IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 29

In the 1830s, sending a letter in Britain was a complicated and expensive business. Charges were calculated according to the distance a letter travelled and the number of sheets of paper it contained, so that a single sheet sent a long way could cost more than a shilling, a large part of a labourer's daily wage. Moreover, the fee was usually paid not by the sender but by the recipient, who was entitled to refuse the letter. Many poorer people therefore wrote rarely, if at all, and some devised ingenious ways of avoiding payment altogether.

One common trick was to send a coded message on the outside of the letter. Since the recipient could examine the cover before deciding whether to pay, a few agreed marks on the address panel could convey a simple message, after which the letter was handed back unopened and the Post Office received nothing. Newspapers, which travelled through the post free of charge once a tax had been paid on them, were also used to carry hidden messages, sometimes by pricking tiny holes beneath particular letters. Meanwhile, Members of Parliament enjoyed the privilege of sending letters free by signing the outside, a practice known as franking, and this right was widely abused, with signed covers handed to friends or even sold.

The man who proposed a radical solution was Rowland Hill, a former schoolmaster with no experience of the postal service. In 1837 he published a pamphlet entitled Post Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability. Using the Post Office's own figures, Hill argued that the actual cost of transporting a letter, even over hundreds of miles, was tiny. The real expense lay in the complex business of calculating the charge for each letter, collecting money from recipients and keeping accounts. If postage were the same for all distances and paid in advance, most of these costs would disappear. Hill therefore proposed a uniform rate of one penny for a letter weighing up to half an ounce, regardless of how far it was sent.

Senior officials at the Post Office were deeply sceptical, predicting that the cost of handling a vastly increased number of letters would bankrupt the service. Hill's ideas, however, found enthusiastic support among merchants, bankers and reformers, and a parliamentary committee examined the scheme in detail. After a vigorous public campaign, the government agreed to adopt it, and Hill was given a post at the Treasury to supervise its introduction. As a transitional step, a uniform rate of four pence was introduced on 5 December 1839, and on 10 January 1840 the Uniform Penny Post came into force throughout the United Kingdom.

Prepayment required a convenient way of showing that postage had been paid, and Hill's answer was a small printed label backed with adhesive, which the sender would attach to the letter. The result was the Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, which went on sale on 1 May 1840 and could be used from 6 May. It carried a profile of the young Queen Victoria based on a medal portrait, and the absence of a country name on British stamps, a tradition that continues today, dates from this first issue. At the same time, prepaid envelopes illustrated by the artist William Mulready were introduced, but their elaborate allegorical design was widely ridiculed and they were soon withdrawn.

The Penny Black remained in use for less than a year. Stamps were cancelled with red ink to prevent reuse, but the red mark was difficult to see on a black background and could be removed relatively easily, allowing dishonest users to send the same stamp twice. In February 1841 the stamp was therefore printed in red, and black ink was used for cancellation instead. The Penny Red, as it became known, was produced in enormous numbers and remained in use, with various modifications, for several decades. From 1864, letters printed in all four corners of each stamp made it harder for anyone to combine the unmarked halves of two used stamps into one apparently new one.

The effect on the volume of mail was immediate. The number of letters posted in the United Kingdom more than doubled between 1839 and 1840, and it continued to rise steadily in the following decades. Cheap postage encouraged ordinary people to write to distant relatives, helped businesses to advertise and send invoices, and supported a growing culture of greetings cards, the first commercial Christmas card being produced in 1843.

Roadside pillar boxes, which allowed letters to be posted at any hour, followed in the early 1850s, first in the Channel Islands, on the recommendation of the novelist Anthony Trollope, who was then working as a Post Office official. Financially, however, the reform was not an immediate success: the Post Office's net revenue fell sharply and took many years to return to its earlier level.

The British model was soon copied abroad. The Swiss canton of Zurich and the Empire of Brazil both issued their own stamps in 1843, and within a few decades almost every country had adopted prepaid postage. Hill, who was knighted in 1860, became one of the most celebrated public servants of the Victorian age. The principle that a letter should cost the same however far it travels, so familiar today that it seems obvious, was at the time one of the boldest experiments in public administration.

A tsunami is not a single wave but a series of waves produced when a large volume of water is suddenly displaced, most often by an earthquake beneath the sea floor, though also by landslides and volcanic eruptions. In the deep ocean the waves may be less than a metre high and pass unnoticed beneath ships, yet they travel at the speed of a jet aircraft, often more than 700 kilometres an hour. As they approach shallow coastal water, they slow down and pile up, sometimes reaching heights of tens of metres. Because the waves can take many hours to cross an ocean, there is often time to warn distant coasts, provided the danger is recognised quickly.

The first organised warning system was a response to tragedy. In April 1946 an earthquake near the Aleutian Islands of Alaska generated a tsunami that reached Hawaii nearly five hours later and killed more than 150 people, many of them in the town of Hilo. No warning had been given. In 1949 the United States established a warning centre at Ewa Beach, on the island of Oahu, which later became the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Its early methods were simple: when seismographs recorded a large earthquake, staff contacted tide-gauge stations around the Pacific to find out whether the sea had begun to behave unusually.

Those methods were soon tested. In May 1960 the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, with a magnitude of 9.5, struck southern Chile. The resulting tsunami devastated the Chilean coast, killed 61 people in Hilo some fifteen hours later, and nearly a day after the earthquake reached Japan, where well over a hundred people died. The disaster persuaded Pacific nations that information had to be shared across borders, and in 1968 an international system was formally established under the coordination of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, with the centre in Hawaii as its operational headquarters.

Detecting an earthquake is relatively straightforward, but predicting the tsunami it will produce is not, because the size of the waves depends on how far the sea floor moves rather than on the shaking alone. Modern systems therefore rely on instruments that measure the ocean directly. The most important are deep-ocean pressure sensors, known in the United States as DART stations. A recorder anchored on the seabed continuously measures the pressure of the water above it, which changes as a tsunami passes, and can detect waves only a centimetre high in water thousands of metres deep. The data are sent by sound signals to a buoy on the surface and relayed by satellite to warning centres, where computer models use them to forecast the height and arrival time of the waves along particular coastlines.

The catastrophe of 26 December 2004 exposed the gaps that remained. A magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra generated a tsunami that killed around 230,000 people in more than a dozen countries. Unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean had no warning system, and although scientists in Hawaii realised that a huge earthquake had occurred, there was no established way to alert the authorities and communities at risk. In some places the waves arrived hours after the earthquake. In response, countries around the Indian Ocean built a regional system, and by the early 2010s centres in Australia, India and Indonesia were providing warnings for the region.

Even the most advanced systems have limitations. When a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off north-eastern Japan in March 2011, the Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning about three minutes later. However, the method used for this rapid assessment could not capture the true size of such an enormous earthquake, and the agency's initial estimate of magnitude 7.9 led it to forecast waves of three to six metres. The waves that struck the coast were in places more than ten metres high. Warnings were upgraded as offshore data arrived, but power failures prevented some residents from receiving them. Japan later changed its procedures so that, when an earthquake may be exceptionally large, the first warning assumes the worst.

Another weakness is that warning systems are designed mainly around earthquakes. In December 2018 part of the Anak Krakatau volcano in Indonesia collapsed into the sea, generating a tsunami that struck the coasts of Java and Sumatra with little or no warning and killed more than 400 people. Because there had been no significant earthquake, seismic monitoring gave no sign of the danger. Tsunamis generated close to shore pose a further problem, since the waves may arrive within minutes, before any official message can be issued.

For these reasons, experts emphasise that technology must be supported by public education. People living on vulnerable coasts are taught that strong or long-lasting shaking, a sudden fall in sea level or a loud roar from the ocean are natural warnings that require immediate movement to high ground. The value of such knowledge was demonstrated in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Simeulue, close to the earthquake's epicentre. Islanders had preserved memories of a destructive tsunami in 1907 through stories passed between generations, and when the sea withdrew, they fled inland. Although the waves devastated coastal villages, local officials reported only a handful of deaths. On a beach in Thailand, similarly, a ten-year-old British girl who had recently studied tsunamis at school recognised the retreating sea as a warning sign and alerted her parents, and the beach was cleared before the waves arrived.

Few aspects of school life provoke as much argument in families as homework. Parents complain that it consumes evenings and causes conflict; teachers feel obliged to set it to satisfy parents who equate it with high standards; and pupils, unsurprisingly, would usually prefer to do without it. Periodically a school announces that it is abolishing homework altogether, and the announcement attracts enthusiastic headlines. My own view is that the question of whether homework helps has no single answer. It depends on the age of the pupil, the nature of the task and, perhaps above all, on what the pupil's home is like.

The most frequently cited evidence comes from the American psychologist Harris Cooper, who has reviewed homework research for several decades. In a 2006 synthesis of studies published since 1987, Cooper and his colleagues found a generally positive association between the amount of homework students did and their achievement. Crucially, however, the relationship was much stronger for older pupils, in the later years of secondary school, than for younger ones, for whom it was weak. Cooper also reported that, even for older students, the benefits appeared to level off beyond a certain amount, and he has popularised a rule of thumb known as the ten-minute rule: roughly ten minutes of homework a night for each year of schooling. Cooper has also argued that homework can bring benefits that tests do not capture, such as better study habits and greater independence, although these are considerably harder to measure.

Such findings require careful interpretation, since most of the studies are correlational. A positive link between homework time and achievement could mean that homework improves learning, but it could equally mean that motivated and able students choose to do more of it. Indeed, research in Germany led by the psychologist Ulrich Trautwein has suggested that how regularly pupils complete their homework is a better predictor of their progress than how long they spend on it, and that very long homework sessions may be a sign that a student is struggling rather than learning efficiently. Time, in other words, is a poor measure of effort, and effort a poor measure of benefit.

There is also evidence that excessive homework carries costs. In a 2013 study of more than 4,000 students at high-performing high schools in affluent Californian communities, researchers associated with Stanford University found that students reported doing an average of around three hours of homework a night. More than half described homework as a primary source of stress, and many reported losing sleep and having too little time for friends, family or exercise. These were privileged students at demanding schools, so the findings cannot be generalised to everyone, but they are a reminder that the relationship between homework and well-being is not straightforward. The authors noted that earlier research had found little additional academic benefit beyond about two hours a night, which suggests that some of these students were working well past the point of diminishing returns.

The most troubling issue, in my view, concerns fairness. Data from the OECD's PISA assessments show that, across member countries, fifteen-year-olds from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds spend more time on homework than their disadvantaged peers, and the OECD has warned that homework may reinforce existing inequalities. A child with a quiet room, a reliable internet connection and educated parents who can explain fractions has a considerable advantage over one who shares a crowded flat, looks after younger siblings or works after school. When homework counts towards grades, it partly measures home circumstances rather than learning.

Some commentators use international comparisons to argue that homework is unnecessary, noting that students in Finland, a country that has often performed well in international tests, report relatively little of it. Others point to Shanghai, where fifteen-year-olds reported around fourteen hours a week of homework in 2012 and achieved outstanding results. Such comparisons are, I believe, almost worthless. National education systems differ in countless respects, from teacher training to culture and private tutoring, and it is impossible to isolate the effect of homework from everything else. A high national average, in any case, tells us nothing about whether the homework itself produced the results.

What, then, should schools do? The evidence suggests that quality matters more than quantity. Short tasks that require pupils to practise recently taught material, recall it from memory or prepare for the next lesson are more likely to be useful than lengthy projects that depend on parental help or expensive materials. Homework should also be checked and discussed, since tasks that receive no feedback quickly come to seem pointless to pupils. Retrieval practice, in which learners attempt to recall information rather than simply reread it, is one of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology, and homework is a natural place for it. For the youngest children, the strongest case is for regular reading, ideally with an adult, rather than worksheets.

Abolishing homework, then, is not the answer, at least for older pupils, for whom the evidence of benefit is reasonably consistent. Nor, however, should schools treat the volume of homework as a measure of their seriousness. A modest amount of well-designed homework, combined with homework clubs that give every pupil a suitable place to work, seems to me the most defensible policy. The real question is not whether homework helps, but which homework helps whom.