IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 275

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain produced more manufactured goods than any other country and liked to describe itself as the workshop of the world. It was in this climate of confidence that Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, proposed an international exhibition of the products of industry. The idea was not entirely new. France had staged national exhibitions of its manufactures since 1798, and British manufacturers who had visited them returned convinced that a similar display at home would show the world what British workshops could achieve.

The plan was taken up by Henry Cole, an energetic civil servant and campaigner, and by leading members of the Society of Arts, and in 1850 a royal commission was appointed to organise the event. A site was found in Hyde Park, and a committee of engineers and architects, among them Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was asked to design the building. Its proposal was for a vast brick structure with an iron dome, and it was widely criticised, both for its appearance and for the damage it would do to the park.

The solution came from an unexpected quarter. Joseph Paxton had trained as a gardener and had made his reputation by building glasshouses for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, including one designed to shelter a giant water lily. Hearing of the exhibition, he sketched a design on a sheet of blotting paper during a meeting and developed it within days. His building would be a frame of iron and glass, made in standard parts that could be cast and fitted together quickly. It was accepted in the summer of 1850, and work began almost at once.

What emerged was unlike any building that had been seen before: around 560 metres long, 124 metres wide, and high enough in the central transept to enclose several mature elm trees, which were left standing inside it. Its length, usually quoted as 1,851 feet, was said to match the year of the exhibition, a coincidence that was widely remarked upon. Around two thousand men worked on the structure, which was held up by slender cast-iron columns, and it was completed in a few months.

Not everyone welcomed the scheme. Critics complained that a glass building would be unbearably hot in summer and that the park would be spoiled, and some doubted that so large a crowd could be safe inside it. The builders answered the first objection with canvas blinds and ventilators, and the second by showing that the whole structure formed a single rigid frame. The roof was made of ridges and furrows, like a garden frame, and the glass was fixed in panes small enough for one man to handle. The palace was designed from the start to be taken down again.

Inside, the displays were arranged in courts by country and by trade. Roughly half of the objects shown came from Britain and its empire, and the rest came from abroad, with France, the German states and the United States among the largest contributors. The Indian court, with its carved ivory, shawls and jewels, was never empty, above all because it contained the Koh-i-Noor diamond, then reputed to be the largest in the world. Visitors queued to shuffle past the case in which the stone lay, an armed guard stood beside it, and the stream of people did not stop. In the machinery court, by contrast, steam engines and looms ran continuously, and the American section displayed Cyrus McCormick's reaper and Samuel Colt's revolvers. Nothing on display was for sale; the exhibition was a showroom, not a market.

Unlike most institutions of the period, the exhibition was open to anyone who could pay the entrance fee, and the fee was lowered at intervals so that working people could attend. Railway companies ran cheap excursions from the industrial towns, and the travel agent Thomas Cook arranged trips that brought thousands of visitors from the north of England. By the time the doors closed on 15 October 1851, more than six million visits had been recorded, a figure that astonished contemporaries.

Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1 May and returned many times, recording her impressions in her diary. When the accounts were drawn up, the event had produced a surplus of about £186,000, a considerable sum at the time. The money was used to buy land in South Kensington, where a cluster of museums and colleges was afterwards built, and the area is still sometimes called Albertopolis.

The building itself was dismantled and rebuilt, in an enlarged form, on a hill at Sydenham in south London, where it stood for more than eighty years. On the night of 30 November 1936 it caught fire, and the flames were visible for miles; within hours the greater part of the structure had collapsed.

The exhibition's influence was not confined to Britain. Its modular frame, made of identical parts that could be taken apart and reassembled, showed that a great building need not be permanent, and iron and glass palaces of the same kind were soon put up in New York and Dublin. Other countries mounted their own international exhibitions in the following decades, beginning with Paris in 1855, and the sequence of world's fairs that continues today can be traced back to the glass building in Hyde Park.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the wooden sailing ship was the most complex object that Europeans built: a machine of tens of thousands of parts, made from several thousand trees, and expected to survive years of salt water, storms and enemy fire. The work was done in dockyards that were industrial sites in all but name, with sawpits, forges, ropewalks and stores of timber. At the head of each yard stood a master shipwright, who combined the roles of designer, engineer and manager, and beneath him worked shipwrights, caulkers, joiners and labourers. The largest yards employed several hundred men, and a first-rate ship of the line absorbed the work of an entire community for two or three years.

The shape of a hull was not worked out on paper in the way a modern engineer would recognise. The shipwright began with a few principal dimensions, among them the length of the keel, the breadth and the depth of the hold, and derived everything else from proportions that long experience had shown to work. The curves of the frames were set out with sets of wooden moulds, in a method the English called whole-moulding. From the eighteenth century some shipwrights also drew the hull's lines full size on the floor of a loft, but such drawings were a tool for the yard rather than a plan from which anyone could build.

Timber, above all oak, was the great constraint. Straight lengths were needed for keels and planking, but the curved pieces that gave a hull its strength could only be cut from the joints of large branches, so the best trees were those that had grown in open ground, where they spread as they rose. Green wood shrank and split, so timbers were stacked to season for years before use. As English oak became scarce and expensive, the navy bought timber from the Baltic and later from North America, and the demand for durable supplies reshaped forests and trade routes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Construction began with the keel, a massive timber running the length of the ship's bottom, which was laid on blocks in the dockyard. To its forward end was joined the stem, a curved timber that rose to form the bow. At the after end stood the sternpost, the upright from which the rudder was hung. Across the keel the shipwright raised the frames, pairs of curved timbers that formed the ribs of the hull. To these he fastened the planking that made the outer skin, caulking the seams with oakum and sealing them with pitch. A large ship might stand on the stocks for a year or more before it was launched.

The most direct evidence of how this was done comes from the ships themselves. The Mary Rose, a warship of Henry VIII's navy, sank in the Solent in 1545 and was raised in 1982; the Vasa, a Swedish warship, capsized on her first voyage in 1628 and was recovered in 1961. Both had been buried in mud that excluded oxygen, and both preserved tool marks, unfinished joints and spare timber that no document records. Neither is typical, however: a royal flagship was built with unusual care and at unusual expense.

Written records supply what the hulls cannot. Dockyard accounts list purchases of timber and payments to workmen, contracts specify dimensions and deadlines, and several treatises set out the shipwright's methods in detail. From the early eighteenth century the navy issued establishments that fixed the dimensions of each class of warship, in an attempt to standardise the fleet. These documents are indispensable, but they have a bias of their own. They describe what was ordered rather than what was done, and they survive best for the state yards, which were only part of the industry.

Scientific analysis has added a third kind of evidence. Dendrochronology, the dating of timber by its growth rings, can establish when a tree was felled and roughly where it grew. Tree-ring sequences from northern Europe have been used in this way to identify oak imported from the Baltic, which is otherwise hard to distinguish from English timber. Analysis of surviving hulls has also revealed repairs and replacements that no document mentions, since a vessel patched with newer wood carries the dates of its refits in its own fabric.

None of this settles the arguments. Historians disagree about how far shipbuilding was a designed science and how far a craft learned by eye and by rule of thumb, and the surviving treatises may describe an idealised practice rather than a real one. Replicas and reconstructions have been used to test particular methods, but a replica is itself an interpretation. Beyond dispute is the scale of the achievement: vessels built by hand, from timber felled, shaped and fitted by men who could not have read a plan, carried the trade and the navies of Europe for three centuries.

Historians like to think of themselves as harmless. Their material is paper, their tools are footnotes, and their conclusions rarely change anything outside a seminar room. Yet the questions they ask can reach into living families. A researcher tracing the wealth behind a country house may find that it was built on the profits of slavery; an archaeologist examining a museum collection may establish that its skulls belonged to people whose descendants still live in the same region; a genealogist may discover that a celebrated local benefactor was also a criminal. Should such findings be published?

The argument for publication rests, first, on the purpose of the discipline. History is not a private hobby; it is the means by which a society understands how it came to be as it is. The wealth of institutions, the boundaries of cities and the distribution of advantage and disadvantage all have histories, and if those histories are left unexamined, the arrangements they produced come to look natural. The findings that cause most discomfort are almost always those that disturb comfortable accounts of the past, and it is precisely those accounts that most need disturbing.

Second, suppression rarely benefits the people it claims to protect. Universities and archives are leaky institutions; a thesis deposited in a library, a photograph in a local paper or an entry in a database will eventually be seen. When a community learns, years later, that researchers knew something and kept it quiet, the sense of betrayal is greater than any distress the information would have caused at the time. There is also a practical point: descendants seeking compensation, land or recognition need evidence, and evidence that is never published cannot be used.

Against this, it is naive to suppose that publication is always neutral. Research does not merely describe the world; it can change how people are seen. The physical anthropologists of the nineteenth century measured skulls in the confident belief that they were doing objective science, and their findings were used for generations to justify racial hierarchies. A clumsily framed publication today, whatever its author's intentions, may supply a community's enemies with material, or fix a family inside a story it did not choose. People who give a DNA sample for a study, or whose ancestors appear in a plantation ledger, did not agree to become subjects of history.

Many disciplines have therefore adopted a principle of consultation. Archaeologists working with human remains are now expected to discuss their plans with the communities most closely connected to them, and in some countries the law requires it. In the United States, legislation passed in 1990 established a process for returning Native American remains and objects to the tribes to which they belong; in Britain, an act of 2004 allowed national museums to release human remains to communities that claimed them. Historians working with documents rather than bones have no such framework, but the ethical reasoning is the same.

Consultation, however, cannot settle everything. Communities are not single voices, and the person who speaks most confidently on their behalf may not represent them. A vocal family or a local politician can prevent research that other members of the same group would have welcomed. And a rule that researchers may publish only what their subjects agree to hear would give any determined objector a veto over the record. Consent is a necessary consideration in research on living people; it cannot be a condition of historical scholarship in general.

The most useful distinction is between the public and the private. Where a finding concerns an institution, a monument, a company or the reputation of a public figure, publication is plainly right: these things belong to everyone, and a community has a legitimate interest in knowing what it is celebrating. Where it concerns private individuals who have no public role, and especially where the information bears on health or on events within living memory, restraint is reasonable. Even then the restraint should lie in the manner of publication, in the amount of detail and the use of names, rather than in silence.

My own view, then, is that historians should publish, but that they should publish with the care of people handling something dangerous. That means accuracy, since a careless claim about a community's past can do more harm than a deliberately withheld one; context, since a bare fact without explanation is easily misused; and consultation, wherever it is practical and the descendants can be identified. It also means honesty about the limits of the evidence, which is the historian's ordinary duty and, in these cases, a form of respect.

What historians should not do is allow discomfort to decide the question. The past is not the property of those who find it flattering, and the people most likely to be hurt by an unwelcome finding are rarely the ones asking for silence. To leave a record as the powerful wrote it is not neutrality; it is a choice with consequences of its own.