IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 459

In the middle of the dry plain that covers much of north-central Sri Lanka, a single mass of dark rock rises abruptly to a height of about 200 metres. This is Sigiriya, a name derived from the Sinhala words for 'lion rock'. Few places in Asia combine a royal palace, a religious community and an elaborate system of gardens on one site, and the rock's sheer sides, terraced paths and painted caves have made it one of the country's most visited monuments. UNESCO added it to its list of World Heritage Sites in 1982. The story of how it came to be built, however, begins with a quarrel over the succession to a throne.

According to the Culavamsa, a chronicle compiled by Buddhist monks on the island, King Dhatusena ruled at Anuradhapura and had two sons. Moggallana, the son of the chief queen, was the rightful heir; Kassapa, whose mother was a consort of lower rank, was not. In about 477 Kassapa seized the throne, and the chronicle relates that he had his father imprisoned and later walled up alive. Moggallana escaped to India and began gathering support. Kassapa, expecting his brother to return at the head of an army, needed a capital that would be difficult to attack.

He chose Sigiriya, and for the rest of his reign, which ended in 495, the court was based there. The summit of the rock, a plateau of about 1.6 hectares, was levelled and covered with buildings: the foundations of a palace, courtyards, bathing pools and a carved stone throne that still stands. Supplying water at that height was the hardest problem, and the builders cut cisterns into the rock to catch the rain. The palace walls are thought to have been plastered and painted white.

Visitors today climb a modern staircase, but the original route passed through the body of an enormous lion. On the northern face, two paws, each larger than a person, were carved out of the living rock, and a stairway climbed between them and up through the animal's mouth. The lion's head has not survived, and it is not known whether it was cut from the rock or built of brick and plaster. The name by which the site is known suggests that the whole figure once dominated the approach.

At the foot of the rock lie the water gardens, laid out on a symmetrical plan of pools, bridges and narrow channels. Their most remarkable feature is a set of fountains fed not by pumps but by underground conduits and changes in pressure; they still play during the heaviest rains. Above them, paths wind between huge boulders and then climb through terraces cut into the slope. The designers worked with the natural rock rather than against it, and the result is regarded as one of the oldest surviving examples of landscape design anywhere in the world.

High on the western face, in a sheltered pocket of rock reached by a spiral stair, are the paintings known as the Sigiriya frescoes. They show women, singly or in pairs, holding flowers or offerings. About twenty figures survive, but there may once have been several hundred, and the rest are believed to have been lost to weather long before the site was studied. The colours were made from earth pigments, and traces of them can still be seen on other parts of the rock. Who the women represent is unknown; suggestions include ladies of the court, attendants and celestial beings.

The path continues along a wall of brick covered in a plaster that was polished until it acted as a mirror, so that the king, it is said, could see his reflection as he walked past. This surface had a second life. Between the sixth and the fourteenth centuries, visitors scratched verses on it: short poems about love, about the beauty of the women in the paintings and about the difficulty of the journey. Well over a thousand of these inscriptions have been recorded, and because many of their authors give their names and occupations, they offer a rare glimpse of how people outside the court wrote and thought.

The end came quickly. Moggallana returned from India with an army, and the brothers met in battle on the plain below the rock. According to the chronicle, Kassapa's own forces deserted him, and rather than be captured he took his own life with a sword. Moggallana moved the capital back to Anuradhapura, and Sigiriya lost its royal purpose. It became a Buddhist monastery, occupied, with interruptions, until about the fourteenth century.

For several hundred years the state took little interest in the site, though local people knew it well. Systematic clearing began in the 1890s under H. C. P. Bell, an archaeologist employed by the colonial government, who removed vegetation and began to uncover the gardens. Excavation and conservation continued through the twentieth century, and parts of the water gardens were restored in the 1980s and 1990s. Today the greatest challenge is the number of visitors: several hundred thousand arrive each year, and their breath, their touch and the moisture they bring threaten the fragile paintings, which visitors are no longer allowed to photograph or touch.

To anyone who owns land beside one, a river looks like a permanent feature of the landscape. Over decades, however, most rivers on flat ground move sideways, and occasionally they abandon their channels altogether and take a new route across the countryside. Such changes have destroyed villages, wiped out farmland and redrawn administrative boundaries; the Kosi, which drains part of the Himalayas, has shifted many kilometres westward across the plains of northern India over the past two centuries. Shifting channels matter for another reason too, because a river leaves its old courses behind as wetlands, and the sediment it carries downstream is what builds deltas and sustains coastal fisheries.

A river crossing a plain rarely runs straight for long. Any small irregularity in the bank deflects the current, and once a bend has begun to form it tends to grow. Water moving round a curve does not travel at the same speed everywhere. It runs fastest near the outside of the bend, where it scours the bank and carries the loosened material away, and slowest near the inside, where it drops part of its load and builds a gently sloping bank of sand and gravel that geomorphologists call a point bar. The result is a meander that migrates: the outer bank retreats while the inner bank advances, and the whole loop travels slowly downstream. Rates vary enormously, from a few centimetres a year on some rivers to tens of metres on others, and a single large flood can do more work than several ordinary years.

As a meander becomes more pronounced, the strip of land between two parts of the same channel narrows. In a flood, when the river carries far more water than usual, it may break straight across this neck, shortening its route and leaving the old loop isolated. The abandoned loop gradually silts up and becomes an oxbow lake, named after the U-shaped collar of an ox yoke. Such lakes are common on floodplains: the lower Mississippi and many European rivers have dozens, at various stages of filling with mud and vegetation. Where the process has been repeated over centuries, the floodplain comes to look like a chain of curved scars, visible from the air and preserved in the layers of sediment beneath the fields.

A more drastic change is avulsion, in which the river leaves its channel altogether and establishes a new one, sometimes many kilometres away. The usual cause is the river's own sediment. Where a channel carries a heavy load, material settles on its bed and on the banks built up by earlier floods, so that the river eventually flows along a ridge above the surrounding plain; embankments, built to prevent flooding, raise it further. When a flood breaches the ridge at some weak point, water pours across the lower ground beyond, and if the new route offers a steeper or more direct path to the sea, the whole river may follow it within a few seasons. Earth movements and a rising or falling sea level can tip the balance in the same direction.

Avulsion is a normal part of life for rivers that reach the sea through a delta. There the channel divides repeatedly, and each branch carries a share of the flow until sediment blocks it and the water finds another way. The Mississippi has switched course many times over the past few thousand years, and engineers have long known that its present channel is not permanent. In the 1960s a control structure was completed to prevent its water from being captured by a neighbouring distributary, the Atchafalaya, which offers a shorter route to the Gulf of Mexico. Deltas also subside as their sediment settles, and because dams upstream now trap much of that sediment, many are sinking faster than they are being rebuilt.

People have tried to fix rivers in place for centuries, with levees, embankments and concrete walls, and such works can be effective for a while. But they alter the balance of erosion and deposition. A channel held between embankments cannot spread its sediment across the floodplain, so its bed rises faster, and in the rainy season the water may end up higher than the fields beside it; breaches then become more violent when they happen. Embankments are nevertheless popular with governments, because they protect land that is already farmed and are easy to present as a solution. In densely populated deltas, from Bangladesh to the Netherlands, the choice is rarely between a natural river and an engineered one, but between different kinds of engineering.

Predicting when a river will abandon its channel remains difficult. Records of past changes are short and uneven, and the quantity of sediment a river carries varies greatly from year to year in ways that are hard to measure. Written sources rarely describe more than a few centuries, and the layers of mud that record older channels are costly to investigate. Computer models can identify stretches that appear vulnerable, but the trigger is usually an exceptional flood, and no model can say when that will come. Researchers also disagree about how quickly a river settles into a new course, and about whether a warmer climate will make such events more frequent. On these questions the evidence is genuinely mixed.

Almost everywhere, cinema screens are dominated by films made in the United States. In most European countries Hollywood productions typically account for between half and three-quarters of box-office receipts, and in many smaller markets the share is higher still. Governments have responded in two broad ways. Some have tried to limit the presence of foreign films, usually through a quota on the number of days or screens they may occupy, or on how many titles may be released in a year; others have preferred to support domestic production with public money. The first approach restricts what audiences can see, and it is therefore the more controversial.

Defenders of quotas make three arguments. The first is economic: film production has high fixed costs, and a small domestic market cannot easily recover them, so a protected home market gives producers the volume they need to become competitive. The second is cultural: films carry a language and a set of references that a foreign industry will not supply, and a country that shows only imported films, it is argued, gradually loses the ability to tell its own stories. The third is political. In the trade negotiations of the early 1990s, France led a group of countries that insisted that audiovisual products should be treated differently from other goods and services. The principle became known as the cultural exception, and it was later given formal shape in a UNESCO convention on cultural diversity adopted in 2005.

The most cited test case is South Korea. From the 1960s the country required cinemas to devote a fixed number of days each year to Korean films, by the end of the period 146. For a long time the rule was associated with weak, imitative production; then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Korean films became both popular at home and successful abroad. In 2006, under pressure from the United States in negotiations over a trade agreement, the government halved the requirement to 73 days. Opponents predicted disaster. In fact the domestic share of the box office stayed high, and in some later years Korean films sold more tickets than all imported films combined. Supporters and critics of quotas read the episode in opposite ways, which suggests how difficult it is to isolate the effect of any single policy.

Critics reply that quotas treat a symptom rather than a cause. If audiences prefer foreign films, restricting supply simply reduces choice and raises prices, and the protected industry has little reason to improve. The history of the British quota, introduced in 1927 to secure screen time for domestic production, is often used in support of this view: it did increase the number of British films made, but many were cheap, hastily produced pictures made only to satisfy the rule, and the phrase 'quota quickie' entered the language. Protection, on this account, can freeze an industry at the level of quality it was meant to raise. Defenders answer that the British scheme was poorly designed rather than fundamentally mistaken, and that the films it generated did leave behind skills and studios that the industry later used.

The alternative is to leave the market open and to support production directly. France operates a system of this kind: a national centre for cinema administers funds raised from levies on cinema tickets and on broadcasters, and television channels are obliged to invest a proportion of their revenue in European and French films. More recently the European Union has required subscription streaming services to ensure that at least thirty per cent of the works in their catalogues are European. Such measures leave audiences free to watch whatever they like while making sure that money flows back into production. They are also less visible than quotas, which may explain why they attract less political attention.

The experience of Nigeria points in a similar direction. For decades the country had little cinema infrastructure and no protection worth the name, yet it developed one of the world's most prolific film industries, selling video productions directly to a mass audience. Its films were made cheaply and sold in markets rather than through cinemas, and the industry grew because it served people whom the formal cinema had never reached. Whatever its artistic limitations, the case shows that a domestic industry can grow where production costs are low enough and where there is a large audience willing to pay a little.

What, then, should governments do? My view is that quotas are a blunt instrument, justified only in narrow circumstances and only for a limited period. Where the obstacle is distribution — a handful of companies controlling which films reach which screens — a requirement that a share of screen time be reserved for domestic work can open a door that would otherwise stay shut. Where the obstacle is simply that domestic films are not good enough, a quota will not help and may do harm, because it removes the pressure that failure ought to create. Subsidies, training and investment obligations are slower and less dramatic, but they address the underlying problem. The test of any policy is not how many national films are made, but whether audiences see films they would otherwise have missed.