IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 262

When the Second World War ended in 1945, Germany was divided into four zones, each occupied by one of the victorious powers: the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The capital, Berlin, lay more than 150 kilometres inside the Soviet zone, yet it too was split into four sectors. The western Allies were guaranteed road, rail and canal access to their sectors, but no agreement specified how many trains or lorries might pass, and the arrangement depended throughout on Soviet goodwill. West Berlin was, in effect, an enclave of some 480 square kilometres surrounded by Soviet troops.

Matters came to a head in June 1948, when the three western zones introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, as part of their programme of economic reconstruction. The Soviet authorities treated this as a threat and, on 24 June, stopped all road and rail traffic between the western zones and West Berlin. Electricity from the eastern grid was also cut. Two million people in the western sectors had food for a few weeks and coal for considerably less.

The western powers faced a stark choice. Sending an armed convoy down the autobahn would almost certainly have meant fighting, while abandoning the city would have handed two million people to Soviet control. An airlift, by contrast, looked barely possible. Planners calculated that West Berlin needed several thousand tons of supplies every day simply to survive, and no city had ever been supplied from the air for more than a few weeks.

The first aircraft flew in on 26 June 1948, two days after the blockade began. The American effort was named Operation Vittles, the British one Operation Plainfare. The early flights were improvised: Dakota aircraft built to carry passengers were loaded with sacks of flour, tins of milk and bundles of medical supplies, and crews worked without any settled system for unloading or repairing the planes. Nothing about the work was safe, since aircraft flew in all weathers and the risk of collision in crowded airspace was constant.

Access was narrowly defined. Three air corridors, each about thirty kilometres wide, linked West Berlin with Hamburg, Hanover and Frankfurt, and aircraft were required to stay inside them. At night, searchlights were directed at the transports, and Soviet fighters sometimes flew close enough for the crews to see the pilots. At Tempelhof, in the American sector, aircraft descended between apartment blocks; at Gatow, in the British sector, they landed on a grass strip.

In July the Americans sent Major General William Tunner to take charge. Tunner had run an airlift over the Himalayas during the war and brought with him a belief in rigid routine. He insisted that every crew follow the same flight path, that aircraft be unloaded and turned round within a fixed time, and that exhausted pilots be replaced rather than allowed to continue. He also exchanged the small Dakotas for four-engined Skymasters, which could carry three times as much.

The winter of 1948–49 tested the system severely. Fog closed the airfields for days at a time and the city's coal stocks fell dangerously low. On bad nights crews flew on instruments alone, guided by radio beams, and a single error could be fatal. Several aircraft crashed in November and December, and the operation came close to collapse. Berliners, meanwhile, endured a diet of bread, potatoes and dried milk, and many spent their evenings clearing rubble from the streets.

Coal made up roughly two-thirds of everything flown in, because the city's power stations and factories depended on it. To increase capacity a new airfield was built at Tegel, in the French sector. Around nineteen thousand Berliners, many of them women, worked in shifts with hand tools, and the main runway was finished in under three months, opening to aircraft in November 1948. British flying boats also took part, landing on the Havel lake with cargoes of salt.

Ordinary Berliners responded with a gratitude that surprised the aircrew. In July 1948 a young American pilot, Gail Halvorsen, gave two sticks of chewing gum to children watching at the end of the runway and promised to drop more. He tied sweets to handkerchief parachutes and waggled his wings as he passed overhead, and the practice, soon formalised as Operation Little Vittles, spread to other squadrons.

The climax came in April 1949. On 15 April, in what became known as the Easter parade, the airlift delivered nearly 13,000 tons in twenty-four hours, a figure that silenced those who had argued the task was impossible. The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949, though flights continued until 30 September to build up reserves. By then aircraft had made almost 280,000 flights and carried more than two million tons. Some 101 people had died, among them aircrew of several nations and German civilians killed on the ground.

For more than three centuries the Byzantine Empire possessed a weapon that its enemies could neither copy nor explain. Western Europeans called it Greek fire; the Byzantines themselves called it liquid fire or sea fire. It is usually described as a burning liquid, projected under pressure from the bows of warships, that went on burning on the surface of the water and could not be put out with water. Its first recorded use is dated to the defence of Constantinople against an Arab fleet in the 670s, and its appearance seems to have been sudden.

The main narrative source is the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, a monk who wrote in the early ninth century, almost a century and a half after the events he describes. According to Theophanes, the weapon was devised by Kallinikos, an architect from Heliopolis in Syria, who had fled to Constantinople as the Arab armies advanced and who equipped the imperial fleet with fire carried in sealed vessels. Historians treat the story with caution, since Theophanes was writing long after the siege and may have compressed several inventions into one.

Imperial documents confirm that the state treated the formula as a secret of the highest importance. In the middle of the tenth century the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, writing a handbook of government for his son, describes the ceremony at which the secret was handed on and mentions siphons mounted on warships. He does not record the recipe itself, and no complete Byzantine account of it survives.

Literary descriptions are vivid but technically unreliable. Anna Komnene, writing in the middle of the twelfth century, describes fire being shot from a bronze tube with a roar and a cloud of smoke, and notes that the formula was a closely guarded secret. She was describing events that had happened before her birth and had almost certainly never seen the weapon used. Her account, like that of Theophanes, reveals more about how the Byzantines wished to be seen than about chemistry.

On the mechanism, historians are reasonably confident. The weapon was delivered through a tube, called a siphon, mounted on the prow of a warship and connected to a pressurised container below deck. Its range was short, probably no more than a few dozen metres, so the technique was useful mainly at close quarters, to break up formations of enemy ships or set fire to a besieging fleet. It was never a wonder weapon: Byzantine fleets were defeated in several battles in which they carried it.

The composition remains uncertain. Because the secret was never written down, historians have to reason backwards from the effects described. Any substance that burns on water and cannot be extinguished by it must contain a light oil, or a chemical that reacts with water. Crude petroleum, known in the region as naphtha, was available from natural seeps, and sulphur and resin were standard ingredients of incendiary mixtures in the ancient world.

In 1977 two scholars, John Haldon and Maurice Byrne, published a reconstruction based on the surviving evidence. They proposed a mixture of petroleum, resin and sulphur, with quicklime added shortly before use. Quicklime reacts with water and produces enough heat to ignite the oil, which would explain both why water made the flames worse and why the mixture had to be kept dry until it was fired. Their recipe will burn on water, though whether it matches the original nobody can say.

Countermeasures were set out in Byzantine military manuals. Sailors were advised to smother the flames with sand or earth, or to douse them with vinegar or urine, and ships were sometimes protected with hides soaked in vinegar. The manuals also warn against using the weapon in a strong wind, which suggests that the Byzantines understood its limitations and regarded it as one weapon among many rather than as a guarantee of victory.

Later European writers tried to fill the gap. A thirteenth-century treatise attributed to a writer known as Marcus Graecus gives recipes for a burning mixture containing sulphur, pitch and petroleum, and it is from such texts, rather than from Byzantine sources, that the popular image of an unquenchable fire largely derives. These recipes were probably compiled from several different traditions, and their connection with the imperial weapon is uncertain.

The weapon was used in the great siege of 717–718 and against Rus fleets in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but references become rarer after that. By the time the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453 there is no record of its use. Whether the knowledge was lost, or whether changes in naval warfare made it obsolete, is disputed. What is clear is that a weapon which had once terrified the empire's enemies ended as a puzzle for historians.

When a prison closes, its home town faces an awkward question. The building is usually enormous, built of stone, and impossible to sell to a developer without argument. Demolition is expensive and often resisted. Increasingly, the answer has been to turn the prison into a museum. Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, Robben Island off Cape Town and Fremantle Prison in Western Australia all now receive visitors. Conversions have multiplied since the 1990s, particularly in Britain, where many Victorian prisons standing in city centres have closed as larger institutions were built on the outskirts. Some of the buildings are vast, with walls enclosing chapels, hospitals, kitchens and workshops.

What those visitors see varies enormously. Alcatraz, a federal penitentiary until 1963, is presented by the National Park Service largely as a ruin, its cells left empty and an audio recording of former guards and prisoners guiding visitors through them. Eastern State, which opened in 1829 and closed in 1971, has deliberately preserved parts of the building in a state of collapse, with peeling paint and fallen plaster, so that decay itself becomes part of the exhibit.

The arguments in favour are straightforward. A prison is a document: its layout, its cells and its workshops record how a society chose to punish, and once the building has gone that evidence has gone with it. Conversion also keeps a large structure in use, draws visitors into a district that may have little else to offer, and provides work. Above all, a museum can put the history of punishment in front of people who would never open a book about it. Prison architecture is also unusually easy to read. A visitor standing in a wing can see at once how many people were held there, where the officers were stationed and how small the exercise yards were.

Critics are less enthusiastic. The historian Robert Hewison argued in the 1980s that Britain was replacing industry with a heritage industry, in which the past is packaged as entertainment and visitors are offered a comforting version of events. Applied to prisons, the objection is that a cell block becomes a backdrop for family photographs, that the shop sells handcuffs as souvenirs, and that incarceration is turned into a day out. The building survives, but its meaning is lost.

David Lowenthal made a related point. Heritage, he argued, is not the same as history: history is an attempt to understand what happened, whereas heritage is an act of celebration, in which the past is reshaped to meet the needs of the present. A prison museum that sets out to celebrate the survival of a fine Victorian building has already chosen a side. The question visitors should ask is not how old the walls are but who was locked behind them.

Michel Foucault's account of the prison is even more troubling for museum directors. In Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, he argued that prisons did not fail to reform criminals by accident; they produced a class of delinquents, and their failure was tolerated because the institution served other purposes. A museum that presents a prison as a triumph of planning repeats the trick, inviting visitors to admire the mechanism and forget the people it was designed to control.

Not every prison museum faces the same difficulty. Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed, and Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years, are places of national memory. Here the risk is not trivialisation but selection. The stories told are those that fit a national narrative, and the ordinary thieves and debtors who made up the great majority of prisoners tend to be left out. Both sites are associated with political causes that the modern state remembers with pride, and both are now presented as national monuments rather than as museums of everyday imprisonment.

The defence of popular enthusiasm was made by the historian Raphael Samuel, who argued that heritage is not imposed on a passive public but created by it, through family history, walking, collecting and remembering. On his account, the people who queue for a prison tour are not the dupes of a tourist industry; they are looking for a connection with a past that official history ignored. Former prisoners who record their testimony for a museum archive are, in his terms, making history rather than consuming it.

My own view is that conversion is almost always better than demolition, but that it carries conditions. The building should be kept as evidence, not restored to a prettified version of itself. The interpretation should be organised around the people held there rather than around the architecture or the celebrity inmates, who were never typical. And a museum should be honest about the present: a country that displays its old prisons while quietly expanding its new ones is using history as an alibi. That means labels which explain who slept in a cell and why, and displays that connect the people held there to the way the state still punishes.

None of this is easy. Museums depend on visitors, and visitors prefer stories with heroes, while a prison offers very few of either. Yet a prison museum that refuses to comfort its audience can do something rare: it can make an abstract argument about power visible in stone. That seems to me a better fate for an empty cell block than a car park, and a far better one than silence.