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.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on the following pages.
THE GREAT SURVIVOR
TV has coped well with technological change. Other media can learn from it.
A Newspapers are dying; the music industry is still yelping about iTunes; book publishers think they are next. Yet one bit of old media seems to be doing rather well. In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl – a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it. Shows like "American Idol" and "Britain's Got Talent" draw huge audiences partly because people are constantly messaging and tweeting about them, and discussing them on Facebook.
B Advertising wobbled during the recession, shaking the free-to-air broadcasters that depend on it. But cable and satellite TV breezed through. Pay-television subscriptions grew by more than 2m in America last year. The explosive growth of cable and satellite TV in India explains how that country has gone from two channels in the early 1990s to more than 600 today. Pay-TV bosses scarcely acknowledge the existence of viewers who do not subscribe to multichannel TV, talking only of people who have "yet to choose" a provider. This is not merely bluster. As our special report this week explains, once people start paying for greater television choice, they rarely stop.
C It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening's worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the Internet "assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing", observes Mike Fries of Liberty Global, a cable giant. Laziness also mitigates the threat from piracy. Although many programmes are no more than three or four mouse clicks away, that still sounds too much like work for most of us. And television-watching is a more sociable activity than it may appear. People like to watch programmes when everybody else is watching them. Give them devices that allow them to record and play back programmes easily, and they will still watch live TV at least four-fifths of the time.
D Yet these natural advantages alone are not enough to ensure television's survival. The internet threatens TV just as much as it does other media businesses, and for similar reasons. It competes for advertising, offering firms a more measurable and precise way of reaching consumers. Technology also threatens to fracture television into individual programmes, just as it has ruinously broken music albums into individual tracks. TV has endured because it has responded better to such threats than other media businesses.
E One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters' initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry's reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to develop alternatives to piracy. Websites like Hulu, a joint venture of the American broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, have drawn eyeballs away from illicit sources. Gradually it has become clear that these websites pose a threat to the TV business in themselves, and that they are not bringing in as much advertising money as might be expected (which is similar to the problem faced by the newspaper business). So television is changing tack again.
F With impressive speed, TV firms are now building online subscription – video services. The trendiest model is authentication: prove that you subscribe to pay-television and you can watch all the channels that you have paid for on any device. Such "TV Everywhere" services are beginning to appear in America and Canada. It is likely that Hulu will become a "freemium" service – mostly free, but with some shows hidden behind a paywall. The move from an ad-supported model to a mixture of subscriptions and advertising is tricky, but logical. It shows that it is not enough to embrace technological change. Businesses must also work out how to build digital offerings that do not cause their analogue ones to collapse.
G Television has domesticated other disruptive technologies. Ten years ago digital video recorders like TiVo promised to transform the way people watched TV. The devices made it easy to record programmes and play them back, zooming through ads. The TV networks responded by running advertisements that work at high speed. Cable and satellite companies built cheap digital video recorders into set-top boxes and charged viewers extra for them. In effect, money flowed back to the television business. In Britain those boxes will soon be deployed to deliver targeted advertising, enabling the living-room television to compete with the internet.
H Other outfits are learning from TV. Record labels sound terribly innovative when they talk about bundling music together with broadband subscriptions. Yet this model comes from television. For the past few years, ESPN, a sports giant, has been showing games on its website. The cost is buried in monthly broadband bills. Hulu-style joint ventures are all the rage in media, too. Magazine publishers have set up Next Issue Media, which is trying to shape the evolution of digital devices to suit their needs. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem aims to do the same for films.
I That box might appear to be sitting in the corner of the living room, not doing much. In fact, it is constantly evolving. If there is one media business with a chance of completing the perilous journey to the digital future looking as healthy as it did when it set off, it is television.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
ACCENTUATE THE NEGATIVE
Jul 5th 2010, 10:11 by The Economist online
A FOR everyone else what the picture showed was the glaciers: for the Dutch it was the flooding. Last January errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the headlines. The chapter on Asia in the report by the IPCC's second working group, charged with looking at the impact of climate change and adapting to it, mistakenly claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This contradicted some reasonably basic physics, had not been predicted by the glacier specialists in the first working group and was unsupported by any evidence. There was a report from the 1990s which said something similar about all the world's non-polar glaciers, but it gave the date as 2350. Then there was a crucial typo and some shoddy referencing. Nevertheless the IPCC's chair, Rajendra Pachauri, had lashed out at people bringing the criticism up, accusing them of "voodoo science". He then had to eat his words, and set up a panel to look into ways the IPCC might be improved.
B Inspired by this to look for other errors, a journalist for a Dutch newspaper spotted that the chapter on Europe gave a figure for the area of the Netherlands below sea level that was much too large. The area at risk of flooding by the sea had been conflated with that at risk of flooding by the Rhine and the Meuse rivers. That the careful Dutch should have provided faulty information and not spotted it in the review process was an embarrassment to the environment minister, Jacqueline Cramer; following a debate in parliament she called on the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), to look at all the regional chapters in the working group II report and make sure they were up to snuff. This the PBL has now done and its report has already been published.
C The authors try hard to make clear that their findings do not undermine the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. And there is nothing in their report as egregious as the glaciers or as embarrassing as the Dutch sea level. But they did find a number of things to take issue with, most of which they thought minor but eight of which they classed as major; and their work seems to bring out a systemic tendency to stress negative effects over positive ones. This tendency can be defended. But a reading of the report suggests there may also be broader and potentially more misleading bias.
D The auditors found one distinct error which they deemed major: a statement about the frequency of turbulence in South African fishing waters which had been translated directly into a statement about the productivity of the fisheries. The IPCC has indicated it will produce an erratum for this, and for a number of other errors all concerned deemed minor. But the PBL also identified seven statements, which, while not errors, it thought were deserving of comment.
E Perhaps the most striking relates to Africa. The table in the summary for policy makers reads: "By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%." The evidence on which this is based says only that yields during years in which there are droughts could be reduced by 50%. Furthermore, the relevant reference applies only for Morocco – and it cites as its source an earlier paper that the PBL says no one, including the IPCC authors, now seems able to find.
F Other criticisms turn on a tendency to generalize. Research showing decreased yields of millet, groundnuts and cowpeas in Niger becomes a claim that crop yields are decreasing in the Sahel, the strip that separates the Sahara from the savannah in Africa, rather than that the yields of some crops are decreasing in some parts of the Sahel. The results of research on cattle in Argentina are applied to livestock (which would include pigs, chickens, llamas and the rest) throughout South America. The expert authors do not provide a compelling reason for their claim that fresh water availability will decline overall in south, east and Southeast Asia, or that the balance of climate-related effects on the health of Europeans will be negative.
G Another problem identified by the PBL analysis is that, in general, negative impacts are stressed over positive ones. The table in the summary for policymakers is almost unremittingly bad news; the conclusions in the chapters that fed into it, while far from cheery, were more mixed. In a similar way, when there is a range of possible impacts, the top end of the range tends to get more play in the summaries for policy makers than the bottom end does. The PBL says that this is a reasonable way to proceed in a document that is explicitly aimed at policy makers thinking about adaptation, but it is not clear how transparent this approach is to readers.
H This may reflect a larger issue. Work on the impacts of climate change – the literature Working Group II assesses – tends to focus on vulnerabilities and damage for much the same reason the IPCC authors do. They seem more important, more urgent and quite possibly more fundable. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change requires countries to assess their vulnerabilities, and these assessments are fodder for Working Group II. Thus the evidence base from which an assessment of impacts has to start is to some extent skewed.
I Perhaps the most worrying thing about the PBL report, though, is a rather obvious one about which its authors say little. In all ten of the issues that the PBL categorized as major (the original errors on glaciers and Dutch sea level, and the eight others identified in the report), the impression that the reader gets from the IPCC is more strikingly negative than the impression which would have been received if the underlying evidence base had been reflected as the PBL would have wished, with more precise referencing, more narrow interpretation and less authorial judgment. A large rise in heat related deaths in Australia is mentioned without noting that most of the effect is due to population rather than climate change. A claim about forest fires in northern Asia seems to go further than the evidence referred to – in this case a speech by a politician – would warrant.
J A suspicion thus gains ground that the way in which the IPCC synthesizes, generalizes and checks its findings may systematically favor adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond just serving the needs of policy makers. Anecdotally, authors bemoan fights to keep caveats in place as chapters are edited, refined and summarized. The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC's findings. But the panel set up to look at the IPCC's workings should ask some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative.