IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 409

The Lewis chessmen are a group of small carved figures, most of them chess pieces, found on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. They came to light in 1831, when a local man digging into a sandbank at the head of Uig Bay uncovered a low stone chamber packed with dozens of carvings. Accounts of the discovery differ in their details, and the identity of the finder has never been established with certainty. What is not in doubt is their quality: this is the largest surviving group of medieval chess pieces in existence, and one of the finest bodies of ivory carving to have come down to us from twelfth-century Europe.

The hoard consists of ninety-three objects: seventy-eight chess pieces, fourteen flat round discs probably used in a game similar to draughts, and a buckle. Most are carved from walrus ivory, obtained from the tusks of the Arctic walrus, though a few are made from the teeth of whales. The figures range in height from a few centimetres to more than ten, and no two are identical, since every piece was cut by hand. Several show scarcely any wear, which suggests that they may never have been used in play; others are rubbed at the edges, and one or two have lost a corner.

Chess reached Europe from India by way of Persia and the Islamic world, and by the twelfth century it was well established at the courts of western Europe. The game changed as it travelled. In the Islamic world, religious teaching discouraged the representation of the human figure, and sets were usually abstract; European carvers had no such scruple, and produced lively images of a medieval court and army. The rules, too, were not those of the modern game: the queen moved a single square at a time, and the bishop, descended from the Persian elephant, was a comparatively weak piece until the changes of the fifteenth century.

The pieces themselves are a small gallery of medieval types. Kings sit with a sword across their knees; some queens hold a drinking horn; bishops carry a crozier; knights ride stocky ponies, armed with spears and shields; and the pawns are simple cones and octagons. The most striking figures are the rooks, carved as wild-eyed warriors biting the tops of their shields. They are usually identified as berserkers, the frenzied fighters of Norse literature. Faces throughout the set are stylised rather than individual, with broad noses and heavy brows, and the expressions range from the solemn to the faintly comic.

Where the pieces were carved has been debated for nearly two centuries. Most art historians place their manufacture in Norway, and specifically in the city of Trondheim, which was an ecclesiastical centre and a busy centre of ivory carving in the twelfth century; fragments of comparable work have been excavated there.

The raw material would have come from Greenland, where Norse settlers hunted walrus, and the trade in tusks passed through Norwegian ports on its way to the markets of Europe. Not all scholars accept that a single centre was responsible: differences in style and in the quality of the finishing have led some to argue that the pieces were made in more than one workshop, perhaps over a period of years.

Dating depends on style rather than on any written record. Comparison with carvings of known date, and with the dress and equipment shown on the figures, has led most specialists to place the set in the second half of the twelfth century, perhaps between about 1150 and 1200. A minority have argued for an earlier date, but the broad period is not seriously disputed, and no document has yet been found that would fix the date more precisely.

Why the hoard was buried, and by whom, is unknown. The most popular explanation is that a merchant concealed stock that was waiting to be sold, perhaps because he feared thieves or a shipwreck; a dealer in luxury goods would have had access to such material, and the absence of a board argues against the hoard being a personal set. Lewis lay within the Norse kingdom of the Isles, whose rulers had close ties with Norway, and Uig was a natural landing place for ships crossing from the east. Other explanations, including the concealment of church property, cannot be ruled out.

The hoard was soon broken up. The larger share, eighty-two pieces, was acquired by the British Museum in London, where it has been displayed ever since. The remaining eleven passed to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and are now held by the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. In recent years a small number of pieces have been lent for display on Lewis itself, and there have been repeated calls, supported by many islanders, for the whole collection to be returned.

The chessmen matter for several reasons. They are rare evidence of a luxury trade that stretched from the Arctic to the Atlantic seaboard; they show how a game from Asia was remade in the image of medieval Europe; and they are carved with a humour that still works on modern audiences. Their pictures appear on postcards, mugs and book covers, and casts and copies are made for museum shops. Few objects from the Middle Ages have crossed so completely into popular affection.

At a school reunion, most of us can pick out a face we have not seen for twenty years without hesitation, yet the name attached to it may refuse to appear for the rest of the evening. The experience is so common that it is rarely thought strange, but it is odd when examined. A name is short, it has been heard many times, and it is the one piece of information about a person that other people repeat most often. Researchers who ask people about everyday memory lapses commonly find that names are among the first things to go, and the difficulty is not confined to the elderly: a student may forget the name of a new acquaintance within minutes of being introduced. Why should this particular item be the hardest to retrieve? Psychologists have worked on the question for four decades, and their answers say as much about the organisation of memory as about names themselves.

The most influential account treats recognising a face and recalling a name as separate achievements. In a model published in 1986, the psychologists Vicki Bruce and Andy Young proposed that a familiar face is processed in stages. First, the visual pattern is matched against stored representations of faces already known. Next comes what they called person identity: information such as occupation, personality and where the person was last met. Only after this does the name become available. The stages, they argued, run in one direction only, so that the name cannot be reached without passing through recognition of the face. The model also predicts something we recognise in practice: a face can feel familiar while nothing else about it can be recovered. The name, in other words, is less a part of what we know about a person than a label fixed to the end of a chain, and a chain with several links can break at any point. The proposal attracted attention because it made testable predictions, and although later versions have been modified, the staged arrangement is still widely assumed.

The deeper problem lies in the nature of names themselves. A name is an arbitrary label: it carries no description of the person who bears it, and for most of us it is a string of sounds and nothing more. Ordinary words are woven into networks of meaning and association, so that dozens of threads lead towards them; a name has essentially one. Psychologists have demonstrated the effect by pitting names against occupations. In one much-cited experiment, volunteers who met a man introduced as a baker were far more likely to remember, when later shown his face, that he was a baker than that his surname was Baker. The occupation described him; the name merely pointed at him.

Faces, by contrast, are extraordinarily informative. A face supplies many cues at once: its shape, its hair, its habitual expression, the sound of the voice that accompanies it, and the place where it is seen. Recognition can therefore succeed through several routes, and it often does so before we can say who the person is or how we know them. A person can be recognised from a glimpse, at a distance, or in a photograph taken long before we met them. Imaging studies have identified regions of the brain that respond strongly and selectively to faces, and damage to those regions can leave a person unable to recognise anyone, including, in some cases, their own reflection.

Failures of retrieval are informative too. When a name is on the tip of the tongue, people can often report its first letter or the number of syllables it contains, and they recognise the correct name instantly when they hear it. The word is stored, in other words, but temporarily inaccessible. Such states are far more frequent for proper names than for common nouns, and they become more common with age. Older adults report these experiences more often than younger ones, though the difference may reflect the number of names they have collected over a lifetime as much as any decline in memory. Learning a new name is also notoriously difficult: a name met for the first time in adulthood seems much harder to retain than a new face or a new fact, and it may vanish within minutes of the introduction.

Individual differences are striking. Some people cannot recognise faces at all: prosopagnosia, as it is called, may follow a stroke or an injury, but it is often present from birth and noticed only in adolescence, when social life begins to depend on it. Those affected identify people by their voices, their clothes or the way they walk, and many develop elaborate strategies for hiding the difficulty from friends and colleagues. At the other extreme are the so-called super-recognisers, who can identify a face glimpsed briefly years before. The ability has begun to interest police forces, some of which have asked people who score highly on such tests to examine images from security cameras. Neither group settles the argument, but both suggest that recognition depends on a system that can be damaged or unusually well developed, rather than on general intelligence.

What does this mean in practice? The advice usually offered is to repeat a new name at intervals and to connect it to something meaningful — a rhyme, an image, a person already known. There is reasonable evidence that such techniques help, though modestly. More fundamental questions remain open. Researchers disagree about whether names and other unique facts are stored in a distinct system or whether the same machinery serves both, and the search for a region of the brain devoted specifically to proper names has produced suggestive rather than conclusive results. Nor is it clear how far training can improve matters: practice with faces seems to help within the laboratory, but whether the gains last, or transfer to the people one actually meets in daily life, has yet to be shown.

Linguists estimate that several thousand of the world's languages are spoken by fewer than ten thousand people, and in a great many communities children now grow up speaking the majority language instead. Because a language is kept alive by being used, campaigners have long argued that it needs a role in ordinary life: in schools, in broadcasting, in local government. In the past two decades a further item has been added to that list, and it is one that would once have seemed unlikely. Tourism, the argument goes, can give a minority language economic value. Whether visitors can genuinely help a language to survive, rather than simply enjoying its final decades, is the question this article examines.

The case begins with a simple observation: people keep the skills that pay. Where a language is required for work — as a guide, a boatman, a cook or a singer — young people have a reason to remain fluent and to stay in the region rather than move to a city where their language is of no use. Economists who study remote regions have noted that language-based tourism can create exactly this kind of employment, and that a wage earned partly through the language changes its standing within a family. A language that brings in income is harder to dismiss as a relic of the past.

The second argument concerns prestige. Many minority languages carry a history of official disapproval, and speakers may have absorbed the message that their language is backward. Visitors who travel across the world to hear it, and who pay for lessons in it, contradict that message. Language planners describe such measures as status planning, and point to the example of Welsh, where bilingual road signs and official notices have made the language permanently visible to travellers and residents alike. It is difficult to prove that a sign changes behaviour, but visibility of this kind does alter what a language appears to be for.

Some visitors are more than passing consumers. Language holidays have become a small but growing industry, and the Irish-speaking districts of the west of Ireland receive adults each summer who come to attend intensive courses, often living with local families for a fortnight. Descendants of emigrants form another category, arriving in search of a language their grandparents spoke. These visitors stay longer and spend more than day-trippers, and a proportion of them go on studying after they return home. For a village with few other sources of income, a summer school can be a significant employer.

Against this stands a well-developed critique. Tourists, it is argued, want a particular version of a culture: songs, costumes, greetings, a good photograph. They do not come to discuss planning applications or to listen to a debate about the health service. The language is therefore used in a narrow range of situations, repeated for each new audience, while the everyday business of the community continues in the majority tongue. In New Zealand, Māori performance has been staged for visitors for well over a century, and it has undeniably kept the language audible; critics nevertheless ask how much of that use has strengthened the language as a working means of communication.

There is also the question of who takes the money. Tourism businesses are often owned by people from outside the region, and the jobs on offer are seasonal and poorly paid. Ownership matters because the people who speak a language are not always the people who sell it. Where a culture is itself the product, misrepresentation becomes a commercial temptation. In northern Scandinavia, Sámi organisations have objected to operators who advertise 'Sámi' experiences with no real connection to Sámi communities, using costumes and designs that local people regard as inaccurate. When the rewards of tourism go to outsiders, the argument that it sustains a language weakens considerably.

The evidence is thinner than the confidence of either side suggests. Tourism cannot easily be separated from schooling, broadcasting, migration and marriage, all of which affect whether a language is passed on, and few studies follow a community over the decades in which language shift actually happens. Some regions with flourishing visitor economies have continued to lose speakers, which suggests that tourism is neither necessary nor sufficient. Hebrew was revived as a spoken language before mass tourism existed, and Hawaiian was brought back chiefly through immersion schools; in both cases the decisive work was done by speakers and teachers rather than by visitors.

The sensible conclusion, then, is that tourism is a supplement to language policy, not a substitute for it. It can pay wages, raise prestige and add learners, and these are real gains for a small language. But it will not by itself put a language into the mouths of children, which is where survival is ultimately decided. The communities that do best appear to be those that control the businesses themselves, insist that the language is used for real work rather than only for display, and connect visitors' money to nurseries, schools and broadcasting. The question is not whether tourists can save a language, but whether a community can use their interest without becoming dependent on it.