IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 210

In October 1347 a fleet of Genoese trading ships put in at Messina, in Sicily, carrying sailors who were dying of a disease that neither they nor the harbour authorities could explain. Within months the illness had reached the Italian mainland and southern France, and by 1348 it had spread through Spain and crossed to England, where most accounts say it first appeared at Melcombe Regis in Dorset. Over the next four years it travelled north through Scandinavia and east across Germany and Poland. Contemporaries knew they were living through an event of extraordinary scale, though they could not have known that the ships from the Black Sea had probably carried not only goods but infected rats and the fleas that lived on them.

The disease took three forms. The most common, bubonic plague, produced the painful swellings known as buboes in the groin, armpit or neck, and killed perhaps half or more of those it infected. A second form attacked the bloodstream and killed so quickly that the swellings never had time to appear. The third affected the lungs and could be passed directly from one person to another in the breath, which made it far more dangerous to anyone nursing the sick. All three were caused by the same organism, though this was not established for another five centuries.

How many people died is impossible to establish precisely, because no medieval government kept a reliable census and parish records survive only in some places. Historians' estimates for Europe as a whole range between a third and a half of the population, with some crowded cities apparently losing more than half and a few isolated communities escaping altogether. England is thought to have lost between a third and a half of its people in the first outbreak, and the disease returned repeatedly in later centuries, so that the population did not recover its earlier level for well over a hundred years.

Medieval responses were a mixture of the practical and the desperate. Cities closed their gates to travellers from infected areas, and in 1377 the Adriatic port of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, required arriving ships to wait thirty days before anyone was allowed to land; the period was later extended to forty, which in Italian gave us the word quarantine. Venice built its first permanent isolation hospital in the fifteenth century. Physicians, trained in the theories of the ancient world, generally blamed corrupted air and recommended fires, aromatic herbs and the removal of rubbish. Some measures, such as cleaning the streets, may have helped; others, such as bleeding and dung poultices, cannot have done so.

Alongside these measures came violence. Searching for someone to blame, communities across Europe turned on their Jewish neighbours, who were accused of poisoning the wells. In 1348 and 1349 hundreds of Jewish communities in Germany and Switzerland were attacked, in some cases with the support of local officials, and thousands of people were killed. The charge was baseless, and in 1348 Pope Clement VI issued a bull declaring the accusation to be untrue; the plague reached towns that had expelled their Jewish residents as readily as those that had not. Groups of flagellants, who moved from town to town whipping themselves in the belief that public penance might avert divine punishment, expressed the same helplessness in a different form.

The economic effects were profound. With perhaps a third of the labour force gone, land was abandoned in some areas, and surviving peasants could demand higher wages and better conditions. In England the government tried to hold wages at their pre-plague level through the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the Statute of Labourers two years later; the attempt failed, and the resentment it created is often cited as one of the long-term causes of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Landowners gradually turned to paid labour or let their land to tenants. Serfdom, the system by which peasants were tied to the land, weakened across western Europe, though it survived for centuries longer in parts of the east.

Contemporaries did not call the catastrophe the Black Death. They wrote instead of the Great Mortality, or simply of the pestilence. The familiar name appears only in later accounts, and its origin is uncertain; one suggestion is that it refers to the darkening of the skin that the septicaemic form could produce, but no medieval source uses it in that sense.

The true cause remained unknown for more than five hundred years. In 1894, during an outbreak in Hong Kong, the Swiss-born bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin identified the bacterium responsible, which was later named Yersinia pestis in his honour. A few years afterwards the French scientist Paul-Louis Simond showed that fleas could carry the infection from rat to rat, completing the picture that most historians now accept.

Since the 1990s, analysis of genetic material from the bones of victims has confirmed the diagnosis. In 2011 a team of researchers published the full genome of Yersinia pestis recovered from skeletons buried in London, and later work has retrieved similar material from graves across Europe. The findings have also opened new questions. Some scholars maintain that the medieval outbreak spread too quickly, and killed too high a proportion of the population, to be explained by rats and their fleas alone, and have argued that human fleas and lice, or the pneumonic form of the disease, must have played a larger part. The argument continues, but few historians now doubt that Yersinia pestis was the cause.

For most of human history the sea floor has been a place where things are lost rather than kept. Some estimates put the number of shipwrecks on the world's seabeds in the millions, though nobody knows how many survive intact, and only a fraction has ever been examined by anyone trained to interpret them. For an archaeologist, a wreck is not primarily a collection of valuable objects. It is a moment frozen in time: a vessel, its cargo, the possessions of its crew and the remains of their food were all deposited on the same day, and have lain together ever since. That is what makes a wreck so different from a rubbish heap on land, where material accumulates over decades and is churned up by later activity.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, almost all work on wrecks was salvage rather than archaeology. A diver in standard dress wore a heavy helmet and received air through a hose from the surface, which allowed useful work at modest depths but tied the diver to a boat and limited how far and how long the work could proceed. The decisive change came in 1943, when Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan developed the demand valve that became known as the aqualung, allowing a diver to breathe compressed air from a cylinder carried on the back. The equipment was cheap, light and simple, and it freed archaeologists from dependence on professional salvors: scholars could at last examine a site themselves, slowly and in person.

Underwater excavation is slow and costly. A large site may take many seasons to complete, and only a fraction of it can ever be examined, so archaeologists record far more than they lift. Every object is photographed and its position fixed in three dimensions before it is moved, because the relationship between finds is often more informative than the finds themselves. A few ships have been raised whole. Sweden's warship Vasa, which capsized in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage in 1628, was lifted in 1961; the English warship Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, was raised in 1982. Both are now displayed in museums in Stockholm and Portsmouth.

Recovery, however, is only the beginning of a wreck's problems. Waterlogged wood is structurally sound only while it stays wet: the cell walls have decayed and the spaces are filled with water, so if the timber dries out it shrinks and crumbles. Conservators therefore replace the water with a synthetic wax, usually polyethylene glycol, a process that can take years of spraying or soaking and may cost far more than the excavation itself. Even then the material remains chemically active. The wood of the Vasa, for example, slowly produces sulphuric acid from compounds absorbed during three centuries in the harbour mud, and conservators continue to monitor and neutralise it.

Whether anything survives at all depends on the sea itself. In most waters the shipworm, a bivalve mollusc that bores through timber, destroys a wooden hull within decades, and warm, oxygen-rich water dissolves almost everything else. The Baltic is different. Its low salinity prevents the shipworm from surviving, and its cold water slows bacterial decay, so that whole vessels, together with ropes, barrels and even clothing, have been recovered from its mud. Similar conditions exist in the Black Sea, where the deep water contains no oxygen and organic material is preserved almost perfectly.

Wrecks have been plundered for as long as people have been able to reach them. The international response was the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2001. It treats underwater sites as cultural heritage rather than as treasure, lays down that they should normally be preserved where they lie, and states that their commercial exploitation for trade or speculation is incompatible with proper protection. The convention has been ratified by many countries but not all, and enforcing rules across vast areas of sea remains extremely difficult. Critics point out that a site left in place may still be damaged by trawling, dredging or construction.

Some sites lie far beyond the reach of any diver. Towed instruments such as side-scan sonar and magnetometers allow a survey vessel to map the seabed and detect buried metal, and remotely operated vehicles, controlled from the surface, can film and sample at depths of several kilometres. The wreck of Titanic, found in 1985 by a team led by Robert Ballard, was located with such equipment. More recently, surveys of the Black Sea have found dozens of vessels in its oxygen-free depths; a project working off the Bulgarian coast reported in 2016 that some of these ships were preserved almost intact, with their masts and rigging still standing.

The value of a wreck lies in the questions it can answer. A ship can show what people ate, how a cargo was packed and what tools and possessions ordinary sailors carried — details that no merchant's ledger records. It can reveal where goods came from and sometimes preserves objects, from musical instruments to children's toys, that have vanished entirely from land sites. None of this happens by itself. A wreck that is stripped of its contents by looters yields almost nothing to scholarship, and one that is left unrecorded before it decays yields nothing at all. The argument between those who see wrecks as treasure and those who see them as heritage is, in the end, an argument about whether the past should be sold or studied.

Far more people now meet the past through novels than through academic history. A successful novel set in Tudor England, especially once it has been adapted for television, will reach many times the readership of the specialist books written about the same period, and its version of events will lodge in the memory far longer. Historians have always been uneasy about this, and it is easy to see why: a story that never happened may come to be remembered as though it had. The question is whether this is a serious problem or a familiar complaint from scholars who would prefer everyone to read their own books.

The charge is not that novelists invent things. Everyone knows that a novel is a made-up story, and readers who pick one up expect dialogue that no one recorded and scenes that no witness described. The difficulty is that invention and research are blended on the same page, in the same tone of voice, without a line between them. A scene that is entirely imagined sits beside one reconstructed from documents, and the reader has no way of telling which is which. Memory does not keep such distinctions. What is remembered afterwards is the story. A reader who has wept over a fictional death may find it hard, years later, to separate what the novel invented from what the records show.

Yet the complaint is often made too confidently. Historians do not simply hand over the past as it was; they select, arrange and explain, and any narrative of a complex event imposes a shape on it. A chapter that opens with a battle and closes with a treaty is already an interpretation, since the people involved experienced no such tidy sequence. The difference between history and fiction lies less in imagination than in the rules that govern it. A historian is expected to show where the evidence comes from, to acknowledge what is uncertain and to accept correction. A novelist is under no such obligation, and this, rather than invention itself, is the real distinction.

The periods that readers think they know are often those that novelists have made familiar. Generations of children learned the outline of the Roman occupation of Britain from a single series of adventure stories, and the Western Front of the First World War is remembered by many people through novels and their adaptations rather than through histories. This is not new. Walter Scott's novels did more than any history book to shape how the nineteenth century pictured the Middle Ages. What has changed is the scale of the audience and the speed with which a fictional version can travel.

What fiction does best is texture. A novel can give the smell of a tannery, the weight of a sword, the tedium of a long voyage, and in doing so it tells us something that no table of wages conveys. It can also restore the uncertainty of the past: people living in 1500 did not know what would happen in 1550, and a good novelist lets them live inside that ignorance. Above all, fiction can show moral choices being made in circumstances where the outcome was unclear and the alternatives were not neatly arranged. None of this requires a writer to alter the historical record, and the most admired novelists of the past research their periods with care.

Where fiction does mislead is in the impression it can leave that a complicated event had a single cause, or that a disputed interpretation is settled. A novel must resolve its conflicts, and a form that demands resolution will always simplify. Television makes the difficulty sharper, because an adaptation is often watched by people who have not read the book and who meet the story without any of its author's misgivings. None of this means that an adaptation is less accurate than the novel it is based on; it means that the audience is less equipped to judge.

Some novelists go further and deliberately contradict the record, imagining that the Armada succeeded or that a king survived. Such books can be illuminating, because they force readers to notice how much they assume about the way things turned out. But they work only when the departure is clearly signposted; a counterfactual that is mistaken for a fact is simply an error. The convention that a novel may invent, while a history may not, is worth defending precisely because it allows both kinds of writing to exist without confusion.

The remedy is not to ask novelists to stop inventing, but to make the boundary visible. Many writers now add an afterword explaining what is documented, what is probable and what is invented, and such notes deserve more attention than they usually receive. Publishers, reviewers and teachers could all do more to encourage them. Schools, in particular, can teach historical novels alongside the evidence, so that pupils learn to ask which parts of a story are supported and how we know.

None of this suggests that historical fiction should be distrusted. Novels enlarge our sense of the past's strangeness, and they recruit readers whom no academic book would ever reach. But they cannot carry the whole weight of a society's memory. Fiction becomes dangerous only when it is the only past a reader has, and the answer to that is not fewer novels but more history.