IELTS Reading Practice Test-18 With Answers |
READING PASSAGE 1
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Origin
of Species
&
Continent
Formation
A
THE
FACT THAT there was once a Pangean supercontinent, a Panthalassa Ocean, and a
Tethys Ocean, has profound implications for the evolution of multicellular life
on Earth. These considerations were unknown to the scientists of the 19th
century – making their scientific deductions even more remarkable. Quite
independently of each other, Charles Darwin and his young contemporary Alfred
Russel Wallace reached the conclusion that life had evolved by natural
selection. Wallace later wrote in My Life of his own inspiration:
B
Why
do some species die and some life? The answer was clearly that on the whole the
best fitted lived. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from
enemies the strongest, the swiftest or the most cunning from famine the best
hunters – then it suddenly flashed on me that this self-acting process would
improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be
killed off and the superior would remain, that is, the fittest would survive.
C
Both
Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas about natural selection had been influenced by the
essays of Thomas Malthus in his Principles of Population. Their
conclusion, however, had been the direct result of their personal observation
of animals and plants in widely separated geographic locations: Darwin from his
experiences during the voyage of the Beagle, and particularly
during the ship’s visit to the Galapagos Islands in the East Pacific in 1835;
Wallace during his years of travel in the Amazon Basin and in the
Indonesia-Australian Archipelago in the 1850s.
D
Darwin
had been documenting his ideas on natural selection for many years when he
received a paper on this selfsame subject from Wallace, who asked for Darwin’s
opinion and help in getting it published. In July 1858, Charles Lyell and J. D
Hooker, close friends of Darwin, pressed Darwin to present his conclusions so
that he would not lose priority to an unknown naturalist. Presiding over the
hastily called but now historic meeting of the Linnean Society in London, Lyell
and Hooker explained to the distinguished members how “these two gentlemen”
(who were absent: Wallace was abroad and Darwin chose not to attend), had
“independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious
theory,”
E
Both
Darwin and Wallace had realized that the anomalous distribution of species in
particular regions had profound evolutionary significance. Subsequently, Darwin
spent the rest of his days in almost total seclusion thinking and writing
mainly about the origin of species. In contrast, Wallace applied himself to the
science of biogeography, the study of the pattern and distribution of species,
and its significance, resulting in the publication of a massive two-volume work
the Geographical Distribution of Animals in 1876.
F
Wallace
was a gentle and modest man, but also persistent and quietly courageous. He
spent years working in the most arduous possible climates and terrains,
particularly in the Malay archipelago, he made patient and detailed zoological
observations and collected a huge number of specimens for museums and
collectors-which is how he made a living. One result of his work was the
conclusion that there is a distinct faunal boundary, called “Wallace’s line,”
between an Asian realm of animals in Java, Bronco and the Philipiones and an
Australian realm in New Guinea and Australia. In essence, this boundary posed a
difficult question: How on Earth did plants and animals with a clear affinity
to the Northern Hemisphere meet with their Southern Hemispheric counterparts
along such a distinct Malaysian demarcation zone? Wallace was uncertain about
demarcation on one particular island-Celebes, a curiously shaped place that is
midway between the two groups. Initially, he assigned its flora-fauna to the
Australian side of the line, but later he transferred it to the Asian side.
Today we know the reason for his dilemma. 200MYA East and West Celebes were
islands with their own natural history lying on opposite sides of the Tethys
Ocean. They did not collide until about 15 MYA. The answer to the main question
is that Wallace’s Line categorizes Laurasia-derived flora-fauna (the Asian) and
Gondwana-derived flora-fauna (the Australian), fauna that had evolved on
opposing shares of the Tethys. The closure of the Tethys Ocean today is
manifested by the ongoing collision of Australia/New Guinea with
Indochina/Indonesia and the continuing closure of the Mediterranean Sea – a
remnant of the Western Tethys Ocean.
G
IN
HIS ORIGIN OF CONTINENTS AND OCEANS, Wegener quoted at length from Wallace’s
Geographical Distribution of Animals. According to Wegener’s reading, Wallace
had identified three clear divisions of Australian animals, which supported his
own theory of continental displacement. Wallace had shown that animals long
established in southwestern Australia had an affinity with animals in South
Africa, Madagascar, India, and Ceylon, but did not have an affinity with those
in Asia. Wallace also showed that Australian marsupials and monotremes are
clearly related to those in South America, the Moluccas, and various Pacific
islands and that none are found in neighboring Indonesia. From this and related
data, Wegener concluded that the then broadly accepted “landbridge” theory
could not account for this distribution of animals and that only this theory of
continental drift could explain it.
H
The
theory that Wegener dismissed in preference to his own proposed that plants and
animals had once migrated across now-submerged intercontinental landbridges. In
1885, one of Europe’s leading geologists, Eduard Suess, theorized that as the
rigid Earth cools, its upper-crust shrinks and wrinkles like the withering skin
of an aging apple. He suggested that the planet’s seas and oceans now fill the
wrinkles between once-contiguous plateaus.
I
Today,
we know that we live on a dynamic Earth with shifting, colliding and separating
tectonic plates, not a “withering skin”, and the main debate in the field of
biogeography has shifted. The discussion now concerns “dispersalism” versus
“vicarianism”: unrestricted radiation of species on the one hand and the
development of barriers to migration on the other. Dispersion is a short-term
phenomenon – the daily or seasonal migration of species and their radiation to
the limits of their natural environment on an extensive and continuous
landmass. Vicarian evolution, however, depends upon the separation and
isolation of a variety of species within the confines of natural barriers in
the form of islands, lakes, or shallow seas – topographical features that take a
long time to develop.
Questions 1-5
Use
the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-E) with
opinions or deeds below.
Write
the appropriate letters A-E in boxes 1-5 on your answer
sheet.
A
Suess
B Wallace
C Darwin and Wallace
D Wegener
E Lyell and Hooker
1
urged Darwin to publish his scientific findings
2
Depicted physical feature of earth’s crust.
3
believed in continental drift theory while rejecting another one
4 Published
works about wildlife distribution in a different region.
5
Evolution of species is based on selection by nature.
Questions 6-8
The
Reading Passage has nine paragraphs A-I
Which
paragraph contains the following information?
Write
the correct letter A-I, in boxes 6-8 on your answer sheet.
6
Best adaptable animal survived on the planet.
7
Boundary called Wallace’s line found between Asia and Australia.
8
Animal relevance exists between Australia and Africa.
Questions 9-13
Complete
the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage.
Using NO
MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.
Wegener
found that continental drift instead of “land bridge” theory could explain
strange species’ distribution phenomenon. In his theory, vegetation and
wildlife 9…………………………… intercontinentally. However, Eduard Suess compared
the wrinkle of crust to 10………………………… of an old apple. Now it is well known
that we are living on the planet where there are 11……………………….. in constant
mobile states instead of what Suess described. Hot spot in biogeography is
switched to concerns between two-terms: “12…………………………….” and “13……………………………..”
READING PASSAGE 2
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
Western
Immigration of Canada
A
By
the mid-1870s Canada wanted an immigrant population of agricultural settlers
established in the West. No urban centres existed on the prairies in the 1870s,
and rural settlement was the focus of the federal government’s attention. The
western rural settlement was desired, as it would provide homesteads for the
sons and daughters of eastern farmers, as eastern agricultural landfilled to
capacity. As well, eastern farmers and politicians viewed western Canada, with
its broad expanses of unpopulated land, as a prime location for expanding
Canada’s agricultural output, especially in terms of wheat production to serve
the markets of eastern Canada.
B
To
bolster Canada’s population and agricultural output, the federal government
took steps to secure western land. The Dominion of Canada purchased Rupert’s
Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. In 1872, the federal government
enacted the Dominion Lands Act. This act enabled settlers to acquire 160 acres
of free land, as long as settlers remained on their land for a period of three
years, made certain minor improvements to the land, and paid a $10.00
registration fee. The Canadian government also created a Mounted Police Force
in 1873. The Mounties journeyed west to secure the area for
future settlers. By 1876 the NWMP had established themselves in the West. The
major posts included Swan River, Fort Saskatchewan, Fort Calgary, Fort Walsh
and Fort Macleod. All of these initiatives attracted a number of
eastern-Canadian settlers, as well as European and American immigrants, to
Canada’s West, and particularly to the area of Manitoba.
C
The
surest way to protect Canadian territory, and to achieve the secondary goal for
joining British Columbia to the rest of the country, was to import large
numbers of Eastern Canadian and British settlers. Settling the West also made
imperative the building of a transcontinental railway. The railway would work
to create an east-west economy, in which western Canada would feed the growing
urban industrial population of the east, and in return become a market for
eastern Canadian manufactured goods.
D
Winnipeg
became the metropolis of the West during this period. Winnipeg’s growth before
1900 was the result of a combination of land speculation, growth of housing
starts, and the federal government’s solution in 1881 of Winnipeg as a major
stop along the CPR. This decision culminated in a land boom between 1881 and
1883 which resulted in the transformation of hamlets like Portage la Prairie
and Brandon into towns, and a large increase in Manitoba’s population. Soon,
Winnipeg stood at the junction of three transcontinental railway lines which
employed thousands in rail yards. Winnipeg also became the major processor of
agricultural products for the surrounding hinterland.
E
The
majority of settlers to Winnipeg, and the surrounding countryside, during this
early period, were primarily Protestant English-speaking settlers from Ontario
and the British Isles. These settlers established Winnipeg upon a
British-Ontarian ethos which came to dominate the society’s social, political,
and economic spirit. This British-Ontarian ethnic homogeneity, however, did not
last very long. Increasing numbers of foreign immigrants, especially from
Austria-Hungary and Ukraine soon added a new ethnic element to the recent
British, the older First Nation Métis, and Selkirk’s settler population base.
Settling the West with (in particular) Eastern Canadians and British immigrant
offered the advantage of safeguarding the 49th parallel from the threat of American
take-over, had not the Minnesota legislature passed a resolution which provided
for the annexation of the Red River district. The Red River in 1870 was the
most important settlement on the Canadian prairies. It contained 11,963
inhabitants of whom 9,700 were Métis and First Nations. But neighbouring
Minnesota already had a population of over 100,000.
F
Not
all of the settlers who came to western Canada in the 1880s, however, desired
to remain there. In the 1870s and 1880s, economic depression kept the value of
Canada’s staple exports low, which discouraged many from permanent settlement
in the West. Countries including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and
the United States competed with Canada for immigrants. Many immigrants and
thousands of Canadians chose to settle in the accessible and attractive
American frontier. Canada before 1891 has been called “a huge demographic
railway station” where thousands of men, women, and children were constantly
going and coming, and where the number of departures invariably exceeded that
of arrivals.”
G
By
1891 Eastern Canada had its share of both large urban centres and problems
associated with city life. While the booming economic centres of Toronto and
Montreal were complete with electricity and telephones in the cities’
wealthiest areas by the turn of the century, slum conditions characterised the
poorest areas like the district known as ‘the Ward’ in Toronto. Chickens and
pigs ran through the streets; privy buckets spilled onto backyards and lanes
creating cesspools in urban slums. These same social reformers believed that
rural living, in stark contrast to urban, would lead to a healthy, moral, and
charitable way of life. Social reformers praised the ability of fresh air, hard
work, and open spaces for ‘Canadianizing’ immigrants. Agricultural pursuits
were seen as especially fitting for attaining this ‘moral’ and family-oriented
way of life, in opposition to the single male-dominated atmosphere of the
cities. Certainly, agriculture played an important part in the Canadian economy
in 1891. One-third of the workforce worked on farms.
H
The
Canadian government presented Canada’s attractions to potential overseas
migrants in several ways. The government offered free or cheap land to
potential agriculturists. As well, the government established agents and/or
agencies for the purpose of attracting emigrants overseas. Assisted passage
schemes, bonuses and commissions to agents and settlers and pamphlets also
attracted some immigrants to Canada. The most influential form of attracting
others to Canada, however, remained the letters home written by emigrants
already in Canada. Letters from trusted friends and family members. Letters
home often contained exaggerations of the ‘wonder of the new world.’ Migrant
workers and settlers already in Canada did not want to disappoint, or worry,
their family and friends at home. Embellished tales of good fortune and
happiness often succeeded in encouraging others to come.
Questions 14-20
The
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H
Choose
the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list below.
Write
the correct number, i-xii, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet
List
of Headings
i
Not all would stay in Canada forever
ii
Government’s safeguard in the West
iii
Eastern Canada is full
iv
Built-up to the new infrastructure
v
An exclusive British domination in Ontario established ever since
vi
Ethnics and language make-up
vii
Pursuing a pure life
viii
Police recruited from mid-class families
ix
Demand of western immigration
x
Early major urban development of the West
xi
Attracting urban environment
xii
Advertising of Western Canada
Example: Paragraph A ix
14 Paragraph
B
15 Paragraph
C
16 Paragraph
D
17 Paragraph
E
18 Paragraph
F
19 Paragraph
G
20 Paragraph
H
Questions 21-26
Complete
the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO
MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.
With
the saturation of Eastern Canada, the Western rural area would supply 21…………………………..
for the descendants of easterners. Politicians also declared that Western is
got potential to increase 22………………………….. of Canada according to 23…………………………..
crop that consumed in the East. The federal government started to prepare and
made it happen. First, the government bought land from a private 24……………………………,
and legally offered a certain area to people who stayed for a qualifying period
of time. Then, mounted 25………………………….. was found to secure the land.
However, the best way to protect citizens was to build a 26……………………………..
to transport the migrants and goods between the West and the East.
READING
PASSAGE 3
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Beyond
the Blue Line
A
Much
of the thrill of venturing to the far side of the world rests on the romance of
difference. So one feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day
in 1778 that he “discovered” Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the
Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the
breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter
Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the
Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back
on Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the
natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a
familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he
had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he
later wondered in his journal: “How shall we account for this Nation spreading
itself so far over this vast ocean?”
B
That
question, and others that flow from it has tantalized inquiring minds for
centuries: Who were these amazing seafarers? Where did they come from, starting
more than 3,000 years ago? And how could a Neolithic people with simple canoes
and no navigation gear manage to find, let alone colonize, hundreds of
far-flung island specks scattered across an ocean that spans nearly a third of
the globe? Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological
find on the island of Éfaté, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an
ancient seafaring people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking
their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a
window into the shadowy world of those early voyagers.
C
“What
we have is a first- or second-generation site containing the graves of some of
the Pacific’s first explorers,” says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the
Australian National University and co-leader of an international team
excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator, digging
up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a
grave – the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old. It is the
oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of
an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a
beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the
1950s.
D
They
were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the sea not just as explorers but
also as pioneers, bringing along everything they would need to build new lives
– their families and livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools. Within the span
of a few centuries, the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world from the
jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral outliers of
Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the way they
explored millions of square miles of an unknown sea, discovering and colonizing
scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes: Vanuatu, New
Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.
It
was their descendants, centuries later, who became the great Polynesian
navigators we all tend to think of: the Tahitians and Hawaiians, the New
Zealand Maori, and the curious people who erected those statues on Easter
Island. But it was the Lapita who laid the foundation – who bequeathed to the
island the language, customs, and cultures that their more famous descendants
carried around the Pacific.
E
While
the Lapita left a glorious legacy, they also left precious few clues about
themselves. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the
teeth of several skeletons. Then as now, the food and water you consume as a
child deposits oxygen, carbon, strontium, and other elements in your
still-forming adult teeth. The isotope signatures of these elements vary subtly
from place to place, so that if you grow up in, say, Buffalo, New York, then
spend your adult life in California, tests on the isotopes in your teeth will
always reveal your eastern roots.
Isotope
analysis indicates that several of the Lapita buried on Éfaté didn’t spend
their childhoods here but came from somewhere else. And while isotopes can’t
pinpoint their precise island of origin, this much is clear: At some point in
their lives, these people left the villages of their birth and made a voyage by
seagoing canoe, never to return. DNA teased from these ancient bones may also
help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did all
Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one outward
migration from a single point in Asia, or several from different points? “This
represents the best opportunity we’ve had yet,” says Spriggs, “to find out who
the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who their closest
descendants are today.”
F
There
is one stubborn question for which archaeology has yet to provide any answers:
How did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many
times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which could
reveal how the canoes were sailed. Nor do the oral histories and traditions of
later Polynesians offer any insights.
“All
we can say for certain is that the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean
voyages, and they had the ability to sail them,” says Geoff Irwin, a professor
of archaeology at the University of Auckland and an avid yachtsman. Those
sailing skills, he says, were developed and passed down over thousands of years
by earlier mariners who worked their way through the archipelagoes of the
western Pacific making short crossings to islands within sight of each other.
The real adventure didn’t begin, however, until their Lapita descendants neared
the end of the Solomons chain, for this was the edge of the world. The nearest
landfall, the Santa Cruz Islands, is almost 230 miles away, and for at least
150 of those miles, the Lapita sailors would have been out of sight of land,
with empty horizons on every side.
G
The
Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade
winds, Irwin notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key
to their success. “They could sail out for days into the unknown and
reconnoiter, secure in the knowledge that if they didn’t find anything, they
could turn about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It’s what made
the whole thing work.” Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant
leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried out
to sea by the tides and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon that
often betokens an island in the distance.
All
this presupposes one essential detail, says Atholl Anderson, professor of
prehistory at the Australian National University and, like Irwin, a keen
yachtsman: that the Lapita had mastered the advanced art of tacking into the
wind. “And there’s no proof that they could do any such thing,” Anderson says.
“There has been this assumption that they must have done so, and people have
built canoes to re-create those early voyages based on that assumption. But
nobody has any idea what their canoes looked like or how they were rigged.”
H
However
they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the
Pacific, then called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the
vast emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly
stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few
thousand in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered
hundreds of islands – more than 300 in Fiji alone. Supplied with such an
embarrassment of riches, they could settle down and enjoy what for a time was
Earth’s last Edens.
I
Rather
than give all the credit to human skill and daring, Anderson invokes the winds
of change. El Niño, the same climate disruption that affects the Pacific today,
may have helped scatter the first settlers to the ends of the ocean, Anderson
suggests. Climate data obtained from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and
from lake-bed sediments in the Andes of South America point to a series of
unusually frequent El Niño around the time of the Lapita expansion, and again
between 1,600 and 1,200 years ago, when the second wave of pioneer navigators
made their voyages farther east, to the remotest corners of the Pacific. By
reversing the regular east-to-west flow of the trade winds for weeks at a time,
these “super El Niño” might have sped the Pacific’s ancient mariners on long,
unplanned voyages could have been key to launching Polynesians across the wide
expanse of open water between Tonga, where the Lapita stopped, and the distant
archipelagoes of eastern Polynesia. “Once they crossed that gap, they could
island-hop throughout the region, and from the Marquesas, it’s mostly downwind
to Hawaii,” Anderson says. It took another 400 years for mariners to reach
Easter Island, which lies in the opposite direction – normally upwind. “Once
again this was during a period of frequent El Niño activity.”
Questions 27-31
Complete
the summary with the list of words A-L below
Write
the correct letter A-L in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
The
question, arisen from Captain Cook’s expedition to Hawaii, and others derived
from it, has fascinated researchers for a long time. However, a surprising
archaeological find on Éfaté began to provide valuable information about
the 27…………………………. On the excavating site, a 28…………………………….
Containing 29……………………………. of Lapita was uncovered. Later on, various
researches and tests have been done to study the ancient people – Lapita and
their 30…………………………….. How could they manage to spread themselves so far
over the vast ocean? All that is certain is that they were good at canoeing.
And perhaps they could take well advantage of the trade wind. But there is
no 31……………………………. of it.
A
bones |
B
co-leader |
C
descendents |
D
international team |
E
inquiring minds |
F
proof |
G
ancestors |
H
early seafarers |
I
pottery |
J
assumption |
K
horizons |
L
grave |
Questions 32-35
Choose
the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write
your answers in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.
32
The chemical tests indicate that
A
the elements in one’s teeth varied from childhood to adulthood.
B
the isotope signatures of the elements remain the same in different places.
C
the result of the study is not fascinating.
D these
chemicals can’t conceal one’s origin.
33
The isotope analysis from the Lapita
A
exactly locates their birth island.
B
reveals that the Lapita found the new place via straits.
C
helps researchers to find out answers about the islanders.
D
leaves more new questions for anthropologists to answer.
34
According to paragraph F, the offspring of Lapita
A
were capable of voyages to land that is not accessible to view.
B
were able to have the farthest voyage of 230 miles.
C
worked their way through the archipelagoes of the western Pacific.
D
fully explored the horizons.
35
Once out exploring the sea, the sailors
A
always found the trade winds unsuitable for sailing.
B
could return home with various clues.
C
sometimes would overshoot their home port and sail off into eternity.
D
would sail in one direction.
Questions 36-40
Do
the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In
boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement is true
FALSE
if the statement is false
NOT
GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
36
The Lapita could canoe in the prevailing wind.
37
It was difficult for the sailors to find ways back, once they were out.
38
The reason why the Lapita stopped canoeing farther is still unknown.
39
The majority of the Lapita dwelled on Fiji.
40
The navigators could take advantage of El Nino during their forth voyages.
1. E
2. A
3. D
4. B
5. C
6. B
7. F
8. G
9. migrated
10. withering skin
11. (tectonic) plates
12. dispersalism
13. vicarisanism
14. ii
15. iv
16. x
17. vi
18. i
19. vii
20. xii
21. Homesteads
22. agricultural output
23. wheat
24. Company
25. Police Force
26. transcontinental railway
27. H
28. L
29. A
30. C
31. F
32. D
33. C
34. A
35. B
36. TRUE
37. FALSE
38. TRUE
39. FALSE
40. NOT GIVEN
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