READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.

Stonehenge

For centuries, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the many mysteries of
Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument that took an estimated 1,500 years to erect. Located
on Salisbury Plain in southern England, it is comprised of roughly 100 massive upright
stones placed in a circular layout.

Archaeologists believe England’s most iconic prehistoric ruin was built in several stages
with the earliest constructed 5,000 or more years ago. First, Neolithic* Britons used
primitive tools, which may have been fashioned out of deer antlers, to dig a massive
circular ditch and bank, or henge. Deep pits dating back to that era and located within the
circle may have once held a ring of timber posts, according to some scholars.

Several hundred years later, it is thought, Stonehenge’s builders hoisted an estimated 80

bluestones, 43 of which remain today, into standing positions and placed them in either a
horseshoe or circular formation. These stones have been traced all the way to the Preseli
Hills in Wales, some 300 kilometres from Stonehenge. How, then, did prehistoric builders
without sophisticated tools or engineering haul these boulders, which weigh up to four
tons, over such a great distance?

According to one long-standing theory among archaeologists, Stonehenge’s builders

fashioned sledges and rollers out of tree trunks to lug the bluestones from the Preseli Hills.
They then transferred the boulders onto rafts and floated them first along the Welsh coast
and then up the River Avon toward Salisbury Plain; alternatively, they may have towed each
stone with a fleet of vessels. More recent archaeological hypotheses have them
transporting the bluestones with supersized wicker baskets on a combination of ball
bearings and long grooved planks, hauled by oxen.

As early as the 1970s, geologists have been adding their voices to the debate over how
Stonehenge came into being. Challenging the classic image of industrious builders
pushing, carting, rolling or hauling giant stones from faraway Wales, some scientists have
suggested that it was glaciers, not humans, that carried the bluestones to Salisbury Plain.
Most archaeologists have remained sceptical about this theory, however, wondering how
the forces of nature could possibly have delivered the exact number of stones needed to
complete the circle.
The third phase of construction took place around 2000 BCE. At this point, sandstone slabs
– known as ‘sarsens’ – were arranged into an outer crescent or ring; some were assembled
into the iconic three-pieced structures called trilithons that stand tall in the centre of
Stonehenge. Some 50 of these stones are now visible on the site, which may once have
contained many more. Radiocarbon dating has revealed that work continued at
Stonehenge until roughly 1600 BCE, with the bluestones in particular being repositioned
multiple times.

But who were the builders of Stonehenge? In the 17th century, archaeologist John Aubrey
made the claim that Stonehenge was the work of druids, who had important religious,
judicial and political roles in Celtic** society. This theory was widely popularized by the
antiquarian William Stukeley, who had unearthed primitive graves at the site. Even today,
people who identify as modern druids continue to gather at Stonehenge for the summer
solstice. However, in the mid-20th century, radiocarbon dating demonstrated that
Stonehenge stood more than 1,000 years before the Celts inhabited the region.

Many modern historians and archaeologists now agree that several distinct tribes of people
contributed to Stonehenge, each undertaking a di erent phase of its construction. Bones,
tools and other artefacts found on the site seem to support this hypothesis. The first stage
was achieved by Neolithic agrarians who were likely to have been indigenous to the British
Isles. Later, it is believed, groups with advanced tools and a more communal way of life left
their mark on the site. Some believe that they were immigrants from the European
continent, while others maintain that they were probably native Britons, descended from
the original builders.

If the facts surrounding the architects and construction of Stonehenge remain shadowy at
best, the purpose of the striking monument is even more of a mystery. While there is
consensus among the majority of modern scholars that Stonehenge once served the
function of burial ground, they have yet to determine what other purposes it had.

In the 1960s, the astronomer Gerald Hawkins suggested that the cluster of megalithic
stones operated as a form of calendar, with di erent points corresponding to astrological
phenomena such as solstices, equinoxes and eclipses occurring at di erent times of the
year. While his theory has received a considerable amount of attention over the decades,
critics maintain that Stonehenge’s builders probably lacked the knowledge necessary to
predict such events or that England’s dense cloud cover would have obscured their view of
the skies.
More recently, signs of illness and injury in the human remains unearthed at Stonehenge
led a group of British archaeologists to speculate that it was considered a place of healing,
perhaps because bluestones were thought to have curative powers.

—–

* Neolithic – The era, also known as the New Stone Age, which began around 12,000 years
ago and ended around 3500 BCE

** Celtic – The Celts were people who lived in Britain and northwest Europe during the Iron
Age from 600 BCE to 43 CE
Questions 1-8

Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

Stonehenge

Construction

Stage 1:

● the ditch and henge were dug, possibly using tools made from 1……………….
timber posts
● 2………………. may have been arranged in deep pits inside the circle

Stage 2:

● bluestones from the Preseli Hills were placed in standing position

● theories about the transportation of the bluestones:

– archaeological:

o builders used 3……………….

tree trunk to make sledges and rollers

o 4……………….
oxen pulled them on giant baskets

– geological:
glaciers
o they were brought from Wales by 5……………….

Stage 3:

● sandstone slabs were arranged into an outer crescent or ring

Builders
druids
● a theory arose in the 17th century that its builders were Celtic 6……………….

Purpose
burial
● many experts agree it has been used as a 7………………. site

● in the 1960s, it was suggested that it worked as a kind of 8……………….

calendar
Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9 During the third phase of construction, sandstone slabs were placed in both the outer
areas and the middle of the Stonehenge site. T

10 There is scientific proof that the bluestones stood in the same spot until approximately
1600 BCE. F

11 John Aubrey’s claim about Stonehenge was supported by 20th-century findings. F

12 Objects discovered at Stonehenge seem to indicate that it was constructed by a

number of di erent groups of people. NG

13 Criticism of Gerald Hawkins’ theory about Stonehenge has come mainly from other
astronomers. NG
READING PASSAGE 2

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

Living with artificial intelligence

Powerful artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be reliably aligned with human values, but
does this mean AI will eventually have to
police those values?

This has been the decade of AI, with one astonishing feat after another. A chess-playing AI
that can defeat not only all human chess players, but also all previous human-programmed
chess machines, after learning the game in just four hours? That’s yesterday’s news, what’s
next? True, these prodigious accomplishments are all in so-called narrow AI, where
machines perform highly specialised tasks. But many experts believe this restriction is very
temporary. By mid-century, we may have artificial general intelligence (AGI) – machines
that can achieve human-level performance on the full range of tasks that we ourselves can
tackle.

If so, there’s little reason to think it will stop there. Machines will be free of many of the
physical constraints on human intelligence. Our brains run at slow biochemical processing
speeds on the power of a light bulb, and their size is restricted by the dimensions of the
human birth canal. It is remarkable what they accomplish, given these handicaps. But they
may be as far from the physical limits of thought as our eyes are from the incredibly
powerful Webb Space Telescope.

Once machines are better than us at designing even smarter machines, progress towards
these limits could accelerate. What would this mean for us? Could we ensure a safe and
worthwhile coexistence with such machines? On the plus side, AI is already useful and
profitable for many things, and super AI might be expected to be super useful and super
profitable. But the more powerful AI becomes, the more important it will be to specify its
goals with great care. Folklore is full of tales of people who ask for the wrong thing, with
disastrous consequences- King Midas, for example, might have wished that everything he
touched turned to gold, but didn’t really intend this to apply to his breakfast.

So we need to create powerful AI machines that are ‘human-friendly’- that have goals
reliably aligned with our own values. One thing that makes this task di icult is that we are
far from reliably human-friendly ourselves. We do many terrible things to each other and to
many other creatures with whom we share the planet. If superintendent machines don’t do
a lot better than us, we’ll be in deep trouble. We’ll have powerful new intelligence
amplifying the dark sides of our own fallible natures.
For safety’s sake, then, we want the machines to be ethically as well as cognitively
superhuman. We want them to aim for the moral high ground, not for the troughs in which
many of us spend some of our time. Luckily they’ll be smart enough for the job. If there are
routes to the moral high ground, they’ll be better than us at finding them, and steering us in
the right direction.

However, there are two big problems with this utopian vision. One is how we get the
machines started on the journey, the other is what it would mean to reach this destination.
The ‘getting started’ problem is that we need to tell the machines what they’re looking for
with su icient clarity that we can be confident they will find it – whatever ‘it’ actually turns
out to be. This won’t be easy, given that we are tribal creatures and conflicted about the
ideals ourselves. We often ignore the su ering of strangers, and even contribute to it, at
least indirectly. How then, do we point machines in the direction of something better?

As for the ‘destination’ problem, we might, by putting ourselves in the hands of these moral
guides and gatekeepers, be sacrificing our own autonomy – an important part of what
makes us human. Machines who are better than us at sticking to the moral high ground
may be expected to discourage some of the lapses we presently take for granted. We might
lose our freedom to discriminate in favour of our own communities, for example.

Loss of freedom to behave badly isn’t always a bad thing, of course: denying ourselves the
freedom to put children to work in factories, or to smoke in restaurants are signs of
progress. But are we ready for ethical silicon police limiting our options? They might be so
good at doing it that we won’t notice them; but few of us are likely to welcome such a
future.

These issues might seem far-fetched, but they are to some extent already here. AI already
has some input into how resources are used in our National Health Service (NHS) here in
the UK, for example. If it was given a greater role, it might do so much more e iciently than
humans can manage, and act in the interests of taxpayers and those who use the health
system. However, we’d be depriving some humans (e.g. senior doctors) of the control they
presently enjoy. Since we’d want to ensure that people are treated equally and that policies
are fair, the goals of AI would need to be specified correctly.

We have a new powerful technology to deal with- itself, literally, a new way of thinking. For
our own safety, we need to point these new thinkers in the right direction, and get them to
act well for us. It is not yet clear whether this is possible, but if it is, it will require a
cooperative spirit, and a willingness to set aside self-interest.

Both general intelligence and moral reasoning are often thought to be uniquely human
capacities. But safety seems to require that we think of them as a package: if we are to give
general intelligence to machines, we’ll need to give them moral authority, too. And where
exactly would that leave human beings? All the more reason to think about the destination
now, and to be careful about what we wish for.

Questions 14-19

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

14 What point does the writer make about AI in the first paragraph?

A It is di icult to predict how quickly AI will progress.

B Much can be learned about the use of AI in chess machines.

C The future is unlikely to see limitations on the capabilities of AI.

D Experts disagree on which specialised tasks AI will be able to perform.

15 What is the writer doing in the second paragraph?

A explaining why machines will be able to outperform humans

B describing the characteristics that humans and machines share

C giving information about the development of machine intelligence

D indicating which aspects of humans are the most advanced

16 Why does the writer mention the story of King Midas?

A to compare di erent visions of progress

B to illustrate that poorly defined objectives can go wrong

C to emphasise the need for cooperation

D to point out the financial advantages of a course of action

17 What challenge does the writer refer to in the fourth paragraph?

A encouraging humans to behave in a more principled way

B deciding which values we want AI to share with us

C creating a better world for all creatures on the planet

D ensuring AI is more human-friendly than we are ourselves

18 What does the writer suggest about the future of AI in the fifth paragraph?

A The safety of machines will become a key issue.

B It is hard to know what impact machines will have on the world.

C Machines will be superior to humans in certain respects.

D Many humans will oppose machines having a wider role.

19 Which of the following best summarises the writer’s argument in the sixth paragraph?

A More intelligent machines will result in greater abuses of power.

B Machine learning will share very few features with human learning.

C There are a limited number of people with the knowledge to program machines.

D Human shortcomings will make creating the machines we need more di icult.

Questions 20-23

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

20 Machines with the ability to make moral decisions may prevent us from promoting the
interests of our communities. YES

21 Silicon police would need to exist in large numbers in order to be e ective. NO

22 Many people are comfortable with the prospect of their independence being restricted
by machines. NG

23 If we want to ensure that machines act in our best interests, we all need to work
together. NG
Questions 24-26

Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-F, below.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Using AI in the UK health system

C
AI currently has a limited role in the way 24…………………. are allocated in the health
service. The positive aspect of AI having a bigger role is that it would be more e icient and
lead to patient benefits. However, such a change would result, for example, in
D
certain 25………………….
A not having their current level of 26…………………. . It is therefore
important that AI goals are appropriate so that discriminatory practices could be avoided.

A medical practitioners B specialised tasks

C available resources D reduced illness

E professional authority F technology experts