Writing based on reading and listening

You will have 3 minutes to read a passage about an academic topic. While you read, you may take notes on scrap paper.

Then you will listen to a lecture about the same topic.

You may take notes while you listen.

After the lecture is over, you will have 20 minutes to write a response to a question that asks you about the relationship between the lecture and the reading passage. Try to answer the question as completely as possible using information from the reading passage and the lecture.

Your response will be evaluated on the quality of your writing and on how well your response presents the points in the lecture and their relationship to the reading passage. Typically, an effective response will be 150 to 225 words.

The Reading

Private collectors have been selling and buying fossils, the petrified remains of ancient organisms, ever since the eighteenth century. In recent years, however, the sale of fossils, particularly of dinosaurs and other large vertebrate has grown into a big business. Rare and important fossils are now being sold to private owner ship for millions of dollars. This is an unfortunate development for both scientists and the general public.
The public suffers because fossils that would otherwise be donated to museums where everyone can see them are sold to private collectors who do not allow the public to view their collections. Making it harder for the public to see fossils can lead to a decline in public interest in fossils, which would be a pity.

More importantly, scientists are likely to lose access to some of the most important fossils and thereby miss out on potentially crucial discoveries about extinct life forms. Wealthy fossil buyers with a desire to own the rarest and most important fossils can spend virtually limitless amounts of money to acquire them. Scientists and the museums and universities they work for often cannot compete successfully for fossils against millionaire fossil buyers.
Moreover, commercial fossil collectors often destroy valuable scientific evidence associated with the fossil they unearth. Most commercial fossil collectors are untrained or uninterested in carrying out the careful field work and documentation that reveal the most about animal life in the past. For example, scientists have learned about the biology of nest-building dinosaurs called oviraptors by carefully observing the exact position of oviraptor fossils in the ground and the presence of other fossils in the immediate surroundings. Commercial fossil collectors typically pay no attention to how fossils lie in the ground or to the smaller fossils that may surround bigger ones.

Listening Script

Of course there are some negative consequences of selling fossils in the commercial market, but they’ve been greatly exaggerated. The benefits of commercial fossil trade greatly outweigh the disadvantages.

First of all, the public is likely to have greater exposure to fossils as a result of commercial fossil trade, not less exposure. Commercial fossil hunting makes a lot of fossils available for purchase. And as a result, even low-level public institutions, like public schools and libraries, cannot routinely by interesting fossils and display them for the public.

As for the idea that scientists will lose access to really important fossils, that’s not realistic, either. Before anyone can put value on a fossil, it needs to be scientifically identified, right? Well, the only people who can identify fossils, who can really tell what given fossil is or isn’t, are scientists. By performing detail examinations in tests on the fossils themselves. So even if a fossil’s destined to go to a private collector, it has to pass through the hands of scientific experts first. This way, the scientific community is not gonna miss out on anything important that’s out there.

Finally, whatever damage commercial fossil collectors sometimes do, if it weren’t for them, many fossils would simply go undiscovered, because there aren’t that many fossil collecting corporations that run by university and other scientific institutions. Isn’t it better for scientists to at least have more fossils being found, even if we don’t have all the scientific data we would like to have about their locations and surroundings than is it to have many fossils go completely undiscovered?

My response

The lecturer explains that the disadvantages of private collectors of fossils are being exagerated. The passage explains that private collectors create great damage on scientific development related to fossils. However, the lecturer argues that private collectors help in scientific development.

First of all, the passage explains that with private collectors a lot of people would lose access to most important fossils due to the fact that they are not in a museum. Nevertheless, the professional explains that with private collectors there is more exposure. This is because private collectors make fossils more accessible to libraries and schools that can buy them.

Secondly, the lecturer clarifies that scientists are always allowed to study the fossils. Because they are the firsts ones to study the fossil in order to discover where the fossil comes from.

Finally, the passage argues that commercial fossil collectors pay no attention to how fossils are extracted. This information is contradicted in the lecture. Private collectors tend to be wealthy people and this means that they are able to use their wealth to help with the expensoive business of extracting fossils. Otherwise, museums or public institutions could not extract fossils from the ground and a lot of fossils would not be discovered.