IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 225

On 24 January 1848, James Wilson Marshall was building a sawmill on the south fork of the American River at Coloma, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, when he noticed bright flakes in the channel that carried water away from the mill wheel. Marshall was working for John Sutter, a Swiss-born settler who had established a fort and a large estate near the junction of the Sacramento and American rivers. Tests showed that the metal was soft enough to be cut with a knife yet hard to break. Sutter later recorded his dismay, for he suspected that news of a gold strike would ruin the farming enterprise he had spent years building.

Keeping the discovery secret was impossible. The millworkers talked, and within weeks prospectors were washing gravel along the river. According to widely repeated accounts, Sam Brannan, a merchant and Mormon elder who had reached California in 1846, carried a bottle of gold dust through the streets of San Francisco and convinced the town that the rumours were true. Whether or not that episode happened as described, Brannan certainly bought up tools and supplies before publicising the find, and he profited handsomely from the customers who followed.

In December 1848, President James K. Polk confirmed the reports in a message to Congress, and the effect on migration was immediate. In 1849 alone, somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 people made the journey to California, most of them young men from the eastern states, and they became known as forty-niners. Others arrived from Latin America, Europe and Australia, and by 1850 the non-Native population of California had risen from roughly 14,000 to more than 100,000.

Getting there was dangerous. The overland route followed the California Trail for some 3,000 kilometres across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, a journey of four to six months that exposed travellers to cholera, drought and accidents with wagons and livestock. Alternatively, ships could sail around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, a voyage of five months or more in cramped conditions. A third route crossed the Isthmus of Panama by canoe and mule, which took days rather than months but left many travellers stranded on the Atlantic side waiting for a ship. The completion of a railway across the isthmus in 1855 made that crossing faster and safer.

San Francisco, a small port of a few hundred inhabitants in 1848, was transformed. Its population reached around 25,000 by 1850, and the harbour filled with ships whose crews had deserted for the goldfields. Almost everything was scarce, and prices for food, tools and accommodation rose to extraordinary levels, with a single egg said to have sold for a dollar. Fires in 1849 and 1851 destroyed large parts of the wooden town, and each time it was rebuilt, increasingly in brick and stone. California became a state in September 1850, barely two years after the discovery, without passing through the usual period as a territory.

At first, mining was a matter of individuals with a pan and a shovel, working the gravel bars of rivers. As the easy deposits were exhausted, miners adopted more elaborate equipment. A rocker, or cradle, allowed one man to wash far more gravel than a pan, and a sluice box, a long wooden channel through which water was diverted, could be worked by a small team.

From the early 1850s, companies turned to hydraulic mining, directing powerful jets of water at whole hillsides, so that the gravel was washed into tunnels and sluices. This method recovered gold on an industrial scale, but it required capital, water rights and a workforce, and it marked the end of the independent prospector.

Hydraulic mining also wrecked the landscape. Vast quantities of mud, sand and gravel were carried downstream, raising the beds of rivers and causing them to flood farmland during the winter rains. Farmers in the Sacramento Valley took the mining companies to court, and in 1884 a federal judge ruled that debris could no longer be dumped into the rivers, a decision that effectively ended large-scale hydraulic mining in California. Mercury, used to separate gold from gravel, was released in large amounts as well and settled in river sediments and the bay, where its effects on fish and wildlife persisted for generations.

Not everyone who came found a welcome. Mexican and Chilean miners, many of them experienced in silver mining, were resented by newcomers from the eastern states, and in 1850 the state legislature imposed a tax on foreign miners that was applied in ways which drove many of them away. Chinese immigrants arrived in growing numbers from the early 1850s, worked abandoned claims and took on other trades, and were subjected to further taxes and to violence. The worst consequences were borne by California's Native peoples, whose lands and food supplies were destroyed by the influx of miners; disease, displacement and killings reduced their numbers drastically, and the state government did little to protect them.

Gold production peaked in 1852, and thereafter the easily worked deposits were gone. Mining became a corporate business of deep shafts and quartz crushing, financed from San Francisco and beyond, while the prospector with a pan survived mainly in folklore. Yet the rush had permanently changed the region. Its population, its agriculture and its connections by steamship and, from 1869, by the first transcontinental railway all dated from those few years, and the town that had grown up around a harbour of deserted ships became the commercial centre of the American west.

For nearly two thousand years, educated Europeans explained illness with a theory that had been formulated in Greece. The medical writings attributed to Hippocrates, composed between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, describe the body as containing four fluids, or humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Health depended on these fluids being correctly balanced, in quantity and in quality, while disease was the result of an excess of one of them or of a disturbance in the mixture. The theory was attractive because it connected the human body to a wider account of the natural world: each humour corresponded to one of the four elements and to a pair of qualities such as hot and wet, so that medicine, cosmology and meteorology formed a single system. A physician who could reason about the elements could therefore reason about a patient.

The most influential version of the theory was constructed by Galen of Pergamon, a Greek physician who worked in Rome in the second century CE and whose writings dominated medical teaching until the Renaissance. Galen linked each humour to a season, an age of life and a temperament. Blood, associated with spring and with childhood, produced the cheerful, sociable person later called sanguine; yellow bile, hot and dry like summer, produced the irritable choleric type; black bile, cold and dry, produced the melancholy temperament; and phlegm, cold and wet like winter, produced the slow, placid phlegmatic type. Because the balance of humours could be shifted by food, sleep, exercise, weather and emotion, the theory offered a rationale for a whole way of living, in which the physician advised on diet and daily habits as much as on remedies. It was, in effect, a theory of character as well as of disease.

Diagnosis followed the logic of the system. A physician examined the pulse, the tongue and, above all, the urine, whose colour and sediment were believed to reveal which humour was excessive. Treatment aimed at removing the surplus or counteracting its qualities. Bloodletting, in which a vein was opened with a lancet or the skin was cut and cupped, was the most common remedy, and a fever with a full, hot pulse was taken to indicate too much blood. Purgatives and emetics emptied the body from above and below; diets of cooling or heating foods corrected the qualities; and drugs were classified according to whether they were warming, cooling, moistening or drying. Bloodletting was not a rare last resort but an ordinary treatment, repeated in some cases over many days, and it was performed by barbers as well as by university-trained physicians.

The theory survived the collapse of the Roman Empire partly because it was carried east. Greek medical texts were translated into Arabic from the eighth century onwards, and the Persian physician Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, produced in the eleventh century a vast encyclopaedia of medicine, the Canon, which arranged Galenic doctrine into a teachable system. Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, the Canon became a standard textbook in the new universities of Europe, and printed editions appeared long after the invention of the printing press. For a student at Bologna, Paris or Oxford, the four humours were not a hypothesis to be tested but the framework within which every medical question was posed. Disputes were settled by citing authorities rather than by observation.

The first serious challenges came from anatomy. Andreas Vesalius, a professor at Padua, published in 1543 a detailed study of the human body based on his own dissections, and corrected many errors that had entered medical teaching because Galen had dissected animals rather than people. Vesalius, however, did not question the humoral account of disease, and most physicians treated his book as a correction of detail rather than a refutation of the system. More radical was Paracelsus, a Swiss physician who dismissed the four humours and argued that disease arose from external agents attacking particular organs; his chemical remedies won few supporters among established physicians, and the universities went on teaching Galen. William Harvey's demonstration in 1628 that the blood circulates, pumped by the heart, destroyed the old physiology, yet humoral treatment continued for another two centuries.

Why did the theory last so long? One reason is that it was flexible: when a patient failed to recover, the physician could adjust the diagnosis rather than abandon the framework. Another is that most patients recovered whatever was done for them, so the system was rarely discredited by its failures. The decisive change came in the nineteenth century. The French physician Pierre Louis, working in Paris in the 1830s, counted outcomes in large groups of patients and found that bleeding did not improve the survival of those with pneumonia. Together with the germ theory of disease developed by Pasteur and Koch, and with the rise of cellular pathology, evidence of this kind made the humours untenable, and by the end of the century they had vanished from European medical education. The vocabulary survived: a sanguine colleague or a melancholic mood still carries a trace of the four fluids, and a related system of three humours is still taught within some traditional medicines.

In August 2015 the highest mountain in North America was officially renamed. For a century it had appeared on maps as Mount McKinley, a name given in 1896 by a prospector in honour of William McKinley, who was then running for president. The mountain's earlier name, Denali, had never fallen out of use among the Athabascan peoples who live around it, and the decision to restore it was welcomed in Alaska and denounced by several politicians from Ohio, McKinley's home state. Few questions about heritage arouse such strong feelings so quickly.

The case for restoration rests on a simple observation. Names given by indigenous peoples commonly describe a place: they record its shape, its water, its animals or an event associated with it, and they are often embedded in stories that explain how people should behave there. The names that replaced them usually honoured an explorer, a monarch or an administrator, many of whom had never seen the place and some of whom never visited the continent. Restoring an original name is therefore not merely a gesture of apology; it is a recognition that another body of knowledge about the place exists and has survived.

Against restoration stand the practicalities. A name is a piece of infrastructure. It appears on road signs, in land registries, on medical records, in legal judgments and in the catalogues of libraries, and every one of those appearances has to be checked when the name changes. Emergency services rely on unambiguous addresses, businesses print stationery and register trademarks, and mapping agencies must decide how long to keep the old name as a searchable alternative. Costs of this kind are rarely enormous in themselves, but they are real, and they are usually met by the same councils that are cutting other services.

The strongest objection is that renaming erases history, and that a town which removes the name of a colonial governor is somehow denying that he existed. This argument has some force where a name commemorates an event or a community that would otherwise be forgotten. But it is weaker than it sounds. Many of the names now defended as traditional were themselves innovations imposed on places that already had names, sometimes within living memory. To object to the removal of a name given in the nineteenth century is not to defend an ancient inheritance; it is to defend one episode of renaming while refusing the same freedom to those who came before and after.

A further difficulty is procedural. Who is entitled to decide? The residents of a village, the wider nation that pays for its maps, or the descendants of the people who were displaced? Consultation is expensive and slow, and it can be captured by the loudest voices on either side. A referendum on a name may become a vote on something else entirely. It is also true that renaming can be a substitute for action: a council that changes a name may feel that it has addressed an injustice while doing nothing about housing, health or education. Symbolic acts are cheap, and for that reason they are sometimes preferred to expensive ones.

There is also a conservative argument worth taking seriously. Names are shared reference points, and their usefulness depends on stability. Historians, scientists and lawyers all need to be able to trace a place through time, and a sequence of renamings makes that harder. Duplicate and ambiguous names already cause confusion, and adding new ones, or restoring names that were used only locally, can make records harder to search. The answer, though, is better indexing and a clear policy on former names, not a veto on change.

In practice, a compromise has often been found in dual naming. New Zealand has given official double names to many of its mountains, rivers and towns, pairing the Maori name with the European one, and the Australian monolith known to most of the world as Ayers Rock has carried both names officially since 1993. Dual naming acknowledges two histories at once and offends almost nobody. Its disadvantage is that double names are clumsy in speech and are often shortened in practice, so that the second element quietly disappears. It can also be a way of postponing a decision indefinitely, allowing a government to claim credit for recognition while changing nothing that people actually say.

My own view is that restoration should be the default where three conditions are met. First, the older name should have remained in continuous use among the people who live in or near the place, rather than being recovered from a single document by an enthusiast. Second, the change should follow a genuine process of local consultation, not an announcement from a capital city. Third, the transition should be funded, so that the cost does not fall on the services that the same community depends on. Where these conditions hold, the argument that a name is inconvenient seems to me weak; where they do not, a case-by-case approach and dual naming are wiser than a general rule.

Names are among the cheapest things a society can change and among the most revealing. The question is not whether we should be allowed to alter them, since we always have, but whose memory we choose to keep in the landscape and whose we allow to fade. On that question, a presumption in favour of the name that the place itself has kept is, I think, the right place to start.