Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

6 
Sustainable (adj) 
1
) 
(C1
) — 
able to continue over a period of time.
2) able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.
3) (C1) causing little or no damage to the environment and 
therefore able to continue for a long time:
Example: A large international meeting was held with the aim o f promoting
sustainable development in all countries.
7 
Degrade (v) 
- to spoil, reduce or destroy the quality of something:
Example: Every day the environment is further degraded by toxic wastes.
8 
Clearing (n) 
- an area in a wood or forest from which trees and bushes have been 
removed.
9 
Eliminate (v) 
(C1
) -
to remove or take away someone or something:
Example: A move towards healthy eating could help eliminate heart disease.
10 
Estimate (v) 
(B2) - to guess or calculate the cost, size, value, etc. of something.

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Negotiation (n) 
(C1) - the process of discussing something with someone in order to 
reach an agreement with them, or the discussions themselves.
Example: The agreement
was 
reached after a series o f difficult negotiations.
Example: They estimate (that) the journey will take at least two weeks.

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Day 14
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
Deforestation in the 21st century
When it comes to cutting down trees, satellite data reveals a shift from the patterns o f the
past
A 
Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest are destroyed each year. Such 
deforestation has long been driven by farmers desperate to earn a living or by 
loggers building new roads into pristine forest. But now new data appears to show 
that big, block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, 
rather than these smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of 
cleared land. Geographer Ruth DeFries of Columbia University and her colleagues 
used satellite images to analyse tree-clearing in countries ringing the tropics, 
representing 98 per cent of all remaining tropical forest. Instead of the usual ‘fish 
bone’ signature of deforestation from small-scale operations, large, chunky blocks of 
cleared land reveal a new motive for cutting down woods.
В 
In fact, a statistical analysis of 41 countries showed that forest loss rates were most 
closely linked with urban population growth and agricultural exports in the early part 
of the 21st century - even overall population growth was not as strong an influence.
‘In previous decades, deforestation was associated with planned colonisation, 
resettlement schemes in local areas and farmers clearing land to grow food for 
subsistence,’ DeFries says. ‘What we’re seeing now is a shift from small-scale 
farmers driving deforestation to distant demands from urban growth, agricultural trade 
and exports being more important drivers.
С 
In other words, the increasing urbanisation of the developing world, as populations 
leave rural areas to concentrate in booming cities, is driving deforestation, rather than 
containing it. Coupled with this there is an ongoing increase in consumption in the 
developed world of products that have an impact on forests, whether furniture, shoe 
leather or chicken feed. ‘One of the really striking characteristics of this century is 
urbanisation and rapid urban growth in the developing world,’DeFries says. ‘People 
in cities need to eat.’ ‘There’s no surprise there,’ observes Scott Poynton, executive 
director of the Tropical Forest Trust, a Switzerland-based organisation that helps 
businesses implement and manage sustainable forestry in countries such as Brazil, 
Congo and Indonesia. ‘It’s not about people chopping down trees. It’s all the people 
in New York, Europe and elsewhere who want cheap products, primarily food.’

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Reading Passage 2
D 
De Eries argues that in order to help sustain this increasing urban and global
demand, agricultural productivity will need to be increased on lands that have already 
been cleared. This means that better crop varieties or better management techniques 
will need to be used on the many degraded and abandoned lands in the tropics. And 
the Tropical Forest Trust is building management systems to keep illegally harvested 
wood from ending up in, for example, deck chairs, as well as expanding its efforts to 
look at how to reduce the ‘forest footprint of agricultural products such as palm oil. 
Poynton says, The point is to give forests value as forests, to keep them as forests 
and give them a use as forests. They’re not going to be locked away as national 
parks. That’s not going to happen.’
E 
But it is not all bad news. Halts in tropical deforestation have resulted in forest 
regrowth in some areas where tropical lands were previously cleared. And forest 
clearing in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, dropped from roughly 
1.9 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 1.6 million hectares a year over the last 
decade, according to the Brazilian government. ‘We know that deforestation has 
slowed down in at least the Brazilian Amazon,’ DeFries says. ‘Every place is different. 
Every country has its own particular situation, circumstances and driving forces.
F 
Regardless of this, deforestation continues, and cutting down forests is one of the 
largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity - a double blow 
that both eliminates a biological system to suck up CO, and creates a new source of 
greenhouse gases in the form of decaying plants. The United Nations Environment 
Programme estimates that slowing such deforestation could reduce some 50 billion 
metric tons of CO,, or more than a year of global emissions. Indeed, international 
climate negotiations continue to attempt to set up a system to encourage this, known 
as the UN Development Programme’s fund for reducing emissions from deforestation 
and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD). If policies like REDD) are to 
be effective, we need to understand what the driving forces are behind deforestation, 
DeFries argues. This is particularly important in the light of new pressures that are on 
the horizon: the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and find alternative 
power sources, particularly for private cars, is forcing governments to make products 
such as biofuels more readily accessible. This will only exacerbate the pressures on 
tropical forests.
G 
But millions of hectares of pristine forest remain to protect, according to this new 
analysis from Columbia University. Approximately 60 percent of the remaining 
tropical forests are in countries or areas that currently have little agricultural trade or 
urban growth. The amount of forest area in places like central Africa, Guyana and 
Suriname, DeFries notes, is huge. ‘There’s a lot of forest that has not yet faced these 
pressures.’

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Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
14 
two ways that farming activity might be improved in the future
15 
reference to a fall in the rate of deforestation in one area
16 
the amount of forest cut down annually
17 
how future transport requirements may increase deforestation levels
18 
a reference to the typical shape of early deforested areas
19 
key reasons why forests in some areas have not been cut down
Questions 20-21
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which 
TWO 
of these reasons do experts give for current patterns of deforestation? 
Write the correct letters in boxes 20 and 21 on your answer sheet.
A 
to provide jobs