IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 299

High above the Urubamba river in southern Peru, a narrow ridge divides two valleys at an altitude of about 2,430 metres. On this ridge, in the middle of the fifteenth century, the Inca ruler Pachacuti ordered the construction of a settlement of some two hundred buildings: temples, storehouses, houses, baths and terraces cut into the steep slopes. The place is now known as Machu Picchu, a name that appears to refer to the mountain above the ruins rather than to the ruins themselves. The Spanish never found it, and this accident of geography, as much as the quality of the stonework, explains why it survives in such remarkable condition.

The settlement was built without mortar, from granite blocks fitted so closely that a knife blade will not pass between them, and it was supplied with water by a canal that still carries a trickle from a spring on the mountainside. Its inhabitants probably numbered a few hundred: the ruler's household, priests, skilled craftsmen, and the servants and labourers who maintained the terraces. When the Inca state collapsed under Spanish invasion in the 1530s, the estate lost its purpose. Its population drifted away, the roofs decayed, and forest crept over the walls, but the place was never entirely lost.

Local farmers continued to use the terraces and to walk the old paths, and the ruins were familiar to people living in the valley below. At the beginning of the twentieth century a few outsiders reached the site. The clearest evidence is an inscription left by a farmer, Agustín Lizárraga, who recorded his name and a date on a wall of the Temple of the Sun in 1902, and who is said to have guided others there. None of these visitors, however, recognised what they were looking at, and none brought the place to the world's attention.

That was left to Hiram Bingham, an American historian who lectured at Yale. Born in Hawaii in 1875, the son of a missionary family, Bingham is often described as an explorer, but his training was in South American history and his ambitions were scholarly. In 1911 he travelled to Peru to search for the last stronghold of Inca resistance, the city of Vilcabamba, where the rulers who fled the Spanish are supposed to have held out for several decades. His route followed the Urubamba valley, through country he had been told contained ruins of great interest.

On 24 July 1911 a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, led Bingham and a companion up a steep, overgrown path. At the top, a boy living in a hut on the terraces, whose name has come down to us as Pablito Alvarez, took them along a rough track to the ruins. Bingham was astonished, and recorded his sense of disbelief in his journal. He spent the day measuring and photographing, and returned the following year with a properly equipped expedition. He was convinced that he had found Vilcabamba.

Bingham's expeditions of 1912 and 1915, supported by Yale University and the National Geographic Society, cleared vegetation, mapped the site and carried away thousands of objects: pottery, tools, ornaments and human bones. In 1913 an entire issue of National Geographic was devoted to Machu Picchu, illustrated with photographs that made the terraced ruins famous throughout the world. For the rest of his life Bingham promoted the site, though his later career took him into politics, first as governor of Connecticut and then as a senator. He died in 1956, long before the question of the objects he had taken became a diplomatic dispute.

His interpretation, however, did not last. Before long, other scholars doubted that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba: the Spanish chronicles described a city further down in the jungle, and the geography did not fit. Later archaeology supported the doubt. Vilcabamba is now generally located at a lowland site called Espíritu Pampa, and Machu Picchu is understood to have been a royal estate, a country palace belonging to Pachacuti and his lineage, occupied for perhaps less than a century.

What the site was used for remains a matter of debate. Most archaeologists accept the estate interpretation, but the presence of a carved stone pillar known as the Intihuatana, once thought to have helped priests track the movement of the sun, has encouraged claims that Machu Picchu was primarily a ceremonial or astronomical centre.

Others have argued that its position, close to a sacred mountain and beside a river, gave it religious significance, and a few have proposed that the terraces were used for testing crops at different altitudes. Because the Inca left no written records, the argument rests on excavation, on chronicles written by people who never saw the place, and on comparison with other Inca sites.

Modern study has also been shaped by tourism and by the need to protect the ruins. Machu Picchu was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1983, and visitor numbers rose sharply in the following decades, exceeding a million in a typical year before the pandemic of 2020. Concern about erosion led the Peruvian authorities to restrict daily entry and to limit the hours at which the main monuments may be visited. After years of negotiation, Yale began in 2011 to return the objects taken by Bingham's expeditions, most of which are now housed in a museum in Cusco.

For most of the Middle Ages, money in Europe meant metal. Coins were struck from gold, silver and copper, and their value depended on their weight and purity, which is why rulers who needed cash were tempted to reduce the precious metal in them. Paper played almost no part in everyday payment. Yet a promise written on paper had already been made to circulate as confidently as silver elsewhere, and the story of how Europe adopted it involves merchants, bankers, a Swedish experiment and a French catastrophe.

The earliest true paper currency was devised in China. During the Northern Song dynasty, merchants in Sichuan, a province short of copper coins, began issuing written certificates for deposits of metal; these notes, known as jiaozi, passed from hand to hand as payment. In the eleventh century the state took over the system and printed notes of its own, and later dynasties continued the practice. When the Venetian traveller Marco Polo reached China in the 1270s he was struck that the Great Khan's subjects accepted pieces of paper in place of gold, and he described the imperial mint in his account of his travels. His readers in Europe found the claim almost incredible.

Paper did not arrive in Europe as money but as credit. From the thirteenth century Italian merchants developed the bill of exchange, a written order instructing one party to pay another at a distance, which allowed goods to be bought in one city and paid for in another without coins being carried across Europe. Such instruments were indispensable to trade, but they were not money in the ordinary sense: they circulated among a small circle of merchants and were settled in coin. The step from a credit note to a circulating banknote was small in principle and took centuries in practice.

War produced some of the earliest European paper money. Besieged cities that ran out of coin sometimes issued notes instead, promising to redeem them when the siege was lifted. The most famous example is Leiden, in the Netherlands, which was surrounded by Spanish troops in 1574; with no metal available, the city authorities printed money on the covers of prayer books, and these flimsy notes are said to have been redeemed after the siege ended. Similar emergency issues appeared in other European towns over the following two centuries, but they were responses to crisis rather than a permanent system.

The first European bank to issue notes as a matter of routine was in Stockholm. In 1657 Johan Palmstruch, a merchant born in Riga to a Dutch family, founded a bank there, and in 1661 his Stockholms Banco began handing out credit notes: printed slips of paper that customers could use in place of the heavy copper plates then used as money in Sweden. The notes were popular and circulated far beyond the bank's customers. But the bank had issued more notes than it could redeem, and in 1668 it collapsed. The Swedish state took over the wreckage and created the Riksbank, which is often described as the world's oldest central bank.

England followed in 1694, when the Bank of England was founded to lend money to the government. Its early notes were not printed forms but handwritten promises, made out to a named person for a specific sum, and they circulated because the Bank was known to pay. In the eighteenth century the Bank began to use partly printed notes, still completed by hand and signed by a cashier. When the supply of gold ran short during the wars with France, the Bank issued small notes for one and two pounds from 1797, bringing paper money into the hands of ordinary people. Fully printed notes, needing no signature, appeared in the 1850s.

The most dramatic experiment took place in France. John Law, a Scottish financier, persuaded the French government to let him establish a bank in 1716 which issued notes, and within a few years his institution, renamed the Banque Royale, had become the country's main source of paper money. Law used the notes to finance a vast trading company with interests in North America, and Parisians speculated wildly in its shares. The bubble burst in 1720: notes were presented for conversion into coin in quantities the bank could not meet, the shares collapsed, and Law fled. For generations afterwards, French opinion treated paper money with suspicion.

For historians, the subject is complicated by the fact that the objects themselves barely survive. A banknote is a promise to pay, and once it has been paid it is a worthless piece of paper; most were destroyed, and those that remain often survive by accident. There is also disagreement about definitions. If a banknote means a printed promise, issued by an institution and intended to circulate from hand to hand, then Sweden's notes of 1661 have the strongest claim to be the first in Europe. If the definition is widened to include any paper instrument transferable at a discount, the bill of exchange takes the prize by several centuries.

By the nineteenth century, paper money had become normal. Industrialising states set up central banks with a monopoly on the issue of notes, and the notes themselves grew more uniform, decorated with fine engraving that made them harder to forge. The long hesitation was over. What had begun as a merchant's receipt in Sichuan, and had been treated in Europe as a dangerous novelty for six hundred years, had become the ordinary means by which most people were paid and most bills were settled.

Every summer, in towns across Europe, crowds gather for events their grandparents would recognise: a bonfire, a procession, a figure in a mask, a boat carried through the streets at night. Traditional festivals are among the most visible expressions of local identity, and many now attract visitors in numbers that would have astonished their organisers a generation ago. That success has produced an awkward question. When an event draws more people than its streets can hold, when it depends on public money and when the participants are outnumbered by spectators, should it be changed?

The case for adaptation begins with safety and money. A ceremony designed for a village of six hundred people cannot simply be repeated for sixty thousand. Councils impose crowd limits, insurers demand barriers and first-aid cover, and fire regulations govern what may be burned and where. Some of the changes that festivals have made in recent decades are of this unglamorous kind: timed entry, a second performance for visitors, a route diverted away from narrow streets. Organisers who refuse to adapt do not preserve the festival; they watch it shrink, lose its funding and eventually disappear.

Adaptation is also urged on grounds of fairness. Many old customs were designed by and for a narrow group: men of a particular trade, members of a single parish, respectable families. Ceremonies that once excluded women, outsiders or children often now include them, and few would argue for restoring the exclusion. Criticism of such changes tends to come from people who were never excluded in the first place.

Against this stands a serious objection. When a festival is reorganised for the convenience of visitors, what the visitors are shown may no longer be the thing they came to see. Anthropologists have described how a ritual performed for paying spectators gradually separates into two: a shortened, picturesque version for the crowd, and a residual, private version that fewer local people bother to keep up. Once the second has faded, the first has nothing left to reproduce. The danger is not that the festival changes, but that it changes into a performance of itself.

Defenders of the old forms sometimes appeal to tradition as though it were a fixed standard. Historians have shown how misleading this can be. Many customs that now feel ancient were codified, revived or invented in the nineteenth century, often by enthusiasts collecting folklore that was already half-forgotten. Others have been repeatedly altered: routes changed, dates moved, costumes redesigned. If a festival's own history is one of continuous adaptation, the argument that it must now stop adapting looks less like respect for the past than a preference for the version someone happens to remember.

There is a further complication. The visitors who worry organisers most are often the ones who most want the festival to be genuine. They come precisely because they have heard that it is not staged for tourists, and their presence is what pushes it towards becoming exactly that. Yet the same appetite can preserve as well as damage. Several local customs have been revived, after decades of neglect, because outsiders took an interest and because young people discovered that an abandoned tradition was suddenly worth money, and worth learning.

The question of who decides is therefore central, and it is here that many well-meaning projects fail. A festival cannot be redesigned by a tourism board or a consultant and still belong to the people who perform it. Decisions that are taken without them, however sensible, are experienced as expropriation, and the response is usually withdrawal: the best participants stop taking part, and the event continues without them. Where change has worked, it has usually been agreed in open meetings by the associations, guilds and families that have always run the thing, often over several years and with much argument.

Governments and international bodies have added another layer. UNESCO's convention on intangible cultural heritage, adopted in 2003, offers recognition and sometimes funding to traditional practices, and listing is eagerly sought by communities and ministries alike. The risk is that a practice inscribed on a list is treated as a thing to be conserved rather than a living activity to be practised. Heritage status can freeze a custom at the moment it was documented, encouraging its guardians to reproduce the recorded version exactly.

None of this means that nothing should ever change. The useful distinction is between the form of a festival and its purpose. A midwinter fire festival can burn different fuel, follow a new route and last two hours instead of four without losing what it is for, provided that the lighting of the fire is still done by the people who live there. What cannot be replaced is participation. A festival in which local people are merely employees, marshals or extras has already become something else, however well attended it is.

My own view is that adaptation is not a betrayal. Festivals have always borrowed, discarded and reinvented, and a tradition that refuses to move is usually one that has stopped being practised. But the direction of change matters. Alterations that make an event easier to watch while making it harder to take part in are the ones that hollow it out; alterations that spread participation more widely, or that allow a custom to survive another generation, deserve the benefit of the doubt. The question is not whether festivals should change, but on whose terms.