【阅读】

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Last man standing

Some 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens beat other hominids to become the only surviving species. Kate Ravilious reveals how we did it.

A Today, there are over seven billion people living on Earth. No other species has exerted as much influence over the planet as us. But turn the clock back 80,000 years and we were one of a number of species roaming the Earth. Our own species. Homo sapiens (Latin for 'wise man'), was most successful in Africa. In western Eurasia, the Neanderthals dominated, while Homo erectus may have lived in Indonesia. Meanwhile, an unusual finger bone and tooth, discovered in Denisova cave in Siberia in 2008, have led scientists to believe that yet another human population - the Denisovans - may also have been widespread across Asia. Somewhere along the line, these other human species died out, leaving Homo sapiens as the sole survivor. So what made us the winners in the battle for survival?

B Some 74.000 years ago, the Toba 'supervolcano' on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted. The scale of the event was so great that ash from the eruption was flung as far as eastern India, more than 2,000 kilometres away. Oxford archaeologist Mike Petraglia and his team have uncovered thousands of stone tools buried underneath the Toba ash. The mix of hand axes and spear tips have led Petraglia to speculate that Homo sapiens and Homo erectus were both living in eastern India prior to the Toba eruption. Based on careful examination of the tools and dating of the sediment layers where they were found. Petraglia and his team suggest that Homo sapiens arrived in eastern India around 78.000 years ago. Migrating out of Africa and across Arabia during a favourable climate period. After their arrival, the simple tools belonging to Homo erectus seemed to lessen in number and eventually disappear completely. 'We think that Homo sapiens had a more efficient hunting technology, which could have given them the edge.' says Petraglia. 'Whether the eruption of Toba also played a role in the extinction of the Homo erectus-like species is unclear to us.'

C Some 45.000 years later, another fight for survival took place. This time, the location was Europe and the protagonists were another species, the Neanderthals.

They were a highly successful species that dominated the European landscape for 300.000 years. Yet within just a few thousand years of the arrival of Homo sapiens, their numbers plummeted. They eventually disappeared from the landscape around 30.000 years ago. with their last known refuge being southern Iberia, including Gibraltar. Initially. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived alongside each other and had no reason to compete. But then Europe's climate swung into a cold, inhospitable, dry phase. 'Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations had to retreat to refugia (pockets of habitable land). This heightened competition between the two groups,' explains Chris Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

D Both species were strong and stockier than the average human today, but Neanderthals were particularly robust. 'Their skeletons show that they had broad shoulders and thick necks,' says Stringer. 'Homo sapiens, on the other hand, had longer forearms, which undoubtedly enabled them to throw a spear from some distance, with less danger and using relatively little energy,' explains Stringer. This long-range ability may have given Homo sapiens an advantage in hunting. When it came to keeping warm. Homo sapiens had another skill: weaving and sewing. Archaeologists have uncovered simple needles fashioned from ivory and bone alongside Homo sapiens, dating as far back as 35,000 years ago. 'Using this technology, we could use animal skins to make ourselves tents, warm clothes and fur boots,' says Stringer. In contrast. Neanderthals never seemed to master sewing skills, instead relying on pinning skins together with thorns.

E A thirst for exploration provided Homo sapiens with another significant advantage over Neanderthals. Objects such as shell beads and flint tools, discovered many miles from their source, show that our ancestors travelled over large distances, in order to barter and exchange useful materials, and share ideas and knowledge. By contrast. Neanderthals tended to keep themselves to themselves, living in small groups. They misdirected their energies by only gathering resources from their immediate surroundings and perhaps failing to discover new technologies outside their territory.

F Some of these differences in behaviour may have emerged because the two species thought in different ways. By comparing skull shapes, archaeologists have shown that Homo sapiens had a more developed temporal lobe - the regions at the side of the brain, associated with listening, language and long-term memory. 'We think that Homo sapiens had a significantly more complex language than Neanderthals and were able to comprehend and discuss concepts such as the distant past and future.' says Stringer. Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York, has recently suggested that Homo sapiens may also have had a greater diversity of brain types than Neanderthals.

'Our research indicates that high-precision tools, new hunting technologies and the development of symbolic communication may all have come about because they were willing to include people with "different" minds and specialised roles in their society,' she explains. 'We see similar kinds of injuries on male and female Neanderthal skeletons, implying there was no such division of labour,' says Spikins.

G Thus by around 30,000 years ago. Many talents and traits were well established in Homo sapiens societies but still absent from Neanderthal communities. Stringer thinks that the Neanderthals were just living in the wrong place at the wrong time. 'They had to compete with Homo sapiens during a phase of very unstable climate across Europe. During each rapid climate fluctuation, they may have suffered greater losses of people than Homo sapiens, and thus were slowly worn down,' he says. 'If the climate had remained stable throughout, they might still be here.'

Questions 1-5

The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

1   a comparison of a range of physical features of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens

2   reference to items that were once used for trade

3   mention of evidence for the existence of a previously unknown human species

4   mention of the part played by i.l fortune in the downfall of Neanderthal society

5   reference to the final geographical location of Nediidei tlials

Questions 6-9

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on the answer sheet.

6  Analysis of stone tools and has enabled Petraglia's team to put forward an arrival date for Homo sapiens in eastern India.

7  Homo sapiens used both to make sewing implements.

8  The territorial nature of Neanderthals may have limited their ability to acquire resources and  

9  Archaeologists examined in order to get an insight into Neanderthal and Homo sapiens' capacity for language and thought.

Questions 10-13

Look at the following statements and the list of researchers, A-C, below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher.

10   No evidence can be found to suggest that Neanderthal communities allocated tasks to different members.

11   Homo sapiens may have been able to plan ahead.

12   Scientists cannot be sure whether a sudden natural disaster contributed to the loss of a human species.

13   Environmental conditions restricted the areas where Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could live.

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Life-Casting and Art

Julian Bames explores the questions posed by Life-Casts, an exhibition of plaster moulds of living people and objects which were originally used for scientific purposes

A Art changes over time and our idea of what art is changes too. For example, objects originally intended for devotional, ritualistic or re-creational purposes may be recategorised as art by members of other later civilisations, such as our own, which no longer respond to these purposes.

B What also happens is that techniques and crafts which would have been judged inartistic at the time they were used are reassessed. Life-casting is an interesting example of this. It involved making a plaster mould of a living person or thing. This was complex, technical work, as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he poured 250 litres of plaster over his human model and nearly killed him. At the time, the casts were used for medical research and, consequently, in the nineteenth century life-casting was considered inferior to sculpture in the same way that, more recently, photography was thought to be a lesser art than painting. Both were viewed as unacceptable shortcuts by the 'senior 1 arts. Their virtues of speed and unwavering realism also implied their limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination.

C For many, life-casting was an insult to the sculptor's creative genius. In an infamous lawsuit of 1834, a moulder whose mask of the dying French emperor Napoleon had been reproduced and sold without his permission was judged to have no rights to the image. In other words, he was specifically held not to be an artist. This judgement reflect the view of established members of the nineteenth-century art world such as Rodin, who commented that life-casting 'happens fast but it doesn't make Art'. Some even feared that 'if too much nature was allowed in, it would lead Art away from its proper course of the Ideal.

D The painter Gauguin, at the end of the nineteenth 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 has 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 traditionalists implied. Painters have always used technical back-up such as studio assistants to do the boring bits, while apparently lesser crafts involve great skill, thought, preparation and, depending on how we define it， imagination.

E Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new 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 art using the old to justify itself. It seems to be saying, look at 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. Take, for example, the cast of the hand of a giant from a circus, made by an anonymous artist around 1889, an item that would now sit happily in any commercial or public gallery. The most significant impact of this piece is on the eye, in the contradiction between unexpected size and 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 fingertips extend far beyond them. Then you take in the element of choice, arrangement, art if you like, in 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. It reminds us slyly, poignantly, of the full-size original

F But is it art? And, if so, why? These are old tediously repeated questions to which artists have often responded, 'It is art because I am an artist and therefore what I do is art. However, what doesn't work for literature works much better for art – works of art 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 and find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic intention of Paul Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil onto flesh, who moulded, cast and decorated in the nineteenth century is now irrelevant. What counts is the surviving object and our response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to reflection and involve 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.

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14  an example of a craftsman's unsuccessful claim to ownership of his work

15  an example of how trends in art can change attitudes to an earlier work

16  the original function of a particular type of art

17  ways of assessing whether or not an object is art

18  how artists deal with the less interesting aspects of their work

Questions 19-24

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?

In boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet, write

YES - if the statement agrees with the information

NO - if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN - if there is no information on this

19  Nineteenth-century sculptors admired the speed and realism of life-casting

20  Rodin believed the quality of the life-casting would improve if a slower process were used

21  The importance of painting has decreased with the development of colour photography

22  Life-casting requires more skill than sculpture does

23  New art encourages us to look at earlier work in a fresh way

24  The intended meaning of a work of art can get lost over time

Questions 25-26

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.

25. The most noticeable contrast in the cast of the giants hand is between the

A dirt and decoration

B size and realism

C choice and arrangement

D balance and texture

26. According to the writer, the importance of any artistic object lies in

A the artist's intentions

B the artist's beliefs

C the relevance it has to modem life

D the way we respond to it

READING PASSAGE 3

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

RISING SEA

Paragraph 1. INCREASED TEMPERATURES

The average air temperature at the surface of the earth has risen this century, as has the temperature of ocean surface waters. Because water expands as it heats, a warmer ocean means higher sea levels. We cannot say definitely that the temperature rises are due to the greenhouse effect; the heating may be part of a “natural” variability over a long time-scale that we have not yet recognized I our short 100 years of recording. However, assuming the build up of greenhouse gases is responsible, and that the warming will continue. Scientists and inhabitants of low-lying coastal areas would like to know the extent of future sea level rises.

Paragraph 2.

Calculating this is not easy. Models used for the purpose have treated the oceans as passive, stationary and one-dimensional. Scientists have assumed that heat simply diffused into the sea from the atmosphere. Using basic physical laws, they then predict how much a known volume of water would expand for a given increase in temperature. But the oceans are not one-dimensional, and recent work by oceanographers, using a new model which takes into account a number of subtle facets of the sea-including vast and complex ocean currents-suggests that the rise in sea level may be less than some earlier estimates had predicted.

Paragraph 3

An international forum on climate change, in 1986, produced figures for likely sea-level rises of 20 cm and 1.4 m, corresponding to atmospheric temperature increases of 1.5 and 4.5C respectively. Some scientists estimate that the ocean warming resulting from those temperature increases by the year 2050 would raise the sea level by between 10 cm and 40 cm. This model only takes into account the temperature effect on the oceans; it does not consider changes in sea level brought about by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, and changes in groundwater storage. When we add on estimates of these, we arrive at figures for total sea-level rises of 15 cm and 70 cm respectively.

Paragraph 4

It's not easy trying to model accurately the enormous complexities of the ever-changing oceans, with their great volume, massive currents and sensitively to the influence of land masses and the atmosphere. For example, consider how heat enters the ocean. Does it just “diffuse” from the warmer air vertically into the water, and heat only the surface layer of the sea? (Warm water is less dense than cold, so it would not spread downwards). Conventional models of sea-level rise have considered that this the only method, but measurements have shown that the rate of heat transfer into the ocean by vertical diffusion is far lower in practice than the figures that many models have adopted.

Paragraph 5

Much of the early work, for simplicity, ignored the fact that water in the oceans moves in three dimensions. By movement, of course, scientists don't mean waves, which are too small individually to consider, but rather movement of vast volumes of water in huge currents. To understand the importance of this, we now need to consider another process-advection. Imagine smoke rising from a chimney. On a still day it will slowly spread out in all directions by means of diffusion. With a strong directional wind, however, it will all shift downwind, this process is advection-the transport of properties (notably heat and salinity in ocean) by the movement of bodies of air or water, rather than by conduction or diffusion.

Paragraph 6

Massive oceans current called gyres do the moving. These currents have far more capacity to store heat than does the atmosphere. Indeed, just the top 3 m of the ocean contains more heat than the whole of the atmosphere. The origin of the gyres lies in the fact that more heat from the Sun reaches the Equator than the Poles, and naturally heat trends to move from the former to the latter. Warm air rises at the Equator, and draws more air beneath it in the form of winds (the “Trade Winds") that, together with other air movements, provide the main force driving the ocean currents.

Paragraph 7

Water itself is heated at the Equator and moves poleward, twisted by the Earth's rotation and affected by the positions of the continents. The resultant broadly circular movements between about 10 and 40 ' North and South are clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. They flow towards the east at mind latitudes in the equatorial region. They then flow towards the Poles, along the eastern sides of continents, as warm currents. When two different masses of water meet, once will move beneath the other, depending on their relative densities in the subduction process. The densities are determined by temperature and salinity. The convergence of water of different densities from the Equator and the Poles deep in the oceans causes continuous subduction. This means that water moves vertically as well as horizontally. Cold water from the Poles travels as depth-it is denser than warm water-until it emerges at the surface in another part of the world in the form of a cold current.

Paragraph 8. HOW THE GREENHOUSE EFFECTS WILL CHANGE OCEAN TEMPERATURES

Ocean currents, in three dimensions, from a giant “conveyor belt”, distributing heat from the thin surface layer into the interior of the oceans and around the globe. Water may take decades to circulate in these 3-D gyres in the lop kilometer of the ocean, and centuries in the deep water. With the increased atmospheric temperatures due to the greenhouse effect, the oceans conveyor belt will carry more heat into the interior. This subduction moves heat around far more effectively than simple diffusion. Because warm water expands more than cold when it is heated, scientists had presumed that the sea level would rise unevenly around the globe. It is now believed that these inequalities cannot persist, as winds will act to continuously spread out the water expansion. Of course, of global warming changes the strength and distribution of the winds, then this “evening-out” process may not occur, and the sea level could rise more in some areas than others.

Questions 27-32

Reading Passage 2 has 8 Paragraphs, 1-8. The first paragraph and the last have been given headings. Choose the correct heading for the remaining 6 Paragraphs from the list below.

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

Write the correct number, A-I, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet

27   Paragraph 2

28   Paragraph 3

29   Paragraph 4

30   Paragraph 5

31   Paragraph 6

32   Paragraph 7

Questions 33-34

Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 33-34 on your answer sheet.

33 Scientists do not know for sure why the air and surface of oceans temperatures are rising because…………

A there is too much variability

B there is no enough variability

C they have not been recording these temperatures for enough time

D the changes have only been noticed for 100 years

34 New search leads scientists to believe that …………

A the oceans are less complex

B the oceans are more complex

C the oceans will rise more than expected

D the oceans will rise less than expected

Question 35

Look at the following list of factors A-F and select THREE which are mentioned in the Reading Passage 2 which may contribute to the rising ocean levels.

Write the correct THREE letters A-F in the box 9 on your answer sheet.

A thermal expansion

B melting ice

C increased air temperature

D higher rainfall

E changes in the water table

F increased ocean movement

Question 36-40

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? 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

36   The surface layer of the oceans is warmed by the atmosphere.

37   Advection of water changes heat and salt levels.

38   A gyre holds less heat than there is in the atmosphere.

39   The process of subduction depends on the water density.

40   The sea level is expected to rise evenly over the Earth's surface.

Keys

Passage 1

1. D      

2. E      

3. A     

4. G     

5. C     

6. sediment layers   

7. ivory and bone

8. new technologies

9. skull shapes

10. C

11. B

12. A

13. B

Passage 2

14. C    

15. E    

16. B   

17. F     

18. D    

19. NO       

20. NO

21. NO

22. NOT GIVEN

23. NO

24. YES

25. B

26. D