Reading Test 1

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

The return of the beaver

How a long-lost animal is reshaping Britain's rivers

For around 400 years, the Eurasian beaver was absent from the rivers of Britain. Once common across the country, the animal was hunted to extinction, chiefly for its fur, which was used to make hats, and for castoreum, an oily substance produced by glands near its tail that was valued in medicine and perfume. By the sixteenth century, references to beavers in written records had all but disappeared, and the species survived only in place names such as Beverley in Yorkshire, whose name is thought to mean 'beaver stream'.

Today, however, beavers are back. The first officially approved release took place in 2009 at Knapdale in Argyll, Scotland, where a small number of animals brought from Norway were set free as part of a five-year scientific trial. At around the same time, a quite separate population appeared on the River Tay in eastern Scotland. Nobody has ever admitted responsibility for these animals, which are believed to have escaped from private collections or to have been released illegally. In England, a similar mystery surrounds the beavers found on the River Otter in Devon in 2013. Although government officials at first planned to remove them, a local campaign persuaded them to allow the family to stay under a monitoring programme.

The reason for all this attention is the beaver's remarkable ability to change its surroundings. Beavers are often described as 'ecosystem engineers'. By felling trees and building dams from branches, mud and stones, they create ponds in which they can build their homes, known as lodges, with underwater entrances that protect them from predators. A single family may build several dams along a short stretch of stream, transforming a fast-flowing channel into a series of pools and wetlands.

These changes can bring considerable benefits. Studies at a fenced site in Devon, where a pair of beavers was introduced in 2011, found that the ponds they created held around a thousand cubic metres of water. During heavy rainfall, the dams slowed the flow of water downstream, reducing peak flows by an average of 30 per cent. Researchers also found that water leaving the site carried far less soil than water entering it, as the ponds allowed sediment to settle. Since much of this soil had been washed off intensively farmed fields, it also contained fertilisers, so the dams were effectively helping to clean the water.

Wildlife, too, appears to benefit. The pools and dead wood created by beavers provide habitats for insects, which in turn attract birds and bats. In Scotland, ecologists recorded a large increase in the number of frogs and toads in areas where beavers had been active, and fish such as trout have been found to grow larger in beaver ponds, perhaps because of the greater supply of food. Not every species does better, however: some plants that need open, fast-flowing water decline when a stretch of river is flooded.

Not everyone welcomes the beaver's return. Farmers have complained that dams can flood valuable fields, and that beavers dig burrows into riverbanks, weakening them. In parts of the Tay valley, beavers have damaged flood banks built to protect farmland. Fishing organisations have expressed concern that dams might prevent salmon from swimming upstream to breed, although evidence from Norway, where beavers and salmon have lived side by side for centuries, suggests that the fish are usually able to get past them.

To deal with such conflicts, Scotland, which gave the beaver legal protection in 2019, has introduced a system of management. Landowners can apply for permission to remove dams or, as a last resort, to have animals trapped and moved elsewhere. Simple devices are also available. One of the most widely used is a pipe that is passed through a dam, which allows water to drain away and keeps the pond at a level that does not threaten nearby land, while leaving the beavers' home intact.

In England, the government announced in 2025 that it would begin to approve licences for wild releases, after a period in which new beavers could only be released inside fenced enclosures. Supporters argue that, with careful management, the animal could play a part in reducing the cost of flood defences, which are expensive to build and maintain. Critics, on the other hand, point out that the benefits seen at small experimental sites may not be repeated on large rivers. What seems certain is that, after centuries of absence, the beaver is once again becoming a familiar part of the British landscape.

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

Understanding crowds

A For much of the twentieth century, the dominant view of crowds was a deeply negative one. Its origins lie in the work of the French writer Gustave Le Bon, whose book The Crowd, published in 1895, argued that individuals who join a crowd lose their capacity for reasoned thought. According to Le Bon, a person in a crowd 'descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation', becoming impulsive, easily influenced and capable of acts that he or she would never commit alone. This idea proved remarkably durable. It shaped the way police forces were trained, the way buildings were designed and even the language used by journalists, who for decades described crowds as 'stampeding' or 'surging' as if they were herds of animals.

B From the 1980s onwards, however, a number of social psychologists began to challenge this picture. Researchers such as Stephen Reicher studied real crowd events rather than relying on theory, and found that the behaviour of people in crowds was far from random. Instead, it reflected the shared values and identity of the group. People who see themselves as members of a crowd, Reicher argued, do not lose their identity; they adopt a social identity, and their actions are guided by what they believe the group stands for. This explains why crowd violence, when it occurs, is usually directed at particular people or places rather than spreading at random.

C One of the most striking implications of this research concerns emergencies. The traditional assumption was that, when faced with danger, a crowd would panic, with each individual fighting selfishly to escape. Studies of real disasters suggest that this rarely happens. John Drury of the University of Sussex interviewed survivors of events including the 2005 London bombings and found that people commonly helped strangers, even at risk to themselves. Drury argues that the sense of common fate created by the emergency itself produces a shared identity, and that this makes cooperation more likely, not less. Where deaths have occurred in crowd disasters, investigations have generally found the cause to be poor design or management, which allowed too many people into too small a space, rather than irrational behaviour.

D The physical behaviour of dense crowds has also been the subject of scientific investigation. Engineers studying crowd flow have found that when the density of people exceeds around five per square metre, individuals begin to lose the ability to control their own movements. At this point, forces can be transmitted through the crowd like waves, and pressure can build up to levels capable of causing serious injury. Specialists in crowd safety have pointed out that those at the front of such a crowd often have no way of knowing what is happening behind them, while those at the back cannot see the danger ahead. The problem, in other words, is one of information rather than attitude.

E These findings have had practical consequences for the design of public spaces. Modern stadiums, for example, are designed so that large numbers of people can leave within a fixed period of time, and their exits are positioned to prevent bottlenecks. Computer simulations, which model each person as an individual following a set of simple rules, allow planners to test layouts before they are built. One unexpected result of such modelling is that placing an obstacle, such as a pillar, a short distance in front of an exit can actually increase the rate at which people leave, because it breaks up the pressure that builds up at the door. The effect has since been observed in experiments with both people and animals.

F Communication has proved equally important. Research has shown that people in an emergency are more likely to act quickly when they are given clear and specific instructions than when they hear a general alarm. A bell or siren, it seems, often causes people to look for more information before they move, wasting valuable time. As a result, many public buildings now use recorded voice messages that tell people exactly what to do and where to go. Some organisers of large events have also begun to use social media to keep crowds informed, although this depends on people being able to use their phones in conditions that may be crowded and noisy.

G Perhaps the greatest change, however, has been in the way that crowds are policed. In the past, police often treated all members of a crowd as potentially dangerous, an approach which, according to the psychologist Clifford Stott, could cause the very disorder it was intended to prevent. When peaceful people are treated as a threat, Stott argues, they come to see the police as their opponents, and the crowd as a whole becomes more willing to support those who wish to cause trouble. Stott's work with police during the European football championships of 2004 showed that a lower-profile approach, in which officers mixed with supporters in ordinary uniforms and dealt only with the specific individuals who caused problems, led to remarkably few arrests. Ideas like these are now part of police training in a number of countries.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

The case for handwriting

Does the pen still have a place in a digital age?

In schools across the world, the pen is in retreat. In 2010, a set of educational standards adopted by most states in the USA no longer required pupils to be taught joined-up, or cursive, handwriting, and in Finland, cursive writing ceased to be a compulsory part of the curriculum in 2016, with keyboard skills given greater emphasis. To many people, this seems an entirely sensible development. Adults now write far more on keyboards and touchscreens than on paper, and it is hard to imagine a future in which this trend is reversed. Why, the argument goes, should children spend hours perfecting a skill that they will rarely use?

Yet a growing body of research suggests that the question is not as simple as it first appears. The physical act of forming letters, it seems, may play a part in learning that typing does not. Some of the most influential evidence comes from studies of young children. Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, scanned the brains of children who had not yet learned to read after they had practised letters in one of three ways: writing them by hand, tracing them, or typing them. When the children were later shown the letters, a network of brain areas associated with reading was activated more strongly in those who had written them freehand than in either of the other groups. James's explanation is that the irregular, imperfect letters produced by a child's hand force the brain to recognise many different versions of the same shape, which helps it to learn what each letter is.

Research with older students has produced similar, if less clear-cut, results. In a study published in 2014, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer asked university students to take notes on a lecture either on laptops or by hand. Those who typed tended to record the lecture almost word for word, while those writing by hand, unable to keep up with the speaker, were forced to summarise. When tested afterwards, both groups remembered facts equally well, but the handwriters performed better on questions that required an understanding of concepts. The study received a great deal of attention in the media, and was widely taken as proof that laptops should be banned from lecture halls.

This conclusion, however, may have been premature. When Kayla Morehead and her colleagues repeated the experiment in 2019, they found that the advantage of handwriting was smaller than had been reported and could not be shown reliably. It is also worth noting that the original study tested students on material they had not reviewed; in reality, most students revise their notes before an examination, and the more complete notes that typing makes possible may then be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Nevertheless, few researchers would dispute the underlying idea that processing information actively, rather than recording it passively, is the key to effective learning.

More recently, researchers have used new technology to look directly at what happens in the brain during writing. In 2024, a team led by Audrey van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recorded the brain activity of students as they either wrote words by hand with a digital pen or typed them. They found far more extensive connections between different regions of the brain during handwriting, particularly in areas linked to memory and the processing of new information. Van der Meer has argued that schools should ensure that children have at least some handwriting practice, while accepting that keyboards are essential in modern life.

There is also evidence that handwriting can affect the content of what children write, and not just how well they remember it. Virginia Berninger of the University of Washington found that primary school children who wrote essays by hand produced more words, wrote faster and expressed more ideas than when they used a keyboard. One possible explanation is that, for young children, typing is itself a demanding task that uses up mental resources which could otherwise be devoted to composition. If so, the advantage may disappear as children become more skilled typists, although few studies have followed the same pupils over a long enough period to find out.

None of this means that the keyboard should be removed from the classroom. For pupils with conditions such as dyspraxia, which affects physical coordination, typing may be the only way to put their ideas into writing without great effort and frustration, and the ability to edit text easily is a genuine advantage at every age. Moreover, much of the research described here concerns handwriting in general rather than cursive script in particular, and there is little evidence that joined-up writing is superior to printing. The debate over whether cursive should be taught therefore remains largely a question of tradition and taste.

What the research does suggest is that the decision to abandon handwriting entirely should not be made lightly. Handwriting is not simply an old-fashioned way of producing text; it appears to be one of the ways in which the brain learns. A sensible approach might be to teach both skills, and to encourage pupils to choose between them depending on the purpose of the task: the keyboard for producing finished work, perhaps, and the pen for planning, note-making and learning. In an age when technology offers ever more ways of avoiding effort, the slow, demanding work of writing by hand may turn out to be precisely what makes it valuable.