IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 289

On the afternoon of 28 November 1660, a young professor named Christopher Wren delivered a lecture on astronomy at Gresham College in the City of London. When it ended, a group of the audience stayed behind to talk, as they often did, about the experiments they had seen and the questions that interested them. By the evening they had agreed to establish a society for what they called physico-mathematical experimental learning, meeting every week to witness experiments and discuss natural knowledge. The body founded that day became the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

The decision was less sudden than it appears. For at least a decade, groups of natural philosophers had been gathering privately in London and Oxford, corresponding by letter and sharing books. Historians have sometimes described these informal circles as an 'invisible college', though the phrase is vague and the evidence for a single organised network is thin. What the Gresham group had that earlier gatherings lacked was a formal constitution, a programme and, eventually, the favour of the crown. Among those present in 1660 were Robert Boyle, whose experiments with an air pump were already famous; John Wilkins, a clergyman and promoter of a universal language; Robert Moray, a Scottish soldier and courtier; and William Brouncker, a mathematician.

Moray was the most useful of these connections. He moved easily between scholarly and aristocratic circles, and within weeks he had spoken of the new society to Charles II, who professed himself pleased with the idea. In July 1662 the King granted it a first charter, making it a corporation. A second charter followed in 1663, which named it the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, gave it a coat of arms and allowed it to elect fellows. Brouncker became the first president, a post he held for more than fifteen years.

The charters mattered less for what they gave the society than for what they allowed it to claim: the standing of a recognised body. They brought no money. The early society survived on the subscriptions of fellows, many of whom paid irregularly, and on the energy of a few organisers. Henry Oldenburg, a German-born diplomat settled in England, acted as secretary and conducted a vast correspondence across Europe in Latin and French. In 1662 Robert Hooke was appointed curator of experiments, a salaried post that obliged him to produce several new demonstrations at each weekly meeting.

Hooke's appointment fixed the character of those meetings. Members were not to settle disputes by quoting ancient authors; they were to look at apparatus, watch it being used and record what happened. When a result seemed doubtful, the experiment was repeated in front of witnesses, and signed accounts were entered in the society's register book. This culture of collective witnessing was the society's most influential invention, and it helped to establish the expectation that a scientific claim should be reported in enough detail for others to test it.

The society's motto, Nullius in verba, is usually translated as 'take nobody's word for it', and it expresses the same attitude. It was adopted with the coat of arms in the 1660s and was aimed as much at the universities as at popular superstition. Aristotle's physics, and the medical doctrines of Galen, had been taught for centuries on the strength of texts; the fellows proposed to test them instead. In practice the rule was applied unevenly, since many fellows were physicians or landowners with practical interests, but the principle was stated plainly in print.

Publication was essential, and here too the society broke new ground. In March 1665 Oldenburg began printing Philosophical Transactions, a monthly sheet of reports, extracts of letters and reviews of books. It was the first journal devoted to science to be sustained over many years, and it gave authors a way of establishing priority and readers a way of keeping up with work done elsewhere.

Hooke's Micrographia, printed the same year, showed what the society's instruments could reveal, and its drawings of insects and plant tissue were among the first to make observation at a very small scale seem worth publishing. Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society, published in 1667, set out to answer critics who thought the fellows frivolous.

That defence was needed. The society had announced ambitions it could not finance: a large college with laboratories, workshops, gardens and a museum, where fellows would live and work together. No such building was ever erected. Subscription income was uncertain, and some of the most valuable work was paid for by individuals rather than by the society. The fellows also had to be cautious, since any gathering that discussed religion or politics risked suspicion, so meetings confined themselves to subjects that could be demonstrated or measured.

The strategy worked well enough for the society to survive. Its members studied the swinging of pendulums, the salinity of seawater and the design of diving bells, and they kept a long interest in instruments that might help navigation. In 1687 the society's imprimatur appeared on Isaac Newton's Principia, the book that reshaped physics; the society itself could not afford to print it, and Edmond Halley paid for publication out of his own pocket. Newton became president in 1703, and his prestige did much to secure the society's position. In 1710 the fellows acquired their first permanent home of their own, in Crane Court, after fifty years of borrowed rooms at Gresham College.

Istanbul occupies a peninsula with almost no rivers of its own, yet it has long been one of the largest cities in Europe. Supplying it has always required engineering on a regional scale. The oldest supply lines were Roman. The aqueduct now known as the Aqueduct of Valens, whose arches still stand beside a busy road in the modern city, was completed in the fourth century AD, and the channels that fed it drew on springs and streams far to the west in Thrace. Some estimates put the total length of the Roman network at more than 200 kilometres.

After the Ottoman conquest of 1453, the new rulers inherited these channels, many of them broken. Repairs began almost at once. But the city grew rapidly, and by the middle of the sixteenth century demand had outgrown the Byzantine inheritance. Suleiman the Magnificent therefore asked his chief architect, Mimar Sinan, to build a new system. Known as the Kırkçeşme, or 'forty fountains', it collected water in the forested hills north-west of the city and carried it about fifty kilometres to the centre.

The most demanding point on the route was the valley of the Alibey stream, which the conduit had to cross. Sinan's answer was the Mağlova aqueduct, completed in the early 1560s: a stone structure carried on two tiers of arches, rising to a height of about thirty-five metres. Contemporary accounts describe how a flood soon damaged the work and how Sinan rebuilt it with a channel designed to resist later floods. The aqueduct still stands, and it is often treated as the finest surviving example of Ottoman hydraulic engineering.

Water moved entirely by gravity, which placed severe demands on surveyors. The gradient of a conduit had to be steep enough to keep water flowing but gentle enough not to damage the masonry, and the line had to be kept level over long distances. Channels cut through rock were lined with stone; elsewhere the water ran through pipes of fired clay, joined with mortar and packed into trenches. Where the line met a valley the engineers used an inverted siphon, in which water plunged down one side under pressure and rose on the other, or, where the drop was too great, a bridge of arches.

Distribution within the city was controlled by small stone chambers. At a maksem, the incoming flow was divided between separate outlets, each leading to a street, a mosque or a bathhouse. Ottoman engineers measured flow by fitting a standard nozzle, called a lüle, into an opening, and allocations were recorded in these units. Because the amount of water in a system was fixed, adding a fountain meant taking flow from somewhere else, and disputes over shares could last for generations.

Most of the water ended in public fountains, built as acts of charity. A fountain usually formed part of a larger endowment, or vakıf, in which the founder dedicated the revenue from shops, land or baths to paying for repairs and for the wages of those who maintained the supply. Water was free to anyone who came with a container, and sebils attached to some complexes offered travellers a cup to drink. The visible expression of the system was the carved stone fountain at the corner of a street.

Building continued long after Sinan. In the 1730s, under Mahmud I, a new line was laid from the Belgrade Forest to a distribution point near the centre of the city; the place is still called Taksim, from the Turkish word for division, because that was where the water was split between districts. In the same period, small dams known as bentler were built in the forest valleys to store water through the dry summer. The last great project of the imperial period, the Hamidiye line, was completed in 1902.

How much of this can be reconstructed depends on documents. Ottoman administrators kept registers of waterways, recording the route of each conduit, the size of its pipes and the fountains it supplied, while foundation deeds listed the buildings that an endowment was expected to maintain. Inscriptions carved on fountains give the date of construction and the name of the benefactor, sometimes in verse. Travellers' accounts add details of what was working and what was not. These sources allow historians to map parts of the network with unusual precision, though the registers are scattered and many have been lost.

Archaeology supplies what the paperwork cannot. The masonry of the aqueducts shows successive repairs in different mortars, and the sequence of these repairs is one of the few ways of dating later work. Inside surviving conduits, layers of carbonate deposited by flowing water can be sectioned and counted, giving a record of when a line was in use and when it was dry. Excavations during road-building in Istanbul have uncovered stretches of pipe and the remains of division chambers that no document mentions.

Interpretation remains contested. One tradition of scholarship presents Ottoman work as essentially conservative, a matter of restoring and extending a Roman system with familiar techniques. Others argue that the sixteenth-century lines involved new solutions to problems of scale, and that the administrative machinery for allocating water by measured nozzle was a genuine innovation. What is not in doubt is that the city could not have grown as it did without the aqueducts, and that some of them were still carrying water in the twentieth century.

In most national curricula, the history of a country is taught as the story of a people who stayed where they were. Movement appears as an interruption: invasions, a wave of refugees, perhaps the arrival of a minority. A growing number of historians argue that this is a mistake, and that the movement of people should be a central theme in every school's history teaching. The proposal sounds reasonable, but it raises hard questions about what history is for, and about how much any curriculum can carry.

The historical case is strong. Human beings have always moved, and the settlements they built were rarely self-sufficient. Farming spread across Europe with people who carried it; the cities of the medieval Mediterranean grew by absorbing newcomers from the countryside and from across the sea; and the industrial cities of the nineteenth century depended on arrivals from poorer regions. A history that leaves this out is not merely incomplete. It misleads, because it makes the settled community the natural unit of human life, when the evidence suggests that movement and mixture were ordinary.

Teaching migration also changes how the present is understood. Public discussion often treats large-scale movement as a recent emergency, a departure from a normal condition of stability. In practice, European populations have shifted repeatedly: with the enclosure of farmland, with the growth of industry, with the redrawing of borders after wars. What is unusual about the last few decades is the speed of communication, not the fact of movement. Pupils who know this are better equipped to judge claims about migration today, and less likely to accept the assumption that a nation is a family writ large.

There is a second argument, about the pupils themselves. In many classrooms, some children will have grandparents who arrived from elsewhere, and a history that acknowledges movement can make the subject feel relevant rather than remote. But this benefit is easily lost. A lesson that invites children to explain their family's origins can turn a pupil into a specimen, and it may place an unfair burden on those whose family history includes flight or irregular status. The aim should be a history that includes movement as a normal part of the national story, not one that asks individual children to represent it.

The objections deserve a hearing. The first is practical. History curricula are already crowded, and teachers are asked to cover political institutions, economic change, war, religion and culture in a few years. A new theme can only be added at the expense of something else, and there is a respectable argument that depth matters more than coverage. The second objection is more serious. When a subject is introduced because it is thought to produce better citizens, it risks becoming instruction rather than enquiry. Pupils are quick to notice when the past is being used to make a point about the present, and they respond by repeating the point rather than examining it.

There is a third difficulty, which historians of empire have done most to identify. 'Migration' is a blanket word. It can describe a merchant moving between two cities and a captive carried across an ocean, and treating those experiences as versions of the same thing is not neutral. The forced transport of enslaved Africans is now sometimes discussed in schools under the heading of migration, and some specialists object that this obscures the coercion involved. The same is true of indentured labour and of people displaced by war. If the theme is taught carelessly, it can soften events that should not be softened.

The evidence raises a further problem. Most written records of migration were produced by states, for states: passenger lists, border registers, censuses of foreigners. They tell us what officials wanted to know, which is rarely what a family experienced. Historians have therefore turned to letters, court records and oral testimony, and archaeologists have studied burial grounds and household objects. Each of these sources has limits, and none of them is easy for a fourteen-year-old to interpret without guidance. A curriculum that promises to teach migration must also provide the training in handling sources that the promise requires.

My own view is that migration should be taught, but not in the way its keenest advocates usually propose. It should not be a separate unit bolted onto an overloaded syllabus, and it should certainly not be a series of moral lessons about tolerance. It should be a strand running through the history that is already taught: the movement of peoples into and out of the country being studied, examined with the same documents and the same scepticism as any other topic. Comparative work is valuable here, since pupils who compare the arrival of Huguenot refugees in one century with the arrival of Commonwealth workers in another will see what is general and what is particular.

The decisive argument, though, is not about citizenship at all. It is that the history of a country is more interesting, and more accurate, when the movement of people is part of it. A curriculum that presents the past as a record of who arrived, when, and what they brought with them teaches pupils something true about the world they live in. It also teaches them to weigh evidence rather than to absorb a message, which is the most defensible purpose a history course can have.