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American history has been
largely the story of migrations. That of the hundred years or so between the
Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of the First World War must certainly be
reckoned the largest peaceful migration in recorded history; probably the
largest of any kind, ever. It is reckoned that some thirty-five million persons
entered the United States during that period, not to mention the large numbers
who were also moving to Argentina and Australia. Historians may come to discern
that in the twentieth and later centuries this movement was dwarfed when
Africa, Asia and South America began to send out their peoples; but if so, they
will be observing a pattern, of a whole continent in motion, that was first
laid down in nineteenth-century Europe. Only the French seemed to be
substantially immune to the virus. Otherwise, all caught it, and all travelled.
English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Germans, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Italians,
Poles, Greeks, Jews, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes,
Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Basques. There were general
and particular causes.
As regards the general causes, the
rise in population meant that more and more people were trying to earn their
living on the same amount of land; inevitably, some were squeezed off it. The
increasing cost of the huge armies and navies, with their need for up-to-date
equipment, that every great European power maintained, implied heavier and
heavier taxes which many found difficult or impossible to pay, and mass
conscription, which quite as many naturally wanted to avoid. The opening up of
new, superbly productive lands in the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, coupled with the availability of steamers and steam trains to
distribute their produce, meant that European peasants could not compete
effectively in the world market: they would always be undersold, especially as
the arrival of free trade was casting down the old mercantilist barriers
everywhere. Steam was important in other ways too. It became a comparatively
easy matter to cross land and sea, and to get news from distant parts. The
invention of the electric telegraph also speeded up the diffusion of news,
especially after a cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic in 1866. New
printing and papermaking machines and a rapidly spreading literacy made
large-circulation newspapers possible for the first time. In short, horizons
widened, even for the stay-at-home. Most important of all, the dislocations in
society brought about by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and
the various wars and tumults of nineteenth-century Europe shattered the old
ways. New states came into being, old ones disappeared, frontiers were recast,
the laws of land- tenure were radically altered, internal customs barriers and
feudal dues both disappeared, payment in money replaced payment in kind, new
industries stimulated new wants and destroyed the self-sufficiency of peasant
households and the saleability of peasant products. The basic structure of
rural Europe was transformed.
Bad times pushed, good times
pulled American factories were usually clamouring for workers): small wonder
that the peoples moved.
Particular reasons were just as
important as these general ones. For example: between 1845 and 1 848 -eland
suffered the terrible potato famine. A million people died of starvation or
disease, a million more emigrated (1846-51). Matters were not much better when
the Great Famine was over: it was followed by lesser ones, and the basic
weaknesses of the Irish economy made the outlook hopeless anyway. Mass
emigration was a natural resort, at first to America, then, in the twentieth
century, increasingly, to England and Scotland. Emigration was encouraged, in
me Irish case as in many others, by letters sent home and by remittances of
money. The first adventurers thus helped to pay the expenses of their
successors. Political reasons could sometimes drive Europeans across the
Atlantic too. In 1848 some thousands of Germans fled the failure of the liberal
revolution of mat year (but many thousands emigrated for purely economic
reasons).
If such external stimuli faltered, American enterprise was more
than willing to fill the gap. The high cost of labour had been a constant in
American history since the first settlements; now, as the Industrial Revolution
made itself felt, the need for workers was greater than ever. The supply of
Americans was too small to meet the demand: while times were good on the family
farm, as they were on the whole until the 1880s, or while there was new land to
be taken up in the West, the drift out of agriculture (which was becoming a
permanent feature of America, as of all industrialized, society) would not be
large enough to fill the factories. So employers looked for the hands they
needed in Europe, whether skilled, like Cornish miners, or unskilled, like
Irish navvies. Then, the transcontinental railroads badly needed settlers on
their Western land grants, as well as labourers: they could not make regular
profits until the lands their tracks crossed were regularly producing crops
that needed carrying to market. Soon every port in Europe knew the activities
of American shipping lines and their agents, competing with each other to offer
advantageous terms to possible emigrants. They stuck up posters, they
advertised in the press, they patiently asnwered inquiries, and they shepherded
their clients from their native villages, by train, to the dockside, and then
made sure they were safely stowed in the steerage.
Question 1
Choose
the correct fetter A, B, C or D Write it in box 1 on your answer sheer.
1 Which
of the following Joes the writer state in the first paragraph?
A The
extent of emigration in the nineteenth century is unlikely to be repeated.
B
Doubts may he cast on how much emigration there really was in the nineteenth
century.
C It is
possible that emigration from Europe may be exceeded by emigration from outside
Europr
D
Emigration can prove to he a better experience tor some nationalities than for
others.
Questions 2-9
Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage
1.
Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each
Write answer, your answers in boxes 2-9 on your answer sheet.
GENERAL
CAUSES OF EMIGRATION TO THE US
Population increases made it impossible for some to live from
agriculture. In Europe, countries kept 2………………………… that were both big, and this
resulted in increases in 3……………………………… and in 4……………………………….. , which a lot of
people wanted to escape. It became impossible for 5………………………………….. in Europe to
earn a living because of developments in other countries and the introduction
of 6…………………………………… People knew more about the world beyond their own countries
because there was greater 7……………………. 8…………………………….. had been formed
because of major historical events. The creation of 9…………………………………………………………….
caused changes in demand.
Questions 10-13
Complete
each sentence with the correct ending A-H from the box below.
Write
the correct letter A-H in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.
10
The end of the potato famine in Ireland
11
People who had emigrated front Ireland
12
Movement off the land in the US
13
The arrival of railroad companies in the West of the US
|
|
|
A made people reluctant to move elsewhere.
B
resulted in a need tor more agricultural workers.
C
provided evidence of the advantages of emigration.
D
created a false impression of the advantages of moving elsewhere.
E did
little to improve the position of much of the population.
F
rook a long time to have any real effect.
G failed to satisfy employment requirements.
H
created a surplus of people, who had emigrated.
|
Section 2
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14—26 which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
How
bugs hitch-hike
across the galaxy
Mankind’s search for alien life could be jeopardised by
ultra-resilient bacteria from Earth. David Derbyshire reports.
What was the most important discovery of the Apollo programme?
Some have argued that it was the rocks that explained how the Moon was formed.
Others believe it was the technological spin-offs. But according to Captain
Peter Conrad, who led the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, it was life.
On the apparently dead lunar surface, a colony of bacteria was
thriving. The organisms were not native to the Moon, but were visitors from
Earth who had hitch-hiked a ride on board one of Nasa’s five Surveyor probes
from the 1960s. To the astonishment of biologists, between 50 and 100
Streptococcus bacteria survived the journey across space, at an average
temperature 20 degrees above absolute zero with no source of energy or water,
and stayed alive on the Moon in a camera for three years. Captain Conrad, who
returned the bacteria to Earth, was later to confess:‘I always thought the most
significant thing we ever found on the whole Moon was the little bacteria that
came back and lived’.
The ability of life to survive, adapt and evolve never fails to
astonish. Over the past three decades, bacteria and archaea have been found in
some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Known as extremophfles, chese
organisms have coped with life in a vacuum, pressure as high as 70 tons per
square inch, depths of four miles beneath the surface and scorching waters
around deep-sea volcanic vents. They have also survived 25 million years inside
a bee preserved in resin. Their resilience has renewed enthusiasm for the
search for alien life – a quest that many had assumed had been banished to
fantasy fiction. Mars and the moons Titan, Europa and Callisto are once again
plausible candidates for extraterrestrials.
As interest in alien life has grown, so have concerns that
mankind could spread its own microscopic bugs, contaminating the places we want
to explore. In 2003, Nasa ended the Galileo probe’s mission by smashing it into
Jupiter. The fear was that it could be carrying bacteria that might contaminate
Europa’s oceans.
The team behind Beagle 2 — the British probe that went to search
for life on Mars in 2003 – was forced to take contamination particularly
seriously. If Beagle carried to Mars life or dead spores picked up during the
manufacture of the spacecraft, its science would be jeopardised. Prof Colin
Pillinger, the Open University scientist who headed the Beagle project, said:
‘What we’ve learnt since the Apollo missions and the Viking Mars missions of
the 1970s is that bugs are far more tenacious than we ever imagined. They seem
to be very tolerant of high temperatures, they lie dormant at low temperatures
for long periods, they are immune to salt, acid and alkali, they seem to
survive on substrate chat are not what people expect. Excremophiles are
extremely adapted to hanging on to life.’
Beagle had to be assembled in a ‘clear? room’ – and one was
specially put together in a converted BBC outside broadcast van garage in
Milton Keynes. It had enough room to include an enormous set of fans that
circulated and filtered the air 500 times an hour. Only a handful of trained
researchers were allowed inside. ‘1 wasn’t allowed in,’ says Prof Pillinger.
‘There was special training for people going in there and
special conditions. There was a ban on beards and a limit of four people at any
one time. The team kept samples of everything that could have contaminated the
craft and monitored every stage of assembly.’
To reduce the workload, the idea was to build as much as
possible before sterilising it and banishing it to the difficult vorking
conditions inside the clean room. The easy stuff was -heated to 115C for 52
hours, more than enough to kill off Dugs. Electronic equipment can’t cope with
those sorts of temperatures, so the team used a hydrogen peroxide plasma,
created in a microwave, to kill off bugs at low temperatures. Parachutes and
gas bags were zapped with gamma radiation. It wasn’t just facial hair that was
banned. ‘You’ve heard of the paperless office,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘We had
the paperless assembly line. The guys normally go in armed with loads of papers
and diagrams, but we didn’t allow any of that. They were given information
through a glass wall, over mikes and monitors. And sometimes on a piece of
paper stuck to the glass with sticky tape.’
Beagle’s heat shield doubled as its biological shield. So once
the instruments were encased and sealed, the craft could be brought back into
the real world. The shield heated up to 1,700 degrees on its descent through
the Martian atmosphere, so bugs on the casing were not a worry. Mars Express –
the craft carrying Beagle – did not need sterilising. Its trajectory was
designed so that if something went wrong, the craft would not simply crash into
the planet. Its course could be corrected en route.
Eventually, space scientists hope to return samples of Mars to
Earth. While the risks of alien bacteria proving hazardous on Earth may be
remote, the rocks will still need to be quarantined. Moon rocks from Apollo
were analysed in vacuum glove boxes for the first two missions. Later,
researchers stored rocks in nitrogen. Prof Pillinger believed the first Mars
rocks should be sterilised before they are studied on Earth. ‘For security
purposes it would be the most sensible thing to do. You don’t have to sterilise
it all, you can contain some of it and then sterilise the sample you want to
look at, but it would lower the risk and make it easier to analyse.’
Questions 14-20
Look at
the statements (Questions 14—20) arid the list of spacecraft below.
Match
each statement with the spacecraft it applies to.
Write
the correct letter A-E in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.
14
provided transport from Earth tor bacteria
15
led to realisation of how tenacious bacteria are
16
was created so that there could be no bacteria on the outer structure
17
was capable of changing direction in the event of a problem
18
brought material which was kept in more than one kind of container
19
required action because of the possibility of the introduction of harmful
bacteria
20
resulted in disagreement as to the relative value of what was found
List of
Spacecraft
|
|
|
A Apollo craft
B
Surveyor probe
C
Galileo probe
D
Beagle 2
E
Mars Express
|
Questions 21-26
Label
the diagram below.
Choose
NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage for each answer. Write your
answers in boxes 21 —26 on your answer sheet.
THE ASSEMBLY OF BEAGLE 2
Section 3
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are hosed on Reading
Passage 3 below.
Finding
out about the world from television news
In The Ideological Octopus (1991). Justin Lewis points to an
important issue concerning the formal structure of television news. As he
notes, television news lacks the narrative element which, in other genres,
serves to capture viewer interest and thus motivate viewing. Lewis posits this
as one of the key reasons why television news often fails to interest people
and why. when they do watch it. people often cannot understand it. Lewis argues
that one fundamental problem with watching television news is that its
narrative structure means that the viewer is offered the punchline before the
joke – because the main point (the headline) comes right at the beginning,
after which the programme, by definition, deals with less and less important
things. Thus, in television news our interest is not awakened by an enigma
which is then gradually solved, to provide a gratifying solution – as so often
happens in fictional narratives. In Lewis’s terms, in television news there is
no enigma, the solution of which will motivate the viewing process. As he
baldly states, ‘If we decided to try to design a television programme with a
structure that would completely fail to capture an audience’s interest, we
might (finally) come up with the format of the average television news show’
(Lewis 1991).
What Lewis also does is offer an interesting contrast, in this
respect, between the high-status phenomenon of television news and the
low-status genre of soap opera. The latter, he observes, offers the most highly
developed use of effective narrative codes. To that extern soap opera, with its
multiple narratives, could be seen, in formal terms, as the most effective type
of television for the cultivation of viewer interest, and certainly as a far
more effective form than that of television news for this purpose. Clearly,
some of Lewis’s speculation here is problematic. There are counterexamples of
his arguments (e.g. instances of programmes such as sports news which share the
problematic formal features he points to but which are nonetheless popular – at
least among certain
types of viewers). Moreover, he may perhaps overstress the importance of
structure as against content relevance in providing the basis for programme
appeal. Nonetheless, I would suggest that his argument, in this respect, is of
considerable interest.
Lewis argues not only that soap opera is more narratively
interesting than television news, in formal terms, but. moreover, that the
world of television fiction in general is much closer to most people’s lives
than that presented in the news. This, he claims, is because the world of
television fiction often feels to people like their own lives. They can, for example,
readily identify with the moral issues and personal dilemmas faced by the
characters in a favourite soap opera. Conversely, the world of television news
is much more remote in all senses; it is a socially distant world populated by
another race of special or ‘elite’ persons, the world of them not ‘tis\ This is
also why ‘most people feel more able to evaluate TV fiction than TV news …
because it seems closer to their own lives and
to the world they live in … [whereas] the world of
television news might almost be beamed in fromm another planet (Lewis 1991). It
is as if the distant world of ‘the news’ is so disconnected from popular
experience that it is beyond critical judgement for many viewers. Hence,
however alienated they feel from it, they nonetheless lack any alternative
perspective on the events it portrays.
One consequence of this, Lewis argues, is that precisely,
because of this distance, people who feel this kind of alienation from the
‘world news’ nonetheless use frameworks to understand news iterms which come
from within the news themselves. This, he argues, is because in the absence of
any other source of information or perspective they are forced back on using
the media’s own framework. Many viewers are simply unable to place the media’s
portrayal of events in any other critical framework (where would they get it
from?). To this extent, Lewis argues. Gerbner and his colleagues (see Gerbner
et al. 1986; Signorielli and Morgan 1990) may perhaps be right in thinking that
the dominant perspectives and ‘associative logics’ offered by the media may
often simply be soaked up by audiences by sheer dint of their repetition. This
is not to suggest that such viewers necessarily believe, or explicitly accept,
these perspectives, but simply to note that they have no other place to start
from, however cynical they may be, at a general level, about not believing what
you see on television’, and they may thus tend, in the end. to fall back on
‘what it said on TV’. In one sense, this
could be said to be the converse of Hall’s negotiated code’ (1980), as taken
over from Parkin (1973). Parkin had argued, that many working-class people
display a ‘split consciousness’, whereby they accept propositions from the
dominant ideology at an abstract level, but then ‘negotiate’ or ‘discount’ the
application of these ideological propositions to the particular circumstances
of their own situation. Here, by contrast, we confront a situation where people
often express cynicism in general (so that Hot believing what you see in the
media’ is no more than common sense), but then in any particular case they
often find themselves pushed back into reliance on the mainstream media’s
account of anything beyond the realm of their direct personal experience,
simply for lack of any alternative perspective.
Questions 27—34
Complete
the summary below using words from the box. Write your answers in boxes 27-34
on your answer sheet.
The
structure of television news.
Justin Lewis says that television news does not have the 27
…………………..feature that other types of programme have. As a result, many viewers
do not find it interesting and may find it 28………………………………… This is
because the 29 ……………………….information comes first and after that 30
………………………………… matters are covered, in television news, there is no 31
………………………….. progress towards a conclusion and nothing 32 ………………………………… to find
out about. in fact, he believes that television news is an example of how the
33 ……………………… process in the field of television could result in something that
is 34 ……………. to what constitutes an interesting programme.
|
upsetting
contrary
crucial
repetitive
|
creativeopinionated
story-telling
informative
|
secondary
routine
additional
related
|
controversial
step-by-step
overwhelming
contusing
|
fast-moving
informal
mysterious
diverse
|
Questions 35—40
Do the
following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3.;
In
boxes 35—40 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
35
Lewis concentrates more on the structure of programmes than on what is
actually in them.
36
Lewis regrets viewers’ preference for soap operas over television news.
37
Lewis suggests that viewers sometimes find that television news
contradicts their knowledge of the world.
38
Lewis believes that viewers have an inconsistent attitude towards the
reliability of television news.
39
Parkin states that many working class people see themselves as exceptions
to general beliefs.
40
The writer of the text believes that viewers should have a less passive
attitude towards what they are told by the media.
