IELTSwithJurabek

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

The Myth of the Eight-hour Sleep

14 We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. Indications from both science and history suggest that the eight-hour sleep may not be a natural or inborn pattern for humans. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted research which implies just that.

Wehr kept a group of people in a darkened room for 14 hours a day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate, but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. First, they slept for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the implications of the study, the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists amongst the general public.

15 In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University in the US published a paper drawn from 16 years of research, revealing historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct periods of time each night. Ekirch's research found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from the ancient Greeks to tribes in Nigeria. Much like Wehr's findings, these references describe a first sleep which began not long following sunset. Then there was a waking period of one or two hours and after that a second sleep. During the waking period, people could be quite active. They sometimes got up and moved around the house, although most people stayed in bed, and perhaps read or wrote if they had enough money for candles. In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time that they were awake between periods of sleep to think about and attempt to analyse their dreams. In his book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky suggests an explanation for this divided sleep pattern in Europe. 'Associations with night before the 17th century were not good,' he writes. He goes on to explain that the streets of the cities and towns at night were often populated by thieves or worse. The streets at night consequently scared many people. Even the wealthy, who could afford to light their way, had better things to spend their nights on.

16 Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century. The pattern began to alter first among the upper classes in northern Europe and, over the course of the next 200 years, began changing amongst the rest of Western society. By the 1920s, the idea a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Ekirch attributes the initial shift to improvements in street and home distincting. As the night became a time for all kinds of activity, the length of time people sleep declined. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by another French city, Lille, in the same year and by Amsterdam in Holland two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn't light its streets until 1684, but by the end of the 17th century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night. Coffee houses emerged as a fashionable phenomenon and many were open virtually around the clock. Going out at night became commonplace, and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time. 'People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th century,' says Ekirch. 'But the Industrial Revolution intensified that attitude considerably.' Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of the pattern of first and second sleep.

17 Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for divided sleep, as well as in difficulties caused by extended exposure to artificial light in the modern world. This could be the cause of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th century, at the same time as accounts of interrupted sleep disappear.

18 Sleep psychologist, Gregg Jacobs, says that the idea that we must sleep for an extended period of time could be damaging if it makes people who wake up in the night anxious, as this anxiety can itself discourage sleep and is likely to affect waking life too. Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people simply rested and relaxed, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian (body clock) neuroscience at Oxford University in the UK, shares this point of view. 'Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training, and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,' Foster says. He feels this needs to change.

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

200 Years of Australian Landscapes at the Royal Academy in London

This exhibition promises to chart the evolution of a nation through its art, but not everyone agrees with the reasons behind the choice of artwork.

For the casual viewer, the exhibition of landscapes, Australia, selected by the Royal Academy of Art, will be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. Included in the exhibition are a range of artists and styles, dating from the earliest days of colonial art and progressing through expressionism and modernism to the greats of the 20th century, culminating with the current generation of Australian artists. It is hardly surprising, then, that this results in a flexible, wide-ranging notion of landscape.

But this landmark exhibition gives rise to some questions, and perhaps problems, regarding Britain's relationship with its former colony. By choosing a style of painting at which British artists excel, the Academy could be seen as inviting criticism of the Australian interpretation by comparison. But it is the very theme of landscape that hints at a telling attitude towards Australian art from Britain. To consider it condescending is perhaps too strong, but for Joanna Mendelssohn, Australian critic and Associate Professor at the University of NSW's College of Fine Arts (COFA), there is a suggestion that British artistic values have directed this exhibition, rather than allowing Australia the freedom to demonstrate its maturity.

What Mendelssohn found surprising about this exhibition was that the underlying rules for selection of works seemed to have been so conservative. Since the landscape is a very strong British artistic theme, it appeared to her that when the British looked to the art of a former colony, there was a tendency for them to think that those colonies would continue to be like the British themselves. In reviewing Australian art, the British insisted on looking at the genre of landscape painting.

Because of colonial ties, it was inevitable during Australian art's formative years that it would reflect Britain's devotion to the beloved landscape before its own character and idiosyncrasies took shape. And while Mendelssohn's concern over the exhibition's conventional selection is valid, the Academy is nevertheless embracing the peculiarities of Australian art from the mid-19th century onward, albeit within the boundaries of landscape.

Australia is curated by Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. "Certainly the influence of English, French or German art is much more evident in the early periods, in the early 1800s to mid-1800s," she says. "What I wanted to show was how Australian art develops a real distinctiveness, associated with the landscape and the light."

The fusion of "tradition" of the European kind with something more specifically Australian, and often personal, is crucial to the exhibition, and extends particularly to some of the more contemporary artists involved. Sydney-born video artist Shaun Gladwell is a good example of this. Gladwell's most famous piece, which is featured in the exhibition, is Storm Sequence (2000), a video of Gladwell skateboarding on the Bondi seafront as one of Sydney's signature brutal storms lingers offshore. It is his acknowledgment of landscape (or seascape) tradition, coloured by Gladwell's own individualism. "To exhibit my work in this show might make some sense because I was interested in Turner and the idea of atmosphere affecting vision, something I was really interested in around the time of Storm Sequence. I was thinking about this tradition of Romantic landscape, but I wanted to make it personal," says Gladwell. But he didn't want to just embark on borrowing imagery from elsewhere. He wanted to bring it to his experience and his world through skateboarding and beach culture.

Visitors to the exhibition encounter Australian Aboriginal art first, the idea being that these works warrant a prominent position because they were "first". Over the last couple of decades, London has hosted many successful exhibitions of Aboriginal art in smaller spaces, but for Soriano, Australia represents an opportunity to place such art in a new context, with new relationships to the art of the settlers and white Australia. "One of the reasons landscape struck me as being the right theme was because Aboriginal art started in and on the landscape," she says. "[The exhibition] is a beautiful meshing of the two different kinds of art, that allowed me to bring them together comfortably and honestly with this theme. It was important for me to present Indigenous art to audiences, and I felt it was important that it was seen as part of Australian art history, rather than a separate exhibition on its own."

Meanwhile, Australian critic Mendelssohn also points out that London is increasingly less important to today's generation of artists, and this somewhat weakens the ceremony surrounding the exhibition in London. "China is the most important art market in the world," she says. "If you've made it in Shanghai, you've made it. The world has changed. My students in Australia, who come from all over the world, really want to see Venice Biennale and Art Basel, but they're less interested in going to London. When I was growing up, London was the destination, and then when I was at university all the smart young things wanted to go to New York," she added. "Now they want to go everywhere. There's no such thing as the centre and the periphery like there used to be. It's much more complicated."