IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 456

Shortly after nine o'clock on a weekday morning, the platforms of Mumbai's suburban railway stations fill with men in white cotton caps, each balancing a wooden crate on his head, and the crates are stacked with cylindrical aluminium containers, clipped together in bundles and marked with symbols in quick-drying paint. These men are dabbawalas, and the tins they carry hold the midday meals of office workers across the city.

The service exists because of a mismatch between where people live and where they work, as Mumbai's commuter trains are among the most crowded in the world and many office workers travel for an hour or more in each direction. Few can go home at midday, yet many prefer food cooked at home, for reasons of cost, diet and religion, to anything a canteen offers. The dabbawalas bridge that gap. The work is usually traced back to 1890, when a small group of men began carrying lunches from homes near the docks to offices in the commercial district. It has continued, with interruptions, ever since.

A lunch box begins its journey at the door of a flat, where a dabbawala collects it between about half past nine and half past ten. Each man gathers thirty or forty boxes, loads them onto a bicycle or a handcart and takes them to his local station, where they are sorted by destination and packed into crates. Trains carry the crates across the city; at the destination station another team unloads them and sorts them again, this time by building. The boxes are delivered to individual desks before half past twelve. In the afternoon the process runs in reverse, and the empty tins are back in the kitchens by early evening. The association estimates that around 200,000 boxes are moved each working day by roughly 5,000 men.

What makes the system work is not technology but a coding scheme. On the lid of each tin, a worker paints a small group of characters. A letter or number indicates the station where the box was collected, another indicates the station where it must be delivered, and further marks identify the building and the floor. Colours carry meaning too, allowing a man to read a stack of tins at a glance without stopping to decipher each one. Because many of the earliest workers could not read, the scheme was designed to be recognised rather than read, and it still relies on pattern and memory rather than literacy.

The dabbawalas are not employees of a company. They belong to a charitable trust, and the work is organised in teams of about twenty-five to thirty men, each attached to a station. Every member of a team owns a share of the work rather than drawing a wage, and the money from each day's deliveries is divided according to the shares held. Recruits are usually drawn from villages in the hills inland from Mumbai, and a place on a team is often passed from father to son. A new man learns the routes by walking them for weeks with an experienced colleague before he is trusted with a crate of his own.

Reliability is the quality for which the service is best known. The association has long maintained that a box is very rarely lost or delivered to the wrong address. It quotes a figure of one mistake in several million collections, though the claim is difficult for outsiders to verify, and business magazines have compared the operation to Six Sigma, the standard of near-perfection that manufacturers aim at. The trust has also obtained ISO 9001 certification, an achievement unusual for an organisation that owns no computers.

The physical demands are considerable. Crates are heavy, platforms are crowded, and the monsoon drenches the city for weeks at a time, so boxes are wrapped in plastic sheeting and carried through water. Trains break down, and when a line is blocked the men must find another route without losing time; on the busiest services they must board carriages that are already full.

More recently the service has had to adapt. Competition from app-based food delivery, which promises a hot restaurant meal within half an hour, has changed expectations, although it has not replaced home cooking. When the pandemic halted the trains in 2020 the dabbawalas stopped work for months, and many returned to their villages; rebuilding the teams afterwards took considerable effort.

Business schools study the dabbawalas as an example of a logistics network that coordinates thousands of movements a day without a central database. The code on the lid does the work that a computer would do elsewhere. Delegations of managers travel to Mumbai to watch the sorting at a station at half past ten in the morning. Visiting executives have joined a round of deliveries, carrying a crate up a staircase to see the system from the inside.

Yet the dabbawalas matter for a simpler reason. The lunch box is a link between a kitchen and a desk, and the man who carries it knows both. In a city where millions of people have left the place they grew up, that connection has a value that no delivery app can claim to measure. The system has survived for more than a century because it does one thing well, and because everyone in it understands exactly what that thing is.

A fleece, a bale of cotton or a bundle of flax has virtually no structural strength of its own. The fibres themselves are short and smooth, and nothing in the bundle resists a steady pull. Pulled gently at both ends, it immediately disintegrates, because the individual fibres slide over one another instead of gripping. Yarn is what happens when those fibres are laid roughly parallel and then twisted. Friction between them then gives the whole assembly a strength that no single fibre could supply on its own.

Before anything can be twisted, the raw material must be thoroughly cleaned and separated, so that wool loses its grease and cotton its seeds. The fibres are then carded between two flat surfaces studded with fine wire, so that the mass is opened into a loose, airy web and rolled into a soft cylinder known as a rolag. For finer yarn the fibres are combed instead, which removes the short ones and leaves the long ones lying parallel. The result is a loose rope of fibre, called roving, ready to be drawn out and twisted.

Twist is the heart of the process. As the end of the roving rotates, the twist runs back along it and locks the fibres into a helix, each one pressing against its neighbours. A yarn needs enough twist to resist the loom or the knitting needle, but not so much that it kinks back on itself. The amount is measured as the number of turns per unit of length, and the figure that suits a yarn depends on the fibre and its purpose. Twist also has a direction, conventionally called S or Z, and plied yarns are twisted the opposite way so that the finished cord stays balanced.

A treadle wheel, a familiar exhibit in museums, is operated by the spinner's foot. The treadle is a broad pedal hinged at the back. Pressing it turns a crank, and a slender rod called the footman carries the movement up to the rim. The rim is the large circular frame that gives the machine its name, and its groove holds the drive band, the cord that also runs around the whorl at the front. Because the whorl is small, a wheel drives the spindle much faster than the rim, and a typical ratio produces thirty turns of the spindle for every revolution of the rim.

The spindle is a slender shaft that rotates in bearings. Around it runs the flyer, a curved arm that turns with the spindle and carries the yarn round with it. The yarn passes first through a small hole, the orifice, at the centre of the flyer. It then goes out to the bobbin, the spool on which the yarn is wound, which sits loosely on the spindle and turns independently of the flyer. Twist is inserted in the short stretch between the spinner's fingers and the orifice, and the rotation of the flyer carries it away from the hands and along the new thread.

Winding the yarn onto the bobbin is the part that puzzles most visitors. If the bobbin turned at the same speed as the flyer, nothing would be wound, because there would be no difference between them. It is therefore arranged to turn at a slightly different speed, either by a separate whorl, which makes it run a little faster than the flyer, or by a brake band, which holds it back so that it runs a little slower. That small difference in speed pulls the yarn steadily onto the spool. Meanwhile the spinner's hands do nothing but draft, sliding the fibres past one another to make the yarn thinner, and moving back and forth to let more twist in or to draw more fibre forward.

Spinning with a weighted spindle is thousands of years old, and the wheel is a later invention that reached Europe in the Middle Ages. The earliest European wheels were simple. A spindle was turned by a band from a large wheel, with no flyer at all, so that the spinner had to stop and wind the yarn on by hand. The addition of the flyer, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, made spinning continuous, and the treadle freed both hands for the fibre. In India the charkha, a small wheel-driven spindle, became a political symbol when Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own cloth in the 1920s and 1930s.

Industrial spinning originated in eighteenth-century Britain. James Hargreaves's spinning jenny, in the 1760s, multiplied the number of spindles one worker could drive. Arkwright's water frame used rollers to draft the fibre, and Crompton's mule later combined both approaches. Together they transformed spinning from a domestic occupation into an industrial process.

Textile scientists can describe the geometry of twist. The friction between individual fibres, however, changes as they are pressed together and as the yarn is pulled. That behaviour is notoriously difficult to model mathematically, and it depends on humidity and temperature as well as on the material itself. So the settings that suit one fleece in one building may disappoint the same spinner on a damp day, and rules of thumb remain partly empirical. The ratio between the wheel and the whorl can be calculated precisely; the behaviour of the fibre, unfortunately, cannot.

One push of the foot supplies both the twisting and the winding, and the hands are free to draft. A well-made wheel from 1800 would still be immediately intelligible, and entirely usable, to a spinner today.

A drone lowering a parcel onto a balcony is no longer a novelty, and regulators in several countries have authorised limited commercial flights, while retailers promise delivery within minutes and engineers describe a future sky busy with small aircraft carrying medicines, groceries and mail. The question is no longer whether the technology works, but whether cities should permit it at scale, and on that question reasonable people disagree sharply.

Much of the argument is conducted as though the choice were between a ban and an open sky. I think that is the wrong way to frame it. The useful questions are narrower: which flights, carrying what, over whose homes, under what conditions, and for how long before the licence is reviewed. Once the debate is put in those terms, some flights become easy to defend and others very hard.

The environmental case is more complicated than it first appears. A small quadcopter uses electricity rather than petrol, and because it flies in a straight line it avoids the congestion that makes a van's engine idle at the kerb. Comparisons of energy use, however, mean very little unless the payload and the number of parcels carried on each trip are taken into account. A van that delivers fifty parcels in one round may consume less energy per parcel than fifty separate drone flights, each carrying one item. Battery weight also limits what a drone can carry and how far it can go.

The most persuasive uses are not shopping deliveries at all. In Rwanda, drones have carried blood supplies to hospitals since 2016, and trials in several countries have tested whether a defibrillator can reach a patient in cardiac arrest before an ambulance does. Here the technology is doing something that roads and traffic make difficult or slow. But the case is strongest precisely where the roads are poor and the distances long. A city with a hospital on every other corner gains much less from a drone carrying a pair of shoes, and a health service that can already reach its patients in eight minutes gains little from shaving two minutes off that time.

Safety is a real concern, though it is often discussed as though the only acceptable risk were none. A delivery drone has several rotors, and designers must show what happens when one fails; aviation authorities generally require redundancy, and some operators fit parachutes that bring a failing aircraft down slowly. The question worth asking is not whether a drone can fall but how its failure rate compares with the risks a city already accepts from vans, bicycles and scaffolding, and that comparison needs data, which at present are thin.

Of all the objections, noise seems to me the most serious. The rotors of a multirotor produce a high-pitched whine that carries much further than the size of the aircraft suggests, and because drones fly low, the sound arrives directly at bedroom windows. A single delivery lasts a few seconds and is easy to dismiss. A thousand deliveries a day along the same route is a different matter: the noise becomes continuous, and researchers who study environmental noise have long known that intermittent sounds which cannot be predicted are among the most irritating of all. Blade design and flight paths can reduce the problem, but they cannot remove it.

Privacy raises a related difficulty, because many delivery drones carry cameras, and some map the ground beneath them in order to navigate, and a device that hovers outside a fourth-floor window is, whatever its purpose, a device that can see in. The legal position is unsettled: in most countries the airspace above a house is not owned outright by the householder, and the rules that govern aircraft were written for machines that fly far higher and pass over in an instant.

The economics are usually oversold. Delivery companies spend a substantial share of their costs on the final stretch between a depot and a customer's door, and flying a parcel across that stretch plainly saves labour. Whether those savings reach the customer is another matter, and it is reasonable to expect operators to serve the districts where orders are plentiful and streets are easy to find before they serve the outskirts. Some economists also point out that the gains should be weighed against the jobs of the couriers whose rounds would shrink.

A city, in my view, should license drones rather than ban them, but the licence should be strict. Flights could be confined to corridors above railways, warehouses and industrial land, so that machines do not pass over gardens and playgrounds. Noise should be capped at the façade of the nearest home and measured over a full day rather than a single flight. Medical and emergency payloads should be considered first, ordinary shopping last. Permission should be conditional, limited in time, and renewed only in the light of published evidence about incidents, noise and complaints.

A city that refuses every licence forgoes benefits that are already within reach, and it will find that the aircraft fly anyway, at the edges of its authority. A city that permits everything, with no evidence and no review, will lose the argument with the residents it is meant to protect. I see no prospect of drones replacing the van; they will carry a small fraction of parcels. The choice is not open sky or closed sky. It is between a rule book and a free-for-all.