IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 430

For thousands of years the horse has been a partner in human labour, transport and warfare, and almost every horse alive today descends from animals domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some five thousand years ago. One population, however, remained apart. Przewalski's horse, a stocky, dun-coloured animal standing about twelve to fourteen hands high, is generally described as the last truly wild horse, in the sense that its ancestors were never deliberately bred by people. Its Mongolian name, takhi, is often translated as 'spirit', and to many Mongolians it has long been a symbol of the open steppe.

The animal is biologically distinct from the domestic horse in several respects. Its mane stands upright with no forelock hanging over the face, its muzzle is pale, and its tail is unusual: the upper part carries short hair, with long hair only at the bottom. The two forms also differ in their chromosomes, Przewalski's horse having 66 and the domestic horse 64. The offspring of a cross possesses 65 and is fertile, which is precisely why the purity of the remaining population is a constant concern.

Western science learned of the animal in the nineteenth century. In 1879 a Russian explorer, Nikolai Przhevalsky, obtained the skin and skull of a horse shot in the Dzungarian basin, on the border of what are now China and Mongolia, and in 1881 the species was formally described from that material. Reports of a genuinely wild horse caused a sensation in Europe, and zoos and private collectors began to pay for expeditions to capture foals. The animals proved difficult to keep: many died in transit or in captivity, and the survivors were scattered among institutions in several countries, so that breeding had to be arranged across borders from the start.

By the middle of the twentieth century the wild population had shrunk to a few hundred animals, and possibly far fewer, in the Dzungarian Gobi, a desert region shared by Mongolia and China. Herds were disturbed by hunting, by competition with livestock for scarce water, and by the disruption caused by the border, which cut across their migration routes. The last confirmed sighting of a wild individual occurred in 1969, when a lone animal was recorded at a waterhole; after that, the species existed only in zoos.

That the species survived at all was due to a handful of captive animals. Genetic studies of the modern population point to a small number of founders, perhaps a dozen or so, from which every living Przewalski's horse descends; one mare captured in the Gobi in 1947 became particularly influential.

Such a narrow genetic base is a serious problem, since it leaves a population vulnerable to disease and to the effects of inbreeding. Zoos responded by keeping detailed studbooks and by moving animals between collections to pair unrelated individuals, and a coordinated breeding programme gradually built numbers up again. Prague Zoo, which had received its first Przewalski's horses in the 1930s, later played a leading part in both breeding and transport.

Returning the horse to the wild was another matter. In the early 1990s the first small groups were released in Hustai National Park in Mongolia, a steppe reserve created with the intention of restoring the species, and further releases followed in the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area in the south-west of the country. Each animal had to be transported long distances, acclimatised in enclosures and taught, as far as possible, to find water and to recognise predators. Mortality in the first years was high, and losses to harsh winters and to accidents were significant. Slowly, however, the herds began to reproduce without help.

Other countries followed. China established a breeding centre in the Kalamaili reserve in Xinjiang and began releasing horses there, and the species has also been introduced to parts of Central Asia and to the Hungarian plain, where herds now live throughout the year. The most surprising site is the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, where a group released in the late 1990s has grown into a self-sustaining population that grazes among abandoned villages and pine forest.

One assumption, however, has been challenged. In 2018 a study of ancient DNA concluded that Przewalski's horses are not the descendants of a lineage that was never domesticated at all. The researchers argued that they descend from horses kept by the Botai, a people who lived in what is now northern Kazakhstan around 3500 BC and who kept horses for meat and milk. On that reading, the takhi is not a wild horse but a feral one: the descendant of animals that were once managed by people and later escaped or were released. The finding remains debated, and it does not alter the practical case for protecting the species, but it complicates the story that has been told to the public.

Whatever its ancestry, the recovery has been genuine. The species was reclassified from extinct in the wild to endangered in 2011, and the wild population now numbers in the hundreds and is growing, though it remains dependent on reserves, on water supplies provided in dry years and on continuing transfers of animals between herds to limit inbreeding. Its story is often told as a simple triumph of conservation. In reality it is an account of what can be achieved when zoos, governments and field biologists coordinate over decades — and a reminder of how nearly this animal was lost.

A hurricane is the name given in the North Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific to a tropical cyclone, a rotating storm system that draws its energy from warm ocean water. The same phenomenon is called a typhoon in the western North Pacific and simply a cyclone in the Indian Ocean and around Australia. Every one begins in much the same way, over a tropical sea, and passes through a sequence of stages that meteorologists can describe with some confidence even when they cannot forecast the details of an individual storm.

Four conditions are usually listed. First, the sea surface must be warm — conventionally at least 26.5°C — and warm to a depth of about 50 metres, so that the churning of the waves does not bring cold water up to the surface and cut off the storm's supply of energy. Second, the air above must be moist and unstable, so that it rises readily. Third, the winds at different heights must not differ greatly in speed or direction; strong wind shear at height tears a developing storm apart by pushing its top away from its base. Fourth, the storm must be far enough from the equator for the Earth's rotation to set the air spinning.

The engine of the storm is a process familiar from any kitchen. Warm, humid air over the sea rises, expands and cools, and the water vapour in it condenses into cloud droplets. Condensation releases heat — latent heat, which was absorbed when the water evaporated — and this warms the air around it. Warmer air is lighter, so it rises faster, drawing in more moist air at the surface. The result is a feedback loop: the more air rises, the more heat is released, and the lower the pressure at the centre becomes. Air flowing in towards that low pressure is deflected by the Earth's rotation, and the storm begins to rotate.

As the system intensifies, its structure becomes more organised. A ring of tall thunderstorms, the eyewall, forms around the centre and contains the strongest winds. Inside it lies the eye, a roughly circular region perhaps 20 to 60 kilometres across where air sinks rather than rises, the skies are often clear and the wind drops. Beyond the eyewall, spiral bands of cloud and heavy rain extend outwards for hundreds of kilometres. Strength is classified on the Saffir–Simpson scale, which runs from category 1 to category 5 according to the highest sustained wind speed; a category 5 storm has winds of at least 252 kilometres an hour. The scale says nothing about the size of a storm or about the amount of rain it will produce.

Storms move westward at first, carried by the trade winds, and then usually curve towards the poles as they meet the prevailing winds of higher latitudes, many eventually turning north-eastwards and dying over cooler water. A hurricane weakens quickly once it makes landfall, because it loses the warm water that supplies its energy and because friction over the land slows the surface winds. Even so, the destruction is often done not by wind but by water: storm surge, a rise in sea level driven ashore by the wind, has historically caused the greatest loss of life, and freshwater flooding from torrential rain causes further deaths well inland.

One of the least understood aspects is rapid intensification, conventionally defined as an increase of at least 55 kilometres an hour in the maximum wind speed within 24 hours. Such episodes are dangerous precisely because they are hard to forecast: a storm may approach a coast as a moderate hurricane and strengthen into a severe one in the hours before landfall, leaving the authorities with too little time to evacuate. Forecasters can recognise the conditions that favour rapid intensification — very warm water, low wind shear, a well-organised core — but they cannot yet say reliably when it will begin. The inner structure of a storm is small compared with the grid of a global forecasting model, and exchanges of heat and moisture between sea and air are hard to measure directly. Aircraft flying through storms release instrument packages that radio back measurements, though coverage is limited.

Hurricanes also respond to large-scale patterns in the climate system. In the Atlantic, an El Niño — the periodic warming of the eastern tropical Pacific — tends to increase vertical wind shear over the Caribbean and the tropical Atlantic, and the number of Atlantic hurricanes is generally lower in El Niño years. Conversely, the cool phase of the same cycle is associated with more active seasons. Dust blown westwards from the Sahara can suppress storms by introducing dry, stable air, and a layer of warm, dry air aloft can have a similar effect.

What warmer oceans will mean is debated in its details, though not in its general direction. Most researchers expect the total number of tropical cyclones to stay roughly the same or perhaps fall slightly, while the strongest storms become stronger and wetter. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour — about 7 per cent more for each degree Celsius — so rainfall from such storms is expected to increase. Sea-level rise will make storm surge more damaging, and a larger share of storms may reach the highest categories.

Warning systems have improved greatly. Satellites, aircraft reconnaissance and numerical models now give coastal communities several days of notice, and deaths from hurricanes have fallen sharply in the countries able to afford them. The remaining uncertainty lies less in understanding what drives a hurricane than in forecasting the particular path and intensity of the next one.

A football club, we are often told, belongs to its supporters. In law it very rarely does. Most professional clubs are companies owned by shareholders, and in England the largest have passed into the hands of American investment firms, Gulf sovereign funds and individual billionaires. Supporters pay for tickets and shirts and pass their allegiance to their children, yet they have almost no say in who owns the club, what it is called or where it plays. When six English clubs announced in April 2021 that they would join a breakaway European Super League, the reaction of their own fans — protests, boycotts, banners — helped to destroy the plan within days. That episode gave new force to an old question: should the people who watch be the people who own?

The strongest evidence that supporter ownership can work comes from Germany. Under a rule known as 50+1, a club may enter the Bundesliga only if its members' association retains a majority — 50 per cent plus one vote — of its own voting rights. Commercial partners may buy shares, and most clubs have sold some, but they cannot outvote the members. A handful of clubs, backed historically by the chemical company Bayer and by Volkswagen, hold exemptions. The rule has not prevented German clubs from building large stadiums or competing in Europe, and it has helped to keep ticket prices low and standing terraces in use.

Other models exist. Real Madrid and Barcelona are owned by their members, who elect a president and vote on major decisions. The Green Bay Packers, in American football, are owned by a non-profit company with hundreds of thousands of shareholders, whose shares carry no dividend, cannot be sold at a profit and are often left to relatives in a will. All three are held up as proof that a club can prosper without a wealthy proprietor.

Critics reply that these examples are misleading. Barcelona, they point out, accumulated debts of more than a billion euros and in 2022 sold parts of its future income to raise cash — decisions taken by a small group of officials and approved, in effect, by a members' vote. Green Bay is a single club in a league whose other teams belong to billionaires, and it benefits from revenue-sharing that no football club enjoys. On this view, supporter ownership is a charming exception rather than a general model.

Economists approach the question differently, asking about incentives rather than sentiment. A private owner, it is argued, has a clearer reason to run a club efficiently than a scattered membership does: ownership gives that person a claim on any profit and therefore an interest in increasing the value of the business. Member-owned clubs may face what economists call a soft budget constraint. Because the members will always rescue the club, or because no one is quite responsible for the losses, the discipline of the market weakens. Supporters vote for lower ticket prices and for higher spending on players, and the two are difficult to reconcile.

Yet the same logic cuts both ways. Private ownership works well only if the owner's interests align with the club's long-term health, and they frequently do not. An owner may borrow money against the club's own assets, sell the stadium, take a dividend, or lose interest and disappear. Several takeovers in England have been financed by debt secured against the club itself. A member-owned club cannot be sold over the heads of its members, and a supporter's horizon is measured in generations rather than in the five or so years that an investment fund allows for its money.

The record of supporter ownership is, in truth, mixed. Clubs rescued by supporters' trusts have sometimes prospered and sometimes run out of money, and a trust that must raise funds from the same people who buy the tickets is not obviously better placed to build a new stand than a company that can borrow. Nor does a members' vote guarantee good judgement: members can be as impatient for success as any billionaire, and the pressure to buy an expensive forward can be just as strong at an annual general meeting. Ownership decides who holds the pen; it does not decide whether what is written is wise.

That is why the more useful question is not who owns the club but what supporters are entitled to be consulted about. In England a government-commissioned review, prompted by the Super League affair, recommended that clubs be required to consult fans' representatives before changing a club's name, badge, colours or stadium, and that an independent regulator oversee the finances of the game and test the suitability of new owners. Germany's rule is valuable less because it keeps clubs in members' hands than because it gives members a veto that cannot be bought.

My own view is that pure supporter ownership should be encouraged but not required. Making it compulsory would either drive capital away from the game or leave clubs dependent on public money. What should be compulsory is a protected voice: binding rights of consultation and consent over the things that make a club what it is, seats for supporters on boards, full disclosure of ownership and debt, and a regulator able to act before a club collapses rather than afterwards. Ownership matters, but it is too blunt an instrument to be the whole answer.