UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS
Cambridge International Level 3 Pre-U Certificate
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Paper 1 Written paper
INSTRUCTIONS (Resource Booklet)
9777/01
October/November 2011
1 hour 30 minutes
READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST
This Resource Booklet contains Documents 1 and 2 which you should use to answer the questions.
You should spend approximately 10 minutes reading the documents before attempting to answer the questions.
This is allowed for within the time set for the examination.
DC (LEO) 32747/2
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This document consists of 3 printed pages and 1 blank page.
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The documents below consider threats to biodiversity. Read them both in order to answer all the questions on the question paper.
Online, the website of The Times, 5 August 2008.
Almost half the world’s primate species are under threat of extinction because they are being eaten or having their homes destroyed by Man.
Monkeys, lemurs, langurs and great apes are among the primates under threat of eradication in a review of all 634 species, apart from human beings.
It was found that 303 of them face the possibility of extinction in the wild, and for 69 species the threat is so severe that they were classified as critically endangered.
Habitat destruction was identified as the single most damaging cause of decline, but for some animals the threat posed by being hunted and eaten by people was the most significant factor.
Among the animals most likely to end up on someone’s table are: the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey and
Delacour’s langur in Vietnam; the golden monkey and L’Hoest’s monkey in Rwanda; and Kirk’s red colobus in Tanzania.
Asia had the worst record for declining primates, with 71 per cent in the region being under threat. In
Cambodia, the country with the worst record, 90 per cent of native species are struggling to survive.
“It’s really, really serious,” said Jean-Christophe Vié, of the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), as the results of the survey were released at the 22nd International Primatological
Society Congress in Edinburgh.
“Primates are one of the most threatened groups we’ve assessed and the threat is growing. Deforestation is the main threat but on top of that we have hunting pressure.”
Primates are among the easiest prey for human hunters because they are comparatively easy to spot in the tree canopy, and often advertise their presence with loud calls.
Red colobuses, langurs, mangabeys, howler and spider monkeys are among hunters’ favourites because, at 10 to 20lb each, they make a sizeable meal loaded with protein.
Russell Mittermeier, a primate specialist at the IUCN and President of Conservation International, said:
“We have raised concerns for years about primates being in peril, but now we have solid data to show the situation is far more severe than we imagined. Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but it appears primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction.”
© UCLES 2011 9777/01/RB/O/N/11

3 serious trouble’, an article from ‘The Green Century’, Time Magazine, published on the
CNN website, 23 August 2002.
“Biodiversity includes all living things that we depend on for our economies and our lives,” explained
Brooks Yeager, Vice President of Global Programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, DC.
“It’s the forests, the oceans, the coral reefs, the marine fish, the algae, the insects that make up the living world around us and which we couldn’t do without,” he said.
Nearly 2 million species of plants and animals are known to science and experts say 50 times as many may not yet be discovered. Yet most scientists agree that human activity is causing rapid deterioration in biodiversity. Expanding human settlements, logging, mining, agriculture and pollution are destroying ecosystems, upsetting nature’s balance and driving many species to extinction.
There is virtual unanimity among scientists that we have entered a period of mass extinction not seen since the age of the dinosaurs, an emerging global crisis that could have disastrous effects on our future food supplies, our search for new medicines, and on the water we drink and the air we breathe.
Estimates vary, but extinction is figured by experts to be taking place between 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural “background” extinction.
At the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago, world leaders signed a treaty to confront this crisis. But its results have been disappointing. According to Yeager, “It hasn’t had the direct kind of impact that some of us had hoped for.”
One hundred and eighty-two nations are now parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The
United States is the only industrial country that has failed to ratify it. But there is wide agreement that the treaty has had virtually no impact on continuing mass extinction.
The treaty is more like a political statement than a plan of action, setting very broad goals instead of real targets, and leaving it to national governments to decide how to reach them.
Many developing countries in tropical areas, where most species of plant and animal can be found, wanted nothing in the treaty that could limit their freedom to exploit natural resources.
So the treaty was framed as a political compromise to balance three principles: conservation, sustainable development and fair sharing of the benefits of biodiversity.
In the process, critics say, the operation of the treaty has lost its focus. It’s been distracted from science and conservation by other issues, such as “biopiracy” (determining who profits from genetic resources) and “biosafety” (controlling trade in genetically modified organisms, such as seeds, with built-in pesticides). Many pressure groups have forced governments to address the issues of “biopiracy” and
“biosafety.”
Debbie Barker, Co-director of the California-based International Forum on Globalization, says, “You cannot really separate preservation and sustainability and conservation and biodiversity without addressing, for example, important new technologies like genetic engineering or genetic modification.”
That may be true, but many scientists and conservationists say almost all the work at the treaty’s conferences has been focused on these “hot-button” issues, including “biopiracy” and “biosafety”, during the past decade. The result, they say, has been a lost opportunity to address the real crisis.
The member nations still stand by the treaty, but at a conference earlier this year at The Hague they issued a statement admitting humans are still destroying biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.
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BLANK PAGE
Copyright Acknowledgements:
Questions 1 & 3
Questions 2 & 3
© Half of Primates Species Threatened ; www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4460659.ece; 5 August 2008.
© The Complex Web of Life on Earth ; www.cnn.com/2002/TECH; 23 August 2002.
Permission to reproduce items where third-party owned material protected by copyright is included has been sought and cleared where possible. Every reasonable effort has been made by the publisher (UCLES) to trace copyright holders, but if any items requiring clearance have unwittingly been included, the publisher will be pleased to make amends at the earliest possible opportunity.
University of Cambridge International Examinations is part of the Cambridge Assessment Group. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), which is itself a department of the University of Cambridge.
© UCLES 2011 9777/01/RB/O/N/11