Reading Passage 1: Amazon Rainforest of Peru

Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

Amazon Rainforest of Peru

AA cement maker proudly speaks about the brief history of the road: this main road was part of an incentive programme supported by the US's fund to help local people to find economic alternatives to harvesting coca, from which cocaine is produced. Four years later, the road is a global vacuum from which timber from the Peruvian rainforest is taken to China. Some wood will be polished into luxury parquet flooring for high-quality homes in Shanghai and Beijing. More wood will be used in Chinese factories and made into patio furniture, decking or flooring in North America and Europe.

BGoing down the street, muddy tracks show the old forest known as Monte Alto, where local farmers have been using the sunlight that comes through the openings in the forest canopy to grow a variety of food crops, like cassava, sweet potatoes, bananas and plantains. They are also growing a few cash crops like coffee and cacao. This also helps to fund essential services like schools and hospitals.

CAs a tree ecologist and student studying about the timber trade, I am here researching a kind of Dipteryx known in the region as shihuahuaco (its international trade name is cumaru) and to research its movements from the Amazonian forest to Chinese factories. Although shihuahuaco is not particularly high profile, ecologists call it a "keystone" tree, as its large seeds are an essential food source for forest herbivores in the dry season, whilst its hollow rooms are utilized as the nesting place of parrots and macaws. It is so hard that local residents use big shihuahuaco trees as a shelter when strong storms bring trees down.

DMy trip began in the company of a great group of people who were logging from the sawmill town in Pucallpa. A two-day trip into the forest guided us beyond the road's end to a community called Esperanza, or "Hope." In the middle of a flourishing Chacra – a farm typical of the area – there was a temporary logging camp. As well as their productive farming, the chacra had a family business called the Medinas which offered a refuge for birds, wild piglets and primates saved from logged areas. From there, I walked through the Monte Alto with my logging friends for 10 days, which they were soon to cut.

EThe adult trees were colossal, reaching heights of up to 50 metres and a width of 1.3 metres, towering above their huge buttresses which spread up to 5 metres around the main trunk. There were one or two such trees per hectare and most of them were put forward for the long voyage across the Pacific. Whilst we found approximately 250 seedlings and saplings, there were only two young trees which had reached the canopy and therefore could be expected to harvest into adults.

FI don't want to be sentimental about trees. On one of my last nights in the rainforest when speaking to the company's chief woodsman Pedro, I felt reassured about the situation. Pedro said, "At least there are the Medias arbolitos." "What, little trees?" I asked. The next day Pedro showed me the trees he was referring to. We walked up the hill and Pedro stopped in front of a very healthy-looking young shihuahuaco growing in the sun. "When do you expect to harvest them?" I had to ask. I hope he wasn't planning to profile them in a few years.