William Henry Perkin
William Henry Perkin was born on March 12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkin’s curiosity
prompted early interests in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance
stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather’s home that
solidified the young man’s enthusiasm for chemistry.
As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study of chemistry. His
talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged
him to attend a series of lectures given by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal
Institution. Those speeches fired the young chemist’s enthusiasm further, and he later went on to
attend the Royal College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853, at the age of 15.
At the time of Perkin’s enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by the noted
German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkin’s scientific gifts soon caught Hofmann’s
attention and, within two years, he became Hofmann’s youngest assistant. Not long after that,
Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would bring him both fame and fortune.
At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is derived from
the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and by 1856 demand for the drug was
surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann made some passing comments about the
desirability of a synthetic substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved
to take up the challenge.
During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time in the laboratory on the top floor of his family’s
house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive and readily
available coal tar waste product. Despite his best efforts, however, he did not end up with
quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perkin’s scientific training and
nature prompted him to investigate the substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate
and alcohol into the aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he finally produced a
deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur’s words ‘chance
favours only the prepared mind’, Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected find.
Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal excretions.
Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to obtain and outrageously
expensive. Indeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at
the time only the rich could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade
quickly. It was against this backdrop that Perkin’s discovery was made.
Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric, thus making it the
world’s first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this breakthrough, he lost no time in
patenting it. But perhaps the most fascinating of all Perkin’s reactions to his find was his nearly
instant recognition that the new dye had commercial possibilities.
Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve
(from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked advice of Scottish dye
works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if
the colour remained fast (i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce
objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry.
With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London. Utilising the
cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of London’s gas street
lighting, the dye works began producing the world’s first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The
company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugenie of France, when she decided
the new colour flattered her. Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable
ladies in that country.
Not to be outdone, England’s Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus
making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for
more. Perkin went back to the drawing board.
Although Perkin’s fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery, the chemist continued
his research. Among other dyes he developed and introduced were aniline red (1859) and aniline black
(1863) and, in the late 1860s, Perkin’s green. It is important to note that Perkin’s synthetic dye
discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical
research in many ways. For instance, they were used to stain previously invisible microbes and
bacteria, allowing researchers to identify such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Artificial
dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin,
their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria.
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-7
on your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT if there is no information on this more than once.
GIVEN
1 Michael Faraday was the first person to recognize Perkin's ability as a student of chemistry.
2 Michael Faraday suggested Perkin should enroll in the Royal College of Chemistry.
3 Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant.
4 Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and famous.
5 The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America.
6 Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product.
7 Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur.
Questions 8-13
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each
answer
Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.
8 Before Perkin’s discovery, with what group in society was the colour purple associated?
9 What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had?
10 What was the name finally used to refer to the first color Perkin invented?
11 What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own dye works?
12 In what country did Perkins newly invented colour first become fashionable?
13 According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers using synthetic
dyes?
Is There Anybody Out There?
A The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity - the same curiosity about the natural world
that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in the Universe. We want to
know whether life evolves naturally if given the right conditions, or whether there is something
very special about the Earth to have fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on
the planet. The simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all
questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science which is continually
pushing out the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested
in whether life exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilisation on Earth for perhaps only a
few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have
told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years or will we wipe
ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that,
if other civilisations do survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion
years. Thus any other civilisation that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than
ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilisation will tell us that long-term survival is possible,
and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on
the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global
pollution, and other threats that we haven’t yet discovered.
B In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules. First, UFOs
(Unidentified Flying Objects] are generally ignored since most scientists don’t consider the
evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious consideration (although it is also important
to keep an open mind in case any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we
make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us,
since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognise it as a life form, quite apart from
whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are looking for may
well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should
communicate with its fellows, be interested in the Universe, live on a planet orbiting a star like
our Sun, and perhaps most restrictively, have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.
C Even when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is still severely
limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have planets, and we certainly do not
know how likely it is that life will arise naturally, given the right conditions. However, when we
look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way), and 100 billion galaxies in the
observable Universe, it seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life
form on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do know about
the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000 stars might
have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100
light years away, which is almost next door in astronomical terms.
D An alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information across the galaxy,
but many of these either require too much energy, or else are severely attenuated while
traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns out that, for a given amount of
transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest
distance, and so all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this
frequency range. So far there have been a number of searches by various groups around the
world, including Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until
now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have been searched.
The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress
voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial
life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed
to search many frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search
using the world’s largest radio telescopes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo, Puerto
Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is searching the nearest
1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The
other part of the project is an undirected search which is monitoring all of space with a lower
sensitivity, using the smaller antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
E There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien
civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite apart from the
impracticality of sending a reply over such large distances at short notice, it raises a host of
ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the global community before any reply
could be sent. Would the human race face the culture shock if faced with a superior and much
older civilisation? Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds
of light years away, so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few
hundred years for our reply to reach them. It’s not important, then, if there’s a delay of a few
years, or decades, while the human race debates the question of whether to reply, and perhaps
carefully drafts a reply.
Questions 14—17
Reading Passage 2 has five paragraphs, A-E. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from
the headings below.
Write the correct number: i-vii, in boxes 14—17 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planets
ii. Appropriate responses to signals from other civilizations
iii. Vast distances to Earth’s closest neighbors
iv. Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
v. Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
vi. Knowledge of extra-terrestrial life forms
vii. Likelihood of life on other planets
Example Paragraph A v
14. Paragraph B
15. Paragraph C
16. Paragraph D
17. Paragraph E
Questions 18-20
Answer the Questions Below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for
each answer Write your answers in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.
18.What is the life expectancy of Earth?
19.What kind of signals from other intelligent civilizations are SETI scientists searching for?
20.How many stars are the world’s most powerful radio telescopes searching?
Questions 21-26
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT if there is no information on this more than once.
GIVEN
21. Alien civilizations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious problems.
22. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many ways.
23. The Americans and Australians have co-operated on joint research projects.
24. So far SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.
25. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.
26. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond promptly.
The History of the Tortoise
If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history,
enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes
even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood and
cellular fluids. In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us,
other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as
woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t
forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could
have happened.
Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing
and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned
around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals
have only gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the
way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call
dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins the manatees, ceased to be land creatures
altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come
ashore to breed. They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent
to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago
and, like all vertebrate returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one
respect, less fully given back to the water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs
on beaches.
There is evidence that all modem turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor which lived
before most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils called Proganochelys quenstedti and
Palaeochersis talampayensis dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the
ancestry of all modem turtles and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil
animals lived on land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it’s obvious.
Ichthyosaurs were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies.
The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a
little less obvious. One way to tell is by measuring the bones of their forelimbs.
Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three measurements in these particular
bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the
three measurements against one another. All the land tortoise species formed a tight cluster of points
in the upper part of the triangle; all the water turtles cluster in the lower part of the triangular graph.
There was no overlap, except when they added some species that spend time both in water and on
land. Sure enough, these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately half way
between the ‘wet cluster’ of sea turtles and the ‘dry cluster’ of land tortoises. The next step was to
determine where the fossils fell. The bones of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis leave us in no doubt.
Their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land
tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the water.
You might think, therefore, that modem land tortoises have probably stayed on land ever since
those early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of them went back to the sea. But
apparently not. If you draw out the family tree of all modem turtles and tortoises, nearly all the
branches are aquatic. Today’s land tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested among
branches consisting of aquatic turtles. This suggests that modem land tortoises have not stayed
on land continuously since the time of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis. Rather, their ancestors
were among those who went back to the water, and they then re- emerged back onto the land in
(relatively) more recent times.
Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return. In common with all mammals, reptiles and
birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and before that various more or less worm-like creatures
stretching back, still in the sea, to the primeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and stayed there
for a very large number of
generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the water and became sea turtles. And finally
they returned yet again to the land as tortoises, some of which now live in the driest of deserts.
Questions 27-30
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each
answer
27.What had to transfer from sea to land before any animals could migrate?
28. Which TWO processes are mentioned as those in which animals had to make big changes as
they moved onto land?
29.Which physical feature. possessed by their ancestors, do whales lack?
30.Which animals might ichthyosaurs have resembled?
Questions 31-33
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 31-33 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 more than once.
31 Turtles were among the first group of animals to migrate back to the sea.
32 It is always difficult to determine where an animal lived when its fossilized remains are
incomplete.
33 The habitat of ichthyosaurs can be determined by the appearance of their fossilized remains.
Questions 34-39
Complete the flow-chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER
from the passage.
Write your answers in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.
Method of determining where the ancestors of turtles and tortoises come from
Step 1: 71 species of living turtles and tortoises were examined and a total of (34) ................were
taken from
the bones of their forelimbs.
Step 2: The data was recorded on a (35) ...................(necessary for comparing the information).
Outcome: Land tortoises were represented by a dense (36) .................. of points towards the top.
Sea turtles
were grouped together in the bottom part.
Step 3: The same data was collected from some living (37) .................. species and added to the other
results.
Outcome: The points for these species turned out to be positioned about (38) .................. up the
triangle
between the land tortoises and the sea turtles.
Step 4: Bones of R quenstedti and P talampayensis were examined in a similar way and the
results added.
Outcome: The position of the points indicated that both these ancient creatures were
(39)......................
Question 40
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.
According to the writer, the most significant thing about tortoises is that
A they are able to adapt to life in extremely dry environments.
B their original life form was a kind of primeval bacteria,
C they have so much in common with sea turtles.
D they have made the transition from sea to land more than once.
