SECTION 2

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

Can we call it “ART”

Life-Casting and Art

A
When these life-castings were made in the 19th century, no one thought of them as art. But, if critics
today can hail Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and the lights going off and on in a gallery as masterpieces
of some kind, then shouldn’t these more skillful and profoundly strange works have a greater claim on
our attention?

B
Art changes over time; what is art changes, too. Objects intended for devotional, ritualistic or
recreational use are re-categorised, by latecomers from another civilisation who no longer respond to
these original purposes. Where would New Yorker cartooning be without Lascaux gags in which one
bison-painter makes anachronistically “artistic” remarks to another” What also happens is that
techniques and crafts judged non-artistic at the time are reassessed.

C
In the 19th century, life-casting was to sculpture what photography was to painting; and both were
viewed as cheating short-cuts by the senior arts. Their virtues – of speed and unwavering realism –
also implied their limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination. For many, life-casting
was an insult to the sculptor’s creative gesture; in a famous lawsuit of 1834, a moulder whose mask of
the dying Napoleon had been reproduced and sold without his permission, was judged to have no
rights in the image – in other words, he was specifically held not to be an artist. Rodin said of life-
casting: “It happens fast, but it doesn’t make art.” Others feared that the whole canon of aesthetics
might be blown off course if too much nature was allowed in, it would lead art away from its proper
pursuit of the ideal.

D
Gauguin, at the end of the century, worried about future developments in photography: if ever the
process went into colour, what painter would labour away at a likeness with a brush made from
squirrel-tail? But painting has proved robust. Photography changed it, of course, just as the novel had
to reassess narrative after the arrival of the cinema. But the gap between the senior and junior arts was
always narrower than the die-hards implied: painters have always used technical back-up – studio
assistants to do the boring bits, cameras lucida and obscura; while apparently lesser crafts involve
great skill, thought, preparation, choice, and – depending how we define it – imagination. Life-casting
was complex, technical work, as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he poured 250 litres of
plaster over his black model Wilson and nearly killed him.

E
Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new art movement implies a reassessment of what
has gone before; what is done now alters what was done before. In some cases, this is merely self-
serving, with the new are using the old to justify itself: Look how all of that points to this; aren’t we
clever to be the culmination of all that has gone before? But usually it is a matter of re-alerting the
sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted; every so often we need the aesthetic equivalent
of a cataract operation. So there are many items in this show – innocent bit-players back in the last
half of the 19th century – which would sit happily nowadays in a commercial or public gallery. Many
curators would probably put in for the stunning cast of the hand of a giant from Barnum’s circus.

F
The initial impact is on the eye, in the contradiction (which Mueck constantly exploits) between
unexpected size and extreme verisimilitude. Next, the human element kicks in: you note that the nails
are dirt-encrusted – unless this is the caster’s decorative addition – and the paddy fingertips extend far
beyond them. (Was the giant an anxious gnawer, or does giantism mean that the flesh simply outgrows
the nails?) Then you take in the element of choice, arrangement, art if you like – the neat, pleated,
buttoned sleeve end that gives the item balance and variation of texture. This is just a moulded hand,
yet the part stands utterly for the whole: and, as an item on public display, it reminds us, slyly,
poignantly, of the full-size original who in his time was just as much a victim of gawping. We are not
a long way from Degas’s La Petite Danseuse (which, after all, one critic said should be in the
Dupuytren pathology museum); though we are nearer to contemporary art that lazily gets called
cutting-edge.

G
Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, the liberation of the text from authorial intension, and the
consequent empowerment of the reader; he announced this, needless to say, in a text written with a
particular intention in order to communicate something very specific to a reader. An own goal of
Keith Weller proportions. But what doesn’t work for literature works much better for art. Pictures do
float free of their creators’ intentions; over time, the “reader” does become more powerful. Few of us
can look at a medieval altarpiece as its painter “intended”, we believe too little and aesthetically know
too much, so we recreate, we find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic
intention of Paul Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil on to flesh, who moulded, cast,
decorated and primped a century and more ago is now irrelevant.

H
What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest
the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to reflection, and involve the heart; further, is an apparent
level of skill involved? Much currently fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the brain; but
it fails to engage the mind or the heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely
true to any significant depth. One of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an
unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder. That is what many of the objects in this show do. The
Ataxic Venus doesn’t make Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad any less intense and moving an image; but she
does offer herself as a companion, precursor, and, yes, rival.

Questions 14-18
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
14 Technicians do the boring work
15 A trial on a famous figure’s mask in 19th century
16 Intention from author is claimed matters in Art
17 How to assess an art
18 Detailed depiction of an earlier work

Questions 19-24
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 19-24 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement is true
NO if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

19 The intension of using artistic objects will change as time pass.

20 In 19th century, people appreciate the fast speed and realism of living casting.
21 Rodin indicated that slow pace would improve the artistic quality of casting.
22 The importance of painting dropped as the development of photographs.
23 Life casting requires less skill and cost than painting.
24 Emerge of new art makes people recoginise the meaning of art again.

Questions 25-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.

25 Why hand of giant from Barnum’s circus attract people’s attention in the first place?
A details and human element
B size and realism
C texture and color
D imagination and intuition

26 What requirement does it depend on when judging if an object is “art”?

A audience status
B fresh or old condition
C lasting period
D public response
SECTION 3
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Honey bees in trouble

Can native pollinators fill the gap?

A
Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder (CCD),
that is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields
will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.

B
But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. For one
thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees
are not a native species. Pollination in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total
number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million
and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of
organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming”
practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed
many native bees outright –they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest – and made
the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and their
effects on pollinators isn’t new – in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.

C
If that ‘Fruitless Fall’ has not-yet-occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which farmers
turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-
domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this
choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system that was emerging.
For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are applied
to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops.
And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in
numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee
you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee,” says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. The honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modern system of
industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more
cheaply than ever before. But that system is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the
photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly
lines, also leaches out some of the resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems.

D
Breno Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of specialization usually is
a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction
at the least disbalance. In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is heavily reliant on a
single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialized. And when the human-
honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony collapse disorder, the vulnerability of that
agricultural system begins to become clear.

E
In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. “The problem is
trying to provide native bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years
in order to service the crop,” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of flowers per acre in a two-to
three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand, native bees can be much more
efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so you don’t need as many to do the job. For
example, about 750 blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) can pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a
task that would require roughly 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. There are bee tinkerers engaged in
similar work in many corners of the world. In Brazil, Breno Freitas has found that Centris tarsata, the
native pollinator of wild cashew, can survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a
source of floral oils, such as by interplanting their cashew trees with Caribbean cherry.

F
In certain places, native bees may already be doing more than they’re getting credit for. Ecologist
Rachael Winfree recently led a team that looked at pollination of four summer crops (tomato,
watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon) at 29 farms in the region of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Winfree’s team identified 54 species of wild bees that visited these crops, and found that wild bees
were the most important pollinators in the system: even though managed honeybees were present on
many of the farms, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower visits in the study. In another
study focusing specifically on watermelon, Winfree and her colleagues calculated that native bees
alone could provide sufficient pollination at 90 percent of the 23 farms studied. By contrast,
honeybees alone could provide sufficient pollination at only 78 percent of farms.

G
“The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,” Winfree admits. In the
Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively small, each farmer typically grows a
variety of crops, and farms are interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which means
there are opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee conservation, too. The landscape is a
bee-friendly patchwork that provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral resources distributed
among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields, suburban neighborhoods, and semi
natural habitat like old woodlots, all at a relatively small scale. In other words, “pollinator-friendly”
farming practices would not only aid pollination of agricultural crops, but also serve as a key element
in the over all conservation strategy for wild pollinators, and often aid other wild species as well.

H
Of course, not all farmers will be able to implement all of these practices. And researchers are
suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural system. For some small-scale farms, native bees
may indeed be all that’s needed. For larger operations, a suite of managed bee – with honeybees filling
the generalist role and other, native bees pollinating specific crops – could be augmented by free
pollination services from resurgent wild pollinators. In other words, they’re saying, we still have an
opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse, resilient, and robust.

Questions 27-30
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
FALSE if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

27 In the United States, farmers use honeybees in a large scale over the past few years.
28 Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers’ health.
29 The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among native bees for every crop.
30 It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees.

Questions 31-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet.

31 The example of the “Fruitless Fall” underlines the writer’s point about
A needs for using pesticides.
B impacts of losing insect pollinators.
C vulnerabilities of native bees.
D benefits in building more pollination industries.

32 Why can honeybees adapt to the modern agricultural system?

A the honeybees can pollinated more crops efficiently
B The bees are semi-domesticated since ancient times.
C Honeybee hives can be protected away from pesticides.
D The ability of wild pollinators using to serve crops declines.

33 The writer mentions factories and assembly lines to illustrate

A one drawback of the industrialised agricultural system.
B a low cost in modern agriculture.
C the role of honeybees in pollination.
D what a high yield of industrial agriculture.

34 In the 6th paragraph, Winfree’s experiment proves that

A honeybee can pollinate various crops.
B there are many types of wild bees as the pollinators.
C the wild bees can increase the yield to a higher percentage
D wild bees work more efficiently as a pollinator than honey bees in certain cases
35 What does the writer want to suggest in the last paragraph?
A the importance of honey bees in pollination
B adoption of different bees in various sizes of agricultural system
C the comparison between the intensive and the rarefied agricultural system
D the reason why farmers can rely on native pollinators

Questions 36-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet

36 Headline of colony collapse disorder states that

37 Viewpoints of Freitas manifest that
38 Examples of blue orchard bees have shown that
39 Centris tarsata is mentioned to exemplify that
40 One finding of the research in Delaware Valley is that

A native pollinators can survive when a specific plant is supplied.

B it would cause severe consequences both to commerce and agriculture.
C honey bees can not be bred.
D some agricultural landscapes are favorable in supporting wild bees.
E a large scale of honey bees are needed to pollinate.
F an agricultural system is fragile when relying on a single pollinator
ANSWER

14. D
15. C
16. G
17. H
18. F
19. YES
20. NO
21. NOT GIVEN
22. NO
23. NOT GIVEN
24. YES
25. B
26. D
27. YES
28. NOT GIVEN
29. NO
30. YES
31. B
32. C
33. A
34. D
35. B
36. B
37. F
38. E
39. A
40. D