IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 287

In 1711 Britain was still fighting France in the long War of the Spanish Succession, and the government was staggering under the weight of its debts. Robert Harley, the lord treasurer, approved a proposal by which a group of merchants would take over part of that debt in exchange for annual interest and exclusive rights to trade in the South Seas. The new South Sea Company was duly incorporated, its charter granting a monopoly of British trade along the eastern coast of South America and in the Pacific. It was a promise that the company would never be able to keep.

Peace came with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and with it a valuable concession. Spain granted Britain the asiento, the contract to supply enslaved Africans to its American colonies for thirty years, together with permission to send one ship a year to trade at the fairs of Spanish America. Investors imagined cargoes of silver and dyestuffs returning to London, but Spanish officials guarded their monopoly jealously, searched British vessels for smuggled goods and kept the annual ship to a modest size. For years the company earned very little from commerce. Its real business was government finance, and it was there that its directors saw the chance of a fortune.

In January 1720 the company proposed to take over the greater part of the national debt, some thirty million pounds, converting government annuities into its own stock. A rival offer from the Bank of England was brushed aside, and Parliament approved the scheme within weeks. The directors had, in effect, been handed the management of a large slice of the nation's finances, and they had every reason to want their shares to be worth as much as possible. The government, for its part, saw a way of reducing the cost of its borrowing.

The stock rose with astonishing speed. Shares that had changed hands for about £128 in the first weeks of 1720 were being sold for more than £300 by the end of March, and in the summer the price came close to £1,000. Few buyers had to find the whole sum at once, because subscriptions were payable in instalments, which made the stock accessible to people of quite modest means. Many bought their shares with borrowed money, using the shares themselves as security, so that a fall in price would ruin them twice over. Clergymen, widows, shopkeepers and peers all joined the rush.

The South Sea Company was not the only object of the mania. Dozens of new ventures advertised for subscriptions, promising fortunes from schemes that ranged from the plausible to the absurd. Some, such as fire insurance, were serious businesses; others existed mainly to sell shares. The language of the day called such projects 'bubbles', and the word has stayed with us ever since. Estimates of how many such projects were launched vary widely, and the figures printed at the time were probably inflated. Contemporary lists include ideas that now appear frankly ridiculous, though not every anecdote about them can be trusted.

In June 1720 Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade the formation of new joint-stock companies without a royal charter. The measure was intended to suppress the company's rivals, and the company itself supported it, but it also removed much of the speculative energy that had been driving the market upwards. By then the price had already begun to falter. Money was becoming dearer, the French Mississippi scheme had collapsed, and the company's trade with Spain had produced nothing like the expected profits. In September the price fell steeply, and by October it was below £200.

The human cost was severe, though the legend of universal ruin is exaggerated. Some investors had sold in the spring and kept their fortunes; others had bought at the very top and lost everything. The mathematician Isaac Newton, who had taken his profit early, is said to have bought back near the peak and lost a large sum. The company itself was not destroyed. It continued to exist as a financial institution, returned to the slave trade under the asiento, and was finally wound up in 1853, more than a century after the crisis.

Parliament opened an inquiry in 1721, and what it uncovered was more damaging than the losses themselves. Robert Knight, the company's cashier, fled to the continent with the company's books. He did not return to England for more than twenty years. Evidence that had already reached the Commons showed that stock had been given away to members of the government and of the royal household in return for their support. The chancellor of the exchequer, John Aislabie, was expelled from the House of Commons and imprisoned in the Tower of London. The earl of Sunderland, the king's leading minister, resigned. Robert Walpole, who had kept clear of the scandal, was brought in to restore public credit, and he dominated British politics for the next two decades.

The affair left a long shadow. The Bubble Act remained on the statute book until 1825, making it harder to form joint-stock companies in Britain than in some competitor economies. Economic historians still argue about how much damage the collapse did to trade and industry, but most now think the wider effects were limited: the losses fell on a relatively narrow circle of investors rather than on the economy as a whole.

Between roughly 1100 and 1500, European scholars and craftsmen made maps of the known world that look strange to modern eyes. Many hundreds survive, from small diagrams in the margins of manuscripts to objects several metres across. The most famous hangs in Hereford Cathedral and was made at about the turn of the fourteenth century. Historians call such works mappae mundi, and for a long time they were treated as failed attempts at geography — picturesque, pious and hopelessly inaccurate. More recent study has asked a different question: not how accurate they were, but what their makers believed a map was for.

The commonest design is the simplest. A circle stands for the inhabited world, enclosed by a ring of ocean. Inside, a T-shaped band of water divides the land into three parts: Asia occupies the upper half, Europe sits at the lower left and Africa at the lower right. East, where the sun rises and where the earthly paradise was believed to lie, is at the top. The arrangement is not a mistake about the shape of the world but a statement about its meaning. The three continents were understood to descend from the three sons of Noah, and the whole design expressed a view of creation in which geography was inseparable from scripture.

The information on these maps came from books rather than from survey. The makers read the Bible, the encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville and the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, and they copied from earlier maps. From such sources came not only real places but the legendary peoples believed to live at the edges of the world: the one-eyed, the dog-headed, and the people who sheltered beneath their own enormous feet. In the far north-east, many maps show the nations of Gog and Magog, shut behind a wall attributed to Alexander the Great and waiting for the end of time. Few makers had travelled far; their maps were libraries arranged in space.

The Hereford map shows the type at its most ambitious. It is drawn on a single sheet of vellum, roughly a metre and a half across, and it carries some five hundred drawings of animals, ships, kings, monsters and ruined cities. Jerusalem sits at the centre, in accordance with a verse of Ezekiel, and Christ in majesty presides over the last judgement at the top. The name of a canon, Richard of Haldingham, is written on it, though how much of the work is his remains uncertain. Whether it was made for display in a cathedral, for teaching or for a wealthy patron, nobody can now say with confidence.

The largest map of this kind was made at Ebstorf, in northern Germany, and it measured more than three and a half metres across. It was drawn on about thirty goatskins stitched together, and the body of Christ appears at the edges as well as at the top, so that the whole world is contained within the divine figure. The original was destroyed in the Second World War, and what visitors see today is a reconstruction based on photographs. The Ebstorf map is also a reminder of how much has been lost: other great maps are known only from descriptions in medieval book catalogues.

Making such an object was slow and expensive. Vellum, prepared from calfskin, had to be scraped, stretched and smoothed before anything could be drawn on it. The pigments were costly: blues, greens and reds were prepared from minerals and plant dyes, some of them imported from far beyond England, and gold leaf was used for the most important details. Modern analysis of these materials, carried out without removing samples, can reveal where colours came from and sometimes when a map was altered. It cannot tell us what the map was for, but it can show that such objects were luxuries, made with care and at considerable cost.

Quite separate from all this was a tradition of practical chart-making in the Mediterranean. From the thirteenth century, sailors used portolan charts, drawn on vellum and covering the coasts from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. They were covered with intersecting lines known as rhumb lines, which helped a navigator to lay off a course with a compass, and their outlines of coastlines are often strikingly accurate. They carried no monsters and no theology. What they recorded was distance, direction and the shape of the shore, information gathered by people who had actually sailed. Such charts were working documents, copied and corrected by generations of chart-makers as knowledge of the coastline improved.

The relationship between the two traditions is a live question. The map of Britain known as the Gough map, made in the fourteenth century, shows a recognisable island with roads and distances between towns, and its outline is far better than anything produced in a monastic scriptorium. Some historians argue that such knowledge came from sailors and royal officials; others stress how much of it was assembled from written itineraries in a library. Either way, the old story that medieval people could not draw a map has to be abandoned. They drew several kinds, for several purposes, and the theological map and the sea chart were not rivals but neighbours. Accuracy was not irrelevant to the makers of the great world maps; it was simply not the first thing they were trying to achieve.

Every year brings a new crop of anniversaries. Some are marked with ceremonies, television programmes and school projects; others pass almost unnoticed. The choice is never neutral, and it is rarely made by general agreement. A state that commemorates one war while ignoring another is making a statement about whose suffering counts. Yet the question of what deserves to be remembered is not only a matter for governments. It concerns anyone who has wondered why a particular date still has the power to move them.

The strongest argument for remembrance is straightforward. Injustices that are forgotten are easier to repeat, and the people who endured them are owed more than silence. When a society acknowledges what was done in its name, it accepts a measure of responsibility that no later generation can inherit in full but none can entirely escape. Truth commissions and public apologies matter even when they cannot restore what was lost, because they establish a record that cannot easily be denied. Remembrance, on this view, is not nostalgia but a form of honesty. The record also gives later generations something to argue with, which is worth more than a silence that everyone agrees to keep.

The sceptics have an answer. Much public commemoration, they point out, is ritual rather than understanding: a wreath is laid, a minute's silence is observed, and nobody learns anything. The growth of what is sometimes called the memory industry has not obviously produced a more historically literate public. Nor does the size of an occasion tell us much about its worth. A ceremony watched by millions may leave no trace in the mind, while a modest exhibition in a single room may change how a visitor sees the world.

Remembrance always selects. A national narrative that finds room for the heroism of soldiers may leave no room for the suffering of civilians, or for the people the soldiers were fighting. One group's commemoration can be another group's erasure, and the competition to be recognised as the chief victim of history is among the least edifying features of public life. No list of events can ever be complete. What matters is whether a society keeps its list open to revision, and whether it is honest about the reasons for its choices.

So what makes an event worth remembering? Three tests seem to me reasonable. The first is consequence: did it change the conditions of life for large numbers of people, and does that change still shape the present? The second is illumination: does knowing about it help us understand something we would otherwise misread? The third is obligation: are there people whose suffering imposes a duty on us, whether or not they are still alive to ask for it? An event may pass one test and fail another, and reasonable people will weigh them differently.

The form remembrance takes matters as much as its content. A plaque on a wall, a documentary, a national day of mourning and a museum gallery do different things, and each has weaknesses. Plaques are cheap and easily ignored; documentaries reach large audiences but simplify; national days can unify a country or entrench a division. Museums, at their best, have time and space to explain. It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that the argument is only about which events we choose. It is also about the means we choose, and about who is given the resources to make them.

The greatest danger in all this is presentism: the habit of judging earlier ages solely by the values of our own. It is easy to condemn a long-dead merchant, and the condemnation costs us nothing. But a society that can only recoil from its predecessors learns very little about them. The arguments over statues of figures whose wealth came from slavery illustrate the difficulty. Defending such monuments as though they were innocent is dishonest; removing them in the middle of the night avoids the argument rather than winning it. Keeping the object but explaining what the person did, and who paid for the memorial, seems to me the most honest course. Explanation is not the same as forgiveness, and it is a great deal more educational than either defence or erasure.

Historians have a particular part to play here. Their training equips them to notice what a comfortable national story leaves out, and to insist on evidence when a myth is more satisfying than the record. This is not a comfortable role, and it is not always a popular one. A good museum display, similarly, does not tell visitors what to feel; it gives them enough evidence to form their own judgement. The alternative is a public memory curated for its flattery, and a nation that remembers only what it can be proud of is not really remembering at all.

None of this means that remembrance should be abandoned, or that every ceremony must justify itself by measurable educational outcomes. Ceremony has its own value: it marks a boundary between what a society accepts and what it rejects. My conclusion is narrower. An event is worth remembering when remembering it changes how we act, and when it enlarges our understanding instead of confirming what we already believe. By that standard, the quality of attention matters far more than the size of the anniversary, and the question we should ask is not whether a date is important but what we propose to do with it.