Reading Practice Test 10: Built and Grown

Read the text below and answer questions 1-13.

The Hidden Economics of Bee Pollination

When people think about the value bees provide, honey is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Yet agricultural economist Femi Adeyemi argues that honey production is a minor part of the story — the far larger economic contribution comes from pollination itself, a service so embedded in food production that most consumers never think about it at all.

Adeyemi's research focuses on crops that depend heavily on insect pollination to set fruit, including almonds, apples, blueberries, and a wide range of other produce found in any supermarket. Without adequate pollination, these crops either fail to produce fruit at commercially viable levels or produce smaller, less uniform yields that are harder to sell. Because wild pollinator populations in many intensively farmed regions have declined significantly, growers increasingly rely on a practice called migratory beekeeping, in which commercial beekeepers transport hives by truck from farm to farm, timing their arrival to each crop's bloom.

The scale of this industry surprises most people encountering it for the first time. In some regions, a single almond-growing season requires trucking in a majority of the country's commercially managed honeybee colonies, concentrated into one relatively small growing region for a few intense weeks of bloom, before being dispersed again to other crops around the country for the rest of the year. Adeyemi describes this as one of the largest livestock movements in modern agriculture, even though it receives a fraction of the public attention given to more visible forms of farming.

This concentration creates a vulnerability that Adeyemi has spent years studying: when so many colonies from different regions are brought into close contact for pollination, diseases and parasites can spread between hives far more readily than would occur among dispersed wild or stationary populations. Colony losses following major pollination events have been documented at levels significantly higher than off-season losses, and Adeyemi's economic modelling suggests that beekeepers now factor a certain rate of colony loss into their pricing for pollination contracts, treating it as an operating cost rather than an occasional setback.

Adeyemi is cautious about proposing simple fixes. Reducing reliance on migratory beekeeping would require either restoring sufficient wild pollinator habitat near farms — a slow and land-intensive process — or developing crop varieties that pollinate more efficiently with fewer visits, both long-term undertakings without a quick substitute. In the meantime, he argues, the true cost of pollination is chronically underpriced relative to the risk beekeepers absorb, a mismatch that, left unaddressed, could eventually threaten the reliability of the food supply chains that depend on it.

Read the text below and answer questions 14-26.

Designing Buildings to Survive Earthquakes

For most of architectural history, buildings were designed primarily to resist static loads — their own weight, the weight of occupants and furnishings, and the force of wind. Earthquake engineering demands something fundamentally different: a structure that can absorb sudden, unpredictable, and violently oscillating forces without collapsing, even though the exact timing, direction, and intensity of a future earthquake can never be known in advance.

Early approaches to earthquake-resistant design focused almost entirely on stiffness, reasoning that a rigid structure would resist swaying and therefore resist damage. Structural engineer Renata Kowalczyk explains that this approach has serious limitations: an extremely rigid building resists small tremors well but can fail catastrophically in a major earthquake, since a completely rigid structure has no way to absorb energy — the force has to go somewhere, and in a purely rigid design, that often means the structure itself fractures.

The alternative philosophy that has largely replaced pure rigidity is controlled flexibility: designing a building to sway and deform in predictable ways during an earthquake, dissipating energy through that movement rather than resisting it outright. Base isolation is one of the clearest examples of this approach — buildings are constructed on top of flexible bearings, often made of layered rubber and steel, that allow the building's foundation to move somewhat independently of the ground shaking beneath it, significantly reducing the force transmitted into the structure above.

Tuned mass dampers represent a different application of the same underlying principle. These are large weights, sometimes hundreds of tonnes, suspended or mounted within a building, engineered to oscillate out of phase with the building's own natural swaying motion. As the structure moves one way, the mass moves to counteract it, absorbing energy that would otherwise flex the building's frame. Kowalczyk notes that similar systems, originally developed primarily to reduce swaying from strong winds in very tall buildings, have since been adapted specifically for seismic applications in earthquake-prone regions.

Retrofitting older buildings presents a distinct challenge from designing new ones, since many structures built before modern seismic codes existed cannot simply be rebuilt with these technologies from scratch. Engineers instead often add supplementary bracing, reinforce critical structural connections, or in some cases install base isolation retroactively beneath an existing foundation — a complex and expensive undertaking, but one that Kowalczyk argues is frequently far cheaper than the cost of rebuilding after a major earthquake destroys an unreinforced structure entirely.