IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 239

On 3 June 1769, the planet Venus was due to cross the face of the Sun, an event that astronomers had awaited for more than a century. An earlier transit in 1761 had produced disappointing results. The next would allow the distance between the Earth and the Sun to be calculated, provided that the observations were made from widely separated points, several of which lay in the Pacific Ocean. Britain's Royal Society therefore asked the Admiralty for a ship to carry observers to the island that the British captain Samuel Wallis had visited two years earlier and named King George's Island.

The man the Admiralty chose to command the expedition was a farmer's son from Yorkshire with little formal education and a great deal of practical experience at sea. James Cook had spent years in the North Sea coal trade before joining the navy, and in his thirties he had surveyed the St Lawrence River in Canada and the coasts of Newfoundland, work that had made his name as a careful chart-maker. For the voyage the navy bought a Whitby-built collier, a broad, flat-bottomed cargo vessel about thirty metres long, renamed her the Endeavour and fitted her out at Deptford. Cook was commissioned as a lieutenant, while the scientists travelled as civilians who did not regard themselves as members of the crew.

The ship was also given a second, more ambitious task. Alongside its public instructions, the Admiralty issued a set of additional orders that were not to be opened until the Pacific had been reached. Cook was to sail south in search of the great southern continent that geographers believed must exist to balance the land of the northern hemisphere, and to take possession of any land he found in the name of the king. Such secrecy was normal in an age of imperial rivalry. The search for Terra Australis Incognita gave the voyage a character quite different from that of a scientific expedition.

The Endeavour left Plymouth on 26 August 1768 with about ninety people on board, among them the astronomer Charles Green and a party of artists and naturalists led by Joseph Banks, a wealthy Lincolnshire gentleman who paid for his scientific companions himself. Banks and his party shared the great cabin with Cook, and it served them as library, workshop and drawing office. With Banks sailed the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander, a pupil of Linnaeus, and the young illustrator Sydney Parkinson, whose drawings and watercolours would become one of the most valuable records of what the expedition saw.

The Endeavour anchored in Matavai Bay in April 1769, and the party built a fortified camp, named Fort Venus, to protect their instruments and keep the crew out of trouble ashore. Relations with the Tahitians were tense at times, but the transit itself was observed in excellent conditions. When the time came to leave, Cook was persuaded to take on board a Tahitian priest and navigator named Tupaia, whose knowledge of the islands, and whose ability to talk with the Māori, proved invaluable over the following months.

Sailing south, the Endeavour found nothing but empty ocean. Unable to make progress against contrary winds, Cook turned west for New Zealand, which Europeans knew only from a brief sighting by Abel Tasman in 1642. In October 1769 the ship anchored at a bay where the first encounter with Māori ended in violence and several of them were killed; Cook named the place Poverty Bay. Over the following six months he sailed round both islands, charting the coast with an accuracy that later navigators relied on, and showed that New Zealand was not part of any southern continent.

Turning west once more, the ship sighted the south-eastern coast of Australia in April 1770 and sailed north along it, looking for a harbour where the crew could take on water and food. Cook landed at a sheltered inlet where two Aboriginal men opposed the landing and were driven off with musket shot. The naturalists found the place so rich in unfamiliar plants that it was named Botany Bay, and the eight days spent there produced a collection that would occupy scholars in London for years.

On the night of 11 June 1770 the Endeavour struck a shoal of the Great Barrier Reef and came close to sinking. Guns and stores were thrown overboard to lighten the ship, and a heavy canvas sail was dragged under the hull to plug the largest hole, a technique known as fothering. Nearly seven weeks passed while repairs were made at the mouth of the Endeavour River, near the site of present-day Cooktown, and the naturalists collected ashore.

In August 1770 Cook landed on Possession Island and claimed the whole eastern coast, which he named New South Wales, for the Crown. The Endeavour then sailed for the Dutch port of Batavia, where fever and dysentery swept through the company. Tupaia died at Batavia, while Parkinson and the astronomer Green died at sea on the way home, and more than thirty of those who had sailed never returned. The Endeavour reached the Downs in July 1771, after a voyage of almost three years.

The results were considerable. Cook's charts of New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia remained in use for decades, Banks returned with thousands of specimens and drawings, and the voyage gave Europeans their first long account of Tahitian society. Within twenty years Britain had begun to settle the coast that Cook had charted, and the Admiralty, satisfied, sent him out twice more.

Papyrus, the writing material of ancient Egypt, was made from a tall sedge that grew abundantly in the marshes of the Nile Delta. The plant, Cyperus papyrus, has a triangular stem that can reach four or five metres in height and ends in a feathery umbrella of leaves. Its outer rind is tough, but the interior is a pale, spongy pith. Egyptian craftsmen did not use the whole stem. They stripped away the green outer layer and cut the pith lengthwise into thin strips. The plant still grows in parts of central Africa, though it has largely disappeared from the lower Nile, where drainage and cultivation destroyed the marshes.

The strips were laid side by side, slightly overlapping, to form a rectangle. A second layer was placed across the first at right angles, so that the two sets of fibres crossed. This arrangement gave the finished sheet strength in both directions. The layers were then beaten with a wooden mallet or pressed under a heavy weight. As the strips were squeezed, the natural sap of the pith acted as an adhesive, binding them into a single sheet. Most scholars think that no glue was needed, and a sheet made in this way could be remarkably thin and flexible. After pressing, the sheet was dried in the sun and smoothed with a stone or shell until its surface was ready to take ink.

Fresh sheets were pasted together along their edges to make a roll. A typical roll contained about twenty sheets, and the joins were made with a paste of flour and water. The side on which the fibres ran horizontally was smoother and was normally the one written on. The finished roll was wound around a wooden rod for storage, which kept the surface clean and made it easy to consult a particular passage by unrolling to the right point.

Writing was done with a reed. Egyptian scribes chewed the end of a thin rush into a fine brush; the split reed pen, cut to a nib that could be sharpened as it wore down, arrived later, in the Greek period. The ink was a carbon ink, made by mixing soot with gum arabic and water; it was stable and has survived on documents for thousands of years. Scribes sat cross-legged with the roll across their knees and wrote in columns across the roll. The tools were cheap and the material itself was light, so a scribe could carry a writing kit easily.

For much of antiquity Egypt controlled the supply of papyrus. The plant grew in few other places, and the finished product was exported across the Mediterranean. Papyrus was one of Egypt's most important exports, and the state's control of it was a source of revenue for centuries. The word itself travelled: the Greek papyros passed into Latin as papyrus and eventually became the English word paper. Rolls were sold in markets from Athens to Rome, and Egyptian workshops produced different grades, from fine sheets used for literature to coarse ones for accounts and wrapping. The trade was valuable enough for the Ptolemaic kings to control and tax it.

The only detailed ancient description of the process comes from Pliny the Elder, who devoted a section of his Natural History, completed in the first century AD, to papyrus. Pliny describes the cutting of the pith, the laying of the strips, the pressing and the drying, and he lists several qualities of sheet, from the finest, called Augusta, to coarser grades used for common purposes. His account is not always easy to follow, and some of his terms remain uncertain, but it agrees closely enough with surviving papyri and with modern experiments to be trusted in its main points. He also records that different qualities came from different parts of the delta.

In 2013 a French team led by Pierre Tallet excavated caves at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast and found a cache of papyri that are among the oldest surviving documents on the material. They include the logbook of an official named Merer, who recorded the transport of limestone from the quarries at Tura to the building site at Giza during the reign of Khufu, in about 2560 BC. The text is not literature but administration: lists of days, deliveries and rations, written in hieratic script. Its survival is a matter of luck. The caves were dry, sealed by sand and never disturbed, and the papyri inside were preserved almost intact for more than four thousand years.

Papyrus decays quickly in damp conditions. It survives in quantity only where the climate is arid, which is why the great collections come from Middle Egypt and the deserts rather than from the wetter Mediterranean coast. Finds from outside Egypt are rare and usually fragmentary, though carbonised rolls from Herculaneum in Italy have been recovered and are being read with modern imaging. From the second century BC parchment began to compete with papyrus, and from the early medieval period paper, a Chinese invention that reached the Islamic world and then Europe, gradually replaced it. Parchment was prepared from animal skin and could be bound in a codex, a format that papyrus rolls did not suit. Papyrus continued in use in Egypt into the tenth century, long after the plant itself had become scarce.

Hardly a year passes without a public figure announcing that history should be taught so that young people grow up to be better citizens. The claim has an obvious appeal: a democracy, the argument runs, needs citizens who understand how their institutions came about and what has been sacrificed for them. In England the national curriculum has repeatedly been justified in these terms, and in the United States disputes over what should go into history textbooks are fought on the same premise. I do not think the claim is false, but I do think it is usually made without the qualifications it needs.

The idea has a long pedigree. Renaissance humanists taught the history of Rome and Greece in the belief that examples of virtue and vice would shape the conduct of those who governed. In the nineteenth century, as new nation-states built school systems, history became a means of attaching people to a country that many of them had not previously felt they belonged to. Neither tradition was much interested in evidence for the claim; the assumption that reading about the past improved character was simply taken for granted.

The argument has returned in a new form, driven by anxiety about civic participation. Falling turnout at elections, declining membership of political parties and surveys reporting that young people know little about how laws are made are all cited as proof that history and civics have been neglected. But this reasoning moves too quickly. The countries in which these trends are most discussed are also those in which a large proportion of young people now go to university, and the causes of declining participation are disputed by political scientists, who point to housing, insecure work and the weakening of local institutions. Voting, after all, is only one of many ways in which people take part in public life. Blaming the syllabus requires a leap of faith.

The difficulty is partly one of measurement. Citizenship is not a score that can be read off at the end of a course. Studies that try to link the study of history to later civic behaviour generally measure something convenient — whether a student votes, joins a voluntary organisation or expresses trust in institutions — and then argue backwards to the teaching received years before. Such studies cannot easily separate the effect of history lessons from the effect of everything else a student brings to them, including family background and the mere fact of having chosen an academic subject. Research of this kind is worth having, but it is a slender foundation for a national policy.

There is, though, a stronger version of the argument, and it rests not on loyalty but on judgement. Good history teaching asks pupils to compare two accounts of the same event, to ask who wrote them and to notice what each leaves out. Those habits of mind are exactly what citizens need when they are told that a policy has failed or that a crisis was unavoidable. The historian David Lowenthal, borrowing a novelist's phrase, called the past a foreign country, and the point of travelling there is to be surprised: to meet people whose assumptions were not ours and to see that what now seems inevitable was once one choice among several. A citizen who has learned that the arrangement of the world is not fixed may be less easily frightened by those who claim that it is.

Yet the same material can do the opposite. History has been used to teach that a nation's borders are ancient and just, that its neighbours are hereditary enemies and that its defeats were treacheries. Every serious account of history education must reckon with this, because the subject has been an instrument of nationalism at least as often as it has been a school of criticism. What distinguishes the two outcomes is the kind of question pupils are asked: whether they are invited to judge a decision in the light of what was known at the time, or merely to admire its result.

That distinction, in practice, is often lost. Where examinations require the recall of long lists of dates, kings and statutes, pupils learn the content and little else; the skills that advocates of history most value are not what such tests reward. Curriculums crowded with prescribed content leave teachers no time for the slow work of comparing sources. Judged by its citizenship benefits alone, a compulsory course of national history can look like poor value, because the benefits are uncertain while the time taken is not.

I would therefore defend history on two grounds, one conditional and one unconditional. The conditional claim is that the subject builds civic capacity when it is taught as an inquiry into evidence rather than as a gallery of national heroes, and when examinations reward argument rather than memorisation. The unconditional claim is that understanding how people unlike ourselves have lived is worth doing for its own sake; a society that studies its past only because it expects a return in votes is likely to get neither the votes nor the history.

Does studying history make better citizens? Sometimes, and only under particular conditions. The claim should be treated as a hypothesis rather than a slogan: one that schools can honour by examining how they teach, and that researchers might one day test more convincingly than they have so far. It is also a claim that no single study is likely to settle.