READING 10/1/2024
Passage 1.
Australian artist Margaret Preston
Margaret Preston's vibrant paintings and prints of Australian flowers, animals and landscapes have delighted the
Australian public since the early 1920s.
Margaret Preston was born Margaret Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide, South Australia in 1875, the daughter of
David McPherson, a Scottish marine engineer and his wife Prudence Lyle. She and her sister were sent at first to a
private school, but when family circumstances changed, her mother took the girls to Sydney where Margaret attended
a public high school. She decided early in life to become an artist and took private art lessons. In 1888, she trained for
several months with Sydney landscape painter William Lister, and in 1893 enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria
Art School, where she studied for just over four years.
In 1898, after her father died, Margaret returned to Adelaide to study and then teach at the Adelaide School of Design.
Her early artwork was influenced by the German aesthetic tradition, in which subjects of the natural world were
depicted in a true to life manner.
Margaret's first visit to Europe in 1904, and her studies in Paris, France had little impact on this naturalism that
dominated her work from this early period. However, some eight years later, after returning to Paris, she began to
recognise the decorative possibilities of art.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret traveled to England, where she had exhibitions and continued her
studies of art. She was a student of pottery, but at some time developed her interest in various techniques of
printmaking and design. In England's West Country, she taught basket weaving at a rehabilitation unit for servicemen.
It was on board a boat returning to Australia that she met wealthy businessman William Preston, whom she
married in 1919. Together Margaret and William settled in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. The most
characteristic prints from her early years in Sydney are views of boats floating on Sydney Harbour and of houses
clustered on foreshore hills. Although Sydney was their home, the couple traveled regularly, both overseas and within
Australia.
Her first major showing in Australia was with her friend Thea Proctor, in exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney in
1925. Many of Preston's prints were hand-coloured in rich scarlet reds, blues and greens, and all of them were set in
Chinese red lacquer frames. Harbour views were again prominent, but in comparison with earlier artworks, they were
compact and busy. using striking contrasts of black and white combined with elaborate patterns and repetitions. Other
prints from this period featured native flora. It was with these still-life subjects that she convinced the public that
Australian native flowers were equal in beauty to any exotic species.
From 1932 to 1939, Preston moved away from Sydney and lived with her husband at Berowra, on the upper reaches of
the Hawkesbury River. The area was one of rugged natural beauty, and for the first time Preston found herself living
in a home surrounded bush. Prior to this, the native flowers that featured in her paintings and prints had been
purchased from local florists; they now grew in abundance around her home. Preston's prints became larger, less
complex and less reliant on the use of bright colours. Flowers were no longer arranged in vases, and Preston began
to concentrate instead on flowers that were growing wild.
While living at Berowra, and undoubtedly prompted by the Aboriginal' rock engravings found near her property,
Preston also developed what was to he a lifelong interest in Aboriginal art. On returning to Sydney in 1939, she
became a member of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, and later visited many important Aboriginal
sites throughout Australia. Preston believed that Aboriginal art provided the key to establishing a national body of art
that reflected the vast and ancient continent of Australia.
During the 1940s, symbols used by Aboriginal people, together with dried, burnt colours found in traditional
Aboriginal paintings, became increasingly prominent in her prints. The artist's titles from this period frequently
acknowledge her sources, and reveal the extent to which she drew inspiration from traditional Aboriginal art to create
her own art.
It was in 1953, at the age of 78, that Preston produced her most significant prints. The exhibition at Macquarie
Galleries in Sydney included 29 prints made using the ancient technique known as stenciling. Many of the artworks in
the exhibition incorporated her fusion of Aboriginal and Chinese concepts. Preston had admired Chinese art since
1915, when she acquired the first of her many books on the subject, and she had visited China on two occasions.
Chinese elements may be found in several of her earlier paintings.
However, in her prints of the 1950s, Preston combined Chinese ideas with her understanding of the Dreamtime'
creation stories of Aboriginal Australians. Preston did not let age alter her habit of working hard. As she got older, her
love of painting, printmaking and travel continued. By the time of her death in 1963, when she was 88, she had
produced over 400 paintings and prints. In a career spanning almost 60 years, she created a body of work that
demonstrates her extraordinary originality and the intensity of her commitment to Australian art.
Questions 1 - 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In boxes 1-7 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
1. Artists in the German aesthetic tradition portrayed nature realistically. T
2. Margaret attended a famous art college in Paris. NG
3. Margaret met her husband William while teaching a craft at a rehabilitation unit. F
4. Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor explored similar themes in their art. NG
5. Margaret's 1925 artworks of Sydney Harbour were simpler than her previous ones. NG
6. The colours in Margaret's Berowra prints were very bright. F
7.When living in Berowra, Margaret painted flowers in their natural location. T
Questions 8 - 13
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.
Margaret Preston's later life
Aboriginal influence
interest in Aboriginal art was inspired by seeing rock engravings close to her Berowra home
symbols
incorporated 8 and colours from Aboriginal art in her own work often referred to Aboriginal
titles
sources in the 9 she gave her artworks
1953 exhibition
stenciling
very old method of 10 was used for some prints
books
was inspired by 11 about Chinese art that she had started collecting in 1915
combination of Chinese and Aboriginal elements
Old age
painting
still interested in 12 and art
400
worked for nearly six decades making more than 13 artworks
dedicated n to Australian art and the originality of her work is seen in Preston's long career
Passage 2.
The importance of law
A. The law influences all of us virtually all the time, it governs almost all aspects of our behavior, and even what
happens to us when we are no longer alive. It affects us from the embryo onwards. It governs the air we breathe, the
food and drink we consume, our travel, family relationships, and our property. It applies at the bottom of the ocean
and in space.
Each time we examine a label on a food product, engage in work as an employee or employer, travel on the roads, go
to school to learn or to teach, stay in a hotel, borrow a library book, create or dissolve a commercial company, play
sports, or engage the services of someone for anything from plumbing a sink to planning a city, we are in the world of
law.
B. Law has also become much more widely recognised as the standard by which behavior needs to be judged. A very
telling development in recent history is the way in which the idea of law has permeated all parts of social life. The
universal standard of whether something is socially tolerated is progressively becoming whether it is legal, rather than
something that has always been considered acceptable. In earlier times, most people were illiterate.
Today, by contrast, a vast number of people can read, and it is becoming easier for people to take an interest in law,
and for the general population to help actually shape the law in many countries. However, law is a versatile instrument
that can be used equally well for the improvement or the degradation of humanity.
C. This, of course, puts law in a very significant position. In our rapidly developing world, all sorts of skills and
knowledge are valuable. Those people, for example, with knowledge of computers, the internet, and communications
technology are relied upon by the rest of us.
There is now someone with IT skills or an IT help desk in every UK school, every company, every hospital, every
local and central government office. Without their knowledge, many parts of commercial and social life today would
seize up in minutes. But legal understanding is just as vital and as universally needed. The American comedian Jerry
Seinfeld put it like this, 'We are all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if
there is a problem, the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.' In other words, the
lawyer is the only person who has read and made sense of the rules.
D. The number of laws has never been greater. In the UK alone, about 35 new Acts of Parliament are produced every
year, thereby delivering thousands of new rules. The legislative output of the British Parliament has more than
doubled in recent times from 1,100 pages a year in the early 1970s,to over 2,500 pages a year today. Between 1997
and 2006, the legislature passed 365 Acts of Parliament and more than 32,000 legally binding statutory instruments. In
a system with so much law, lawyers do a great deal not just to vindicate the rights of citizens and organizations but
also to help develop the law through legal arguments, some of which are adapted by judges to become laws. Law
courts can and do produce new law and revise old law, but they do so having heard the arguments of lawyers.
E. However, despite their important role in developing the rules, lawyers are not universally admired. Anti-lawyer
jokes have a long history going back to the ancient Greeks.
More recently the son of a famous Hollywood actor was asked at his junior school what his father did for a living, to
which he replied,'My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the
lawyer. For balance, though, it Is worth remembering that there are and have been many heroic and revered lawyers
such as the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero and Mahatma Gandi, the Indian campaigner for independence.
F. People sometimes make comments that characterise lawyers as professionals whose concerns put personal reward
above truth, or who gain financially from misfortune. There are undoubtedly lawyers that would fit that bill, Just as
there are some scientists, Journalists and others In that category, But, In general, it is no more Just to say that lawyers
are bad because they make a living from people's problems than it is to make the same accusation In respect of nurses
or IT consultants, A great many lawyers are involved in public law work, such as that Involving civil liberties, housing
and other Issues. Such work Is not lavishly remunerated and the quality of the service provided by these lawyers relies
on considerable professional dedication, Moreover, much legal work has nothing to do with conflict or misfortune, but
is primarily concerned with drafting documents. Another source of social disaffection for lawyers, and disaffection for
the law, is a limited public understanding of how law works and how It could be changed. Greater clarity about these
issues, maybe as a result of better public relations, would reduce many aspects of public dissatisfaction with the law.
Questions 1-6
The reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. Different areas of professional expertise C
ii. Reasons why it is unfair to criticise lawyers F
iii. The disadvantages of the legal system
iv. The law applies throughout our lives A
v. The law has affected historical events
vi. A negative regard for lawyers E
vii. Public's increasing ability to influence the law B
viii. growth in laws D
Questions 7-8
Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 7-8 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about legal skills in today's world?
A. There should be a person with legal training in every hospital.
B. Lawyers with experience in commercial law are the most in demand.
C. Knowledge of the law is as important as having computer skills.
D. Society could not function effectively without legal experts.
E. Schools should teach students about the law.
Questions 9-13
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.
Lawyers as professionals People sometimes say that (9)____________________ is of little interest to lawyers, who
are more concerned with making money. This may well be the case with some individuals, in the same way that some
(10)________________ or scientific experts may also be driven purely by financial greed. However, criticising
lawyers because their work is concerned with people's problems would be similar to attacking IT staff or
(11)_____________ for the same reason. In fact, many lawyers focus on questions relating, for example, to housing or
civil liberties, which requires them to have (12)______________to their work. What's more, a lot of lawyers' time is
spent writing (13)________________________ rather than dealing with people's
Truth – journalists – nurses – dedication - documents
Passage 3.
Pacific navigation and voyaging
How people migrated to the Pacific islands
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until 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 by 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 a wealth of investigations has been conducted, and most of them, thankfully, 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 most of their investigations not in
libraries, but in the field.
In 1965, David Lewis, a physician and experienced yachtsman, set to work using his own unique philosophy: he took
the yacht he had owned for many years and navigated through the islands in order to contact those men who still find
their way at sea using traditional methods. He then accompanied these men, in their traditional canoes, on test voyages
from which all modern instruments were banished from sight, though Lewis secretly used them to confirm the
navigator’s calculations. His most famous such voyage was a return trip of around 1,000 nautical miles between two
islands in midocean. Far from drifting, as proposed by Sharp, Lewis found that ancient navigators would have known
which course to steer by memorizing which stars rose and set in certain positions along the horizon and this gave them
fixed directions by which to steer their boats.
The geographer Edwin Doran followed a quite different approach. He was interested in obtaining exact data on canoe
sailing performance, and to that end employed the latest electronic instrumentation. Doran traveled on board
traditional sailing canoes in some of the most remote parts of the Pacific, all the while using his instruments to record
canoe speeds in different wind strengths - from gales to calms - the angle canoes could sail relative to the wind. In the
process, he provided the first really precise attributes of traditional sailing canoes.
A further contribution was made by Steven Horvath. As a physiologist, Horvath’s interest was not in navigation
techniques or in canoes, but in the physical capabilities of the men themselves. By adapting standard physiological
techniques, Horvath was able to calculate the energy expenditure required to paddle canoes of this sort at times when
there was no wind to fill the sails, or when the wind was contrary. He concluded that paddles, or perhaps long oars,
could indeed have propelled for long distances what were primarily sailing vessels.
Finally, a team led by p Wall Garrard conducted important research, in this case by making investigations while
remaining safely in the laboratory. Wall Garrard’s unusual method was to use the findings of linguists who had
studied the languages of the Pacific islands, many of which are remarkably similar although the islands where they are
spoken are sometimes thousands of kilometres apart. Clever adaptation of computer simulation techniques pioneered
in other disciplines allowed him to produce convincing models suggesting the migrations were indeed systematic, but
not simultaneous. Wall Garrard proposed the migrations should be seen not as a single journey made by a massed fleet
of canoes, but as a series of ever more ambitious voyages, each pushing further into the unknown ocean.
What do we learn about Pacific navigation and voyaging from this research? Quite correctly, none of the researchers
tried to use their findings to prove one theory or another; experiments such as these cannot categorically confirm or
negate a hypothesis. The strength of this research lay in the range of methodologies employed. When we splice
together these findings we can propose that traditional navigators used a variety of canoe types, sources of water and
navigation techniques, and it was this adaptability which was their greatest accomplishment. These
navigators observed the conditions prevailing at sea at the time a voyage was made and altered
their techniques accordingly. Furthermore, the canoes of the navigators were not drifting helplessly at sea but were
most likely part of a systematic migration; as such, the Pacific peoples were able to view the ocean as an avenue, not a
barrier, to communication before any other race on Earth. Finally, one unexpected but most welcome consequence of
this research has been a renaissance in the practice of traditional voyaging. In some groups of islands in the Pacific
today young people are resurrecting the skills of their ancestors, when a few decades ago it seemed they would be lost
forever.
Question 1-5
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. The Pacific islands were uninhabited when migrants arrived by sea from Southeast Asia Y
2. Andrew Sharp was the first person to write about the migrants to islanders N
3. Andrew Sharp believed migratory voyages were based on more on luck than skill Y
4. Despite being controversial, Andrew Sharp’s research had positive results Y
5. Edwin Doran disagreed with the findings of Lewis’s research NG
Questions 6-10
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.
6. David Lewis’s research was different because
A he observed traditional navigators at work
B he conducted test voyages using his own yacht
C he carried no modern instruments on test voyages
D he spoke the same language as the islanders he sailed with
7. What did David Lewis’s research discover about traditional navigators?
A They used the sun and moon to find their position
B They could not sail further than about 1,000 nautical miles
C They knew which direction they were sailing in
D They were able to drift for long distances
8. What are we told about Edwin Doran’s research?
A Data were collected after the canoes had returned to land
B Canoe characteristics were recorded using modern instruments
C Research was conducted in the most densely populated regions
D Navigators were not allowed to see the instruments Doran used
9. Which of the following did Steven Horvath discover during his research?
A Canoe design was less important than human strength
B New research methods had to be developed for use in canoes
C Navigators became very tired on the longest voyages
D Human energy may have been used to assist sailing canoes
10. What is the writer’s opinion of p Wall Garrard’s research?
A He is disappointed it was conducted in the laboratory
B He is impressed by the originality of the techniques used
C He is surprised it was used to help linguists with their research
D He is concerned that the islands studied are long distances apart
Questions 11-14
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.
11. One limitation in the information produced by all of this research is that it C
12. The best thing about this type of research A
13. The most important achievement of traditional navigators D
14. The migration of people from Asia to the Pacific E
A. was the variety of experimental techniques used
B. was not of interest to young islanders today
C. was not conclusive evidence in support of a single theory
D. was being able to change their practices when necessary
E. was the first time humans intentionally crossed an ocean
F. was the speed with which it was conducted
