IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 434

High in the mountains of Ethiopia, above roughly 3,000 metres, the landscape opens into a cold, treeless country of grassland, heather and scattered rocks. This is the Afroalpine zone, and it is the only place on Earth where the Ethiopian wolf is found; the species is endemic to the Ethiopian highlands. A slender animal with long legs, a reddish coat and a pale throat, it is the rarest member of the dog family, and its wild population has numbered fewer than 500 adults for several decades. Most of these wolves live in a handful of mountain ranges, and the largest population by far is in the Bale Mountains, which holds more than half of the species.

European naturalists first described the animal in the 1830s, from skins collected in the Simien Mountains, and placed it among the foxes; for more than a century it was known in English as the Simien fox. Its appearance supports the mistake, since it is smaller and more delicately built than a grey wolf. Studies of its DNA have since shown that it belongs with the wolves and coyotes rather than the foxes, and that it has been isolated in the Ethiopian highlands for a very long time. Exactly when its ancestors arrived, and from where, is still debated by biologists.

Ethiopian wolves eat small mammals, and their diet is dominated by rodents. In the Bale Mountains the most important of these is the giant mole rat, a burrowing animal found nowhere else and large enough to be worth catching. The wolves also take grass rats and other species. They are unusual among canids in hunting by day, when their prey is active above ground, and they hunt alone, moving slowly across the grassland and listening for movement beneath the soil before pouncing. Cooperative hunting, which is central to the lives of wolves elsewhere, plays no part in their feeding.

Yet the Ethiopian wolf is a social animal in every other respect. It lives in small packs, usually of fewer than fifteen adults, and all the adults defend the territory together, chasing away neighbours and marking the boundaries with scent. Only the dominant female breeds; the subordinate females do not usually produce pups of their own, and instead help to raise those of the pair that bred, guarding the den and bringing food. Males usually stay in the pack where they were born, while females are more likely to leave and attempt to join another group.

Mating takes place in the second half of the year, and after a gestation of about two months the dominant female gives birth in a den, often a burrow dug beneath a rock or into soft soil. Litters are small, and the pups stay underground for their first weeks. Adults returning from a hunt regurgitate food for them, and every member of the pack takes part, so that the pups are fed by individuals that may not be their parents. In this way a pack raises a single litter at a time, investing heavily in a few offspring.

The wolves share their mountains with farmers who graze cattle and sheep and grow crops on the lower slopes. Because the animals are protected and have never been hunted heavily for their fur, they show little fear of people and will sometimes approach within a few metres. This tameness makes them easy to watch, but it also makes them vulnerable. Attacks on livestock are rare, yet wolves are occasionally killed in retaliation for the loss of a goat or a calf, and the spread of agriculture, heavy grazing by livestock and the building of roads have reduced and broken up the areas where they can live. Some are also killed by vehicles on the road that crosses the Bale Mountains.

The most serious danger, however, comes from disease. Domestic dogs living around the edges of the wolves' range carry rabies and canine distemper, to which the wolves have no resistance, and a single infected dog can start an outbreak that spreads through a pack within weeks. An epidemic of rabies in the Bale Mountains in the early 1990s killed a large proportion of the wolves there and prompted the first emergency action. Veterinary teams now vaccinate domestic dogs around the protected areas, and have also vaccinated wolves directly when an outbreak threatens.

Conservation work is coordinated by the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme, which was set up in the 1990s and employs local people as monitors. Staff follow packs, record births and deaths, and watch for the first signs of disease. The programme also works with communities, helping farmers to improve the health of their animals and to reduce grazing pressure on the high pastures, and it supports teaching about the wolf in local schools.

The future of the species remains uncertain. Its populations are small and separated by farmland, so each is vulnerable to a single epidemic or a run of poor breeding seasons, and the genetic diversity within packs is low. Climate change is expected to shift the vegetation zones of the highlands upwards, squeezing the grassland on which the rodents, and therefore the wolves, depend. Even so, the Bale population has recovered after each outbreak so far, which conservationists regard as grounds for cautious optimism, though not for complacency.

Ask anyone to describe how people behave when a fire breaks out in a crowded building, and the answer will almost certainly involve panic: people screaming, pushing and trampling one another in the rush for the doors. This picture is so familiar that it has shaped legislation. Fire regulations in many countries assume that occupants will try to leave as fast as possible, and buildings are designed on the assumption that a crowd will behave like water pouring through an opening. Over the past sixty years, however, researchers who have examined the records of fires, floods and transport accidents have reached a different conclusion.

The sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, working in the United States from the 1950s, was among the first to test the idea against evidence. Reviewing reports of disasters, he found that the behaviour shown in films — competitive flight, people knocking others aside — was largely absent from the records. Survivors instead described helping strangers, searching for relatives and waiting for instructions. Later studies of fatal fires found that victims had generally not been crushed by a selfish mob; they had been trapped by smoke or by exits that would not open.

If people do not panic, why do evacuations so often take longer than the designers of buildings expect? The answer lies partly in uncertainty. An alarm is ambiguous: it may mean danger, but it may equally be a test or a burnt piece of toast. Before acting, people try to work out what is happening. They look at those around them, a process known as milling, and they look for confirmation from staff or from visible evidence such as smoke. This takes time, and it means that a crowd's response depends heavily on how the few people who understand the situation behave.

Where people go once they decide to move is also more orderly than the panic model predicts. In a study that has been widely cited since, the environmental psychologist Jonathan Sime examined the behaviour of people caught in a fire and found that they tended to head for the exit they had used on the way in, or for some other place that was familiar to them, even when another door was closer. People also tended to look for the friends or colleagues they had arrived with, and to leave as a group rather than alone.

More recent research has concentrated on how people treat one another during an emergency. The social psychologist John Drury has interviewed survivors of disasters, including the crush at the Hillsborough football stadium in 1989. Again and again, survivors described strangers pulling them free, sharing water and reassuring those in danger, and they spoke of a sudden sense of shared identity with people they had never met. Drury argues that this is more than simple altruism: under a common threat, the individual self is partly replaced by a collective one, and people who were strangers begin to act as members of a single group.

Surveys of survivors of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York provide some of the most detailed evidence available. In the two towers, many people did not begin to descend the stairs until several minutes after the buildings were struck. Some waited for instructions, while others finished a telephone call, saved a computer file or collected their belongings. Contrary to the popular image, researchers found little evidence of pushing on the stairs. Instead, people made space for those who were injured, passed water along and stepped aside for firefighters climbing in the opposite direction.

When serious injury does occur in a crowd, the cause is often not behaviour but physics. In a dense crowd the pressure between bodies can become strong enough to stop the lungs inflating, and people die of compression asphyxia while still standing upright, unable to fall. Such crushes arise not from panic but usually from poor crowd management: a gate left closed, a route narrowed by a barrier, or an event that begins before there is space beyond the entrance. Survivors commonly describe confusion and an inability to control their own movement, not a decision to trample others.

The practical consequences are considerable. If people need information rather than discipline, alarms should be accompanied by clear spoken instructions, and staff should be trained to direct others rather than to shout orders. Designers are urged to make the nearest exit obvious, because people use the routes they know. Experience also shows that rehearsal matters: staff who have taken part in a drill leave sooner and choose the nearest exit. Because people follow one another, a few individuals moving towards the stairs can start a general flow, a tendency sometimes called herding.

Much remains uncertain. Emergencies are, fortunately, rare and unpredictable, and it is impossible to run a controlled experiment in which a real building is filled with people and set alight. Research therefore relies on interviews carried out afterwards, sometimes years later, and survivors' recollections may be reshaped by what they have read or heard since. Buildings and cultures differ, so a finding from one country may not transfer to another. What is clear is that the old picture of the panicking crowd has survived not because the evidence supports it but because it makes a better story.

Science has never been short of prizes, but the past two decades have seen an extraordinary proliferation of them. The Nobel Prizes, established in 1901 under the will of Alfred Nobel, remain the most famous, while the Fields Medal, awarded every four years to a small number of mathematicians under the age of forty, carries comparable prestige in its own discipline. Alongside these, wealthy foundations and technology entrepreneurs have created awards with far larger sums attached. The Breakthrough Prize, founded in 2012, gives each of its winners three million dollars, several times the value of a Nobel. Similar awards now exist for medicine, energy and the environment, and new ones are announced almost every year. The question is whether all this money and attention encourages better science, or merely rewards people who have already succeeded.

Defenders of prizes make several arguments. The first is motivational: a substantial award provides an incentive for effort, and shows young people that a life in research can bring honour. The second is practical. A laureate finds it easier to raise funds for an unfashionable project, and universities compete to recruit prize winners because their presence raises the standing of the institution. A prize also brings media coverage of a kind that a journal article rarely attracts. The third argument is that prizes give the public a way into science, turning complicated work into a story about a person and a discovery.

Perhaps the strongest argument concerns information. The quality of scientific work is difficult for outsiders to judge, and even specialists disagree about which questions matter most. A prestigious award performs a useful function in this setting, because it condenses the judgement of a community into a signal that funders, journalists and governments can act on. Foundations often look at who has won what before they commit their money, and a prize can draw attention to a field that was previously ignored. Prizes also mark out the boundaries of a discipline, telling outsiders which kinds of work count as important. In this view, prizes are not a distraction from science but part of the machinery by which science is assessed.

Critics reply that the machinery is unreliable. In the 1960s the sociologist Robert Merton described what he called the Matthew effect in science: the tendency for eminent researchers to receive credit for work that others, often younger colleagues, have done. Merton noted that a well-known name on a paper attracts more attention than the content of the paper warrants, and that a discovery may be attributed to the senior author long after the contribution of a student has been forgotten. The structure of prizes reinforces the pattern. The Nobel rules allow a prize to be shared by no more than three people, yet a single paper in physics or medicine may have hundreds of authors; the award inevitably simplifies, and sometimes misrepresents, how the work was done.

There is also a question about what a prize does to the winner. The intuition is that recognition encourages further effort, but the evidence is less encouraging. Analyses of the publication records of Nobel laureates have found that their output does not rise after the award and may fall, as invitations, committees and administrative duties consume the time they once spent on research. Psychologists have long argued, moreover, that rewards offered for work that people already find interesting can weaken their internal motivation, a phenomenon usually called the overjustification effect, although whether this applies to scientists at the top of their profession is unclear.

Prizes may also change the direction of a whole field. Because awards tend to go to work on a small number of visible problems, researchers and funders shift resources towards those problems and away from others. A prize given for one technique can make it fashionable, so that young researchers adopt it before its limitations are understood, while less glamorous but essential work, such as the careful measurement of long-term outcomes, goes unrewarded. Fields acquire prestige from the awards attached to them, and lose it when the awards go elsewhere. The result is a research landscape shaped partly by the decisions of a small number of committees.

Then there is the question of who wins. In most scientific disciplines women form a minority of laureates, and the imbalance is not explained by the number of women now working in the field; it reflects decades in which women were largely excluded from universities and laboratories. Prize committees read a record that is itself shaped by unequal opportunities. Something similar can be said of researchers in low-income countries, whose work circulates less widely and is therefore less likely to be noticed by a committee meeting in Stockholm or Oslo.

What follows from all this? I do not think prizes should be abolished. The evidence that they motivate is weak, but so is the evidence that they do serious harm to science itself, and they give the public something to celebrate. What should change is their design. Awards that recognise a team rather than an individual, or that reward the open sharing of data and patient long-term work, would encourage the behaviour we say we want. So would spending the same money on researchers at the beginning of their careers, who need support far more than professors need another medal.