IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 243

On 12 September 1940, four teenagers set out from the town of Montignac in the Dordogne region of south-western France to investigate a hole beneath a fallen tree that one of them, Marcel Ravidat, had come across a few days earlier. Local stories told of a hidden tunnel leading to buried treasure, and with a lamp and a rope the boys widened the opening and lowered themselves into the dark. Instead of a tunnel they entered a cave whose walls were covered with painted animals. The boys returned the next day better equipped, and within weeks the extent of the discovery was clear. The cave took its name from the nearby manor of Lascaux.

The site is not a single chamber but a system of galleries and shafts. The largest space, the Hall of the Bulls, is about seventeen metres long and rises to more than five metres; beyond it runs a narrower corridor, the Axial Gallery, whose curved walls carry some of the most carefully finished figures in the cave. Further passages lead to the Nave, the Apse and the Chamber of Felines, and at the deepest point a shaft drops several metres to a floor on which a single small scene is painted.

Roughly six hundred painted animals have been counted, along with roughly fifteen hundred figures engraved into the soft limestone with flint tools. Horses are the most numerous, followed by bison, aurochs — the huge wild cattle hunted in Europe at the time — red deer and ibex. A few predators appear, among them a bear. Human beings are almost absent: the best-known exception is in the shaft, where a stick-like figure with a bird's head lies beside a bison. In the Hall of the Bulls there is an animal with two long straight horns and a heavy body that matches no species known today, which visitors call the unicorn.

Only a handful of colours were used: reds and yellows from iron-rich clays, and blacks made from manganese minerals or charcoal. These were ground to powder, mixed with a liquid and applied in several ways. Some marks were made with brushes of hair or plant fibre, others by dabbing with pads of fur or moss, and many of the broad areas of colour were sprayed by blowing pigment through a hollow bone. The painters worked on scaffolding: holes cut into the rock to hold beams show where platforms were fixed. Traces of sandstone lamps burning animal fat have also been found on the floor.

Dating the work is difficult, because the pigments themselves cannot be dated directly. The chronology rests on radiocarbon measurements of charcoal and of the torches used by the painters, which place the main phase of decoration at roughly seventeen thousand years ago. A few scholars have argued for a longer period of use, noting that figures overlap in ways that suggest repeated visits over centuries, but the general estimate is not seriously disputed.

What the paintings were for is far less certain. One long-standing suggestion is hunting magic: images of the animals to be killed, painted to bring them within reach. Others have seen the work of shamans, or evidence of a belief that certain animals carried spiritual power. A further view is more practical, holding that the caves were meeting places for groups from a wide area and that the repeated placing of particular animals in particular positions recorded a shared identity. None of these explanations can be tested, and most archaeologists now accept that no single purpose need explain every figure.

The cave's modern history has been almost as dramatic as its ancient one. It opened to the public in 1948 and soon drew well over a thousand visitors a day, whose breath raised the humidity and the level of carbon dioxide inside. Green algae spread across the walls, and in the 1960s the growth of crystals on the paintings was reported. The cave was closed to visitors in 1963 and air conditioning was installed, yet there have been later alarms, including a fungus that spread through the galleries in the early 2000s and required repeated treatment. Only a few specialists are now allowed inside, and then for short periods.

For everyone else there is a copy. Lascaux II, a reconstruction of the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, opened in 1983 a few hundred metres from the original and has since received millions of visitors, while further replicas have travelled to other countries. The original cave, together with other prehistoric sites in the Vézère valley, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979, by which time its value as a record of human creativity was beyond argument.

Lascaux also changed what the public expected of prehistory. Before 1940, cave art was known mainly to specialists and to readers of a few spectacular finds elsewhere. The images of the Hall of the Bulls, reproduced in newspapers, schoolbooks and on postage stamps, made the creativity of hunter-gatherers visible to everyone. The cave has been closed to all but a handful of researchers for more than sixty years, yet it remains the best-known prehistoric site in the world.

A parish register is the book in which the clergy of a parish recorded baptisms, marriages and burials. In England the practice was imposed from above. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's vicar-general, ordered every parish to keep such a register, to enter each event on the day it occurred and to store the book in a locked chest. The motives were not purely religious: the crown had an interest in who was married to whom, since inheritances could turn on the question. At the end of the sixteenth century parishes were instructed to copy their older entries into more durable parchment books, and many surviving registers date from that copying rather than from the original ceremonies. Compliance varied: some parishes began at once, others after an interval, and the earliest surviving books are often copies made decades later.

Later legislation reshaped the records. Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753, in force from 1754, required marriages to be celebrated in a parish church according to the Anglican rite, recorded in a separate register and signed by the couple and two witnesses; its purpose was to suppress clandestine weddings and the irregular ceremonies performed in and around London. In 1812 an Act associated with George Rose obliged parishes to keep baptisms and burials in separate printed books of a standard design. From 1 July 1837, civil registration in England and Wales made the state, rather than the parish, responsible for recording births, marriages and deaths, though many clergymen carried on keeping their own registers beside the new system. Each change left its mark on the paper: the date at which a register begins to use a printed form is a reliable guide to the legislation behind it.

For the historian the registers are both indispensable and treacherous. A baptism is not a birth: the two might be separated by days in a devout household or by months where a family waited for a fee to be waived, and a burial is not a death. Stillbirths were rarely recorded, since no baptism had taken place. Dissenters and Roman Catholics might appear only irregularly, and the very poor sometimes escaped the record altogether. Registers have also been lost, burned, damaged by water or kept so carelessly that pages are missing. No parish series is complete, and anyone using one must first establish what it does and does not contain. The handwriting, the abbreviations and the Latin of the earliest books present problems of their own, and a page read wrongly can invent a person who never existed.

The systematic exploitation of such sources began in France. In the 1950s the demographer Louis Henry, working with the archivist Michel Fleury, developed a technique that became known as family reconstitution. The principle is simple: instead of counting events, the researcher follows individual families, linking a baptism to the marriage of the same person years later, then to the baptisms of that person's children and finally to a burial. The result is a set of family histories from which rates of fertility, infant mortality and age at marriage can be calculated. In England the method was taken up by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, founded in 1964 by Peter Laslett and E. A. Wrigley, whose teams reconstituted parishes by hand, entry by entry. It is slow work, and a single parish may occupy a researcher for years.

The findings overturned accepted wisdom. English couples, it turned out, married late by the standards of most societies, the women often in their middle twenties, and a substantial minority never married at all. This pattern, which the demographer John Hajnal later described as characteristic of western Europe, held population growth in check without the constant famines and epidemics that had been assumed to dominate. Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England, published in 1981, reconstructed the national population back to 1541 and argued that the decisive influence on growth was fertility rather than mortality. Laslett, in The World We Have Lost, used lists of household members to show that the nuclear family was already the norm in England long before industrialisation. These conclusions were surprising because they gave ordinary people, rather than kings and parliaments, a central role in the country's economic development.

Family reconstitution also has a structural weakness. It can follow only those who stayed in the parish — the 'stayers'. Anyone who moved away, and in England that included a large share of the young and the poor, vanishes from the reconstituted family, so the rates describe a population more settled and probably more prosperous than the whole. Nor can the method say much about towns, where mobility was highest and registers most chaotic. Historians therefore treat the figures as estimates with a margin of error, and their disagreements are real: how far mortality was governed by crisis, whether living standards rose or fell before 1800, and how much of the change should be attributed to the age at which people married. The registers have not ended the argument; they have given it a set of numbers to argue about.

Every few years a school announces that it is dropping Latin, and the news travels further than the school's own pupils ever will. Some commentators mourn the loss of a discipline they associate with accuracy and rigour; others welcome the disappearance of what they see as a relic of privilege. Both reactions are usually expressed at speed and with very little examination of what is at stake. The question deserves better, because it involves three separate issues: what the languages give access to, what learning them does to a pupil's mind, and who is allowed to learn them.

The practical objections are serious. The number of pupils taking Latin to public examination is small, and provision is concentrated in schools that charge fees. A comprehensive school that adds Latin to its timetable must usually take something else away, and head teachers may reasonably conclude that the same hours would be better spent on a modern language or on science. Nothing in what follows denies the force of that point. A dead language has no speakers to practise with and no obvious place on a curriculum vitae.

The traditional defence is access to texts. Reading Virgil, Cicero, Herodotus or Plato in the original is the stated aim of every classics course, and it is a real aim: these works shaped the vocabulary of law, politics and science, and they underlie much of the literature written in Europe since. Yet the defence is weaker than it looks, because excellent translations exist. A pupil who reads Sophocles in English can still be moved by him. If the only argument for teaching the language were that the literature matters, the case would be lost, since the literature is available to anyone who can read a modern language at all.

What is lost in translation is harder to describe but not imaginary. Latin and Greek arrange words with a freedom English cannot match, and they carry meaning in the endings of words rather than in their order. A single adjective may be held back until the end of a long sentence and then released, changing everything that came before it. Translation must choose one reading and discard the others, and an ambiguity that may be the point of the sentence disappears. Metre is lost in the same way, and so is the concision of Latin prose, which cannot be reproduced without adding words that were never there.

The second argument is the weakest. It is often said that Latin provides a kind of mental training, teaching logical thought, and that it improves a pupil's English. Educational research has repeatedly failed to show that studying one subject strengthens general reasoning in another, and there is no reason to think Latin is an exception. A pupil who has learned to analyse a Latin sentence has learned to analyse a Latin sentence. As for English, the claim is defensible only where the teaching is deliberately comparative, and then the credit belongs to the comparison rather than to the language.

There is, though, a better argument, which has little to do with literature or with mental training. Because nobody speaks Latin, its machinery is exposed in a way that a living language never quite is. In French or Spanish a pupil can often guess the meaning of a sentence from its context and its familiar words, so grammar remains something felt rather than understood. In Latin the endings of nouns and verbs have to be read, and the structure of the sentence becomes visible. A teacher who uses the language well can make grammar an object of study rather than an obstacle.

Then there is the question of who gets to learn it. Where a subject is taught mainly in fee-paying schools and at universities, it acquires a social meaning quite independent of its content, and Latin has long served as a mark of the educated. Some conclude that the subject should therefore be retired. That seems to me exactly the wrong response. The objection is to the restriction, not to the language, and the remedy is to make Latin available more widely rather than in fewer places. Programmes that have introduced Latin into state schools in England in recent years are worth watching, though whether they will alter the subject's social profile is not yet known.

Ancient Greek stands differently. Its literature is arguably more important than Latin's — history, philosophy and tragedy of the first order — and its language is harder, with its own alphabet and a more intricate set of verb forms. Few schools can sustain it and the number of pupils involved is tiny. Here the division of labour seems to me clear: Greek literature should be available to everyone who wants it, in translation, as part of a course in classical civilisation, while the language itself should be offered to those who choose it.

So my answer to the question is yes, with two conditions. Latin and Greek should not be compulsory for all pupils, because the case for them is not strong enough to justify displacing subjects that more pupils will need, and compulsion would produce a nation of bored ex-beginners. Nor should they be defended as marks of distinction. They should be taught because they give direct access to texts that have shaped the way Europe thinks, and because they make the workings of language visible. Those are good reasons and they are sufficient. Prestige is not among them.