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Traditional farming system in Africa
A
By tradition land in Luapula is not owned by individuals, but as in many
other parts of Africa is allocated by the headman or head woman of a
village to people of either sex, according to need. Since land is generally
prepared by hand, one ulupwa cannot take on a very large area; in this
sense, the land has not been a limiting resource over large parts of the
province. The situation has already changed near the main townships, and
there has long been a scarcity of land for cultivation in the Valley. In these
areas registered ownership patterns are becoming prevalent.
B
Most of the traditional cropping in Luapula, as in the Bemba area to the
east, is based on citemene, a system whereby crops are grown on the
ashes of tree branches. As a rule, entire trees are not felled but are
pollarded so that they can regenerate. Branches are cut over an area of
varying size early in the dry season and stacked to dry over a rough circle
about a fifth to a tenth of the pollarded area. The wood is fired before the
rains and in the first year planted with the African cereal finger millet
(Eleusine coracane).
C
During the second season, and possibly for a few seasons more the area is
planted to variously mixed combinations of annuals such as maize,
pumpkins (Telfiria occidentalis) and other cucurbits, sweet potatoes,
groundnuts, Phaseolus beans and various leafy vegetables, grown with a
certain amount of rotation. The diverse sequence ends with vegetable
cassava, which is often planted into the developing last-but-one crop as a
relay.
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D
Richards (1969) observed that the practice of citemene entails a definite
division of labour between men and women. A man stakes out a plot in an
unobtrusive manner since it is considered provocative towards one’s
neighbours to mark boundaries in an explicit way. The dangerous work of
felling branches is the men’s province and involves much pride. Branches
are stacked by the women and fired by the men. Formerly women and
men cooperated in the planting work, but the harvesting was always done
by the women. At the beginning of the cycle little weeding is necessary,
since the firing of the branches effectively destroys weeds. As the cycle
progresses weeds increase and nutrients eventually become depleted to a
point where further effort with annual crops is judged to be not
worthwhile: at this point the cassava is planted, since it can produce a crop
on nearly exhausted soil. Thereafter the plot is abandoned, and a new area
pollarded for the next citemene cycle.
E
When the forest is not available – this is increasingly the case nowadays –
various ridging systems (ibala) are built on small areas, to be planted with
combinations of maize, beans, groundnuts and sweet potatoes, usually
relayed with cassava. These plots are usually tended by women, and
provide subsistence. Where their roots have year-round access to water
tables mango, guava and oil-palm trees often grow around houses,
forming a traditional agroforestry system. In season some of the fruit is
sold by the roadside or in local markets.
F
The margins of dambos are sometimes planted to local varieties of rice
during the rainy season, and areas adjacent to vegetables irrigated with
water from the dambo during the dry season. The extent of cultivation is
very limited, no doubt because the growing of crops under dambo
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conditions calls for a great deal of skill. Near towns, some of the vegetable
produce is sold in local markets.
G
Fishing has long provided a much-needed protein supplement to the diet
of Luapulans, as well as being the one substantial source of cash. Much fish
has dried for sale to areas away from the main waterways. The Mweru and
Bangweulu Lake Basins are the main areas of year-round fishing, but the
Luapula River is also exploited during the latter part of the dry season.
Several previously abundant and desirable species, such as the Luapula
salmon or mpumbu (Labeo altivelis) and pale (Sarotherodon machochir)
have all but disappeared from Lake Mweru, apparently due to
mismanagement.
H
Fishing has always been a far more remunerative activity in Luapula that
crop husbandry. A fisherman may earn more in a week than a bean or
maize grower in a whole season. I sometimes heard claims that the
relatively high earnings to be obtained from fishing induced an ‘easy
come, easy go’ outlook among Luapulan men. On the other hand, someone
who secures good but erratic earnings may feel that their investment in
economically productive activity is not worthwhile because Luapulans fail
to cooperate well in such activities. Besides, a fisherman with spare cash
will find little in the way of working equipment to spend his money on.
Better spend one’s money in the bars and have a good time!
I
Only small numbers of cattle or oxen are kept in the province owing to the
prevalence of the tsetse fly. For the few herds, the dambos provide
subsistence grazing during the dry season. The absence of animal draft
power greatly limits peoples’ ability to plough and cultivate land: a
married couple can rarely manage to prepare by hand-hoeing. Most
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people keep freely roaming chickens and goats. These act as a reserve for
bartering, but may also be occasionally slaughtered for ceremonies or for
entertaining important visitors. These animals are not a regular part of
most peoples’ diet.
J
Citemene has been an ingenious system for providing people with
seasonal production of high-quality cereals and vegetables in regions of
acid, heavily leached soils. Nutritionally, the most serious deficiency was
that of protein. This could at times be alleviated when fish was available,
provided that cultivators lived near the Valley and could find the means of
bartering for dried fish. The citemene/fishing system was well adapted to
the ecology of the miombo regions and sustainable for long periods, but
only as long as the human population densities stayed at low levels.
Although population densities are still much lower than in several
countries of South-East Asia, neither the fisheries nor the forests and
woodlands of Luapula are capable, with unmodified traditional practices,
of supporting the people in a sustainable manner.
Overall, people must learn to intensify and diversify their productive systems
while yet ensuring that these systems will remain productive in the future when
even more people will need food. Increasing overall production of food, though
a vast challenge in itself, will not be enough, however. At the same time,
storage and distribution systems must allow everyone accesses to at least a
moderate share of the total.
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Questions 1-4: Choose NO MORE THAN 2 WORDS from the passage for
each answer.
1 In Luapula land allocation is in accordance with……………
2 The citemene system provides the land with ……………….. where
crops are planted.
3 During the second season, the last planted crop is………………
4 Under suitable conditions, fruit trees are planted near………………
Questions 5-8 : Classify the following items with the correct description.
5 be used in some unusual occasions,
such as celebrations.
A fish 6 cannot thrive for being affected by
B oxen the pests.
C goats 7 be the largest part of creating profit.
8 be sold beyond the local area.
Questions 9-12 : TRUE – FALSE – NOT GIVEN
9 People rarely use animals to cultivate the land.
10 When it is a busy time, children usually took part in the labor force.
11 The local residents eat goats on a regular time.
12 Though citemene has been a sophisticated system, it could not provide
enough protein.
Question 13What is the writer’s opinion about the traditional ways of
practices?
A They can supply the nutrition that people need.
B They are not capable of providing adequate support to the population.
C They are productive systems that need no more improving.
D They will be easily modified in the future.
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Life-Casting: Can we call it “ART” ?
A
When these life-castings were made in the 19th century, no one thought
of them as art. But, if critics today can hail Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and
the lights going off and on in a gallery as masterpieces of some kind, then
shouldn’t these more skillful and profoundly strange works have a greater
claim on our attention?
B
Art changes over time; what is art changes, too. Objects intended for
devotional, ritualistic or recreational use are re-categorised, by
latecomers from another civilisation who no longer respond to these
original purposes. Where would New Yorker cartoon be without Lascaux
gags in which one bison-painter makes anachronistically “artistic”
remarks to another” What also happens is that techniques and crafts
judged non-artistic at the time are reassessed?
C
In the 19th century, life-casting was to sculpture what photography was
to painting; and both were viewed as cheating short-cuts by the senior
arts. Their virtues – of speed and unwavering realism – also implied their
limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination. For many, life-
casting was an insult to the sculptor’s creative gesture; in a famous lawsuit
of 1834, a moulder whose mask of the dying Napoleon had been
reproduced and sold without his permission, was judged to have no rights
in the image – in other words, he was specifically held not to be an artist.
Rodin said of life-casting: “It happens fast, but it doesn’t make art.” Others
feared that the whole canon of aesthetics might be blown off course if too
much nature was allowed in, it would lead art away from its proper
pursuit of the ideal.
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D
Gauguin, at the end of the century, worried about future developments in
photography: if ever the process went into colour, what painter would
labour away at a likeness with a brush made from squirrel-tail? But
painting has proved robust. Photography changed it, of course, just as the
novel had to reassess narrative after the arrival of the cinema. But the gap
between the senior and junior arts was always narrower than the die-
hards implied: painters have always used technical back-up – studio
assistants to do the boring bits, cameras Lucida and Obscura; while
apparently lesser crafts involve great skill, thought, preparation, choice,
and – depending on how we define it – imagination. Life-casting was
complex, technical work, as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he
poured 250 litres of plaster over his black model Wilson and nearly killed
him.
E
Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new art movement
implies a reassessment of what has gone before; what is done now alters
what was done before. In some cases, this is merely self-serving, with the
new is using the old to justify itself: Look how all of that points to this;
aren’t we clever to be the culmination of all that has gone before? But
usually it is a matter of re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take
things for granted; every so often we need the aesthetic equivalent of a
cataract operation. So there are many items in this show – innocent bit-
players back in the last half of the 19th century – which would sit happily
nowadays in a commercial or public gallery. Many curators would
probably put in for the stunning cast of the hand of a giant from Barnum’s
circus.
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F
The initial impact is on the eye, in the contradiction (which Mueck
constantly exploits) between unexpected size and extreme verisimilitude.
Next, the human element kicks in: you note that the nails are dirt-
encrusted – unless this is the caster’s decorative addition – and the paddy
fingertips extend far beyond them. (Was the giant an anxious gnawer, or
does giantism mean that the flesh simply outgrows the nails?) Then you
take in the element of choice, arrangement, art if you like – the neat,
pleated, buttoned sleeve end that gives the item balance and variation of
texture. This is just a moulded hand, yet the part stands utterly for the
whole: and, as an item on public display, it reminds us, slyly, poignantly,
of the full-size original who in his time was just as much a victim of
gawping. We are not a long way from Degas’s La Petite Danseuse (which,
after all, one critic said should be in the Dupuytren pathology museum);
though we are nearer to contemporary art that lazily gets called cutting-
edge.
G
Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, the liberation of the text from
authorial intention, and the consequent empowerment of the reader; he
announced this, needless to say, in a text written with a particular
intention in order to communicate something very specific to a reader. An
own goal of Keith Weller proportions. But what doesn’t work for
literature works much better for art. Pictures do float free of their
creators’ intentions; over time, the “reader” does become more powerful.
Few of us can look at a medieval altarpiece as its painter “intended”, we
believe too little and aesthetically know too much, so we recreate, we find
new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic intention of
Paul Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil on to flesh,
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who moulded, cast, decorated and primped a century and more ago is now
irrelevant.
H
What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests
are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to
reflection, and involve the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill
involved? Much currently fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly
the brain, but it fails to engage the mind or the heart. It may, to use the old
dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth. One
of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an
unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder. That is what many of the
objects in this show do. The Ataxic Venus doesn’t make Ron Mueck’s Dead
Dad any less intense and moving an image; but she does offer herself as a
companion, precursor, and, yes, rival.
Questions 14-18: Which paragraph A-H contains the following information?
14 Technicians do boring work
15 A trial on a famous figure’s mask in the 19th century
16 The intention from the author is claimed matters in Art
17 How to assess an art
18 Detailed depiction of an earlier work
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Questions 19-24: YES – NO – NOT GIVEN
19 The intention of using artistic objects will change as time pass.
20 In the 19th century, people appreciate the fast speed and realism of
living casting.
21 Rodin indicated that slow pace would improve the artistic quality of the
casting.
22 The importance of painting dropped as the development of
photographs.
23 Lifecasting requires less skill and cost than painting.
24 Emerge of new art makes people recognise the meaning of art again.
25 Why the hand of a giant from Barnum’s circus attract people’s
attention in the first place?
A details and the human element
B size and realism
C texture and color
D imagination and intuition
26 What requirement does it depend on when judging if an object
is “art”?
A audience status
B fresh or old condition
C lasting period
D public response
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HONEY BEES IN TROUBLE
CAN NATIVE POLLINATORS FILL THE GAP?
A
Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment,
colony collapse disorder (CCD), that is wiping out the honeybees that
pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be
sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.
B
But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a
natural state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD
was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a
native species. Pollination in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s
industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination
industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in
recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities
of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop
monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed
native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices
killed many native bees outright – they’re as vulnerable to insecticides
as an agricultural pest – and made the agricultural landscape
inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and
their effects on pollinators isn’t new – in her 1962 ecological alarm cry
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result
from the disappearance of insect pollinators.
C
If that ‘Fruitless Fall’ has not-yet-occurred, it may be largely thanks to
the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators
to service crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated
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since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that
determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the
kind of agricultural system that was emerging. For example, honeybee
hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are
applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used
to pollinate many different crops. And although they are not the most
efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers,
with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt, if
there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the
honeybee,” says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The
honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modern
system of industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and
more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that
system is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the
photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and pollination into a series
of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out some of the resilience
characteristics of natural ecosystems.
D
Breno Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high
degree of specialization usually is a very dangerous game: it works well
while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the
least disbalance. In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is
heavily reliant on a single pollinator species, we humans have become
riskily overspecialized. And when the human-honeybee relationship is
disrupted, as it has been by colony collapse disorder, the vulnerability
of that agricultural system begins to become clear.
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E
In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop
pollination. “The problem is trying to provide native bees inadequate
numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to
service the crop,” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of flowers per
acre in a two-to three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the
other hand, native bees can be much more efficient pollinators of certain
crops than honeybees, so you don’t need as many to do the job. For
example, about 750 blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) can pollinate a
hectare of apples or almonds, a task that would require roughly 50,000
to 150,000 honeybees. There are bee tinkerers engaged in similar work
in many corners of the world. In Brazil, Breno Freitas has found that
Centris tarsata, the native pollinator of wild cashew, can survive in
commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils,
such as by interplanting their cashew trees with a Caribbean cherry.
F
In certain places, native bees may already be doing more than they’re
getting credit for. Ecologist Rachael Winfree recently led a team that
looked at pollination of four summer crops (tomato, watermelon,
peppers, and muskmelon) at 29 farms in the region of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. Winfree’s team identified 54 species of wild bees that
visited these crops, and found that wild bees were the most important
pollinators in the system: even though managed honeybees were
present on many of the farms, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent
of flower visits in the study. In another study focusing specifically on
watermelon, Winfree and her colleagues calculated that native bees
alone could provide sufficient pollination at 90 percent of the 23 farms
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studied. By contrast, honeybees alone could provide sufficient
pollination at only 78 percent of farms.
G
“The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,”
Winfree admits. In the Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are
relatively small, each farmer typically grows a variety of crops, and
farms are interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which
means there are opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee
conservation, too. The landscape is a bee-friendly patchwork that
provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral resources distributed
among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields,
suburban neighborhoods, and semi-natural habitat like old woodlots, all
at a relatively small scale. In other words, “pollinator-friendly” farming
practices would not only aid pollination of agricultural crops, but also
serve as a key element in the overall conservation strategy for wild
pollinators, and often aid other wild species as well.
H
Of course, not all farmers will be able to implement all of these practices.
And researchers are suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural
system. For some small-scale farms, native bees may indeed be all that’s
needed. For larger operations, a suite of managed bee – with honeybees
filling the generalist role and other, native bees pollinating specific
crops – could be augmented by free pollination services from resurgent
wild pollinators. In other words, they’re saying, we still have an
opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse,
resilient, and robust.
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Questions 27-30 : YES – NO – NOT GIVEN
27 In the United States, farmers use honeybees on a large scale
over the past few years.
28 Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers’ health.
29 The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among
native bees for every crop.
30 It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees.
31 The example of the “Fruitless Fall” underlines the writer’s point
about
A needs for using pesticides.
B impacts of losing insect pollinators.
C vulnerabilities of native bees.
D benefits in building more pollination industries.
32 Why can honeybees adapt to the modern agricultural system?
A the honeybees can pollinate more crops efficiently
B The bees are semi-domesticated since ancient times.
C Honeybee hives can be protected away from pesticides.
D The ability of wild pollinators using to serve crops declines.
33 The writer mentions factories and assembly lines to illustrate
A one drawback of the industrialised agricultural system.
B a low cost in modern agriculture.
C the role of honeybees in pollination.
D what a high yield of industrial agriculture.
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34 In the 6th paragraph, Winfree’s experiment proves that
A honeybee can pollinate various crops.
B there are many types of wild bees as the pollinators.
C the wild bees can increase the yield to a higher percentage
D wild bees work more efficiently as a pollinator than honey bees in
certain cases
35 What does the writer want to suggest in the last paragraph?
A The importance of honey bees in pollination
B adoption of different bees in various sizes of the agricultural system
C the comparison between the intensive and the rarefied agricultural
system
D the reason why farmers can rely on native pollinators
36 The headline of colony collapse disorder states that
37 Viewpoints of Freitas manifest that
38 Examples of blue orchard bees have shown that
39 Centris tarsata is mentioned to exemplify that
40 One finding of the research in Delaware Valley is that
A native pollinators can survive when a specific plant is supplied.
B it would cause severe consequences both to commerce and
agriculture.
C honey bees can not be bred.
D some agricultural landscapes are favorable in supporting wild bees.
E a large scale of honey bees are needed to pollinate.
F an agricultural system is fragile when relying on a single pollinator
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Passage 1 Passage 2 Passage 3
1. need 14. D 27. YES
2. (the) ashes 15. C 28. NOT GIVEN
3. (vegetable) cassava 16. G 29. NO
4. houses 17. H 30. YES
5. C 18. F 31. B
6. B 19. YES 32. C
7. A 20. NO 33. A
8. A 21. NOT GIVEN 34. D
9. TRUE 22. NO 35. B
10. NOT GIVEN 23. NOT GIVEN 36. B
11. FALSE 24. YES 37. F
12. TRUE 25. B 38. E
13. B 26. D 39. A
40. D
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