IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 425

In the late 1950s a British archaeologist, James Mellaart, was surveying the Konya plain in south-central Turkey when local farmers showed him two large mounds beside a river. The eastern mound turned out to hold the remains of a settlement occupied from roughly 7100 to 6000 BCE, and Mellaart began excavating there in 1961. The site, known in Turkish as Çatalhöyük, soon became famous as one of the largest and most densely packed communities of the Neolithic period. It is often described as the world's first city, although many archaeologists consider that label misleading.

What surprises visitors most is the absence of streets. Houses were built of mud brick, each pressed tightly against its neighbours so that walls were shared. The settlement therefore spread outwards as a single dense mass rather than along roads or around a square. There were no doorways at ground level. Instead, people climbed a wooden ladder to the flat roof and entered through a hole, which also allowed smoke from the hearth below to escape. Refuse was swept into piles between the houses, and the whole mass was rebuilt on the same spot again and again.

Inside, a house typically consisted of one main room with smaller storerooms attached. Along the walls were raised platforms covered in plaster, which served as beds and working surfaces, while a hearth and oven provided heat and cooking. The walls were plastered so frequently that archaeologists have counted dozens of layers, some of them painted with geometric patterns or scenes in red ochre. Some of the paint survives well enough to show that the same designs were renewed again and again.

Estimating how many people lived there is difficult. Counting the houses and allowing for the number that stood at any one time, scholars have suggested a population of between 3,500 and 8,000 at the settlement's height. That would have made it exceptional for its period. Because each house was rebuilt several times on the same foundations, excavation has revealed more than a dozen successive levels of occupation, stacked like the layers of a cake. Some estimates are considerably higher, but all agree that the settlement dwarfed its neighbours.

The dead were not buried in a separate cemetery. They were placed beneath the floors of the houses, usually under the platforms where people slept, curled on their side and often accompanied by objects such as necklaces of stone and shell beads. Some were buried with mirrors made from polished obsidian. In a few cases a grave was reopened later and the skull removed, a practice found at several Neolithic sites in the region whose meaning remains uncertain. Because so many people were buried inside the settlement, their bones give an unusually detailed picture of diet, health and the ages at which people died.

Farming and herding provided most of the food. The inhabitants grew wheat and barley, along with lentils and peas, and kept domesticated sheep and goats; they also hunted wild cattle, deer and birds. Householders obtained obsidian, a black volcanic glass, from sources in Cappadocia nearly 200 kilometres to the east, and worked it into blades and points. The site appears to have played a central part in the exchange of this material, which is found in many houses in both finished and unfinished forms. The scale of the trade suggests a community connected to a wide network rather than an isolated village.

Çatalhöyük is best known for its art. Excavators have recovered numerous clay figurines, including the celebrated seated woman whose hands rest on the heads of two animals. They have also found the heads and horns of wild cattle set into benches and walls. Wall paintings show hunting scenes and geometric designs. One appears to show a plan of the settlement with a mountain beyond it, which a few archaeologists have read as an erupting volcano, though the interpretation is disputed. The pigments were made from ochre and other minerals, some of which must have been brought from a distance.

Mellaart interpreted the settlement as the centre of a fertility cult, arguing that larger, richly decorated rooms were shrines and that a powerful elite controlled the community. Later research has undermined this picture. Ian Hodder, who resumed excavation in 1993, has stressed how similar the houses are to one another in size and layout. There is no palace, temple or obviously richer dwelling, and he argues that the decorated rooms were ordinary houses used for domestic ritual. Others point out that some houses contain far more art and imported goods than others, so the question of inequality is not settled.

Hodder's project introduced techniques that Mellaart had not used, such as the systematic sieving of soil to recover tiny fragments of plants and bones. The work has continued for three decades with teams from many countries, and in 2012 UNESCO declared Çatalhöyük a World Heritage Site. Around 6000 BCE the eastern mound was abandoned, and a smaller community later occupied the western one. Why the earlier settlement came to an end is still debated; explanations include a change in climate, the exhaustion of local resources and the difficulty of maintaining so tightly packed a town.

Colour is one of the first things a shopper registers, and marketers have long treated it as a powerful tool. Articles about branding repeat the claim that a large majority of purchase decisions are influenced by colour, usually without citing any research that would support the figure. The honest answer is more modest. Research suggests three routes by which colour has a genuine effect: attention, recognition and expectation. Colour appears to matter a great deal for catching attention and for making a product recognisable, and it shapes what people expect a product to be like before they try it. What it rarely does is determine a purchase on its own. Shoppers choose on price, habit, brand and need, and colour works at the margins of those decisions. For a manufacturer, the practical question is not which colour sells best but which colour does a particular job.

On a crowded shelf, contrast matters more than any particular hue. A pack that stands out from its neighbours is more likely to be picked up and examined. That is why brands in the same category often choose deliberately different colours, and why a newcomer may take the colour the market leader has left unused. Repetition does the rest. A colour used consistently for years becomes a shortcut: shoppers spot the familiar red or yellow from several metres away and reach for it without reading the label. Studies of brand recognition find that colour is one of the cues people recall most readily, along with the shape of the package and the logo. This is recognition rather than persuasion, but for a product that is already trusted, recognition is enough. The colour that works is therefore one that is both distinctive and immediately associated with the category.

Colour also creates expectations, particularly with food and drink. Drinks that look more intensely coloured are often judged to taste stronger, and a pale orange juice may be rated as less sweet than a darker one made from the same liquid. The best-known demonstration comes from a French experiment in which tasters were given a white wine that had been coloured red with an odourless dye. They described it using the vocabulary of red wine, mentioning tannins and dark fruits that the wine did not contain. The lesson usually drawn is that people taste with their eyes as much as with their tongues, although the study was small and has been repeated only occasionally. Food manufacturers have long understood this, and some adjust the shade of a product to make it seem fresher.

Beyond attention and expectation, the meanings attached to colour are learned rather than fixed. White suggests purity and weddings in many European countries and mourning in parts of East Asia. Red can signal danger to a European shopper and good fortune to a Chinese one, which is why a campaign that works in one market may fail in another. Even within a single country, responses vary with age, with the product category and with fashion, so that colours which look dated to one generation may look reassuring to another. Blue, which surveys in many countries find to be the most widely liked colour, is popular precisely because it carries few strong associations. Manufacturers who trade internationally therefore face a choice: adapt the packaging to each market, or build a single colour identity and accept that its meaning will not travel unchanged.

Experimental evidence for the more ambitious claims is thinner than the marketing literature suggests. Some carefully controlled studies have found that a red background reduces the amount people are willing to pay, or that particular hues speed up decisions. Yet the effects are usually small, and they depend on the context in which the colour appears. Psychology has also been forced to reconsider a number of striking findings from the past, because independent researchers failed to reproduce them when they repeated the experiments. Nor do laboratory results translate easily to a shop, where lighting, packaging materials, neighbouring products and time pressure all intervene. On a screen the problem is compounded, because the colour a designer sees is not the colour every customer's device will display.

There is also a practical argument for restraint. Roughly one man in twelve has some form of colour vision deficiency, which makes certain pairs of colours, especially red and green, hard to tell apart. A website that marks a required field in red, or a packet that uses colour alone to distinguish one flavour from another, will confuse a proportion of its customers. Good design therefore uses words, shapes and positions as well as colour, and tests packaging in poor light and on cheap screens. None of this makes colour unimportant. It simply places colour where it belongs: among the many influences on what a shopper notices, recognises and expects, rather than as a hidden switch that decides what people buy.

Few decisions in urban transport arouse as much anger as the removal of parking spaces to make room for a cycle lane. When a city announces such a scheme, shopkeepers predict empty streets and lost takings, and residents complain that they will no longer be able to park outside their homes. Local newspapers, meanwhile, print photographs of unused bike lanes in winter. Supporters reply that streets are public assets, and that a strip of asphalt reserved for stationary cars is a poor use of some of the most valuable land in the city. The argument is usually presented as a contest between motorists and cyclists, but the real question is how a limited kerbside should be shared.

The strongest argument for protected lanes is safety. Where cycling takes place in heavy traffic, only the confident will ride, and the population of cyclists is skewed towards young men. Segregated routes, which separate riders from moving vehicles by a physical barrier, attract a much broader group: children, older people and those carrying passengers or shopping. Campaigners point out that streets were redesigned in the twentieth century around the needs of the motor vehicle, and that restoring space for bicycles is a correction rather than a privilege. Public health researchers add a further argument: regular riding reduces the risk of heart disease and improves mental health. Across a whole population, the benefits appear to outweigh the injury risk to individuals, particularly where protected infrastructure exists.

Against this, businesses on affected streets have a genuine concern. A shop may depend on customers who arrive by car with bulky purchases, and a delivery van that cannot stop nearby may take its trade elsewhere. Yet the evidence that removing parking destroys trade is weaker than is often assumed. Several cities that have installed protected lanes and counted sales in the surrounding streets have reported that takings held up or even increased. Such studies need to be read cautiously, because they compare whole shopping areas over time and cannot separate the effect of the lane from wider changes in the economy or in shopping habits. They also say nothing about individual shops, some of which may indeed lose custom while others gain.

The debate about traffic is equally contested. Transport planners have long observed that building new road capacity tends to generate additional traffic, as journeys previously avoided or made by other means become attractive. The reverse process has been documented too. Studies of road closures and lane removals in several countries have found that a proportion of the traffic forecast to appear simply failed to materialise, a phenomenon known as traffic evaporation. Some drivers change their route, some travel at a different hour, some combine trips, and a few switch to public transport or to a bicycle. Evaporation is not guaranteed, however; it depends on how many alternatives exist.

Residents often raise a different fear: that traffic pushed off a main road will reappear in the quiet streets where their children play. This displacement is real, and it is one reason schemes succeed or fail according to their design. A single lane inserted into a network that offers drivers many parallel shortcuts may achieve little except moving congestion a few streets away. Cities that have reduced through traffic in residential areas, using bollards, one-way filters or restrictions on turning, have generally found that the benefits depend on a coherent plan rather than on isolated interventions.

The least comfortable part of the argument concerns accessibility. Not everyone can ride a bicycle, and some people — those with limited mobility, carers, and tradespeople carrying tools and equipment — genuinely depend on parking close to their destination. Disability organisations have argued, reasonably, that removing designated accessible bays to make way for a cycle lane can leave some residents effectively confined to their homes. Campaigners for better cycling sometimes dismiss such objections, and opponents of cycling schemes sometimes exploit them. Both responses are unhelpful: a well-designed scheme protects accessible bays and loading areas, even at the cost of a slightly narrower lane.

Equity raises a harder question. Cycling in many cities is most common among younger, relatively affluent and well-educated residents. A programme that mainly benefits them, while making driving more expensive for everyone else, could widen inequality rather than narrow it. Economists who study parking make a related point. Parking is rarely free. Its cost is buried in rents, in the prices charged by shops with car parks, and in the taxes that pay for enforcement, so that people without a car subsidise those who own one. Making the cost of kerbside space visible, by charging for it, is presented by these economists as a matter of fairness rather than a punishment.

My own view is that the trade is worth making, but only if it is made honestly. Cities should reallocate kerbside space where a protected route will carry substantial numbers of people, and should be prepared to abandon a scheme that measurement shows to be failing. They should protect accessible parking and loading, charge for the remaining space rather than remove it altogether, and publish the traffic counts on which their claims rest. Above all, they should stop describing the choice as a war between two tribes. The kerbside is a scarce public asset, and deciding how to use it is a question of evidence and priorities rather than of identity.