IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 463

Of all the craft devised by the peoples of the Arctic, none is more elegant than the kayak. A narrow, decked boat propelled by a double-bladed paddle, it was used for hunting along coasts and rivers from Greenland and Canada to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The word comes from Inuit languages; in Greenlandic the boat is a qajaq. Where the larger open umiak carried families and goods, the kayak carried a single hunter, and it was built for stealth: it moved almost silently, sat low in the water and could be paddled for hours through rough seas.

The materials available were few. Timber was scarce across most of the Arctic, so builders relied on driftwood carried north by great rivers, and where wood was unobtainable they used bone and antler. The frame was held together with pegs and with lashings of sinew, since metal fastenings were unknown. The finished skeleton was covered with skins, preferably those of the bearded seal, whose hide is thick and hard-wearing; in some regions walrus hide was used instead. The women who made the covers stitched them with sinew thread, using seams designed to stay watertight, and treated the skin with oil to keep it supple. A covering might last a season or two before it had to be replaced.

From outside, a kayak looks like a single carved object, but it is a carefully engineered frame. Along the bottom runs the keel, one lengthwise timber that gives the boat its line through the water. Curving upward from it on both sides are the ribs, thin cross-pieces of wood soaked or steamed until they bend, then lashed to the keel and to two long timbers, the gunwales, that form the upper edges of the hull. Extra stringers run lengthwise between keel and gunwales. The whole assembly is light, flexible and easy to repair: a broken rib can be replaced without dismantling the boat.

The paddler sat in an opening cut through the deck, called the cockpit, with the legs stretched forward out of sight. Around this opening ran a raised rim, to which the edge of a waterproof jacket or skirt was fastened, so that water breaking over the boat could not run inside. The sealed cockpit had a second purpose: if the boat capsized, it could be rolled upright again without shipping water. The deck itself was slightly arched so that waves ran off it, and on longer journeys it carried equipment — a spare paddle, a harpoon, bladders of fresh water — lashed down with thongs of hide.

The shape of the hull varies from region to region. Boats built for crossings of open sea are long, sometimes six metres or more, and narrow, a width of fifty centimetres being not unusual, because length and narrowness make for speed and allow a boat to ride over steep waves. Boats used on rivers or among pack ice are shorter, wider and therefore more manoeuvrable.

All kayaks sit low in the water, which keeps them stable but means that the paddler, rather than the boat, supplies much of the balance. At either end the hull narrows to a point — the bow in front, the stern behind — so that the boat cuts through a wave instead of being stopped by it.

For the hunter, the kayak was a way of approaching animals unnoticed. Seals on ice floes are easily alarmed by noise or by movement, and a kayak could be paddled upwind until the hunter was within throwing distance of a harpoon. A line attached to the harpoon was fastened to a sealskin float, which marked the animal's position and tired it as it swam. Birds were taken with a throwing spear or with bolas, weighted cords joined at a centre, which entangled a bird in flight. Since a successful hunter might have to carry a heavy seal home, the boat had to bear weight as well as move quickly.

The most remarkable skill associated with the kayak is the roll. If a boat overturned, a trained paddler could bring it upright with a sweep of the paddle and a movement of the hips, without leaving the cockpit. Variants were practised until a hunter could recover using one hand, a shortened paddle or no paddle at all, a technique in which the body itself is swept through the water. Such accomplishments were celebrated, and young people were expected to master them before hunting alone. In Greenland, kayak races and rolling competitions survived into the twentieth century.

European visitors who reached the Arctic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recognised the kayak's qualities and took boats and drawings home. By the late 1800s kayaks were being built in Britain and Germany for sport, with canvas replacing skins and metal screws replacing sinew lashings. Racing soon produced narrower, less stable craft, designed for speed on sheltered water rather than for survival at sea. The Arctic hunting boat had become the ancestor of a leisure industry.

Modern sea kayaks and white-water kayaks descend directly from these Arctic boats, although glass fibre, plastic and aluminium have replaced driftwood and sealskin. In Greenland and Canada, meanwhile, enthusiasts have revived the qajaq in its original form, building with wood and canvas and practising the old rolls. The design has proved remarkably durable. A boat shaped by the need to hunt silently in freezing water turns out to be one of the most efficient craft ever devised for human power alone.

In November 1960 a young researcher named Jane Goodall, who had been sent to the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now Tanzania without a university degree, watched a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard push blades of grass into a termite mound and draw them out covered with insects. Until that moment, the making and use of tools had been widely regarded as the defining difference between human beings and other animals. Goodall's observation destroyed that assumption. Chimpanzees, it turned out, use a varied toolkit, and how they acquire and pass on those skills has become one of the most productive questions in the study of animal behaviour.

Most of the tools are simple and plant-based. To extract termites, a chimpanzee selects a grass stem, a twig or a vine, strips the leaves from it, and pushes it into a hole in the mound; the insects bite the intruding stem and are pulled out and eaten. At some sites the tools are trimmed and even frayed at the end, as though to improve the catch, and a chimpanzee may carry a favoured probe some distance. Leaves are used as sponges: a wad of leaves is chewed briefly, then pressed into a hollow in a tree to soak up water, which is then squeezed into the mouth.

The most demanding technique is nut cracking, practised by chimpanzees in parts of West Africa. An animal places a hard-shelled nut on a flat stone or a root that serves as an anvil, and strikes it with a stone or a piece of wood held in both hands as a hammer. Suitable stones are heavy and are carried to the site and reused. The skill is not easily acquired. Young chimpanzees spend years watching their mothers and experimenting with unsuitable hammers, and they may not be fully proficient until they are five or six years old.

Another behaviour has proved harder to interpret. Chimpanzees at several sites swallow whole leaves, sometimes dozens at a time, without chewing them, and the leaves pass through the gut largely intact. Because the behaviour is often seen at times when the animals also show signs of intestinal infection, some researchers have proposed that the rough leaves help to expel parasitic worms, and that the practice is a form of self-medication. The idea is attractive and there is some supporting evidence, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated.

Tool use is not confined to feeding on insects and nuts. At Fongoli, in Senegal, researchers reported that chimpanzees were making hunting weapons: they broke a branch, stripped its side shoots and sharpened one end with their teeth, then thrust the point into hollows in trees where small nocturnal primates called bushbabies sleep during the day. It is not known how often the technique succeeds, since kills are rarely seen, but the report was significant because it suggested that chimpanzees, like humans, could make a tool for the specific purpose of hunting another mammal.

Comparisons between communities have changed how the animals are understood. In a synthesis published in 1999, a team led by Andrew Whiten assembled observations from seven long-term research sites and catalogued dozens of behaviour patterns that were customary in some communities and absent in others. A chimpanzee in one forest might crack nuts, fish for termites and use leaf sponges, while a chimpanzee elsewhere did none of these things. Since the animals belong to the same species, the differences have to be explained by learning, and many biologists were persuaded that the variation could reasonably be called cultural.

Social transmission is well documented. Infants watch their mothers closely and are tolerated at close quarters while she works, and they pick up tools she has dropped. Yet the mechanism is disputed. Do young chimpanzees copy the precise movements they see, or do they learn only that a nut can be cracked and then work out the technique for themselves? Field observations and careful experiments have produced evidence for both positions, and the balance probably differs between tasks. Compared with the way human children are taught, chimpanzee learning looks slow, depending on imitation and long practice rather than on explanation.

Chimpanzee technology also has a history. Excavations in the Taï forest have recovered stone hammers and anvils, together with nutshells, in layers dated to roughly 4,300 years ago, showing that nut cracking is not a recent response to the presence of researchers. The finds are among the earliest evidence of habitual tool use by any animal other than humans. They also raise the question of why the technology has not changed. The same kinds of stone and the same techniques appear to have been used for millennia, whereas human tools became steadily more complex.

Explaining the gaps between communities remains difficult. A behaviour may be missing because the animals have never invented it, or because their environment lacks the necessary materials: there are no suitable nuts to crack, no appropriate stones, no termites. Separating culture from ecology is painstaking work, and it is the main task of chimpanzee research today. What is no longer in doubt is that a chimpanzee's tools are part of its inheritance, passed from one generation to the next.

Ask an urban designer what a city is for and the answer will usually mention work, housing, transport and culture. Children rarely appear on the list. Their needs are treated as a separate branch of planning, dealt with by providing playgrounds and safe routes to school, rather than as a test of whether a neighbourhood works at all. This seems to me a mistake. Children use streets differently from adults: they walk slowly, they stop to examine things, they cannot see over parked cars, and they have no choice about where they live. A city that is comfortable for a ten-year-old, who can cross a road, find a friend and get home again without an adult, is almost always comfortable for everyone else as well.

The evidence that something has gone wrong is striking. A study of children's independent mobility in England, published in 1990, compared the freedom of primary-age children with that of an earlier generation. In 1971, the researchers found, eight in ten children aged seven or eight made the school journey unaccompanied; by 1990 only about one in eleven did so. The change was not confined to the journey to school. Children were also far less likely to be allowed out alone to visit friends or play in the street, and the distances they were permitted to roam had contracted sharply.

Two explanations are usually offered for the change, and the first is traffic. The number of vehicles on residential streets rose enormously in the second half of the twentieth century, but the speed of those vehicles matters more than most people realise. The distance a car needs in order to stop increases roughly with the square of its speed, so a small increase in speed produces a large increase in danger. Streets laid out when they carried carts and bicycles now carry fast cars, and parents respond rationally by keeping their children indoors.

The second explanation is fear of strangers, although the risk of a child being harmed by a stranger has not risen and may well have fallen. Both explanations suggest that the problem lies in the street rather than in the child or the parent. In the Netherlands, from the late 1960s, planners began rebuilding residential streets as woonerven, shared spaces in which the car is a guest and speed is restrained by the design of the road itself. Sweden went further in 1997, when its parliament adopted a road-safety principle known as Vision Zero, which assumes that people will make mistakes and that the system should ensure those mistakes are not fatal.

The playground, by contrast, has been the standard answer to children in the city, and it is an inadequate one. Setting land aside for play is better than nothing, and some playgrounds are excellent, but a playground is a place children are taken to, usually by an adult, at a time chosen by an adult. It offers a narrow range of activity and removes children from the ordinary life of the street. More importantly, the existence of a fenced play area has often been used to justify streets that no child could safely use. A city with excellent playgrounds and dangerous roads has not solved the problem; it has moved it.

Layout matters as much as speed. The popsicle test — whether a child can walk to a shop and buy an ice cream before it melts — has become a rough measure of how well a neighbourhood works. Compact districts with a mixture of homes, shops and schools shorten the distances a child must cover, while sprawling suburbs push every destination beyond walking range and make the car indispensable. Density alone is not the answer, since crowded streets with fast traffic can be worse for children than quiet suburbs with none. What matters is the combination of short distances and slow movement.

If children are to be taken seriously as users of the city, they must be consulted. A few cities have begun to do this, setting up children's councils and asking pupils to map the routes they take and the places they avoid. The results are often unexpected. Children notice details that adults have stopped seeing: a crossing where the light is too short for short legs, a patch of ground that could be a garden. Consulting them is not merely a gesture. The changes they ask for — benches, shade, slower traffic — tend to be cheap, and they benefit everybody.

The objection most often raised is that this is a concern of wealthy cities, a luxury to be considered after housing, water and employment. It is true that a city in which children cannot walk safely to school has problems that make playground design seem trivial. Yet the argument reverses the priority. In countries where most of the population is young, children are the majority of street users, and a settlement laid out without pavements, shade or crossings imposes daily costs on everyone who lives there. The objection also assumes that child-friendly design is expensive. Much of it is not: it is a matter of priorities, and of the width and speed of roads.

The measure of a city, then, is not how many playgrounds it can list but whether a child can move through it without an escort. That test captures things that statistics about housing and transport miss: whether streets are places or only channels for vehicles, whether neighbours know one another, whether the distance between home and everything else can be walked. Designing with children in mind is not a specialised branch of planning. It is the most demanding test we have of whether a city is any good.