IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 305

Shortly before midnight on 4 November 1605, a group of men moved through the vaults beneath the Palace of Westminster. They were led by Sir Thomas Knyvet, a magistrate who had been ordered to search the cellars. In one of them, which had been leased by Thomas Percy, a kinsman of the Earl of Northumberland, they came upon a man wrapped in a cloak and carrying a lantern. He gave his name as John Johnson. Beneath the firewood and coal that filled the space, the search party uncovered thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. Johnson was taken away for questioning, and within a day or two he had admitted that he was Guy Fawkes.

The arrest ended more than a year of planning. The moving spirit behind the conspiracy was Robert Catesby, a Warwickshire gentleman of strong Catholic faith. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, English Catholics had hoped that James VI of Scotland, who succeeded her, would relax the heavy penalties imposed on those who refused to attend Protestant services. Those hopes faded quickly. The new king was short of money and continued to collect the fines. The peace treaty he made with Spain in 1604 also removed any prospect that a Catholic power would intervene on the English Catholics' behalf. Catesby concluded that only a violent blow against the government could change anything.

The plan was to destroy the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament, fixed for 5 November 1605, when the king, the Lords and the Commons would all be present. A group of provincial gentlemen, several of them linked by blood or marriage, was recruited; they included Thomas Wintour, John and Christopher Wright, Robert Keyes and, later, Ambrose Rookwood, Francis Tresham and Everard Digby. Fawkes was the soldier of the group. Born in York and raised as a Protestant, he had converted to Catholicism and had served in the Spanish Netherlands, where he learned how to handle explosives. His task was to light the fuse and escape across the Thames by boat.

The conspirators first tried to reach their target by digging a tunnel from a house they had rented close to Parliament, but the walls were thick and the work was slow. Fortune then favoured them. A cellar directly beneath the House of Lords became available, and Percy, who had connections at court, took the lease. The gunpowder was carried into the cellar during the autumn, a few barrels at a time. The powder, however, was several years old and had decayed, and some historians doubt whether it would have produced the blast the conspirators intended.

The plot was betrayed by a letter. On 26 October, William Parker, Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer, was handed an anonymous note while he was staying at a house outside London. Its author advised him to find an excuse to stay away from Parliament, because a sudden and terrible blow would be struck. Monteagle took the letter straight to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the king's principal secretary, who showed it to James. The king, struck by the idea of a blow that nobody would see, concluded that gunpowder was meant, and a search of the cellars was ordered.

Fawkes was interrogated in the Tower of London. He held out for a time, refusing to name his companions, but the king authorised torture, and by 8 November he had confessed and given the names of the others. They had already fled the city. Catesby, Percy and several others made for Holbeach House in Staffordshire, where an accidental explosion of their own damp powder injured some of them. On 8 November the house was surrounded; in the fighting Catesby and Percy were shot dead, and the survivors were taken to London. Fawkes and seven others were tried at Westminster Hall in January 1606 and convicted of treason, and all eight were executed at the end of that month.

Not everyone has been satisfied that this is the whole story. From the moment the plot was discovered, Catholics complained that it had been manufactured by Cecil to discredit them, and the argument has been revived periodically since. The letter to Monteagle is central to the dispute. It was extraordinarily vague, and it reached the authorities ten days before the opening of Parliament, yet the search was delayed until the night before. Those who suspect a government hand point out that Cecil had much to gain from a Catholic conspiracy. Most modern historians, however, accept that the plot was real and that the conspirators meant what they said. A full-length study published in the 1990s concluded that the plot was genuine, while leaving open the question of how much the government knew in advance — a question that the surviving evidence cannot settle.

Parliament responded with legislation that tightened the penalties on Catholics and required that 5 November be observed as a day of thanksgiving. That act remained on the statute book until 1859. The date was marked with sermons, bells and bonfires, and in the following centuries effigies of the pope, and later of Fawkes himself, were burned. A children's rhyme about the fifth of November keeps the memory alive.

For most people in Britain the plot survives as fireworks and a rhyme, and Fawkes, a minor figure in 1605, has become its most famous name. The cellar in which he was found was destroyed when fire consumed the old Palace of Westminster in 1834, and what stands on the site today belongs to the Victorian building that replaced it.

Roman writers divided the day differently from the way we do. Daylight and darkness each contained twelve hours, whatever the season, so that an hour of a summer day was much longer than an hour of a winter night. According to the elder Pliny, the first sundial seen in Rome was brought from Sicily in 263 BC by the consul Manius Valerius Messalla and set up in the Forum. It had been calibrated for a different latitude and gave the wrong time for almost a century, until a corrected sundial was installed in 164 BC. A comic playwright of the period complained that the city was now full of sundials, each one chopping the day into pieces.

A sundial works by casting a shadow. An upright rod, or a carefully shaped edge, known as the gnomon, throws a line of darkness onto a surface marked with hour lines, and the position of that line gives the time. Because the sun's path across the sky depends on the observer's distance from the equator, the markings must be cut for the latitude at which the instrument will be used. A sundial made for Rome is useless in Alexandria. Greek geometers supplied the mathematics for this, and Roman craftsmen copied and simplified the Greek types, producing dials carved on columns, on walls and on small portable plates.

Sundials had obvious limits. They told nothing at night and little under a cloudy sky, and a shadow is a fragile thing to build a schedule around: in winter the sun may not clear the rooftops at all. Nor could a sundial be carried about easily without losing its accuracy. For the hours of darkness, and for the courts and households of a large city, the Romans needed a different device.

The alternative was the water clock. The Greek name for it, clepsydra, means something like water thief, and its principle was simple: water ran through a small hole from one vessel into another, and the level in the lower vessel, or in the upper one as it emptied, showed how much time had passed. In Athens the device was used to limit the length of speeches in court. The Romans adopted it for the same purpose. Each side in a case was given a fixed quantity, and a magistrate could grant more if a speaker was interrupted.

The decisive improvement was made in Alexandria in the third century BC by an engineer named Ctesibius, whose work survives only in later descriptions. In his clock, water flowed into a vessel at a steady rate and lifted a float. The float was attached to a toothed bar which engaged with a pinion, so that as the water rose the bar turned a pointer past a scale of hours. Ctesibius is also credited with adding moving figures and a sound to mark a fixed hour. Where the hours changed length through the year, the scale was cut on a drum that could be turned to the correct position each month.

Water clocks had a flaw. The flow through a small hole slows as the water above it falls, so a clock of the simplest kind measured the hours unevenly, running fast when full and slow when nearly empty. The solution was to keep the level constant. In the developed form described by the Roman writer Vitruvius, water ran first into a small tank kept full to the brim. The surplus escaped through an overflow, so that the pressure feeding the clock never varied. Clean water and a clear hole were equally important, since grit or a blockage would ruin the reading.

The evidence for all this is uneven. Sundials survive in large numbers: hundreds of stone examples have been found across the Roman world, many of them inscribed with the name of the maker and the latitude for which they were cut. Water clocks, by contrast, have left almost nothing. Their working parts were made of bronze, which was valuable and was melted down when the machine broke, and their wooden cases rotted. What we know of them comes from texts — Vitruvius, the Alexandrian inventor Hero, and writers in Arabic and Byzantium who preserved and extended the tradition — and from a few images on mosaics and reliefs.

One monument raises a larger question. In 10 BC the emperor Augustus brought an obelisk from Egypt and set it up in the Campus Martius, in the northern part of the city. Beneath it the ground was paved and inlaid with bronze, so that the shadow of the shaft fell across a set of markings. In the 1970s the German archaeologist Edmund Buchner argued that the pavement was a gigantic sundial, built so that on Augustus's birthday, 23 September, the shadow pointed towards the Altar of Peace. The reconstruction has been disputed. Some archaeologists doubt whether a shadow cast by an obelisk of that size could be read with any precision, and others question whether the bronze strips were ever a complete dial. The obelisk now stands in a different square, where it was re-erected in 1792.

We cannot say how accurate an ordinary water clock was, who owned one, or how a household without either instrument kept appointments. Nor do the surviving texts, written by and for the educated, tell us how most people experienced the passage of the day. Reconstruction is also risky, since a description copied centuries later may describe a machine that never existed in quite that form.

Every few years a government announces a monument. It may commemorate a war, a founding moment, or, increasingly, a wrong that the state itself once sanctioned: slavery, forced migration, the treatment of indigenous peoples. Such projects arrive with a budget, a site and a committee, and, more often than not, an argument. In Britain the long campaign for a memorial to the victims of slavery, and the years of argument over where such a memorial should stand, have shown how quickly a stone can become a battleground. One question raised by these projects is rarely answered explicitly: what part should historians play in deciding what a monument says?

The case for consulting historians seems obvious. A memorial is, among other things, a claim about the past, and claims can be false. The inscription on a plinth is history compressed into a sentence, and compressions distort: a date is wrong, an ancestor invented, a phrase quietly assigns blame to the wrong party. A committee that includes a historian is less likely to make such mistakes, and may also be pushed to ask whose story is missing. Yet accuracy is a modest virtue in a memorial. Nobody visits a monument in order to check a date.

Against this, it can be argued that commemoration is not scholarship. A monument does not describe the past; it makes a statement about the values of the present, and historians have no special authority over what a society should honour. Asking a professor to approve a design lends the weight of the seminar room to a decision that is moral and political. The risk is not only that academics will be used; it is that the public will be persuaded that a contested question has been settled by expertise. That danger is real, and it is not avoided by co-opting a specialist at the last minute.

There is a deeper difficulty, which the first two positions both overlook. Historians disagree with one another. On almost any subject worth commemorating, the evidence supports more than one reading. The scale of a massacre, the responsibility for a famine, the question of whether an event marked a break with the past or a continuation of it: each of these is disputed. A committee that asks what historians think will therefore receive several answers, and it may be tempted to choose the one that suits the story it had already decided to tell. Consultation then becomes a formality, a way of certifying a version of the past that was settled before the historians arrived.

A case in point is the statue of a seventeenth-century merchant that stood in the centre of Bristol until a crowd pulled it down in 2020. Edward Colston had made much of his fortune from the slave trade; that was no secret, and local antiquarians had documented it for years. What the monument's inscription omitted was not a hidden fact but an inconvenient one. The quarrel in Bristol was never about evidence; it concerned what a city chooses to celebrate, and who has the right to decide.

If scholars are to be useful, their involvement needs structure. Advice offered after the design has been fixed can do little more than tinker with the wording. The sensible moment to begin is while a scheme is still a proposal and nothing has been cast in bronze. Historians should be asked not for a verdict but for a brief: what is agreed, what is disputed, and where the evidence is thin. That brief should be published, so that visitors and journalists can compare the monument with the history it claims to represent. A monument should also be capable of correction; inscriptions can be added to, and a panel of text can be replaced more easily than a statue. A short statement of what is known and what is not will serve the public better than a learned report that nobody reads.

Some academics will object that any participation in such a process compromises them. I do not accept this. Refusing to advise leaves the field to whoever is loudest, and the result is a memorial that historians will afterwards criticise but could have improved. The analogy with other professions is instructive: a doctor who advises a government on a health campaign is not thereby endorsing everything that government does. What matters is that the terms of the advice are clear, including the limits of what a historian can honestly claim to know.

There is also a practical cost to consultation. A monument delayed by a decade may never be built, and the communities that campaigned for it are unlikely to be rewarded by a report. Committees should therefore separate the questions that need research from those that need a decision. A month may be enough to verify a date; it will not settle what a nation ought to regret.

My conclusion is therefore that historians should be at the table but not at the head of it. Their contribution is not to decide what a nation should remember, still less to bless a decision already taken, but to complicate: to say where the evidence is thin, where the story is contested and whose voices are absent from it. The verdict itself should rest with those who will live with the memorial, and who will have to explain it to their children. A sculpture erected without scholarly advice may still move people, but it is more likely to be not only contested but simply wrong.