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TEXT B Britain’s east midlands were once the picture of English countryside, alive with flocks, shepherds, skylarks and buttercups the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed, and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks are now rare. "Farmers kill anything that affects production," says Marsh. "Agriculture is too efficient." Anecdotal evidence of a looming crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40 years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies are the furthest along--71 percent of Britain’s 58 species are shrinking in number, and some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain’s grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species are on the path to extinction. There’s hardly a corner of the country’s ecology that isn’t affected by this downward spiral. The problem would be bad enough if it were merely local, but it’s not: because Britain’s temperate ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it’s the best microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded alarms about species’ extinction in the past, but always specific to a particular animal or place--whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a "biodiversity hot spot" with a unique ecology. But in Britain, "the main drivers of change are the same processes responsible for species’ declines worldwide," says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world’s species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousand deaths--from overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen is released when fossil fuels burn in cars and power plants--but also when ecologically rich heath lands are plowed and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global implications. Wildlife is getting blander. "We don’t know which species are essential to the web of life so we’re taking a massive risk by eliminating any of them," say’s David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska. Chances are we’ll be seeing the results of this experiment before too long. Which of the following statements is TRUE of Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens’s surveys
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Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will by given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions. Now listen to the interview. Ideally, how much does a hypothetical couple’s 401k amount to over 10 years
TEXT A As a contemporary artist, Jim Dine has often incorporated other people’s photography into his abstract works. But, the 68-year-old American didn’t pick up a camera himself and start shooting until he moved to Berlin in 1995--and once he did, he couldn’t stop. The result is a voluminous collection of images, ranging from early-20th-century style heliogravures to modern-day digital printings, a selection of which are on exhibition at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographic in Paris. They are among his most prized achievements. "I make photographs the way I make paintings," says Dine, "but the difference is, in photography, it’s like lighting a fire every time." Though photography makes up a small slice of Dine’s vast oeuvre, the exhibit is a true retrospective of his career. Dine mostly photographs his own artwork or the subjects that he has portrayed in sculpture, painting and prints including Venus de Milo, ravens and owls, hearts and skulls. There are still pictures of well-used tools in his Connecticut workshop, delightful digital self-portraits and intimate portraits of his sleeping wife, the American photographer Diana Michener. Most revealing and novel are Dine’s shots of his poetry, scribbled in charcoal on walls like graffiti. To take in this show is to wander through Dine’s life: his childhood obsessions, his loves, his dreams. It is a poignant and powerful exhibit that rightly celebrates one of modern art’s most intriguing--and least hyped--talents. When he arrived on the scene in the early 1960s, Dine was seen as a pioneer in the pop-art movement. But he didn’t last long; once pop stagnated, Dine moved on. "Pop art had 1o do with the exterior world," he says. He was more interested, he adds, in "what was going on inside me." He explored his own personality, and from there developed themes. His love for handcrafting grew into a series of artworks incorporating hammers and saws. His obsession with owls and ravens came from a dream he once had. His childhood toy Pinocchio, worn and chipped, appears in some self-portraits as a red and yellow blur flying through the air. Dine first dabbled in photography in the late 1970s, when Polaroid invited him to try out a new large-format camera at its head-quarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He produced a series of colorful, out-of-focus self-portraits, and when he was done, he packed them away. A half dozen of these images in per feet condition--are on display in Paris for the first time. Though masterful, they feel flat when compared with his later pictures. Dine didn’t shoot again until he went to Berlin in the mid ’90s to teach. By then he was ready to embrace photography completely. Michener was his guide: "She opened my eyes to what was possible," he says. "Her approach is so natural and classic. I listened." When it came time to print what he had photo graphed, Dine chose heliogravure, the old style of printing favored by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Curtis and Paul Strand, which gives photographs a warm tone and an almost hand drawn loop like Dine’s etchings. He later tried out the traditional black-and-white silver-gelatin process, then digital photography and jetink printing, which he adores. About the same time, Dine immersed himself into Jungian psychoanalysis. That, in conjunction with his new artistic tack, proved cathartic. "The access photography gives you to your subconscious is so fantastic," he says. "I’ve learned how to bring these images out like a stream of consciousness--something that’s not possible in the same way in drawing or painting because technique always gets in your way." This is evident in the way he works: when Dine shoots, he leaves things alone. Eventually, Dine turned the camera on himself. His self-portraits are disturbingly personal; he opens himself physically and emotionally before the lens. He says such pictures are an attempt to examine himself as well as "record the march of time, what gravity does to the face in everybody. I’m a very willing subject." Indeed, Dine sees photography as the surest path to self-discovery. "I’ve always learned about myself in my art," he says. "But photography expresses me. It’s me. Me. "The Paris exhibit makes that perfectly clear. According the Dine, the difference between painting and photography is that ______.
Question 10 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question. Now listen to the news.
TEXT B Britain’s east midlands were once the picture of English countryside, alive with flocks, shepherds, skylarks and buttercups the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed, and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks are now rare. "Farmers kill anything that affects production," says Marsh. "Agriculture is too efficient." Anecdotal evidence of a looming crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40 years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies are the furthest along--71 percent of Britain’s 58 species are shrinking in number, and some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain’s grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species are on the path to extinction. There’s hardly a corner of the country’s ecology that isn’t affected by this downward spiral. The problem would be bad enough if it were merely local, but it’s not: because Britain’s temperate ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it’s the best microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded alarms about species’ extinction in the past, but always specific to a particular animal or place--whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a "biodiversity hot spot" with a unique ecology. But in Britain, "the main drivers of change are the same processes responsible for species’ declines worldwide," says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world’s species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousand deaths--from overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen is released when fossil fuels burn in cars and power plants--but also when ecologically rich heath lands are plowed and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global implications. Wildlife is getting blander. "We don’t know which species are essential to the web of life so we’re taking a massive risk by eliminating any of them," say’s David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska. Chances are we’ll be seeing the results of this experiment before too long. From the first paragraph, we get the impression that George Marsh ______.
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