IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 252

In the middle of the nineteenth century, travelling from the eastern states of America to California was a serious undertaking. A wagon train following the overland trails might take four to six months, and the journey was dangerous. The alternative was to sail, either all the way round the southern tip of South America, which could take even longer, or to Panama, where travellers crossed the isthmus by boat, mule and a short stretch of railway. Businessmen, journalists and politicians had talked for years about a railway to the Pacific. What held it back was not a lack of enthusiasm.

For more than a decade the proposal stalled in Congress, for reasons of sectional politics rather than engineering. A railroad would enrich the states and territories it crossed, and members from the North and the South each wanted the eastern terminus in their own region. Surveys of several possible routes were commissioned and argued over. The secession of the southern states in 1860 and 1861 removed the southern option, and in 1862 Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, which President Lincoln signed that July. It chartered two companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, and granted them land and government loans to build a line that would meet somewhere in the middle. A second act, two years later, doubled the land grants.

The Central Pacific was a Californian enterprise, backed by four Sacramento merchants: Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, later known as the Big Four. The route had been surveyed by Theodore Judah, a young engineer who had spent years lobbying for the railway and who became the company's chief engineer. In 1863, having caught yellow fever while crossing Panama, he died at the age of thirty-seven. The Big Four, whose methods he had distrusted, then took control.

Work began at Sacramento on 8 January 1863, and the first hundred miles, climbing into the Sierra Nevada, proved the hardest. The rock was granite, and the Summit Tunnel near Donner Pass had to be cut with hand tools and black powder, later with nitroglycerin, by men working in shifts around the clock; it took well over a year. In the winter of 1866 and 1867, snow buried the cuttings and swept into the camps. Avalanches killed workers, and no reliable count of the dead survives.

The company could not find enough white labourers in California, so in 1865 it began recruiting in China. Eventually some ten thousand Chinese men worked for the Central Pacific, forming about four-fifths of its workforce. They were organised into gangs under Chinese foremen, were housed and fed by the company, and were given much of the most dangerous work, including the handling of explosives. The Union Pacific, building westwards, relied heavily on Irish immigrants and on veterans of the Civil War.

The Union Pacific's progress was slower at first. Its line started from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1865, and materials had to be brought up the Missouri River or hauled overland by wagon. Its chief engineer was Grenville Dodge, a former Union officer; its vice-president was Thomas Durant, a promoter whose methods were later exposed. Insiders had set up a construction company of their own, Credit Mobilier, which charged the railroad far more than the work cost and passed the profits to shareholders. The arrangement became a national scandal in 1872.

Because Congress had never fixed the meeting point, the two companies raced towards each other, and the incentives were perverse. Each was paid by the mile, so each had an interest in laying as much track as possible, and in some places the graders worked on parallel courses side by side. On 28 April 1869 a Central Pacific crew laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in a single day, a record never since approached by manual labour.

On 10 May 1869 the rails met at Promontory Summit, in Utah. Stanford, a former governor of California and now president of the company, tapped a spike of gold that had been made for the occasion. The spike and the hammer were connected to a telegraph line, so that the blows were transmitted to cities across the country and celebrated with bells and cannon fire. Two locomotives, the Central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's No. 119, stood nose to nose for the photographers. A few hundred people attended. The Chinese workers who had built most of the line were largely absent from the celebrations, and from the histories written afterwards.

The effects were immediate. A journey that had taken months now took about a week, and freight costs fell sharply. Mail, machinery, grain and cattle moved in both directions, towns along the line grew, and the Plains, crossed in a few days rather than a season, were opened to settlement. For the Native American peoples of the region the consequences were disastrous: hunters travelled west by train to shoot bison for their hides, and the army could move troops far more quickly. Yet the line was not quite continuous. There was no bridge across the Missouri at Omaha until 1872, and until then passengers and goods crossed the river by ferry.

The railroad also created a new kind of traveller. Within a few years, excursion companies were selling tours to the Rockies and to California, and the scenery of the American West, seen from a carriage window, became part of the country's idea of itself.

Anyone who writes the number 2025 is using a system that took a thousand years and several thousand miles to reach them. Its rules are simple. Ten separate symbols are enough, and the value of each depends on where it stands: the 2 in 2025 counts for two thousand, but the same digit in the units place counts for two. To make this work, the system also needs a sign for nothing, which holds an empty place so that the other digits keep their correct value. That combination of ten digits, place value and zero is what distinguishes the numerals used across most of the world today from every earlier method of counting.

The system was developed in India. Mathematicians there were using a place-value notation by the middle of the first millennium, and the rules for calculating with zero were set out by Brahmagupta in 628, in a Sanskrit treatise on astronomy that also gave methods for solving equations. For the earliest physical trace, scholars turn to a bundle of birch-bark fragments found in 1881 near Bakhshali, in what is now Pakistan. Some of these contain a dot used as a placeholder. Radiocarbon tests reported in 2017 dated the oldest pieces to the early centuries of the first millennium, but the dating of the collection as a whole is still disputed.

Zero had a name before it had a shape. Indian mathematicians called the empty place sunya, meaning void or empty. Translators working in Arabic kept the idea but adapted the sound, and the word became sifr. When the concept reached Latin Europe, sifr turned into zephirum, and from that came both the English word zero and, by a separate route, cipher. The dot itself was eventually written as a small circle, though when and where this change happened is not known. The change was gradual, and its chronology remains uncertain, so the search for the earliest examples still occupies historians of mathematics.

The decisive stage in the numerals' journey was Baghdad. The Abbasid caliphs, ruling from a city founded in 762, paid for the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian learning into Arabic, and the arrival of paper from China, a craft that reached the Islamic world in the eighth century, made books far cheaper than they had been on papyrus or parchment. Baghdad had a paper mill by the 790s. In this setting a scholar named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, working in the first half of the ninth century, wrote a treatise describing the Indian system of calculation and explaining how it could be used. The Arabic original of that arithmetic book has not survived; what scholars work with is a Latin translation, itself altered in the course of transmission.

Two of al-Khwarizmi's books had an extraordinary afterlife in European languages. His own name, Latinised as Algoritmi, gave English the word algorithm, while the title of his treatise on solving equations, al-jabr, gave it algebra. Later scholars in the Islamic world pushed the system further. A book written in Damascus in the tenth century by Abu al-Hasan al-Uqlidisi describes calculations with decimal fractions, and shows the new figures being used with pen and paper rather than on a counting board.

Europe learned of the numerals slowly and indirectly. In the second half of the tenth century a young scholar from Aquitaine, Gerbert of Aurillac, studied in Catalonia, where Christian and Muslim territories met, and there encountered a form of counting board fitted with the new figures. He later became a teacher, an archbishop and finally pope, and his writings spread awareness of the system among educated Europeans, though he did not use the digits in the way a modern reader would recognise. More substantial knowledge arrived through translation. In the twelfth century, scholars working in Toledo and elsewhere turned Arabic works on mathematics and astronomy into Latin. Neither route was direct, and for a long time the figures were regarded in Europe as an exotic import.

The most influential advocate was Leonardo of Pisa, known today as Fibonacci, the son of a merchant who traded in North Africa. His book Liber Abaci, completed in 1202, explained the Indian system to merchants, showed how much easier it was than Roman numerals for calculation and bookkeeping, and worked through practical problems of profit, exchange and the mixing of alloys. Its influence was great, but not immediate. For a century and more, many professional calculators in Italy went on using counting boards and Roman figures, and the two methods competed in the schools. Copies spread across Europe, and there were soon schools in the Italian trading cities where the new arithmetic was taught.

Opposition was practical as well as conservative. Figures written in ink could be altered: a 1 could be turned into a 7, and a 0 added to the end of a sum. In 1299 the bankers' guild of Florence forbade its members to use the new symbols and required accounts to be kept in words, and the ban was repeated at intervals during the following century. In much of Europe, however, the numerals were too useful to resist. They were standard in commercial arithmetic by the fifteenth century, and printing, from the middle of that century, fixed the shapes of the digits that schoolchildren still learn, although the forms printed today are not identical to those used in Arabic-speaking countries.

Drive into almost any European or North American city that grew up around a single industry and you will eventually come to a large brick building with a tall chimney, a water tower or a pair of iron gates. Many of these structures now carry a sign announcing a museum of industry, a heritage centre or a visitors' centre, with a cafe, a car park and a shop. Since the 1970s, as mills, mines, breweries, gasworks and railway works have closed, thousands of such places have been preserved or converted. Some are run by national bodies, but many depend on volunteers, small grants and the income from a tea room. Whether this is the best use of them is a question worth taking seriously.

The case for preservation rests on three arguments. The first is memory. A works that employed a whole town for a century is part of the identity of the people who live there, and demolition erases not only a building but the record of the labour that took place inside it. The second is economic. Industrial heritage can attract visitors, and the most celebrated example is in Germany's Ruhr region, where a colliery that closed in 1986 is now a cultural site on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and a disused steelworks has been turned into a public park with walkways, gardens and climbing walls. The third is environmental. Keeping a sound structure in use avoids the waste of demolition and the energy and materials needed for a new building.

Each of these arguments has force, and each is easily overstated. The environmental case, in particular, is not as straightforward as it looks. A vast single-glazed shed with a leaking roof can use more energy in a year than a modern building would use in twenty, and the additional transport costs of a site in a remote valley may outweigh the savings. The economic case depends on visitors who may not come: the towns with the strongest industrial heritage are often the ones with the fewest hotels, and a museum of mining in a depressed region competes with every other attraction for the same modest number of tourists.

Cost is the objection that is hardest to answer. Blast furnaces, winding towers and warehouses are enormous, and enormous buildings are expensive to keep standing: roofs fail, steel rusts, and the ground beneath may be contaminated with the residues of a century of work. The money required is public money, and in places where the need for housing, health services and schools is acute, a grant for the restoration of a chimney is not obviously well spent. There is also an uncomfortable irony in a museum devoted to work in a district where there is very little of it.

A more subtle criticism concerns the story a site is allowed to tell. Industrial museums are usually run by people who love machinery, and who are often former employees, and they depend on visitors having a pleasant day. The result can be a version of history with the hardship taken out: the looms are beautiful, the furnaces impressive, and the low pay, the accidents, the strikes and the polluted water are mentioned in a corner. A mill that has been restored to working order, with a gift shop beside it, is a charming place. It is also a partial account of what a mill was.

Others argue that the choice is not between preservation and demolition but between freezing a place and using it. A warehouse converted into studios, workshops and flats is busier, and generates more income, than one kept exactly as it was on the day the last worker left. Supporters of this view point to sites where new building has been inserted into old shells, so that the structure is repaired and the town gains a library, a college or a swimming pool rather than a display of obsolete machinery. The past is then part of ordinary life instead of a place to be visited. That seems to me a better outcome than a perfectly preserved emptiness.

Yet the best sites show that honest interpretation is possible. Several colliery museums in Britain employ former miners as guides, and their accounts of the work are more convincing than any label. Where such testimony is recorded, and where the deaths and the disputes are given space, a heritage site can become a resource for argument about the present, not merely a display of old equipment. That, in turn, depends on who is in the room when decisions are made. Too often the choice of what to keep is settled between a local authority and a consultant, with the company that once owned the site taking care to leave its own record untroubled.

My own view is that the question cannot be answered in the abstract; it has to be answered town by town, openly. Some structures are of genuine architectural or technical importance and should certainly be kept, and the best of them can carry a new use. Others are ordinary sheds whose loss would cost their communities little. What matters is that preservation should not be a substitute for an economic plan, that the account given to visitors should include the injuries and the pollution as well as the elegance of the machinery, and that the people who live beside a site should decide what it says about them.