IELTS Academic Reading Test 11

In the 15th century, the Italian merchant Cyriacus Of Ancona journeyed in search Of the Mediterranean’s classical past. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for today’s cultural holidays. Today we take it for granted that we travel around the world to admire the monuments of the past. We prepare for such trips by reading about what we are going to see, set out on the journey with a good idea of how we will get there and where we will stay and have a sense of what we will encounter on location. Cyriacus of Ancona (1391-1452), the first cultural tourist since antiquity, lacked these advantages when, in the first half of the 15th century, he sailed around the Mediterranean in search of the remains of Greek and Roman civilizations.

Cyriacus first became fascinated by ancient monuments while walking in his home city Ancona and looking at the marble arch, erected in AD 115, to the Roman Emperor Trajan. He suddenly saw the structure in a new light. He no longer saw it as just a familiar and generally overlooked landmark, but as a doorway to the wonders of ancient imperial Rome. Not many people of Cyriacus’s time were interested in historical travel, they generally ignored old buildings and structures, or worse, dismantled them for their building materials.

Cyriacus decided to see the world for himself and to record details of whatever other antiquities remained to be discovered. His training as a merchant did not prepare him for this vocation; He did not know ancient languages. history or art. However, he set out to solve these failings, first by learning Latin at the age of 30 and then adding ancient Greek. Having done this, he then set off on voyages around the Mediterranean to find, investigate and understand ancient cultures from their buildings, sculptures and inscriptions. Thus he became the first archaeologist and cultural tourist. predating other antiquarians by some 200 years. Travel in the 15th century, however, was anything but simple or enjoyable. Overland journeys by foot or mule along bad roads, under constant threat from bandits, were bad; voyages by seas were even worse. When the weather cooperated, sailing went relatively smoothly. ships proceeded along coasts from one recognizable landmark to another. However, when there was no wind the ship did not move. Strong winds were no friends either, they drenched the ship with lashing waves and blew it off course. Water swamped the desk, splashed into the cabins and soaked mattresses, clothes and food.

Remarkably, Cyriacus never complained about the miseries of travel. Optimistic by nature, he endured such hardships unafraid and saw opportunities where other people saw setbacks. Among many of the important records made by Cyriacus was his crucial documenting, in 1431. of the remains of Cyzicus, an ancient Roman city that had relied on commerce for its financial success.

He hired a local person to take him to the site and then had to work out for himself the significance of the ruins he was looking at because there was no guidebook on ancient architecture to help him. Indeed, his contemporary knowledge about the ruins. Cyzicus had been a splendid city in its prime. Unfortunately, the area was highly seismic and in AD 123 the city was so devastated by a major earthquake that, when the Roman Emperor Hadrian visited it the following year. he was so saddened that he decided to subsidize a campaign to reconstruct Cyzicus. He made a substantial donation for a new temple to the Roman Jupiter. Cyriacus thought the ruined city was awe-inspiring. He found the remains of the temple and examined it in great detail, looking for clues in ancient texts to help him understand what he was seeing. He sketched the great doorway adorned with carved foliage and mythological characters. Cyriacu’s account of this temple is the only record of this building as in the following centuries it was entirely stripped of all its stonework and all that remains is its base.

Cyriacus also Visited mainland Greece. in 1436, When no one went to Greece in order to see the country’s ancient ruins. One of his destinations was the sanctuary of Delphi. The ancient Greeks considered Delphi as being located in the most beautiful spot in Greece. When Cyriacus arrived at the site of Delphi, however, he found war, earthquakes and avalanches had all but obliterated its ruins. Determined to find any ancient traces, Cyriacus spent six days walking all over the areas, peering at odd stone blocks sticking out of the ground, running his hands over inscriptions to trace fragments of words. and trying to puzzle out the few surviving structural remains. Climbing uphill towards the rocks that tower over the site, he came upon a theater built into the slope. Soon after his visit, the site was buried by a rockslide and was not seen again until archaeologists began to systematically excavate the area in the late 19th century. Cyriacus had hoped to visit Egypt and Ethiopia but he never got there. However, in his life he did record for posterity countless ancient monuments around the Mediterranean, paving the way for future archaeologists and cultural tourists.

Questions 1–7

• Cyriacus was unable to research his journeys before he left.
• The Roman Emperor Trajan built the city of Ancona.
• Respect for ancient architecture was widespread in the 15th century.
• Cyriacus’s experience as a merchant gave him the skills he needed to investigate the ancient world.
• Before leaving on his journey, Cyriacus studied ancient languages.
• Travelling by sea in the 15th century was easier than travelling on land.
• Cyriacus tried to make his fellow sea travelers more comfortable

Questions 8–13

• Ancient Roman and Greek sites visited by Cyriacus The city of Cyzicus • The wealth of the city had come from ___ • to the ancient city ruins not available when visited by Cyriacus. • The city was destroyed by a powerful in AD 123 • A year later Emperor Hadrian supported a to rebuild the city • Cyriacus found part of the temple, which was built in the time of Emperor Hadrian, and made drawings of the to the temple and its decorative carvings. The sanctuary of Delphi • By the 15th century Delphi had almost disappeared due to natural disasters and

A What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Almost all living organisms are uniquely adapted to the environment in which they live, some so well that scientists study them in the hope of replicating their natural designs in technology. This process, called biomimetics, is the crossroads where nature and engineering meet.

B Perhaps the best example of biomimetics is Velcro. In 1948 a Swiss scientist, George de Mestral, had trouble removing a plant’s prickle which was stuck to his dog’s fur, so he studied it under a microscope. Impressed by the stickiness of the prickle’s hooks, he copied the design, engineering a fastener made of two pieces. One piece has stiff hooks like the prickly seedcase, while the other has soft loops that allow the hooks to stick. De Mestral named his invention Velcro — a combination of the words “velour” and “crochet”.

C Andrew Parker, a research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, is a leading proponent of biomimetics — applying designs from nature to problems in engineering, materials science, medicine and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes — studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he cannot say which company is behind it. He is working to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms (a type of algae) and, with the British Ministry of Defence, to emulate the water-repellent properties of these same creatures. He even draws inspiration from nature’s past: on the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber that he studied in a museum in Poland, Parker noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. This feature is now being built into solar panels.

D To Parker, every species, even those that have become extinct, is a success story, optimised by millions of years of natural selection. He asks: why not learn from this? Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colours of certain birds derive not from pigments but from neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural colour, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint and holograms on credit cards. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal light bulb wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat), and bombardier beetles have a highly effective combustion chamber in their posterior that heats chemicals and fires them at would-be predators.

E For all nature’s sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from simple substances like keratin, calcium carbonate and silica, which are manipulated into structures of fantastic complexity and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this substance into walls of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armour 3,000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living material’s exceptional properties is critical to re-creating it synthetically.

F Though impressed by biological structures, Robert Cohen, an engineer at MIT in the United States, considers biology merely a starting point for innovation. “You don’t have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a water-collection device, or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating,” Cohen says. “The biological structure provides a clue to what is useful. But maybe you can do it better.” Ultimately he considers a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. “Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient,” says Cohen. “What I want to know is, can we actually transform these structures into something with true utility in the real world?”

G This, of course, is the tricky bit. Potentially one of the most useful embodiments of natural design is the bio-inspired robot, which could be deployed in places where people would be too conspicuous, bored to tears, or killed. But such robots are notoriously hard to build. Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and manoeuvrable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations.

H The key to making his micromechanical flying insect (MFI) work, Fearing says, is not to attempt to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying. “The fly’s wing is driven by 20 muscles, some of which only fire every fifth wing beat, and all you can do is wonder, ‘What on earth just happened there?’” says Fearing. “Some things are just too mysterious and complex to be able to replicate.”

I For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practise it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products, and arguably only one household word — Velcro. Some biomimeticists blame industry, whose short-term expectations about how soon a project should be completed and become profitable clash with the time-consuming nature of biomimetics research. Others lament the difficulty in coordinating joint work among diverse academic and industrial disciplines, which is required to understand natural structures and mimic what they do. But the main reason biomimetics has not yet come of age is that from an engineering standpoint, nature is famously, fabulously complex. For the present, people cannot hope to reproduce such intricate nanopuzzles. Nonetheless, the gap with nature is gradually closing.

Questions 14–19

• how an organism turns a basic material into something incredibly strong
• a claim that biomimetics has had limited commercial impact so far
• a difficulty that led to a researcher’s accidental discovery
• an example of nature being far more efficient than a common household object
• an ancient specimen that inspired a modern innovation
• situations where it is preferable to replace a human with a machine

Questions 20–22

• All living things provide something useful for humans to discover.
• Natural designs are sometimes impossible for people to copy.
• Biomimetics achieves nothing unless it has a practical application.

Questions 23–26

• Andrew Parker is studying the shiny surface of diatoms in order to develop ___.
• Paint companies are interested in the way some ___ get their colour.
• Bombardier beetles protect themselves by shooting hot ___ at their enemies.
• One scientist is studying the ___ to build a tiny robot that can help people in danger.

A  Peter Brigg discovers how talc from Luzenac’s Trimouns in France finds its way into food and agricultural products – from chewing gum to olive oil. High in the French Pyrenees, some 1,700m above sea level, lies Trimouns, a huge deposit of hydrated magnesium silicate – talc to you and me. Talc from Trimouns, and from ten other Luzenac mines across the globe, is used in the manufacture of a vast array of everyday products extending from paper, paint and plaster to cosmetics, plastics and car tyres. And of course, there is always talc’s best-known end use: talcum powder for babies’ bottoms. But the true versatility of this remarkable mineral is nowhere better displayed than in its sometimes surprising use in certain niche markets in the food and agriculture industries.

B  Take, for example, the chewing gum business. Every year, Talc de Luzenac France – which owns and operates the Trimouns mine and is a member of international Luzenac Group (the art of Rio Tinto minerals) – supplies about 6,000 tones of talc to chewing gum manufacturers in Europe. “We’ve been selling to this sector of the market since the 1960s,” says Laurent Fournier, a sales manager in Luzenac’s Specialties business unit in Toulouse. “Admittedly, in terms of our total annual sales of talc, the amount we supply to chewing gum manufacturers is relatively small, but we see is as a valuable niche market: one where customers place a premium on securing suppliers from a reliable, high-quality source. Because of this, long term allegiance to a proven supplier is very much a feature of this sector of the talc market.” Switching sources – in the way that you might choose to buy, say, paperclips from Supplier A rather than from Supplier B – is not an easy option for chewing gum manufacturers,” Fournier says. “The cost of reformulating is high, so when customers are using a talc grade that works, even if it’s expensive, they are understandably reluctant to switch.”

C  But how is talc actually used in the manufacture of chewing gum? Patrick Delord, an engineer with a degree in agronomics, who has been with Luzenac for 22 years and is now senior market development manager, Agriculture and Food, in Europe, explains that chewing gums has four main components. “The most important of them is the gum base,” he says. “It’s the gum base that puts the chew into chewing gum. It binds all the ingredients together, creating a soft, smooth texture. To this the manufacturer the adds sweeteners, softeners and flavourings. Our talc is used as a filler in the gum base. The amount varies between, say, ten and 35 per cent, depending on the type of gum. Fruit flavoured chewing gum, for example, is slightly acidic and would react with the calcium carbonate that the manufacturer might otherwise use as a filler. Talc, on the other hand, makes an ideal filler because it’s non-reactive chemically. In the factory, talc is also used to dust the gum base pellets and to stop the chewing gum sticking during the lamination and packing process,” Delord adds.

D  The chewing gum business is, however, just one example of talc’s use in the food sector. For the past 20 years or so, olive oil processors in Spain have been taking advantage of talc’s unique characteristics to help them boost the amount of oil they extract from crushed olives. According to Patrick Delord, talc is especially useful for treating what he calls “difficult” olives. After the olives are harvested – preferably early in the morning because their taste is better if they are gathered in the cool of the day – they are taken to the processing plant. There they are crushed and then stirred for 30-45 minutes. In the old days, the resulting paste was passed through an olive press but nowadays it’s more common to add water and centrifuge the mixture to separate the water and oil from the solid matter. The oil and water are then allowed to settle so that the olive oil layer can be decanted off and bottle. “Difficult” olives are those that are more reluctant than the norm to yield up their full oil content. This may be attributable to the particular species of olive, or to its water content and the time of year the olives are collected – at the beginning and the end of the season their water content is often either too high or too low. These olives are easy to recognize because they produce a lot of extra foam during the stirring process, a consequence of an excess of a fine sold that acts as a natural emulsifier. The oil in this emulsion is lost when the water is disposed of. Not only that, if the wastewater is disposed of directly into local fields – often the case in many smaller processing operations – the emulsified oil may take some time to biodegrade and so be harmful to the environment.

E  “If you add between a half and two per cent of talc by weight during the stirring process, it absorbs the natural emulsifier in the olives and so boosts the amount of oil you can extract,” says Delord. “In addition, talc’s flat, ‘platey’ structure helps increase the size of the oil droplets liberated during stirring, which again improves the yield. However, because talc is chemically inert, it doesn’t affect the colour, taste, appearance or composition of the resulting olive oil.”

F  If the use of talc in olive oil processing and in chewing gum is long-established, new applications in the food and agriculture industries are also constantly being sought by Luzenac. One such promising new market is fruit crop protection, being pioneered in the US. Just like people, fruit can get sunburned. In fact, in very sunny regions up to 45 per cent of a typical crop can be affected by heat stress and sunburn. However, in the case of fruit, it’s not so much the ultraviolet rays which harm the crop as the high surface temperature that the sun’s rays create.

G  To combat this, farmers normally use either chemicals or spray a continuous fine canopy of mist above the fruit trees or bushes. The trouble is, this uses a lot of water – normally a precious commodity in hot, sunny areas – and it is therefore expensive. What’s more, the ground can quickly become waterlogged. “So our idea was to coat the fruit with talc to protect it from the sun,” says Greg Hunter, a marketing specialist who has been with Luzenac for ten years. “But to do this, several technical challenges had first to be overcome. Talc is very hydrophobic: it doesn’t like water. So in order to have a viable product we needed a wettable powder – something that would go readily into suspension so that is could be sprayed onto the fruit. It also had to break the surface tension of the cutin (the natural waxy, waterproof layer on the fruit) and of course, it had to wash off easily when the fruit was harvested. No-one’s going to want an apple that’s covered in talc.”

H  Initial trials in the state of Washington in 2003 showed that when the product was sprayed onto Granny Smith apples, it reduced their surface temperature and lowered the incidence of sunburn by up to 60 per cent. Today the new product, known as Envelop Maximum SPF, is in its second commercial year on the US market. Apple growers are the primary target although Hunter believes grape growers represent another sector with long term potential. He is also hopeful of extending sales to overseas markets such as Australia, South America and southern Europe.

Questions 27–32

• Talc is used to increase the size of drops.
• Talc is applied to reduce foaming.
• Talc is employed as a filler of base.
• Talc is modified and prevented sunburn.
• Talc is added to stop the stickiness.
• Talc is used to increase production.

Questions 33–38

• Spanish olive oil industry has been using talc in the oil extraction process for about ___ years. It is useful in dealing with difficult olives which often produce a high amount of because of the high content of solid materials. When smaller factories release , it could be to the environment because it is hard to and usually takes time as it contains emulsified. However, talc power added in the process is able to absorb the emulsifier oil. It improves the oil extraction production because with the aid of talc powder, size of oil increased.

Questions 39–40

• In which process is talc used to clear the stickiness of chewing gum?
• Which group of farmers does Envelop intend to target in a long view?