Test 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Q uestions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
What is exploration?
We are all explorers. Our desire to discover, and then share that new -found knowledge, is part
o f what makes us hum an - indeed, this has played an im portant part in our success as a species.
Long before the first caveman slumped down beside the fire and grunted news that there were
plenty o f w ildebeest over yonder, our ancestors had learnt the value o f sending out scouts to
investigate the unknown. This questing nature o f ours undoubtedly helped our species spread
around the globe, ju st as it nowadays no doubt helps the last nom adic Penan m aintain their
existence in the depleted forests o f Borneo, and a visitor negotiate the subways o f New York.
Over the years, w e’ve come to think o f explorers as a peculiar breed - different from the rest o f
us, different from those o f us who are m erely ‘well travelled’, even; and perhaps there
is
a type o f
person more suited to seeking out the new, a type o f caveman m ore inclined to risk venturing out.
That, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that we all have this enquiring instinct, even today;
and that in all sorts o f professions - w hether artist, marine biologist or astronom er - borders o f
the unknown are being tested each day.
Thomas H ardy set some o f his novels in Egdon Heath, a fictional area o f uncultivated land, and
used the landscape to suggest the desires and fears o f his characters. He is delving into matters
we all recognise because they are com m on to humanity. This is surely an act o f exploration, and
into a world as remote as the author chooses. Explorer and travel w riter Peter Flem ing talks o f
the m om ent when the explorer returns to the existence he has left behind w ith his loved ones. The
traveller ‘who has for weeks or months seen him self only as a puny and irrelevant alien crawling
laboriously over a country in which he has no roots and no background, suddenly encounters his
other self, a relatively solid figure, w ith a place in the minds o f certain p eople’.
In this book about the exploration o f the earth ’s surface, I have confined m yself to those whose
travels were real and who also aimed at m ore than personal discovery. But that still left me w ith
another problem: the word ‘explorer’ has becom e associated w ith a past era. We think back to a
golden age, as if exploration peaked somehow in the 19th century - as if the process o f discovery
is now on the decline, though the truth is that we have named only one and a h a lf m illion o f this
planet’s species, and there may be m ore than 10 m illion - and th a t’s not including bacteria. We
have studied only 5 per cent o f the species we know. We have scarcely m apped the ocean floors,
and know even less about ourselves; we fully understand the workings o f only 10 per cent o f our
brains.
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