemists and physicists, geologists and biologists, researchers in every laboratory in every field of research use the scientific method. They don’t accept untested observations. So they don’t believe that mud produces frogs. Plenty of frogs used to appear near the Nile in spring.

Dry weather was the precondition of frogs’ recurrent arrival.

Observation is a necessary stage of the scientific method.

A hypothesis is a properly asked question.

A number of experiments should be carried out either to confirm or to reject the hypothesis.

At least once in history did the Leaning Tower of Pisa serve science.

The number of experiments performed by the Egyptians was not sufficient to prove their theory.

Multiple experiments are needed in order to prove the hypothesis.

A theory is a confirmed hypothesis that automatically becomes a law.

Only scientific laws can enable the scientists to make predictions.