IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 211

The Great Fire of London began in the small hours of Sunday 2 September 1666, in Pudding Lane, a narrow street of wooden houses a short walk from the Thames. It started in the bakehouse of Thomas Farriner, a baker who supplied bread to the royal household. Farriner insisted afterwards that his ovens had been properly raked out, and the precise cause has never been settled; a spark falling on stored fuel, or an oven left smouldering, are the explanations most often offered. What is certain is that the flames reached a heap of firewood outside and then the neighbouring buildings.

Conditions could scarcely have been worse. Months of unusually dry weather had left the City in the grip of a drought, and timber, thatch and stored goods were ready to burn. Most houses were built of timber and many were coated with pitch and tar, while the warehouses along the river held hemp, rope, oil and coal. Because the upper storeys of many buildings overhung the street, flames could cross from one side to the other without touching the ground. There was no professional fire service, only parish volunteers, and a strong east wind was driving the fire into the densest part of the City. The usual method was to make a gap in the buildings ahead of the fire, but the City's rulers were reluctant to act without the owners' consent.

Later that Sunday, Samuel Pepys, a senior official at the Navy Board, made his way to Whitehall by boat and described to Charles II what he had seen. The King ordered that houses in the fire's path be demolished and promised payment to the men who helped. Pepys meanwhile sent his wife and his valuables out of the city and buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese in his garden, an episode ever since quoted as evidence of how quickly the disaster overtook ordinary precautions.

The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, was less decisive. Told that houses would have to be pulled down to create gaps the fire could not cross, he hesitated, complaining of the cost to householders and of the difficulty of rebuilding on rented land. Demolition had to be carried out well ahead of the flames to be of any use, and the wind drove the fire forward faster than the workmen could work. In the end the King's brother, the Duke of York, took charge, organising and paying firefighters, and gunpowder was used to blow up buildings that could not be pulled down in time.

By Tuesday the fire had become a storm. It destroyed the Royal Exchange, the City's commercial heart, and burned through Newgate Prison. It reached St Paul's Cathedral, where the lead roof melted and ran through the streets and the stonework cracked in the heat, and it consumed the stocks of booksellers who had stored their wares in the crypt. Eighty-seven parish churches were lost as well as the cathedral, and some 13,200 houses. Yet the flames stopped short of the Tower of London, and they never crossed the river.

The fire was halted on Wednesday 5 September. Two things ended it: the east wind dropped, and the firebreaks made with gunpowder at last stood in the flames' path. The burnt area stretched from the Tower in the east to the Temple in the west, and north as far as Smithfield.

Given the scale of the destruction, the recorded death toll was astonishingly small. Parish records list only a handful of deaths, and most historians accept that the fire killed few people directly, though some argue that the true number was higher, since the poor who fled were never counted. The homelessness, by contrast, was on an enormous scale: perhaps 70,000 people lost their homes, out of a population of roughly 80,000. Many camped in fields at Moorfields and Islington, and the King issued proclamations for their relief.

The search for someone to blame was immediate and ugly. Foreigners and Catholics were suspected, and a Frenchman named Robert Hubert, who confessed to having started the fire, was hanged at Tyburn in October 1666, although he had not even been in London when it began. The accusation of a Catholic plot took root and was later carved into the Monument, and the offending words were not removed until the nineteenth century. A Fire Court was set up to settle disputes between landlords and tenants over who should pay for rebuilding.

Rebuilding changed the character of the City. Christopher Wren proposed a rational plan of broad avenues and open squares, but it was rejected: too many owners held too many small plots, and trade had to be restored quickly. Parliament instead passed an Act for Rebuilding in 1667, which required new houses to be built of brick or stone, banned overhanging upper storeys, widened the main streets and set rules for fire precautions. Wren was appointed to rebuild St Paul's and many of the parish churches, and the Monument, a column designed by Wren and Robert Hooke, was erected near the bakehouse in Pudding Lane. Fire insurance, almost unknown before 1666, became common: Nicholas Barbon opened an office in the 1680s.

The fire ended an era in more than architecture. The medieval City of narrow alleys and timber gables disappeared, and with it a whole way of life. Whether the fire also ended the plague of 1665, as contemporaries believed, is still debated: the epidemic had largely faded before September 1666.

Ground-penetrating radar is a survey technique that maps what lies beneath the ground without opening it. A transmitter antenna sends short pulses of radio-frequency energy into the soil. Whenever a pulse meets a boundary between materials whose electrical properties differ — the top of a buried wall, the fill of a ditch, the empty space inside a tomb — part of the energy is reflected back to a receiver. The time a reflection takes to return, measured in billionths of a second, indicates how deep the boundary lies, provided the speed at which the signal travels through the ground can be estimated. Reflections are strongest where the contrast is sharp, which is why a void or a metal object stands out clearly while a gradual change in the soil may pass unnoticed.

The method grew out of radar rather than out of archaeology. In the 1960s it was used to measure the thickness of glaciers, and in the following decade archaeologists began experimenting with it, at first on a handful of sites where the soil was known to be favourable. Early surveys were slow and produced images that few specialists could interpret, and scepticism was widespread. Equipment became lighter and cheaper during the 1990s, and by the end of that decade the technique had become a routine part of archaeological survey in many countries.

Two properties of the equipment govern what can be achieved. The first is the frequency of the antenna: a high-frequency antenna of 500 megahertz or more produces a sharp image, but its signal is quickly absorbed, whereas a low-frequency antenna reaches deeper at the cost of detail. The second is the ground itself. Electrically conductive material, such as wet clay or soil containing salt, drains energy from the pulse, so that in some conditions a survey may see less than a metre below the surface, while dry sand or gravel may allow penetration to several metres. Depth and resolution therefore pull against each other, and the antenna is chosen to suit the question being asked. Surveys of an important site may therefore be carried out with two or three antennas in turn.

A survey is normally carried out along a grid of parallel lines, the antenna being towed across the ground at a steady speed while its position is recorded continuously, in modern practice by satellite positioning. The result is a mass of readings that must be processed to remove background noise before it can be read. Software assembles the data into vertical sections, and from these it produces horizontal slices at successive depths, which show buried features as a kind of plan. A single object, such as a pipe or a large stone, typically appears in the raw record as a curved shape known as a hyperbola. A survey of a large field can generate millions of readings, and processing them may take as long as the fieldwork itself.

Archaeologists value the technique because it responds to structures that other methods miss. Buried walls, floors, ditches, pits and kilns all produce recognisable reflections, and because radar can be used on hard surfaces it is one of the few methods available inside churches, where digging is impossible. A large project begun around Stonehenge in 2010 combined ground-penetrating radar with magnetometry and other instruments to map a whole ceremonial landscape of buried pits, ditches and monuments without excavating it. Radar has also been used to search for unmarked graves, both in cemeteries whose records are poor and in criminal investigations.

The limits are equally important. Radar cannot usually identify what a buried feature is made of, still less when it was built; a stone wall and a brick wall may return a similar signal, and a natural hollow may look much like a pit dug by people. Most archaeological surveys reach only one to three metres below the surface. In towns, pipes, cables, rubble and modern disturbance clutter the record. The most serious danger, however, is over-interpretation: a plausible anomaly on a screen can become a temple or a road in a report, when the evidence supports nothing so definite. Nor can it show whether a buried feature is important enough to protect.

For this reason radar is rarely used alone. Magnetometry, which detects burnt material, ditches and iron objects, covers ground far more quickly; earth resistance responds to variations in moisture; and aerial photography and lidar reveal earthworks that survive as slight bumps in fields. Aerial photography, for its part, reveals buried structures only indirectly, through the effect they have on the growth of crops above them, and often only in a dry summer. Each method responds to a different property of the soil, and where two or three of them agree the interpretation is much stronger, which is why the best projects combine several.

None of these techniques can replace excavation entirely. Interpretations are tested by digging small trenches over selected anomalies, a process known as ground-truthing, and it is common for such trenches to show that an expected wall is in fact a spread of rubble, or that a promising enclosure is a natural feature. Survey is nonetheless attractive for reasons of cost and conservation: it is far cheaper than open excavation, and it destroys nothing. In Britain, planning rules that require developers to pay for an archaeological evaluation before building have made geophysical survey a routine first step on sites of every kind.

Every few years a statue comes down or a portrait is removed from a wall, and the same argument breaks out. On one side are those who insist that we must not judge people of the past by the standards of the present; on the other are those who reply that remaining neutral is itself a choice. The quarrel would be clearer if those taking part separated three different questions: how we should understand the past, whether what was done then was wrong, and whom we should honour now.

The case for restraint deserves to be taken seriously. The purpose of history is to understand, not to sentence, and understanding requires us to enter a world in which the moral vocabulary was different: rights, equality and even childhood have meant other things at other times. The historian E. P. Thompson warned against what he called the enormous condescension of posterity — the habit of looking back on earlier generations as less intelligent and less decent than ourselves. Judged by our own age, almost every generation stands condemned, and a history composed entirely of verdicts teaches us little.

Yet the argument for restraint is weaker than it sounds, for two reasons. Defenders of the past often claim that everyone accepted a practice at the time, but this is frequently untrue. Slavery, the exploitation of small children in factories and mines, and the public execution of thieves were all opposed by people who lived then. To condemn such a practice is not necessarily to apply a foreign standard; it may be to agree with a minority that has since become the majority. The claim that we should excuse people because of the age they lived in runs up against the awkward fact that their own neighbours made the same criticisms we make now.

The second reason is that the argument confuses two different questions: how we should judge a person, and how we should assess what that person did. It is quite possible to conclude that a policy was cruel, or a decision disastrous, without delivering a verdict on an individual's entire character. Historical figures are not of one piece; the same man may have founded a hospital and enriched himself through a trade that we now find abhorrent, and we lose nothing by saying both. The distinction matters because the alternative is a crude choice between wholesale celebration and wholesale erasure.

The achievements of the past raise a related point. It would be absurd to discard the work of a scientist or the music of a composer because we disapprove of their politics. Yet admiration for achievement must not harden into an excuse. That someone paid for a great cathedral does not make the treatment of the people who built it acceptable, and it should not silence the question. What is worth asking is not whether a person was admirable in every respect but whether a particular action was.

Nor should we take refuge in the reflection that our own descendants will disapprove of us. That thought is true but unhelpful: since all standards are temporary, none need be examined. The opposite temptation is moral self-congratulation. Judging the dead costs us nothing and flatters us, and there is a real danger that the past becomes a screen on which each generation projects its own preferences. A standard applied honestly cuts both ways: some reputations would survive it better than their defenders fear.

Monuments are where the argument becomes concrete. A statue is not part of the historical record; it is a statement by the people who paid for it about whom they wished to honour. Its design, its position and the wording on its plinth reflect their politics rather than any scholarly assessment. Taking one down therefore destroys no knowledge. The books, the archives and the museums remain, and the person is not erased; they are merely no longer honoured in a public place.

Those who describe removing a monument as an attack on history are confusing commemoration with understanding. A society that never reconsiders its monuments has stopped thinking about its past, not protected it. The only real choice is between a judgement we have examined and one we have inherited unexamined; refusing to decide is itself a decision. Setting an explanatory panel beside a statue, or moving it to a museum where its story can be told in full, is one way of remembering without honouring.

What would be a defensible way of judging? It should be directed at actions and their consequences rather than at character, and it should ask a question stricter than whether people were like us. We should ask whether they acted worse than their contemporaries knew how to act. That standard allows full weight to circumstance without offering an excuse, and it distinguishes the slave trader from the reformer who eventually opposed him. It also requires evidence, and humility about how little of anyone's inner life can now be recovered.

My answer to the question in my title is therefore qualified. We cannot help judging historical figures by the values we hold, and we should not pretend that we can. But we should judge them by the best of those values rather than the easiest, and we should keep the judgement of persons separate from the question of whom we choose to honour. The past belongs to everyone; public space belongs to the living, and what we place in it is a decision about the present.