TEST 8
READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

BUILD A MEDIEVAL CASTLE

Build a Medieval Castle

A   Michel Guyot, owner and restorer of Saint Fargeau castle in France, first had the idea of building a 13th-century style fortress following the discovery that the 15th-century red bricks of his castle obscured the stone walls of a much older stronghold. His dream was to build a castle just as it would have been in the Middle Ages, an http://www.bo.com/iclti9 idea which some found mildly amusing and others dismissed as outright folly.

However, Maryline Martin – project director – was inspired by the exciting potential for the venture to regenerate the region. It took several months to bring together and mobilise all the various different partners: architects, archaeologists and financial backers. A site in the heart of Guédelon forest was found: a site which offered not only all the resources required for building a castle – a stone quarry, an oak forest and a water supply – but in sufficient quantities to satisfy the demands of this gigantic site. The first team started work and on June 20th 1997 the first stone was laid.

B   Unlike any other present-day building site, Michel Guyot’s purpose is clear, he warmly welcomes members of the public to participate. The workers’ role is to demonstrate and explain, to a wide audience, the skills of our forefathers. Stone quarrying, the building of vaulted ceilings, the blacksmith’s work and the raising of roof timbers are just some of the activities which visitors can witness during a visit to Guédelon. The workers are always on hand to talk about their craft and the progress of the castle.

Each year 60,000 children visit Guédelon with their schools. The site is an excellent educational resource, bringing to life the history of the Middle Ages. Guided tours are tailored to the school curriculum and according to age groups: activity trails for primary school children and interactive guided tours for secondary school children. Pupils of all ages have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of medieval stonemasons by taking part in a stonecarving workshop or discover the secrets of the medieval master-builders at the geometry workshop.

C   Workers in the Burgundy region of France are building a 13th century castle. They’re not restoring an old castle. They’re actually building a new old castle. See the builders are constructing it from scratch. The craftsmen have been working for nearly ten years now but they’re not even halfway done yet. That’s because they’re using only medieval tools and techniques. The World’s Gerry Hadden takes US to the site of what will be the Guedelon Castle. Another reason said by Jean Francois, a member of Guedelon stone cutter’s guild, for eight hours a day he bangs on a 13th century chisel with a 13th century iron mallet.

Build a Medieval Castle

D   The progress of construction has to give way to tourists side for their visits. The visitors from 2010, however unsightly they may be, are vital to the project. The initial funding came not from pillaging the local peasantry but from regional councils, the European Union and large companies. For the last 10 years, Guédelon, 100 miles southeast of Paris, has funded itself from its entrance fees. Last year it had a record 300,000 visitors, who paid almost €2.5m, making it the second most-visited site in Burgundy. The mostvisited site was the Hospice de Beaune, a beautiful 15th-century almshouse built 600 years before, or, if you prefer, 200 years “after”, Guédelon.

E   limestone is found in the construction of various local buildings, from the great and prestigious edifice of Ratilly castle to the more modest poyaudines houses. This stone contains 30-40% iron oxide; this can make it extremely hard to extract and dress. Having studied the block in order to determine and anticipate the natural fault lines of the stone, the quarrymen first carve a series of rectilinear holes into the block. Iron wedges are then hammered into this line of holes. The shockwaves produced by the quarrymen’s sledgehammers cause the stone to split along a straight line.

The highest quality blocks are dressed to produce lintels, voussoirs, corbels, ashlars etc. The medium quality blocks are roughly shaped by the stonecutters and used on the uncoursed curtain walls, and as facing stones on the castle’s inner walls. There are water-filled clay pits in the forest. Clay is taken from these pits, cleaned and pugged. It is then shaped in wooden moulds to form bricks. After the bricks have been left to air-dry, they are fired in a woodfired kiln for about 12 hours, at roughly 1000°c.

F   The mortar is the “glue” used to bind the castle’s stones. It is made up of precise doses of lime, sand and water. The people working there wear the tunics, skirts and headgear that they might have worn then, but they wear these over jeans and shoes with reinforced toes. They mix their mortar primarily as they would have done then, using sand they dig themselves, but they are not allowed to use the extremely effective hot lime from medieval days, because of its toxicity, and so they add a modem chemical ingredient instead, to achieve the same effect.

Workers in the Mid Age obviously were unaware of it and some died earlier by inhaling toxic gas. And so, we met many wonderful people who do not pretend to be anything but modem human beings practicing an old technique and finding out what it would have felt like, as much as possible, to do it with only the resources of an older time.

G  We also learned that even if there is a straight lintel across a doorway, you will usually find an arch of stones built into the wall differently. Because of the physics of an arch, which channels the weight above it down into whatever is supporting it at each side instead of pressing down in the middle, this helps to take a lot of the weight off of the lintel itself, whether it is free standing or buried in the wall against the impact of warfare. The arch is the strongest element for spanning space in stone architecture. This is why, in ancient ruins, you will often find the entire wall missing, and the arched windows and doorways still standing, in beautiful patterns against the sky

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Origin of Species & Continent Formation

A

THE FACT THAT there was once a Pangean supercontinent, a Panthalassa Ocean, and a Tethys Ocean, has profound implications for the evolution of multicellular life on Earth. These considerations were unknown to the scientists of the 19th century – making their scientific deductions even more remarkable. Quite independently of each other, Charles Darwin and his young contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace reached the conclusion that life had evolved by natural selection. Wallace later wrote in My Life of his own inspiration:

B

Why do some species die and some live? The answer was clearly that on the whole the best-fitted lived. From the effects of disease, the most healthy escaped; from enemies the strongest, the swiftest or the most cunning from famine the best hunters – then it suddenly flashed on me that this self-acting process would improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain, that is, the fittest would survive.

C

Both Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas about natural selection had been influenced by the essays of Thomas Malthus in his Principles of Population. Their conclusion, however, had been the direct result of their personal observation of animals and plants in widely separated geographic locations: Darwin from his experiences during the voyage of the Beagle, and particularly during the ship’s visit to the Galapagos Islands in the East Pacific in 1835; Wallace during his years of travel in the Amazon Basin and in the Indonesia-Australian Archipelago in the 1850s.

D

Darwin had been documenting his ideas on natural selection for many years when he received a paper on this same subject from Wallace, who asked for Darwin’s opinion and help in getting it published. In July 1858, Charles Lyell and J. D Hooker, close friends of Darwin, pressed Darwin to present his conclusions so that he would not lose priority to an unknown naturalist. Presiding over the hastily called but now historic meeting of the Linnean Society in London, Lyell and Hooker explained to the distinguished members how “these two gentlemen” (who were absent: Wallace was abroad and Darwin chose not to attend), had “independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory,”

E

Both Darwin and Wallace had realized that the anomalous distribution of species in particular regions had profound evolutionary significance. Subsequently, Darwin spent the rest of his days in almost total seclusion thinking and writing mainly about the origin of species. In contrast, Wallace applied himself to the science of biogeography, the study of the pattern and distribution of species, and its significance, resulting in the publication of a massive two-volume work the Geographical Distribution of Animals in 1876.

F

Wallace was a gentle and modest man, but also persistent and quietly courageous. He spent years working in the most arduous possible climates and terrains, particularly in the Malay archipelago, he made patient and detailed zoological observations and collected a huge number of specimens for museums and collectors-which is how he made a living. One result of his work was the conclusion that there is a distinct faunal boundary, called “Wallace’s line,” between an Asian realm of animals in Java, Bronco and the Philipiones and an Australian realm in New Guinea and Australia. In essence, this boundary posed a difficult question: How on Earth did plants and animals with a clear affinity to the Northern Hemisphere meet with their Southern Hemispheric counterparts along such a distinct Malaysian demarcation zone? Wallace was uncertain about demarcation on one particular island-Celebes, a curiously shaped place that is midway between the two groups. Initially, he assigned its flora-fauna to the Australian side of the line, but later he transferred it to the Asian side. Today we know the reason for his dilemma. 200MYA East and West Celebes were islands with their own natural history lying on opposite sides of the Tethys Ocean. They did not collide until about 15 MYA. The answer to the main question is that Wallace’s Line categorizes Laurasia-derived flora-fauna (the Asian) and Gondwana-derived flora-fauna (the Australian), fauna that had evolved on opposing shares of the Tethys. The closure of the Tethys Ocean today is manifested by the ongoing collision of Australia/New Guinea with Indochina/Indonesia and the continuing closure of the Mediterranean Sea – a remnant of the Western Tethys Ocean.

G

IN HIS ORIGIN OF CONTINENTS AND OCEANS, Wegener quoted at length from Wallace’s Geographical Distribution of Animals. According to Wegener’s reading, Wallace had identified three clear divisions of Australian animals, which supported his own theory of continental displacement. Wallace had shown that animals long established in southwestern Australia had an affinity with animals in South Africa, Madagascar, India, and Ceylon, but did not have an affinity with those in Asia. Wallace also showed that Australian marsupials and monotremes are clearly related to those in South America, the Moluccas, and various Pacific islands and that none are found in neighboring Indonesia. From this and related data, Wegener concluded that the then broadly accepted “landbridge” theory could not account for this distribution of animals and that only this theory of continental drift could explain it.

H

The theory that Wegener dismissed in preference to his own proposed that plants and animals had once migrated across now-submerged intercontinental landbridges. In 1885, one of Europe’s leading geologists, Eduard Suess, theorized that as the rigid Earth cools, its upper-crust shrinks and wrinkles like the withering skin of an aging apple. He suggested that the planet’s seas and oceans now fill the wrinkles between once-contiguous plateaus.

I

Today, we know that we live on a dynamic Earth with shifting, colliding and separating tectonic plates, not a “withering skin”, and the main debate in the field of biogeography has shifted. The discussion now concerns “dispersalism” versus “vicarianism”: unrestricted radiation of species on the one hand and the development of barriers to migration on the other. Dispersion is a short-term phenomenon – the daily or seasonal migration of species and their radiation to the limits of their natural environment on an extensive and continuous landmass. Vicarian evolution, however, depends upon the separation and isolation of a variety of species within the confines of natural barriers in the form of islands, lakes, or shallow seas – topographical features that take a long time to develop.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Smell and Memory

Why might the aroma of a perfume or the mustiness of an old trunk bring back such vivid childhood memories? The solution has been discovered, claims Alexandra Witze.

A         You likely focus on a newspaper with your eyes rather than your nose. But raise the paper to your nose and take a deep breath. You may be transported back to your youth when your parents read the newspaper on Sunday mornings when you smell newsprint. Perhaps another smell, such as your mother's perfume or the smokiness of a driftwood bonfire, brings back memories for you. A rush of memories might be triggered by certain smells. It is known as the "Proustian phenomenon," after the French author Marcel Proust. Proust's narrator dips a madeleine biscuit into a cup of tea near the start of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. and the taste and smell trigger 3000 pages' worth of childhood memories.

B         This phenomena is now being studied scientifically. Scientists have learned, for instance, how sensory memories are shared throughout the brain, with various brain regions remembering the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of a particular experience. This discovery was made by cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Herz at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Nevertheless, psychological studies have shown that memories brought on by smells can be both more emotional and more specific than memories not brought on by odors. Odour molecules cause brain cells in the amygdala, an area of the brain that aids in emotion management, to dance as you inhale. The other senses, like taste and touch, however, travel through other regions of the brain before they reach the amygdala. The emotional power of fragrances may be explained by the direct relationship between odors and the amygdala. According to Rachel Herz, there is a special relationship between the sense of smell and the area of the brain that manages emotions.

C         But, the links go on. The memory of scents also influences other parts of the brain, like the tentacles of an octopus extending outward. In recent experiments, neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) instructed 15 volunteers to see photographs while inhaling unrelated scents. For instance, after viewing a photograph of a duck and its fragrance, the participants would be asked to create a story that connects the two. The olfactory cortex, which is known to be involved in processing scents, was shown to be particularly active in the participants' brains during the time of the brain scans. The volunteers saw the duck image again five minutes later, but this time without the scent of roses. The olfactory cortex in their brains also lit up once more, according to a recent study. The fact that the olfactory cortex activated when the odor was absent shows that people's sensory memories of events are distributed around several different parts of the brain. According to Jay Gottfried, team leader at UCL, picture taking a vacation by the sea. While the sound of the surf and the smell of seaweed travel to many locations, the sight of the waves remains in one place. The spread of memories across the brain might have benefits. "Any one of the sensory inputs can trigger that memory," Gottfried says. "Maybe the scent of sun lotion, a particular sound from that day, or the sight of a rock formation." In the case of an early hunter and gatherer (out on a plain), the sight of a lion may be enough to make them flee, rather than having to wait for the sound of its roar and the stink of its hide to take effect.

D         According to Herz, remembered fragrances may also carry extra emotional burden. According to her findings, memories evoked by odors are more emotional than memories triggered by other stimuli. Herz selected five volunteers in one recent study who had distinct recollections related with a specific scent, such as opium for Ladies and Juniper Breeze from Bath and Body Works. She took pictures of the volunteers' brains when they inhaled that scent and another unconnected perfume, not knowing which one was which. (They were also shown photos of each perfume bottle.) When the volunteers smelt the specific perfume, their brains were most active, particularly in the amygdala and the hippocampus, which aid in memory formation. Herz's findings were published in the journal Neuropsychologia earlier this year.

E          Yet she couldn't be certain that the other senses wouldn't trigger a strong response as well. In another study, Herz contrasted odors with noises and images. She asked 70 respondents to recall an emotional recollection involving three things: popcorn, freshly cut grass, and a campfire. The products were then compared using views, sounds, and fragrances. For example, the user may view a lawnmower image, then smell grass, and finally listen to the machine's sound. Memories triggered by smell were more evocative than those triggered by sight or sound.

F          Odor-evoked memories may be both more emotional and more detailed. Collaborating with colleague John Downes, University of Liverpool psychologist Simon Chu began exploring scent and memory in part because of his grandmother's recollections about Chinese culture. They would pass a tiny pot of spice or incense around as generations met to tell oral tales; afterwards, when they wished to remember the story with as much information as possible, they would pass the same smell around again. "That corresponds with a lot of anecdotal data about how odors may be incredibly good recalls of earlier experiences," adds Chu. Scientific study appears to back up the anecdotes. Chu and Downes recruited 42 volunteers to recount a life story, then tried to see if odors like coffee and cinnamon may help them remember more information in the story. They could.

G         Despite these research, not everyone is convinced that Proust can be studied scientifically. Chu and Downes exchanged criticism with famous perfumer and chemist J. Stephan Jellinek in the June issue of Chemical Senses. Jellinek chastised the Liverpool researchers for, among other things, presenting the fragrances and requesting people to recall memories, rather than investigating what memories were spontaneously elicited by the odors. Nevertheless, as Chu points out, science can only do so much to examine a phenomenon that is intrinsically unique to each individual. Meanwhile, Jellinek has been gathering anecdotal stories of Proustian events in the hopes of discovering any. "There is an argument to be made that surprise may be a big component of the Proust phenomenon," he adds. "That's why these recollections have such an impact on people." Nobody knows if Proust ever had a mystical experience. But, his ideas about memory, which he wrote as fiction nearly a century ago, continue to influence scientists today.

Smell and Memory Reading Questions