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Test 1

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading passage 1 on
pages 2 and 3.

The development of the silk industry

Silk, a natural fibre produced by a particular worm called a silkworm, has been used in
clothing for many centuries
Silk became a precious commodity,
When silk was first discovered in China over highly sought after by other countries from an
4,500 years ago, it was reserved exclusively early date, and it is believed that the silk trade
for the use of the emperor, his close relations actually existed before the Silk Road2 was
and the very highest of his dignitaries. Within officially opened in the second century BC. An
the palace, the emperor is believed to have Egyptian mummy with a silk thread in her
worn a rope of white silk; outside, he, his hair, dating from 1070 BC, has been
principal wife, and the heir to the throne wore discovered in the village of Deir el Medina
yellow, the colour of the earth. near the Valley of the Kings, and is probably
the earliest evidence of the silk trade. During
Gradually silk came into more general
the second century BC, the Chinese emperor
use, and the various classes of Chinese society
Han Wu Di’s ambassadors travelled as far
began wearing tunics of silk. As well as being
west as Persia and Mesopotamia, bearing gifts
used for clothing and decoration, silk was
including silks. A range of important finds of
quite quickly put to industrial use and rapidly
Chinese silks have also been made along the
became one of the principal elements of the
Silk Road. One of the most dramatic of these
Chinese economy. It was used in the
finds was some Tang silk discovered in 1900.
production of musical instruments, as string
It is believed that around 1015 AD Buddhist
for fishing, and even as the world’s first luxury
monks possibly alarmed by the threat of
paper. Eventually even the common people
invasion by Tibetan people, had sealed more
were able to wear garments of silk.
than ten thousand manuscripts and silk
During the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 paintings, silk banners and textiles in caves
AD), silk ceased to be a mere fabric and near Dunhuang, a trading station on the Silk
became a form of currency. Farmers paid Road in north-west China.
taxes in grain and silk, and silk was used to
Some historians believe that the first
pay civil servants and to reward subjects for
Europeans to set eyes upon the fabulous
outstanding services. Values were calculated
fabric were the Roman legions of Marcus
in lengths of silk as they had previously been
Licinius Crassus, Governor of Syria. According
calculated in weight of gold. Before long, silk
to certain accounts of the period, at an
became a currency used in trade with foreign
important battle near the Euphrates River in
countries, which continued into the Tang
53 BC, the Roman soldiers were so startled by
dynasty (616- 907 AD). It is possible that this
the bright silken banners of the enemy that
added importance was the result of a major
they fled in panic. Yet, within decades Chinese
increase in production. Silk also found its way
silks were widely worn by the rich and noble
so thoroughly into the Chinese language that
families of Rome. The Roman Emperor
230 of the 5,000 most common characters of
Heliogabalus (218- 222 AD) wore nothing but
Mandarin1 have ‘silk’ as their key component.
silk. By 380 AD, the Roman historian
Marcellinus Ammianus reported that, ‘The
.
Test 1

use of silk, which was once confined to the Byzantine church and state created imperial
nobility has now spread to all classes without workshops, monopolising production and

distinction – even to the lowest.’ The desire keeping the secret to themselves. This
for silk continued to increase over the allowed a silk industry to be established,
centuries. Despite this demand, the price of undercutting the market for ordinary-grade
silk remained very high. Chinese silk. However, high quality silk
textiles, woven in China especially for the
In spite of their secrecy about Middle Eastern market, continued to achieve
production methods, the Chinese eventually high prices in the West, and trade along the
lost their monopoly on silk production. Silk Road continued as before. By the sixth
Knowledge of silk production methods century the Persians, too, had mastered the
reached Korea around 200 BC, when waves of art of silk weaving, developing their own rich
Chinese immigrants arrived there. Shortly patterns and techniques. But it wasn't until
after 300 AD, it travelled westward, and the the 13th century that Italy began silk
cultivation of the silkworm was established in production, with the introduction of 2,000
India. skilled silk weavers from Constantinople.
Eventually, silk production became
Around 550 AD silk production
widespread throughout Europe.
reached the Middle East. Records indicate
that two monks from Constantinople
World silk production has
(modern-day Istanbul), capital of the
approximately doubled during the last 30
Byzantine Empire, appeared at their
years in spite of man-made fibres replacing
emperor's court with silkworm eggs which
certain uses of silk. Before this period, China
they had obtained secretly, and hidden in
and Japan were the two main producers,
their hollow bamboo walking sticks. Under
together manufacturing more than 50 per
their supervision the eggs hatched into
cent of world production each year. After the
worms, and the worms spun silk threads.
late 1970s, however, China dramatically
Byzantine was in the silk business at last. The
increased its silk production, and once again
became the world's leading producer.
 Test 1

Questions 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

Chinese silk
Early Uses
Clothing

at first, silk only available to Chinese of high rank

emperor wore 1 .......................silk indoors

In industry

silk items included parts of musical instruments, fishing strings and 2 ……………………

Currency

silk was used as payment of 3....................... as well as for wages and rewards
silk replaced 4 .......................as a unit of value
silk soon used as payment in 5 .......................trade

Evidence of silk trade

1070 BC, Egypt
hair of a 6 .......................contained silk

2nd century BC, Persia and Mesopotamia:

gifts of silk were presented by Chinese ambassadors

1015 AD, north-west China:

silk objects were hidden inside 7 ……………………
Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 17
In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, 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

8 Their first sight of silk created fear among Roman soldiers.

9 The quality of Chinese silk imported by the early Romans varied widely.

10 The Byzantine emperor first acquired silkworm eggs from the Chinese emperor.

11 The price of high-grade Chinese silk fell due to competition from Middle-Eastern
producers.

12 Silk was produced in the Middle East several centuries before it was produced in
Europe.

13 Global silk production has declined in recent years.

 READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.

The discovery of a baby mammoth

A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species
A On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets
reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, looking
carefully at a diminutive corpse. Although he'd never seen such an animal before, Khudi
had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found
each summer, and this persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily
well preserved. Apart from its missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi
realised the find might be significant and he knew he couldn't just return home and
forget all about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to
consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend took him to meet the director of the
local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the
Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.

B Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions
coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the
primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically
altered the vegetation. ‘We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a
significant part in their extinction.’ says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth
expert at London's Natural History Museum. 'In Eurasia, the timing of the two events
matches closely.' The extinctions also coincided, however; with the arrival of modern
humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to
make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to
blame as the temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.

C The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological
Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum's director, was one of the first scientists
to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued 'the best preserved
mammoth to come down to us from the Ice Age', and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after
Khudi's wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan
Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years
researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a
French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had
examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively
poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely. Other than the missing hair and toenails, the
only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.

D Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba's anatomy: her milk tusks.
Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from
the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals
continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the other hand,
 to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples
frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at
their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when
humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done
limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia,
suggests the same conclusion.

E In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to

undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test
confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It
also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with
dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki,
Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these,
Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been
indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba's trunk was packed so tightly
that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was
frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was
created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To
Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba’s death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki,
however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning
than asphyxiation.

F Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some
clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental
development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health
and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well-
preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus
primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from
North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba's premolars and tusks revealed that
she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 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 similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world

15 details of the uses to which mammoth body parts were put

16 a theory that accounts for the damage to Lyuba’s face

17 an explanation of how an individual was able to identify a small corpse

18 a comparison between Lyuba and other young mammoth corpses

Questions 19-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 19-23) and the list of people below. Match each
statement with the correct person, A-G.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 19-23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

19 The indications are that mammoths died as a result of climate change.

20 Teeth analysis is important in discovering why mammoths died out.

21 The corpse of the baby mammoth is in better condition than any other that has been
discovered.

22 It would be a mistake to ignore the baby mammoth’s discovery, because of its

potential importance.

23 Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good
physical condition.

List of People

A Yuri Khudi
B Kirill Serotetto
C Adrian Lister
D Alexei Tikhonov
E Dan Fisher
F Bernard Buigues
G Naoki Suzuki

Questions 24 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24 Some researchers say that a marked rise in temperature impacted on mammoths by

changing the type of ................... available.

25 Fisher concluded that many of the mammoth tusks he looked at displayed signs
of ……………….. .

26 Not long after Lyuba’s death, the Mammuthus primigenius group she belonged to
was replaced by another group that came from ……………….. .
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 on
pages 10 and 11

What makes a musical expert?

How does someone become expert in music? And is it really
possible to have a 'talent' for music?

Does that class of people acknowledged to be musical experts just have more of the same
basic skills we are all endowed with, or do they have a set of abilities – or neural structures -
that are totally different from those of the rest of us? Are high levels of musical
achievement simply the result of training and practice, or are they based on innate brain
structure - what we refer to as ‘talent’? Talent can be defined as something that originates
in genetic structures and that is identifiable by trained people who can recognize it
existence before a person has achieved exceptional levels of performance. The emphasis on
early identification means that to investigate it, we study the development of skills in
children.

It is evident that some children acquire skills more rapidly than others: the age of onset for
walking and talking varies widely, even between children in the same household. There may
be genetic factors at work, but these are closely linked with other factors - with a
presumably environmental component- such as motivation and family dynamics. Similar
factors can influence musical development and can mask the contribution of genetics to
musical ability.

Brain studies, so far, haven't been of much use in sorting out the issues. Gottfried Schlaug at
Harvard collected brain scans of individuals with absolute pitch* (AP) and showed that a
region in the brain called the planum temporale is larger in these people than in others. This
suggests that the platinum is involved in AP, but it's not clear if it starts out larger in people
who eventually acquire AP, or if the acquisition of AP makes the planum increase in size.

Results of research into the areas of the brain involved in skilled motor movement are more
conclusive. Studies of violin players have shown that the region of the brain responsible for
controlling the movement of the left hand (the hand that requires greater precision in violin
playing) increases in size as a result of practice. We do not know yet if the propensity for
increase pre-exists in some people and not others.

The evidence against talent comes from research on how much training the experts do. Like
experts in mathematics, chess, or sports, experts in music require lengthy periods of
instruction and practice. In several studies, the very best music students were found to have
practiced more than twice as much as the others. In another study, students were secretly
divided into two groups based on teachers’ perceptions of their talent. Several years later, it
was found that the students who achieved the highest performance ratings had practiced
the most, irrespective of which ‘talent’ group they had been assigned to, suggesting that
practice does not merely correlate with achievement, but causes it.

Anders Ericsson, at Florida State University, approaches the topic of musical expertise as a
general problem in cognitive psychology. He takes as a starting point the assumption that
there are certain issues involved in becoming an expert at anything; that we can learn about
musical expertise by studying expert chess players, athletes, artists, mathematicians, as well
as the musicians themselves. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand
hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-
class expert – in anything. In study after study, of composers, ice skaters, concert pianists,
chess players and master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Someone would
do this amount of practice if they practiced, for example, roughly 20 hours a week for ten
years. Of course, this doesn't address why some people don't seem to get anywhere when
they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But
no-one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less
time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to
achieve true mastery.

The ten-thousand-hour theory is consistent with what we know about how the the brain
learns. Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neural tissue.
The more experiences we have with something, the stronger the memory/learning trace for
that experience becomes. Although people differ in how long it takes them to consolidate
information neurally, it remains true that increased practice leads to a greater number of
neural traces, which create stronger memory representation.

The classic rebuttal to this theory goes something like this: ’What about Mozart? I hear that
he composed his first symphony at the age of four!’ First, there is a factual error here:
Mozart didn't write it until he was eight. Still, this is unusual, to say the least. However, this
early work received little acclaim and was not performed very often. In fact the only reason
we know about it is because the child who wrote it grew up to become Mozart. And Mozart
had an expert teacher in his father, who was renowned as a teacher of musicians all over
Europe. We don't know how much Mozart practiced, but if he started at age two and
worked thirty - two hours a week (quite possible, given that his father was a stern
taskmaster) he would have made his ten thousand hours by the time he composed his first
symphony. This does not mean that there are no genetic factors involved in Mozart's
greatness, but that inborn traits may not be the only cause.
Questions 27-30
Choose the correct letter A, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 27-30 on your answer Sheet

27 In the first paragraph, the writer suggests that a musician who is ‘talented’ is
someone

A who is aware of being set apart from other people.

B whose brain structure is unlike that of other people.
C who can perform extremely well in early childhood.
D whose essential skills are more varied than those of ordinary people.

28 According to the winter, what is unclear about the findings of Gottfried Schlaug?

A Which part of the brain is linked to a particular musical skill,

B Which type of musical skill leads to the greatest change in the brain
C Whether a feature of the brain is a cause or an effect of a musical skill
D Whether the acquisition of a musical skill is easier for some people
than others

29 According to the writer, what has been established by studies of violin

players?

A Changes may occur in the brain following violin practice.

B Left-handed violinists have a different brain structure from other
people.
C A violinist’s hand size is not due to practice but to genetic factors.
D Violinists are born with brains that have a particular structure.

30 According to the writer, findings on the amount of practice done by expert musicians
suggest that

A talent may have little to do with expertise.

B practice may actually prevent the development of talent.
C talent may not be recognised by teachers.
D expertise may be related to quality of instruction.
Questions 31-35
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 37
In bores 31-36 on your answer sheet

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

31 Anders Ericsson's work with cognitive psychology has influenced other researchers.

32 Different areas of expertise seem to have one specific thing in common.

33 In order to be useful, practice must be carried out regularly every day.

34 Anyone who practices for long enough can reach the level of a world-class expert.

35 Occasionally, someone can become an expert at global level with fewer than 10,000
hours’ practice.

36 Existing knowledge of learning and cognitive skills supports the importance of

practice.

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J below
Write me connect letter A-J, n boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet

Mozart
The case of Mozart could be quoted as evidence against the 10,000-hour-practice theory.
However, the writer points out that the young Mozart received a lot of 37 ................ from his
father, and that the symphony he wrote at the age of 38 ……………. was not 39 ................ and
may be of only academic interest. The case therefore supports the view that expertise is not
solely the result of 40................ characteristics.

A popular B artistic C completed

D eight E tuition F encouragement
G inherited H four I practice
J two