READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Is Graffiti Art or Crime? 

A

The term graffiti derives from the Italian graffito meaning ‘scratching’ and can be defined as uninvited marking or writing scratched or applied to objects, built structures and natural features. It is not a new phenomenon: examples can be found on ancient structures around the world, in some cases predating the Greeks and Romans. In such circumstances it has acquired invaluable historical and archaeological significance, providing a social history of life and events at that time. Graffiti is now a problem that has become pervasive, as a result of the availability of cheap and quick means of markmaking.

B

It is usually considered a priority to remove graffiti as quickly as possible after it appears. This is for several reasons. The first is to prevent ‘copy-cat’ emulation which can occur rapidly once a clean surface is defaced. It may also be of a racist or otherwise offensive nature and many companies and councils have a policy of removing this type of graffiti within an hour or two of it being reported. Also, as paints, glues and inks dry out over time they can become increasingly difficult to remove and are usually best dealt with as soon as possible after the incident. Graffiti can also lead to move serious forms of vandalism and, ultimately, the deterioration of an area, contributing to social decline.

C

Although graffiti may be regarded as an eyesore, any proposal to remove it from sensitive historic surfaces should be carefully considered: techniques designed for more robust or utilitarian surfaces may result in considerable damage. In the event of graffiti incidents, it is important that the owners of buildings or other structures and their consultants are aware of the approach they should take in dealing with the problem.
The police should be informed as there may be other related attacks occurring locally. An incidence pattern can identify possible culprits, as can stylised signatures or nicknames, known as ‘tags’, which may already be familiar to local police. Photographs are useful to record graffiti incident and may assist the police in bringing a prosecution. Such images are also required for insurance claims, and can be helpful to cleaning operatives, allowing them to see the problem area before arriving on site.

D

There are a variety of methods that are used to remove graffiti. Broadly these divide between chemical and mechanical systems. Chemical preparations are based on dissolving the media; these solvents can range from water to potentially hazardous chemical ‘cocktails’. Mechanical systems such as wire-brushing and grit-blasting attempt to abrade or chip the media from the surface. Care should be taken to comply with health and safety legislation with regard to the protection of both passers-by and any person carrying out the cleaning. Operatives should follow product guidelines in terms of application and removal, and wear the appropriate protective equipment. Measures must be taken to ensure that run-off, aerial mists, drips and splashes do not threaten unprotected members of the public. When examining a graffiti incident it is important to assess the ability of the substrate to withstand the prescribed treatment. If there is any doubt regarding this, then small trial areas should be undertaken to assess the impact of more extensive treatment.

E

A variety of preventive strategies can be adopted to combat a recurring problem of graffiti at a given site. As no two sites are the same, no one set of protection measures will be suitable for all situations. Each site must be looked at individually. Surveillance systems such as closed circuit television may also help. In cities and towns around the country, prominently placed cameras have been shown to reduce anti-social behavior of all types including graffiti. Security patrols will also act as a deterrent to prevent recurring attacks. However, the cost of this may be too high for most situations. Physical barrier such as a wall, railings, doors or gates can be introduced to discourage unauthorized access to a vulnerable site. However, consideration has to be given to the impact measures have on the structure being protected. In the worst cases, they can be almost as damaging to the quality of the environment as the graffiti they prevent. In others, they might simply provide a new surface for graffiti.

F

One of the most significant problems associated with graffiti removal is the need to remove it from surfaces that are repeatedly attacked. Under these circumstances the repeated removal of graffiti using even the most gentle methods will ultimately cause damage to the surface material. There may be situations where the preventive strategies mentioned above do not work or are not a viable proposition at a given site. Anti-graffiti coatings are usually applied by brush or spray leaving a thin veneer that essentially serves to isolate the graffiti from the surface.

G

Removal of graffiti from a surface that has been treated in this way is much easier, usually using low-pressure water which reduces the possibility of damage. Depending on the type of barrier selected it may be necessary to reapply the coating after each graffiti removal exercise.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Music: Language We All Speak

Section A

Music is one of the human species' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere - but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery - mere "auditory cheesecake", as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B

But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we're from - not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the 6 August issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.

To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realise two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale - that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself.

Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.

Section C

This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular – which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se," says Schwartz.

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sounds, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning, and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analogue to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument - the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us - specifically, we like the sounds that remind us of us.

This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song - that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences."

Section D

Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world - birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting - previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.

Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.

But what's been played to animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sound the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.

Section E

No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.

For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states", Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song". This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trancelike state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture". So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realise.