Reading › Re-order Paragraphs
Exercise 5
Task reminder: Type the correct order (A, B, C…) in the boxes to restore the original paragraph sequence. Start by finding the topic sentence — it has no backward references.
1. The Discovery of Penicillin
| A. Fleming returned from holiday in 1928 to find that mould had contaminated one of his bacterial cultures and, crucially, had killed the surrounding bacteria. | |
| B. This chance observation led him to identify penicillin, the substance produced by the mould that was lethal to many harmful bacteria. | |
| C. Alexander Fleming was a bacteriologist working at St Mary’s Hospital in London, searching for substances that could combat bacterial infection. | |
| D. His serendipitous find was subsequently developed into a practical drug by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, whose work enabled the mass production of penicillin during World War II. |
Show Answer 2. How Habits Form Show Answer 3. The Rise of E-Commerce Show Answer A. Over time, if a behaviour is repeated consistently in a stable context, the brain encodes it as a habit, meaning it can be triggered automatically without conscious deliberation. B. This automaticity is energy-efficient because habitual actions consume far less cognitive resource than deliberate decisions. C. Habits begin with a deliberate choice: a person decides to act in a new way in response to a particular situation. D. Understanding this process explains why breaking a habit requires sustained conscious effort — it involves overriding an ingrained neural pattern rather than simply making a different decision. A. These advantages were dramatically amplified by the widespread adoption of smartphones, which made online shopping accessible at any time and from any location. B. The emergence of the internet in the 1990s created the possibility of conducting commercial transactions electronically, without the need for physical shops. C. Early e-commerce pioneers such as Amazon and eBay proved that consumers would embrace online purchasing if trust, convenience, and reliable delivery could be guaranteed. D. Today, e-commerce accounts for a rapidly growing share of global retail sales, reshaping supply chains, transforming consumer behaviour, and placing intense competitive pressure on traditional retailers.