IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 301

The disturbances that gave the English language the word 'Luddite' began in the spring of 1811, not in a factory but in the cottages of stocking weavers. For more than two centuries, stockings had been made on hand frames, machines of wood and iron that a skilled worker operated at home. These workers were not factory employees but outworkers, paid by the hosiers who supplied the yarn and sold the finished goods. A long slump in trade had pushed many hosiers to cut rates. Some had also begun to use wide frames, which produced a broad sheet of cloth to be cut and sewn into shape, undercutting the older method of knitting a complete garment.

Wages were sometimes paid in goods rather than coin, a practice known as truck, with poor-quality items handed over at inflated prices. The weavers' petitions to Parliament were ignored. In the autumn of 1811, gangs began to ride out at night and smash frames, particularly those belonging to hosiers who had cut rates. The attackers destroyed only the machines they blamed, and they took the name signed on their threatening letters: Ned Ludd, or General Ludd.

Who Ludd was, nobody knew. A tradition repeated by later writers holds that the name came from a Leicestershire boy who smashed a frame in the 1770s after being beaten by his master. Historians have found no evidence that any such leader existed. The letters were written in different hands, and the name was evidently a useful pseudonym that gave anonymous crowds a figurehead. The authorities took the threat seriously, and the Home Office collected reports of every incident.

The movement spread into the woollen districts of Yorkshire and the cotton towns of Lancashire. In Yorkshire its most determined supporters were the croppers, highly skilled men who raised the nap of finished cloth with heavy hand shears. They were among the best-paid workers in the trade, and their livelihood was threatened by two machines: the gig mill, which raised the nap mechanically, and the shearing frame, which trimmed the cloth without them. Mill owners who installed either machine became targets.

Luddite groups in Yorkshire were better organised than their Nottinghamshire counterparts. Men drilled at night on the moors, took oaths of secrecy and gathered information about which mills had installed new equipment. Some employers received letters warning them to remove their machines; others were attacked without warning. Contemporary accounts spoke of tens of thousands of armed men.

In February 1812 Parliament debated a bill to make the destruction of frames a capital offence. The young poet Lord Byron, in his first speech in the Lords, made a passionate defence of the knitters, but the bill was passed. A later attempt to regulate the framework knitting trade and protect wages was opposed by the hosiers and defeated. Parliament had chosen punishment over conciliation.

Force was used as well. On 11 April 1812 a large body of men attacked Rawfolds Mill near Huddersfield, where William Cartwright had installed shearing frames. Cartwright and a handful of workers, protected by soldiers, held the mill, and two of the attackers were mortally wounded. Three weeks later another mill owner, William Horsfall, was shot and killed as he rode home. Several men were later tried and hanged for his murder.

Thousands of soldiers were moved into the industrial north, and militia units were called out in several counties. Magistrates in the worst-affected districts were given powers to search houses for weapons, and rewards were offered for information. The military presence was heavy enough to be resented by people who had no part in the disturbances.

In January 1813 a special commission opened at York Castle to try the Yorkshire Luddites. Dozens of men were brought before the court on charges of administering unlawful oaths, attacking mills and murder. Several were hanged and others were transported to Australia. In Nottinghamshire frame-breaking continued at a lower level for another year or two, but it never regained its former strength.

Further outbreaks came after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, when trade collapsed. In 1816 and 1817 there were renewed attacks on mills in the Midlands, but the movement had lost its coherence and it faded. Historians have argued about what the Luddites wanted. Eric Hobsbawm described machine-breaking as a form of 'collective bargaining by riot', a way for workers with no unions and no vote to put pressure on their employers, while other historians stress the political language of the letters, which invoked ancient rights and sometimes threatened revolution.

The word has had a long life. Charlotte Brontë set her novel Shirley in the Yorkshire disturbances, and gave a sympathetic portrait of the mill owner's opponents. In the twentieth century 'Luddite' became a term of abuse for anyone who resisted new technology. That is an odd fate for a movement whose members objected not to machines as such but to the use of machines to cut their wages.

The Romans were not the first people to count their citizens, but they made the count a permanent institution of the state. Tradition credited its foundation to Servius Tullius, the sixth of Rome's kings, in the sixth century BC, and in the Republic the census was held, at least in principle, every five years. Its purpose was to establish two things at once: what each citizen owned, and therefore what he owed in tax, and how he should serve in the army. Because the Romans voted in groups rather than as individuals, the same information also shaped political power.

The procedure was public and personal. The head of a household presented himself before the official conducting the count, usually in the open air, and made a sworn declaration. He gave his own name and age, the names of his wife and children, the district in which he lived, and a valuation of everything he owned: land, houses, slaves, animals and money. Lists were then drawn up, and a citizen who failed to declare his property risked having it confiscated. The declaration was an assertion of status as much as a statement of fact.

On the basis of the declaration each man was placed in a class according to his property. The wealthiest served as cavalry and provided their own horses; men of middling means served as heavy infantry and bought their own armour and weapons; the poorest, who owned little more than their children, were exempt from service in the legions. The classes also met in separate voting groups, and because the richest groups voted first, they often decided an issue before the poorer citizens were called. Property determined both the burden of service and the weight of a vote.

The officials who conducted the census, the censors, had wider duties than counting. Two were elected, normally from among former consuls, and they held office for eighteen months. They reviewed the roll of the senate, and a censor could strike out the name of a member whose conduct he judged disgraceful, whether for bankruptcy, cruelty to a dependant or simple extravagance. They also reviewed the equestrians, the wealthy class just below the senate, and they let the contracts by which the state collected its taxes and carried out public works. The office was respected and feared, because a censor's judgement could damage a family's standing for a generation.

The count ended with a ceremony of purification called the lustrum, at which a pig, a sheep and a bull were led around the assembled citizens and sacrificed; the word lustrum came to mean the five-year period itself. The ritual mattered because a census was valid only if it was completed without interruption. If one of the two censors died in office, the whole count was annulled and had to begin again, and there are cases in which a census was abandoned in this way and repeated.

Under the emperors the census changed character. Augustus held three censuses, in 28 BC, 8 BC and AD 14, and used them to review the senate and reshape the governing class as well as to record property. His own account of his achievements, inscribed on bronze and set up outside his mausoleum in Rome, claims that the first of these counts recorded just over four million Roman citizens. Even allowing for pride and rounding, the figure suggests an enormous administrative effort, and the provincial censuses on which taxation depended became a regular feature of imperial government.

Almost all of our detailed evidence for the working of the census in the provinces comes from Egypt. Papyri preserved in the dry soil record declarations made by householders to local officials, listing every member of the household, their ages, and any animals or land they owned. These returns were made on a fourteen-year cycle, and the officials who collected them were not Romans from Italy but local men, often literate Greeks or Egyptians who knew the villages and could check a claim. Because the purpose was taxation, the declarations had to be updated whenever people died, came of age or left the district.

The census could also provoke resistance. When Judaea came under direct Roman rule in AD 6, the governor of Syria, Quirinius, conducted a census there, and the historian Josephus records that the count helped to provoke a revolt. The Gospel of Luke connects the birth of Jesus with a census ordered by Augustus, and scholars have argued for two centuries over whether the two accounts can be reconciled, since Herod the Great, in whose reign the Gospel places the birth, died in 4 BC, several years before Quirinius governed Syria.

Yet the census records of Rome itself, the tabulae censoriae, have not survived. Historians therefore depend on later writers, such as Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who described the institution centuries after its early development, and on laws and inscriptions that happened to be cut in bronze or stone. Even the totals in ancient sources are difficult to use. It is rarely clear whether a figure covers adult men only, all free citizens including women and children, or everyone in Italy. Modern estimates of the population of Roman Italy vary widely, and the interpretation of the census figures is one of the longest-running arguments in ancient history.

Visitors to the cave at Lascaux in south-western France have not been able to see the original paintings since 1963, when it was closed because the breath of more than a thousand daily visitors was damaging the images. What they see today, a few hundred metres away, is a careful reconstruction, opened in 1983. Replicas now stand in for the paintings of Chauvet Cave as well, and the practice is spreading to other kinds of exhibit: casts, printed facsimiles and digital reconstructions. The question is no longer whether museums will show copies, but what they owe the public when they do.

The strongest argument for copies is conservation. Light, humidity, heat from human bodies and even the carbon dioxide in breath all attack organic materials, and a famous object is loved to death precisely because it is famous. A manuscript that is handled each time it is exhibited loses a little of itself; a textile hung in a gallery for a season may never be hung again. If a copy can carry the burden of public attention, the original can rest in the dark, in controlled conditions, and be studied by specialists when necessary. On this reasoning, a replica is not a deception but a form of care.

Museums have a long history of exhibiting copies without embarrassment. In the nineteenth century, before cheap travel and colour photography, plaster casts were the principal means by which students and the public encountered classical sculpture. The cast courts that opened at the South Kensington Museum in London in 1873 still contain a cast of Trajan's Column so tall that it had to be displayed in two pieces. Many of these casts are now valuable in their own right, because they record details of sculptures that have since been damaged or cleaned. A copy made in 1870 can tell a conservator what a surface looked like before a century of pollution.

Copies also widen access in ways that have nothing to do with fragility. A tactile replica allows a blind visitor to feel the shape of a carving that may not be touched in any circumstances. A working model of a machine can be operated by children while the original stands behind glass. And since only a small proportion of any large collection is ever on display, a copy can bring an object out of storage and into a gallery where it can at least be seen. For a public museum this is a serious argument: a copy on view serves more people than an original in a crate.

Against all this stands the conviction that an original is not simply a more accurate version of its copy. Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, used the word 'aura' for the quality that a work of art possesses by virtue of its presence in time and space. Something of that feeling is familiar even to people who reject the theory: the knowledge that a surface was touched by a particular hand, or that an object was carried from a battlefield or a tomb, changes the experience of looking. Remove that knowledge, and the object becomes an illustration of itself.

There is a more practical objection, too. A copy is an argument, not a neutral record: it embodies decisions about what to include and what to leave out. A reconstructed wall painting may be based on a few fragments and a great deal of educated guesswork, and if it is displayed without explanation, the guesswork acquires the authority of evidence. Digital reconstructions are particularly seductive, since they present a clean, brightly coloured and entirely modern image of a past that may have looked nothing like it. Yet digital scanning has not replaced physical replicas; the two are used together, and a print is often made from a digital file. Conservators also point out that replicas are not permanent: plaster casts crack, pigments fade and 3D prints warp, so that a museum which has replaced an original with a copy eventually has to conserve the copy as well.

The remedy is not to abandon copies but to be honest about them. A label that says only 'replica' does very little; visitors need to know what they are looking at, how it was made, which parts are evidence and which are invention, and what the original is like. Some of the best displays of this kind treat the copy as a subject in its own right, explaining the casting technique or the scanning process. Handled in this way, a replica can teach something that the original cannot, because the original, silent and fragile, cannot explain itself.

The spread of copies has also become entangled with arguments about who owns the past. If a museum can display an accurate copy, the case for keeping a disputed original on the other side of the world looks weaker; yet a copy may equally be used to quieten demands for return, offering a substitute while the original stays where it is. What matters is that the availability of copies should not become an excuse for refusing to discuss ownership at all.

So should museums show copies rather than originals? Sometimes, yes: for the most fragile objects, and for those that cannot be shown safely in any other way, a good replica is better than a locked door. As a general policy, however, the choice is a false one. The aim should be copies alongside originals, clearly distinguished, with the copy doing the work the original cannot do — being touched, taken apart, sent on tour, or used to show a building as it once looked — while the original is kept for the evidence that only it can provide. The danger is not that museums will show copies. It is that they will show them without saying so.