IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 322

Alexis St Martin was a young French-Canadian voyageur, one of the men who paddled canoes carrying furs for the American Fur Company. On 6 June 1822 he was standing in the company's store on Mackinac Island, in what was then Michigan Territory, when a shotgun was discharged by accident at close range. The charge tore into his left side, breaking ribs and opening the wall of his stomach. The army surgeon at the fort nearby was William Beaumont, and he reached the young man within minutes. Beaumont cleaned the wound, removed fragments of bone and clothing, and expected his patient to die. St Martin did not die.

The wound healed badly and then surprisingly well. The torn edges of the stomach fused with the edges of the opening in the abdominal wall. Through a hole about the width of a finger, food and drink could be seen, and could escape. Beaumont dressed the wound daily, held compresses against it and fed his patient small amounts of food, and in time the man regained his strength. The opening, a fistula, never closed. St Martin could not work as a voyageur again, and the army, after some hesitation, kept him on as a servant.

Beaumont was not a man of grand theory. Born in Connecticut in 1785, he had learned medicine as an apprentice and served as a surgeon in the war of 1812; his training owed more to careful practice than to the universities. He was, however, an unusually patient observer. For two years he watched the opening, noticing that food left inside it disappeared, that the stomach's surface reddened when the man was feverish, and that the interior responded to changes in what was eaten and drunk. The idea that he might use the fistula to study digestion seems to have come to him gradually.

His experiments began in 1825. Beaumont tied small pieces of meat, bread and vegetables to a silk string and inserted them through the opening, pulling them out at intervals to see how far digestion had gone. He collected the liquid that seeped from the stomach by having St Martin lie on his side while a bottle was held to the aperture. Samples of this gastric juice were sent to chemists in the United States and Europe, who agreed that it contained an acid; later work established that the acid was hydrochloric. Beaumont also warmed and cooled the food, and recorded that digestion slowed when the temperature fell.

He noticed that the state of the man's mind mattered too. When St Martin was angry, frightened or unwell, digestion appeared to stop, and food stayed in the stomach far longer than usual. Beaumont recorded these observations without being able to explain them. Modern research on the digestive system has given such effects a physiological basis, but in the 1820s they were simply facts that any theory of digestion would eventually have to accommodate.

Beaumont was not the first person to argue that digestion is chemical. The Italian naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown decades earlier, using birds and other animals, that gastric juice could break down food outside the body. What the fistula offered was something no animal experiment could provide: the process could be watched, in a living human being, from beginning to end, and the fluid responsible could be collected and analysed. It was this directness, rather than any single discovery, that gave Beaumont's work its authority.

The book appeared in 1833, printed at Beaumont's own expense in Plattsburgh, New York, under the title Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. It was not a bestseller, but it was read by physiologists in Europe and America. At a time when much written about the stomach was speculation, it gave the subject a body of precise, repeatable observations.

The relationship behind the research was not a partnership between equals. Beaumont was an officer, a surgeon and an employer; St Martin was a labourer with no schooling, no income and an opening in his side that made ordinary work difficult. Beaumont paid him wages and took him along when the army moved him from one post to another, from Mackinac to Niagara and then to Wisconsin. St Martin seems to have agreed to the experiments, but he also ran away more than once, returning to Canada and his family, and came back only when money ran out. Beaumont wrote about him with irritation and affection in roughly equal measure.

Eventually St Martin went home for good. He married, farmed in Quebec, raised a large family and lived to old age, outliving Beaumont, who died in 1853. The opening in his side remained, and he wore a compress over it for the rest of his life. He refused, or his family refused on his behalf, to allow further examination. After his death in 1880 the family arranged a burial intended to put the body beyond the reach of medical science.

Modern readers tend to ask a question that Beaumont's contemporaries did not: could a man in St Martin's position genuinely refuse? He depended on the wages the experiments brought, and the gap in education and power between the two men was enormous. No committee weighed the risks and no consent form was signed. Yet the case produced knowledge that no other route could have supplied, and it is hard to see how the same knowledge could be obtained today.

For most of the twentieth century, the standard account of how respiratory viruses pass from one person to another was simple. An infected person coughs or sneezes, propelling a cloud of droplets into the air; the larger droplets fall to the ground within a metre or two, and anyone standing close enough may breathe them in or receive them on the eyes, nose or mouth. Hands and surfaces complete the picture, because viruses deposited on a door handle can be transferred to the face. This account is not wrong, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it is incomplete.

The division between droplets and airborne particles dates back to the 1930s, when the American engineer William Wells showed that the smallest droplets do not simply vanish. As a droplet travels, the water in it evaporates, leaving behind a tiny residue that Wells called a droplet nucleus. These particles, a few thousandths of a millimetre across, can stay suspended for minutes or hours and be carried far from the person who produced them. Wells argued that tuberculosis spread in this way. The convention that particles above about five micrometres are droplets and smaller ones aerosols is convenient, but it is a matter of degree rather than a sharp boundary.

Where these particles come from is often misunderstood. Coughing and sneezing produce plenty of large droplets, but they generate comparatively few of the fine ones. Ordinary breathing, and above all talking, singing and shouting, release a steady stream of fine particles from deep in the lungs, and the louder the speech, the greater the number emitted. Individuals differ enormously as well: a minority of people, sometimes called super-emitters, release far more particles than others, and the reason is not fully understood.

Knowing that particles can float is not the same as knowing that they matter. For decades, only a handful of infections were accepted as truly airborne. Measles and tuberculosis are the clearest examples, along with chickenpox; all three are caused by organisms that remain infectious in very small particles and can be caught by people who have never been near the source case. Influenza occupied a disputed middle ground, since it spreads readily in winter but is also transmitted by direct contact and by larger droplets.

The arrival of COVID-19 forced a reconsideration. In July 2020 a group of scientists published an open letter urging the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the new virus could spread through the air, and the organization later amended its guidance. The argument was not that droplets played no part, but that they could not explain every pattern of transmission. The debate exposed how deeply assumptions about disease shape hospital design, cleaning routines and public advice, and how slowly such assumptions change.

Some of the strongest evidence comes from outbreaks with a distinctive geography. In January 2020, ten diners at a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, became infected, including several who sat at tables more than a metre from the person who had fallen ill first. The room was air-conditioned and its windows were closed, and the investigators concluded that particles had been carried across the room in the recirculated air. In March of the same year, at a choir rehearsal in Skagit County, Washington, one singer infected most of the 61 people present, although they avoided physical contact. Cold, crowded meatpacking plants produced similar patterns.

Physicists and engineers describe indoor air in terms of how often it is replaced. A room with a ventilation rate of one air change per hour, common in older buildings, has its whole volume of air exchanged once in sixty minutes; a modern office may reach three or four. The Wells-Riley model, developed from Wells's work, uses this figure to estimate the probability that a susceptible person will be infected. Because measuring those particles directly is difficult, engineers often use carbon dioxide as a proxy: the gas is exhaled by everyone in the room, so high concentrations show that much of the air being breathed has already been breathed by someone else.

The practical implications are straightforward, if expensive. Opening windows, checking that mechanical systems are supplying fresh air and fitting filters that capture fine particles all reduce exposure. Portable air cleaners with high-efficiency filters help where ventilation is poor, and ultraviolet light, used at ceiling height or inside ducts, can damage the genetic material of viruses. Masks reduce the number of particles released by an infected wearer and the number inhaled by others. Evidence on humidity is weaker, although dry air appears to favour the survival of some viruses.

Surfaces, by contrast, have proved a less important route than was assumed in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Laboratory studies recovered viable virus from plastic and steel for several days, but the quantities fell rapidly, and such material has rarely been found in real buildings. Cleaning and hand hygiene remain sensible, particularly in hospitals, but the emphasis has shifted towards the air.

Much remains uncertain. The dose of virus needed to infect a person, the proportion of transmission that occurs by each route and the factors that turn one person into a super-spreader are all poorly quantified, and some of the disagreement reflects the difficulty of separating routes that operate at the same time. What can be said with confidence is that enclosed, crowded and poorly ventilated spaces are where most transmission happens, and that the cheapest way to reduce it is usually to fill such spaces with clean air.

Few subjects divide opinion as sharply as cookery in schools. To its supporters it is an essential life skill; to its critics it is a distraction from academic work and a poor substitute for what families used to do. England settled the question in 2014, when cooking and nutrition became a compulsory part of the national curriculum for pupils up to the age of fourteen. The change followed a long public campaign, led most visibly by the chef Jamie Oliver, whose television series about school dinners had prompted the government to spend more on meals. A government-commissioned review, the School Food Plan, written by the restaurateurs Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, then recommended that cooking and nutrition be compulsory for all pupils. Whether this has produced a generation of confident cooks is another matter.

The argument for teaching children to cook rests on a simple observation: the skills have been lost. Within a generation, the time households spend preparing food from basic ingredients has fallen sharply in most industrialised countries, while consumption of manufactured products has risen. A child who leaves school unable to prepare a simple meal depends on whatever the food industry chooses to sell. Cooking is also one of the few practical subjects that pays a dividend every day of a person's life.

The evidence that lessons change behaviour is mixed but not discouraging. Evaluations of school cookery programmes tend to report short-term gains in pupils' knowledge and confidence, and a few have found changes in what children choose to eat at home. What is much harder to show is whether such gains persist. Very few studies have followed pupils into adulthood to see whether they cook regularly, and the ones that exist are small. The reasonable conclusion is that lessons can raise confidence, but confidence is not a lasting habit.

Yet the strongest objection to the cookery lesson is not that it fails, but that it is asked to do too much. Cooking is shaped by circumstances: by the time a parent has left after a second shift, by the price of fresh vegetables compared with a frozen pizza, by whether the family has a working oven, and by whether there is a shop nearby that sells anything other than packaged food. Telling a family in that position to cook from scratch is not a policy; it is a reproach.

Practical subjects are also expensive, and therefore easy to marginalise. A kitchen with enough ovens for thirty pupils costs money to build and maintain, and ingredients must be bought for every lesson. In schools without suitable rooms, cooking is taught on paper or in a single demonstration. Teachers report that their lessons are often squeezed into a few weeks of the year, and that many of those teaching food lack specialist training. The British Nutrition Foundation, a charity, produces free materials for teachers, including lesson plans and recipes. A subject examined by written test but never practised is unlikely to produce cooks.

This matters because the pupils who most need the subject are those in schools least able to provide it. Where cookery is optional, it tends to be chosen by academically inclined pupils and by parents who already cook. When it is compulsory, a similar inequality reappears inside the timetable: a well-equipped school with a specialist teacher runs a proper course, while a school under pressure offers a term of worksheets. Making a subject universal on paper does not make it universal in practice.

The better argument, in my view, is for a wider subject than cookery. Children need to know where food comes from, how it is produced and preserved, how to read a label, how to store food safely and how to feed themselves cheaply. They also need to understand processing. The Brazilian researcher Carlos Monteiro has argued that the most useful distinction is not between foods by nutrient but by degree of processing, and his classification, known as NOVA, ranges from unprocessed foods to ultra-processed formulations made with industrial ingredients.

None of this proves that schools should attempt it. A familiar objection is that the curriculum is already crowded, that literacy and numeracy matter more, and that food habits are formed at home long before a child reaches a classroom. There is force in this. Schools cannot compensate for every failure of the society around them, and a cookery lesson is a weak instrument against advertising budgets and the price of sugar. The World Health Organization has recommended that governments restrict the marketing of foods high in fat, sugar and salt to children.

My own view is that cooking should be taught to every child, but that the case for it has been oversold. It is worth doing because a practical skill is genuinely useful, because it gives children some control over what they eat, and because the alternative is dependence on products whose contents most people cannot describe. It is not worth doing as a substitute for regulating the marketing of unhealthy food or for ensuring that families have enough money to eat well.

That means the subject must be properly resourced: kitchens, trained teachers, sufficient time and equipment that works. It should be compulsory in reality as well as on paper. Above all, its success should be judged not by examination results but by whether, ten years later, former pupils are still cooking. On that test the policy has not yet been evaluated, and anyone who claims otherwise is guessing.