Reading 2025-11 Test 1

What is today a simple children's toy has a surprisingly rich history. Dolls have been a part of humankind for thousands of years. Often depicting religious figures, or used as playthings, early dolls were probably made from primitive materials such as clay, fur, or wood. Dolls through the ages. Dolls constructed of flat pieces of wood, painted with various designs, and with hair made of clay, have often been found in Egyptian graves dating back to 2000 BC. Egyptian tombs of wealthy families have included pottery dolls. Dolls being placed in these graves leads some to believe that they were cherished possessions. Girls from ancient Greece and Rome offered their wooden dolls to goddesses after they were too 'grown-up' to play with dolls. Most ancient dolls that were found in tombs were very simple creations, often made from such materials as clay, rags, wood, or bone. Some of the more unique dolls were made with ivory or wax. The main goal was to make the doll as lifelike as possible. That ideal led to the creation of dolls with movable limbs and removable garments, dating back to 600 BC. Following the era of the ancient dolls, Europe became a major hub for doll production. These dolls were primarily made of wood. Fewer than 30 examples of primitive wooden stump dolls from England survive today. The Grodnertal area of Germany produced many peg wooden dolls, a type of doll that has very simple peg joints and resembles a clothespin (a device for hanging washing on a clothesline). An alternative to wood was developed in the 1800s. 'Composition' is a collective term for mixtures of pulped wood or paper that were used to make doll heads and bodies. These mixtures were moulded under pressure, creating a durable doll that could be mass produced. Manufacturers closely guarded the recipes for their mixtures, sometimes using strange ingredients like ash or eggshells. Papier-mâché, a type of composition, was one of the most popular mixtures. In addition to wooden dolls, wax dolls grew in popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Much in Germany was a major manufacturing center for wax dolls. Wax dollmakers would model a doll's head in wax or clay, and then cover it with plaster to create a mould. Then they would pour melted wax into the cast. The wax for the head would be very thin, no more than 3 mm. Some of the most distinctive wax dolls were created in England between 1850 and 1930. One of the first dolls that portrayed a baby was made in England from wax at the basinsion of the 10th century. Around the same time porcelain became popular. It is made by firing special clays in a kiln at more than 2372 degrees Fahrenheit (1300°C), and only a few clays can withstand firing at such high temperatures. Porcelain is used generically to refer to both china and bisque dolls; china is glazed, whereas bisque is unglazed. Germany, France, and Denmark started creating china heads for dolls in the 1840s. These china heads were replaced in the 1860s by ones made of bisque. Bisque, which is porcelain fired twice with colour added to it after the first firing, looked more like skin than china did. In France, the bébé was popular in the 1880s, and it has become a highly sought after doll today. The bébé, first made in the 1850s, was different from its predecessors because it depicted a younger girl. Until then, most French dolls were representations of adults. Although the French dolls were unrivalled in their artistry, German bisque dolls became quite popular because they were not as expensive. Kammer & Reinhardt introduced a bisque character doll in the 1900s, starting a trend of creating realistic dolls. For many centuries, rag dolls were made by mothers for their children. The term 'rag doll' refers generically to dolls made of any fabric. 'Cloth doll' refers to a subset of rag dolls made of linen or cotton. Commercially produced rag dolls were first introduced in the 1850s by English and American manufacturers. Although not as sophisticated as dolls made from other materials, rag dolls were well loved, often as a child's first toy. Dollmaking did not become an industry in the United States until after the Civil War in the 1860s. Doll production was concentrated in the New England region of the United States, with dolls made from a variety of materials such as leather, rubber, papier-mâché, and cloth. Celluloid was developed in the state of New Jersey in the late 1860s and was used to manufacture dolls until the mid-1950s. German, French, American, and Japanese factories churned out cheaply produced celluloid dolls in mass quantities. However, celluloid fell out of favour because of its extreme flammability and propensity to fade in bright light. After World War I, doll makers experimented with plastics. Hard plastic dolls were manufactured in the 1940s. They resembled composition dolls, but they were much more durable. Other materials used in doll manufacturing included rubber, foam rubber, and vinyl in the 1950s and 1960s. Vinyl changed doll making, allowing doll makers to root hair into the head, rather than using wigs or painting the hair. Although most dolls are now mass-manufactured using these modern materials, many modern doll makers are still using the...

Dolls Earliest known dolls represented religious figures used as toys Egypt 2000 BC bodies were made of 1 _________ 2 _________ was used for the hair Ancient Greece and Rome dolls were given to 3 _________ by older girls 600 BC realistic dolls had separate clothes and 4 _________ that could be put in different positions 17th and 18th centuries dolls made of 5 _________ moulds made of 6 _________

A Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was produced by "miasma" or "poisoning of the air". Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequences of these theories were that little was done to combat the disease before the end of the century. Things became so bad that 1 lm Italians (from a total population of 25m) were "permanently at risk". In malarial zones the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. Those who escaped death were weakened or suffered from splenomegaly - a "painful enlargement of the spleen" and "a lifeless stare". The economic impact of the disease was immense. Epidemics were blamed on southern Italians, given the widespread belief that malaria was hereditary. In the 1880s, such theories began to collapse as the dreaded mosquito was identified as the real culprit. B Italian scientists, drawing on the pioneering work of French doctor Alphonse Laveran, were able to predict the cycles of fever but it was in Rome that further key discoveries were made. Giovanni Battista Grassi, a naturalist, found that a particular type of mosquito was the carrier of malaria. By experimenting on healthy volunteers (mosquitoes were released into rooms where they drank the blood of the human guinea pigs), Grassi was able to make the direct link between the insects (all females of a certain kind) and the disease. Soon, doctors and scientists made another startling discovery: the mosquitoes themselves were also infected and not mere carriers. Every year, during the mosquito season, malarial blood was moved around the population by the insects. Definitive proof of these new theories was obtained after an extraordinary series of experiments in Italy, where healthy people were introduced into malarial zones but kept free of mosquito bites — and remained well. The new Italian state had the necessary information to tackle the disease. C A complicated approach was adopted, which made use of quinine - a drug obtained from tree bark which had long been used to combat fever, but was now seen as a crucial part of the war on malaria. Italy introduced a quinine law and a quinine tax in 1904, and the drug was administered to large numbers of rural workers. Despite its often terrible side-effects (the headaches produced were known as the "quinine-buzz") the drug was successful in limiting the spread of the disease, and in breaking cycles of infection. In addition, Italy set up rural health centres and invested heavily in education programmes. Malaria, as Snowden shows, was not just a medical problem, but a social and regional issue, and could only be defeated through multi-layered strategies. Politics was itself transformed by the anti-malarial campaigns. It was originally decided to give quinine to all those in certain regions — even healthy people; peasants were often suspicious of medicine being forced upon them. Doctors were sometimes met with hostility and refusal, and many were dubbed "poisoners". D Despite these problems, the strategy was hugely successful. Deaths from malaria fell by some 80% in the first decade of the 20th century and some areas escaped altogether from the scourge of the disease. War, from 1915-18, delayed the campaign. Funds were diverted to the battlefields and the fight against malaria became a military issue, laying the way for the fascist approach to the problem. Mussolini's policies in the 20s and 30s are subjected to a serious cross-examination by Snowden. He shows how much of the regime's claims to have "eradicated" malaria through massive land reclamation, forced population removals and authoritarian clean-ups were pure propaganda. Mass draining was instituted — often at a great cost as Mussolini waged war not on the disease itself, but on the mosquitoes that carried it. The cleansing of Italy was also ethnic, as "carefully selected" Italians were chosen to inhabit the gleaming new towns of the former marshlands around Rome. The "successes" under fascism were extremely vulnerable, based as they were on a top-down concept of eradication. As war swept through the drained lands in the 40s, the disease returned with a vengeance. E In the most shocking part of the book, Snowden describes — passionately, but with the skill of a great historian — how the retreating Nazi armies in Italy in 1943-44 deliberately caused a massive malaria epidemic in Lazio. It was "the only known example of biological warfare in 20th century Europe". Shamefully, the Italian malaria expert Alberto Missiroli had a role to play in the disaster: he did not distribute quinine, despite being well aware of the epidemic to come. Snowden claims that Missiroli was already preparing a new strategy — with the support of the US Rockefeller Foundation — using a new pesticide, DDT. Missiroli allowed the epidemic to spread, in order to create the ideal conditions for a massive, and lucrative, human experiment. Fifty-five thousand cases of malaria were recorded in the province of Littoria alone in 1944. It is estimated that more than a third of those in the affected area contracted the disease. Thousands, nobody knows how many, died. With the war over, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation were free to experiment. DDT was sprayed from the air and 3m Italians had their bodies covered with the chemical. The effects were dramatic, and nobody really cared about the toxic effects of the chemical. F By 1962, malaria was more or less gone from the whole peninsula. The last cases were noted in a poor region of Sicily. One of the final victims to die of the disease in Italy was the popular cyclist, Fausto Coppi. He had contracted malaria in Africa in 1960, and the failure of doctors in the north of Italy to spot the disease was a sign of the times. A few decades earlier, they would have immediately noticed the tell-tale signs; it was later claimed that a small dose of quinine would have saved his life. As there are still more than 1m deaths every year from malaria worldwide, Snowden's book also has contemporary relevance. This is a disease that affects every level of the societies where it is rampant. It also provides us with "a message of hope for a world struggling with the great present-day medical emergency".

Before the link between malaria and 14 ________ was established, there were many popular theories circulating among the public, one of which points to 15 ________, the unclean air. The lack of proper treatment affected the country so badly that rural people in malaria infested places had extremely short 16 ________. The disease spread so quickly, especially in the south of Italy, thus giving rise to the idea that the disease was 17 ________. People believed in these theories until mosquito was found to be the 18 ________ in the 1880s.

Academics are now working more with filmmakers who are impressed by the results of their research in computer generated imagery (CGI) Every year the film academy in the USA celebrates the outstanding achievements of the year in a ceremony known as the Oscars. In 2004 a notable event took place: the academic world met the cinematographic world when researchers from Stanford University in the USA were awarded an Oscar. These researchers, led by Steve Marschner, were from the field of Computer Graphics at Stanford. They were part of a growing cohort of computer scientists that has become fundamental to moviemaking. Films have demonstrated that CGI can be used to alter an actor's appearance - making them seem younger, older, more fragile, or more powerful - while still looking surprisingly real. However, this effect only works well if the modified actors are not shown in extreme close-up shots. This is because replicating the detailed textures of skin and fabric is difficult, and the illusion becomes less convincing at close range. Marschner and his team made major progress in accurately and realistically reproducing both skin and cloth. They identified that one of the key problems in making believable computer-generated characters is that CGI often treats skin as opaque and flat (two-dimensional), whereas real skin is translucent and has depth (three-dimensional), meaning it lets some light pass through. The group won an Oscar for successfully creating a CGI system that mimics translucency when light enters the skin, scatters underneath, and then exits again. This process, known as subsurface scattering, is based on mathematical concepts that date back decades to their use in astrophysics. Since human skin naturally possesses translucency, it had to be artificially simulated to capture the soft, realistic quality of actual skin. Earlier CGI systems that assumed skin was fully opaque resulted in characters looking artificial and plastic-like. The breakthrough was so important for giving life to digital characters that, within two years of their research being published, every major visual effects company had adopted it in their rendering software. Even after receiving their award, the researchers remained determined to perfect their work, believing that the fine details of light reflection still were not reproduced convincingly. They examined closely how skin and fabrics reflect light in different ways depending on their physical structure - the precise arrangement of fibers in cloth and the network of fibers in skin. To investigate this, Marschner's team used computerized tomography, a medical imaging technique most familiar for viewing internal organs. Like traditional X-rays, it uses radiation, but instead of producing a single photographic exposure, it combines images taken from multiple angles in a computer, allowing it to capture subtle details invisible in conventional radiographs. This advanced imaging provided a highly detailed, three-dimensional map of the microstructure of various materials. By analyzing these maps, the researchers could develop new algorithms that accurately simulate how light interacts with the complex geometry of skin pores and fabric weaves. Their subsequent work focused on replicating the phenomenon of specular reflection, where light glints off individual fibers or skin oils, and diffuse reflection, where light is scattered evenly from a rough surface. This dual approach was crucial for overcoming the final hurdle of achieving photorealism in extreme close-ups, ensuring that a digital character’s skin would show pores and fine wrinkles just like real human skin, and that cloth would exhibit the intricate play of light across its woven threads.

After winning the Oscar, the researchers wanted to improve how light 32 _________ is shown. They studied how the physical composition of skin and cloth affects this. To do this, they employed 33 _________, a method from medical science. This technique uses 34 _________ to create composite images from various angles, revealing minute details. The data from this process was used to create a detailed 35 _________ of material structures. The team then created 36 _________ to simulate the interaction of light with these tiny structures.