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Part III. Cloze-test making 20%Paraphrase the following article within 250 words and create a cloze test with fivemultiple-choice questions and then explain the purpose of the questions you have created.Photosynthesis is the basis of life on Earth. Thermodynamics is the order and disorder in theuniverse. Put them together and you have the makings of a book that may re-order the way youthink about the world. And that is what Oliver Morton, news editor at Nature (and who onceworked for this paper), has done.Mr. Morton’s thesis is that modern biology has become so focused on the movement ofinformation, in the form of genes, that it has neglected the processes needed to move thatinformation around: in essence, thermodynamics. People talk glibly of “using up” energy when infact they are doing no such thing. What is actually used up is order. An energy flow drives theprocess, but it is disorder (or “entropy”, to use the jargon) that changes, by increasing.A highly ordered system like a living thing thus needs an abundant supply of negative entropy(or unentropy, or call it what you will) to maintain its internal order. That negative entropy comesfrom the sun and is captured by photosynthesis, which uses light to split water molecules andcombines the resulting hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form sugars. The sugars are a store ofnegative entropy that can be used elsewhere. The waste product, conveniently for the animals ofEarth, is oxygen.The book, then, is in part a refrain in praise of photosynthesis, the Earth’s energy and ordercurrency-exchange market. It is also an entertaining history of how the subject arrived where it istoday—and an illuminating insight for the non-scientist into how the magisterial pronouncementsof science are every bit as much the result of sausage-making as Bismarck’s description of theprocess of legislation.The text is peppered with vignettes and asides that highlight science’s faltering marchforward on the backs of researchers, who are by turns quirky and visionary. The process ofdiscovery is not chronological but is forever folding back on itself, revisiting half-solvedproblems. Mr. Morton is careful to point out where progress has been impeded by hubris ortucked away in academic literature.There is also, of course, the inevitable warning. Having perfected the energy-into-order recipeover billions of years, photosynthesis has left a great deal of waste in the Earth, as well ascontributing oxygen to the atmosphere. That buried waste—coal, oil, and natural gas—is whatpowers the industrial revolution still sweeping the Earth. By reuniting the two waste products ofphotosynthesis—oxygen in the air and carbon in the ground—this revolution has fuelled a rise inatmospheric carbon dioxide three times higher than any previous rise that can be measured. Thesystem—the interaction between life and its surroundings: the atmosphere, the oceans, and theupper levels of the Earth’s crust—has been pushed out of equilibrium.Morton argues that the way in which industrialized humanity interfering with the homeostaticprocess can be undone—not by way of a single, magic bullet, but by pursuit of a number ofultimately achievable goals. The damage is done, but it is, he says, reparable. Humanity hadbetter hope he is right.

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