You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13
which are based on Reading Passage below.
TOURISM
A Tourism, holidaymaking and travel are these days more
significant social phenomena than most commentators have considered. On the
face of it, there could not be a more trivial subject for a book. And indeed
since social scientists have had considerable difficulty explaining weightier
topics, such as work or politics, it might be thought that they would have
great difficulties in accounting for more trivial phenomena such as
holidaymaking. However, there are interesting parallels with the study of
deviance. This involves the investigation of bizarre and idiosyncratic social
practices which happen to be defined as deviant in some societies but not
necessarily in others. The assumption is that the investigation of deviance can
reveal interesting and significant aspects of normal societies. It could be
said that a similar analysis can be applied to tourism.
B Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its
opposite, namely regulated and organised work. It is one manifestation of how
work and leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social
practice in modern societies. Indeed acting as a tourist is one of the defining
characteristics of being ‘modern’ and the popular concept of tourism is that it
is organised within particular places and occurs for regularised periods of
time. Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to, and their stay
in, various destinations. This necessarily involves some movement, that is the
journey, and a period of stay in a new place or places. ‘The journey and the
stay’ are by definition outside the normal places of residence and work and are
of a short term and temporary nature and there is a clear intention to return
‘home’ within a relatively short period of time.
C A substantial proportion of the population of modern
societies engages in such tourist practices new socialised forms of provision
have developed in order to cope with the mass character of the gazes of
tourists as opposed to the individual character of travel. Places are chosen to
be visited and be gazed upon because there is an anticipation especially
through daydreaming and fantasy of intense pleasures, either on a different
scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. Such
anticipation is constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist
practices such as films, TV literature, magazines records and videos which
construct and reinforce this daydreaming.
D Tourists tend to visit features of landscape and
townscape which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are
viewed because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary. The
viewing of these tourist sights often involves different forms of social
patterning with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or
townscape than is normally found in everyday life. People linger over these
sights in a way that they would not normally do in their home environment and
the vision is objectified or captured through photographs postcards films and
so on which enable the memory to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured.
E One of the earliest dissertations on the subject of
tourism is Boorstins analysis of the pseudo event (1964) where he argues that
contemporary. Americans cannot experience reality directly but thrive on pseudo
events. Isolated from the host environment and the local people the mass
tourist travels in guided groups and finds pleasure in inauthentic contrived attractions
gullibly enjoying the pseudo events and disregarding the real world outside.
Over time the images generated of different tourist sights come to constitute a
closed self-perpetuating system of illusions which provide the tourist with the
basis for selecting and evaluating potential places to visit. Such visits are
made says Boorstin, within the environmental bubble of the familiar American
style hotel which insulates the tourist from the strangeness of the host
environment.
F To service the burgeoning tourist industry, an array
of professionals has developed who attempt to reproduce ever-new objects for
the tourist to look at. These objects or places are located in a complex and
changing hierarchy. This depends upon the interplay between, on the one hand,
competition between interests involved in the provision of such objects and, on
the other hand changing class, gender, and generational distinctions of taste
within the potential population of visitors. It has been said that to be a
tourist is one of the characteristics of the modern experience. Not to go away
is like not possessing a car or a nice house. Travel is a marker of status in
modern societies and is also thought to be necessary for good health. The role
of the professional, therefore, is to cater for the needs and tastes of the
tourists in accordance with their class and overall expectations.
Reading Passage has 6 paragraphs (A-F). Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph
from the list of headings below Write the appropriate numbers (i-ix) in boxes 1-6.
NB. There are more headings than paragraphs so you will
not use all of them You may use any heading more than once.List of Headings