Academic Reading Passage 1

Light Pollution
Light Pollution is a threat to Wildlife, Safety and the Starry Sky

A After hours of driving south in the pitch-black darkness of the Nevada desert, a dome of hazy
gold suddenly appears on the horizon. Soon, a road sign confirms the obvious: Las Vegas 30 miles.
Looking skyward, you notice that the Big Dipper is harder to find than it was an hour ago.

B Light pollution—the artificial light that illuminates more than its intended target area—has
become a problem of increasing concern across the country over the past 15 years. In the suburbs,
where over-lit shopping mall parking lots are the norm, only 200 of the Milky Way’s 2,500 stars
are visible on a clear night. Even fewer can be seen from large cities. In almost every town, big
and small, street lights beam just as much light up and out as they do down, illuminating much
more than just the street. Almost 50 percent of the light emanating from street lamps misses its
intended target, and billboards, shopping centres, private homes and skyscrapers are similarly
over-illuminated.

C America has become so bright that in a satellite image of the United States at night, the outline
of the country is visible from its lights alone. The major cities are all there, in bright clusters: New
York, Boston, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and, of course, Las Vegas. Mark
Adams, superintendent of the McDonald Observatory in west Texas, says that the very fact that
city lights are visible from on high is proof of their wastefulness. “When you’re up in an airplane,
all that light you see on the ground from the city is wasted. It’s going up into the night sky. That’s
why you can see it.”

D But don’t we need all those lights to ensure our safety? The answer from light engineers, light
pollution control advocates and astronomers is an emphatic “no.” Elizabeth Alvarez of the
International Dark Sky Association (IDA), a non-profit organization in Tucson, Arizona, says that
overly bright security lights can actually force neighbours to close the shutters, which means that
if any criminal activity does occur on the street, no one will see it. And the old assumption that
bright lights deter crime appears to have been a false one: A new Department of Justice report
concludes that there is no documented correlation between the level of lighting and the level of
crime in an area. And contrary to popular belief, more crimes occur in broad daylight than at night.

E For drivers, light can actually create a safety hazard. Glaring lights can temporarily blind
drivers, increasing the likelihood of an accident. To help prevent such accidents, some cities and
states prohibit the use of lights that impair night-time vision. For instance, New Hampshire law
forbids the use of “any light along a highway so positioned as to blind or dazzle the vision of
travellers on the adjacent highway.”

F Badly designed lighting can pose a threat to wildlife as well as people. Newly hatched turtles
in Florida move toward beach lights instead of the more muted silver shimmer of the ocean.
Migrating birds, confused by lights on skyscrapers, broadcast towers and lighthouses, are injured,
sometimes fatally, after colliding with high, lighted structures. And light pollution harms air
quality as well: Because most of the country’s power plants are still powered by fossil fuels, more
light means more air pollution.

G So what can be done? Tucson, Arizona is taking back the night. The city has one of the best
lighting ordinances in the country, and, not coincidentally, the highest concentration of
observatories in the world. Kitt Peak National Optical Astronomy Observatory has 24 telescopes
aimed skyward around the city’s perimeter, and its cadre of astronomers needs a dark sky to work
with.

H For a while, that darkness was threatened. “We were totally losing the night sky,” Jim
Singleton of Tucson’s Lighting Committee told Tulsa, Oklahoma’s KOTV last March. Now, after
retrofitting inefficient mercury lighting with low-sodium lights that block light from “trespassing”
into unwanted areas like bedroom windows, and by doing away with some unnecessary lights
altogether, the city is softly glowing rather than brightly beaming. The same thing is happening in
a handful of other states, including Texas, which just passed a light pollution bill last summer.
“Astronomers can get what they need at the same time that citizens get what they need: safety,
security and good visibility at night,” says McDonald Observatory’s Mark Adams, who provided
testimony at the hearings for the bill.

I And in the long run, everyone benefits from reduced energy costs. Wasted energy from
inefficient lighting costs us between $1 and $2 billion a year, according to IDA. The city of San
Diego, which installed new, high-efficiency street lights after passing a light pollution law in 1985,
now saves about $3 million a year in energy costs.

J Legislation isn’t the only answer to light pollution problems. Brian Greer, Central Ohio
representative for the Ohio Light Pollution Advisory Council, says that education is just as
important, if not more so. “There are some special situations where regulation is the only fix,” he
says. “But the vast majority of bad lighting is simply the result of not knowing any better.”
Simple actions like replacing old bulbs and fixtures with more efficient and better-designed ones
can make a big difference in preserving the night sky.
*The Big Dipper: a group of seven bright stars visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

Questions 1-5

The first six paragraphs of Reading Passage 1 are lettered A-F.

Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs A-F from the list of headings below.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all.

List of Headings
i Why lights are needed

ii Lighting discourages law breakers

iii The environmental dangers

iv People at risk from bright lights

v Illuminating space

vi A problem lights do not solve

vii Seen from above

viii More light than is necessary

ix Approaching the city

Example) Paragraph A ix

1) Paragraph B

2) Paragraph C

3) Paragraph D

4) Paragraph E

5) Paragraph F
Questions 6-9

Complete each of the following statements with words taken from the passage.

Write ONE or TWO WORDS for each answer.

6) According to a recent study, well-lit streets do not .................... or make

neighbourhoods safer to live in.

7) Inefficient lighting increases .................... because most electricity is produced from

coal, gas or oil.

8) Efficient lights .................... from going into areas where it is not needed.

9) In dealing with light pollution .................... is at least as important as passing new

laws.

Questions 10-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the writer's claims

NO if the statement contradicts the writer's claims

NOT
if there is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
GIVEN
10) One group of scientists find their observations are made more difficult by bright
lights.

11) It is expensive to reduce light pollution.

12) Many countries are now making light pollution illegal.

13) Old types of light often cause more pollution than more modern ones.

Academic Reading Passage 2

CRUEL TO BE KIND
1 Would you let another driver into your lane in heavy traffic? Or are you the
sort of driver who slows to a crawl when someone is tailgating or driving much
too close behind you? If you do either, it’s OK: you are being human.
2 To date, no evidence either of altruism or spite has been found in any other
animal except Homo sapiens. Being nice or nasty at a cost to yourself could be
part of what makes you human. But now scientists are investigating our closest
genetic relative, the chimpanzee. Somewhere in the 99.7 percent of DNA that
the two species share, perhaps there are genes for charity and malice.
3 In a study carried out at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, which was published in the British journal Proceedings of the
Royal Society in 2006, researchers tested whether chimpanzees would help or
hinder a hungry neighbor. A chimpanzee in a testing room had two choices: it
could either deliver food to a chimpanzee in a room next door, or to an empty
room. In both cases, the chimpanzee controlling the food could not get any
itself.
The study found the chimpanzee controlling the food would do nothing for half
the time, then give food to the other chimpanzee only a quarter of the time –
which demonstrates neither altruism nor spite. ‘I was predicting chimps would
be spiteful ,’ says Keith Jensen, a doctoral student who led the study. ‘I mean,
 they’re chimpanzees. I get spat on all the time. But though they knew they
couldn’t get the food, sometimes they gave it to the other guy anyway.’
4 In contrast, humans frequently perform selfless acts. We donate blood, give
money to charities and help old ladies cross the street. Altruism is among the
very foundations of our society. Banking, government and the health services
all depend on people working for the benefit of complete strangers.
5 And we can be spiteful too. In the famous Ultimatum Game, $10 is to be
shared by two people. Person 1decides how the $10 is to be split between them
, and Person 2 chooses to accept or reject the offer. If the offer is rejected,
neither gets anything. Economists predicted Person 1 would offer a $9/$1 split
and that Person 2 would accept it because $1 is better than nothing.
Surprisingly, Person 1 generally offers a kind and a fair $5/$5 split, which is
accepted. If anything less even is offered, Person 2 generally rejects the offer,
docking their own pay as punishment for the other person’s selfishness.
6 What happens if chimpanzees are rewarded? In a similar study published in
Nature in October 2005, the chimpanzee controlling the food received food
regardless of whether or not it chose to deliver food to a neighbor or an empty
room. Again, the chimpanzee in control gave food to the neighbor only about a
quarter of the time – even when the other chimpanzee was begging frantically.
7 If able to help others at no cost to themselves, most humans will do so. This is
called ‘other-regarding’, which means humans are considerate to each other.
Chimps, it seems, are not. ‘I don’t know why chimps aren’t other-regarding,’
says Joan Silk from the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the
study. ‘It might be they are unaware of others’ needs. It might be they are
aware, but unconcerned.’ The findings may come as a surprise to field
primatologists who often observe chimpanzees sharing food in the wild, even
precious sources of protein like meat. ‘Food sharing among adults in the wild
might be based on self-interest’, says Silk. ‘Males might share meat with other
males because they anticipate receiving meat in return in the future.
Alternatively, males might share meat because it is more costly to monopolise
it than to allow others to share it.’
8 But for now it appears humans are the only animals known to think
considerately and inconsiderately about others even when they are strangers.
Chimpanzees do not appear to have either the ability or the inclination. Perhaps
somewhere along the split with our common ancestor, the selfless gene and the
mean gene evolved.
9 So next time someone cuts into your lane, relax – it’s higher evolution at work.

Questions 14-17

Match each researcher or piece of research (Questions 14-17) with the correct
finding (A-H) from the box below.

14. German researchers

15. Research based on an economic game

16. Research published in Nature

17. Joan Silk

Lists of findings

A A chimpanzee’s behavior is not affected by whether the chimp itself has food.

B People often do generous things.

C Studying chimpanzees has revealed much about how humans drive.

D People normally put their own interests first.

E Chimpanzee behavior demonstrates neither generosity nor meanness.

F Generosity and meanness may be determined by our genes.

G Chimpanzees will steal food when they can.

H We simply do not understand why chimps behave differently from people.

Questions 18-22

Circle the appropriate letter.

18. The genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are

A. well-understood.

B. being studied.

C. 99.7% understood.

D. not measurable.

19. Keith Jensen was surprised by the result of his research because

A. chimpanzees are known to be kindly creatures.

B. he has experienced chimpanzees being unfriendly to him.

C. chimpanzees usually share food with each other.

D. he predicted that the hungry chimpanzee would get the food.

20. According to the writer, some social institutions are examples of human

A. foolishness

B. generosity

C. welfare

D. selfishness

21. According to the writer, the results of the Ultimate Game showed that people general

A. penalize unjust treatment

B. accept unjust treatment

C. expect unjust treatment

D. enjoy unjust treatment

22. According to Joan Silk, in normal circumstances, chimpanzees frequently

A. understand each other’s needs

B. feel concern about each other’s needs

C. meet each other’s needs

D. ignore each other’s needs

Questions 23-26

Complete the sentences with words from Reading passage 2. Write NO MORE THAN
THREE WORDS for each answer.

23. The chimpanzee is humankind’s ………………………

24. Many human social institutions rely on people helping ………………………

25. Anthropologists call creatures which consider others’ needs………………………

26. A………………………gene may be responsible for our unkind behavior.

Academic Reading Passage 3

HOMER’S LITERACY LEGACY

Why was the work of Homer, famous author of ancient Greece, so full of clichés?

A Until the last tick of history’s clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission
and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principal medium of moving information
across space and from one generation to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of
telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the
classicist Eric Havelock, a “massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of
encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history and technology which the effective citizen was
required to learn as the core of his educational equipment”. The greatest oral works
transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains.
In India, an entire class of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect
fidelity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were often attacked to poets as
official memorizers. The Buddha’s teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of
oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the
first century B.C.

B The most famous of the Western tradition’s oral works, and the first to have been
systematically studied, were Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. These two poems – possibly the
first to have been written down in the Greek alphabet – had long been held up as literacy
archetypes. However, even as they were celebrated as the models to which all literature
should aspire, Homer’s masterworks had also long been the source of scholarly unease.
The earliest modern critics sensed that they were somehow qualitatively different from
everything that came after – even a little strange. For one thing, both poems were oddly
repetitive in the way they referred to characters. Odysseus was always “clever Odysseus”.
Dawn was always “rosy-fingered”. Why would someone write that? Sometimes the
epithets seemed completely off-key. Why call the murderer of Agamemnon “blameless
Aegisthos”? Why refer to “swift-footed Achilles” even when he was sitting down. Or to
“laughing Aphrodite” even when she was in tears? In terms of both structure and theme,
the Odyssey and Iliad were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability. The same
narrative units – gathering armies, heroic shields, challenges between rivals – pop up
again and again, only with different characters and different circumstances. In the context
of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks* seemed hard to explain.
C At the heart of the unease about these earliest works of literature were two
fundamental questions: first, how could Greek literature have been born ex nihilo* with
two masterpieces? Surely a few less perfect stories must have come before, and yet these
two were among the first on record. And second, who exactly was their author? Or was it
authors? There were no historical records of Homer, and no trustworthy biography of the
man exists beyond a few self-referential hints embedded in the texts themselves.

D Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first modern critics to suggest that Homer
might not have been an author in the contemporary sense of a single person who sat down
and wrote a story and then published it for others to read. In his 1781 Essay on the Origin
of Languages, the Swiss philosopher suggested that the Odyssey and Iliad might have
been “written only in men’s memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in
writing” – though that was about as far as his enquiry into the matter went.

E In 1975, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf argued for the first time
that not only were Homer’s works not written down by Homer, but they weren’t even by
Homer. They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of
Greek bards*, and only redacted* in their present form at some later date. In 1920, an
eighteen-year-old scholar named Milman Parry took up the question of Homeric
authorship as his Master’s thesis at the University of California, Berkely. He suggested
that the reason Homer’s epics seemed unlike other literature was because they were
unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the
evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. All
those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the
bizarrely repetitive epithets – “clever Odysseus” and “pray-eye Athena” – that had
always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material
evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic* aids that helped the
bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems.

F The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just “one of a long
tradition of oral poets that…composed wholly without the aid of writing”. Parry realized
that if you were setting out to create memorable poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad were
exactly the kind of poems you’d create. It’s said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can
commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that clichés so easily
seep into our speech and writing – their insidious memorability – is exactly why they
played such an important role in oral storytelling. The principles that the oral bards
discovered as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling were the same
mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their
first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century. Words
that rhyme are than abstract ones. Finding patterns and structure in information is how
our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme is a
way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.

Glossary:

Quirk: behavior or a habit which seems to be unique to one person

Ex nihilo: a Latin phrase used to express the idea of ‘creation out of nothing’

Bard: a person who composed and recited long, heroic poems

Redacted: published

Mnemonic: a sentence or short poem used for helping someone to remember something

Cliché: a phrase or idea that is unoriginal because people use it very frequently.

Questions 27-32

Reading passage 3 has six paragraphs, A-F

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

27. The claim that the Odyssey and Iliad were not poems in their original form.

28. A theory involving the reinterpretation of the term ‘author’

29. References to the fact that little is known about Homer’s life

30. A comparison between the construction of Homer’s poems and another art form

31. Examples of the kinds of people employed to recall language

32. Doubts regarding Homer’s apparently inappropriate descriptions

Questions 33 and 34

Choose TWO letters in boxes 33 and 34 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of these points are made by the writer of the text about the Odyssey and the
Iliad?

A They are sometimes historically inaccurate.

B It is uncertain which century they were written in.

C Their content is very similar.

D Later writers referred to them as ideal examples of writing.

E There are stylistic differences between them.

Questions 35 and 36

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 35 and 36 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following theories does the writer of the text refer to?

A Homer wrote his work during a period of captivity.

B Neither the Odyssey nor the Iliad were written by Homer.

C Homer created the Odyssey and Iliad without writing them down.

D Homer may have suffered from a failing memory in later life.

E The oral and written version of Homer’s work may not be identical.

Questions 37-40

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

The importance of the spoken word and how words are remembered

Spoken poetry was once the means by which each 37…………………of a particular

culture or community could pass on its knowledge. Indeed, it has been suggested that it

was the duty of a 38…………………to know poetry so they would be informed about

subjects such as politics and history.

Psychologists now know that when people are trying to remember information, they may

find it difficult to remember words that express 39………………… ideas. It is easier to

remember words which sound similar or go together with 40…………………..