IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 16

Coffee is today one of the most widely traded agricultural products in the world, grown in more than seventy countries across the tropics and drunk daily by hundreds of millions of people. Its history, however, begins in a single region. The species that produces most of the world's coffee, Coffea arabica, originated in the forests of the Ethiopian highlands, where it still grows wild. A popular story tells of a goatherd named Kaldi who noticed that his animals became unusually lively after eating the red berries of a certain shrub, but the tale was written down long after coffee had become popular, and historians regard it as a legend rather than a record of real events.

The earliest reliable evidence of coffee drinking comes from Yemen, across the Red Sea, in the fifteenth century. There, members of Sufi religious orders drank it to help them stay awake during night-time prayers. From Yemen the habit spread northward through the Arabian Peninsula and into Egypt and Syria. The Yemeni port of Mocha became the principal centre of the coffee trade, giving its name to a style of coffee that is still familiar today. The word coffee itself comes, by way of Turkish and Italian, from the Arabic word qahwa.

The new drink was not universally welcomed. Coffee houses, where men gathered to talk, play games and listen to music, struck some authorities as places of idleness and dangerous political gossip. In 1511 the governor of Mecca ordered the coffee houses of the city to be closed, although the ban did not last. Despite such opposition, coffee houses multiplied, and in 1554 the first ones opened in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Europeans encountered coffee through trade with the Ottoman world, and by the early seventeenth century it was arriving in Venice. England's first coffee house opened in Oxford around 1650, and London's first followed in 1652. Within a few decades the city had hundreds of them. They had their opponents in England too: in 1675 King Charles II issued a proclamation ordering their suppression, but it was withdrawn within days after a public outcry.

They were sometimes called 'penny universities', since for the price of a cup anyone could join conversations on politics, science and commerce. Some developed into lasting institutions. Lloyd's of London, today a major insurance market, grew out of a coffee house opened by Edward Lloyd in the 1680s, where merchants and ship owners gathered to exchange shipping news.

For a long time Yemen controlled the supply of coffee, and its traders reportedly took care that the beans they exported could not easily be planted. In the 1690s, however, the Dutch succeeded in establishing coffee plantations on Java, in what is now Indonesia, and a plant later presented to King Louis XIV of France became the ancestor of much of the coffee grown in the Americas. In the 1720s a French naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, carried a seedling to the Caribbean island of Martinique, and in 1727 coffee was introduced to Brazil. Brazil has been the world's largest coffee producer since the nineteenth century.

Coffee beans are not really beans at all but the seeds of a fruit known as the coffee cherry. When ripe, the cherry is usually bright red. Its thin outer skin covers a layer of sweet pulp, beneath which lies a slippery, sugary coating called mucilage. Under this is a papery husk, the parchment, which encloses each seed, and each seed is in turn wrapped in a delicate membrane known as the silver skin. Most cherries contain two seeds, which grow with their flat sides facing each other. In a small proportion of cherries, however, only one seed develops, and it takes a rounded shape; this is called a peaberry and is sometimes sold separately.

After harvesting, the outer layers of the fruit must be removed. In the washed method, the skin and pulp are removed by machine soon after picking, the remaining mucilage is broken down by fermentation in tanks of water, and the seeds are then dried. In the natural method, which uses much less water, whole cherries are spread out in the sun to dry for several weeks before the shrivelled fruit is removed. The two methods give the coffee noticeably different flavours, with natural coffees often tasting fruitier. Once the seeds are dry, the parchment is removed by a process called hulling, and the green coffee is exported, usually to be roasted close to where it will be sold.

Two species dominate the modern trade. Arabica, generally regarded as having the finer flavour, accounts for the majority of production, while Robusta, from the species Coffea canephora, is hardier, gives higher yields and contains more caffeine; it is widely used in instant coffee. Robusta was identified much later than Arabica, in central Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century, and is grown chiefly at lower altitudes. Arabica in particular grows best within a narrow range of temperatures, and scientists have warned that climate change may substantially reduce the land suitable for it in the coming decades. This is a serious concern for the millions of smallholder farmers who grow most of the world's coffee.

In 1773 the German pastor and naturalist Johann August Ephraim Goeze, peering through a microscope at a drop of water, described a tiny, slow-moving creature that he called a 'little water bear'. Three years later the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani called the animal il tardigrado, meaning 'slow stepper', a name that was later adopted for the whole group. Tardigrades are rarely more than a millimetre long. They have plump, segmented bodies and eight stubby legs ending in claws, and they feed by piercing plant cells, algae or smaller animals with a pair of sharp stylets and sucking out the contents. More than 1,300 species have been described, living in habitats from deep-sea sediments to tropical forests, though the most familiar are found in the thin films of water that cling to mosses and lichens.

Tardigrades have become famous for their apparent indestructibility. In laboratory experiments, individuals in a dormant state have survived temperatures close to absolute zero, brief heating to well above the boiling point of water, pressures several times greater than those at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench and doses of radiation hundreds of times higher than would kill a human. In 2007 tardigrades were carried into orbit on a European mission and exposed to the vacuum of space; many survived, and a few even survived exposure to the Sun's unfiltered ultraviolet radiation as well. Their fame has spread far beyond science. In 2019 an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, which carried dehydrated tardigrades among its cargo, crashed on the Moon, prompting widespread speculation about whether the animals could have survived the impact.

These feats are possible only in a special dormant state. When their surroundings dry out, many tardigrades pull in their legs and head, lose almost all the water in their bodies and shrivel into a compact, barrel-shaped form known as a tun. Their metabolism slows to an almost undetectable level, a condition called anhydrobiosis, meaning 'life without water'. When water returns, the animals rehydrate and can resume normal activity within hours. Not every tardigrade has this ability, however: many marine species lack it, and even in those that possess it, survival depends on drying out slowly enough for the body to prepare. In one well-known case, Japanese researchers revived tardigrades from a sample of Antarctic moss that had been kept frozen for more than thirty years.

How tardigrades survive drying has long puzzled biologists. Some other organisms that can withstand desiccation, such as brine shrimp, accumulate large amounts of a sugar called trehalose, which forms a glass-like solid that protects their cells. The same sugar helps certain yeasts and plants to survive drought, and it is used commercially to stabilise foods and medicines. Many tardigrades, however, produce little trehalose. In 2017 a team led by Thomas Boothby reported that tardigrades rely instead on unusual proteins, found only in this group, which lack a fixed three-dimensional shape. As the animal dries, these proteins appear to form a glass-like matrix that holds other molecules in place and prevents them from being damaged. When the genes for the proteins were inserted into yeast and bacteria, the microorganisms became more tolerant of drying.

Tardigrades' resistance to radiation appears to involve a different mechanism. In 2016 Japanese scientists studying the species Ramazzottius varieornatus identified a protein they named Dsup, short for 'damage suppressor', which binds to DNA and appears to shield it from harm. When they introduced the protein into cultured human cells, the cells suffered roughly 40 per cent less DNA damage from X-rays. Later work showed that Dsup attaches to nucleosomes, the structures around which DNA is wound inside cells, and may protect it from the highly reactive molecules produced when radiation passes through water. Such findings have encouraged speculation about practical uses, from preserving vaccines without refrigeration to shielding astronauts from radiation, although these remain distant prospects.

Despite their reputation, tardigrades are far from invincible. Their extraordinary tolerance applies mainly to the dormant tun; active tardigrades are much more vulnerable. In a study published in 2020, researchers in Denmark found that half of the active individuals of one species died after twenty-four hours at about 37 degrees Celsius, roughly the temperature of the human body. Even tuns survived for much shorter periods when exposed to high temperatures for a day rather than an hour. Since many tardigrades live in mosses on rooftops and rocks, where conditions can change rapidly, the researchers suggested that rising global temperatures could pose a real threat to them.

Perhaps the most intriguing question is why tardigrades can resist conditions, such as the vacuum of space or intense radiation, that they never encounter in nature. The most widely accepted answer is that these abilities are side effects of adaptations to a far more ordinary challenge: repeated drying out. Dehydration damages cells, including their DNA, in ways that resemble the effects of radiation, so mechanisms that evolved to cope with drought may happen to protect against other extreme conditions as well. A similar link has been proposed for the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which is famous for surviving enormous doses of radiation and is also highly resistant to drying. Tardigrades, in other words, are not built for space; they are built for life in a cushion of moss that may dry out and become wet again many times a year.

In February 1897 a British military force attacked Benin City, the capital of the Kingdom of Benin in what is now southern Nigeria, in retaliation for the killing of a British delegation earlier that year. The city was burned, its ruler, the Oba, was sent into exile, and thousands of objects were seized from the royal palace. Many of the brass plaques had once decorated the pillars of the palace itself. Among them were the brass plaques and sculptures now known collectively as the Benin Bronzes, many of which had recorded the kingdom's history for centuries. The objects were distributed among soldiers, sold at auction and acquired by museums and private collectors across Europe and North America. The British Museum alone holds more than 900 of them.

For more than a century, requests for their return were largely ignored. In recent years, however, the position has shifted remarkably. In 2022 Germany agreed to transfer ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes in its public collections to Nigeria, and the Horniman Museum in London transferred ownership of 72 objects. In France, a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and published in 2018 by the scholars Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy recommended the return of objects taken from Africa during the colonial period. In 2021 France returned 26 royal treasures that its troops had seized in 1892 from the Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now the Republic of Benin.

The arguments for return are, in my view, powerful. Objects taken by force during military campaigns were not acquired with the consent of their owners, and the passage of time does not change how they were obtained. Many of these items were not simply works of art but objects with religious, political or historical meaning for the communities that made them, and their absence is felt as a continuing loss. It is also difficult to defend a situation in which people must travel to Europe, and obtain visas that may be refused, in order to see their own heritage.

Opponents of large-scale restitution have usually appealed to the idea of the universal museum. In 2002 the directors of a group of major European and American museums signed a declaration arguing that their institutions serve the people of every nation, allowing visitors to compare the achievements of many cultures in one place. They also argued that objects acquired in earlier times should be viewed in the light of the values of those times. There is something to the first point: a visitor to a great museum can indeed see connections between cultures that would be invisible if every object stayed in its place of origin. The second is weaker, since the standards of an earlier era may explain how objects were taken but can hardly justify keeping them today.

In some countries the law itself stands in the way. The British Museum Act of 1963 prevents the museum's trustees from disposing of objects in the collection except in narrowly defined circumstances. This is one reason why the museum has not returned the Parthenon Sculptures, which Lord Elgin removed from the Acropolis in Athens in the early nineteenth century, despite long-standing requests from Greece.

The museum has instead proposed loans and partnerships, an approach that critics regard as an attempt to keep ownership while appearing to cooperate. In the United States, by contrast, a law passed in 1990 requires federally funded museums to return Native American human remains and sacred objects to the communities from which they came. When new regulations under that law took effect in 2024, several major American museums closed galleries or covered display cases while they consulted the communities concerned.

Practical concerns are sometimes raised as well. Critics ask whether returned objects will be properly conserved and displayed, and to whom they should be given when the original owners were a kingdom, a religious community or a family rather than a modern state. These are genuine questions. In 2023, for example, a decree by Nigeria's president recognised the Oba of Benin, a descendant of the ruler exiled in 1897, as the owner of the returned bronzes, and some European commentators questioned whether the objects would remain accessible to the public. Yet it would be strange to argue that objects should stay in Europe because their rightful owners might not look after them in the way Europeans would prefer.

None of this means that every object in a European museum should be sent elsewhere. Many items were acquired through legitimate purchase, gift or exchange, and museums have a responsibility to research the history of their collections, a field known as provenance research, before making decisions. Such research is slow and expensive, and its results may surprise the institutions themselves. What is required is not a blanket rule but transparency and a willingness to act when the evidence shows that objects were taken by force or deception. Each case must be judged on its own facts.

Returning objects need not mean the end of museums' role in sharing the world's cultures. Long-term loans, joint exhibitions and collaborations between institutions in Europe and Africa can allow objects to be seen in many places while ownership rests with those entitled to it. In my view, honesty about how collections were formed is likely to strengthen, rather than weaken, the relationship between museums and the public, as well as with the communities whose heritage they hold.