READING PASSAGE 1
Read the text and answer questions 1-13.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1.
Voyage of Going: Beyond the Blue Line 2
A. One feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he ‘discovered’ Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: ‘How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this vast ocean?’
B. Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of Efate, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window into the shadowy world of those early voyagers. At the same time, other pieces of this human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data gleaned from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from sediments in alpine lakes in South America may help explain how, more than a thousand years later, a second wave of seafarers beat their way across the entire Pacific.
C. ‘What we have is a first-or-second-generation site containing the graves of some of the Pacific’s first explorers,’ says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the Australian National University and co-leader of an international team excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator, digging up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a grave the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old. It is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the 1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the sea not just as explorers but also as pioneers, bringing everything they would need to build new lives — their families and livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools.
D. Within the span of a few centuries the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world from the jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral outliers of Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the way they explored millions of square miles of unknown sea, discovering and colonizing scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes: Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.
E. What little is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific came from Taiwan. And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines. With the discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Efate, the volume of data available to researchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at least 62 individuals have been uncovered so far including old men, young women, even babies — and more skeletons are known to be in the ground. Archaeologists were also thrilled to discover six complete Lapita pots. It’s an important find, Spriggs says, for it conclusively identifies the remains as Lapita. ‘It would be hard for anyone to argue that these aren’t Lapita when you have human bones enshrined inside what is unmistakably a Lapita urn.’
F. Several lines of evidence also undergird Spriggs’s conclusion that this was a community of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania. For one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them early in the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the obsidian flakes littering the site indicates that the rock wasn’t local; instead it was imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago, the springboard for the Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the teeth of several skeletons. DNA teased from these ancient bones may also help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did all Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one outward migration from a single point in Asia, or several from different points? ‘This represents the best opportunity we’ve had yet,’ says Spriggs, ‘to find out who the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who their best descendants are today.’
G. There is one stubborn question for which archaeology has yet to provide any answers: How did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which could reveal how the canoes were sailed. Nor do the oral histories and traditions of later Polynesians offer any insights, for they segue into myth long before they reach as far back in time as the Lapita. ‘All we can say for certain is that the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean voyages, and they had the ability to sail them,’ says Geoff Irwin, a professor of archaeology at the University of Auckland and an avid yachtsman. Those sailing skills, he says, were developed and passed down over thousands of years by earlier mariners who worked their way through the archipelagoes of the western Pacific making short crossings to islands within sight of each other. Reaching Fiji, as they did a century or so later, meant crossing more than 500 miles of ocean, pressing on day after day into the great blue void of the Pacific. What gave them the courage to launch out on such a risky voyage?
H. The Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade winds, Irwin notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key to their success. ‘They could sail out for days into the unknown and reconnoiter, secure in the knowledge that if they didn’t find anything, they could turn about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It’s what made the whole thing work.’ Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried out to sea by the tides, and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon that often betokens an island in the distance. Some islands may have broadcast their presence with far less subtlety than a cloud bank. Some of the most violent eruptions anywhere on the planet during the past 10,000 years occurred in Melanesia, which sits nervously in one of the most explosive volcanic regions on Earth. Even less spectacular eruptions would have sent plumes of smoke billowing into the stratosphere and rained ash for hundreds of miles. It’s possible that the Lapita saw these signs of distant islands and later sailed off in their direction, knowing they would find land. For returning explorers, successful or not, the geography of their own archipelagoes provided a safety net to keep them from overshooting their home ports and sailing off into eternity.
I. However, they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific, then called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of islands - more than 300 in Fiji alone. Still, more than a millennium would pass before the Lapita’s descendants, a people we now call the Polynesians, struck out in search of new territory.
READING PASSAGE 2
Read the text and answer questions 14-26.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Multitasks
A. Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multitaskers. Multitaskers are able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus. However, Thomas Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really do multiple things simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music, but in reality, the brain can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will cause you to ignore some of the words of the music. When people think they are accomplishing two different tasks efficiently, what they are really doing is dividing their focus. While listening to music, people become less able to focus on their surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when we talk with friends and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to someone else talk, or maybe they are reading a text on their smartphones and don’t hear what you are saying. Lehman called this phenomenon ‘email voice’.
B. The world has been changed by computers and their spin offs like smartphones or cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smartphone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day-to-day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more people than ever. Even inventions such as the cordless phone has increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up and chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.
C. Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species. He found that for humans, the size of this part constitutes one-third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger in a human, it allows a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimuli to his subjects in a way that mimics multitasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients’ heads to pick up the electrical patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.
D. Davis Meyer, a professor of the University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment, Meyer found that when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person focused on a single task one at a time.
E. People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking. Gloria Mark set office workers as her subjects. She found that they were constantly multitasking. She observed that nearly every 11 minutes, people at work were disrupted. She found that doing different jobs at the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by outside sources. She found that in an office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no reason at all, check a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. She suggested that the average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The formats of media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time.
F. So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As a matter of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic.
No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cellphones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction. Instead of arriving at the office and checking all of their e-mails for new tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distractions and efficiently finish tasks one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multitasking.
READING PASSAGE 3
Read the text and answer questions 27-40.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children’s and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in the Grimms’ collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remain unrivalled to this day.
Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves. Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany had been overrun by the French under Napoleon, who were intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of saving the endangered oral tradition of Germany.
For much of the 19th century, teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original Snow White, the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. Even today some protective parents shy away from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence.
Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children’s and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children’s literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare. In the Grimms’ hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil.
In the 20th century the Grimms’ fairy tales have come to rule the bookshelves of children’s bedrooms. The stories read like dreams come true: handsome lads and beautiful damsels, armed with magic, triumph over giants and witches, and wild beasts. They outwit mean, selfish adults. Inevitably, the boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. And parents keep reading because they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents. According to the Grimms, the collection served as ‘a manual of manners’.
Altogether, some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper’s daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travellers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasures was ‘Aschenputtel’—Cinderella. Marie Hassenpflug was a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Snow White’, and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian fairy tales.
Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rolleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, and creative energy — these are Teutonic traits. The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also coloured the narratives. Throughout Europe, children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hansel and Gretel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in ‘The Six Swans.’ ‘The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimms’ fantasy’, Rolleke points out. ‘It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times.’
The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the ‘universal style’ of the writing. ‘You have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless.’ ‘The tales allow us to express ‘our utopian longings’,’ says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigour of the original text. ‘They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.’
Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic value of the Grimms’ stories, calling fairy tales the ‘great comforters’. By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim’s theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren’t interested in exercising their unconsciousness. The Grimm tales, in fact, please in an infinite number of ways. Something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. This flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture.
Part 1
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-6, write
YES if the statement is true
NO if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
1 Captain Cook once expected the Hawaii might speak another language of people from other pacific islands.
2 Professor Spriggs and his research team went to the Efate to try to find the site of ancient cemetery.
3 The Lapita completed a journey of around 2,000 miles in a period less than a centenary.
4 The Lapita were the first inhabitants in many pacific islands.
5 The unknown pots discovered in Efate had once been used for cooking.
6 The urn buried in Efate site was plain as it was without any decoration.
7 The Lapita’s eastward migration was motivated by the search for fertile lands.
Questions 8-10
Summary
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage 1, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage 1 for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet.
Scientific Evidence found in Efate site
Tests show the human remains and the charcoal found in the buried urn are from the start of the Lapita period. Yet the 8 covering many of the Efate site did not come from that area. Then examinations carried out on the 9 discovered at Efate site reveal that not everyone buried there was a native living in the area. In fact, DNA could identify the Lapita’s nearest 10 present-days.
Questions 11-13
What did the Lapita travel in when they crossed the oceans?
11
In Irwin’s view, what would the Lapita have relied on to bring them fast back to the base?
12
Which sea creatures would have been an indication to the Lapita of where to find land?
13
Part 2
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
14 A reference to a domestic situation that does not require multitasking.
15 A possible explanation of why we always do multitask together.
16 A practical solution to multitask in work environment.
17
Relating multitasking to the size of prefrontal cortex.
18 Longer time spent doing two tasks at the same time than one at a time.
Questions 19-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of scientists below.
Match each statement with the correct scientist, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
| List of Scientists |
|
A Thomas Lehman |
19 When faced with multiple visual stimulants, one can only concentrate on one of them.
20 Doing two things together may be faster but not better.
21 People never really do two things together even if you think you do.
22 The causes of multitask lie in the environment.
23 Even minor changes in the workplace will improve work efficiency.
Questions 24-26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26.
A term used to refer to a situation when you are reading a text and cannot focus on your surroundings is 24 .
The 25 part of the brain controls multitasking.
The practical solution of multitask in work is not to allow use of cellphone in 26 .
Part 3
Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-32, write
YES if the statement is true
NO if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
27 The Grimm brothers believed they would achieve international fame.
28 The Grimm brothers were forced to work in secret.
29 Some parents today still think Grimm fairy tales are not suitable for children.
30 The first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales sold more widely in England than in Germany.
31 Adults like reading Grimm’s fairy tales for reasons different from those of children.
32 The Grimm brothers based the story “Cinderella” on the life of Dorothea Viehmann
Questions 33-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.
Write your answers in boxes 33-35.
Questions 36-40
Summary
Complete the summary using the list of sentences, A-H, below.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 36-40.
36 Heinz Rolleke said the Grimm’s tales are “German” because the tales.
37 Heinz Rolleke said the abandoned children in tales.
38 Bernhard Lauer said the writing style of the Grimm brothers is universal because they.
39 Jack Zipes said the pursuit of happiness in the tales means they.
40 Bruno Bettelheim said the therapeutic value of the tales means that the fairy tales.
| A. reflect what life was like at that time B. help children deal with their problems C. demonstrate the outdated system D. tell of the simplicity of life in the German countryside E. encourage people to believe that they can do anything F. recognize the heroes in the real life G. contribute to the belief in nature power H. avoid details about characters’ social settings. |