IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 280

In August 1914, as the nations of Europe moved towards war, a ship named Endurance left Plymouth harbour. She was the vessel of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, whose leader was Sir Ernest Shackleton, a veteran of earlier Antarctic journeys. The plan was ambitious almost to the point of folly: one party would land on the coast of the Weddell Sea and cross the continent by way of the South Pole, while a second group, based at the Ross Sea, would lay supply depots for the final stages of the crossing. Endurance had been built in Norway and strengthened with extra timber for work in the ice, and her name came from a family motto meaning 'by endurance we conquer'.

Endurance sailed from South Georgia on 5 December 1914, carrying a crew of twenty-eight. Shackleton had been warned that the Weddell Sea was unusually full of ice that year, and the warning proved accurate. Within weeks the ship was weaving between floes, and on 19 January 1915 she became trapped. The pack closed around the hull and held it fast; for the next nine months the ship drifted with the ice, a helpless passenger on a current that carried her north and west.

The crew settled into a strange routine, hunting seals and penguins, exercising the dogs and taking scientific measurements. Shackleton kept the men busy because idleness, he believed, bred despair. In late October 1915, with the ship's timbers splintering and water pouring into the hold, he gave the order to abandon her. The men camped on the ice beside the wreck, and on 21 November 1915 the Endurance sank, her stern lifting into the air as she went down. The navigator, Frank Worsley, recorded the position in his log: 69 degrees south, in the middle of the Weddell Sea.

Everything that could be salvaged was dragged across the ice: food, tents, sledges, the ship's boats and the photographic plates of Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer. Hurley had documented the whole enterprise, and when the weight became too great he smashed some of his glass negatives rather than lose them all to the melting ice. The party then drifted north for five months, camping on floes that repeatedly cracked beneath them, until in April 1916 the ice began to break up.

The floe split, and the men took to three lifeboats, the James Caird, the Dudley Docker and the Stancomb Wills. After seven exhausting days they reached Elephant Island, a barren, glacier-covered rock where nobody lived. They landed on a narrow beach, killed seals for food and shelter, and lit fires with blubber. The island lay far from any shipping lane, and as the southern winter closed in, the chance that a passing vessel would find them was negligible.

Shackleton decided to attempt the voyage to South Georgia, some 800 nautical miles to the north-east, where there were whaling stations. He chose five companions, including Worsley as navigator and the carpenter Harry McNish. The James Caird, a six-metre open boat, was strengthened and given a makeshift deck of wood and canvas. The crossing took sixteen days across the roughest ocean in the world. Worsley, working from a sextant in a boat that never stopped moving, obtained only a handful of sightings of the sun, yet his navigation brought them to South Georgia on 10 May 1916.

They had landed on the wrong side of the island, and their boat was too damaged to put to sea again. Three of the party, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley, crossed the uncharted mountains and glaciers on foot, carrying about fifteen metres of rope, a carpenter's adze and a few days' food, and reached the whaling station at Stromness after thirty-six hours. The men still on Elephant Island were rescued at the fourth attempt, on 30 August 1916, by the Chilean steamer Yelcho.

Not everyone on the expedition came home. The Ross Sea party, whose task was to lay the depots, was marooned for nearly two years after its ship, the Aurora, was torn from its moorings, and three of its members died. But all twenty-eight men who had sailed on the Endurance survived. Shackleton, who died in South Georgia in 1922 and is buried there, never achieved the crossing of the continent that had been the expedition's purpose.

The story became famous slowly. Hurley's photographs and Shackleton's account, South, published in 1919, brought it to a wide public, and in the later twentieth century the expedition became a byword for leadership in adversity. The wreck itself was found in March 2022, more than three thousand metres down in the Weddell Sea, by a search expedition using underwater vehicles. The cold, still water had preserved the hull, and the ship's name was clearly legible.

Marine insurance is much older than the institution most closely associated with it. Contracts covering ships and cargoes were being written in the Mediterranean by the middle of the fourteenth century, and the earliest surviving example is generally dated to Genoa in 1347. The business travelled with Italian merchants to northern Europe, and the London street where they settled, Lombard Street, took its name from the Lombard bankers who worked there. What these early insurers lacked was not demand but information: a merchant asked to bear the risk of a voyage knew little about the ship or the crew.

That need was met, from the late seventeenth century, in a coffee house. Edward Lloyd kept an establishment in Tower Street, close to the river, and it became a meeting place for shipowners, merchants and ships' captains. Lloyd made it his business to gather shipping news and to circulate it among his customers, so that the house became a market for information as much as for coffee. A man who wanted to insure a cargo could find there both the news he needed and others willing to share his risk.

The method of sharing was simple. A document describing the ship, the voyage and the cargo was passed around, and each merchant who agreed to take a portion of the risk wrote his name underneath the description, together with the amount he would accept. The practice gave the language the word 'underwriter', and it explains why a single voyage might be covered by dozens of individuals, none of whom stood to lose everything. A broker, acting for the merchant, would carry the document from one subscriber to the next until the whole sum had been found.

As the business grew, so did the need for rules. In 1771 a group of subscribers paid for new premises, and three years later the organisation moved into the Royal Exchange, where it remained for more than a century. Lloyd's was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1871, and later legislation set out how the market should be governed.

News remained at the heart of the business. Lloyd's List, which began in 1734 and is still published, recorded the movements of ships and the losses at sea, and reports from correspondents around the world allowed underwriters to judge risk more accurately than their rivals. The organisation also accumulated objects and customs that gave it a corporate identity, among them a bell recovered from the wreck of a naval vessel.

A separate institution with a confusingly similar name developed alongside it. Lloyd's Register of Shipping began in the 1760s, when a group of merchants and underwriters agreed to survey and classify ships so that risks could be judged on evidence rather than rumour. Vessels were graded according to the condition of their hull and equipment, and the resulting register was published for anyone to consult. Lloyd's Register has never been part of the insurance market.

During the nineteenth century the market widened. Underwriters who had begun with ships and cargoes started to cover fire, accident and, later, reinsurance, the insurance of insurers. Disasters tested them. When an earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco in 1906, Lloyd's underwriters paid the claims in full, a decision often said to have secured their reputation in the United States, and the loss of the Titanic six years later produced the largest marine claim the market had yet faced.

For most of its history, the capital behind Lloyd's came from wealthy individuals, known as Names, who accepted unlimited liability: if the syndicate they backed ran out of money, they were personally responsible for its debts, in principle down to the value of their houses. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, a series of disasters and an accumulation of claims from earlier decades produced losses on a scale that many Names could not meet, and some were ruined. Corporate capital was admitted from 1994, and in 1996 a company called Equitas was created to take over the market's old liabilities.

Lloyd's today is not an insurance company. It is a marketplace, in which syndicates, backed by members and corporate capital, compete to accept risk, while the Corporation of Lloyd's supervises the market and maintains a central fund for the protection of policyholders. Claims are met from a chain of security rather than from a single balance sheet. Since 2013 the market has been regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, and the business written is no longer mainly marine. Coffee houses have gone, but the exchange of information that Edward Lloyd began still lies at the centre of what the institution does.

In England, and in many other countries, school history is built around a story. Pupils begin with prehistoric Britain and move forward, through invasions and revolutions, to the world wars and beyond. The shape of the story is usually one of improvement: more rights, longer lives, better laws, greater tolerance. It is an attractive shape, and teachers use it for good reasons. A narrative gives pupils a framework into which new knowledge can be fitted, and it answers the question that beginners always ask, which is what happened next. But the story carries assumptions that are rarely examined.

The classic statement of the progressive view was made by Thomas Macaulay, whose History of England, published from 1848, presented the nation's past as the record of a steady advance in liberty, law and prosperity. He made no secret of his belief that his own age was better than those that preceded it. His book sold in enormous numbers and did more than any other to fix the idea of English history as a story of progress in the public imagination.

The most formidable attack on that idea came from Herbert Butterfield, whose short book The Whig Interpretation of History appeared in 1931. Butterfield argued that historians who trace a line of progress towards the present commit a serious error. They select the figures who seem to have foreseen the modern world and praise them, while ignoring the vast majority who thought differently; they judge the past by the standards of the present; and they turn history into a moral tale in which the present is always vindicated. Butterfield did not deny that things had improved. He denied that improvement was the plot.

There is a great deal to be said for Butterfield's objection. A story of progress must decide what counts as progress, and that decision is always a judgement about the present. For every reform that lasted there were dozens of movements that collapsed, and for every advance in liberty there was often a reaction. History written from below, in the tradition of E. P. Thompson's celebrated study of English workers published in 1963, restores to the record the people who were not improved by progress at all: the hand-loom weavers whose trade vanished and the labourers whose wages fell.

The argument becomes sharper when the subject is empire. David Olusoga, among others, has argued that the history of slavery and colonial rule belongs at the centre of British history rather than at its margins, and that a national story told as a march towards freedom quietly omits the centuries in which British ships and British capital were central to the slave trade. A pupil who learns only about the abolition of slavery in 1833, without learning what preceded it, receives a story that flatters. The remedy is not to replace celebration with shame; it is to include what actually happened.

Yet the critics of the progressive story face a difficulty of their own. If the story of progress is abandoned, what takes its place? A collection of disconnected topics is easier to teach without prejudice but harder to remember, and pupils who leave school with no chronological framework cannot follow the references that public life assumes. When the national curriculum for England was redrawn in 2013 under the education secretary Michael Gove, it required that pupils should understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative. Critics called the result a list.

There is a further problem with the ideal of telling the past as it really was, which Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century German historian, made the centre of his method. Ranke's insistence that the historian should show what happened rather than serve the purposes of the present remains a professional standard. But selection is unavoidable, and every selection embodies a view of what matters. The choice is not between a story and no story, but between stories that are examined and stories that are not.

My own view is that the story of progress should be taught, but taught as an argument rather than as a fact. Pupils should meet the claim that life has improved, and then meet the objections: that improvement was uneven, that it was paid for by people who did not consent, and that some of what looked like advance was reversed within a generation. They should learn that historians disagree about whether the twentieth century was, on balance, an improvement on the nineteenth, and why the answer depends on what is measured. A narrative taught in this way does not flatter the nation; it trains the mind.

The alternative, a history that presents progress as self-evident, is not merely inaccurate. It is also politically fragile, because it cannot explain the moments when things get worse. A country that can look at its past without needing to approve of all of it is better equipped to think about its future.