IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 245

Between roughly 250 and 900 CE, in what are now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras, the Maya built city-states whose rulers commissioned temples, monuments and painted books. Their astronomy has attracted more attention than any other achievement of this civilisation. Scribes recorded the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the planets with a care unusual anywhere at the time, and they embedded their observations in two calendars that governed ritual, farming and royal display.

Two calendars ran at the same time. The first, usually called the tzolk'in, was a cycle of 260 days, formed by combining twenty day names with the numbers one to thirteen; each day received a name and a number, and no pairing repeated until 260 days had passed. The second, the haab', approximated the solar year: eighteen months of twenty days, followed by five days that were thought unlucky. A particular combination of the two recurred only once in fifty-two years, a span known as the Calendar Round.

For longer spans, scribes used the Long Count, a tally of days from a starting point set in the distant past. Its units were the k'in, a single day; the winal of twenty days; the tun of 360 days; the k'atun of about twenty years; and the b'ak'tun of roughly 394 years. Dates were carved on stone monuments as a series of numbers, and the system allowed events to be placed precisely in relation to one another across centuries.

Venus received particular attention. Its pattern of appearances repeats about every 584 days, and astronomers recorded the date on which it first became visible as a morning star. They knew that five such cycles come close to eight solar years, producing a pattern on which ceremonies could be scheduled, since Venus was associated with danger and warfare. In the surviving Dresden Codex, a book painted on folded bark paper, a table of Venus observations fills several pages.

The same manuscript contains tables for predicting eclipses. These are not records of eclipses that had occurred but calculations of when one might: the Maya understood that eclipses happen only at particular phases of the Moon and at certain times of year, and they divided the lunar cycle into periods of 29 and 30 days. The result was a sequence covering about twelve thousand days. Whether scribes could foresee an individual eclipse, rather than a window of a few days, is still disputed.

To make such observations, astronomers worked from temples aligned with points on the horizon. The best known is the round tower at Chichén Itzá called El Caracol, or the snail, after the spiral staircase inside it. Its upper windows appear to line up with the northernmost and southernmost points at which Venus sets on the horizon, and the building seems to have been rebuilt more than once to correct its alignments. Other structures were oriented towards the rising or setting of the Sun at particular times of year, though how many were deliberately astronomical is still argued over.

Underpinning all of this was a number system of some sophistication. The Maya counted in twenties, using a dot for one, a bar for five and a shell-shaped sign for zero, combined to express large values. The zero, employed as a placeholder in the Long Count, is among the earliest known in any written tradition. Numbers were written vertically, and the system coped with the enormous totals required by a count that began thousands of years before the scribe's lifetime.

Knowledge of the sky belonged to the priesthood and the scribal elite rather than to a separate profession. It allowed rulers to present themselves as intermediaries between the human world and the cosmos: a war begun on an auspicious day, or a temple dedicated when Venus rose, carried a legitimacy that victory alone could not supply. Because observation and ritual were so closely linked, scholars often find it impossible to separate the empirical content of Maya astronomy from its religious meaning.

Most of this knowledge survives only in fragments. In the sixteenth century Spanish missionaries destroyed Maya books as works of superstition; at Maní in Yucatán in 1562 a large number were burned on the order of the bishop Diego de Landa. Only four manuscripts painted before the conquest remain, the most important being the Dresden Codex, bought in Vienna in 1739 and later taken to Dresden. Landa also wrote a description of Maya customs and calendar practices, and his account gave later scholars a starting point.

For a long time the glyphs on monuments resisted interpretation, and they were thought to record little but dates. In the 1950s the Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov argued that Maya writing was a genuine script mixing signs for words with signs for syllables, a claim that many specialists in the West rejected but that later work confirmed. Once the inscriptions could be read, astronomical passages could be placed in their political setting, and stelae that had seemed to be pure records of the heavens turned out to celebrate the births, marriages and conquests of named kings.

Popular interest revived towards the end of the thirteenth b'ak'tun, which fell in December 2012. Newspapers reported predictions that the world would end. No Maya inscription says anything of the kind: the date marked a return to the beginning of the count, and surviving texts treat the completion of a b'ak'tun as a cause for ceremony rather than alarm.

Between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, glaciers in many mountain ranges grew larger than they had been for thousands of years, and in Europe winters were, on average, colder than those of the twentieth century. This period is commonly called the Little Ice Age, a term introduced by the American glaciologist François Matthes in 1939 to describe the advances that followed a warmer interval after the last great ice age. When exactly the cold phase began and ended has been argued over ever since. Some researchers place its coldest part between about 1550 and 1850; others begin in the late thirteenth century and end in the nineteenth. The difference matters, because a period that lasted five centuries and one that lasted three cannot easily have the same explanation.

Much of the earliest evidence came from the Alps. When glaciers expand they overwhelm pastures, woods and sometimes buildings, and when they retreat they leave behind ridges of rubble, known as moraines, that mark how far they reached. In the seventeenth century Swiss communities recorded processions and prayers intended to halt the ice, and in several valleys legal documents describe fields and houses abandoned to the glacier. Dating these advances precisely is difficult. Moraines can be dated by measuring the lichen that grows on their stones, or by radiocarbon dating wood crushed beneath them, but both methods carry large margins of error, and a glacier may advance several times within a single century.

Written records provide a second source. Parish registers note the dates of harvests and the price of grain; town chronicles describe floods, droughts and unusually hard winters; and diaries mention snow lying in months when it was not expected. In England the Thames froze repeatedly between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and printed souvenirs from the frost fairs held on the ice survive. Such documents are valuable because they are dated to the day, but they are also uneven. They were kept by literate people in a small part of the world, they record what seemed remarkable rather than what was typical, and a chronicler who had never travelled could not know whether a severe winter was local or general.

To overcome these limits, climatologists turn to natural archives. The width and density of tree rings in cool, high-altitude forests reflect the length of the growing season, and long sequences of rings can be matched from living trees to timbers preserved in bogs and old buildings. Ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica contain layers of snow laid down year by year, together with traces of volcanic ash and sulphate, and the bubbles trapped in the ice preserve samples of the atmosphere of the time. Lake sediments and cave deposits add further records. Each archive has its own distortions, but where several agree, confidence in the reconstruction increases.

Explanations of the cooling usually combine several causes. The Sun's output varies, and the second half of the seventeenth century, a particularly cold stretch in Europe, coincided with a period of very low sunspot activity lasting from 1645 to about 1715. Volcanic eruptions can cool the planet for a few years by throwing sulphate particles into the stratosphere, where they reflect sunlight; a series of large eruptions in the thirteenth century, including one in Indonesia in 1257, may have contributed to the onset of the cold phase. Changes in ocean circulation, and the growth of sea ice, could have amplified the effect. No single cause is sufficient, and researchers still disagree about the relative importance of each.

The consequences for people were sometimes severe. Harvests failed in successive years in many parts of Europe, and grain prices rose sharply. In Scotland the 1690s were remembered as the Ill Years, when a run of poor harvests contributed to widespread hunger and death. The retreat of the Norse settlements in Greenland, abandoned in the fifteenth century, has often been blamed on the advancing cold, although most historians now regard climate as one factor among several, including the declining demand for walrus ivory and conflict with the Inuit. Attributing a war, a migration or a famine to the weather is tempting and rarely straightforward.

A further difficulty is the word 'age' itself. The cooling was not a single event but a series of colder and milder episodes, and it did not affect every region at the same time or to the same degree. Temperatures in parts of the southern hemisphere appear to have fallen less, and in some places the evidence points to little change at all. Some scholars have therefore argued that the Little Ice Age was mainly a North Atlantic phenomenon, while others, using more numerous records, maintain that the cooling was global but uneven, with regional peaks at different dates.

Why does the argument matter now? The Little Ice Age is the most recent example of a sustained natural cooling, and understanding its causes helps scientists test the models they use to predict future climates. Volcanic eruptions, in particular, offer a natural experiment: when a large eruption occurs today, researchers can compare the measured cooling with what their models forecast. The period is also a reminder that climate change is not a single trend but a set of regional shifts, and that societies respond to it with whatever resources and politics they happen to possess.

The world contains rather more than seven thousand living languages, and by most estimates at least two in five of them are spoken by so few people, and so few children, that their future is in doubt. Campaigners often add that a language disappears every fortnight or so, a figure repeated in newspapers and in the publications of international organisations although it rests on estimates rather than on any count of documented cases. My concern here is not with the number but with the form the argument usually takes. Too much of the public discussion is conducted in the language of loss and statistics, and too little in the language of the people who actually speak these languages.

The first and most frequently heard argument for protection is that a language is a storehouse of knowledge. Many small languages contain distinctions that larger ones lack: vocabularies that classify plants, animals, winds or kinship in extraordinary detail, and grammatical categories that mark, for instance, whether a speaker witnessed an event or merely heard about it. Some of this information survives translation, but much of it does not, because a language does not simply label the world; it sorts it. Ethnobiologists have recorded medicinal and ecological knowledge from speakers of languages that are no longer being passed to children, and the loss to science is real. It is not, however, the strongest reason for action.

A second argument is political. For many communities a language is inseparable from identity, and the deliberate suppression of languages has been one of the instruments of colonial rule. In Canada, Australia and the United States, generations of indigenous children were sent to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages and punished if they did; the effects are still visible in the number of older people who understand a language but will not speak it. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, treats the maintenance of a language as a right rather than a favour. On this view protection is owed because of what was done, quite apart from any benefit it might bring.

Revival is not a fantasy. Hebrew, which had ceased to be a spoken vernacular, was rebuilt as an everyday language from the late nineteenth century and became the language of the state of Israel. Māori language nests, in which preschool children spend their days with fluent speakers, began in New Zealand in the early 1980s and were followed by legislation in 1987 that made Māori an official language. Welsh-medium schooling and broadcasting have helped to slow a long decline, and Cornish and Manx, whose last traditional native speakers have died, now have small populations of new speakers. Each of these cases, however, depended on unusually favourable conditions: a state, a legal framework, and decades of public money.

Sceptics reply that none of this is new. Languages have died throughout history, often without anyone recording the fact, and the world has not been noticeably poorer in consequence. Public money is finite, and a health service or a school that teaches in the majority language may do more for a poor community than a translation programme. Ireland is often cited: Irish has been taught compulsorily in schools for a century, is an official language of the state and of the European Union, and appears on every road sign and official document, yet the number of people who speak it fluently from day to day remains modest. If a century of favourable policy cannot produce speakers, the sceptics ask, what can?

There is force in this objection, and it points to a danger that enthusiasts seldom acknowledge. Protection can become compulsion, and compulsion breeds resentment: a language imposed through examination requirements may be resented by exactly the people whose goodwill it needs. A second danger is that a language is preserved as an object of heritage rather than as a means of communication, celebrated in festivals and printed on bilingual signs while the number of households in which it is spoken continues to fall. Language is not a monument. It survives by being used, by people who find it useful and pleasant to use.

What does appear to work is support for use in the earliest years and in ordinary life. Immersion preschools, where children spend a full day with fluent adults, produce speakers in a way that weekly lessons rarely do. Broadcasting, subtitles, children's television and, increasingly, social media give a minority language a place in daily experience. Documentation by linguists is valuable, and urgent for languages with only a handful of elderly speakers, but a dictionary and a grammar are a record, not a revival. The distinction between recording a language and saving it is one that campaigners sometimes blur.

Where does this leave the question? In my view, endangered languages should be protected, but the justification is neither the romantic one that every language is a unique window on reality nor the scientific one that each holds a treasure of botanical lore. It is that a community's language is part of the conditions in which its children can grow up with self-respect. That argues for state support of a particular kind: money for nurseries, schools, broadcasting and interpreting, and a legal framework in which speaking a minority language is not a disadvantage. It also argues for restraint. The decision to maintain a language belongs to those who speak it, and outside help is useful only when it is asked for. A policy that treats speakers as exhibits rather than citizens will fail, however generous its budget.