IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 281

For several centuries the Atlantic Ocean could be traversed only by ship, and even the swiftest steamship required most of a week to complete the passage. Then, shortly after midday on 14 June 1919, a twin-engined aeroplane lifted off from a grass airfield outside St John's, Newfoundland, and turned eastwards towards Europe, carrying the pilot John Alcock, the navigator Arthur Whitten Brown and a bag of letters that thereby became the first airmail to be transported across the ocean. Almost sixteen hours later the aircraft came down in bogland in the west of Ireland, having covered roughly 1,890 miles without interruption.

The crossing was the outcome of a competition organised by a newspaper. In 1913 the Daily Mail, then owned by Lord Northcliffe, had offered a prize of £10,000 to the first aviators to fly the Atlantic without stopping. The regulations allowed competitors seventy-two hours in which to accomplish the journey. The First World War put an end to any attempt, and it was only in the spring of 1919 that several crews began serious preparations. Most of them selected Newfoundland as their point of departure, since the island lies on the western periphery of the ocean and offers the shortest distance to Britain.

The earliest attempts ended badly. In May 1919 Harry Hawker and his navigator Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve took off from Newfoundland but were compelled to come down in the sea, where they spent several hours before a Danish cargo vessel rescued them. A team of American naval aviators crossed the Atlantic during the same period, but they accomplished the journey in stages by way of the Azores, which demonstrated that the ocean could be flown without demonstrating that it could be flown in a single leap. Alcock and Brown, both former prisoners of war, were the crew chosen by Vickers, whose aircraft arrived in Newfoundland in crates.

The Vimy was a large biplane designed as a bomber and subsequently adapted for the attempt. Its two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines were mounted between the wings, the open cockpit afforded the crew no protection whatsoever from the weather, and additional fuel tanks were installed so that the aircraft could remain airborne for the necessary distance. There was no autopilot, no reliable heating and no possibility of relaxation: one of the two men had to hold the aeroplane on its course at all times.

The aircraft had been assembled in Newfoundland with considerable difficulty, and the take-off itself constituted a gamble. Laden with fuel, the Vimy required every yard of the airfield. According to contemporary accounts, it lifted off barely in time to clear the trees at the far end.

Navigation constituted the most formidable problem. Brown carried a sextant, a compass and a drift indicator, and he intended to establish the aircraft's position by taking sightings of the sun and the stars. In practice, dense cloud obscured the sky for much of the crossing, and for hours together he could do no more than estimate their whereabouts from the wind, the speed of the aircraft and the movement of the sea beneath them. Radio would have assisted him considerably, but the transmitter failed soon after take-off, and the crew were unable to transmit or to receive a single message.

The aircraft flew through banks of cloud and hail, and ice accumulated on the wings and on the exposed components of the engines. According to some accounts, Brown climbed out of his seat onto the fuselage and, at considerable personal risk, cleared the accumulated ice from the engines. At one point the aeroplane entered a spin and recovered only a few hundred feet above the surface of the water. According to later accounts, the noise from a broken exhaust pipe was so appalling that the two men could communicate only by passing written notes to one another.

At about eight o'clock on the morning of 15 June, Brown identified two small islands off the coast of Connemara and realised that they had reached Ireland. Alcock turned inland and selected what appeared from above to be a green field; it was in fact a peat bog near the village of Clifden. The wheels sank and the nose of the Vimy penetrated the soft ground and broke off. Neither man was injured, and local inhabitants soon arrived on bicycles to discover what had occurred.

The flight was treated as a feat of national importance. The two men were received in London as heroes and were knighted by King George V within days of their landing. They collected the £10,000 prize, and the crossing was regarded as proof that the aeroplane had become a machine for spanning oceans rather than a weapon of war. Alcock did not enjoy his celebrity for long: in December 1919 he was killed when the aircraft he was piloting crashed in France. Brown survived until 1948.

In July 1919 the British airship R34 flew from Scotland to the United States and back again, the first crossing by air from east to west. Within a few years airlines were planning regular services, and by the late 1930s flying boats were carrying passengers across the ocean in considerable comfort. Two men in an open aircraft, relying on a sextant and a compass, had crossed a wilderness of water without a single radio message reaching the ground.

Almost every account of the stock exchange begins with a search for origins, and almost every account disagrees with the last. An exchange, in the modern sense, is a place where shares in companies, government bonds and similar securities are bought and sold at prices that are published and publicly known. Institutions of that kind took shape over several centuries, and no single city can claim to have invented them. Which exchange came first depends on what one counts as an exchange: a building, a regular meeting, a printed list of prices, or trade in company shares rather than in goods.

The name itself comes from Bruges. In the fourteenth century the merchants of that Flemish city, many of them Italians far from home, are said to have gathered in the square in front of an inn belonging to a family called Van der Beurse. From their habit of meeting there, according to a widely repeated account, the place took the name of the family, and the word travelled into French, Dutch, German and Russian as the ordinary term for a stock exchange. The story is told in almost every history of the subject, though the documentary proof is thin, and some linguists have proposed other explanations.

The first building erected specifically for such business was in Antwerp, where a new exchange opened in 1531. It was an imposing structure with a colonnaded courtyard, and merchants from all over Europe came to deal there. Yet the business conducted in it was not mainly in company shares. Antwerp's speciality was commodities, above all sugar, spices and English cloth, together with bills of exchange, the written orders that allowed a merchant in one city to settle a debt in another without moving coins across Europe. Judged by its trade in shares, Antwerp was not a stock exchange at all.

Amsterdam is usually given that title. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company received a charter giving it a monopoly of trade with Asia, and its capital was divided into shares that investors could buy and sell. Trade in those shares, together with dealings in government bonds, made Amsterdam the busiest securities market in Europe. In 1611 the city completed a purpose-built exchange, designed by the architect Hendrick de Keyser, where merchants could meet under one roof in all weathers. It is the combination of a permanent building, a permanent company and continuous trading that persuades most historians to call Amsterdam the first modern exchange.

The market that grew up there was sophisticated. Investors bought shares for delivery at a future date, lent money against shares and used a form of option contract. In 1609 a merchant named Isaac Le Maire organised a group of investors who sold shares they did not own in the hope of buying them back more cheaply later, an early example of what would now be called a bear raid. Amsterdam is also associated with the tulip mania of 1637, though recent historians have argued that the episode was smaller in scale and less damaging than the traditional story suggests.

London's market grew out of a different institution. The Royal Exchange, founded by the merchant Thomas Gresham and opened by Elizabeth I in 1571, was intended as a meeting place for dealers in goods, and for a long time shares in the great trading companies were a sideline there. After the exchange was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and rebuilt, business increasingly moved to the coffee houses nearby, where dealers met at fixed hours and prices circulated by word of mouth. From 1698 a broker named John Castaing published a regular list of share and bond prices. In 1720 the collapse of the South Sea Company ruined many investors, and the government responded with the Bubble Act, which made it harder to set up joint-stock companies without a charter.

New York came later. Philadelphia already had an organised market in 1790, but the New York Stock Exchange dates its foundation to 17 May 1792, when 24 brokers signed an agreement under a buttonwood tree in Wall Street, promising to deal only with one another and to charge a fixed commission. The document was short and the tree is long gone, but the institution that grew from it became the largest exchange in the world.

Historians are cautious about all of this, because the evidence is uneven. Amsterdam left an exceptional archive: notarial records of loans and disputes, the company's own ledgers, and printed price lists that allow scholars to reconstruct the level of prices over long periods. Antwerp's records are rich in commercial correspondence but poorer in information about who was trading what. English sources are best for the eighteenth century, when newspapers reported prices and bankruptcies in detail. Even the best records, however, show prices rather than motives, and for every documented dealer there were probably a dozen whose dealings left no trace at all.

Why does it matter which city was first? Partly because cities still use the claim. Amsterdam, Antwerp and London have all, at different times, described themselves as the birthplace of the stock exchange, and the label is worth money to a tourist board. Partly, too, because the answer tells us something about what makes a market work: a building, a company with shares that can be sold, and a public record of prices.

On a weekday morning in any English cathedral city, a small drama repeats itself at the west door. A family on holiday approaches, expecting to look inside, and finds a desk, a notice of charges and a polite request for payment. Some pay; some turn away. The question of whether cathedrals should charge visitors is usually treated as a simple matter of principle, with the defenders of free entry on one side and the defenders of the fabric fund on the other. In my view neither side has quite the argument it believes it has.

The financial case for charging is strong. A medieval cathedral is less a building than a permanent programme of repair: stone erodes, lead is stripped from roofs, gutters block, and heating a vast interior through the winter is costly. Cathedrals receive little direct money from the state for their upkeep and must raise most of what they spend on conservation themselves, from grants, from their congregations and from visitors. Where entry is free, a donation box has to do the work of a ticket office, and it generally does that work less efficiently, because a donation is optional and a ticket is not.

The way charging works is often misunderstood. Many English cathedrals charge nothing at all, and those that do generally charge only for sightseeing. Anyone attending a service, or simply coming in to pray, is admitted without payment; several cathedrals sell a ticket that allows unlimited return visits for a year, so that the cost falls on the tourist rather than on the parishioner who looks in every week. The income is normally reserved for the building itself.

The case against rests on a different idea of what a cathedral is. It is first of all a church, not a heritage attraction, and the tradition to which it belongs is one in which the doors stand open. A notice of charges at the entrance, critics say, contradicts the institution's own message more effectively than any sermon can correct. They add that the people most likely to be deterred by a charge are precisely those the Church says it wishes to reach: the poor, the curious and the local family that might one day become a congregation.

The practical version of this objection is harder to dismiss than the theoretical one. Charging changes who comes. A cathedral that sells tickets tends to attract organised visitors with a purpose and a timetable, and it loses some of those who wander in because the door was open, and it is from the wanderers that regular attenders are sometimes made. There is a subtler cost too: a ticket desk makes the building feel like an attraction, and a building that feels like an attraction is easier for a government to leave to the market.

Defenders reply that the choice is not between charging and being free, but between charging and doing less: fewer stonemasons, a roof patched rather than repaired, a tower closed to the public. They point out that the alternatives available to free cathedrals, such as donation boxes, commercial events and letting the building out for dinners and filming, bring difficulties of their own, and that some of them damage the atmosphere quite as much as a ticket desk.

The English arrangement is not the only one available. In France most cathedrals belong to the state, which maintains them and admits visitors free of charge; in Italy many churches are free to enter but charge for the dome, the cloister or the museum attached to them. Britain has chosen a third path, in which a building of national importance is the responsibility of a religious body that must pay for it largely from its own resources. That choice is defensible, but it explains why English cathedrals look to visitors for money in a way that French ones do not.

My own view is that charging is legitimate, but only on conditions that some cathedrals already meet and others should adopt. Entry for worship and private prayer must be free, and visibly free, so that a stranger can walk in without having to explain to a steward what they have come for. Local residents, school groups and children should pay little or nothing, both because they are the cathedral's future and because a charge that falls hardest on them cannot be defended. And the money must be openly spent on the fabric.

The most important condition is less tangible. A cathedral that charges should still behave as though entry were free. The desk at the door should be a welcome rather than a barrier, staff should be able to waive the charge without embarrassment, and there should be hours or days when anyone may walk in. Where those conditions hold, a ticket is a reasonable way of asking those who can afford it to contribute to something they plainly value.

So I would neither abolish charges nor introduce them everywhere. The question is better answered building by building, in the light of what the money does and who is being kept out. What must not happen is for the Church to drift, without ever deciding, into treating its greatest buildings as businesses with a prayer meeting attached.