Complete the summary using the list of words, A-H, below. Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 35-37 on your answer sheet. Dunlop’s comfortable tyre Dunlop originally devised a new tyre to make his son’s trike more comfortable. He was familiar with different types of rubber tubes as he used them in his job. A lighter inner tube filled with air was fitted inside a heavier rubber【R35】______. Unfortunately, he could not patent it due to a 【R36】______ between his and an earlier invention. It was the invention of the valve which proved his success. Around this time people had more【R37】______and so cycling was taken up by the masses. A tube B similarity C supplement D money E oxygen F difference G casing H practice

Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. Australia’s Growing Disaster Farming is threatening to destroy the soil and native flora and fauna over vast areas of Australia. What price should be put on conservation? Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Committee estimates that burning wood from cleared forest accounts for about 30 per cent of Australia’s emissions of carbon dioxide, or 156 million tonnes a year. And water tables are rising beneath cleared land. In the Western Australian wheat belt, estimates suggest that water is rising by up to 1 metre a year. The land is becoming waterlogged and unproductive or is being poisoned by salt, which is brought to the surface. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) reckons that 33 million hectares have been degraded by salination. The federal government estimates the loss in production from salinity at A$200 million a year. According to Jason Alexandra of the ACF, this list of woes is evidence that Australia is depleting its resources by trading agricultural commodities for manufactured goods. In effect, it sells topsoil for technologies that will be worn out or redundant in a few years. The country needs to get away from the ’colonial mentality’ of exploiting resources and adopt agricultural practices suited to Australian conditions, he says. Robert Hadler of the National Farmers’ Federation does not deny that there is a problem, but says that it is ’illogical’ to blame farmers. Until the early 1980s, farmers were given tax incentives to clear land because that was what people wanted. If farmers are given tax breaks to manage land sustainably, they will do so. Hadler argues that the two reports on land clearance do not say anything which was not known before. Australia is still better off than many other developed countries, says Den Graetz, an ecologist at the CSIRIO, the national research organisation. ’A lot of the country is still notionally pristine,’ he says ’It is not transformed like Europe where almost nothing that is left is natural.’ Graetz, who analysed the satellite photographs for the second land clearance report, argues that there is now better co-operation between Australian scientists, government officials and farmers than in the past. But the vulnerable state of the land is now widely understood, and across Australia, schemes have started for promoting environment friendly farming. In 1989 Prime Minister Bob Hawke set up Landcare, a network of more than 2000 regional conservation groups. About 30 per cent of landholders are members. ’It has become a very significant social movement,’ says Helen Alexander from the National Landcare Council. ’We started out worrying about not much more than erosion and the replanting of trees but it has grown much more diverse and sophisticated.’ But the bugbear of all these conservation efforts is money. Landcare’s budget is A$110 million a year, of which only A $6 million goes to farmers. Neil Clark, an agricultural consultant from Bendigo in Victoria, says that farmers are not getting enough. ’Farmers may want to make more efficient use of water and nutrients and embrace more sustainable practices, but it all costs money and they just don’t have the spare funds,’ he says. Clark also says scientists are taking too large a share of the money for conservation. Many problems posed by agriculture to the environment have been ’researched to death’, he says. ’We need to divert the money for a while into getting the solutions into place’. Australia’s chief scientist, Michael Pitman, disagrees. He says that science is increasingly important. Meteorologists, for example, are becoming confident about predicting events which cause droughts in Australia. ’If this can be done with accuracy then it will have immense impact on stocking levels and how much feed to provide,’ says Pitman. “The end result will be much greater efficiency.’ Steve Morton of the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology says the real challenge facing conservationists is to convince the 85 per cent of Australians who live in cities that they must foot a large part of the bill. “The land is being used to feed the majority and to produce wealth that circulates through the financial markets of the cities,’ he says. One way would be to offer incentives to extend the idea of stewardship to areas outside the rangelands, so that more land could be protected rather than exploited. Alexander agrees. ’The nation will have to debate to what extent it is willing to support rural communities,’ she says. ’It will have to decide to what extent it wants food prices to reflect the true cost of production. That includes the cost of looking after the environment.’ Questions 1-8 Look at the following statements (Questions 1-8) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A-G. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. List of People A Jason Alexandra B Robert Hadler C Dean Graetz D Helen Alexander E Neil Clark F Michael Pitman G Steve Morton

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. Questions 27-34 Reading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs, A-I. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-I from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet. List of Headings i How to grow a rubber tree ii Useful additions to an existing idea iii Useful for making your coat waterproof iv The first known uses v Exporting new forests vi Inspiration from a bumpy bicycle ride vii How different is rubber nowadays? viii New demand leads to dramatically escalating cost ix Unpopular due to decay x A good idea in principle xi Many modern uses Example Answer Paragraph A xi Natural Rubber An exotic material A Today, we take modern materials very much for granted, without knowing their origin or realising their versatility. Rubber, for example, is a vital component of cars, supplying traction between the wheels and the road, as well as sealing oil and fuel from leakage and absorbing unwanted vibrations from the engine. Rubber also supplies us with many domestic items (toy balloons, water bottles, condoms, carpet underlay, mattresses and cushioning), office products (rubber bands, erasers) and articles of sports and recreation (footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, etc.). But where does rubber come from? B Natural rubber was discovered during the various invasions of South America by the Spanish conquistadors in the 15th century. The material, made simply by drying out the sap of a native tree, Hevea brasiliensis, was first spotted by Columbus in the West Indies in the 1490s, where it was used to made balls. It was also made into bags for carrying liquids by moulding flexible rubber sheet into the desired shape. Rubber was clearly a material well known to native cultures, and recent discoveries of its use in ancient ceremonies are hardly surprising. C Despite its early discovery by the Spanish, it was not until about 1730 that rubber was introduced into Britain, and not until 1791 that its use for the mackintosh (the rubberised raincoat) was introduced. In 1770 Joseph Priestley, who also discovered oxygen, noticed that rubber erases pencil marks. Despite this serendipitous finding, it still took some time before the material was to find widespread application. One reason for this was its deterioration with time, degrading in air to a sticky unmanageable mess. That was to change dramatically with the invention of ’vulcanisation’, when, in 1834, Charles Goodyear found that cooking the material with raw sulphur stabilised it and stiffened products manufactured from the substance. D This discovery opened the way to pneumatic tyres for early vehicles such as carriages (travel in which was rather painful owing to the rigid wheels and rough roads then in existence). The first patent for a tyre dates from 1846, when Robert Thompson announced the pneumatic tyre, a great advance for wheeled traffic. The key to the idea is the cushion provided by the air pocket, the pressure of which can be varied to suit the user. The invention languished, perhaps because of problems with containing the inevitable leaks of air from the many inner tubes. However, solid rubber tyres were subsequently adopted, with much reduced cushioning. E At the same time, vulcanised rubber came to be used for an increasing number of products, such as galoshes or Wellington boots and improved mackintoshes, where rubber was combined with textile to make a waterproof fabric. The growing demand for natural rubber made it a commodity product, yet only supplied by one area in the world — Brazil. As a result, the price soared, creating rich entrepreneurs, who essentially exploited natives to collect the raw latex from the rainforest. But since the tree could potentially be grown in any tropical climate, why not collect seedlings and transplant to other countries? F Intensive efforts were made at Kew Gardens to raise healthy plants from seeds collected by Sir Henry Wickham in Brazil in 1876. The young trees raised in the tropical greenhouse at Kew were shipped to Ceylon and Malaysia to form the nucleus of large plantations. Those countries were able to meet the rising demands of the rubber industry, and the price of raw rubber fell dramatically. G In 1888, over forty years after Thompson’s invention of the pneumatic tyre, John Dunlop, a Belfast vet, responded to a request from his young son for better tyres for his trike. When ridden over the rough cobbles of Belfast’s streets, solid rubber tyres just could not give a comfortable ride. Various rubber tubes were used by vets, and Dunlop reinvented the pneumatic tyre by fitting a wheel with an inflated rubber tube protected by a heavier outer cover. After much experimentation, the world’s first bicycle tyre emerged. H Dunlop’s first patent to protect the invention was inevitably invalid because of Thompson’s prior patent, but he went on to invent the valve and numerous other components which were proved valid. Those inventions were the base on which he and others built the bike tyre industry, which brought cycling into a new era for everyone. It was an era when industrial progress had created new-found wealth and leisure time for millions. As with any new and fundamental invention, the idea was taken up by others, in particular by Michelin in France (1896), to develop a much heavier-duty device, the car tyre. I Today a wide range of synthetic rubber is available to designers, many for specialty tasks requiring, for example, very high or low temperatures. Yet natural rubber is still a valuable international commodity, helping many developing countries earn useful hard currency. The technology of processing the raw rubber has improved greatly over the years, but the basics still remain the same as they were when Kew Gardens selected the best plants for cloning and transplanting over one hundred years ago.

Complete the flow chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet. [*]

Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19-21 on your answer sheet. Problems with taxonomy - Only 【R19】______ species have been classified so far. - Difficult to distinguish between species of certain creatures, for example【R20】______ - Possibility of a large number of species of【R21】______ dying out soon.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. What if everything had a barcode? A vast new database will let us catalogue every plant and animal on the planet, and identify them in seconds. Imagine going for a walk and spotting a wild flower. Its beauty and fragrance delight you, but the name eludes you. No problem. You whip out a hand-held scanner, about the size of a mobile phone, and pop a fragment of a leaf into the device. A few seconds, and the read-out tells you that you’re looking at a pyramidal orchid. Satisfied, you continue on your way. Sound far-fetched? Not at all. Scientists are currently creating a DNA barcode for every species of plant and animal on the planet It won’t be long before everyone, from experts to amateurs, will be able to scan the world’s flora and fauna as if they were checking out groceries at a supermarket, to look up or confirm their identities. There are numerous practical uses too. Such a device would let you scan fish at the fishmonger’s to check if it’s been labelled properly, work out exactly what is in your mixed vegetable soup, and confirm whether a piece of furniture really has come from a renewable forest, as the retailer claims. It would also assist forensic science teams, who could quickly identify the pollen on a suspect, to link him to a particular location; customs officials, in their efforts to prevent disease-carrying pests being taken across national borders; and environmental inspectors assessing water quality, who need to work out what microbes are lurking in a particular sample. It was Professor Paul Hebert, a biologist from the University of Guelph in Canada, who came up with the idea of DNA barcoding the natural world. The inspiration came while he was walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket, marvelling at the ability of the store to keep track of all the lines stocked and sold using the thick and thin lines that make up a barcode. Could scientists, he wondered, exploit a barcode system to record the millions of species on earth via their DNA? The compilation of a planetary inventory began more than 250 years ago, with the Swedish life classifier Carl Linnaeus. In 1758, he founded the science of taxonomy — a method of classifying living things — based on physical and behavioural characteristics. To date, scientists have classified about 1.7 million organisms, a small fraction of the total number of species, which has been estimated at anywhere between 5 and 30 million. But taxonomy is difficult and time-consuming. Many species, such as the different kinds of flies, look remarkably similar. Only an expert who has spent years examining a particular group can distinguish one from another. Even the experts may be stumped, however, when presented with an egg, an embryo, a seedling or a root. The next problem is that we are running out of time in which to complete the inventory. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that a quarter of the world’s population of mammals are threatened with extinction. So, Hebert’s idea centred on finding a fragment of DNA that would disclose the identity of a species without having to decode its entire genetic code. He envisaged a ’DNA barcode reader’, similar to the scanners at retail checkouts. Outlining his idea in Scientific American, Hebert writes: ’An inspector at a busy seaport, a hiker on a mountain trail, or a scientist in a lab could insert a sample containing DNA — a snippet of whisker, say, or the leg of an insect — into the device, which would detect the sequence of nucleic acids in the barcode segment. This information would be instantly relayed to a reference database, a public library of DNA barcodes. Anyone, anywhere, could identify species.’ To create the barcode, Hebert proposed the use of a section of DNA, from the energy-producing units found in all cells. He selected a gene that gives rise to an enzyme known as COL This gene is small enough to be quickly and easily deciphered, but has sufficient variation for us to be able to tell most animal species apart. You and I, for instance, will have different versions of CO1, but they will be similar enough to show that we’re both humans and not chimpanzees. In 2003, Hebert and his team published their first results. They showed that the barcode system could identify the group an animal came from (for example, whether it was a vertebrate, a worm or an insect) and even the species when it was stored in the barcode library. After years of work, results indicate that animals can now be identified by their barcodes in 98 per cent of cases. Early results have confirmed the additional benefits of the new system: for example, caterpillars of the tropical butterfly Astraptes fulgerator, which was first recognised as a species in 1775, all look very similar, and were assumed to belong to a single species. Barcoding has shown there are 10 different kinds. Of course, the value of the system depends on a comprehensive reference library of the DNA (COl) barcodes of established species. The Barcode of Life Data systems is an enormous international collaboration supported by 150 institutions in 45 countries. To date, it has compiled more than 500,000 records from 50,000 species. The consortium is hoping that the world’s birds will be barcoded in the next three years. ’People have watched birds for so long that they might think every different tweet has been heard, every different colour observed, but barcoding may prove otherwise,’ says Professor Mark Stoeckle, professor of the human environment at Rockefeller University, New York, who works with Hebert. He estimates that out of the world’s 10,000 bird species, DNA barcoding will distinguish at least 1,000 new ones. Questions 14-18 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-H, below. Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 35-37 on your answer sheet. Dunlop’s comfortable tyre Dunlop originally devised a new tyre to make his son’s trike more comfortable. He was familiar with different types of rubber tubes as he used them in his job. A lighter inner tube filled with air was fitted inside a heavier rubber【R35】______. Unfortunately, he could not patent it due to a 【R36】______ between his and an earlier invention. It was the invention of the valve which proved his success. Around this time people had more【R37】______and so cycling was taken up by the masses. A tube B similarity C supplement D money E oxygen F difference G casing H practice

Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.