Reading Practice Test 8: Minds and Machines

Read the text below and answer questions 1-13.

Crows and the Puzzle of Tool Use

For a long time, the ability to design and use tools was considered a hallmark of advanced primate cognition, something separating humans and their closest relatives from the rest of the animal kingdom. That assumption has been steadily undermined by research into an unlikely group of tool users: crows, and in particular the New Caledonian crow, a species that has become the focus of decades of study by comparative psychologist Hannah Ridley and her colleagues.

In the wild, New Caledonian crows fashion hooked tools from twigs, stripping away side branches and bending the tip into a small hook used to extract insect larvae from deep crevices in tree bark. What caught Ridley's attention was not merely that the crows used tools, but that different populations on the same island produce distinctly different tool designs, passed down in a manner that resembles a simple form of cultural transmission rather than fixed instinct alone.

To test the limits of this ability under controlled conditions, Ridley's team designed a series of puzzle boxes requiring crows to use one tool to retrieve a second, longer tool, which could then be used to reach food otherwise out of reach — a multi-step problem requiring the bird to plan several moves ahead rather than react to immediate stimuli. Several crows solved this puzzle on their first attempt, without trial and error, suggesting they were mentally simulating the sequence of steps before acting rather than learning through repeated failure.

Perhaps the most striking result came from a variant of the classic water displacement task, in which food floats out of reach at the bottom of a narrow tube partially filled with water, and the bird must drop solid objects into the tube to raise the water level within reach. Ridley's crows consistently chose objects that would sink over those that would float, and preferred denser objects that displaced more water — a level of discrimination about physical properties that some researchers argue rivals the performance of young children given the equivalent task.

Ridley is careful not to overstate the comparison to human cognition. She points out that crow brains are organised completely differently from mammalian brains, lacking the layered cortex associated with primate intelligence, which suggests that sophisticated tool use and physical reasoning may have evolved independently along a very different neural architecture. Rather than proving that crows think like small feathered primates, Ridley argues the research shows that advanced problem-solving can arise from more than one biological starting point — a conclusion with implications for how intelligence itself should be defined.

Read the text below and answer questions 14-26.

Photography's Long Fight for Recognition as Art

When photography was first developed in the early nineteenth century, it was widely regarded not as an art form but as a mechanical process — a chemical and optical trick for producing an exact copy of reality, requiring skill in operating equipment rather than the creative judgement associated with painting or sculpture. This distinction, between craft as skilled reproduction and art as original creative expression, shaped how photography was treated by galleries, critics, and art institutions for much of its early history.

A pivotal shift came through the Pictorialist movement of the late nineteenth century, whose practitioners deliberately manipulated their photographic prints — through soft focus, selective printing techniques, and even scratching or painting directly onto negatives — specifically to argue that a photograph could reflect the photographer's individual vision rather than simply recording a scene mechanically. Critics at the time were divided: supporters saw Pictorialism as proof that photography belonged alongside painting, while detractors argued that disguising a photograph's mechanical nature was itself an admission that the medium could not stand as art on its own terms.

The debate took an unexpected turn in the early twentieth century, when photographer and critic groups shifted toward the opposite argument: that photography's value as art lay precisely in its mechanical precision, not in imitating painting. Sharp-focus, unmanipulated images of ordinary subjects — a shell, a pepper, an industrial structure — were presented as art precisely because they used the camera's unique capabilities rather than disguising them. This reversal effectively split photography's claim to artistic status into two competing arguments that persisted for decades: art through resemblance to painting, or art through embracing the camera's distinct mechanical nature.

Museums were slow to resolve the question institutionally. Major art museums did not establish dedicated photography curatorial departments until well into the twentieth century, decades after photography's technical development, and even then, some critics continued to argue that photography's usefulness for documentation, journalism, and commerce made it fundamentally different in purpose from painting, regardless of aesthetic quality. Others countered that a medium's practical uses elsewhere did not disqualify individual works from being considered art, pointing out that printmaking had commercial applications too without losing its artistic standing.

Today, photography's place in major art collections is largely settled, but the underlying tension — between valuing a medium for skilled reproduction versus original creative vision — has resurfaced with newer technologies, from digital manipulation to AI-generated imagery, suggesting the boundary between craft and art is redrawn with each new tool rather than settled once and for all.