Reading Practice Test 11

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on the passage below.

The origins of writing

A  Writing is one of the greatest of all human inventions. It allows thought to be fixed in a lasting form, carried across great distances and preserved for thousands of years, and it is often taken as the dividing line between prehistory and recorded history. Remarkably, though, it was not invented just once. In a handful of places, quite separately and without any contact, human beings hit upon the astonishing idea of making marks that stand for words.

B  For most of the human story there was no writing at all. Knowledge, laws and stories were held in memory and passed on by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. People used simple aids to help — notches cut in a stick to count animals, or knotted cords to record numbers — but these could store only the barest information. Memory is fragile and dies with the person; spoken words fade the moment they are uttered. Something more permanent was needed.

C  The first true writing appeared in Mesopotamia, in the Middle East, about five thousand years ago. Its purpose was strikingly practical: it grew out of the need to keep accounts. As cities grew and trade expanded, officials needed to record how much grain had been stored, how many animals had been traded, who owed what to whom. They began by pressing marks into tablets of soft clay, and from these humble records of business the world's first script slowly developed.

D  At first the signs were simple pictures: a drawing of an ox meant an ox, a drawing of grain meant grain. But pictures alone are clumsy — they cannot easily show names, actions or abstract ideas. Over centuries the signs became simpler and more stylised, until they no longer looked like the things they represented. More importantly, they came to stand for sounds rather than objects. This was the crucial leap, for once a sign could represent a sound, any word at all — however abstract — could at last be written down.

E  Writing was invented more than once. Besides Mesopotamia, the ancient Egyptians developed their own hieroglyphs, the Chinese created a script whose descendants are still in use today, and, on the other side of the world, the Maya of Central America devised a writing system entirely of their own. Each of these arose independently, without knowledge of the others. Most of the world's many scripts, however, are not fresh inventions but descendants of one of these few original systems.

F  A later and hugely important simplification was the alphabet. Rather than using hundreds or thousands of signs, an alphabet uses only about two dozen letters, each standing for a single basic sound. This made writing far easier to learn, so that it was no longer the preserve of a small class of professional scribes. The alphabet spread widely and, in various forms, became the ancestor of most of the alphabets in use around the world today.

G  The consequences of writing were enormous. It allowed knowledge to accumulate steadily across the generations, instead of being lost each time an expert died. It made it possible to record laws, to run the administration of large states, and to gather taxes and organise armies. And it gave rise, in time, to literature, philosophy and science. Almost everything we mean by civilisation rests, in one way or another, on those first marks pressed into clay.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on the passage below.

The life of a glacier

A  A glacier is a vast mass of ice, formed on land, that moves slowly under its own weight. Glaciers form wherever, year after year, more snow falls in winter than melts away in summer, so that the snow builds up rather than disappearing. Though we think of ice as still and lifeless, a glacier behaves in some ways like a very slow river, flowing downhill over centuries. Together, the world's glaciers and ice sheets hold the great majority of its fresh water, locked away in frozen form.

B  The making of a glacier begins with snow. As fresh snow piles up, the layers beneath are gradually squeezed by the weight above them. The delicate snowflakes are crushed together, the air between them is forced out, and over many years the snow is compressed into dense, solid ice. Once this ice grows thick and heavy enough, it can no longer stay still: pulled by gravity, it begins to creep slowly downhill, and a glacier is born.

C  A glacier can be divided into two broad regions. In its upper part, high in the mountains, more snow arrives each year than is lost, and the glacier gains mass. Lower down, where the air is warmer, more ice melts than is replaced, and here the glacier loses mass. The lower end of the glacier, where it finally comes to a stop, is called the snout, and it is from here that streams of meltwater pour out and flow away downstream.

D  As a glacier grinds its way downhill, its surface is put under great strain. Where the ice passes over a steep drop or an uneven bed, it cannot bend fast enough and instead cracks open, splitting into deep fissures called crevasses that can be extremely dangerous to cross. All the while, the moving ice tears rock from the land and drags it along, so that a glacier acts like a giant sheet of sandpaper, slowly grinding away everything beneath and around it.

E  Over thousands of years, glaciers are among the most powerful shapers of the landscape. They carve the familiar deep, steep-sided valleys of mountain regions, and the rock and rubble they carry, known as moraine, is dumped in long ridges wherever the ice finally melts. Many of the lakes, valleys and hills of northern Europe and North America were sculpted by huge glaciers during past ice ages, and the scenery that millions admire today is, in effect, their handiwork.

F  Glaciers are also sensitive indicators of climate, and this makes their present condition a cause for concern. Because they grow when it is cold and shrink when it is warm, glaciers around the world are now retreating as the planet heats up, and many are melting faster than at any time in recorded history. The consequences reach far beyond the mountains. Melting ice adds to a slow but dangerous rise in sea levels, and in many parts of the world the meltwater from glaciers feeds the rivers on which millions of people depend, especially in the dry season. As the glaciers shrink, that vital supply is put at risk.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on the passage below.

Why we laugh

Laughter is one of the most universal of all human behaviours. It appears in babies when they are only a few months old, long before they can speak or understand a single joke, and it is found in every human society ever studied. Yet for something so familiar and so apparently simple, laughter is remarkably poorly understood, and much of what we take for granted about it turns out, on closer inspection, to be quite wrong.

The first surprise is how little laughter has to do with jokes. When researchers recorded ordinary conversations and noted down exactly what was said just before each burst of laughter, they found that only a small fraction followed anything that could be called a joke. Far more often, people were laughing at utterly unremarkable remarks — ‘Where have you been?’ or ‘Look, it's So-and-so!’ Laughter, this suggests, is less a reaction to cleverness than a kind of social glue.

This fits with a second finding: we laugh far more readily in company than we do alone. Studies show that people are many times more likely to laugh when others are present than when they are by themselves, even in response to exactly the same joke, film or situation. Laughter is, overwhelmingly, a social act — a signal sent out to other people, rather than a private response to something amusing.

But what is that signal for? Its main purpose seems to be to build and strengthen the bonds between people. Shared laughter tells those around us that we are friendly, relaxed and one of the group; it eases tension and smooths over awkward moments. Laughter is also strikingly contagious: merely hearing someone else laugh makes us much more likely to laugh in turn, so that good feeling can spread quickly through a whole group of people.

Nor is laughter unique to human beings. Young apes make a breathy, panting sound during play and when they are tickled that strongly resembles human laughter, and even rats have been found to produce high-pitched chirps when they are played with. This points to a startling conclusion: laughter is far older than humanity itself. It seems to have begun not with jokes or language but in the rough-and-tumble of animal play, as a signal meaning something like, ‘Don't worry — this is only a game.’

Laughter may also do us some good. It has been claimed to lower the levels of stress hormones in the body and to bring various modest benefits to physical health, although such effects are notoriously difficult to measure and all too easy to exaggerate. What is not in doubt is that laughter's primary role is a social one. Whatever it may or may not do for the individual body, its chief purpose is plainly to connect us to the people around us.

Understood in this way, laughter turns out to be far older and deeper than the jokes that we suppose cause it. It is, at its core, a social signal, inherited from our distant animal ancestors, that serves to hold groups of individuals together. And it is a signal we produce most freely and most fully not, in fact, when something strikes us as funny, but simply when we find ourselves among people we like and trust.