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SECTION TEST - ACADEMIC READING
(Time: 60 minutes)
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Passage 1
CAVES Caves are natural underground spaces, commonly those into which man can enter There are three major types: the most widespread and extensive are those developed in soluble rocks, usually limestone or marble, by underground movement of water; on the coast are those formed in cliffs generally by the concentrated pounding of waves along joints and zones of crushed rock; and a few caves are formed in lava flows, where the solidified outer crust is left after the molten core has drained away to form rough tunnels, like those on the small basalt volcanoes of Auckland. Limestone of all ages, ranging from geologically recent times to more than 450 million years ago, is found in many parts of New Zealand, although it is not all cavernous. Many caves have been discovered, but hundreds still remain to be explored. The most notable limestone areas for caves are the many hundreds of square kilometres of Te Kuiti Group (Oligocene) rocks from Port Waikato south to Mokau and from the coast inland to the Waipa Valley - especially in the Waitomo district; and the Mount Arthur Marble (upper Ordovician) of the mountains of northwest Nelson (fringed by thin bands of Oligocene limestone in the valleys and near the coast). Sedimentary rocks (including limestone) are usually laid down in almost horizontal layers or beds which may be of any thickness, but most commonly of 5-7.5 cm. These beds may accumulate to a total thickness of about a hundred metres. Pure limestone is brittle, and folding due to earth movements causes cracks along the partings, and joints at angles to them. Rain water percolates down through the soil and the fractures in the underlying rocks to the water table, below which all cavities and pores are filled with water. This water, which is usually acidic, dissolves the limestone along the joints and, once a passage is opened, it is enlarged by the abrasive action of sand and pebbles carried by streams. Extensive solution takes place between the seasonal limits of the water table. Erosion may continue to cut down into the floor, or silt and pebbles may build up floors and divert stream courses. Most caves still carry the stream that formed them. Caves in the softer, well-bedded Oligocene limestones are typically horizontal in development, often with passages on several levels, and frequently of considerable length. Gardner's Gut, Waitomo, has two main levels and more than seven kilometres of passages. Plans of caves show prominent features, such as long, narrow, straight passages following joint patterns as in Ruakuri, Waitomo, or a number of parallel straights oriented in one or more directions like Te Anaroa, Rockville. Vertical cross sections of cave passages may be tall and narrow following joints, as in Burr Cave, Waitomo; large and ragged in collapse chambers, like Hollow Hill, Waitomo (233m long, 59.4m wide, and 30.48m high); low and wide along bedding planes, as in Luckie Strike, Waitomo; or high vertical water-worn shafts, like Rangitaawa Shaft (91m). Waitomo Caves in the harder, massive Mount Arthur Marble (a metamorphosed limestone) are mainly vertical in development, many reaching several hundred metres, the deepest known being Harwood Hole, Takaka (370m). The unique beauty of caves lies in the variety of mineral encrustations which are found sometimes completely covering walls, ceiling, and floor. Stalactites (Gk. stalaktos, dripping) are pendent growths of crystalline calcium carbonate (calcite) formed from solution by the deposition of minute quantities of calcite from percolating ground water. They are usually white to yellow in colour, but occasionally are brown or red. Where water evaporates faster than it drips, long thin straws are formed which may reach the floor or thicken into columns. If the source of water moves across the ceiling, a thin drape, very like a stage curtain, is formed. Helictites are stalactites that branch or curl. Stalagmites (Gk. stalagmos, that which dripped) are conical or gnarled floor growths formed by splashing, if the water drips faster than it evaporates. These may grow toward the ceiling to form columns of massive proportions. Where calcite is deposited by water spreading thinly over the walls or floor, flowstone is formed and pools of water may build up their edges to form narrow walls of rimstone. Gypsum (calcium sulphate) is a white cave deposit of many crystal habits which are probably dependent on humidity. The most beautiful form is the gypsum flower which extrudes from a point on the cave wall in curling and diverging bundles of fibres like a lily or orchid.
Complete the summary. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. There are several (1)……… of caves with the most common and largest being located in limestone or marble. Coastal caves are created in cliffs usually by waves. In lava flows, the solidified outer crusts that remain once the molten core has drained away also form (2)………. Limestone is to be found all over New Zealand, but not all of it contains caves. While many caves are known, there are large numbers that have yet to be uncovered. The main (3)………… for limestone caves are Te Kuiti Group rocks.
Complete the flow-chart. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. 
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erosion
cracks
passage
fractures
streams
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Choose TWO answer choices.
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1. Which TWO of the following features of caves in the softer limestones are mentioned in the text?
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Explain:
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Do the following statements agree with the information in the reading passage?TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information about the statement
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1. The limestone found in New Zealand is more than 450 million years old.
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Explain:
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2. Stalactites are more often white to yellow than brown or red.
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Explain:
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3. Stalagmites never grow very large.
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Explain:
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Passage 2
WHALE STRANDINGS Why do whales leave the ocean and become stuck on beaches? When the last stranded whale of a group eventually dies, the story does not end there. A team of researchers begins to investigate, collecting skin samples for instance, recording anything that could help them answer the crucial question: why? Theories abound, some more convincing than others. In recent years, navy sonar has been accused of causing certain whales to strand. It is known that noise pollution from offshore industry, shipping and sonar can impair underwater communication, but can it really drive whales onto our beaches? In 1998, researchers at the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, a Greek non-profit scientific group, linked whale strandings with low- frequency sonar tests being carried out by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). They recorded the stranding of 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales over 38.2 kilometres of coastline. NATO later admitted it had been testing new sonar technology in the same area at the time as the strandings had occurred. ‘Mass’ whale strandings involve four or more animals. Typically they all wash ashore together, but in mass atypical strandings (such as the one in Greece), the whales don't strand as a group; they are scattered over a larger area. For humans, hearing a sudden loud noise might prove frightening, but it does not induce mass fatality. For whales, on the other hand, there is a theory on how sonar can kill. The noise can surprise the animal, causing it to swim too quickly to the surface. The result is decompression sickness, a hazard human divers know all too well. If a diver ascends too quickly from a high-pressure underwater environment to a lower-pressure one, gases dissolved in blood and tissue expand and form bubbles. The bubbles block the flow of blood to vital organs, and can ultimately lead to death. Plausible as this seems, it is still a theory and based on our more comprehensive knowledge of land-based animals. For this reason, some scientists are wary. Whale expert Karen Evans is one such scientist. Another is Rosemary Gales, a leading expert on whale strandings. She says sonar technology cannot always be blamed for mass strandings. "It’s a case-by-case situation. Whales have been stranding for a very long time - pre-sonar.” And when 80% of all Australian whale strandings occur around Tasmania, Gales and her team must continue in the search for answers. When animals beach next to each other at the same time, the most common cause has nothing to do with humans at all. "They're highly social creatures,” says Gales. "When they mass strand - it’s complete panic and chaos. If one of the group strands and sounds the alarm, others will try to swim to its aid, and become stuck themselves.” Activities such as sonar testing can hint at when a stranding may occur, but if conservationists are to reduce the number of strandings, or improve rescue operations, they need information on where strandings are likely to occur as well. With this in mind, Ralph James, physicist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, thinks he may have discovered why whales turn up only on some beaches. In 1986 he went to Augusta, Western Australia, where more than 100 false killer whales had beached. “I found out from chatting to the locals that whales had been stranding there for decades. So I asked myself, what is it about this beach?” From this question that James pondered over 20 years ago, grew the university's Whale Stranding Analysis Project. Data has since revealed that all mass strandings around Australia occur on gently sloping sandy beaches, some with inclines of less than 0.5%. For whale species that depend on an echolocation system to navigate, this kind of beach spells disaster. Usually, as they swim, they make clicking noises, and the resulting sound waves are reflected in an echo and travel back to them. Flowever, these just fade out on shallow beaches, so the whale doesn’t hear an echo and it crashes onto the shore. But that is not all. Physics, it appears, can help with the when as well as the where. The ocean is full of bubbles. Larger ones rise quickly to the surface and disappear, whilst smaller ones - called microbubbles - can last for days. It is these that absorb whale 'clicks! "Rough weather generates more bubbles than usual,” James adds. So, during and after a storm, echolocating whales are essentially swimming blind. Last year was a bad one for strandings in Australia. Can we predict if this - or any other year - will be any better? Some scientists believe we can. They have found trends which could be used to forecast ‘bad years’ for strandings in the future. In 2005, a survey by Klaus Vanselow and Klaus Ricklefs of sperm whale strandings in the North Sea even found a correlation between these and the sunspot cycle, and suggested that changes in the Earth’s magnetic field might be involved. But others are sceptical. “Their study was interesting ... but the analyses they used were flawed on a number of levels,” says Evans. In the same year, she co-authored a study on. Australian strandings that uncovered a completely different trend. “We analysed data from 1920 to 2002 ... and observed a clear periodicity in the number of whales stranded each year that coincides with a major climatic cycle.” To put it more simply, she says, in the years when strong westerly and southerly winds bring cool water rich in nutrients closer to the Australia coast, there is an increase in the number of fish. The whales follow. So what causes mass strandings? “It's probably many different components,” says James. And he is probably right. But the point is we now know what many of those components are.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
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sperm/ sperm wales/ sperm whale
skin/ skin samples
around Tasmania/ Tasmania
noise/ noise pollution
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Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
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blood
microbubbles
nutrients
sound waves
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Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage? True if the statement agrees with the information False if the statement contradicts the information Not given if there is no information on this
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1. The aim of the research by the Pelagos Institute in 1998 was to prove that navy sonar was responsible for whale strandings.
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Explain:
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2. The whales stranded in Greece were found at different points along the coast.
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Explain:
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3. Rosemary Gales has questioned the research techniques used by the Greek scientists.
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Explain:
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4. According to Gales, whales are likely to try to help another whale in trouble.
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Explain:
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5. There is now agreement amongst scientists that changes in the Earth′s magnetic fields contribute to whale strandings.
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Explain:
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Passage 3
THE BIRTH OF SCIENTIFIC ENGLISH World science is dominated today by a small number of languages, including Japanese, German and French, but it is English which is probably the most popular global language of science. This is not just because of the importance of English-speaking countries such as the USA in scientific research; the scientists of many non-English-speaking countries find that they need to write their research papers in English to reach a wide international audience. Given the prominence of scientific English today, it may seem surprising that no one really knew how to write science in English before the 17th century. Before that, Latin was regarded as the lingua franca for European intellectuals. The European Renaissance (c. 14th-16th century) is sometimes called the 'revival of learning', a time of renewed interest in the 'lost knowledge' of classical times. At the same time, however, scholars also began to test and extend this knowledge. The emergent nation states of Europe developed competitive interests in world exploration and the development of trade. Such expansion, which was to take the English language west to America and east to India, was supported by scientific developments such as the discovery of magnetism (and hence the invention of the compass), improvements in cartography and - perhaps the most important scientific revolution of them all - the new theories of astronomy and the movement of the Earth in relation to the planets and stars, developed by Copernicus (1473-1543). England was one of the first countries where scientists adopted and publicised Copernican ideas with enthusiasm. Some of these scholars, including two with interests in language - John Wallis and John Wilkins - helped found the Royal Society in 1660 in order to promote empirical scientific research. Across Europe similar academies and societies arose, creating new national traditions of science. In the initial stages of the scientific revolution, most publications in the national languages were popular works, encyclopaedias, educational textbooks and translations. Original science was not done in English until the second half of the 17th century. For example, Newton published his mathematical treatise, known as the Principia, in Latin, but published his later work on the properties of light - Opticks - in English. There were several reasons why original science continued to be written in Latin. The first was simply a matter of audience. Latin was suitable for an international audience of scholars, whereas English reached a socially wider, but more local, audience. Hence, popular science was written in English. A second reason for writing in Latin may, perversely, have been a concern for secrecy. Open publication had dangers in putting into the public domain preliminary ideas which had not yet been fully exploited by their 'author'. This growing concern about intellectual property rights was a feature of the period - it reflected both the humanist notion of the individual, rational scientist who invents and discovers through private intellectual labour, and the growing connection between original science and commercial exploitation. There was something of a social distinction between 'scholars and gentlemen' who understood Latin, and men of trade who lacked a classical education. And in the mid-17th century it was common practice for mathematicians to keep their discoveries and proofs secret, by writing them in cipher, in obscure languages, or in private messages deposited in a sealed ox with the Royal Society. Some scientists might have felt more comfortable with Latin precisely because its audience, though international, was socially restricted. Doctors clung the most keenly to Latin as an 'insider language'. A third reason why the writing of original science in English was delayed may have been to do with the linguistic inadequacy of English in the early modern period. English was not well equipped to deal with scientific argument. First, it lacked the necessary technical vocabulary. Second, it lacked the grammatical resources required to represent the world in an objective and impersonal way, and to discuss the relations, such as cause and effect, that might hold between complex and hypothetical entities. Fortunately, several members of the Royal Society possessed an interest in language and became engaged in various linguistic projects. Although a proposal in 1664 to establish a committee for improving the English language came to little, the society's members did a great deal to foster the publication of science in English and to encourage the development of a suitable writing style. Many members of the Royal Society also published monographs in English. One of the first was by Robert Hooke, the society's first curator of experiments, who described his experiments with microscopes in Micrographia (1665). This work is largely narrative in style, based on a transcript of oral demonstrations and lectures. In 1665 a new scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was inaugurated. Perhaps the first international English-language scientific journal, it encouraged a new genre of scientific writing, that of short, focused accounts of particular experiments. The 17th century was thus a formative period in the establishment of scientific English. In the following century much of this momentum was lost as German established itself as the leading European language of science. If is estimated that by the end of the 18th century 401 German scientific journals had been established as opposed to 96 in France and 50 in England. However, in the 19th century scientific English again enjoyed substantial lexical growth as the industrial revolution created the need for new technical vocabulary, and new, specialised, professional societies were instituted to promote and publish in the new disciplines.
Complete the summary. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. In Europe, modern science emerged at the same time as the nation state. At first, the scientific language of choice remained (1)………. It allowed scientists to communicate with other socially privileged thinkers while protecting their work from unwanted exploitation. Sometimes the desire to protect ideas seems to have been stronger than the desire to communicate them, particularly in the case of mathematicians and (2)……….
In Britain, moreover, scientists worried that English had neither the (3)............ nor the grammatical resources to express their ideas. This situation only changed after 1660 when scientists associated with the (4)………… set about developing English. An early scientific journal fostered a new kind of writing based on short descriptions of specific experiments. Although English was then overtaken by (5) ……………,it developed again in the 19th century as a direct result of the (6)……………
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industrial revolution
German
Royal Society
technical vocabulary
doctors
Latin
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Complete the table. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Science written in the first half of the 17th century | Language used | Latin | English | Type of science | Original | (1)……… | Examples | (2)……… | Encyclopaedias | Target audience | International scholars | (3)………, but socially wider |
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Principia / the Principia / Newton's Principia / mathematical treatise
local / more local / local audience
popular
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Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage? YES if the statement agrees with the writers claims NO if the statement contradicts the writer's claims NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
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1. There was strong competition between scientists in Renaissance Europe.
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Explain:
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2. The most important scientific development of the Renaissance period was the discovery of magnetism.
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Explain:
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3. In 17th-century Britain, leading thinkers combined their interest in science with an interest in how to express ideas.
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Explain:
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| No. | Date | Right Score | Total Score |
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PARTNERS |
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NEWS |
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