reading 4
reading 4
reading 4
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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13. which are based on Reading Passage
1 on pages 2 and 3.
Flying the Coast
The development of an air service on the west coast of New zealand's South Island
Cut off from the rest of the country by a range of mountains, the west coast of New zealand's
South Island -or the "Coast as it is commonly known -was the country's"wild west frontier.
But unlike Fiordland to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the
Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich. Settlers hunted and
fished, logged, milled and mined. They farmed where they managed to clear the forest and
drain the swamps. It was pure survival at times. The isolation was inescapable, not so much
because of the great distances that travellers had to cover, but rather due to the topography of
the place -the mountains, gorges, glaciers, rivers and headlands-which necessitated long
detours and careful timing with regard to weather and tides.
Bridges were few and far between in the early years, and even ferry crossings were often
impossible after heavy rains. Each river had its attendant ferryman or woman whose attention
a traveller would attract with a rifle shot. It was the kind of country where one would greatly
benefit from a pair of wings.
Maurice Buckley, a World War I pilot, was the first to give Coasters, as the residents of the
region were called, such wings, by establishing the Arrow Aviation Company in 1923. That
year he bought an Avro biplane on the east coast, which he transported across the country by
rail, wings off, before reassembling it in a local garage. When he opened for business the
following year, the colourful Avro was an instant crowd-pleaser and Coasters queued up for
joyrides. For the first major flight, Buckley invited Dr Teichelmann, a local mountaineer, to
join him. They flew over the Franz Josef Glacier and landed at Okarito. Afterwards,
Teichelmann wrote about how extraordinary it was to look at the world from the air, " like
taking the roof off the house and watching the performances from above.
Next came an aviator named Bert Mercer, who made a reconnaissance flight to the Coast in
August 1933 and started Air Travel (NZ) the following year, Mercers aircraft of choice was a
DH83 Fox Moth. By comparison with the regular. open-air aircraft of the day, the Fox Moth
was a plane that offered considerable luxury, housing four passengers in an enclosed forward
area fully protected from the weather. Mercer opened for business in December 1934, picking
up the airlines first passengers and, on the last day of that year, commenced a regular delivery
of mail, carrying 73k9 to Haast and Okuru. From that day on, the Fox Moth became a much-
anticipated sight on the coast.
Mercer got on with everyone and won their respect by anticipating, then meeting their needs.
One of those was setting up the first aerial shipping route to help transport a kind of small
fish known as whitebait Starting in 1935 Mercer would put the plane down where there was
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no airstrip, instead using remote beaches such as the one at the mouth of the Paringa River,
collect the whitebait and whisk them off to the night train and waiting city markets in
perfectly fresh condition, Mercer relied on his senses -what he could see and hear -to
navigate, flying around the weather and contours of the land. Although often warned to do so
by aviation authorities, he refused to develop the skills necessary to navigate the plane "blind,
using just its instruments on the console in front of him. The old habits were too hard to
change.
With the outbreak of World war II, mercer's aircraft were considered so essential to the
remote Coast that they were not militarised. In fact, the business continued to grow in the
early years, thanks in large part to a government-issued subsidy, which allowed him to
expand into neighbouring areas. Despite the war in far-off lands, life on the Coast was
business as usual. The settlers were always in need of mail and transportation. In time,
though, this presented Mercer with a pressing issue: with so many now joining the Air Force,
he no longer had enough pilots. In 1942 he wrote in his diary, I am back to where I started
eight years ago- on my own.
The only solution to keep the airline going was to pack as much into every plane as possible
and make every flight count. But some of mercer's newly formed team objected to the
amount of cargo they had to carry, which for a small rural airline was a fact of life. One man,
Norm Suttle, left the airline after a few months in protest about carrying more than was
appropriate for the aircraft. This marked another decline in the airline's fortunes, When Bert
Mercer died in 1944, the airline was taken over by Fred Lucas, a man who shared mercer's
pioneering spirit. Under Lucas s leadership the newly formed West Coast Airways saw
Another decade of profitable returns. But in the following decade, times changed fast.
Helicopters were soon found to be ideal machines for the Coast terrain, and quickly took over
the vast majority of the local air transport business.
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Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write
1 In the 1930s, the Coast and Fiordland had populations of a similar size.
2 Most settlers on the Coast were migrants from oversea
3 The coast's geographical features made moving around the region difficult
4 The first bridges to be built on the Coast were swept away by floods
5 Maurice Buckley flew his Avro biplane to the Coast in 1923
6 Coasters were unwilling to fly at first
Questions 7-13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.
Bert Mercer and aviation on the Coast
Early Years
• Mercer set up Air Travel (NZ) in 1934
• theFoxMothwasnotedforits7 ...............................compared to other planes
• in 1934 mercer's company started to transport 8 ........................ and passengers
• from 1935 planes landed on 9 ......................... to pick up fresh produce
World War II
• the airline expanded at first because it got a 10......................... from the state
• there was a shortage of 11 .................................. by 1942
Final Years
• there were disputes at the airline about the quantity of 12....................... in each plane
• 1950s: 13 ................................. became popular and the airline suffered
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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reacting
Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.
A Even today, almost 400 years after his death, the works of the famous English
dramatist William Shakespeare have lost none of their appeal, nor have questions about the
source of his genius. For is it really credible that an ordinary actor from the small town of
Stratford-upon-Avon should metamorphose into so extraordinary a dramatist? For some, the
answer is Obvious: Shakespeare was a genius whose gift is no more suspicious than that of
the physicist Albert Einstein, the German salesman's son who devised the theory of relativity.
But others have insisted that a mere school leaver simply could not have penned such
sophisticated works. They believe that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for someone with far
more impressive qualifications who wrote the plays that still play to packed theatres today.
But after long and largely fruitless debate, researchers are now turning to scientific methods
to resolve the controversies surrounding Shakespeare. Ways of identifying the literary
fingerprint of writers are currently being developed using computers. This analysis of
features of literary style is known as 'stylometry' and with it researchers can recognise the
work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with impressive reliability.
B The idea of using these basic scientific techniques to probe questions of authorship
dates back to 1851, when the Victorian mathematician Augustus de Morgan suggested that
different authors might be identified through the frequency with which they used words of
different lengths. His idea attracted the attention of Thomas Mendenhall, an American
physicist who decided to use word length to investigate one of the oldest controversies about
the works of Shakespeare: were they actually written by someone else?
C As long ago as 1785, the Elizabethan writer and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was
identified as a possible contender for having written Shakespeare's works. Bacon's possible
motivation for not wanting to be known as the author of such masterpieces is far from clear,
but Mendenhall believed his methods might at least reveal telltale signs of Bacon's hand in
the plays. However, his results, published in 1901, revealed Bacon's writing style to be quite
unlike that of Shakespeare. But Mendenhall's methods also revealed some key concerns.
Recognising the need to include large samples of writing from both authors, Mendenhall
lumped all their works together, despite the fact that literary style can vary enormously
between plays, poetry and philosophy, for example. His focus on word length as the sole
'fingerprint of writing style was also questionable - for how could he be sure that some other
characteristics would not give different results? But Mendenhall's biggest fault was perhaps
simply that he was too far ahead of his time - he was attempting a task that cried out for the
kind of computers not even conceivable over 100 years ago. More recently with their
development scholars have been able to look for subtle peculiarities among the complete
works of authors, which, in Shakespeare's case, amount to over 800,000 words. D
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D One of the key controversies now being probed is Shakespeare's relationship with
other dramatists. Was he a lone genius or was his work the result of collaboration?
Traditional methods of investigating such questions have relied on traits like the use of
metaphor, but these may be shared by different authors simply on cultural grounds. In
contrast, modern stylometry focuses on far more fundamental characteristics which are less
likely to be shared by others. The text-crunching power of computers allows researchers to
pinpoint phrases, words or even individual letters by their frequency in the work of different
authors. Pattern recognition techniques are then used to develop a 'fingerprint' for each
author.
E Stylometry has come up with little to encourage the continual number of experts who
insist Shakespeare was simply too uneducated to create works of enduring brilliance. In 1996,
literary scholar Ward Elliott and mathematician Robert Valenza of Claremont McKenna
College, California, published the results of a stvlometric comparison of the works of
Shakespeare with those of over 30 of the proposed 'real' authors. Elliott and Valenza applied
a battery of 51 tests to computerised texts and found that none of the claimants had a
stylometric 'fingerprint similar to that of Shakespeare. 'I think these claims were driven
initially by a sense that Shakespeare is too "important" to be an ordinary person', says
Professor Kate Mcluskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of
Birmingham.
F Elliott and Valenza's research found something else too. Some of the earliest plays,
notably Henry VI and the notoriously violent Titus Andronicus, seem to be a combination of
Shakespeare and his brilliant contemporary the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was
born in the same year as Shakespeare. 'Traditional scholars accept that Marlowe influenced
Shakespeare's early work,' says Dr Thomas Merriam, one of Britain's leading stylometry
experts. He explains that, provisionally at least, stylometric studies suggest some of
Marlowe's actual text exists within the early plays of Shakespeare.
G Some scholars remain cautious about basing new views of Shakespeare's career on
stylometric analysis of centuries-old texts: If they have been edited, amended or shortened,
then the data from them is highly compromised,' says Dr Markus Dahl of London University.
Even so the results to date are in line with the growing view of Shakespeare as a hardworking
professional who perfected his skills throughout his career,
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Questions 14 - 19
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
17 mention of the time when the use of stylometry was first proposed
18 support for the opinion that Shakespeare became more skilful as he grew older
Questions 20 - 22
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Stylometry
A key controversy is Shakespeare's relationships with other writers. It has always been
uncertain whether he worked in 20 ....................... with others or not. To investigate this
issue, literary experts traditionally looked at stylistic features such as the writer's choice of
metaphor, although it was recognised that this choice may have been influenced by cultural
factors.
Questions 23 - 26
Look at the following statements (Questions 23-26) and the list of people below.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.
23 People search for a more distinguished author because they cannot accept that a
normal individual could write such brilliant plays
25 The fact that Shakespeare's works are likely to have been altered over the years raises
doubts about any stylometric analysis.
26 Analysis proves that Shakespeare's style differs from those of writers who have been
suggested as the authors of the plays.
List of People
A Thomas Mendenhall
B Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza
C Professor Kate Mcluskie
D Dr Thomas Merriam
E Dr Markus Dahl
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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 on pages 11 and 12
Questions 27 - 33
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-C and E-H from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
27 Paragraph A
28 Paragraph B
29 Paragraph C
Example
Paragraph D vi
30 Paragraph E
31 Paragraph F
32 Paragraph G
33 Paragraph H
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Saving languages
The campaign to keep minority languages alive
A Ten years ago, Michael Krauss, a professor at the University of Alaska, shocked his
colleagues in the discipline of lia gusties with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so
languages spoken in the world would disappear within a century. Krauss founded the Alaskan
Native Language Center to preserve as much as possible of the 20 tongues still known to the
state's indigenous people. Only two of those languages were being taught to children, and the
rest were rapidly falling from use. Other linguists are making similar predictions. A survey in
Australia found that 70 of the surviving 90 Aboriginal languages were no longer used
regularly by all age groups. The same is true for all but 20 of the other 175 North American
languages in the US.
B Outwardly, the consolidation of human language might seem like a good trend that
could ease ethnic tensions and aid global commerce. Linguists don't deny those benefits, and
they acknowledge that small communities often choose to switch to the majority language
because they believe it will boost their social or economic status.
C Many experts in the field nonetheless mourn the loss of rare languages, for several
reasons. Some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of human
speech, still far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which elements of
grammar and vocabulary - if any - are universal. An English researcher, Nicholas Ostler,
offers an example: 'Ica, spoken in northern Colombia, seems to have nothing comparable to a
personal pronoun system - I, we, you, etc. Otherwise, I would have thought that personal
pronouns were a linguistic universal.' Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration
patterns by comparing borrowed words in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these
cases, the wider the range of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right
answers.
D 'I think the value is mostly in human terms,' says James Matisoff, a specialist in rare
Asian languages at the University of California. 'Language is the most important element in
the culture of a community. When it dies, you lose the special knowledge of that culture and
a unique window on the world. But despite the constant talk about saving endangered
languages over the past ten years, the field of descriptive linguistics has accomplished little in
this respect. 'You would think that there would be some organised response to this situation,
some attempt to determine which languages can be saved and which should be documented
before they disappear,' says Sarah G Thomason, of the University of Michigan. 'But there
isn't any such effort.'
E However, there are some signs of progress. The Volkswagen Foundation, a German
charity, has created a multimedia archive in the Netherlands that can house recordings,
grammars, dictionaries and other data. Contributions from the Ford Foundation have helped a
master-apprentice programme, in which fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger
relative their native tongue through shared activities. So far, about 75 teams have completed
the programme. 'It's too early to call this language revitalisation, admits Leanne Hinton of
Berkeley. 'In California, the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the
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recruitment rate of young speakers. But, if nothing else, we prolong the survival of the
language.' This will give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.
F Complicating matters, dozens of institutions around the world are setting up digital
libraries on endangered languages. This could create chaos, because the projects use non-
standardised data formats, terminology and even names of languages. Gary F Simons, of the
Dallas-based research group SIL International, has been working to bring some order to this
by building an 'open languages data community' - a kind of digital card catalogue. This
system will allow researchers to check their theories against a vast array of data.
G However, even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it
vanishes from use is a fossil skeleton. Linguists may be able to sketch an outline of the
language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. As yet, there is no
discipline of conservation linguistics. Almost every strategy to keep people speaking a
language has succeeded in some places but failed in others. One factor that always seems to
occur in the death of a language, according to Hans-Jurgen Sasse of the University of
Cologne in Germany, is that speakers start regarding their own language as inferior to the
majority language. Children pick up on the attitude, and prefer to speak the dominant
language. This is how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic slipped into extinction.
Questions 34 - 38
Look at the following opinions (Questions 34-38) and the list of people below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 34-38 on your answer sheet.
34 In the long run, the California scheme will not have enough tutors.
List of People
A Michael Krauss
B Nicholas Ostler
C James Matisoff
D Sarah G Thomason
E Leanne Hinton
F Gary F Simons
G Hans-Jurgen Sasse
Questions 39 and 40