Reading Test 2

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

Forests beneath the sea

Along rocky coastlines in cool waters around the world grow some of the most productive ecosystems on Earth: kelp forests. Kelp is a large brown seaweed, technically a type of alga rather than a plant, and some species can grow astonishingly fast. Giant kelp, found along the Pacific coast of North America and in parts of the southern hemisphere, may grow as much as 50 centimetres in a single day under ideal conditions, reaching lengths of over 30 metres. Like the trees in a forest on land, the kelp forms a canopy near the surface, beneath which a rich community of animals lives.

Kelp does not have roots. Instead, it attaches itself to rocks on the sea floor by means of a structure called a holdfast, which resembles a tangle of roots but takes no nutrients from the rock. Nutrients are absorbed directly from the surrounding water through the kelp's blades, the leaf-like parts of the seaweed. Many species have small bladders filled with gas at the base of each blade, which keep it floating upwards towards the light. Because kelp needs cool water that is rich in nutrients, it thrives in areas where cold water rises from the depths of the ocean, a process known as upwelling.

The forests provide food and shelter for an enormous variety of creatures. Fish shelter among the stems, which also serve as nurseries for young fish; crabs and snails graze on the blades; and seals and sea lions hunt in the canopy. Even creatures that live far away benefit. When storms tear kelp from the rocks, it is washed onto beaches, where it feeds insects and the birds that eat them, or it sinks into the deep sea, providing food in a habitat where little else grows.

Kelp forests also matter to people. In many coastal communities, kelp has long been harvested as a food and a fertiliser, and today it is used in products ranging from toothpaste to ice cream, in which a substance extracted from kelp, called alginate, acts as a thickener. The forests protect coastlines by reducing the force of waves, and they support commercial fisheries worth billions of dollars. More recently, scientists have become interested in their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, although how much of this carbon is stored for long periods remains uncertain.

Yet these forests are disappearing in many places. Along the coast of northern California, more than 90 per cent of the kelp has been lost since 2014. The causes there were complex. A period of unusually warm water, which kelp tolerates poorly, coincided with the collapse of the population of sunflower sea stars, large predators that feed on sea urchins, as a result of a wasting disease. With their main predator gone, urchin numbers exploded, and the urchins consumed much of the remaining kelp, leaving behind areas of bare rock known as 'urchin barrens'.

Similar processes have been recorded elsewhere. In Tasmania, warming waters have allowed a species of urchin from further north to move south and spread, and the island has lost the great majority of its giant kelp forests. Off the coast of Norway, on the other hand, kelp has returned to some areas once dominated by urchins, possibly because rising water temperatures there have harmed the urchins more than the kelp.

Efforts to restore kelp forests take several forms. One approach is to remove urchins, using divers who either crush them or collect them by hand. In some places, the collected urchins are kept in tanks and fed until they are fat enough to be sold as food, so that the removal programme pays for itself. Another approach involves growing young kelp on ropes or small stones in laboratories and then placing them on the sea floor. Researchers in Australia are also attempting to breed varieties of kelp that can survive higher temperatures.

Whether such projects can operate on a large enough scale remains to be seen. Restoration is expensive, and kelp forests cover vast areas. But the fact that kelp can grow so quickly gives some cause for optimism: where conditions are favourable, a kelp forest can recover within a few years, far faster than the decades or centuries required for a forest on land.

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

Should museums be free?

A In 2001, the British government removed admission charges at the country's national museums, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. The effect was immediate. In the first year, visits to the museums that had previously charged rose by around 70 per cent, and by the end of the decade, some institutions were receiving more than twice as many visitors as before. Supporters of the policy hailed it as a great success, arguing that it had opened up the nation's collections to people who might never otherwise have seen them.

B Not everyone was convinced. Critics pointed out that a rise in the total number of visits does not necessarily mean that a wider range of people are visiting. Surveys carried out in the years after the change suggested that much of the increase came from people who were already regular museum-goers and who now visited more often. The proportion of visitors from lower-income groups rose only slightly. According to the cultural economist Helen Marsh, this is not surprising. 'The price of a ticket is rarely the main barrier,' she says. 'People who don't visit museums often say that they simply don't feel that museums are meant for people like them.'

C Free entry also has costs. Museums that do not charge for admission must find other sources of income, and in the UK, government funding for the national museums has fallen in real terms since the policy was introduced. Many have responded by expanding their shops and cafés, by charging for special exhibitions, and by hiring out their buildings for private events. Some directors have argued that this has led to a growing dependence on 'blockbuster' exhibitions, which attract paying visitors but leave less room for smaller, more experimental displays.

D Elsewhere, the picture is mixed. In the United States, many major museums charge high entry fees, but the Smithsonian Institution's museums in Washington have always been free. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ended its long-standing policy of allowing all visitors to pay whatever they wished, and began to require visitors from outside New York State to pay a fixed price. The museum said that the proportion of visitors paying the full suggested amount had fallen sharply over the previous decade, and that the change was needed to protect its finances.

E Some economists argue that the debate is too often presented as a choice between two extremes. Arjun Kapoor, a professor of public policy, suggests that museums could charge tourists while offering free entry to local residents, as several museums in Europe already do in various forms. Others favour making entry free at certain times only, such as one evening a week, which allows people on low incomes to visit without removing a valuable source of revenue. However, research by the sociologist Clara Reyes has found that free evenings tend to be used mainly by young professionals rather than by the groups they are intended to help.

F What does seem clear is that removing charges is most effective when it is combined with other measures. Museums that have succeeded in attracting new audiences have usually done so by working with local communities, schools and charities, and by changing what they display and how they display it. Marsh points to museums that invite local people to help choose objects for exhibitions or to tell their own stories in the galleries. 'A free ticket opens the door,' she says, 'but people also need a reason to walk through it.'

G There is also the question of how the success of a museum should be measured. Visitor numbers are easy to count, and governments often use them to judge whether public money is being well spent. Yet Kapoor argues that numbers alone say little about the value of a visit. A museum that attracts a million people who spend twenty minutes wandering through its galleries may be doing less good, he suggests, than one that attracts far fewer visitors but engages them deeply. Finding better ways of measuring that kind of impact, he believes, is the real challenge facing museums today.

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

The unreliable witness

In 1932, the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett published the results of a series of experiments that would change the way scientists thought about memory. Bartlett asked students at the University of Cambridge to read a Native American folk tale called 'The War of the Ghosts' and then to retell it after intervals of minutes, days and, in some cases, years. The story was chosen deliberately: its events and the logic connecting them were unfamiliar to his English participants. As the students retold it, Bartlett noticed that they did not simply forget parts of the story. Instead, they changed it, shortening it, dropping details that seemed strange to them, and replacing unfamiliar elements with more familiar ones. Canoes became boats; hunting seals became fishing.

From these observations, Bartlett concluded that memory is not a process of storing and retrieving exact copies of past events. Rather, it is reconstructive: each time we recall something, we rebuild it, using fragments of the original experience together with our general knowledge and expectations about how the world works, which he called 'schemas'. This process is usually efficient, since it allows us to fill gaps and make sense of incomplete information. But it also means that our memories can be distorted without our being aware of it.

For several decades, Bartlett's ideas attracted relatively little attention, partly because his methods were informal by the standards of later psychology. He gave his participants few instructions and did not carefully control the conditions in which they recalled the story. It was not until the 1970s that the reconstructive nature of memory became a major focus of research, largely through the work of the American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus.

In one of her best-known studies, conducted in 1974 with John Palmer, participants watched films of car accidents and were then asked to estimate how fast the cars had been travelling. The crucial difference lay in the wording of the question. Participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they 'smashed into' each other gave higher estimates than those asked how fast they were going when they 'hit' each other. A week later, those in the 'smashed' group were also more than twice as likely to report having seen broken glass, although there had been none in the film. A single word, it seemed, could alter not only how people described an event but what they believed they had seen.

Loftus went on to show that it was possible to create memories of entire events that had never happened. In a study published in 1995, participants were given short descriptions of four events from their childhood, supposedly provided by relatives. Three were real; the fourth, an account of being lost in a shopping centre at the age of five, was invented. After being interviewed about the events twice, around a quarter of the participants claimed to remember being lost, some of them describing the experience in considerable detail.

Such findings have had important consequences for the legal system. Juries have traditionally found eyewitness testimony highly persuasive, yet studies of cases in which convicted people were later shown to be innocent, often through DNA evidence, have found that mistaken identification by witnesses was a factor in a large majority of them. The witnesses were not lying; they were sincerely convinced by memories that had been shaped by suggestive questioning, by seeing the suspect's photograph in the media, or by repeated discussion of the events.

As a result, many police forces have changed the way they interview witnesses and conduct identification procedures. Witnesses are now commonly encouraged to describe events in their own words before being asked specific questions, and officers are trained to avoid questions that suggest a particular answer. In identity parades, it is increasingly recommended that the officer conducting the procedure should not know which person is the suspect, so that he or she cannot influence the witness, even unintentionally. Witnesses may also be asked to state how confident they are at the moment of identification, since confidence tends to grow over time, regardless of whether the memory is accurate.

None of this means that memory is generally untrustworthy. In everyday life, most of our memories are accurate enough for our purposes, and the errors that do occur tend to concern details rather than the main outline of events. What the research does show is that the feeling of certainty that accompanies a memory is not a reliable guide to its accuracy. A vivid, detailed and confidently held memory may be entirely mistaken, and a vague one may be correct. Bartlett, who described remembering as 'an imaginative reconstruction', would not have been surprised.