READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
How the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid
On August 16, 1858, the first telegraphic message crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Travelling
along a recently laid cable, the message from Britain’s Queen Victoria to US President James
Buchanan took just 16 hours. Prior to this, communication across the Atlantic would have been
by ship – and taken around 10 days.

People had been communicating via overland telegraph since 1844 and messages had been
passing between Britain and France since 1850 when the first submarine cable was laid in the
English Channel. But the attempt to span the Atlantic Ocean was the most daring attempt yet –
and was the talk of the age, the 19th-century equivalent of the Apollo space mission. The idea
that one could seemingly cheat time and space was inspiring and it changed the way people
thought about the world and their place in it.

The driving force behind the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was an American businessman
called Cyrus Field. In 1856, he and Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilson Bright
formed the Atlantic Telegraph company. They raised £350,000 mostly from businessmen in
London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. They also secured £14,000 annually from the
British government plus the loan of ships and a similar amount from the US government.

Getting the cable made proved to be difficult. The distance between the west coast of Ireland
and Newfoundland is over 3,700km, and Field was unable to find a company that was capable
of supplying the required cable in the desired time frame. As a result, two companies were
engaged to fulfil the order. The cable had a core of seven copper wires down which the signal
would pass. These were insulated with several layers of gutta-percha (a natural plastic made
from tree sap) and then armoured with iron wire. When it was complete, the weight of the
cable proved too great for any single ship. It was therefore loaded onto two: the British ship,
HMS Agamemnon and the American ship, USS Niagara.

The first attempt to lay the cable began on August 5 1857 with both ships departing from the
west coast of Ireland, near Ballycarbery Castle. The venture did not go according to plan. The
cable snapped on the first day, but was recovered from the bottom and repaired. A few days
later, mid-Atlantic, the cable snapped again, this time in water 3km deep. It was lost and the
expedition abandoned.

The next summer in 1858 they tried again. On this expedition, the two great ships met mid-
Atlantic, each carrying half the cable. The two ends were joined together and the ships sailed
away from each other. The cable broke three times and each time they were forced to start
again. On July 29, with little hope of success, the cable was joined for the fourth time and the
ships sailed for home. This time they succeeded. The cable was landed in Newfoundland on
August 4 and in Ireland the following day. And a week or so later Queen Victoria sent that first
trans-Atlantic message to President Buchanan.

The celebrations were tremendous. One US newspaper proclaimed:

New York has seldom seen a more complete holiday than that on September 1 1858, in
celebration of the successful laying of the Atlantic cable. The enthusiasm of an entire nation

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was expressed in this jubilee of its metropolis, and the era of a closer connection with Europe
was well ushered in by a day of genuine rejoicing and gaiety.

Celebrations were, however, short-lived: the cable performed badly and failed after just three
weeks. The project was put on hold, but the concept had been proved possible. By 1865,
further research had been carried out into the problems which had plagued the earlier cables.
In addition, cables had been successfully laid in the Mediterranean and in the Persian Gulf.
The cables that were used were better engineered, with thicker cores and better insulation
allowing faster transmission speeds.

In 1865, Field incorporated a second company to raise enough funds to try again. He
chartered the largest ship in the world at the time, the SS Great Eastern, which could carry the
entire Atlantic cable. Huge salt-water tanks and other state-of-the-art machinery were fitted to
ensure it remained in mint condition during its journey. All went well until, in heavy winds
1000km off the coast of Newfoundland, the cable rubbed on the side of the ship, snapped and
plunged to the deep ocean floor.

Not one to quit, Field vowed to return the following year. This final 1866 expedition proved to
be successful and the cable was put into commercial service on July 28. One month later, the
1865 cable was brought to the surface and repaired, providing a second Atlantic telegraph link.
The service had obvious and immediate impact. People in government were able to respond
more swiftly to evolving situations. News travelled more quickly, which boosted trade on both
sides of the Atlantic. It also had a profound effect on things such as family life and cultural ties.
For example, it was no longer so difficult for immigrants in America to keep in touch with their
families back home.

The roller-coaster of cable-laying highs and lows between 1857 and 1866 caught the
imaginations of a generation the way the space race did in the 20th century. There was
immense public interest in the endeavour and in telegraphy more generally. At the time,
telegraphic science was reported widely in the newspapers and the fortunes of the telegraph
companies were followed closely. Discussions of the pitfalls and solutions to spanning the
Atlantic with cable became everyday topics of conversation, and endless articles in the
newspapers ensured that the project stayed in people’s thoughts.

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Questions 1 – 6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text
In boxes 1 – 6 below, 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 Field failed to find a company that could produce all of the cable needed by the specified
date.
2 HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara set sail from different locations on August 5, 1857.
3 On the 1858 expedition, the cable broke three times because of a manufacturing fault.
4 The newspaper quoted in the passage disapproved of the enthusiasm that met the 1858
expedition.
5 Many articles appeared in the press between 1857 and 1866 about the science behind the
telegraph.
6 Between 1857 and 1866, people talked about the problems related to the telegraph project
on a regular basis.

Questions 7 – 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7 – 13 below.
The history of the trans-Atlantic telegraph
The first attempts to lay cable:
 the Atlantic Telegraph company was set up by Field, Brett and Bright in 1856
 the central wires of the cable were made of 7…………………..
 the cable was put onto two ships due to its 8…………………..
 the 1857 attempt failed
 the cable was successfully laid in 1858
Events between 1858 and 1866:
 celebrations were brief since problems emerged
 further research led to the cable’s thickness and 9………………. being improved
 Field set up another company to get the 10……………….. for another attempt
 the strong winds experienced by the SS Great Eastern led to the cable being lost
 the 1866 expedition was successful
The changes the trans-Atlantic telegraph brought about:
 members of the 11……………………
 could react more quickly to events
 news could be relayed faster, thus improving 12…….. …………
 it became easier for US 13…………………..
 to maintain contact with their families

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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
REMOVING UNWANTED NOISE
A A noisy restaurant, a busy road, or a windy day are all situations that can be intensely
frustrating for the hearing impaired when trying to understand what other people are saying.
Some 10 million people in the UK suffer from hearing difficulties and, helpful as hearing aids
are, those who wear them often complain that background noise continues to interfere with
their understanding. But what if hearing aid wearers could choose to filter out all the
troublesome sounds and focus just on the voices they want to hear?
Engineer Dr Richard Turner believes that this is fast becoming a possibility. He is developing a
system that identifies the distracting noise and ‘rubs it out’. ‘The poor performance in noise of
current hearing devices is a major reason why six million people in the UK who would benefit
from hearing aids do not use them,’ he said. Moreover, as the population ages, a greater
number of people will be hindered by the inability to hear clearly. In addition, hearing-impaired
patients who have been fitted with cochlear implants – devices implanted to help those whose
auditory hair cells have died – suffer from similar limitations.
B The solution lies in the statistics of sound, as Turner explained: ‘Many interfering noises
are immediately recognisable. Raindrops patter on a surface, a fire crackles, talkers babble at
a party and the wind howls. But what makes these different noises sound the way they do? No
two rain sounds are identical because the precise arrangement of falling water droplets is
never repeated. Nonetheless, there must be statistical similarities in the sounds of these
raindrops compared with, say, the crackle of a fire.’ He believes that for this reason, the brain
may be able to group similar types of sounds together based on their specific characteristics.
Turner and his colleagues have analysed this process mathematically and then developed
algorithms that mimic what the brain is doing. The mathematical system that they have
developed is capable of being ‘trained’ – a process that uses new methods from the field of
machine learning – so that it can recognise new sounds. ‘Rather surprisingly, it seems that a
relatively small set of statistics is sufficient to describe a large number of sounds’ he says.
Crucially, the system that Turner and his team have come up with is capable of telling the
difference between speech and other types of sound.
C ‘What we can now do is to erase background noise and pass these cleaned-up sounds
to a listener to improve their perception in difficult surroundings,’ said Turner. The idea is that
future devices will have several different modes in which they can operate. These might
include a mode for travelling in a car or on a train, a mode for places like a noisy party or a
busy restaurant, a mode that can be used outdoors in windy weather, and so on. The device
might intelligently select an appropriate mode based on the characteristics of the incoming
sound.
D ‘In a sense we are developing the technology to underpin intelligent hearing devices,’
said Turner. An additional possibility would be for users to override the selection made by the
device and select a processing mode based upon what sorts of noise they wish to erase. They
could even guide the processing on their device using an interface on a mobile phone through
wireless communication. Turner anticipates that his team will need two more years of
simulating the effect of modifications that clean up sound before they start to work with device
specialists. ‘If these preliminary tests go well, then we’ll be looking to work with hearing device

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companies to try to adapt their processing in order to incorporate these machine learning
techniques.’

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E Tinnitus sufferers, who are plagued by a constant ringing in their ears, could also benefit
from the technology. At present, people with tinnitus sometimes use environmental sound
generators as a distraction from the ringing in their ears. But such generators offer only a
limited selection of sounds – a gently flowing stream, waves lapping on the seashore, or
leaves rustling. With the new technology, individual patients could select the best sound to
distract them from their tinnitus.
F The technology not only holds promise for helping the hearing impaired, but it also has
the potential to improve phone calls – anyone who has ever tried to hold a conversation with
someone phoning from a crowded room will recognise the possible benefits of such a facility.
Systems that can deal with unwanted audio content would also be welcomed by the increasing
numbers of people using video-sharing websites. For example, a video containing a
conversation that takes place by a busy roadside on a windy day could be made more
intelligible by isolating the speech from the noises – users could even be offered the chance to
de-noise their video during the upload process.

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Questions 14 – 19
The text has six sections, A – F.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i – ix, in boxes 14 – 19 below.

List of Headings
i How hearing loss may be caused by certain types of sounds
ii Uses for Turner’s research in media and communications
iii Creating a model for the classification of sounds
iv Potential developments that still require further research
v A drawback in the help currently available to those with hearing problems
vi Providing the hearing-impaired with training in new technology
vii A more effective way to take attention away from a hearing problem
viii Analysing the sounds produced in the process of speaking
ix The possibility of a hearing aid that can adjust itself to different environments

14 Section A ______
15 Section B ______
16 Section C ______
17 Section D ______
18 Section E ______
19 Section F ______

Questions 20 – 23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 20 – 23 below.

Improving the performance of hearing aids

At present, many people find their hearing aids do not work well when there is background
noise. This also applies to people without hearing aids who have had implants fitted to help
with hearing loss. Dr Richard Turner is looking for a solution to this problem. Although sounds
are never 20………….… , he believes they do share some similarities. He and his colleagues
have worked on a mathematical system using 21………...….. which replicate how we hear
sounds. To allow this system to be ‘trained’, they have applied procedures used in machine
learning and found that many different sounds can be described using a limited number of
22……...……. They have now developed a system that can distinguish 23……………. from
other sounds.

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Questions 24 – 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes, 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24 Turner’s team are now planning a new development involving a device which could

A allow sound to be heard at a greater distance.

B adapt itself to different kinds of background noise.
C allow a user to remove all types of sound completely.
D adapt itself to disorders involving other senses.

25 In section E, a stream, waves and leaves are examples of the sounds that tinnitus
sufferers

A can currently use to help their condition.

B might choose to use if they were available.
C hear in their ears as a result of their condition.
D find to be the most natural solutions to their problem.

26 The writer refers to ‘a busy roadside on a windy day’ in section F to illustrate that

A unwanted noise could be erased from video recordings.

B some environments are difficult for the hearing-impaired.
C when noises are combined in a video they are difficult to erase.
D - people must cooperate in order to learn how to apply the technology

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READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
The Bug Picture
Lara Zanarini gives her view on insects

How many other species do we share our planet with? The truth is that scientists don't have
the slightest idea. Some early guesses of 30 million or even 100 million have been replaced in
the last few years with more reliable ones of somewhere between five to ten million species.
But despite this massive uncertainty there is one thing which is indisputable: the vast majority
of Earth’s inhabitants are invertebrate – without a backbone – and most of those are insects.

It is therefore not very surprising that these creatures have a pre-eminent impact on the
functioning of global ecosystems. Creatures like us – and I don’t just mean primates (such as
apes and monkeys), but all vertebrates (back-boned animals) – make up less than three
percent of all species.

Yet it is these very animals that most people hold dear, especially those with a passing
resemblance to ourselves. I use a slide in my lectures which has images of all sorts of insects
along with one face-on image of a female slender loris, a wide-eyed furry primate, with a baby
on its back. No prizes for guessing the first, and probably the only, thing audiences look at. It
seems we can’t help ourselves. Appealing they may be, but in the great ecological scheme of
things, they are fairly useless. If you really want to understand the world around you – you
need to take a serious look at insects.

Pollination, the process by which flying insects transfer grains of pollen from one plant to
another and so aid their reproduction, is perhaps one of the most essential partnerships ever
to have evolved. This plant-insect version of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’, has
been around for 100 million years and it has given the world a rich diversity, and not just of
flowering plants. Twenty thousand species of bee are responsible for the continued survival of
the angiosperms, which includes a very long list of fruit and vegetables from pumpkins, plums
and peas to cherries, cucumbers and cocoa.

What about herbivory and carnivory – plant- and meat-eating? Ecology really doesn’t get much
more basic than this. The light energy from the sun is converted to chemical energy and the
plants – the producers – that carry out this astonishing transformation are fed on by primary
consumers – the herbivores. They in turn are eaten by secondary consumers – the carnivores.
But it may come as a surprise to many that all the herds of grazing ungulates – cows, goats
and sheep – are entirely ‘out-munched’, perhaps by a factor of ten to one, by myriads of tiny
insects. What about the meat-eaters? Again, insects consume many times more animal flesh
than all vertebrate carnivores put together, and ants alone are the major carnivorous species
in any habitat you could mention.

If this sounds implausible, consider that although insects are individually small, there are an
awful lot of them – an estimated ten million, million, million (1019) with an impressively large
biomass*. Insects are also the major food source for countless species. Many trillions of
creatures a year are eaten by insect-eating species of birds, bats and a multitude of other furry
and feathery animals. Space prevents me from extolling the role of insects in global
decomposition and nutrient recycling.

But there is a problem looming – the first effects of which we are already feeling. Almost every
study that has been done to date points to a steady decline in insect species’ richness and
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abundance. The loss of natural habitat and the prodigious amounts of pesticides used in
agriculture are taking their toll. The decreases seen in well-studied insect groups such as bees
and butterflies are surely taking place in many other groups as well. At what point does the
web of life become so frayed that it starts to disintegrate? We may find out sooner rather than
later.

It is thought that the world’s tropical forests hold more than half of all extant species. If these
complex habitats are being felled and degraded at even the slowest rate that has been
suggested, it will still only be a matter of a few hundred years before they are lost. It is
therefore an inescapable conclusion that our planet could lose more than half of all its living
species in the time it takes for a tiny acorn to become a veteran oak tree.

There’s no doubt about it – we are the most intelligent and capable species yet to evolve on
Earth. In a very short time after our appearance we covered the entire globe, establishing
colonies wherever it was possible to survive. A few of us have walked on the surface of the
Moon and visited the deepest abysses of the oceans. We spend vast sums of money to probe
the very make-up of matter and remotely examine other parts of our solar system. We want to
understand the science of everything from the infinitesimally small to the astronomically large.
This truly is ‘big’ science and of course it’s expensive. But do we have to do it right now? What
about understanding the environment a bit better? Perhaps what we actually need is a bit
more ‘bug’ science.

* biomass: the total quantity or weight of organisms in a certain area

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Questions 27 – 31
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in the text?
In boxes 27 – 31 below, write.
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

27 Early guesses probably greatly over-estimated the total number of species on Earth.
28 Primates play a significant role in the ecology of our planet.
29 We still have a great deal to learn about the importance of pollination.
30 Some people may be unaware that the world’s insects consume more food overall than
mammals.
31 It will take a long time for us to learn the effects of habitat loss and extensive pesticide
use.

Questions 32 – 36
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A – F, below.
Write the correct letter, A – F, in boxes 32 – 36 below.

32 Scientists have recently revised their views regarding

33 There is absolutely no doubt about
34 Almost every study done so far has indicated
35 A lot of research on insect groups has focused on
36 The rate at which tropical forests are being lost can help us calculate

A a fall in the total number and variety of insects in the world.

B the number of plants that are pollinated by insects.
C how many different animal species are currently in existence.
D how long it will be before the Earth's biodiversity is drastically reduced.
E the predominance of invertebrates among the Earth's species.
F the declining numbers of bees and butterflies.

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Questions 37 – 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes, 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37 In the third paragraph, the writer refers to a particular slide to emphasise

A the predominance of insects in the world.

B a common misunderstanding about global biodiversity.
C our instinctive reaction towards certain types of animals.
D the main distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates.

38 What does 'they' in the third paragraph refer to?

A lectures about animals given by the writer

B audiences who attend events focused on insect life
C images which depict various different types of species
D creatures which appear comparatively similar to humans

39 What does the writer imply about 'big' science in the final paragraph?

A It should not be our priority at the moment.

B It serves no useful purpose in the long term.
C It will cost an unreasonable amount in the future.
D It results from our natural curiosity about the world.

40 What point does the writer make overall about insects?

A Certain insect species are more at risk than others.

B Insects are more important than many people realise.
C There is an interdependence between different insect species.
D The ecological role of insects is likely to change in the near future.

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