Reading 2025-10 Test 4

The development of an air service on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island Cut off from the rest of the country by a range of mountains, the west coast of New Zealand's South Island - or the "Coast” as it is commonly known - was the country's "wild west frontier”. But unlike Fiordland to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich. Settlers hunted and fished, logged, milled and mined. They farmed where they managed to clear the forest and drain the swamps. It was pure survival at times. The isolation was inescapable, not so much because of the great distances that travelers had to cover, but rather due to the topography of the place - the mountains, gorges, glaciers, rivers and headlands - which necessitated long detours and careful timing with regard to weather and tides. Bridges were few and far between in the early years, and even ferry crossings were often impossible after heavy rains. Each river had its attendant ferryman or woman whose attention a traveler would attract with a rifle shot. It was the kind of country where one would greatly benefit from a pair of wings. Maurice Buckley, a World War I pilot, was the first to give Coasters, as the residents of the region were called, such wings, by establishing the Arrow Aviation Company in 1923. That year he bought an Avro biplane on the east coast, which he transported across the country by rail, wings off, before reassembling it in a local garage. When he opened for business the following year, the colorful Avro was an instant crowd-pleaser and Coasters queued up for joyrides. For the first major flight, Buckley invited Dr Teichelmann, a local mountaineer, to join him. They flew over the Franz Josef Glacier and landed at Okarito. Afterwards, Teichelmann wrote about how extraordinary it was to look at the world from the air, "like taking the roof off the house and watching the performances from above." Next came an aviator named Bert Mercer, who made a reconnaissance flight to the Coast in August 1933 and started Air Travel (NZ) the following year. Mercer's aircraft of choice was a DH83 Fox Moth. By comparison with the regular open-air aircraft of the day, the Fox Moth was a plane that offered considerable luxury, housing four passengers in an enclosed forward area fully protected from the weather. Mercer opened for business in December 1934, picking up the airline's first passengers and, on the last day of that year, commenced a regular delivery of mail, carrying 73 kg of letters to Haast and Okuru. From that day on, the Fox Moth became a much-anticipated sight on the coast. Mercer got on with everyone and won their respect by anticipating, then meeting their needs. One of those was setting up the first aerial shipping route to help transport a kind of small fish known as whitebait. Starting in 1935 Mercer would put the plane down where there was no airstrip, instead using remote beaches such as the one at the mouth of the Paringa River, collect the whitebait and whisk them off to the night train and waiting city markets in perfectly fresh condition. Mercer relied on his senses - what he could see and hear - to navigate, flying around the weather and contours of the land. Although often warned to do so by aviation authorities, he refused to develop the skills necessary to navigate the plane "blind," using just its instruments on the console in front of him. The old habits were too hard to change. With the outbreak of World War II, Mercer's aircraft were considered so essential to the remote Coast that they were not militarized. In fact, the business continued to grow in the early years, thanks in large part to a government issued subsidy, which allowed him to expand into neighboring areas. Despite the war in far-off lands, life on the Coast was business as usual. The settlers were always in need of mail and transportation. In time, though, this presented Mercer with a pressing issue: with so many now joining the Air Force, he no longer had enough pilots. In 1942 he wrote in his diary, "I am back to where I started eight years ago- on my own." The only solution to keep the airline going was to pack as much into every plane as possible and make every flight count. But some of Mercer's newly formed team objected to the amount of cargo they had to carry, which for a small rural airline was a fact of life. One man, Norm Suttle, left the airline after a few months in protest about carrying more than was appropriate for the aircraft. This marked another decline in the airline's fortunes. When Bert Mercer died in 1944, the airline was taken over by Fred Lucas, a man who shared Mercer's pioneering spirit. Under Lucas's leadership the newly formed West Coast Airways saw another decade of profitable returns. But in the following decade, times changed fast. Helicopters were soon found to be ideal machines for the Coast terrain, and quickly took over the vast majority of the local air transport business.

Bert Mercer and aviation on the Coast Early Years ● Mercer set up Air Travel (NZ) in 1934 ● The Fox Moth was noted for its 7__________ compared to other planes ● in 1934 mercer’s company started to transport 8__________ and passengers ● from 1935 planes landed on 9__________ to pick up fresh produce World War II ● the airline expanded at first because it got a 10__________ from the state ● there was a shortage of 11__________ by 1942. Final Years ● there were disputes at the airline about the quantity of 12__________ in each plane ● 1950s: 13__________ became popular and the airline suffered

A The ants and their agriculture have been extensively studied over the years, but the recent research has uncovered intriguing new findings about the fungus they cultivate, how they domesticated it and how they cultivate it and preserve it from pathogens. For example, the fungus farms, which the ants were thought to keep free of pathogens, turn out to be vulnerable to a devastating mold, found nowhere else but in ants’ nests. To keep the mold in check, the ants long ago made a discovery that would do credit to any pharmaceutical laboratory. B Leaf-cutting ants and their fungus farms are a marvel of nature and perhaps the best known example of symbiosis, the mutual dependence of two species. The ants’ achievement is remarkable—the biologist Edward O. Wilson has called it “one of the major breakthroughs in animal evolution”—because it allows them to eat, courtesy of their mushroom’s digestive powers, the otherwise poisoned harvest of tropical forests whose leaves are laden with terpenoids, alkaloids and other chemicals designed to sicken browsers. C Fungus growing seems to have originated only once in evolution, because all gardening ants belong to a single tribe, the descendants of the first fungus farmer. There are more than 200 known species of the attine ant tribe, divided into 12 groups, or genera. The leaf-cutters use fresh vegetation; the other groups, known as the lower attines because their nests are smaller and their techniques more primitive, feed their gardens with detritus like dead leaves, insects and feces. In 1994 a team of four biologists, Ulrich G. Mueller and Ted R. Schultz from Cornell University and Ignacio H. Chapela and Stephen A. Rehner from the United States Department of Agriculture, analyzed the DNA of ant funguses. The common assumption that the funguses are all derived from a single strain, they found, was only half true. D The leaf-cutters’ fungus was indeed descended from a single strain, propagated clonally, or just by budding, for at least 23 million years. But the lower attine ants used different varieties of the fungus, and in one case a quite separate species, the four biologists discovered. Cameron R. Currie, a Ph.D. student in the University of Toronto, it seemed to Mr. Currie, resembled the monocultures of various human crops, that are very productive for a while and then succumb to some disastrous pathogen, such as the Irish potato blight. Monocultures, which lack the genetic diversity to respond to changing environmental threats, are sitting ducks for parasites. Mr. Currie felt there had to be a parasite in the ant-fungus system. But a century of ant research offered no support for the idea. Textbooks describe how leaf-cutter ants scrupulously weed their gardens of all foreign organisms. “People kept telling me, ‘You know the ants keep their gardens free of parasites, don’t you?’” Mr. Currie said of his efforts to find a hidden interloper. E But after three years of sifting through attine ant gardens, Mr. Currie discovered they are far from free of infections. In last month’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and two colleagues, Dr. Mueller and David Mairoch, isolated several alien organisms, particularly a family of parasitic molds called Escovopsis. Escovopsis turns out to be a highly virulent pathogen that can devastate a fungus garden in a couple of days. It blooms like a white cloud, with the garden dimly visible underneath. In a day or two the whole garden is enveloped. “Other ants won’t go near it and the ants associated with the garden just starve to death,’’ Dr. Rehner said. “They just seem to give up, except for those that have rescued their larvae.” F Evidently the ants usually manage to keep Escovopsis and other parasites under control. But with any lapse in control, or if the ants are removed, Escovopsis will quickly burst forth. Although new leaf-cutter gardens start off free of Escovopsis, within two years some 60 percent become infected. The discovery of Escovopsis’s role brings a new level of understanding to the evolution of the attine ants. “In the last decade, evolutionary biologists have been increasingly aware of the role of parasites as driving forces in evolution,” Dr. Schultz said. There is now a possible reason to explain why the lower attine species keep changing the variety of fungus in their mushroom gardens, and occasionally domesticating new ones—to stay one step ahead of the relentless Escovopsis. G Interestingly, Mr. Currie found that the leaf-cutters had in general fewer alien molds in their gardens than the lower attines, yet they had more Escovopsis infections. It seems that the price they pay for cultivating a pure variety of fungus is a higher risk from Escovopsis. But the leaf-cutters may have little alternative: they cultivate a special variety of fungus which, unlike those grown by the lower attines, produces nutritious swollen tips for the ants to eat. H Discovery of a third partner in the ant-fungus symbiosis raises the question of how the attine ants, especially the leaf-cutters, keep this dangerous interloper under control. Amazingly enough, Mr. Currie has again provided the answer. “People have known for a hundred years that ants have a whitish growth on the cuticle,” said Dr. Mueller, referring to the insects’ body surface. “People would say this is like a cuticular wax. But Cameron was the first one in a hundred years to put these things under a microscope. He saw it was not inert wax. It is alive.” Mr. Currie discovered a specialised patch on the ants’ cuticle that harbours a particular kind of bacterium, one well known to the pharmaceutical industry, because it is the source of half the antibiotics used in medicine. From each of 22 species of attine ant studied, Mr. Cameron and colleagues isolated a species of Streptomyces bacterium, they reported in Nature in April. The Streptomyces does not have much effect on ordinary laboratory funguses. But it is a potent poisoner of Escovopsis, inhibiting its growth and suppressing spore formation. Because both the leaf-cutters and the lower attines use Streptomyces, the bacterium may have been part of their symbiosis for almost as long as the Escovopsis mold. If so, some Alexander Fleming of an ant discovered antibiotics millions of years before people did. Even now, the ants are accomplishing two feats beyond the powers of human technology. The leaf-cutters are growing a monocultural crop year after year without disaster, and they are using an antibiotic apparently so wisely and prudently that, unlike people, they are not provoking antibiotic resistance in the target pathogen.

A Leaf-cutting ants B Lower attine ants C Both leaf-cutting ants and lower attine ants

A The starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world: first folios of Shakespeare, Gutenberg Bibles and manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Yet the library’s most controversial possession is an unprepossessing vellum manuscript about the size of a hardback book, containing 240-odd pages of drawings and text of unknown age and authorship. Catalogued as MS408, the manuscript would attract little attention were it not for the fact that the drawings hint at esoteric knowledge, while the text seems to be some sort of code – one that no-one has been able to break. It’s known to scholars as the Voynich manuscript, after the American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the manuscript from a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912. B Over the years, the manuscript has attracted the attention of everyone from amateur dabblers to top codebreakers, all determined to succeed where countless others have failed. Academic research papers, books and websites are devoted to making sense of the contents of the manuscript, which are freely available to all. ‘Most other mysteries involve secondhand reports,’ says Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University, a leading Voynich expert. But this is one that you can see for yourself. C It is certainly strange: page after page of drawings of weird plants, astrological symbolism and human figures, accompanied by a script that looks like some form of shorthand. What does it say and what are the drawings about? Voynich himself believed that the manuscript was the work of the 13th century English monk Roger Bacon, famed for his knowledge of alchemy, philosophy and science. In 1921 Voynich’s view that Bacon was the writer appeared to win support from the work of William Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, who claimed to have found the key to the cipher system used by Bacon. According to Newbold, the manuscript proved that Bacon had access to a microscope centuries before they were supposedly first invented. They claim that this mediaeval monk had observed living cells created a sensation. It soon became clear, however, that Newbold had fallen victim to wishful thinking. Other scholars showed that his ‘decoding’ methods produced a host of possible interpretations. D The Voynich manuscript has continued to defy the efforts of world-class experts. In 1944, a team was assembled to tackle the mystery, led by William Friedman, the renowned American codebreaker. They began with the most basic code breaking task: analysing the relative frequencies of the characters making up the text, looking for signs of an underlying structure. Yet Friedman’s team soon found themselves in deep water. The precise size of the ‘alphabet’ of the Voynich manuscript was unclear: it’s possible to make out more than 70 distinct symbols among the 170,000-character text. Furthermore, Friedman discovered that some words and phrases appeared more often than expected in a standard language, casting doubt on claims that the manuscript concealed a real language, as encryption typically reduces word frequencies. E Friedman concluded that the most plausible resolution of this paradox was that ‘Voynichese’ is some sort of specially created artificial language, whose words are devised from concepts, rather than linguistics. So, could the Voynich manuscript be the earliest known example of an artificial language? Friedman’s hypothesis commands respect because of the lifetime of crypt analytical expertise he brought to bear,’ says Rob Churchill, co-author of the Voynich Manuscript, that still leaves a host of questions unanswered, however, such as the identity of the author and the meaning of the bizarre drawings. ‘It does little to advance our understanding of the manuscript as a whole,’ says Churchill. Even though Friedman was working more than 60 years ago, he suspected that major insights would come reality that the device that had already transformed codebreaking: the computer. In this he was right – it is now the key tool for uncovering clues about the pleasure from manuscript’s language. F The insights so far have been perplexing. For example, in 2001 another leading Voynich scholar, Dr Gabriel Landin of Birmingham University in the UK, published the results of his study of the manuscript using a pattern-detecting method called spectral analysis. This revealed evidence that the manuscript contains genuine words, rather than random nonsense, consistent with the existence of some underlying natural language. Yet the following year, Voynich expert Ren Zandbergen of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany showed that the entropy of the text (a measure of the rate of transfer of information) was consistent with Friedman’s suspicions that an artificial language had been used. G Many are convinced that the Voynich manuscript isn’t a hoax. For how could a medieval hoaxer create so many telltale signs of a message from random nonsense? Yet even this has been challenged in new research by Rugg. Using a system, first published by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano in 1150 in which a specially constructed grille issued to pick out symbols from a table, Rugg found he could rapidly generate text with many of the basic traits of the Voynich manuscript. Publishing his results in 2004 Rugg stresses that he hadn’t set out to prove the manuscript a hoax. ‘I simply demonstrated that it’s feasible to hoax something this complex in a few months, he says. Inevitably, others beg to differ. Some scholars, such as Zandbergen, still suspect the text has genuine meaning, though believe it may never be decipherable. Others, such as Churchill, have suggested that the sheer weirdness of the illustrations and text hint at an author who had lost touch with reality. H What is clear is that the book-sized manuscript kept under lock and key at Yale University has lost none of its fascination. ‘Many derive great intellectual pleasure from solving puzzles,’ says Rugg. The Voynich manuscript is as challenging a puzzle as anyone could ask for.

A Gordon Rugg B Roger Bacon C William Newbold D William Friedman E Rob Churchill F Gabriel Landini G Ren Zandbergen H Girolamo Cardano

Voynich Researchers William Newbold believed that the author of the Voynich manuscript had been able to look at cells through a 35.................................... , Other researchers later demonstrated that there were flaws in his argument. William Friedman concluded that the manuscript was written in an artificial language that was based on 36.................................... . He couldn’t find out the meaning of this language but he believed that the 37.................................... would continue to bring advances in code breaking. Dr Gabriel Landini used a system known as 38.................................... in his research, and claims to have demonstrated the presence of genuine words. Dr Gordon Rugg’s system involved a grille, that made it possible to quickly select symbols that appeared in a 39.................................... . Rugg’s conclusion was that the manuscript lacked genuine meaning.