IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 321

On the evening of 24 June 1859, a thirty-one-year-old Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant reached the small town of Castiglione, in Lombardy, a few hours after one of the bloodiest battles of the nineteenth century had ended nearby. The fighting at Solferino, between the armies of France and Sardinia on one side and Austria on the other, had lasted about fifteen hours and left some 40,000 men dead or wounded. The town's churches, houses and streets were filled with injured soldiers who had no one to care for them.

Dunant had not come to Italy as a humanitarian. Born in Geneva in 1828 into a devout and prosperous family, he had grown up in a city with a strong tradition of charitable work, and as a young man he had visited prisons and helped the poor. By 1859, however, his main concern was business. He hoped to obtain land and water rights in the French colony of Algeria, and he travelled to Italy in the belief that a personal appeal to the Emperor Napoleon III, who was commanding the French army, would help his case. The Emperor, busy with a war, never saw him.

What Dunant found instead changed the direction of his life. The French army's medical services were hopelessly overstretched, and hundreds of wounded men lay in the church of Castiglione without bandages, food or water. Dunant organised volunteers, mostly local women, to carry water and dress wounds, and he bought supplies with his own money and with funds raised from travellers. The women of the town worked for days, treating soldiers from both sides alike, and a phrase they used, 'tutti fratelli' — all are brothers — was later closely associated with the organisation Dunant went on to found.

Back in Geneva, Dunant wrote an account of what he had witnessed. A Memory of Solferino was published in 1862, at his own expense, and he sent copies to princes, generals, politicians and philanthropists across Europe. The book was short and its final pages contained two proposals. The first was that each country should create a society of trained volunteers, ready in peacetime to support military medical services in wartime. The second was that governments should sign an agreement protecting wounded soldiers and those who cared for them. Both ideas were adopted within a remarkably short time.

In February 1863, five Genevans met to put the first proposal into practice. Alongside Dunant were General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a celebrated military commander and cartographer; Gustave Moynier, a lawyer; and two doctors, Louis Appia and Théodore Maunoir. The group, initially a committee of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare, became known as the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, and later as the International Committee of the Red Cross. Its members were private citizens, not government representatives, and this independence shaped the organisation's character.

In October 1863 the committee organised a conference in Geneva, to which European governments were invited to send delegates. The meeting agreed on a common emblem: a white armband bearing a red cross, a deliberate reversal of the colours of the Swiss flag. It also laid down rules for the treatment of the wounded and for the neutrality of those caring for them. The emblem mattered because it was meant to be visible at a distance, on a battlefield, marking a person who must not be fired upon.

On 22 August 1864, twelve states signed the first Geneva Convention, a treaty requiring armies to care for wounded soldiers regardless of their nationality and to respect medical personnel and equipment marked with the emblem. It was the first international agreement of its kind devoted to the victims of war rather than to the rules of fighting, and further provisions protecting sailors, prisoners of war and civilians were added in later decades and in the twentieth century.

Dunant himself did not share in the movement's success. His business affairs had been neglected during his years of campaigning, and in 1867 he was declared bankrupt, a humiliation that damaged his reputation and lost him his place on the committee. He left Geneva and lived for many years in obscurity and poverty, moving between cities before settling in the Swiss town of Heiden, where he lived in a hospice. He continued to write about disarmament and the peaceful settlement of disputes, but few paid attention.

In 1895 a journalist visiting Heiden discovered the founder of the Red Cross living in a single room, and the resulting newspaper article brought Dunant belated fame. Letters and honours arrived from around the world, and in 1901 he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize with the French economist Frédéric Passy. Despite his improved circumstances, he never returned to the committee he had helped to create, and he remained bitter about the man who had replaced him there. He died in 1910.

By then the movement had grown far beyond its origins. National societies existed across Europe and the Americas, and the 1949 revision of the Geneva Conventions, which remains the foundation of the laws of war, extended protection far beyond the wounded soldier. Dunant's most famous idea, however, was simple and has never been superseded: that in the middle of a battle there must be people who are permitted, by common agreement, to do nothing but help.

The eye is often compared to a camera, and the comparison is useful up to a point. Both instruments gather light through an opening, focus it with a lens and form an image on a sensitive surface at the back. The eye, however, is soft tissue that adjusts itself continuously, without its owner noticing. Light passes through the cornea, then the pupil and the lens, and finally reaches the retina, where the image is detected and converted into nerve signals.

Most of the bending of light takes place at the very front of the eye. The cornea, a transparent dome about half a millimetre thick, has a fixed curvature and supplies roughly two-thirds of the eye's total focusing power. Because its shape cannot change, its contribution is constant. The cornea contains no blood vessels, since their shadows would scatter light before it reached the retina; it takes oxygen straight from the air and nutrients from the fluid behind it. Its smoothness matters as much as its curvature, because a scarred or uneven surface spreads light and softens the image however well the lens is focused.

The lens is a different kind of structure: a flexible, layered body suspended behind the iris by a ring of fine fibres called zonules. These fibres are attached to a circular muscle. When a person looks at something close, the ciliary muscle contracts, the ring shrinks, the fibres go slack and the lens springs into a rounder, thicker shape with more focusing power. When the gaze shifts to a distant object, the muscle relaxes, the fibres pull tight and the lens flattens. The change of shape is called accommodation, and in a young adult it happens in a fraction of a second.

How much light enters is controlled separately, by the iris, the coloured ring of muscle that gives the eye its colour. Its central opening, the pupil, narrows in bright light and widens in dim light. The pupil also narrows slightly when attention turns to something near, and this has an optical value: a smaller aperture widens the range of distances over which objects stay reasonably sharp, just as a small setting on a camera brings more of a scene into focus.

The lens is not a fixed piece of tissue. New fibres are added to its outer layers throughout life, so it grows larger and denser and its elasticity steadily declines. The consequence is presbyopia, the loss of the ability to focus on near objects, which most people begin to notice in their early forties and which continues to worsen until about the age of sixty. Holding a book at arm's length is an attempt to push the object further away and so reduce the demand on the lens.

Focusing problems also arise from the shape of the eyeball rather than from the lens. In myopia, or short-sightedness, the eye is usually longer than average, so light from a distant object comes to a focus in front of the retina and the image is blurred. In hyperopia the eye is shorter and the focus falls behind the retina. Astigmatism has yet another cause: the cornea is curved more in one direction than in another, so light is focused differently in different planes. Such errors are measured in dioptres and are usually corrected with spectacles.

However well the light is focused, nothing is seen until it is detected. The retina lines the back of the eye and contains two kinds of photoreceptor cell. Rods, numbering around 120 million, are extremely sensitive and work in dim light but cannot distinguish colours. Cones, about six million in all, provide colour vision and fine detail, and are packed most densely in a small central pit called the fovea, used whenever we look directly at something. Signals pass through several layers of cells to the optic nerve, a bundle of about a million fibres that leaves the eye for the brain.

Where the optic nerve leaves the retina there are no photoreceptors at all, and this creates a blind spot in each eye. We are normally unaware of it, because the brain fills the gap with information drawn from the surrounding area and from the other eye. The brain also turns the inverted image the right way up and combines the two slightly different images from the two eyes into a single impression that has depth. Vision, then, is not simply a matter of optics: much of what we see is constructed after the light has been detected.

Correction has traditionally meant placing another lens in front of the eye, and more recently reshaping the cornea with a laser so that its fixed power suits the length of the eyeball. A clouded lens removed in cataract surgery is replaced by a plastic intraocular lens, which cannot change shape, so the patient loses accommodation. Implants designed to move slightly in response to the eye's own muscle exist, but they have not matched the natural lens, and why the lens stiffens with age is still debated.

Drug treatments are also being explored. In 2021 the American regulator approved the first eye drops intended for presbyopia. They work by narrowing the pupil, which sharpens near vision in the same way as a small aperture, and their effect lasts only a few hours. Such drops treat the symptom rather than the stiffening lens, and they do not suit everyone. For most people, spectacles remain the simplest answer.

Few public-health questions return to the news as reliably as the legal age at which young people may buy alcohol. Most European countries settle on eighteen, a handful allow beer and wine at sixteen, and the United States has required twenty-one since the 1980s. Every few years a government, a committee of doctors or a newspaper column proposes that the limit be raised, and every few years the proposal is quietly dropped. The reason is not that the question is unimportant but that the evidence is more awkward than either side admits.

Nobody disputes the harm. Alcohol is a major contributor to death and disability among young adults, through injuries, violence and road crashes as well as through illnesses that develop later. It is also the substance that adolescents in most high-income countries are most likely to misuse. What is disputed is whether the age at which purchase becomes legal has much to do with the size of that harm. A law sets a boundary; drinking happens on both sides of it, and a great deal of teenage drinking takes place in homes, at parties and in fields rather than across the counter of a shop.

The strongest argument for a higher limit comes from the United States, where the federal government used the withholding of highway funds to push every state to twenty-one during the 1980s. Researchers have repeatedly linked that change to fewer road deaths among young drivers, and the memory of those results is why the figure of twenty-one still dominates the international debate. The logic is straightforward: younger drivers are inexperienced, alcohol impairs judgement and reaction time, and the combination is lethal. If a single measure reduces deaths, then a country that has not adopted it looks careless.

Yet the American experience is a narrower guide than it first appears. The deaths that fell were mostly on the road, and road deaths are shaped by seat-belt laws, the design of cars, the price of fuel and the quality of public transport as well as by drinking. Countries with dense cities, late-night buses and a long habit of moderate drinking may gain far less from shifting the age from eighteen to twenty-one. Nor do the American studies tell us how much difference the law made by itself, as opposed to the publicity that surrounded it.

The most popular argument among doctors is neurological. Heavy drinking in adolescence is associated with measurable differences in brain structure and with poorer performance on tests of memory and attention. It is easy to move from that association to a conclusion about the law, and many commentators do so. The move is not justified. Adolescents who drink heavily differ from those who do not in many other ways, including family circumstances, mental health and the kinds of risk they are willing to take, and no ethical experiment could ever separate those influences. If the brain were the test, moreover, the limit would have to be twenty-five, which nobody proposes.

Nor is there much support for the claim that a higher age makes alcohol more attractive. The idea is plausible, and it is often repeated, but the natural experiment has been running for two decades and it points the other way. Surveys in several European countries have recorded a marked fall in teenage drinking since the early 2000s, without any change in the legal age, and in Britain the decline has been steepest among the youngest age groups. Whatever is reducing adolescent drinking, the age limit does not appear to be the cause.

What does seem to work is the set of measures that make alcohol harder to obtain. A law that is not enforced is a statement rather than a barrier, and surveys of young Americans consistently find that a determined seventeen-year-old can obtain alcohol without much difficulty. Price and availability, by contrast, change behaviour without requiring anyone to check a document. Scotland introduced a minimum price per unit of alcohol in 2018, and early evaluations reported a fall in the amount bought in shops. Licensing rules that limit the number of outlets in a neighbourhood point in the same direction.

There is also a question of fairness. An eighteen-year-old may vote, marry, sign a contract and, in many countries, serve in the armed forces; to tell such a person that a glass of wine is beyond their judgement is to treat them as a child in one area of life while demanding adult responsibility in every other. That inconsistency does not by itself settle the argument, but it explains why higher limits are resented and widely evaded, and a rule that is routinely broken teaches contempt for rules in general.

So where does that leave the question? My own view is that the age should indeed rise, but not as far as twenty-one. Where sixteen-year-olds may buy beer and wine, eighteen is the right limit, and the case for it is strong enough to justify the inconvenience to the small number of young people who drink sensibly. Beyond eighteen, the evidence for further restriction is thin, the cost in resentment is real and the benefits are speculative. A government that wants to reduce harm among young people would do better to raise the price, control the number of outlets and enforce the law it already has than to move a number on a statute book.