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SECTION TEST - ACADEMIC READING
(Time: 60 minutes)

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Passage 1

THE POWER OF LIGHT

Light reveals the world to us. It sets our biological clocks. It triggers in our brains the sensations of colour. Light feeds us, supplying the energy for plants to grow. It inspires us with special effects like rainbows and sunsets. Light gives us life-changing tools, from incandescent bulbs to lasers and fibre optics.

There has been light from the beginning. There will be light, feebly, at the end. In all its forms, visible and invisible, it saturates the universe. Light is more than a little bit inscrutable. Modern physics has sliced the stuff of nature into ever smaller and more exotic constituents, but light won’t reduce. Light is light - pure, but not simple. No one is quite sure how to describe it. A wave? A particle? Yes, the scientists say. Both.

It is a measure of light’s importance in our daily lives that we hardly pay any attention to it. Light is almost like air. It’s a given. A human would no more linger over the concept of light than a fish would ponder the notion of water. There are exceptions, certain moments of sudden appreciation when a particular manifestation of light, a transitory glory, appears: a rainbow, a sunset, a flash of lightning in a dark sky, the shimmering surface of the sea at twilight, the dappled light in a forest, the little red dot from a professor’s laser pointer. The flicker of a candle, flooding a room with romance. The torch searching for the circuit breakers after a power cut.

Usually, though, we don’t see light, we merely see with it. You can’t appreciate the beauty of a rose if you ponder that the colour red is just the brain’s interpretation of a specific wavelength of light with crests that are roughly 700 nanometres apart. A theatrical lighting director told me that she’s doing her job best when no one notices the lights at all. Her goal is to create an atmosphere, a mood - not to show off the fancy new filters that create colours of startling intensity.

Light is now used for everything from laser eye surgery to telephone technology. It could even become the main power source for long distance space travel. The spaceship would have an ultrathin sail to catch the ‘wind’ of light beamed from an Earth-based laser. In theory such a craft could accelerate to a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, without carrying fuel.

What we call light is really the same thing in a different set of wavelengths as the radiation that we call radio waves or gamma rays or x- rays. But visible light is unlike any other fundamental element of the universe: it directly, regularly and dramatically interacts with our senses. Light offers high-resolution information across great distances. You can’t hear or smell the moons of Jupiter or the Crab Nebula. So much of vital importance is communicated by visible light that almost everything from a fly to an octopus has a way to capture it - an eye, eyes, or something similar.

It’s worth noting that our eyes are designed to detect the kind of light that is radiated in abundance by the particular star that gives life to our planet: the sun. Visible light is powerful stuff, moving at relatively short wavelengths, which makes it biologically convenient. To see long, stretched-out radio waves, we’d have to have huge eyes like satellite dishes. Not worth the trouble! Nor would it make sense for our eyes to detect infrared light (though some deep-sea shrimp near hot springs do see this way). We’d be constantly distracted, because in these wavelengths any heat-emitting object glows. That would include almost everything around us.

There is also darkness in the daytime: shadows. There are many kinds of shadows, more than I realized until I consulted astronomer and shadow expert David Lynch in Topanga Canyon, up the coast from Santa Monica, California. Lynch points out that a shadow is filled with light reflected from the sky, otherwise it would be completely black. Black is the way shadows on the moon looked to the Apollo astronauts, because the moon has no atmosphere and thus no sky to bounce light into the unlit crannies of the lunar surface.

Lynch is a man who, when he looks at a rainbow, spots details that elude most of us. He knows, for example, that all rainbows come in pairs, and he always looks for the second rainbow: a faint, parallel rainbow, with the colours in reverse order. The intervening region is darker. That area has a name, wouldn’t you know: Alexander’s dark band. As I took in the spectacular view across the canyon, Lynch explained something else: ‘the reason those mountains over there look a little blue,’ he said, indicating the range that obscures the Pacific, ‘is because there’s sky between here and those mountains. It’s called airlight.’

What next for light? What new application will we see? What orthodoxy-busting cosmic information will starlight deliver to our telescopes? Will the rotating disco ball ever make a dance-floor comeback? Above all, you have to wonder: will we ever fully understand light?

There have been recent headlines about scientists finding ways to make light go faster than the speed of light. This is what science fiction writers and certain overly imaginative folks have dreamed of for decades. If you could make a spaceship that wasn’t bound by Einstein’s speed limit, they fantasized, you could zip around the universe far more easily.

Lijun Wang, a research scientist at Princeton, managed to create a pulse of light that went faster than the supposed speed limit. ‘We created an artificial medium of cesium gas in which the speed of a pulse of light exceeds the speed of light in a vacuum,’ he said, ‘but this is not at odds with Einstein.’ Even though light can be manipulated to go faster than light, matter can’t. Information can’t. There’s no possibility of time travel.

I asked Wang why light goes 186,282 miles a second and not some other speed. ‘That’s just the way nature is,’ he said. There are scientists who don’t like ‘why’ questions like this. The speed of light is just what it is. That’s their- belief. Whether light would move at a different velocity in a different universe is something that is currently outside the scope of experimental science. It’s even a bit ‘out there’ for the theorists.

What’s certain is that light is going to remain extremely useful for industry, science, art, and our daily, mundane comings and goings. Light permeates our reality at every scale of existence. It’s an amazing tool, a carrier of beauty, a giver of life. I can’t help but say that it has a very bright future.

Answer the following questions using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

a little blue cesium gas a spaceship

What appearance can the land have when seen from a distance?

In what have some people imagined travelling?

In what substance did light go faster than previously thought possible?

Passage 2

Nineteenth-Century Paperback Literature

A publishing craze that hit both America and England from the mid- to late nineteenth century attracted the readership of the semiliterate working class. In America, dime novels typically centered on tales of the American Revolution and the Wild West, while British penny bloods (later called penny dreadfuls) told serial tales of horror or fictionalized1 versions of true crimes. These paperback novels were sold at newsstands and dry goods stores and succeeded in opening up the publishing market for both writers and readers. The industrial revolution facilitated the growth of literacy, making it easier to print and transport publications in large quantities, thus providing inexpensive entertainment for the masses.

Though Johann Gutenberg’s printing press was designed in the fifteenth century, it was not until after the first newspapers began circulating in the eighteenth century that it became a profitable invention. Throughout the nineteenth century, commoners in England were becoming educated through normal schools, church schools, and mutual instruction classes, and by the 1830s, approximately 75 percent of the working class had learned to read. In 1870, the Forster Education Act made elementary education mandatory for all children. Though few children’s books were available, penny dreadfuls were highly accessible, especially to male youths who created clubs in order to pool their money and start their own libraries. Similar to reading a newspaper, dime novels and penny dreadfuls were meant to be read quickly and discarded, unlike the hardbound high literature that was written in volumes and published for the elite. Struggling authors, many of whom had limited writing and storytelling skills, suddenly found an audience desperate to read their work. When the first typewriter became available in the 1870s, authors were able to maximize2 their output. Successful authors, some of whom wrote over 50,000 words a month, were able to earn a decent living at a penny per word.

From the 1830s to 1850s, penny bloods featured tales of gore that often depicted the upper class as corrupt. One of the most beloved characters from the penny blood serials was Sweeney Todd. In the original story, String of Pearls: ARomance, published in 1846, Sweeney Todd was a demon barber who used his razor to torture his victims before turning them into meat pies. In 1847, hack- playwright George Dibdin Pitt adapted Thomas Prest’s story for the stage, renaming it The String of Pearls: The Fiend of Fleet Street. With no copyright laws, authors were always at risk of having their ideas pilfered. Pitt’s play was released again one year later at one of London’s “bloodbath” theaters1 under the name Founded on Fact. The Sweeney Todd story also made its way into musicals and comedies. Controversy still exists over whether Thomas Prest’s character was based on a real person. No records of a barber shop on Fleet Street, or a barber named Sweeney Todd have been found, though Thomas Prest was known for getting his inspiration from “The Old Bailey” of the London Times, a section devoted to real-life horror stories.

Despite the warning from Lord Shaftsbury that the paperback literature was seducing middle-class society into an unproductive life of evil, the penny bloods grew in popularity. They provided a literary voice for commoners at an affordable price. Eventually, penny bloods became known as penny dreadfuls and began to focus more on adventure than horror.

In 1860, Beadle and Adams was the first firm in the United States to publish a title that would be categorized2 as a dime novel. Malaeska: The IndianWife of the White Hunter, by Anne Stephens, had originally been published twenty years earlier as a series in a magazine. In novel form, approximately 300,000 copies of the story were sold in the first year, paving the way for the new fad in America. Many dime novels were written as serials with recurring characters, such as Deadwood Dick, Commander Cody, and Wild Bill. Originally, the paperbacks were intended for railroad travelers; however, during the Civil War, soldiers quickly became the most avid dime novel readers. Beadle dime novels became so popular that the company had to build a factory of hack writers to mass produce them. As urbanization3 spread, stories of the Wild West were in less demand, and tales of urban outlaws became popular. At that time, dime novels were chosen for their illustrated covers rather than their sensational stories and characters. Despite their popularity, by the late 1880s dry goods stores were so full of unsold books that prices dropped to less than five cents per copy. Many titles that could still not sell were given away or destroyed. The International Copyright Law, passed by Congress in 1890, required publishers to pay royalties to foreign authors. Selling at less than five cents a copy, the paperback industry was doomed until the arrival of pulp paper.

Passage 3

TELEPATHY

Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the issue of telepathy has divided the scientific community, and even today it still sparks bitter controversy among top academics

Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes around the world have risked the derision of sceptical colleagues by putting the various claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous scientific studies. The results and their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them.

Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is genuine. Other parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having tried to produce definitive scientific proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do concur on one issue, however: that the most impressive evidence so far has come from the so-called 'ganzfeld' experiments, a German term that means 'whole field'. Reports of telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to suspect that telepathy might involve 'signals' passing between people that were so faint that they were usually swamped by normal brain activity. In this case, such signals might be more easily detected by those experiencing meditation-like tranquillity in a relaxing 'whole field' of light, sound and warmth.

The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting in soft reclining chairs in a sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their eyes are covered with special filters letting in only soft pink light. In early ganzfeld experiments, the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from a random selection of four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a person acting as a 'sender' would attempt to beam the image over to the 'receiver' relaxing in the sealed room. Once the session was over, this person was asked to identify which of the four images had been used. Random guessing would give a hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real, however, the hit-rate would be higher. In 1982, the results from the first ganzfeld studies were analysed by one of its pioneers, the American parapsychologist Charles Honorton. They pointed to typical hit-rates of better than 30 per cent - a small effect, but one which statistical tests suggested could not be put down to chance.

The implication was that the ganzfeld method had revealed real evidence for telepathy. But there was a crucial flaw in this argument - one routinely overlooked in more conventional areas of science. Just because chance had been ruled out as an explanation did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of getting positive results. These ranged from 'sensory leakage' - where clues about the pictures accidentally reach the receiver - to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued a review of all the ganzfeld studies done up to 1985 to show that 80 per cent had found statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that there were still too many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew up a list demanding new standards for future research.

After this, many researchers switched to autoganzfeld tests - an automated variant of the technique which used computers to perform many of the key tasks such as the random selection of images. By minimising human involvement, the idea was to minimise the risk of flawed results. In 1987, results from hundreds of autoganzfeld tests were studied by Honorton in a 'meta-analysis', a statistical technique for finding the overall results from a set of studies. Though less compelling than before, the outcome was still impressive.

Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between individual ganzfeld studies. Defenders of telepathy point out that demanding impressive evidence from every study ignores one basic statistical fact: it takes large samples to detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces hit-rates only marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it's unlikely to be detected by a typical ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is just not big enough. Only when many studies are combined in a meta-analysis will the faint signal of telepathy really become apparent. And that is what researchers do seem to be finding.

What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream scientists: most still totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at least in part from the lack of any plausible mechanism for telepathy.

Various theories have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from theoretical physics. They include 'quantum entanglement', in which events affecting one group of atoms instantly affect another group, no matter how far apart they may be. While physicists have demonstrated entanglement with specially prepared atoms, no-one knows if it also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such questions would transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to argue that the future lies not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing possible mechanisms. Some work has begun already, with researchers trying to identify people who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trials. Early results show that creative and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University of Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these will eventually give the researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the case for the existence of telepathy.

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

Telepathy Experiments
Name/Date	Description	Result	Flaw
Ganzfeld studies 1982	Involved a person acting as a (1).........., who picked out one (2)........... from a random selection of four, and a (3)..........., who then tried to identify it.	Hit-rates were higher than with random guessing.	Positive results could be produced by factors such as (4).......... or (5)..........
Autoganzfeld studies 1987	(6).......... were used for key tasks to limit the amount of (7)......... in carrying out the tests.	The results were then subjected to a (8)..........	The (9).......... between different test results was put down to the fact that sample groups were not (10)......... (as with most ganzfeld studies).

lack of consistency sender sensory leakage/outright fraud/ fraud big/ large enough sensory leakage/outright fraud/ fraud human involvement picture/ image meta-analysis computers receiver

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)

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