READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

Saving British Bitterns

Paragraph A

The bittern, a British waterbird, does not have a good record as far as survival is concerned. By 1886, habitat destruction and other pressures had pushed it close to extinction. Fortunately, it recovered a few decades later, and in 1950 the numbers of nature male bitterns rose to a peak of about 70. By the 1980s, however, it was clear that the bird was in trouble again. The bittern needs extensive wet reedbeds to survive, and long periods of drainage, pollution and lack of management had destroyed most of its habitat. By 1997, it again faced imminent extinction. To prevent this, the British government set up a plan for the bittern, aiming to establish a population of 50 males by 2010. However, this target was reached six years early, a rate of recovery faster than anyone had dared hope for. We at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) now claim the bittern as one of Britain’s greatest wildlife success stories, since figures reveal that the number of these rare birds has increased fivefold in just seven years.

Paragraph B

Bitterns have feathers that help them to conceal themselves and a shy nature; they usually remain hidden within the cover of reedbed vegetation. Our first challenge was to develop standard methods to monitor their numbers. The booming call of the male bittern is its most distinctive of feature during the breeding season, and we developed a method to count them using the sound patterns unique to each individual. This not only allowed us to be much more certain of the number of booming males in the UK, but also enabled us to estimate local survival of males from one year to the next.

Paragraph C

Our first direct understanding of what breeding bitterns require in their ideal habitat came from comparisons of reedbed sits that had lost their male birds with those that retained them. This research showed that bitterns had been retained in reedbeds where the natural process of drying out had been slowed through management. Based on this work, broad recommendations on how to manage and rehabilitate reedbeds for bitterns were made, and funding was provided through a European Union(EU) wildlife fund to manage 13 sites within the core breeding range.

Paragraph D

To refine these recommendations and provide fine-scale, quantitative habitat prescriptions on the bitterns’ preferred feeding habitat, we started radio-tracking male bitterns on the RSPB’s Minsmere and Leighton Moss reserves. This showed clear preferences for feeding in the wetter reedbed areas, particularly within reedbed next to larger open pools. The average home range sizes of the male bitterns we followed (about 20 hectares) provided a good indication of the area of reedbed necessary when managing or creating habitat indication of the area of reedbed necessary when managing or creating habitat for this species. Female bitterns undertake all the incubation and care of the young, so it was important to understand their requirements as well. Over the course of your research, we located 87 bittern nests and found that female bitterns preferred to nest in areas of continuous vegetation, well into the reedbed, but where was still present during the driest part of the breeding season

Paragraph E

The success of the habitat prescriptions developed from this research has been spectacular. For instance, at Minsmere, male bittern numbers gradually increased from one to ten following reedbed lowering, a management technique designed to halt the drying out process. After a low point of 11 mature males in 1997, bittern numbers in Britain responded to all the habitat management work and started to increase for the first time since 1950.

Paragraph F

The final phase of research involved understanding the diet, survival and dispersal of bittern chicks. To do this we fitted small radio tags to young bittern chicks in the nest, to determine their fate through to fledging, when they begin to fly, and beyond. Many chicks did not survive to this stage, and starvation was found to be the most likely reason for their demise. The fish prey fed to chicks was mainly those species penetrating into the reed edge. So, an important element of recent studies has been development of recommendations on habitat and water conditions to promote native fish populations. Once independent, radio tagged young bitterns were found to seek out new sites during their first winter, a proportion of these would remain on new sites to breed if the conditions were suitable. A second EU-funded project aims to provide these suitable sites in new areas. A network of 19 sites developed through this partnership project will secure a more sustainable UK bittern population with successful breeding outside of the core area, less vulnerable to chance events and sea level rise.

Paragraph G

By 2004, the number of booming male bitterns in the UK had increased to 55. Almost all of the increase occurred on those sites undertaking management based on advice derived from our research. What rescuing the bittern, the work has helped a range of other spectacular wetland species such as otters. Although science has been at the core of the bittern story, success has only been achieved through the trust, hard work and dedication of all the managers, owners and wardens of sites that have implemented, in some cases very drastic, management to secure the future of this wetland species in the UK.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

The hazards of multitasking

Doing more than one thing at once – is it always a good idea?

You arrive at the office, review your to-do list and start to feel a headache coming on. You resolve to tackle the items as quickly as possible. While you return calls, you sort email and other letters. You begin keying in slides for tomorrow's presentation. Then your manager comes in wanting an immediate update on sales figures. You have just opened the spreadsheet when a very important customer calls. With the receiver held between your shoulder and your ear, you continue adding up the sales totals until, 15 minutes later, you finally manage, politely, to get rid of the client. You've been multitasking again.

You may believe that anyone who wants to get ahead today should master the art of multitasking. However, a recent study by the Families and Work Institute in New York City has found that 45 per cent of US workers believe that they are asked or expected to work on too many tasks at once. Managers may be surprised to learn that they are actually wasting their workers' time. As it turns out, the human brain cannot really master the computer's art of crunching data in the background while moving between process windows. Instead, a growing number of studies show that trying to juggle jobs rather than completing them sequentially can take longer, and leave workers with a reduced ability to perform each task. In addition, the stress associated with multitasking may contribute to short-term memory difficulties. The combination results in inefficiency, careless thinking and mistakes – not to mention the possible dangers of divided attention for drivers, air traffic controllers, and others who handle machinery.

How can a time management strategy that has become part of the common wisdom actually be so wrong? Exploring that question requires a closer look at an area of consciousness research that examines how the brain focuses attention. One of the modern foundations of current knowledge of multitasking was laid in 1935, when the American – psychologist John Ridley Stroop reported that processing information from one task could cause interference with another. Stroop noticed that when study participants were asked to name the colour of a word – such as 'green' – printed in a different colour – red, for example they experienced difficulty saying the name of the colour. This phenomenon is thought to occur when two tasks get tangled: the brain must suppress one that has been learned so well that it has become automatic (reading), to attend to a second task that requires concentration (naming the colour).

During the past couple of decades, psychologists have probed more deeply into the nature and limitations of multitasking. Psychologist and brain researcher Ernst Pöppel, of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, believes that it is impossible to carry out two or three different tasks simultaneously with the same degree of concentration. He says that seemingly simultaneous awareness and processing of information actually takes place in 'three-second windows'. In these three- second segments, the brain takes in, as a block, all the data about the environment streaming in from the sensory systems; subsequent events are processed in the next window. So a person can concentrate on a conversation for three seconds, then for three seconds on a crying child, and three seconds on a computer screen. While one subject at a time occupies the foreground of consciousness, the others stay in the background until they, in turn, are given access to the central processor.

Another experiment by psychologist David E Meyer, of the University of Michigan, quantified just how much time we can lose when we shuttle between tasks. The researchers asked test participants to write a report and check their email at the same time. Those individuals who constantly jumped back and forth between the two tasks took about one and a half times as long to finish as those who completed one job before turning to the other. Each switchover from one task to another meant rethinking, and thus involved additional neural resources. In effect, the brain needs time to shut off the rules for one task and to turn on the rules for another. 'Multitasking saves time only when it is a matter of relaxed, routine tasks,' Meyer says. It also takes the brain longer to adapt when switching rapidly back to an interrupted task, rather than waiting longer before switching back.

By its nature multitasking is stressful, and the area in the brain most involved with multitasking is also most affected by the resulting stress. Located behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex, which neuroscientists call the 'executive' part of the brain, helps us to assess tasks, prioritise them and assign mental resources. It also 'marks' the spot at which a task has been interrupted, so that we can return to it later. This stress can also affect brain cells in another region, the hippocampus, which is important for forming new memories; damage in that area also makes it difficult for a person to acquire new skills.

Psychiatrists Edward Halliwell and John Ratey, of Harvard University, say that multitasking can bring about a brain condition that causes sufferers to constantly seek new information while having difficulties concentrating on its content. All in all, it may be wise to let the email wait while you work on your presentation. You will save time and perform each task better.