PASSAGE 2 - Questions 11–20

IF STATUES COULD TALK

On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, sat on Anakena beach and stared at the enormous human statues there – the moai. The statues are from 4 feet tall to 33 feet tall. Some weigh more than 80 tons. They were carved, a long time ago, with stone tools and then they were moved up to 11 miles to the beach. Tuki stares at their faces and he feels a connection. “This is something that was produced by my ancestors,” he says. “How did they do it?”

The first Polynesians arrived at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), probably by canoe, hundreds of years ago. The island is 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of its nearest inhabited neighbour, Pitcairn. Nowadays 12 flights arrive every week from Chile, Peru and Tahiti. In 2011, 50,000 tourists – ten times the island’s population – flew to Easter Island. Almost all of the jobs on Easter Island depend on tourism. And the tourists go there for only one thing: the moai.

People around the world became curious about the statues after the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl made Easter Island famous, and there are different theories about how the statues were moved to the beach. Many researchers think the statues were pulled along the ground using ropes and wood.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond has suggested that many people were needed to build and move the moai. As a result, the island’s trees were cut down for wood and to create farming land. This open land was fragile and it was soon eroded by the strong winds, so it was very difficult to grow food. The situation was an early example of an ecological disaster, according to Diamond.

On the other hand, archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University Long Beach have a more positive view of the island’s history. They suggest that the inhabitants actually pioneered a type of sustainable farming – they built thousands of circular stone walls, called manavai, and grew food inside them. And their theory about how the moai were moved is that they were “walked” along using a system of only ropes and a few people.

As José Tuki contemplates these enormous statues, he doesn’t mind that there are no definite answers about the history of his island. “I want to know the truth,” he says, “but maybe knowing everything would take its power away.”

11. According to the passage, the Easter Island statues______.

PASSAGE 3 - Questions 21–30

Culture is a word in common use with complex meanings, and is derived, like the term broadcasting, from the treatment and care of the soil and of what grows on it. It is directly related to cultivation and the adjectives cultural and cultured are part of the same verbal complex. A person of culture has identifiable attributes, among them a knowledge of and interest in the arts, literature, and music. Yet the word culture does not refer solely to such knowledge and interest nor, indeed, to education. At least from the 19th century onwards, under the influence of anthropologists and sociologists, the word culture has come to be used generally both in the singular and the plural (cultures) to refer to a whole way of life of people, including their customs, laws, conventions, and values.

Distinctions have consequently been drawn between primitive and advanced culture and cultures, between elite and popular culture, between popular and mass culture, and most recently between national and global cultures. Distinctions have been drawn too between culture and civilization; the latter is a word derived not, like culture or agriculture, from the soil, but from the city. The two words are sometimes treated as synonymous. Yet this is misleading. While civilization and barbarism are pitted against each other in what seems to be a perpetual behavioural pattern, the use of the word culture has been strongly influenced by conceptions of evolution in the 19th century and of development in the 20th century. Cultures evolve or develop. They are not static. They have twists and turns. Styles change. So do fashions. There are cultural processes. What, for example, the word cultured means has changed substantially since the study of classical (that is, Greek and Roman) literature, philosophy, and history ceased in the 20th century to be central to school and university education. No single alternative focus emerged, although with computers has come electronic culture, affecting kinds of study, and most recently digital culture. As cultures express themselves in new forms not everything gets better or more civilized.

The multiplicity of meanings attached to the word made and will make it difficult to define. There is no single, unproblematic definition, although many attempts have been made to establish one. The only non-problematic definitions go back to agricultural meaning (for example, cereal culture or strawberry culture) and medical meaning (for example, bacterial culture or penicillin culture). Since in anthropology and sociology we also acknowledge culture clashes, culture shock, and counter culture, the range of reference is extremely wide.

21. According to the passage, the word “culture” ______.

PASSAGE 4 – Questions 31-40

ARTISANS AND INDUSTRIALIZATION

Before 1815 manufacturing in the United States had been done in homes or shops by skilled artisans. As master craftworkers, they imparted the knowledge of their trades to apprentices and journeymen. In addition, women often worked in their homes part time, making finished articles from raw material supplied by merchant capitalists. After 1815 this older form of manufacturing began to give way to factories with machinery tended by unskilled or semiskilled laborers. Cheap transportation networks, the rise of cities, and the availability of capital and credit all stimulated the shift to factory production.

The creation of a labor force that was accustomed to working in factories did not occur easily. Before the rise of the factory, artisans had worked within the home. Apprentices were considered part of the family, and masters were responsible not only for teaching their apprentices a trade but also for providing them some education and for supervising their moral behaviors. Journeymen knew that if they perfected their skill, they could become respected master artisans with their own shops. Also, skilled artisans did not work by the clock, at a steady pace, but rather in bursts of intense labor alternating with more leisurely time.

The factory changed that. Goods produced by factories were not as finished or elegant as those done by hand, and pride in craftsmanship gave way to the pressure to increase rates of productivity. The new methods of doing business involved a new and stricter sense of time. Factory life necessitated a more regimented schedule, where work began at the sound of a bell and workers kept machines going at a constant pace. At the same time, workers were required to discard old habits, for industrialism demanded a worker who was alert, dependable, and self-disciplined. Absenteeism and lateness hurt productivity and, since work was specialized, disrupted the regular factory routine. Industrialization not only produced a fundamental change in the way work was organized; it transformed the very nature of work.

The first generation to experience these changes did not adopt the new attitudes easily. The factory clock became the symbol of the new work rules. One mill worker who finally quit complained revealingly about “obedience to the ding-dong of the bell - just as though we are so many living machines.” With the loss of personal freedom also came the loss of standing in the community. Unlike artisan workshops in which apprentices worked closely with the masters supervising them, factories sharply separated workers from management. Few workers rose through the ranks to supervisory positions, and even fewer could achieve the artisan’s dream of setting up one’s own business. Even well-paid workers sensed their decline in status.

In this newly emerging economic order, workers sometimes organized to protect their rights and traditional ways of life. Craft workers such as carpenters, printers, and tailors formed unions, and in 1834 individual unions came together in the National Trades’ Union. The labor movement gathered some momentum in the decade before the Panic of 1837, but in the depression that followed, labor’s strength collapsed. During hard times, few workers were willing to strike or engage in collective action. And skilled craftworkers, who spearheaded the union movement, did not feel a particularly strong bond with semiskilled factory workers and unskilled laborers. More than a decade of agitation did finally bring a workday shortened to 10 hours to most industries by the 1850’s, and the courts also recognized workers’ right to strike, but these gains had little immediate impact.

Workers were united in resenting the industrial system and their loss of status, but they were divided by ethnic and racial antagonisms, gender, conflicting religious perspectives, occupational differences, political party loyalties, and disagreements over tactics. For them, the factory and industrialism were not agents of opportunity but reminders of their loss of independence and a measure of control over their lives. As United States society became more specialized and differentiated, greater extremes of wealth began to appear. And as the new markets created fortunes for the few, the factory system lowered the wages of workers by dividing labor into smaller, less skilled tasks.

31. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about articles manufactured before 1815?