IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 232

In 1900 a group of sponge divers sheltering from a storm near the small Greek island of Antikythera noticed what appeared to be the wreck of a ship on the sea bed. Using simple diving suits and considerable courage, they brought up bronze and marble statues, glassware, jewellery and coins from a cargo vessel that had sunk in about 70 BC. The finds were taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and there, in 1902, someone noticed that one corroded lump of bronze contained something altogether unexpected: the remains of gear wheels.

For years the largest fragment was displayed as a curiosity, a corroded mass of bronze about the size of a shoebox. Its importance was recognised only gradually. A museum archaeologist eventually noticed a gear wheel embedded in the metal, and closer examination revealed inscriptions and the outlines of many more gears. The device had been housed in a wooden case, of which only fragments of the frame survived, and it had once been protected by bronze covers. At least thirty gear wheels remain, cut by hand from sheet bronze with triangular teeth, the largest about thirteen centimetres across.

The first serious study was undertaken by Derek de Solla Price, a historian of science at Yale University, who examined the fragments in the 1950s and published a detailed account in 1974. Working from X-ray photographs, he counted the teeth on the surviving gears and proposed that the instrument had been used to calculate the positions of the sun and moon. His conclusions were greeted with scepticism by some scholars, who found it hard to accept that so complex a mechanism could have existed in the ancient world. Price also argued that a dial on the front showed the movements of the planets, but he could read too little of the inscriptions to prove it.

In the 1990s a British museum curator, Michael Wright, began making his own X-ray images and later built working reconstructions. Interest was transformed in 2005, when a team led by the mathematician Tony Freeth and the astronomer Mike Edmunds used a specially built X-ray computed tomography machine to scan the fragments. The scans revealed inscriptions hidden inside the plates and the shapes of gears that had been invisible for two thousand years. Results published in the journal Nature in 2006 showed that the plates carried a long text which was, in effect, a user's manual, describing what each dial displayed and in what order the movements occurred.

The mechanism appears to have been built in the second century BC, although the precise date and place of manufacture remain uncertain. Its front dial showed the position of the sun and moon against the zodiac, together with the phase of the moon; on the back were two spiral dials for calendars.

One followed the nineteen-year Metonic cycle, which reconciled the lunar month with the solar year. Another predicted eclipses using the Saros cycle of 223 lunar months, and a smaller dial gave the dates of the Olympic Games and other festivals. Among the gear trains was a pin-and-slot device that modelled the varying speed of the moon across the sky, an irregularity that had puzzled astronomers for centuries.

To produce these movements the maker cut gears with as many as 223 teeth and meshed them so that a single turn of the main axle generated a series of different cycles. Nothing remotely as complicated is known from the ancient world, and no comparable gearing appears in Europe until the astronomical clocks of the fourteenth century, more than a thousand years later. The dial of the Games is the only part of the instrument that refers to the human world rather than to the sky, and its presence has been taken as a sign that the device was made for a public or aristocratic audience rather than for an astronomer's private use.

Some historians suspect that it was not unique. The Roman writer Cicero, in the first century BC, described bronze spheres made by Archimedes and by the Stoic philosopher Posidonius which reproduced the movements of the sun, moon and planets. Whether these were geared devices of the same kind is unknown, but they suggest that the idea of modelling the heavens in metal was already familiar to educated Romans, and that a craftsman with the necessary skills might have found a patron for such work.

Divers have returned to the wreck several times since 2014, recovering more objects but no second mechanism. Study of the original continues. In 2021 a team published a reconstruction of the front dial showing the planets arranged in the order used by Greek astronomers, and analysis of the holes that survive in one ring has recently been used to argue that it marked a lunar year of 354 days rather than a solar year of 365.

The significance of the Antikythera mechanism lies less in what it predicted than in what it shows about human capability. Greek craftsmen could design precision gearing and encode a sophisticated astronomical theory in bronze at a time when, according to older accounts, such technology did not exist. It is the earliest known geared calculating device: a machine built not to do work but to calculate. That it survives at all is a matter of luck, for the wreck lay at a depth that sponge divers could only just reach, and it was a storm that happened to drive them to the spot.

For most of human history nobody farmed. If agriculture began about ten thousand years ago, then for hundreds of thousands of years before that our ancestors lived by hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. What they actually ate attracts unusual attention, partly because it is interesting in itself and partly because it has been recruited into arguments about how people should eat today. Books promising that a Stone Age diet will prevent modern disease sell in large numbers.

The first detailed studies were made in the 1960s among the !Kung San, a group of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Richard Lee, an anthropologist who spent years with them, recorded what they ate and how long they spent getting it, and his figures surprised his colleagues: the working week needed to feed a camp appeared to be well under thirty hours, shorter than that of a factory worker in the United States. Plant foods, especially the mongongo nut, supplied most of the calories. The economist Marshall Sahlins drew on such findings in an essay describing hunter-gatherers as the original affluent society, a phrase argued over ever since.

In eastern Africa, the Hadza of Tanzania have been studied for decades. They live in a dry and unpredictable landscape and move camp often. Their diet includes tubers dug from hard ground, berries, baobab fruit and meat from animals hunted with bows, but honey is the food they value most. It is collected from wild bees, sometimes with the help of a small bird that leads people to a hive, and it is eaten in quantity whenever it can be found.

At the opposite extreme are the Inuit of the Arctic, whose traditional diet contained almost no plant food. Seal, whale, fish, caribou and birds provided fat and protein in abundance, and the difficulty was not calories but vitamins. The solution was to eat much of the meat and fish raw and to consume parts of animals that other societies discard, such as liver, skin and stomach contents; these supplied vitamin C in quantities that prevented scurvy.

The Natufians, who lived in the eastern Mediterranean around twelve thousand years ago, were hunter-gatherers who had begun to settle. They harvested wild wheat and barley with flint sickles, ground the grain on stone mortars and stored it. Their diet sits on the boundary between gathering and farming, and it is one reason why the invention of agriculture is now seen as a gradual process rather than a sudden event.

In northern Australia, Aboriginal groups of Arnhem Land managed their land with fire. Small, deliberate burns were set at particular seasons to clear undergrowth and encourage fresh growth, which attracted kangaroos and other game. The archaeologist Rhys Jones called this firestick farming in 1969, and the term, though debated, captures a real point: people were shaping the environment that fed them.

All of this knowledge rests on evidence that is uneven. In most sites the material that survives best is bone and shell, so the record is tilted towards animal food; seeds, leaves, tubers and berries rot away unless they are charred or waterlogged. Flat stones used for grinding, and the silica sheen left on a sickle blade by cutting grass, provide indirect traces of plant use, and they are easy to miss. A site that produced a thousand animal bones and no plant remains may reflect the chemistry of the soil rather than the diet of its people.

Chemistry offers a way round some of these gaps. The nitrogen and carbon isotopes locked in bone collagen vary according to what a person ate, and the ratio of nitrogen isotopes rises with the amount of animal protein and of marine food. Measuring them in skeletons from a cemetery can show whether a community relied on fish or on land animals, and whether men and women, or rich and poor, ate differently. The method gives averages over years rather than a menu, and it cannot identify individual plants.

Microscopic evidence fills in another part. Dental calculus, the hardened plaque that forms on teeth, traps starch grains, pollen and fragments of plant tissue, and techniques developed in recent decades allow these to be identified. In dry caves, coprolites, preserved faeces, may contain seeds, hairs and parasites. Analyses of this kind have shown that plant foods were eaten in places where the animal bones had suggested an almost entirely carnivorous diet.

The idea of a single Stone Age diet nevertheless survives in popular writing. It should not. Hunter-gatherers lived in environments as different as tropical rainforest and Arctic tundra, and within one region the food available changed with the seasons; a year in which the game failed might force a group to eat foods it would normally ignore. Nor does the evidence support the claim that early diets were uniformly rich in meat: in some societies plant foods dominated, in others they were almost absent. Comparisons with modern health are more fragile still, since the populations studied today are not relics of the past but people living in difficult circumstances.

What the research offers is not a prescription but a corrective. It shows that our species has fed itself in an astonishing variety of ways, and that the diet of any one group is a response to a particular place, season and technology. The lesson for the present is less about what to eat than about how much variety a food system can accommodate.

Every year, somewhere in the world, a school decides that its pupils will not read the original text of a play by Shakespeare or a poem by Chaucer but a modernised version, in which obsolete words are replaced and the word order is tidied into something closer to ordinary speech. The decision is usually reported as a scandal, and the argument that follows is predictable. Yet the question behind it is a serious one, and it deserves better than either of the slogans it usually attracts. What exactly is lost when a historical text is rewritten for young readers, and what is gained?

The case for modernising begins with comprehension. A fourteen-year-old meeting a play written four hundred years ago faces unfamiliar vocabulary, unfamiliar grammar, omitted letters, puns that no longer work and references to a world of beliefs that has vanished. Where the gap is too wide, reading becomes decoding, and decoding is not the same as reading for meaning. Teachers who use modernised editions often report that pupils finish the text, argue about the characters and want to see the play performed, and that some of them then go back to the original. Access, on this view, is not a lowering of standards but the condition of ever having a standard to lower.

The urge to fit old texts to a new audience is not new. In 1807 there appeared a family edition of Shakespeare from which he had removed words and passages that could not, in his view, be read aloud in a household; the first edition is thought to have been prepared largely by Henrietta Bowdler, though later and fuller editions bore the name of her brother Thomas. His name became a verb, and the practice he represented has been mocked ever since. It is worth noticing, though, that Bowdler's motive was moral rather than linguistic. He did not think Shakespeare's language too difficult; he thought some of it too indecent. Modernisation for comprehension is a different project, even if both begin from the wish to make a text fit for a particular audience.

A more instructive precedent is the Penguin Classics. When E. V. Rieu's prose translation of Homer's Odyssey appeared in 1946, it sold in enormous numbers and was read by people who had never opened a classical text. Rieu did not claim to have improved Homer. He offered a version that would let a reader follow the story, and he assumed that some of those readers would go on to meet the poetry elsewhere. A modernised classroom text can work in the same way: as a door rather than a replacement.

Against this, the strongest argument is that in literature the language is not a container for the meaning but part of the meaning itself. Shakespeare's ambiguities, his compressed metaphors, the way a single word can carry two senses at once, are not decorations that a moderniser can remove without loss; they are the reason the plays are still read. Rewrite the text into plain prose and you may produce a clear story, but you have also produced a different work, one that no longer shows how thought and feeling were once expressed. Something similar happens with historical documents. A modernised charter or letter tells us what it says, but not how the people who wrote it thought.

The choice, however, is not simply between a purist original and a flattened rewrite. There is a spectrum of supports. Marginal glosses, facing-page versions, good footnotes, recordings, film and above all performance in a theatre can carry a great deal of the difficulty without altering a single word. A footnote that explains a joke can preserve it; a rewrite that explains it away cannot. Teachers may read a passage aloud, act it, paraphrase it and then return to the original for the final line. What makes the difference is whether the support is designed to bring the pupil back to the text or to replace it.

Assessment matters here more than is often admitted. If an examination rewards little more than the recall of plot and character, then a simplified version will do the job, and schools under pressure will choose it. If questions ask pupils to comment on a particular metaphor, to compare two speeches or to explain why a word might have been chosen, the original becomes necessary. What is examined, in other words, quietly determines what is taught, and the argument about modernisation is partly an argument about the kind of questions we set.

My own view is that modernised editions have a real place, particularly in the early years of secondary school and for pupils who are still building confidence as readers, but that they should be a starting point and never the destination. A pupil who leaves school having studied only rewritten Shakespeare has been given the story and denied the language. A pupil who has been helped through the original, slowly and with support, has acquired something that cannot be summarised: an ear for how English can be made to work.

The question, then, is not whether to modernise but how much and for how long. We should be suspicious of the assumption that difficulty is itself a virtue; but we should be equally suspicious of the assumption that a text written four centuries ago can be made entirely comfortable without ceasing to be interesting. Making the past accessible is not the same as making it disappear. The best teaching of old texts has always done both at once, and it asks more of the teacher than either slogan allows.