Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on the passage below.
The lighthouse
For as long as people have sailed, the sea has been dangerous, and for almost as long they have tried to light its edges. A lighthouse is, at heart, a very simple idea: a bright light, raised high above the shore, that warns ships of danger and guides them safely to port. The most famous of the ancient world, the great Pharos of Alexandria, stood for over a thousand years and was counted among the Seven Wonders. Yet the basic purpose of a lighthouse has never really changed.
Lighthouses are built wherever the sea threatens ships: on rocky headlands, at the mouths of harbours, and on lonely reefs far from land. Because a sailor at night may see several lights at once, each lighthouse is given its own pattern of flashes — a kind of signature — so that it can be told apart from its neighbours. By timing the flashes, a navigator can identify exactly which light he is looking at, and so fix his position along the coast.
Building a tower that can survive the sea is no small task. To be useful, the light must be lifted high, so lighthouses are typically tall, and to withstand the battering of storms they were traditionally built of solid stone, with thick walls and a broad foundation anchored to the rock. The famous Eddystone lighthouse, off the coast of England, was destroyed by storms and fire several times before an engineer finally built one strong enough to last. Its gently curved shape, which allowed waves to slide past rather than strike it head-on, became a model for others.
For centuries the light itself was disappointingly weak. Early towers burned open coal fires or, later, candles and oil lamps, whose glow could easily be lost in rain or mist. The great breakthrough came in the nineteenth century with the invention of the Fresnel lens, a remarkable arrangement of glass rings that gathered the scattered light of a single lamp and bent it into a narrow, powerful beam. Housed in the glazed room at the very top of the tower, known as the lantern, the lens could throw its light many kilometres out to sea.
Keeping a lighthouse burning was demanding and often lonely work. The keeper had to tend the lamp through every night, trim its wick, wind the clockwork that turned the lens, and keep the great windows clean of salt and soot. Keepers kept careful logs of passing ships and the weather, and many risked their lives to rescue sailors wrecked on the rocks below. On the most remote towers, a keeper might see no other person for weeks at a time.
The age of the keeper is now over. First electricity replaced the oil lamp, and then, one by one, lighthouses were automated, their lamps switched on and off by machines that needed no human hand. Satellite navigation has made many lights less vital than they once were, and some have been switched off altogether. Yet lighthouses have not vanished. Many are preserved as monuments or museums, admired for their beauty and their history, and a surprising number still sweep their beams across the water each night, as they have for generations.