READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

You should spend 20 minutes on Question 14-26, which are based on Reading passage 2

Orientation of birds

A. For many of us, the way birds are able to orientate is both astounding and difficult to appreciate fully. For instance, the annual migration of the golden plover of the Pacific takes it from Alaska to Hawaii on a flight of well over 3,000 kilometres, and if it were to deviate by only one degree, it would miss the island on which it nests.

B. The first systematic studies on orientation in birds were made possible by the ‘homing instinct’ exhibited by so many species. Birds are caught at a time when they show an attachment to their territory, especially during the nesting season. They are taken to some spot, released, and the percentage of returns is recorded. The distance can be varied, and the direction, as well as the method of transporting them, and then the influence of climatic and other factors on their ability to find their way home can be studied. These experiments have shown a wide variation in the ability to home, and three types of homing behaviour have been identified.

C. In the first type, birds methodically explore the area in which they are released until they pick up some familiar feature, and then they quickly find their way back to the nest. Such birds possess a highly developed visual memory, as experiments with pigeons have shown. Domestic pigeons have been trained to peck at a certain point on an aerial photograph, with a system of rewards, and four years later, the birds were still able to respond to this training when placed on the aerial photograph. Birds’ eyes have a power of resolution two to three times greater than ours, enabling them to pick up very fine details. If a bird uses only this type of homing behaviour, however, it can only succeed if the point of release is not too far away. If the birds are transported 800 kilometres from their nest, it is only by good fortune that they find their way back as a result of long exploratory flights. Usually, the area known to a bird is its feeding territory. Released within this area, the birds soon make their return; release them outside it and far fewer return. However, if a bird is released for a second time in the same place, its visual memory comes into play, and the bird, no longer requiring tedious exploratory flights, will return much more quickly.

D. The second type of homing behaviour is shown by birds that are capable of choosing their flight direction and holding to it for the rest of their journey. How do they decide what direction to take? They appear to choose their normal migration direction even if they are released in a different place from their usual starting point. If, for example, birds which normally fly to the north-east to reach latitude 45 degrees north are released at that latitude, they will immediately start flying north-east anyway. So if they’re released further to the west, they’ll maintain the correct direction, but fly west of their destination, and so fail to arrive.

E. The third type of homing behaviour shows the highest degree of orientation. Released at one point, the birds immediately take stock of it, compare its position with that of the nest, decide on the direction, and fly off. This happens even if the birds are in a country right off their migration routes, where they have never been before. In one example, a Laysan albatross returned to its nesting area on Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific, having flown over 5,000 kilometres from the west coast of the USA in just over ten days. This is a perfect example of the third type of homing, for the albatross clearly couldn’t rely on any landmarks over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

F. The percentage of successful birds varies greatly, being highest in those species with a strong migratory behaviour. Thus, the lesser black-backed gull is more migratory than the herring gull and more often reaches ‘home’. Great migrants such as the swift have the highest percentage of returns. In one case, seven out of nine Alpine swifts were recaptured at their nests after being displaced some 1,400 kilometres; one made the journey in three days.

G. What part does heredity play in all this? Two research studies suggest that instinctive, i.e. genetically inherited, behaviour patterns play a part in navigation. The first was carried out by Ernst Schüz and it is highly significant. Schüz caught first-year European storks and released them later, after the departure of the adult storks at a time when they normally make their south-west autumn migration to Africa. The recaptures showed that, in spite of the fact that there were no adults to guide them, the birds unanimously headed south-west. This was a most striking finding, for it showed that the birds had an innate and unlearned attraction to the African wintering area that they have occupied for thousands of years.

H. The case of starlings is a little different. These birds have a great aptitude for homing, but this behaviour differs in the different age groups. Birds that were shifted to the south-east of their normal migration route split into two lots. The adults, in full possession of their gift for orientation, found their wintering area by modifying their direction by 90 degrees, whereas the juveniles sought their winter quarters to the south-east of their real position.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

You should spend 20 minutes on Question 14-26, which are based on Reading passage 2

The role of accidents in business

In 1894, Dr John Kellogg and his brother, Will, were supervising a hospital and health spa in Michigan. The patients were on a restricted diet. One day, the brothers left cooked wheat unattended for more than 24 hours. When they returned, they saw what they had done. It was no good to eat, but they decided to run the stale wheat through rollers, just to see how it would turn out. Normally, the process produced long sheets, but they were surprised to discover that this time the rollers created flat flakes. They baked them and then tried the same thing with corn. From this accidental discovery came the cornflakes that generations have now been eating for breakfast.

Accidents happen; there is nothing predictable and orderly about innovation. Nobel laureate Sir Alan Hodgkin, who discovered how nerve cells transmit electrical impulses between the skin and the brain, commented: ‘I believe that the record of my published papers conveys an impression of directedness and planning which does not at all coincide with the actual sequence of events.’

The same rule applies in business. The mistake that gave us cornflakes keeps repeating itself in the history of disruptive innovation, the kind that transforms markets. Louis Daguerre, for instance, discovered the technique that gave us photography in the 1830s, when drops of mercury from a shattered thermometer produced a photographic image. The microwave was discovered when Percy Spencer, a scientist with Raytheon, was testing a new vacuum tube and discovered that the sweet in his pocket had melted. The artificial sweetener, saccharin, was the unintentional result of a medical scientist’s work on a chemical treatment for gastric ulcers. While working for the firm 3M, researcher Art Fry had no idea he was taking the first steps towards Post-it Notes when he used bits of adhesive office paper that could be easily lifted off the page to replace the scrap-paper bookmarks that kept falling out of his hymn book.

Breakthrough and disruptive innovation are rarely driven by an orderly process. Usually, they come out of a chaotic, haphazard mess, which is why big companies, full of managers schooled in business programmes designed to eliminate random variation and mistakes, struggle with them. In these sorts of environments, accidents are called failures and are discouraged.

It is no surprise, then, that research from the late British economist Paul Geroski and London Business School’s Constantinos Markides found that companies that were skilled at innovation were usually not that skilled when it came to commercialisation, and vice versa. Their book, Fast Second, divides businesses into ‘colonists’ and ‘consolidators’. Small and nimble, colonists are adept at creating market niches but are terrible institution builders. Consolidators, with their strong cultures of discipline and cost control, know how to take clever ideas from other firms and turn them into mass-market items. Microsoft is a prime instance of this.

With companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on research and development, US academics Robert Austin and Lee Devin examined how managers can encourage productive slip-ups. In their article Accident, Intention and Expectation in the Innovation Process, they argue that business processes actually prevent helpful mis-steps from occurring. According to their catalogue of accidents, not all false steps and mishaps are equal. Accidents, they say, come from unlikely mental associations such as memories and vague connections, looking for something and finding it in an unexpected way, looking for one thing and finding something else, and not looking for anything but finding something valuable.

Accident-prone innovation, they say, requires companies to get outside the ‘cone of expectation’. It means throwing together groups from diverse backgrounds and combining ideas in unpredictable ways. Other strategies also include having systems that watch out for accidents and examine them for value, generating them when they do not happen often enough, seizing on the useful ones, capturing their valuable features, and building on them to add value and give potential for useful accidents.

All this, however, requires thinking that is often counter-intuitive to the way businesses operate. In other words, it is the kind of thinking that goes against the beliefs of most business managers. It runs counter to the notion frequently pushed by consultants that you can ‘harness’ creativity and direct it to line up with intention. ‘The cost of accidents? In business, people tend to call such efforts failure.’

There are tentative signs that more companies are starting to realise that failure can lead to commercial gain, and that this is part of the risk-taking that underpins innovation. Australia’s largest brewing company, for example, made a bad error when it launched a new beer called Empire Lager, pitched at younger consumers. Having spent a fortune creating a beer with a sweeter taste, designing a great-looking bottle, and a television campaign, Foster’s was left with a drink that no one wanted to buy. The target market was more interested in brands built up by word of mouth.

Instead of wiping the unsuccessful product launch, Foster’s used this lesson learned to go on and develop other brands instead. One of them, Pure Blonde, is now ranked as Australia’s fifth-largest beer brand. Unlike Empire Lager, there has been almost no promotion, and its sales are generated more by word of mouth.

Other companies are taking similar steps to study their own slip-ups. Intuit, the company behind financial tools such as Quicken, holds regular ‘When Learning Hurts’ sessions. But this sort of transformation is never easy. In a market that focuses on the short-term, convincing employees and shareholders to tolerate failure and not play it safe is a big thing to ask.