Cambridge Primary Checkpoint
ENGLISH 0058/01
Paper 1 Non-fiction April 2025
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Text for Section A
The sun rises above the horizon. The ocean is calm. Seabirds break their
night-time silence with a round of raucous calls, a noisy welcome to the new day.
In rainforests, fields and wetlands all over the world, birds join in with the dawn
chorus1. The remarkable thing is that this daily performance is not limited to 5
animals living above the waves. Below the surface, a multitude of sounds fills the
sea, the many voices of the ‘choral reef’.
Just like songbirds on land in spring, the creatures of the coral reef perform their
own chorus at dawn and again at dusk. However, the underwater sounds are
louder in the evening than in the morning. Whatever the time of day, though, it is 10
a lively chorus created by some of the most unlikely performers. It has long been
known that fish make sounds, but who would have thought tiny creatures like sea
urchins and shrimps were part of the choir?
The tropical coral reef is a naturally noisy place, and we are only just realising
how important sound is to the creatures living there. Steve Simpson, of the 15
University of Exeter, has been studying them. He has designed a piece of
underwater equipment with four hydrophones. These record the sounds that
creatures make and show him which direction they are coming from.
‘Listening in surround sound, we can work out who’s making which noises and
why,’ Steve explains. ‘Are they trying to impress each other or to scare 20
something away? There’s a whole underwater language that we’re only just
starting to understand.’
One of the most vocal reef creatures he studied is the clownfish. In one
experiment, Steve introduced a model of a fish called the coral trout, a known
predator of clownfish. He then recorded the buzzing sounds that the female 25
clownfish made to frighten off the attacker and warn other fish. Every time a boat
passed by, this channel of communication was blocked. The fish were inaudible
– they could no longer hear each other.
‘You think of all the boats that are driving around, all the ships, and the offshore
drilling, all the noise we are making in the ocean, and then you realise just how 30
much we’re drowning out natural sounds. It’s robbing animals of their ability to
talk to each other.’
As Steve has found out, even the sounds made by small boats and jet skis are
interfering with how young coral reef fish find their way to a suitable reef to live
on. 35
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‘Noise in the ocean is a real problem, but we can do something about it. We can
choose when and where we make noise. If there are nights when we know coral
reef fish are settling onto the reef, we can have restricted quiet zones when boats
are not allowed to drive around at night. We can directly reduce the noise that we
make, and we can start doing that today.’ 40
Glossary
1
dawn chorus: when birds sing at the beginning of each day
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