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Test 16 / 20

You will hear part of a radio discussion about the intelligence of great apes.

Chimpanzees

At first, Paula the chimpanzee looked as if she was going to the mirror.

attack

Paula’s use of the mirror to examine her was proof that she understood what it was.

eyeeyes

Ray describes the apes he works with as both and intelligent.

sensitivehighly sensitive

Ray explains how one chimpanzee used both food and to win friends.

beddingbedding materialbedding materials

Ray says that from a human perspective, it’s possible to put a interpretation on Tammy’s behaviour.

political

Ray gives the example of the dropped to show that gorillas possess bargaining skills.

sunglassespair of sunglasses

Annabel describes the apes which take part in experiments as for their species.

ambassadors

Ray questions the validity of experiments which involve giving to apes.

drugs

 

Man 1: It wasn’t so very long ago that we thought the main dividing line between humans and the great Apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas was affected we use tools and they don’t. Put a recent TV documentary called ‘monkey in the mirror’ show the mounting evidence that not only do used tools. They even use different tools to do different jobs. I spoke to Ray Debenham who is a zookeeper with responsibility for Apes and Annabelle Jones who was involved in the making of the programme. Annabelle began by describing one of the most memorable scenes

Woman 1: A young chimpanzee called Paula comes into a room where there’s a huge mirror in front of her and you can see her thought processes initially she thinks perhaps. It’s another chimpanzee. She gets ready to attack it but then Paula stops.

Looks, swerised from side to side beginning to test this thing in the mirror and it does the same thing. this is what little children around the age of 2 and chimps go through just the same transition. And before you know it she’s there fingering high looking into it using a mirror to examine a part of herself. She can’t see any other way and that’s one of the really crucial tests of intelligence .if animals can recognise themselves it proves to us that they know they have a self and the only Apes do it apart from humans.

Man 1: Ray you’ve been working with Apes from many years, does this sort of behaviour surprised you?

Man 2: I’ve come to know them as not only extremely intelligent but also highly sensitive animals very much aware of who they are. 

The society is hierarchical and you can see this in their behaviour for example many years ago a chimpanzee call Tammy who is now the dominant female and her group went through a period when Kelly ingratiating herself with the other females she would give them my items of food and also bedding material as well, but she was also careful to hold Back the choices pieces and always the largest share for herself

Women 1: Sounds like she was buying friends

Man 2: Exactly it was a sort of behaviour that we would interpret as political and we recognise it is very human because we do it too

Man 1: and didn’t one of your gorillas demonstrate bargaining skills to you Ray?

Man 2: That’s right. This is who lean over the wall of the enclosure app to drop things guidebooks cameras and someone anyway one day a lady’s sunglasses fell off and a gorilla immediately went over to them pick them up and looked at me. I threw him a couple of grapes to distract him, but he ignore them. So I threw in another one and he just kept looking at me. I think we got up to about 10 great before eventually he surrendered his bargaining tool.

Man 1: He got the measure of the situation

Man 2: Undoubtedly

Man 1: And Annabelle, there are lots of scenes in the film where we see experiments with chimpanzees. If they are so intelligent, how can we really justify experiments like that?

Woman 1: Well, it depends on what you mean by experiments. a lot of what we know, a lot about on your respect for the Apes comes from people who work closely with them and find ways of asking them to show us what they can do and what they thinking. that kind of experiment I think it’s wonderful. You know, faced the Apes living in a world that’s put of humans. It’s good if there are some Ambassadors for this species

Man 2: The kinds of experiments that are a lot more questionable, of the things that we do just for our own good. For example, if chimps are the only animals that can cash certain types of human illness. You know people can argue that the greater good is to look for a cure for the illness and that experiments with drugs are valid. I’m not so sure because you have to realise that it’s a terribly intelligent being you experimenting on.

Woman 1: At the other extreme, when we see Apes behaving in ways we recognise we start indulging and sentimental feelings. I mean there is a danger that maybe we try to imagine them as more human in a sense because we find it cute

Man 2: No way. In the past, people went wild the board drawing lines between us and animals. And I think it’s time for a bit of back-⁠swing. Recognising how much they are like us.

Woman 1: But, there are obvious differences. I mean here we are talking to each other on the radio. You know and we have a society and technology and it is allowed us to do all of this. It’s a long way from spending three years learning how to use a stone as a tool to crack a nut.

Man 2: Yeah, but we can’t just draw a line. There’s just no one thing that we do that is totally conceptually different from anything they do.

Women 1: Well, there are…..

Man 1: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it Annabelle, thank you very much.

Test 1 / 20

Assistant Curator

Lizzy, who works in the furniture, textiles and fashion department of the V and A museum, feels her job is incredibly

VARIED

She often spends quite a lot of time doing writing and on collections.

RESEARCH

The thing about the V and A is that she finds working with collections and objects incredibly

EXCITING

She explains how objects can tell you very interesting and very  things about a period.

UNEXPECTED

She finds the fact that there’s always something new to discover really

THRILLING

While working in a public Contemporary Art Gallery, she realised she wanted something that was more history

FOCUSED

She makes the point that there are limited openings, and anyone interested needs to look at it in as way as possible.

BROAD

She further explains that the V and A offers various  often for students doing a degree programme.

INTERNSHIPS

Speaker 1

(0:04) My name is Lizzie Bisley, I’m an Assistant Curator in the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion department at the V&A. (0:10) My job is incredibly varied, so this morning I started my day doing some research on a Napoleonic medal cabinet that the V&A has just acquired, and then I spent about an hour looking at an amazing 1950s Christian Dior dress. (0:28) Tomorrow I’ve got some visitors coming in to look at some 1980s Italian designs, I’ll be meeting them in the store to look at that, and I spend quite a lot of time doing writing and research on the collection and publishing things online on the V&A’s Search the Collections database.

(0:43) The best thing about working at the V&A is probably working with the collection, because I find it incredibly exciting to work with objects. (0:52) The V&A has an amazing collection, but in any museum collection I think you’ll always find objects that tell you something very interesting and very unexpected about the period that you’re looking at, or the people who made it, and no matter how many times an object has been studied, there’s always something else that you can think about or discover about it, which is really thrilling. (1:12) But the other great thing about working at the V&A is that it’s filled with so many interesting people.

(1:17) You’re always meeting people who have something exciting and different to tell you. (1:21) I really enjoyed history at high school and then went on to do my degree and had a job (1:28) for a couple of years working in a public contemporary art gallery, which was great, (1:33) but I realised that I really wanted to do something that was more history-focused, so I came and (1:41) started doing a master’s degree in history of design, and then worked for about three (1:47) or four years doing about ten jobs at a time, patching together little bits of research (1:53) and editorial work and little bits of writing, and kind of finally managed to get a job as (2:03) an assistant curator. (2:03) And I think one of the difficult things about getting into curatorial work is that there aren’t a huge number of jobs, so you need to be willing to take on lots of different things and look at it in as broad a way as possible, and make your own projects if there aren’t any available, that kind of thing, kind of attack it in as many different ways as you can.

(2:21) We work in the Furniture and Textiles and Fashion department, we work a lot with young (2:27) people who come in as visitors, so partly school groups who come in either to have appointments (2:33) in our stores and look at objects in the study rooms, objects that are in storage, or we (2:39) also give talks and tours to school groups quite often who come round, but we also offer (2:46) various internships often for students who are in a summer between two years of a degree (2:52) programme.

(2:52) We try to give as much help as possible to students who want to work in museums, and give them a real sense of what the practical work of being in a museum is like. (3:02) I think you need to be, to do a job like the assistant curator job at the V&A, you need to be interested in objects, and you need to be interested in research, and you need to be interested in history or thinking about what objects can tell you about the past or the present. (3:19) You also have to be quite able to work in a very varied way, and you have to enjoy practical work because a lot of curatorial jobs are quite practical.

Test 2 / 20

Museum

This museum houses objects collected by the based in the city.

Cultural Society

It has one of the country’s best galleries containing exhibits.

natural science

The museum’s displays of butterflies and  are closed to visitors at present.

birds

The section called is popular with young people.

Let’s InteractLet's Interact

The picture galleries contain works on various themes by .

German artists

The museum’s needs modernising.

heating

The guide uses the word to describe the Rutland Dinosaur’s effect on people.

intimidating

Polystyrene was used to reconstruct most of the Rutland Dinosaur’s .

tail

Welcome to the City Museum and Art Gallery. Before we start our tour, I’d like to give you a bit of background information about the place itself. The museum was founded in 1849 as a home for the collections built up over the years by the local Cultural Society , and is one of seven museums owned by the city council. Its collections of dinosaurs and mummies are well known, and it also has one of Britain’s top five exhibitions of natural science. Unfortunately, not all areas are open to the public at the moment. In the cellar storerooms, for example, there are, amongst other things, display cases full of butterflies, and many others full of birds.

Upstairs, there’s a section designed especially for children, for those of you who are interested, where young people can dress up, draw pictures, and find out about the museum at their own pace. It’s called ‘Let’s Interact’ and there’s more noise there than silence, as you might imagine. But we find this to be a successful way of attracting children to museums. Let’s face it, museums in the past have been boring, rather stuffy places for children, and indeed adults,
to visit.

The picture galleries, which we’ll be visiting later, boast a fine collection of drawings, prints and woodcuts by German artists, and the art collection is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically. The themes we shall see are: colour, light, movement, signs, and symbols.

It’s a bit cold here, I’m afraid. I do apologise for this but, I’m sorry to say, the central heating needs a million-pound refit, which the city can’t afford to undertake at the moment. So, if any of you are millionaires, and feeling generous today, please see me after the tour!

Now, if you will just follow me to the end of the Grand Colonnade, we’ll turn right into the first exhibit room on the ground floor. [pause] Now, this room houses the Rutland Dinosaur. As you can see, it’s three and a half metres high and fourteen metres long, quite an intimidating sight! This Cetiosaurus, as it’s called, was found in England’s smallest county in 1968. The creature loped across the countryside 175 million years ago, and is the most complete example of the breed discovered to date. Most of the neck, some of the spine and a bit of the tail were found in Rutland; the rest of the tail is polystyrene. For those of you who prefer your dinosaurs on a much more human scale, there is a much smaller 200-million-year-old Pilosaur over there.