IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 271

The Pacific Ocean covers about a third of the planet and contains thousands of islands, many of them separated from their nearest neighbour by hundreds or even thousands of kilometres of open water. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century almost every habitable island in this vast expanse had been found and settled. The achievement belongs to a people whose descendants still live across the region, from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south and Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the east, and it ranks among the most remarkable feats of exploration in human history.

The ancestors of the Polynesians were speakers of Austronesian languages who spread from island Southeast Asia out into the Pacific. Archaeologists trace their movement through a distinctive pottery decorated with small stamped patterns, known as Lapita ware, which appears in the Bismarck Archipelago, off the coast of New Guinea, from about 1500 BC. Lapita communities reached Fiji, Tonga and Samoa by roughly 800 BC, and there the trail of pottery stops. The islands further east were settled later, by voyagers who had left the pottery behind.

The vessels that carried them were among the finest craft of the pre-industrial world. A voyaging canoe consisted either of two hulls joined by a platform or of a single hull steadied by an outrigger float, and it was driven by sails woven from pandanus leaves. The hulls were built up from planks lashed together with coconut fibre rather than nailed, so that the whole structure flexed with the sea instead of resisting it. Some canoes were more than twenty metres long and could carry dozens of people, together with food, water and animals.

Every voyage was also a colonising expedition. The settlers carried with them the plants and animals on which their lives would depend: taro, yams, breadfruit and bananas, together with pigs, dogs and chickens. Canoes also carried cuttings, roots and seeds, since few of the plants the settlers relied on could survive a long sea crossing without human care. The presence of the same crops and livestock on islands thousands of kilometres apart is itself evidence of deliberate settlement rather than accidental drift, and the diet of Polynesia remains remarkably uniform to this day.

Finding an island that no one has ever seen requires more than luck. At night, Polynesian navigators steered by the stars, using the rising and setting points of particular constellations as a compass that shifted with the seasons. During the day they read the direction of the prevailing swell, felt through the hull, and watched the flight paths of seabirds such as terns, which range far out to sea in the morning and return to land at dusk.

Cloud gathered over high islands could be seen from a great distance, and an unfamiliar colour in the sea or a changed pattern in the waves warned of shallow water. Such knowledge was learned over many years and preserved in chants that fixed the position of each star.

The long pause that followed the settlement of western Polynesia ended around 1000 AD, when canoes began to reach the islands of central Polynesia, among them the Society Islands and the Marquesas. From these groups, voyagers pushed north to Hawaii and east to Rapa Nui, and finally, in about 1250 to 1300, south-west to New Zealand, the last major landmass to be settled. These were not one-way journeys: the same navigators who found a new island could return home, and contact between island groups was maintained for generations. The voyages that reached New Zealand crossed more than 1,500 kilometres of open sea.

Not everyone accepted that the Pacific had been settled from the west. In 1947 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in order to show that a drift voyage from South America was possible, and his book about the journey made the idea famous. The theory that Polynesians had come from the Americas was popular for a time, but the evidence has not supported it. The Polynesian languages belong to the Austronesian family, whose homeland lies in Southeast Asia; the archaeological sequence runs from west to east; and genetic studies of living Polynesians point to Island Southeast Asia as the source of most of their ancestry.

There was, however, some contact in the other direction. The sweet potato, a plant native to the Andes, was being grown throughout Polynesia long before Europeans arrived, and most researchers think it was carried across the ocean by Polynesian sailors who had reached South America and returned. Its names in the different island languages are clearly related to one another, which suggests that the plant spread with the voyagers themselves. How and when the crossing was made is still debated, and no one has shown that such voyages led to lasting settlement.

In the twentieth century the techniques of Polynesian navigation survived in only a few places, most notably on the small Micronesian island of Satawal, where the navigator Mau Piailug had been trained in the traditional methods. In 1976 he guided the Hawaiian double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments, a voyage of several thousand kilometres that lasted more than a month. The journey, and the canoes built since, have become a symbol of Polynesian identity and have helped to revive the teaching of traditional navigation.

Anyone who has dug a garden in northern Europe knows how different its soil is from the dry earth of the Mediterranean. The clay soils of the north are heavy, sticky and slow to drain, and the light scratch plough used by Roman farmers, which merely stirred the surface, could not cope with them. The implement that could was the heavy plough, a machine of wood and iron that cut a furrow, lifted the soil and turned it over in a single pass, burying weeds and bringing fresh earth to the surface.

The working parts of the plough were few but precisely shaped. At the front, a knife-like coulter cut vertically through the turf. Behind and slightly below it, a broad iron share sliced horizontally beneath the furrow, freeing a long slice of soil. The mouldboard, a curved board set at an angle behind the share, then caught that slice, lifted it and rolled it over. The whole assembly hung from a heavy beam, the stout bar to which the draught animals were hitched, and at the rear two upright stilts allowed the ploughman to guide the implement and to judge how deep it ran. Many ploughs ran on two wheels at the front, which helped to keep the furrow at a constant depth.

The effects were visible from a distance. Because the plough threw the soil always to the same side, repeated passes built up long ridges separated by deep furrows, and the pattern can still be traced in the shape of fields in parts of England and Scandinavia. These ridges became the basis of the open-field system, in which villagers held scattered strips in large common fields. The furrows helped to drain wet ground, and the working of heavy clay opened land that had previously been left as waste or woodland. Because ridge and furrow survived in pasture long after the fields stopped being ploughed, it is one of the most durable records of medieval farming.

Where the heavy plough came from is disputed. Some historians have looked to the Slavic lands east of the Elbe, where wheeled ploughs fitted with a mouldboard appear early; others place its development in the Low Countries or northern France. The evidence is patchy: a handful of illustrations in manuscripts, marks left by ploughs in the subsoil, and references in charters to land held by teams of oxen. Most scholars accept that the implement was in use in northern Europe by the tenth century and widespread by the twelfth, but the route by which it spread is uncertain.

The plough's appetite for power shaped rural society. A single heavy plough needed a team of eight oxen, and few peasants owned even one pair. A peasant with one or two animals might join with several neighbours to make up a full team, which is one reason why ploughing was a collective activity. Oxen were therefore shared, and the co-operative groups that formed around a single plough team are often seen as the origin of the common fields and of the manorial organisation of labour. Slow and patient, oxen were also cheap to keep, and on most estates they remained the main source of draught power for centuries.

Horses offered speed, and speed mattered. A horse could work faster than an ox and might plough more ground in a day. But early harnesses worked against the animal. The commonest arrangement, a strap across the chest and another around the neck, pressed on the windpipe when the horse leaned into the load, so that it pulled best with its head raised and its breath half cut off. The padded collar, which rests on the shoulders and transfers the pull through the frame of the animal's body rather than its throat, solved the problem and allowed the horse to lean forward with its head down.

Two other changes came at much the same time. Nailed iron horseshoes protected hooves on heavy wet ground, and horses needed oats, a crop that had to be grown for them, whereas oxen could live on grass and stubble for much of the year. The padded collar itself was in use in China long before it can be seen in European manuscripts, and how and when it reached Europe is unknown.

In 1962 the American historian Lynn White Jr. argued that the collar, the horseshoe and the heavy plough together brought about a revolution in medieval farming, allowing the cultivation of heavy soils and contributing to the growth of population and towns. His book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, is still cited, but its claims have been widely criticised. Historians of technology have pointed out how slowly horses replaced oxen, and how long oxen remained the main plough animals on most manors. Reconstructions of the older harness suggest that it constrained a horse less severely than White assumed. The collar, in short, was important but not decisive on its own.

Regional variation was considerable. In the light soils of East Anglia and much of the Mediterranean the heavy plough was unnecessary, and simpler implements survived. In the heavy clays of the Midlands, by contrast, the wheeled plough with a mouldboard became almost universal. Nor was the change from ox to horse quick: it took centuries, and in some regions oxen were still at work in the nineteenth. What historians now describe is not a single invention but a long accumulation of small improvements, which together raised the productivity of the land and the number of people it could feed.

Every year thousands of objects cross borders on loan. A single touring exhibition may involve hundreds of loans negotiated over years, each with its own contract, insurance policy and condition report. For museums, lending has become routine: it is how collections are made visible, how scholarship is shared and how institutions build relationships with one another. Yet the same mechanism now sits at the centre of a much harder argument, about objects whose ownership is disputed. Can a loan be a fair way of sharing a cultural treasure, or does it merely postpone a question that ought to be answered?

The case for lending rests on something that is easy to forget in the heat of argument: most objects spend most of their lives in storage. A museum that lends a sculpture to another country allows people who would never otherwise see it to stand in front of it, and it exposes the object to new research, new audiences and, frequently, to conservation expertise that the lender does not possess. Loans also run in both directions, and the flow is not simply from rich countries to poor ones: major exhibitions in Europe and North America depend heavily on objects borrowed from institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

There are costs, and they are not trivial. Objects that travel are handled, packed, exposed to vibration and to light, and subjected to changes in temperature and humidity. Conservators regard travel as a distinct risk, to be weighed against the benefits of display, and for the most fragile things - ancient textiles, painted wood, objects already cracked - the sensible answer is often no. Even a well-packed object can suffer damage that is invisible at the time and appears years later. Insurance is expensive, and the indemnity schemes that many governments offer to reduce the cost are themselves a form of public subsidy for exhibition.

The difficult cases, however, are not about fragility but about history. The sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens were removed between 1801 and 1805 by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, under permissions granted by the Ottoman authorities who controlled Greece at the time; in 1816 they were sold to the British Museum. Greece has asked for their return for decades. The museum's trustees are barred by an act of Parliament from disposing of objects in the collection, and successive British governments have declined to change the law. Attention has therefore turned to a compromise: a long-term loan of the sculptures to Athens, in exchange for an acknowledgement that the museum holds legal title.

The Benin Bronzes present a sharper case. Thousands of cast metal plaques and sculptures were taken from Benin City in 1897, when a British force sacked the palace, and were subsequently distributed among museums in Europe and North America. There is no argument about consent: the objects were looted. Several German museums have since transferred ownership of their holdings to Nigeria, and other institutions have returned individual pieces, while Nigeria has announced plans for a museum in Benin City to house returned works. Here the loan question barely arises, because nobody defends the acquisition itself.

This is why the language of lending can be troubling when it is applied to contested objects. A loan presupposes two parties who agree about who owns the thing being lent. Where that agreement is missing, an offer to lend quietly asserts the lender's ownership and asks the claimant to accept it as the price of seeing the object at home. The claimant is placed in the position of a guest in a house that used to be theirs. That may be a practical way forward, and it may be better than nothing, but it is not the same as settling a claim.

Defenders of the great encyclopaedic museums make a different argument. Objects from many civilisations, displayed side by side, allow comparisons that no national collection can offer, and the directors of several major museums made this case in a joint declaration in 2002, describing their institutions as universal museums that serve humanity rather than any single nation. There is something in this: a visitor to London or Berlin can see Egyptian, Greek and West African material within an hour, and the juxtaposition is genuinely illuminating. But the argument proves less than it claims. Comparison does not require permanent possession, and in any case most of the world's population will never visit those cities.

What, then, should be done? Three things seem to me clear. First, loans are a genuine public good and should be encouraged, with governments funding indemnities and transport for objects of outstanding importance. Second, fragile objects should travel rarely or not at all; high-quality replicas, three-dimensional scans and digital images can now do much of the work that a journey once did. Third, and most importantly, a loan should follow the settlement of a disputed title, not replace it.

That last point cuts both ways. Claimant countries should recognise that return does not always mean a single permanent home; agreements that divide a collection, or that rotate it between two cities, are often better than an all-or-nothing outcome. Lenders, for their part, should stop treating an unreturnable object as a permanent possession and a returnable one as a defeat. The question is not whether treasures should travel. It is who decides, and on what terms.