IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 470

The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the heaviest animal known to have existed, larger than any dinosaur yet discovered. A fully grown adult may reach 30 metres in length and weigh as much as 150 tonnes. Its heart alone can weigh close to 200 kilograms, and the column of spray that it forces from its blowhole on a calm day can be seen from several kilometres away. Nothing about the species is modest.

Blue whales are baleen whales, a group that filters food from the water rather than seizing prey with its teeth. In place of teeth, a blue whale has several hundred fringed plates of keratin hanging from its upper jaw, each of them up to a metre long. The animals feed almost exclusively on krill, small shrimp-like crustaceans that gather in swarms so dense that the water turns pink. To capture them, a whale accelerates into a swarm, opens its mouth until the pleats of skin beneath its chin stretch like the folds of an accordion, and engulfs a volume of water that may exceed its own weight.

The technique, known as lunge feeding, is enormously demanding. In the feeding season a blue whale may consume up to four tonnes of krill a day, but each lunge costs energy, and the effort is repaid only if the swarm is dense enough to be worth attacking. In the Southern Ocean, where the largest concentrations of krill occur, the whales feed through the short Antarctic summer and then migrate towards warmer waters, where many of them spend months living on the fat they have stored.

Four subspecies are usually recognised. The Antarctic blue whale is the largest of them; the northern blue whale lives in the North Atlantic; the pygmy blue whale, which is shorter but stockier, inhabits the Indian Ocean and the south-western Pacific; and a fourth form is found in the northern Indian Ocean. All are highly migratory and all produce low-frequency sounds that travel great distances underwater. These calls, some of them below the range of human hearing, are thought to serve both as contact signals between animals that have become separated and as a way of advertising for mates.

For most of human history the blue whale was safe from hunters, because it was too fast and floated too high in the water to be caught with hand-thrown harpoons. That changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Norwegian inventor Svend Foyn developed an explosive harpoon fired from a cannon mounted on a steam-powered vessel. Antarctic whaling began in earnest in 1904, when a station opened on the island of South Georgia, and it was transformed in the 1920s by factory ships that could process whales at sea. In the season of 1930–31 alone, some 29,000 blue whales were killed in Antarctic waters.

The species was driven close to extinction. The International Whaling Commission, established in 1946, banned the hunting of blue whales in 1966, by which time the Antarctic population had fallen to a few hundred animals. Recovery has been slow, partly because a female produces a single calf only every two or three years, and partly because the survivors were so few. Counts remain imprecise, but the world population today is generally estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 mature animals.

Even the early life of a blue whale is remarkable. A calf is about seven metres long and weighs two and a half tonnes at birth, and it puts on weight rapidly on its mother's milk, which is exceptionally rich in fat. The mother nurses it for around six months and the pair usually remain together for longer, often migrating side by side.

Research on diving has produced surprising findings. Blue whales feed at depths of a hundred metres or more, and a single dive may last fifteen minutes. In 2019 researchers at Stanford University attached electronic tags to a blue whale off the coast of California and recorded its heart rate directly for the first time. At the surface the heart beat up to 25 or 30 times a minute; near the bottom of a dive it slowed to as few as two beats a minute, a rate that allows the animal to conserve oxygen while it hunts.

Age is difficult to establish. In recent decades scientists have learned to estimate it from plugs of wax that accumulate in the ear canal, much as rings record the age of a tree. These plugs suggest that blue whales live for several decades, and quite possibly for eighty years or more.

Today the dangers are different but no less serious. Ship strikes are a significant cause of death where busy shipping lanes cross whale habitat, and entanglement in fishing gear kills an unknown number every year. Underwater noise from shipping and from seismic exploration may interfere with the long-range calls on which the animals depend. Warmer ocean conditions also affect krill, and because blue whales eat such quantities, any change in the abundance of their prey is likely to affect them quickly.

Conservationists remain cautiously hopeful. Blue whales are protected throughout their range, and some populations, notably the one off the west coast of the United States, appear to be increasing. In the Southern Ocean, however, numbers are still a small fraction of what they were before industrial whaling began, and full recovery will take many decades.

Two students receive the same low mark in a mock examination. One decides that the subject is simply too difficult and stops revising; the other decides that a different method might work, adopts it and improves. Psychologists describe the difference between them in terms of optimism, but the word in ordinary use is vague. In research it refers to something narrower and more measurable: a stable tendency to expect that things will turn out well. The question that has occupied researchers for four decades is whether that tendency helps to produce achievement or merely accompanies it.

Two traditions dominate the field. The first, associated with the American psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver, treats optimism as a general expectation about the future and measures it with a short questionnaire, the Life Orientation Test, on which people rate their agreement with statements about uncertain outcomes. The second, developed by Martin Seligman, concerns what is known as explanatory style. When something goes wrong, pessimists attribute it to causes that are permanent, that affect everything they do and that reflect a flaw in themselves; optimists attribute the same event to causes that are temporary, limited and external. A third strand, Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy, focuses on belief in one's capacity to perform a particular task, while a fourth, the hope theory of C. R. Snyder, separates the will to reach a goal from the ability to find a route to it.

The association between these measures and achievement is well documented. In studies of university students, optimists are more likely to complete their degrees and less likely to drop out. In one much-cited experiment, competitive swimmers were told that their times in a race had been slower than they really were; those with an optimistic explanatory style swam faster in the next race, while pessimists did worse than before. Large longitudinal studies have also linked optimism to better physical health.

Measuring something so general is not straightforward. People's answers to questionnaires are influenced by mood, and someone who has just succeeded is likely to report greater confidence than someone who has just failed. Explanatory style is inferred from the way people explain particular events, which means that the same individual may look optimistic about work and pessimistic about sport.

Why should optimism matter? Researchers point to several routes. Optimists persist when progress is difficult, and persistence is often what separates a competent performance from an abandoned one. They tend to use problem-focused coping, seeking information and adjusting their plans, whereas pessimists are more inclined to avoid the difficulty or to give up. They also build larger networks of friends and colleagues, from whom they obtain practical help and encouragement. And when a setback cannot be changed, they are quicker to reframe it, so that disappointment does not spread into other areas of their lives.

If optimism is a habit of thought rather than a fixed trait, it ought to be teachable. Programmes developed at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s taught schoolchildren to notice pessimistic explanations and to dispute them with evidence. Trials of these programmes reported modest reductions in depressive symptoms, and several education systems have since adopted similar courses. The effects on academic results, however, have been smaller and less consistent than the effects on mood.

Optimism is not, in any case, entirely malleable. Twin studies suggest that roughly a quarter of the variation between individuals is inherited, and people's scores on questionnaires tend to remain fairly stable over years. This stability is one reason for caution about claims that a short course can transform a pupil's outlook, let alone that pupil's examination results.

Optimism also has a darker side, which popular accounts often ignore. Neil Weinstein's research in the 1980s showed that people consistently underestimate their own chances of illness, divorce and other misfortunes, a bias that may discourage sensible precautions. The planning fallacy, described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is the related tendency to assume that a project will take less time and cost less money than it does. And not everyone gains from positive expectations: the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor described a strategy they called defensive pessimism, in which anxious people deliberately imagine the worst and prepare for it.

The central uncertainty is one of cause and effect. Almost all the evidence is correlational: people who score highly on optimism questionnaires also achieve more, but it is difficult to rule out the possibility that success breeds optimism, or that a third factor such as family income produces both. Interventions provide stronger evidence, but they are few and often measure attitudes rather than achievement. Publication bias is a further concern, since studies that find an effect are more likely to appear in print than those that do not. Cultural difference is another open question, because most of the questionnaires were designed in Europe and North America.

A fair summary of the evidence is therefore modest. Optimism appears to help, especially when it works through persistence, planning and social support, and especially for people who already have reasonable opportunities. It is not a substitute for ability, resources or good teaching, and it can misfire when it encourages people to ignore risk. The most defensible aim for schools and employers is not to make everyone cheerful but to help people recognise a hopeless explanation when they meet one.

In April 2024 Venice began charging people who arrive for the day an entrance fee, an experiment watched closely by crowded destinations everywhere. On the designated dates, between 8.30 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon, such visitors had to buy a ticket costing five euros; people staying overnight, residents of the Veneto region and children under fourteen were exempt. The following year the scheme was extended to fifty-four days, and the price rose for those who booked at short notice.

The case for doing something is easily stated. The historic centre has lost most of its inhabitants: the resident population, around 175,000 in the early 1950s, is now below 50,000. At the same time the city receives tens of millions of visits a year, though the exact figure is disputed. Its streets are narrow, its buildings stand on wooden piles driven into the mud, and its bridges and squares were designed for a fraction of the people who now use them. Shops selling food have given way to shops selling souvenirs, and the noise and waste of daily tourism have to be cleared away every night.

Supporters of the charge make three arguments. It raises money that can be spent on cleaning, transport and the repair of old buildings. It signals to visitors that their presence has costs. And the booking system produces data about how many people are coming and when, information that is valuable in itself, since a city cannot manage what it cannot count.

Administering such a scheme is not free. Tickets must be sold, checked and enforced, exemptions verified and appeals handled, and extra staff are needed at the entrances to the historic centre. The cost of collection is rarely set against the money raised, yet it determines whether the charge is a profitable levy or an expensive gesture.

Critics reply that five euros is trivial. Anyone who has travelled to Venice will spend far more than that on lunch, and a charge smaller than the price of a coffee is unlikely to alter anybody's plans. If the purpose is to reduce numbers, the sum must be large enough to be felt; if the purpose is to raise revenue, the payment should be called a tax and judged by how much it brings in.

There is a subtler objection. A fee can be understood as a purchase, and a purchase confers a right. Visitors who have paid may feel that they have bought their place in the city, and that complaints from those who live there no longer apply to them. Some urban scholars contend that the charge turns a shared space into a service, and that this change of meaning may matter more than the money collected. If that is right, the fee does not simply ration access; it changes the relationship between guest and host.

The design of the scheme also rests on a questionable assumption. Day trippers are often blamed for congestion, yet they leave little waste and occupy no housing. Overnight visitors, who are exempt, place far greater demands on water, on waste collection and above all on accommodation, and the conversion of apartments into short-term lets has done more than anything else to push residents out of the city. Cruise passengers, who arrive in the largest groups but spend the least, are a separate problem again.

Venice has not relied on the fee alone. Large cruise ships have been barred from the Giudecca canal since 2021, tour groups have been limited in size, and the use of loudspeakers by guides has been restricted. The flood barriers first raised in 2020 now hold back the highest tides. None of these measures, however, addresses the price of housing, which many people in the city regard as the decisive issue.

Charges of this kind are spreading. Bhutan requires most visitors to pay a substantial daily sum, which limits numbers but also limits the income the country earns from them. Bali introduced a levy on foreign tourists in 2024, and several European cities have raised taxes on overnight stays. Comparison is difficult because each scheme is designed for a different purpose: some raise money, some ration access, and some exist mainly to show that a government is doing something.

Early evidence from Venice suggests that arrivals have not fallen, though it is hard to separate the effect of the charge from the weather, the cost of flights and the steady growth of travel. Its defenders answer that a policy can be judged by what it pays for as well as by whom it deters, and that a modest charge applied on fifty days is not a serious test of the principle.

My own view is that the principle is sound and the practice timid. A city that is being loved to pieces is entitled to ask its visitors to contribute, and a charge on day visitors is a reasonable way of doing so. But the sum should be set at a level that influences behaviour, the revenue should be ring-fenced for the upkeep of the city and the services residents use, and the scheme must be accompanied by determined action on short-term lets and on cruise traffic. On its own the ticket is a gesture; as one instrument in a serious policy, it is worth defending.