Practice Cam 13 Reading Test 04
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Cutty Sark: the
fastest sailing ship of all time
The nineteenth century was a period of great
technological development in Britain, and for shipping the major changes were
from wind to steam power, and from wood to iron and steel.
The fastest commercial sailing vessels of all time
were clippers, three-masted ships built to transport goods around the world,
although some also took passengers. From the 1840s until 1869, when the Suez
Canal opened and steam propulsion was replacing sail, clippers dominated world
trade. Although many were built, only one has survived more or less
intact: Cutty Sark, now on display in Greenwich, southeast London.
Cutty Sark’s
unusual name comes from the poem Tam O’Shanter by the Scottish
poet Robert Burns. Tam, a farmer, is chased by a witch called Nannie, who is
wearing a ‘cutty sark’ – an old Scottish name for a short nightdress.
The witch is depicted in Cutty Sark’s figurehead – the carving of a
woman typically at the front of old sailing ships. In legend, and in Burns’s
poem, witches cannot cross water, so this was a rather strange choice of name
for a ship.
Cutty Sark was
built in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1869, for a shipping company owned by John
Willis. To carry out construction, Willis chose a new shipbuilding firm, Scott
& Linton, and ensured that the contrast with them put him in a very strong
position. In the end, the firm was forced out of business, and the ship was
finished by a competitor.
Willis’s company was active in the tea trade between
China and Britain, where speed could bring shipowners both profits and prestige,
so Cutty Sark was designed to make the journey more quickly
than any other ship. On her maiden voyage, in 1870, she set sail from London,
carrying large amounts of goods to China. She returned laden with tea, making
the journey back to London in four months. However, Cutty Sark never
lived up to the high expectations of her owner, as a result of bad winds and
various misfortunes. On one occasion, in 1872, the ship and a rival
clipper, Thermopylae, left port in China on the same day. Crossing
the Indian Ocean, Cutty Sark gained a lead of over 400 miles,
but then her rudder was severely damaged in stormy seas, making her impossible
to steer. The ship’s crew had the daunting task of repairing the rudder at sea,
and only succeeded at the second attempt. Cutty Sark reached
London a week after Thermopylae.
Steam ships posed a growing threat to clippers, as
their speed and cargo capacity increased. In addition, the opening of the Suez
Canal in 1869, the same year that Cutty Sark was launched, had
a serious impact. While steam ships could make use of the quick, direct route
between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, the canal was of no use to sailing
ships, which needed the much stronger winds of the oceans, and so had to sail a
far greater distance. Steam ships reduced the journey time between Britain and
China by approximately two months.
By 1878, tea traders weren’t interested in Cutty
Sark, and instead, she took on the much less prestigious work of carrying
any cargo between any two ports in the world. In 1880, violence aboard the ship
led ultimately to the replacement of the captain with an incompetent drunkard
who stole the crew’s wages. He was suspended from service, and a new captain
appointed. This marked a turnaround and the beginning of the most successful
period in Cutty Sark’s working life, transporting wool from
Australia to Britain. One such journey took just under 12 weeks, beating every
other ship sailing that year by around a month.
The ship’s next captain, Richard Woodget, was an
excellent navigator, who got the best out of both his ship and his crew. As a
sailing ship, Cutty Sark depended on the strong trade winds of
the southern hemisphere, and Woodget took her further south than any previous
captain, bringing her dangerously close to icebergs off the southern tip of
South America. His gamble paid off, though, and the ship was the fastest vessel
in the wool trade for ten years.
As competition from steam ships increased in the
1890s, and Cutty Sark approached the end of her life
expectancy, she became less profitable. She was sold to a Portuguese firm,
which renamed her Ferreira. For the next 25 years, she again
carried miscellaneous cargoes around the world.
Badly damaged in a gale in 1922, she was put into
Falmouth harbor in southwest England, for repairs. Wilfred Dowman, a retired
sea captain who owned a training vessel, recognised her and tried to buy her,
but without success. She returned to Portugal and was sold to another
Portuguese company. Dowman was determined, however, and offered a high price:
this was accepted, and the ship returned to Falmouth the following year and had
her original name restored.
Dowman used Cutty Sark as a
training ship, and she continued in this role after his death. When she was no
longer required, in 1954, she was transferred to dry dock at Greenwich to go on
public display. The ship suffered from fire in 2007, and again, less seriously,
in 2014, but now Cutty Sark attracts a quarter of a million
visitors a year.
Questions 1-8
Do the following statements agree with the
information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-8 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
1 Clippers
were originally intended to be used as passenger ships.
2 Cutty
Sark was given the name of a character in a poem.
3 The
contract between John Willis and Scott & Linton favoured Willis.
4 John
Willis wanted Cutty Sark to be the fastest tea clipper
travelling between the UK and China.
5 Despite
storm damage, Cutty Sark beat Thermopylae back
to London.
6 The
opening of the Suez Canal meant that steam ships could travel between Britain and
China faster than clippers.
7 Steam
ships sometimes used the ocean route to travel between London and China.
8 Captain
Woodget put Cutty Sark at risk of hitting an iceberg.
Questions 9-13
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage
for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on
your answer sheet.
9 After
1880, Cutty Sark carried as
its main cargo during its most successful time.
10 As
a captain and Woodget
was very skilled.
11 Ferreira went
to Falmouth to repair damage that a had
caused.
12
Between 1923 and 1954, Cutty Sark was used for
13 Cutty
Sark has twice been damaged by
in the 21st century.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
SAVING THE SOIL
More than a third of the Earth’s top
layer is at risk. Is there hope for our planet’s most precious resource?
A
More than a third of the world’s soil is endangered,
according to a recent UN report. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable
soil could be gone in 60 years. Since soil grows 95% of our food, and sustains
human life in other more surprising ways, that is a huge problem.
B
Peter Groffman, from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem
Studies in New York, points out that soil scientists have been warning about
the degradation of the world’s soil for decades. At the same time, our
understanding of its importance to humans has grown. A single gram of healthy
soil might contain 100 million bacteria, as well as other microorganisms such
as viruses and fungi, living amid decomposing plants and various minerals.
That means soils do not just grow our food, but are
the source of nearly all our existing antibiotics, and could be our best hope
in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Soil is also an ally
against climate change: as microorganisms within soil digest dead animals and
plants, they lock in their carbon content, holding three times the amount of
carbon as does the entire atmosphere. Soils also store water, preventing flood
damage: in the UK, damage to buildings, roads and bridges from floods caused by
soil degradation costs £233 million every year.
C
If the soil loses its ability to perform these
functions, the human race could be in big trouble. The danger is not that the
soil will disappear completely, but that the microorganisms that give it its
special properties will be lost. And once this has happened, it may take the
soil thousands of years to recover.
Agriculture is by far the biggest problem. In the
wild, when plants grow they remove nutrients from the soil, but then when the
plants die and decay these nutrients are returned directly to the soil. Humans
tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to
enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile. In the past we
developed strategies to get around the problem, such as regularly varying the
types of crops grown, or leaving fields uncultivated for a season.
D
But these practices became inconvenient as
populations grew and agriculture had to be run on more commercial lines. A
solution came in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch
process for manufacturing ammonium nitrate. Farmers have been putting this
synthetic fertiliser on their fields ever since.
But over the past few decades, it has become clear
this wasn’t such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers can release polluting
nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the
rain, releasing nitrogen into rivers. More recently, we have found that
indiscriminate use of fertilisers hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and
salty, and degrading the soil they are supposed to nourish.
E
One of the people looking for a solution to his
problem is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the
Netherlands, and now advises some of the world’s top soil scientists. He came
to realise that the best way to ensure his trees flourished was to take care of
the soil, and has developed a cocktail of beneficial bacteria, fungi and humus*
to do this. Researchers at the University of Valladolid in Spain recently used
this cocktail on soils destroyed by years of fertiliser overuse. When they
applied Floris’s mix to the desert-like test plots, a good crop of plants
emerged that were not just healthy at the surface, but had roots strong enough
to pierce dirt as hard as rock. The few plants that grew in the control plots,
fed with traditional fertilisers, were small and weak
F
However, measures like this are not enough to solve
the global soil degradation problem. To assess our options on a global scale we
first need an accurate picture of what types of soil are out there, and the
problems they face. That’s not easy. For one thing, there is no agreed
international system for classifying soil. In an attempt to unify the different
approaches, the UN has created the Global Soil Map project. Researchers from
nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that
can be fed measurements from field surveys, drone surveys, satellite imagery,
lad analyses and so on to provide real-time data on the state of the soil.
Within the next four years, they aim to have mapped soils worldwide to a depth
of 100 metres, with the results freely accessible to all.
G
But this is only a first step. We need ways of
presenting the problem that bring it home to governments and the wider public,
says Pamela Chasek at the International Institute for Sustainable Development,
in Winnipeg, Canada. ‘Most scientists don’t speak language that policy-makers
can understand, and vice versa.’ Chasek and her colleagues have proposed a goal
of ‘zero net land degradation’. Like the idea of carbon neutrality, it is an
easily understood target that can help shape expectations and encourage action.
For soils on the brink, that may be too late.
Several researchers are agitating for the immediate creation of protected zones
for endangered soils. One difficulty here is defining what these areas should
conserve: areas where the greatest soil diversity is present? Or areas of
unspoilt soils that could act as a future benchmark of quality?
Whatever we do, if we want our soils to survive, we
need to take action now.
Questions 14-17
Complete the summary below.
Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on
your answer sheet.
Why soil degradation could be a disaster
for humans
Healthy soil contains a large variety of bacteria
and other microorganisms, as well as plant remains and 14 It
provides us with food and also with antibiotics, and its function in
storing 15 has
a significant effect on the climate. In addition, it prevents damage to
property and infrastructure because it holds 16
If these microorganisms are lost, soil may lose its
special properties. The main factor contributing to soil degradation is
the 17 carried
out by humans.
Questions 18-21
Complete each sentence with the correct
ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 18-21 on
your answer sheet.
18
Nutrients contained in the unused parts of harvested crops
19
Synthetic fertilisers produced with Haber-Bosch process
20
Addition of a mixture developed by Pius Floris to the soil
21 The
idea of zero net soil degradation
A may
improve the number and quality of plants growing there.
B may
contain data from up to nine countries.
C may not be
put back into the soil.
D may help
governments to be more aware of soil-related issues.
E may cause
damage to different aspects of the environment.
F may be
better for use at a global level.
Questions 22-26
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G,
in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once.
22 a
reference to one person’s motivation for a soil-improvement project
23 an
explanation of how soil stayed healthy before the development of farming
24
examples of different ways of collecting information on soil degradation
25 a
suggestion for a way of keeping some types of soil safe in the near future
26 a
reason why it is difficult to provide an overview of soil degradation
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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Book Review
The Happiness Industry: How the
Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
By William Davies
‘Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is
self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no
further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ This pronouncement by
Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of ‘positive psychology’, summarises
the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, it is obvious
that the purpose of government is to promote a state of collective well-being.
The only question is how to achieve it, and here positive psychology – a
supposed science that not only identifies what makes people happy but also
allows their happiness to be measured – can show the way. Equipped with this
science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they
never could in the past.
It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way
of thinking, and for that very reason increasingly popular. Those who think in
this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the
meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as
if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to
their attention. It was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) who was more
than anyone else responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For
Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence
of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with
self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have
struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but
for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Without knowing anything
much of him or the school of moral theory he established – since they are by
education and intellectual conviction illiterate in the history of ideas – our
advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks in rejecting as outmoded
and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human
happiness to date.
But as William Davies notes in his recent book The
Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good
is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich,
lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a
well-defined historical framework. Rightly, Davies his story with Bentham,
noting that he was far more than a philosopher. Davies writes, ‘Bentham’s
activities were those which we might now associate with a public sector
management consultant’. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting
that the departments of government be linked together through a set of
‘conversation tubes’, and to the Bank of England with a design for a printing
device that could produce unforgeable banknotes. He drew up plans for a
‘frigidarium’ to keep provisions such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables
fresh. His celebrated design for a prison to be known as a ‘Panopticon’, in
which prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while being visible at
all times to the guards, was very nearly adopted. (Surprisingly, Davies does
not discuss the fact that Bentham meant his Panopticon not just as a model
prison but also as an instrument of control that could be applied to schools
and factories.)
Bentham was also a pioneer of the ‘science of
happiness’. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it has to be measured,
and Bentham suggested two ways in which this might be done. Viewing happiness
as a complex of pleasurable sensations, he suggested that it might be
quantified by measuring the human pulse rate. Alternatively, money could be
used as the standard for quantification: if two different goods have the same
price, it can be claimed that they produce the same quantity of pleasure in the
consumer. Bentham was more attracted by the latter measure. By associating
money so closely to inner experience, Davies writes, Bentham ‘set the stage for
the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the
business practices of the twentieth century’.
The Happiness Industry describes
how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We
learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined
and treated as psychological maladies. In addition, Davies shows how the belief
that inner of pleasure and displeasure can be objectively measured has informed
management studies and advertising. The tendency of thinkers such as J B
Watson, the founder of behaviourism*, was that human beings could be shaped, or
manipulated, by policymakers and managers. Watson had no factual basis for his
view of human action. When he became president of the American Psychological
Association in 1915, he ‘had never even studied a single human being’: his
research had been confined to experiments on white rats. Yet Watson’s reductive
model is now widely applied, with ‘behaviour change’ becoming the goal of
governments: in Britain, a ‘Behaviour Insights Team’ has been established by
the government to study how people can be encouraged, at minimum cost to the
public purse, to live in what are considered to be socially desirable ways.
Modern industrial societies appear to need the
possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours. But
whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be
responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.
———————–
* ‘behaviourism’: a branch of psychology which is concerned with observable
behaviour
Questions 27-29
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 27-29 on
your answer sheet.
27
What is the reviewer’s attitude to advocates of positive psychology?
A They are
wrong to reject the ideas of Bentham.
B They are
over-influenced by their study of Bentham’s theories.
C They have
a fresh new approach to ideas on human happiness.
D They are
ignorant about the ideas they should be considering.
28 The
reviewer refers to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in order to suggest that
happiness
A may not be
just pleasure and the absence of pain.
B should not
be the main goal of humans.
C is not
something that should be fought for.
D is not
just an abstract concept.
29
According to Davies, Bentham’s suggestion for linking the price of goods to
happiness was significant because
A it was the
first successful way of assessing happiness.
B it
established a connection between work and psychology.
C it was the
first successful example of psychological research.
D it
involved consideration of the rights of consumers.
Questions 30-34
Complete the summary using the list of words A-G below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in
boxes 30-34 on your answer sheet.
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was active in other areas besides
philosophy. In the 1970s he suggested a type of technology to improve 30 for
different Government departments. He developed a new way of printing banknotes
to increase 31 and
also designed a method for the 32 of
food. He also drew up plans for a prison which allowed the 33 of
prisoners at al times, and believed the same design could be used for other
institutions as well. When researching happiness, he investigated possibilities
for its 34
and suggested some methods of doing this.
A
measurement
B security
C implementation
D profits
E observation
F communication
G preservation
Questions 35-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of
the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 35-40 on your answer
sheet, write
YES
if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO
if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN
if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
35 One
strength of The Happiness Industry is its discussion of the
relationship between psychology and economics.
36 It
is more difficult to measure some emotions than others.
37
Watson’s ideas on behaviourism were supported by research on humans he carried
out before 1915.
38
Watson’s ideas have been most influential on governments outside America.
39 The
need for happiness is linked to industrialisation.
40 A
main aim of government should be to increase the happiness of the population.
Passage 1
1. FALSE
2. FALSE
3. TRUE
4. TRUE
5. FALSE
6. TRUE
7. NOT GIVEN
8. TRUE
9. wool
10. navigator
11. gale
12. training
13. fire
Passage 2
14. minerals
15. carbon
16. water
17. agriculture
18. C
19. E
20. A
21. D
22. E
23. C
24. F
25. G
26. F
Passage 3
27. D
28. A
29. B
30. F
31. B
32. G
33. E
34. A
35. YES
36. NOT GIVEN
37. NO
38. NOT GIVEN
39. YES
40. NO
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