Part 1
Questions 1-13 The History of Dolls
The History of Dolls
Tracing the world’s oldest plaything, from ancient clay figures to modern vinyl
What is today a simple children’s toy has a surprisingly rich history. Dolls have been a part of humankind for thousands of years. Often depicting religious figures, or used as playthings, early dolls were probably made from primitive materials such as clay, fur, or wood. Dolls constructed of flat pieces of wood, painted with various designs, and with hair made of clay, have often been found in Egyptian graves dating back to 2000 BC. Egyptian tombs of wealthy families have included pottery dolls. Dolls being placed in these graves leads some to believe that they were cherished possessions .
Girls from ancient Greece and Rome offered their wooden dolls to goddesses after they were too ‘grown-up’ to play with dolls. Most ancient dolls that were found in tombs were very simple creations, often made from such materials as clay, rags, wood, or bone. Some of the more unique dolls were made with ivory or wax. The main goal was to make the doll as lifelike as possible. That ideal led to the creation of dolls with movable limbs and removable garments, dating back to 600 BC.
Following the era of the ancient dolls, Europe became a major hub for doll production. These dolls were primarily made of wood. Fewer than 30 examples of primitive wooden stump dolls from England survive today. The Grodnertal area of Germany produced many peg wooden dolls, a type of doll that has very simple peg joints and resembles a clothespin (a device for hanging washing on a clothesline). An alternative to wood was developed in the 1800s.
’Composition’ is a collective term for mixtures of pulped wood or paper that were used to make doll heads and bodies. These mixtures were moulded under pressure, creating a durable doll that could be mass produced. Manufacturers closely guarded the recipes for their mixtures, sometimes using strange ingredients like ash or eggshells. Papier-mâché, a type of composition, was one of the most popular mixtures.
In addition to wooden dolls, wax dolls grew in popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Much in Germany was a major manufacturing center for wax dolls. Wax dollmakers would model a doll’s head in wax or clay, and then cover it with plaster to create a mould. Then they would pour melted wax into the cast. The wax for the head would be very thin, no more than 3 mm. Some of the most distinctive wax dolls were created in England between 1850 and 1930. One of the first dolls that portrayed a baby was made in England from wax at the basinsion of the 10th century.
Around the same time porcelain became popular. It is made by firing special clays in a kiln at more than 2372 degrees Fahrenheit (1300°C), and only a few clays can withstand firing at such high temperatures. Porcelain is used generically to refer to both china and bisque dolls; china is glazed , whereas bisque is unglazed. Germany, France, and Denmark started creating china heads for dolls in the 1840s. These china heads were replaced in the 1860s by ones made of bisque . Bisque, which is porcelain fired twice with colour added to it after the first firing, looked more like skin than china did.
In France, the bébé was popular in the 1880s, and it has become a highly sought after doll today. The bébé, first made in the 1850s, was different from its predecessors because it depicted a younger girl. Until then, most French dolls were representations of adults. Although the French dolls were unrivalled in their artistry, German bisque dolls became quite popular because they were not as expensive. Kammer & Reinhardt introduced a bisque character doll in the 1900s, starting a trend of creating realistic dolls.
For many centuries, rag dolls were made by mothers for their children. The term ‘rag doll’ refers generically to dolls made of any fabric. ‘Cloth doll’ refers to a subset of rag dolls made of linen or cotton. Commercially produced rag dolls were first introduced in the 1850s by English and American manufacturers. Although not as sophisticated as dolls made from other materials, rag dolls were well loved, often as a child’s first toy.
Dollmaking did not become an industry in the United States until after the Civil War in the 1860s. Doll production was concentrated in the New England region of the United States, with dolls made from a variety of materials such as leather, rubber, papier-mâché, and cloth. Celluloid was developed in the state of New Jersey in the late 1860s and was used to manufacture dolls until the mid-1950s. German, French, American, and Japanese factories churned out cheaply produced celluloid dolls in mass quantities. However, celluloid fell out of favour because of its extreme flammability and propensity to fade in bright light.
After World War I, doll makers experimented with plastics. Hard plastic dolls were manufactured in the 1940s. They resembled composition dolls, but they were much more durable . Other materials used in doll manufacturing included rubber, foam rubber, and vinyl in the 1950s and 1960s. Vinyl changed doll making, allowing doll makers to root hair into the head, rather than using wigs or painting the hair. Although most dolls are now mass-manufactured using these modern materials, many modern doll makers are still using the techniques and craftsmanship of earlier centuries, creating limited-edition dolls that are highly prized by collectors. These handmade dolls often reflect traditional methods, emphasising fine detail and artistic quality over mass production.
Questions 1-6
Complete the notes below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1–6 on your answer sheet.
The earliest dolls
Earliest known dolls
• Represented religious figures
• Used as toys
• Egypt 2000 BC
• Bodies were made of 1 .
• 2 was used for the hair
Ancient Greece and Rome
• Dolls were given to 3 by older girls
600 BC
• Realistic dolls had separate clothes and 4 that could be put in different positions
17th and 18th centuries
• Dolls made of 5
• Moulds made of plaster
1800s
• 6 became more common • New manufacturing process developed
• Recipes for these mixtures kept secret
Questions 7-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 7–13 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
7. Bisque dolls appear less realistic than dolls made of china.
8. French dolls tended to cost more than German bisque dolls.
9. The first rag dolls were manufactured in the 1850s.
10. Only dolls made of cotton or linen are classified as cloth dolls.
11. Dolls made of celluloid tended to lose their colour.
12. Composition dolls lasted longer than the plastic dolls that were made in the 1940s.
13. Doll collectors prefer a doll to be dressed in its original clothing.
Part 2
Questions 14-26 A unique golden textile
A unique golden textile
How the silk of more than a million wild spiders became a single piece of cloth
A A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce this golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
B Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric which is chemically related to nylon. It is very tough and durable and used in bullet-proof vests. Kevlar is also resistant to wear, tear, and heat and has absolutely no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar’s aramid filaments, and greater than that of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand of spider silk long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). Spider silk is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 per cent of its length without breaking. It can hold its strength below --40°C. This gives it a very high toughness, which equals that of commercial fibres.
C Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce. Unlike silkworms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together. According to Peers, there’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 per cent of the properties of natural spider silk.
D Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboue, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboue built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them. The spiders were temporarily restrained, their silk extracted, and then let go. Peers managed to build a replica of this 24-spider silking machine that was used at the turn of the century, said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. ‘When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-coloured silk started coming out’, Godley said.
E But to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their plan. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are overwhelming. To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders, Godley said, because they bite. By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden colour of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June. Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and wove it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been silked, they were released back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. We can go back and re-silk the same spiders, he said. It’s like the gift that never stops giving.
F Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk, or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical product, or an alternative to Kevlar armour. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria or even cows and goats to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful. Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinneret, spiders apply force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and transform it into solid silk. When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a transformation from liquid to solid, said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, Ohio, US, who was not involved in creating the textile. Scientists simply can’t replicate the efficiency with which a spider produces silk. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet. For now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.
Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 14–19 on your answer sheet.
* Drag a heading and drop it into the blank space.
Questions 20-23
Look at the following statements (Questions 20–23) and the list of researchers below. Match each statement with the correct researcher, A, B or C. NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of Researchers
A. Simon Peers
B. Nicholas Godley
C. Todd Blackledge
20. It takes a tremendous number of spiders to make a small amount of silk.
20
21. Scientists want to use the qualities of spider silk for medical purposes.
21
22. Scientists are making some progress in their efforts to manufacture spider silk.
22
23. Spider silk compares favourably to materials known for their strength.
23
Questions 24-26
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 24–26 on your answer sheet.
Producing spider silk in the lab
Both scientists and manufacturers are interested in producing silk for many different purposes. Some researchers have tried to grow silk by introducing genetic material into 24 and some animals. But these experiments have been somewhat disappointing. It is difficult to make spider silk in a lab setting because the silk comes from a liquid protein made in a 25 inside the spider’s body. When a spider spins silk, it causes a 26 that turns this liquid into solid silk. Scientists cannot replicate this yet.
Part 3
Questions 27-40 Rights for apes
Rights for apes
Humans have rights, other animals don’t -- no matter how human-like they are. Kate Douglas investigates the controversial campaign to get that changed
A growing number of people across the world are attempting to persuade governments to grant great apes rudimentary ‘human rights’. They argue that great apes are enough like us to deserve special treatment over other animals. The campaign has gathered momentum over the past few years and is stirring up a good deal of controversy. Various religious groups and the human rights charity Amnesty International point out that we have a long way to go to secure rights for humans before we start thinking about animals. Other critics argue that the proposal is not radical enough and should be extended to other intelligent social animals such as elephants and dolphins, and potentially to all animals.
The Great Ape Project (GAP) is an international organisation that has been lobbying for legal rights for apes since 1993. The project has had some degree of success. New Zealand considered the possibility of extending human rights to great apes in 1999 as part of its new animal welfare bill. In the end, the bill did not go as far as granting apes individual legal rights, but did give them special status. Testing or teaching involving apes now requires government approval and must demonstrate that any likely benefits are not outweighed by harm to the individual animal. In effect that means no biomedical testing, only studies that increase our understanding of these species. The practice of using apes in biomedical research has also effectively ended in Europe now. So with all this legal protection in place, what’s the big deal about individual rights? GAP campaigners say that these regulations don’t go far enough and they still allow people who own great apes to lawfully neglect their needs.
Michele Stumpe, a lawyer based in the US, points out that without rights, animals are mere property and their owners have no obligation to consider their best interests. Legally, however, only ‘persons’ can have ‘rights’, which is why the law needs to be changed to recognise the ‘personhood’ of apes.
Stumpe says that one reason for the resistance is the use of terms like ‘rights’ and ‘personhood’. It seems like a radical idea and that scares people, but when we talk about rights, it really just means protection in layman’s terms, she says. For the philosopher Peter Singer (Princeton University), the opposition runs deeper than just semantics. He says the great apes are ‘the victims of arbitrary discrimination’, or what he calls ‘speciesism’. He makes an argument on moral grounds for extending human rights to all beings that show intelligence and awareness -- including some level of self-awareness -- and have emotional and social needs. That means going beyond the boundaries of our own species -- and therein lies the problem. ‘It’s that gulf between humans and animals that people want to maintain,’ he says. Others take a similar view. It requires a radical shift in people’s ideas about themselves, according to Ian Redmond, chief consultant for the UN Great Apes Survival Project.
Gary Francione, a leading animal-rights lawyer from Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and a member of the original GAP group, calls it ‘spiritual superiority’. ‘We just think we’re special because we’re human.’
Those less sympathetic to the animal rights agenda see things rather differently. Some argue that beyond the species barrier lies a slippery slope. ‘Mice share around 90 per cent of our DNA: should they get 90 per cent of human rights?’ asks geneticist Steve Jones from University College, London. He is concerned that giving rights to great apes would be the beginning of the end of all research with animals. Singer accepts that there is a question about where you draw the line, but sees no reason for that to stop society from taking the first step. ‘The strongest and clearest case is with great apes, but we’re open to arguments that it could be extended to other mammals,’ he says.
Some take it even further. Francione no longer supports the idea of extending rights to great apes on the basis that their minds are like ours. Instead, he argues that all sentient beings should have just one right: the right not to be treated as the property of humans. He believes his approach has the advantage of simplicity, because sentience -- the ability to feel pain or distress -- is an objective quality, and because it would bring an end to captive animals altogether. It would make it illegal to breed any animals, including agricultural animals and even pets. His idea highlights a logical inconsistency at the heart of the GAP agenda: it seeks to give legal rights to animals but does not give them the right to be free. Francione’s approach is certainly several steps too far for many people.
It is not clear what GAP’s proposals mean for wild apes, and even some of the animals’ most outspoken defenders are not convinced that giving them human rights is the best way to protect them. Primatologist Frans de Waal, from the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, US, says ‘The concept of rights applies only to those capable of carrying responsibilities within our society.’ He believes the emphasis should be on the obligations humans have towards other animals, both for their care and for their conservation.
Redmond, on the other hand, suggests that applying GAP principles to wild populations might lead to increased penalties for killing apes or even give them land rights, though he admits the latter is unlikely. At the very least, an increased regard for the well-being of apes among people in western countries would lead to a decreased demand for animals being kidnapped from the wild and then exported to zoos, wildlife parks or private collectors.
Questions 27-31
Complete the summary using the list of words, A–J, below. Write the correct letter, A–J, in boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet.
Rights for great apes
* Drag a word and drop it into the blank space.
Some people believe that the campaign to grant human rights to the great apes does not go far enough. They want it to include other 27 that are judged to demonstrate understanding. One country introduced 28 which went some way to protecting the apes. As a result, anyone who is interested in using apes for 29 must first obtain the official go-ahead from the state. They will have to prove that any advances gained do not come at the expense of the animal’s 30. So researchers can now only work on projects that may lead to the acquisition of further 31 about the way apes function and interact.
Questions 32-36
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32. Why does Stumpe refer to ‘layman’s terms’?
33. According to Singer, what is the root of the problem?
34. If Francione’s current idea was implemented,
35. What is the writer’s attitude to Francione’s theory?
36. How does de Waal change the perspective of the animal rights discussion?
Questions 37-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
37. Particularly valuable animals in captivity are more likely to be protected by law.
38. de Waal highlights the need to give human rights to higher order animals.
39. If GAP beliefs were implemented in the wild, the survival rate of the larger apes would increase.
40. If people in Western countries, for example, learned to consider apes’ needs, fewer apes would be captured for sale.