IELTS Academic Reading Test 10

The exchanging of business cards is as Close to a universal ritual as you can find in the business world. The ritual may be universal, but the details of business cards and how they are swapped vary across countries. Americans throw their cards casually across a table; the Japanese make the exchange of cards a formal ceremony. While there are cards that are discreet and understated. others are crammed full of details and titles. Some business people hand out 24-carat gold cards, and there are kindergarten children who have cards with not only their own contact details, but also with the job descriptions of their parents and even grandparents. This practice has become so common in parts of New York, for example, that the use of such cards is now prohibited by some of these institutions.

Cards have been around a long time in one form or another. The Chinese invented calling cards in the 15th century to give people notice that they intended to pay them a visit, but these were for social purposes only. Then, in the 17th century, European business people invented a new type of card to act as miniature advertisements, signalling the advent of the business card.

In today's world, business cards can cause people to have strong emotional reactions. According to one experienced company director, very few things can provoke more heated discussion at a board meeting than the composition of the company's business cards. Lots of companies try to promote themselves by altering the form of the card. Employees at one famous toy company give out little plastic figures with their contact details stamped on them. One fast food company has business cards which are shaped like a portion of French fries. A Canadian divorce lawyer once gave out cards that could be torn in two- for each of the spouses. For many business commentators, such gimmicky business cards prove that the use of a physical business card is nearly at an end. After all, why bother exchanging bits of thick paper at all when you can simply swap electronic versions by smartphone. However, one can just as well argue the opposite: that business cards are here to stay, and in a business world full of meetings and correspondence, it is more important than ever that your card is unique. Attempts to reinvent business cards for the digital age have not been successful. Even at the latest technology conferences, people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from paper rather than using a digital alternative.

To understand business cards, it is necessary to understand how business works. That business cards are thriving in a digital age is a forceful reminder that there is much about business that is timeless. According to Kate Jones, a business lecturer, there is one eternal and To understand business cards, it is necessary to understand how business works. That business cards are thriving in a digital age is a forceful reminder that there is much about business that is timeless. According to Kate Jones, a business lecturer, there is one eternal and inescapable issue. Her 2006 Study of more than 200 business executives in North America found that trust was the key element for running a successful business. It is vital to be able to look someone in the eye and decide what sort of person they are. In this way. you can transform acquaintanceships into relationships. A good proportion of business life will always be about building social connections - having dinner or playing port with clients and colleagues - and while computers can deal with administrative tasks. It is still human beings that have to focus on the emotional.

The rapid advance of globalisation means that this relationship building process is becoming ever more demanding Managers have to put more effort in when dealing with international counterparts, especially when there is not a common language, which is so often the case these days. A recent UK survey showed that chief executives of global organisations now routinely spend three out of every four weeks on international travel It is in these situations that business cards are doubly useful, as they are a quick way of establishing connections. Cards can also remind you that you have actually met someone in a face to face meeting rather than just searched for them on the internet. Looking through piles of different cards can enhance your memory in ways that simply looking through uniform electronic lists would never do.

Janet McIntyre is a leading expert on business cards in today's world. She maintains that as companies become more complex, cards are essential in determining the exact status of every contact you meet in multinational corporations. Janet also explains how exchanging business cards can be an effective way of initiating a conversation, because it gives people a ritual to follow when they first meet a new business contact. The business world is obsessed with the idea of creating and inventing new things that will change the way we do everything, and this does lead to progress. But there are lots of things that do not need to be changed and in Janet McIntyre's view, tradition also has an equally valuable role to play. Therefore the practice of exchanging business cards is likely to continue in the business world.

A The production of any great art form, and classical music is no exception, does not usually occur in a society dominated by the basic material demands of food and shelter. Art and music have flourished in those periods of history, and those parts of society, in which the luxury of free time and material wealth has allowed such a culture to take precedence over more material matters. In the medieval European world, it was thus primarily in the closed communities of the church and monastery, and royal courts that music, literature, and learning were able to flourish.

B It was not until the 18th century that this situation changed to any great extent, and the rise of an economically independent middle class meant that concert-going became a public activity for anyone who cared to buy a ticket. It is worth remembering that the idea of classical music widely accepted today did not exist until about 300 years ago. Performing music in concert halls to a paying audience, as something inherently pleasurable and significant, was pretty much unheard of until the 18th century, and not widely established until the 19th. The concert venue, the audience, and the idea of masterpieces of classical music, were all effectively invented during the course of the 18th century in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and other European cities where the arts in general were blossoming.

C Today, music that was originally written for a concert venue may appear, out of its original context, in an advert or film. Conversely, music written specifically for films is sometimes performed live. But nothing has changed music over the last century more radically than the invention and dissemination of recording technologies. However, although Thomas Edison originally developed the phonograph in 1877, and wax cylinders were used as early as the 1880s for recording music, commercial recordings of music were not generally available to the majority until the 1920s. From the mid-1980s onwards, the vinyl disc gradually gave way to the new technology of the CD, but just a decade later, the digital MP3 file was already displacing the CD as the favoured way to produce recorded music. Yet now, people have more music stored on their phones or computers—which they can call up with the touch of a finger—than would have been contained on all the metres of library shelves of a proud 'record collector' of the 20th century.

D Before recording, music was a social event—it involved one or more people coming together to make music. The music lasted for as long as the musicians sang or played, and then it was over. Therefore, the only music that was heard tended to be compositions by recent or living musicians, probably working in the locality. It was rare to hear music from a past generation, distant place, or culture. Even when music became professionalized, people who wanted to listen to music went to a specific venue, at a specific time, to hear musicians create a one-off event.

E Nowadays, however, technology makes almost all the world's music instantly available to anyone with access to simple and cheap gadgets for playing it. Music thus floats free of any specific occasion or venue. It is no longer restricted to a particular audience or group of musicians. For the first time, listening to music can be entirely a personal affair. This is one of the reasons the classical label becomes harder to pin down. One of its distinctive features—a performance defined by concert halls and opera houses—is dissolved by recording formats. As a consequence, all music, classical music included, can be any person's soundtrack for activities such as commuting, exercising, or working.

F The ubiquity of music as recorded sound means that it's very easy to overlook the most definitive aspect of the classical music tradition—the fact that it is written or notated music. Though classical music may lack a precise definition and mean quite different things to different people, at its heart is the idea of music that has remained viable over the years because it was written down in notation. The origins of what music historians think of as classical music lie in the ninth century when a system of musical notation was first developed. Before this time, singers in religious services in cathedrals or monasteries had to learn by heart a huge repertory of chants. The first attempts to notate music were intended to help them remember these. Over the next centuries, notation became more complex, incorporating such aspects as rhythm and pitch, allowing composers to rework and refine their musical ideas. Put very simply, the history of classical music, in all its varied forms, is the history of a tradition that grew out of the possibilities of musical notation.

In the deep, clear channels of Australia’s Shark Bay, bottlenose dolphins have discovered tools, raising questions about the origins of intelligent behavior, the nature of learning, and the birth of technology. There, dolphins in one extended family routinely use sponges* to protect their noses as they forage for fish hidden in the abrasive seafloor sand, according to Georgetown University scientists.

As far as the researchers can tell, a single dolphin may have invented the technique relatively recently and taught it to her offspring. The simple innovation dramatically changed their behavior, hunting habits, and social life, the researchers found. Those that adopted it became loners who spent much more time hunting than others and dive more deeply in search of prey. The sponging dolphins teach the technique to all their young, but only the females seem to grasp the idea. ‘It is indisputably tool use,’ says primate anthropologist Craig Stanford at the University of Southern California, an authority on animal cognition and behavior. For those seeking a glimpse of our own beginnings, the dolphins of Shark Bay offer a hint of the inventive impulse that occurred when our earliest ancestors first shaped destiny by fashioning implements with their hands.

Tool use of any sort among wild animals is rare, difficult to document reliably, and controversial. The line between instinct, ingenuity, and intelligence is easily blurred by wishful thinking, experts caution. Field observations often give rise to scholarly disputes. Even so, 10 primate species of monkeys and apes, along with 30 species of birds, are thought to use sticks, rocks, or leaves as tools.

In the first in-depth analysis of this natural dolphin behavior, marine biologist and psychologist Dr. Janet Mann at Georgetown University and her colleagues found that the dolphins of Shark Bay use their makeshift hunting masks more often than any other species uses tools, except human beings.

The curious hunting habit was first observed by a local fisherman who reported to marine biologists that he had seen a dolphin with an odd growth on its nose. Monitoring its movements through the bay’s unusually clear waters, researchers soon discovered that the dolphin was actually balancing a conical basket sponge on its nose.

At first, it was not evident what the dolphin was doing with a sponge. Observing from a small boat, Dr. Mann and her colleagues eventually identified 41 dolphins who regularly used sponges to hunt, cataloging 1,295 dives in which they surfaced with sponges on their snouts.

Researchers were startled to realize that the dolphins of Shark Bay employed one living creature as a tool to help hunt another.

Not any basket sponge would do, the researchers soon learned. The dolphins might search for 10 minutes to locate one with the right conical shape to cap their nose, tear it free of its mooring, and then carry it to a preferred hunting ground along channels between eight meters and 13 meters deep. ‘You can see that they are scattering the sand gently as they go along,’ says Dr. Mann. ‘When they startle a fish out of the sand, they immediately drop the sponge and go after it.’

‘They return to retrieve the sponge and pick up the hunt again, repeating the pattern. They really use these sponges as a foraging tool,’ says dolphin biologist Maddalena Bearzi, president of the Ocean Conservation Society of Los Angeles. ‘They discovered it could create an advantage in their foraging technique, and they pass it from generation to generation.’ However, among the hundreds of dolphins living in this bay, only a few dozen use sponges to keep from scraping their noses, and that offered researchers an opportunity to compare creatures that use tools to others of the same species that do not.

Although these dolphins all appear to be related, researchers at the University of New South Wales suggest that nurture, not nature, is the reason these dolphins use tools, ruling out genetic explanations for the behavior. Instead, they are convinced that the use of sponges is passed from one generation to the next through imitation. Among bottlenose dolphins, mothers nurse their young for up to eight years, ample time for calves to absorb their mother’s hunting tricks by observation. ‘This is an example of culture among these animals,’ says Dr. Bearzi. ‘This is part of the reason it is so important.’

So far, almost all of the dolphin spongers have proved to be female. ‘The sex difference is really striking,’ Dr. Mann says. ‘I don’t know of another species where it is so dramatic.’ Of the sponging offspring, only the daughters could be seen still sponging once they reached maturity. The sons tried it but almost always abandoned it. Male dolphins rarely play a role in child-rearing and tend to fish in packs.

For Dr. Mann, the discovery that dolphins, too, are tool users adds an unexpected dimension to the history of innovation, shedding new light on animal intelligence. Clever mimics and fast learners, dolphins have unusually large brains — four times the size of a chimpanzee’s and second only to humans in relative size. ‘It speaks to this whole issue of creativity and learning and brain size,’ she says. ‘The number one question that drives me and others is: Why do dolphins have such big brains? What are they doing down there in the water that requires them to be so smart?’