IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 435

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the towns around the Bay of Naples were destroyed, and Herculaneum, a small coastal town a few kilometres from the volcano, was buried under surges of hot gas, ash and rock that swept down the mountainside at great speed. Because this material was both hot and dense, it sealed buildings in a way that preserved wood, food and even textiles. Rooms were filled almost to their ceilings. Excavation began in the early eighteenth century, but for decades it was carried out by tunnels rather than open pits, and much was destroyed or dispersed.

In the 1750s a team of tunnellers working for the Bourbon court, which then ruled southern Italy, broke into a large villa on the seafront. Its rooms were full of marble and bronze, and in one small chamber the workmen found what at first appeared to be lumps of charcoal. These proved to be rolls of papyrus, the writing material of the ancient Mediterranean, reduced by heat to a dark and brittle mass. Several hundred were recovered, and more were found in later seasons; the total is usually given as close to 1,800.

The villa, known today as the Villa of the Papyri, was among the grandest private houses of the Roman world, laid out on terraces above the shore. Scholars believe it belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman senator whose family was linked by marriage to Julius Caesar, although the identification depends on an inscription found elsewhere and is not certain. The library is unique, being the only one to survive more or less intact from the classical world; almost everything else read in Greek and Latin today comes from copies made by medieval scribes centuries later.

Opening the scrolls has always been the difficulty. Carbonisation had fused the layers of papyrus, so any attempt to unroll a roll tended to break it apart. One early method was to cut a scroll in half and scrape away the inner layers, which destroyed part of the text but exposed enough for a reading. The results were published, but the cost was severe: hundreds of scrolls were ruined, and what survives of many consists of a few damaged strips.

The first person to make real progress was Antonio Piaggio, a cleric from Genoa employed by the court in Naples. He devised a machine in which a scroll hung from above, held open by threads and small weights, while a thin membrane was slowly peeled from its outer surface. The process was so slow that a single scroll could occupy months or years, and visitors came from across Europe to watch it. He opened only a handful of papyri, though modified versions of his machine were still in use two centuries later.

What the scrolls contain is almost entirely Greek prose, much of it by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher who settled in Italy in the first century BC. The texts include treatises on music, poetry, rhetoric and ethics, together with occasional verse and the marks of a working library: corrections, additions and duplicate copies. The collection suggests a wealthy Roman with intellectual interests and a Greek scholar in his household. Epicurean philosophy held that pleasure, understood as the absence of pain and disturbance, is the aim of life.

Reading the rolls without opening them became conceivable with high-resolution scanning. From the early 2000s a team at the University of Kentucky led by Brent Seales worked on methods that combine X-ray imaging of a scroll with computing that reassembles its coiled layers into a flat surface. In 2016 the team showed what the method could do by virtually unrolling a charred Hebrew scroll from En-Gedi, near the Dead Sea, and reading its text. The Herculaneum papyri proved harder, because their carbon-based ink barely shows up in X-ray images.

That gap was closed in 2023 by a competition. The Vesuvius Challenge, funded by technology investors, offered prizes to anyone who could extract text from scans released by the Kentucky team. Within months a student had identified a Greek word meaning 'purple' in one scan, and in early 2024 a team of three researchers won the principal award for producing several columns of continuous text. The passage turned out to be a discussion of pleasure, music and the good life, in which the author weighed the claims of food and song.

More text has continued to appear. The methods depend on machine learning, and the decipherers have had to teach themselves the shapes of letters that no living person has seen, using photographs of fragments opened in the eighteenth century as a guide. Pieces cut apart by early excavators are now being reunited in the same way, with lines recovered from one fragment and matched to another.

The library offers a rare chance to read the ancient world without the filter of medieval copying, and it raises an awkward question. Excavating the villa thoroughly would probably yield more books, but the site lies beneath a modern town, and digging would be expensive and destructive. Many scholars argue that, since the technology for reading carbonised texts is improving so quickly, any scroll not in danger of being lost should be left in the ground until the methods are better.

Sound travels through seawater at about 1,500 metres per second, roughly four times faster than in air, and it is absorbed far less than light. For an animal that spends its whole life underwater, this difference matters. Visibility in coastal water may be a few metres, and even in the clear ocean a dolphin cannot see a shoal of fish much beyond thirty metres. Sound, by contrast, carries a long way, and it reaches a dolphin from every direction, since hearing is not limited by the position of the eyes. Bottlenose dolphins, the species most often studied, live in groups whose membership changes constantly, and much of their acoustic behaviour can be understood as a way of keeping track of animals that are out of sight.

Dolphins produce three broad classes of sound. Whistles are tonal signals, typically lasting from a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds, whose frequency rises and falls in a smooth curve. Clicks are extremely short bursts of broadband energy, many of them at frequencies far above the limit of human hearing, and they are used chiefly for echolocation: a dolphin emits a stream of clicks and builds an image of its surroundings from the returning echoes. Burst-pulse sounds lie between the two, a rapid series of clicks that to a human ear resembles a creaking door. Whistles are generally treated as the communicative class, although the boundaries are not absolute, and clicks may carry information as well as revealing the sea floor.

The most striking discovery about dolphin whistles came from a simple observation: individual animals produce a distinctive pattern that stays remarkably constant, while other whistles vary. These signature whistles were first described in the 1960s, and they have since been studied in a wild population in Sarasota Bay, Florida, where individual animals have been followed for decades. A calf does not simply inherit its mother's whistle. Instead, during its first year it develops a pattern of its own, apparently by modifying elements heard around it until the result is unique. In effect, each dolphin invents a name for itself.

That interpretation rests on experiments. When a recording of a dolphin's own signature whistle is played through an underwater speaker, the animal typically turns towards the source and answers, whereas it pays much less attention to the whistle of another dolphin. Dolphins also copy. In several studies, animals have learned to reproduce the signature whistles of close associates, and males in particular appear to converge on the whistles of their alliance partners. The copies seem to function as a way of addressing a particular individual, and a dolphin that hears its own whistle copied may respond by approaching the speaker.

Not all dolphin signalling is tonal. Burst-pulse sounds are common in situations of conflict, when two animals compete for a mate or a position, and they are also exchanged between mothers and calves during the first months of life. Dolphins supplement sound with visible behaviour: they slap the surface with their tails, snap their jaws shut so that the sound carries through the water, butt one another with their heads and release streams of bubbles. Some of these actions are clearly aggressive; others, such as gentle rubbing with a pectoral fin, appear to maintain a bond between animals.

What makes dolphins unusual is that they can learn new sounds. Most mammals, including most primates, produce a fixed repertoire determined largely by inheritance; a monkey cannot be taught a new call. Dolphins, like parrots, songbirds, seals and humans, are vocal learners, able to modify the sounds they make in response to what they hear. This capacity is almost certainly a precondition for signature whistles, since a signal unique to the individual has to be invented rather than inherited. In captivity, dolphins have proved able to imitate artificial whistles and to match the rhythm of sounds played to them.

Whether any of this amounts to language is a different question, and one on which researchers divide. In the 1960s, claims that dolphins possessed a complex language with sentences and grammar attracted wide publicity, but they were not supported by evidence that could be checked, and few specialists now accept them. Current work looks for structure in sequences of whistles, asking whether particular combinations recur more often than chance and whether they change with context. So far the results are modest. Signature whistles identify the caller, and other whistles may convey excitement or co-ordinate a manoeuvre, but the signals do not show the hierarchical grammar that is the defining feature of human language.

Much remains unresolved. It is not certain, for instance, whether a signature whistle functions as a name in the human sense or simply as a contact call that happens to be individually distinctive, and the two explanations are hard to separate. New technology is changing the questions that can be asked: miniature tags record the sounds an individual hears as well as those it makes, and machine learning is being used to sort thousands of hours of recordings. The same tools are revealing how much of the dolphins' acoustic world is masked by the noise of shipping, a practical concern in waters where vessel traffic is heavy.

In 2014, state primary schools in England became obliged to teach a foreign language to children aged seven to eleven. Scotland had already adopted a policy of introducing two additional languages in the early years, and several other European countries begin a first foreign language at six or seven. The change rested on an assumption that few politicians questioned: that an earlier start produces better results. Anyone who has watched a seven-year-old imitate an accent and a fifteen-year-old memorise a verb table may feel the assumption is obvious. The research, however, is more equivocal than the policy suggests.

The case for an early start rests partly on the idea of a sensitive period in language development. Researchers who study how languages are learned in classrooms point out that children who begin a second language before adolescence, and who hear it regularly, usually end up with pronunciation closer to that of a native speaker than those who begin later. The same researchers observe that young children are less self-conscious about making mistakes, more willing to sing and repeat, and more likely to form a positive attitude to the language. They add, however, that neither tendency guarantees much will be learned in two short lessons a week.

Psychologists who study bilingual children offer a further argument, and here the evidence needs care. Children who grow up using two languages every day tend to perform somewhat better than monolinguals on tasks that require them to ignore distractions and switch between rules, and the psychologist Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues have documented such differences over several decades. But these studies concern children who are genuinely bilingual, educated and tested in both languages. A pupil who has two forty-minute lessons a week is not in that position, and no study has shown that such lessons produce measurable gains in attention.

Economists approach the question differently, by estimating the value of language skills in the labour market. Their findings are consistent: people who are fluent in a second language earn more, on average, than those who are not, and the premium is largest where the skill is scarce. The crucial word is fluent. The returns are concentrated among workers who can use the language professionally, and there is little evidence that a few years of primary teaching, on its own, brings anyone to that level. Whether the investment pays therefore depends on what happens after the age of eleven.

Teachers' organisations have been more cautious, and their concerns are practical. Primary teachers are generalists, and few have a degree in the language they are asked to teach. In England the requirement was introduced without a large increase in specialist provision, and many schools rely on staff who are themselves only a little ahead of their pupils. Lessons may be taken by a teacher who is not confident in the language, in a crowded timetable, and with little time for the training that would make them effective.

Critics of the policy make a different point, about opportunity cost. Time given to a foreign language is time not given to reading, arithmetic or science, and the primary day is finite. Some argue that the benefits claimed for early language learning are modest and uncertain, while the benefits of secure literacy are large and well established. They also point out that gains made in primary school are often lost when pupils move to secondary school, where the language may be taught again from the beginning.

The belief that younger is better owes much to research on immigrants. Studies of people who move to a new country in childhood consistently find that those who arrive before adolescence end up with accents closer to those of native speakers, and this result is often quoted in support of early schooling. But the comparison is imperfect. An immigrant child is immersed in the language for many hours every day, in the playground as well as the classroom, and has a strong practical motive to learn. A pupil who receives two short lessons a week has neither advantage. When researchers compare classroom learners who begin at seven with those who begin at eleven, the older group usually makes faster progress in grammar and vocabulary, at least for the first two or three years.

My own view is that the policy is defensible, but not for the reason usually given. The evidence that an early start produces better learners is weak; the evidence that it produces more willing ones is stronger. Certain conditions, however, matter more than age. The first is that the teaching should be done by people who are properly trained, whether or not they are specialists, and who are given time to prepare. The second is continuity: a primary programme that leads nowhere, or that is repeated word for word at secondary school, wastes the years it occupies. A third is simply time in the timetable; twenty minutes a week, whatever the age of the pupils, will achieve very little.

None of this means that age is irrelevant. Pronunciation, fluency and confidence are easier to acquire young. But the question that matters for policy is not whether a seven-year-old learns faster than an eleven-year-old; it is whether the lessons a seven-year-old receives are worth the hours they take. On the present evidence they can be, provided the conditions are right.