IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 426

Korean is spoken by tens of millions of people, yet for most of its history it was written with signs borrowed from a language unrelated to it. Chinese characters, known in Korea as hanja, were adopted along with Confucian texts and Buddhist scriptures, and they remained the medium of government, scholarship and formal literature. The difficulty was not that Korean lacked words for complex ideas. It was that Chinese characters represent morphemes, not sounds, and that the grammar of Korean, with its particles and verb endings, fits awkwardly into a writing system designed for Chinese.

The ruler who changed this was Sejong, fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, who reigned from 1418 to 1450. Sejong was a patron of science and letters, and his court sponsored astronomers, musicians and inventors. The king worked on a new script for several years and completed it in 1443. Three years later, in 1446, the alphabet was made public in a document called Hunminjeongeum, translated as 'the correct sounds for the instruction of the people'. Its preface explained that the purpose was to allow ordinary people to express themselves in writing.

A Korean sentence is built from roots that carry meaning, to which endings are attached to show tense, politeness and each word's role. Chinese characters can be used to write the roots, but they offer no natural way to record the endings, and a writer had to resort to complicated conventions. To master the several thousand characters needed for a scholarly text took years of study. The result was a divided literacy: a small male elite could read the classics in Chinese, while farmers, artisans and most women had no practical script for their own language.

Sejong's alphabet was not a simplified copy of Chinese. Its basic letters were designed from scratch, and their shapes were meant to show how the sounds are produced. In the Hunminjeongeum explanations, the consonant signs are described as pictures of the lips, tongue, teeth and throat in the act of articulation. The letter for m, for example, is said to outline the mouth, while the letter for s reflects the shape of the teeth. This principle, later called featural writing, is unusual among the world's scripts: the form of a letter carries information about the sound it represents.

The vowel letters followed a different logic. They were built from three simple symbols: a round dot for heaven, a horizontal line for earth and a vertical line for humanity. Combinations of these elements produced the basic vowels, and additional strokes distinguished related sounds. The original alphabet contained twenty-eight letters, of which four have since fallen out of use in South Korea. The letters were not written in a single string, as in English. They were grouped into square syllable blocks, so that each block corresponds roughly to a spoken syllable and can be read as a unit.

The script was also economical. Because the shapes of related sounds were related in form, a learner who mastered a few basic letters could predict the appearance of others. The system could be taught in a few days to someone who already spoke Korean, and it required no knowledge of Chinese. It was, in modern terms, a writing system designed for mass literacy rather than for the preservation of a scholarly caste.

In 1444 a group of senior officials, led by the scholar Choe Malli, submitted a petition against the new alphabet. They argued that Korea's close relationship with Chinese civilisation depended on the use of Chinese characters, and that a separate vernacular script would mark the country as barbarous. The king rejected their arguments. Yet opposition did not disappear with Sejong's death. For generations, official documents and examinations continued to use Chinese characters, and the new script was often treated as a tool for women, children and the uneducated rather than as a fit medium for serious literature.

In practice, Hangul spread from below. It was used in private letters, in popular novels and in instruction for women, while poets and officials continued to compose in Chinese. Its fortunes changed in the late nineteenth century, when reformers and Christian missionaries opened schools and newspapers that used the vernacular script. During the Japanese colonial period, from 1910 to 1945, Korean language and writing were suppressed in schools and public life, and the script became a symbol of national identity. After liberation in 1945, both Korean states made Hangul their official writing system.

The name Hangul is modern. It was popularised in the early twentieth century and means something like 'Korean script' or 'great script'; before then the alphabet was usually called eonmun, the vulgar or vernacular script. Modern South Korean Hangul uses twenty-four basic letters, fourteen consonants and ten vowels. North Korea uses a slightly different arrangement and calls the script Choson'gul. In both states, literacy is now close to universal, and the alphabet is celebrated on a national holiday, Hangul Day.

For historians of writing, Hangul is a rare case of a script whose invention can be dated, whose purpose is recorded and whose designer is known. It is also a reminder that the value of a writing system lies not in its age or prestige but in how easily it can be learned. Sejong's creation has survived six centuries of political change, and it remains one of the most systematic alphabets in use anywhere.

An igloo was a winter dwelling, not a shelter of last resort. The word comes from Inuktitut 'iglu', which simply means house, and the snow house was only one of several kinds of building a family might use. What made the design extraordinary was the cold. Outside temperatures of forty degrees below zero are common in the Central Canadian Arctic, yet the interior of a well-built snow house can be kept close to freezing, and sometimes well above it, using nothing but body heat and a small lamp. That achievement has fascinated travellers, physicists and, more recently, engineers.

Building one requires the right snow. It must be firm enough to cut into blocks that hold their shape, which usually means snow that has been drifted by wind for weeks. The builder probes a slope with a knife or a stick and cuts blocks roughly the size of a large suitcase. The first row is laid in a circle, and each block is trimmed to a wedge so that the ring leans slightly inward. The wall then rises in a spiral, each block resting on the one below and bridging the joint beneath it, and the last block is shaped to close the hole at the top. The builder works from inside, passing blocks through the gap until it is sealed.

The finished shape is a dome, and the dome is the first secret of its warmth. A sphere presents the smallest possible surface area for a given volume of space, so heat escapes through the walls more slowly than it would from a box of the same size. Wind is the greatest enemy of any shelter in the Arctic, and a smooth, rounded surface lets it slide past instead of tearing at corners. A wall of snow, meanwhile, is mostly air: the blocks may be only a tenth as dense as water, and the air trapped between the ice grains is an excellent insulator.

The second secret lies in the entrance. Rather than a door in the wall, a low tunnel projects from the side of the dome, and its floor is lower than the floor inside. Because cold air is denser than warm air, it flows down and gathers in the tunnel instead of entering the living space, and the passage itself can be blocked with a snow block or a piece of skin. A visitor must crawl through the tunnel and up into the room, which is inconvenient but remarkably effective.

Inside, the snow is shaped into a raised platform at the back, on which the family sleeps, and the floor in front of it is dug down. Warm air rises, so the platform is the warmest place in the house. Skins, usually caribou, are hung on the walls or laid on the platform; they keep clothing dry and stop the sleepers from touching the snow. Where light was wanted, a thin pane of clear freshwater ice could be set into the wall. A lamp burning seal oil gave light and, in winter, a little heat for cooking.

Contrary to the popular image of a sealed box, a snow house must breathe. A small hole is left at the highest point of the dome, and another may be cut near the entrance, so that fresh air enters and the carbon dioxide and moisture produced by breathing and burning escape. Without this, the air becomes foul and the interior surfaces stream with condensation. With it, the inner face of the wall melts very slightly and then refreezes into a thin, hard glaze that gives the structure extra strength.

How much of the warmth comes from which effect is still not fully settled. Engineers who have modelled snow houses on computers point out that the insulating value of snow depends heavily on its density and on the wind, and that measurements taken in occupied dwellings vary widely. Some researchers emphasise the glaze; others argue that the trapped air in the blocks does most of the work. Even the question of how much warmer the interior is than the outside air has produced a surprisingly wide range of answers. Field measurements are difficult, since instruments must work in extreme cold and the presence of the researchers alters the conditions inside.

Snow houses were not the only option. Hunters caught away from home built simple shelters, sometimes a dome of blocks thrown up in an hour, while families settling for the winter built larger dwellings with room for several people. In some regions a snow house was used mainly as a base for hunting trips rather than as a family home. Today few are built as permanent dwellings; most are made by hunters, by visitors learning traditional skills, or by researchers, and the skills involved are passed on within families and, increasingly, through courses run by Inuit organisations.

One further factor is the ground beneath. Heat is lost through the floor as well as through the walls, so a layer of snow or twigs is spread on the floor, and the raised platform keeps sleepers off the coldest surface. Modern engineers have borrowed the principle in emergency shelters and in the design of polar research stations, where lightweight panels filled with air perform the same function as the air in a block of snow.

Every few years a government or a school district announces that it intends to shorten the summer holiday, and every time the proposal produces strong emotions. To parents who must find and pay for weeks of childcare, a long break is a logistical burden; to teachers, it is the only period in the year when they can rest properly or study for a further qualification; to children, it is simply summer. The debate is usually conducted as though the length of the holiday were a matter of tradition or taste. In fact there are serious arguments on both sides, and they rest on evidence that is weaker than either side usually admits.

The most persistent claim is that the long holiday exists because children were needed on family farms. Historians of education have largely abandoned this explanation. In North America, cities with no farming to speak of were among the first to adopt a long summer break, and rural schools often closed at other times of year, for planting or harvest, while remaining open in summer. Rural schools, in fact, often had shorter summer closures than city schools. The urban calendar seems to have been shaped by heat, by disease and by the fact that wealthier families left the city in the hot months. The holiday, in other words, was a product of the city, not of the field.

The argument that attracts most attention now is learning loss. A large body of research, much of it from the United States, suggests that during the long break pupils forget some of what they learned, and that the effect is uneven: some studies find that mathematics and spelling suffer more than reading comprehension, and that the losses are greatest among children from poorer families, who may have fewer books at home and less access to organised activities. The pattern is often called the summer slide. It is real, but it is usually modest, and most children recover quickly once teaching resumes.

How much weight this should carry is disputed. Test scores taken at the start and end of the school year cannot easily separate the effect of the holiday from everything else that happens in children's lives, and families who choose summer programmes differ from those who do not. Reviews of the evidence tend to conclude that the average loss is small and that the gap between rich and poor pupils widens, rather than that all pupils fall behind. The strongest version of the learning-loss argument, then, is an argument about inequality, not about the average child.

If long holidays damage learning, shortening them should improve it. The evidence for that is surprisingly thin. Studies of schools that have moved to a year-round calendar, with the same number of teaching days redistributed across the year, generally find no consistent improvement in achievement. A shorter summer with more frequent breaks may help teachers and pupils avoid exhaustion, and may reduce the loss of routine, but it does not by itself add learning time. Where results have improved, the improvement has usually come from additional teaching, not from the calendar.

Shortening the holiday also has costs that are easy to overlook. In many countries the long break falls in the hottest weeks of the year, and schools without air conditioning cannot simply open earlier. Teachers who use the summer to work a second job or to complete a master's degree would lose that opportunity unless their contracts changed. Families who rely on the break to travel to see relatives, or who cannot afford extra childcare, would be affected in ways that a simple calculation of test scores will never reveal.

Teachers' working conditions deserve a place in the argument too. The holiday is often described as a perk, but it is also the only sustained period in which many teachers can plan, read and recover from a job that surveys of stress consistently rank highly, and in which burnout is common. Shortening the break without reducing workload would be likely to increase the number of teachers leaving the profession, which would harm exactly the pupils the reform is meant to help.

In my judgement the question itself is poorly posed. The choice is not between a twelve-week holiday and an eight-week one, but between a long holiday with nothing in it and a long holiday with something in it. The most promising policies are those that keep a genuine break of reasonable length and use part of it for well-designed, voluntary summer programmes aimed at the children who lose most: reading groups, mathematics catch-up, sport and meals. Such programmes are expensive, but they are cheaper than extending the school year for everyone, and the evidence that they help disadvantaged pupils is stronger than the evidence for shortening the holiday itself.

A modest reduction in the summer break, accompanied by better pay and conditions for the staff who teach in it, is defensible. A wholesale reorganisation of the school year, justified by the slogan of learning loss, is not. The holiday is not the cause of educational inequality; it is simply a period in which inequality becomes easier to see.