IELTS Reading Intensive Lesson - Biogeography & Wallace Line - Trí Đức English TRÍ ĐỨC ENGLISH IELTS Reading Intensive — Passage Analysis & Practice I. READING PASSAGE: Biogeography & The Wallace Line [Paragraph A] "Why do some species die and some live? The answer was clear: on the whole the best fitted lived. From the effects of disease, the healthiest escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters... This self-acting process would improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain, that is, the fittest would survive." It is a reflection written by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858 that framed a theory of the evolutionary origin of species. [Paragraph B] Quite independent of each other, Charles Darwin and his young contemporary Wallace reached the same conclusion on natural selection. Their conclusions, however, had been the direct result of their personal observation of animals and plants in widely separated geographic locations. Darwin attributed his to his experiences during the voyage of the Beagle, and particularly during the ship's visit to the Galapagos Islands in the East Pacific in 1835. And Wallace attributed his to his years of travel in the Amazon Basin and in the Indonesia-Australian Archipelago in the 1850s. [Paragraph C] Darwin had already been recording his ideas on evolution for years when he received a note from Wallace who solicited his opinion on the same subject and requested his assistance to get a paper on the subject published. In July 1858, Darwin's close friends Charles Lyell and J.D. Hooker, strongly encouraged Darwin to present his conclusions immediately so that he would not lose priority to an unknown naturalist. Presiding over the hastily called but now historic meeting of the Linnean Society of London, the world's oldest active biological society, Lyell and Hooker explained to the distinguished members how "these two gentlemen" had "independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory." [Paragraph D] Both Darwin and Wallace had realized that the anomalous distribution of species in particular regions had profound evolutionary significance. As a result of his correspondence with Wallace and his conversations with Lyell and Hooker, Darwin opted to sequester himself in near seclusion, where he spent his remaining days studying and writing about the origin of the species. Wallace, on the other hand, applied himself to the science of biogeography, the study of the pattern and distribution of species, and its significance. [Paragraph E] For Wallace, years of hard work resulted in a detailed record of zoological observations and a huge collection of specimens which he sold to museums and collectors. Among the conclusions in his findings was Wallace's contention that there is a distinct faunal boundary (called Wallace's Line) between the Asian kingdom of animals in Java, Bo...