READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on pages 6 and 7.

                       Children's Literature

Stories and poems aimed at children have an exceedingly long history in Britain: lullabies, for example, were sung in Roman times, and a few nursery rhymes and games are almost as ancient. Yet so far as written-down literature is concerned, while there were stories in print before 1700 that children often seized on when they had the chance, such as translations of Aesop's fables, fairy-stories and popular ballads and romances, these were not aimed at young people in particular. Since the only genuine child-oriented literature at this time would have been a few instructional works to help with reading and general knowledge, plus the odd Puritanical tract as an aid to morality, the only course for keen child readers was to raid adult literature. This still occurs today, especially with adult thrillers or romances that include more exciting, graphic detail than is normally found in literature for younger readers.

By the mid-1700s, there were enough eager child readers and enough parents glad to cater for this interest for publishers to specialise in children's books whose first aim was pleasure rather than education or morality. In Britain, a London merchant named Thomas Boreham produced Cajanus, the Swedish Giant in 1742, while the more famous John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744, containing stories, games, plus a free gift (a ball and a pin-cushion). It is a tribute to Newbery's flair that he hit upon a winning formula quite so quickly, to be pirated almost immediately in America.

Such pleasing levity was not to last. Influenced by Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) decreed that all books for children save Robinson Crusoe were a dangerous diversion, contemporary critics saw to it that children's literature should be instructive and uplifting. Prominent among such voices was Mrs Sarah Trimmer, whose magazine The Guardian of Education (1802) carried the first regular reviews of children's books. In these, she condemned fairy tales for their violence and general absurdity; her own stories, Fabulous Histories (1786), described talking animals, who were always models of sense and decorum.

The great blow to the instructive children's book was to come from an unlikely source: early 19th-century interest in folklore. Both nursery rhymes, selected by James Orchard Halliwell for a folklore society in 1842, and collections of fairy stories from the scholarly Grimm brothers, swiftly translated into English in 1823, soon rocketed to popularity with the young, quickly leading to new editions, each one more child-centred than the last. From this time onwards, younger children could expect stories written for their particular interests, and with the needs of their own limited experience of life kept well to the fore.

However, while such books were available for young children from homes wealthy enough to afford such fare, older child readers and adults still tended to read the same books as each other. What eventually determined the reading of older children was often not the availability of special children's literature as such, but access to books that contained characters, such as young people or animals, with whom they could more easily empathise, or action, such as exploring or fighting, that made few demands on adult maturity or understanding.

In time, however, adults themselves moved on to a narrower spectrum of imaginative literature, leaving genres they once freely enjoyed - such as animal or fairy stories - to a younger audience.

The final apotheosis of literary childhood as something to be protected from unpleasant reality came with the arrival in the late 1930s of the child-centred bestsellers intent on entertainment at its most escapist. In Britain, novelists such as Enid Blyton described children who were always free to have the most unlikely adventures, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad could ever happen to them in the end. Reaction against such dream worlds was inevitable after World War II, coinciding with the growth of paperback sales, children's libraries and a new spirit of moral and social concern. Urged on by committed publishers and progressive librarians, writers slowly began to explore new areas of interest, while also shifting the settings of their plots away from the middle-class world to which their chiefly adult patrons had always previously belonged.

The situation today seems to be that writers of children's literature are often recommended to the attention of adult as well as child readers. This echoes the 19th-century belief that children's literature, rather than representing a defensive barrier between childhood and adulthood, can be shared by different generations.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the Reading Passage 3 on pages 10 and 11.

Honeybees in trouble - can native pollinators fill the gap?

Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment: colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is destroying whole colonies of honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile and economies will collapse. However, what is at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. In the USA, where CCD has its greatest impact, honeybees are not a native species and the way most commercial crops are pollinated, with enormous populations of honeybees, is a very different practice from how things happen in nature or how they happened in days gone by. Pollination in modern agriculture is an industry.

Agricultural intensification began as farmers started using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides and planting large-scale crop monocultures (using just one species of crop). This killed many native bees and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those remaining. Concern about these practices is not new. In 1962, the ecologist Rachel Carson warned of a 'Fruitless Fall' that could follow the disappearance of insect pollinators.

The fact that the 'Fruitless Fall' has not yet occurred may be thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. This bee's biology suited the kind of agriculture that was emerging. Honeybee hives can be closed and shifted to protect their occupants when pesticides are applied to a field. Honeybees can be used to pollinate 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 in a hive. 'Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee,' says Jim Cane, of the US Department of Agriculture.

The honeybee is a crucial cog in the system of industrial agriculture that delivers more food, and more kinds of it, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is vulnerable because making a farm into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory also leaches out some resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems. Breno Freitas, at the Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil, believes such a high degree of specialisation, '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.' When the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it is by CCD, we see the vulnerability of this practice.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to freeing agriculture from a honeybee monoculture. One is to learn how to manage additional species of bees for the pollination of specific crops. The other is to learn how to shape the agricultural landscape to support a diverse community of wild bees. In Brazil, Freitas found that the native pollinator of wild cashew can survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as the Caribbean cherry tree.

It is unlikely that any native bees will prove as versatile as the honeybee, but native bees can be matched to specific crops. Cane says, ‘Just about every crop is visited and effectively pollinated by a native bee’ - even crops that are not native. 'The problem is trying to provide [native] bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the crop.' However, often not as many native bees are needed to pollinate a crop. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees can pollinate a hectare of apples, a task that would require 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. Nevertheless, millions of native bees would be needed to pollinate a large commercial orchard.

In certain places, wild bees may already do more than they get credit for. Rachael Winfree of Rutgers University recently led a team that studied pollination of four crops (tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon) in Delaware. Winfree's team identified 54 species of wild bees visiting these crops, and found wild bees were the most important pollinators: although managed honeybees were present, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower visits. 'The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,' Winfree concedes. In the Delaware Valley, most farms are small and each farmer typically grows a variety of crops. 'But I think what my work shows is that native bees can be sufficient in a certain type of agricultural system.'

'Native bees can be a component of our agricultural systems if we do the right thing,' concludes Scott Hoffman Black of the Xerces Society. He suggests leaving weeds along field margins, growing a variety of crops rather than large monocultures and planting patches of native wildflowers, to give native bees a place within the agricultural landscape. Moreover, many of these strategies to assist bees would also help butterflies, birds, beetles, and native plants.

Researchers working on alternatives to honeybees are not suggesting that honeybees be made obsolete in agriculture. Instead, they suggest shifting to an agricultural system which comprises a mixture of species. For small-scale farms, native bees may be enough. For larger operations, a suite of managed bees with honeybees filling the generalist role and native bees pollinating specific crops could be more suitable. In other words, we have an opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse and resilient.