IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 130

In the early 1950s almost everything shown on American television was performed live. A drama performed in New York reached the East Coast as it happened, but audiences further west, in different time zones, either saw it later as a blurred film recording or missed it altogether. Filming a television screen with a cine camera, a process known as kinescoping, produced a picture of poor quality that degraded further with each copy. The industry needed a way of storing pictures and sound that could be replayed at once, as often as required, without any loss.

The idea of recording sound magnetically was already half a century old. In 1898 the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen had patented a device that stored speech as patterns of magnetisation on a steel wire, and German engineers improved the technique during the 1930s using tape coated with iron oxide powder. After the Second World War, an American company called Ampex, founded by Alexander Poniatoff, began building tape recorders in California, and the singer Bing Crosby, who disliked performing live, invested in the firm and used its machines to pre-record his radio programmes.

Television pictures, however, demanded far more than sound. A video signal carries far more information than an audio signal, with frequencies reaching several million cycles per second, and early tape recorders could not store such detail. The problem was solved not by moving the tape faster but by moving the recording heads.

Instead of a stationary head pressed against tape travelling at great speed, a small group of heads was mounted on a wheel that spun as the tape crawled past it, so that each head swept across the tape at an angle and laid down a short diagonal track. A wide tape moving slowly could therefore carry an enormous quantity of information.

The team that turned this principle into a working machine was led by Charles Ginsburg at Ampex. Work began in 1951, and after several years of experiment the company demonstrated its video recorder in April 1956 at a convention of broadcasters in Chicago. The machine used tape two inches wide and cost about 50,000 dollars, more than most American houses at the time. Even so, the television networks and their largest stations ordered it quickly, and within a few years it was standard equipment in studios. The name of the format, quadruplex, referred to the four heads of the spinning wheel.

The consequences were immediate. On 30 November 1956 the CBS network used videotape to record its evening news programme and transmit it to the western states three hours later, so that audiences nationwide saw the same broadcast. Advertising agencies could pre-record commercials, and programmes could be sold abroad. Until then, a hit show might survive only as a poor kinescope print; from the late 1950s it was increasingly archived on tape. Yet editing remained laborious. Tape could not be cut with ease, and for some years programmes were assembled by copying chosen sections from one machine to another, with a visible loss of quality at every generation.

The next step was a change in geometry. In a helical system the tape is wrapped around a drum at a slant, so that a single head, or a pair of heads, records a long, continuous track and the tape itself can move slowly. The track could now be very long, so the tape could be narrower and the machine smaller and cheaper; Japanese manufacturers, shut out of the early market, took the lead in this approach. In 1971 Sony introduced U-matic, the first video format to win wide use with a cassette rather than an open reel, and television news crews, who had been filming on celluloid, began carrying video cameras instead.

Meanwhile the machines were moving into the home. Sony's Betamax, launched in 1975, offered one hour of recording on a cassette small enough to post, and the following year the Victor Company of Japan (JVC) introduced a rival format, VHS. The two systems were incompatible, and for a decade they competed for the same customers. VHS eventually prevailed, largely because JVC licensed its design to many other manufacturers, so that VHS machines were sold by dozens of brands and became cheaper, and because it offered longer recording times, which mattered to viewers who wished to tape a whole evening's television.

The spread of home recording provoked a legal battle. Film studios sued Sony in the United States, arguing that a device which allowed viewers to copy films without payment was unlawful. In 1984 the Supreme Court decided, by five votes to four, that recording a programme in order to watch it later was a legitimate use, and the decision secured the future of the video cassette recorder. Within a decade most households in Britain and the United States owned one, and video rental shops had become a feature of every high street. Schools, too, built libraries of recorded programmes.

Digital formats eroded the technology's advantage. The DVD, which stores pictures as patterns of pits read by a laser, appeared in the late 1990s, and hard-disk recorders that could pause and rewind live television followed soon afterwards. Videotape survived longest in professional archives and in the camcorders used by families, but even there it gave way to memory cards. In 2016 the Japanese firm Funai, by then the last company still making video cassette recorders, announced that it would stop production, and a format that had once seemed permanent quietly disappeared from the shops.

A brain-computer interface, or BCI, is a system that reads electrical activity from the nervous system and turns it into a signal a machine can act on. The aim is to bypass damaged pathways: someone who cannot move a hand or speak may still produce the brain signals that would normally accompany those actions, and electrodes can pick them up. In principle the same technology would let anyone operate a computer without touching it. In practice progress has been slow, because the brain is a difficult place both to listen to and to leave equipment inside.

Everything a BCI does begins with neurons, cells that communicate by brief electrical impulses, each lasting about a thousandth of a second. When a neuron fires, the voltage across its membrane changes sharply, and the resulting currents can be detected a short distance away. The signals are tiny, measured in millionths of a volt outside the skull, and they are drowned in the noise of muscle activity and electrical equipment. Electrodes on the scalp, the basis of electroencephalography, are safe and cheap but hear only a blurred chorus of thousands of neurons. Electrodes inserted into the cortex record the crisp firing of individual cells, but they require surgery and tend to lose quality as scar tissue forms around them.

One neural interface has been in routine use for decades. A cochlear implant, placed in the inner ear, converts sound into electrical pulses that stimulate the auditory nerve, and hundreds of thousands of people now hear with one. Deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes implanted in the brain deliver steady pulses to correct the erratic activity underlying Parkinson's disease, is likewise an established treatment. Both devices work by stimulating tissue rather than by listening to it, which is technically easier: delivering a pulse requires far less precision than interpreting the chatter of millions of cells.

The best-known early demonstration of a listening interface involved a young American, Matt Nagle, who had been paralysed from the shoulders down by a knife wound. In 2004 surgeons implanted an array of 96 microelectrodes, each narrower than a human hair, into the part of his brain that controls movement. Wires carried the signals through his skull to a computer, which learned to translate patterns of neural firing into commands. Within months he could move a cursor and, with a robotic arm, grasp an object. The results were published in 2006 and widely reported, though the system worked only under laboratory supervision.

Progress since then has been steady rather than dramatic. In 2012 a research team reported that a woman who had lost the use of her limbs after a stroke had used a brain-controlled robotic arm to lift a bottle and drink from it. A more recent frontier is speech. In 2023 two groups published results in which implants in the speech areas of the cortex decoded attempts to talk; one volunteer, severely paralysed, produced sentences at around 60 words a minute, several times faster than earlier systems, though the output still contained frequent errors.

Non-invasive systems have found quieter, more practical uses. The simplest is the P300 speller, developed in the late 1980s, which relies on a distinctive electrical response that the brain produces about 300 milliseconds after a person notices something they are attending to. By flashing letters in a grid and watching for that response, the system can work out which letter a user wants, allowing people who cannot speak or type to write messages, if slowly. Similar approaches let paralysed patients steer a wheelchair or control a robotic arm.

The central limitation is bandwidth. A few hundred electrodes in the cortex yield a stream of data that carries only a fraction of the information the nervous system itself uses, and decoding is statistical: the computer guesses the intended movement from the behaviour of a population of cells, and the guess has to be adjusted as the electrodes shift or the brain adapts. Longevity is a further obstacle. Electrodes that penetrate brain tissue provoke a reaction, and the scars that form gradually insulate them. Meanwhile the hardware must be powered and its data transmitted, either through a cable that passes through the skin, with a risk of infection, or by a wireless link, which is harder to fit inside a device small enough to be implanted.

Research has consequently moved in two directions. One is to make implants less damaging: very thin flexible electrodes, or arrays that rest on the surface of the brain rather than inside it, may survive longer, at the price of weaker signals. The other is to avoid open surgery altogether. A device developed in Australia is delivered through a blood vessel in the neck and expanded against the wall of a large vein beside the cortex, where it can record activity without penetrating the brain. Several companies have now implanted wireless devices in small numbers of patients, though published evidence on how well they perform over years is still limited.

None of this makes a seamless connection between mind and machine likely in the near future. The gap between a laboratory demonstration and a device that works reliably in a home remains wide. Ethical questions multiply as the technology improves: how long a trial should run, who owns the neural data a device records, and whether someone who depends on an interface to communicate can be said to consent freely to its removal. Researchers generally argue that such questions should be settled before, not after, the devices become common.

In a fire station in Livermore, California, a hand-blown light bulb has been glowing almost continuously since 1901, apart from brief interruptions when it has been moved. It survives because its carbon filament is unusually thick and it is left on day and night. For critics of modern manufacturing, the bulb is proof that products were once built to last, and could be again. Yet it is also a poor guide to how industry behaves, because it was made before anyone had thought seriously about how long a product ought to survive.

The phrase itself is older than most people suppose. In 1932 a London estate agent named Bernard London published a pamphlet proposing that manufactured goods be given a legal lifespan, after which they would be collected and destroyed; he argued that this would restart a depressed economy. It was a book by the American writer Vance Packard, published in 1960 under the title The Waste Makers, that brought the idea of planned obsolescence to a wide audience. Packard distinguished three ways in which a product can become obsolete: of function, when a better one exists; of quality, when it wears out or breaks; and of desirability, when it simply goes out of fashion.

The clearest documented case of manufacturers shortening a product's life dates from the 1920s. In 1924 the leading lamp makers of Europe and North America formed what is known as the Phoebus cartel and agreed to standardise the life of a domestic bulb at 1,000 hours, well below the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that some lamps then achieved. The cartel collapsed in the late 1930s, but the episode is still cited because it shows that a product's lifespan can be decided in a boardroom rather than in a laboratory.

Even so, deliberate life-shortening is real, but it is narrower than the rhetoric of its critics suggests. Much of what is called planned obsolescence is simply the by-product of competition and rapid innovation: a computer bought five years ago is not broken, but it is no longer worth repairing. Designing a product to fail and designing a product that the market will later leave behind are quite different activities, and it matters which one is being condemned. It would be wrong to treat novelty as a fault in itself, or to regard the wish to own something new as a form of stupidity. The reasonable objection is not to change but to waste.

The smartphone illustrates the difficulty. In 2017 Apple confirmed that a software update had slowed some older iPhones, saying that the change was meant to stop ageing batteries shutting down unexpectedly. Critics called it a way of pushing customers to buy new handsets, and in 2020 the French competition and consumer authority fined the company 25 million euros, concluding that users had not been properly informed. The fine addressed a single failure of disclosure; the deeper problem is the moment when a manufacturer stops supporting a device altogether. A phone that no longer receives security updates is obsolete whatever the condition of its battery, and the decision lies entirely with the company that wrote the software.

Physical design raises similar obstacles. Batteries are sealed into cases, screens are bonded rather than screwed, and some printers refuse to work with ink cartridges that carry no authorised chip. When a repair costs half the price of a new item, and the new item is faster and brighter, replacement is the rational choice even for a thrifty owner. The consequence is an extraordinary volume of waste: the Global E-waste Monitor, a report produced by United Nations bodies, estimated that the world discarded 62 million tonnes of electronic equipment in 2022, of which only a small fraction was properly recycled.

Defenders of current practice reply that consumers get what they want. Styling changes have been used to sell cars since the 1920s, when General Motors began altering its models every year to persuade buyers to trade up. Competition has also produced genuine improvements in safety, fuel consumption and performance, and a market in which nothing new appears would be a poor one. The weak point in this argument is information. Price is visible in a shop; durability is not. A buyer cannot tell whether a washing machine will last five years or fifteen, and by the time the answer is known the purchase is long finished.

Legislation has begun to address the imbalance. European rules now require manufacturers of several categories of appliance to supply spare parts for a set number of years and to make repair information available to independent workshops, and a broader right to repair has been under discussion for some years. Such measures are slow to negotiate and cover only a handful of product groups, and they achieve little if a replacement part costs nearly as much as a new machine. Nor do they touch the software that decides whether a device continues to function at all.

The conclusion I would draw is that the argument needs to be made more precisely. It is not wasteful to replace a product that has genuinely been improved. What deserves criticism is the set of choices that make a product impossible to keep: batteries that cannot be changed, parts that cannot be bought, software that is abandoned while the hardware still works. Those choices are deliberate, they are avoidable, and they are the proper target of both regulation and consumer pressure.