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CEFR READING PART PRACTICE – MATCHING HEADINGS
Read the text and put headings from the statements A-H.
There is
one
TASK 8
HEADINGS:
A) An unexpected preference for modern items
B) Two distinct reasons for selection
C) A lengthy, but necessary task
D) The need to show as much as possible to visitors
E) The two roles of museums
F) Who owns the museum exhibits
G) Collections for research purposes
H) The 'global' size of the problem
1. When, in 1938, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington DC, decided it had run out
of space, it began transferring part of its collection from the cramped attic ad basement rooms where the specimens
had been languishing to an out-of-town warehouse. Restoring those speciments to pristine conditions was a
monumental task.
One member staff, for example, spent six months doing nothing but gluing the legs back on the
crane flies. But 30 million items and seven years later, the job was done.
2. At least for the moment. For the Smithsonian owns 130 million plants, animals, rocks and fossils and that number
is growing at 2-3% a year.
On an international scale, however, such numbers are not exceptional. The Natural
History Museum in London has 80 million speciments. And the Science Museum has 300,000 objects recording the
history of science and technology. Deciding what to do with these huge accumulations of things is becoming a
problem They cannot be thrown away, but only a tiny fraction can be put on display.
3. The huge, invisible collections behind the scenes at science and natural history museums are the result of the dual
functions of these institutions.
On the one hand, they are places for the public to go and look at things. On the other,
they are places of research - and researchers are not interested merely in the big, showy things that curators like to
reveal to the public.
4. The public is often surprised at the Science Museum's interest in recent objects. Neil Brown, the senior curator
for
classical physics, says he frequently turns down antique brass and mahogany electrical instruments on the
grounds that they are already have enough of them, but he is happy to receive objects such as the Atomic domestic
coffee maker, and a 114-piece Do-It- Yourself toolkit with canvas case, and a green beer bottle.
5. Natural history Museums collect for a different reason. Their accumulations are part of attempts to identify and
understand the natural world. Some of the plants and animals they hold are "type speciments". In other words, they
are the
standard reference unit, like a reference weight or length, for the species in question. Other speciments are
valuable because of their age. One of the most famous demonstrations of natural selection in action was made using
museum speciments. A study of moths collected over a long period of time showed that their wings became darker
(which made them less visible to birds) as the industrial revolution made Britain more polluted.
6. Year after year, the value of such collections quietly and valuably increases, as scientists find uses that would
have been unimaginable to those who started them a century or two ago. Genetic analysis,
pharmaceutical
development and so on would have been unimaginable to the museum's founders.
7. But as the collections grow older, they grow bigger. Insects may be small, but there are millions of them and
entomologists would like to catalogue every one. And when the reference material is a pair of giraffes or a blue
whale, space becomes a problem. That is why museums such as the Smithsonian are increasingly forced to turn to
out of town storage facilities. But museums that show the public only a small fraction of their
material risk losing
the goodwill of governments and the public, which they need to keep running. Hence, the determination of so many
museums is to make their back room collections more widely available.
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