IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 415

On 5 July 2009 Terry Herbert, a metal detectorist who had been searching the same farm field in Staffordshire for several years, dug up a piece of gold. Further signals followed, and within days he had recovered hundreds of objects, many of them decorated with gold filigree and red stones. Herbert reported the discovery through the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the system by which amateur finds in England and Wales are recorded, and its local finds liaison officer called in archaeologists. Their excavation of the surrounding soil produced several hundred more pieces. In total the hoard contains roughly 4,000 objects, including more than five kilograms of gold.

The field lies at Hammerwich, near Lichfield, in the heartland of the early medieval kingdom of Mercia, a few kilometres from the line of Watling Street, the Roman road that remained in use for centuries afterwards. Nothing at the site suggests a grave, a shrine or a building; the objects were lying in plough soil, apparently without a container, and generations of farming had scattered them. Whether the place itself carried any meaning for those who buried the hoard cannot now be recovered.

Under English law such a discovery sets in motion a legal process. The coroner for the district holds an inquest to decide whether the objects qualify as treasure, and the find was duly declared treasure in September 2009. A committee of experts then valued the hoard at £3.28 million, a sum that had to be paid to Terry Herbert and to Fred Johnson, the landowner, before the objects could pass to a museum. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent raised the money with the help of a public appeal and grants from the Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The contents of the hoard are dominated by fittings from weapons. There are around seventy sword pommels, the caps that sat at the end of a sword's grip, together with hilt plates, belt buckles and mounts, nearly all of them made of gold and many inlaid with garnets. The stones were cut into thin slices and set into cells of gold, a technique known as cloisonné; in most cases the garnets have come away from the metal that once held them, and conservators later spent years matching hundreds of loose stones back to their settings. Fragments of a helmet also survive, among them a decorated cheek guard.

Two objects stand apart from the rest. One is a large gold cross, which had been folded almost flat, perhaps so that it would fit inside a pouch, perhaps as part of the ritual of burial. The other is a narrow strip of gold bearing a Latin text from the Bible, a passage from the Book of Numbers in which Moses calls on God to rise up and scatter his enemies. The strip was folded too, and some of its letters were hidden inside the fold until the metal was gently opened.

Almost every item in the hoard has been deliberately damaged. Pommels are bent, plates are twisted, and fittings are broken into pieces. Some of the damage may have happened when the hoard was buried, but its regularity points to intention. Various explanations have been offered: that the objects were taken as plunder and broken up, that they were assembled as a payment between peoples, or that they were buried as an offering. No interpretation has commanded general agreement, and the complete absence of coins, which might have supplied a firm date, adds to the difficulty.

Dating therefore depends on the decoration of the objects. The animals and interlace carved into the metalwork resemble work from the seventh century, and comparison with pieces found elsewhere suggests that most of the objects were made between about 600 and 675. When the hoard was buried is a separate question, and opinions differ, with some scholars placing the event early in the eighth century. The debate matters because the answer would help to identify which Mercian ruler's household the treasure came from.

After the purchase a research project was set up, funded by English Heritage and the two museums, which brought together archaeologists, conservators and historians. The first task was to catalogue the thousands of fragments, many of them tiny, and to record each one photographically. X-rays revealed how the pieces had been constructed and how they had been damaged.

As the work went on it became clear that fragments found several metres apart, and even in different seasons of excavation, belonged to the same object, which implies that the hoard had been disturbed long before it was found. Study of the garnets and the gold also traced where the raw materials had come from.

The find has altered the study of early medieval England. Before 2009, the finest surviving metalwork from the period was the material excavated at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939, from a royal burial of the early seventh century. The Staffordshire Hoard is different in character and far larger, and it has allowed scholars to examine the skill of Mercian goldsmiths in detail for the first time. It has also proved popular with the public: thousands of people queued to see the objects when they went on display, and parts of the hoard now have permanent homes in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent.

At the World Memory Championships, competitors are given a shuffled pack of cards and a short time in which to memorise the order. Some can recite the sequence of a second pack, dealt face down, while holding a conversation. Others remember hundreds of random digits after a single viewing. To an audience the performances look like evidence of an extraordinary mind, and the competitors are often described as geniuses. Yet when researchers have examined them, they have found people of ordinary intelligence whose brains appear, at least in structure, unremarkable. What sets them apart is a technique that is more than two thousand years old.

The technique is said to have been discovered by accident. According to the Roman writer Cicero, the poet Simonides of Ceos was the only guest to survive when the roof of a banqueting hall collapsed. The bodies were so badly crushed that relatives could not identify them, but Simonides was able to name every victim because he remembered where each person had been sitting. From this he concluded that orderly arrangement is the foundation of memory. The story may well be embellished, but the principle was eagerly taken up by teachers of rhetoric, who advised speakers to attach each section of a speech to a column or a corner of a familiar building. For centuries, an accomplished memory was regarded as a skill to be trained rather than a gift.

The method is now usually called the method of loci, or the memory palace, and it rests on the observation that people are very good at remembering places. The user chooses a familiar route — the rooms of a house, or a walk to school — and fixes an image of each item to be learned at a particular point along it. The images are made as vivid as possible, often ridiculous or shocking, because the mind holds on to the absurd. When the list has to be recalled, the user travels the route in the imagination, and each location yields up the object deposited there.

The first systematic comparison of memory champions with other people was carried out at University College London and published in 2003. Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues recruited ten competitors who had finished high in international memory championships and compared them with a control group of similar age and background. Brain scans showed no structural differences between the two groups, so the champions' advantage could not be explained by anatomy. The difference appeared instead when the volunteers were asked to memorise numbers: the champions showed greater activity in regions known to be involved in spatial navigation, including the hippocampus. They also performed no better than the control group on standard tests of intelligence.

Other work has shown how far practice can extend an ordinary memory. In a series of experiments begun in the late 1970s, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked a student to listen to strings of digits and repeat them back. At first the student managed about seven, the usual limit of short-term memory. After many months of practice he could reproduce more than eighty. He achieved this not by enlarging his memory but by converting groups of digits into running times he already knew, and by building those times into a hierarchy of associations.

A more recent study asked whether this kind of training could change the brain. Fifty-one young adults with no special interest in memory were divided into groups, and one group was given half an hour of method-of-loci training a day for forty days. By the end, the trained group's performance on the sort of word lists used in competitions had improved substantially, and the pattern of connections between regions of their brains had come to resemble that of experienced memory athletes. Some of the improvement was still present four months later. The study, published in 2017, is often cited as evidence that intensive practice can alter the organisation of the adult brain.

What remains uncertain is whether these gains spread beyond the task. The trained volunteers did not become generally more intelligent, and there is little evidence that the technique strengthens memory for everyday events, such as where a person left their keys. Nor is it clear how well it works for material that is not easily pictured: legal principles, mathematical arguments and abstract definitions resist being turned into vivid images. Researchers also disagree about whether the changes seen in the brain represent a lasting new capacity or simply hours of practice at one particular activity.

Even so, the technique has found practical uses. Medical students have been taught to build a memory palace for the structures of the body, placing the bones of the hand, say, on the furniture of their bedroom, and some report that the material is retained longer than when it is learned from a diagram. Language learners use similar routes for vocabulary. The drawbacks, however, are real. Constructing the images takes time and imagination, similar items placed in neighbouring rooms become confused, and the method does nothing for material that must be understood rather than listed.

The lesson of all this is not that everyone could win a memory championship. It is that the capacity of ordinary memory is far larger than most people assume, provided that information is organised in a form the brain can handle. A science journalist who spent a year on the technique and then won a national competition made exactly this point: his memory had not changed, but the way he used it had. The skill that memory athletes acquire is genuine, but it is narrow, and it depends on practice rather than on any inherited gift.

Few questions in education arouse as much feeling as the age at which children should begin school. In England, children are legally required to be in education from the term after their fifth birthday, and most enter a reception class in the September following their fourth birthday. In most other European countries formal schooling begins at six, and in Finland at seven, after a year of pre-primary education that is largely play-based. Since almost every country manages to teach children to read and calculate, the difference in starting ages is striking, and it has encouraged repeated calls for England to follow its neighbours.

Developmental psychologists who have studied the question are often sceptical about early formal instruction. In their view, children of four and five learn chiefly through play, movement, conversation and exploration, and the dispositions that make for successful learning later — curiosity, persistence, the willingness to concentrate — are formed in those activities. A classroom organised around worksheets and sitting still, they argue, may secure a short-term gain in letter recognition at the cost of the attitudes that sustain learning. Some go further and maintain that no formal teaching should begin before the age of six.

Economists who study early intervention reach a different conclusion. Their interest is in what produces the greatest return on public money, and a body of research on intensive pre-school programmes for disadvantaged children in the United States has reported benefits that lasted into adult life, including higher rates of employment and lower rates of arrest. On this view, the children who gain most from structured early education are precisely those whose homes provide least support for learning, and postponing the start of anything resembling school may deprive them of the very experience that would help them most.

A group of early years specialists in England has campaigned for a less formal curriculum for the youngest pupils, arguing that the present framework squeezes out the activities that four-year-olds need. Their complaint is not so much about the age of entry as about what happens after it: they maintain that the reception year has become too narrow, with too much time devoted to a restricted set of literacy and numeracy targets and too little to stories, music and outdoor play.

Researchers who study the relative age effect approach the problem from another direction. Within any class there is a spread of almost a year in children's ages, and the oldest members of the group hold an advantage that has nothing to do with ability. Studies in several countries have found that children born shortly after the school entry cut-off are more likely to be judged ready for school, more likely to be placed in higher groups and, in some countries, more likely to be selected for representative sport. The effect is largest in the early years and tends to shrink as children grow older, which suggests that decisions taken at five are unreliable evidence of what a child can do.

Those who examine the practicalities point to a constraint that is easily overlooked. If formal schooling began a year or two later, families would still need somewhere for four-year-olds to go during the working day, and the state would have to provide many more nursery places and many more trained staff to run them. In countries where school entry is late, the gap is filled by a well-established system of early childhood education and care, usually with high levels of public spending and a workforce holding graduate qualifications. Introducing a later start without that infrastructure would simply shift a burden onto parents, and onto mothers in particular.

These arguments do not carry equal weight, and the international comparisons that dominate public discussion are the weakest of them. National systems differ in curriculum, teacher training, class size, testing, private tutoring and the expectations of parents, and the starting age is entangled with all of them. Finland's results in international surveys, much cited in this debate, cannot be credited to the age of seven when the same system also produces highly qualified teachers and considerable autonomy for schools. With so many differences at once, it is impossible to separate the effect of a starting age from everything else.

What the evidence does support is a conclusion about quality. The content of the day matters far more than the age of entry. What counts is what happens once a child is inside the building: whether the day offers a generous ration of play, talk, stories and physical activity alongside systematic teaching of reading and number, and whether the adults are well trained and well paid. Classes should be small, with a generous ratio of adults to children, and children who arrive already behind should receive extra help rather than be left to catch up on their own.

My own view, then, is that raising the compulsory age of entry is not the reform England most needs, though there is a case for making the reception year less formal and giving teachers more freedom over how reading and number are introduced. Nor should the benefits of an early start be dismissed: for some children, especially the most disadvantaged, a structured and language-rich setting before the age of six is a considerable advantage, and they are unlikely to find one anywhere else. The debate about age, for all the attention it attracts, is a distraction from the question that matters: what kind of day should a five-year-old have?