Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
below.
Ensuring our future food supply
Climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties of seeds we depend
on for food. Luckily, we still have many of the seeds used in the past-but we must
take steps to save them.
Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa in the USA, an 890-acre stretch of
rolling fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed.
Everything about Heritage Farm is in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of
intensively farmed fields of corn and soybean that are typical of modern
agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted to collecting rather than growing seeds. It is
home to the Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest non government-owned seed
banks in the United States.
In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy was given the seedlings of two plant varieties that her
great grandfather had brought to America from Bavaria in 1870: Grandpa Ott’s
morning glory and his German Pink tomato. Wanting to preserve similar
traditional varieties, known as heirloom plants, Diane and her husband, Kent,
decided to establish a place where the seeds of the past could be kept and traded.
The exchange now has more than 13,000 members, and the many thousands of
heirloom varieties they have donated are kept in its walk-in coolers, freezers, and
root cellars the seeds of many thousands of heirloom varieties and, as you walk
around an old red barn that is covered in Grandpa Ott’s beautiful morning glory
blossoms, you come across the different vegetables, herbs, and flowers they have
planted there.
"Each year our members list their seeds in this,"Diane Ott Whealy says, handing
over a copy of the Seed Savers Exchange 2010 Yearbook. It is as thick as a big-
city telephone directory, with page after page of exotic beans, garlic, potatoes,
peppers, apples, pears, and plums-each with its own name and personal history
.For example, there’s an Estonian Yellow Cherry tomato, which was brought to the
seed bank by “an elderly Russian lady” who lived in Tallinn, and a Persian Star
garlic from “a bazaar in Samarkand.”There’s also a bean donated by archaeologists
searching for pygmy elephant fossils in New Mexico.
Heirloom vegetables have become fashionable in the United States and Europe
over the past decade, prized by a food movement that emphasizes eating locally
and preserving the flavor and uniqueness of heirloom varieties. Found mostly in

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farmers' markets and boutique groceries, heirloom varieties have been squeezed
out of supermarkets in favor of modern single-variety fruits and vegetables bred to
ship well and have a uniform appearance, not to enhance flavor. But the movement
to preserve heirloom varieties goes way beyond the current interest in North
America and Europe in tasty, locally grown food. It’s also a campaign to protect
the world’s future food supply.Most people in the well-fed world give little thought
to where their food comes from or how it’s grown. They wander through well-
stocked supermarkets without realizing that there may be problem ahead.We’ve
been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rainforests.Very
little,by contrast,is being said or done about the parallel decline in the diversity of
the foods we eat.
Food variety extinction is happening all over the world - and it's happening fast. In
the United States an estimated 90 percent of historic fruit and vegetable varieties
are no longer grown. Of the 7,000 different apple varieties that were grown in the
1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of
rice once thrived; now only about a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent
of the wheat varieties cultivated just a hundred years ago have disappeared.
Experts estimate that in total we have lost more than 50 percent of the world's food
varieties over the past century.
Why is this a problem? Because if disease or future climate change affects one of
the handful of plants we've come to depend on to feed our growing planet, we
might desperately need one of those varieties we've let become extinct. The loss of
the world's cereal diversity is a particular cause for concern. A fungus called Ug99,
which was first identified in Uganda in 1999, is spreading across the world's wheat
crops. From Uganda it moved to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. By 2007 it
had jumped the Persian Gulf into Iran. Scientists predict that the fungus will soon
make its way into India and Pakistan, then spread to Russia and China, and
eventually the USA.
Roughly 90 percent of the world's wheat has no defense against this particular
fungus. If it reached the USA, an estimated one billion dollars' worth of crops
would be at risk. Scientists believe that in Asia and Africa alone, the portion
currently in danger could leave one billion people without their primary food
source. A famine with significant humanitarian consequences could follow,
according to Rick Ward of Cornell University.

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Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage? In boxes 1 -7
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

1 Heritage Farm is different from most other nearby farms.

2 Most nongovernment-owned seed banks are bigger than Seed

Savers Exchange.

3 Diane Ott Whealy's grandfather taught her a lot about seed

varieties.

4 The seeds people give to the Seed Savers Exchange are stored
outdoors.

5 Diane and her husband choose which heirloom seeds to grow on

Heritage Farm.

6 The seeds are listed in alphabetical order in The Seed Savers

Exchange Yearbook.

7 The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook describes how each seed was
obtained.

Questions 8-13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your
answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet

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 The food we grow and eat
Supermarkets

 sell fruit and vegetables that transport well

 want fruit and vegetables to be standard in their 8

Public awareness

 while people know about plants disappearing from 9 very few

know about the decline in fruit and vegetable varieties

Extinction of food varieties

 less than 100 of the types of 10 once available in the USA are
still grown
 over 11 of food varieties around the world have disappeared in
the last 100 years

Current problems in food production

 a particular fungus is attacking wheat in various countries

 Rick Ward believes the threat to food supplies in Asia and Africa might lead
to a 12

Food production in the future

 climate change and disease may put pressure on food production

 twice the amount of food may be needed because of
an increase in 13

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

Whale culture

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A. Most social scientists stubbornly resist the idea that animals have culture. Even
such advanced cetacean mammals as whales and dolphins clearly don’t have art.
literature, or architecture. But patient observation over many years has begun to
reveal behaviors that can only have been learnt from other whales. And that, say
whale biologists, constitutes culture.

B. So far, humpback and killer whales provide the best evidence of culture in
cetaceans, and the song of the male humpback is among the most striking
examples. Humpback populations in different oceans sing different songs, but
within the same ocean they all stick to the same one. However, during the breeding
season the sounds change, as it appears that females are drawn to novel songs. One
male might add an extra set of groans; another might drop a series of grunts. Soon
all the other males have altered their own rendition to incorporate the changes until
they are once again singing the same song. Since this occurs among thousands of
whales spread across a vast part of the planet, the change cannot be in response to
any factor in the animals’ environment. The latest version of the song can be learnt
only from other whales – almost certainly by imitation.

C. Culture plays an even bigger part in the life of killer whales. Nowhere is this
more obvious than along the north-west coast of America, where killer whales are
split into two distinct populations – ‘residents’ and ‘transients’. They live in the
same stretch of water, but they don’t mingle. In effect, they belong to two quite
separate cultures. Residents live in stable groups, or ‘pods’, made up of two or
three mothers and their offspring – perhaps 20 whales in all. Calves stay with their
mothers throughout adulthood, and in many years of observation no one has ever
seen a whale switch pods. Transients travel in smaller, more changeable groups of
between three and six.

D. One of the most obvious distinctions between the transient and resident
societies IS the way they impart information. Killer whales detect prey with a
range of echo locating clicks, but converse with a vocabulary of squeaks, whistles
and whines. Transients have only a few such calls, and all transient societies share
the same ones. Residents have a much more extensive repertoire, and each family
group has its own unique and distinctive set of calls. Despite regular interaction
between them, each resident pod sticks firmly to its own dialect. Research shows
these dialects are maintained for at least 40 years.

E. To qualify as part of killer whale culture, dialects must be learnt from other
members of the pod. Animals with different dialects share the same waters, so the

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variations can’t be a product of the physical environment. “ And we can throw out
the notion that the dialects are inherited,” says Lance Barrett-Lennard of the
University of the British Columbia. He has spent the past seven years analyzing
DNA from 270 whales. His paternity tests reveal that female killer whales
invariably attract mates from outside their own pod – males with a very different
dialects. If dialects were programmed by genetics, call patterns from both father
and mother would be passed on the cafl. “A calf uses the calls of its maternal pod
very precisely. There’s no input from the father,’ says Barrett-Lennard.

F. The question still remains – is this culture? It is, according to Frans de Waal of
Emory University in Atlanta, who argues that culture is just another biological
adaptation that has evolved in many creatures. One benefit of viewing culture in
this way is that you can start to understand how and why it might have arisen in
these creatures. Whales have several biological attributes that give them an
advantage in social learning. Apart from their advanced mental abilities, they are
adept at recognising sounds: ideal for communication in the marine environment.
Many species spend years rearing their offspring, and live in small, stable, multi-
generational societies, a social system that provides ample opportunity for teaching
and learning.

G. But why have cetaceans evolved the ability to learn from other group members?
Experts in whale biology believe that ecological factors and the need to adapt to
sudden changes in the environment played a large part in the emergence of culture.
Although the ocean is a relatively stable habitat in many ways, it is highly
changeable in one crucial respect – the availability of food. One moment there
might be a plentiful supply of fish, the next they’ve disappeared. When that
happens, the past experience of the senior members of the group – and the ability
to share this knowledge – is a huge asset. The dialects of killer whales allow
members of the groups to identify each other, enabling them to share information
about food hot spots. Among resident killer whales, it also allows females to avoid
inbreeding by picking out a mate with a strange dialect from outside their pods,
says Barrett-Lennard.

H. The importance of share information seems to have led to biological changes in

at least some species of whale. Female killer whales, like humans, are very unusual
in that they live up to a quarter of a century after they had their last offspring. This
only makes sense if they have something useful to give their descendants. And
what whale matriarchs offer is the most important thing of all – cultural
knowledge, vital for the group’s survival, passed directly from one generation to
the next.

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Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading
Passage?
In boxes 1-5 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.

27 Resident killer whales appear to remain with their maternal group for life.

28 Resident killer whales have a more restricted range of calls than transients.

29 There is a vocabulary of sounds which is common to all transient killer whales.

30 Resident killer whales share the dialects of other resident communities living in
the same waters.

31 The dialects of transient killer whales remain constant over time.

Questions 32-34
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.

It has been observed that resident killer whales invariably live in fixed family
groups, known as 32… . Each of these has its own unique set of calls, despite close
contact with other family groups. As the same areas of ocean contain many
different groups with widely varying dialects, it is clear that these differences could
not have emerged as a result of the whales’ 33… .

According to tests conducted by Lance Barrett-Lennard, a calf communicates

exclusively with the dialect of the group to which its 34… belongs. Barrett-
Lennard also rejects the idea that the call patterns are inherited.

Questions 35-37

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Choose THREE letters. A-F
Write the correct letters in boxes 9-11 on your answer sheet
Which THREE of the following features of whales are mentioned in the passage’?

A intelligence

B physical strength

C sensitivity to sound.

D prolonged life span

E lengthy period of fertility

F adaptability to a variety of foods

Questions 38-40
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-H in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

38 an example of the kind of information passed by whales to each other

39 a reference to variations in communication styles between different cultures

within one species

40 ways in which the skills of whales are favorable for the development of culture

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Passage 1 Passage 2 Passage 3

1. TRUE 27. TRUE

2. FALSE 28. FALSE

3. NOT GIVEN 29. TRUE

4. FALSE 30. FALSE

5. NOT GIVEN 31. NOT GIVEN

6. NOT GIVEN 32. pods

7. TRUE 33. physical

environment
8. appearance
34. mother
9. rainforests
35. A
10. apples
36. C
11. 50 percent
37. D
12. famine
38. H
13. population
39. D

40. F

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