IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 307

On 10 March 1801, in every parish of England, Wales and Scotland, local officers were required to answer a short set of questions about the people living around them. The result was the first census of Great Britain. Parliament had approved the measure only a few months earlier, at the end of 1800, and the whole operation was carried out on a single day, so that the entire country was counted at the same moment. When the returns were added together, they showed that Great Britain contained roughly 10.5 million people.

Given how useful such a count appears today, it is surprising that Britain had waited so long. Several European states had already numbered their inhabitants: Sweden had done so in 1749, and the young United States had counted its population in 1790. In Britain, however, a proposal put before Parliament in 1753 had been thrown out by the House of Lords, whose members disliked the expense and suspected that a register of people would soon become a tool of taxation. Opponents also warned that a count would reveal British weakness to its enemies, an argument that carried particular weight in 1800, when the country was again at war with France.

The man who turned the idea into an administrative reality was John Rickman, the well-educated son of a clergyman, who had become private secretary to Charles Abbot, the MP who guided the bill through the Commons. Rickman designed the questions, arranged the printing and distribution of the forms, and afterwards supervised the publication of the results. He went on to organise the next three censuses, in 1811, 1821 and 1831. He died in 1840, the year before responsibility for the census passed to a new government department.

In most of England and Wales the forms were completed by the overseers of the poor, the parish officers who already collected local taxes and knew who lived where; parish clerks and, in some places, schoolmasters helped them. Each officer recorded the number of inhabited and uninhabited houses in his area, the number of families, and the number of men and women. He was then asked to sort the working population into three broad classes: those employed mainly in agriculture, those in trade, manufacturing or handicraft, and those in neither. In Scotland, where parish administration was organised differently, other officers carried out the work.

The method was cheap and quick, but it had obvious weaknesses. Houses were counted rather than households named, and no names of individuals were recorded anywhere, so the census produces totals but not people. Some parishes sent in late or incomplete returns and a few sent nothing at all, which is why the published figures are generally thought to understate the population slightly. The occupational classes were especially crude: a man who farmed in summer and wove cloth in winter had to be placed in a single category, and the line between trade and agriculture was rarely clear.

Once the forms had been gathered, they passed to the clerk of the peace for each county and from there to London, where Rickman and a small staff reduced them to tables. The results were printed for Parliament, and Rickman also produced a parish-by-parish abstract, which allowed local readers to see the figures for their own neighbourhood. This abstract proved one of the most durable products of the whole exercise, and local historians still consult it.

The census covered only Great Britain. Ireland, then governed separately from London, was not counted until 1821. The count also took place while Britain was at war with France, and some parishes suspected that the numbers would be used to choose men for military service. There is little evidence that they were, but the suspicion helps to explain why a few returns are missing.

A census every ten years had not been part of the original plan, but the exercise proved too useful to abandon. Rickman repeated it in 1811, 1821 and 1831 with almost identical questions, so that the four sets of returns can be compared directly. Historians value this consistency, because it allows them to trace the slow movement of people from the countryside into the growing industrial towns. The limits of the method became harder to ignore, however, and in 1841 the census was transferred to the newly created General Register Office, which recorded the name, age and occupation of every individual for the first time.

Even the crude totals of 1801 were revealing. They confirmed that the population was growing quickly, not declining as many people had assumed, and they showed that England was already far more populous than Scotland. They also offered the first nationwide picture of a society in which manufacturing employed a substantial share of the workforce.

Modern censuses ask dozens of questions and are processed by computer, yet the principle established in 1801 has not changed. A state counts its people on an agreed day, in an agreed way, and publishes the result. The first attempt was rough, but it made the size of the nation a matter of public record, and every later count has built on the same simple idea.

For three centuries, from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the peoples of Scandinavia travelled, traded and fought across Europe, and the ship was the technology that made this possible. A longship was long, narrow and pointed at both ends, with a hull built from overlapping planks and a single square sail. It was light enough to be dragged overland between rivers, yet strong enough to cross the North Atlantic. Understanding how such vessels were built is therefore central to understanding the period itself.

The evidence is fragmentary, and much of it comes from graves. In Norway, the Gokstad ship was excavated from a burial mound in 1880 and the Oseberg ship in 1904; both had been preserved in heavy clay and had partly collapsed, but together they revealed almost the whole form of a large vessel. The Oseberg grave also contained the bodies of two women. In Denmark, five ships deliberately sunk in Roskilde Fjord around 1070 to block a channel were excavated in 1962 and painstakingly reassembled. Alongside these finds are picture stones from Gotland, the embroidered ships of the Bayeux tapestry, and references in law codes and sagas, which describe crews and voyages but say little about carpentry.

The hull was built by a method known as clinker construction, in which each plank of the outer skin overlaps the one below it. This is the opposite of the later Mediterranean practice of fitting planks edge to edge to produce a smooth surface. In a longship the overlapping planks were fastened with iron rivets driven through their edges, and the joints between them were sealed with tarred animal hair or wool. The result was a hull that was light for its strength and that flexed in a heavy sea rather than resisting the water rigidly. Only when the outer shell was complete were the internal frames fitted.

The keel was a single massive timber running the whole length of the bottom of the hull, and from it rose the steeply curved stem and stern posts. This symmetry had practical value: a vessel that did not need to be turned round could be rowed backwards out of a narrow inlet. The draught was remarkably shallow, well under a metre and a half when loaded, which allowed a ship to be beached on an open shore or taken far up a river. A large vessel could therefore reach places that a deeper-keeled trader could not.

At sea the main source of power was the sail. A single mast, stepped in the middle of the deck, carried a square sail on a horizontal yard, and could be lowered when the ship was rowed or when the crew had to pass beneath a bridge. The sail itself was a square of woollen cloth, woven on upright looms and often dyed in contrasting stripes; striped sails appear in contemporary pictures. Wool is not waterproof, however, and such a sail must have absorbed a good deal of water in rough weather, which suggests that the cloth was treated in some way whose exact nature is still debated. No complete sail has ever been found.

When the wind failed, the crew rowed. Oar ports were cut low in the hull, just above the waterline, and a large warship might carry sixty oars or more. Steering was managed not by a rudder hung at the centre of the stern, as in later European ships, but by a broad-bladed steering oar mounted on the starboard, or right-hand, side near the back of the vessel. A helmsman could feel the water through the blade and correct the course, though in a following sea the task demanded great strength.

Reconstruction has changed the way historians think about these ships. Norwegian teams sailed copies of the Gokstad vessel from the 1890s onwards, and in 2007 the Danish reconstruction Sea Stallion, built from the timbers of one of the Roskilde ships, sailed from Roskilde to Dublin and back the following year. The voyages showed how fast a longship could travel under sail with a fair wind, and how exposed the crew were in a storm. They also showed that the hull was far more flexible than a modern boatbuilder would consider safe, twisting and bending as it met the waves.

Scientific dating has added a further layer of evidence. Tree-ring analysis can establish when a ship was built, to within a year or two, and can also indicate where its timber grew. The longest of the Roskilde ships, an oak vessel of about thirty metres, was built in the Dublin region in the 1040s, which fits the picture of an Irish-Scandinavian town supplying ships to northern fleets. Not every question can be answered in this way. Scholars still argue about how far the completed shell determined the shape of the frames inside it, and about the relative importance of sail and oars on different kinds of voyage.

What has not survived is almost as revealing as what has. Rope, rigging, wooden blocks and most of the textiles have vanished, leaving the modern image of the longship cleaner and simpler than the reality. The ships that carried the Vikings across Europe were ingenious, but they were also wet, crowded and uncomfortable, and their crews must have spent much of every voyage bailing.

Few subjects provoke such strong reactions among history teachers as the proposal that sport should be studied as history. The argument surfaces whenever a syllabus is revised, and it tends to be conducted with more heat than light. In some countries school courses now give sport a substantial place; in others the idea has been firmly resisted. Supporters argue that sport is one of the most revealing windows on modern society, while critics reply that history lessons are too precious to spend on games. Both positions, it seems to me, mistake the real question, which is not what history should be about but how it should be taught.

The case for the subject is easily stated. Sport is not a separate corner of life but a place where the largest processes of modern history become visible. Industrialisation brought the factory clock, the Saturday half-day and the railway excursion, and with them the crowds that made professional football a business. Empire carried cricket to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, where it was later adopted and turned into a language of national identity. The history of women in sport is inseparable from the history of medicine, dress reform and the long argument about what female bodies could safely do. None of this is trivial. Some of the most valuable work in the field has been written by historians with no particular interest in games, whose motive was a historical puzzle: why rugby split into two codes in 1895, for example, or why the modern Olympic Games, first held in 1896, became a stage for nationalism.

There is also a practical argument. Pupils arrive in the classroom with more settled knowledge about sport than about almost any other area of public life. They know who won, who was paid what and which team is supposed to be the best. A good teacher can use that certainty as material, asking where the knowledge comes from and what it leaves out, and showing how quickly it dissolves under questioning. That starting point is valuable precisely because it is unstable.

The case against is equally easy to state. Much of what passes for the history of sport is not history at all but celebration. It lists trophies, repeats anecdotes and treats the importance of the game as self-evident. Writing of this kind, produced by clubs and journalists as well as by enthusiastic amateurs, assumes the value of sport instead of arguing for it, and its characteristic product is the anniversary volume that flatters everyone involved. A curriculum built on such material would teach admiration rather than analysis.

The second objection is that the sources are too thin. It is true that the record of sport is scattered and often fragile: the minute books of clubs, the results pages of local newspapers, the memories of people who took part. But this is an argument about difficulty, not about worth. A pupil who learns to question a club's own account of its founding, or to notice who is missing from a photograph, is practising the same skills as a pupil working on a treaty or a tax return. In this respect the history of sport is not easier than political history; it is simply less familiar.

Nor does the subject deserve to be dismissed as trivial. The objection that sport is a pastime, and that pastimes are not serious, would also exclude the history of religion, of music and of the family, all of which are now established parts of the discipline. Historians have learned to treat leisure, health, gambling and spectacle as serious subjects, and sport sits at the point where all four meet.

What, then, should a course in the history of sport look like? It should be organised around questions rather than around events, in the way that any other historical topic is organised. Pupils should be asked why certain sports became commercial in one country and remained amateur in another, why crowds were segregated by class or by sex, and how governments have used international competition. Assessment should reward argument and source work rather than the recitation of results; a pupil who can explain why a match mattered should score higher than one who can remember the score. Taught in this way, the subject demands the same rigour as any other branch of history.

My conclusion, therefore, is a conditional yes. The history of sport earns its place in the curriculum not because pupils enjoy it, though many do, and not because it is easy, which it is not, but because it asks historical questions about material that pupils thought they already understood. It will be taken seriously when its teachers insist on the same standards of evidence and argument as their colleagues in other fields, and not before. A subject that can teach a class to read a wage book, a fixture list and a photograph as evidence has nothing to apologise for.