IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 224

When California became a state in 1850, it lay more than two thousand kilometres from the rest of the country, across mountains and desert. Letters from the east travelled by steamship, either across the Isthmus of Panama or around the southern tip of South America, and the journey took weeks. A stagecoach route through the south, opened in 1858, cut the time to about twenty-four days, but it was slow and often unreliable. Merchants in San Francisco, newspaper editors and politicians all wanted something faster, and the service that answered them was provided not by the government but by private enterprise.

The firm behind it was Russell, Majors and Waddell, which had made its fortune carrying freight across the plains to army posts and mining camps. Its partners, William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell, traded under the name of the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, and they expected to win a federal contract for carrying the mail. Their route ran from St Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, a distance of some 1,900 miles, and letters would travel the whole way in relays, passed from one rider to the next. The Pony Express was the name by which the venture was advertised, though it was never the company's formal title.

To make such speed possible, the company built relay stations at intervals of roughly ten miles, where a rider changed horses, and larger home stations where one rider handed his load to another, usually after between seventy-five and a hundred miles. It is generally said to have maintained around 190 stations and to have employed about eighty riders and several hundred horses. Riders were selected for their lightness rather than their strength, and many of them were still teenagers; by the standards of the day they were paid well.

The most distinctive piece of equipment was the mochila, a leather cover that fitted over the saddle and had four pockets, three of them locked. Letters were sorted into the pockets, and because the mochila could be lifted from one saddle and dropped onto another, a change of horses took only a minute or two. The design also meant that the mail was never left unattended, and it restricted each load to about twenty pounds.

The first riders left St Joseph and Sacramento on 3 April 1860, and the service was immediately popular. Its achievements were real, if occasional. When Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address was carried to California in 1861, it reached Sacramento in seven days and seventeen hours, an average of more than 160 miles a day. Not every journey was so quick, since weather and accident could add days to a schedule. Normally, however, the mail took about ten days, which was still less than half the time taken by the overland stagecoach.

The price matched the speed. At first the charge was five dollars for every half ounce, a sum comparable with a labourer's weekly wage, and although it was later reduced to a dollar, the Pony Express remained a service for businesses, newspapers and the wealthy rather than for ordinary families. What customers were buying was urgency: financial news, political intelligence and reports for the press, which could then be printed for a far wider readership.

The route crossed some of the most difficult country in North America — deserts, mountain passes and rivers without bridges — and it operated in all weathers. In 1860, fighting between the army and Native American groups in what is now Nevada destroyed stations and forced the company to suspend part of the route. Riders were expected to defend themselves and their mail, and there are accounts of horses lost to exhaustion, snow and flood.

A few riders became famous. Robert Haslam, known as Pony Bob, was celebrated for a ride in 1860 in which he covered some 120 miles after the man who was to relieve him refused to continue. William Cody, later famous as Buffalo Bill, claimed to have ridden for the company as a boy; the claim is often repeated, though some historians have questioned it.

Speed, however, could not save the business. In 1860 Congress passed an act providing federal money for a telegraph line across the continent, and on 24 October 1861 the line was completed, having been built eastwards from California and westwards from Nebraska. A horse-borne mail service was now redundant, and the Pony Express closed two days later, eighteen months after it had begun. The partners lost a great deal of money, and their firm did not long survive.

The service is remembered far more often than it was ever profitable. It has come to stand for speed, endurance and enterprise, and the picture of a lone rider galloping through the night has proved more durable than the company that created it. For historians of communication its significance is modest; for the wider public it is enormous. The advertisement said to have called for small, wiry young men, though no copy from 1860 has ever been found, is still quoted as though it were a document of the age.

Every calendar is a compromise, because the year cannot be divided neatly into days. The calendar used in Europe for sixteen centuries was introduced on the advice of Greek astronomers by Julius Caesar, who in 46 BC replaced a confused lunar system with one based on the sun. The system he replaced had been so disordered that the year 46 BC was extended to 445 days in order to bring the calendar back into line with the seasons. Caesar's own calendar gave the year 365 days and added an extra day every fourth year, so that its average length was 365.25 days. The actual time the earth takes to return to the same point in its orbit, however, is about 365.2422 days. The difference is small — roughly eleven minutes a year — but it accumulates, and after a few centuries it becomes visible in the seasons.

By the sixteenth century the accumulated error had become an embarrassment. The Church had fixed the date of Easter at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and it was agreed that Easter should fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, which at that time fell on 21 March. By the 1570s, however, the equinox was arriving on 11 March, ten days early. The error also disturbed those who used the calendar to date saints' days, to plan the agricultural year and, increasingly, to record astronomical observations.

The eventual reform came from the papacy. Pope Gregory XIII appointed a commission, and its technical work drew on a scheme produced by a physician and astronomer from Calabria, Luigi Lilio, who was known in Latin as Aloysius Lilius and who died before the commission had finished its work. The scheme had been submitted to the Pope some years earlier, and it was examined by scholars and churchmen before it was adopted. The decisive text, a papal bull of February 1582, ordered that ten days be omitted: in the states that accepted it, Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed immediately by Friday 15 October. The same document set out a new method for calculating Easter.

The lasting part of the reform was a new rule for leap years. Years divisible by four would remain leap years, but century years would not, unless they were also divisible by 400: 1600 was a leap year, 1700 and 1800 were not, and 2000 was. The average length of the year under this rule is 365.2425 days, only about 26 seconds longer than the astronomical year, and therefore roughly a day too long every three thousand years. The bull also replaced the tables for calculating Easter, which had to be reprinted periodically as the underlying cycles shifted.

Adoption depended on politics as much as on astronomy. The states of Catholic Europe — Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland among them — accepted the new calendar almost at once. Protestant states, whose rulers had no wish to accept an order from Rome, delayed: the German Protestant territories adopted it in 1700, and Britain and its American colonies followed in 1752, by which time eleven days had to be removed. Sweden managed the change gradually, over several decades. Russia did not switch until after the revolution of 1917, when 31 January was followed by 14 February, and Greece waited until 1923.

The documents that allow historians to follow the reform are unusually abundant. The papal bull itself survives, as do the printed calendars and almanacs prepared for parishes, the correspondence of the mathematicians involved and the manuals in which the new rules were explained to clergy and officials. Astronomers can also check the reform by calculating backwards: the observations of the equinox that the commission used can be compared with the date on which the equinox actually fell in 1582. Parish registers, which sometimes record both dates for the same event, show how the change was applied in practice, and notarial documents reveal the confusion it caused.

The evidence has not settled every question. Much of Lilio's own manuscript is lost, and the surviving summaries were written by others, so historians dispute how much of the final scheme was his and how much was the work of the Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius, who defended and explained the reform for the rest of his life. There is a further question about whether the reform was primarily religious or scientific. It was prompted by the need to keep Easter in its proper season, yet it relied on careful measurement and on observations accepted by astronomers of every faith.

Popular stories often exaggerate the disruption. It is sometimes said that crowds in 1752 rioted and demanded their eleven days back, but historians who have looked for contemporary evidence have found very little; the change created difficulties for accounts, rents and wages, but it appears to have been accepted with more grumbling than violence. What is certain is that the new calendar worked. It spread, in time, across the world, and it is now used for civil purposes almost everywhere. Because the rule still leaves a small error, astronomers have occasionally proposed a further adjustment, but no change has been agreed.

Few historical labels are as familiar, or as slippery, as the Renaissance. The word itself is old: Italian writers of the sixteenth century, among them the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, used it to describe what they believed was a rebirth of the arts after centuries of decline. Its modern meaning, however, owes more to the nineteenth century, and above all to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose book on the civilisation of Renaissance Italy, published in 1860, presented the period as the moment when the individual and the modern world were born. The question is whether that description records a real change or flatters a small part of Europe.

Defenders of the traditional account have plenty to point to. In the visual arts, the period produced a new understanding of perspective and anatomy, and a style of building and sculpture that deliberately imitated classical models. Printing, developed in the middle of the fifteenth century, multiplied books faster than any earlier method, and Greek texts lost in western Europe were recovered and translated. Above all, writers of the period expressed a new confidence in human capacity, in the power of learning and eloquence to improve both the individual and the city. To those who hold this view, the Renaissance is the beginning of the modern world.

Critics reply that the Middle Ages were never the gap that the word implies. Medieval Europe built cathedrals of extraordinary technical ambition, founded universities, and adopted inventions that changed daily life, among them the mechanical clock, spectacles and the heavy plough. The numerals that made arithmetic practical reached Europe from the Islamic world, and translations made in Toledo and Sicily gave Latin readers philosophy and science they had lost. In 1927 the American scholar Charles Homer Haskins described a renaissance of the twelfth century, and much of what looked new in Italy had been assembled earlier elsewhere.

Historians of art have complicated the picture in a different way. The new naturalism was real, but it was paid for by a narrow group of patrons: princely families, wealthy merchants and the papacy itself. Contracts specified the subject, the size, the colours and even the quantity of gold to be used, and most of the paintings and sculptures produced were religious in purpose. The period was not a sudden conversion to secular curiosity but a change in style, serving purposes that a thirteenth-century bishop would have recognised.

Historians of science make a similar argument. The period did not produce modern science: astrology and alchemy flourished, and Copernicus's claim that the earth moved around the sun, published in 1543, convinced few people before 1600. What the humanists did contribute was a set of skills. By comparing manuscripts, and by asking whether a document could have been written when it claimed, they developed the technique of detecting errors and forgeries in old texts. The gift of the period to science, on this account, was a habit of doubt rather than a body of discoveries.

Economic historians ask a different question, namely what changed for the majority. For most Europeans the answer is: very little. Harvests, rents, disease and the price of bread governed their lives, and the wealth generated by trade and by the printing press was concentrated in a handful of cities. If a turning point is to be measured by the experience of ordinary people, the great break came later, with the commercial expansion of the sixteenth century and, far more decisively, with industrialisation.

For literary scholars, the central achievement is the recovery of classical Latin and the effort to write in imitation of it. This was a movement of the study and the desk: scholars learned to read ancient authors closely, to imitate their style and to argue about their texts. It was also an elite pursuit, conducted in a language that most people could not read. Printing did not resolve the matter, because it spread old superstition as readily as new learning.

My own view is that the Renaissance is real, but that it needs to be located more precisely than Burckhardt located it. What changed was the relationship between a small, literate minority and its past: the sense of a gap between their own age and antiquity, and the ambition to close that gap by imitating and surpassing it. That is a genuine change, and an important one, but it is a change in culture and in self-consciousness, not a transformation of the conditions in which most people lived.

Whether the term is justified, then, depends on the question being asked. For the history of art, of scholarship, of architecture and of the printed book, the period is a watershed, and a historian who ignores it will misunderstand what followed. For the history of agriculture, of disease, of wages or of ordinary labour, it is almost invisible. Both statements can be true at once, because they describe different parts of the same society.

The danger of the label is not that it is meaningless but that it flatters. It invites us to trace the origins of our own world to a few Italian cities and to overlook what continued unchanged beside them. Used with care, the word is a useful name for a shift in elite culture; used as a verdict on an age, it misleads.