Reading Practice Test 17

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

Signed, sealed, delivered: a history of the post

A  Long before the internet, people found ways to send messages across great distances. The ancient Persian Empire, more than 2,500 years ago, built a chain of stations along its royal roads, each a day’s ride apart, where riders could hand their messages to a fresh rider and horse. The Greek historian Herodotus admired the system so much that he wrote: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ — words that are carved today above the entrance of a post office in New York.

B  For most of history, however, postal systems existed to serve governments, not ordinary people. Kings and emperors used them to send orders to distant officials and to receive reports in return. Private letters were usually carried by travellers, merchants or servants, and might take months to arrive, if they arrived at all. In many countries, sending a letter by the official post was either forbidden to the public or extremely expensive.

C  Even when the public was allowed to use the post, the system could be bafflingly complicated. In Britain in the early nineteenth century, the cost of a letter depended on the distance it travelled and on the number of sheets of paper it contained, and it was paid not by the sender but by the person who received it. Many people refused to accept letters they could not afford, and some developed ingenious tricks to avoid payment: they would mark the outside of a letter with a secret code, so that the receiver could read the message at a glance and then hand the unopened letter back to the postman.

D  In 1837, a teacher and reformer named Rowland Hill published a pamphlet proposing a radical change. Hill calculated that the real cost of carrying a letter lay mainly in handling it, not in transporting it, so the price did not need to depend on distance at all. He suggested a single low charge of one penny for any letter within the country, paid in advance by the sender. To prove payment, the sender would attach a small printed label to the envelope, covered on the back with glue.

E  Hill’s idea became reality in 1840 with the issue of the Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, which carried a portrait of the young Queen Victoria. The results were dramatic. Within a year the number of letters sent in Britain had more than doubled, and it continued to grow rapidly in the following decades. Within a few years, other countries had copied the system, and in 1874 the Universal Postal Union was founded so that letters could pass easily between nations.

F  Cheap postage changed society in ways that are easy to forget. It allowed families separated by migration to stay in touch, helped businesses to advertise and to send bills, and spread newspapers, magazines and books to readers far from cities. Some historians argue that it also encouraged ordinary people to learn to read and write, since there was now a practical reason to do so.

G  Today the number of personal letters is falling steadily, replaced by email and instant messaging. Yet postal services remain busy, because the growth of online shopping means that more parcels are being delivered than ever before. The postman’s round, it seems, has not disappeared but simply changed its cargo.

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

A sea of plastic

A  Every year, an estimated eight to eleven million tonnes of plastic waste enters the world’s oceans — the equivalent of a rubbish truck emptying its load into the sea every minute. Plastic has been found on the most remote beaches on Earth, in the ice of the Arctic and in the deepest ocean trench, nearly eleven kilometres below the surface. Because most plastics take hundreds of years to break down, the amount in the sea is steadily building up.

B  Much of this plastic comes from the land. Rivers carry waste from towns and cities into the sea, and a relatively small number of large rivers, many of them in Asia and Africa, are thought to be responsible for a large share. The main cause is not that people in these regions use more plastic, but that rapidly growing cities often lack proper systems for collecting and managing waste. Fishing is another major source: lost or abandoned nets, known as ‘ghost nets’, make up a large proportion of the plastic floating in some parts of the ocean.

C  Once in the sea, plastic does not stay in one place. Ocean currents gather floating debris into vast slowly turning areas called gyres. The best known, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii, is sometimes described as a floating island of rubbish. In reality, it is more like a thin soup: most of the plastic consists of tiny fragments, spread so widely that it is almost invisible from a passing ship.

D  The harm caused to wildlife is well documented. Turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, their natural food, and seabirds feed bottle tops and other fragments to their chicks. Animals that swallow plastic can starve, because their stomachs fill with material they cannot digest. Others become trapped in ghost nets and drown. Scientists estimate that hundreds of species are affected in one way or another.

E  Less visible, but perhaps more worrying, are microplastics — pieces smaller than five millimetres. Some are made deliberately small, such as the tiny beads once added to face washes and toothpaste, but most are produced when larger items are broken down by sunlight and the movement of waves. Microplastics are eaten by plankton and small fish, and so enter the food chain; they have been found in seafood, in salt and even in human blood. What effect they have on human health is not yet known.

F  Cleaning up the ocean is extremely difficult, because most plastic is either too small to collect or has already sunk to the seabed. For this reason, most experts argue that the priority must be to stop plastic reaching the sea in the first place. This means improving waste collection in fast-growing cities, recovering nets from fishing boats, and reducing the use of single-use items such as bags, straws and packaging. Several countries, including Bangladesh, which banned thin plastic bags in 2002, have already taken steps in this direction.

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

Music and the mind

Every known human culture makes music. People sing to their babies, march to drums, dance at weddings and mourn with songs at funerals. Yet music has no obvious practical use: it does not feed or shelter us, and it is hard to see how the ability to enjoy a melody helped our ancestors survive. Why, then, does music have such a powerful hold on the human mind? Scientists studying the brain have begun to find some intriguing answers.

One of the most striking findings is that music engages almost the entire brain. Neuroscientist Anita Sharma has used brain scans to show that listening to music activates not only the regions that process sound, but also those involved in movement, memory and emotion. This, she suggests, explains why music can make us want to tap our feet, why a familiar song can carry us instantly back to a moment in the past, and why it can move us to tears.

Music’s emotional power seems to be linked to the brain’s reward system — the same system that responds to food and other pleasures. Psychologist Daniel Weiss found that when people listen to music they love, their brains release dopamine, a chemical associated with pleasure and motivation. Interestingly, dopamine was released not only at the emotional peak of a piece but also in the moments before it, as listeners anticipated what was coming. Weiss believes that much of the pleasure of music comes from this cycle of expectation and reward: we enjoy guessing what will happen next, and we enjoy being pleasantly surprised.

There have also been bold claims about music’s effect on intelligence. In the 1990s, a study reported that students who listened to a piece by Mozart performed slightly better on a test of spatial reasoning immediately afterwards. The finding was widely reported as the ‘Mozart effect’, and some parents began playing classical music to their babies in the hope of making them cleverer. Later research, however, failed to support these hopes. Psychologist Elena Moretti argues that the small, short-lived improvement was probably due to the music putting listeners in a good mood, rather than to anything special about Mozart.

Learning to play an instrument may be a different matter. Studies by music educator Samuel Okoye suggest that children who receive regular music lessons over several years tend to show improvements in their ability to listen carefully, to remember sequences and to concentrate. Okoye is careful to point out that it is difficult to separate the effects of music lessons from other factors, such as family background, but he believes the discipline of daily practice is valuable in itself.

Perhaps the most moving evidence of music’s power comes from medicine. Patients with severe memory loss caused by dementia often remain able to recognise and sing songs from their youth long after they have forgotten the names of their own children. Music therapists use this to help patients feel calmer and more connected to those around them. In my view, this tells us something important: whatever its origins, music is not a luxury but a deep part of what makes us human.