Cambridge 9 Reading Test 1 - Answers With Explanation

1. It was his teacher who first spotted his talent: "His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by... Michael Faraday" — Faraday was not the first to recognise it — FALSE.

2. Faraday's lectures "fired the young chemist's enthusiasm further", but nothing says Faraday suggested Perkin enrol at the Royal College of Chemistry — NOT GIVEN.

3. The reverse is true: "within two years, he became Hofmann's youngest assistant" — Hofmann employed Perkin, not the other way round — FALSE.

4. Perkin made his famous discovery "during his vacation in 1856", aged just 18 (born 1838) — TRUE.

5. Quinine is "derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America" — "native to" does not mean the tree grows exclusively there — NOT GIVEN.

6. "He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product" — TRUE.

7. The passage quotes Pasteur's words about Perkin's luck ("chance favours only the prepared mind") but never says Perkin was inspired by Pasteur's own discoveries — NOT GIVEN.

8. "The purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich could afford it."

9. "The most fascinating of all Perkin's reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had commercial possibilities."

10. "Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve."

11. "He asked advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it."

12. "The company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugénie of France... mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country."

13. "In what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria."

14. Paragraph B sets out the ground rules of the search: "we make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us" — the assumptions behind SETI, heading iv.

15. Paragraph C reasons that "perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet", so "our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100 light years away" — the likelihood of life on other planets, heading vii.

16. Paragraph D explains why "radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date have concentrated on" them — seeking radio transmissions, heading i.

17. Paragraph E opens the debate on "how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien civilisation" and concludes "we should not reply immediately" — appropriate responses, heading ii.

18. "Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that... their ages will range from zero to several billion years."

19. "So all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range."

20. "This part of the project is searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals."

21. "It is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global pollution" — YES.

22. "We make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us" — YES.

23. The passage mentions Australian searches at Parkes and the separate American NASA-funded project, but never states the two collaborated — NOT GIVEN.

24. "Until now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have been searched" — NO.

25. The passage only says Congress "voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years"; no criticism from Congress is mentioned — NOT GIVEN.

26. "Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately" — NO.

27. "We mustn't forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened."

28. "Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and reproduction."

29. Whales still breathe air, "having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation."

30. "The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water" (of ichthyosaurs).

31. "Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago" — the passage never says they were among the very first group to do so — NOT GIVEN.

32. "Sometimes it's obvious... With turtles it is a little less obvious" — determining habitat from fossils isn't always difficult — FALSE.

33. "The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water" — appearance reveals habitat — TRUE.

34. "Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier... obtained three measurements in these particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises."

35. "They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the three measurements against one another."

36. "All the land tortoise species formed a tight cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle."

37. Data was added from "some species that spend time both in water and on land" — "these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph."

38. "These amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately half way between the 'wet cluster'... and the 'dry cluster'."

39. "Their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land tortoises."

40. "Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return" — they moved from sea to land more than once, matching option D.