A Harvard Myrmecologist Is Not Just The Darwin Of The Ant World, But Its Homer Too - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

A Harvard myrmecologist is not just the Darwin of the ant world, but its Homer too

Described as a 'six-legged Iliad', Wilson's Anthill draws parallels between human and ant societies. Though there are no ant symphony orchestras, secret police, or schools of philosophy, both ants and men conduct wars, divide into specialized castes of workers, build cities, maintain infant nurseries and cemeteries, take slaves, practice agriculture, and indulge in occasional cannibalism, though ant societies are more energetic, altruistic, and efficient than human ones (The New York Review of Books).

A "Go To the ant, thou sluggard," says the Bible. "Consider her ways, and be wise." The book of Proverbs, chapter six, says that the industrious legions of ants, which have now colonized every continent on earth, except Antarctica, have "no guide, overseer, or ruler".

B In fact, the good book got ants all wrong. Ant societies are rigidly stratified and usually ruled by queens. The little creatures are constantly guided by their scent trails and other chemical signals, not to mention their genes. Nobody has done more to reveal the true nature of the "superorganisms" that ant societies comprise than Edward Wilson, a Harvard biologist, campaigning green, two-time Pulitzer prize-winning author, pioneer of sociobiology, and now, at the age of 80, also a debut novelist.

C One part of "Anthill", by the world's leading myrmecologist, demonstrates that in Mr. Wilson ants have found not only their Darwin but also their Homer. Midway through the novel, and comprising a fifth of the whole, is a self-contained novella, "The Anthill Chronicles", which purports to be an undergraduate biology thesis by the protagonist of "Anthill", about the rise and fall of four ant colonies in a tract of forest in southern Alabama. Happily for the reader, these chronicles bear no resemblance to student reports, though most of the details of life among the six-legged will be familiar to fans of Mr. Wilson's entomological writings. The "thesis", we are told, has been lightly edited by two professors to present the story "as near as possible to the way ants see such events themselves".

D The success of this novella-within-a-novel derives from the fact that Mr. Wilson has no need to resort to the Hollywood method of anthropomorphizing his ants, as two popular animated features - "Antz" and "A Bug's Life" - did in 1998. There are no individual perspectives in "The Anthill Chronicles": no lovers, no personalities, no neuroses, and no selves. The only heroes are the ant colonies themselves, and they are as engaging and at least as memorable as most two-legged Hollywood creations.

E Mr. Wilson's mini-epic begins with the demise of the queen of the Trailhead Colony, whose death is not at first noticed by her daughter-followers. While her body rots encased in its external skeleton, her lingering scent misleadingly tells the colony that all is still well.

F The neighboring Streamside Colony wipes out the Trailheaders, and then itself falls victim to a "supercolony", comprising millions of workers and thousands of queens, which rose to power thanks to a single-gene mutation that weakens their sensitivity to queen-odors, and thus permits them to tolerate multiple simultaneous queens. Growing out of control, the supercolony in effect eats up its own territory and is exterminated by "the moving tree trunks, the ant gods" - i.e., humans spraying insecticide. This leaves room for the tiny Woodland Colony to expand its territory and thrive, and so the epic struggle continues, as it has for thousands of years.

G The tale within a tale is an astonishing literary achievement; nobody but Mr. Wilson could have written it, and those who read it will tread lightly in the forest, at least for a while. Yet Mr. Wilson wants his audience to do more than that. The novel as a whole is mainly about people, and an author's prologue-echoing the theme of some of Mr. Wilson's earlier work-warns of further disaster if this wayward species does not start to take better care of its biosphere, the planet.

H The hero of "Anthill" is Raff Cody, an Alabaman youngster who follows up his biology studies with a stint at Harvard law school, with the express purpose of returning equipped to save his beloved patch of forest from rapacious property developers. This character owes something to Mr. Wilson's own background, and so does the story's narrator, Raff's biology professor. (It's one of the few defects in the novel that Mr. Wilson hasn't quite decided which of the pair is him.)

I Raff's early adventures in the swamps owe something to Huck Finn's; and the novel's denouement, with a monstrously eccentric woodsman and some implausible Fundamentalist villains, recalls the Florida black comedies of Carl Hiaasen, only without the laughs. One can't help rooting for the ants. Thanks to the depth of Mr. Wilson's understanding of them, his evocation of their ways is a more powerful tool for raising ecological awareness than any Disneyfication is likely to be.