IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 234

For centuries the security and prosperity of Venice depended on ships. The republic needed war galleys to defend its trade routes and merchant vessels to carry spices, salt, cloth and glass across the Mediterranean, and it needed them in large numbers and at short notice. To meet that demand the city's rulers created something without parallel in medieval Europe: the Arsenale, a shipyard owned by the state and enclosed within high brick walls on the eastern edge of the city. Visitors who today walk past its towers in the Castello district seldom realise that the quiet basins behind them were once the busiest industrial site in Europe.

The yard is traditionally said to have been founded in 1104, although the earliest surviving documents that mention it date from some decades later, and historians therefore describe its origins with caution. What is not in doubt is that it expanded steadily through the Middle Ages, absorbing neighbouring land, canals and buildings as the fleet grew. Even the name of the complex is disputed. One long-standing suggestion is that it derives from the Arabic dar al-sina'a, meaning a house of manufacture or craft, a reminder of how closely medieval Venice was tied to the trading world of the eastern Mediterranean.

Building and repairing ships consumed enormous quantities of raw material. Timber was floated down from the forests of the mountains to the north and stored under cover to season, while hemp for ropes and sails arrived by boat from the plains of northern Italy. Iron, pitch and tar came from further afield. Because all of these were valuable and easily stolen, the yard was walled and its gates were guarded night and day, and the men who worked inside were subject to rules that outsiders rarely saw.

The Arsenal was already famous enough to serve as an image for Dante. In the Inferno, written in the early fourteenth century, the poet compared the boiling pitch in which the damned are plunged to the pitch that the shipwrights of Venice boiled to caulk their vessels. He described men hammering at the ribs of ships that could not sail, one shaping the prow, another the stern, and others making oars or twisting ropes. Historians value the passage less as literature than as the earliest detailed description of the yard at work.

Much of the Arsenal's speed came from a system that later ages would call mass production. Hull frames and planks were cut to standard patterns and kept in store, so that a vessel could be assembled from parts made months or years earlier rather than shaped from scratch.

The yard contained its own ropewalk, sail lofts, foundries and bakeries, and specialised workshops made oars, masts and barrels. Rope-making was moved into a long brick hall known as the Corderie, rebuilt from 1579, a decade after a great fire had damaged the yard, and designed, according to tradition, by the architect Antonio da Ponte. Even the most routine materials were produced on the site rather than bought in.

The most celebrated claim about the yard concerns a visit by Henry III of France in 1574. According to an often repeated story, the workers assembled and launched a complete galley while the king was being entertained, proving that Venice could produce a warship in a single day. The tale is difficult to verify, and no surviving record settles the question, but it captures the reputation the Arsenal enjoyed abroad. What can be said with confidence is that the yard's capacity to fit out vessels quickly was real, and that it gave Venice an advantage over rivals who depended on scattered private boatyards.

The workforce was correspondingly large. Sixteenth-century accounts speak of as many as 16,000 people employed in the yard at its height, a figure that modern historians regard as an exaggeration but which indicates the scale of the operation. The permanent craftsmen, known as arsenalotti, formed a privileged group within Venetian society, and they lived with their families in the parish beside the yard. Their skills passed from father to son, and their loyalty mattered to a government that had reason to fear unrest in a city built on water.

Decline came slowly. As Portuguese, Dutch and English ships began to carry trade that had once passed through the Mediterranean, Venice lost the commercial base that had paid for its fleet. By the seventeenth century the yard was building far fewer vessels than in its prime, and although it was maintained and partly rebuilt, it never recovered its former scale. The end of the republic in 1797 hastened the process: French forces occupying the city removed ships and stores, and under the Austrian rule that followed, the Arsenal became a military depot rather than a shipyard.

Today the site is divided. Part of it is still occupied by the Italian navy and closed to visitors, while other basins and halls have been restored. Since 1980 the Corderie and neighbouring buildings have housed exhibitions of the Venice Biennale, and the long ropewalk has become one of the best-known art venues in Europe. The contrast is striking: halls that once rang with the noise of hammering now hold the hush of a gallery, visited by people who often have no idea what the building was for.

Obsidian is a natural glass formed when molten rock cools so quickly that its atoms cannot arrange themselves into crystals. The result is hard, brittle and capable of being fractured into an edge far finer than that of a steel scalpel. Long before metals were smelted, communities living near volcanoes were making knives, arrowheads and scrapers from it, and its smooth dark surface, usually black but sometimes green or streaked with brown, made it attractive for ornaments and mirrors as well. Toolmakers learned to strike long, thin blades from a prepared core, a skill that produced many cutting edges from a single lump of raw material. For everyday cutting, no other material then available held so sharp an edge.

What makes obsidian valuable to archaeologists is that it is scarce. It forms only where volcanoes have produced lava of the right kind, so the central and eastern Mediterranean has just a handful of sources: the island of Melos in the Cyclades, Lipari off the north coast of Sicily, Pantelleria between Sicily and Africa, Monte Arci in Sardinia, and several deposits in central and eastern Anatolia. Similar sources exist in East Africa, the Caucasus, Mexico and Japan. Because these places are few, and most of them lie across water, a piece of obsidian found far from any of them is evidence of movement between communities.

The oldest evidence of such movement in the Aegean comes from Franchthi Cave, on the coast of the Peloponnese, where obsidian from Melos appears in layers dated to roughly 11,000 years ago. Melos lies more than a hundred kilometres from the mainland and can be reached only by boat. Nobody suggests that a regular merchant fleet existed so far back, but somebody was crossing open water at a time when the first farming communities were only just forming. Finds of early obsidian in Crete and along the Anatolian coast point in the same direction, although the dating of individual pieces is often disputed.

Identifying the source of an artefact is a matter of chemistry. Small samples, sometimes no larger than a grain of sand, can be analysed by techniques such as X-ray fluorescence or neutron activation, which reveal the proportions of trace elements in the glass. Laboratories have built up reference collections from every known quarry, so that a fragment in a museum store can often be matched to a particular island within days. Portable instruments have recently allowed some of this work to be done in museums and in the field, reducing the need to remove material from valuable objects. The approach has transformed the study of prehistoric exchange, although it can say only where the raw material came from, not who carried it or why.

Interpretation is harder than identification. Some archaeologists argue for direct procurement: small parties from coastal villages made the voyage themselves, collected nodules at the quarry and carried them home. Others hold that obsidian passed from community to community, changing hands many times before reaching its final resting place, a pattern usually called down-the-line exchange. The two models predict different distributions of material, and the evidence has been read both ways. Finds of central Anatolian obsidian in the Levant, involving a journey of several hundred kilometres overland as well as across the sea, have fuelled a long-running argument about how such pieces reached the coast.

A quite separate technique offers dates rather than origins. When obsidian is freshly broken, its surface begins to absorb a tiny quantity of water from the surrounding air and soil, forming a layer of hydrated glass that thickens slowly and at a steady rate. If the rate is known, the thickness of the layer gives the time since the tool was made. The measurement is made by examining a thin section under a microscope, and the method, developed in the 1960s, was welcomed as a way of dating objects that radiocarbon techniques could not touch, since stone contains no carbon.

The welcome was qualified. The rate at which the hydrated layer forms depends on temperature, on the composition of the glass and on how an object has been buried, and conditions can vary sharply within a single site. In practice the method must be calibrated against dates obtained by other means, usually radiocarbon dates from charcoal found in the same layer. Errors of several centuries are common. The technique also works best on material only a few thousand years old; on older pieces the layer becomes so thick that its edge is hard to define. Obsidian hydration is therefore used alongside other methods rather than in place of them.

Obsidian was traded on other continents as well. In Mesoamerica the green obsidian of Pachuca, in the mountains north-east of the Basin of Mexico, was worked on a large scale by the city of Teotihuacan, and blades of it circulated across a wide region for centuries. Polished obsidian mirrors, which the Aztecs associated with divination, were among the objects carried to Europe in the sixteenth century, where they were prized by collectors. The study of the material has never been confined to the Mediterranean, and comparisons between continents have sharpened the questions archaeologists ask of it.

When the returns of the 1921 census for England and Wales were placed online in January 2022, the website hosting them struggled to cope with the demand. Within days, hundreds of thousands of people had searched for grandparents, for great-uncles who died young, and for streets that no longer exist. Something similar had happened when the 1911 returns were released more than a decade earlier, and something similar happens in every country that opens a set of old census schedules. The enthusiasm is easy to mock. It is also a reminder that a census is not merely a statistical exercise: it is a collection of individual lives, recorded in remarkable detail and then locked away for a very long time.

A household schedule records the name, age, sex, occupation and place of birth of everyone present on census night, together with their relationship to the head of the household and the address at which they were staying. Some countries asked about religion, language or disability; others noted whether a person was deaf, blind or of unsound mind, and institutions such as prisons, workhouses and asylums were enumerated alongside ordinary homes. Because enumerators collected the forms in person and copied the answers into a standard format, the schedules of very different countries can be compared with one another. The result is a portrait of a society at a single moment that no other source can match — and, for the families concerned, a mass of information that was never intended for strangers.

Those who defend a long closure period begin with a promise. When householders fill in a form, they do so on the understanding that their answers will be used for statistical purposes and will not be published while they or their children might be affected by them. Confidentiality, on this view, is part of a bargain: information in exchange for discretion. A census depends on trust, and trust is easily lost. If the bargain weakens, the argument runs, response rates fall and the quality of the data suffers, damaging the very research that open records are supposed to serve. There are also individual cases that can cause genuine distress: a child born outside marriage, a spell in a mental hospital, a prison sentence, a marriage that ended badly and was never discussed afterwards.

Against this, historians point out that privacy is not a permanent property of a document. Almost everyone named in a return from a century ago is dead, and the law in most countries does not protect the dead. The dead, after all, cannot be harmed by a stranger reading their occupation. The benefits of access, moreover, are considerable. Family historians reconstruct patterns of migration and kinship that official summaries conceal; demographers study household structure and employment; medical researchers trace the incidence of disease across generations. There is also an argument about collective memory: a society that cannot examine its own recorded past must rely on the summaries that others chose to make of it, and those summaries invariably reflect the concerns of the age that produced them.

The interval itself is hard to defend in principle. Britain has settled on a hundred years, the United States on seventy-two and Canada on ninety-two, while other countries have chosen periods in between. Each figure reflects an administrative compromise rather than a calculation. In practice the figure seems to have been chosen because it is a round number that outlasts a long human life. Seventy-two years may sound short, yet it is longer than the lifetime of most of the people listed in the schedules; a hundred years is comfortable for officials, but it means that the 1921 records were opened only when scarcely anyone named in them could still be embarrassed by what they revealed.

The next difficulty is technological. Censuses are now collected digitally, and recent records exist as databases rather than as bundles of paper; in England and Wales the 2021 census was the first to be completed mainly online. That has advantages for preservation, since a well-managed file can be copied indefinitely, but it creates a new problem for confidentiality. Paper can be locked in a room; data can be queried, linked to other datasets and, in principle, de-anonymised. Removing names is not enough when a combination of age, occupation and a small area can identify a single household. Archives therefore face a question their predecessors never had to answer: how to keep a digital record both safe and readable for a century, when the software needed to read it will long since have been replaced.

My own view is that the hundred-year rule is broadly right. It should be treated as a limit rather than as an excuse, however. The returns that cause most distress are those containing details of health, disability and institutional confinement, and these could remain closed for longer while the rest of a schedule is opened earlier. Researchers could be given access to anonymised samples years before the public sees a single name. What is not defensible is the combination of a long closure with a careless attitude to preservation. The returns of the 1931 census for England and Wales were destroyed by fire in 1942, and no census was taken in 1941, so a whole decade of national memory disappeared because nobody had thought carefully enough about where the paper was stored. A promise of eventual access is worthless unless the document survives to be read.