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.
The development of the silk industry
Silk, a natural fibre produced by a particular worm called a silkworm, has been used
in clothing for many centuries
When silk was first discovered in China gold. Before long, silk became a currency
over 4,500 years ago, it was reserved used in trade with foreign countries, which
exclusively for the use of the emperor, lus continued mto the Tang dynasty (616-907
close relations and the very highest of his AD). It is possible that this added
dignitaries. Within the palace, the emperor importance was the result of a major
is believed to have worn a robe of white increase in production. Silk also found its
silk; outside, he, his principal wife, and the way so thoroughly into the Chinese
heir to the throne wore yellow, the colour of language that 230 of the 5,000 most
the earth. common characters of Mandarin1 have ‘silk’
as their key component.
Gradually silk came into more general
use, and the various classes of Chinese Silk became a precious commodity, highly
society began wearing tunics of silk. As well sought after by other countries from an early
as being used for clotlung and decoration, date, and it is believed that the silk trade
silk was quite quickly put to industrial use, actually existed before the Silk Road2 was
and rapidly became one of the principal officially opened in the second century BC.
elements of the Chinese economy. It was An Egyptian mummy with a silk thr ead in
used in the production of musical her hail-, dating from 1070 BC, has been
instruments, as string for fishing, and even discovered in the village of Deir el Medina
as the world’s first luxury paper. Eventually near the Valley of the Kings, and is probably
even the common people were able to wear the earliest evidence of the silk trade. During
garments of silk. the second century BC, the Chinese emperor
Han Wu Di’s ambassadors travelled as far
Dining the Han dynasty (206 BC-220
west as Persia and Mesopotamia, bearing
AD), silk ceased to be a mere fabric and
gifts including silks. A range of important
became a form of currency. Farmers paid
finds of Chinese silks have also been made
then taxes in gram and silk, and silk was
along the Silk Road. One of the most
used to pay civil servants and to reward
dramatic of these finds was some Tang silk
subjects for outstanding services. Values
discover in 1900 it is believed that around
were calculated in lengths of silk as they had
1015 AD Buddhist monks, possibly alarmed
previously been calculated in weight of
by the threat of mvasion by Tibetan people,
2An ancient trade route between China and the
Mediterranean Sea
had sealed more than ten thousand walking sticks. Under their supervision the
manuscripts and silk paintings, silk banners eggs hatched into worms, and the worms
and textiles ni caves near Dunhuang, a spun silk threads. Byzantium was in the silk
trading station on the Silk Road in north business at last. The Byzantine church and
west China. state created imperial workshops,
monopolising production and keeping the
Some historians believe the first Europeans
secret to themselves. This allowed a silk
to set eyes upon the fabulous fabric were the
industry to be established, undercutting the
Roman legions of Marcus Licinius Crassus,
market for ordinary-grade Chinese silk.
Governor of Syria. According to certahi
However, high quality silk textiles, woven in
accounts of the period, at an important battle
Clnna especially for the Middle Eastern
near the Euphrates River in 53 BC, the
market, continued to achieve high prices in
Roman soldiers were so startled by the
the West, and trade along the Silk Road
bright silken banners of the enemy that they
continued as before. By the sixth century the
fled m panic. Yet, within decades Chinese
Persians, too, had mastered the art of silk
silks were widely worn by the rich and noble
weaving, developing then own rich patterns
families of The Roman Emperor
and techniques. But it wasn't until the 13th
Heliogabalus (218-222 AD) wore nothing
century that Italy began silk production,
but silk. By 380 AD. the Roman historian
with the introduction of 2,000 skilled silk
Marcellinus Ammianus reported that, ‘The
weavers from Constantmople.Eventually,
use of silk, which was once confined to the
silk production became widespread
nobility, has now spread to all classes
throughout Europe.
without distinction — even to the lowest.’
The desire for silk continued to increase World silk production lias approximately
over the centuries. Despite this demand, the doubled during the last 30 years in spite of
price of silk remained very high. man-made fibres replacing certain uses of
silk. Before this period, China and Japan
In spite of then- secrecy about production
were the two main producers, together
methods, the Chinese eventually lost then
manufacturing more than 50 per cent of
monopoly on silk production. Knowledge of
world production each year. After the late
silk production methods reached Korea
1970s, however, China dramatically
around 200 BC, when waves of Chinese
increased its silk production, and once again
immigrants anived there. Shortly after 300
became the world’s leading producer.
AD, it travelled westward, and the
cultivation of the silkworm was established
in India.
Around 550 AD silk production reached the
Middle East. Records indicate that two
monks from Constantinople (modern-day
Istanbul), capital of the Byzantine Empire,
appeared at their emperor’s court with
silkworm eggs which they had obtamed
secretly, and hidden in their hollow bamboo
Questions 1-7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1 -7 on your answer sheet.
Chinese silk
Early Uses
Clothing
at first, silk only available to Chinese of high rank
emperor wore 1 silk indoors
In industry
silk items included parts of musical instillments, fishing strings and 2
Currency
... as
well as for wages and rewards
silk was used as payment of 3
• silk replaced 4 as a unit of value
• silk soon used as payment in 5
Evidence of silk trade
1070 BC, Egypt:
• hair of a 6 contained silk
2nd century BC, Persia and Mesopotamia:
• gifts of silk were presented by Chinese ambassadors
1015 AD, north-west China:
• silk objects were hidden inside 7
Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the Information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
8 Their fust sight of silk created fear among Roman soldiers.
9 The quality of Chinese silk imported by the early Romans varied widely.
10 The Byzantine emperor first acquired silkworm eggs from the Chinese emperor.
11 The price of high-grade Chinese silk fell due to competition from Middle-Eastern
producers.
12 Silk was produced in the Middle East several centuries before it was produced in
Europe.
13 Global silk production has declined in recent years.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
on pages 6 and 7.
The discovery of a baby mammoth
A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species
A. Ona May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets
reindeer herder named Yuri Kliudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey Rrver, looking
carefully at a diminutive coipse. Although he'd never seen such an animal before, Kliudi
had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each
summer, and this persuaded him the coipse was a baby mammoth- It was eerily well
preserved. Apart from its missing hail' and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Kliudi realised
the fmd might be significant and he knew he couldn't just return home and forget all
about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to consult an old
fr iend named Knill Serotetto. His fr iend took hun to meet the director of the local
museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Kliudi and Serotetto back to the
Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.
B. Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the
extinctions conicided with the end of the most recent ice age. many researchers believe
that the primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp nse in temperature, which
dramatically altered the vegetation. We have strong evidence that the temperatine rise
played a significant part in then extinction says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and
mammoth expert at London's Natural History Museum, 'hi Eurasia, the tuning of the two
events matches closely.' The extinctions also conicided, however, with the arrival of
modem humans, hi addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and
tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were
as much to blame as the temperahire rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C. The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological
Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum's director, was one of the fu st
scientists to view the baby, a female. Accordmg to Tikhonov, Kliudi had rescued 'the best
preserved mammoth to come down to us from the Ice Age', and he gratefully named her
Lyuba, after Kliudi's wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find
than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30
years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard
Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and
Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in
a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely. Other than the missing hair and
toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D. Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba's anatomy: her milk
tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came
7 ~ I 1 egion of North America, and his research showed that these
animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the
other hand, to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His
samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should
have been at theft peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but
also when liumans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter.
He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off
the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E. In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to
undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicme. The test
confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It
also showed that the end of her tnmk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled
with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues,
Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba.
During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat,
which had been indicated earlier by the scan, hi fact, the sediment in Lyuba's trunk was
packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk.
If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial
vacuum was created in the base of her tnmk, which would have flattened surrounding
soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba's death were clear: she had
asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence
for drowning than asphyxiation.
F. Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba lias begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some
clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her
dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluatmg
health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her
well-preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of
Manmiuthus priniigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to
Siberia fr om North America would take theft place. Finally, Lyuba's premolars and tusks
revealed that she had been bom in late spring and was only a month old when she died
i roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago
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 similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world
15 details of the uses to which mammoth body parts were put
16 a theory that accounts for the damage to Lyuba’s face
17 an explanation of how an individual was able to identify a small coipse
18 a comparison between Lyuba and other young mammoth coipses
Questions 19-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-G.
Write the collect letter, A-G, in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
19 The indications are that mammoths died as a result of climate change.
20 Teeth analysis is important in discovering why mammoths died out.
21 The corpse of the baby mammoth is in better condition than any other that has been
discovered.
22 It would be a mistake to ignore the baby mammoth's discovery, because of its potential
importance.
23 Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good physical
condition.
List of People
A Yiu i Kliudi
B Kii ill Serotetto
C Adrian Lister
D Alexei Tikhonov
E Dan Fisher
F Bernard Buigues
G Naoki Suzuki
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 on your answer sheet.
24 Some researchers say that a marked rise in temperature impacted on mammoths by
changing the type ofavailable.
25 Fisher concluded that many of the mammoth tusks he looked at displayed signs
of
26 Not Ion? after T vuha’s death, the Mammuthus prnnigenius group she belonged to was
replaced i v mother oup that came from
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
on pages 10 and 11.
What makes a musical expert?
How does someone become expert in music? And is it really
possible to have a ‘talent’ for music?
Does that class of people acknowledged to be musical experts just have more of the same basic
skills we are all endowed with, or do they have a set of abilities - or neural structures - that are
totally different from those of the rest of us? Are high levels of musical achievement simply the
result of training and practice, or are they based on innate brain structure - what we refer to as
'talent'? Talent can be defined as something that originates in genetic structures and that is
identifiable by Pained people who can recognize its existence before a person has achieved
exceptional levels of performance. The emphasis on early identification means that to investigate
it, we study the development of skills in children.
It is evident that some children acquire skills more rapidly than others, the age of onset for
walking and talking var ies widely, even between children in the same household. There may be
genetic factors at work, but these are closely linked with other factors - with a presumably
environmental component - such as motivation and family dynamics. Similar factors can
influence musical development and can mask the contribution of genetics to musical ability.
Brain studies, so far, haven’t been of much use in sorting out the issues. Gottfried Schlaug at
Harvard collected brain scans of individuals with absolute pitch* (AP) and showed that a region
in the brain called the planum temporale is larger in these people than in others. This suggests
that the planum is involved in AP, but it’s not clear if it starts out larger in people who eventually
acquire AP, or if the acquisition of AP makes the planum increase in size.
Results of research into the areas of the brain involved in skilled motor movement are more
conclusive. Studies of violin players have shown that the region of the brain responsible for
controlling the movement of the left hand (the hand that requires greater precision in violin
playing) mcreases m size as a result of practice We do not know yet if the propensity for mcrease
pre-exists in some people and not others.
The evidence against talent comes from research on how much training the experts do. Like
experts in mathematics, chess, or sports, experts in music require lengthy periods of instinction
and practice, hi several studies, the very best music students were found to have practiced more
than twice as much as the others In another study, students were secretly divided into two groups
based on teachers' perceptions of their talent. Several years later, it was found that the students
who achieved the highest performance ratings had practiced the most, irrespective of which
people who can identify or sing any musical note correctly without help
'talent' group they had been assigned to, suggesting that practice does not merely correlate with
achievement, but causes it.
Anders Ericsson, at Florida State University, approaches the topic of musical expertise as a
general problem in cognitive psychology. He takes as a starting point the assumption on that
there are certain issues involved in becoming an expert at anything, a we can learn about musical
expertise by studying expert chess players, athletes, artists, mathematicians, as well as the
musicians themselves. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of
practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in
anything, hi study after study, of composers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players and
master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Someone would do this amount of
practice if they practiced, for example, roughly 20 hours a week for ten yeais. Of course, this
doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some
people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no-one has yet found a case in
which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain
this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
The ten-thousand-hour theory is consistent with what we know about how the brain learns.
Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neural tissue. The more
experiences we have with something, the stronger the memory/learning trace for that experience
becomes. Although people differ in how long it takes them to consolidate information neutrally,
it remains true that increased practice leads to a greater number of neural traces, which create
stronger memory representation.
The classic rebuttal to this theoiy goes something like this: What about Mozart? I hear that he
composed his first symphony at the age of four!’ First, there is a factual error here- Mozart didn’t
write it until he was eight. Still, this is unusual, to say the least However, this early work
received little acclaim and was not performed very often, hi fact the only reason we know about
it is because the child who wrote it grew up to become Mozart. And Mozart had an expert
teacher in his father, who was renowned as a teacher of musicians all over Europe. We don t
knowz how' much Mozart practiced, but if he started at age two and worked thirty- two hours a
week (quite possible, given that his father was a stern taskmaster) he would have made his ten
thousand hours by the tune he composed his first symphony This does not mean that there are no
genetic factors involved in Mozart’s greatness, but that inborn traits may not be the only cause.
Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D
Write the collect letter m boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.
27 In the first paragraph, the writer suggests that a musician who is talented is someone
A who is aware of being set apart from other people.
B whose brain structure is unlike that of other people.
C who can perform extremely well in early childhood.
D whose essential skills are more varied than those of ordinary people.
28 According to the writer, what is unclear about the findings of Gottfried Schlaug?
A which part of the brain is finked to a particular musical skill
B which type of musical skill leads to the greatest change in the brain
C whether a feature of the brain is a cause or an effect of a musical skill
D whether the acquisition of a musical skill is easier for some people than
others
29 According to the writer, what has been established by studies of violin players?
A Changes may occur in the brain following violin practice.
B Left-handed violinists have a different brain structure from other people.
C A violinist’s hand size is not due to practice but to genetic factors
D Violinists are born with brains that have a particular structur e.
30 According to the writer, findings on the amount of practice done by expert musicians
suggest that
A talent may have little to do with expertise.
B practice may actually prevent the development of talent.
C talent may not be recognised by teachers.
D expertise may be related to quality of instruction.
Questions 31-36
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
in boxes 31-36 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
31 Anders Ericsson’s work with cognitive psychology has influenced other researchers.
32 Different areas of expertise seem to have one specific thing in common.
33 In order to be usefill, practice must be earned out regularly every day.
34 Anyone who practices for long enough can reach the level of a w'orld-class expert.
35 Occasionally, someone can become an expert at global level with fewer than 10,000
hours' practice.
36 Existing know ledge of learning and cognitive skills supports the importance of
practice.
Questions 37-40
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
Mozart
The case of Mozart could be quoted as evidence against the 10,000-hour-practice theory.
However, the writer points out that the young Mozart received a lot of 37from his
father, and that the symphony he wrote at the age of 38was not 39
and may be of only academic niterest. The case therefore supports the view that expertise is not
solely the result of 40characteristics.
A popular B artistic C completed
D eight E tuition F encouragement
G inherited H four I practice
J two
Silk The discovery of a baby What makes a musical
mammoth expert
1 white 14 D 27 C
2 paper 15 B 28 C
3 taxes 16 E 29 A
4 gold 17 A 30 A
5 foreign 18 C 31 Not Given
6 mummy 19 C 32 Yes
7 caves 20 E 33 Not Given
8 True 21 D 34 No
9 Not Given 22 A 35 No
10 False 23 E 36 Yes
11 False 24 vegetation 37 E
12 True 25 human hunting 38 D
13 False 26 North America 39 A
40 G
