IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 223

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest continuous railway in the world. From Moscow to Vladivostok it runs for roughly 9,300 kilometres across the whole of Siberia, and for most of its length it passes through territory that, when the line was planned, had no roads worth the name. The decision to build it was taken in 1891, and the work that followed was one of the largest engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Its purposes were partly military, partly economic and partly political: to move troops quickly to the far eastern frontier, to carry Siberian grain and minerals to markets in the west, and to bind a vast empire more tightly together.

The scheme owed much to Sergei Witte, who as finance minister pressed the case for a railway that would open Siberia to settlement and trade. In 1891 the Tsarevich Nicholas, then heir to the throne, travelled to Vladivostok and laid the first stone of the eastern terminus. Work then began at both ends of the route at once, crews advancing westwards from the Pacific coast and eastwards from the Urals. Nothing on this scale had been attempted before in such conditions, and nobody could say how long it would take.

The obstacles were formidable. Survey parties mapped rivers a kilometre wide, among them the Ob, the Yenisei and the Amur, and crossed forests and marshes where the ground froze solid for half the year. Rails, locomotives and bridge parts had to be brought thousands of kilometres by river barge and cart. The labour was done largely by hand, with picks, crowbars, shovels and wheelbarrows. Many of the workers were peasants from the overcrowded provinces of European Russia, but soldiers and convicts were also employed, and the numbers involved ran into the tens of thousands. They lived in tents and earth shelters, and disease and the cold killed many of them; no reliable figure for the death toll exists.

Pressure to finish quickly shaped how the line was built. The first track was light, the embankments were low and many bridges were made of timber, so that construction could be pushed ahead before the ground had settled. The result was a route that worked, but slowly: a train could take several weeks to reach the Pacific, and floods washed out bridges almost every spring. In the following decades much of the line had to be rebuilt with heavier rails and stone bridges before it could carry the traffic its planners had imagined.

Lake Baikal presented the hardest problem. The line reached Irkutsk, on the western shore, in 1898, but the cliffs and steep valleys along the southern shore made a railway round the lake a costly undertaking, and for several years trains were carried across the water instead. An ice-breaking ferry, built in Britain and shipped to Siberia in pieces, entered service in 1900 and could take a whole train of wagons in one crossing. In winter, when the ice grew thick, a temporary track was laid over it and locomotives crossed on the frozen surface. The lakeside line itself, cutting through tunnels and rock, was not finished until 1905.

Meanwhile a shortcut had been built across Manchuria. Between 1897 and 1903 the Chinese Eastern Railway carried the route south-east from Chita through Harbin to Vladivostok, cutting hundreds of kilometres from the journey and avoiding the difficult country along the Amur. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 changed the calculation, however: the southern section of that line passed into Japanese hands, and the Russian government decided that it needed a route running entirely through its own territory.

The Amur line, built between 1908 and 1916, supplied that route, and it required a bridge of unprecedented size across the Amur at Khabarovsk. When the bridge was completed in 1916, the whole journey from Moscow to Vladivostok could at last be made on Russian track. The celebration was short-lived, since revolution and civil war interrupted traffic, and it was not until the 1920s that regular through services were established.

The railway transformed Siberia. Settlers moved east in large numbers, taking up farmland that the state made available, and towns grew up where the line crossed the great rivers: the settlement that became Novosibirsk was founded in 1893 at the crossing of the Ob. Refrigerated wagons carried Siberian butter to European markets, and grain, timber and coal followed. The line also made it easier for the state to send exiles and prisoners into Siberia, a use that its planners had always intended.

Today the route is electrified along its whole length, the last stretch having been converted only in the early 2000s, and much of it is double-tracked. Container trains from China and Japan use it, though far fewer than its builders hoped, and the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok still takes about six days. For travellers, the railway remains a way of measuring the size of the country: a week of forest, steppe and wide rivers, with the same timetable hanging at every station.

For roughly three centuries, from the sixth century BC until the fleets of the Hellenistic kings, the trireme was the standard warship of the Mediterranean. The name comes from the Greek word for three, and refers to the three banks of oars that drove it. At the sea battle off Salamis in 480 BC the Athenian fleet is said to have numbered well over a hundred of these ships, and vessels of the same type were still being built when the Roman navy adopted them. Each ship was commanded by a trierarch, a wealthy citizen who paid part of the cost of fitting it out, a duty that Athens treated as a form of public service.

A trireme was about 37 metres long and no more than six metres wide, and it carried a crew of around 200, of whom 170 were rowers. Most of the hull was open, with a deck at the stern and a small platform for archers at the bow. The bow itself ended in a bronze ram, cast in one piece and fixed to the timber of the keel and the lower hull, which was intended to punch a hole in an enemy's side. Along each side ran an outrigger, a structure projecting beyond the hull that allowed the oars of the highest bank to reach the water at a workable angle. Because the hull was long and narrow, cables were stretched from end to end and tightened to stop it bending in heavy seas. A single mast amidships could carry a square sail, though it was usually lowered before a fight.

The rowers sat in three banks, one above another, known as thranites, zygioi and thalamites. The thalamites, at the bottom, worked their oars through ports cut close to the waterline, while those above sat on benches that rose step by step towards the deck. The 170 men pulled together for hours, and the timing was set by a piper or by a man striking a mallet. Older accounts assumed that such work must have been done by slaves, and for a long time historians accepted the assumption. The evidence points the other way. Athenian comedy treats rowers as citizens, and the fleet was manned largely by free men, including members of the poorest class, who were paid by the state.

Much of what is known about the ships comes from records and buildings rather than from the ships themselves. At Zea, one of the harbours of Piraeus, archaeologists have identified the stone slipways of the sheds in which Athenian warships were kept, and their dimensions confirm the length of the vessels. Inscriptions carved on stone list the ships of the Athenian fleet, the equipment handed back at the end of each season and the oars each vessel carried, giving an unusually detailed picture of how a navy was administered. The inventories were compiled each year by officials, so a single vessel and its gear can be followed from one campaign to the next. Such documents are precise about numbers and silent about almost everything else, and they cannot tell us how a ship handled at sea.

Images provide a different kind of evidence. A fragment of marble sculpture from Athens, known as the Lenormant relief and made around 400 BC, shows the midships of a trireme, with the heads and shoulders of three levels of oarsmen and the blades of their oars projecting through the side. In 1980 divers off Athlit, in Israel, found a bronze ram still attached to a piece of timber, one of very few ancient rams to survive, though it probably came from a warship larger than a trireme. It showed how the bronze was cast and how it was fixed to the hull with nails and a collar.

In battle, a trireme's weapon was its speed. A fleet typically formed a line and tried either to row straight through the opposing line, a manoeuvre called the diekplous, or to sweep round its flank, the periplous. Both required the rowers to produce a burst of speed at exactly the right moment, and both depended on a disciplined crew: a fleet that lost the rhythm lost its speed, and an inexperienced fleet could be beaten by a smaller but better-drilled one. Ships also carried soldiers, who fought on deck once a vessel had been grappled, but the ram remained the principal means of sinking an enemy. The historians and playwrights who describe these battles were not writing technical manuals, and their accounts leave much unexplained.

How fast a trireme could travel is disputed. In 1987 a full-scale reconstruction, Olympias, was built for the Greek navy to designs prepared by the historian John Morrison and the naval architect John Coates, and it was crewed by 170 volunteer rowers. In trials it reached about nine knots, and it could not sustain even that for long. The figure is impressive for a wooden ship of its size, but it falls short of the speeds implied by some ancient accounts, which has led to arguments that the ancient crews were better trained or that the reconstruction is wrong in some respect.

Important questions remain open. No complete warship of the class has ever been recovered from the sea, and the warm waters of the Mediterranean destroy timber quickly. It is still unclear whether the upper rowers' oars passed through the outrigger or over the top of it, how far a trireme could travel in a day, and whether all three banks rowed for the whole of a voyage or took turns. On such details the evidence is too thin, and a model is not the same thing as the ship: an experiment can suggest what was possible, but it cannot prove what was done.

Ask a general reader to name a historian's subject and the answer is usually a person: a queen, a general, a revolutionary. Thomas Carlyle gave this instinct its most famous form. In a series of lectures delivered in 1840, he argued that the story of humanity was essentially the story of a handful of exceptional men. The claim was not mere flattery. Carlyle believed that admiration for such figures amounted to a moral education, and that a nation which had stopped believing in heroes had lost something valuable.

The objections came quickly. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher and sociologist, replied that a great man is himself a product of his society, which must have reached a particular state before his talents could be used. A brilliant general in a country without roads, money or soldiers would achieve nothing. Spencer's point is that the hero and the age cannot be separated, and that to credit the individual with the change is to mistake the last step in a long process for the whole of it. The argument was aimed at readers who liked to see their own age as the work of a few commanding minds.

Twentieth-century history moved in Spencer's direction. In France, the historians associated with the journal Annales argued that the most interesting questions concerned climate, land, population and trade over long periods rather than the decisions of kings. Fernand Braudel's study of the Mediterranean gave half its length to mountains, sea routes and harvests before a single battle is described. Such history was often quantitative, patient and deliberately unheroic, and it changed what counted as evidence: tax records, parish registers and ships' manifests became as valuable as treaties and memoirs.

A parallel movement recovered the lives of those who had left few documents. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, took as its subject the artisans and weavers whom earlier historians had treated as a backdrop. He tried to reconstruct their beliefs and customs from court records, pamphlets and songs. Similar work followed in women's history and in oral history, where interviews with people who had never expected to be asked gave historians material that no archive contained.

Microhistory pushed the method further. In The Cheese and the Worms, published in 1976, Carlo Ginzburg reconstructed the world of a sixteenth-century Italian miller whose remarks about religion brought him before the Inquisition. The man's ideas were his own, formed from books he had borrowed and arguments he had heard in his village, and the trial documents reveal both a singular mind and the intellectual climate of the time. A single obscure life, carefully examined, can illuminate structures of belief that no chronicle of princes would show.

Yet the retreat from individuals has costs. Structures do not make decisions; people do. A history composed only of long movements and demographic trends can explain why something was possible but not why it happened at one moment rather than another, or why one course was chosen and another rejected. When responsibility is dissolved into circumstance, it becomes hard to say that anyone was to blame for anything, a conclusion that suits those who committed the acts. Epidemics and harvest failures may be the product of millions of small decisions, but a decision to go to war is not.

The opposite error is just as serious. A history built around a few celebrated figures quietly assumes that the achievements of a society belong to the people whose names were carved on the monument. Cathedrals, railways and fortunes were built by labourers whose names are unknown, and the inventor is usually one of many people working on the same problem at the same time. A story with one central character must also leave out much of what gave that character room to act, so the past comes to look simpler than it was.

The most illuminating work now crosses the old boundary. A good biography asks what in a society made its subject possible, and a good social history shows how changes were carried out by particular people in particular places. The best of this work is neither a chronicle of kings nor a history without actors, and it is usually written with an eye on both the person and the circumstances that formed them. The fashion for one approach or the other says less about evidence than about what historians want their readers to feel: admiration, sympathy or indignation.

My own view is that ordinary people should be at the centre of history, but not because individuals do not matter. Their lives raise the questions that connect the past to the present, and a history that leaves them out is not merely incomplete but misleading. The great figures remain worth studying, provided we ask what they were able to do, who made that possible, and who paid for it.