It was a simple letter asking for a place to study at Scotland's oldest university which helped start a revolution in higher education. A 140-year-old letter written by a lady calling for her to be allowed to study medicine at St Andrews University has been discovered by researchers. Written by Sophia Jex-Blake in 1873, the seven-page document, which urged the university to allow women to study medicine at the institution, was released yesterday on International Women's Day. The document was discovered buried in the university archives by part-time history student Lis Smith, who is completing her PhD at St Andrews Institute of Scottish Historical Research. She said: "We knew that Sophia Jex-Blake and her supporters, in their effort to open up university medical education for women, had written to the Senatus Academicus at St Andrews in an attempt to gain permission to attend classes there, but we didn't know documentary evidence existed. While searching the archives for information about the university's higher certificate for women, I was astonished to come across what must be the very letter Jex-Blake wrote." In the letter, Sophia and her supporters offered to hire teachers or build suitable buildings for a medical school and to arrange for lectures to be delivered in the subjects not already covered at St Andrews. Although her letter was not successful, it eventually led to the establishment of the Ladies Literate in Arts at St Andrews, a distance-learning degree for women. The qualification, which ran from 1877 until the 1930s, gave women access to university education in the days before they were admitted as students. It was so popular that it survived long after women were admitted as full students to St Andrews in 1892. Ms Jex-Blake went on to help establish the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. She was accepted by the University of Berne, where she was awarded a medical degree in January 1877. Eventually, she moved back to Edinburgh and opened her own practice. Lis Smith found Sophia's letter to St Andrews University _ . A) by pure chance B) in the school office C) with her supporters' help D) while reading history books
A
(Question)
Science Daily (May 1S, 2012) - People who rate themselves as having high emotional intelligence (El) tend to overestimate their ability to detect deception in others. This is the finding of a paper published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology on 18 May 2012. Professor Stephen Porter. director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at University of British Columbia Canada along with colleagues Dr. Leanne Brinke and Alysha Baker used a standard questionnaire to measure the EI of 116 participants. These participants were then asked to view 20 videos from around the world of people pleading for the safe return of a missing family member. In half the videos the person making the plea was responsible for the missing person's disappearance or murder. The participants were asked to judge whether the pleas were honest or deceptive say how much confidence they had in their judgments, report the clues they had used to make those judgments and rate their emotional response to each plea. Professor Porter found that higher EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and sympathetic feelings towards people in the videos who turned out to be responsible for the disappearance. Although EI, in general, was not associated with being better or worse at telling the difference between truths and lies. people with a higher ability to notice and express emotion (a component of EI) were not so good at spotting when people were telling lies. Professor Porter says: "Taken together, these findings suggest findings features of emotional intelligence and the decision-making processes _ lead to may nave the paradoxical effect of weakening people's ability to detect deception." "These findings are important because El is a well-accepted concept and is used in a variety of fields, including the workplace" What is the best title for the passage? A) How to detect deception in our daily life. B) The disadvantages of high emotional intelligence. C) The relationship between one's El and recognition. D) Emotionally intelligent people are less good at spotting liars.
(Answer)
D
Ques: Some people are so rude! Who sends an e-mail or a text message that just says "Thank you"? Who leaves a voice mail message rather than texts you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google? Don't these people realize that they're wasting your time? Maybe I'm the rude one for not appreciating life's little politeness. But many social agreed standards just don't make sense to people drowning in digital communication. In texts, you don't have to declare who you are or even say hello; E-mail, too, is slower than a text; Voice mail is a now impolite way of trying to connect. My father learned this lesson after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to. _ , he called my sister to express his dissatisfaction that I never returned his phone calls. "Why are you leaving him voice mails?" my sister asked. "Just text him." In the age of the smartphone, there is no reason to ask once-acceptable questions about: the weather forecast, a business's phone number, or directions to a house, a restaurant, which can be easily found on Google Maps. But people still ask these things. And when you answer, they respond with a thank-you e-mail. How to handle these differing standards? Easy: Consider your audience. Some people, especially older ones, appreciate a thank-you message. Others, like me, want no reply. The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that in traditional societies, the young learn from the old. But in modern societies, the old can also learn from the young. Here's hoping that politeness never goes out of fashion but that time-wasting forms of communication do. Which of the following does the writer agree to? A) Dealing with voice mail should vary with each person. B) Declaring who they are or saying hello in texts is necessary. C) People needn't learn from one another in traditional societies. D) People needn't turn to Google for help when in trouble.
Ans: A
Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability, a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. The researchers said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical functions of sound, the ear itself and a born ability to hear harmony. The study shows that musical harmony can be learnt, and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds. So if you thought that the music of some foreign culture (or Jazz) sounded like the crying of cats, it's simply because you haven't learnt to listen by their rules. The researchers used 66 volunteers with a range of musical training and tested their ability to hear combinations of notes to determine if they found the combinations familiar or pleasing. They found that people needed to be familiar with combinations of notes. If they couldn't recognize the notes, they found the notes _ . This finding put an end to centuries of theories claiming that physical functions of the ear determine what we find attractive. The study found that trained musicians were much more sensitive to unpleasant notes than non-musicians. When they couldn't find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, while non-musicians were much less sensitive. This shows the importance of training or nurturing the brain to like particular sound of combinations of notes, like those found in jazz or rock. Depending on their training, a strange chord sound was pleasant to some musicians, but very unpleasant to others. This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical note is learnt. To confirm this finding, they trained 19 non-musicians to find the notes of a random selection of western chords. Not only did the participants' ability to hear notes improve rapidly; the chords they had learnt sounded more pleasant--regardless of how the chords were played. The question of why some combinations of musical notes are heard as pleasant or unpleasant has long been debated. "... Although non-musicians were less sensitive to music, they can still _ . A) find the beauty of chords without training B) enjoy the beauty of music when played by musicians C) be trained to like particular music D) make friends with real musicians
C