IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 276

In the last week of August 1854, cholera broke out in Soho, in the centre of London. The first cases appeared near Broad Street, and within days the disease had reached the surrounding courts and alleys. Its symptoms were terrifying: violent diarrhoea and vomiting, muscular cramps and a loss of fluid so rapid that a healthy adult could die within hours. Nobody knew what caused it. Most British doctors were convinced that cholera was carried in foul air, a theory known as miasma. The remedy, they argued, lay in clearing the smells of the streets, the drains and the homes of the poor.

The man who would change that view was John Snow, born in York in 1813, the son of a labourer. Apprenticed at fourteen to a surgeon in Newcastle upon Tyne, he moved to London in 1836 and qualified as a doctor two years later. He built a practice in Soho and earned his living as an anaesthetist, at a time when the use of ether and chloroform to deaden pain in surgery was still a novelty. In 1853 he gave chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of a prince, an event that made his name in fashionable circles. His real interest, however, lay elsewhere.

Snow had been brooding on cholera since the epidemic of 1848–49. He rejected the idea that the disease travelled in the air. It was, he maintained, the work of a living agent that multiplied inside the intestines of a patient, was expelled in the stools, and reached the next victim through water contaminated with sewage. In 1849 he published a short book setting out the case. It attracted little notice. What he lacked was evidence so plentiful and so precise that it could not be argued away.

The outbreak of 1854 supplied it. Snow lived a few minutes' walk from Broad Street, and he began visiting the houses where people had died, questioning their families and marking each death on a map of the parish. The marks clustered around one source: the pump in Broad Street, which stood at a corner of the thoroughfare and drew customers from several surrounding courts. Where deaths had occurred at a distance, Snow usually found that the family had sent for water from that pump, or had moved away but still preferred its taste.

Snow took his findings to the parish authorities. On 8 September 1854 the board of guardians agreed to take away the handle of the pump, and it was removed that day. The epidemic was already fading, and the removal probably did less to end it than legend suggests. It did, however, give Snow's argument a public hearing. By the time the outbreak was over, 616 people in the parish had died.

His strongest evidence came from a comparison that had nothing to do with Broad Street. Two private companies supplied water to the same districts of south London, sometimes to the same street. The Southwark and Vauxhall company drew its water from a stretch of the Thames thick with the city's sewage. The Lambeth company had recently moved its intake upstream, beyond the reach of London's waste. Snow went from house to house recording which company served each one, and then compared the deaths. Among customers of the dirtier supply the death rate was many times higher. He called this his 'grand experiment'.

The medical and official world was not convinced. The official reports on the epidemic, written by William Farr at the General Register Office, gave contaminated water a minor role and placed the main weight of their argument on elevation, drainage and smell. Snow died in 1858, aged forty-five, with his explanation still a minority view among doctors. He had convinced a few people, however, and one of them proved unexpectedly useful.

Henry Whitehead was the young curate of St Luke's, the church whose parish covered Broad Street. He knew the neighbourhood and its people, and he set out to disprove the water theory, which seemed to him to ignore the obvious fact that disease passed from person to person. Interviewing families, he found something Snow's map could not show. In one house in Broad Street a baby had died of cholera a few days before the outbreak began. Its infected water had been emptied into a cesspool a few feet from the well that fed the pump, and the brickwork of the cesspool was found to be in poor repair. Whitehead became a convert.

The identity of the cholera organism was established separately. In 1854 an Italian anatomist, Filippo Pacini, described comma-shaped bacteria in the intestines of victims, but his work was ignored for decades. It was the German physician Robert Koch who isolated the organism in 1883 and showed how it produced the disease. Public health moved faster than bacteriology. After an outbreak in east London in 1866, Farr accepted that water carried cholera, and the expansion of piped, filtered and sewered supplies followed.

Snow's reputation recovered far more slowly. The pump is gone, but a replica stands in Broadwick Street, as the street is now called, and the pub beside it carries his name. Historians of public health describe his work as the foundation of modern epidemiology, the study of how disease moves through a population. His method, rather than his theory, is what endures: count the cases, compare the groups and let the numbers speak.

Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, wool was the most valuable thing that England sold to the outside world. The fleeces of English sheep, above all those of the Cotswolds, Lincolnshire and the Yorkshire dales, were long, strong and reasonably clean, and the cloth towns of Flanders — Bruges, Ghent and Ypres — depended on them. Flemish weavers used English wool for the sturdy threads that formed the framework of a cloth, and they bought it in vast quantities. For the crown the trade was a source of tax; for the great landowners it was a source of cash; for the merchants who organised it, it was a route to wealth and political influence.

Most of the wool that left England was produced not by small farmers but on great estates. The Cistercian abbeys, which had been granted wide tracts of moorland and valley, kept flocks that numbered thousands and organised their lands around sheep. Lay lords did the same, and a bishop or an earl might own several flocks in different counties. A monastery would often sell its entire clip a year or more in advance to a merchant, who paid part in cash and part in goods and then took responsibility for moving the wool to the coast. Estate accounts record the shearing, the washing, the packing and the tolls paid on the road.

The crown taxed the trade from an early date. In 1275 Edward I introduced an export duty on wool, known to contemporaries as the great custom, charged at a fixed rate on every sack that left the country; a sack was a standard measure of 364 pounds in weight. Because the duty fell on a bulky, uniform and easily counted commodity, it became the most dependable part of royal income, and kings and parliaments argued over it for centuries. When the crown needed money urgently it could also demand a share of the wool itself, paying for it late or not at all, a practice that did little to endear the government to wool growers.

The trade was also channelled. From the late thirteenth century, exports had to pass through a designated town, called the staple, where royal officials could supervise them and collect the duty. The staple moved about: for long periods it was fixed in Flanders, and in 1363 Edward III ordered that English wool should be sold through Calais, the French port he had captured in 1347 and was developing as a military and commercial base. English merchants who belonged to the Company of the Staple gained a monopoly of the Calais trade, while foreign merchants were charged higher rates.

The men who handled the trade were among the most powerful in the kingdom. Some were English: William de la Pole, a merchant of Hull, lent the crown sums so large that he was appointed chief baron of the Exchequer, and his descendants became earls and then dukes. Others came from Italy. The great Florentine banking houses of the Bardi and the Peruzzi bought English wool and lent Edward III the money with which he began the war against France, and when the king defaulted in the 1340s both firms collapsed. The English wool trade was thus tied to the credit of Europe, and a royal quarrel or a failed harvest could shake it.

Exports of raw wool reached perhaps 40,000 sacks a year at the beginning of the fourteenth century, but the trade was never stable. War, heavy taxation and the Black Death of 1348–49 disrupted it, and the population of England fell by perhaps half within a generation, reducing both the labour available to tend sheep and the demand for cloth. Meanwhile the English cloth industry grew, first in towns such as Norwich and later in the villages of the west, and by the middle of the fifteenth century exports of finished cloth had overtaken those of raw wool. Much English wool was now spun and woven at home, by English hands.

How do historians know any of this? The most important source is a long series of customs accounts. Every official who collected the wool duty had to render an account, and these accounts, kept by the Exchequer, list the port, the ship, the merchant and the number of sacks in each shipment. They survive in extraordinary bulk from 1275 onwards, and generations of scholars have added them up to produce annual totals of exports. The figures must be handled with care. Wool was smuggled; values were understated to reduce the duty; some wool went to Scotland and Ireland without being recorded; and no account was kept of the wool that English weavers used themselves.

Other kinds of evidence fill some of the gaps. Cartularies and account rolls show how estates managed their flocks, while wills and court records reveal the local trade in wool and cloth. Archaeologically, the wool economy survives in the great monastic barns and wool houses, in the fulling mills where cloth was thickened, and in the woad and madder grown for dye. The textiles themselves have almost entirely perished. Historians still disagree about how much of the country's wealth the trade represented, and about its effect on ordinary people: in 1516 Thomas More protested in Utopia that sheep were swallowing up the men who farmed the land.

Every city and university is a museum of tributes to the dead. A statue in a market square, a name carved over a college door, an honorary degree, a knighthood, a lectureship paid for by a long-dead benefactor: most such honours have gone unregarded for generations. Recently they have become arguments. In 2020, during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, a crowd in the English city of Bristol pulled down the statue of a merchant who had made money from the slave trade and rolled it into the harbour; it was later recovered and put on display in a museum, its graffiti intact. A campaign at a South African university had already succeeded in removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes in 2015, and a similar demand was made at his old college in Oxford, which spent six years considering it before deciding to leave the monument in place.

An honour is not a neutral record. A plaque stating where a person lived is a piece of information; a statue on a pedestal, paid for by public subscription and placed where everyone must pass it, is a statement that the person is worthy of admiration. The distinction matters because the commonest defence of a contested monument — that it is simply part of history — confuses the two. Nobody proposes destroying the documents that record a slave trader's business, or digging up the graves in which such men lie. What is at issue is a public act of approval, and approval can be withdrawn without any loss of historical knowledge.

The strongest objection to withdrawal is what is often called presentism: the belief that we have no right to judge the dead by the standards of our own age, which they could not have shared. The objection has real force. Almost every figure who lived before the nineteenth century held views about religion, gender or race that would now be thought barbaric, and a city that removed every such figure from its walls would soon have bare walls. Yet the argument is not decisive. The moral consensus of the past was never as complete as it now appears, and there were always people who objected to what their neighbours accepted, including the slave trade itself.

A second objection is that removal destroys. To pull down a statue is to lose an object that might have taught something; to rename a building is to break a link that former students value. This is a serious point, and it points towards a third option: keep the monument and change its meaning by explaining it. A panel that repeats the facts, however, is not enough. Interpretation works only when it is honest about the balance of a person's life, and only when the prominence of the object is reduced rather than merely annotated. A statue left on its plinth in the main square, with a small plaque at its foot, has not really been reinterpreted at all.

There is also a danger that contextualisation becomes a way of avoiding a decision. A carefully worded inscription can allow an institution to keep a prestigious name, and the donations that may come with it, while appearing to have addressed the problem. Where the wording has been negotiated by lawyers, the result is often so bland that it tells the passer-by nothing at all. Process matters as well. Decisions taken quickly in response to a protest tend to be reversed quickly when attention moves elsewhere, and a rule applied only to the most conspicuous cases satisfies nobody.

It helps to ask what the honour was originally for. A gift that founded a library is not the same as a statue erected to celebrate a military victory, and a person may be honoured for one part of a life while the objection concerns another. Where a benefaction was funded directly by enslaved labour, the institution that still benefits from it is arguably obliged to say so, and perhaps to share the benefit more widely. Where a man was honoured for his science and the objection concerns a pamphlet he once wrote, the case for removing his name is much weaker than the case for naming what he wrote.

It also matters who is asking. A campaign led by the descendants of people who were enslaved or dispossessed is not merely expressing a preference about a lump of bronze; it is making a claim about whether the city's public space belongs to them as much as to anyone else. That claim deserves more weight than the discomfort of those who would rather not think about it. Withdrawal, after all, punishes nobody. The dead cannot be demoted, and no one's knowledge of the past depends on a particular statue standing in a particular street.

My own view is therefore this. The default should be to keep, explain and, where necessary, demote: to reduce an inscription, to pair an object with the objections to it, to move a monument from a place of honour to a place of study. But the defenders of context must accept its limits. Where a person's public honour rests on precisely the conduct that is now condemned, and where those most affected ask for it to go, an institution that refuses is not protecting history; it is protecting itself. The question is not whether the past was different. It is whether the honour still says something that the institution is willing to defend today.