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C3
Stepwells – Reading 3
A millennium ago, stepwells were fundamental to life in the driest parts of India.
Although many have been neglected, recent restoration has returned them to
their former glory. Richard Cox travelled to north-western India to document
these spectacular monuments from a bygone era.

     During the sixth and seventh centuries, the inhabitants of the modern-day
states of Gujarat and Rajasthan in North-western India developed a method of
gaining access to clean, fresh groundwater during the dry season for drinking,
bathing, watering animals and irrigation. However, the significance of this
invention – the stepwell – goes beyond its utilitarian application.

     Unique to the region, stepwells are often architecturally complex and vary
widely in size and shape. During their heyday, they were places of gathering, of
leisure, of relaxation and of worship for villagers of all but the lowest castes. Most
stepwells are found dotted around the desert areas of Gujarat (where they are
called vav) and Rajasthan (where they are known as baori), while a few also
survive in Delhi. Some were located in or near villages as public spaces for the
community; others were positioned beside roads as resting places for travellers.

     As their name suggests, stepwells comprise a series of stone steps descending
from ground level to the water source (normally an underground aquifer) as it
recedes following the rains. When the water level was high, the user needed only
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to descend a few steps to reach it; when it was low, several levels would have to
be negotiated.

     Some wells are vast, open craters with hundreds of steps paving each sloping
side, often in tiers. Others are more elaborate, with long stepped passages
leading to the water via several storeys built from stone and supported by pillars,
they also included pavilions that sheltered visitors from the relentless heat. But
perhaps the most impressive features are the intricate decorative sculptures that
embellish many stepwells, showing activities from fighting and dancing to
everyday acts such as women combing their hair and churning butter.

     Down the centuries, thousands of wells were constructed throughout

northwestern India, but the majority have now fallen into disuse; many are
derelict and dry, as groundwater has been diverted for industrial use and the
wells no longer reach the water table. Their condition hasn’t been helped by
recent dry spells: southern Rajasthan suffered an eight-year drought between
1996 and 2004.

     However, some important sites in Gujarat have recently undergone major

restoration, and the state government announced in June last year that it plans to
restore the stepwells throughout the state.

     In Patan, the state’s ancient capital, the stepwell of Rani Ki Vav (Queen’s
Stepwell) is perhaps the finest current example. It was built by Queen Udayamati
during the late 11th century, but became silted up following a flood during the
13th century. But the Archaeological Survey of India began restoring it in the
1960s, and today it’s in pristine condition. At 65 metres long, 20 metres wide and
27 metres deep, Rani Ki Vav features 500 distinct sculptures carved into niches
throughout the monument, depicting gods such as Vishnu and Parvati in various
incarnations. Incredibly, in January 2001, this ancient structure survived a
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devastating earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale.

     Another example is the Surya Kund in Modhera, northern Gujarat, next to the
Sun Temple, built by King Bhima I in 1026 to honour the sun god Surya. It’s
actually a tank (kund means reservoir or pond) rather than a well, but displays
the hallmarks of stepwell architecture, including four sides of steps that descend
to the bottom in a stunning geometrical formation. The terraces house 108 small,
intricately carved shrines between the sets of steps.

     Rajasthan also has a wealth of wells. The ancient city of Bundi, 200 kilometres
south of Jaipur, is renowned for its architecture, including its stepwells. One of
the larger examples is Raniji Ki Baori, which was built by the queen of the region,
Nathavatji, in 1699. At 46 metres deep, 20 metres wide and 40 metres long, the
intricately carved monument is one of 21 baoris commissioned in the Bundi area
by Nathavatji.

     In the old ruined town of Abhaneri, about 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, is
Chand Baori, one of India’s oldest and deepest wells; aesthetically, it’s perhaps
one of the most dramatic. Built in around 850 AD next to the temple of Harshat
Mata, the baori comprises hundreds of zigzagging steps that run along three of its
sides, steeply descending 11 storeys, resulting in a striking geometric pattern
when seen from afar. On the fourth side, covered verandas supported by ornate
pillars overlook the steps.

     Still in public use is Neemrana Ki Baori, located just off the Jaipur–Dehli
highway. Constructed in around 1700, it’s nine storeys deep, with the last two
levels underwater. At ground level, there are 86 colonnaded openings from
where the visitor descends 170 steps to the deepest water source.

    Today, following years of neglect, many of these monuments to medieval

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engineering have been saved by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has
recognised the importance of preserving them as part of the country’s rich
history. Tourists flock to wells in far-flung corners of northwestern India to gaze
in wonder at these architectural marvels from 1,000 years ago, which serve as a
reminder of both the ingenuity and artistry of ancient civilisations and of the
value of water to human existence.

Questions 1–5
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 1?

In boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet, write

 
TRUE   if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE   if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN   if there is no information on this
 
1. Examples of ancient stepwells can be found all over the world.
2.   Stepwells had a range of functions, in addition to those related to water
collection.
3.  The few existing stepwells in Delhi are more attractive than those found
elsewhere.
4.   It took workers many years to build the stone steps characteristic of
stepwells.
5.  The number of steps above the water level in a stepwell altered during the
course of a year.

Questions 6–8
Answer the questions below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6–8 on your answer sheet.

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6.   Which part of some stepwells provided shade for people?

7.   What type of serious climatic event, which took place in southern Rajasthan,
is mentioned in the article? 7  
8.   Who are frequent visitors to stepwells nowadays?

Question 9-13
Complete the table below

Choose ONE WORD AND /OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

Stepwell
Date Features Other notes
s
Restored in the 1990s
Late
Rani Ki As many as 500 sculptures
11th
Vav decorate the monument Excellent condition, despite
century
the 9 …………… of 2001.
Steps on the 10
Surya …………… produce a Looks more like a 11
1026
Kund geometric pattern …………… than a well. 
Carved shrines. 
One of 21 baoris in the area
Raniji Ki Intricately carved
1699 commissioned by Queen
Baori monument
Nathavatji
Old, deep and very
dramatic
Chand Steps take you down 11
850 AD  
Baori storeys to the bottom
Has 12 …………… which
provide a view to the steps. 
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Neemran Has two 13

1700 Used by public today
a Ki Baori …………… levels. 

DELIVERING THE GOODS – Reading 2

The vast expansion in international trade owes much to a revolution in the

business of moving freight

A     International trade is growing at a startling pace. While the global economy has
been expanding at a bit over 3% a year, the volume of trade has been rising at a
compound annual rate of about twice that. Foreign products, from meat to machinery,
play a more important role in almost every economy in the world, and foreign markets
now tempt businesses that never much worried about sales beyond their nation’s
borders.

B     What lies behind this explosion in international commerce? The general worldwide
decline in trade barriers, such as customs duties and import quotas, is surely one
explanation. The economic opening of countries that have traditionally been minor
players is another. But one force behind the import-export boom has passed all but
unnoticed: the rapidly falling cost of getting goods to market. Theoretically, in the world
of trade, shipping costs do not matter. Goods, once they have been made, are assumed to
move instantly and at no cost from place to place. The real world, however, is full of
frictions. Cheap labour may make Chinese clothing competitive in America, but if delays
in shipment tie up working capital and cause winter coats to arrive in spring, trade may
lose its advantages.

C     At the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and manufacturing were the two most
important sectors almost everywhere, accounting for about 70% of total output in
Germany, Italy and France, and 40-50% in America, Britain and Japan. International
commerce was therefore dominated by raw materials, such as wheat, wood and iron
ore, or processed commodities, such as meat and steel. But these sorts of products are
heavy and bulky and the cost of transporting them relatively high.
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D     Countries still trade disproportionately with their geographic neighbours. Over
time, however, world output has shifted into goods whose worth is unrelated to their
size and weight. Today, it is finished manufactured products that dominate the flow of
trade, and, thanks to technological advances such as lightweight components,
manufactured goods themselves have tended to become lighter and less bulky. As a
result, less transportation is required for every dollar’s worth of imports or exports.

E     To see how this influences trade, consider the business of making disk drives for
computers. Most of the world’s disk-drive manufacturing is concentrated in South-east
Asia. This is possible only because disk drives, while valuable, are small and light and so
cost little to ship. Computer manufacturers in Japan or Texas will not face hugely bigger
freight bills if they import drives from Singapore rather than purchasing them on the
domestic market. Distance, therefore, poses no obstacle to the globalisation of the disk-
drive industry.

F     This is even more true of the fast-growing information industries. Films and
compact discs cost little to transport, even by aeroplane. Computer software can be
‘exported’ without ever loading it onto a ship, simply by transmitting it over telephone
lines from one country to another, so freight rates and cargo-handling schedules
become insignificant factors in deciding where to make the product. Businesses can
locate based on other considerations, such as the availability of labour, while worrying
less about the cost of delivering their output.

G     In many countries deregulation has helped to drive the process along. But, behind
the scenes, a series of technological innovations known broadly as containerisation and
inter-modal transportation has led to swift productivity improvements in cargo-
handling. Forty years ago, the process of exporting or importing involved a great many
stages of handling, which risked portions of the shipment being damaged or stolen
along the way. The invention of the container crane made it possible to load and unload
containers without capsizing the ship and the adoption of standard container sizes
allowed almost any box to be transported on any ship. By 1967, dual-purpose ships,
carrying loose cargo in the hold* and containers on the deck, were giving way to all-
container vessels that moved thousands of boxes at a time.

H     The shipping container transformed ocean shipping into a highly efficient, intensely
competitive business. But getting the cargo to and from the dock was a different story.
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National governments, by and large, kept a much firmer hand on truck and railroad
tariffs than on charges for ocean freight. This started changing, however, in the mid-
1970s, when America began to deregulate its transportation industry. First airlines,
then road hauliers and railways, were freed from restrictions on what they could carry,
where they could haul it and se what price they could charge. Big productivity gains
resulted. Between 1985 and 1996, for example, America’s freight railways dramatically
reduced their employment, trackage, and their fleets of locomotives – while increasing
the amount of cargo they hauled. Europe’s railways have also shown marked, albeit
smaller, productivity improvements.

I     In America the period of huge productivity gains in transportation may be almost
over, but in most countries, the process still has far to go. State ownership of railways
and airlines, regulation of freight rates and toleration of anti-competitive practices, such
as cargo-handling monopolies, all keep the cost of shipping unnecessarily high and
deter international trade. Bringing these barriers down would help the world’s
economies grow even closer.

Questions 14-17
Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-I.
Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-I in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

14 a suggestion for improving trade in the future

15 the effects of the introduction of electronic delivery
16 the similar cost involved in transporting a product from abroad or from a local
supplier
17 the weakening relationship between the value of goods and the cost of their delivery

Questions 18-22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet, write –

TRUE    if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE    if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN    if there is no information on this
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18 International trade is increasing at a greater rate than the world economy.

19 Cheap labour guarantees effective trade conditions.
20 Japan imports more meat and steel than France.
21 Most countries continue to prefer to trade with nearby nations.
22 Small computer components are manufactured in Germany.

Questions 23-26
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below.
Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

THE TRANSPORT REVOLUTION

Modern cargo-handling methods have had a significant effect on 23 ………………….. as the
business of moving freight around the world becomes increasingly streamlined.
Manufacturers of computers, for instance, are able to import 24 ………………….. from
overseas, rather than having to rely on a local supplier. The introduction
of 25 ………………….. has meant that bulk cargo can be safely and efficiently moved over
long distances. While international shipping is now efficient, there is still a need for
governments to reduce 26 ………………….. in order to free up the domestic cargo sector.

A tariffs             B components               C container ships         D output

E employees     F insurance costs          G trade                         H freight

I fares               J software                     K international standards

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Telepathy – Reading 3
Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the
issue of telepathy has divided the scientific community, and even today it still
sparks bitter controversy among top academics

Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes

around the world have risked the derision of sceptical colleagues by putting the various
claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous scientific studies. The results and
their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them.

Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is
genuine. Other parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having
tried to produce definitive scientific proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do
concur on one issue, however, that the most impressive evidence so far has come from
the so-called 'ganzfeld' experiments, a German term that means 'whole field'. Reports of
telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to
suspect that telepathy might involve 'signals' passing between people that were so faint
that they were usually swamped by normal brain activity. In this case, such signals
might be more easily detected by those experiencing meditation-like tranquillity in a
relaxing 'whole field' of light, sound and warmth.

The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting in
soft reclining chairs in a sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their eyes are
covered with special filters letting in only soft pink light. In early ganzfeld experiments,
the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from a random selection of
four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a person acting as a 'sender'
would attempt to beam the image over to the 'receiver' relaxing in the sealed room.
Once the session was over, this person was asked to identify which of the four images
had been used. Random guessing would give a hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real,
however, the hit-rate would be higher. In 1982, the results from the first ganzfeld
studies were analysed by one of its pioneers, the American parapsychologist Charles
Honorton. They pointed to typical hit-rates of better than 30 per cent — a small effect,
but one which statistical tests suggested could not be put down to chance.
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The implication was that the ganzfeld method had revealed real evidence for telepathy.
But there was a crucial flaw in this argument — one routinely overlooked in more
conventional areas of science. Just because chance had been ruled out as an explanation
did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of getting positive
results. These ranged from 'sensory leakage' — where clues about the pictures
accidentally reach the receiver — to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued
a review of all the ganzfeld studies done up to 1985 to show that 80 per cent had found
statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that there were still too
many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew
up a list demanding new standards for future research.

After this, many researchers switched to autoganzfeld tests — an automated variant of

the technique which used computers to perform many of the key tasks such as the
random selection of images. By minimising human involvement, the idea was to
minimise the risk of flawed results. In 1987, results from hundreds of autoganzfeld tests
were studied by Honorton in a 'meta-analysis', a statistical technique for finding the
overall results from a set of studies. Though less compelling than before, the outcome
was still impressive.

Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between

individual ganzfeld studies. Defenders of telepathy point out that demanding impressive
evidence from every study ignores one basic statistical fact: it takes large samples to
detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces hit-rates only
marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it's unlikely to be detected by a
typical ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is just not big enough.
Only when many studies are combined in a meta-analysis will the faint signal of
telepathy really become apparent. And that is what researchers do seem to be finding.

What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream
scientists: most still totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at least
in part from the lack of any plausible mechanism for telepathy.

Various theories have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from
theoretical physics. They include 'quantum entanglement', in which events affecting one
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group of atoms instantly affect another group, no matter how far apart they may be.
While physicists have demonstrated entanglement with specially prepared atoms, no-
one knows if it also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such
questions would transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to
argue that the future lies not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing
possible mechanisms. Some work has begun already, with researchers trying to identify
people who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trials. Early results show that
creative and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University
of Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these
will eventually give the researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the
case for the existence of telepathy.

Questions 27-30
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A —G, below.
Write the correct letter, A—G, in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

27 Researchers with differing attitudes towards telepathy agree on

28 Reports of experiences during meditation indicated
29 Attitudes to parapsychology would alter drastically with
30 Recent autoganzfeld trials suggest that success rates will improve with

A the discovery of a mechanism for telepathy.

B the need to create a suitable environment for telepathy.
C their claims of a high success rate.
D a solution to the problem posed by random guessing.
E the significance of the ganzfeld experiments.
F a more careful selection of subjects.
G a need to keep altering conditions.

Questions 31-40
Complete the table below.
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Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 31-40 on your answer sheet.

Telepathy Experiments
Name/
Description Result Flaw
Date
Involved a person
acting as
a 31…………….. , who
picked out Positive results could be produced by
Ganzfeld Hit-rates were higher
one 32…………………… fr factors such
studies than with random
om a random selection as 34……………………. Or 35………………
1982 guessing.
of four, and ..……
a 33………………….. ,
who then tried to
identify it.
36…………………… were The 39………………….. between
Autogan  The results were
used for key tasks to different test results was put down to
zfeld then subjected
limit the amount the fact that sample groups were
studies to a 38
of 37……………………. in not 40…………………… (as with most
1987 ……………………….
carrying out the tests. ganzfeld studies).