READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
Tickling and laughter
Why does tickling, or even the thought of it, produce laughter?
A Tickling is the act of touching so as to cause laughter or twitching movements.
Tickling may have been one of the first ways early humans communicated with each
other and is a useful form of non-verbal communication, particular with babies and
children. The word itself comes from the English of the Middle Ages when tickelen
meant ‘to touch lightly’.
B If you don’t know whether you are ticklish, you’ll have to ask someone else. Tickling
is not included in the spectrum of pains and pleasures that we can inflict on
ourselves and while we can stroke and scratch and hurt ourselves, the one thing we
can’t do effectively is tickle ourselves. And no-one knows why. It is a subject that has
intrigued philosophers and scientists since antiquity. He ancient Greek philosophers
Plato and Aristotle speculated about tickling and its purpose. The 19th-century
British scientist Charles Darwin was the first to attempt to analyse this peculiar
phenomenon, observing the involuntary spasm it seems to trigger in babies and
primates, and he came to the conclusion that tickling was an ingredient in forming
social bonds. In 1872 he noted that the key to the success of tickling is that ‘the
precise point to be tickled must not be known’. So it is surprise, rather than tactile
pressure, that is a key ingredient in successful tickling. Indeed, in people who are
extremely suggestible, the threat of being tickled without even being touched is
enough to induce hysterical laughter. This is as effective with adults as with children
and provides a clue to the fact that tickling is not merely a physical sensation.
Ticklishness is not something that diminishes with age, nor does anyone know why
some people are more ticklish than others, and there are no distinctions to be made
along gender lines. The whole thing is mysterious.
C Research has been done on animals on the relationship between tickling and
laughter. Neuroscientists at Bowling Green University in Ohio in the USA have
recently discovered that rats respond to being tickled with squealing, chirping
sounds, increased excitement and little kicks – especially when tickled one the nape
of the neck. Dogs may not respond quite as effusively, but it is common for tummy-
tickling to trigger frantic hind leg action which appears to be a sign of pleasure. More
controversial is the claim that Washoe, a female gorilla living in the primate facility at
Washington Central University and trained in American sign language, frequently
makes the sign for ‘tickle me’, suggesting that it is pleasant sensation.
D For eminent neuroscientist Professor V S Ramachandran, head of the Department
of Brain and Cognition at the University of California, laughter is the essential key to

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 unlocking the mystery of tickling. ‘Laughter’ is a signal that the tickling is a false
alarm, that there is nothing to really worry about, the subject is not really under
attack,’ Ramachandran says. ‘When someone tells you a joke, they take you along a
path of expectation to a punchline which is a twist in the path. When the subject
laughs at the punchline, it is a recognition that danger has been averted. The same
applies to tickling.’
E Ramachandran has studied the response by children to tickling. He says: ‘Most
babies are ticklish. In evolutionary terms it may be that in humans, ticklishness is a
leftover of childhood behaviour with some social benefits. But because there are so
many layers to the human mind, people who do not consider themselves ticklish my
be inhibited about laughing and exposing their vulnerability.’ Another researcher,
Christine Harris believes that there are two types of tickling. The lighter pressure
results in the urge to scratch or rub, while the heavier provokes laughter. As to why
some areas of the body appear to be more sensitive to tickling than others – the
soles of the feet, the underarm area, the stomach and the neck are most commonly
mentioned – Ramachandran suggests that ‘these are areas that are not normally
touched by other people so it is an indication that they are considered private space’.
Other especially ticklish areas include the waist and ribs.
F The laughter response to the stimulus of tickling comes from the brain. Sarah Jayne
Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at London’s University College, says the
cerebellum, a more primitive part of the brain, dampens the tickle sensation if you try
to tickle yourself, telling the cortex to ignore the feeling. To demonstrate theory, she
constructed a robotic tickle machine with a foam-tipped arm and operated by an
unseen person. Blakemore used MRI scans which measure blood flow in the brain
to compare cerebral activity when six volunteers tried to tickle themselves and when
they were tickled by the machine. The part of the brain that registers touch reacted
more strongly when the machine tickled them than when they tickled themselves.
Recent studies suggest that reaction to tickling, like laughter, is innate. Children born
deaf and blind react normally to being tickled. No specific studies have been
conducted, however, on tickling in people suffering from autism.

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Questions 1 – 5
Reading passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1 the parts of the human body which are sensitive to tickling
2 the interest in tickling shown by scientists and thinkers throughout history
3 the similarity between response to tickling and response to telling funny stories
4 an experiment on tickling oneself
5 a reason why some people do not believe they are ticklish
Questions 6 – 11
Look at the following claims (Questions 6-11) and the list of people below.
Match each claim with the correct person, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
6 Laughter demonstrates that tickling is not a threat.
7 Tickling strengthens relations between people.
8 Different sorts of tickling cause different reactions.
9 Tickling oneself results in a weaker sensation than being tickled by someone or
something else.
10 Effective tickling relies on not knowing where it will happen.
11 Understanding laughter will allow us to understand tickling.
List of people
A Charles Darwin
B Professor V S Ramachandran
C Christine Harris
D Sarah Jayne Blakemore

Questions 12 and 13
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.

When people are tickled, the brain produces a laughter-response. If you attempt to
tickle yourself, the part of the brain called the 12 …………… weakens the feeling you
experience. A recent experiment testing why people do not laugh when they tickle
themselves examined 13 …………… in the brain to assess brain activity. The
experiment found that the area of the brain where we experience the sensation of touch
responded more intensely when tickling was controlled by another person.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
The Museum Dilemma
Can museums and art galleries make works of art both accessible to the public and
protected at the same time?
On any day of the week, tourists flock to museums and galleries such as the Louvre in
Paris and The Met in New York, willingly paying their steep entrance fees. This is in stark
contrast to the 55,000 local museums around the globe, who often struggle when it comes
to attracting visitors and the resulting much-needed funds. These institutions may be a
source of pride to locals, but are too often perceived as dusty cabinets – useful when it
comes to storing ancient things, but not very interesting to look at. The constant dilemma
for museum curators is that increasing visitor numbers also brings a far greater change for
damage, which can be deliberate, incidental or accidental.
Deliberate damage cannot be controlled for, as the perpetrators act in a determined and
destructive way. This was the case with the Leonardo da Vinci cartoon damaged by
gunshot in the National Gallery in London in 1987, despite the painting being protected
behind a glass screen. Incidental damage is easier to anticipate and often results from a
visitor’s innate curiosity and instructive urge to touch. This is mainly managed through the
use of signage, gallery attendants, or with a physical barrier such as a rope. Gallery
attendants are the more expensive but preferred option as written warnings tend to be
ignored. However, cutbacks in funding mean fewer and fewer attendants.
Rope barriers are commonplace but their very nature renders them ineffective – visitors
can still get quite close to a painting. It was in recognition of this that staff at Huashan 1914
Creative Park in Taipei decided to place a raised platform between the barrier and a
valuable 17th century oil painting as a reminder to visitors to not get too close.
Unfortunately, the platform inadvertently contributed to extensive damage when a young
boy tripped on it and put his hand through the painting while trying to break his fall.
Many galleries would rather not use barriers at all because they tend to spoil the overall
look, and some have resorted to technology to get around this issue. In the past, museums
such as the Stederlijk Museum in Amsterdam used alarms triggered by lasers to alert
visitors to their proximity to a painting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trade-off between
aesthetics and noise means this idea has not been taken up universally.
Nevertheless, technology does appear to solve the issues of attracting visitors, and there
are more interactive displays popping up. Even so, incorporating the occasional exhibit that
encourages visitor engagement can mean that visitors then assume it is acceptable to get
up close and personal with all works of art. The ensuing surface damage is often not
immediately apparent, but when thousands of subsequent visitors reach out to touch a
beautiful sculpture, the effect builds up cumulatively causing irreversible damage to the

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patina of materials such as bronze. While the surface of a painting does not offer quite the
same tactile allure, they too can suffer similar consequences.
Despite these challenges, technology use in museums seems likely to grow, especially as
they are uniquely placed to take advantage of augmented reality, where real people and
ancient artefacts can be juxtaposed in a virtual world. Tools such as these are being used
to construct exciting experiences that can bring a dull museum visit to life while also
keeping visitors away from precious and fragile objects.
One such example is an augmented reality project that was initially trialled at White Sands
National Monument in New Mexico with great success. Staff there showed visitors how, by
scanning a code with a smart phone camera, a troop of mammoths would appear to walk
over the horizon. Curiously though, when the same idea was later deployed with The
Etches Collection, an exhibit in Dorset, on Britain’s Jurassic Coast, no one engaged with it.
Rather than a lack of interest in the technology, the failure appears to have been due to the
reluctance of visitors to download the museum’s app onto their own phone. The best
technology in the world can’t fix that.
A key challenge is the lack of insight into what visitors actually want and expect from a
museum visit, and a recent study at several cultural sites in Scotland has tried to provide
this. Through questionnaires and interviews, researchers made some surprising
discoveries. While it had been assumed that more visual experiences would need less
narrative, the study shows the opposite is true: visitors still see information about the place
as important, whether the experience is virtual or not. Interestingly, although audiences do
enjoy immersive visitor attractions, if an exhibition is purely a simulation, they like to be
able to handle objects at the same time for extra realism, such as at Culloden Battlefield,
whose visitor centre has artefacts such as 18th-century weapons.
The clear message is that, although technology has much to offer the museums, and is
arguably essential to their survival, there is clearly some way still to go. It can bring
museums to life to the benefit rather than the detriment of the precious artefacts and
artworks they are home to, but only if it gives visitors the experience they want.

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Questions 14-19
Look at the following museums and galleries (Questions 14-19) and the list of
comments below.
Match each place with the correct comment, A-J.
Write the correct letter, A-J, next to questions 14-19.

14 National Gallery, London

15 Huashan 1914 Creative Park, Taipei
16 Stederlijk Museum, Amsterdam
17 White Sands National Monument, New
Mexico
18 The Etches Collection, Dorset
19 Culloden Battlefield, Scotland

List of comments
A This museum shows the benefits of using a physical barrier
B An attempt to prevent damage had the opposite effect
C This is a good example of the importance of alarm systems
D This experience shows the potential benefits of technology for museums
E Holding something real helps improve a virtual experience
F An occurrence here shows that certain damage cannot be prevented
G This shows that technology will only benefit museums if it is used
H Some people prefer to have a real experience rather than a virtual one
I A system used to protect artwork proved to be unpopular elsewhere
J Visitors are not at all interested in using technology

Questions 20-26
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 20-26 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

20 Even the most famous museums in the world generally struggle for funds.
21 The majority of people admit they have never visited their local museum.
22 Putting up written signs is the best way to avoid incidental damage.
23 Rope barriers have been shown to cause visitors to trip.
24 Some interactive exhibits can lead to more incidental damage.
25 Surface damage to paintings is very different to that of sculptures.
26 Even with simulated experiences, visitors still want to be told the history of a place.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3.
Pacific navigation and voyaging
How people migrated to the Pacific islands
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until ancestors of
today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000
years ago. At the present time, the debate continues about exactly how they migrated such
vast distances across the ocean, without any of the modern technologies we take for
granted.
Although the romantic vision of some early twentieth-century writers of fleets of heroic
navigators simultaneously setting sail had come to be considered by later investigators to
be exaggerated, no considered assessment of Pacific voyaging was forthcoming until 1956
when the American historian Andrew Sharp published his research. Sharp challenged the
‘heroic vision’ by asserting that the expertise of the navigators was limited, and that the
settlement of the islands was not systematic, being more dependent on good fortune by
drifting canoes. Sharp’s theory was widely challenged, and deservedly so. If nothing else,
however, it did spark renewed interest in the topic and precipitated valuable new research.
Since the 1960s a wealth of investigations has been conducted, and most of them,
thankfully, have been of the ‘non-armchair’ variety. While it would be wrong to denigrate all
‘armchair’ research – that based on an examination of available published materials – it
has turned out that so little progress had been made in the area of Pacific voyaging
because most writers relied on the same old sources – travelers’ journals or missionary
narratives compiled by unskilled observers. After Sharp, this began to change, and
researchers conducted most of their investigations not in libraries, but in the field.
In 1965, David Lewis, a physician and experienced yachtsman, set to work using his own
unique philosophy: he took the yacht he had owned for many years and navigated through
the islands in order to contact those men who still find their way at sea using traditional
methods. He then accompanied these men, in their traditional canoes, on test voyages
from which all modern instruments were banished from sight, though Lewis secretly used
them to confirm the navigator’s calculations. His most famous such voyage was a return
trip of around 1,000 nautical miles between two islands in mid-ocean. Far from drifting, as
proposed by Sharp, Lewis found that ancient navigators would have known which course
to steer by memorizing which stars rose and set in certain positions along the horizon and
this gave them fixed directions by which to steer their boats.
The geographer Edwin Doran followed a quite different approach. He was interested in
obtaining exact data on canoe sailing performance, and to that end employed the latest
electronic instrumentation. Doran traveled on board traditional sailing canoes in some of
the most remote parts of the Pacific, all the while using his instruments to record canoe
speeds in different wind strengths – from gales to calms – the angle canoes could sail

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relative to the wind. In the process, he provided the first really precise attributes of
traditional sailing canoes.
A further contribution was made by Steven Horvath. As a physiologist, Horvath’s interest
was not in navigation techniques or in canoes, but in the physical capabilities of the men
themselves. By adapting standard physiological techniques, Horvath was able to calculate
the energy expenditure required to paddle canoes of this sort at times when there was no
wind to fill the sails, or when the wind was contrary. He concluded that paddles, or perhaps
long oars, could indeed have propelled for long distances what were primarily sailing
vessels.
Finally, a team led by P Wall Garrard conducted important research, in this case by making
investigations while remaining safely in the laboratory. Wall Garrard’s unusual method was
to use the findings of linguists who had studied the languages of the Pacific islands, many
of which are remarkably similar although the islands where they are spoken are sometimes
thousands of kilometres apart. Clever adaptation of computer simulation techniques
pioneered in other disciplines allowed him to produce convincing models suggesting the
migrations were indeed systematic, but not simultaneous. Wall Garrard proposed the
migrations should be seen not as a single journey made by a massed fleet of canoes, but
as a series of ever more ambitious voyages, each pushing further into the unknown ocean.
What do we learn about Pacific navigation and voyaging from this research? Quite
correctly, none of the researchers tried to use their findings to prove one theory or another;
experiments such as these cannot categorically confirm or negate a hypothesis. The
strength of this research lay in the range of methodologies employed. When we splice
together these findings we can propose that traditional navigators used a variety of canoe
types, sources of water and navigation techniques, and it was this adaptability which was
their greatest accomplishment. These navigators observed the conditions prevailing at sea
at the time a voyage was made and altered their techniques accordingly. Furthermore, the
canoes of the navigators were not drifting helplessly at sea but were most likely part of a
systematic migration; as such, the Pacific peoples were able to view the ocean as an
avenue, not a barrier, to communication before any other race on Earth. Finally, one
unexpected but most welcome consequence of this research has been a renaissance in
the practice of traditional voyaging. In some groups of islands in the Pacific today young
people are resurrecting the skills of their ancestors, when a few decades ago it seemed
they would be lost forever.

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Question 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

27 The Pacific islands were uninhabited when migrants arrived by sea from
Southeast Asia
28 Andrew Sharp was the first person to write about the migrants to islanders
29 Andrew Sharp believed migratory voyages were based on more on luck than skill
30 Despite being controversial, Andrew Sharp’s research had positive results
31 Edwin Doran disagreed with the findings of Lewis’s research

Questions 32-36
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.
32 David Lewis’s research was different because
A he observed traditional navigators at work
B he conducted test voyages using his own yacht
C he carried no modern instruments on test voyages
D he spoke the same language as the islanders he sailed with

33 What did David Lewis’s research discover about traditional navigators?

A They used the sun and moon to find their position
B They could not sail further than about 1,000 nautical miles
C They knew which direction they were sailing in
D They were able to drift for long distances

34 What are we told about Edwin Doran’s research?

A Data were collected after the canoes had returned to land
B Canoe characteristics were recorded using modern instruments
C Research was conducted in the most densely populated regions
D Navigators were not allowed to see the instruments Doran used

35 Which of the following did Steven Horvath discover during his research?
A Canoe design was less important than human strength
B New research methods had to be developed for use in canoes
C Navigators became very tired on the longest voyages
D Human energy may have been used to assist sailing canoes

36 What is the writer’s opinion of P Wall Garrard’s research?

A He is disappointed it was conducted in the laboratory
B He is impressed by the originality of the techniques used
C He is surprised it was used to help linguists with their research
D He is concerned that the islands studied are long distances apart

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Questions 1 37-40
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.
37 One limitation in the information produced by all of this research is that it
38 The best thing about this type of research
39 The most important achievement of traditional navigators
40 The migration of people from Asia to the Pacific

A was the variety of experimental techniques used

B was not of interest to young islanders today
C was not conclusive evidence in support of a single theory
D was being able to change their practices when necessary
E was the first time humans intentionally crossed an ocean
F was the speed with which it was conducted