Practice Cam 13 Reading Test 03
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
The coconut palm
For millennia, the coconut has been central to the
lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, on the other hand,
coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian
merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in South Asia in the late
13th century, and among the mid-14th-century travel writings of Sir John
Mandeville there is mention of ‘great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India).
Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are clichés in the west to sell
holidays, chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and even romance.
Typically, we envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs
that, when opened, provide sweet white flesh. But we see only part of the fruit
and none of the plant from which they come. The coconut palm has a smooth,
slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an important source of
timber for building houses, and is increasingly being used as a replacement for
endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk is
surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long.
The leaves have hard veins in their centres which, in many parts of the world,
are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away.
Immature coconut flowers are tightly clustered together among the leaves at the
top of the trunk. The flower stems may be tapped for their sap to produce a
drink, and the sap can also be reduced by boiling to produce a type of sugar
used for cooking.
Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per
year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three
layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard, inner
layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut fibre, ‘coir’, which has
numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes. The woody
innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the
seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely
used in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel. When
broken in half, the shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.
Inside the shell are the nutrients (endosperm)
needed by the developing seed. Initially, the endosperm is a sweetish liquid,
coconut water, which is enjoyed as a drink, but also provides the hormones
which encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields. As
the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually solidifies to form the brilliant
white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made
into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in
different parts of the world, as well as in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut
fat, glycerine, acquired strategic importance in a quite different sphere, as
Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention:
dynamite.
Their biology would appear to make coconuts the
great maritime voyagers and coastal colonizers of the plant world. The large,
energy-rich fruits are able to float in water and tolerate salt, but cannot
remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest after about 110 days at sea they
are no longer able to germinate. Literally cast onto desert island shores, with
little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical
sun, coconut seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket in the seed,
created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the
fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture
that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut seedling as it starts to grow.
There have been centuries of academic debate over
the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the
Caribbean or the east coast of the Americans before the voyages of the European
explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
16th century trade and human migration patterns reveal that Arab traders and
European sailors are likely to have moved coconuts from South and Southeast
Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to the east coast of America. But
the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th
century sailors has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two
diametrically opposed origins have been proposed: that they came from Asia, or
that they were native to America. Both suggestions have problems. In Asia,
there is a large degree of coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human
use – but there are no relatives growing in the wild. In America, there are
close coconut relatives, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous. These
problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on
coral islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.
Questions 1-8
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on
your answer sheet.
|
THE
COCONUT PALM |
||
|
Part |
Description |
Uses |
|
trunk |
up
to 30 metres |
timber
for houses and the making of 1 |
|
leaves |
up
to 6 metres long |
to
make brushes |
|
flowers |
at
the top of the trunk |
stems
provide sap, used as a drink or a source of 2 |
|
fruits |
outer
layer |
|
|
middle
layer (coir fibres) |
used
for 3 |
|
|
Inner
layer (shell) |
a
source of 4 (when
halved) for 5 |
|
|
coconut
water |
a
drink a
source of 6 for
other plants |
|
|
coconut
flesh |
oil
and milk for cooking and 7 glycerine
(an ingredient in 8 ) |
|
Questions 9-13
Do the following statements agree with the
information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 9-13 on your
answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
9 Coconut
seeds need shade in order to germinate.
10
Coconuts were probably transported to Asia from America in the 16th century.
11
Coconuts found on the west coast of America were a different type from those
found on the east coast.
12 All
the coconuts found in Asia are cultivated varieties.
13 Coconuts
are cultivated in different ways in America and the Pacific.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
How baby talk gives infant brains a
boost
A
The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched,
exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope
to understand how ‘baby talk’ impacts on learning. Most babies start developing
their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play
classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that
infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born,
gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.
B
Early language exposure seems to have benefits to
the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes
are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the
sweet if sometimes absurd sound of infant-directed speech influence a baby’s
development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby
talk.
C
Fathers don’t use baby talk as often or in the same
ways as mothers – and that’s perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark
VanDam of Washington State University at Spokane and colleagues equipped
parents with recording devices and speech-recognition software to study the way
they interacted with their youngsters during a normal day. ‘We found that moms
do exactly what you’d expect and what’s been described many times over,’ VanDam
explains. ‘But we found that dads aren’t doing the same thing. Dads didn’t
raise their pitch or fundamental frequency when they talked to kids.’ Their
role may be rooted in what is called the bridge hypothesis, which dates back to
1975. It suggests that fathers use less familial language to provide their
children with a bridge to the kind of speech they’ll hear in public. ‘The idea
is that a kid gets to practice a certain kind of speech with mom and another
kind of speech with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of
speech to practice,’ says VanDam.
D
Scientists from the University of Washington and the
University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations
between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording
vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The
study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters
began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they
found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless
of socioeconomic status. ‘Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk
were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard
speech,’ says Nairán Ramirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. ‘We also
found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one
context,’ she adds. ‘The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies
babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.’
E
Another study suggests that parents might want to
pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind.
Researchers from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal found
that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults – which
may be why baby talk is such a universal tool among parents. They played
repeating vowel sounds made by a special synthesizing device that mimicked
sounds made by either an adult woman or another baby. This way, only the impact
of the auditory cues was observed. The team then measured how long each type of
sound held the infants’ attention. They found that the ‘infant’ sounds held
babies’ attention nearly 40 percent longer. The baby noises also induced more
reactions in the listening infants, like smiling or lip moving, which
approximates sound making. The team theorizes that this attraction to other
infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech. ‘It
may be some property of the sound that is just drawing their attention,’ says
study co-author Linda Polka. ‘Or maybe they are really interested in that
particular type of sound because they are starting to focus on their own
ability to make sounds. We are speculating here but it might catch their
attention because they recognize it as a sound they could possibly make.’
F
In a study published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, a total of 57 babies from two slightly
different age groups – seven months and eleven and a half months – were played
a number of syllables from both their native language (English) and a
non-native tongue (Spanish). The infants were placed in a brain-activation
scanner that recorded activity in a brain region known to guide the motor
movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk
prompts infant brains to start practicing their language skills. ‘Finding
activation in motor areas the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back
right from the start, and suggests that seven-month-olds’ brains are already
trying to figure out how to make interesting finding was that while the
seven-month-olds responded to all speech sounds regardless of language, the
brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of
non-native sounds compared to native sounds. The study may have also uncovered
a process by which babies recognize differences between their native language
and other tongues.
Questions 14-17
Look at the following ideas (Questions 14-17)
and the list of researchers below.
Match each idea with the correct researcher, A, B or C.
Write the correct letter, A, B or C,
in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once.
14 the
importance of adults giving babies individual attention when talking to them
15 the
connection between what babies hear and their own efforts to create speech
16 the
advantage for the baby of having two parents each speaking in a different way
17 the
connection between the amount of baby talk babies hear and how much vocalising
they do themselves
List of Researchers
A
Mark VanDam
B Nairán
Ramirez-Esparza
C Patricia Kuhl
Questions 18-23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each
answer.
Write your answers in boxes 18-23 on
your answer sheet.
Research into how parents talk to babies
Researchers at Washington State University
used 18 together
with specialised computer programs, to analyse how parents interacted with
their babies during a normal day. The study revealed that 19 tended
not to modify their ordinary speech patterns when interacting with their
babies. According to an idea known as the 20 they
may use a more adult type of speech to prepare infants for the language they
will hear outside the family home. According to the researchers, hearing baby
talk from one parent and ‘normal’ language from the other expands the
baby’s 21 of
types of speech which they can practise.
Meanwhile, another study carried out by scientists
from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut recorded
speech and sound using special 22 that
the babies were equipped with. When they studies the babies again at age two,
the found that those who had heard a lot of baby talk in infancy had a much
larger 23 Than
those who had not.
Questions 24-26
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F,
in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.
24 a
reference to a change which occurs in babies’ brain activity before the end of
their first year.
25 an
example of what some parents do for their baby’s benefit before birth
26 a
mention of babies’ preference for the sounds that other babies make
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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Whatever happened to the Harappan
Civilisation?
New research sheds light on the
disappearance of an ancient society
A
The Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and
India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were
abandoned. The Harappan Civilisation was a sophisticated Bronze Age society who
built ‘megacities’ and traded internationally in luxury craft products, and yet
seemed to have left almost no depictions of themselves. But their lack of
self-imagery – at a time when the Egyptians were carving and painting
representations of themselves all over their temples – is only part of the mystery.
B
‘There is plenty of archaeological evidence to tell
us about the rise of the Harappan Civilisation, but relatively little about its
fall,’ explains archaeologist Dr Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge.
‘As populations increased, cities were built that had great baths, craft
workshops, palaces and halls laid out in distinct sectors. Houses were arranged
in blocks, with wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own
wells and drainage systems. It was very much a “thriving” civilisation.’ Then
around 2100 BC, a transformation began. Streets went uncleaned, buildings
started to be abandoned, and ritual structures fell out of use. After their
final demise, a millennium passed before really large-scale cities appeared
once more in South Asia.
C
Some have claimed that major glacier-fed rivers
changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply and agriculture;
or that the cities could not cope with an increasing population, they exhausted
their resource base, the trading economy broke down or they succumbed to
invasion and conflict; and yet others that climate change caused an
environmental change that affected food and water provision. ‘It is unlikely
that there was a single cause for the decline of the civilisation. But the fact
is, until now, we have had little solid evidence from the area for most of the
key elements,’ said Petrie. ‘A lot of the archaeological debate has really only
been well-argued speculation.’
D
A research team led by Petrie, together with Dr
Ravindanath Singh of Banaras Hindu University in India, found early in their
investigations that many of the archaeological sites were not where they were
supposed to be, completely altering understanding of the way that this region
was inhabited in the past. When they carried out a survey of how the larger
area was settled in relation to sources of water, they found inaccuracies in
the published geographic locations of ancient settlements ranging from several
hundred metres to many kilometres. They realised that any attempts to use the
existing data were likely to be fundamentally flawed. Over the course of
several seasons of fieldwork they carried out new surveys, finding an
astonishing 198 settlement sites that were previously unknown.
E
Now, research published by Dr Yama Dixit and
Professor David Hodell, both from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, has
provided the first definitive evidence for climate change affecting the plains
of north-western India, where hundreds of Harappan sites are known to have been
situated. The researchers gathered shells of Melanoides
tuberculate snails from the sediments of an ancient lake and used
geochemical analysis as a means of tracing the climate history of the region.
‘As today, the major source of water into the lake is likely to have been the
summer monsoon,’ says Dixit. ‘But we have observed that there was an abrupt
change about 4,100 years ago, when the amount of evaporation from the lake
exceeded the rainfall – indicative of a drought.’ Hodell adds: ‘We estimate
that the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon climate lasted about 200 years
before recovering to the previous conditions, which we still see today.’
F
It has long been thought that other great Bronze Age
civilisations also declined at a similar time, with a global-scale climate
event being seen as the cause. While it is possible that these local-scale
processes were linked, the real archaeological interest lies in understanding
the impact of these larger-scale events on different environments and different
populations. ‘Considering the vast area of the Harappan Civilisation with its
variable weather systems,’ explains Singh, ‘it is essential that we obtain more
climate data from areas close to the two great cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa
and also from the Indian Punjab.’
G
Petrie and Singh’s team is now examining
archaeological records and trying to understand details of how people led their
lives in the region five millennia ago. They are analysing grains cultivated at
the time, and trying to work out whether they were grown under extreme
conditions of water stress, and whether they were adjusting the combinations of
crops they were growing for different weather systems. They are also looking at
whether the types of pottery used, and other aspects of their material culture,
were distinctive to specific regions or were more similar across larger areas.
This gives us insight into the types of interactive networks that the
population was involved in, and whether those changed.
H
Petrie believes that archaeologists are in a unique
position to investigate how past societies responded to environmental and
climatic change. ‘By investigating responses to environmental pressures and
threats, we can learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant
governmental and administrative bodies, to be more proactive in issues such as
the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and
rural development, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the
future.’
Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H,
in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once
27
proposed explanations for the decline of the Harappan Civilisation
28
reference to a present-day application of some archaeological research findings
29 a
difference between the Harappan Civilisation and another culture of the same
period
30 a
description of some features of Harappan urban design
31
reference to the discovery of errors made by previous archaeologists
Questions 32-36
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on
your answer sheet.
Looking at evidence of climate change
Yama Dixit and David Hodell have found the first
definitive evidence of climate change affecting the plains of north-western
India thousands of years ago. By collecting the 32 of
snails and analysing them, they discovered evidence of a change in water levels
in a 33 in
the region. This occurred when there was less 34 than
evaporation, and suggests that there was an extended period of drought.
Petrie and Singh’s team are using archaeological
records to look at 35 from
five millennia ago, in order to know whether people had adapted their
agricultural practices to changing climatic conditions. They are also examining
objects including 36 ,
so as to find out about links between inhabitants of different parts of the
region and whether these changed over time.
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below.
Look at the following statements (Questions 38-40) and the list of
researchers below.
Match each statement with the correct
researcher, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D,
in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once.
37
Finding further information about changes to environmental conditions in the
region is vital.
38
Examining previous patterns of behaviour may have long-term benefits.
39
Rough calculations indicate the approximate length of a period of water
shortage.
40
Information about the decline of the Harappan Civilisation has been lacking.
List of Researchers
A
Cameron Petrie
B Ravindanath
Singh
C Yama Dixit
D David Hodell
Answer
Passage 1
1. furniture
2. sugar
3. ropes
4. charcoal
5. bowls
6. hormones
7. cosmetics
8. dynamite
9. FALSE
10. FALSE
11. NOT GIVEN
12. TRUE
13. NOT GIVEN
Passage 2
14. B
15. C
16. A
17. B
18. recording devices
19. fathers / dads
20. bridge hypothesis
21. repertoire
22. (audio-recording) vests
23. vocabulary
24. F
25. A
26. E
Passage 3
27. C
28. H
29. A
30. B
31. D
32. shells
33. lake
34. rainfall
35. grains
36. pottery
37. B
38. A
39. D
40. A
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