IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

PRESERVING ANTARCTIC HISTORY

Protecting early buildings in Antarctica

A Few people conjuring up the "most comfortable dwelling place imaginable" are likely to picture a wooden shelter on an island off the coldest continent on Earth. But that's how Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott described the hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island that was the base for his 1910-13 expedition. The hut is nestled below a small hill on a long stretch of black sand. In 2011, it looked like a building site, but now, seals lie on the ice in front of the newly restored structure and sun reflects off the cliffs of the nearby glacier.

B The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZAHT) and its team of conservation workers recently announced the completion of 10 years of intensive work to save three historic buildings on Ross Island. As well as the hut at Cape Evans, it has worked on the Discovery Hut from Scott's 1901-04 expedition at Hut Point, and the hut at Cape Royds, built for Ernest Shackleton's 1907-09 expedition. When work began, many of the artefacts were temporarily removed while carpenters from the team of conservation workers repaired the walls, floors and roof. In Scott's "zone of command" was the table where team member Edward Wilson made his enduring biological and botanical illustrations. In a dark corner nearby, Edward Atkinson had once incubated his moulds and parasites. Of particular interest is the small workbench and array of test tubes, sample jars and Bunsen burner stands of biologist Edward Nelson, lit by sunshine through a dusty window. This was where the young scientist preserved marine specimens as part of his search for new species and an understanding of the Antarctic food chain.

C The NZAHT executive director Nigel Watson describes the three restored huts as "fantastic remnants of humans' first contact with the continent". The idea for the birth of the conservation project, he says, "was the fact that we were in great danger of losing them". When the on-site work began in 2004, snow and ice were building up around, under and sometimes inside the huts, damaging the structures and threatening their contents. "We now have three buildings that are structurally sound and watertight with a very different feel - they are drier and lighter and the humidity is reduced. It's a much better environment for the collection."

D As well as heritage carpenters, the NZAHT team on Ross Island has included experts in textile, paper and metal conservation: in total, 62 experts from 11 countries have visited Antarctica to work on the project, often spending a whole summer on-site, sleeping in tents and popping 25km back to Scott Base for the occasional shower. "It became known as the most exciting conservation project in the world," says Watson, "so it attracted top heritage conservation talent."

E Some of the most exciting discoveries were three intact crates of "Mackinlay's Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky" found encased in ice beneath Shackleton's hut, a paper notebook that belonged to surgeon, zoologist and photographer George Murray Levick found buried in dirt at Cape Evans and a small box of 22 cellulose nitrate negatives waiting to be developed into photographs found in Herbert Ponting's darkroom. But most of the 18,202 items catalogued and conserved are more mundane: food, tools, clothing and other personal items that were not precious enough to be taken home on the return voyages.

F The NZAHT team's conservation treatments involved thorough cleaning, followed by chemical treatment to help slow, or even reverse, the deterioration. Metal items would go through corrosion removal, followed by a chemical stabilisation treatment, then application of an oxygen and moisture barrier to prevent further corrosion. Treatment of paper items often involved washing to remove harmful acids and salts and to help reinforce the fibres so that in some cases the paper was even stronger than before.

G As a result of the project, the NZAHT has become the world leader in cold-climate heritage conservation and its members have been interviewed for numerous television documentaries and radio reports. The Ross Island huts are "the jewels in the crown", says Watson, but there are other historic buildings needing attention. With logistics support from Antarctica New Zealand, programme managers Al Fastier and Lizzie Meek will be part of a small team heading to Cape Adare, an exposed site more than 700 km north of Scott Base. The two Cape Adare huts, remnants of an 1898-1900 British expedition, "are not only the first buildings on the continent", says Watson, but also "the only example of humanity's first buildings on any continent on Earth."

H The three-year restoration effort will involve construction repairs and the removal, conservation and return of about 1100 objects. Compared with the hut sites on Ross Island, which are relatively sheltered, Cape Adare is "a very remote and challenging place to work in," says Watson. It's set among the world's biggest colony of Adelie penguins on an exposed spit of land, and it is important that they don't interrupt the functioning of the colony in any way while they are there. Lizzie Meek looks forward to the challenge. "But I'm also looking forward to going back to the Ross Island huts and seeing them with fresh eyes. After so many years of working on them, to be able to step inside and look around to see what we have accomplished will be amazing."

I If you can find your way to Antarctica, you'll need a permit to visit any of these huts, which are each in an Antarctic Specially Protected Area. But there's an easier way to see them without making the long journey: the trust has partnered with Google to offer Street View walkthroughs of each of the dwellings, available via Google Earth or through the NZAHT's website.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

FLOWER POWER

A 27 Why do we give people flowers? To offer condolence to those who are grieving. To celebrate. To woo. To ask for forgiveness. We all know intuitively that there is something psychologically powerful about giving flowers; in fact, few objects provoke such a universal emotional response. In the US alone, the flower industry is now worth about $5bn a year - which suggests that, at the very least, they service a compelling human need.

B 28 Recent studies at the Department of Psychology at Rutgers State University of New Jersey investigated claims that flowers are unique among living organisms in their ability to induce profound changes in our emotional state. As the first part of their research, the Rutgers team visited 150 women in their homes. Each was presented with a variety of gifts such as flowers, fruit or sweets. The women were unaware that the study was about the effect of the flowers on their emotions. They were told that it was a study about their daily moods, and that they would receive a gift in return for taking part. Following the presentation of the gift, those receiving flowers were assessed as displaying a much more positive mood than those who got other gifts, and this effect lasted for several days. After receiving flowers, they were also more willing to answer questions concerning their social circle and intimate conversations with friends and family. The results suggest that flowers influence our secondary socio-emotional behaviours, as well as having a strong effect on our immediate emotional expression.

C 29 In the second study, the psychologists observed participants being handed single flowers, or alternative gifts, in a constrained and stressful situation - inside an elevator. Contrary to predictions regarding gender differences, both men and women presented with flowers were more likely to smile, to stand closer and to initiate conversation. Several subjects who were given the alternative gift then learnt that flowers were also being handed out, and returned to the elevator and demanded a flower. The scientists used elevators for this study precisely because the most typical behaviour in sparsely occupied elevators is for people to retreat to opposite corners. The subjects who received flowers, however, closed up that space to a considerable extent - indicating that the flowers not only induced a strong positive mood, but brought a significant affiliation among people who had never previously met.

D 30 The third study involved regularly sending flowers to a selected sample of men and women. The researchers found not only a profound elevation of mood, but also reliable improvements in other measures of cognitive function, like memory. In this series of experiments, some participants produced such extraordinary emotional displays that the psychologists were totally unprepared for them. Subjects gave spontaneous hugs and kisses to the people who delivered the flowers, and sent invitations to the psychologists to come to their homes for refreshments.

E 31 Various evolutionary hypotheses attempt to explain the remarkably powerful psychological effect of flowers. One is that our aesthetic preferences for fertile locations and growing things stem from prehistory, when these clues in our environment could mean the difference between starvation and survival. We may have become hardwired to respond positively to flowers because for early man, finding them in a particular location predicted future food supplies and possibly a better place to rear children. Yet the flaw in this argument is that the showy flowers which humans seem to find most visually attractive are generally found on those plants which yield no edible products.

F 32 The Rutgers psychologists' findings show that the various physical attributes of flowers combine to directly affect our emotions through multi-channel interactions. We have evolved preferences for the particular colours, textures, patterned symmetries and specific floral odours which influence our moods. Indeed, previous research has established that popular perfumes, which often have a floral "top-note", will actually reduce depression. The origins of these inclinations may well be as the evolutionary theories suggest: the patterned symmetries of flowers can be detected easily as a recognisable signal within a wide variety of visual arrays, and a response to certain colour tones is important in finding ripe fruit against a leafy background. But, claim the Rutgers team, these preferences have long been separated from their primary evolutionary use, and become rewarding to us more generally. Thus plants with preferred colours, shapes and odours - despite having no other products - would therefore be protected and dispersed.

G 33 The Rutgers study suggests that flowers may have actually evolved to exploit their peculiar impact on humans. The team's theory proposes a plant-human co-evolution, or even domestication, based on the intense emotional rewards that flowers provide. The idea that flowering plants, with no known food or other basic survival value to man, have co-evolved with us by exploiting an emotional niche instead, is very much like the scenario presented for the evolution of dogs. Flowers may be the plant equivalent of "companion animals". If this is true, then there is a very real sense in which, when you next give flowers, they are using you just as much as you are using them.