06 FOCUS TEST

ENGLISH II
Student’s Name Date 14/08/25 Total Marks
Stage IGCSE Time 35 min 20

Read the following article about miners trapped underground in Chile, and then answer the questions.

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(a) When do people work most closely together? [1]

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(b) What was previously the longest period that miners had been trapped underground? [1]

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(c) How did the miners first make contact with the rescuers? [1/2]

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(d) What were psychologists particularly keen to find out? Give two details. [2]

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(e) What made the rescuers decide to send the miners clean clothes and razors? [1]

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(e) Why were the men all given the same colour shirts to wear? [1]

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(g) How did the food supplied by the rescuers change from the earliest stages to the final

stages? Give two details. [1]

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(h) According to the diagram, what was the width of each of the supply tubes? [1/2]

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(i) How did the miners prepare for what they would face when they came out of the capsule? [1]

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(j) What did the experts believe that the miners needed to do for their physical and mental

health? Give four details. [4]

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Read the following article about “dowsing”, the ancient technique for finding water underground, and
then complete the notes on the opposite page.

Discovering the existence of water underground without scientific means or knowledge is one of the
world’s oldest mysteries.
Instead of using modern equipment, the discoverer – or dowser – holds thin metal rods or just simply
a twig from a tree. When the rods cross or the twig moves without any help from the operator, it is
considered a sign that water lies beneath the surface of the ground.
Costas Kyriakou, who lives in Cyprus, is a practising dowser, and is convinced that the technique
works. He claims that he has never been wrong in discovering water underground. He believes that
there are no hidden secrets and says: “It is a gift which a genuine dowser must possess and I believe
that I have this gift. My body sends electromagnetic waves which respond to the presence of water.”
He cannot wear clothes made of synthetic materials because they immediately make his body itch.

Costas discovered his gift accidentally when he was only 15 years old. A piece of abandoned metal he
had picked up suddenly went wild in his hands. When he was about the same age, he found water
underground in the fields near his village.
With a lifetime of experience, he can now tell the quantity of the water in an underground area.
Because of the high costs involved in searching for water, this is an important factor for companies
when deciding whether it is worth drilling a test hole to locate it. He can tell the basic quality of the
water, for example, how pure it is and whether it contains any salt. He can also distinguish water from
other liquids, such as oil, for instance. He demonstrated this by showing how differently his

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instruments behaved when placed over the buried tanks of a petrol station
in comparison to a water
well. He is even able to discover how deep the water is underground and can trace the direction in
which it is flowing.

As Costas became more experienced, he changed the tools that he used. He soon decided to throw
away the standard “L” shaped copper or tin rods, and replaced them with a single rod with a loop at
either end. He uses this with one hand, in the same way as he uses a twig or any small piece of wood.

Costas also noticed that the rod and the twig only helped in discovering water that was near the
surface. To go really deep, he uses a kind of pendulum, a weight, preferably made of bronze, that simply
hangs by a piece of string. It is an amazing sight to watch a heavy object like that defying the law of gravity,
at first swinging from side to side like a proper pendulum and then spinning round without any help or
interference from the human handling it.
If an ordinary person tries to do the same test over a particular spot which is known to contain
water, nothing happens. The pendulum remains hanging with no movement. But if Costas touches you
with his hands as you hold it, you can feel the string immediately become charged with energy – like
an electric current.
Dowsing is a popular activity in countries like Cyprus, where water is sometimes in short supply.
However, in many other northern European countries, where water is plentiful, dowsing is mainly used
to detect other things, such as metal objects, underground.
Make your notes under each heading.
Costas’s early discoveries [1]

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What Costas can tell companies about water underground [3]

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Tools that Costas now uses to detect water [3]

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