IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 226

In 1922 an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India named Rakhaldas Banerji began digging into a large mound beside the Indus River, in what is now the province of Sindh in Pakistan. Local people called the place Mohenjo-daro, usually translated as 'the mound of the dead'. Banerji had been drawn there by reports of unusual finds: fragments of pottery, beads, and small square seals carved with animals and with rows of signs that nobody could read. What his trenches revealed was not a burial ground but the remains of a city built of baked brick, laid out with a regularity that astonished him.

Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, an urban culture that flourished in the plains of the Indus and its tributaries between roughly 2600 and 1900 BCE. Its people built cities, kept written records, traded over great distances and made jewellery and toys of remarkable quality. They were contemporaries of the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and their cities were laid out on a scale that few settlements elsewhere could match. The civilisation was already known from Harappa, excavated in the 1920s, but the discoveries in Sindh showed that it had been far more extensive than anyone had supposed.

The city is divided into two parts. To the west stands a raised platform of mud brick faced with baked brick, usually called the citadel; to the east lies the lower town, where most people lived and worked. The streets of the lower town follow a grid, crossing at right angles, and the principal thoroughfares were wide enough for carts. Beneath the streets ran covered drains of brick, with inspection holes at intervals, and many houses had bathrooms, private wells and rubbish chutes. Bricks were made in a standard proportion of four to two to one, a consistency that implies shared rules of measurement across a very large region.

The most famous structure on the citadel is the Great Bath, a rectangular tank roughly twelve metres by seven, sunk into the ground, with steps at either end leading down into the water. Its floor and walls were made watertight with a layer of bitumen, and a well close by supplied it; a drain carried the used water away. Nobody knows what the bath was for. Some archaeologists believe it was used for ritual purification, since water appears to have been important in the religious life of the cities, but no readable text confirms the idea.

Beside the bath stood a group of buildings that early excavators identified as a granary and a college of priests, together with a large pillared hall. These labels have not worn well. The granary may have had nothing to do with grain, and the function of the hall is still disputed. What can be said is that the citadel contains structures unlike ordinary houses, built on a scale that required the organised labour of many people and the storage of a considerable surplus.

The everyday life of the city is known mainly through smaller objects. Thousands of seals have been found, usually of steatite, carved with humped bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants and other animals, and with strings of signs in the Indus script. That script has never been deciphered: the inscriptions are short, no bilingual text has come to light, and the language behind the signs is unknown. Excavation also produced a small bronze figure of a young woman, a bearded stone head that early writers nicknamed the priest-king, and quantities of beads, bangles and toys.

Notably absent are the obvious signs of royalty that fill sites of the same date in Egypt and Mesopotamia: no tomb of a named ruler, no temple with a statue of a god, no palace clearly marked out as such. This has encouraged the view that the Indus cities were comparatively egalitarian, governed by merchants or assemblies rather than kings. Other scholars regard the citadel itself as evidence of a powerful authority, whatever form it took. Without readable texts, the argument is unlikely to be settled soon.

Mohenjo-daro was gradually abandoned after about 1900 BCE, and the reasons remain disputed. The cities depended on rivers that shift their courses, and the climate of the region grew drier as the monsoon weakened. Trade with Mesopotamia declined, and the cities may have lost the networks that had sustained them. An invasion by Indo-European-speaking peoples was once widely blamed and is still repeated in popular accounts, but archaeologists no longer accept it: there is no layer of destruction, and the decline appears to have been gradual.

The ruins are now in danger. Groundwater and salt have attacked the bricks, and the Indus has flooded the site more than once; exceptionally heavy rains in 2022 caused serious damage. Conservation has gone on for decades with mixed results, and some early repairs, including the use of cement and the addition of a modern brick layer, have created problems of their own. UNESCO added Mohenjo-daro to its World Heritage List in 1980.

Only a fraction of the city has been examined, and much of what was dug in the 1920s was recorded less carefully than modern standards require. Every new technique, from satellite survey to the analysis of ancient DNA in burials, offers a way of asking fresh questions of a city that has still not told us its name.

Alchemy has a poor reputation. In popular accounts it is a story of frauds and dreamers squandering their lives in the search for a way to turn lead into gold, or for an elixir that would abolish death. Historians of science take a different view. For more than a thousand years, from Greek-speaking Egypt through the Islamic world to the courts of Renaissance Europe, men and women who called themselves alchemists assembled the apparatus, the materials and much of the knowledge from which chemistry would eventually be built.

Their workshops were serious places. Alchemists designed and refined furnaces, stills, retorts and water baths, and they were among the first to describe the preparation of the strong mineral acids, including the mixture that dissolves gold. They worked with salts, sulphur, mercury, arsenic and a wide range of plant and mineral substances, and they devised tests for identifying them. In the Islamic world, writers such as Jabir ibn Hayyan and al-Razi produced systematic accounts of distillation, crystallisation and the classification of materials, which were translated into Latin and studied in Europe for centuries afterwards.

The most influential reformer of the discipline was Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus and died in 1541. He insisted that its proper business was medicine rather than gold, and that the physician should prepare remedies from minerals as well as from plants. In place of the four elements of Greek philosophy he proposed three principles — salt, sulphur and mercury — which he believed could be separated out of any substance. His writing was combative and often obscure, but his emphasis on experiment and on chemical remedies reshaped medical thinking for a century.

Robert Boyle, an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, is often described as a bridge between the two disciplines. His book The Sceptical Chymist, published in 1661, attacked the idea that all bodies were composed of four elements or of three principles, arguing instead that matter consisted of tiny particles whose arrangement produced the qualities we observe. Yet Boyle was not a modern chemist in every respect. He believed that transmutation might be possible, and he helped to persuade the English Parliament to repeal a law of 1404 that had made it an offence to multiply gold or silver.

One of the strangest episodes belongs to the same period. A German alchemist named Hennig Brand, hoping to find the philosopher's stone in the human body, boiled large quantities of urine and in the 1660s obtained a waxy substance that glowed in the dark and burned fiercely. He had discovered phosphorus, the first element whose discovery is credited to a known individual.

The decisive break came in France. Antoine Lavoisier, working in the 1770s and 1780s, showed that combustion was not the release of a fiery substance but the combination of a gas he named oxygen with the burning material. By weighing everything involved before and after a reaction, he established that matter is neither created nor destroyed in chemical change. His Traité élémentaire de chimie of 1789 set out a list of simple substances that could not be broken down further, together with a system of names for compounds. Lavoisier was executed in 1794, during the Terror, at the age of fifty.

Explanation followed measurement. John Dalton, a Quaker schoolmaster in Manchester, proposed that each element consisted of atoms of a particular kind, identical in weight to one another but different from those of every other element, and that compounds were formed when atoms joined in fixed proportions. When chemists found that elements always combine in whole-number ratios by weight, Dalton's atoms offered a reason. His New System of Chemical Philosophy appeared in 1808; the table of atomic weights it contained was rough, but the method was the foundation of the science.

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, a Swedish chemist, gave the new theory its working language. It was he who proposed, in 1813, that elements should be represented by one or two letters taken from their Latin names, and he and his students determined atomic weights with a care that made chemical formulas trustworthy. He also coined several terms that chemists still use, among them catalysis and isomerism.

Why did alchemy give way? Not, for the most part, because a single experiment disproved it. Its central claim, that one metal could be transformed into another, was impossible to test decisively with the equipment available, and the secrecy that surrounded the work made it hard to check. What changed was the standard of proof. Chemistry required results that others could repeat, weights that could be compared and findings that were published. Quantification, rather than the refutation of magic, was the crucial step.

Much of the older subject survives inside the newer one. The vocabulary of chemistry is full of Arabic words — alcohol, alkali, alembic — that entered Latin through translations of alchemical texts, and the bench, the still and the crucible are inherited directly. Alchemy was not a false start but a long apprenticeship, during which the techniques of chemistry were perfected years before anyone could explain why they worked.

When a streaming service adds a film made fifty years ago to its catalogue, it inherits a problem. A comedy may contain a joke about a disabled character that its makers intended as harmless fun; a thriller may use a racial slur as casual decoration; a cartoon may include a caricature that a modern audience finds unforgivable. In 2019 the Disney studio began attaching warnings to some of its older titles, and in June 2020 the service HBO Max briefly removed Gone with the Wind before restoring it with an introduction by a film scholar. Such decisions raise a question about how a society should treat its own cultural past.

The argument for cutting is easily stated. Films were made by people who shared the prejudices of their time, and some of those prejudices were written into the scripts, the casting and the jokes. A viewer who belongs to a group that was once mocked on screen is entitled to watch a film without being reminded, in the middle of an evening's entertainment, that people like them were once figures of fun. The injury is not imaginary simply because the film is old. Art does not float above history; it carries the assumptions of the society that produced it, and those assumptions can wound.

It is also true that the distinction between public and private censorship is less clean than it appears. Whether a scene disappears because a government board demands it or because a company fears criticism, the result is identical: something that once existed no longer does. The word 'censorship' is reserved for the state, and the quiet editing that companies do to protect their reputation escapes the label. The Hollywood studios of the 1930s cut their own films to satisfy the Production Code, a set of moral rules enforced from 1934, and nobody describes the prints that circulated as censored, although they were.

Against this, it must be said that a warning is not a cut. An advisory notice, however clumsily worded, leaves the work intact and adds something to it; the viewer remains free to continue, to stop, or to watch in a different frame of mind. Removing a scene, by contrast, takes a decision on the viewer's behalf and gives no indication that any decision has been taken. The first is a form of hospitality; the second is a quiet act of authority.

The appeal to the original version is also less straightforward than campaigners sometimes assume. Many films of the studio era survive only in prints that were altered before release, or re-edited for television, or shortened for cinemas in particular countries. Restorers frequently work with incomplete material and make choices of their own, and a director's cut assembled decades later is itself a new object. A scene restored today may be a piece of guesswork, and nobody can say with certainty which take the director preferred. The purity of the original is often a convenient fiction rather than a fact.

What, then, should be done? The alternative to cutting is not silence. A short introduction, a note on the screen, a programme of accompanying material, can do what a cut cannot: it can explain, complicate and preserve at the same time. The information need not be solemn; a sentence or two is usually enough. Nor is explanation as fragile as its critics claim. A viewer who has been told why a scene was once thought funny is in a better position to judge it than one who has simply had it removed, and rather better placed than one who has never been told that the scene existed.

Two objections deserve answers. The first is that some material is beyond explanation, and that asking a viewer to sit through it is a form of cruelty; to this I would reply that the viewer may always stop watching, whereas a cut makes that decision on everyone's behalf. The second is that warnings are a fig leaf, allowing a company to profit from a work while appearing to disapprove of it. That objection has force: a business that denounces its own product in a caption has done very little. Where a company genuinely believes a film to be indefensible, withdrawal is at least honest.

None of this means that no cutting is ever justified. Correcting a technical fault, restoring a damaged soundtrack or removing a scene inserted without the consent of those filmed seems to me plainly different from editing a work because its ideas are unwelcome. Repairs of that kind are usually documented, and the original material is preserved alongside them; deletions made for reasons of taste rarely leave any record at all. The distinction is between repairs that return a film to what it was and changes that make it something it never was.

My own position is therefore simple. Show the film, show it whole, and explain it. A society that hides the uglier parts of its inheritance cannot understand them, and cannot argue with them either. Leaving an uncomfortable scene in place, and saying why it is there, is a more honest tribute to the people it once hurt than deleting it.