PASSAGE 2 – Questions 11–20

MY FIRST LOVE

During the baking hot months of the summer holidays, my mother and I used to escape to one of the scattered lakes north of Prince Albert. In its magic surroundings, we spent the long summer days in the open air, swimming, canoeing, or just lying dreaming in the sun. In the evening, the lake was always a bright luminous grey after the unbelievable sunset colours had faded.

The last summer before we returned to England was particularly enchanted. For one thing, I was in love for the first time. No one will ever convince me that one cannot be in love at fifteen. I loved then as never since, with all my heart and without doubts or reservations or pretence.

My boyfriend Don worked in Saskatoon, but the lake was “his place” — the strange and beautiful wilderness drew him with an obsessive urgency, so I suspected it was not to see me that he got on his motorcycle as many Fridays as he possibly could, and drove three hundred-odd miles along the pitted prairie roads to spend the weekends at our place.

Sometimes he couldn’t come, and the joy would go out of everything until Monday, when I could start looking forward to Friday again. He could never let us know in advance, as we were too far from civilization to have a phone or even a telegraph service. Besides, Don was hard up and sometimes worked overtime at weekends.

One Friday night a storm broke out. I lay in bed and listened to the thunder and the rain beating on the roof. I tried not to expect Don that night, hoping he would have enough sense to wait until the storm ended. Yet in my frightened thoughts, I couldn’t help imagining Don fighting the storm. His motorbike seemed, in my thoughts, frail enough to be blown onto its side by the first gust that struck it. I thought of Don pinned under it, skidding, his face pressed into the mud.

I crawled back into bed, trying to close my throat against the tears. But when my mother, prompted by the deep sympathy and understanding between us, came in to me, she kissed my cheek and found it wet. “Don’t get upset, Jane,” she said softly. “He may still come.”

When she had tucked me in and gone, I lay thinking about Don, about the danger of the roads — you couldn’t ride or walk along them safely after heavy rain; your feet would slip from under you. The roads in Northern Canada are not like the friendly, well-populated English ones, where there are always farmhouses within walking distance and cars driving along them day and night.

It was hours later that I suddenly realized the sound of the roaring engine was real. The storm was dying. I lay absolutely still, relief and pain fighting for ascendancy within me, each in itself overwhelming enough to freeze the breath in my lungs as I heard Don’s heavy, tired footsteps on the wooden stairs.

11. Every summer, Jane used to spend:

PASSAGE 3 – Questions 21–30

KETCHUP

The sauce that is today called ketchup (or catsup) in Western cultures is a tomato-based sauce quite distinct from the Eastern sauces of its ancestors. A sauce called ke-tjap was in use in China as early as the 17th century, but the Chinese version was made of pickled fish, shellfish, and spices. The popularity of this Chinese sauce spread to Singapore and Malaysia, where it was called kechap. The Indonesian ketjab derives its name from the same source but is made from very different ingredients. It is prepared by cooking black soy beans, fermenting them, placing them in a salt brine for at least a week, cooking the resulting solution further, and sweetening it heavily; this process results in a dark, thick, and sweet variation of soy sauce.

Early in the 18th century, sailors from the British navy came across this exotic sauce on voyages to Malaysia and Singapore and brought samples of it back to England. English chefs tried to recreate the sauce but were unable to do so exactly because key ingredients were unknown or unavailable in England; chefs ended up substituting ingredients such as mushrooms and walnuts in an attempt to recreate the special taste of the original Asian sauce. Variations of this sauce became quite the rage in 18th-century England, appearing in a number of recipe books as an exotic addition to menus of the time.

The English version did not contain tomatoes, and it was not until the end of the 18th century that tomatoes became a main ingredient in the ketchup of the United States. It is quite notable that tomatoes were added, since they had previously been considered dangerous to health. Tomatoes had been cultivated by the Aztecs, who called them “tomatl”; however, early botanists had recognized that tomatoes belonged to the Solanaceae family, which includes several poisonous plants. The leaves of the tomato plant are poisonous, though of course the fruit is not.

(A) Thomas Jefferson, who cultivated the tomato in his gardens at Monticello and served dishes containing tomatoes at lavish feasts, often received credit for changing the reputation of the tomato.

(B) Soon after Jefferson had introduced the tomato to American society, recipes combining the new fashionable tomato with the equally fashionable and exotic sauce known as ketchup began to appear.

(C) By the middle of the 19th century, both the tomato and tomato ketchup were staples of the American kitchen.

(D) Tomato ketchup, popular though it was, was quite time-consuming to prepare. In 1876, the first mass-produced tomato ketchup, a product of German-American Henry Heinz, went on sale and achieved immediate success. From tomato ketchup, Heinz branched out into a number of other products, including various sauces, pickles, and relishes.

21. The word "ancestors" in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to:

PASSAGE 4 – Questions 31–40

FOOD CHAINS

Originally, the idea of a “food chain” was developed by a scientist named Charles Elton in 1927. Elton described a general food chain in terms of where plants and animals get their energy. He started with plants, which get energy from sunlight. Next, plant-eating animals get their energy from eating other plants. At the next level of the chain, meat-eating animals get their energy from eating other animals. Elton’s idea of a “chain” related to the concept that all these animals are linked together by what they eat. Anything that affects one part of the chain affects all of the other parts in the chain. The first part of the chain, plants, is called the producer. All of the parts of the chain above the producer are called consumers.

Here is a simple example of a food chain. Grass uses sunlight to produce sugars and proteins so that it can grow. Rabbits eat the grass and get energy from it. Foxes eat rabbits and get energy from them. Foxes are at the “top” of this food chain because nothing eats them. Now imagine that a farmer ploughs the field of grass where the rabbits eat. Some of the rabbits might die. Others will probably move to another location to find food. In either case, there are fewer rabbits. This means less food for the foxes. Thus, the foxes depend on the grass in a way, even though they don’t eat the grass directly.

A In the natural world, of course, there are no simple food chains like this. Rabbits eat lots of plants, and foxes eat lots of things besides rabbits. B Additionally, there are lots of other creatures in nature that eat grass and rabbits! C However, that does not mean the idea of a simple food chain is not important. D

Food chains are still a useful concept to consider, even if they are an oversimplification of reality. Take, for example, the case of DDT’s effect on consumers. In the 1960s, DDT, a common pesticide at that time, was used widely by farmers. Farmers used it a little at a time, so large animals were not harmed. However, once DDT was used in a field, it did not go away. When it rained, it was washed into rivers and lakes. Plankton, tiny water organisms, absorbed the DDT. Then fish ate the plankton. Then larger fish ate lots of the smaller fish, so the concentration of DDT in the larger fish became higher. Then, birds such as the osprey ate large quantities of the larger fish.

In the end, the concentration of DDT in the osprey was 10 million times greater! The DDT did not kill the osprey, though. It just made the female osprey lay eggs with very thin shells. The shells were so thin that when the mother sat on the eggs, they broke. Thus, the osprey population became greatly reduced before rebounding to today’s levels.

31. According to the passage, which of the following is true about Elton's idea of food chains?