IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 191

British and American cities at the end of the nineteenth century were full of experiments in powered road transport. Steam carriages, petrol cars and battery-driven vehicles all competed for customers, and the noisy, malodorous internal combustion engine had no obvious claim on the future. For a short period the electric car was not a curiosity but a serious commercial proposition, and it was far from clear which source of power would eventually dominate.

The technology rested on the rechargeable battery. In 1859 the French physicist Gaston Planté built the first practical lead-acid cell, two lead plates dipped in dilute sulphuric acid. Such cells could be recharged, but they stored little energy for their weight. In 1881 another Frenchman, Camille Faure, transformed the device by coating the plates with a paste of lead oxide, which greatly increased the capacity that a given amount of lead could hold. In the same year the electrical engineer Gustave Trouvé fixed a small motor and a set of these improved cells to a tricycle and demonstrated it in Paris, an achievement generally regarded as the first practical electric vehicle.

American inventors soon followed. In 1890 a chemist named William Morrison built a six-passenger electric wagon in Des Moines, Iowa, and within a few years several firms were selling electric carriages, often constructed on the same frames as horse-drawn vehicles. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, which had grown rich making bicycles, began offering electric cars under the Columbia name in 1897, advertising them as silent, clean and simple to operate.

The most ambitious experiment was a taxi service. Two Philadelphians, the chemist Henry Morris and the engineer Pedro Salom, designed a purpose-built electric cab called the Electrobat in 1894; early versions were so heavy that they ran on steel-tyred wheels, and later ones were made much lighter. In 1897 a fleet of electric cabs began carrying fares in New York City. The business was soon absorbed into a larger concern, the Electric Vehicle Company, in which Pope took a controlling interest.

The electric car had genuine advantages. It started at the turn of a switch, whereas a petrol car of the period had to be cranked by hand, a tiring and sometimes dangerous operation that could break the driver's wrist. It produced no smoke, made little noise and needed no gear changes, and it could be recharged overnight from the mains. These qualities made it attractive to doctors, who made many short journeys with frequent stops, and to wealthy women, to whom it was marketed explicitly. Range was not yet a serious drawback, because almost all motoring took place inside cities and their suburbs.

Electric vehicles also held the land speed record. In the spring of 1899 the Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy took a bullet-shaped car called La Jamais Contente to a closed road at Achères, west of Paris, and became the first person to drive a vehicle at more than 100 kilometres an hour; his best run was measured at just under 106 kilometres an hour. The car was powered by two electric motors and a large bank of batteries, and its achievement was widely reported as proof that electricity was the equal of any rival.

At the turn of the century the balance of production still favoured electricity. By one widely quoted estimate, rather more than a third of the motor vehicles built in the United States in 1900 were electric, a larger share than those driven by petrol, with steam accounting for most of the remainder. Battery-powered vehicles were especially common in fleets: as delivery vans, as buses and as taxis, where short daily routes and a central depot for recharging suited them perfectly.

The position reversed with striking speed. Petrol cars became much cheaper: the Ford Model T, introduced in 1908, fell in price year after year as production methods improved. Petrol itself became plentiful and inexpensive after large oil fields were discovered in Texas in 1901. Roads outside cities were improved, encouraging longer journeys that no battery of the period could support, and filling stations spread along them. Most decisive of all, in 1912 an electric starter motor was fitted to a production car, so that a petrol engine no longer had to be turned by hand; the electric car had lost one of its strongest selling points to a device that was itself electrical.

Inventors tried to rescue the battery. Thomas Edison developed a nickel-iron cell, marketed from about 1901, which was more durable than lead-acid and tolerated careless treatment better, but it was expensive and delivered less power for its weight, and it never displaced the older chemistry. A few manufacturers persisted. The Detroit Electric Car Company, whose products were bought mainly by women, remained in business until 1939, though its total output over more than three decades was fewer than fifteen thousand vehicles.

For decades afterwards the electric car survived mainly as a memory, kept alive by milk floats and fork-lift trucks. Its first age had ended not because the idea was unsound but because the petrol engine improved faster than the battery. When concern about urban air pollution and imported oil revived official interest in electric traction in the 1960s and 1970s, engineers found themselves working on much the same problems of energy density and cost that had defeated their predecessors sixty years earlier.

Every rocket ever launched has been, in essence, a machine for throwing away most of itself. A satellite may weigh a few tonnes, while the vehicle that lifts it is hundreds of tonnes of metal and propellant, and almost all of that material is discarded within minutes of lift-off: spent stages fall back into the sea, or burn up in the atmosphere, or are left in orbit as debris. For most of the history of spaceflight this was accepted as unavoidable. The economics were brutal, because a launch vehicle was used once, but the engineering worked.

The reason lies in the rocket equation, set out by the Russian theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903. A rocket accelerates by throwing propellant backwards, and the change in velocity it can achieve depends on the speed of the exhaust and on the ratio between its mass when full of propellant and its mass when empty. Because the relationship is logarithmic, every additional metre per second of velocity costs a disproportionate amount of propellant and structure. Building a rocket in separate stages, each thrown away when its own propellant is exhausted, is one way of escaping the worst of this arithmetic.

Partly reusable vehicles have existed since the 1980s. The Space Shuttle orbiter flew back to a runway and was flown again, and the casings of its two solid rocket boosters were recovered from the ocean by parachute and, after refurbishment, reused. The savings were far smaller than had been hoped. Refurbishing the orbiter between missions became a vast industrial undertaking, the booster casings landed in salt water and demanded extensive inspection, and the whole system cost far more per launch than the expendable rockets it was meant to replace. When the Shuttle was retired in 2011, the conclusion drawn by many observers was that reusability did not pay.

Then the approach changed. On 21 December 2015 a Falcon 9 first stage returned to Cape Canaveral after lifting a batch of satellites on their way to orbit, and landed upright on a concrete pad. It was the first time an orbital-class booster had been recovered in one piece. The manoeuvre was intricate. After separating from the upper stage, at an altitude of roughly seventy kilometres and a speed of about two kilometres a second, the booster fired small thrusters to turn itself around and point its engines in the direction of travel; a boost-back burn then reversed its course towards the coast.

A further burn, known as the entry burn, slowed the stage as it plunged back into the thickening atmosphere, protecting its structure from the heat of re-entry. Grid fins – small lattice panels later changed from aluminium to titanium so that they could withstand higher temperatures – steered it as it fell. In the final seconds a single engine relit to bring the velocity to almost nothing, and the landing legs unfolded. Some flights end on land; most end on a small autonomous platform in the ocean, itself moving with the waves.

Blue Origin, a company founded by Jeff Bezos, had reached the same milestone a month earlier on a smaller scale: on 23 November 2015 its New Shepard vehicle flew above the internationally recognised boundary of space and returned to land upright. New Shepard is a suborbital rocket, however, carrying tourists and experiments on brief up-and-down flights rather than accelerating payloads to orbital speed.

The engineering is only half the problem; the other half is money. Carrying propellant for the return costs payload, because a stage that must keep fuel for a landing burn, and fly back towards its launch site, cannot give its payload as much speed as one that is simply allowed to fall into the sea. Reuse therefore pays only if the same stage flies many times with little work between flights. SpaceX aims to inspect and refly a booster in weeks rather than months, and now routinely launches boosters that have flown more than a dozen times. The vehicle that comes back is also heavier than it needs to be, since it carries landing legs, fins and the fuel for the return journey, all of which are dead weight for most of the flight.

Some parts remain hard to reuse. The second stage reaches orbital velocity, roughly 28,000 kilometres an hour, and is destroyed on re-entry unless it carries a heavy heat shield; on most launchers it is still thrown away. Payload fairings, the nose-cone halves that protect the satellite during the climb, are recovered from the sea after some flights. Fairings are large, expensive to make, and recovering them took years of experiment with parachutes and ships. SpaceX's much larger Starship is designed to bring both stages back: the booster is caught in the arms of its launch tower, while the upper stage relies on thousands of ceramic tiles to survive the heat of re-entry.

The consequences reach beyond the launch industry. When access to space becomes cheaper, more of it is attempted: constellations of hundreds of small satellites for communications and Earth observation, scientific instruments that once shared a ride now flying alone, and commercial stations in low orbit. Reusability has not made launches cheap in absolute terms, and its savings are difficult to disentangle from other improvements, but the direction of travel is unmistakable. A rocket that lands is no longer a demonstration; it is an ordinary part of the timetable.

Public libraries rest on a simple bargain: anyone may borrow books without paying, and the state, or the institution itself, rewards the people who wrote them. For most of their history that bargain has been conducted in print. A library buys a copy, owns it, lends it as often as it likes and replaces it when it falls apart. Digital books have disturbed this arrangement, and the argument about how to repair it has become one of the more revealing disputes in contemporary cultural policy.

The difference is one of ownership. When a library buys a printed book it acquires an object, and copyright law generally allows it to lend that object to whomever it chooses; in some countries the writer also receives a small payment, known as public lending right, each time the book is borrowed. An e-book is not bought but licensed. The licence normally permits one borrower at a time, in imitation of a physical copy, but it expires after a fixed number of loans or a set period, and the file may vanish from the catalogue when the term ends. Libraries have found themselves paying several times the retail price for a title that they never own and cannot keep.

The case for treating the two formats alike rests on the purpose of the institution rather than on the nature of the object. A public library exists so that access to reading does not depend on income, and digital lending serves that aim more completely than print in several respects. It reaches people who cannot easily visit a building: those with limited mobility, carers, shift workers and residents of remote areas. It works at three in the morning. And it allows a reader to enlarge the type, change the font or listen to a synthesised voice, which for a person with a visual impairment is not a convenience but the difference between reading and not reading.

Against this, publishers argue that a digital file behaves nothing like a printed copy. A printed book can be lent to one reader at a time because it is a physical object; a file could be lent to ten thousand readers at once at no extra cost. If libraries were free to do that, the market for the book might collapse. Licence terms that appear harsh – high prices, limits on the number of loans, titles withdrawn after a year – are, on this account, an attempt to recreate in software the scarcity that paper provided for nothing.

The courts have not settled the matter. In 2016 the Court of Justice of the European Union considered a dispute involving a Dutch public library and held that the lending of a digital copy can fall within the exception that copyright law makes for libraries, provided that the copy was lawfully acquired, that it is lent to one user at a time for a limited period, and that the author receives remuneration. That judgment established a principle, but it did not fix a price, and the terms offered by publishers differ widely between countries and between companies.

The economics matter more than the legal theory. Library budgets are finite, and a pound spent on a licence is a pound not spent on print, on staff or on buildings. If a licence costs three or four times the retail price and expires after a couple of years, the cost of each loan can be far higher than for a printed book that survives twenty years and dozens of borrowings. A library that devotes its acquisitions budget to licences may end up with a smaller collection that it does not control.

There is a further worry about the record. Every digital loan generates data: who borrowed what, when and for how long. Print lending has been recorded too, but the records were local, incomplete and of little commercial interest. Reading data are valuable, and readers have a reasonable expectation that what they borrow from a public library will not become a profile. Licence agreements should say plainly what is collected and who is allowed to see it.

It is often argued that borrowing and buying are complements rather than rivals: a reader who takes a book from a library may go on to buy it or the author's next one. Some research on printed books supports this, though the findings are not unanimous and the digital market is young. Publishers' fears are not baseless; but a system in which a library cannot offer a new title at all is not one that serves readers.

My own view is that equal terms is the wrong test, and that equal access is the right one. It is unreasonable to demand that a digital file be governed by rules invented for objects that wear out; the licence model recognises a genuine difference. But the present arrangement has drifted far from any defensible balance. Terms that expire, prices several times the retail level and the quiet removal of titles from catalogues are not the minimum necessary to protect authors; they are the exercise of market power over a single customer who cannot go elsewhere. A statutory licence, negotiated nationally, with one copy lent to one reader at a time and fair payment to writers, would serve readers, authors and the institution itself far better than the present patchwork of private contracts. Libraries should lend e-books, but on terms that the public can see and defend.