English Written Proficiency Advanced 2 READING 2 BONES TO PHONES 1. Questions 1-15 are based on the following reading passage. Glance through the text before you start. A. With no books, no TV, no Internet, just Radio survived, the pnewnatic . . : how did our forebears exercise their minds mail didn't. Books are still here, but the Inca quipe aren't. Why around the campfire back in Palaeolithic times? do some media die while others live oni, asks Margaret Werthei One pastime seems to have been bone-notching. Across Europe and the Middle East, early humans took to etching parallel lines and crosses into pieces of bone. Why they did this is still a mystery, though present thinking is that the bones served as tally sticks or even a form of lunar calendar. Whatever their purposes, the bones were clearly important, or they would not ‘ho fulsiwere ned a tes by have been used for so long ~ about 90,000 years tea : “T doubt very much that any form of media we have today will survive that long,” declares Bruce Sterling with heartfelt admiration. B, Sterling, a Texas-based science-fiction writer, is a man who should know about such matters, He has spent much of the past five years sifting through the dustbins of history in search of dead media. He and fellow writer Bruce Kadrey are assembling an archive of the dead and dying, Their only criteria are that a device must have been used to create, store or communicate information, and that it must be deceased ~ or at least down. to its last gasp. C. Appropriately, for a project about the transience of media, the Dead Media Project is housed on the Internet. Sterling and Kadrey set the ball rolling, but ultimately it is a communal effort, relying on a cadre of selfless workers around the globe who scour historical sources for arcane, obscure, forgotten and abandoned media. Most of these are not academic historians, just self-professed obsessives. sonnei se etn School of Foreign Languages - TNU Page 75English Written Proficiency Advanced 2 D. At present, the official archive, known as the Dead Media Working Notes, contains more than 400 listings. Take, for example, she imeksuit- huge stone relics that do the Arctic landscape of North America, Their builders, the Inuit, used them as travel guides, By learning the shapes of individual sculptures and the sequences in which they appeared, the Inuit could travel vast distances over unfamiliar ground without getting lost. Then there are the Jusaka, used by the Luba people of Zaire. These hand-held wooden objects, which were studded with beads or pins or incised with ideograms, were used to teach traditional lore about cultural heroes, clan migration and sacred matters. Yet the symbols they carried were not direct representations of information, but designed to jog the memory. Many cities io the nineteenth century hed pneumatic mail systems. E. In the category called “Dead Physical Transfer Systems”, one group stands out — the multifarious systems designed to deliver mail. Pigeon posts have been around for 4,000 years, starting with the Sumerians. More recently, at the end of the nineteenth century, many cities boasted pneumatic mail system made up of underground pipes. ‘Telegrams and letters shot through the tubes in canisters propelled by compressed air. But perhaps the most bizarre postal innovation was missile mail. On 8 June 1959, at the behest of the US Post Office Department, the submarine USS Barbero fired a missile containing 3,000 letters at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida, The postal service’s website quotes an official at the time saying: “Before man reaches the Moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missile.” Sadly, the trial did not lead to a postal revolution. ee ie Te SoS Een Page 76 School of Foreign Languages - TNUEnglish Written Proficiency Advanced 2 F, With his knowledge of media fossils and what has lived on, has Sterling noticed any qualities that select for survival? “It really depends on the society that gave birth to it,” he says. “It helps a lot if it is the nerve system of how government information is transmitted.” At the very least,, he argues, successful media need a close association with some form of power in society. The Inca Iguipu illustrates the point. The Inca did not write, but kept records on complex arrangements of coloured, knotted strings, some weighing up to twenty kilograms and carrying tens of thousands of knots. These knots were tied by an official class- the Inca equivalents of historians, scribes and accountants. G. Unfortunately, the quipu did not survive long, but were burnt by the Spanish invaders, This demonstrates, as Sterling puts it, that media can be murdered. He believes that but for the Spanish, guipu could have been taken a great deal further. They are his favorite dead media “One of the things that really fascinates me is that they were networks,” he says. “They had directories and even sub-directories, and all this just with strings and knots.” H. Kadrey has noted another feature of long-lasting media: they tend to be simple. There are systems for sending messages with light, which have been invented time and again, starting with the Babylonians, Romans and Imperial Chinese, who operated a network of fires along the Great Wall. Before the invention of electrical telegraphy, the Russians, Czechs, British and Australians all experimented with optical telegraphy. These attempts may vary in their levels of sophistication but they’re all based on the same simple idea. “All a person needs is a shiny thing and the Sun,” says Kadrey, L Another shining example that draws the admiration of both Sterling and Kadrey is that old standby, the book, “I have this argument all the time,” Kadrey says, “So many people today claim that the book is dead. I don’t believe it for a minute,” he says. “It’s a very powerful technology. Books are so dub, just ink on a page, but they've lasted so long!” EXAM PRACTICE — Locating information 2, Look at Exam briefing and Task Approach before answering the questions Academic reading: Locating information In this task you have to locate information in paragraphs or sections of a text. You may need to find specific details, a description or a comparison, for example. The questions are not in text order, Some paragraphs may have more than one matching item. nner SS tri er School of Foreign Languages - TNU Page 77English Written Proficiency Advanced 2 TASK APPROACH: Look through the questions 1-8 and underline key words and phrases Study the first paragraph, looking for information which matches any of the questions When you find a possible answer, check that there is an exact maich between question and information in the text. Continue working through the text in the same way, paragraph by paragraph. Questions 1-8, The reading passage has nine paragraphs labeled A — I. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A—I next to each question, 18. 1, Where the Dead Media Project can be found Cc 2, A medium that was destroyed 3. An experimental medium which was not developed 4, A long-lasting but mysterious dead medium 5. A visual aid for teaching 6, How dead media are defined 7. A design feature shared by several successful media 8. The importance of a medium’s role in society Question 9-13 Look at the following descriptions (Questions 9 - 13) and the list of media below. Match each description with the correct medium. Example Its inventors were very optimistic about its future .D. 9. a widely used system in the 19" century, operating below ground level 10. their meaning depended on their form and the order in which they were placed 11. made only by a certain group in the society 12. may have been used to record years, months and their divisions 13. various experimental systems using the same basic principle List of media A. bone-notching E, Inca quipu B, Inuit inuksuit F. optical telegraphy C. pneumatic mail G. electrical telegraphy D, missile mail HL the book ere RT eth ESSE Page 78 School of Foreign Languages - TNUEnglish Written Proficiency Advanced 2 4, Remind yourself of the three key questions you should ask yourself in choosing the correct answer, Questions 14-15 Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D 14. What is the main role of Sterling and Kadrey in the Dead Media Project? A. They have collected the majority of the dead media in the archive. B, They were responsible for initiating the research C. They are writing a book about the subject D. They travel round the world searching for dead or dying media 15. What is Sterling’s opinion about the Inca quipu? A. They represent the most important records of the time B. They were unnecessarily complicated C. They will never be fully understood D. They had potential for further development School of Foreign Languages - TNU Page 79