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Parents will be able to run an official check on the status of childminders for the first time from today. Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, will shame the worst providers and praise the best by placing details of all childminders’ reports on its website. The providers will be ranked on a scale of one to four, with one meaning "outstanding ", two "good", three "satisfactory" and four "inadequate". Of the first 1,060 inspections to be posted this morning, 45 (32 childminders and 13 day-care providers) have been ranked as "inadequate" while only 16 (14 childminders and 2 day-care nurseries) warranted the ranking "outstanding". The vast majority were either good (680) or satisfactory (319). However, Ofsted warned that a "satisfactory" rating meant there was "scope for improvement". Maurice Smith, Ofsted’s director of early years, said, "Over one million children are placed with childminders and in nurseries every day so it’s imperative parents have easy access to good information about the quality of care that their children are getting." David Bell, the chief schools inspector and Ofsted’s chief executive, has acknowledged that parents are almost certain to shun the services of any childminder ranked as inadequate. A childminder could be rated as inadequate if their premises fail to pass health and safety requirements or if a complaint alleging physical abuse of a child is upheld. In extreme circumstances, their registration can be withdrawn immediately but their report would be published if they were served with a notice to improve within a 12-month period. Mr. Smith said of the "outstanding" ratings, "This is a fantastic achievement by those who work in the childcare profession and go all out to provide a top-class service. All providers will have the chance to shine during their inspections under the new framework. I hope that today’s ’outstanding’ providers will act as an inspiration to others." The 1,060 inspections to be placed on the Internet today were all carried out in the first year of inspection of child-minding services. Ofsted only had its brief to inspect services extended from schools and colleges last year. It plans to inspect all childminding and day-care services over a three-year period with a total of 94,000 reports placed on its website by 2007. Fears that paedophiles could gain access to details of child-minding services have prompted inspectors to agree restrictions on how parents can access information. As of today, parents will be able to type their postcode into Ofsted’s website and search for registered childminders in their area. Services within a five-mile radius of the address can be accessed. However, the report will not contain the name or address of the childminder. To obtain that, the parent will have to contact their local Children’s Information Service. Ofsted warned that some providers may have chosen to opt out of having their details available on request—and that this is likely to be because they are full and do not have the space to mind more children. Ofsted has also agreed that nurseries will be given no notice of inspections so inspectors get a "warts and all" picture. Childminders will be rung the previous week and asked to indicate which days they will be available to avoid inspectors arriving when they are out with their charges on a trip. One of the days will be selected by the inspectors without giving further notice. It can be inferred from the passage that ______.
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Real innovation is a dying art. It’s true that creativity—the business of thinking up new ideas—is far from dead, but it’s getting harder and harder to get new concepts applied in design, manufacturing or business. It costs thousands of pounds to get a new idea into the marketplace, and there is very little support for anything from most companies or government. A lot of people don’t want to know. I’ve always been interested in new ideas: I was trained as an engineer and went to work for an automotive components company, and almost from the first day I was asking why things were done in this way and not that. I thought up my first invention at 19—then I discovered someone else had got there first. I’ve been inventive all my life. I’ve got 14 patents to my name. Invention is what happens when you come across a problem, and look for a solution. It could be at work or at home in the garden—like a better way of mowing the lawn, say. But these days creativity is being stifled because there are so many hoops to go through. You have a brilliant idea for a left-handed widget but you still have to ask yourself: Is it new Has it already been protected Is there a market for it Is the investment worth it Only 4 percent of granted patents reach the market place. Part of the problem is that manufacturing industry and government are obsessed with complex technology like bioengineering. There is no interest in low technology or simple ideas that are equivalent to the invention of the paperclip. Inventors still come up with simple devices, but it’s difficult to get anyone interested. But it’s also a very British problem. Inventions from Britain are often taken up overseas, because most British companies tend not to look outside their own factory gates. My own personal theory is that it’s a legacy of the Empire, when Britain had a captive audience and little competition, so industries didn’t need to market their products. Nowadays, companies from other leading economies have to make what the consumer wants in order to ensure their profits, so they are always ready to innovate. And many British manufacturers have never caught up. Plus, British schoolchildren aren’t embracing vocational training subjects such as metalwork, woodwork, or design and technology. As a result university engineering departments are closing. Tomorrow’s World used to be on the TV, but where is that now The whole lack of interest in creativity and invention is a symptom of the class system, too—there’s a kind of snobbishness in Britain about cleverness and originality. The only inventors you see in the media are people like Sir Clive Sinclair and Trevor Bayliss who come across like mad scientists. What does the phrase "caught up" in Paragraph 5 mean
On the map there’s just one island, but when you get there you’ll find two distinct Sardinias. If you’re wondering which is the right destination for you, take the ice-cream test and try two gelati in Sardinia. On the wealthy Costa Smeralda I was served an ice-cream with enormous speed and efficiency by a Tom Cruise look-alike—all teeth, tan and ambition. But on Sardinia’s quieter western coast—the Riviera de Corallo—it was served, quite slowly and with elegance, by a girl with the face of an angel. My vote goes—narrowly—to this less-visited shore. There I found a seat in Alghero’s Piazza Civica, where the late afternoon sun was warming the old stones and the fishing boats were back at anchor just through the archway of the Porta al Mare. I reflected, as I ate my ice-cream and watched the locals make their evening passeggiata through the ancient square and the Door to the Sea, that the world is not such a bad place after all. By contrast, at a little cafe near the marina at Porto Cervo on the Costa Smeralda, watching beautiful young things leaping on and off their yachts, I reflected mainly that most people seemed to have a lot more money than I. It’s all very idyllic, the sea is always blue and the weather from May to October is invariably perfect. But is this plutocrats’ playground Sardinia No—not if you mean the rugged Sardinia with its roots in prehistory and its future in a possible split with mother Italy. To see the real Sardinia you could take the overnight ferry from Livorno on the Italian mainland to Olbia just below the Costa Smeralda. Perhaps hire a little Fiat—although Ferraris are available—and take the road that skirts the millionaire belt, heading north and then west. Head inland now, towards Sassari and Alghero. The hills crowd the shoreline, the villages are few and the roads are empty. Dotted around the fields, sticking up through olive groves like huge rock cones, are the remains of forts built by the mysterious Nuragic people, who came here long before the Romans and Phoenicians. A little way down the coast along a precipitous new highway is the ancient town of Bosa, where lace making and timber working keep many of the locals occupied. There is, of course, a great deal more to Sardinia than the Costa Smeralda and the Riviera del Corallo—there’s a whole islandful of things to see and do. South-central is where the main chain of mountains runs; snow-capped for four months of the year and a popular climbing and walking venue in gentler seasons. The coastline is longer than mainland Italy’s entire western side, with resorts dotted around natural harbours and scenic inlets. You could take in most of them in a two-day tour by car. But nothing compares with the Costa Smeralda or the Riviera del Corallo. It just depends on how you like your gelati. It can be inferred from the passage that ______.
Sunspots act like planet-sized hurricanes that suck in as much material as they spew out, temporarily overriding the laws of magnetic fields, scientists said on Tuesday. A team of researchers from NASA and Stanford University said by peering into the Sun for the first time, they discovered how the magnetic fields, which make up the cool dark sunspots on the surface, clump together instead of dispersing. Scientists had previously observed gases pouring out of the sunspots, and thought this was the product of the various magnetic fields repelling each other, in the same way magnets repel each other when brought together. But the researchers said the out-flowing matter is just a surface feature that occurs while the sunspot sucks in new material to hold itself together. "If you look a bit deeper, you find material rushing inward, like a planet-sized whirlpool or hurricane. This inflow pulls the magnetic fields (back) together," said Junwei Zhao, one of the Stanford researchers. The pressure in this sunspot hurricane is about 10 times higher than a tropical hurricane on Earth, scientists said. "Without this flow, a sunspot would not last a day. With it, it lasts for weeks. In the end, the sunspot does get torn apart—but we still don’t know how yet," Stanford colleague Philip Scherrer, said at a news conference. To get this deeper knowledge the team used sound wave technology, which they likened to the ultrasound doctors use to capture images of unborn babies. The research showed the magnetic field below a sunspot would cut off the spot’s supply of energy from the Sun’s hot core, turning it into a plug. Any matter above the plug would then cool and become denser, until gravity dragged it and any surrounding gases into the center of the spot at 3,000 miles per hour. "As long as the magnetic field remains strong, the coding effect will maintain an inflow that makes the structure stable...thereby setting up a self-perpetuating cycle," the team said in its report. British scientist Douglas Gough from Cambridge University, described the group’s findings as the solution to a 400-year-old riddle. Understanding the sunspot component would help scientists gain a global knowledge of the Sun, he said. "Take a TV set. It is not simply the sum of its components. And trying to understand the whole requires a greater global knowledge, but you can’t build a TV set unless you know how the components work. It’s the same with the Sun and its components," Gough said. The findings are the latest in a long line of sunspot research, which stems back to the early 17th century, when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei used sunspots to calculate the speed of the Sun’s rotation, His hand-drawn renditions of sunspot locations contrasted sharply with the computer-generated multicolored models of sunspots on display at NASA’s Washington headquarters. "Imagine yourself flying over a lake, you can see the surface but you don’t know how deep it is, how the temperature varies with depth. It was the same with sunspots until now," NASA’s George Withbroe said. Which of the following is INCORRECT according to the passage
Three years ago E]on College, a school of more than 4, 000 students with a rising academic reputation, decided it was no longer good marketing to be known as Fighting Christians and changed its mascot to the Phoenix, emblematic of its rebirth after a major fire in the 1920s. Some alumni resisted, but the change produced nothing like the soul-searching the school went through when, five months later, it joined a major movement in US higher e-ducation by dropping the word "college" and renaming itself Elon University. In the past 10 years, according to Higher Education Publications Inc. in Arlington, 161 other US colleges have done the same thing, for reasons that often have as much to do with image as academics. To make the situation more confusing, many of the new universities still advertise their collegelike atmosphere, while some institutions that call themselves colleges still tell potential applicants that they are just like universities. Guess which image is more appealing to 21st-century teenagers and their tuition-paying parents George Dehne & Associates, a consulting firm, found that two-thirds of prospective students said they planned to enroll in a public or private university, not college. Dehne found that universities were more highly regarded than colleges by employers and graduate schools and more likely to be credited with having better students, a better social life, greater diversity of students, greater prestige and stronger science programs. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Menlo Park, Calif. , classifies institutions based on the number and range of their academic program. "But the use of college, university or anything else in the name has nothing to do with it," said Alexander C. McCormick, senior scholar at the foundation. A few states regulate name changes of even private schools. In Oregon, a school that calls itself a university without authorization can be charged with "unlawful trade practices". But in most cases, colleges can rename themselves if they choose, and very few of the bigger ones have resisted the temptation. Among the 228 universities ranked by U. S. News & World Report in its "America’s Best Colleges" guide, only three of them—Boston College (12,375 students), the College of William and Mary (7,500 students) and Dartmouth College (5,000 students)—insist on keeping the more intimate title. The colleges that have made the switch call the renaming a reasoned response to the demands of students, faculty and modern preferences. Longwood College in Farmville, Va. , for instance, became a university in July because of the growth of its graduate programs and its effort to attain Division I athletic status among other factors. Leo Lambert, the President of Elon University, said his school’s name change has worked out fine. He’s not sure there’s any connection, but applications have increased 30 percent since the switch, and campus visits are up 67 percent. Lambert says he’s also seen signs of the power of the word "university". For instance, when he and his daughter Callie were visiting colleges last summer, they attended an information session at William and Mary. Although William and Mary officials said much about the virtues of intimacy, Lambert recalled, they also "took pains to make the point that they were really a university—law school, graduate programs, etc.—that chose to call itself a college.\ What can we infer from the passage
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