THE FARMERS! PARADE OF HISTORY
A. History of Farmers trading company: In 1909 Robert Laidlaw established mail-order company Laidlaw Leeds in Fort Street, Auckland. Then, branch expansion: purchase of Green and Colebrook chain stores; further provincial stores in Auckland and Waikato to follow. Opening of the first furniture and boot factory. In 1920, the Company now had 29 branches; the Whangarei store was purchased. Doors open at Hobson Street for direct selling to the public. The firm establishes London and New York buying offices. With permission from the Harbour Board, the large FARMERS electric sign on the Wyndham Street frontage is erected.
B. In 1935, if the merchandise had changed, the language of the catalogs hadn’t. Robert Laidlaw, the Scottish immigrant who established a century-old business, might have been scripting a modern-day television commercial when he told his earliest customers: Satisfaction, or your money back. “It was the first money back guarantee ever offered in New Zealand by any firm,” says Ian Hunter, business historian. “And his mission statement was, potentially, only the second one ever found in the world.” Laidlaw’s stated aims were simple: to build the greatest business in New Zealand, to simplify every transaction, to eliminate all delays, to only sell goods it would pay the customer to buy.
C. This year, the company that began as a mail-order business and now employs 3500 staff across 58 stores turns 100. Its centenary will be celebrated with the release of a book and major community fundraising projects, to be announced next week. Hunter, who is writing the centenary history, says “coming to a Farmers store once a week was a part of the New Zealand way of life”. By 1960, one in every 10 people had an account with the company. It was the place where teenage girls shopped for their first bra, where newlyweds purchased their first dinner sets, where first pay cheques were used to pay off hire purchase furniture, where Santa paraded every Christmas.
D. Gary Blumenthal’s mother shopped there, and so did he. The fondest memory for the Rotorua resident? “We were on holiday in Auckland… I decided that the lookout tower on top of the Farmers building would be a unique place to fit the ring on my new fiance’s finger.” The lovebirds, who had to wait for “an annoying youth” to leave the tower before they could enjoy their engagement kiss, celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in June.
E. Farmers, says Hunter, have always had a heart. This, from a 1993 North & South interview with a former board chairman, Rawdon Busfield: “One day I was in the Hobson Street shop and I saw a woman with two small children. They were clean and tidily dressed, but poor, you could tell. That week we had a special on a big bar of chocolate for one shilling. I heard the woman say to her boy, ‘no, your penny won’t buy that’. He wasn’t wearing shoes. So I went up to the boy and said,’ Son, have you got your penny? ‘He handed it to me. It was hot. He’d had it in his hand for hours. I took the penny and gave him the chocolate.”
F. Farmers was once the home of genteel tearooms, children’s playgrounds and an annual sale of celebration for the birthday of Hector the Parrot (the store mascot died, aged 131, in the 1970s his stuffed remains still occupy pride of place at the company’s head office). You could buy houses from farmers. Its saddle factory supplied the armed forces, and its upright grand overstrung pianos offered “the acme of value” according to those early catalogs hand-drawn by Robert Laidlaw himself. Walk through a Farmers store today and get hit by bright lights and big brands. Its Albany branch houses 16 international cosmetics companies. It buys from approximately 500 suppliers, and about 30% of those are locally owned.
G. “Eight, 10 years ago,” says current chief executive Rod McDermott, “lots of brands wouldn’t partner with us. The stores were quite distressed. We were first price point focused, we weren’t fashion focused. “Remove the rose-tinted nostalgia, and Farmers is, quite simply, a business, doing business in hard times. Dancing with the Stars presenter Candy Lane launches a clothing line? “We put a trial on, and we thought it was really lovely, but the uptake wasn’t what we thought it would be. It’s got to be what the customer wants,” says McDermott.
H. He acknowledges retailers suffer in a recession: “We’re celebrating 100 years because we can and because we should.” Farmers almost didn’t pull through one economic crisis. By the mid 1980s, it had stores across the country. It had acquired the South Island’s Calder Mackay chain of stores and bought out Haywrights. Then, with sales topping $375 million, it was taken over by Chase Corporation. Lincoln Laidlaw, now aged 88, and the son of the company’s founder, remembers the dark days following the stock market crash and the collapse of Chase. “I think, once, Farmers was like a big family and all of the people who worked for it felt they were building something which would ultimately be to their benefit and to the benefit of New Zealand… then the business was being divided up and so that kind of family situation was dispelled and it hasn’t been recovered.” For a turbulent few years, the stores were controlled, first by a consortium of Australian banks and later Deka, the Maori Development Corporation and Foodland Associated Ltd. In 2003, it went back to “family” ownership, with the purchase by the James Pascoe Group, owned by David and Anne Norman, the latter being the great-granddaughter of James Pascoe, whose first business interest was jewelry.
I. “Sheer power of the brand,” says McDermott, “pulled Farmers through and now we’re becoming the brand it used to be again.” Farmers was the company that, during World War n, topped up the wages of any staff member disadvantaged by overseas service. Robert Laidlaw, a committed Christian who came to his faith at a 1902 evangelistic service in Dunedin concluded his original mission statement with the words, “all at it, always at it, wins success”. Next week, 58 Farmers stores across the country will announce the local charities they will raise funds for in their centenary celebration everything from guide dog services to hospices to volunteer fire brigades will benefit. Every dollar raised by the community will be matched by the company. “It’s like the rebirth of an icon,” says McDermott.
DEVELOPMENT OF ADOLESCENCE (THE ADOLESCENCE)
A. The American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes three stages of adolescence. These are early, middle and late adolescence, and each has its own developmental tasks. Teenagers move through these tasks at their own speed depending on their physical development and hormone levels. Although these stages are common to all teenagers, each child will go through them in his or her own highly individual ways.
B. During the early years young people make the first attempts to leave the dependent, secure role of a child and to establish themselves as unique individuals, independent of their parents. Early adolescence is marked by rapid physical growth and maturation. The focus of adolescents’ self-concepts is thus often on their physical self and their evaluation of their physical acceptability. Early adolescence is also a period of intense conformity to peers. ‘Getting along,’ not being different, and being accepted seem somehow pressing to the early adolescent. The worst possibility, from the view of the early adolescent, is to be seen by peers as ‘different’.
C. Middle adolescence is marked by the emergence of new thinking skills. The intellectual world of the young person is suddenly greatly expanded. Their concerns about peers are more directed toward their opposite sexed peers. It is also during this period that the move to establish psychological independence from one’s parents accelerates. Delinquency behavior may emerge since parental views are no longer seen as absolutely correct by adolescents. Despite some delinquent behavior, middle adolescence is a period during which young people are oriented toward what is right and proper. They are developing a sense of behavioral maturity and learning to control their impulsiveness.
D. Late adolescence is marked by the final preparations for adult roles. The developmental demands of late adolescence often extend into the period that we think of as young adulthood. Late adolescents attempt to crystallize their vocational goals and to establish a sense of personal identity. Their needs for peer approval are diminished and they are largely psychologically independent from their parents. The shift to adulthood is nearly complete.
E. Some years ago, Professor Robert Havighurst of the University of Chicago proposed that stages in human development can best be thought of in terms of the developmental tasks that are part of the normal transition. He identified eleven developmental tasks associated with the adolescent transition. One developmental task an adolescent need to achieve is to adjust to a new physical sense of self. At no other time since birth does an individual undergo such rapid and profound physical changes as during early adolescence. Puberty is marked by sudden rapid growth in height and weight. Also, the young person experiences the emergence and accentuation of those physical traits that make him or her a boy or girl. The effect of this rapid change is that a young adolescent often becomes focused on his or her body.
F. Before adolescence, children’s thinking is dominated by a need to have a concrete example for any problem that they solve. Their thinking is constrained to what is real and physical. During adolescence, young people begin to recognize and understand abstractions. The adolescent must adjust to increased cognitive demands at school. Adults see high school in part as a place where adolescents prepare for adult roles and responsibilities and in part as preparatory for further education. School curricula are frequently dominated by the inclusion of more abstract, demanding material, regardless of whether the adolescents have achieved formal thought. Since not all adolescents make the intellectual transition at the same rate, demands for abstract thinking prior to achievement of that ability may be frustrating.
G. During adolescence, as teens develop increasingly complex knowledge systems and a sense of self, they also adopt an integrated set of values and morals. During the early stages of moral development, parents provide their child with a structured set of rules of what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and unacceptable. Eventually, the adolescent must assess the parents’ values as they come into conflict with values expressed by peers and other segments of society. To reconcile differences, the adolescent restructures those beliefs into a personal ideology.
H. The adolescent must develop expanded verbal skills. As adolescents mature intellectually, as they face increased school demands, and as they prepare for adult roles, they must develop new verbal skills to accommodate more complex concepts and tasks. Their limited language of childhood is no longer adequate. Adolescents may appear less competent because of their inability to express themselves meaningfully.
I. The adolescent must establish emotional and psychological independence from his or her parents. Childhood is marked by a strong dependence on one’s parents. Adolescents may yearn to keep that safe, secure, supportive, dependent relationship. Yet, to be an adult implies a sense of independence, of autonomy, of being one’s own person. Adolescents may vacillate between their desire for dependence and their need to be independent. In an attempt to assert their need for independence and individuality, adolescents may respond with what appears to be hostility and lack of cooperation.
J. Adolescents do not progress through these multiple developmental tasks separately. At any given time, adolescents may be dealing with several. Further, the centrality of specific developmental tasks varies with early, middle, and late periods of the transition.
SPACE TRAVEL AND HEALTH
A. Space biomedicine is a relatively new area of research both in the USA and in Europe. Its main objectives are to study the effects of space travel on the human body, identifying the most critical medical problems, and finding solutions to those problems. Space biomedicine centers are receiving increasing direct support from NASA and/or the European Space Agency (ESA).
B. This involvement of NASA and the ESA reflects growing concern that the feasibility of travel to other planets, and beyond, is no longer limited by engineering constraints but by what the human body can actually withstand. The discovery of ice on Mars, for instance, means that there is now no necessity to design and develop a spacecraft large and powerful enough to transport the vast amounts of water needed to sustain the crew throughout journeys that may last many years. Without the necessary protection and medical treatment, however, their bodies would be devastated by the unremittingly hostile environment of space.
C. The most obvious physical changes undergone by people in zero gravity are essentially harmless; in some cases, they are even amusing. The blood and other fluids are no longer dragged down towards the feet by the gravity of Earth, so they accumulate higher up in the body, creating what is sometimes called ‘fat face', together with the contrasting ‘chicken legs’ syndrome as the lower limbs become thinner.
D. Much more serious are the unseen consequences after months or years in space. With no gravity, there is less need for a sturdy skeleton to support the body, with the result that the bones weaken, releasing calcium into the bloodstream. This extra calcium can overload the kidneys, leading ultimately to renal failure. Muscles too lose strength through lack of use. The heart becomes smaller, losing the power to pump oxygenated blood to all parts of the body, while the lungs lose the capacity to breathe fully. The digestive system becomes less efficient, a weakened immune system is increasingly unable to prevent diseases and the high levels of solar and cosmic radiation can cause various forms of cancer.
E. To make matters worse, a wide range of medical difficulties can arise in the case of an accident or serious illness when the patient is millions of kilometers from Earth. There is simply not enough room available inside a space vehicle to include all the equipment from a hospital’s casualty unit, some of which would not work properly in space anyway. Even basic things such as a drip depend on gravity to function, while standard resuscitation techniques become ineffective if sufficient weight cannot be applied. The only solution seems to be to create extremely small medical tools and ‘smart' devices that can, for example, diagnose and treat internal injuries using ultrasound. The cost of designing and producing this kind of equipment is bound to be, well, astronomical.
F. Such considerations have led some to question the ethics of investing huge sums of money to help a handful of people who, after all, are willingly risking their own health in outer space, when so much needs to be done a lot closer to home. It is now clear, however, that every problem of space travel has a parallel problem on Earth that will benefit from the knowledge gained and the skills developed from space biomedical research. For instance, the difficulty of treating astronauts in space has led to rapid progress in the field of telemedicine, which in turn has brought about developments that enable surgeons to communicate with patients in inaccessible parts of the world. To take another example, systems invented to sterilize wastewater onboard spacecraft could be used by emergency teams to filter contaminated water at the scene of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. In the same way, miniature monitoring equipment, developed to save weight in space capsules, will eventually become tiny monitors that patients on Earth can wear without discomfort wherever they go.
G. Nevertheless, there is still one major obstacle to carrying out studies into the effects of space travel: how to do so without going to the enormous expense of actually working in space. To simulate conditions in zero gravity, one tried and tested method is to work underwater, but the space biomedicine centers are also looking at other ideas. In one experiment, researchers study the weakening of bones that results from prolonged inactivity. This would involve volunteers staying in bed for three months, but the center concerned is confident there should be no great difficulty in finding people willing to spend twelve weeks lying down. All in the name of science, of course.
Part 1
Questions 1-5
Reading Passage has nine paragraphs, A–I. Which paragraph contains the following information?
1. Generosity offered in an occasion. 1
2. Innovation of offer made by the head of company. 2
3. Fashion was not its strong point. 3
4. A romantic event on the roof of farmers. 4
5. Farmers were sold to a private owned company. 5
Questions 6-10
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.
6. Farmers was first founded as a 6
in Auckland by Mr. Laidlaw.
7. Farmers developed fast and bought one 7
then.
8. During oversea expansion, Farmers set up 8
in cities such as London.
9. Farmers held a 9
once a year for the well-known parrot.
10. In the opinion of Lincoln Laidlaw, Farmers is like a 10
for employees, not just for themselves but for the whole country.
Questions 11-13
Use the information in the passage to match the people (A-C) with opinions or deeds
NB You may use any letter more than once.
A. Lincoln Laidlaw
B. Rod McDermott
C. Ian Hunter
11. Product became worse as wrong aspect focused. 11
12. An unprecedented statement made by Farmers in New Zealand. 12
13. Character of the company was changed. 13
Part 2
Questions 14-19
Match the following characteristics with the correct stages of the adolescent.
A. early adolescence
B. middle adolescence
C. later adolescence
14. interested in the opposite sex 14
15. exposure to danger 15
16. the same as others 16
17. beginning to form individual thinking without family context 17
18. less need the approval of friends 18
19. intellectual booming 19
Questions 20-23
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
List of statements
A. form personal identity with a set of morals and values
B. develops a table and productive peer relationships
C. are designed to be more challenging than some can accept
D. varies from people to people
E. focuses on creating a self-image
F. become an extension of their parents
20. One of Havighurst’s research 20
21. High School Courses 21
22. Adolescence is a time when young people 22
23. The developmental speed of thinking patterns 23
Questions 24-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
24. The adolescent lacks the ability to think abstractly. 24
25. Adolescents may have a deficit in their language ability. 25
26. The adolescent experiences a transition from reliance on his parents to independence. 26
Part 3
Questions 27-31
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for the paragraphs from the list below.
List of Headings
i The problem of dealing with emergencies in space
ii How space biomedicine can help patients on Earth
iii Why accidents are so common in outer space
iv What is space biomedicine?
v The psychological problems of astronauts
vi Conducting space biomedical research on Earth
vii The internal damage caused to the human body by space travel
viii How space biomedicine First began
ix The visible effects of space travel on the human body
x Why space biomedicine is now necessary
27. Paragraph B 27
28. Paragraph C 28
29. Paragraph D 29
30. Paragraph E 30
31. Paragraph G 31
Questions 32-33
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
32. Where, apart from Earth, can space travelers find water? 32
33. What happens to human legs during space travel? 33
Questions 34-38
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
34. The obstacles to going far into space are now medical, not technological. 34
35. Astronauts cannot survive more than two years in space. 35
36. It is morally wrong to spend so much money on space biomedicine. 36
37. Some kinds of surgery are more successful when performed in space. 37
38. Space biomedical research can only be done in space. 38
Questions 39-40
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
| Research area | Application in space | Application on Earth |
| Telemedicine | treating astronauts | 39. 39 in remote areas |
| Sterilization | sterilizing wastewater | 40. 40 in disaster zones |
| Miniaturization | saving weight | wearing small monitors comfortably |