UCAT Verbal Reasoning practice questions

Despite its name, the Bayeux Tapestry is not strictly a tapestry. In a true tapestry the design is woven into the fabric on a loom; the Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery, made by stitching coloured wool onto strips of linen that were then joined together. It is roughly 70 metres long but only about half a metre high, and it tells, in a continuous sequence of scenes, the story of the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, including the Battle of Hastings.

Nobody recorded who made it or when. Most historians believe it was commissioned within a few years of the conquest by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was William the Conqueror's half-brother. Odo appears prominently in several scenes, which supports this view. Although the embroidery has been kept in Normandy for most of its known history, many specialists think it was stitched in England, probably in Canterbury, because the style of its figures closely resembles illustrations in manuscripts produced there at the time.

The earliest surviving written reference to it is an inventory of the treasures of Bayeux Cathedral, dated 1476, which records that it was hung around the nave on particular feast days. The end of the work is missing. The surviving embroidery breaks off with scenes of the English fleeing the battlefield, and some scholars suspect that the lost final section went on to show William's coronation, which took place on Christmas Day 1066, about ten weeks after the battle.

The tapestry is sometimes treated as a straightforward record of what happened, but it tells the story from a Norman point of view. It shows Harold Godwinson swearing an oath to William before taking the English crown himself, so that Harold's coronation appears as a betrayal; accounts written from the English side present Harold's claim more sympathetically. Even so, historians value the work highly for its incidental details of clothing, ships, weapons, buildings and food preparation, which few other sources from the period show so fully.

Scurvy, a disease that causes bleeding gums, loosened teeth, exhaustion and the reopening of old wounds, killed large numbers of sailors on long voyages in the eighteenth century. It is now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C, which the human body cannot make for itself, but at the time its cause was hotly disputed.

In 1747 James Lind, a surgeon on the Royal Navy ship HMS Salisbury, carried out what is often described as one of the first controlled clinical trials. He chose twelve sailors with scurvy whose cases were as similar as he could find, housed them together and gave them all the same basic diet. He then divided them into six pairs and gave each pair a different daily addition: cider, a dilute acid known as elixir of vitriol, vinegar, seawater, two oranges and a lemon, or a medicinal paste taken with barley water. The pair given citrus fruit recovered most quickly; one of them was fit for duty after about six days. The pair given cider showed some improvement, while the others showed little.

Lind published his findings in 1753, but his conclusions were less clear-cut than his experiment might suggest. His book discussed many possible causes of scurvy, including damp sea air, and the trial occupied only a small part of it. He also recommended preserving citrus juice by heating it into a concentrate, a process now known to destroy much of its vitamin C.

The Royal Navy did not begin issuing lemon juice routinely to its sailors until 1795, more than forty years after Lind's book appeared. Even then the problem was not permanently solved. In the nineteenth century the navy switched to lime juice from British colonies in the Caribbean, which contains considerably less vitamin C than lemon juice, and scurvy reappeared on some long expeditions.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, loading a cargo ship was slow and labour-intensive. Goods arrived at the docks in sacks, barrels, crates and bales of every shape and size, and gangs of dockworkers carried or hoisted them aboard one item at a time, a method known as break-bulk shipping. A ship could spend almost as long in port being loaded and unloaded as it spent at sea, and theft from cargoes was common.

In 1956 an American trucking businessman, Malcolm McLean, sent a converted tanker, the Ideal X, from Newark to Houston carrying 58 metal containers that could be lifted directly between lorries and the ship. Shipping goods in boxes was not new — railways and some shipping lines had used containers of various kinds for decades — but McLean organised his whole business around it, and the cost of loading cargo fell dramatically.

Containerisation did not spread overnight. Ports needed expensive new cranes and large areas of open land for stacking boxes, and shipping lines, railways and road hauliers had to agree on standard container sizes so that a box could pass between them without being unpacked. International standards were not agreed until the late 1960s. Dockworkers' unions, correctly foreseeing that far fewer jobs would be needed, often resisted the change.

The effects on port cities were dramatic. Old docks close to city centres, hemmed in by buildings, struggled to adapt. In Britain, the docks of London's East End went into steep decline from the late 1960s, while Felixstowe, a small port on the Suffolk coast with room to expand, grew to become the country's busiest container port, which it remains today. Many economists argue that the container did more to increase international trade in the late twentieth century than any trade agreement, though its precise effect is hard to measure because shipping costs were also changing for other reasons, such as movements in fuel prices and the growing size of ships.

By the 1840s, astronomers had a problem with Uranus. The planet, discovered by William Herschel in 1781, was not following the path predicted for it by Newton's law of gravitation, even after the pull of the known planets had been taken into account. Some astronomers wondered whether Newton's law broke down at such great distances from the Sun. Others suspected that the gravity of an undiscovered planet beyond Uranus was pulling it off course.

Working independently, two mathematicians set out to calculate where such a planet would have to be. In England, John Couch Adams reached a result in 1845 but struggled to persuade senior astronomers to take it seriously. In France, Urbain Le Verrier published his own prediction in 1846. Le Verrier sent his figures to Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory, and on the night of 23 September 1846 Galle and his assistant, using a recently drawn star chart, found the planet now called Neptune within about one degree of the predicted position. It later emerged that James Challis, who had begun searching from Cambridge at Adams's urging, had recorded the planet twice in August 1846 without recognising it, because he had not compared his observations promptly.

The discovery was celebrated as a triumph of Newtonian physics: a planet had been located by calculation before anyone had knowingly seen it. Encouraged, Le Verrier later turned to a small irregularity in the orbit of Mercury and proposed that it was caused by another unseen planet, even closer to the Sun, which became known as Vulcan. Several observers claimed to have spotted it, but none of the sightings was ever confirmed. The irregularity was finally explained in 1915 by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which showed that, in this case, Newton's law itself needed correcting.

Grey wolves had been wiped out in Yellowstone National Park by the 1920s, largely as a result of government programmes to kill predators. In the mid-1990s, after years of public debate, wolves captured in Canada were released into the park, and their numbers grew quickly. The reintroduction has since become one of the most widely discussed events in modern ecology.

A popular account holds that the returning wolves set off a ‘trophic cascade’: a chain of effects running down the food web. In this account, wolves not only reduced the number of elk but also changed their behaviour, as elk began to avoid valleys and riverbanks where they could easily be ambushed. Freed from heavy browsing, willow and aspen grew back along streams. These in turn provided food and building material for beavers, whose dams created wetlands for fish, birds and amphibians. Versions of this story have been viewed millions of times online.

Many ecologists now regard the account as too tidy. Elk numbers were also reduced by hunting outside the park's boundaries, by drought, and by growing populations of bears and cougars, which also kill elk calves. Studies tracking elk with GPS collars have produced mixed results on whether elk avoid risky areas to the extent that the story requires. The recovery of willow has also been patchy. Where decades without beaver dams had allowed streams to cut deeper channels, the water table dropped, and in some of these places willow has struggled to return even where elk are now scarce.

None of this means that the wolves have had no effect. Rather, it suggests that ecosystems seldom respond to the return of a single species in a simple, predictable way, and that a striking story can travel further than the evidence behind it.

In 1857 members of the Philological Society of London called for a new dictionary of English that would record not just the meanings of words but their histories, illustrated with quotations showing how each word had been used over the centuries. The project they set in motion became the Oxford English Dictionary, and it took far longer than anyone expected.

The work depended on volunteers. Readers in Britain and abroad were asked to go through books from particular periods and to copy onto individual slips of paper sentences that showed words in use, noting the author, title and date of each. Millions of slips were eventually sent in. When James Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster with a passion for languages, was appointed editor in 1879, the project had stalled, and many of the slips collected under earlier editors turned out to be disorganised or missing.

Murray had an iron shed, which he called the Scriptorium, built in his garden in Oxford and fitted with more than a thousand pigeonholes for sorting the slips. When he was appointed, it was hoped that the dictionary would be finished in about ten years. In fact the first part, covering the words from A to Ant, did not appear until 1884. Murray remained editor for the rest of his life, and the complete dictionary was finally published in 1928, thirteen years after his death. It defined more than 400,000 words and phrases.

Among the most productive volunteers was William Chester Minor, a former American army surgeon who sent in many thousands of quotations. Minor was confined at Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane, having killed a man in London while suffering from severe delusions. Murray is said to have corresponded with him for several years before discovering where his letters came from, and the two men eventually became friends.

Teenagers are often accused of laziness for staying up late and struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Research on the body clock suggests that biology plays a larger part than character.

Human sleep is regulated by two main processes. The first is ‘sleep pressure’, a drive to sleep that builds up the longer a person stays awake and is relieved by sleeping. The second is the circadian rhythm, an internal cycle lasting roughly 24 hours, controlled by a small region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. One of the signals of this body clock is the hormone melatonin, whose level rises in the evening and helps to prepare the body for sleep. Bright light, especially in the evening, delays the release of melatonin.

During puberty, the timing of the circadian rhythm typically shifts later, so that melatonin is released later in the evening than in childhood. There is also evidence that sleep pressure builds up more slowly in adolescents than in younger children. Together, these changes mean that many teenagers genuinely find it hard to fall asleep early, even if they go to bed early. The shift does not last: the body clock usually reaches its latest timing around the end of the teenage years and then gradually moves earlier again. Meanwhile, teenagers are generally thought to need eight to ten hours of sleep a night, and when school starts early, many are left short of sleep during the week and then sleep in for long periods at weekends.

Some schools have experimented with later start times. Several studies have reported that students at such schools sleep longer on school nights and are less sleepy in lessons, and some have found improvements in attendance. However, later starts can clash with parents' working hours, school transport timetables and after-school activities. Researchers also warn that the benefit may shrink if teenagers simply respond by going to bed even later, for example because of evening screen use.

Tulips reached the Dutch Republic from the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century and soon became prized by wealthy collectors. The most sought-after were ‘broken’ tulips, whose petals showed dramatic streaks and flames of colour. Growers could not reliably reproduce these patterns and did not know that they were caused by a virus spread by insects called aphids. The virus also weakened the bulbs, which made the most admired varieties even scarcer.

During the 1630s, trade in bulbs spread beyond collectors. Because bulbs spend most of the year in the ground, buyers often agreed to pay a fixed price for a bulb to be handed over when it was lifted in the summer, and these contracts could themselves be resold, sometimes several times over, at gatherings in taverns. Prices rose steeply over the winter of 1636–37, then collapsed in early February 1637, when buyers failed to appear at an auction in Haarlem.

The episode became famous through a book published in 1841 by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, who described a whole nation gripped by a buying frenzy, with people of every class ruined when prices fell. His account has been retold ever since as a warning about financial bubbles.

Historians who have recently examined Dutch archives have challenged this picture. They found few bankruptcies that could be linked to tulips, and most of the traders they could identify were merchants and skilled craftsmen rather than the poor. Many contracts were never honoured: disputes dragged on until buyers and sellers settled, often for a small fraction of the agreed price, so actual losses were usually far smaller than the contract prices suggest. Much of Mackay's material, these historians argue, came from moralising pamphlets published soon after the crash, whose authors had their own reasons to exaggerate. On this view, tulip mania was real but brief and limited — more remarkable as a story than as an economic event.

When a foraging honeybee finds a rich source of nectar, she can tell other workers in the hive where it is. The Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch spent decades working out how, and in 1973 he shared a Nobel Prize for his research.

Von Frisch found that bees returning from distant food perform a ‘waggle dance’ on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. The dancer runs in a straight line while waggling her abdomen from side to side, then circles back to her starting point and repeats the run, turning alternately left and right so that her path traces a figure of eight. The angle of the waggle run relative to straight up the comb shows the direction of the food relative to the sun: a run straight upwards means ‘fly towards the sun’, while a run angled 40 degrees to the right of vertical means ‘fly 40 degrees to the right of the sun’. The length of time the waggle run lasts indicates distance: the longer the run, the further away the food. For food very close to the hive, bees instead perform a ‘round dance’, which signals that food is nearby but gives little information about its direction.

Not everyone was convinced. In the 1960s some researchers argued that recruits found food mainly by following its scent, which clung to the dancer's body, and that the dance itself might carry little useful information. The debate was largely settled by later experiments. In one, researchers used radar to track bees that had followed a dance. Some of these bees were captured as they left the hive and released at a different spot. They flew in the direction and for roughly the distance the dance had indicated, and so ended up in the wrong place. Scent is now thought to help recruits pinpoint the food once they are close to it.

In 1912 the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been joined in a single landmass, which he later called Pangaea, and had since drifted apart. He was not the first to notice that the coastlines of South America and Africa look as though they would fit together, but he gathered a far wider range of evidence than anyone before him. Fossils of the same land animals and plants had been found on continents now separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean. Distinctive rock formations seemed to continue from one continent to the next, and deposits left by ancient glaciers had been found in regions that now have hot climates.

Most geologists rejected the idea, many of them forcefully. Their main objection was that Wegener could not explain what force could push continents through the solid rock of the ocean floor; the mechanisms he suggested were shown by physicists to be far too weak. Many critics explained the matching fossils instead by proposing that land bridges had once connected the continents and had since sunk beneath the sea. Wegener died in 1930 on an expedition across the Greenland ice sheet, with his theory still out of favour.

The picture changed after the Second World War, when new surveys of the ocean floor revealed a vast system of underwater mountain ranges and measurements of the magnetism preserved in sea-floor rocks showed matching stripes on either side of these ridges. The best explanation was that new ocean floor was being created at the ridges and spreading outwards. By the late 1960s this idea had been developed into the theory of plate tectonics, which holds that the Earth's outer layer is broken into rigid plates that move slowly, carrying the continents with them. Wegener's central claim, that the continents move, was vindicated — but not his account of how: the continents do not plough through the ocean floor but travel with it.

In the summer of 1858 a spell of unusually hot weather turned the River Thames in London into what became known as the ‘Great Stink’. For centuries the river had received much of the city's waste, and the problem had worsened as the population grew and as flushing toilets, which drained into sewers that emptied straight into the river, became more common.

The smell was so bad that curtains in the Houses of Parliament, beside the river, were soaked in chemicals in an attempt to block it, and there was talk of moving Parliament's business out of London. Within weeks, legislation was passed giving the Metropolitan Board of Works the money and authority to build a new sewer system.

The scheme was designed by the Board's chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette. Instead of letting sewers empty into the Thames in central London, he built large ‘intercepting’ sewers running roughly parallel to the river. These collected the waste and carried it, mainly by gravity but with the help of pumping stations, to outfalls well to the east of the city, where it was released into the river as the tide went out. Parts of the system were laid inside new embankments built along the river, which also carried roads and, later, an underground railway. Bazalgette is said to have made his main pipes considerably wider than his calculations required, on the grounds that the work should only have to be done once.

At the time, many experts believed that diseases such as cholera were spread by foul air, or ‘miasma’. The physician John Snow had argued in the 1850s that cholera spread through contaminated water, but his view was not widely accepted. Bazalgette's sewers were built mainly to get rid of the smell, yet by keeping sewage out of the water that people drank they also reduced cholera. When the disease struck London again in 1866, the outbreak was concentrated in an area of East London that had not yet been connected to the new system.