C2 Reading Practice Test 2

Jane Goodall's career is often described as improbable, which is a polite way of saying that it did not follow the rules. Born in London in 1934, she was a child who preferred earthworms to dolls, and who famously hid in a henhouse for hours, as a small girl, simply to find out how a hen laid an egg. Her mother, who had been searching anxiously, chose to listen to her excited account rather than scold her. The episode is a fair introduction to a lifetime's habit of watching patiently until the world gave up its secrets. Her prospects, nevertheless, looked unremarkable. Her family could not afford university, so after school she took work as a secretary, a waitress and a film assistant. Her chance came in 1957, when a friend invited her to Kenya. There she met the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who, impressed by her knowledge of animals, hired her as his assistant and eventually sent her to study wild chimpanzees on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. In the summer of 1960, aged twenty-six, she arrived at Gombe, in what is now Tanzania, with a notebook, a pair of binoculars and, because the authorities considered it improper for a young woman to camp alone in the forest, her mother as a companion. The early months produced little. The chimpanzees fled whenever she approached. Gradually, however, through simple persistence, she gained their tolerance, and then her first great discovery: she watched a male she called David Greybeard strip the leaves from a twig and use it to extract termites from a mound. Until then, the making and use of tools had been regarded as one of the defining features of humankind. Leakey is reported to have replied that science must now either redefine "tool", redefine "man", or accept chimpanzees as human. Goodall's methods attracted criticism. She had no first degree when she began; she gave her subjects names instead of numbers; and she wrote about their personalities, emotions and family relationships in terms that some scientists thought unscientific. Her reply was to continue observing carefully and to earn a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1965, one of very few people admitted without a bachelor's degree. In time, her view that animals have individual characters became widely accepted. The research at Gombe, which began in 1960, is regarded as the longest-running continuous study of wild chimpanzees. From the 1980s, however, Goodall turned increasingly from the forest to the lecture hall. Convinced that chimpanzees were losing their habitat, she travelled constantly, reportedly spending most of the year on the road, and founded programmes to encourage young people to look after animals, communities and the environment. For many, the most lasting image of her remains the quiet figure in the forest, waiting.

Travel is, by common consent, one of life's great pleasures, and for many towns and regions it is also the principal source of income. Yet in recent years a new word has entered the vocabulary of local councils and newspaper editors alike: overtourism. It describes places where the number of visitors has grown so large that those who live there feel their daily lives and their surroundings are being diminished. Two voices, equally sincere, dominate the argument. Dilek runs a small guesthouse in a coastal town in southwest Turkey, and she is unapologetic about the industry on which her family depends. "Before tourism came," she says, "young people left. Now they stay. The bakery, the boat captain, the shop that sells ceramics: they all exist because visitors arrive. It is easy for people in big cities to romanticise a quiet village, but quiet does not pay school fees. Besides, who has the right to decide that a place belongs only to those who happen to live there? Beauty is not private property." In her view, the answer lies in better management, such as limiting construction and spreading visitors across the year, rather than in turning anyone away. Ruben, who lives in the old centre of a famous Mediterranean city, sees things differently. "I do not blame the tourists," he says. "I blame a situation where the neighbourhood no longer serves its inhabitants. The grocer has been replaced by a souvenir shop, the flat downstairs is let to a different group of strangers every weekend, and rents have risen so far that my children cannot afford to live here. A city should be a place for living in, not merely looking at." For Ruben, some limits are unavoidable, and he points to Venice, which has begun charging day visitors a fee on selected days, as an experiment worth watching. Neither position can easily be dismissed. Critics of restrictions argue that charges may simply favour wealthy travellers and that a place which closes its doors risks losing the economic life that sustains it. Supporters counter that unregulated growth tends to destroy the very qualities that attracted people in the first place, leaving a town less authentic, more crowded and, in the end, less appealing to visitors as well. Possibly the most promising ideas lie between the extremes: encouraging visitors to travel outside peak months and to explore lesser-known destinations, requiring tourism income to support local services, and protecting housing for permanent residents. None of these measures is dramatic, but together they suggest that the question is not whether people may travel, but whether the benefits and burdens of travel are fairly shared.

It was not the sort of book that anyone borrowed for pleasure. A Comprehensive Atlas of the Northern Counties, published in 1887 and weighing roughly as much as a small dog, had occupied the same shelf of the university library for so long that the shelf seemed to have grown around it. Tomasz had requested it for one reason only: his thesis, now in its fourth year, depended on a single disputed boundary, and the atlas was reputed to give the clearest account of it. The account, as it turned out, was indeed admirably clear. It was also, as he discovered on page 212, contested. In the margin beside the relevant paragraph, in a small and slanting pencil hand that had faded to the colour of dust, someone had written, "Nonsense. The author has never walked this road." Below it, in what looked like the same hand but a darker pencil, the same reader had added, evidently after reflection, "Or has, and chooses to forget it." Tomasz sat back in his chair. In his experience, the marginalia in library books consisted largely of underlining, exclamation marks and, in one memorable volume, the remark "Who cares?", which he had found strangely liberating. But this was something else: a stubborn, courteous argument conducted with an author who had been unable to reply for well over a century. Over the following hours, he found other notes. A correction to a spelling of a village. A small drawing of a bridge. On page 240, beside a passage describing an upland farm, the words: "My grandmother was born here. They say the spring has never failed." He read this several times. The reader had not been checking a fact; he or she had been quietly reclaiming a place from the abstraction of the printed page. It occurred to Tomasz that the disputed boundary in his thesis was a similar matter. For three years he had treated it as an academic puzzle, an assemblage of documents to be weighed against one another. It had not once crossed his mind that for someone, at some point, it had been the edge of a field. He turned to his own notes, found the paragraph in which he had dismissed a rival theory as "implausible, though not demonstrably false", and deleted the word "implausible". Then, after a pause that was longer than it needed to be, he took a soft pencil from his bag, turned back to page 212, and wrote beneath the other two comments, in letters smaller than he intended: "Agreed. Thank you." He returned the atlas at closing time. The librarian, who had seen him arrive with the despair of the thesis-writer and leave with something resembling cheerfulness, said nothing. But she watched him go, and then, because she was a person of unusual curiosity, she took the atlas from the return trolley and opened it.