Reading Z1-3
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
The Bermuda Triangle is a mythical section of the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared. Unexplained circumstances surround some of these accidents, including one in which the pilots of a squadron of U.S. Navy bombers became disoriented while flying over the area; the planes were never found. Other boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages. But although myriad fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well-traveled sections of the ocean. In fact, people navigate the area every day without incident.
The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil’s Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida. When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World, he reported that a great flame of fire (probably a meteor) crashed into the sea one night and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later. He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time, a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.
William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which some scholars claim was based on a real-life Bermuda shipwreck, may have enhanced the area’s aura of mystery. Nonetheless, reports of unexplained disappearances did not really capture the public’s attention until the 20th century. An especially infamous tragedy occurred in March 1918 when the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy cargo ship with over 300 men and 10,000 tons of manganese ore onboard, sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay. The Cyclops never sent out an SOS distress call despite being equipped to do so, and an extensive search found no wreckage. “Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship,” U.S. President Woodrow Wilson later said. In 1941, two of the Cyclops’ sister ships similarly vanished without a trace along nearly the same route.
A pattern allegedly began forming in which vessels traversing the Bermuda Triangle would either disappear or be found abandoned. Then, in December 1945, five Navy bombers carrying 14 men took off from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airfield to conduct practice bombing runs over some nearby shoals. But with his compasses apparently malfunctioning, the leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got severely lost. All five planes flew aimlessly until they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea. That same day, a rescue plane and its 13-man crew also disappeared. After a massive weeks-long search failed to turn up any evidence, the official Navy report declared that it was “as if they had flown to Mars.”
By the time author Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” in a 1964 magazine article, additional mysterious accidents had occurred in the area, including three passenger planes that went down despite having just sent “all’s well” messages. Charles Berlitz, whose grandfather founded the Berlitz language schools, stoked the legend even further in 1974 with a sensational bestseller about the legend. Since then, scores of fellow paranormal writers have blamed the triangle’s supposed lethality on everything from aliens, Atlantis, and sea monsters to time warps and reverse gravity fields, whereas more scientifically minded theorists have pointed to magnetic anomalies, waterspouts, or huge eruptions of methane gas from the ocean floor.
In all probability, however, there is no single theory that solves the mystery. As one skeptic put it, trying to find a common cause for every Bermuda Triangle disappearance is no more logical than trying to find a common cause for every automobile accident in Arizona. Moreover, although storms, reefs, and the Gulf Stream can cause navigational challenges there, maritime insurance leader Lloyd’s of London does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an especially hazardous place. Neither does the U.S. Coast Guard, which says: “In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.”
READING PASSAGE 2.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2
WOMEN’S PAIN IS DIFFERENT FROM MEN’S—THE DRUGS COULD BE TOO
A. Men and women can’t feel each other’s pain. Literally, we have different biological pathways for chronic pain, which means pain-relieving drugs that work for one sex might fail in the other half of the population. So why don’t we have pain medicines designed just for men or women? The reason is simple: because no one has looked for them. Drug development begins with studies on rats and mice, and until three years ago, almost all that research used only male animals. As a result, women in particular may be left with unnecessary pain—but men might be too.
B. Now a study in the journal *Brain* reveals differences in the sensory nerves that enter the spinal cords of men and women with neuropathic pain, which is persistent shooting or burning pain. The first such study in humans, it provides the most compelling evidence yet that we need different drugs for men and women. “There’s a huge amount of suffering that’s happening that we could solve,” says Ted Price, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, Dallas, and an author of the *Brain* article. “As a field, it would be awesome to start having some success stories.”
C. Some 50 million people struggle with pain most days or every day, and chronic pain is the leading cause of long-term disability in the United States. Women are more likely than men to have a chronic pain condition, such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, or migraines. Meanwhile, pain medications are killing us. About 17,000 people die each year from prescribed opioids as clinicians write almost 200 million opioid prescriptions, or more than one for every two American adults.
D. The failure to include sex differences in the search for better pain relief stems in part from flawed but deep-seated beliefs. “Medical researchers made the assumption that men and women were absolutely identical in every respect, except their reproductive biology. If there were differences in how their drugs worked between men and women, they didn’t want to hear about it,” says Marianne Legato, a cardiologist who began sounding an alarm in the 1980s about differences in heart attack symptoms among women. She went on to pioneer a new field of gender-specific medicine.
E. The *Brain* study came about from a unique opportunity at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. You can’t take a biopsy of spinal tissue, but researchers were able to study clusters of sensory neurons in eight women and 18 men who had spinal tumors removed. The analysis included sequencing RNA to determine which genes are active in the neural cells. They compared men and women who had a history of chronic neuropathic pain to those who didn’t. Their pain wasn’t caused by the tumors themselves. Some patients had nerve compression causing neuropathic pain, while others didn’t have neuropathic pain or chronic pain at all. In men who did have neuropathic pain, macrophages—cells of the immune system—were most active. In women, neuropeptides, which are protein-like substances released by neurons, were prominent. “This represents the first direct human evidence that pain seems to be as sex-dependent in its underlying biology in humans as we have been suggesting for a while now, based on experiments in mice,” says Jeffrey Mogil, professor of pain studies at McGill University in Montreal and a leading researcher on sex differences in pain, who was not involved in the *Brain* study.
F. Tailoring new medicines to men or women would be revolutionary, particularly considering that it took many years for women (and female animals) to get included in pain research at all. Fearful of potential birth defects, in 1977 the FDA cautioned against including women of childbearing age in clinical trials, which meant women used drugs solely designed for men. By 1993, the thinking had changed, and Congress passed a law requiring the inclusion of women in clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. Although clinical trials now include both men and women, they often don’t report results by sex.
G. The acknowledgement of sex differences in pain could stir up the field and lead to new advances. Amid the promise of “personalized” medicine, with drugs tailored to patients based on genetic sequencing, developing pain medicines for half the population seems like a no-brainer. “Now there’s a whole new frontier opening up in front of our eyes,” Price says.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.
A CHANGE IN OUR DIETS MAY HAVE CHANGED THE WAY WE SPEAK
You might be able to thank agriculture for a rise in the use of “f” and “v” sounds, a controversial new study suggests. As the saying goes, we are what we eat—but does that aspect of our identity carry over to the languages we speak? In a new study in Science, a team of linguists at the University of Zurich uses biomechanics and linguistic evidence to make the case that the rise of agriculture thousands of years ago increased the odds that populations would start to use sounds such as f and v. The idea is that agriculture introduced a range of softer foods into human diets, which altered how humans’ teeth and jaws wore down with age in ways that made these sounds slightly easier to produce. “I hope our study will trigger a wider discussion on the fact that at least some aspects of language and speech—and I insist, some—need to be treated as we treat other complex human behaviours: laying between biology and culture” says lead study author Damián Blasi.
If confirmed, the study would be among the first to show that a culturally induced change in human biology altered the arc of global languages. Blasi and his colleagues stress that changes in tooth wear didn’t guarantee changes in language, nor did they replace any other forces. Instead, they argue that the shift in tooth wear improved the odds of sounds such as f and v emerging. Some scientists in other fields, such as experts in tooth wear, are open to the idea. “Tooth wear is a common pattern with deep evolutionary roots; it’s not specific for humans and hominins but also present in the great apes,” University of Zurich paleoanthropologists Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer, who didn’t participate in the study, said in a joint email. “Who could have imagined that, after millions of years of evolution, it will have implications for human language diversity?”
But many linguists have defaulted to scepticism, out of a broader concern about tracing differences in languages back to differences in biology—a line of thinking within the field that has led to ethnocentrism or worse. Based on the world’s huge variety of tongues and dialects, most linguists now think that we all broadly share the same biological tools and sound-making abilities for spoken languages. “We really need to know that the small average differences observed in studies like this aren’t swamped by the ordinary diversity within a community,” Adam Albright, a linguist at MIT who wasn’t involved with the study, says in an email.
Teeth might feel solidly embedded in the skull and jaw, but as anyone who’s worn braces can tell you, teeth can shift and drift in the jawbone quite a bit as people age. Humans are often born with a slight overbite, but as teeth naturally wear down, they tilt to a more vertical orientation. To compensate, the bottom jaw shifts forward so that the top and bottom rows of teeth are in an edge-on-edge alignment. For much of our species’ history, this edge-on-edge configuration was the norm in adulthood, as seen in many prehistoric skulls studied over the last three decades. But when societies adopted new agricultural techniques, such as the cultivation of cereal grains and raising cattle, diets changed. Once porridge, cheese, and other soft foods dominated ancient menus, people’s teeth saw less wear, which let more people keep an overbite into adulthood. A more common overbite, the thinking goes, set the stage for sounds such as f and v, which you make by tucking your bottom lips beneath their top teeth. If your top teeth jut out slightly more, it’s theoretically easier to make these sounds, which linguists call labiodentals.
When Blasi’s team compared language records with data on how different societies acquire food, they found that languages used by modern hunter-gatherer societies use about a quarter of the f sounds that that agricultural societies do, suggesting a possible correlation with diet. And when they looked at the vast family of Indo-European languages, they found that the odds of labiodentals popping up were worse than 50 percent until 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. “It is often assumed that the structure and the processes we see in languages today were the same as 10,000 years ago,” Blasi said. “Now we have a very strong case to think that there are some global and very frequent linguistic phenomena that are surprisingly recent in times of human history.”
The time of labiodentals’ rise roughly matches up to when their speakers first started using dairy products and cultivating cereal grains. Blasi’s team argues that this is no coincidence. “The landscape of sounds that we have is fundamentally affected by the biology of our speech apparatus,” says study co-author Balthasar Bickel. “It’s not just cultural evolution.” Although the researchers suggest that overbite and overjet make it easier to produce labiodentals, “that doesn’t mean that labiodentals will emerge within all languages”, said study co-lead author Steven Moran at the University of Zurich. “It does mean that the probability of producing labiodentals increases slightly over time and that means that some languages are likely to acquire them, but not all languages will.” In the future, “we are interested in applying our novel methods to other speech sounds beyond just labiodentals,” Moran said. “Nearly half of all known speech sounds are unique to particular languages.”
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