IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 452

Few ingredients seem more thoroughly European than the tomato, yet the plant reached the continent only after 1492, when contact with the Americas began. Its wild ancestors grew along the western edge of South America, in the Andes, but the tomato itself was domesticated much further north, in what is now Mexico, and Spanish ships carried seed from there across the Atlantic. Even the word is American: 'tomato' derives from tomatl, the name used in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico.

The first written description of the tomato in Europe dates from 1544, when the Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli discussed it in a commentary on an ancient botanical work. He named it mala aurea, the golden apple, and noted that the fruit was already being eaten in parts of Italy, where cooks fried it in oil and seasoned it with salt and pepper. Within a generation, then, the plant had moved from curiosity to kitchen in the Mediterranean, while in northern Europe it remained unknown as food for far longer.

The names given to the fruit reveal how it was understood. Italians called it pomodoro, golden apple, and the French pomme d'amour, love apple, a phrase that later gave rise to the belief that the fruit was considered an aphrodisiac. Early European varieties were in fact yellow or pale, so the association with gold was reasonable; red types became dominant only later.

In northern Europe the plant was treated with caution. Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, the same botanical group as deadly nightshade, henbane and tobacco, all of which were known to be dangerous, and a resemblance between the tomato and some of its relatives was enough to raise doubts about the fruit. English herbals of the late sixteenth century listed the tomato among these plants, and many readers drew the obvious conclusion. For a century or more, tomatoes were grown in northern gardens for their appearance rather than their taste.

In Spain and southern Italy, by contrast, the fruit was eaten from an early date. Seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian cookbooks include it in soups, stews and sauces, and the surplus crop was preserved by drying and pressing it into a thick paste that would keep through the winter. Even in Italy, however, the tomato was not yet the everyday food it later became; pasta with tomato sauce became widespread only in the nineteenth century.

Northern Europe and North America came round to the tomato slowly. In the eighteenth century it was still chiefly a garden plant in Britain, and although growers in the southern states of North America were cultivating it for the table before 1800, the belief that the fruit was unwholesome lingered in rural districts for decades. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, it was being sold in city markets on both sides of the Atlantic, and the old fears had largely faded.

Two changes secured the tomato's place in ordinary cooking. The first was canning. From the middle of the nineteenth century, tomatoes could be sealed in tins and glass jars, which made them available all year and allowed them to be shipped in bulk; canned tomatoes became a standard item in shops and army rations. The second was migration: large numbers of Italians settled in the United States and northern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bringing the sauces and pastes of their home regions with them.

Meanwhile, a quite different product emerged in the United States. Ketchup had originally been a thin sauce made from mushrooms, walnuts or anchovies, in imitation of preserved fish sauces imported from Asia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, tomato replaced these ingredients as the base, sugar was added, and the thick red condiment now familiar took shape. By 1900 it was to be found in kitchens across the country.

The tomato is a useful source of vitamin C and of lycopene, the pigment responsible for the red colour of ripe fruit. Lycopene is absorbed more readily from cooked tomatoes than from raw ones, because heating breaks down the cell walls that lock the pigment inside, which may help to explain why sauces and pastes feature so heavily in Mediterranean cooking. Whether these compounds deliver all the health benefits claimed for them is still being investigated.

Today the tomato is one of the most widely grown crops in the world, and the largest producers are in Asia. In northern Europe, most fruit is grown under glass, where heat, light and water can be controlled and tomatoes can be picked throughout the year; the glasshouses of the Netherlands are among the most productive anywhere. Elsewhere the old suspicion has given way to enthusiasm of a different kind. In the Spanish town of Buñol, a festival first held in 1945 now sees thousands of people throw tomatoes at one another every August.

Yet abundance has brought a complaint that growers know well. Commercial varieties are bred to ripen evenly and to survive long journeys, and growers in the twentieth century selected for appearance and firmness at the expense of flavour. Researchers have identified a genetic change that makes the colour of fruit more uniform but also lowers its sugar content, and older, less tidy varieties are now sought out by cooks who value taste above appearance.

Most of us experience memory as a kind of recording: an event happens, it is stored, and later we play it back. Psychologists have known for the best part of a century that this picture is wrong. The British psychologist Frederic Bartlett, working at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s, asked students to read a North American folk tale containing ghosts, canoe journeys and customs that were strange to them, and then to reproduce it from memory at intervals over the following months. The versions they produced became steadily shorter and more orderly. Unfamiliar details were quietly dropped, motives were made to fit English habits of thought, and the story turned into something the rememberer could comfortably explain. Bartlett concluded that remembering is not retrieval of a fixed record but an act of construction, in which past experience and present expectations are combined.

Later research confirmed the practical consequences. From the 1970s onwards, psychologists studying eyewitness testimony showed how easily a memory can absorb information supplied after the event. In one much-cited series of experiments, volunteers watched a film of a traffic accident and were then asked questions about it. The wording of a question changed what they later remembered: those asked how fast the cars were going when they 'smashed' into each other gave higher speeds than those asked about the cars 'hitting' one another, and a week later were more likely to report broken glass that had never appeared in the film. A suggestion contained in a question had become part of the memory itself, indistinguishable from what had been witnessed. The effect is not confined to laboratory films; it has been found in studies of witnesses to real crimes and accidents.

Neuroscience has offered an explanation. Forming a memory involves strengthening connections between nerve cells, and for a long time this was thought to happen once, at the moment of learning. Work on animals published around 2000 suggested something more surprising: when a memory is recalled, it becomes temporarily unstable and has to be rebuilt, a process known as reconsolidation. In experiments with rats, researchers trained the animals to fear a particular sound, then played the sound and immediately gave a drug that blocks the production of proteins in the brain. The fear seemed to vanish and did not return. The implication was striking, since it suggested that a memory might be altered at the very moment it was being used. The work also helped to explain why reminders of an event can be so powerful.

The social side of memory has attracted increasing attention. In ordinary life memories are rarely rehearsed in silence; they are told to someone. Each telling is an opportunity for revision. Listeners react, ask for clarification, lose interest in certain details and enjoy others, and the teller adjusts accordingly. Studies in which participants retell the same incident to several different people have found that successive versions become smoother, shorter and more consistent with the teller's current view of themselves, while details that do not fit that view tend to disappear. There is a further twist. As retelling makes an account more fluent, the teller's confidence in it usually rises, even though its accuracy may be falling. This pattern appears in studies of dramatic public events, where people's certainty about where they were and how they heard the news has remained high for years while their accounts have quietly diverged from the facts.

How far these findings apply outside the laboratory is genuinely unresolved. Reconsolidation is well established in animals, but demonstrating it in people is difficult: it is not possible to give human volunteers drugs that interrupt protein production in the brain, so researchers must rely on indirect methods, and the results have been mixed. The idea that a memory can be 'erased' or rewritten at will, which appears regularly in popular accounts, is not supported by the evidence. Nor is it settled whether retelling helps or harms. Recalling something is one of the most effective ways of fixing it in mind, and a story retold to an attentive listener may become more durable as a result; retold to an audience that supplies new and wrong details, the same story may become less accurate. Both effects have been demonstrated, and which dominates seems to depend on the circumstances.

The practical implications are considerable. Courts have begun to take account of the fact that a confident witness is not necessarily a reliable one, and in some countries the first account a witness gives is recorded as soon as possible, precisely because later interviews alter it. Historians who collect oral testimony are advised to notice how a narrative changes between tellings rather than to treat the most polished version as the truest. In clinical settings the picture is more complicated still. Talking through a distressing experience can be valuable, but single sessions in which survivors are encouraged to describe a traumatic event in detail shortly after it happened have not been shown to prevent later problems, and some researchers have raised concerns that they may do harm. The memory of an event, it seems, is less a possession than a habit of telling.

The idea is simple enough. A school, or a wealthy donor, offers students money for good results: so many pounds for an A, rather less for a B, perhaps a bonus for perfect attendance. The sums involved are modest by the standards of education budgets, the scheme is easy to explain to parents, and its effects can be measured in a single examination season. Small wonder that cash incentives have been tried in cities from New York to Delhi. Yet the more such schemes are studied, the less straightforward their results appear, and the argument about whether they belong in schools at all has become one of the sharper disputes in education policy.

The case for paying students is made most confidently by economists, who see the classroom as a setting in which the ordinary logic of incentives applies. A pupil who works hard pays a cost now - effort, boredom, time that could be spent otherwise - and receives a reward only years later, in the form of better qualifications and a better job. Since young people are notoriously impatient, many will underinvest in their own futures unless something makes the return more immediate. On this account, cash is simply a way of bringing the reward forward. Economists who take this view add that the payment has to be large and prompt; a token sum that arrives months later changes nothing.

The evidence, however, has been unkind to the simplest version of the theory. When large-scale trials paid students for grades, the gains were small or undetectable, and in some cases achievement did not move at all. The schemes that produced real improvements were different in an important respect: they paid for inputs rather than outputs.

A programme that rewarded students for reading books, turning up to lessons or completing homework produced better results than one that rewarded the final grade. Two explanations have been offered. The first is that students know what reading is and can do more of it, but do not know how to raise a grade directly. The second is that paying for an outcome over which a pupil has only partial control is close to paying for luck.

Psychologists who study motivation raise a deeper objection. Their research suggests that rewards work best for tasks that are dull and repetitive, and can be counterproductive for activities that people already find interesting. In a series of experiments from the early 1970s, students who were paid for solving puzzles lost interest in them once the payment stopped, while those who had received nothing continued to play. The explanation usually given is that payment changes the reason for doing something: an activity freely chosen becomes a job done for money. If the same shift occurs in learning, cash could make the very pupils who are already curious less inclined to study for its own sake.

Teachers' organisations have been more concerned with what schemes cost in practice. Someone has to verify that a grade has been earned, keep records, distribute money and handle appeals, and all of this falls on schools already short of administrative staff. There is also the risk of distortion: where a payment depends on the grade a teacher awards, there is an obvious pressure to award higher grades, and the resulting inflation makes the measure worthless. Some school leaders add a further objection, that a pupil who is paid for an A has been told, in effect, that the learning itself was not worth the effort.

Questions of fairness cut both ways, which is why they are the most difficult to settle. One camp argues that cash rewards are regressive: a student whose parents can afford books, a quiet room and a tutor is far better placed to earn them than one who is working evenings to support a family, so the scheme hands public money to those who need it least. Others reply that this is an argument for targeting payments on the poorest students, who respond most to small sums. Both sides agree that rewards do nothing to change the conditions in which children study.

My own view is that the economists have misidentified the problem. The return to effort is not too distant; it is too uncertain. A pupil who does not believe that studying will lead anywhere has little reason to respond to any incentive, however prompt, and the evidence from the trials suggests that precisely these pupils gain least from cash. What does appear to change outcomes is the quality of what happens in classrooms, from which it follows that the money would be better spent on teachers, tutoring and materials than on prizes. Small incentives for specific habits, such as reading at home, may have a modest part to play. Paying for grades is another matter, and I doubt it will ever be shown to work on a large scale.

None of this means that the experiment should not have been tried; a policy that sounds plausible should be tested, and the trials have taught us a good deal about how little we know. But schools should be wary of the attractions of the scheme: it is cheap to announce, easy to measure and photogenic for its sponsors. The question worth asking is narrower and more awkward than whether to pay for grades. It is which pupils, at what age, and for what, money might actually change.