IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 467

The red panda is a small mammal of the mountain forests of the eastern Himalayas and south-western China. Roughly the size of a large domestic cat, it has a body about half a metre long and a bushy, ringed tail almost as long again. Its dense reddish-brown coat, which also covers the soles of its feet, and the pale markings on its face make it unmistakable. Adults generally weigh between three and six kilograms.

Europeans knew nothing of the animal until the nineteenth century. It was described for science in 1825 by the French zoologist Frédéric Cuvier, who gave it the name Ailurus fulgens, meaning 'shining cat', and placed it among the raccoons. Cuvier worked from skins and skulls sent to Paris by collectors in the Himalayas. The giant panda was not described until 1869, so for more than forty years the name 'panda' belonged to this species alone.

Its family tree has been disputed ever since. At various times the red panda has been grouped with raccoons, with bears and with the weasels, and it is now placed in a family of its own, Ailuridae. Comparisons of DNA have settled part of the argument. The species belongs among the musteloid mammals, a group that also contains weasels, otters and raccoons, and its resemblance to the giant panda results from similar habits rather than from shared ancestry. Two subspecies are usually recognised, one in the Himalayas and one in China and Myanmar; the eastern animals are somewhat larger and darker, and some researchers argue that they deserve the status of a separate species.

The red panda's range is fragmented. It is found in Nepal, Bhutan, northern India, Myanmar and the mountains of south-western China, but not everywhere within that area, and the remaining populations are separated by ridges, rivers and cleared land. Animals in one valley may therefore have no contact with those in the next, and over several generations the two groups can drift apart genetically.

Red pandas live in temperate forest between roughly 2,200 and 4,800 metres above sea level, where bamboo grows thickly beneath the trees. They are largely solitary and are most active around dusk and dawn, spending much of the day asleep in a nest of twigs and leaves, often well above the ground. Individuals mark the boundaries of their territories with scent from glands beneath the tail, and they keep in contact with whistles, squeals and short, sharp calls.

Bamboo makes up the greater part of the diet, though the animals also take fruit, roots, insects, eggs and the occasional small bird. Bamboo offers little energy and is difficult to digest, and the red panda cannot break down most of the cellulose it contains, so it must eat large quantities of leaves and young shoots. To grip the slender stems it uses an enlarged wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, which works against the other digits like an extra thumb. The giant panda has a similar structure, but the two species evolved it independently.

The animal's metabolic rate is unusually low, which helps it survive on such a meagre diet but leaves it with little strength to spare. Red pandas rest for long periods and move deliberately rather than rapidly, and they can descend a tree head first by rotating the ankle joint, a manoeuvre that few climbing mammals manage. In cold weather they become less active, and their body temperature falls slightly.

Females give birth after a gestation of about four months, usually to one or two cubs. The young are born blind, weigh little more than a hundred grams and are covered in pale grey fur; the adult colouring develops over several weeks. The mother makes a nest in a hollow tree or a rock crevice and will move her cubs to another site if she is disturbed. Cubs stay with their mother for about a year.

Several pressures combine against the species. Forest is cleared for timber, firewood and farmland, and the bamboo understorey is grazed by cattle and sheep. Red pandas are hunted for their fur, and in parts of China their tails have traditionally been used as hats, which are said to bring good fortune to a wedding. Free-ranging dogs transmit disease, and cubs fall victim to leopards and to large birds of prey.

Counting red pandas is not easy. The animals are secretive, live in dense vegetation and are difficult to observe directly, so surveys rely on droppings, on hair collected from trees and on camera traps. Estimates of the wild population therefore vary widely, and some biologists suspect that the true figure is lower than the published one. A species that cannot be counted accurately is hard to protect, because no one can say whether numbers are falling.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the red panda as Endangered, having earlier classed it as Vulnerable, and the total population is thought to be fewer than 10,000 mature adults. In India the animal is the state animal of Sikkim, and a conservation breeding programme at the zoo in Darjeeling has produced cubs for release into the wild. Connected forest is what the species needs most, since small isolated populations lose genetic diversity. The web browser Firefox took its name from an old nickname for the red panda, and has made the animal familiar to millions of people who will never see one.

No living language is pure. English, often held up as an example of a language that has absorbed words from everywhere, borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French, Latin, Greek and Norse, and more recently from languages across Asia and Africa. Estimates vary, partly because nobody agrees on what counts as a borrowed word, but most historians of the language put the figure well above half. What is unusual about English is the scale of the borrowing, not the fact of it.

Words are borrowed for many reasons, but the commonest is need. When a society meets an object, a food or an idea for which it has no name, it usually takes the name as well. Tomatoes, chocolate and tobacco entered European languages from the Americas in this way, and the vocabulary of computing has spread around the world in English. Prestige matters too. French was so admired in eighteenth-century Europe that aristocracies from Berlin to St Petersburg conversed in it, and English now plays a comparable role for scientists and popular musicians.

Conquest and migration have produced the largest borrowings. After the Norman invasion of 1066, French became the language of the English court, law and administration for some three centuries, and English acquired thousands of French words, many of which displaced native ones. The result is visible in pairs such as cow and beef or sheep and mutton, where the animal has an English name and the meat a French one, a distinction that reflects who looked after the animals and who ate them.

Linguists distinguish several kinds of borrowing. The simplest is the loanword, taken over more or less intact, like café from French or kindergarten from German. A second kind is the loan translation, or calque, in which the parts of a foreign word are translated rather than copied: the French for skyscraper is gratte-ciel, 'scratches sky', and German television is Fernsehen, 'far seeing'. A third is the semantic borrowing, in which an existing word gains a new meaning from a foreign model; a fourth is the hybrid, part native and part borrowed, of which English has thousands.

Borrowed words are rarely left alone. Each language reshapes them to fit its own sound system and grammar. Japanese, which has few consonant clusters of the kind found in English, inserts vowels between consonants, so that strike becomes sutoraiki. English attaches its own endings to foreign material, as in readable, where a borrowed suffix is joined to a native verb. The process can take a generation or two, and a word may be borrowed twice, at different periods, ending up as two quite separate items.

Grammar is far more resistant than vocabulary. Speakers readily take a noun for a new food and even a verb for a new activity, but they seldom adopt a foreign way of forming plurals or marking tense. When grammar does cross a boundary, the effect can be lasting. English owes the pronoun they, and its related forms them and their, to Norse settlers whose language was close enough to Old English for the borrowing to pass unnoticed; Old English had different forms, and the newcomers' version gradually replaced them.

Not everyone welcomes borrowing. Some languages have institutions whose task is to keep it in check. In Iceland a language council has for decades coined new terms from Old Norse roots rather than accepting foreign ones: the word for computer is tölva, a blend of an old word for number and one for a seeress, and the word for telephone is simi, originally meaning thread. France has taken a different route, legislating in 1994 to require French in official documents and advertising, though English words remain common in both.

The meaning of a borrowed word can drift surprisingly far. German speakers use Handy for a mobile phone, a sense that English does not have; Japanese arubaito, from the German for work, means a part-time job, usually a student's; and waishatsu, from 'white shirt', means the kind of formal shirt worn to an office. Such changes are not errors; they are the normal life of words in a new home.

Quite how borrowing works remains contested. Linguists can describe what happened to a word after it entered a language, but they cannot reliably predict which words will be adopted and which rejected; usefulness, prestige and sheer chance all seem to play a part. Counting is harder still, because dictionaries include different numbers of technical and foreign terms, so claims that a language consists of a particular percentage of borrowed words should be treated with caution. Nor is there agreement on whether heavy borrowing weakens a language: most linguists see it as a sign of contact and vitality, but public anxiety about it is real and recurrent.

The present era has no precedent in one respect: the volume of English words now flowing into other languages. English is the language of international research, of aviation and of much of the internet, and younger speakers in many countries mix it into their own speech more freely than their grandparents did. Yet the history of borrowing suggests that prediction is unwise. Languages have absorbed invasions, empires and technologies and have remained recognisably themselves, and the words they take in are eventually made to obey their own rules.

In the past two decades, universities outside the English-speaking world have introduced several thousand degree programmes taught entirely in English. The shift began in northern Europe, where institutions in the Netherlands and the Nordic countries were quick to offer master's courses in English, and it has spread to East Asia and the Gulf. The arguments for it are easy to state: students can move between countries, researchers can read the literature in the language in which most of it is published, and graduates acquire a skill that employers are said to value.

University leaders rarely put the case in purely educational terms. English-medium programmes attract fee-paying students from abroad, they make it easier to recruit international staff, and they improve the international indicators that shape league tables. None of these motives is discreditable, but they are institutional rather than academic, and they mean that the decision to teach in English is often taken by administrators before anyone has asked whether it will improve learning. Once a programme is advertised in English, moreover, it is difficult to reverse.

The pedagogical objection is the most straightforward. Listening to a lecture, taking notes, reading a dense textbook and writing an essay all draw on the same limited pool of attention, and doing them in a second language leaves less capacity for the subject itself. Applied linguists who record what happens in multilingual classrooms report that students in English-medium seminars speak less, ask fewer questions and are more likely to remain silent when a concept is unclear. Lecturers, for their part, simplify: they speak more slowly, use fewer idioms and set shorter reading lists.

The second objection concerns the language that is left behind. A language remains capable of expressing complex thought only because it is used for complex thought. If law, medicine and engineering are taught only in English, the vocabulary of those fields in the national language stops developing, and the language gradually becomes a medium for everyday conversation and little else. Researchers in the Nordic countries, where the process has gone furthest, describe this as domain loss, and they warn that it is difficult to reverse once a generation of professionals has been trained entirely in another language.

How strong is the evidence? Weaker than either side usually admits. Studies that compare students of similar proficiency who take the same subject in their own language and in English often find little difference in what they know at the end of the course. Yet the same studies report differences in participation and in the willingness to raise awkward questions. Comparisons are also hard to interpret, because students choose their programmes and because a class taught in English attracts a different mix of people. English-medium teaching is neither the catastrophe its critics describe nor the effortless success its promoters advertise.

The economic argument deserves particular scrutiny. It is often said that graduates with English will earn more and find work abroad. Employers plainly value English, but they also value subject knowledge, reliability and familiarity with local conditions; a graduate who cannot draft a clear technical report is not attractive. The evidence that English-medium degrees raise earnings is thin, and it is difficult to separate the effect of the degree from the effect of the kind of student who chooses it. Most graduates, in any case, will spend their careers in their own country.

My own position is that the question is badly framed. It is presented as a choice between teaching everything in English and teaching everything in the national language, and it is neither. A university can require students to read in English, which is where most research is published, while discussing and examining the same material in the language they know best. Some courses, particularly at postgraduate level and in fields such as molecular biology or computer science, are natural candidates for English throughout; others, especially in law, education and the humanities, are not.

Where a university does decide on English, a good deal has to be in place first. Students need a level of proficiency at which reading and listening are no longer a struggle, and this should be tested before admission rather than discovered in the second term. Lecturers need training, since explaining a difficult idea to non-native speakers is a skill that few acquire by accident. Writing centres and honest information about the language demands of a programme all cost money. Without such provision, 'English-medium' is little more than a marketing label, and the students who suffer most are those who can least afford to.

There is also work to be done in the other direction. If a language is to remain usable for academic work, someone must pay for it: for translation of key texts, for academic publishing and for the development of technical terminology. Several countries have done this deliberately, and their experience suggests that the decline of a national academic register is not inevitable.

The conclusion I would draw is therefore modest. Universities in non-English-speaking countries should teach in English where there is a clear academic reason and where the support exists to do it well, and they should be honest with applicants when the support does not. They should not adopt English across the board because a ranking rewards it, nor reject it because a columnist dislikes it. The language of instruction is a design decision, and it should be taken on the same evidence as any other.