IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 273

For more than a thousand years, the road to power in imperial China ran through a desk. Candidates sat for days in a narrow cell, writing answers about ancient texts, in the hope that a good result would lead to a post as a government official. The system, known as the keju, outlasted dynasties, survived invasions and rebellions, and was adopted in modified forms in Korea and Vietnam. It came to an end only in the twentieth century.

Its origins are usually traced to the Sui dynasty, and the year 605 is often given for the first examination of this kind. Before then, officials had largely been recruited through recommendation, and posts had tended to remain within a small number of great families. The Sui rulers, who had reunified the country after a long period of division, wanted a body of officials whose loyalty lay with the state rather than with local clans, and a written test offered a way of finding talented men whatever their background. The Tang dynasty, which took power in 618, developed the system further, adding subjects such as poetry and the interpretation of the classics.

Over the centuries the syllabus narrowed. By the late imperial period the core of the examination was the Confucian canon, and candidates were expected to know the Four Books and the Five Classics so well that they could quote them from memory. The standard interpretation was that of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi, whose commentaries became the official orthodoxy from the Yuan dynasty onwards. From the middle of the Ming dynasty candidates also had to write in a fixed structure of eight sections, later known as the eight-legged essay, which balanced pairs of sentences against one another and was judged as much on form as on content. A poem composed to strict rules, and a discussion of a practical problem of government, completed the paper.

The system had several tiers. A candidate first sat examinations organised locally, and if successful became a shengyuan. The next step was the provincial examination, held in a walled compound; those who passed became juren, or 'recommended men'. Above that lay the metropolitan examination in the capital and then a final palace examination presided over, at least nominally, by the emperor himself. Those who came through all of these were jinshi, a title that opened the door to high office.

The provincial examinations were gruelling. Each candidate worked in a tiny cell, open at the front, with one board as a desk and another as a bed. Entrance was preceded by a search, and candidates brought their own food, bedding and ink. Once inside they were shut in for days at a time. Their answers were then written out again by scribes so that examiners could not recognise a candidate's handwriting, and the name on the copy was concealed — precautions developed under the Song dynasty and designed to make marking as impersonal as possible.

Competition was ferocious, and the numbers were controlled. Quotas fixed for each province determined how many juren could be produced at each examination, and only a minority of those who sat could possibly succeed; the examination compounds, with their thousands of cells, were built to hold crowds far larger than could be passed. Failure was not final. Candidates could sit again, and many did, year after year, some continuing into their sixties and seventies.

Where so much depended on a single result, cheating was inevitable. Surviving collections contain miniature books, some only a few centimetres long, printed on thin paper so that a candidate could conceal the classics about his person, and other manuscripts carry model answers copied out in microscopic handwriting. Guards searched clothing and even food. Those who were caught faced severe penalties.

The examination is often presented as an engine of social mobility. It is true that men from modest backgrounds occasionally reached the highest posts, and the ideal of advancement by merit rather than birth was genuinely powerful. Yet success required years of study with books and a teacher, and so it favoured families with money and leisure. Women were excluded entirely, and certain occupational groups were barred from sitting in some periods. The reality was more complicated than the legend.

In the nineteenth century criticism grew. Reformers complained that the examination rewarded elegance in prose and a knowledge of ancient texts, while testing nothing about mathematics, science, geography or the world beyond China's borders — precisely the subjects that seemed essential after the country's defeats in war and the upheavals of the Taiping rebellion. The final metropolitan and palace examinations were held in 1904. In 1905 an imperial edict abolished the keju altogether, ending a system that had shaped public life for thirteen hundred years.

Its influence did not disappear with it. Competitive written recruitment for public service is now taken for granted in much of the world, and some historians have argued that accounts of the Chinese examinations, circulated by travellers and missionaries, encouraged European governments to introduce competitive tests of their own in the nineteenth century. The extent of that influence is disputed, but the parallel was noticed at the time.

Among the oldest written records in the world are small lumps of clay, most of them no bigger than a bar of soap, covered in dense wedge-shaped marks. They come from Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and they were produced over roughly three thousand years, from about 3200 BC until the first century AD. Their script, cuneiform, was used for Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and other languages, and the world's collections hold several hundred thousand of them. The earliest tablets are not poems or laws but accounts: quantities of grain, numbers of sheep and goats, lists of workers and the rations due to them.

The medium was ordinary river clay, cheap and always to hand. A scribe flattened a lump into a tablet, sometimes with a raised edge, and pressed into it a stylus cut from a reed. Because the reed was cut at an angle, the impressions it made had a characteristic wedge shape, and the writer turned the tablet as the signs accumulated in columns. Small tablets could be held in one hand; large ones, used for long administrative lists, might be the size of a sheet of paper and were propped on a stand. Most tablets were simply left to dry in the sun, which made them hard but brittle. Those baked in a kiln, or fired by accident in a burning building, are the ones that have survived best, and many others were re-used, their surfaces smoothed or the clay soaked and worked again.

The contents are overwhelmingly practical. Perhaps nine out of ten surviving tablets are records of the kind any large organisation produces: receipts for barley, inventories of livestock, contracts of sale, loans with interest, lists of prisoners or of men called up for labour. A smaller number are letters, school exercises and mathematical problems, the last including tables for multiplication and division. There are also long reference lists of words, and collections of omens compiled for divination. Literature, by contrast, is rare. The poems and epics for which Mesopotamian civilisation is famous survive on comparatively few tablets, and some are known from a single copy. Historians therefore have to be careful: the archive describes a bureaucracy in great detail and its poetry only in fragments.

Why the records survive at all is largely a matter of chance. In a country where mud-brick buildings were constantly being rebuilt, old tablets were often dumped, used as filling, or left in rooms that collapsed over them. The richest archives come from destruction. When a palace or temple burned, the tablets stored in it were baked hard and, in effect, preserved; the fire that ended a city's life also made its paperwork permanent. This creates a peculiar distortion, because destruction is not a random event. Administrative centres and royal libraries are far better represented in museums than villages or farmsteads, and a period of peace is often harder to document than a war or a siege. A tablet that survived because it was thrown on a rubbish heap may tell us about daily rations; one that survived because a palace burned may tell us about royal ideology.

Reading the tablets took two generations of scholarship. The decisive clue was an immense inscription carved on a cliff at Behistun in western Iran on the orders of the Persian king Darius I around 520 BC, which recorded the same text in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. A British army officer, Henry Rawlinson, copied the relief in the 1830s and 1840s, sometimes working from a rope against the rock face, and the parallelism of the three versions allowed scholars to work out the values of the signs. Because a cuneiform sign can stand for a whole word or for a syllable, and may have several values, the process was slow, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the Babylonian version could be read with some confidence. The same methods later opened the Hittite archives found at Boğazköy in Turkey, which the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný identified in 1915 as an Indo-European language.

The greatest threat to the tablets is not decay but the antiquities market. Many collections in Europe and North America were assembled in the nineteenth century from objects bought in Baghdad and other cities, with no record of where they were found; a tablet torn from its room has lost much of the information that made it valuable, since its meaning often depends on the other tablets beside it. Illegal excavation has continued, and during the conflicts of the past three decades sites in Iraq and Syria have been dug over on an industrial scale. Well-excavated groups, such as the merchant archives from Kültepe in central Turkey, are therefore prized, because the position of each tablet on a floor tells us what the whole room was for. Meanwhile an international project is photographing and cataloguing tablets in collections around the world so that scattered fragments can be compared, and researchers have begun to test computer methods for matching broken pieces.

Every year a committee of twenty-one governments meets to decide which of the world's places deserve to be called heritage. Since the convention that created it was adopted in 1972, more than 1,200 sites in over 160 countries have been inscribed. Listing brings visitors, money and a certain kind of pride, and it also brings arguments. Ministers lobby for their own candidates, conservation groups complain that the wrong places are chosen, and a growing number of commentators ask whether the label has become too easy to win.

The procedure is not, on paper, casual. A state that wants a place listed must first put it on a tentative list of candidates and then submit a dossier that may run to hundreds of pages. Two advisory bodies carry out the technical assessment — ICOMOS for cultural sites and IUCN for natural ones — judging whether a place has outstanding universal value against ten criteria, and whether it is adequately protected. The committee then accepts, rejects, defers or refers the nomination. From first proposal to inscription can take a decade.

The argument for a higher bar starts from numbers. When the convention was drafted, the list was expected to hold a few hundred places; it now holds well over a thousand, and critics say the label has been inflated. Europe, with a small share of the world's land and population, holds a very large share of the sites, and a Global Strategy adopted in 1994 to correct this has worked only slowly. If almost any old town with a cathedral can be inscribed, the argument runs, the distinction is worth little. Removal is theoretically possible, but only three sites have ever been deleted, so the list, once joined, is hard to leave.

The objection to raising the bar is that it would punish the wrong countries. Several African and Pacific states hold very few sites, not because their heritage is thin but because preparing a nomination requires archivists, conservators and money. A dossier can take years of work and cost a great deal, and ministries with small budgets cannot compete with those that employ full-time World Heritage staff. A stricter test would entrench the pattern it claims to correct. It would be perverse if the capacity to prepare paperwork, rather than the value of a place, decided what was recognised.

Nor is the committee's judgement above suspicion. Its members sit as representatives of states that may themselves have nominations pending, and it would be naive to imagine that votes are never traded. The committee has from time to time limited the number of nominations it will examine in a single session, which has shortened the agenda without shortening the queue.

My own view is that the argument about entry conditions, though not unimportant, is aimed at the wrong target. The difficulty is not that too many places are called heritage; it is that the label changes so little. In practice, the protection that inscription offers is limited. Liverpool's historic waterfront was removed from the list in 2021 after a programme of development went ahead regardless, and Dresden lost its status in 2009 for much the same reason. In both cases the list recorded the damage; it did not prevent it. Deletion is a last resort, and it does nothing to repair stone.

That said, there is a case for a higher bar, provided it is applied selectively. A state seeking to inscribe a third cathedral town, of a kind already over-represented, should have to show that the addition tells the world something new; a state with two sites in a region that is barely represented should not. Every nomination should also have to demonstrate not only that a place is outstanding but that it will be looked after: a management plan with money behind it, trained staff, and a record of resisting damaging development. The capacity to protect, not merely the quality of the fabric, should decide.

The system's real weakness, however, lies after inscription. What happens to a site once it is listed matters more than the quality of the nomination that put it there. Once a place is on the list, the committee's oversight depends on periodic reports submitted at long intervals and on the willingness of states to describe their own failures honestly. The List of World Heritage in Danger draws attention when a crisis becomes public, but it is a blunt instrument and has never been used consistently. Money and expertise are spent on winning the designation and then evaporate. Inscription should be treated as a continuing obligation rather than a prize.

So should status be harder to obtain? Yes, but the difficulty should be applied selectively. A higher threshold for categories that are already well represented, and a requirement that every candidate show real management capacity, would do more good than a longer form. What the system needs is not fewer inscriptions but more honest ones.