TEST 1
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 1-13 which are based on Reading
Passage 1 on pages 2 and 3.
The development of the silk industry
Silk, a natural fibre produced by a particular worm called a silkworm, has been used in
clothing for many centuries.
When silk was first discovered in China over actually existed before the Silk Roadt was
4,500 years ago, it was reserved exclusively for officially opened in the second century BC. An
the use of the emperor, his close relations and Egyptian mummy with a silk thread in her hair,
the very highest of his dignitaries. Within the dating from 1070 BC, has been discovered in
palace, the emperor is believed to have worn a the village of Deir el Medina near the Valley of
robe of white silk; outside, he, his principal the Kings, and is probably the earliest evidence
wife, and the heir to the throne wore yellow, of the silk trade. During the second century BC,
the colour of the earth. the Chinese emperor Han Wu Di's ambassadors
Gradually silk came into more general use, and travelled as far west as Persia and
the various classes of Chinese society began Mesopotamis, bearing gifts including silks. A
wearing tunics of silk. As well as being used for range of important finds of Chinese silks have
clothing and decoration, silk was quite quickly also been made along the Silk Road. One of the
put to industrial use, and rapidly became one of most dramatic of these finds was some Tang
the principal elements of the Chinese economy. silk discovered in
It was used in the production of musical 1900. It is believed that around 1015 AD
instruments, as string for fishing, and even as Buddhist monks, possibly alarmed by the threat
the world's first luxury paper. Eventually even of invasion by Tibetan people, had sealed more
the common people were able to wear than ten thousand manuscripts and silk
garments of silk. paintings, silk banners and textiles in caves near
During the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), silk Dunhuang, a trading station on the Silk Road in
ceased to be a mere fabric and became a form north-west China.
of currency. Farmers paid their taxes in grain Some historians believe the first Europeans to
and silk, and silk was used to pay civil servants set eyes upon the fabulous fabric were the
and to reward subjects for outstanding Roman legions of Marcus Licinius Crassus,
services. Values were calculated in lengths of Governor of Syria. According to certain
silk as they had previously been calculated in accounts of the period, at an important battle
weight of gold. Before long, silk became a near the Euphrates River in 53 BC, the Roman
currency used in trade with foreign countries, soldiers were so startled by the bright silken
which continued into the Tang dynasty (616- banners of the enemy that they fled in panic.
907 AD). It is possible that this added Yet, within decades Chinese silks were widely
importance was the result of a major increase worn by the rich and noble families of Rome.
in production. Silk also found its way so The Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (218-222 AD)
thoroughly into the Chinese language that wore nothing but silk. By 380 AD, the Roman
230 of the 5,000 most common characters of historian Marcellinnus Ammianus reported
Mandarin· have 'silk' as their key component. that. The use of silk, which was one
Silk became a precious commodity, highly
sought after by other countries from an early
date, and it is believed that the silk trade
1 An ancient trade route between China and the
• A group of related Chinese dialects which have mediterranean Sea
been recognised as the 'national language' since
the early 20th century
confined to the nobility, has now spread to all classes
without distinction - even to the lowest. The desire
for silk continued to increase over the centuries.
Despite this demand, the price of silk remained very
high.
In spite of their secrecy about production methods,
the Chinese eventually lost their monopoly on silk
production. Knowledge of silk production methods
reached Korea around 200 BC, when waves of
Chinese immigrants arrived there. Shortly after 300
AD, it travelled westward, and the cultivation of the
silkworm was established in India.
Around 550 AD silk production reached the
Middle East. Records indicate that two monks from
Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), capital of the
Byzantine Empire, appeared at their emperor's court
with silkworm eggs which they had obtained secretly,
and hidden in their hollow bamboo walking sticks.
Under their supervision the eggs hatched
into worms, and the worms spun silk threads.
Byzantium was in the silk business at last. The
Byzantine church and state created imperial
workshops, monopolising production and keeping
the secret to themselves. This allowed a silk industry
to be established, undercutting the market for
ordinary-grade Chinese silk. However, high quality
silk textiles, woven in China especially for the Middle
Eastern market, continued to achieve high prices in
the West, and trade along the Silk Road continued as
before. By the sixth century the
Persians, too, had mastered the art of silk weaving,
developing their own rich patterns and techniques. But
it wasn't until the 13th century that Italy began silk
production, with the introduction of 2,000 skilled silk
weavers from Constantinople. Eventually, silk
production became widespread
throughout
Europe.
World silk production has approximately
doubled during the last 30 years in spite of manmade
fibres replacing certain uses of silk. Before this
period, China and Japan were the two main
producers, together manufacturing more than 50 per
cent of world production each year. After the late
1970s, however, China dramatically increased
its silk production, and once again became the
world's leading producer.
at first, silk only available to
gifts of silk were presented by
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.
The discovery of a baby mammoth
A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species
A On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer
herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, looking carefully at a
diminutive corpse. Although he'd never seen such an animal before, Khudi had seen many
mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each summer, and this
persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily well preserved. Apart from its
missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi realised the find might be significant
and he knew he couldn't just return home and forget all about it. He therefore decided to
travel to the small town of Var Sale to consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend
took him to meet the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly
Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.
B Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions
coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the primary
cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the
vegetation. 'We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in
their extinction.' says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth
expert at London's Natural History Museum. 'In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches
closely.' The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In
addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons,
tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the
temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological Museum
in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum's director, was one of the first scientists to view the
baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued 'the best preseNed mammoth to
come down to US from the Ice Age', and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi's wife.
Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan
Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years
researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a
French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had
examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor
state. Lyuba was another story entirely. Other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw
in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba's anatomy: her milk tusks.
Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from the
Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued
to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene· temperature change. On the other hand, to Fisher the
tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from
animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer
grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most
eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his
analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo
a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her
skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that
the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment.
Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other
colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix
of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan.
In fact, the sediment in Lyuba's trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible
explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled
convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would
have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba's death were
clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more
evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues
to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental
development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health
and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her
wellpreserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus
primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North
America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba's premolars and tusks revealed that she had
been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good
physical condition.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 on pages 10 and 11.
What makes a musical expert?
How does someone become expert in music? And IS it really possible to
have a 'talent' for music?
Does that class of people acknowledged to be musical experts just have more of the same
basic skills we are all endowed with, or do they have a set of abilities - or neural structures
that are totally different from those of the rest of US? Are high levels of musical achievement
simply the result of training and practice, or are they based on innate brain structure - what
we refer to as 'talent'? Talent can be defined as something that originates in genetic
structures and that is identifiable by trained people who can recognize its existence before a
person has achieved exceptional levels of performance. The emphasis on early identification
means that to investigate it, we study the development of skills in children.
It is evident that some children acquire skills more rapidly than others: the age of onset for
walking and talking varies widely, even between children in the same household. There may
be genetic factors at work, but these are closely linked with other factors - with a presumably
environmental component - such as motivation and family dynamics. Similar factors can
influence musical development and can mask the contribution of genetics to musical ability.
Brain studies, so far, haven't been of much use in sorting out the issues. Gottfried Schlaug at
Harvard collected brain scans of individuals with absolute pitch· (AP) and showed that a
region in the brain called the planum temporale is larger in these people than in others. This
suggests
that the plan um is involved in AP, but it's not clear if it starts out larger in people who
eventually acquire AP, or if the acquisition of AP makes the planum increase in size.
Results of research into the areas of the brain involved in skilled motor movement are more
conclusive. Studies of violin players have shown that the region of the brain responsible for
controlling the movement of the left hand (the hand that requires greater precision in violin
playing) increases in size as a result of practice. We do not know yet if the propensity for
increase pre-exists in some-peopled not others.
The evidence against talent comes from research on how much training the experts do. Like
experts in mathematics, chess, or sports, experts in music require lengthy periods of
instruction
and practice. In several studies, the very best music students
Were found to have practiced more than twice as much as the others. In another study,
students were secretly divided into two groups based on teachers' perceptions of their talent.
Several years later, it was found that the students who achieved the highest performance
ratings had practiced the most, irrespective of which 'talent' group they had been assigned
to,
* individuals with absolute pitch: people who can identify or sing any musical note correctly without help
suggesting that practice does not merely correlate with achievement, but causes it.
Anders Ericsson, at Florida State University, approaches the topic of musical expertise as a general
problem in cognitive psychology. He takes as a starting point the assumption that there are certain
issues involved in becoming an expert at anything; that we can learn about musical expertise by
studying expert chess players, athletes, artists, mathematicians, as well as the musicians
themselves. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is
required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything.
In study after study, of composers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players and master
criminals, this number comes up again and again. Someone would do this amount of practice if
they practiced, for example, roughly 20 hours a week for ten years. Of course, this does not
address why some people do not seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people
get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no-one has yet found a case in which true
world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to
assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
The ten-thousand-hour theory is consistent with what we know about how the brain learns.
Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neural tissue. The more
experiences we have with something, the stronger the memory/learning trace for that experience
becomes. Although people differ in how long it takes them to consolidate information neutrally,
it remains true that increased practice leads to a greater number of neural traces, which create
stronger memory representation.
The classic rebuttal to this theory goes something like this: 'What about Mozart? I hear that he
composed his first symphony at the age of four!' First, there is a factual error here: Mozart did
not write it until he was eight. Still, this is unusual, to say the least. However, this early work
received little acclaim and was not performed very often. In fact, the only reason we know about
it is because the child who wrote it grew up to become Mozart. And Mozart had an expert teacher
in his father, who was renowned as a teacher of musicians all over Europe. We do not know how
much Mozart practiced, but if he started at age two and worked thirty- two hours a week (quite
possible, given that his father was a stern taskmaster) he would have made his ten thousand hours
by the time he composed his first symphony. This does not mean that there are no genetic factors
involved in Mozart's greatness, but that inborn traits may not be
the only cause.
who is aware of being set apart from other people.
whose brain structure is unlike that of other people,
who can perform extremely well in early childhood.
According to the writer, what is unclear about the findings of Gottfried Schlaug?
Left-handed violinists have a different brain structure from other people.
Violinists are born with brains that have a particular structure
talent may have little to do with expertise.
practice may actually prevent the development of talent.
expertise may be related to quality of instruction.
if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
cognitive
In order to be useful, practice must be carried out regularly every day.
,000 hours' practice.
therefore supports the view that expertise is not solely the result of
popular
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