You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on READING PASSAGE 1 below.
FROZEN IN TIME: CAPTAIN SCOTT'S HUTS
For those few hundred visitors who make the long journey by ship each year to see the hut for themselves, it looks eerie as if the adventurers had just stepped outside. Yet it is nearly a century since Robert Falcon Scott and his men embarked on the doomed march to the South Pole an episode that was to go down as one of the most vainglorious in the heroic age of exploration.
Today their huts at Cape Evans on Ross Island, complete with preserved jars of Heinz Indian Relish, tins of boiled cabbage and still-edible pats of butter, are undergoing a vital restoration. Here, where Scott's party endured a gruelling Antarctic winter as they planned their assault on the South Pole, conservationists hope to restore for future generations a permanent monument to the bravery of the men who gave up comfortable middle class lives to risk all in the blizzards and sub-zero temperatures.
Nearly £3.5m has been raised to safeguard the quarters which became a microcosm of Edwardian society during the opening stages of the Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-13, Scott's second and final foray on to the frozen continent.
The most urgent work has already begun as experts announced this week that they had uncovered 300 new artifacts belonging to the expedition. But time and the elements are stacked against the future survival of Scott's hut and its 8,000 items of equipment and expedition memorabilia, and it has been declared one of the most endangered sites in the world by the World Monument Fund.
Philippa Foster Back, whose grandfather was part of Scott's 1910 team that helped build the camp, chairs the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.
"We are in a race against time to preserve this irreplaceable part of our heritage. The end of the fundraising is in sight but the final mile is going to be the hardest, she said.
The fundraising effort, which is being led in Britain and New Zealand but has drawn support from around the world, is seeking another £175,000. Half the money has been donated by the private February Foundation, with the balance coming from small donors and polar enthusiasts. It is hoped the work will be finished in time for the centenary celebrations in 2014 when millions will be able to pay a virtual visit to the hut via the internet. But much work must be done before then. Wind deflectors have been fitted to prevent recent heavy snow from building up around the prefabricated dwelling and crushing it. Last year 85 tonnes had to be shovelled away from the structure and water from melting ice continues to endanger the interior.
Stoves, lights, clothes, bedding and harnesses for the team of dogs remain where they were left. Objects such as tins, corks, scientific test tubes and compressed "patent" coal bricks from Cardiff remain intact.
Sir David Attenborough, one of the campaign's leading supporters, described the base as "a time warp without parallel". "You walk into Scott's hut and you are transported to the year 1912 in a way that is quite impossible anywhere else in the world". Everything is there," he said. The actor and presenter Michael Palin has described it as "one of the great memorials to exploration anywhere on earth".
The 15m by 8m hut was built by Scott and his team when they landed in Antarctica in 1911. It took a week to erect but was well-loved by the men who called it home despite the hardships they endured there. In his journal, Scott observed: "The hut is becoming the most comfortable dwelling-place imaginable. We have made ourselves a truly seductive home, within the walls of which peace, quiet and comfort remain supreme. Such a noble dwelling transcends the word 'hut', and we pause to give it a more fitting title only from lack of the appropriate suggestion."
By the time of his return to the Arctic, Scott had become a hero of Edwardian society and the expedition enjoyed support from the government and people alike. Schools and churches raised money to buy blankets and tents, and news of their progress was eagerly awaited back home. Scott recreated the social structures within the quarters that he had known from the navy. A bulkhead of bottled supplies partitioned the living area. Space was set aside for the 16 officers and scientists. The men bedded down in the wardroom at the east end and dined in the mess-deck at the west end. The wardroom was dominated by a large table and spindle-backed chairs. On Sundays the table was covered with a dark blue cloth, although for ordinary meals it was covered with a white oil cloth. There was also a player piano and an HMV gramophone. At the eastern end a darkroom was built and workbenches were constructed for the scientists to conduct their experiments. The men amused themselves by working hard and giving lectures on their specialised subjects - anything from watercolour painting to the history of Japan. On special feast days such as mid-winter's night, they dined on roast seal.
Scott's goal was to beat his rival Roald Amundsen to the Pole. He had been greatly disconcerted on learning that the Norwegian changed his plans to conquer the North Pole after a successful American expedition and set sail for Antarctica instead to challenge him bead on. In the end Scott, 43, and his party of four were narrowly beaten to the prize and it was on the return journey that they perished amid scenes of unimaginable suffering. The last entry in the explorer's diary dated 29 March 1912 reads: "Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance and courage... which would have stilted the hearts of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale."
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on READING PASSAGE 2 below.
WHY SOME SHAPES ARE MORE PLEASING TO THE EYE THAN OTHERS
A The ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens, Mona Lisa's face and the head of George Clooney all have one thing in common. Their attractiveness is said to be based on the "golden ratio"; which is supposed to be the most aesthetically pleasing shape to the human eye. The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, produces a shape similar to a widescreen television or a cinema screen and describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and half times its width. The proportion is said to pervade art, architecture and nature.
B The modernist architect Le Corbusier used the golden ratio for conferring harmonious proportions on everything from door handles to high-rise buildings, whereas the surrealist painter Salvadore Dali deliberately incorporated the rule into his painting Sacrament of the Last Supper. Now a theoretical mathematician has come up with what he believes is a possible reason why the human eye finds shapes in these proportions so particularly appealing. It comes down to how easy it is for the eye and the brain to scan such an image for important details, based on our evolutionary history.
C Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University in North Carolina said that the golden ratio - which was first identified mathematically by Euclid in 3rd Century BC – just happens to be the most efficient shape for visual scanning, which could explain why it is behind so many works of art and architectural wonders. "When you look at what so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere. It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down," Professor Bejan said.
D "Scanning left to right is five times faster than scanning up and down and that is largely due to the left or right eye taking over when the opposite eye gives up. When you scan vertically, it's like having just one eye. The eyes are also an arranged on a horizontal axis, which happens to fit in with the landscape," he said. Professor Bejan has applied a mathematically-based law he devised in 1996 to describe how designs in nature, from the flow of water in river deltas to the branching airways in a set of lungs, are geared towards ever-increasing efficiency of movement, such as the faster flow of water, air, blood or even individuals in a crowd.
E Vision is also subject to increased efficiency based on the faster flow of information from the eye to the brain. And the visual scene that is easiest to scan is one where the horizontal axis is wider than the vertical, Professor Bejan said. This is true for a gazelle scanning the African horizon for predators, or early human hunter gatherers searching their territory for food. "Animal vision should be configured in a way that seeing and scanning should be the fastest and the easiest. And when the proportions allow this to be done, it should be a source of pleasure because of its past evolutionary associations with finding food or a mate," Professor Bejan said.
F According to the theoretical study published in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Eco-dynamics, the most efficient proportions for the human eyes to scan is a rectangular shape where the horizontal is about one and a half times the vertical, which Professor Bejan said approximates to the golden ratio. "It is a consequence of the fact that our perceived world is roughly a horizontal tableau. Our supply of images reflects the orientation of the landscape. Danger comes to the animal from the sides and from behind, not from above, and not from below," Professor Bejan said.
G Perceiving the world through a rectangular box has led to this particular shape becoming aesthetically pleasing and being subconsciously incorporated into works of art. It may also explain why some faces that approximate more closely than other faces are viewed as being the most attractive. A recent study by scientists at the University of Toronto found that female faces were judged the most attractive if the vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth was approximately 36 percent of the face's length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes was approximately 46 percent of the facial width. This was also the proportions of the average face.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on READING PASSAGE 3 below.
The Big Question: Has a key breakthrough been made in the search for a cure for cancer?
A British scientists announced that they have sequenced a "cancer genome" for the first time. It means they have identified all of the many thousands of genetic mistakes that make a tumour cell different from a healthy cell taken from the same cancer patient. Not all of these mistakes, or DNA mutations, were involved in triggering the cancer, but some of them - the “drivers” – clearly were. Scientists believe it will be possible eventually to identify these driver mutations and find the genetic faults that led to the changes in a healthy human cell that caused it to divide uncontrollably to form a cancerous tumour.
B There is unlikely ever to be a single "cure" for cancer, which after all affects so many different tissues and organs of the body. In fact, there may be as many as 200 different types of cancer, and many more subtypes. But each and every cancer involves damage to the DNA template that rules the cell and governs the way it divides. In this respect, cancer is a genetic disease, indeed it is said to be the most common genetic disease since, in the developed world, it strikes one in three people over a lifetime, killing as many as one in five. By understanding the nature of these genetic mutations in a cancer cell, it should be possible to design tailor-made drugs that specifically target the faults, or the outcome of the faults. It could also lead to new methods of diagnosing cancer in the earliest stages of the disease before it becomes apparent to the patient or doctor, or new ways of finding secondary cancers lurking in the body that have evaded earlier anti-cancer treatment.
C It was a team of human genome scientists led by Peter Campbell and Professor Mike Stratton at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, which is funded by the Welcome Trust, the world's biggest medical research charity. They are part of the Cancer Genome Consortium, a collaboration of research institutes from countries such as Britain and France in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia. They will be taking samples from about 500 patients around the world in the hope of analysing the genomes of the 50 most common cancers.
D The Sanger Institute scientists analysed cells stored from two patients who had died of cancer. One was a 55-year-old man with small-cell lung cancer and the other was a 45-year-old man with malignant melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer. The researchers took a cancerous cell and a healthy cell from each patient and sequenced the full genetic code, or genome, of all four cells. They did this dozens of times over to make sure they had a correct final sequence, consisting of some 3 billion letters of the full human genome.
E The scientists found that the lung cancer cell had 22,910 DNA mutations that the healthy cell from the same patient did not possess. These mutations in the lung must have accumulated during the lifetime of the patient, many as a result of exposure to cigarette smoke. The same goes for the 33,345 mutations identified in the cancerous skin cells of 45-year-old man with malignant melanoma, although most of the mutations here are presumed to have been caused by exposure to sunlight. Both of these "cancer genomes show where the mutations occurred and in which of the chromosomes of the cell. They were published in the journal Nature. It was the scientific first step towards the "personalised medicine" of sequencing the DNA of cancer patients on a routine basis.
F Some of them involve quite big changes to the DNA molecule, such as rearrangements of hundreds of thousands of letters in the four-letter code of DNA. But some of them are the smallest change possible, a shift for instance in one letter (known as a base) to another, such as C to T and vice versa, or an A to G and vice versa. These "base pairs" are at the heart of the DNA sequencing exercise. Some of these mutations are already known from previous studies to be linked with certain environmental mutagens, the mutation-causing agents. Tobacco smoke, for instance, often results in the mutation of G to T, whereas ultraviolet light tends to mutate C to T. By looking at the mutations in the lung-cancer cell and the skin-cancer cell, scientists were able to see the influence that smoking and exposure to the sun had on the DNA of these two patients. "In the melanoma sample, we can see sunlight's signature writ large in the genome," said Andy Futreal at the Sanger Institute. But not all the mutations would have been involved in triggering the cancer. Most of them would have been harmless "passenger" mutations, but some of them would have been "drivers" within the genes that are in some way involved in cancer development.
G For this, it would be necessary to extend the sequencing effort into other patients suffering from the same cancer, perhaps as many as 500 people to achieve statistical significance. By comparing all mutations in all patients with the same cancer, scientists will be able to identify those that appear to be common to them all, and hence likely to be involved in triggering that particular disease. Scientists have already identified more than 30 genes that play some kind of role in cancer development. This gives them a lead in terms of knowing where to search for the likely driver mutations that are probably involved in causing the cancer.
H In the past, cancer drugs were discovered largely by trial and error. Now it is possible to find the precise genetic fault that causes a cell to divide uncontrollably and so hopefully be able to design a drug that can fix that specific fault. For instance, scientists found that faults in a gene called BRAF were involved in triggering a high proportion of skin cancers. The mutations meant that the BRAF gene was permanently switched in the "on" position, causing the cells to divide continually in malignant melanoma. Scientists are now developing drugs that turn this gene "off", and some of these substances are near to clinical trials.
I They are very excited by it-they have branded it "remarkable", "ground-breaking" and "fascinating". But it will still be many years before we can expect full genome sequencing of a patient's cells to be used routinely in hospitals and clinics - that is if the NHS can ever afford it given the parlous state of public finances.