IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 436

For half a century before the First World War, the cheapest and most casual way of sending a message in Europe and North America was not a letter but a postcard. A small piece of stiff paper, sold already stamped, carried a few lines that anyone could read, and it cost a fraction of what a letter cost to send. The card was quick to write, needed no envelope, and could carry a picture as well as words. At the height of its popularity it was one of the most widely used forms of communication.

The first official postcard was issued by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1869. The proposal came from an economist in Vienna, who pointed out that a short written message required neither an envelope nor the labour of folding and weighing a sheet of paper, and that a much lower rate would attract a great deal of new business. The postal administration was persuaded. The card carried a printed stamp and cost about half the price of a letter, and it proved popular at once, particularly with people who had never written a letter in their lives.

Other countries followed quickly. Germany and Britain both introduced postcards in 1870, France following in 1873; in Britain the Post Office sold them across its own counters at half the price of a letter. These early cards were strictly functional objects. The cards themselves were plain: a printed stamp and a few ruled lines for the address were the only decoration, and the reverse side was left blank. Nothing about them suggested the commercial and sentimental value the postcard would soon acquire.

In 1878 the Universal Postal Union, the body that coordinates international mail, formally recognised the postcard, which meant that a card could be sent abroad for a fixed and modest charge. International correspondence by card grew quickly, and the picture side became a place where countries advertised themselves. Cards showing mountains, cathedrals and costumes were bought by foreigners and carried home as proof of travel.

The transformation began when private firms were allowed to print and sell their own cards. In Britain permission was granted in 1894, and publishers immediately began to experiment with illustrations: views of towns, humorous scenes, portraits of actors and members of royal families. Some cards reproduced paintings; others were designed to be amusing, sentimental or patriotic. The postcard had become a cheap luxury, and a large public was eager to buy it.

A technical change made the card far easier to use. Until the early 1900s the whole of the back was reserved for the address, so a sender who wanted to write a message had to squeeze it onto the picture side, often over the sky of a landscape or the wall of a building. Postal authorities then agreed to divide the back into two halves, one for the address and one for the message. Britain allowed the divided back in 1902, and the United States followed in 1907.

Much of the production was done by firms rather than by the photographer whose name appeared on the card. A local photographer made a negative, which was sent to a specialist printer; firms in Germany dominated the trade because of their skill in colour lithography, and a single negative could yield tens of thousands of copies. Colour might be added by hand, with a stencil, or by printing the image in several layers of ink. The subjects were ordinary: a main street, a market, a pier, a school. Because so much has since been demolished or rebuilt, these cards are often the only surviving record of a street that disappeared long ago.

Between about 1900 and 1914 the postcard enjoyed what is usually called its golden age. In Britain alone, hundreds of millions of cards were posted each year, and many more were bought to be kept. Families collected them in albums, arranged by country or subject, and shops in seaside resorts sold them to visitors for a penny or two. Publishers produced cards for every taste: comic scenes, cats, ships, flowers, royal weddings. Postcards were sent to announce an arrival, to tease a friend, to arrange a meeting, and above all to show that someone had been somewhere interesting.

Because anyone could read a postcard, messages were guarded. Senders wrote about the weather, their health and the journey, and promised to write at length when they got home. Intimate news was left for letters. This is one reason why postcards are so useful to historians of daily life and so disappointing to biographers.

The First World War interrupted both tourism and the manufacture of luxury goods, and the card never recovered its former position. After 1918 the telephone became steadily more common in ordinary households, letter post became faster, and the cheap snapshot camera allowed people to make their own pictures. The number of cards posted in Britain fell sharply and continued to fall for decades. By the middle of the century the postcard had been reclassified, in effect, as a souvenir rather than a means of correspondence.

Yet the picture postcard has never disappeared. Cards are still sold in museums, seaside shops and stationers, and tourists still send them, though far fewer than before. For the historian they remain a remarkable archive. They record clothes, shop fronts, advertisements and street furniture that nobody thought worth photographing for any other purpose, and they survive in enormous quantities, which is exactly what a historian wants.

A music box is a machine that stores a tune as a pattern of metal pins. It contains no recording, no electricity and no electronic circuit; the music exists in the precise position of thousands of tiny studs set into a rotating barrel, and it is produced by pieces of steel that are plucked, released and left to ring. Small versions were built into snuffboxes and watches, and larger ones into pieces of furniture; the largest were intended for public rooms, where their sound had to carry. Because the mechanism is entirely mechanical, the same box will play exactly the same notes a century after it was made, provided its parts are kept clean and its spring is sound.

The heart of the instrument is the comb: a single piece of hardened steel, cut along one edge into a row of parallel teeth of graduated length. Each tooth is fixed at its base and free at its tip, so it behaves like a cantilever beam. Shorter teeth vibrate faster and therefore sound higher, while longer ones give the bass notes. Tuning is done at the factory by removing a little metal from beneath the tip of each tooth, which alters its mass and thus its frequency. Once a tooth has been set vibrating, hardened steel has so little internal damping that the note may ring for several seconds.

The tune is stored on the cylinder, a brass barrel mounted parallel to the comb and turned by the clockwork. Its surface is studded with pins, each driven in at a carefully calculated angle and position. As the barrel rotates, a pin arrives beneath a tooth, lifts it and then slips past, releasing it. The tooth, left to itself, vibrates at its own fixed frequency. The spacing of the pins around the barrel determines rhythm, and their arrangement along its length decides which tooth is plucked; a full revolution of the cylinder plays one piece.

Power comes from a mainspring, a long ribbon of steel coiled inside a barrel at the opposite end of the instrument from the comb. Winding the spring through a key in the side of the case stores energy in it. The rim of the spring barrel carries gear teeth, and these drive a train of brass wheels that ends at the cylinder. A spring of this kind, however, does not deliver its energy evenly: its force is greatest when fully wound and weakest as it unwinds, and the difference can be considerable.

If the cylinder were connected directly to the spring, the music would start at a gallop and slow down as the spring ran out. The remedy is the governor, a small fan of angled brass vanes mounted on a spindle at one side of the mechanism and driven through a worm gear. As the fan spins, its vanes push against the air, and the resistance they meet rises with speed. The result is an equilibrium: the fan turns fast enough to absorb the surplus energy of the spring but not fast enough to run away. A version of the same device, known as a fly, controls the striking mechanism of a clock.

The teeth alone produce very little sound, because a thin strip of steel moves too little air to be heard across a room. Most of what a listener hears has been radiated by the bedplate, the brass plate on which the comb and the barrel are mounted, and by the wooden case enclosing the whole mechanism. The case is not merely a container: it is a resonator, and makers chose their woods and their dimensions with care. Some boxes also carry a damper rail, a bar covered in felt that can be lowered onto the teeth to silence them.

The instrument appeared in the late eighteenth century in the watchmaking region around Geneva. A watchmaker named Antoine Favre is generally credited with the crucial idea of substituting a row of tuned steel teeth, plucked by pins on a rotating cylinder, for the bells and hammers used in earlier musical automata. Production soon concentrated in the Swiss village of Sainte-Croix, where families of craftsmen cut combs and set pins by hand. In the earliest boxes the cylinder was fixed, so the instrument could play only the one tune built into it.

Later makers made cylinders that could be lifted out and replaced, so that one box could play several tunes, and from the 1890s steel discs with punched projections largely replaced the barrel, because a disc was far cheaper to stamp than a cylinder was to pin. Several questions remain unsettled. Acousticians still disagree about how much of the sound comes from the case and how much from the bedplate, and about why combs of apparently identical dimensions can differ so noticeably in tone. The temperament used by individual makers is also uncertain, since few left written records of their tuning.

Collectors today distinguish sharply between cylinder boxes and the later disc machines. The cylinder box has a warmer, softer tone, and each pin can be set to strike with a slight accent, so a skilled programmer could shape a phrase. Disc boxes are louder and more regular, but the punched projections wear, and a well-worn disc develops a characteristic clatter. Neither can vary its volume much: a note is either played or it is not.

Climate policy has three parts, and they are often confused. Mitigation means cutting the emissions that cause warming. Adaptation means preparing for changes that can no longer be avoided: higher sea walls, drought-resistant crops, early-warning systems. Loss and damage means everything that is left over when both have been attempted — the homes destroyed, the shorelines lost, the harvests that failed. Insurance cannot cover all of it. The question that has dominated international negotiations for more than a decade is who should pay for that residue, and on what grounds.

In 2009, at a fraught conference in Copenhagen, rich countries promised to mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer ones. The promise was vague in almost every respect: it did not say whether the money would take the form of loans or grants, whether existing aid could be counted towards the total, or how it would be divided between countries. In the event, the target was missed, and a large share of what was provided consisted of loans, which must be repaid with interest.

Loss and damage was handled separately. A mechanism was set up in 2013 to study the problem, but it had no money of its own. Then, in 2022, a conference in Egypt agreed to establish a fund, and governments began to pledge to it. The pledges were modest, amounting in total to a few hundred million dollars — a tiny fraction of the sums that studies of future damage suggest will eventually be needed. Campaigners celebrated a breakthrough; finance ministries in donor countries began to calculate what they might have conceded.

The moral case for payment rests on history. The atmosphere does not distinguish between a tonne of carbon dioxide released in Manchester in 1850 and a tonne released in Malawi last year; what matters is the total that has accumulated. The countries that industrialised first have therefore contributed most of the greenhouse gases now in the air, and they did so while growing rich. Many of the countries suffering most from droughts and rising seas have contributed very little. On any ordinary understanding of fairness, that asymmetry demands a response.

Opponents reply that the argument proves both too much and too little. Too much, because the responsibility of a nation whose citizens knew nothing of climate science in 1900 is not the same as that of a government that has understood the problem since the 1980s. Too little, because the money would come from current taxpayers in rich countries, some of whom are themselves poor, and because several vulnerable governments have spent decades subsidising the fuels that cause the damage.

The most powerful objection, though, is legal rather than economic. To accept that payments are owed as compensation is to accept a principle of liability, and liability has no obvious limit. Some governments fear a procession of claims, each supported by the growing science of event attribution, which estimates how much more likely a particular heatwave or flood was made by human influence. One may accept that science and still doubt that any court, or any treaty, could allocate responsibility for a single flood among a hundred emitters.

A second objection concerns incentives. If the cost of damage is borne by others, governments may build in the wrong places, neglect warning systems or continue to encourage development on exposed coasts. Economists call this moral hazard, and it is a real problem in insurance of every kind. But it is easily exaggerated here. Many of the most exposed states have tiny budgets and no realistic means of protecting themselves; the choice facing them is not between adaptation and dependence but between assistance and abandonment.

Practical objections are harder to dismiss. Money that arrives as a loan is not compensation but debt, and several small island states already spend more on servicing debt than on health. Aid that is relabelled as climate finance helps nobody, since it reduces the money available for clinics and schools. Donors also worry about corruption. Yet these are arguments for conditions and transparency, not arguments against payment as such, since exactly the same objections could be raised against any form of development assistance.

Nor is it obvious what should count as damage. A storm destroys a house that was insured; is the loss the value of the house, the cost of rebuilding it, or the rent its owners must now pay? Drought reduces a harvest, but part of that loss may reflect poor farming practice rather than the weather. Researchers who try to put a figure on loss and damage therefore produce ranges so wide that they are of little use to a negotiator, and the difficulty of measurement gives reluctant governments an excuse to delay.

My own view is that payment is justified, but that the vocabulary of compensation is a trap. Framed as damages, the money will always be negotiated in an atmosphere of accusation, and it will always be smaller than campaigners hope and later than they need. Framed instead as a form of insurance, with contributions calculated from cumulative emissions and payouts tied to agreed evidence, it becomes a question of design rather than guilt. The fund should give grants rather than loans, it should be predictable, and it should be judged by whether the money reaches the households for which it is intended.