TEST 9

READING PASSAGE 1

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

CHINESE YELLOW CITRUS ANT FOR BIOLOGICAL CONTROL

A         In 1476, the farmers of Berne in Switzerland decided, according to this story, there was only one way to rid their fields of the cutworms attacking their crops. They took the pests to court. The worms were tried, found guilty and excommunicated by the archbishop. In China, farmers had a more practical approach to pest control. Rather than rely on divine intervention, they put their faith in frogs, ducks and ants. Frogs and ducks were encouraged to map up the pests in the paddies and the occasional plague of locusts.

But the notion of biological control began with an ant. More specifically, the story says, it started with the predatory yellow citrus ant is a type of weaver ant, which has been polishing off pests in the orange groves of southern China for at least 1700 years. The yellow citrus ant $0 is a type of weaver ant, which binds leaves and twigs with silk to form a neat, tent-like nest. In the beginning, farmers made do with the odd ants’ nest here and there. But it wasn’t long before growing demand led to the development of a thriving trade in nests and a new type of agriculture—ant farming.

B         For an insect that bites, the yellow citrus ant is remarkably popular. Even by ant standards, Oecophylla smaragdina is a fearsome predator. It’s big, runs fast and has a powerful nip – painful to humans but lethal to many of the insects that plague the orange groves of Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China. And for at least 17 centuries. Chinese orange growers have harnessed these sixlegged killing machines to keep their fruit groves healthy and productive.

The story explains that citrus – a fruits evolved in the Far East and the Chinese discovered the delights of their flesh early on. As the ancestral home of oranges, lemons and pomelos, China also has the greatest diversity of citrus pests. And the trees that produce the sweetest fruits, the mandarins—or kan-attract a host of planteating insects, from black ants and sap sucking mealy bugs to leaf-devouring caterpillars. With so many enemies, fruit growers clearly had to have some way of protecting their orchards.

C         The West did not discover the Chinese orange growers’ secret weapon until the early 20th century. At the time, Florida was suffering an epidemic of: itrus canker and in 1915 Walter Swingle, a plant physiologist working for the US Department of Agriculture, was, the story says, sent to China in search of varieties of orange that were resistant to the disease. Swingle spent some time studying the citrus orchards around Guangzhou, and there he came across the story of the cultivated ant. These ants, he was told, were “grown” by the people of a small village nearby who sold them to the orange growers by the nestful.

D         The earliest report of citrus ants at work among the orange trees appears in a book on tropical and subtropical botany written by His Han in AD 304. “The people of Chiao-Chih sell in their markets ants in bags of rush matting. The nests are like silk. The bags are all attached to twigs and leaves which, with the ants inside the nests, are for sale. The ants are reddish-yellow in colour, bigger than ordinary ants. In the south if the kan trees do not have this kind of ant, the fruits will all be damaged by many harmful insects, and not a single fruit will be perfect.”

E         Initially, farmers relied on nests which they collected from the wild or bought in the market — where trade in nests was brisk. ‘It is said that in the south orange trees which are free of ants will have wormy fruits. Therefore the people race to buy nests for their orange trees,’ wrote Liu Hsun in Strange Things Noted in the South, written about AD 890. The business quickly became more sophisticate. From the 10th century, country people began to trap ants in artificial nests baited with fat. “Fruit growing families buy these ants from vendors who make a business of collecting and selling such creatures,” wrote Chuang Chi-Yu in 1130.

“They trap them by filling hogs’ or sheep’s bladders with fat and placing them with the cavities open next to the ants’ nests. They wait until the ants have migrated into the bladders and take them away. This is known as ‘rearing orange ants’.” Farmers attached the bladders to their trees, and in time the ants spread to other trees and built new nests. By the 17th century, growers were building bamboo walkways between their trees to speed the colonization of their orchards. The ants ran along these narrow bridges from one tree to another and established nests “by the hundreds of thousands”.

F          Did it work? The orange growers clearly thought so. One authority, Chi Ta— Chun, writing in 1700, stressed how important it was to keep the fruit trees free of insect pests, especially caterpillars. “It is essential to eliminate them so that the trees are not injured. But hand labour is not nearly as efficient as ant power…” Swingle was just as impressed. Yet despite this reports, many Western biologists were skeptical.

In the West, the idea of using one insect to destroy another was new and highly controversial. The first breakthrough had come in 1888, when the infant a orange industry in California had been saved from extinction by the Australian vedalia beetle. This beetle was the only thing that had made any inroad into the explosion of cottony cushion scale that was threatening to destroy the state’s citrus crops. But, as Swingle now knew, California’s “first” was nothing of the sort. The Chinese had been expert in biocontrol for many centuries.

G         The story goes on to say that the long tradition of ants in the Chinese orchards only began to waver in the 1950s and 1960s with the introduction of powerful organic (I guess the author means chemical insecticides. Although most fruit growers switched to chemicals, a few hung onto their ants. Those who abandoned ants in favour of chemicals quickly became disillusioned. As costs soared and pests began to develop resistance to the chemicals, growers began to revive the old ant patrols.

They had good reason to have faith in their insect workforce. Research in the early 1960s showed that as long as there were enough ants in the trees, they did an excellent job of dispatching some pests— mainly the larger insects—and had modest success against others. Trees with yellow ants produced almost 20 per cent more healthy leaves than those without. More recent trials have shown that these trees yield just as big a crop as those protected by expensive chemical sprays.

H         One apparent drawback of using ants—and one of the main reasons for the early skepticism by Western scientists was that citrus ants do nothing to control mealy bugs, waxy-coated scale insects which can do considerable damage to fruit frees. In fact, the ants protect mealy bugs in exchange for the sweet honeydew they secrete. The orange growers always denied this was a problem but Western scientists thought they knew better. Research in the 1980s suggests that the growers were right all along.

Where mealy bugs proliferate under the ants’ protection they are usually heavily parasitized and this limits the harm they can do. Orange growers who rely on carnivorous ants rather than poisonous chemicals maintain a better balance of species in their orchards. While the ants deal with the bigger insect pests, other predatory species keep down the numbers of smaller pests such as scale insects and aphids. In the long run, ants do a lot less damage than chemicals-and they’re certainly more effective than excommunication.

READING PASSAGE 2

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

LONDON SWAYING FOOTBRIDGE

READING PASSAGE 3

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

Children’s Literature

There is a long history of Children's stories and poems. Lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few games and nursery rhymes are almost as old. However, in 1700 there were stories in print that children often seized the opportunity when they had it , such as translations of Aesop's fables, fairy-stories, and popular ballads and romances. They were not specifically aimed at young people. The only truly child-oriented literature at the time would have been a few instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, as well as the occasional Puritanical tract as a morality aid, so eager child readers had no choice but to read adult literature. 

By the mid 18th century, there were enough eager kid readers, and enough parents willing to pander to this enthusiasm, for publishers to specialise in children's books whose primary goal was entertainment rather than teaching or morals. Cajanus, The Swedish Giant was published in 1742 by a London merchant named Thomas Boreham, while A Little Pretty Pocket Book was published in 1744 by the more famous John Newbery. Its contents—rhymes, stories, children's games, and a free present ('A ball and a pincushion')—foreshadowed the lucky-dip contents of children's annuals this century in many ways. It's a testament to Newbery's talent that he came up with a winning formula so rapidly, and that it was almost immediately stolen in America. 

Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile, Or Treatise on Education  (1762) decreed that all books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw to it that children’s literature should be instructive and uplifting. Mrs. Sarah Trimmer’s magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) published the first regular reviews of children's books, and was one of the most prominent of these voices. Her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786), described talking animals who were always models of sense and decorum, and she was the one who condemned fairy tales for their violence and general absurdity.

So, the moral story for children was always under threat from within, given how children can elicit entertainment from even the most stern moralist. The greatest blow to the improving children's book came from an unlikely source: early 19th century folklore interest. James Orchard Halliwell chose the Nursery rhymes for a folklore society in 1842.  And, also the Grimm brothers' collection of fairy tales were quickly translated into English in 1823 and became popular with children, prompting new editions, each one more child-centric than the last. Younger children can now expect stories tailored to their specific interests, with the needs of their own limited life experience firmly in mind.

What eventually determined the reading of older children was access to books that contained characters and not the availability of special children’s literature, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily empathise, or actions like fighting and exploring, that made few demands on understanding and adult maturity.

With the arrival in the late 1930s of child-centred best-sellers the final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality came intended as entertainment at its most escapist. British novelists such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton said children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, believe that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. In the self-enclosed world inhabited by Enid Blyton’s young characters, the fact that war broke out again during her books’ greatest popularity fails to register. After World War II, reaction against such dream-worlds was inevitable, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, new spirit of social and moral concern and children’s libraries. Writers slowly began to explore new areas of interest urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians while also changing the settings of their plots from the middle-class world to which their chief patrons had always previously belonged.

Critical emphasis, during this development, has been divided. For some the most important task to get rid children’s books of the social prejudice and exclusiveness, no longer found acceptable. The other people concentrated more on the good accomplishments of modern children’s literature. The fact that authors of these works are now frequently recommended to adult as well as child readers echoes the 19th-century belief that children's literature can be passed down through generations rather than serving as a protective barrier between childhood and the necessary maturation toward adult understanding.