Otter

A
Otters have long, thin bodies and short legs – ideal for pushing through dense
undergrowth or hunting in tunnels. An adult male may be up to 4 feet long and 30lbs.
Females are smaller typically. The Eurasian otter’s nose is about the smallest among the
otter species and has a characteristic shape described as a shallow ‘W’. An otter’s tail (or
rudder, or stern) is stout at the base and tapers towards the tip where it flattens. This
forms part of the propulsion unit when swimming fast underwater. Otter fur consists of
two types of hair: stout guard hairs which form a waterproof outer covering, and under-
fur which is dense and fine, equivalent to an otter’s thermal underwear. The fur must be
kept in good condition by grooming. Seawater reduces the waterproofing and insulating
qualities of otter fur when saltwater in the fur. This is why freshwater pools are important
to otters living on the coast. After swimming, they wash the salts off in pools and the
squirm on the ground to rub dry against vegetation.

B
The scent is used for hunting on land, for communication and for detecting danger.
Otterine sense of smell is likely to be similar in sensitivity to dogs. Otters have small
eyes and are probably short-sighted on land. But they do have the ability to modify the
shape of the lens in the eye to make it more spherical, and hence overcome the refraction
of water. In clear water and good light, otters can hunt fish by sight. The otter’s eyes and
nostrils are placed high on its head so that it can see and breathe even when the rest of the
body is submerged. Underwater, the cotter holds its legs against the body, except for
steering, and the hind end of the body is flexed in a series of vertical undulations. River
otters have webbing which extends for much of the length of each digit, though not to the
very end. Giant otters and sea otters have even more prominent webs, while the Asian
short-clawed otter has no webbing – they hunt for shrimps in ditches and paddy fields so
they don’t need the swimming speed. Otter’s ears are tiny for streamlining, but they still
have very sensitive hearing and are protected by valves which close them against water
pressure.

C
A number of constraints and preferences limit suitable habitats of otters. Water is a must
and the rivers must be large enough to support a healthy population of fish. Being such
shy and wary creatures, they will prefer territories where man’s activities do not impinge
greatly. Of course, there must also be no other otter already in residence – this has only
become significant again recently as populations start to recover. Coastal otters have a
much more abundant food supply and range for males and females may be just a few
kilometres of coastline. Because male range overlaps with two or three females – not
bad! Otters will eat anything that they can get hold of – there are records of sparrows and
snakes and slugs being gobbled. Apart from fish, the most common prey are crayfish,
crabs and water birds. Small mammals are occasionally taken, most commonly rabbits
but sometimes even moles.

D
Eurasian otters will breed any time where food is readily available. In places where the
condition is more severe, Sweden for example where the lakes are frozen for much of
winter, cubs are born in spring. This ensures that they are well grown before severe
weather returns. In the Shetlands, cubs are born in summer when fish is more abundant.
Though otters can breed every year, some do not. Again, this depends on food
availability. Other factors such as food range and quality of the female may have an
effect. Gestation for Eurasian otter is 63 days, with the exception of Lutra canadensis
whose embryos may undergo delayed implantation. Otters normally give birth in more
secure dens to avoid disturbances. Nests are lined with bedding to keep the cub’s warm
mummy is away feeding.

E
Otters normally give birth in more secure dens to avoid disturbances. Nests are lined with
bedding (reeds, waterside plants, grass) to keep the cub’s warm while is away feeding.
Litter Size varies between 1 and 5. For some unknown reason, coastal otters tend to
produce smaller litters. At five weeks they open their eyes – a tiny cub of 700g. At seven
weeks they’re weaned onto solid food. At ten weeks they leave the nest, blinking into
daylight for the first time. After three months they finally meet the water and learn to
swim. After eight months they are hunting, though the mother still provides a lot of food
herself. Finally, after nine months she can chase them all away with a clear conscience,
and relax – until the next fella shows up.

F
The plight of the British otter was recognised in the early 60s, but it wasn’t until the late
70s that the chief cause was discovered. Pesticides, such as dieldrin and aldrin, were first
used in1955 in agriculture and other industries – these chemicals are very persistent and
had already been recognised as the cause of huge declines in the population of peregrine
falcons, sparrow hawks and other predators. The pesticides entered the river systems and
the food chain – micro-organisms, fish and finally otters, with every step increasing the
concentration of the chemicals. From 1962 the chemicals were phased out, but while
some species recovered quickly, otter numbers did not – and continued to fall into the
80s. This was probably due mainly to habitat destruction and road deaths. Acting on
populations fragmented by the sudden decimation in the 50s and 60s, the loss of just a
handful of otters in one area can make an entire population unviable and spell the end.

G
Otter numbers are recovering all around Britain – populations are growing again in the
few areas where they had remained and have expanded from those areas into the rest of
the country. This is almost entirely due to legislation, conservation efforts, slowing down
and reversing the destruction of suitable otter habitat and reintroductions from captive
breeding programs. Releasing captive-bred otters is seen by many as a last resort. The
argument runs that where there is no suitable habitat for them they will not survive after
release and where there is suitable habitat, natural populations should be able to expand
into the area. However, reintroducing animals into a fragmented and fragile population
may add just enough impetus for it to stabilise and expand, rather than die out. This is
what the Otter Trust accomplished in Norfolk, where the otter population may have been
as low as twenty animals at the beginning of the 1980s. The Otter Trust has now finished
its captive breeding program entirely, great news because it means it is no longer needed.
Questions 1-9
The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 1-9 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
1 A description of how otters regulate vision underwater
2 The fit-for-purpose characteristics of otter’s body shape
3 A reference to an underdeveloped sense
4 An explanation of why agriculture failed in otter conservation efforts
5 A description of some of the otter’s social characteristics
6 A description of how baby otters grow
7 The conflicting opinions on how to preserve
8 A reference to the legislative act
9 An explanation of how otters compensate for heat loss
Questions 10-13
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer
10 What affects the outer fur of otters?
11 What skill is not necessary for Asian short-clawed otters?
12 Which type of otters has the shortest range?
13 Which type of animals do otters hunt occasionally?

WEALTH IN A COLD CLIMATE

A
Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when inspiration struck.
“There was this anecdote about the great yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in
1793,” Masters recalls. “This epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came.” The
inclement weather froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover.
B
If weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the
historical fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring
economic mysteries of all — why are almost all the wealthy, industrialised nations to be
found at latitudes above 40 degrees? After two years of research, he thinks that he has
found a piece of the puzzle. Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in
Indiana, and Margaret McMillan at Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are
among the factors that distinguish rich nations from poor ones. Their study is published
this month in the Journal of Economic Growth. The pair speculates that cold snaps have
two main benefits — they freeze pests that would otherwise destroy crops, and also
freeze organisms, such as mosquitoes, that carry disease. The result is agricultural
abundance a big workforce.
C
The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for countries,
the second climate data from the University of East Anglia. They found a curious tally
between the sets. Countries having five or more frosty days a month are uniformly rich;
those with fewer than five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day
figure is important; it could be the minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. Masters
says: “For example, Finland is a small country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a
small country that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps climate has something to do with that.” In
fact, limited frosts bring huge benefits to farmers. The chills kill insects or render them
inactive; cold weather slows the break-up of plant and animal material in the soil,
allowing it to become richer; and frosts ensure a build-up of moisture in the ground for
spring, reducing dependence on seasonal rains. There are exceptions to the “cold equals
rich” argument. There are well-heeled tropical countries such as Hong Kong and
Singapore (both city-states, Masters notes), a result of their superior trading positions.
Likewise, not all European countries axe moneyed — in the former communist colonies,
economic potential was crushed by politics.
D
Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor 一 the
wealth of nations is too complicated to be attributable to just one
factor. Climate, he feels, somehow combines with other factors — such
as the presence of institutions, including governments, and access to
trading routes — to determine whether a country will do well.
Traditionally, Masters says, economists thought that institutions had
the biggest effect on the economy, because they brought order to a
country in the form of, for example, laws and property rights. With
order, so the thinking went, came affluence. “But there are some
problems that even countries with institutions have not been able to
get around,” he says. “My feeling is that, as countries get richer, they
get better institutions. And the accumulation of wealth and
improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a favourable
environment, including climate.”
E
This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and
destined to remain penniless. Instead, richer countries should change the way in which
foreign aid is given. Instead of aid being geared towards improving governance, it should
be spent on technology to improve agriculture and to combat disease. Masters cites one
example: “There are regions in India that have been provided with irrigation —
agricultural productivity has gone up and there has been an improvement in health.”
Supplying vaccines against tropical diseases and developing crop varieties that can grow
in the tropics would break the poverty cycle.
F
Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations, citing
anthropological, climatic and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the most
affluent. In 350BC, Aristotle observed that “those who live in a cold climate… are full of
spirit”. Jared Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in
his book Guns, Germs and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa
and the Americas are aligned north-south. So, in Europe, crops can spread quickly across
latitudes because climates are similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat,
spread quickly from the Middle East into Europe; it took twice as long for corn to spread
from Mexico to what is now the eastern United States. This easy movement along similar
latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant a faster dissemination of other technologies
such as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates. The region also boasted domesticated
livestock, which could provide meat, wool and motive power in the fields. Blessed with
such natural advantages, Eurasia was bound to take off economically.

G
John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, two US economists, have also pointed out striking
correlations between the geographical location of countries and their wealth. They note
that tropical countries between 23.45 degrees north and south of the equator are nearly all
poor. In an article for the Harvard International Review, they concluded that
“development surely seems to favour the temperate-zone economies, especially those in
the northern hemisphere, and those that have managed to avoid both socialism and the
ravages of war”. But Masters cautions against geographical determinism, the idea that
tropical countries are beyond hope: “Human health and agriculture can be made better
through scientific and technological research,” he says, “so we shouldn’t be writing off
these countries. Take Singapore: without air conditioning, it wouldn’t be rich.”
Questions 14-20
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list below.
Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i The positive correlation between climate and wealth
ii Other factors besides climate that influence wealth
iii Inspiration from reading a book
iv Other researchers’ results do not rule out exceptional cases
v different attributes between Eurasia and Africa
vi Low temperature benefits people and crops
vii The importance of institution in traditional views.
viii The spread of crops in Europe, Asia and other places
 ix The best way to use aid
x confusions and exceptional
14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F
20 Paragraph G
Questions 21-26
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.
Dr William Master read a book saying that a (an) 21………………….. which struck an
American city of years ago was terminated by a cold frost. And academics found that
there is a connection between climate and country’s wealthy as in the rich but small
country of 22…………………..; Yet besides excellent surroundings and climate, one
country still need to improve both their 23………………….. to achieve long prosperity,
Thanks to resembling weather condition across latitude in the continent of
24………………….. ’crops such as 25…………………… is bound to spread faster than
from South America to the North. Other researchers also noted that even though
geographical factors are important, a tropical country such as 26………………….. still
became rich due to scientific advancement.

Musical Maladies
Music and the brain are both endlessly fascinating subjects, and as a neuroscientist
specialising in auditory learning and memory, I find them especially intriguing. So I had
high expectations of Musicophilia, the latest offering from neurologist and prolific author
Oliver Sacks. And I confess to feeling a little guilty reporting that my reactions to the
book are mixed.
Sacks himself is the best part of Musicophilia. He richly documents his own life in the
book and reveals highly personal experiences. The photograph of him on the cover of the
book— which shows him wearing headphones, eyes closed, clearly enchanted as he
listens to Alfred Brendel perform Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata—makes a positive
impression that is borne out by the contents of the book. Sacks’s voice throughout is
steady and erudite but never pontifical. He is neither self-conscious nor self-promoting.
The preface gives a good idea of what the book will deliver. In it Sacks explains that he
wants to convey the insights gleaned from the “enormous and rapidly growing body of
work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex
and often bizarre disorders to which these are prone ” He also stresses the importance of
“the simple art of observation” and “the richness of the human context.” He wants to
combine “observation and description with the latest in technology,” he says, and to
imaginatively enter into the experience of his patients and subjects. The reader can see
that Sacks, who has been practicing neurology for 40 years, is torn between the "old-
fashioned” path of observation and the new-fangled, high-tech approach: He knows that
he needs to take heed of the latter, but his heart lies with the former.
The book consists mainly of detailed descriptions of cases, most of them involving
patients whom Sacks has seen in his practice. Brief discussions of contemporary
neuroscientific reports are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Part I, “Haunted by
Music,” begins with the strange case of Tony Cicoria, a nonmusical, middle-aged
surgeon who was consumed by a love of music after being hit by lightning. He suddenly
began to crave listening to piano music, which he had never cared for in the past. He
started to play the piano and then to compose music, which arose spontaneously in his
mind in a “torrent” of notes. How could this happen? Was the cause psychological? (He
had had a near-death experience when the lightning struck him.) Or was it the direct
result of a change in the auditory regions of his cerebral cortex? Electro-encephalography
(EEG) showed his brain waves to be normal in the mid-1990s, just after his trauma and
subsequent "conversion” to music. There are now more sensitive tests, but Cicoria has
declined to undergo them; he does not want to delve into the causes of his musicality.
What a shame!
Part II, “A Range of Musicality,” covers a wider variety of topics, but unfortunately,
some of the chapters offer little or nothing that is new. For example, chapter 13, which is
five pages long, merely notes that the blind often have better hearing than the sighted.
The most interesting chapters are those that present the strangest cases. Chapter 8 is about
“amusia,” an inability to hear sounds as music, and “dysharmonia,” a highly specific
impairment of the ability to hear harmony, with the ability to understand melody left
intact. Such specific “dissociations” are found throughout the cases Sacks recounts.
To Sacks’s credit, part III, “Memory, Movement and Music,” brings us into the
underappreciated realm of music therapy. Chapter 16 explains how “melodic intonation
therapy” is being used to help expressive aphasie patients (those unable to express their
thoughts verbally fol-lowing a stroke or other cerebral incident) once again become
capable of fluent speech. In chapter 20, Sacks demonstrates the near-miraculous power of
music to animate Parkinson’s patients and other people with severe movement disorders,
even those who are frozen into odd postures. Scientists cannot yet explain how music
achieves this effect.
To readers who are unfamiliar with neuroscience and music behavior, Musicophilia may
be something of a revelation. But the book will not satisfy those seeking the causes and
implications of the phenomena Sacks describes. For one thing, Sacks appears to be more
at ease discussing patients than discussing experiments. And he tends to be rather
uncritical in accepting scientific findings and theories.
It’s true that the causes of music-brain oddities remain poorly understood. However,
Sacks could have done more to draw out some of the implications of the careful
observations that he and other neurologists have made and of the treatments that have
been successful. For example, he might have noted that the many specific dissociations
among components of music comprehension, such as loss of the ability to perceive
harmony but not melody, indicate that there is no music center in the brain. Because
many people who read the book are likely to believe in the brain localisation of all mental
functions, this was a missed educational opportunity.
Another conclusion one could draw is that there seem to be no "cures” for neurological
problems involving music. A drug can alleviate a symptom in one patient and aggravate
it in another, or can have both positive and negative effects in the same patient.
Treatments mentioned seem to be almost exclusively antiepileptic medications, which
“damp down” the excitability of the brain in general; their effectiveness varies widely.
Finally, in many of the cases described here the patient with music-brain symptoms is
reported to have “normal” EEG results. Although Sacks recognises the existence of new
technologies, among them far more sensitive ways to analyze brain waves than the
standard neurological EEG test, he does not call for their use. In fact, although he exhibits
the greatest compassion for patients, he conveys no sense of urgency about the pursuit of
new avenues in the diagnosis and treatment of music-brain disorders. This absence
echoes the hook’s preface, in which Sacks expresses fear that “the simple art of
observation may be lost” if we rely too much on new technologies. He does call for both
approaches, though, and we can only hope that the neuro logical community will respond.

Questions 1-9
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-9 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. A description of how otters regulate vision underwater

2. The fit-for-purpose characteristics of otter’s body shape

3. A reference to an underdeveloped sense

4. An explanation of why agriculture failed in otter conservation efforts

5. A description of some of the otter’s social characteristics

6. A description of how baby otters grow

7. The conflicted opinions on how to preserve

8. A reference to a legislative act

9. An explanation of how otters compensate for heat

Questions 10-13

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

10. What affects the outer fur of otters?

11. What skill is not necessary for Asian short-clawed otters?

12. Which type of otters has the shortest range?

13. Which type of animals do otters hunt occasionally?