Reading Practice Test 3

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

The invention of paper

For most of human history, writing was a difficult and expensive business, limited by the surfaces on which words could be recorded. The peoples of the ancient world wrote on whatever came to hand: the Mesopotamians pressed marks into tablets of wet clay, the Egyptians made sheets from the papyrus reed, and in many places scribes used parchment, a fine material prepared from animal skin. In China, people wrote on strips of bamboo tied together into bundles, or on lengths of silk. Bamboo, however, was heavy and awkward, and silk was far too costly for everyday use. What the world needed was a writing surface that was light, smooth and cheap.

That surface was paper, and its invention is traditionally credited to Cai Lun, an official at the Chinese imperial court, around the year 105 CE. In truth, simple forms of paper may have existed before him; what Cai Lun did was to improve and standardise the process so that good paper could be made in quantity. His great insight was to use cheap and plentiful materials. Instead of silk, he took tree bark, hemp, old rags and even worn-out fishing nets, and turned these humble scraps into a material fit for an emperor.

The method he refined was ingenious. The raw materials were first soaked in water and beaten until they broke down into a soft pulp. This pulp was mixed with a large quantity of water in a vat, so that the tiny fibres floated freely. A worker then dipped a screen — a frame covered with a fine mesh — into the vat and lifted it out flat, so that a thin, even layer of fibres was left lying on the mesh as the water drained away. The wet sheet was turned out and pressed to squeeze out the remaining water, and finally it was hung up or laid out to dry. What remained was a sheet of paper: smooth, light and, above all, cheap to produce.

For several centuries the Chinese kept the method a closely guarded secret, and paper spread only slowly beyond their borders. The turning point came in the eighth century. After a battle near the town of Talas in Central Asia in 751, it is said that Chinese papermakers were taken prisoner and their skills passed to the Islamic world. Paper mills soon appeared in the great cities of Samarkand and Baghdad, and from there the craft travelled westward, reaching Spain and Italy by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Everywhere it went, paper gradually replaced the older, more expensive writing materials.

In China itself, cheap paper quickly transformed daily life. Government officials could keep detailed records, scholars could copy and share their writings, and merchants could keep their accounts with ease. By the later centuries, paper was even being used to print the world's first banknotes. Long before Europe had given up its parchment, paper had woven itself into the fabric of Chinese society, and the steady demand for it supported a thriving industry of mills and workshops.

The consequences were enormous. Parchment had always been costly: a single large book might require the skins of an entire flock of sheep, which put books beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest. Paper changed this completely, making it possible for far more people to read and write. Centuries later, when the printing press was developed in Europe, it was cheap paper that allowed printed books, and the ideas they contained, to spread across the world as never before. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern world of learning rests, quite literally, on paper.

Paper itself has continued to change. For most of its history it was made from rags, but by the middle of the nineteenth century manufacturers had learned to make it from wood pulp instead. Wood was far more abundant than old cloth, and paper became cheaper still — so cheap that it could be thrown away without a second thought. Today, that very cheapness has become a problem, as the world worries about the forests cut down to feed the paper mills and searches for ways to recycle what it has already made. Yet for nearly two thousand years, this simple sheet of pressed fibres has remained one of the most useful inventions in human history.

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

Saving the world's seeds

A  For thousands of years, farmers have saved seeds from their best plants and sown them the following year, slowly producing an astonishing variety of crops. There were once tens of thousands of different kinds of apple, rice and wheat, each suited to a particular place and taste. Today much of that variety is disappearing, as farmers around the world plant the same small number of high-yielding types. This loss worries scientists, and a global effort is now under way to save the seeds of the past before they vanish for good.

B  The reason diversity matters is not merely sentimental. Every variety of a crop carries a slightly different set of characteristics, and some of these may one day prove vital. A type of wheat that seems unremarkable now might carry resistance to a disease that does not yet exist, or the ability to survive a drought that climate change will bring. If such varieties are lost, that hidden potential is lost with them. Keeping a wide range of crops alive is, in effect, an insurance policy against an uncertain future. Some of these old varieties survive only in the fields of a few elderly farmers, and once they are gone they cannot be brought back.

C  The main tool for this work is the seed bank. A seed bank collects seeds from as many varieties as possible, dries them, and stores them in conditions that keep them alive for as long as possible. There are now well over a thousand seed banks around the world, holding many millions of samples between them. Each one is a kind of library, but instead of books its shelves hold the living material from which future crops can be grown.

D  Seed banks, however, can themselves be destroyed — by fire, by flood, by a failure of power, or by war. For this reason, a global backup store has been created, dug deep into the frozen rock of a mountain on a remote northern island. Often called the ‘doomsday vault’, it holds duplicate copies of seeds from seed banks all over the world, kept safe in case the originals are lost. Its value was proved when a seed bank in Syria was damaged during that country's civil war: scientists were able to withdraw backup copies from the vault and begin their collection again. The frozen island was chosen precisely because it is so cold and so remote that the seeds would remain safe even if the machinery ever failed.

E  Preparing seeds for long storage is a careful science. The seeds are first dried until they contain very little moisture, then sealed in airtight foil packets and kept at a very low temperature, usually around minus eighteen degrees Celsius. Cold and dry, a seed's living processes slow almost to a stop, and many kinds will remain able to grow after decades, or even centuries, in storage. From time to time a sample is taken out and planted, both to check that the seeds are still alive and to grow a fresh supply.

F  Not every seed can be saved in this way, however. The seeds of some plants — including important crops such as mango, cocoa and many forest trees — die if they are dried and frozen. Known as ‘recalcitrant’ seeds, they must be preserved by other means: as living plants in special gardens, or through advanced laboratory techniques that are expensive and still being developed. For these species, the simple freezer is not enough.

G  Storing seeds in a vault, valuable though it is, cannot do the whole job. Many scientists argue that diversity must also be protected in the field — by supporting the farmers who still grow traditional varieties, and by conserving the wild relatives of our crops, the untamed plants from which they were first bred and which still grow in forests and grasslands. A seed frozen in a vault is safe, but a plant growing in the ground continues to change and adapt. Both, it is now widely agreed, are needed if the world's crops are to survive whatever the future may hold. Saving seeds, in this sense, is not a single task but a partnership between the vault, the garden and the farmer's field.

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

The psychology of first impressions

We like to think that we judge other people carefully, weighing the evidence before making up our minds. In reality, we do nothing of the sort. Shown the face of a stranger, we form an impression of them — trustworthy or shifty, warm or cold, competent or foolish — within a fraction of a second, long before we have exchanged a single word. And, for better or worse, we then act on these lightning judgements.

Just how fast this happens was revealed by the psychologist Naomi Blake, whose research on what she calls ‘thin slices’ of behaviour has become well known. In one series of studies, people were shown photographs of faces for only a tenth of a second and asked to rate them for qualities such as trustworthiness. Their snap judgements turned out to match, almost exactly, the judgements of other people who were given as long as they liked to decide. Extra time, Blake found, did not change people's opinions; it merely made them more confident that they were right.

One of the most powerful forces shaping these first impressions is what psychologists call the ‘halo effect’. According to Professor Ravi Menon, who has studied it for many years, a single striking quality in a person tends to colour our view of all their other qualities, even ones it has nothing to do with. Physically attractive people, for example, are routinely judged to be more intelligent, more honest and more capable than others, simply because they are good-looking. There is, of course, no real reason why beauty should go hand in hand with honesty, yet the impression is remarkably hard to resist.

Are first impressions ever accurate? Sometimes, yes. People can read certain emotions and even some personality traits at rates a little better than chance, and a quick judgement is not always a wrong one. But Menon warns that the accuracy of first impressions is routinely exaggerated. Much of what we ‘see’ in a stranger's face is in fact supplied by our own expectations and stereotypes, and by our mood at the moment we happen to be looking. A tired or anxious observer will read the very same face quite differently from a relaxed one.

What makes first impressions so important is that they are remarkably difficult to shift. Here the work of Dr Clara Obi is revealing. Once we have decided what someone is like, she has shown, we tend to notice and remember everything that fits our impression, while explaining away or simply forgetting anything that does not. A person we have judged to be unfriendly will be seen as cold even when they are being perfectly pleasant. Through this ‘confirmation bias’, a first impression tends to reinforce itself, so that a poor start can be extraordinarily hard to recover from.

The consequences reach far beyond the awkwardness of a bad introduction. Studies of job interviews suggest that many are effectively decided in the first few seconds, before the candidate has said anything of substance. In the courtroom, the faces of defendants have been found to influence the way they are judged. Even doctors and teachers, who ought to know better, are not immune. In each of these settings, decisions that should rest on careful evidence are quietly shaped by impressions formed in an instant.

It is worth pausing on how strange this is. We would never accept a court verdict reached in half a second, or a medical diagnosis made before the patient had even spoken. Yet in countless everyday situations we allow exactly such snap judgements to guide us, rarely stopping to ask whether the confident feeling of ‘knowing’ someone at a glance has any basis in fact. That confidence, as Blake's work shows, is often an illusion.

Can we do any better? None of the researchers believes that we can stop forming first impressions; the habit is far too deeply rooted for that. But we can, they suggest, learn to hold our judgements more loosely. Being aware that the halo effect exists, slowing down before we decide, and deliberately looking for evidence that might prove us wrong can all help to loosen the grip of that first, instant verdict. As Blake puts it, we cannot help the impression that forms in the first tenth of a second — but we can choose how much to trust it.