When John Paul Yong sang his disco classic Love Is in the air, he probably wasn’t thinking about human beings (34) smells into the atmosphere to attract potential mates. However, the success of this song in the 1990s coincided with an increasing interest from the scientific community in discovering why people fall in love.
The first scientists to investigate love in depth were sociologists, and they quickly destroyed the common belief that people fall in love with each other because of (35) . They discovered that reality was much less romantic. In 2005, sociologists Christine R Schwartz and Robert D Mare presented a paper on their extensive study of couples (36) had married between 1940 and 2005 that showed that people very rarely marry someone who has a different level of education from theirs. Neither, according to research by (37) academics, do we fall for people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, nor with different beliefs. Sociologists concluded that we want to go out with people who are just like us. (38) , you can walk into a room level of education, intelligence and looks as you, and you are unlikely to fall in love with any of them.
(Adapted from Solutions – Third Edition – Upper-intermediate – Student’s book – Unit 5 - page 58)

The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how ‘baby talk’ impacts on learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.
Early language exposure seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the sweet if sometimes absurd sound of infant-directed speech influence a baby’s development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.
Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. “Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard speech,” says Nairán Ramirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. “We also found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context,” she adds. ‘The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.’
(Adapted from Cambridge IELTS 13 Reading – Test 03)

The first newspapers appeared in the 17th century, but ordinary people didntt use to buy them often because they were expensive. This changed in the 1850s with the invention of powerful printing presses, which could print 10,000 papers per hour. As a result, newspaper prices came down and more people could afford to buy them. Thanks to another new invention, the photograph, it was also the first time that newspapers contained pictures as well as articles.
When a volcano erupted on the Pacific island of Krakatoa in 1883, it killed 36.000 people. It was one of the worst natural disasters in history. It was also significant because it was the first time that news could travel around the world in minutes, using undersea electrical telegraph wires. Before the telegraph was invented, it used to take weeks far news to travel to a different continent. News of Abraham Lincoln's death, for example, took nearly two weeks to reach Europe in 1865.
In the early 20th century, before televisions became popular, people used to go to the cinema to watch the news. Ten-minute films called “news reels” contained moving images of four or five top news stories. The news reels were changed weekly, not daily, so the news wasn't always up to date. Nowadays, they are important as historical documents, as they provide the only audiovisual records of those times.
At the start of the 21st century, developments in smartphone technology and the growth at social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have completely changed the way that we get our news. Now anybody can report news. This is sometimes called “citizen journalism.” One of the first and most famous examples of it happened in New York in 2009 when a plane carrying 150 passengers landed in the Hudson River after a flock of birds flew into the plane's engine. People who saw the crash posted comments and photos on Twitter and the news spread around the world in minutes. Professional journalists didn't arrive at the scene until 15 minutes later
(Adapted from Navigate Pre-Intermediate B1 Coursebook, Julie Norton, Caroline Krantz, OXFORD UP ELT, 2015 - page 108)