You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Collecting must be one of the most varied of human activities, and it is one that many psychologists find fascinating. Many forms of collecting have been dignified with a technical name: an arctophilist collects teddy bears, a philatelist collects postage stamps, and a deltiologist collects postcards. Amassing hundreds or thousands of postcards, chocolate wrappers or whatever takes time, energy and money that could surely be put to more productive use. Yet there are millions of collectors around the world. Why do they do it?
There are people who collect because they want to make money. This could be called an instrumental reason for collecting: collecting as a means to an end. They might look for antiques that they can buy cheaply and expect to sell at a profit. But there may be a psychological element too: buying cheap and selling dear can give the collector a sense of triumph. As selling online is so easy, more and more people are joining in.
Many collectors collect to develop their social life, attending meetings of a group of collectors and exchanging information on items. This is a variant on joining a bridge club or a gym, and similarly brings them into contact with like-minded people. Another motive is the desire to find something special, or a particular example of the collected item, such as a rare early recording by a particular singer. Some may spend their whole lives in a hunt for this. Psychologically, this can give a purpose to a life that otherwise feels aimless. There is a danger, though, that if the individual finds what they are looking for, rather than celebrating, they may feel empty now that the goal that drove them has gone.
If you think about collecting postage stamps, another potential reason, or perhaps a result, is its educational value. Stamp collecting opens a window to other countries and to the plants, animals or famous people shown on their stamps. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, many collectors amassed fossils, animals and plants from around the globe, and their collections provided a vast amount of information about the natural world. Without those collections, our understanding would be greatly inferior.
In the past, and nowadays too, though to a lesser extent, a popular form of collecting, particularly among boys and men, was trainspotting. This might involve trying to see every locomotive of a particular type, using published data that identifies each one, and ticking off each engine as it is seen. Trainspotters exchange information, these days often by mobile phone, so they can work out where to go to see a particular engine. As a by-product, many practitioners become very knowledgeable about railway operations or technical specifications of different engine types.
Similarly, people who collect dolls may go beyond simply enlarging their collection and develop an interest in the way dolls are made, or the materials that are used. These have changed over the centuries from the wood that was standard in sixteenth-century Europe, through the wax and porcelain of later centuries, to the plastics of today’s dolls. Collectors might also study how dolls reflect notions of what children like, or ought to like.
Not all collectors are interested in learning from their hobby. Another psychological reason for collecting is the need for a sense of control, perhaps as a way of dealing with insecurity. Stamp collectors, for instance, arrange stamps in albums, usually very neatly, according to principles such as country in alphabetical order or grouping by what they depict: people, birds, maps and so on.
One reason, conscious or not, for what someone chooses to collect is to show the collector’s individualism. Someone who collects something as unexpected as dog collars may be conveying their belief that they must be interesting themselves. There is at least one dog collar museum, and it grew out of a personal collection.
Of course, all hobbies give pleasure, but the common factor in collecting is usually passion: pleasure is putting it far too mildly. More than most other hobbies, collecting can be totally engrossing and can give a strong sense of personal fulfilment. To non-collectors it may appear an eccentric, if harmless, way of spending time, but collecting potentially has a lot going for it.