IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 468

London in the middle of the eighteenth century offered plenty of entertainment, but very little of it was available on a regular basis. For most of the year, anyone who wanted to watch acrobats, tumblers or trained animals had to wait for a fair, where such performers appeared for a few days before moving on. Theatres with a permanent home were protected by law and seldom allowed rivals to stage the kind of mixed spectacle that drew large crowds. It was a former soldier, Philip Astley, who spotted the gap.

Astley was born in 1742 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the English Midlands, the son of a cabinetmaker. At seventeen he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment, and served through the Seven Years' War. In the army he acquired an unusual reputation. He was said to be able to break in the most difficult horses, and he learned to perform acrobatics on horseback, standing upright on a galloping animal as it circled the training ground. When he left the army he married and earned his living as a riding master.

In 1768 Astley leased a piece of open ground at Halfpenny Hatch, a short walk from Westminster Bridge in London. In the mornings he taught riding; in the afternoons he gave displays of trick riding, accompanied by a drummer and a piper. He charged a modest entrance fee, and the audiences grew. The site was rough and unpaved, and lighting for evening shows came from candles and oil lamps, but the formula of an outdoor ring, a small band and a star performer had been established.

What made the performances possible was the shape of the ground. Astley trained inside a circle, and the ring he settled on, about 42 feet (13 metres) across, remains the standard size in circuses today. Riding in a circle allowed him to use the outward pull of the turn to keep his balance while standing on a horse's back. It also meant that every spectator sat within a few metres of the action. When he added rope-dancers, tumblers, jugglers and a clown to fill the intervals between his riding displays, the essential structure of the modern circus – a series of varied acts in a single ring – was in place.

By 1770 Astley had enclosed the yard, added a roof and erected seats, and his modest arena became Astley's Amphitheatre. Fire was a constant hazard in such buildings. The amphitheatre burned down in 1794 and again in 1803, and on each occasion it was rebuilt and reopened within a year. Its success depended on Astley's energy as much as on the building: he performed almost every afternoon, trained his own horses and supervised every detail of the programme.

Astley soon had competitors. In 1782 the writer and composer Charles Dibdin joined forces with Charles Hughes, a riding master, to open the Royal Circus on the other side of the Thames, a name that helped to fix the word circus to this kind of entertainment. Competition between the two establishments was intense, and it was complicated by the law. Under the Licensing Act of 1737, only two London theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were permitted to stage spoken drama. Rival houses therefore relied on music, mime, dance and spectacle. The circus, which told its stories without dialogue, escaped the restriction that shaped the legitimate stage.

Astley also looked abroad. He opened a permanent circus in Paris in 1782 and toured his company through France and the Low Countries. The French Revolution disrupted these ventures, and by the early 1790s the Paris establishment had passed into the hands of Antonio Franconi, an Italian animal trainer whose descendants ran circuses in France for more than a century.

Across the Atlantic the first circus performance took place in Philadelphia in April 1793, when John Bill Ricketts, a Scottish rider who had worked in England, opened a wooden amphitheatre. The new republic was enthusiastic: George Washington attended a performance that spring, and Ricketts went on to take his show to New York and Boston. His building burned down in 1799, and Ricketts himself was lost at sea not long afterwards.

In the nineteenth century the circus took to the road. In Britain, travelling companies performed in wooden booths that could be dismantled and carried by wagon; in the United States, promoters began in the 1820s to perform under canvas, and the tented circus became a national institution. One remarkable British proprietor was Pablo Fanque, born William Darby in Norwich, who ran a successful touring circus from the 1840s and is generally described as the first black circus owner in Britain.

Animals were central to the appeal of the nineteenth-century circus, which advertised lions, elephants, camels and performing dogs alongside horses. Public taste, and public ethics, changed. Several countries have now restricted or banned the use of wild animals in travelling shows; the United Kingdom passed legislation to that effect in 2019. The Canadian company Cirque du Soleil, founded in 1984, offered a different model altogether: no animals, a theatrical storyline and performers recruited from gymnastics and street arts.

Yet the basic arrangement Astley devised survives almost unchanged: a circular ring, a band, a sequence of short acts and an audience seated close enough to see the sweat on a horse's neck. The word itself is Roman, from the Latin for a ring, and was first applied to the long arena used for chariot racing.

Every sound begins as a movement of air. A vibrating object, whether a plucked string or a human voice, pushes and pulls on the molecules around it, creating tiny fluctuations in pressure that travel outwards. The task of the auditory system is to convert those faint changes into electrical signals that the brain can interpret, and to do so fast enough for us to follow a conversation in a noisy room. The conversion happens in three stages, handled by the outer, middle and inner ear.

The visible part, the pinna, is more than a funnel. Its ridges and hollows alter the spectrum of the sound that reaches the ear canal in ways that depend on the direction the sound arrives from, and the brain learns to read these changes as clues to height and front-to-back position. The canal itself, roughly two and a half centimetres long, behaves like a tube open at one end, and it resonates at frequencies of about two to four kilohertz, the range that carries much of the information in speech.

At the end of the canal the sound wave strikes the eardrum, a membrane less than a centimetre across, which vibrates in response. On its inner side lies the middle ear, an air-filled cavity containing the three smallest bones in the human body: the malleus, the incus and the stapes, attached to one another in a chain. Their names describe their shapes: a hammer, an anvil and a stirrup, and the stapes is only about three millimetres long.

Sound travels easily through air but poorly into water, and the fluid inside the inner ear is watery. If the vibrations of the eardrum met that fluid directly, most of their energy would bounce back. The middle ear solves the problem. Because the eardrum is much larger than the oval window, the small membrane through which the vibrations enter the inner ear, the force collected over a wide area is concentrated onto a small one. The chain of bones also works as a lever, adding a little extra force. Together these effects raise the pressure considerably, so that enough energy reaches the fluid to be detected.

Beyond the oval window lies the cochlea, a spiral tube that would be about 35 millimetres long if straightened out. It is divided along its length by the basilar membrane, a flexible strip that widens and becomes floppier towards the far end. In the mid-twentieth century the Hungarian-born physiologist Georg von Békésy, working on the cochleas of human cadavers, showed that sound sets up a travelling wave along this membrane. The wave does not travel all the way along the tube: it reaches a peak and dies away, and the position of that peak depends on frequency. Békésy received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1961.

Riding on the basilar membrane is the structure that does the detecting: the organ of Corti, which contains thousands of hair cells in rows. Each cell carries a bundle of stiff filaments, called stereocilia, on its upper surface. When the membrane moves, the bundles are pushed against a fixed ceiling above them and the stereocilia tilt. Tiny protein threads, known as tip links, connect the tip of one stereocilium to the side of the next, and the tilting stretches them. This pull opens channels in the cell membrane, allowing ions to rush in and setting off an electrical signal.

Not all hair cells send messages to the brain. The outer hair cells, which outnumber the inner ones, act instead as a mechanical amplifier. When they receive an electrical signal they change length, contracting and elongating thousands of times a second, driven by a membrane protein called prestin. In doing so they feed energy back into the basilar membrane, sharpening its response and boosting faint sounds. Without it the ear would be far less sensitive and far less able to separate notes of similar pitch. Its discovery overturned the older picture of the cochlea as a purely passive device.

How this feedback loop is controlled, and why it does not tip the system into uncontrolled oscillation, is still not fully understood. One visible consequence, however, is that a healthy ear is not silent. In 1978 the British scientist David Kemp showed that a microphone placed in the ear canal can record faint sounds produced by the cochlea itself, known as otoacoustic emissions. They are strongest in ears with good hearing and absent when the outer hair cells are damaged, which makes them a convenient way of screening newborn babies.

The signals leave the hair cells through the fibres of the auditory nerve. Information about a sound is carried both by the rate at which a fibre fires and by the timing of its firing. The brain compares the arrival times of a sound at the two ears to judge where it comes from. Processing does not stop at the ear: the brain sends fibres back down to the cochlea, where they can adjust the sensitivity of the hair cells.

Hair cells are fragile. Loud noise, certain medicines and the ordinary process of ageing destroy them, and in mammals they are not replaced. Birds and fish can regenerate damaged hair cells. In recent years experiments on mice have shown that a combination of drugs and gene therapy can prompt supporting cells in the cochlea to turn into new hair cells, and that the animals gain some hearing as a result. Whether the same approach could restore useful hearing in people without causing unwanted cell growth remains unknown.

A proposal to build a new office block in an old English town rarely passes without argument. In the case I have in mind, the planning authority asked the architects to use local stone, to match the height of the neighbouring terraces and to give the building a pitched roof. The architects protested that they were being asked to design a fake. Neither side asked the question that matters. The quarrel is usually conducted as a dispute about style, when it is really about what a building is for and how long it is meant to last.

Those who defend imitation make a reasonable case. A street is a shared object, and a building that ignores the materials, colours and proportions around it can damage something that no single owner possesses. Historic towns also attract visitors and residents precisely because they look coherent, and one aggressive structure can spoil a view that took centuries to compose. In 1984 the then Prince of Wales famously likened a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London to a carbuncle disfiguring a much-loved face, and he later built the village of Poundbury in Dorset, where new houses follow traditional designs.

Modernists reply that a building dressed in the costume of another century is a lie. A structure of steel and concrete pretending to be stone, with columns that hold nothing up, is dishonest about how it was made and what it can do. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos argued in 1908 that ornament was a waste of labour and material, and that a building should express its own age rather than borrow from a dead one. On this view the office block should look like an office block, and the town would be the better for containing two centuries side by side.

History complicates the argument, because copying the past is itself an old tradition. The Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century filled Britain with churches and public buildings modelled on medieval work, and its architects were entirely serious about it. The Georgian terraces that visitors now admire were speculative mass housing, run up quickly for profit; they became beautiful later, in the eyes of people who no longer had to live in them. The Arts and Crafts movement deliberately revived hand techniques that industry had nearly destroyed.

There is also a practical difficulty that the debate often ignores. Imitation is much harder than it looks, and it is expensive. A modern commercial building must meet fire regulations, energy standards and the demands of the people who will work in it, and these requirements push towards thin walls, large windows and services hidden above suspended ceilings. Stone can be fixed as a thin cladding over a steel frame, but the result lacks the depth and weight of a load-bearing wall. Done well, imitation requires craft skills that are now scarce and expensive.

The most extreme form of copying is the replica. Berlin's Humboldt Forum, completed in 2020, reproduces the baroque facade of a palace demolished after the Second World War, while the interior is entirely modern. The critic's question is not whether it looks right but what it is claiming. A copy that pretends to be an original removes the evidence by which a town tells its own history.

Professional conservation has developed a stricter answer than either side of the popular argument. The Venice Charter, agreed in 1964, holds that the aim of restoration is to preserve and reveal the original fabric of a building. Any new work must be distinguishable from it, so that the intervention can be read as a later addition rather than mistaken for an old one. A town's past is legible only if its layers are honest. The practice that conservationists most dislike follows from the same reasoning: facadism, in which the front of a historic building is kept as a shell while the rest of the structure is pulled down and rebuilt. The street view survives; the building does not.

Surveys of public taste are often produced as a trump card in this debate, and they usually show a preference for traditional forms. In several studies, participants asked to rate photographs of buildings have given higher marks to those with pitched roofs, visible brickwork and ornament than to plain modern ones. Photographs show a facade and not a plan, so the studies say nothing about how a building is to live in or how well it will age. Preferences are also shaped by familiarity: people tend to like what they grew up with. What people say in a laboratory and what they would pay to occupy are different questions.

My own view is that the quarrel is misdirected. The relevant question is not whether a new building resembles its neighbours but whether it will be worth keeping in a hundred years. Buildings that survive are those that were generously made, with good materials, sensible proportions and rooms that can be used for more than one purpose. Those qualities belong to no single period, and they can be found in a glass tower as easily as in a stone terrace. New buildings in historic towns should therefore be required to match the depth of their neighbours' walls, the durability of their materials and the generosity of their ground floors. Copying the geometry and the craft is useful; copying the costume is merely sentimental.