You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on READING PASSAGE 1 below.
ATLANTIS - TRUE STORY OR CAUTIONARY TALE?
If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago. But one of his most famous stories - the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis - is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,300 years after Plato's death?
"It's a story that captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "It's a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasise about."
Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B.C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the centre. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island.
There are many theories about where Atlantis was - in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain, even under what is now Antarctica. "Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there," says Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany. "Every place you can imagine."
Plato said Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his own time, and that its story had been passed down by poets, priests, and others. But Plato's writings about Atlantis are the only known records of its existence.
Possibly Based on Real Events?
Few, if any, scientists think Atlantis actually existed. Ocean explorer Robert Ballard, the National explorer-in-residence who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, notes that "no Nobel laureates" have said that what Plato wrote about Atlantis is true.
Still, Ballard says, the legend of Atlantis is a "logical" one since cataclysmic floods and volcanic explosions have happened throughout history, including one event that had some similarities to the story of the destruction of Atlantis. About 3,600 years ago, a massive volcanic eruption devastated the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea near Greece. At the time, a highly advanced society of Minoans lived on Santorini. The Minoan civilization disappeared suddenly at about the same time as the volcanic eruption.
But Ballard doesn't think Santorini was Atlantis, because the time of the eruption on that island doesn't coincide with when Plato said Atlantis was destroyed.
Romm believes Plato created the story of Atlantis to convey some of his philosophical theories. "He was dealing with a number of issues, themes that run throughout his work," he says. "His ideas about divine versus human nature, ideal societies, the gradual corruption of human society - these ideas are all found in many of his works. Atlantis was a different vehicle to get at some of his favourite themes."
The legend of Atlantis is a story about a moral, spiritual people who lived in a highly advanced, utopian civilization. But they became greedy, petty, and "morally bankrupt", and the gods "became angry because the people had lost their way and turned to immoral pursuits," Orser says.
As punishment, he says, the gods sent "one terrible night of fire and earthquakes" that caused Atlantis to sink into the sea. And all of these plots satisfy Plato's desires to express his perspectives about the way humans should deal with important ethical issues and the consequences of living decaying lives.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on READING PASSAGE 2 below.
WHERE HAVE ALL OUR BIRDS GONE?
People have been listening to skylarks singing in Britain for 10,000 years. But now they, and many other much-loved species, are vanishing fast. David Adam finds out why.
A family of Starlings has chosen a post box for the third year running in an Essex seaside town to raise their young brood.
A The B1042 that winds from the Bedfordshire town of Sandy towards the village of Potton is a difficult road to cross. Fast and twisty, there are several blind bends where pedestrians must take their lives into their hands. That is trickier than it sounds, for most pedestrians who cross the B1042 already have a pair of binoculars in their hands.
The road separates the grand headquarters of the RSPB, home to hundreds of birdwatchers, from some unkempt fields, home to hundreds of watchable birds-hence the regular skips across the tarmac.
The skips, though, are now less regular for many RSPB staff, for the star attraction of the neighboring fields has flown. Until a year ago, a clutch of woodlark nested there, one of Britain's rarest birds with just 1,000 or so thought to remain. Then their home was ploughed up and replaced with a giant field of swaying hemp plants. The wood-lark have not been seen since.
B It is not just the professional birdwatchers of the RSPB who have seen their local landscape transformed. Across Britain, and with little fanfare, the face of the countryside has subtly changed in recent years. Farm fields that stood idle for years under EU schemes to prevent overproduction, such as the one across the road from the RSPB, have been conscripted back into active service. The uncultivated land, previously a haven for wildlife, has been ploughed, and farmers have planted crops such as wheat and barley, with occasional hemp for use in paper and textiles.
C As a result, the amount of land available for birds such as the woodlark has halved in the last two years. Without efforts to stem this loss of habitat, conservation experts warn that the countryside of the future could look and sound very different. Starved of insects in the spring and seeds through the winter, the metallic-sounding corn bunting and plump grey partridge, formerly one of the most common birds on UK shores, are on the brink. And the skylark, whose twittering has provided the soundtrack to millions of countryside walks and inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Ode to a Skylark, to praise its "profuse strains of unpremeditated art", is struggling and could soon vanish from many areas. Numbers fell 53% from 1970 to 2006. "This is not just about birdwatchers. These birds are part of our common heritage," says Gareth Morgan, head of agriculture policy at the RSPB.
D Government figures show that populations of 19 bird species that rely on farmland have halved since serious counting started in the 1970s – a decline conservationists blame on intensive farming methods, with insecticide and herbicide sprayed on to monoculture fields show of vibrant hedges. The unmistakable yellowhammer, which likes to sing while perched as a dash of colour on hedges and bushes, has steadily disappeared with the hedges and bushes. And a startling 80% drop across England in 40 years has diluted the shifting Rorschach blots painted on the dusk sky by massed flocks of starling-though urban changes are blamed for this too.
E Farmland birds may sound a niche problem, and you may think that the rest of the countryside is doing OK, but for most people, farmland is the British countryside. About 75% of Britain is farmed, and about half of that is arable field. Take a train between two UK towns, particularly in eastern counties, and almost all of the countryside you see is farmland.
F As Simon Gillings of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) puts it: "For most people, farmland is the countryside and farmland birds are the birds they see." If birds are struggling, then it is a fair bet that other wildlife is too. "Birds are indicative of other things," Gillings says. "If birds are declining then what does that say about the plants and insects they rely on? It's all linked together."
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on READING PASSAGE 3 on the following pages.
LIFE BEYOND EARTH
A We all have our suppositions, our scenarios. The late astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that there are a million technological civilizations in our galaxy alone. His more conservative colleague Frank Drake offers the number 10,000. John Oro, a pioneering comet researcher, calculates that the Milky Way is sprinkled with a hundred civilizations. And finally there are skeptics like Ben Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA who thinks we may as well be alone in this galaxy if not in the universe.
B All the estimates are highly speculative. The fact is that there is no conclusive evidence of any life beyond Earth. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as various pundits have wisely noted. But still we don't have any solid knowledge about a single alien microbe, a solitary spore, much less the hubcap from a passing alien starship.
C Our ideas about extra-terrestrial life are what Sagan called "plausibility arguments," usually shot through with unknowns, hunches, ideologies, and random ought-to-bes. Even if we convince ourselves that there must be life out there, we confront a second problem, which is that we don't know anything about that life. We don't know how truly alien it is. We don't know if it's built on a foundation of carbon atoms. We don't know if it requires a liquid-water medium, if it swims or flies or burrows.
D Despite the enveloping nebula of uncertainties, extra-terrestrial life has become an increasingly exciting area of scientific inquiry. The field is called exobiology or astrobiology or bioastronomy – every few years it seems as though the name has been changed to protect the ignorant.
E Whatever it's called, this is a science infused with optimism. We now know that the universe may be aswarm with planets. Since 1995 astronomers have detected at least 22 planets orbiting other stars. NASA hopes to build a telescope called the Terrestrial Planet Finder to search for Earth-like planets, examining them for the atmospheric signatures of a living world. In the past decade organisms have been found thriving on our own planet in bizarre, hostile environments. If microbes can live in the pores of rock deep beneath the earth or at the rim of a scalding Yellowstone spring, then they might find a place like Mars not so shabby.
F Mars is in the midst of a full-scale invasion from Earth, from polar landers to global surveyors to rovers looking for fossils. A canister of Mars rocks will be rocketed back to Earth in the year 2008, parachuting into the Utah desert for scrutiny by scientists in a carefully sealed lab. In the coming years probes will also go around and, at some point, into Jupiter's moon Europa. That icy world shows numerous signs of having a subsurface ocean and could conceivably harbor a dark, cold biosphere.
G The quest for an alien microbe is supplemented by a continuing effort to find something large, intelligent, and communicative. SETI – the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence has not yielded a confirmed signal from an alien civilization in 40 years of experiments, but the signal-processing technology grows more sophisticated each year. The optimists figure it's only a matter of time before we tune in the right channel.
H No one knows when – or if – one of these investigations might make a breakthrough. There's a fair bit of boosterism surrounding the entire field, but I'd bet the breakthrough is many years, if not decades, away. The simple truth: extra-terrestrial life, by definition, is not conveniently located.
I But there are other truths that sustain the search for alien organisms. One is that, roughly speaking, the universe looks habitable. Another is that life radiates information about itself – that, if nothing else, it usually leaves a residue or an imprint. If the universe contains an abundance of life, that life is not likely to remain forever in the realm of the unknown.
J Contact with an alien civilization would be an epochal and culturally challenging event, but ex-biologists would settle gladly for the discovery of a tiny fossil, a mere remnant of extra-terrestrial biochemistry. One example. One data point to add to the one we have – Earth life. That's what we need to begin the long process of putting human existence in its true cosmic context.