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SECTION TEST - ACADEMIC READING
(Time: 60 minutes)

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Passage 1

Affordable Art

Art prices have fallen drastically. The art market is being flooded with good material, much of it from big-name artists, including Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Many pieces sell for less than you might expect, with items that would have made £20,000 two years ago fetching only £5,000 to £10,000 this autumn, according to Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the Fine Art Fund. Here, we round up what is looking cheap now, with a focus on works in the range of £500 to £10,000.

Picasso is one of the most iconic names in art, yet some of his ceramics and lithographs fetched less than £1,000 each at Bonhams on Thursday. The low prices are because he produced so many of them. However, their value has increased steadily and his works will only become scarcer as examples are lost.

Nic McElhatton, the chairman of Christie’s South Kensington, says that the biggest 'affordable' category for top artists is ‘multiples' - prints such as screenprints or lithographs in limited editions. In a Christie's sale this month, examples by Picasso, Matisse, Miro and Steinlen sold for less than £5,000 each.

Alexandra Gill, the head of prints at the auction house, says that some prints are heavily hand-worked, or often coloured, by the artist, making them personalised. 'Howard Hodgkin’s are a good example,’ she says. ‘There’s still prejudice against prints, but for the artist it was another, equal, medium.

Mr Hoffman believes that these types of works are currently about as ‘cheap as they can get’ and will hold their value in the long run - though he admits that their sheer number means prices are unlikely to rise any time soon.

It can be smarter to buy really good one-offs from lesser-known artists, he adds. A limited budget will not run to the blockbuster names you can obtain with multiples, but it will buy you work by Royal Academicians (RAs) and others whose pieces are held in national collections and who are given long write-ups in the art history books. For example, the Christie's sale of art from the Lehman Brothers collection on Wednesday will include Valley with cornflowers in oil by Anthony Gross (22 of whose works are held by the Tate), at £1,000 to £1,500. There is no reserve on items with estimates of £1,000 or less, and William Porter, who is in charge of the sale, expects some lots to go for very little’. The sale also has oils by the popular Mary Fedden (whose works are often reproduced on greetings cards), including Spanish House and The White Hyacinth, at £7,000 to £10,000 each.

Large works by important Victorian painters are available in this sort of price range, too. These are affordable because their style has come to be considered ‘uncool’, but they please a large traditionalist following nonetheless. For example, the sale of 19th-century paintings at Bonhams on Wednesday has a Hampstead landscape by Frederick William Watts at £6,000 to £8,000 and a study of three Spanish girls by John Bagnold Burgess at £4,000 to £6,000. There are proto-social realist works depicting poverty, too, such as Uncared For by Augustus Edwin Mulready, at £10,000 to £15,000.

Smaller auction houses offer a mix of periods and media. Tuesday's sale at Chiswick Auctions in West London includes a 1968 screenprint of Campbell's Tomato Soup by Andy Warhol, at £6,000 to £8,000, and 44 sketches by Augustus John, at £200 to £800 each.

The latter have been restored after the artist tore them up. Meanwhile, the paintings and furniture sale at Duke’s of Dorchester on Thursday has a coloured block print of Acrobats at Play by Marc Chagall, at £100 to £200, and a lithograph of a mother and child by Henry Moore, at £500 to £700. A group of five watercolour landscape studies by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot is up at £1,500 to £3,000.

Affordable works from lesser-known artists and younger markets are less safe, but they have the potential to offer greater rewards if you catch an emerging trend. Speculating on such trends is high-risk, so is worthwhile only if you like what you buy (you get something beautiful to keep, whatever happens), can afford to lose the capital and enjoy the necessary research.

A trend could be based on a country or region. China has rocketed, but other Asian and Middle Eastern markets have yet to really emerge. Mr Horwich mentions some 1970s Iraqi paintings that he sold this year in Dubai. 'They are part of a sophisticated scene that remains little-known.' Mr Hoffman tips Turkey and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale in New York features a 1962 oil by the Vietnamese Vu Cao Dam, a graduate of Hanoi’s Ecole des Beaux Arts de I’lndochine and friend of Chagall, at $8,000 to $12,000 (£5,088 to £7,632). The painting shows two girls boating in traditional ao dai dresses.

A further way of making money is to try to spot talent in younger artists. The annual Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park provides a chance to buy from 170 contemporary galleries. Or you could gamble on the future fame trajectory of an established artist’s subject. For example, a Gerald Laing screenprint of The Kiss (2007) showing Amy Winehouse and her ex-husband is up for £4,700 at the Multiplied fair.

Use information from the passage to complete the table below. Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each space.

Example of artist	Name of work/Type of art form	Reason for low price
(1)…………	ceramics and lithographs	he produced many
(2)…………	Valley with cornflowers	(3)…………
John Bagnold Burgess Vu Cao Dam	a study of three Spanish girls (5)…………	(4) ………… Asian region (except China) is not popular at the moment

Anthony Gross Picasso/Pablo Picasso oil painting 'uncool' style/uncool style lesser-known artist

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)

Passage 2

Taking soundings

A Until recently it was thought that dolphins, porpoises and bats were the only mammals to use echolocation to locate prey and to navigate their environment. New research suggests that ‘great whales’, like the blue whale and the humpback whale, might be able to ‘see’ in a similar way. Underwater sound recordings of humpback whales have captured sonar clicks similar to those made by dolphins.

B The ability of ‘great whales’ to use sound to communicate has been known for decades. In deep water, where light cannot penetrate, whales use sound like we use our eyes. Low frequency vocalizations, in the form of grunts and moans are inaudible to the human ear, but form a pattern or song that enables whales to recognize their own species. Blue whales are the loudest animals on earth and their sounds can travel for hundreds of kilometres. Highly sensitive hearing allows whales to avoid shipping and to orientate themselves to the land by listening to waves crashing on the shore. Whales might also use sound to detect the seabed or polar ice packs by listening to the echoes of their own whale song. Man-made ocean sound, or ‘noise pollution’, can drown out whale calls. Increasing amounts of background noise from motorized shipping and from oil and gas drilling is making it difficult for whales to communicate and navigate via sound.

C Echolocation, also called bisonar, is a different form of sensory perception. A dolphin, for example, sends out a series of short clicks and waits for an echo to be reflected back from the obstacle or prey. Both the size and distance of an object can be determined from the echo. The clicks, known as ultrasound, consist of high-pitch (frequency) sound waves, well above the range of the human ear, and distinct from the low-pitched whale song. Whilst there is evidence supporting the use of ultrasound by whales, it has not been shown that they can use echolocation. Instead, the clicks might serve to scare and control shoals of small fish on which some whales prey.

D A major concern of environmentalists is that high-power military sonar might disorientate or harm whales, and that it is responsible for the mass strandings seen on beaches. However, whales were beaching themselves before the invention of sonar and evidence from fossils indicates that stranding goes back thousands of years. Today though, stranding occurs more frequently in waters where navy training exercises take place. The impact of man-made sonar on the stranding of whales and dolphins can no longer be ignored. Following pressure from environmentalists, US law requires that the navy take steps to minimize the effects of sonar on mammals wherever possible. Most of these precautions are common sense and include avoiding whale migration routes when whales are present, not operating the sonar when dolphins are riding a bow wave, and checking to see if a stranding has taken place after sonar has been deployed.

E The phenomenon of stranding is not well understood but it can occur for entirely natural reasons. One explanation involves the ability of whales, like many animals, to use the earth’s magnetic field for direction finding. Ocean currents are thought to cause fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field, which may leave whales vulnerable to navigation errors when they migrate to their breeding grounds. Other reasons for stranding include straying into shallow coastal water when following prey, or when attempting to escape predators such as killer whales. Sea currents, winds and storms are all known to play their part. When a single whale is found dead on a beach it might have died from natural causes out at sea and been washed up on shore. It is apparent that multiple deaths at sea cannot produce a ‘mass stranding’ on a single beach because the carcases would have washed up along different parts of the shoreline. In these circumstances there is concern that the multiple deaths may be man-made, linked to marine pollution, over-fishing, which deprives the whales of food, or entanglement with nets. However, a mass stranding of whales on a single beach, like those shown on television, can also arise naturally. Whales are social animals that swim in groups known as ‘pods’. Some scientists have speculated that if a sick or injured whale takes refuge in shallower water the rest of the pod might follow on to become trapped when the tide goes out.

Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

common sense major concern training exercises migration routes

The harmful effects of high-power sonar on whales are a . It is recognized that the navy pose a threat to whales during when the number of beachings have been observed to increase. The impact of sonar on mammals can be lessened by taking a number of steps. For example, it is clear that ships with sonar equipment should keep away from whale .

Complete the summary below. Choose ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

predators cannot social navigation

Several reasons, not linked with human activities, have been proposed to explain why whales beach themselves. Changes in the earth′s magnetic compass can lead to mistakes in . Alternatively, whales might stray into shallow water when pursued by , or to chase prey, and then become trapped by the tide. Whilst one whale on a beach might have died naturally out at sea and been washed ashore, a group of whales because their bodies would appear on different stretches of sand. ‘Mass stranding′ appears to be linked to the nature of whales and their tendency to swim into shallow water as a group.

Passage 3

THE RETURN OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It is becoming acceptable again to talk of computers performing human tasks such as problem-solving and pattern-recognition.

(A) After years in the wilderness, the term ‘artificial intelligence' (AI) seems poised to make a comeback. AI was big in the 1980s but vanished in the 1990s. It re-entered public consciousness with the release of AI, a movie about a robot boy. This has ignited public debate about AI, but the term is also being used once more within the computer industry. Researchers, executives and marketing people are now using the expression without irony or inverted commas. And it is not always hype. The term is being applied, with some justification, to products that depend on technology that was originally developed by AI researchers. Admittedly, the rehabilitation of the term has a long way to go, and some firms still prefer to avoid using it. But the fact that others are starting to use it again suggests that AI has moved on from being seen as an over- ambitious and under-achieving field of research.

(B) The field was launched, and the term ‘artificial intelligence’ coined, at a conference in 1956,,by a group of researchers that included Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, all of whom went on to become leading figures in the field. The expression provided an attractive but informative name for a research programme that encompassed such previously disparate fields as operations research, cybernetics, logic and computer science. The goal they shared was an attempt to capture or mimic human abilities using machines. That said, different groups of researchers attacked different problems, from speech recognition to chess playing, in different ways; AI unified the field in name only. But it was a term that captured the public imagination.

(C) Most researchers agree that AI peaked around 1985. A public reared on science-fiction movies and excited by the growing power of computers had high expectations. For years, AI researchers had implied that a breakthrough was just around the corner. Marvin Minsky said in 1967 that within a generation the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence' would be substantially solved. Prototypes of medical-diagnosis programs and speech recognition software appeared to be making progress. It proved to be a false dawn. Thinking computers and household robots failed to materialise, and a backlash ensued. 'There was undue optimism in the early f 980s,’ says David Leake, a researcher at Indiana University. ‘Then when people realised these were hard problems, there was retrenchment. By the late 1980s, the term AI was being avoided by many researchers, who opted instead to align themselves with specific sub-disciplines such as neural networks, agent technology, case-based reasoning, and so on.'

(D) Ironically, in some ways AI was a victim of its own success. Whenever an apparently mundane problem was solved, such as building a system that could land an aircraft unattended, the problem was deemed not to have been AI in the first place. 'If it works, it can’t be AI,' as Dr Leake characterises it. The effect of repeatedly moving the goal-posts in this way was that AI came to refer to 'blue-sky' research that was still years away from commercialization. Researchers joked that AI stood for 'almost implemented’. Meanwhile, the technologies that made it onto the market, such as speech recognition, language translation and decision-support software, were no longer regarded as AI. Yet all three once fell well within the umbrella of AI research.

(E) But the tide may now be turning, according to Dr Leake. HNC Software of San Diego, backed by a government agency, reckon that their new approach to artificial intelligence is the most powerful and promising approach ever discovered. HNC claim that their system, based on a cluster of 30 processors, could be used to spot camouflaged vehicles on a battlefield or extract a voice signal from a noisy background - tasks humans can do well, but computers cannot. ‘Whether or not their technology lives up to the claims made for it, the fact that HNC are emphasising the use of AI is itself an interesting development,“ says Dr Leake.

(F) Another factor that may boost the prospects for AI in the near future is that investors are now looking for firms using clever technology, rather than just a clever business model, to differentiate themselves. In particular, the problem of information overload, exacerbated by the growth of e-mail and the explosion in the number of web pages, means there are plenty of opportunities for new technologies to help filter and categorise information - classic AI problems. That may mean that more artificial intelligence companies will start to emerge to meet this challenge.

(G) The 1969 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured an intelligent computer called HAL 9000. As well as understanding and speaking English, HAL could play chess and even learned to lipread. HAL thus encapsulated the optimism of the 1960s that intelligent computers would be widespread by 2001. But 2001 has been and gone, and there is still no sign of a HAL-like computer. Individual systems can play chess or transcribe speech, but a general theory of machine intelligence still remains elusive. It may be. however, that the comparison with HAL no longer seems quite so Important, and AI can now be judged by what it can do, rather than by how well it matches up to a 30-year-old science-fiction film. ‘People are beginning to realise that there are impressive things that these systems can do.’ says Dr Leake hopefully.

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