IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 421

In 1952 an American archaeologist, Edward Gifford, began excavating a site called Lapita on the west coast of New Caledonia, a French territory in the south-western Pacific. The finds were fragments of earthenware, many of them ornamented with geometric patterns of remarkable precision. The site gave its name both to the pottery and to the culture that made it. Similar sherds were later recognised on islands hundreds of kilometres away, and it became clear that the Lapita style belonged to a society that was both widespread and highly mobile.

The decoration is what makes the material so distinctive. While the clay was still damp, the potter pressed a small toothed implement into the surface, leaving rows of tiny dentate marks. By rocking and repeating the stamp, the potter built up bands, chevrons and triangles, and on a few vessels stylised faces with eyes and noses.

The technique demands patience and a steady hand, and it appears to have been reserved for certain pots rather than for everything a community made: much of the pottery recovered is plain, and ornamented vessels usually form only a small proportion of a collection. The clay itself was tempered with sand or crushed shell, and the pots were fired at comparatively low temperatures in the open air.

Dating the material has never been easy, but the broad outline is now agreed. The oldest known Lapita pottery comes from the Bismarck Archipelago, off the coast of New Guinea, and dates from roughly 1350 BC, whereas the earliest material from Fiji, Tonga and Samoa is several centuries younger. From the Bismarcks the style moved eastwards, reaching Vanuatu and New Caledonia within a few centuries. The islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa lie more than 3,000 kilometres from the Bismarcks, and Samoa marks the eastern limit of the pottery: fragments have been recovered there, but nowhere beyond. The dates come from radiocarbon measurements on charcoal and shell, and they have been refined repeatedly over the decades.

How did people reach these islands in the first place? The answer lies in the double-hulled canoe, a vessel that could carry a family, its animals and its plants across open water and could be sailed rather than merely paddled. The settlers brought pigs, dogs and chickens, together with root crops and fruit trees, and they carried stone and shell for tools. Sailing eastwards, however, meant working against the prevailing trade winds for much of the year, and the achievement of the first voyagers is difficult to overstate.

Chemical analysis of stone artefacts has provided some of the most striking evidence of these voyages. Obsidian — volcanic glass, which fractures into razor-sharp edges — occurs naturally on only a few islands, notably Talasea on the island of New Britain. Fragments from that source have been recovered from Lapita sites several hundred kilometres away, and pots were sometimes made from clay carried from elsewhere as well. Such finds are usually interpreted as evidence of exchange networks linking communities, rather than of journeys made by individual families.

One puzzle remains. After the first burst of expansion, movement appears to have stopped. Samoa and Tonga were settled by about 800 BC, yet the islands of central and eastern Polynesia, from the Society Islands to Hawaii and New Zealand, were reached only from about AD 1000 onwards — a gap of well over a thousand years. At the same time the pottery changed: in Tonga and Samoa the intricate stamped decoration gradually fell out of use and vessels were left plain, a style known as Polynesian Plain Ware. Why such a long pause occurred, and why the decoration was abandoned, are questions that archaeologists still argue about.

Excavation of Lapita settlements has given a picture of daily life. Many sites lie on small offshore islets rather than on the larger islands behind them, perhaps because islets offered better fishing or some protection from mosquitoes. Shellfish gathered from the reef were eaten in quantity, and their shells were then worked into fish hooks, knives and ornaments. Fish bones, turtle bone and the remains of seabirds appear in the deposits, together with the bones of the pigs, dogs and chickens the settlers had brought. Some of the earliest human burials in Remote Oceania belong to this period.

For a long time the link between the Lapita world and the Polynesians of today was inferred mainly from pottery styles. It now rests on much firmer ground. The languages of the region, from Madagascar to Easter Island, belong to the Austronesian family, and the Lapita communities were among its speakers. Genetic research on ancient burials, together with studies of living populations, has confirmed the connection and revealed a more complicated history than the pottery alone suggested. Most researchers accept that these communities were, in large part, the ancestors of the people who later colonised the rest of Polynesia.

Why the pottery matters, then, is not only as art. It records, in fired clay, one of the great migrations in human history and allows archaeologists to follow a people across an ocean long before any written record existed. The word Lapita is a European label, invented by scholars, for communities that were spread across thousands of kilometres and changed over many centuries, but it remains a useful one. It names the moment when the Pacific began to be peopled.

Cities are, acoustically speaking, among the harshest habitats that birds have ever occupied. Traffic, aircraft, machinery and the sheer density of human activity produce a constant background of sound, much of it in the same part of the frequency range that songbirds use to advertise for mates and defend a territory. That birds should respond has seemed obvious since the early 2000s, when the first systematic comparisons were published, and a large literature has since grown up around the question of how urban noise alters song. The answers turn out to be more complicated, and in some respects more interesting, than the first studies suggested.

The physical problem is straightforward. Engine and tyre noise is broadband, but most of its energy lies at low frequencies, below about two kilohertz. A bird's song is also built mainly from low notes, because low frequencies carry well through vegetation and across distance. In a city, however, the low notes are masked by the rumble of engines and the hiss of tyres, so a signal that evolved to travel far becomes hard to distinguish from the background. The bird has two options: sing more loudly, or sing at a pitch where the noise is weaker. A bird that switches to a higher register escapes the worst of the interference, at least in the short term.

The first evidence of a pitch shift came from the Netherlands. In 2003 a team at Leiden University compared the songs of great tits recorded in the city with those of birds in quiet woodland nearby, and found that urban males sang higher. The finding has since been repeated in other European cities. City great tits also tend to sing faster, producing more notes in the same time. Because they are abundant and tolerant of people, great tits have become the standard subject of urban bioacoustics.

Not every adjustment involves pitch. The European robin, a familiar garden bird, has become famous for singing after dark in towns and cities. Night song is rare in the countryside but common in towns, and a study in the English city of Sheffield found that it was linked more closely to daytime noise than to street lighting: the quietest hours may be the only ones in which a robin's song can be heard clearly. Artificial light may contribute as well. Whether night singing is an adaptation or merely a by-product of light pollution remains disputed.

The common blackbird offers a different pattern. Working in several European cities, researchers have found that urban blackbirds begin their dawn song earlier than birds in nearby woods, and that the difference is greatest in the busiest parts of the city. Here light seems less important than noise: the quieter early hours allow a song to be heard before the traffic builds up. The shift is small in absolute terms, but it can be measured consistently from year to year. Blackbirds are among the commonest birds of European towns, which may be why their timing has been measured more often than that of other species.

Volume has been studied most thoroughly in the common nightingale, a species that has become rare in much of northern Europe but still breeds in Berlin and other cities. Recordings show that males in noisy territories sing more loudly than males in quiet ones, and that they raise the volume of individual notes rather than simply singing more. This adjustment, known as the Lombard effect, was first described in human speech in the early twentieth century: people automatically raise their voices in a noisy room, and birds appear to do the same.

Each of these adjustments has a cost, which is why none of them is universal. A song pitched higher is easier to pick out against traffic, but high frequencies are absorbed and scattered more quickly by foliage, so the song carries less far. Singing louder costs energy and may attract the attention of predators. Singing earlier means leaving the roost in colder, darker conditions, when foraging is harder. Urban birds are not simply better off than rural ones; they are making compromises forced on them by the acoustic environment.

Not all populations respond in the same way. Great tits in some cities show the expected upward shift, while in others the same species shows none at all, and a few studies have reported birds singing lower than their rural counterparts. Some species seem unable to shift: a song that already sits above the traffic noise has no reason to change, and a species with a narrow repertoire may have nowhere to move. Habitat matters too, since a bird in a leafy suburb is not living in the same acoustic world as one beside a motorway.

How much any of this matters is still unclear. A higher song may still attract a mate and repel a rival, but no study has yet shown that urban populations are surviving better as a result. Cities alter other things as well: they are warmer, they offer different food, and they expose birds to unfamiliar predators and diseases. Separating the effect of noise from all of these is difficult, and many of the studies are small, local and unreplicated. The honest conclusion is that we have documented a striking flexibility in birdsong without yet understanding what it costs the birds that show it.

Every four years, a large proportion of the world's population watches the same football match at the same time. Major sporting occasions are among the few remaining events that can still assemble a national audience, and most governments treat them as more than entertainment. Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Australia and several other countries all have legislation identifying a handful of events that must remain available on free television, even when a pay broadcaster has offered far more money for them. The policy is popular and rarely examined. It nevertheless raises a genuine question: should the state decide which sporting occasions the public is entitled to watch without paying?

The British arrangement in its present form rests on the Broadcasting Act of 1996, under which the government draws up a list of events of national importance. The list has two parts. Events in the first, among them the Olympic Games, the football World Cup finals and the Wimbledon finals, must be shown live on a free-to-air channel; those in the second, which include home Test cricket, must at least be available as free highlights. Other countries have adopted comparable schemes. In Australia the practice is known as anti-siphoning legislation, because its purpose is to prevent pay broadcasters from siphoning off coverage that was once freely available.

The case for such rules rests on equality of access. A paywall does not merely charge for a service; it excludes anyone who cannot or will not pay, including children, and it does so at precisely the moment when the widest audience exists. Publicly funded sport is often involved as well, since many of the stadiums, training facilities and youth programmes that produce elite athletes have been supported by taxpayers. On this view, a small protected window is a modest return on a large public investment, and the audiences involved, tens of millions for a World Cup final, are on a scale that no subscription channel can match.

The economic objection is that protection has a price and that somebody must pay it. Broadcasting rights are the largest single source of income for many sports, and an event on the list cannot be sold to the highest bidder. The money a pay broadcaster would have paid does not vanish from the economy; it is simply unavailable to the governing body, which may then have less to spend on coaching, facilities and the less prominent competitions.

Defenders of listing reply that this argument treats the broadcaster's cheque as the only benefit that matters. A sport that is invisible on free television struggles to recruit players and spectators, and the loss of visibility may eventually cost more than the rights deal gains. It is also telling that governing bodies rarely publish the calculations on which their claims rest, and that the sums at stake are small beside the revenues of professional football.

The strongest objection to the present arrangements, however, is not economic but technological. Listing was devised when broadcasting was a scarce resource: a handful of channels used publicly owned frequencies, and the state could reasonably insist that some of that capacity serve the national good. Scarcity of that kind has gone. Digital transmission, satellite and the internet have multiplied the ways in which a signal can reach a household, and the justification for regulation has shifted from the allocation of a scarce resource to the protection of a cultural entitlement. Whether that is a proper function of government is a question of political philosophy, not of engineering.

The audience has changed too. Viewers increasingly watch clips, highlights and second screens rather than a single live broadcast, and a young audience that follows a tournament through short videos on a phone is not obviously served by a rule about who may transmit the full ninety minutes. If the aim is that nobody should be excluded from a national occasion, free highlights and online access may achieve it more efficiently than a protected live window. Those who defend the list are attached to a model of shared simultaneous viewing that is fading for reasons unconnected with money.

There are practical difficulties as well. The list is drawn up by ministers advised by a regulator, and it changes rarely; each revision provokes intense lobbying from broadcasters and governing bodies alike. Because the list is fixed in advance, it cannot easily accommodate new competitions or new habits of watching, and it inevitably reflects the sporting world at the time it was written. A mechanism designed to protect the public's access can therefore end up protecting the interests of whichever sport was prominent when the list was last revised.

What should be done? I would keep a short list, but justify it on narrower grounds than tradition. The state should guarantee free access to a handful of occasions that genuinely belong to the whole nation and cannot be replaced by anything else; everything beyond that is a matter for the market. The list should be shorter than it is now, reviewed regularly, and accompanied by a duty to make free highlights available promptly. The burden of proof should lie with those who wish to remove an event, not with those who wish to keep it. Equality of access, not nostalgia, is the reason to regulate.