IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 302

When the first water-powered cotton mills were built in Britain in the 1770s and 1780s, their owners needed large numbers of cheap, small hands. Children were employed to piece together broken threads and to crawl beneath the machines to sweep away the fluff that gathered there. Many were not local at all. Parish authorities in London, anxious to reduce the cost of supporting the poor, sent hundreds of children north as apprentices, bound to a mill owner for a term of years. Far from home and with nobody to speak for them, these apprentices worked whatever hours the machinery and the demand for cloth dictated.

The first attempt to limit their labour came in 1802, when Parliament passed the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, promoted by the cotton manufacturer Sir Robert Peel. It restricted parish apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours' work a day, banned night work and required some instruction in reading and writing. The Act is often described as the beginning of factory legislation. Its weakness was that it had no machinery of its own: enforcement was left to local magistrates, who were often mill owners themselves or their friends, and who rarely acted.

A second Act, passed in 1819, went further on paper. It forbade the employment of any child under nine in a cotton mill and limited those aged between nine and sixteen to twelve hours a day. Yet it too depended on the courts, and no official was appointed to enter a mill and check what happened there. In practice, both Acts were widely disregarded, and children continued to work the hours their employers chose.

Agitation for change grew in the 1830s. Richard Oastler, a land agent in Yorkshire, published a series of letters denouncing what he called Yorkshire slavery, and the manufacturers John Fielden and Robert Owen lent their support. In 1832 a parliamentary committee chaired by Michael Sadler took evidence from dozens of workers, including young children, and its reports shocked readers. Supporters of the Ten Hours movement printed and distributed this testimony, though critics later complained that the questioning had been leading and the witnesses carefully selected.

In 1833 a Royal Commission, in which Edwin Chadwick played a leading part, reported on the employment of children in factories. Its findings were contested, but the legislation that followed was the most important so far. The Factory Act of 1833 removed children under nine from textile mills altogether, limited those aged nine to thirteen to nine hours a day and restricted young people between thirteen and eighteen to twelve hours. It prohibited night work for anyone under eighteen. Above all, it created a body of four paid inspectors with the right to enter mills without warning, and it required mill owners to provide two hours of schooling a day for the youngest children.

The inspectors' published reports give historians a remarkable record of conditions in the mills, but they also show how hard the law was to enforce. In the early years there were only four inspectors for the whole country, and mill owners learned to shorten a child's recorded hours by moving workers between shifts, or to claim that a small employee was older than the register suggested. Fines were imposed, but prosecutions were few in proportion to the number of mills.

Attention next turned underground. In 1842 Lord Ashley, later the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, secured the Mines and Collieries Act, which barred women and girls from working in mines and stopped boys under ten from going below ground. A commission of inquiry had gathered testimony about children who sat alone in the dark for twelve hours at a time, opening and shutting ventilation doors, and the report gave Ashley's case a moral force that mill owners could not match. The Act did not shorten the hours of adult miners or improve the ventilation that made the work so dangerous.

Further legislation followed in 1844 and 1847. The Act of 1844 reduced the hours of children aged eight to thirteen to six and a half a day, which they were to combine with attendance at school, and it brought women within the protection of the law. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited women and young persons in textile mills to ten hours a day, a limit that in practice shortened the day of many adult men as well, since a mill could not easily run without its female employees.

Historians disagree about how much the Acts themselves achieved. Some argue that the employment of young children in textiles was already declining as machinery became larger and heavier, and that legislation followed economic change rather than causing it. Others reply that the decline was slow and uneven, and that the inspectors gave workers, for the first time, somewhere to complain.

Whatever the balance of that argument, the principle established in these decades proved durable: that the state has a duty to set limits on the labour of the young and to pay officials to enforce them. Factory legislation was extended to workshops and other trades in 1867 and consolidated in a single statute in 1878. Meanwhile the school attendance laws of the 1870s and 1880s made the classroom, rather than the mill, the normal workplace of a child.

Europe has one of the most intricate coastlines on earth. Its peninsulas, islands, estuaries and fjords add up to tens of thousands of kilometres, and much of the seabed near the shore is sand or mud that shifts with every winter storm. For anyone who sailed before the age of engines, knowing where the water was deep enough, and where a reef lay just beneath the surface, was the difference between a profitable voyage and a drowned crew. Chart-making is therefore an attempt to fix on paper features that will not stay still.

The earliest surviving sea charts, known as portolan charts, appear in the Mediterranean in the late thirteenth century. Drawn on vellum and often richly coloured, they show coastlines with an accuracy that still surprises scholars, but they leave the interior of the land almost blank. Their most distinctive feature is a web of straight lines, called rhumb lines, radiating from points marked on compass roses, which allowed a navigator to lay off a course of constant bearing. They carry no grid of latitude and longitude, and they were evidently the work of practical sailors rather than of scholars.

Scholars approached the sea differently. The Geography of the second-century writer Ptolemy, rediscovered in western Europe around 1400 and printed with maps from the 1470s, offered a framework of coordinates. Its influence was enormous, but in northern waters its positions were often badly wrong, and pilots learned to distrust them. A more practical achievement was Gerardus Mercator's world map of 1569, whose projection showed a course of constant compass bearing as a straight line. To achieve this, Mercator stretched the distances between parallels of latitude towards the poles, so that a straight line on the chart corresponded to a real course at sea.

Printed sea atlases followed. In 1584 the Dutchman Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer published an atlas covering the coasts of western Europe, and an English version appeared a few years later as The Mariners Mirrour. For the first time a pilot could buy, in one printed volume, charts that had previously circulated in manuscript and been guarded by their owners. The printed atlas made the coastline of Europe a shared possession, though the surveys behind the charts were crude and often copied from one another.

Accuracy improved when surveyors began to work from measured geometry rather than from estimates made at sea. In the 1610s the Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snellius used a chain of triangles, built on a carefully measured base line, to calculate the length of a degree of the meridian. Angles were measured with instruments called theodolites, carried to hilltops and church towers so that distant stations could be seen. In France the Cassini family spent much of the eighteenth century carrying triangles across the kingdom, and in Britain a military survey of the Scottish Highlands after the Jacobite rising of 1745 supplied the skills for what became, in 1791, the Ordnance Survey.

At sea the corresponding institutions were the hydrographic offices. The British Admiralty established one in 1795, with Alexander Dalrymple as its first hydrographer, and its ships began to survey coasts far beyond Europe. The instrument of this work was the lead line: a weight of several kilograms on a rope marked at intervals, lowered to the seabed while the ship was stopped. The hollow base of the lead was filled with tallow, so that it came up bearing a sample of sand, mud or shell, telling the navigator not only the depth of water but the kind of ground beneath it.

Two problems complicated the recording of this information. The first was the tide. A depth measured at high water is useless unless the reader knows the state of the tide when it was taken, so charts came to express depths relative to a chosen low-water level, the chart datum, from which the height of the tide could be predicted. Different countries chose different levels, so comparing a British chart with a French one could still mislead. The second problem was magnetic variation: the compass does not point to true north, and the size of the error changes slowly over the years.

In the twentieth century the lead line was replaced by sound. The first practical echo sounders, developed around the time of the First World War, measured the time a pulse of sound took to travel to the seabed and back, and by the 1920s survey ships were using them to trace a continuous profile of the sea floor along their course instead of stopping to take readings at intervals. After 1945, multi-beam systems mapped a wide swathe of seabed beneath the ship rather than a single line.

Since the 1970s, satellites have transformed the work. Satellite altimetry, which measures the height of the sea surface from orbit, reveals the shape of the seabed indirectly, because the surface bulges slightly over submarine mountains and dips over trenches. Positioning, once the surveyor's greatest difficulty, now comes from satellite navigation to within a few centimetres, so that a reef located by one ship can be found again by another. European countries have also agreed on a common reference frame, so that positions recorded in different countries can be compared directly.

Yet the maps are never finished. Estuaries silt up, sandbanks migrate, and dredging and coastal defences alter the shape of the shore, so charts of busy waters are reissued at intervals of months. Historians read old charts with their limitations in mind: a chart shows what its maker could see and chose to record, and the gaps on an early map may say more about the surveyor's instructions than about the coast.

Few discoveries capture the public imagination as completely as a ship raised from the seabed after centuries in the dark. The excavation of a well-preserved wreck can fill a museum, sell newspapers and persuade a generation of children that the past is real. It is hardly surprising that when a promising site is found, the first question asked is where the money will come from. The answer, increasingly, is the public purse — and that is where the argument begins.

The strongest argument for spending public money is that the evidence is disappearing. In the cold, oxygen-poor waters of the Baltic a wooden hull can survive for centuries, but in the warmer Mediterranean the shipworm bores through timber at a rate that leaves little behind. Trawlers drag heavy gear across the seabed, and anchor chains and dredgers break up sites that have lain undisturbed since the sixteenth century. Each wreck is a document that cannot be copied, and once it has been scattered there is no way to read it again.

Commercial salvage companies make a straightforward case. Sophisticated side-scan sonar, remotely operated vehicles and experienced crews are expensive, and the companies that own them can find wrecks that cash-strapped heritage bodies cannot. Without private capital, they argue, many sites would not be examined at all, and a sale of recovered material is the only reliable way of paying for the work. Their supporters add that a wreck left in the water will eventually be destroyed anyway, so that something is better than nothing.

Maritime archaeologists reply that this reasoning mistakes the nature of a wreck. What makes a site valuable is not the individual object but the relationship between objects: the position of a coin in a chest, the arrangement of ballast, the bones in the hold. Lift the cargo without recording those relationships and the information is destroyed as surely as if the ship had broken up. Excavation, they insist, is an act of destruction, justified only when a site is threatened and the work is done to a high standard, with a full record published afterwards.

From this follows a principle that has become orthodoxy among heritage bodies: preservation in place. The 2001 UNESCO convention on the underwater cultural heritage gives it legal expression, favouring the protection of wrecks where they lie and discouraging the sale of recovered objects. National agencies, whose budgets are always smaller than the number of sites they are responsible for, tend to prefer spending on survey and designation rather than on excavation. Yet the principle cannot be absolute. A site in the path of a new harbour wall, or one being eaten away by currents, has to be dug or it will be lost.

Museums occupy an awkward position in this debate. A single recovered cargo can transform an exhibition and draw visitors who would never come to see a collection of pottery, and curators know it. But the cost of conserving waterlogged material is enormous. Timber recovered from the sea must be kept wet and then impregnated over years with a synthetic wax, and every large object requires storage, staff and climate control long after the excitement of the discovery has faded.

Amateur divers are too often left out of these discussions. Sports divers have found a remarkable number of important sites, and in several European countries a voluntary reporting scheme allows them to pass on what they have seen without losing access to the water. Such schemes cost very little to run and can be the most effective protection a state can introduce, since a site that is regularly visited is unlikely to be looted unnoticed.

Nor does the law give clear answers. In a case that lasted several years, a salvage company recovered a large quantity of coins from a Spanish warship sunk in 1804 and took them to the United States. Spain maintained that a warship remains the property of its flag state, however long it has lain on the seabed, and the courts eventually agreed, ordering the return of the coins. The litigation showed how far the legal position of a wreck depends on where it lies, who can reach it and which country is prepared to argue.

What, then, should the public pay for? In my view, not the hunt for treasure. Money spent on searching for a rich cargo is money spent on a lottery, and the interests of the investor and the scholar point in opposite directions from the start. Public funds are better used for the unglamorous work of survey, monitoring and record-keeping, and for a properly resourced service that can respond when a site is discovered or threatened. Where a wreck is exceptional, a carefully planned excavation is justified — but as a research project with a published report, not as a spectacle.

The best argument for public funding is not that the objects inside a wreck are valuable. It is that the knowledge they carry belongs to everyone and cannot be replaced. If that claim is accepted, the conclusion follows: the state should pay for understanding, protect what it can leave alone, and regulate severely those who would turn the seabed into a shop.