IELTSリーディング対策 ┃概要と問題形式の把握

Bring back the big cats

There will be no threat to human beings by the lynx: there is no instance of a lynx preying on people. It is a specialist predator of roe deer that has exploded in Britain in recent decades which holds back the intensive browsing and planning to re-establish forests. It will also winkle out sika deer, an exotic species that is impossible for human beings to control as it hides in impenetrable plantations of young trees. Reintroducing this predator comes with the aim of bringing back the forests to the parts of our bare and barren uplands. The lynx needs deep cover thus giving little risk to sheep and other livestock which need to be in a condition of farm subsidies that are kept out of the woods.

Several conservationists suggested that the lynx can be reintroduced within 20 years in the recent trip of the Cairngorm Mountains. If trees return to the bare hills anywhere in Britain, the big cats will follow. If it is seen from the perspective of anywhere else in Europe, there will be nothing extraordinary about the proposals. Now, the lynx has been reintroduced to the Mountains, Alps in eastern France and mountains in Germany and re-established in many places. Since 1970, the European population has tripled to nearly 10, 000. Like wolves, bears, pigs, bison, moose and other species, the lynx will spread as farming, left the hills and then people discover that it is much needed to protect wildlife than to hunt it as tourists will pay to see it. Large scale rewilding will happen everywhere except Britain.

Music and the emotions

A recent paper in Neuroscience by a research team in Montreal, Canada, marks an important step in repealing the precise underpinnings of ‘the potent pleasurable stimulus’ that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people who experience ‘chills’ to instrumental music, the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. They then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favourite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI), they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered is that music triggers the production of dopamine – a chemical with a key role in setting people’s moods – by the neurons (nerve cells) in both the dorsal and ventral regions of the brain. As these two regions have long been linked with the experience of pleasure, this finding isn’t particularly surprising.

What is rather more significant is the finding that the dopamine neurons in the caudate – a region of the brain involved in learning stimulus-response associations, and in anticipating food and other ‘reward’ stimuli – were at their most active around 15 seconds before the participants’ favourite moments in the music. The researchers call this the ‘anticipatory phase’ and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favourite part. The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. Why are they so active in the period preceding the acoustic climax? After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells is most active when the ‘chills’ have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved.

The Desolenator: producing clean water

A
Traveling around Thailand in the 1990s, William Janssen was impressed with the basic rooftop solar heating systems that were on many homes, where energy from the sun was absorbed by a plate and then used to heat water for domestic use. Two decades later Janssen developed that basic idea he saw in Southeast Asia into a portable device that uses the power from the sun to purify water.

B
The Desolator operates as a mobile desalination unit that can take water from different places, such as the sea, rivers, boreholes, and rain, and purify it for human consumption. It is particularly valuable in regions where natural groundwater reserves have been polluted, or where seawater is the only water source available.

Janssen saw that there was a need for a sustainable way to clean water in both the developing and the
developed countries when he moved to the United Arab Emirates and saw large-scale water processing.
‘I was confronted with the enormous carbon footprint that the Gulf nations have because of all of the
desalination that they do,’ he says.

Silbo Gomero- the Whistle Language of the Canary Islands

La Gomera is one of the Canary Islands situated in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of Africa. This small volcanic island is mountainous, with steep rocky slopes and deep, wooded ravines, rising to 1,487 metres at its highest peak. It is also home to the best known of the world’s whistle languages’, a means of transmitting information over long distances which is perfectly adapted to the extreme terrain of the island.

This ‘language, known as ‘Silbo’ or ‘Silbo Gomero – from the Spanish word for ‘whistle’ – is now shedding light on the language-processing abilities of the human brain, according to scientists. Researchers say that silbo activates parts of the brain normally associated with spoken language, suggesting that the brain is remarkably flexible in its ability to interpret sounds as language.

‘Science has developed the idea of brain areas that are dedicated to language, and we are starting to understand the scope of signals that can be recognised as language, says David Corina, co-author of a recent study and associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Silbo is a substitute for Spanish, with individual words recoded into whistles which have high- and low-frequency tones. A whistler or silbador puts a finger in his or her mouth to increase the whistle’s pitch, while the other hand can be cupped to adjust the direction of the sound.”There is much more ambiguity in the whistled signal than n the spoken signal, explains lead researcher Manuel Carreiras, psychology professor at the University of La Laguna on the Canary island of Tenerife. Because whistled ‘words’ can be hard to distinguish, silbadores rely on repetition, as well as awareness of context, to make themselves understood.

The risks agriculture faces in developing countries

A
Two things distinguish food production from all other productive activities: first, every single person needs food each day and has a right to it; and second, it is hugely dependent on nature. These two unique aspects, one political, the other natural, make food production highly vulnerable and different from any other business. At the same time, cultural values are highly entrenched in food and agricultural systems worldwide.

B
Farmers everywhere face major risks; including extreme weather, long-term climate change, and price volatility in input and product markets. However, smallholder farmers in developing countries must in addition deal with adverse environments, both natural, in terms of soil quality, rainfall, etc. and human, in terms of infrastructure, financial systems, markets, knowledge and technology. Counter-intuitively, hunger is prevalent among many smallholder farmers in the developing world.

C
Participants in the online debate argued that our biggest challenge is to address the underlying causes of the agricultural system’s inability to ensure sufficient food for all, and they identified as drivers of this problem our dependency on fossil fuels and unsupportive government policies.

D
On the question of mitigating the risks farmers face, most essayists called for greater state intervention.
In his essay, Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, argued that governments can significantly reduce risks for farmers by providing basic services like roads to get produce more efficiently to markets, or water and food storage facilities to reduce losses. Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, suggested that the procurement and holding of stocks by governments can also help mitigate wild swings in food prices by alleviating uncertainties about market supply.

E
Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, held up social safety nets and public welfare programmes in Ethiopia, Brazil and Mexico as valuable ways to address poverty among farming families and reduce their vulnerability to agriculture shocks. However, some commentators responded that cash transfers to poor families do not necessarily translate into increased food security, as these programmes do not always strengthen food production or raise incomes.

Regarding state subsidies for agriculture, Rokeya Kabir, Executive Director of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, commented in her essay that these ‘have not compensated for the stranglehold exercised by private traders.
In fact, studies show that sixty percent of beneficiaries of subsidies are not poor, but rich landowners and non-farmer traders.

F
Nwanze, Murphy and Fan argued that private risk management tools, like private insurance, commodity futures markets, and rural finance can help small-scale producers mitigate risk and allow for investment in improvements. Kabir warned that financial support schemes often encourage the adoption of high-input agricultural practices, which in the medium term may raise production costs beyond the value of their harvests.

Murphy noted that when futures markets become excessively financialised they can contribute to short-term price volatility, which increases farmers’ food insecurity. Many participants and commentators emphasised that greater transparency in markets is needed to mitigate the impact of volatility, and make evident whether adequate stocks and supplies are available. Others contended that agribusiness companies should be held responsible for paying for negative side effects.

G
Many essayists mentioned climate change and its consequences for small-scale agriculture. Fan explained that in addition to reducing crop yields, climate change increases the magnitude and the frequency of extreme weather events, which increase smallholder vulnerability. The growing unpredictability of weather patterns increases farmers’ difficulty in managing weather-related risks.

According to this author, one solution would be to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to new climate trends and extreme weather patterns. Accordingly, Pat Mooney, co-founder and executive director of the ETC Group, suggested that ‘if we are to survive climate change, we must adopt policies that let peasants diversify the plant and animal species and varieties/breeds that make up our menus.

H
Some participating authors and commentators argued in favour of community- based and autonomous risk management strategies through collective action groups, co-operatives or producers’ groups. Such groups enhance market opportunities for small-scale producers, reduce marketing costs and synchronise buying and selling with seasonal price conditions.

According to Murphy, ‘collective action offers an important way for farmers to strengthen their political and economic bargaining power, and to reduce their business risks. One commentator, Giel Ton, warned that collective action does not come as a free good. It takes time, effort and money to organise, build trust and to experiment. Others, like Marcel Vernooij and Marcel Beukeboom, suggested that in order to ‘apply what we already know’, all stakeholders, including business, government, scientists and civil society, must work together, starting at the beginning of the value chain.

Why fairy tales are scary tales

Some people think that fairy tales are just stories to amuse children, but their universal and
enduring appeal may be due to more serious reasons

People of every culture tell each other fairy tales but the same story often takes a variety of
forms in different parts of the world. In the story of Little Red Riding Hood that European
children are familiar with, a young girl on the way to see her grandmother meets a wolf and
tells him where she is going. The wolf runs on ahead and disposes of the grandmother, then
gets into bed dressed in the grandmother’s clothes to wait for Little Red Riding Hood. You may
think you know the story – but which version? In some versions, the wolf swallows up the
grandmother, while in others it locks her in a cupboard. In some stories, Red Riding Hood gets
the better of the wolf on her own, while in others a hunter or a woodcutter hears her cries and
comes to her rescue.

The universal appeal of these tales is frequently attributed to the idea that they contain
cautionary messages: in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, to listen to your mother, and avoid
talking to strangers. ‘It might be what we find interesting about this story is that it’s got this
survival-relevant information in it,’ says anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at Durham University in
the UK. But his research suggests otherwise. ‘We have this huge gap in our knowledge about
the history and prehistory of storytelling, despite the fact that we know this genre is an
incredibly ancient one,’ he says. That hasn’t stopped anthropologists, folklorists* and other
academics devising theories to explain the importance of fairy tales in human society. Now
Tehrani has found a way to test these ideas, borrowing a technique from evolutionary biologists

To work out the evolutionary history, development and relationships among groups of
organisms, biologists compare the characteristics of living species in a process called
‘phylogenetic analysis’. Tehrani has used the same approach to compare related versions of fairy
tales to discover how they have evolved and which elements have survived longest.
Tehrani’s analysis focused on Little Red Riding Hood in its many forms, which include another
Western fairy tale known as The Wolf and the Kids. Checking for variants of these two tales and
similar stories from Africa, East Asia and other regions, he ended up with 58 stories recorded
from oral traditions. Once his phylogenetic analysis had established that they were indeed
related, he used the same methods to explore how they have developed and altered over time.

First, he tested some assumptions about which aspects of the story alter least as it evolves,
indicating their importance. Folklorists believe that what happens in a story is more central to
the story than the characters in it – that visiting a relative, only to be met by a scary animal in
disguise, is more fundamental than whether the visitor is a little girl or three siblings, or the
animal is a tiger instead of a wolf.

However, Tehrani found no significant difference in the rate of evolution of incidents compared
with that of characters. ‘Certain episodes are very stable because they are crucial to the story,
but there are lots of other details that can evolve quite freely,’ he says. Neither did his analysis
support the theory that the central section of a story is the most conserved part. He found no
significant difference in the flexibility of events there compared with the beginning or the end.
But the really big surprise came when he looked at the cautionary elements of the story.
‘Studies on hunter-gatherer folk tales suggest that these narratives include really important
information about the environment and the possible dangers that may be faced there – stuff
that’s relevant to survival,’ he says. Yet in his analysis such elements were just as flexible as
seemingly trivial details. What, then, is important enough to be reproduced from generation to
generation?

The answer, it would appear, is fear – blood-thirsty and gruesome aspects of the story, such as
the eating of the grandmother by the wolf, turned out to be the best preserved of all. Why are
these details retained by generations of storytellers, when other features are not? Tehrani has
an idea: ‘In an oral context, a story won’t survive because of one great teller. It also needs to be
interesting when it’s told by someone who’s not necessarily a great storyteller.’ Maybe being
swallowed whole by a wolf, then cut out of its stomach alive is so gripping that it helps the story
remain popular, no matter how badly it’s told.

Jack Zipes at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, is unconvinced by Tehrani’s views on
fairy tales. ‘Even if they’re gruesome, they won’t stick unless they matter,’ he says. He believes
the perennial theme of women as victims in stories like Little Red Riding Hood explains why they
continue to feel relevant. But Tehrani points out that although this is often the case in Western
versions, it is not always true elsewhere. In Chinese and Japanese versions, often known as The
Tiger Grandmother, the villain is a woman, and in both Iran and Nigeria, the victim is a boy.
Mathias Clasen at Aarhus University in Denmark isn’t surprised by Tehrani’s findings. ‘Habits and
morals change, but the things that scare us, and the fact that we seek out entertainment that’s
designed to scare us – those are constant,’ he says. Clasen believes that scary stories teach us
what it feels like to be afraid without having to experience real danger, and so build up
resistance to negative emotions.

Nutmeg was a highly prized and costly ingredient in European cuisine in the Middle Ages, and was used as a flavouring, medicinal, and preservative agent. Throughout this period, the Arabs were the exclusive importers of the spice to Europe. They sold nutmeg for high prices to merchants based in Venice, but they never revealed the exact location of the source of this extremely valuable commodity. The Arab-Venetian dominance of the trade finally ended in 1512, when the Portuguese reached the Banda Islands and began exploiting its precious resources.

Always in danger of competition from neighbouring Spain, the Portuguese began subcontracting their spice distribution to Dutch traders. Profits began to flow into the Netherlands, and the Dutch commercial fleet swiftly grew into one of the largest in the world. The Dutch quietly gained control of most of the shipping and trading of spices in Northern Europe. Then, in 1580, Portugal fell under Spanish rule, and by the end of the 16th century the Dutch found themselves locked out of the market. As prices for pepper, nutmeg, and other spices soared across Europe, they decided to fight back.

In 1602, Dutch merchants founded the VOC, a trading corporation better known as the Dutch East India Company. By 1617, the VOC was the richest commercial operation in the world. The company had 50,000 employees worldwide, with a private army of 30,000 men and a fleet of 200 ships. At the same time, thousands of people across Europe were dying of the plague, a highly contagious and deadly disease. Doctors were desperate for a way to stop the spread of this disease, and they decided nutmeg held the cure. Everybody wanted nutmeg, and many were willing to spare no expense to have it. Nutmeg bought for a few pennies in Indonesia could be sold for 68,000 times its original cost on the streets of London. The only problem was the short supply. And that’s where the Dutch found their opportunity.