IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 106

For a brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century, the fastest way to move cargo and passengers across the world's oceans was a type of sailing ship known as the clipper. These vessels were long and narrow, with a sharp, hollow bow and an immense spread of canvas; everything about their design was subordinated to speed. The name is generally thought to come from a word meaning to move swiftly. Clippers were expensive to build and costly to operate, and they carried far less than ordinary merchant ships of similar length. Their brief dominance rested on routes where speed was worth more than volume.

The immediate ancestors of the clipper were the fast schooners built in Baltimore, which combined a sharply raked bow with a narrow hull. Some were used as privateers in the war between Britain and the United States that began in 1812, and others later carried opium along the Chinese coast. From the 1840s, however, larger three-masted ships began to leave the yards of New York and other eastern ports. The Rainbow, launched in New York in 1845 to a design by John Willis Griffiths, is often described as the first of the true clippers, and it was followed within a few years by a series of increasingly extreme designs.

The trade that did most to create demand for such ships was the gold rush. After gold was discovered in California in 1848, tens of thousands of people wanted to reach San Francisco as quickly as possible. The overland journey was slow and dangerous, and the sea route around Cape Horn took months. A fast ship could charge a premium for passage, and the mail contract added further rewards. A clipper that completed the voyage in record time could earn far more in a single season than a slower vessel earned in several.

Similar incentives operated in the tea trade. Each year the first cargo of the new season's tea commanded a much higher price in London than later shipments, so merchants were willing to pay heavily for speed. The result was an informal annual race from the Chinese ports to the English Channel. The most celebrated took place in 1866, when five clippers left Fuzhou together. Two of them reached London within an hour of each other, and the premium was divided between them; a third arrived only a short time later and received a much lower price.

Clipper hulls were built of wood, but from the 1860s some of the most successful were composite: iron frames covered with wooden planking. This construction was strong enough for a longer, finer hull than timber alone could support. It also allowed the planking to be sheathed in metal, which discouraged the growth of weed and barnacles that slowed a ship down. The Cutty Sark, launched at Dumbarton on the river Clyde in 1869 for the London owner John Willis, was built in this way; her designer was Hercules Linton.

Clippers were among the most costly merchant ships of their day. The hull had to be built with exceptional care, the masts and spars were enormous, and the sail area of a large example could exceed three thousand square metres. Ownership was usually divided into shares held by merchants, shipmasters and investors in the port where the ship was registered, and a single disastrous voyage could ruin them. Because so much depended on the skill of the master and the quality of the crew, owners competed fiercely for experienced officers.

Life on board was arduous. Because a clipper's earnings depended on speed, the master drove the ship hard, carrying sail long after a cautious seaman would have reduced it. Crews were small for the area of canvas they had to handle, and accidents were frequent. A ship that missed the favoured season might have to sail home half empty, and the cost of an idle winter in a foreign port could wipe out the profits of a successful passage.

The clippers' heyday was short. Steamships had existed for decades but had been too thirsty for coal to compete on long voyages. From the 1860s, more efficient compound engines and, later, triple-expansion engines changed that calculation, and steamships could keep to a timetable in a way that sailing ships never could.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut the distance to Asia for vessels that could use it, but the canal was awkward for sailing ships. They needed to be towed through, and could not work to windward in its narrow channel. In the same year the first transcontinental railway in the United States was completed, removing much of the demand for the long sea passage to California.

Some clippers found new work carrying wool from Australia, a trade in which a fast passage still commanded a premium, and a few survived into the twentieth century under foreign flags. Very few remain today. The Cutty Sark, preserved in a dry dock at Greenwich, is the best known; her best recorded day's run was 363 nautical miles. But the clipper's lasting legacy is a set of passages that have never been bettered by a commercial sailing ship. The Flying Cloud reached San Francisco from New York in 1851 in 89 days and repeated the feat three years later.

Volcanic soils are among the most productive agricultural soils on Earth, yet they are also among the most variable. They form wherever lava, ash or pumice has been broken down by rain, frost and the roots of plants. The parent material may be a lava flow that cooled centuries ago or a layer of ash deposited in a single eruption. Because volcanic material is rich in the minerals that plants need, and because it weathers quickly, the resulting soil can support intensive farming within a few decades. The same qualities do not guarantee fertility, however, and some volcanic regions have soils that are thin, acidic or poor in nutrients.

The minerals in fresh volcanic rock are unstable at the surface. Rain, aided by acids released by lichens and plant roots, attacks the glass and crystals, and the chemical reactions release calcium, magnesium, potassium and other elements. In a warm, wet climate this weathering can be remarkably fast. Basalt, the dark lava that forms much of the ocean floor and many volcanic islands, is especially susceptible. As the primary minerals break down, new clay minerals form, and the soil gradually acquires the capacity to hold nutrients and water. The rate depends on temperature and rainfall, so a lava flow in Iceland may take far longer to become productive than one in Indonesia.

Soils formed from volcanic ash are classified as andosols. They are usually dark at the surface, because organic matter accumulates and is protected from decay by the volcanic clays. Andosols are unusually light: their bulk density is often less than half that of many other agricultural soils, which makes them easy to work with hand tools and less prone to compaction. They also contain distinctive clay minerals, including allophane and imogolite, which are not found in most other soils. These clays give the soil a crumbly, friable structure that roots can penetrate easily.

Their high porosity gives andosols a high water-holding capacity: they can absorb a large proportion of their own volume in water and release it slowly to plant roots, which helps crops survive dry spells. The effect is not entirely beneficial. In poorly drained sites they may become waterlogged, and drainage is then needed. Farmers on volcanic slopes often dig ditches or build raised beds to keep the root zone aerated, because many crops will not tolerate standing water. The balance between retention and drainage is one of the practical skills that volcanic farming demands.

Phosphorus presents a paradox in these soils. Allophane and the iron and aluminium oxides that form in these soils bind phosphate ions tightly, so that phosphorus, an essential nutrient, may be present in the soil yet unavailable to crops. This process, known as phosphorus fixation, is particularly strong in acidic andosols. Where the soil is also poor in organic matter, the shortage of available phosphorus can be severe, and crops may grow slowly even though the total phosphorus content is high. Farmers may therefore apply phosphate fertiliser or manure in quantities that would be unnecessary on other soils, and the nutrients can remain locked in the soil for years. The very minerals that make andosols fertile in other respects can thus limit their productivity.

Java, one of the most densely populated rural regions on Earth, owes much of its agricultural output to soils formed from volcanic ash. Farmers have built terraces and irrigation channels to grow rice, and many fields produce two or three crops a year. The volcanoes that built the island also replenish the soil: each eruption adds fresh ash, which weathers into new material. Steep slopes are vulnerable to erosion once the forest cover is removed, however, and the pressure to cultivate every available patch of land makes careful terracing essential.

On the flanks of Mount Etna in Sicily and Mount Vesuvius near Naples, vineyards and orchards cover slopes that have been farmed for centuries. The soils there are dark and stony, and they drain freely, which suits grapevines. Volcanic ash also supplies potassium and other nutrients, and the local climate provides the rest. The area around Vesuvius was famous in Roman times for its wine and grain, and it remains productive today.

Volcanic soil comes with hazards. An eruption can bury fields under ash, destroy crops with lava or launch mudflows, known as lahars, that sweep down valleys after heavy rain. Volcanic gases can damage vegetation, and ash can be heavy enough to break branches. Farmers on the flanks of active volcanoes accept these hazards because the land is so productive and because good land is scarce. In many regions, monitoring and evacuation plans now reduce the risk, but they cannot remove it. The decision to farm such ground is therefore a calculated trade-off between fertility and danger.

Not every volcanic soil is fertile. In the wet tropics, heavy rainfall can leach bases and silica from the profile, leaving behind iron and aluminium oxides that are less favourable to crops. Very old volcanic landscapes may therefore support only poor vegetation, despite their origin. With sound management, however, many volcanic soils remain productive for centuries. Researchers study how quickly ash weathers, how much phosphorus the soil can supply and how erosion can be controlled. Their findings matter because some of the world's poorest farmers depend on volcanic ground, and because the same soils are under pressure from population growth.

Few public arguments are conducted on such misleading terms as the one about older workers. On one side, governments warn that ageing populations make longer working lives unavoidable and point to the arithmetic of pensions. On the other, unions and campaigners reply that asking a bricklayer or a care assistant to work until 67 is simply unjust. Both statements contain some truth, and neither is an argument. The question we should be asking is not how long people ought to work, but how work ought to be arranged across a life that now lasts considerably longer than it did when pension systems were designed.

The arithmetic itself is not in dispute. In most rich countries the number of people over 65 is growing much faster than the number of people of working age, because people are living longer and having fewer children. Across the OECD, life expectancy at 65 has risen by several years since 1970. Japan has a higher proportion of over-65s than any other large economy, close to 30 per cent, and South Korea and parts of southern Europe are following the same path.

Pension systems that pay today's retired people out of today's taxes must adjust somehow, and there are only three broad options: pay more in, receive less out, or work for longer. Most governments have chosen a mixture, and have legislated to raise the age at which a state pension becomes payable. Germany is phasing in an increase to 67, Britain's pension age is rising towards 67, and France raised its legal retirement age from 62 to 64 in 2023, provoking protests that showed how deeply the change is resented. What such reforms seldom do is ask whether the jobs people are expected to do in their sixties are jobs they can actually do.

One objection should be dismissed at once: the claim that keeping older people in work takes jobs away from the young. This rests on what economists call the lump of labour fallacy, the assumption that an economy contains a fixed number of jobs, so that one person's employment must be another person's unemployment. In practice the number of jobs depends on demand, and an older worker who stays in employment earns and spends money, which supports other jobs. Countries that have raised their pension ages have generally not seen youth unemployment rise as a result.

The fairness objection deserves more serious attention, though not in the form in which it is usually made. The relevant measure is not life expectancy but healthy life expectancy, the number of years a person can expect to live in good health. This varies sharply with occupation and income. A senior civil servant may remain capable of desk work into her seventies, while a roofer or a nurse may not. A single pension age applied to everyone therefore transfers the burden onto precisely those whose bodies wear out soonest, and who have the least savings to fall back on.

Employers are the other obstacle. Recruitment practices routinely favour younger applicants, and older job-seekers report that their applications are rejected far more often than their experience would justify. Employers often assume that older staff are less adaptable or more likely to take time off, assumptions that the evidence does not support; if anything, older workers tend to stay longer, which makes training them easier to justify. Yet few organisations design jobs that change as their employees do, by offering shorter hours, less physical work or a move into mentoring.

None of this means that age makes no difference. Physical strength and the speed of certain mental processes decline, but other abilities, such as judgement, vocabulary and the accumulated knowledge of a trade, hold up well or improve. Productivity therefore depends on the demands of the job: work that rewards speed or stamina penalises ageing, while work that rewards experience rewards it. The sensible response is not to decide at what age everyone should stop, but to let hours and responsibilities taper. Several countries now allow people to draw part of their pension while they continue to work.

That points towards policies rarely discussed in the same breath as pension ages: better health care for the over-fifties, training available throughout a career rather than concentrated at its start, and workplaces that accommodate reduced hours. Retirement itself may become less of a cliff edge and more of a slope, with people cutting their hours over several years instead of stopping abruptly on a date fixed by law.

The argument about older workers, in short, is really an argument about the shape of a working life. A society that expects everyone to work flat out from 22 to 67 and then stop is not treating ageing well; it is merely postponing the moment at which it must. The alternative is a labour market flexible enough to accommodate people whose capacities change, which would benefit not only the old but anyone with caring responsibilities or a health problem. That is a harder programme than raising a number in a statute, and a more useful one.