READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The coming back of the “Extinct”

Grass in Britain

A

It’s Britain’s dodo, called interrupted brome because of its gappy seed-head, this unprepossessing grass was found nowhere else in the world. Sharp-eyed Victorian botanists were the first to notice it, and by the 1920s the odd-looking grass had been found across much of southern England. Yet its decline was just as dramatic. By 1972 it had vanished from its last toehold-two hay fields at Pampisford, near Cambridge. Even the seeds stored at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden as an insurance policy were dead, having been mistakenly kept at room temperature. Botanists mourned: a unique living entity was gone forever.

B

Yet reports of its demise proved premature. Interrupted brome has come back from the dead, and not through any fancy genetic engineering. Thanks to one green-fingered botanist, interrupted brome is alive and well and living as a pot plant. Britain’s dodo is about to become a phoenix, as conservationists set about relaunching its career in the wild.

C

At first, Philip Smith was unaware that the scrawny pots of grass on his bench were all that remained of a uniquely British species. But when news of the “extinction” of Bromus interruptus finally reached him, he decided to astonish his colleagues. He seized his opportunity at a meeting of the Botanical Society of the British Isles in Manchester in 1979, where he was booked to talk about his research on the evolution of the brome grasses. It was sad, he said, that interrupted brome had become extinct, as there were so many interesting questions botanists could have investigated. Then he whipped out two enormous pots of it. The extinct grass was very much alive.

D

It turned out that Smith had collected seeds from the brome’s last refuge at Pampisford in 1963, shortly before the species disappeared from the wild altogether. Ever since then, Smith had grown the grass on, year after year. So, in the end, the hapless grass survived not through some high-powered conservation scheme or fancy genetic manipulation, but simply because one man was interested in it. As Smith points out, interrupted brome isn’t particularly attractive and has no commercial value. But to a plant taxonomist, that’s not what makes a plant interesting.

E

The brome’s future, at least in cultivation, now seems assured. Seeds from Smith’s plants have been securely stored in the state-of-the-art Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex. And living plants thrive at the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Cambridge. This year, “bulking up” is underway to make sure there are plenty of plants in all gardens, and sackfuls of seeds are being stockpiled at strategic sites throughout the country.

F

The brome’s relaunch into the British countryside is next on the agenda. English Nature has included interrupted brome in its Species Recovery Programme, and it is on track to be reintroduced into the agricultural landscape if friendly farmers can be found. Alas, the grass is neither pretty nor useful – in fact, it is undeniably a weed, and a weed of a crop that nobody grows these days, at that. The brome was probably never common enough to irritate farmers, but no one would value it today for its productivity or its nutritious qualities. As a grass, it leaves agriculturalists cold.

G

So where did it come from? Smith’s research into the taxonomy of the brome grasses suggests that interruptus almost certainly mutated from another weedy grass, soft brome, hordeaceus. So close is the relationship that interrupted brome was originally deemed to be a mere variety of soft brome by the great Victorian taxonomist Professor Hackel. But in 1895, George Claridge Druce, a 45-year-old Oxford pharmacist with a shop on the High Street, decided that it deserved species status, and convinced the botanical world. Druce was by then well on his way to fame as an Oxford don, mayor of the city, and a fellow of the Royal Society. A poor boy from Northamptonshire and a self-educated man, Druce became the leading field botanist of his generation. When Druce described a species, botanists took note.

H

The brome’s parentage may be clear, but the timing of its birth is more obscure. According to agricultural historian Joan Thirsk, sainfoin and its friends made their first modest appearance in Britain in the early 1600s. seeds brought in from the Continent were sown in pastures to feed horses and other livestock. But in those early days, only a few enthusiasts – mostly gentlemen keen to pamper their best horses – took to the new crops.

I

Although the credit for the “discovery” of interrupted brome goes to a Miss A. M. Barnard, who collected the first specimens at Odsey, Bedfordshire, in 1849. The grass had probably lurked undetected in the English countryside for at least a hundred years. Smith thinks the botanical dodo probably evolved in the date 17th or early 18th century, once sainfoin became established.

J

Like many once-common arable weeds, such as the corncockle, interrupted brome seeds cannot survive long in the soil. Each spring, the brome relied on farmers to resow its seeds; in the days before weedkillers and sophisticated seed sieves, an ample supply would have contaminated stocks of crop seed. But fragile seeds are not the brome’s only problem: this species is also reluctant to release its seeds as they ripen. Show it a ploughed field today and this grass will struggle to survive, says Smith. It will be difficult to establish in today’s “improved” agricultural landscape, inhabited by notoriously vigorous competitors.

Questions 1-7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE               if the statement is true

FALSE              if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN     if the information is not given in the passage

1   The name for interrupted brome is very special as its head shaped like a sharp eye

2   Interrupted brome thought to become extinct because there was no live seed even in a labs condition.

3   Philip Smith comes from the University of Cambridge.

4   Reborn of the interrupted brome is attributed more to scientific meaning than seemingly aesthetic or commercial ones

5   English nature will operate to recover interrupted brome on the success of survival in Kew.

6   Interrupted Brome grows poorly in some competing modern agricultural environment with other plants.

7   Media publicity plays a significant role to make interrupted brome continue to exist.

Questions 8-13

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below.

Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

NB  You may use any letter more than once

A          George Claridge Druce

B          Nathaniel Fiennes

C          Professor Hackel

D         A. M. Barnard

E          Philip Smith

J           Joan Thirsk

Choose the people who

8   reestablished the British unique plants

9   identified the interrupted brome as just to its parent brome

10   gave an independent taxonomy place to interrupted brome

11   discovered and picked the first sample of interrupted brome

12   recorded the first ‘show up’ of sainfoin plants in Britain

13   collected the last seeds just before its extinction

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. 

London Swaying Footbridge

A

In September 1996 a competition was organized by the Financial Times in association with the London Borough of Southwark to design a new footbridge across the Thames. The competition attracted over 200 entries and was won by a team comprising Arup (engineers), Foster and Partners (architects) and the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro.

B

The bridge opened to the public on 10 June 2000. Up to 100,000 people crossed it that day with up to 2000 people on the bridge at any one time. At first, the bridge was still. Then it began to sway, just slightly. Then, almost from one moment to the next, when large groups of people were crossing, the wobble intensified. This movement became sufficiently large for people to stop walking to retain their balance and sometimes to hold onto the handrails for support. It was decided immediately to limit the number of people on the bridge, but even so, the deck movement was sufficient to be uncomfortable and to raise concern for public safety so that on 12 June the bridge was closed until the problem could be solved.

C

The embarrassed engineers found the videotape that day which showed the center span swaying about 3 inches side to side every second. The engineers first thought that winds might be exerting excessive force on the many large flags and banners bedecking the bridge for its gala premiere. What’s more, they also discovered that pedestrians also played a key role. Human activities, such as walking, running, jumping, swaying, etc. could cause horizontal forces which in turn could cause excessive dynamic vibration in the lateral direction in the bridge. As the structure began moving, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the same lateral rhythm as the bridge. The adjusted footsteps magnified the motion – just like when four people all stand up in a small boat at the same time. As more pedestrians locked into the same rhythm, the increasing oscillations led to the dramatic swaying captured on film.

D

In order to design a method of reducing the movements, the force exerted by the pedestrians had to be quantified and related to the motion of the bridge. Although there are some descriptions of this phenomenon in existing literature, none of these actually quantifies the force. So there was no quantitative analytical way to design the bridge against this effect. An immediate research program was launched by the bridge’s engineering designers Ove Arup, supported by a number of universities and research organizations.

E

The tests at the University of Southampton involved a person walking ‘on the spot’ on a small shake table. The tests at Imperial College involved persons walking along with a specially built, 7.2m-long platform which could be driven laterally at different frequencies and amplitudes. Each type of test had its limitations. The Imperial College tests were only able to capture 7 – 8 footsteps, and the ‘walking on the spot’ tests, although monitoring many footsteps, could not investigate normal forward walking. Neither test could investigate any influence of other people in a crowd on the behavior of the individual being tested.

F

The results of the laboratory tests provided information which enabled the initial design of a retrofit to be progressed. However, the limitations of these tests were clear and it was felt that the only way to replicate properly the precise conditions of the Millennium Bridge was to carry out crowd tests on the bridge deck itself. These tests done by the Arup engineers could incorporate factors not possible in the laboratory tests. The first of these was carried out with 100 people in July 2000. The results of these tests were used to refine the load model for pedestrians. The second series of crowd tests were carried out on the bridge in December 2000. The purpose of these tests was to further validate the design assumptions and to load test a prototype damper installation. The test was carried out with 275 people.

G

Unless the usage of the bridge was to be greatly restricted, only two generic options to improve its performance were considered feasible. The first was to increase the stiffness of the bridge to move all its lateral natural frequencies out of the range that could be excited by the lateral football forces, and the second was to increase the damping of the bridge to reduce the resonant response.

Questions 14-17

Choose FOUR letters, A-H.

Write the correct letters in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

Which FOUR of the following situation were witnessed on the opening ceremony of the bridge?

A   The frequency of oscillation increased after some time.

B   All the engineers went to see the ceremony that day.

C   The design of the bridge astonished the people.

D   Unexpected sideway movement of the bridge occurred.

E   Pedestrians had difficulty in walking on the deck.

F   The bridge fell down when people tried to retain their balance.

G   Vibration could be detected on the deck by the pedestrians.

H   It was raining when the ceremony began.

Questions 18-22

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage 2

Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer

Write your answers in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.

After the opening ceremony, the embarrassed engineers tried to find out the reason for the bridge’s wobbling. Judged from the videotape, they thought that 18…………………………. and 19………………………….. might create an excessive force on the bridge. The distribution of 20……………………….. resulted from human activities could cause 21……………………………. throughout the structure. This swaying prompted people to start adjusting the way they walk, which in turn reinforced the 22………………………..

Questions 23-26

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 2 for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.