-
Reading Test
ALL ANSWERS MUST BE
WRITTEN ON THE ANSWER SHEET.
The test
is divided as follows:
Reading Passage 1
Questions 1 to 13
Reading
Passage 2
Questions 14 to
27
Reading Passage 3
Questions 28 to 40
Start at the beginning of the test and
work through it. You should answer all the
questions.
If you cannot do
a particular question leave it and go on to the
next one. You can
return to it later.
TIME ALLOWED: 60 MINUTES
NUMBER OF QUESTIONS: 40
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on
questions
1-13.
Vines in the sky
A
The farms of the future may
be built right in the centre of your city.
Suburban
sprawl combined with the vast
economies of scale in operation in agriculture,
have
typically driven food production
far from populated centres, with an increase in
the cost of transport and risk of
spoilage en route. However, the days of market
gardens on the edges of urban areas
supplying fresh food straight to your table
may soon be over mass city-centre
farming may soon replace them. A visionary
microbiologist and environmental
lecturer, Dickson Despommier from Columbia
University in New York sees our future
cities populated by a new kind of market
garden. The creator of this radical
‘vertical farming' idea describes the evolution of
the concept from an older project
involving rooftop gardening in Manhattan.
While that was interesting, it couldn't
be sustained on a mass scale. But it planted
the seed of another idea Looking at
greenhouse projects in New York. the resulting
concept was large-scale, indoor urban
agriculture in skyscrapers.
B
Following
this, Despommier set up Jaboratory projects aimed
at different design
challenges and
attracted a wide range of enthusiastic
collaborators and contributors.
He
believes this vertical farming method could be a
solution to some of the world's
most
pressing issues. The world population is expected
to grow by three billion to
8.6 billion
over the next half century. By then, some 80 per
cent of the world's
population will
live in cities, and they will need to eat. At the
same time,
conventional farm and
grazing land takes up an enormous amount of space,
with
over one-third of the world's
surface currently used for agriculture. Despommier
figures that in the next five decades
an area of new arable land roughly the size of
Brazil will be required to feed the
world's growing population - land that simply
doesn't exist.
C
Despommier's concept relies
on using green methods of architecture and
materials to build skyscrapers that
house grow and produce crops. New materials
and technologies such as cheaper
reflectors, which reflect sunlight where it's
needed, more efficient solar panels for
energy and system-wide recycling are
integral to the plan. One unusual
feature is the use of a type of shellfish to
filter
water. These can clean urban
sewage to a state suitable for irrigation.
D
'Outside, one acre (0.4 of a hectare)
of land means one crop a year,' says
Despommier. ‘Indoors, you can grow one
crop every three months. You can get
four crops a year' He suggests that 150
such buildings could feed the entire city of
New York for a year. Indoor crops
require less pesticide and are less subject to the
problems in nature, such as drought.
Some academics say that a single skyscraper
farm covering 1.3 hectares could
produce enough food to feed 35,000 people for a
year- the same as a 420-hectare farm
Each floor of the design would be rigged up
with hydroponic watering systems and
artificial lighting, and solar panels to
provide electricity. However, vertical
farming is not without its challenges. One is
light - artificial lighting uses a
great deal of electricity and generates
considerable
heat. Another is cost,
with some AS93 million per building for
construction and
A$$5.5 million a year
for operation.
E
Among experts, opinions
vary on whether the project can succeed Creating
conditions suitable for growth is a
serious challenge, and some think the crop yield
would be too low to make economic
sense. 'My biggest reservation is that the
basic premise is flawed. We already
know how to increase food production from
existing land resources, particularly
in areas with surplus land such as sub-Saharan
Africa. It's just that we do it
incredibly badly at the moment,' says Rob Brook, a
rural development researcher at the
University of Wales in Bangor. 'This is a rich
person's pipe dream.
F
Yet there is
strong support elsewhere. Luc Mougeout, an
advocate of urban
agriculture at
Canada's International Development Research
Centre, says the
vertical farm is not
only possible, but will happen within this
generation. 'It would
collect at one
site a diversity of elements already at work in
some form or another
around the world,'
he says. Despommier has the backing of his
university as well
as venture
capitalists from the Middle East, China and the
Netherlands.
If the vertical farming
vision becomes a reality, we could find ourselves
once again
enjoying fresh fruit and
vegetables sourced from just-around the corner,
except
these might come from the 45th
floor.
Questions 1-6
Reading Passage I has six
sections,
A-F
.
Which section contains the following
information?
Write the
correct letter,
A-F
, in
boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than
once.
1
doubts about the feasibility of the
project
2
the idea of moving market gardens from
the outskirts to inner-city areas
3
how the system
would avoid current agricultural problems
4
a
previous program that was not practical for
widespread use
5
sources of financial
assistance to the proposal
6
a method of
dealing with waste matter
Questions 7-10
Complete the
notes below.
Choose
NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A
NUMBER
from the
passage for
each answer.
Write your
answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.
Despommier's solution to a
world problem
Population
within 50 years
thought to
reach 7
.......................................
8
....................................... living in
urban areas
Land
Proportion of Earth's area now used for
farming: 9 .......................................
Will need an extra area as large as 10
......................................
to provide food
Questions
11-13
Answer the questions
below.
Choose
NO
MORE THAN THREE WORDS
from the passage
for each answer.
Write your
answers in boxes
11-13
on
your answer sheet.
11
How will the indoor farms
get energy?
12
Besides the expense, what other
challenge for indoor farms must be dealt with?
13
When does Luc
Mougeout believe that Despommier's idea will
become a reality?
READING
PASSAGE
2
You should spend about 20
minutes on questions
14-27
.
Movements of the planets
People have pondered the movements of
stars and planets for as long as humans have
been on this Earth. Long ago it was
noticed that some of the lights in the sky seemed
permanent in relation to each other and
these were known as the 'fixed stars', whereas
other lights moved about much more
freely and were called 'the wanderers'. We now
know the latter as the planets and we
also know that the stars are by no means fixed
but move in predictable patterns. That
both stars and planets circled the sky over 24
hours was thought to be because they
revolved around the Earth.
One early theory described the 'music
of the spheres'. It was believed that the stars
and planets were fixed on glass-like
spheres that were centred on the Earth and
created heavenly music as they moved,
this latter belief possibly originating from the
humming in the ears at high altitude.
The Greek astronomer, mathematician and
geographer Ptolemy was one of the first
to suggest a pattern to these movements and
in his Ptolemaic system the Sun, the
Moon and the planets each had a sphere that
moved independently of the others, and
the stars were all fixed on the outermost
sphere. This system was thus able to
account for the differing movements then
observed.
By the 16th century, more accurate
measuring instruments were available, and using
these, even before the telescope was
developed, a Polish monk, Nicolaus Copernicus,
spent much of his life making far more
exact observations of the heavens. He tried to
explain the mathematics behind the
planets' movements but found that the circular
movement of a sphere could not explain
why, for example, Mars apparently stopped
and went backwards for a short time. He
discovered that the planets' movements
could be far more easily predicted if
not the Earth but the Sun were placed in the
centre of the system, and the planets
circled the Sun rather than the Earth. The
problem with this explanation was that
many people believed that man was the centre
of the universe, and so not everyone
accepted it. Copernicus avoided this difficulty by
suggesting the theory merely as a
method of more accurately working out the dates of
important celebration days. The theory
got strong support in the 17th century, when
the eminent Italian mathematician and
astronomer Galileo Galilei taught the
Copernican system to his students.
The telescope was invented
in the Netherlands in the early l7th century and
this
allowed far more accurate
measurements of planetary motion to be taken. The
German astronomer Johannes Kepler used
it to discover that the Copernican
observations were not quite correct and
so could not be used to predict the orbits of