IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

John Ray and the Study of Plants

14 The 17th-century English scholar and botanist John Ray was well aware that he lived through, and participated in, a profound revolution in the way people interacted with nature. In the preface to his Synopsis of British Plants, published in 1690, he gave thanks that he had been born at a time when traditional dependence on the teaching of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) had given way to a new philosophy, based on experiment and observation of the real world, that we now call science.

15 Ray was born in 1627. His father was a village blacksmith, and his mother was also a respected member of the community, a healer who was an expert in folk medicine and the use of herbs to treat ailments. Ray must have stood out as an unusually bright boy among his schoolmates, and his talents were recognised by a church official, Samuel Covell, who had graduated from Cambridge University in 1600, and maintained his links with his university. Through his influence, Ray was admitted to Cambridge University in 1644 at the age of seventeen - a huge step for a village blacksmith's son. There he made a solid start, and quickly gained a reputation as a brilliant student. He studied the classics (Greek, Latin and Hebrew) and mathematics, but there was nothing yet we would now call science in the curriculum. After graduating in 1648, he became a minor member of staff at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1651, Lecturer in Mathematics in 1653, and Lecturer in Humanities in 1655.

16 Almost immediately after graduating, Ray also seems to have developed the interest to which he would devote the rest of his life: the study of the natural world. He explains this conversion into a naturalist - in particular into a botanist - in the preface to his first book, the Cambridge Catalogue of English Plants. Here Ray tells us that he suffered an illness in his early twenties, and was advised to take long walks and ride in the fresh air while recovering. While doing this, he became interested in the local flora, and finding nobody able to teach him, Ray investigated it for himself. He then went on to pass on the knowledge he acquired to others.

17 By the mid-1650s, even the first-year students at Trinity College were able to identify the plants and flowers around Cambridge, as they were being taught (unofficially - none of this was part of their formal education) by Ray. Many of them were the sons of landowners, and so had a natural, if amateurish, interest in country matters. But a few of them took his efforts to understand the natural world much more seriously. One of these, Francis Willughby, later played an important part in Ray's life.

18 Having himself had no authority on the subject of plants on which to draw, Ray also started work on what would become his Cambridge Catalogue of English Plants. The work was not published until 1660 because, as Ray explained in the preface, he had to start from scratch: "I had first to become familiar with the literature, to compare the plants that I found with the pictures, and when there seemed to be a resemblance, to go fully into any unknown descriptions. Gaining skill by experience, I acquired at last the ability to recognise to what tribe and family similars could be assigned; this taught me to search for similarities and saved a vast deal of labour, which others would have spent in their difficulties. I was eager to make the most of this and was fortunate to share my enthusiasm with my friends ..."

19 Ray's Cambridge Catalogue of English Plants was much more than a simple list of species. It gave the names of plants found in the area around Cambridge and included information about where they grew and how common they were. In doing this, Ray was producing something that would be of practical use to students and other readers interested in the local natural world. At the same time, the book showed his determination to describe plants accurately, on the basis of direct examination rather than reliance on old authorities. In this respect, it reflected the spirit of the new learning that Ray admired.

20 Ray's studies of plants were only the beginning of a much larger ambition. With the support of Francis Willughby, he began to imagine a more comprehensive investigation of nature, one that would attempt to classify living things according to careful observation of their shared characteristics. This was an ambitious undertaking, especially at a time when many aspects of the natural world remained poorly described. Yet Ray believed that by collecting evidence systematically and comparing related forms, it would be possible to build a more reliable understanding of nature than scholars had possessed before.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

Sir Francis Ronalds 1788 - 1873

An early pioneer in the story of long-distance communication

A Francis Ronalds was born in London in 1788, the second of eleven children. When he was nineteen his father died, and as the eldest son, the young Ronalds had to assume the responsibility of running the family's cheese business. He combined this occupation with his passions for chemical experiments and for meteorology, the study of the Earth's atmosphere and its changes. This brought him into contact with the elderly Swiss meteorologist Jean Andre de Luc, who was also an inspired inventor in the field of electricity. In 1814, de Luc encouraged Ronalds to start work on this new discipline.

B For the next few years, Ronalds experimented enthusiastically with various kinds of electrostatic clockwork devices. He was particularly interested in the idea of electric telegraphy: transmitting messages over distance, using electrical impulses carried along metal wires. In the best traditions of nineteenth-century scientists, these investigations were carried out at home. In early 1816, Ronalds gutted the family home in Hammersmith, West London, and covered its rooms, halls, and staircases with electric wire. This experiment involved the use of current to produce movement in small corks at the ends of circuits.

C Some months later, Ronalds built two large wooden frames accommodating 8 miles (12.9 km) of electrically charged iron wire in his back garden. At either end of the wire was a revolving disc, on which letters and numbers were engraved. These dials were kept revolving by means of a clockwork mechanism. When somebody wanted to send a message, he would wait until the dial at his end was showing the desired number or letter, and then interrupt the charge on the wire. This would cause two balls suspended on the wire to fall together. The person at the opposite end would then note down what was indicated by the dial at his end at the moment when the balls made contact. Ronalds soon developed a modified version of his invention in which the wire was encased in glass tubes and buried in the ground. The system was slow and depended on the two dials staying in step, but it worked.

D Ronalds immediately contacted the Admiralty, the department of the British government which had control over the nation's naval affairs. He was not the first to propose a system of this nature to them. Some ten years earlier, in 1806, the inventor Ralph Wedgwood had offered the Admiralty a similar type of telegraph based on frictional electricity, which it had rejected. The Admiralty had its home in London, whereas its naval fleets were based over 130 km away in Portsmouth. With communication between these two cities in mind, Ronalds wrote to Lord Melville, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, to offer him his telegraphic system.

E Ronalds believed that his invention was capable of carrying messages some 800 km, and in his letter to Lord Melville written on 11 July 1816 he spoke of the "mode of conveying telegraphic intelligence with great rapidity, accuracy, and certainty, in all states of the atmosphere, either at night or in the day, and at small expense." In 1816, the Admiralty had at its disposal only the late eighteenth-century telegraphic system of semaphore, whereby a mechanical device was used to control a mast with two arms. The disadvantage of this system was that it was only usable in daylight and in clear weather conditions. Nevertheless, John Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, wrote back to Ronalds on 5 August, saying that "telegraphs of any kind are wholly unnecessary, and NO other than the one now in use will be adopted."

F Ronalds did not pursue the matter further or attempt to patent his telegraph. However, in a small pamphlet published in 1823, he described his invention and listed some of its potential uses: "Why should not government govern at Portsmouth almost as promptly as in Downing Street? Why should our defaulters escape by default of our foggy climate? Let us have Electrical Conversazione offices communicating with each other all over the kingdom if we can." Although Ronalds lived long enough to see his prophecies come to fruition, he made no further contribution to the progress of telegraphic communication. In 1843, he was appointed the first Honorary Director and Superintendent of the Observatory at Kew, where he devised an accurate, automatic system for registering meteorological data using photography. A similar system was developed independently by Charles Brooke, but the British Association of Meteorologists confirmed Ronalds's priority. His system remained in use for many decades.

G Meanwhile, the people who benefited most directly from Ronalds's telegraphic work were the physicist Charles Wheatstone and his business partner William Cooke. They saw the potential of a rapid communication system for the growing number of private railway companies, and in 1837 they developed the Wheatstone-Cooke five-needle telegraph. The pair patented their design in the same year, the first of its kind to be officially registered, and reaped considerable financial gain as a result. Ronalds himself retired in 1852 and devoted his later years to collecting and cataloguing a vast library of published material on electricity and magnetism. In 1870, three years before he died, he was knighted by Queen Victoria, a belated honour in recognition of his "early and remarkable labours in telegraphic investigations."