IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 133

The space shuttle was born from an ambition that outran the money available to satisfy it. In the late 1960s, with the Apollo Moon programme winding down, NASA wanted a vehicle that could fly repeatedly, carrying satellites and laboratories into orbit at a fraction of the cost of expendable rockets. Studies suggested a fully reusable two-stage craft, but such a machine would have been extremely expensive to develop. In January 1972 President Richard Nixon approved a cheaper compromise: a partly reusable system. That decision shaped everything that followed, including the shuttle's failure to deliver the savings promised for it.

The craft that emerged consisted of three main parts. The orbiter was the winged vehicle that carried the crew and payload, and it was intended to fly dozens of times. It was attached to a huge external tank of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which fed the orbiter's three main engines. The tank was the only major component that was not reused, being discarded on every flight.

Either side of it stood a slim solid rocket booster, providing most of the thrust at lift-off. Each booster separated after about two minutes, fell by parachute into the ocean and was recovered for refurbishment. Because the orbiter came back from orbit as a glider, its underside and nose had to withstand temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius. The answer was a covering of thousands of individual tiles made largely of silica.

Columbia, the first orbiter to be completed, made its maiden flight on 12 April 1981, exactly twenty years after Yuri Gagarin had become the first person in space. John Young, an experienced astronaut, and Robert Crippen, a test pilot who had never flown in space, spent just over two days in orbit. They tested the vehicle's systems before bringing it back to a runway in California. Three further test flights followed, each with a crew of two, and the shuttle was declared operational in 1982. From the start, however, the machine proved far more complex to maintain than its designers had hoped: thousands of workers were needed to prepare each launch.

The shuttle's early missions flew satellites, launched from the payload bay with the help of an upper stage. It also carried Spacelab, a laboratory built by the European Space Agency, and on mission STS-31 in April 1990 the crew of Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. But the vehicle never came close to the flight rate that had been used to justify its cost. After the Challenger accident, the United States abandoned the practice of launching commercial satellites on the shuttle, and many of those customers turned to expendable European and American rockets instead.

On 28 January 1986 the shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lift-off, killing all seven astronauts on board, among them a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe. The cause was a joint in one of the solid rocket boosters, whose rubber sealing rings had stiffened in the cold; the launch had gone ahead despite warnings from engineers about the low temperature. A presidential commission headed by William Rogers concluded that NASA's decision-making had been seriously flawed. The fleet stayed on the ground for almost three years, returning to flight with Discovery in September 1988.

The accident brought substantial changes: a redesigned booster joint, a system allowing the crew to bail out during gliding flight, and stricter limits on what the shuttle could carry. In 1991 NASA also received a replacement orbiter, Endeavour, assembled largely from spare parts to fill the gap left by Challenger. These improvements made the vehicle safer, but they also made it more expensive to fly, and the number of missions per year remained far below the original plan.

From 1998 the shuttle found a new purpose: assembling the International Space Station. Orbiters carried modules, trusses and solar arrays into orbit, and crews performed long and demanding spacewalks to attach them. More than thirty flights were devoted to the station. It could not have been built without a vehicle able to carry large structures into orbit and then return to Earth for another load. It was in this period that the shuttle came closest to justifying the arguments made for it, though at a cost per flight that no commercial launcher would have regarded as tolerable.

That purpose was interrupted on 1 February 2003, when Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing its crew of seven. A piece of insulating foam had broken off the external tank during launch and struck the leading edge of the left wing, damaging the heat-resistant panels. The crew had no means of repairing the damage, and NASA's managers had not sought images of the wing that might have revealed it. The investigation that followed was as critical as the one after Challenger, and it led to another long suspension. Flights resumed in July 2005, and the remaining missions were flown with a second shuttle on standby to rescue the crew if necessary.

The programme ended with Atlantis on mission STS-135 in July 2011, after 135 flights in all. Five orbiters flew in space; two were lost in accidents, and the surviving three are now museum pieces. More than 350 people travelled on the shuttle during its thirty years of service, and its crews launched and repaired satellites, conducted thousands of experiments and assembled a space station. Whether the shuttle was a failure, or a bold experiment that was asked to do too much, remains a matter of argument among engineers. But few would now claim that reusability alone makes access to space cheap.

Telemedicine — the delivery of health care at a distance, with patient and clinician in different places — is often described as an invention of the internet age, but its history is longer than that. As early as the 1950s, hospitals experimented with closed-circuit television to let specialists see patients many miles away, and in 1959 a television link in Nebraska was used for psychiatric consultations. Space agencies gave the field its next push, since monitoring astronauts in orbit required ways of transmitting physiological data to the ground. In the early 1970s, satellite links connected villages in Alaska with hospitals, allowing health workers to discuss cases with doctors hundreds of kilometres away.

How a consultation happens depends on the information being exchanged. In 'store-and-forward' telemedicine, data are collected, saved and sent to a specialist to review later, which suits fields such as dermatology and radiology, where an image carries most of the diagnostic information. In real-time telemedicine, clinician and patient communicate by video, which is closer to an ordinary appointment. A growing range of devices can be attached at the patient's end: digital stethoscopes that transmit the sounds of the heart and lungs, cameras that photograph the back of the eye, and monitors that record blood oxygen and blood pressure. The clinician at the other end may therefore receive more measurements than a brief conventional consultation would produce.

Radiology is the specialty that adopted remote work earliest and most completely. Because X-rays, CT scans and MRI images are digital, they can be sent anywhere almost instantly, and in many countries scans taken at night in one hospital are read by a radiologist in another city, or on another continent, where it is daytime. The arrangement allows small hospitals to offer services that could not otherwise be staffed. It has also raised questions about who is responsible when a report is wrong, and about the standards applied in the country where the image is read.

A second strand is remote monitoring, in which measurements are collected in a patient's home and reviewed by a clinical team. People with heart failure may weigh themselves each morning on a scale that transmits the reading, because a rapid gain in weight suggests that fluid is accumulating and can be treated before the patient becomes seriously ill. Similar arrangements exist for blood pressure in hypertension, for blood sugar in diabetes and for heart rhythm, with pacemakers and defibrillators able to report to a monitoring centre. The appeal is that problems are found between appointments rather than in an emergency department, and that the patient's own home becomes part of the care.

The strongest arguments for telemedicine are heard where doctors are scarcest. In many low-income countries specialists are concentrated in a few cities, and a patient may travel for a whole day to reach one. Programmes that send a trained technician with a camera into a rural clinic, and transmit the images for a distant specialist to grade, have been used for disease of the eye, for tuberculosis and for skin conditions. The cost of a consultation falls, and the specialist's time is used more efficiently, because it is the image that travels rather than the patient.

These advantages are real, but they are not automatic. A consultation by video provides none of the information that comes from touching a patient — the feel of an abdomen, the sound of a chest through a stethoscope placed on the skin — and clinicians describe a loss of confidence in their judgement when the physical examination is missing. Licensing and payment rules were written for a world in which doctor and patient were in the same place, and in many jurisdictions they still restrict practice across borders. A further obstacle is the digital divide: people who are older, poorer or living where connectivity is poor are often those most in need of care and least able to use the technology.

Does telemedicine work? The evidence is more mixed than enthusiastic accounts suggest, largely because the studies are so varied. Reviews comparing telemedicine with conventional care for chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart failure have generally found similar outcomes, with no sign that patients are harmed, and some trials have reported better control of blood pressure when remote monitoring was combined with regular contact from a nurse. Yet many studies are small, short and carried out by the teams that developed the service, and few have measured cost properly. The most defensible summary is that telemedicine works for some conditions and some tasks, and is not a general substitute for the clinic.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the picture abruptly. When face-to-face appointments became hazardous, health systems that had piloted telemedicine for years were forced to depend on it within weeks, and video consultations rose from a small fraction of appointments to a large minority in many countries. Much of that expansion has persisted, though usually at a lower level than during the emergency. Current research is directed at making remote care more reliable: cameras and sensors that can capture a usable image without a specialist operating them, software that summarises a consultation, and protocols for deciding which complaints are safe to assess at a distance and which require the patient to be seen in person.

When a person types a description into an image generator and receives a striking picture a few seconds later, an awkward legal question follows the picture around: who owns it? The person who typed the words, the company that built the model, the millions of photographers whose work was used to train it, or nobody at all? Courts and copyright offices around the world have spent the past few years trying to answer, and their conclusions have been more consistent than the noise surrounding them suggests. The principle they keep returning to is that copyright protects the product of a human mind.

That principle is older than the technology. Copyright law in the English-speaking world has generally required an author, and an author has generally meant a person. The point was tested in a case that became famous as the 'monkey selfie': a photographer left his camera on a tripod in an Indonesian forest, a macaque took a series of photographs with it, and the question arose of whether the animal held the copyright. In 2018 a United States appeals court effectively said no, because animals cannot bring such a claim. The case is remembered as an amusing curiosity, but its underlying logic is central to the argument about machines.

The United States Copyright Office applied the same reasoning to artificial intelligence in 2022. Reviewing an application to register an image called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which the applicant said had been created autonomously by a computer program, the Office refused registration because there was no human author. A federal court upheld the refusal in 2023. In a separate decision concerning a graphic novel whose text was written by a person but whose illustrations were generated by an AI tool, the Office registered the text and the way the elements were arranged, while excluding the images themselves.

This distinction between a human contribution and a machine's output has become the practical test. Under guidance issued by the Office in 2023, material produced by a generative model is not protected, but a work that combines human expression with generated elements may be, provided the human contribution is itself original and can be identified. A photographer who composes a scene with great care, or an artist who edits and arranges generated material into a new whole, may therefore hold rights in what they contributed. The Office has also said that issuing prompts, however elaborate, does not by itself make the person who typed them the author of the result.

Not every legal system takes the same route. The United Kingdom has contained a provision for 'computer-generated' works since 1988, defined as works generated by a computer in circumstances where there is no human author. In such cases the author is taken to be the person who made the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work, and protection lasts for fifty years rather than the usual seventy years after the author's death. The provision was drafted long before anyone imagined a machine that could produce a competent drawing from a sentence.

Several commentators have suggested that this approach should be copied more widely. On their account, the law should not pretend that a prompter is an author, because that would empty the concept of authorship of meaning; it should instead offer a separate, thinner right to the person who invested in producing the work, much as a database or a sound recording can be protected without anyone claiming to have written it. A short-term right of this kind, they argue, would give publishers and studios the certainty they need to invest.

An obvious objection is that a race to register machine output could flood the registers with material nobody actually created. There is also the question of the training data, which is logically separate but rarely far from the discussion. Artists and photographers have sued the developers of image generators, arguing that the models were built on copies of their work; the companies respond that training extracts statistical patterns rather than storing the images, and that any single output is rarely close to a particular input. Whatever the courts eventually decide, the outcome will shape the market for years.

My own view is that the law should resist the temptation to make ownership automatic. The value of a generated image lies overwhelmingly in the model and the data behind it, and the person who typed the prompt has contributed an idea rather than an expression. Yet the opposite error is just as serious: a rule that refused protection to anything touched by a generative tool would punish exactly those artists who use the tools thoughtfully. The sensible course is the one the Copyright Office has taken — protect what a person actually contributed, and refuse to protect the rest.

Two practical consequences follow. First, anyone publishing generated material should keep a record of their own contribution, because a dispute will turn on evidence of what they did rather than on what the software did. Second, these tools do not so much destroy copyright as force it back to first principles. The question was never really who owns the output; it was what a human being brought into existence. That question has been the foundation of the law for three centuries, and it remains a good one.