IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 251

Between the early 1840s and the late 1860s, between 250,000 and 400,000 people crossed the interior of North America on a route that became known as the Oregon Trail. It ran for roughly 3,200 kilometres, from the towns on the Missouri River where emigrants bought their last supplies to the fertile valleys of the Pacific north-west. Independence, in Missouri, was the most celebrated of these starting points, though St Joseph and Council Bluffs also sent wagons west. The journey usually took a family four to six months, and most emigrants were farmers seeking land they could own.

The trail existed because of an accident of geography. For hundreds of kilometres the Rocky Mountains present an almost unbroken wall of ridges and peaks, but in what is now Wyoming they are crossed by a broad, gently sloping opening about thirty kilometres wide. Fur traders had known South Pass since the 1820s, and it was their knowledge that made wagon traffic possible. The first substantial party of emigrants set out in 1841; two years later the movement known as the Great Migration carried around 900 people to Oregon in a single season, and the numbers rose sharply thereafter.

Most families travelled in a covered wagon, a wooden box about three metres long and a metre wide, with a curved canvas cover stretched over hoops. Popular images show a family riding inside, but the wagon was in practice a freight vehicle carrying food, tools and furniture, and almost everyone walked. A loaded wagon with its team rarely managed more than three kilometres an hour. The canvas kept out some rain but very little dust, and in summer the heat inside the wagon was such that nobody chose to sit there.

Oxen were the usual draft animals, not horses. A slow ox was stronger and cheaper than a mule, survived on poorer grass and water, and could be eaten if the party ran out of food. Teams of four to six yoke, or eight to twelve animals, were common. Emigrants also had to carry nearly all their food for the whole journey, together with tools, spare parts and ammunition, and the weight limit was brutal. Heaps of abandoned furniture, barrels and even books were a familiar sight along the first weeks of the route, where families discovered what their animals could actually pull.

There were no signposts. The route was marked by natural features, and emigrants learned to read them. Chimney Rock, a slender spire of soft rock in what is now Nebraska, could be seen for many kilometres and announced that roughly a third of the distance had been covered. Further west stood Fort Laramie, a fur-trading post where supplies could be bought and equipment repaired. Independence Rock, a vast outcrop of granite in Wyoming, was supposed to be reached by 4 July; parties that carved their names there in early summer had left themselves enough time to cross the mountains before the snow came.

Beyond South Pass the trail turned south-west towards Fort Hall and then across the Snake River plain, a stretch many remembered as the hardest of the journey. Water was scarce and often alkaline, the grass had been grazed bare by those ahead, and every river crossing was a gamble with wagons, animals and children. The last obstacles were the Blue Mountains and the descent to the Columbia River. From 1846 a rough toll road around the southern side of Mount Hood, built by a businessman named Samuel Barlow, allowed wagons to reach the Willamette Valley without being dismantled and floated downstream.

The greatest danger, however, was disease rather than landscape. Cholera travelled the trail with the emigrants themselves, most lethally in the epidemic years around 1850, and could kill a healthy adult within a day. Typhoid and dysentery, spread by contaminated water, were almost as common. Accidental gunshot wounds, drowning and crushing injuries from wheels and animals killed many more. Historians generally estimate that about one in ten emigrants died before reaching the end of the trail, and disease accounted for the great majority of those deaths.

Relations with the peoples whose land the emigrants were crossing varied from place to place and from year to year. Some groups traded food, horses and guidance; others, seeing their grazing and hunting destroyed, resisted, and there were violent clashes. The migration also changed the country it passed through. Hundreds of thousands of wagons and millions of animals stripped the vegetation along the route, and the bison herds on which Plains peoples depended were already under pressure before the railways arrived.

Some parties never arrived. The most notorious was the Donner Party of 1846, which followed an untested shortcut across the desert west of the Great Salt Lake and was then trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada; nearly half its members died, and some of the survivors ate the bodies of the dead.

Traffic on the Oregon Trail fell sharply after 1848, when the discovery of gold in California diverted most new arrivals to a more southerly route. Wagon migration to Oregon continued, however, until 1869, when the first railway to cross the continent was completed in Utah and a journey that had taken months could be made in days. By then the trail had carried a population large enough to settle the region, and its ruts can still be traced across the plains today.

In 762 the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded a new capital on the west bank of the Tigris and gave it the name Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, though the world soon knew it as Baghdad. The city was laid out as a circle, with the caliph's palace and the great mosque at its centre and the markets arranged around them. Its position was well chosen, for goods arrived by river and by caravan from China, India, Central Asia and East Africa. The wealth that accumulated there allowed the Abbasid court to support poets, physicians, astronomers and scholars on a scale that had no earlier equivalent in the region. Within a century it was among the largest cities in the world, and its population is thought to have reached several hundred thousand.

Books were among the treasures that this wealth purchased. The caliph Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809, is credited with collecting a substantial library, and his son al-Ma'mun, caliph from 813 to 833, is usually associated with the foundation or expansion of the institution known as Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. It contained a library and rooms in which scholars copied, translated and argued over texts. According to later accounts, al-Ma'mun sent envoys abroad to buy manuscripts, and he and his courtiers were prepared to pay large sums for them.

None of this would have been possible without a change in the material from which books were made. Before paper, scribes wrote on parchment, prepared from animal skin, or on papyrus, and both were expensive. According to a widely repeated account, papermakers captured at the battle of Talas in 751, when Arab forces defeated a Chinese army in Central Asia, carried the craft to Samarkand; from there it spread westwards. Whatever the details, by the end of the eighth century Baghdad had its own paper mills. Paper was made from rags, which a large city produced in quantity. The result was a sharp fall in the cost of books, and both booksellers and private libraries multiplied accordingly.

The most celebrated of the translators was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian physician of the ninth century who, with a team of assistants, produced Arabic versions of the medical writings of Galen and Hippocrates that were still being copied hundreds of years later. Hunayn and his colleagues gathered several different copies of the same work whenever they could and compared them, so that the Arabic text was sometimes fuller and more reliable than any single Greek manuscript available in Europe at the time. Work on this scale was expensive, and it was financed by the caliphs and by wealthy officials who competed to be seen as patrons of learning.

The work done in Baghdad was not confined to preservation. In mathematics and astronomy in particular, scholars used what they had inherited from Greece and India as the starting point for investigations of their own. The mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who worked in the city in the early ninth century, wrote a treatise on equations whose title gave the world the word algebra, and his account of the numerals used in India, including a sign for zero, helped to spread the system that is the ancestor of the figures used today. Astronomers supported by al-Ma'mun measured the length of one degree of latitude on a level plain, observing how the height of the stars changed as they travelled north and south, and from it calculated the circumference of the Earth, arriving at a figure remarkably close to the truth.

How much of this can actually be seen is another matter. Almost nothing survives of the original buildings, and most of what is written about the House of Wisdom comes from authors who lived long after the events they describe. Some historians therefore doubt whether Bayt al-Hikma was a formal academy with a director, a curriculum and salaried staff, as it is sometimes portrayed, or simply the caliph's own library. The word bayt can mean a house, a household or a storehouse, and the sources do not always make clear which is intended. It is safer, perhaps, to think of a palace library that grew, changed and declined over more than a century.

The end came with the Mongols. In 1258 Hulagu Khan's army took Baghdad, executed the last Abbasid caliph and destroyed much of the city. The Abbasid state never recovered its former power. What happened to the library is unknown, and one famous story, that so many books were thrown into the Tigris that the river ran black with ink, first appears in sources written centuries later. Historians treat it with caution, since it may tell us more about how later writers imagined the catastrophe than about what actually occurred.

What survived was the learning itself. In the twelfth century European scholars, working mainly in Toledo and Sicily, translated Arabic texts into Latin, and with them a large part of Greek science, medicine, mathematics and philosophy re-entered western Europe. Some Greek works are known today only because they had been translated into Arabic and the Arabic versions survived. The vocabulary of modern science still carries traces of this route: algebra, algorithm and alkali all came into European languages from Arabic. It was through these Latin versions, rather than the Greek originals, that the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy first became widely available in the universities of Europe. For several centuries the books that Baghdad had gathered and copied were the main channel through which the learning of the ancient world reached the modern one.

Every few years a historical film is attacked for its errors. The complaints follow a familiar pattern: a battle fought on the wrong ground, a queen who was a child at the time shown as an adult, a machine captured by the wrong navy. Historians write articles listing the mistakes, the filmmakers reply that they make drama rather than documentaries, and the argument dies down until the next film arrives. Behind this ritual lies a question that is rarely examined: what, exactly, do we expect a historical film to do?

The case for leniency rests on the obvious difference between a film and a book of history. A film has two hours, a budget and an audience that expects to be moved. The past, as it was lived, has no plot; a film must impose one. Events that took years must be compressed, dozens of characters merged into one, and motives made visible in a glance or a line of dialogue. No narrative art can avoid this, and Shakespeare's history plays are full of inventions that nobody now demands be corrected; they are understood to be plays about history rather than substitutes for it.

There is also a practical objection to the demand for accuracy: nobody agrees on the standard. A film can be accurate about the cut of a coat and wrong about why a war was fought, or reproduce the look of a city while misunderstanding the economy that sustained it. Some productions employ historical advisers and follow their advice closely; others ignore it, and the audience cannot tell which. Historians themselves disagree about the past, and it would be strange to insist that a director settle disputes that the profession has not resolved. The number of errors in a film, counted one by one, tells us very little about whether the film is honest.

Yet the argument that it is only entertainment cannot be the end of the matter, for two reasons. The first is that for most people films are the most vivid source of what they know about the past; long after the textbook has been forgotten, the images remain. The second is that films do not merely leave gaps in knowledge; they can fill them with confident error. Research on memory suggests that people readily absorb invented details from films and later recall them as facts, particularly when those details fit what they already believe. A film that relocates a battle is not simply an incomplete account of the past; it is an active source of a false one.

None of this means that every departure from the record is equally serious. A distinction is worth drawing between invention and distortion. Inventing a character to carry several people's experiences, or a private conversation that no one recorded, is a legitimate dramatic device, and audiences generally understand it. Distortion is different: it changes the evidence about matters that were public and contested. A film that makes an American crew responsible for capturing a German cipher machine, when the feat was in fact achieved by the Royal Navy, has not simplified the past; it has reassigned credit.

The most troubling cases are those in which a film shifts responsibility for something terrible. Braveheart, released in 1995, gave a leading role to a French princess who at the date of the events shown was still a child living in another country; that is invention, and it does little harm in a film that makes no claim to be a documentary. Less harmless are films that attribute atrocities to the wrong side, or that tidy away a nation's own crimes. Memory is not a private matter, and films help to decide what a society will remember.

Some of the blame belongs to the way history is taught. If the only history a person meets is in a classroom, and if that history consists of dates and lists, the cinema will always seem more alive. A subject presented as a set of settled conclusions, rather than as a series of arguments about evidence, gives an audience no way of judging what it is shown. Historians who want films to be better might begin by making their own subject more inviting.

So what should be demanded? Not, I think, a perfect match with the record, which no film can deliver. What can reasonably be asked is that a film be honest about the kind of thing it is doing. If the plot requires an invented battle, an invented romance or a compression of time, there is no harm in saying so, and a short note at the end costs nothing. What is objectionable is the pretence of authority: the caption announcing that this is what really happened.

In the end, the most useful response to an inaccurate film is not a boycott but a conversation. Historians who complain that the public gets its history from cinema are complaining about a situation they could change by writing for that public rather than for each other. A film that sends people to a bookshop has done more for historical understanding than a monograph that nobody reads. The obligation therefore runs in two directions: filmmakers should not pretend to a truth they have not earned, and historians should not sneer at the audience they might reach.