A plane flies a slow pattern over Carlton Hill station, a 3,600 square kilometre ranch in the Kimberley region in northwest Australia. As the plane circles, those aboard drop 1,000 small pieces of meat, one by one, onto the scrubland below, each piece laced with poison; this practice is known as baiting. Besides 50,000 head of cattle, Carlton Hill is home to the dingo, Australia’s largest mammalian predator and the bane of a grazier's (cattle farmer's) life. Stuart McKechnie, manager of Carlton Hill, complains that graziers’ livelihoods are threatened when dingoes prey on cattle. But one man wants the baiting to end, and for dingoes to once again roam Australia’s wide-open spaces. According to Chris Johnson of James Cook University, ‘Australia needs more dingoes to protect our biodiversity.’
About 4,000 years ago, Asian sailors introduced dingoes to Australia. Throughout the ensuing millennia, these descendants of the wolf spread across the continent and, as the Tasmanian tiger disappeared completely from Australia, dingoes became Australia’s top predators. As agricultural development took place, the European settlers found that they could not safely keep their livestock where dingoes roamed. So began one of the most sustained efforts at pest control in Australia’s history. Over the last 150 years, dingoes have been shot and poisoned, and fences have been used in an attempt to keep them away from livestock. But at the same time, as the European settlers tried to eliminate one native pest from Australia, they introduced more of their own.
In 1860, the rabbit was unleashed…
Questions 1–7
Reading Passage has eight sections, A-H. Which sections contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.
1.A description of a barrier designed to stop dingoes, which also divides two kinds of farm animals.
2.How dingoes ensure that rival species do not dominate
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until the ancestors of today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000 years ago. At the present time, the debate continues about exactly how they migrated such vast distances across the ocean without any of the modern technologies we take for granted.
Although the romantic vision of some early twentieth-century writers of fleets of heroic navigators simultaneously setting sail had come to be considered by later investigators to be exaggerated, no considered assessment of Pacific voyaging was forthcoming until 1956, when the American historian Andrew Sharp published his research. Sharp challenged the ‘heroic vision’ by asserting that the expertise of the navigators was limited and that the settlement of the islands was not systematic, being more dependent on good fortune and drifting canoes. Sharp’s theory was widely challenged, and deservedly so. If nothing else, however, it did spark renewed interest in the topic and precipitated valuable new research.
Since the 1960s, numerous investigations have been conducted, and most of them have been of the ‘non-armchair’ variety. While it would be wrong to denigrate all ‘armchair’ research—that based on an examination of available published materials—it has turned out that so little progress had been made in the area of Pacific voyaging because most writers relied on the same old sources: travelers’ journals or missionary narratives compiled by unskilled observers. After Sharp, this began to change, and researchers conducted…
Questions 14–18
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage? Write YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer, NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer, or NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.
14.The Pacific islands were uninhabited when migrants arrived by sea from Southeast Asia
The advisability of humans participating directly in space travel continues to cause many debates. There is no doubt that the presence of people on board a space vehicle makes its design much more complex and challenging, and produces a large increase in costs, since safety requirements are greatly increased, and the technology providing necessities for human passengers such as oxygen, food water must be guaranteed. Moreover, the systems required are bulky and costly, and their complexity increases for long-duration missions. Meanwhile, advances in electronics and computer science allow increasingly complex tasks to be entrusted to robots, and unmanned space probes are becoming lighter, smaller and more convenient.
However, experience has shown that the idea of humans in space is popular with the public. Humans can also be useful; there are many cases when only direct intervention by an astronaut or cosmonaut can correct the malfunction of an automatic device. Astronauts and cosmonauts have proved that they can adapt to conditions of weightlessness and work in space without encountering too many problems, as was seen in the operations to repair and to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. One human characteristic which is particularly precious in space missions, and which so far is lacking in robots, is the ability to perform a great variety of tasks. In addition, robots are not good at reacting to situations they have not been specifically prepared for. This is especially important in the case of deep space missions. While, in the case of the Moon, it is possible for…
Questions 28–33
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-ix in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet
28.Paragraph A
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Answers & explanations
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40 answers3 explanations open
1
E
- “a barrier designed to stop dingoes” is “fences to keep them away from”
- “divide two kinds of non-natives animals”. Here, two kinds of non-natives animals are dingoes and livestock.
Answer: E
2
D
- “rival species” is “smaller predators”
- “not dominate” is “lessen competition”
- “how” means “eat” and “kill”
- In the sentence, dingoes will kill and eat predators to decrease competition, which means that the methods used by dingoes to ensure that species do not dominate is killing and eating them.
Answer: D
3
C
- “non-native species” means “the rabbit was unleashed on Australia by a wealthy landowner”
- In the passage, “Rabbits provide a huge prey base for two other species introduced species: the feral (wild) cat and the red fox” means that “Cat and Fox hunt and eat rabbits”. Thus, this is “other animals feed on”
Answer: C
4
B
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5
F
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6
A
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7
D
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8
D
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9
A
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10
B
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11
Tasmanian tiger
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12
rabbits
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13
overpopulation
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14
YES
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15
NO
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16
YES
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17
YES
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18
NOT GIVEN
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19
C
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20
C
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21
B
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22
D
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23
B
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24
C
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25
B
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26
D
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27
E
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28
vi
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ii
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30
i
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31
v
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32
ix
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33
viii
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34
A
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35
D
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36
infrastructure
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37
spaceships
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38
communication
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39
laboratories
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40
colonisation / colonization
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Understand why, not only what.
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