The outlook for conservation heritage changed

Concept: A sentence-completion question set on an unseen passage is answered by literal comprehension: the completion must be the one the passage itself asserts, not merely one that sounds reasonable or that is mentioned somewhere in the text. The method is to locate the sentence that carries the same idea as the stem — here, a change in the outlook for heritage conservation — and then read the clause the writer attaches to it.

Application: The passage opens by stating that change together with the event it is tied to: “Heritage conservation practices improved worldwide after the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) was established with UNESCO’s assistance in 1959.” The clause governed by “after” is the establishment of that Centre, so the stem is completed by “after the establishment of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property”.

Cross-check: Each of the three remaining completions is assembled from material that does occur in the passage, but always in a different role; none of them is offered by the writer as the point from which the outlook changed:

• Training the specialists — the passage lists this among the things the inter-governmental organisation “has done”, that is, work carried out once it already existed: more than 4,000 professionals trained, practice standards provided, technical expertise shared.

• UNESCO’s assistance to educational institutions — the passage ties UNESCO’s assistance to the founding of the Centre in 1959; educational institutions come up only later, in the writer’s recommendation that conservation be made part of mainstream research and engineering institutes, as in Europe.

• ASI’s measures to protect the monuments — the Archaeological Survey of India belongs to the passage’s account of India’s present position: 6,600 protected monuments, over 60,000 further heritage structures awaiting attention, and only about 150 trained conservation professionals.

Result: The passage dates the change in the outlook for heritage conservation from the establishment of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), set up with UNESCO’s assistance in 1959.