IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 15

Few inventions have shaped the modern world as profoundly as printing with movable type. Before it, every book in Europe had to be copied by hand, usually by scribes working in monasteries or, from the thirteenth century onwards, in commercial workshops serving the universities. Copying a substantial volume could take months, and errors crept in with every new copy. The materials were costly too, particularly parchment, which was made from the skins of animals. Books were therefore scarce and expensive, and most libraries were small by modern standards.

Printing itself, however, was not a European invention. In China, texts were printed from carved wooden blocks by the eighth century at the latest, and the oldest surviving dated printed book, a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, was produced in 868. Around the 1040s, a craftsman named Bi Sheng created movable type from baked clay, according to a description written by the scholar Shen Kuo a few decades later. Yet movable type never displaced woodblocks in China, partly because written Chinese requires thousands of different characters, which made sets of type enormously expensive to make and organise. In Korea, printers used movable metal type from at least the thirteenth century, and the oldest surviving book printed in this way, a collection of Buddhist teachings known as the Jikji, dates from 1377.

In Europe the decisive step was taken in the German city of Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg, who had trained as a metalworker, around 1450. Whether or not he knew of Asian printing, which remains uncertain, Gutenberg's achievement lay in combining several technologies into an efficient system. The most important was a hand mould that allowed individual letters to be cast quickly and precisely in large numbers, each of identical height so that they could be locked together in a frame.

He developed an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that melted at a low temperature, cooled rapidly and was hard enough to withstand repeated pressing. He also created an oil-based ink that would stick to metal type, since the water-based inks used by scribes ran off its surface. Finally, he adapted the screw press, already used for making wine and olive oil, to press paper firmly and evenly against the inked type.

Gutenberg's most famous product, a Latin Bible with 42 lines on most pages, was completed by about 1455. Scholars estimate that around 180 copies were printed, some on paper and some on vellum, and fewer than fifty survive today. The project was enormously costly, and Gutenberg had borrowed heavily from a financier, Johann Fust. In 1455 Fust took legal action to recover his money, and Gutenberg appears to have lost control of much of his equipment. He thus gained little wealth from his invention, while Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer went on to run one of the most successful printing businesses of the age.

The new technology spread with astonishing speed. Printers, many of them trained in Mainz, set up presses across Europe, and by 1500 printing had been established in more than 250 towns. Venice became the leading centre, and there the scholar-printer Aldus Manutius introduced italic type in 1501 and produced small, affordable editions of classical texts that readers could carry with them. In 1476 William Caxton set up the first press in England, at Westminster, having previously printed the first book in English in Bruges. Books printed before 1501 are known as incunabula, from the Latin word for cradle, and tens of thousands of different editions are recorded from this period.

The effects of printing went far beyond making books cheaper. Because every copy of an edition was identical, scholars in different cities could refer to the same page and correct the same errors, which helped to standardise texts in fields from astronomy to law. When Nicolaus Copernicus published his theory of a Sun-centred universe in 1543, for example, readers across Europe saw exactly the same diagrams. Printed maps, diagrams and tables could be reproduced accurately, rather than being gradually degraded by successive copyists. Printing also helped to fix the spelling and grammar of national languages, as printers chose particular forms and repeated them in thousands of copies.

Most dramatically, printing transformed religion and politics. When Martin Luther circulated his criticisms of the Church in 1517, printers quickly reproduced them, and within a few years Luther had become the most published author in Europe. Short, cheap pamphlets written in German rather than Latin reached a far wider audience than any earlier religious debate. The Church authorities, too, made extensive use of print, but they found it impossible to control the flow of ideas as they once had.

Historians still debate how revolutionary printing really was. Literacy rates rose only slowly, and for centuries most Europeans continued to receive information mainly through speech and images. Handwritten manuscripts remained in use for many purposes long after 1500. Nevertheless, by making texts cheaper, more numerous and more consistent, the printing press created the conditions in which the scientific and intellectual changes of the following centuries could take place. Some historians, most notably Elizabeth Eisenstein in the late 1970s, have argued that print was a powerful agent of change in its own right; others stress that its effects depended on the religious, economic and political circumstances of each society.

In 2004 the marine biologist Richard Thompson and his colleagues at the University of Plymouth published a short paper in the journal Science describing tiny fragments of plastic in sediment collected from British beaches and estuaries. Using plankton samples that had been gathered and stored since the 1960s, they also showed that the quantity of such fragments in the surrounding seas had increased over the decades. They called these particles microplastics. The term, now usually applied to pieces smaller than five millimetres across, has since entered everyday language, and the particles themselves have turned up almost everywhere scientists have looked: in Arctic sea ice, in the deepest ocean trenches, in drinking water and in the bodies of animals and people.

Microplastics come from two broad kinds of source. Primary microplastics are manufactured at a small size, such as the pellets from which plastic products are made and the microbeads that were once widely added to toothpastes and facial scrubs. Secondary microplastics form when larger objects break down, as sunlight, waves and abrasion gradually fragment bottles, bags and fishing nets into ever smaller pieces. Two of the largest sources are easy to overlook. Synthetic clothing sheds large numbers of fibres each time it is washed, and vehicle tyres release particles as they wear against road surfaces. Pellets can also escape in huge quantities during transport: in 2021 the container ship X-Press Pearl caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka, and vast numbers of pellets were washed up on the country's beaches.

Microbeads were among the first targets for regulation, because they seemed an unnecessary source of pollution that could easily be replaced with natural alternatives. The United States banned them from rinse-off cosmetics under a law signed in 2015, and the United Kingdom introduced a similar ban in 2018. Such measures are welcome, but microbeads made up only a small proportion of the total, and dealing with fibres and tyre wear is far more difficult. Filters fitted to washing machines can capture many fibres, and some governments have considered making them compulsory, but no comparable solution yet exists for the particles released by tyres.

Once released, microplastics can be transported over great distances by rivers, ocean currents and the wind. Researchers have found fibres in snow in the Arctic and in the Alps, and in 2019 a study detected particles in air samples from a remote mountain site in the French Pyrenees, far from any obvious source. Many particles eventually sink, and in 2019 researchers reported finding microplastics inside small crustaceans collected from the Mariana Trench, more than ten kilometres below the surface. Sediments on the deep sea floor may hold far more plastic than the ocean surface, which helps to explain why only a small fraction of the plastic thought to have entered the sea can be found floating.

The effects on wildlife are still being worked out. Large plastic items cause obvious harm, entangling seals and turtles or filling the stomachs of seabirds, but the effects of tiny particles are subtler and harder to detect. Laboratory experiments have shown that a wide range of animals, from zooplankton to fish and seabirds, swallow microplastics, often because they mistake them for food. In some studies, exposure reduced feeding, growth or reproduction. However, many experiments have used concentrations of particles far higher than those usually found in the environment, and some scientists argue that the risks to most wild populations at current levels remain uncertain. Particles may also carry other pollutants, since many chemicals in seawater tend to stick to plastic surfaces, although the importance of this route of exposure is debated.

Inevitably, attention has turned to human health. In 2022 researchers in the Netherlands reported finding plastic particles in the blood of 17 of the 22 healthy volunteers they tested, and microplastics have since been reported in human lungs, placentas and other tissues. Nanoplastics, particles smaller than a thousandth of a millimetre, are of particular concern because they may be small enough to enter cells. In 2024 a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients with micro- and nanoplastics in fatty deposits removed from their neck arteries were more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, or to die, over the following three years than patients without them. The authors cautioned, however, that their study showed an association rather than proving that the plastics caused harm. Measuring such tiny particles without contaminating the samples is also notoriously difficult, since plastic is present in laboratory equipment, clothing and even the air.

Because microplastics are so persistent and so widely dispersed, removing them from the environment on any significant scale is practically impossible. Most researchers therefore argue that the priority must be to reduce the amount of plastic entering the environment in the first place, through better waste management, smarter product design and, in the view of many, lower overall plastic production. Negotiations towards a global treaty on plastic pollution began under the United Nations in 2022, although governments have struggled to agree on whether such a treaty should limit production as well as improve the handling of waste. Technical fixes have their limits. Wastewater treatment plants already remove most of the microplastics in sewage, but the particles they retain end up in sewage sludge, which is often spread on farmland as fertiliser, returning them to the environment.

It is widely believed that creativity is the preserve of the young. Popular culture celebrates the youthful genius: the mathematician who makes a breakthrough in his twenties, the poet who writes masterpieces before thirty, the entrepreneur who founds a billion-dollar company while still a student. The belief has practical consequences, influencing how research funding is distributed, whom companies hire and how older people view their own potential. Yet the evidence suggests that the relationship between age and creative achievement is far more varied than the stereotype allows.

The first systematic attempt to study the question was made by the American psychologist Harvey Lehman, whose book Age and Achievement appeared in 1953. Lehman compiled lists of notable contributions in dozens of fields, from chemistry to music, and recorded the age of each contributor at the time. He concluded that the most outstanding work was typically produced between the ages of thirty and forty, after which the rate of major achievement declined. His findings were influential, but critics pointed out a statistical problem. Because fewer people survived into old age in earlier centuries, and because many older people had retired, there were simply fewer older individuals available to make contributions in the first place.

Later research refined Lehman's picture considerably. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, who has studied creativity for several decades, has argued that what matters is not a person's age as such but the number of years since they began working in a field. Someone who takes up painting at fifty may reach a creative peak in their sixties. Simonton has also shown that the peak arrives at different points in different disciplines. In fields such as pure mathematics and lyric poetry, where a limited number of concepts can be combined in original ways, major contributions tend to come early. In fields such as history or philosophy, which require the accumulation of extensive knowledge, peaks come much later. Strikingly, he found that the proportion of a creator's works that become successful remains roughly constant across a career, so that productive periods yield both more successes and more failures.

The economist David Galenson has proposed a different explanation for the variation in creative careers. Studying painters, poets and novelists, he distinguished between two types of innovator. Conceptual innovators, who have clear ideas they wish to express and execute them decisively, tend to make their most important contributions early. Pablo Picasso, who painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in his mid-twenties, is Galenson's leading example. Experimental innovators, by contrast, proceed by trial and error, refining their work gradually and often uncertain whether it is finished. Paul Cézanne, whose most highly valued paintings date from the final years of his life, belongs to this group. In Galenson's view, neither approach is superior, but each has its own characteristic timetable. Galenson has noted that the art market reflects this pattern: the auction prices of Picasso's paintings tend to be highest for works made early in his career, whereas Cézanne's most expensive works are late ones.

In science, there is evidence that the age of peak achievement has been rising. In 2011 Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg examined the careers of more than 500 Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry and medicine. Before 1905, about two-thirds of laureates had carried out their prize-winning work before the age of forty, and around a fifth before thirty. By the end of the twentieth century, prize-winning work done before thirty had become extremely rare. Jones has suggested that this reflects what he calls the burden of knowledge: as science advances, researchers must master an ever larger body of existing work before they can contribute something new, which lengthens their training and delays their first major discoveries.

Even in the field most strongly associated with youthful brilliance, the evidence does not support the stereotype. In a study published in 2020, Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones and two colleagues examined data from the United States Census Bureau on millions of business founders. They found that the average age of those who founded the fastest-growing new companies was 45, and that founders with several years of experience in the same industry were considerably more likely to succeed than those without. The famous young founders of technology companies, in other words, are memorable precisely because they are unusual.

What should we conclude from all this? In my view, the evidence demolishes the idea that creativity is a resource that inevitably runs out with age. It is true that some abilities associated with creativity, such as the speed with which we can process new information, decline gradually during adulthood. On many measures of vocabulary and general knowledge, however, older adults perform as well as younger ones or better. But these losses can be offset by gains in knowledge, judgement and expertise, and the timing of a creative peak depends far more on the nature of the field and the way an individual works than on the calendar. The danger of the youthful-genius myth is that it can become self-fulfilling: if older people are denied opportunities, funding or encouragement, they will indeed produce less.

This is not to say that age makes no difference at all. In some fields, particularly those that reward radical conceptual leaps, the young may genuinely have an advantage, perhaps because they are less committed to established ways of thinking. But organisations and societies that write off creative potential at forty or fifty are wasting a resource that, as the populations of many countries grow older, they can ill afford to lose.