IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 455

In the Deccan plateau of western India, about a hundred kilometres from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, a horseshoe-shaped cliff rises above a gorge cut by the Waghora river. Along its face, thirty caves were chiselled into the rock. They were numbered by nineteenth-century visitors, but the numbers say nothing about age: the oldest caves lie near the middle of the curve and the most celebrated are among the latest. The site is the finest surviving record of ancient Indian painting, and in 1983 it was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list.

The earliest excavation dates from the second century BCE, when this region was ruled by the Satavahana dynasty. Five caves were cut at that time, among them two large halls, Caves 9 and 10, intended for congregational worship. Their plan — a long nave, side aisles divided by columns and a rounded end containing a stupa, the mound that stood for the Buddha — imitates earlier structures built of timber and thatch, even to the rafters reproduced in stone. In these early caves the Buddha is never shown in human form. He appears instead as a wheel, a pair of footprints or a tree: symbols rather than portraits.

Then the work stopped. For roughly four hundred years the site seems to have been deserted, until a second campaign began in the fifth century CE, when the Vakataka dynasty controlled the region. This was the golden age of Ajanta: more than twenty caves were cut or enlarged within a few decades, an outburst of activity that scholars link to the reign of the Vakataka king Harisena and to the wealth of his court.

Rock-cut architecture of this kind needed no scaffolding. Masons began at the top of the cliff and cut downwards, shaping the ceiling before the walls and the floor and tipping the debris into the gorge. The clearest evidence of how the work proceeded is Cave 24, which was never finished: its floor is still rough, and the marks left by the tools allow archaeologists to reconstruct the sequence in which each part of a cave was carved.

Completed caves fall into two broad types. A chaitya is a hall of worship with a stupa at its far end; a vihara is a monastery, usually a square hall surrounded by small cells where monks slept and kept their few possessions. Some of the later excavations are enormous. Cave 26, a chaitya, contains a reclining figure of the Buddha some seven metres long, carved as he passes into final nirvana; the sculpture is generally understood to represent his death. In Cave 19, a chaitya of the same period, the facade above the entrance arch is covered with carved figures and a standing Buddha framed by ornament.

The paintings for which Ajanta is famous belong almost entirely to the second period. The walls of Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 carry scenes from the Jataka tales, stories of the Buddha's earlier lives, together with images of bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who postpone their own release in order to help others. The most reproduced image in Indian art is the figure in Cave 1 known as Padmapani, 'the bearer of the lotus', a bodhisattva who holds a blue lotus and stands with downcast eyes. In Cave 17 the walls are divided into panels narrating a sequence of stories.

The technique was laborious. Workers first covered the rough rock with a thick layer of clay mixed with rice husks, vegetable fibre and animal dung, which was left to dry and then smoothed. Over this came a thin coat of fine lime plaster. Pigments were applied to the dry surface with a binding medium, a method usually described as fresco-secco rather than true fresco, in which colour is absorbed by wet plaster. Because the paint sits on the surface it is extremely fragile, and much of what survives has lost its original brilliance.

As Buddhism declined in the region the monasteries lost their patrons and the site was abandoned, probably by the seventh century. Forest covered the cliffs, and the caves were known only to local people. In April 1819 a young British officer, John Smith, was hunting in the gorge when he noticed the arched window of Cave 10 above the trees. He climbed up and scratched his name and the date on a painted pillar, where the graffiti can still be seen: an act of vandalism that marks the start of the site's modern history.

News of the discovery brought visitors, and the government eventually ordered that the paintings be recorded. Copying them proved far harder than expected. The artist Robert Gill worked at the site in the 1840s and 1850s, but many of his copies were destroyed in fires, first in 1866 and again later. A second campaign in the early twentieth century, which included work by the painter Lady Herringham, produced more reliable records, though it too suffered from the deterioration of the originals.

Conservation has had its own misfortunes. In the 1920s a team of restorers applied a protective coating to many of the paintings in the hope of holding the pigment in place; in time the coating darkened and hid the colours, and removing it has been slow work. The greatest enemy today is humidity, together with the moisture released by the breath of visitors. Access to the most important caves is now controlled and visitors are admitted in small groups.

Anyone who has booked a hotel room online will recognise the message: 'Only one room left at this price.' Auction sites count down the final seconds of a sale; shops display the number of items remaining in a warehouse; ticket sites put a timer on a customer's basket. None of these devices is new. Limited editions, closing-down sales and 'while stocks last' were used by shopkeepers long before the internet. What has changed is the speed and precision with which a shortage can be signalled, and the fact that a claim of scarcity can now be generated automatically for every visitor to a website. Supermarkets reduce a price and add the words 'when it's gone, it's gone'; travel companies warn that a fare will rise at midnight. This article examines why such messages work, how they are produced, and where the evidence for their effectiveness is weaker than the people who sell them suggest.

Psychologists offer two explanations. The first is that limited availability carries information. If something is hard to obtain, we assume that other people want it, and we read their apparent enthusiasm as evidence of quality; a crowd outside a restaurant is a reason to join the queue. In the absence of better information, rarity serves as a shortcut to judgement. The second explanation concerns freedom. According to reactance theory, set out by the psychologist Jack Brehm in the 1960s, people value the ability to choose and resist any restriction placed on it. When an option is about to be withdrawn, the wish to keep it open grows stronger and the item itself becomes more attractive. Loss aversion, a concept developed by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, points the same way: losses weigh more heavily than equivalent gains, and missing a bargain that will never return feels like a loss. In each case the shortage itself is the message, and it is processed quickly, before any careful thought about whether it is true.

Experimental evidence supports both ideas, though it is patchier than the confident language of marketing textbooks implies. In a widely cited study carried out in the 1970s, volunteers were asked to rate the attractiveness of biscuits. Some were given a jar containing ten, others a jar containing only two. The biscuits in the nearly empty jar received higher ratings, and the effect was strongest when participants believed that the shortage had been created by demand from other people rather than by an accident in the laboratory kitchen. Later work has qualified this picture. Scarcity appears to be most persuasive for products that buyers already want, and for goods bought for pleasure or to display status rather than for routine use; a shortage of something nobody cares about is not a selling point. One reason for the patchiness is that such studies measure stated preferences rather than purchases made with real money.

Online retail has turned these findings into engineering. A stock counter can be linked to a real inventory or to nothing at all. Countdown clocks can be reset when they reach zero, and many are a design choice rather than a genuine deadline. 'Only one left' messages may refer to a particular size, colour or seller rather than to the product itself. Some sites show how many other users are looking at the same item, borrowing the social proof of a crowd; others send emails warning that a basket will soon expire. Because adding such a message costs almost nothing and the results are easy to measure, companies test different versions against one another and keep whichever produces more sales, a process that tends to select for urgency regardless of whether it is truthful. Some retailers argue that their figures are accurate and that customers gain from knowing that stock is low.

The tactic can also misfire. Customers who suspect that a deadline is fictitious may react against the seller rather than against the loss, so that reactance works in the opposite direction. A shortage may equally suggest that a product has failed: if nobody else wants it, there may be a reason. Marketing researchers have found that scarcity cues are weaker for goods that people buy mainly in order to fit in, because the value of such goods depends on their being widely adopted. Repetition matters too. A customer who hurries to buy on the first occasion may ignore the next warning, and a belief that a retailer invents its urgency is hard to undo once it has formed. The risk is greatest for brands that depend on a reputation for honesty, since one exposed fake countdown can cost more than the sales it generates.

Regulation is beginning to catch up. Consumer authorities in Europe and elsewhere have started to treat invented deadlines and false stock claims as misleading commercial practices, and online platforms have been required to explain how rankings and reviews are produced. Some regulators now require a firm to state the basis on which a stock figure or a price comparison has been calculated. Yet the honest answer to the question of how well scarcity works is that nobody knows precisely. Laboratory studies observe small groups of students making hypothetical choices; companies hold sales data but rarely publish it. What is clear is that the tactic draws on a real feature of human judgement, and that its power depends on customers not asking too closely why the offer is about to end.

For most of the history of money, the question of whether to use cash did not arise. Notes and coins were the only means of payment available to ordinary people, and the alternatives — cheques, then cards, then transfers — were additions rather than replacements. That has changed. In Sweden, where the decline of cash is furthest advanced, the central bank has reported that notes and coins now account for a small and shrinking share of payments, and a growing number of shops refuse to accept cash at all. The resulting debate is often presented as a contest between progress and nostalgia. It is nothing of the kind. The real questions are who bears the costs of each payment system, and who is protected when one of them disappears.

The case for moving away from cash begins with cost. Notes and coins must be printed or minted, counted, transported under guard, stored in safes and insured, and the expense is borne by banks and retailers before being passed on to customers. Handling cash takes time at the till. Cash is also, for the same reason, attractive to those who wish to avoid records: it is the preferred medium of the informal economy, of tax evasion and of robbery. Electronic payments leave a trail and make it possible to sell online. On these grounds some economists argue that a rapid transition would raise productivity and reduce crime. Small retailers reply that card processing fees take a slice of every sale, while cash costs them nothing per payment.

The difficulty is that a payment system is not a product that can simply be withdrawn when a better one appears. The World Bank's Global Findex database has estimated that well over a billion adults still have no account at a bank or similar institution. Many are poor, rural or informally employed; others are elderly, disabled or recent migrants. In rich countries the number is smaller but not negligible, and it includes people who have accounts but cannot use them with confidence. A society that accepts only digital payments does not merely inconvenience such people. It excludes them from buying food, paying a bill or receiving wages.

Researchers who study low-income households describe a 'poverty premium': those outside the banking system pay more, in money or in time, for the same services. They travel further to pay a bill in person, pay a fee to a shop that cashes a cheque, or rely on a relative's card. Removing cash does not create this disadvantage, but it deepens it, and it makes the disadvantage harder to see, because only the digital transactions remain visible.

Privacy is the second objection. Cash is the only common means of payment that leaves no record of who paid whom. Every card or phone transaction, by contrast, produces data that are stored, combined with other data and often sold. Campaigners concerned with civil liberties argue that a fully digital system would give governments and companies an unprecedented picture of daily life, and that the mere existence of such records changes behaviour. Banks and technology firms reply that fraud is easier to detect when payments are traceable, and that customers have accepted a similar trade-off in most other areas of life.

A third argument is more practical. Digital payments depend on electricity, telecommunications and the computer systems of a handful of institutions. These fail from time to time, and when they do, shops that no longer keep a cash float cannot trade at all. Central banks have taken the point. Several are investigating digital currencies of their own: the Riksbank has piloted a digital krona, the European Central Bank has been preparing a digital euro, and the Bank of England has consulted on a digital pound. Their motives include efficiency, but also the wish to provide a public means of payment that does not depend on a single private network.

Governments have begun to legislate. In Britain the financial regulator has been given a statutory duty to protect reasonable access to cash, and several countries now require shops that sell essential goods to accept it. These measures are modest, and none guarantees that cash will remain widely used, since people can only spend what banks and cash machines provide. They nevertheless mark a recognition that access to payment is infrastructure rather than a private service, and that infrastructure is judged by what happens when it fails.

How quickly the shift will continue is genuinely uncertain. Demand for cash rose in several countries during the financial crisis of 2008 and again during the pandemic, even as its use in shops fell, which suggests that people value it as a store of precautionary wealth. Predictions of a completely cashless economy have been made for twenty years and have not yet come true in any large country.

My own view is that the aim should be to reduce dependence on cash, not to abolish it. Cash should be treated as a form of public infrastructure, available to anyone who needs it and accepted wherever essential goods and services are sold. Digital payments should be required to work when the network is down, and rules on data should limit how transaction records are used. A society that cannot pay for a loaf of bread during a power cut has not modernised; it has merely transferred risk from the state to the individual. The question, then, is not whether we should stop using cash, but what we should keep it for.