IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 240

Alexandria, founded on the Egyptian coast in 331 BC, had one advantage that its founder could not have missed and one disadvantage that no amount of planning could remove. The advantage was a deep natural harbour; the disadvantage was that the land behind it was almost entirely flat. Sailors approaching from the north saw a low, featureless shoreline that merged into the sky, and the shoals off the delta of the Nile made any navigational mistake costly. A marker visible from far out at sea was not a luxury but a necessity, and it was this need that produced one of the most celebrated structures of the ancient world.

The tower was built on the island of Pharos, which lay just off the coast and had already given its name to the harbour area. The island was linked to the mainland by a long causeway, the Heptastadion, whose construction helped to divide the harbour into two basins. Work on the lighthouse began in the reign of Ptolemy I, one of Alexander's generals, who had taken control of Egypt after his master's death. Ptolemy died before it was finished, and the building was completed under his son, Ptolemy II, in the first half of the third century BC. The architect credited with the design was Sostratus of Cnidus.

Later writers described a building of three distinct stages. The lowest was a square tower with a massive core of masonry; above it rose a narrower octagonal section, and above that a circular drum that carried the lantern. On the summit stood a statue of a god or a ruler, though which one is uncertain. Estimates of the height vary widely, but modern calculations usually put the whole structure somewhere between about 100 and 130 metres, which would have made it, apart from the pyramids, the tallest building in the Mediterranean world.

By day, according to several sources, a large polished mirror caught the sunlight and threw it far out to sea. At night a fire was kept burning in the lantern, and the fuel, probably wood, had to be carried up through the interior. The light was probably visible for tens of kilometres in good conditions, although how far is impossible to establish. Later Arab writers went further and claimed that the mirror could be angled to concentrate the sun's rays and set an enemy fleet alight. No ancient source supports this, and most historians treat the story as legend.

One of the most quoted stories about the tower comes from the Greek writer Lucian. He relates that Sostratus carved his own name, together with a dedication to the gods who protect sailors, into the stone face of the building, then covered the letters with plaster and cut the name of Ptolemy into the plaster instead. The king's name, Sostratus calculated, would be allowed to stand as long as the plaster lasted; when it crumbled, his own name would reappear.

Running the lighthouse was expensive and required organisation. Fuel had to be gathered and stored, the mirror kept clean, and the fire tended through the night. This suggests that the building was an institution rather than a single monument, staffed and funded over centuries. Beyond its practical purpose, the tower announced the city to merchants, marked the entrance to the Great Harbour and reminded visitors of the wealth of the Ptolemies. It also appeared on the reverse of bronze coins issued in Alexandria under Roman rule.

Earthquakes damaged the building repeatedly. One in the eighth century is said to have brought down the upper part, and by the twelfth century Arab travellers described a tower that was already much reduced, with a small mosque built at the top. A severe earthquake in 1303 did further damage, and by the end of the fourteenth century the Pharos had ceased to work as a lighthouse and lay in ruins. Its stone was a convenient quarry in a city with little good building material of its own.

In 1480 the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay built a fortress on the site, incorporating much of the fallen masonry. It was raised partly in response to the naval threat posed by the Ottoman empire, and it still stands, though it has been restored and rebuilt many times. Visitors today are often surprised to learn that the stones beneath their feet may once have formed part of the greatest lighthouse of antiquity.

Since 1994 a team led by the French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur has been surveying and excavating the sea bed beside the fort, at the mouth of the eastern harbour. Diving there is difficult: the water is polluted, visibility is poor and the ancient blocks are scattered over a wide area. Even so, the work has recovered colossal statues, column capitals and many hundreds of architectural fragments, some of which are thought to have come from the lighthouse itself. Their identification remains a matter of debate, since stone can be moved, reused and lost again.

The name Pharos passed into Greek and Latin as a general word for a lighthouse, and from there into the modern languages: the French phare, the Italian faro and the Spanish faro all descend from it. Few buildings have left so durable a mark on the vocabulary of the sea. Modern architects have found the design difficult to reconstruct from descriptions alone, and every model of the tower is a hypothesis rather than a portrait.

Between roughly the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, pilgrimage was one of the strongest forces shaping the lives of Europeans. People set out for Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury and Cologne, and for hundreds of lesser shrines. The reasons were rarely simple. A pilgrimage could be a penance imposed by a priest, a vow made during illness, an act of thanksgiving, or a search for healing. Merchants travelled with goods, and the jobless travelled in hope of work. Even those who stayed at home took part, paying others to travel on their behalf or contributing to the upkeep of a wayside chapel. Whatever the motive, the journey was understood as a religious act, and distance gave it value: the further the shrine, the greater the merit.

The routes themselves were mostly inherited. Roman roads still carried traffic centuries after the empire that built them had gone, and medieval pilgrims followed them through France, Italy and Spain, crossing the Alps at passes such as Mont Cenis and the Great St Bernard. In 990 Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury travelled home from Rome and noted the stopping places along the way; the route he recorded underlies what is now called the Via Francigena. Towards Santiago, four French roads met in the Pyrenees and joined at Puente la Reina, a crossing that gave the town its name, 'the bridge of the queen'. New roads were opened as shrines grew richer, and the map of Europe was gradually covered by a dense web of pilgrim ways.

Travel was slow. A party on foot might cover twenty-five to thirty kilometres in a day, less in mountains or bad weather, so a journey from England to Rome could consume several months and one to Jerusalem a year or more. The wealthy rode horses or mules, and the sick were sometimes carried. Most pilgrims joined company for protection, since rivers, robbers and disease made solitary travel foolish. Journeys were planned to avoid the winter, when passes were closed and food scarce, and the roads filled in spring and summer with people carrying staffs, broad hats and small bundles. Some never returned; those who did brought back stories that shaped local devotion for generations.

The infrastructure that grew up around these journeys was substantial. Religious houses were expected to shelter travellers, and a chain of hospices appeared at mountain passes and river crossings; the hospice on the Great St Bernard pass, traditionally founded in the eleventh century, is only the best known. Bridges were built and maintained by lay confraternities that collected alms for the purpose, and a bridge might be the most expensive structure a small town ever erected. Tolls, guides and inns completed a system that historians have compared to a transport network, though it was never planned as one. The same institutions served merchants and messengers, so pilgrim traffic helped to pay for roads and bridges that benefited everyone.

The most detailed description of any route comes from a twelfth-century compilation known as the Codex Calixtinus, whose fifth book is a practical guide for pilgrims travelling to Santiago. It lists the stages of the journey, warns which rivers are unsafe to drink from, praises some peoples and insults others, and describes the shrines and their relics. Its advice was not neutral: the compiler's prejudices shaped which places travellers visited and how they were received. Guidebooks, then as now, helped to create the routes they claimed merely to describe.

Pilgrims also left physical traces. From the twelfth century onwards, shrines sold a cheap badge of lead alloy, stamped with an image that identified the place: the scallop shell for Santiago, crossed keys for Rome, a palm for Jerusalem, a bell or a small flask for Canterbury. A badge was pinned to a hat or a cloak as proof of the journey and as protection on the way home, and the trade was profitable enough to attract counterfeiters. Thousands have been recovered from the mud of the Thames and from riverbanks, wells and graves across Europe, and their distribution maps journeys that written sources never mention.

Written evidence exists, but it has limits. A few pilgrims left accounts, the best known being the Book of Margery Kempe, dictated in the 1430s by an Englishwoman who travelled to Jerusalem and Rome. In their wills, people left money for others to make the journey on their behalf, and church courts dealt with those who abandoned the road or returned too soon. Yet most pilgrims were illiterate and left no record at all, and the literate few shaped their stories for edification rather than accuracy. Historians therefore read such texts for what they reveal about attitudes as much as about routes.

Not everyone approved. Church authorities worried about vagabonds who used pilgrimage as an excuse for begging, and rules required some travellers to obtain permission before setting out. Satirists mocked pilgrims as tourists and pleasure-seekers; Chaucer's portraits of a group riding to Canterbury were written for a court that knew exactly what it was laughing at. The Reformation ended much of this in England, where shrines were demolished and monasteries dissolved in the late 1530s. Interest revived in the nineteenth century, when writers and artists began to treat the medieval pilgrim as a picturesque figure, and the road to Santiago now carries hundreds of thousands of walkers a year.

Every few years another small workshop closes, and with it goes a set of skills that took generations to build. Thatching, drystone walling, hand-weaving, boatbuilding and bell-founding are trades that survive in parts of Europe on a mixture of private commissions, heritage grants and the enthusiasm of a few hundred people. Whether the public should pay to keep them alive is a question that returns whenever a cultural budget is set. The debate is usually framed as a choice between heritage and the market. I think that framing is misleading, and that the real question is what exactly is being preserved, and who benefits.

The strongest argument for support is that craft knowledge is largely unrecorded. A manual can explain how to cut a joint, but it cannot convey how much pressure a tool needs or how a piece of timber sounds when it is sound. That knowledge lives in the hands and eyes of practitioners and is passed on by watching, imitating and being corrected. A film can capture the movements but not the judgements behind them. When the last practitioner dies, it is gone, and the loss is not merely sentimental: attempts to repair historic buildings have repeatedly had to begin with experiment and guesswork because the techniques had disappeared.

There is also an economic argument. Training a craftsperson takes years, and a small workshop that takes on an apprentice bears the cost while the benefit may later go to a competitor or to another region. Some of the skills have no substitute: lime mortar lets an old wall breathe in a way that cement does not, and repairs carried out with modern materials have damaged fabric that had survived for centuries. The skills are needed for work that the public pays for in any case, since churches, listed houses, museums and public buildings all depend on people who can work in stone, lead, glass and timber. In the language of economics, the market under-provides training because the returns cannot be captured by the firm that pays for it.

Against this, critics reply that a subsidy is simply a transfer from taxpayers to a business that cannot survive on its own, and that the money would do more good elsewhere. Consumers, they argue, are perfectly capable of deciding which products they value; if nobody will pay for hand-thrown pottery, that is information rather than a market failure. Grants, on this view, create dependency: a workshop that reshapes itself around a funding scheme rather than around its customers has not been saved, only postponed. It is also said that grants go to the crafts that photograph well, while less picturesque trades vanish without notice. These objections are serious, and a scheme that ignores them deserves to fail.

A further complication comes from history. Scholars have shown that many traditions presented as ancient were codified, revived or invented in the nineteenth or twentieth century, and that 'traditional' design often reflects the taste of collectors and revivalists rather than that of the makers themselves. The same is true of the buildings these crafts are used to repair, many of which were altered so heavily in the Victorian period that their original state is itself a nineteenth-century invention. If authenticity is the reason for subsidy, the reason is weaker than it looks, because someone must decide which version of the past counts as genuine. A craft revived by enthusiasts a century ago is no less useful, but it is not an unbroken survival.

Yet this argument cuts both ways. If traditions are continually remade, a craft is not a fixed object to be pickled but a body of knowledge that can be adapted to new materials and new uses. Supporting a craft therefore need not mean freezing it in the shape it had in 1850; it can mean making sure that the competence survives into a world where it will be used differently. The argument about authenticity, however damaging to claims about the ancient lineage of a trade, does not settle the question of public support. The test should be the transmission of skill, not the reproduction of a particular product.

What, then, should public money pay for? Not blanket grants to unviable businesses. The best case is for teaching: funded apprenticeships, part-time courses, and the systematic recording of techniques before the people who know them retire. Commissions for public buildings and collections give makers work while setting a standard. Partnerships with museums and universities can document methods and materials. Conditions should be attached to any support: teach openly, publish what is learned, and show that the skill will outlive the money. A grant that keeps a business afloat for five years and leaves nothing behind when it ends has bought time, not knowledge.

None of this is an argument for propping up every craft that loses its market. I would not spend public money to keep a workshop open out of nostalgia, and I have no wish to see a trade preserved as a performance for visitors. But I would spend it to make sure that a technique is taught to the next generation, because the alternative is a loss that no later generation can repair. That, rather than the survival of any particular workshop, is what a cultural policy ought to be buying. The test is simple: will the skill survive the grant?