You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
On 19 July 1545, English and French fleets engaged in a sea battle off the southern coast of England in an area known as the Solent, located between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Among the English vessels was a warship called the Mary Rose. Built in Portsmouth around 35 years earlier, the ship had a long and successful career, becoming a favorite of King Henry VIII. Accounts of the ship’s sinking vary: while it’s agreed that the Mary Rose was not struck by the French, some believe it was outdated, overladen, and sailing too low in the water, while others suggest it was mishandled by an undisciplined crew. What is undisputed, however, is that the Mary Rose sank in the Solent, taking at least 500 men with her. Efforts to recover the ship following the battle were unsuccessful.
The ship eventually settled on the seabed, lying on her starboard (right) side at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. The hull (the body of the ship) acted as a trap for the sand and mud carried by the Solent currents, causing the starboard side to fill quickly while the port (left) side remained exposed to erosion by marine organisms and mechanical degradation. Due to this, nearly all of the starboard half of the ship survived intact. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire site was covered by a layer of hard gray clay, which minimized further erosion.
In 1836, fishermen in the Solent discovered their equipment had become caught on an underwater obstruction, which turned out to be the Mary Rose. Diver John Deane, who was exploring a nearby wreck, was asked by the fishermen to free their gear. Deane dove down and found their equipment tangled on a timber protruding from the seabed. Upon further exploration, he uncovered more timbers and a bronze gun. Deane continued to dive intermittently at the site until 1840, recovering additional items including more guns, two bows, various timbers, a pump, and several smaller objects.
The Mary Rose then faded from memory until 1965, when military historian and amateur diver Alexander McKee initiated a project called ‘Solent Ships’ in collaboration with the British Sub-Aqua Club. Although the project officially aimed to examine known wrecks in the Solent, McKee’s real goal was to find the Mary Rose. Traditional search techniques proved inadequate, leading McKee to collaborate with Harold E. Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, Edgerton’s side-scan sonar detected a large, unusually shaped object that McKee believed was the Mary Rose.
Subsequent excavations revealed stray pieces of timber and an iron gun, but the real breakthrough came on 5 May 1971, when part of the ship’s frame was uncovered. McKee and his team were certain they had found the wreck, but they were unaware of the treasure trove of well-preserved artifacts hidden within. Interest in the project grew, leading to the formation of The Mary Rose Trust in 1979, with Prince Charles as President and Dr. Margaret Rule as Archaeological Director. Although an excavation in 1978 suggested that raising the hull might be possible, the decision to proceed wasn’t made until January 1982, after all the necessary data had been gathered.
Raising the Mary Rose presented unique challenges due to the fact that the hull was an open shell. As a result, the salvage operation was divided into three distinct stages. First, the hull was attached to a lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. To prevent the hull from being sucked back into the mud, 12 hydraulic jacks were used to raise it a few centimeters over several days, allowing the lifting frame to gradually rise up its four legs. Only once the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame—clear of the seabed—did the operation move to the second stage. In this phase, the lifting frame was connected to a crane hook, and the hull was fully lifted from the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This required precise positioning of the cradle’s legs within the ‘stabbing guides.’ The cradle was custom-designed based on archaeological survey drawings and was equipped with air bags to cushion the hull’s delicate timber framework. The third and final stage involved lifting the entire structure out of the water, with the hull also supported from below. On 11 October 1982, millions of viewers worldwide watched as the skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted from the water, ready to return home to Portsmouth.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Easter Island, or Rapu Nui as it is known locally, is home to several hundred ancient human statues – the moai. After this remote Pacific island was settled by the Polynesians, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai – some of which are ten metres tall and weigh over 7,000 kilos – came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, then transported for many kilometres, without the use of animals or wheels, to massive stone platforms. The identity of the moai builders was in doubt until well into the twentieth century. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, thought the statues had been created by pre-Inca peoples from Peru. Bestselling Swiss author Erich von Daniken believed they were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science – linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence – has definitively proved the moai builders were Polynesians, but not how they moved their creations. Local folklore maintains that the statues walked, while researchers have tended to assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using ropes and logs.
When the Europeans arrived, Rapa Nui was grassland, with only a few scrawny trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, researchers found pollen preserved in lake sediments, which proved the island had been covered in lush palm forests for thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived did those forests disappear. US scientist Jared Diamond believes that the Rapanui people – descendants of Polynesian settlers – wrecked their own environment. They had unfortunately settled on an extremely fragile island – dry, cool, and too remote to be properly fertilised by windblown volcanic ash. When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As trees became scarce and they could no longer construct wooden canoes for fishing, they ate birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Before Europeans arrived, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism, he maintains. The collapse of their isolated civilisation, Diamond writes, is a ’worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future’.
The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interprets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other ways of asserting their dominance. They competed by building ever bigger figures. Diamond thinks they laid the moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails, but that required both a lot of wood and a lot of people. To feed the people, even more land had to be cleared. When the wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began toppling the moai. By the nineteenth century, none were standing.
Archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an ‘ecological catastrophe’ – but they believe the islanders themselves weren’t to blame. And the moai certainly weren’t. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Rapanui went to heroic efforts to protect the resources of their wind-lashed, infertile fields. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks and gardened inside them, and used broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist. In short, Hunt and Lipo argue, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming.
Hunt and Lipo contend that moai-building was an activity that helped keep the peace between islanders. They also believe that moving the moai required few people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, archaeological evidence backs up Rapanui folklore. Recent experiments indicate that as few as 18 people could, with three strong ropes and a bit of practice, easily manoeuvre a 1,000 kg moai replica a few hundred metres. The figures’ fat bellies tilted them forward, and a D-shaped base allowed handlers to roll and rock them side to side.
Moreover, Hunt and Lipo are convinced that the settlers were not wholly responsible for the loss of the island’s trees. Archaeological finds of nuts from the extinct Easter Island palm show tiny grooves, made by the teeth of Polynesian rats. The rats arrived along with the settlers, and in just a few years, Hunt and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island. They would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing palm trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nui’s forest, even without the settlers’ campaign of deforestation. No doubt the rats ate birds’ eggs too. Hunt and Lipo also see no evidence that Rapanui civilisation collapsed when the palm forest did. They think its population grew rapidly and then remained more or less stable until the arrival of the Europeans, who introduced deadly diseases to which islanders had no immunity. Then in the nineteenth century slave traders decimated the population, which shrivelled to 111 people by 1877.
Hunt and Lipo’s vision, therefore, is one of an island populated by peaceful and ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land, rather than by reckless destroyers ruining their own environment and society. ‘Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapu Nui is an unlikely story of success’, they claim. Whichever is the case, there are surely some valuable lessons which the world at large can learn from the story of Rapa Nui.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings, for instance, seems to stimulate the brain’s amygdala. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings, this finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving.
Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from Mondrian’s geometrical blocks of color to Pollock’s seemingly haphazard arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions, such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality would have an even greater impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.
Angelina Hawley-Dolan of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings – either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps, and elephants. They then had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many were labeled incorrectly – volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp’s messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that viewers can sense the artist’s vision in paintings, even if they can’t explain why.
Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that are neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how "powerful" they considered an artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny, and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding the moment of recognition.
And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of color? Mondrian’s works are deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. With the originals, volunteers’ eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the image, but with the altered versions, they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they later rated the work.
In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to compare original paintings with ones that he had altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miró. Vartanian also found that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain areas linked with meaning and interpretation.
In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analyzed the visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but too much results in a kind of “perceptual overload,” according to Forsythe. What’s more, appealing pieces – both abstract and representational – show signs of “fractals,” repeated motifs recurring on different scales. Fractals are common throughout nature, for example, in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process such patterns.
It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer’s moment of creation. This has led some to wonder whether Pollock’s works feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be due to our brain’s “mirror neurons,” which are known to mimic others’ actions. The hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten.
It’s still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics – and these studies are probably only a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art appreciation to a set of scientific laws. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the style of a particular artist, their place in history, and the artistic environment of their time. Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it’s not so different from science, where we are constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.