IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 123

For most of the twentieth century, obtaining cash meant visiting a bank during its opening hours and dealing with a clerk behind a counter. Anyone paid on a Friday evening, or taken ill at the weekend, faced an obvious difficulty. The idea of a machine that would hand out money at any hour was therefore attractive long before the technology existed to build one. The story of how the cash machine developed involves several false starts, a number of competing designs and one sheet of slightly radioactive paper.

One of the first patents for an automated banking machine was granted in the late 1930s to Luther George Simjian, an inventor who had already registered a long list of devices. A version of his machine, called the Bankograph, was installed in a bank in New York in 1939. It accepted deposits of coins and notes in an envelope and printed a receipt for the customer, but it did not dispense cash. It was removed after about six months because it attracted very little use. For almost thirty years afterwards, the idea of automatic cash remained dormant.

The machine usually described as the first true cash dispenser was the work of John Shepherd-Barron, an engineer employed by the printing firm De La Rue. Shepherd-Barron had been thinking about how to obtain money outside banking hours, and the design he produced paid out a fixed sum of ten pounds. Instead of a plastic card it used a paper cheque impregnated with a small quantity of radioactive carbon, which a detector inside the machine was able to recognise. Barclays Bank installed the first of these machines at its branch in Enfield, in north London. It was opened on 27 June 1967 by the actor Reg Varney, whose photograph with the machine appeared in newspapers around the world.

Withdrawal required a personal identification number, and here a domestic conversation shaped the technology. Shepherd-Barron had designed a six-digit code, but the story goes that his wife found six digits too many to remember, so the system was shortened to four — an arrangement that has survived into an age of fingerprint sensors. The system was limited: customers had to obtain the special cheques from their branch in advance, and each one could be used only once. Even so, the principle had been demonstrated, and other banks quickly commissioned machines of their own.

The next step was to replace the paper cheque with a plastic card carrying data in a magnetic stripe, a technology already used on admission tickets and in some security systems. A machine of this kind was installed by a bank in Rockville Centre, New York, in 1969, and British banks followed in the early 1970s. They gave their machines names such as Cashpoint, which entered everyday speech. Magnetic stripes brought problems of their own. They could be damaged by a magnetic clasp in a handbag, they could be copied, and because each bank operated its own system, a town centre might contain several machines belonging to different banks, each with its own queue.

The obvious solution was to link machines together. Shared networks, developed during the 1970s and 1980s, allowed a customer of one bank to withdraw money from another bank's machine, with the cost settled between the institutions afterwards. The largest British network, Link, was formed in 1985, and international schemes made it possible to obtain local currency abroad. In the 1990s the number of machines grew rapidly and they spread into supermarkets, petrol stations and pubs, so that cash came to be obtained in the middle of an ordinary errand rather than on a separate visit to a branch.

The machines changed the work of branches and the jobs within them. Cash handling moved out of the branch and into the wall, and staff who had once counted notes were redeployed or reduced in number. The change was not welcomed everywhere: unions in several countries complained that machines were being used to cut employment, and some customers initially mistrusted a device that appeared to swallow their cards without explanation.

Modern cash machines are far removed from the dispenser in Enfield. The most important advance is the recycling mechanism, which allows notes paid in by one customer to be paid out to the next, so that a machine needs refilling less often. Many machines now read cards by radio rather than by contact, and they communicate with a central computer in encrypted form. In Sweden, where cash now accounts for a very small share of payments, banks have removed a large number of machines; elsewhere the cash machine remains the most convenient source of notes.

The newest designs are also more secure. Some identify a customer by scanning the veins in the palm of the hand, and others allow a withdrawal to be authorised on a mobile telephone and collected without a card at all. Few inventions have become so thoroughly embedded in daily life while attracting so little notice. The plain boxes set into the walls of so many high streets are the direct descendants of a radioactive cheque.

Asteroids are the rubble left over from the formation of the solar system, and most of them circle the sun in a broad belt between Mars and Jupiter. A smaller number, known as near-Earth asteroids, follow orbits that bring them comparatively close to our own planet, and these are the objects that space agencies and mining companies study. Astronomers have now catalogued more than 30,000 of them, and the number continues to grow. What an asteroid contains depends on where it formed and how much it was heated. Some are stony, some are rich in carbon and water, and a few are composed almost entirely of metal.

The variety is commercially important. Carbon-rich asteroids, known as carbonaceous chondrites, contain water locked into their minerals as well as organic compounds. Metallic asteroids, classified as M-type, consist largely of iron and nickel. They also contain small quantities of the platinum group metals, such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, which are valued on Earth for use in catalytic converters, electronics and fuel cells. These metals are scarce in the Earth's crust, partly because much of the planet's original supply sank into its iron core early in its history, so an asteroid that never melted may hold far richer ores. Water may be the more valuable commodity, because it can be split by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, the components of rocket propellant. A supply of water in orbit would allow spacecraft to refuel far from Earth.

Extraction would look nothing like mining on Earth. Conventional mining relies on gravity to hold rock and machinery in place and on an atmosphere to support combustion, and a small asteroid offers neither. Engineers therefore propose to work the loose material, or regolith, that covers many asteroid surfaces, using solar power and mechanical or magnetic separation rather than drills and explosives. Water could be released by heating the regolith in a sealed vessel and condensing the vapour that emerges. Power is another constraint, since sunlight at an asteroid may be weak and may be unavailable for part of each rotation, so batteries or a nuclear source would be needed. Whether such equipment can be made light enough to launch and robust enough to run unattended for years is not yet known.

The cost of transport dominates every calculation. Reaching a near-Earth asteroid may require only a modest change in velocity if its orbit is well chosen, but returning material to Earth demands a considerable change in velocity, and therefore propellant and hardware. The price of reaching low Earth orbit has also fallen sharply since rockets that can be reused entered service in the 2010s. Falling launch prices have altered the arithmetic, though not enough to make the business obviously profitable. Enthusiastic estimates of the wealth contained in metallic asteroids are also misleading. Journalists have attached astronomical figures to the iron, nickel and platinum in an asteroid called Psyche, but selling even a fraction of such a mass would depress prices. The metal would have to be sold slowly over decades.

The legal position is unsettled. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by the major spacefaring nations, forbids any country from asserting sovereignty over a celestial body. It says nothing explicit, however, about who owns material removed from one. In 2015 the United States passed legislation confirming that American companies own the resources they extract, and Luxembourg adopted a similar law two years later. Other governments object that national laws cannot settle a question of international law, and no global agreement has yet been reached. The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has debated the question for years without reaching a conclusion.

Spacecraft have already shown that material can be collected and brought home. Japan's Hayabusa mission returned tiny grains from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, its successor Hayabusa2 brought back samples from Ryugu in 2020, and NASA's OSIRIS-REx delivered material from Bennu in 2023. These were scientific missions rather than mining operations, but they tested navigation, sampling and capsule re-entry. NASA's Psyche spacecraft, launched in 2023, is travelling to a metallic asteroid of the same name. It is expected to arrive in 2029 and will orbit the body, studying it rather than taking anything from it.

Commercial interest has so far outpaced achievement. Two American start-ups, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, announced ambitious plans around 2012, attracted publicity and some investment, and were both acquired by other companies before they had flown a mining mission. Their successors tend to be more modest, concentrating on instruments, navigation software and the processing of material in space rather than on extraction itself. No company has yet sold material extracted from an asteroid. Investors remain cautious, because the first sale is many years away and the market for space resources has not been proved.

Even a successful industry would raise questions about who benefits. Asteroid mining promises metals for terrestrial manufacturers. Its earliest customers, however, are more likely to be space agencies seeking propellant and building materials for missions to the Moon and Mars. There, the cost of lifting every kilogram from Earth is prohibitive. Scientists also warn that frequent visits to asteroids could contaminate pristine bodies and add to the population of debris in orbit. For the moment, the most valuable product of asteroid mining may be the technology developed while trying.

Millions of people now wear a device that counts their steps, measures their pulse and estimates how well they slept. Until recently that information was private, or shared with friends as a mild form of competition. It is now of interest to insurance companies. Several life and health insurers offer lower premiums or shopping vouchers to customers who allow their activity to be monitored, and a few have redesigned their products around such monitoring. Whether this is a sensible way to pay for healthcare, or a quiet transfer of power from the patient to the insurer, deserves serious examination.

Insurers argue that they have a legitimate interest in the behaviour of the people they cover. The costs of treating cancer, diabetes and heart disease are borne collectively, so if policyholders can be helped to exercise more, everyone's premiums should eventually fall. The best-known version is Vitality, a programme run by the South African insurer Discovery and exported to other markets; in 2018 the American insurer John Hancock linked all its life cover to it. Rewards are usually small — a cinema ticket, a coffee, a few dollars off a premium — and are intended as nudges rather than payments.

The case for encouragement is not absurd. Physical inactivity is a genuine risk to health, and evidence from behavioural economics suggests that immediate small rewards change habits more effectively than distant warnings about disease. Yet the evidence that such schemes produce lasting change is weaker than the marketing implies. Step counts may rise while rewards are on offer and slip back once they stop. A programme that recruits the health-conscious and rewards them for being healthy benefits the fit rather than improving public health.

A more technical objection concerns accuracy. Wrist-worn devices count steps well enough, but their estimates of energy expenditure and sleep are much less reliable. A widely cited study by researchers at Stanford University in 2017 compared several popular trackers with laboratory equipment. It found that most measured heart rate acceptably during steady exercise, but that errors in measuring energy expenditure were far larger. Readings can also be affected by skin tone, movement and the tightness of the strap. Data used to set a price should meet a clinical standard, and much of this data does not.

Privacy is the second difficulty. Information about heart rhythm, sleep and activity is health data, and in Europe it belongs to a special category that may be processed only with explicit consent. Consent is questionable when refusing it may mean paying more. Such data can reveal a pregnancy or a heart condition long before a diagnosis is recorded, and it can be combined with location records to build a detailed picture of a person's life. The insurer does not need to know that you are unwell; an unusual pattern of sleep may be enough to raise a question.

Fairness is the third. Rewards for activity favour the young, the healthy and the comfortably off, while people with disabilities, chronic illness or physically demanding jobs may find the targets impossible. A scheme that looks voluntary can therefore become a surcharge on illness, which is precisely what insurance is supposed to prevent. Some countries already restrict insurers' use of genetic information, for fear that people will be penalised for a risk they cannot alter. Wearable data can act as a proxy for that information, because a change in gait or heart rhythm may hint at a condition before it is diagnosed.

Defenders reply that insurers have always classified risk. Age, postcode and smoking status are already used, and a medical questionnaire can be far more intrusive than a step counter. On this view, wearable data is simply a more precise instrument. But there is a difference of scale and intimacy. A questionnaire records what a person knows about themselves, whereas a wrist device records what they do not know, continuously, and hands the interpretation to an organisation whose interests are not identical to their own.

What would a defensible arrangement look like? Devices and the measurements they produce should be independently validated before any of them affects a price. Only a narrow set of measures, such as step counts, should be used, and not measures that disclose illness. Participation should carry a genuine right of withdrawal, including deletion of the data already collected, and the size of any discount or penalty should be capped. Regulators should also be able to inspect the algorithms that turn a stream of readings into a price.

None of this requires rejecting the technology. A person who wants to be rewarded for walking more, and who is content to share the evidence, may reasonably strike that bargain. The danger lies not in the device but in the terms attached to it. The sensible position is to permit insurers a narrow, validated and transparent use of wearable data, while insisting that those who cannot or will not be tracked are not penalised. Insurance works by pooling risk, and a scheme that dissolves the pool into a collection of monitored individuals has stopped being insurance at all.