1. Read Aloud

Constellation (26 April 2020)

A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of stars forms an imaginary outline or pattern, typically representing an animal, mythological person or creature, or an inanimate object. The origins of the earliest constellations likely go back to prehistory.

Pluto (22 April 2020)

Investigators also compared those microbes with those living in 52 other soil samples taken from all around the planet. The park had organisms that also exist in deserts, frozen tundra, forests, rainforests, and prairies. Antarctica was the only area that had microbes that did not overlap with those found in Central Park. Only a small percentage of the park’s microbes were found to be already listed in databases.

Father (Version 2) (29 April 2020)

Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at five-thirty, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this for a living.

2. Describe Image

Water Cycle (2 May 2020, Perth)

Penguin (4 May 2020, Canberra)

3. Summarize Written Text

Aging World (2 May 2020)

We live in an aging world. While this has been recognized for some time in developed countries, it is only recently that this phenomenon has been fully acknowledged. Global communication is “shrinking” the world, and global aging is “maturing” it. The increasing presence of older persons in the world is making people of all ages more aware that we live in a diverse and multigenerational society. It is no longer possible to ignore aging, regardless of whether one views it positively or negatively.

Demographers note that if current trends in aging continue as predicted, a demographic revolution, wherein the proportions of the young and the old will undergo a historic crossover, will be felt in just three generations. This portrait of change in the world’s population parallels the magnitude of the industrial revolution traditionally considered the most significant social and economic breakthrough in the history of humankind since the Neolithic period. It marked the beginning of a sustained movement towards modern economic growth in much the same way that globalization is today marking an unprecedented and sustained movement toward a “global culture”. The demographic revolution, it is envisaged, will be at least as powerful.

While the future effects are not known, a likely scenario is one where both the challenges as well as the opportunities will emerge from a vessel into which exploration and research, dialogue and debate are poured. Challenges arise as social and economic structures try to adjust to the simultaneous phenomenon of diminishing young cohorts with rising older ones, and opportunities present themselves in the sheer number of older individuals and the vast resources societies stand to gain from their contribution.

4. Summarize Spoken Text 

Indian Peasants Debt (Version 1) (2 May 2020)

The debt today is so high, it’s two hundred thousand rupees, three hundred thousand rupees of peasant who have no capital. They who know within a year or two, when they accumulate that kind of debt. Where is the debt coming from? It’s coming from a seed that is costing a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand rupees per kilogram, depending on what you got. Seeds that used to be free, used to be theirs. Pesticides each time, the more they use, the more they have to use, 12 sprays, 15 sprays, 20 sprays. Pesticides used in just the last five years in the land areas of India has shown up by 2000 percent. That’s why the free market and globalization have brought and since we are talking about peasants, who have no money, who have no capital, they can only buy expensive seeds and expensive pesticides by borrowing. And who lend that money? The seed companies that sell the pesticides, which are the same companies that sell the seeds, as you know, are now also the major creditors.

Einstein (30 April 2020)

For thousands of years, philosophers and astronomers and thinkers of all sorts have imagined that the universe, the space around us was rather like this floor in front of us. It was fixed and unchangeable and thins happen on it, just as people walk around. So the stars, the comets, and the planets, and the other heavenly bodies moved around and traced down their parts on this completely unchanging stage of space. In the 20th century, as the result of Einstein’s work that view of the universe was completely transformed. We began to understand that there was no absolutely fixed stage of space at all on which all celestial notions were played out. But in some sense on the larger scale in the universe, the space itself was in the state of a continuous dynamic change. That was a prediction made by Einstein.But it wasn’t Einstein Harold the owner of making the discovery that our universe was really like that.

5. Fill in the Blanks (Reading)

History Books (25 April 2020)

What history books tell us about the past is not everything that happened, but what historians have selected. They cannot put in everything: choices have to be made. Choices must similarly be made about which aspects of the past should be formally taught to the next generation in the shape of school history lessons. So, for example, when a national school curriculum for England and Wales was first discussed at the end of the 1980s, the history curriculum was the subject of considerable public and media interest. Politicians argued about it; people wrote letters to the press about it; the Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, intervened in the debate. Let us think first about the question of content. There were two main camps on this issue – those who thought the history of Britain should take pride of place, and those who favored what was referred to as ‘world history’.

Australia Higher Education Funding

(27 April 2020)

Financing of Australian higher education has undergone dramatic change since the early 1970s. Although the Australian Government provided regular funding for universities from the late 1950s, in 1974, it assumed full responsibility for funding higher education – abolishing tuition fees with the intention of making university accessible to all Australians who had the ability and who wished to participate in higher education.

Since the late 1980s, there has been a move towards greater private contributions, particularly students fees. In 1989, the Australian Government introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) which included a loans scheme to help students finance their contributions. This enabled universities to remain accessible to students by delaying their payments until they could afford to pay off their loans. In 2002, the Australian Government introduced a scheme similar to HECS for postgraduate students – the Postgraduate Education Loan Scheme (PELS).

Funding for higher education comes from various sources. This article examines the three main sources – Australian Government funding, students fees and charges, and HECS. While the proportion of total revenue raised through HECS is relatively small, HECS payments are a significant component of students’ university costs, with many students carrying a HECS debt for several years after leaving university. This article also focuses on characteristics of university students based on their HECS liability status, and the level of accumulated HECS debt.

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