IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 278

Shortly before midnight on 14 April 1912, the White Star liner Titanic, then the largest ship in the world, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, some 600 kilometres south of Newfoundland. She sank at about twenty past two the following morning. Of the roughly 2,200 people on board, more than 1,500 died, most of them from exposure in water close to freezing. The ship was on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, and her loss shocked a public that had come to regard such a vessel as practically unsinkable.

The Titanic was thought to be unsinkable not because anyone believed that she could not sink, but because her design was believed to make sinking extremely unlikely. Sixteen watertight compartments crossed the lower part of the hull, and it was widely claimed that the ship could stay afloat with any four of them flooded. The bulkheads that divided the compartments, however, did not rise high enough to prevent water from spilling over their tops. When the iceberg opened several compartments to the sea, water filled the first and then poured into the next, and so on along the ship. The lookouts had no binoculars, and in the darkness they saw the ice only a few hundred metres ahead.

The most notorious failure concerned the lifeboats. Under the rules then enforced by the British Board of Trade, a ship of the Titanic's tonnage had to carry sixteen lifeboats, because the regulations were based on the size of a vessel rather than on the number of people it carried. The Titanic actually carried twenty, including four collapsible boats, so her owners could claim that she exceeded the legal minimum. Those twenty boats, however, could hold only about 1,180 people, roughly half of those on board. In the confusion after the collision many of them were lowered only partly filled; one boat designed for sixty-five left with about twenty-eight people in it.

Wireless telegraphy had been installed on the ship, but it had no agreed role in an emergency. The nearest vessel, the Californian, had stopped for the night among the ice, and her only wireless operator had shut down his equipment and gone to bed shortly before the collision; her officers saw the Titanic's distress rockets but did not understand what they meant. The ship whose operator did hear the call was the Carpathia, some ninety kilometres away. She turned and steamed through the ice, arriving at about four in the morning, and became the first vessel to reach the survivors, of whom she rescued about 700.

Two inquiries followed. The American Senate investigation, chaired by William Alden Smith, opened in Washington within days of the sinking and questioned survivors who had been brought ashore. The British inquiry, led by Lord Mersey, a senior judge, began in London in May, after the American hearings had already started. Both were critical of the ship's speed in an area known to contain ice, of the shortage of boats and of the failure to fill the boats that existed. Both recommended enough places for everyone on board and a continuous radio watch. The hearings took evidence from dozens of witnesses and produced hundreds of pages of testimony.

The first attempt to turn such recommendations into international law was made remarkably quickly. In January 1914 delegates from a number of maritime nations met in London and signed the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which set standards for lifeboats and other life-saving equipment, for watertight subdivision, for fire protection and for radio equipment. The convention was to come into force within a short time, but the First World War intervened and it was never ratified by enough states. Several of its provisions were nevertheless applied by the leading shipping nations.

The same concern produced a second innovation. Ice drifting south into the busy North Atlantic routes had long been a hazard, and the International Ice Patrol was established in 1914 under the convention signed in London. It has been operated ever since by the United States Coast Guard, which locates icebergs by ship and by aircraft and publishes their positions, and its costs are shared by the nations whose ships use the routes. This was an early example of states paying for a service that protects everyone who sails.

Wireless was transformed by law rather than by convention. In the United States the Radio Act of 1912, passed in the same year as the disaster, required ships at sea to keep a continuous watch on the distress frequency, and similar rules followed elsewhere. Later safety conventions, agreed in 1929, 1948, 1960 and 1974, revised and extended the original scheme; the 1974 convention, as amended, remains the foundation of international maritime safety today.

The Titanic itself is still being studied. The wreck was located in 1985, and the site is now protected by an international agreement among the states most closely connected with the ship. The story has been retold in books and films ever since, usually with more attention to the passengers than to the regulations. Nothing found on the seabed can alter the central lesson of 1912: that a vessel is not made safe by confidence in its design, but by rules that assume the worst.

Few objects are as familiar to the modern traveller as the passport. It is a small booklet, usually dark red or dark blue, bearing a photograph, a number and a nationality, and it is now demanded at almost every international frontier. Yet as a universal requirement it is less than a century old. The word came into English from French, from elements meaning to pass through a port or gate, and for most of its history the document it described was a privilege granted to a few rather than an obligation imposed on everyone.

In medieval and early modern Europe, a person who needed to cross a frontier or enter a walled city might carry a letter of safe conduct, issued by a ruler or a town council, asking that the bearer be allowed to travel and trade without interference. Such letters were useful to merchants, envoys, pilgrims and scholars. Most people, however, never travelled more than a few miles from their homes, and those who did rarely needed paperwork.

The nineteenth century, with its railways and steamships, might have been expected to produce more controls rather than fewer, but the opposite happened. Liberal ideas about the free movement of goods and people prevailed, and several states stopped asking travellers for documents at their borders. By the middle of the century a British traveller could cross much of western Europe without showing anything to an official, and passports became objects that few people bothered to obtain. The tide turned abruptly in 1914.

When war broke out, frontiers were closed and states demanded to know who was crossing them. In Britain the Aliens Restriction Act of August 1914 gave the government sweeping powers over foreigners, and in 1915 British subjects themselves were required to hold a passport in order to leave or re-enter the country. A passport office was created inside the Foreign Office to issue the booklets. The document that emerged was practical rather than elegant: a folded sheet or a small booklet containing a description of the holder, and later a photograph, signed and stamped by an official.

Every state now had a document, but no two looked alike, and a traveller might be asked for papers that another country did not recognise. In 1920 a conference organised by the League of Nations in Paris recommended a standard booklet, with the holder's details on the first page, a photograph and the text in at least two languages. The recommendation was widely taken up, and the result is recognisably the passport still in use. The same period produced an innovation for those who had no state to protect them: in 1922 the League issued identity documents to Russian refugees, who had been stripped of their nationality, and later extended the scheme to other displaced groups. These documents, associated with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, were accepted by many governments and allowed hundreds of thousands of stateless people to travel.

International standards became more formal after the Second World War. The convention signed at Chicago in 1944, which created the International Civil Aviation Organization, gave that body responsibility for the documents that air passengers would need, and its guidance fixed the size, layout and contents of the passport booklet. From the late 1940s, therefore, a passport issued in one country increasingly resembled a passport issued in another.

Technology changed the document again. In 1980 the International Civil Aviation Organization published a standard for a passport that could be read by machine, with two lines of letters and digits at the foot of the personal data page, and governments replaced their old booklets over the following two decades. A further revision, in the mid-2000s, added a chip containing the holder's details and a digital image of the face. National styles survived even this standardisation, though not always: in 1988 the British passport changed from dark blue to burgundy to match its European partners, and in 2020 it changed back again.

Historians disagree about what all this amounts to. The sociologist John Torpey has argued that the passport as a universal document is essentially a creation of the First World War and of the modern state's claim to control movement across its borders; on that view, earlier safe-conducts were a different kind of thing altogether. Other scholars stress continuity, pointing out that states have long wanted to record who entered and left, and that the twentieth century standardised an old practice rather than inventing one. The evidence is uneven. National archives hold registers of the passports issued, but these record the documents, not the journeys, and the papers carried by ordinary travellers were rarely kept. Comparisons between countries are difficult too, because rules differed and changed often.

What is not in doubt is the passport's double character. It is a certificate of identity that protects the person who holds it, and an instrument of control that can be withheld. The next stage is already visible: several states now check arrivals by scanning the face, and the booklet may eventually become a record on a telephone rather than a physical object. If that happens, the document will have travelled a long way from the letter of safe conduct, but the questions it raises, about who may move and who may not, will be exactly the same.

Every few years a council somewhere in Britain announces that it intends to do something about a Victorian cemetery that has become overgrown and expensive to look after. The proposal may be to clear part of the site for housing, to convert the chapels into flats, or simply to stop cutting the grass. Each time, the announcement is followed by protest: petitions from relatives, objections from conservation bodies and letters to local newspapers about respect for the dead. The argument is usually conducted in the language of sentiment, which is a pity, because the strongest arguments on both sides have nothing to do with sentiment at all.

The great urban cemeteries were themselves a response to a scandal. In the first half of the nineteenth century, churchyards in rapidly growing towns were dangerously full. In 1843 the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick published a report on burial in towns, describing overcrowded grounds where coffins were stacked and graves reopened within weeks, and arguing that such places were a danger to the health of the living. Parliament responded with a series of Burial Acts from 1852 onwards, which allowed local boards to open cemeteries outside the built-up area. Joint-stock companies laid out landscaped cemeteries on the edge of cities, designed as parks as much as burial places.

For local historians, the value of such places is not primarily architectural. A cemetery is a record of a whole community rather than of its famous members: the inscriptions give names, ages, occupations and causes of death, and sometimes the places from which people came. In a town whose earlier records have been lost, a row of headstones may be the best surviving evidence of infant mortality, of an epidemic, or of the arrival of a particular group of migrants. A few cemeteries now appear on the national register of historic parks and gardens.

Conservationists make a different and, to my mind, stronger case. Because many of these sites have never been intensively farmed or built on, they can support old grassland, lichens on stonework and insects that have vanished from the surrounding countryside. Derelict chapels shelter bats. An overgrown cemetery is not a wilderness, but it is often the closest thing to one in a dense urban area, and local people use it as a short cut and a quiet place to sit.

Against this, the practical difficulties are real. Once burials stop, a cemetery has almost no income, while the cost of maintaining it continues indefinitely. Monuments become unsafe, since a heavy stone that shifts in the ground is a genuine hazard, and fencing a large site against vandalism is expensive. Councils facing cuts to services that everyone uses find it hard to justify spending on a place that few people visit. It is easy to demand that a cemetery be preserved; it is harder to say who should pay.

For the families of those buried, the issue is not money but consent. British law does not give relatives ownership of a grave, but it does treat the remains with care: they may not be disturbed without a licence, and on consecrated ground the permission of the Church of England is needed as well. Relatives argue that the remains of their ancestors should not be moved without their agreement, whatever the law allows. In practice graves are rarely moved. That a grave has not been visited for thirty years does not mean that nobody cares; it may mean that the family has moved away, or died out, or that the last visitor is now too old to come.

This is why the argument that old graves matter only to relatives is so weak. The interest is shared: the historian who reads the stones, the ecologist who records the plants, the walker who uses the path. The opposite claim, that no grave may ever be disturbed, is also difficult to defend in a country where land is scarce and where some burial grounds have been closed for more than a century. Human remains are a source of information for archaeologists, but excavation destroys the context in which they lie.

My own view is that the presumption should be against disturbing any grave, but that a presumption is not an absolute rule. A cemetery that is locked, overgrown and falling down serves nobody: not the dead, not their descendants and not the neighbourhood. Where a site has genuinely been abandoned, the sensible course is to keep the ground as public open space, to allow the buildings to be converted, and to use the spaces between the graves rather than the graves themselves. Housing on the site of a Victorian cemetery is not wicked, but it is usually unnecessary.

Whatever is decided, one step should come first. Every inscription, name and date can now be photographed and entered in a database, and every grave can be plotted on a map, at modest cost; local family-history societies often do this work voluntarily. If a site is to change, the record should be complete before anything is moved, because a photograph of a stone is a poor substitute for the stone itself. Recording is cheap; losing a cemetery's history is not.

What is at stake, finally, is not whether we value the dead, since almost everyone claims to, but what kind of places we want our towns to contain. A cemetery is one of the few spaces in a modern city that is not for sale, not for traffic and not for profit. That, rather than sentiment, is the reason to be careful with them. The dead do not need the ground. The living do.