IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 258

Between the spring of 1918 and the early months of 1920, a strain of influenza swept around the world in three great waves. It is usually called the Spanish flu, although it did not begin in Spain, and the name reflects the way the disease was reported rather than its origin. Estimates of the death toll vary, but most historians accept a figure of at least fifty million people. More people are thought to have died of influenza in those months than were killed in the First World War, which was then drawing to its close.

Where the virus first appeared has never been settled. The earliest widely documented outbreak affected Haskell County in Kansas in January and February 1918, and by March cases had appeared at Camp Funston, a large military camp in the same state where thousands of recruits were being trained before being sent to Europe. Because soldiers carried the infection across the Atlantic, some historians have argued that the disease spread from the American interior to the battlefields of France. Others point to evidence of earlier cases in Britain, France or China, and no single origin has been agreed.

The illness that appeared in the spring of 1918 was, in most cases, unremarkable. Those who caught it ran a fever, ached and recovered within a few days, and doctors often described a familiar influenza. Deaths were recorded, but they were not out of the ordinary. It was the second wave, which began in late August and September 1918 and appeared in Europe, North America and West Africa within a few weeks of one another, that proved catastrophic. A third wave followed in the early months of 1919.

The symptoms of the second wave were distressing. Patients developed severe pneumonia, and their skin sometimes turned a deep blue as their lungs failed to absorb oxygen. Nosebleeds and bleeding from the ears were reported, and some people died within a day or two of falling ill. Because antibiotics did not yet exist, doctors could do nothing to stop the bacterial infections that followed the viral illness. Treatment consisted largely of nursing care and fluids, together with medicines that had no effect on the virus itself.

What made the pandemic unusual was the age of its victims. Influenza normally kills the very old and the very young, but mortality in 1918 followed a W-shaped curve: death rates were high among infants, low among schoolchildren, and then rose sharply again among adults between about twenty and forty. Pregnant women were especially vulnerable. One explanation offered by epidemiologists is that the immune systems of healthy young adults overreacted to the infection, producing damaging inflammation in the lungs; another is that people born after about 1889 lacked protection acquired by earlier generations.

The name by which the pandemic became known had little to do with its origin. Spain remained neutral in the First World War, and its newspapers were free to report a disease that the press in Britain, France, Germany and the United States had been discouraged from describing in detail, since governments feared the effect on civilian morale. Reports from Madrid reached the world, and the king, Alfonso XIII, was himself infected. In Spain the disease was called the French flu; elsewhere it became the Spanish flu, a name that proved remarkably durable.

Public health authorities responded with the measures available to them. In many cities schools, churches, theatres and cinemas were closed, public gatherings were banned and people were instructed to wear gauze masks. The results depended heavily on how early such measures were introduced. In Philadelphia, where a large parade to promote the sale of war bonds went ahead in late September 1918 despite warnings from doctors, deaths rose sharply in the following weeks. In St Louis, officials closed schools and banned gatherings within days of the first cases, and the city's death rate appears to have been substantially lower.

Medicine in 1918 was poorly placed to identify the cause. Viruses could not be seen under any microscope then in use, and most bacteriologists blamed the disease on a bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae, which the German bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer had linked to influenza in 1892. Vaccines were prepared against this bacterium and given to millions of soldiers and civilians, but they could not have worked. It was not until the 1930s that influenza was shown to be caused by a virus, and not until 1933 that the first human influenza virus was isolated.

The pandemic faded rather than ended. Case numbers declined through 1919, and by 1920 the disease had returned to the seasonal pattern familiar before the war. Historians and epidemiologists have suggested several reasons: so many people had been infected that the virus had few susceptible hosts left, and it may also have mutated into a milder form. No vaccine and no effective drug existed to influence the outcome.

For decades the pandemic was studied mainly by demographers, and there was little public commemoration of a catastrophe that had killed more people than the war it followed. Scientific interest revived at the end of the twentieth century. In 1997 a pathologist recovered lung tissue from the body of an influenza victim buried in the permafrost of Alaska, and in 2005 researchers working with preserved samples announced that they had reconstructed the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus. That work suggested that the virus had probably originated in birds.

The word fresco comes from the Italian for 'fresh', and it describes a method of wall painting in which pigments are applied to plaster that has not yet set. In true fresco, known in Italy as buon fresco, the picture becomes part of the wall itself, which is why so many such paintings have survived for centuries. A related method, fresco secco, involved painting on plaster that had already dried, with a binding medium such as egg to hold the colour. Secco work was quicker and allowed blues and other colours that lime would otherwise damage, but it flaked away far more readily.

The durability of buon fresco depends on a chemical reaction. Lime is made by heating limestone to a high temperature, and the resulting quicklime is then slaked with water to form a paste. Mixed with sand and spread on a wall, this paste gradually absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and turns back into calcium carbonate, a hard, transparent crystal. Pigment applied while the plaster is still damp is trapped beneath the growing crystal layer and becomes, in effect, part of the stone. Because the process needs air, setting is affected by humidity, and a painter working in a cold, wet season had less time than one working in summer.

A wall was prepared with several coats of mortar, each leaner in lime than the last, until a final smooth layer, the intonaco, was reached. This top coat was applied only in the area that the painter expected to finish in a single session, because once it had set no further pigment would be absorbed. The patch of fresh plaster was called a giornata, a day's work. The joins between one giornata and the next can often be seen with the naked eye in a finished painting, and they allow art historians to work out the order in which a composition was built up.

Not every colour could be used. Pigments had to resist the strongly alkaline lime, and several attractive materials did not. Many earth colours, including the ochres, umbers and green earths, were safe, as were carbon black and the expensive blue made from lapis lazuli, but certain copper-based greens and blues changed colour or faded. Where such pigments were essential, painters sometimes applied them after the plaster had dried, using a binder, and these passages tend to be the first to deteriorate. Analysis of surviving works has shown how often a painter combined the two methods.

Because mistakes could not be corrected once the plaster had set, the design had to be settled in advance. Painters began with a full-scale drawing on paper, known as a cartoon, which was laid against the wall and pricked along its outlines; charcoal dust forced through the holes left a dotted guide on the plaster. Sometimes the main lines were also incised with a stylus. On the rough coat beneath the intonaco, artists frequently sketched the composition in red earth, and this underdrawing, called sinopia, survives wherever the top layer has fallen away, offering unusually direct evidence of how a design evolved.

Speed was therefore central to the craft. A painter had to judge exactly how much plaster to lay each morning, since too large an area would dry before it could be covered, while too small an area wasted days. The work could not be paused halfway through a face or a hand. Corrections were possible only by chipping away the plaster and starting the section again, which is one reason why fresco cycles were planned with such care and why assistants were used for borders and repetitive detail. A large scheme might occupy a workshop for years.

The most celebrated fresco cycle in the world, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512. He regarded himself as a sculptor and accepted the commission reluctantly. In the 1980s and 1990s a long restoration removed centuries of soot, wax and varnish and revealed colours far more brilliant than anyone had expected. The cleaning was controversial. Some art historians argued that it had gone beyond dirt and taken off finishing touches that Michelangelo had added on dry plaster, leaving an image that was partly the restorers' own. Others replied that the grime had been the greater distortion, and the argument has never been fully settled.

Frescoes are remarkably durable, but they are not indestructible. Damp rising through a wall dissolves salts, which crystallise beneath the surface and push the plaster away from its backing; earlier repairs, carried out with materials such as cement, have sometimes made the problem worse. Where a painting has begun to separate, conservators may detach it from the wall altogether, a delicate operation that preserves the image but removes it from its setting. To identify the pigments, specialists examine minute samples in cross-section under a microscope and use techniques such as X-ray fluorescence. The results are then compared with technical descriptions that survive from antiquity and the Renaissance: the Roman architect Vitruvius set out how mortar should be applied, and a handbook written around 1400 by the painter Cennino Cennini describes the whole process. Such comparisons often show that painters did not always follow the instructions they had been given.

Almost every city has streets named after people, and almost every city occasionally renames one. The change may follow a death, an anniversary or a change of government, and it is usually presented as a small matter of taste: a modest tribute that costs nothing. In practice, the timing of an honour raises harder questions. How long should a community wait before it decides that a person's reputation will hold? Who bears the cost of the change, and who is given a voice in it? This article argues that delay is sensible for existing streets, but that the case for it is practical rather than historical.

Those who favour honouring people soon after their deaths make a reasonable point. A city that commemorates only figures from the distant past honours the dead but says nothing about the values of the living. Naming a street after a doctor who ran a hospital through an epidemic, or a campaigner who has just retired, gives the honour a meaning that residents can feel directly. There is also a question of fairness. When the bar is set at half a century, the people who clear it tend to be those who already had money, education and access to the record. Delay, in other words, is not neutral: it tends to confirm the reputations that were established first.

The argument for caution is equally strong. A public reputation is not fixed at the moment of death; it continues to be examined, and a record that looks admirable at a funeral may look very different after a decade of biographies and archives. Honours awarded in the first rush of admiration have embarrassed councils before now, and reversing them is more awkward than never granting them. Supporters reply that this risk can be managed: a name on a street is a mark of respect, not a verdict, and respect can be withdrawn. That reply is reasonable, but it concedes that a street name is a judgement the public will later have to revisit.

The practical objections are, in my view, the strongest. Renaming an existing street is not merely a symbolic act. Residents must change their addresses on documents, banks and insurance policies; businesses must reprint stationery and inform customers; delivery firms, taxi drivers and emergency services must update their systems; and maps and official records become ambiguous for years. The costs are real, and they fall hardest on the people least able to absorb them, who are rarely the people who campaigned for the change. Naming a new street after someone avoids almost all of this, which is why the distinction between naming and renaming matters so much.

Two different acts are often confused here. Removing a name from a street is not the same as deleting a person from history. The past is not changed by a sign; what changes is whether a city still chooses to endorse a particular record. Keeping a name is not neutral either, since a plaque in a prominent place is a continuing public statement. Once that is understood, the argument that renamings erase history loses much of its force, although a cautious city ought to explain its reasons and might well keep a record of the old name rather than quietly dropping it.

Historians of commemoration add a further point. Street names are a record of who held power at the time the streets were laid out, and the pattern is rarely accidental. The wave of renamings in German cities after 1945, and in Eastern Europe after 1989, were attempts to withdraw public approval from defeated regimes, not to pretend that they had never existed. Even the decision to leave a name alone is a decision. Seen this way, the current argument about recent figures is simply the latest round in a long process by which communities adjust the version of themselves that their streets display. On new housing estates, indeed, names are frequently chosen by the developers who build them, which raises a further question about who is doing the commemorating.

What would a defensible policy look like? First, a distinction between new streets and old ones, with the heavier burden of proof placed on renaming. Second, a waiting period before an existing street is renamed after someone recently dead, while allowing new streets, schools and public buildings to be named much sooner. Third, a local decision: residents and businesses on the street should have a genuine say, and the council should meet the direct costs of the change rather than leaving them to householders. Fourth, a written record of what was changed and why. None of these measures is expensive, and together they would make the process far less contentious than it often is.

None of this answers the question in the abstract, and it should not. Whether to rename a street after a recently deceased figure is not a matter of principle but of particular cases: what the person did, how well it is known, how much disruption the change would cause and how strongly local people support it. My own position is that delay is justified for existing streets and unnecessary for new ones, and that the decisive test is neither the passage of time nor the warmth of the tribute, but whether the community will still be content with the name in twenty years.