IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 413

Few mammals modify their environment as extensively as the beaver. Two species survive: the North American beaver and the Eurasian beaver, the latter slightly smaller and considerably rarer. Both are rodents, and a mature adult may exceed twenty kilograms, which makes the beaver the largest rodent in North America and Europe. Like all rodents, beavers possess incisors that continue growing throughout their lives, their orange coloration deriving from iron within the enamel. Ecologists classify the species as an ecosystem engineer: an animal whose construction work generates habitats upon which numerous other organisms depend.

Beavers inhabit slow rivers, streams and lakes throughout North America, Europe and parts of Asia. They establish lasting pair bonds and seldom wander far from their natal locality, though young adults eventually travel some distance to found new colonies. A typical colony comprises an adult pair, the year's kits and offspring from the preceding breeding season, which remain until they disperse.

The colony's focal structure is the lodge, an interwoven dome of branches, stones and mud up to about two metres high and several metres in diameter. Its exterior is plastered with mud which hardens and binds the components together. Inside, above the level of the surrounding pond, lies a single chamber floored with woodchips and shredded bark. Fresh air enters through a small ventilation hole, left free of mud, at the dome's summit. The remaining openings are tunnels sloping downwards from the chamber which emerge beneath the pond's surface, preventing predators from simply walking inside.

Beavers occupy such locations only because they regulate the surrounding hydrology. Where a stream is too shallow to conceal an entrance, the family constructs a dam. Working principally at night, they drag branches through the water, wedge them upright within the riverbed and plug intervening gaps with stones, grass and handfuls of mud, adding successive layers to the upstream face. The barrier elevates the water level behind it until a pond sufficiently deep for swimming has formed. Beavers repair every leakage immediately, apparently responding to the sound of running water.

An individual dam may be extended annually, and some North American examples exceed several hundred metres in length. A breached section is usually reconstructed within a night or two. Maintenance continues for as long as the pond is occupied. When a dam is eventually abandoned it decays, the impounded water drains away, and a flat expanse of fertile, waterlogged soil is colonised by grasses and shrubs.

Beneath the surface the beaver is admirably equipped. Folds of skin seal its ears and nostrils, while a transparent membrane slides across each eye, permitting vision whenever the head is submerged. Its lips close behind the incisors, enabling the animal to carry branches without swallowing water, and its hind feet are webbed. The broad, flattened tail, covered with scales rather than fur, stores fat for winter and functions as a rudder; slapped sharply against the surface, it signals danger to the colony. A beaver can remain submerged for approximately fifteen minutes.

Beavers breed annually, and a female produces two or three kits during late spring. The kits can swim within a day or two of birth yet remain close to the lodge and are suckled for several weeks. Older offspring stay within the family and assist in repairing the dam and provisioning the new litter, a cooperative behaviour unusual among rodents. Beavers demarcate territorial boundaries with a pungent secretion, and intruders are driven away. In the wild an individual may survive for ten to twelve years.

The consequences extend well beyond the colony itself. A pond slows the current, allowing water to percolate into the ground instead of rushing downstream; this can diminish a flood's peak and maintain a river's flow throughout a dry summer. Sediment accumulates in the pond, and the nitrogen and phosphorus attached to it are absorbed by vegetation, improving water quality. The shallow margins warm early in spring and function as nurseries for amphibians, aquatic insects and small fish. Eventually the pond fills with peat and silt, storing carbon. Ecologists regard such wetlands as unusually productive habitats.

Not everybody welcomes a beaver. A dam situated unsuitably floods agricultural land and roads, and a colony can fell valuable timber and obstruct the culverts that conduct water beneath a highway. Wildlife managers increasingly install flow devices — pipes inserted through a dam to hold the water at an agreed level — or wrap significant trees' trunks in wire mesh, enabling beavers and people to share the same valley. Trapping has proved less effective than formerly supposed, since new animals rapidly colonise vacant stretches.

Britain illustrates how attitudes can change. Beavers were hunted throughout Europe for their fur and for castoreum, a secretion from their scent glands once employed in medicine, and they had vanished from Britain by the sixteenth century. In 2009 Norwegian animals were released at Knapdale in Argyll during a five-year trial, and a second population of uncertain origin was discovered beside the River Otter in Devon. Scotland gave beavers legal protection in 2019, and in 2020 the Devon animals were permitted to remain.

This is not to pretend that beavers are straightforward neighbours, nor that every stream requires their attention. It is simply to acknowledge that a rodent with an instinct for engineering can, in an appropriate location, retain water upon the land and create room for other lives.

Reading is a recent invention. Writing systems have existed for a few thousand years, and mass literacy for barely two centuries, which is far too short a time for the human brain to have evolved a specialised organ for reading. Children therefore have to adapt circuits that were built for something else. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has described this process as neuronal recycling: areas of the cortex that originally handled faces, objects and spoken language are recruited, with practice, for the visual symbols of print. Learning to read is thus not a single skill but a set of connections between the eyes, the language areas and the memory systems that hold the sounds of words.

Imaging studies show that learning to read changes the brain. In skilled adult readers, a small region on the left side of the brain, often called the visual word form area, responds strongly to strings of letters and hardly at all to other objects. This region becomes tuned through experience, so that it recognises common letter patterns quickly and without conscious effort. Children who are just beginning, by contrast, rely more heavily on areas involved in sounding words out and in controlling attention. The shift from laborious decoding to automatic recognition is the central change of the early school years, because it frees the mind to think about meaning.

Phonics is the name given to teaching that makes these connections explicit. Children are taught the correspondences between letters, or groups of letters, and the sounds of speech, and are then shown how to blend those sounds into words: /k/ /a/ /t/, cat. In a systematic programme the correspondences are introduced in a planned order rather than picked up incidentally from stories, and in a synthetic programme children learn to synthesise, or blend, sounds rather than to analyse whole words first. The approach matters particularly in English, which has around forty-four speech sounds but only twenty-six letters, so that the same sound can be written in several ways and the same letters can be pronounced differently.

The evidence for systematic phonics is substantial. A large review published in 2000 by the National Reading Panel in the United States concluded that systematic phonics instruction produced better progress in reading than approaches that taught letter-sound relationships incidentally or not at all, and that the advantage was greatest for younger children and for those who were struggling. A long study in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, followed children who had been taught by a synthetic phonics programme from their first year at school; several years later their word reading and spelling were still ahead of that of comparable children taught differently. Reviews since then have broadly confirmed these findings, although there is less agreement about how large the effect is.

England has gone further than most countries in embedding the method in policy. A government review led by Sir Jim Rose in 2006 recommended systematic synthetic phonics as the first approach for beginners, and it later became a requirement of the national curriculum. Since 2012, children in Year 1, aged five and six, have taken a short screening check in which they read forty words aloud to a teacher. Half of these are ordinary words and half are invented ones, which a child cannot recognise from memory and must decode. Schools report the proportion of pupils meeting the expected standard, and the results are published.

Critics do not deny that phonics works; they dispute that it is sufficient, and they question how its success is measured. Reading, they point out, means understanding, and a child who can decode the word 'rhinoceros' without knowing what a rhinoceros is has not read it in any useful sense. Comprehension depends on vocabulary, on familiarity with the written register and on general knowledge, none of which phonics lessons supply. Others argue that the screening check tells teachers only whether a child can decode a list of words, not whether the child understands a story, and that some schools have narrowed their teaching in order to raise their scores.

Research on reading supports much of this. Children who arrive at school with a large vocabulary and a well-developed understanding of spoken language generally learn to read more easily, whatever method their school uses. So do children who are read to at home, who see adults reading and who find the whole business interesting rather than frightening. The most influential account describes reading comprehension as the product of two things: the ability to decode print and the ability to understand language. Neither on its own is enough, which is why programmes that combine phonics with storytelling, discussion and vocabulary teaching tend to do better than either element alone.

Much remains uncertain. Nobody knows the ideal amount of phonics teaching, how long it should continue or which children need something different; the answers appear to depend on the language, the child and the quality of the teaching. The long-term effect on comprehension is especially hard to measure, because so many other influences intervene between the age of six and the age of sixteen. Teachers are left to judge how much practice each individual child needs. What is clear is that the argument is no longer about whether to teach letter-sound correspondences but about how, when and alongside what. That is a more technical question, and a more useful one.

Walk through almost any suburb in Europe, North America or Australia and you will pass lawn after lawn: close-mown, uniform and usually green. Grass of this kind is so familiar that it scarcely looks like a decision. Yet it is one. A widely cited estimate from the early 2000s put the area of turfgrass in the United States at around sixteen million hectares, roughly three times the land under irrigated maize, and comparable proportions have been reported for other wealthy countries. No other single crop covers so much of the land around our homes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that councils, landscape architects and ecologists have begun to ask whether some of it should become wildflower meadow instead.

The ecological argument for meadow is not that lawns are poisonous but that they are empty. A close-mown lawn of a single grass species offers little food or shelter, and if it is regularly treated with herbicide it offers even less. A meadow of native flowers and grasses, by contrast, can support bees, hoverflies, beetles and butterflies, together with the birds that feed on them. Insect populations have fallen sharply in many countries, and urban green space is increasingly seen as a refuge. Researchers who survey flower strips along roadsides and in parks generally find more pollinating insects on them than on the mown grass beside them, although the size of the increase varies greatly between sites and years.

The case becomes stronger when the costs of maintenance are counted. Lawns need water in dry summers, and in some cities a large share of domestic consumption goes on gardens. They need mowing, which in most places still means a petrol-driven machine, and a lawn cut every fortnight through the growing season produces a steady stream of emissions and noise. Meadow, by contrast, is cut once or twice a year, and the cut grass is removed so that the soil gradually loses fertility, which is what allows flowers to compete with vigorous grasses. There may also be a modest benefit for the urban heat island, since long grass and undisturbed soil hold moisture and stay cooler than a surface shaved to a few centimetres.

None of this persuades everyone. The objections are rarely about ecology and almost always about use and appearance. A meadow in July, with its grasses going brown and its seed heads collapsing, looks to many residents like land that has been neglected, and neglect in a public park is read as a sign that nobody is in charge. Sports pitches, picnic areas and the verges where children play cannot become meadow. There is also the question of neighbours: a council that stops mowing a strip of grass beside a road may find that the complaints come not from people who dislike flowers but from those who now have to look at untidy growth from their kitchen window.

Practical difficulties are just as real. Meadow does not appear simply because the mower is put away. A lawn that is left unmown usually turns into tall grass and a few vigorous weeds, not into a flower-rich sward. Successful projects usually begin by removing nutrients, sowing or plugging native plants, and then managing the site for several years. Seed is expensive, results in the first season can be disappointing, and a dry spring may ruin the whole attempt. Those who study restoration emphasise that the soil matters as much as the seed: on ground enriched by decades of fertiliser, the grasses win and the flowers do not.

How much good all this does is harder to establish than campaigners sometimes suggest. Many urban meadows are small and isolated, and a patch a few metres wide in a city centre will not compensate for the loss of habitat in the surrounding countryside. Studies of insect numbers are often short-term, and a scheme that looks successful in its second year may be dominated by grass by its fifth. Comparisons are further complicated because the insects that a meadow attracts may come from gardens and waste ground nearby rather than from the meadow itself. Some ecologists therefore argue that money would be better spent on larger, connected sites — old railway land, cemeteries, the edges of rivers — than on scattering seed across every roundabout.

The most useful advice, however, is not to choose between meadow and lawn everywhere but to decide which is appropriate where. Flower-rich meadow suits verges, the margins of parks, embankments and land that is hard to mow. Lawns, and in particular hard-wearing grass, remain the right surface for playing fields, paths and places where people sit on the ground. Managers who explain the plan in advance, who keep the edges neat and who put up a sign tend to meet far less opposition than those who simply leave the mower in the shed.

My own view is that the case for replacing some lawn is strong, but that it rests on management rather than on the mere absence of mowing. A meadow that is sown, weeded, cut and cleared every year is not a way of saving money in the first instance, though it may become one. Nor is the argument mainly about beauty, since a meadow in June is beautiful and a meadow in February is not. It is about whether a city's green space should be doing ecological work. On that test, the best of these schemes succeed, and the worst deserve the criticism they attract.