IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 217

The Grand Canal is the longest artificial waterway in the world. It runs for some 1,800 kilometres from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south, crossing the Yellow River and the Yangtze on the way, and it joins a series of lakes, rivers and shorter cuts into a single route. It was not the work of one ruler or one century. Instead it was assembled piece by piece over more than two thousand years, as successive states and dynasties extended, straightened and repaired it. In 2014 the canal was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List.

The earliest sections date from the fifth century BCE, when the rulers of Wu, a state in the lower Yangtze region, cut a channel to move soldiers and supplies between the Yangtze and the Huai River. Other states dug similar waterways, and after China was unified in 221 BCE the network was gradually extended. For centuries, however, these canals served particular regions rather than forming one continuous route.

The decisive change came under the Sui dynasty. From 605 onwards, the emperor Yang ordered his engineers to join the existing waterways into a single network, with its hub at Luoyang and branches reaching north towards the region of modern Beijing and south to the Yangtze delta. The work was carried out at great speed and at enormous human cost: the dynasty's own annals record repeated levies of labour on a vast scale, and later writers made the suffering of the conscripted peasants proverbial. The unified canal allowed the wealth of the south to be moved north, and it outlasted the dynasty that built it, which collapsed in 618.

What the canal carried, above all, was grain. The fertile lower Yangtze produced far more food than its own population needed, while the capital and the armies guarding the northern frontier required supplies that the dry north could not grow. Moving grain overland by cart was slow and expensive; a barge hauled by men or animals cost a fraction as much for each tonne it carried. Alongside grain, the canal carried salt, silk, timber, pottery and tax payments of every kind, and market towns grew up wherever goods had to be transferred or stored.

Engineering the route was another matter. A canal crossing the north China plain had to cope with rivers that flooded in summer and shrank in winter, and with long stretches of gently rising ground. The solution was to divide the channel into stages separated by gates, so that boats could be raised or lowered between stretches of water at different levels. A Chinese official named Qiao Weiyue is credited with replacing a slipway on a canal in 984 with a chamber enclosed by two gates — the earliest recorded pound lock. Chambers of this kind became standard equipment on the waterway.

The route changed with the capital. When the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty established their seat at Dadu, on the site of modern Beijing, the old canal was too indirect, since goods from the south had to travel west to Luoyang and back. In the 1280s and 1290s the astronomer and engineer Guo Shoujing was put in charge of a new cut. His channel, completed in 1293, brought barges directly into the capital, and it needed a dependable water supply, which he obtained by collecting springs and storing water in reservoirs upstream.

Under the Ming and Qing dynasties the canal was the busiest inland waterway in the empire and the object of permanent official anxiety. A separate administration was created to manage it, with officials responsible for dredging, for the upkeep of embankments and for the timetable of the grain fleets. Silt, floods and the wandering of the Yellow River made maintenance a constant drain on the treasury, and every serious breach of the banks threatened the supply of the capital.

In 1855 the Yellow River changed its course, abandoning the channel it had followed to the sea and turning north through Shandong to the Gulf of Bohai. The canal was cut in several places, and a government weakened by rebellion and short of money could not restore it. Traffic moved increasingly to seagoing ships and later to the railways. In 1901 the imperial government formally ended the transport of grain by canal, and long stretches of the waterway silted up or ran dry.

Since the middle of the twentieth century the canal has been dredged and rebuilt in stages. The southern section, between Hangzhou and the Yangtze, remains navigable. It still carries a steady traffic of barges loaded with sand, coal and building materials, while parts of the northern route have been restored for irrigation and for tourism. Engineers have also used the line of the old canal in the South–North Water Transfer Project, which moves water from the Yangtze basin towards the dry north.

The canal has no single monument to visit. Its importance lies in what it made possible: the integration of a huge country, the growth of cities along its banks, and the movement of people as well as goods. It is often mentioned together with the Great Wall as one of the great achievements of imperial China, although its purpose was to feed people rather than to keep invaders out.

Parchment is a writing surface made from the skin of an animal — usually a sheep or a goat and, for the finest quality, a calf. The terms are often used loosely, but strictly speaking parchment comes from sheepskin or goatskin, while the smoother, paler material made from calfskin is called vellum. Prepared skins were used around the Mediterranean long before they became the dominant support for books in Europe. From roughly the fourth century CE onwards, parchment gradually displaced papyrus, the fibrous sheet made from a reed that grew along the Nile, and it was parchment that made the codex — the book with folded leaves rather than a roll — practical, because a sheet of skin bends and sews far more readily than a brittle sheet of reed. The change was slow: the papal chancery in Rome was still issuing documents on papyrus in the eleventh century.

Making parchment was skilled, dirty and slow. Skins were first soaked in lime, which loosened the hair and swelled the fibres, and then scraped clean. The wet skin was stretched on a wooden frame and held under tension by cords passed through holes along its edges, so that it dried flat and taut. While it dried, a curved knife was used to shave away the remaining flesh and to thin the underside; the outer surface might then be rubbed with pumice and dusted with chalk so that ink would take evenly. Sheep and goats were the commonest sources of skin, being kept almost everywhere for milk and meat. The result was a thin, tough and slightly translucent sheet, and the cost was considerable: a large Bible could require the skins of several hundred animals.

Parchment is exceptionally durable, and manuscripts written on it have survived for more than a thousand years. It keeps remarkably well in dry conditions, which is one reason why so many early books survive from Egypt and the Middle East. Its weakness is moisture. Skin is a collagen material and reacts to changes in humidity: in damp air it absorbs water and the leaves cockle, and repeated swelling and drying can distort them or make the ink flake away. Libraries therefore control the air in their stores. Fire, insects and careless handling have destroyed far more manuscripts than any scribe's error.

The oldest and still the most widely used method of dating a manuscript is palaeography, the study of handwriting. Scribal scripts changed gradually across Europe, and a trained eye can place a page within a period: uncial and half-uncial hands in late antiquity, the clear Carolingian minuscule that spread from the monasteries of the Frankish empire in the ninth century, and the dense, angular Gothic scripts of the later Middle Ages. Because these changes were slow and varied from region to region, palaeography usually yields a range of decades rather than a precise year, and it depends on comparison with documents whose dates are known from other evidence. It can also be misled: an archaising scribe might deliberately copy an older style, and a forger might do the same.

Scientific dating offers an independent check. Radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon-14 in the collagen of the skin and therefore gives the time at which the animal died. Because the method requires the destruction of a sample, however small, it is used on manuscripts only when the question matters and the owner agrees. Its results are usually expressed as a range, often of several decades, and they date the skin rather than the writing, since a stock of parchment might be kept for years before it was used. In 2009 the parchment of the Voynich manuscript, a codex written in an unknown script, was tested at a laboratory in Arizona and placed between 1404 and 1438 — evidence that the material was medieval, whatever the text may be.

Newer techniques examine what the parchment is made of. ZooMS, short for zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, identifies an animal species from the pattern of collagen fragments in a tiny sample. Applied to a manuscript, it can show whether the pages came from sheep, goat or calf, and occasionally from an unexpected animal. Genetic analysis goes further. Because skin cells retain DNA, researchers can match separate leaves to one another and even to the same animal, which helps to establish whether pages now held in different libraries once formed part of a single book, and to reconstruct how a scriptorium obtained its supplies.

Some of the most valuable information comes from manuscripts that were reused. Parchment was expensive, so a text that was no longer wanted might be scraped or washed away and written over; such a book is called a palimpsest. The erased words are not always lost. The Archimedes Palimpsest, a thirteenth-century prayer book made from the leaves of older mathematical works, was read again in the early twenty-first century by multispectral imaging, which photographs each page in different wavelengths of light and makes faint traces of ink legible. No single method settles the date of a manuscript. Palaeography, radiocarbon testing and the study of materials are strongest when their results agree, and a disagreement between them is itself informative, since it may point to a later addition or to a deliberate deception.

In the past three decades, apologies for historical wrongs have become a familiar feature of public life. The German parliament has repeatedly acknowledged the crimes of the Nazi era; the Australian government apologised in 2008 to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples whose children had been taken from them; Canada apologised in the same year to former pupils of its residential schools; and in 2007 the British prime minister expressed deep sorrow for his country's role in the slave trade, though he stopped short of using the word apology. Each of these gestures was contested, and the argument about whether states should apologise at all shows no sign of ending.

The objection most often made is that a state apology implicates people who did nothing wrong. Citizens of a modern democracy cannot be held personally responsible for crimes committed before they were born, and an apology delivered by a prime minister on behalf of a nation inevitably suggests that they can. On this view guilt is individual and dies with the individual, so that to inherit it is a confusion of categories, and to ask the descendants of perpetrators to apologise is to ask them to confess to something they never did. Some critics add a practical worry: once one wrong is admitted, the list of possible claims has no obvious limit.

The reply is that a state is not a collection of individuals but a continuing institution. It holds property, honours treaties and pays debts incurred centuries ago, and it is the same legal person that passed the laws in question. An apology by such an institution is therefore not a confession of personal guilt but an acknowledgement that the wrong was done in its name and that the institution endures. Nor are the wrongs always safely in the past. The consequences of dispossession and of slavery are visible in the statistics of health, wealth and schooling, and a government that treats such legacies as ancient history is declining to notice evidence it could hardly ignore.

Where an apology has been joined to material measures, it has generally been taken more seriously. West Germany's agreement with Israel in 1952, under which payments were made to the new state and later to individual survivors, is the most substantial example, and the United States Congress apologised and paid reparations to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. Those payments were controversial at the time and were opposed by many, which is a reminder that a serious apology is rarely cheap in political terms. Money by itself proves nothing, but willingness to pay is one test of whether the words were meant.

There is a difficulty on the other side as well. An apology is addressed to a group, yet no group has a single voice, and the question of who may speak for the dead cannot be answered in principle. Some descendants of enslaved people have argued that an apology is worse than nothing if it allows a government to declare the matter closed, since a nation that has said sorry may feel that it has discharged its obligations and need do nothing further. The risk is real: an apology is a speech act, and like any speech act it can be used to end a conversation rather than to begin one.

None of this is an argument against apologising; it is an argument for doing it well. An apology that carries weight tends to have certain features. It names the wrong specifically rather than regretting vaguely that suffering occurred. It is delivered by someone with the authority to speak for the institution, and it is not made conditional on anything in return. Above all, it is shaped with the people to whom it is addressed, rather than announced to them once it has been written; a statement drafted by officials for a domestic audience and translated afterwards for the victims' descendants is unlikely to convince anyone.

Governments worry, not unreasonably, that an apology will be read as an admission of legal liability. Some have therefore attached disclaimers, as the United States Senate did in 2009, when it passed a resolution apologising for slavery and for the segregation that followed while stating that nothing in the resolution supported any claim for compensation. A disclaimer of this kind weakens an apology, because it tells the recipients exactly how much the words are worth. Yet it does not make the words worthless: a wrong acknowledged in public and recorded by a legislature has a value independent of any courtroom.

My own view is that governments should apologise for wrongs that their predecessors committed, or permitted, when the historical record is clear and the wrong was done by the state itself. But an apology is a beginning, not a settlement. Its worth lies in what follows it — in reformed institutions, in teaching, and in measures agreed with the communities concerned. The question a government should ask is not whether it can be blamed for the past but whether it is willing to answer for it, and to answer for something is not to accept an inherited guilt but to take responsibility for what a continuing institution did.