IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 479

In the south-west of what is now Colorado, a high plateau rises above the surrounding desert, its top cut by deep canyons and its edges worn into alcoves and overhangs. This is Mesa Verde, Spanish for 'green table', a name it already carried when European explorers reached the region. Between roughly 600 and 1300 CE the mesa was home to a people whom archaeologists call the Ancestral Puebloans, who built the remarkable stone settlements that have made the site famous. The most celebrated of these are tucked into the shaded recesses of the canyon walls, high above the valley floor.

The earliest inhabitants of the region were not cliff dwellers at all. For several centuries they lived on the mesa top in small settlements of semi-subterranean houses, dug partly into the ground and roofed with timber and mud. They grew maize, beans and squash on the flat land, hunted deer and rabbits, and gathered wild plants such as piñon nuts and juniper berries. A wetter climate in the early centuries made farming reasonably reliable, and the population grew. By about 750 CE they had begun to build houses of stone above ground, using flat blocks of sandstone mortared together with mud.

The move into the alcoves came surprisingly late. Most of the famous cliff palaces were constructed during the thirteenth century. The best known, which nineteenth-century visitors named Cliff Palace, contains more than 150 rooms, together with a number of circular ceremonial chambers known as kivas. Building such a settlement required the co-operation of a large community, the careful transport of stone, water and timber, and a detailed knowledge of how sunlight and rainwater behave in a sheltered, south-facing recess.

Life in the alcoves offered clear advantages. The overhanging rock gave protection from rain, snow and the midday sun, and the shallow caves kept a more even temperature than the exposed mesa top. The sites were also easy to defend, since a narrow ledge or a hand-and-toe trail was all that connected many of them to the world above. But the same locations imposed costs. Every drop of drinking water and every basket of maize had to be carried up from springs and fields far below, and smoke from cooking fires had to find its way out through the rock. The bones of the inhabitants suggest that the work was physically demanding, particularly for women.

Why the Ancestral Puebloans abandoned the mesa so completely has been debated for more than a century. Tree-ring records, which allow archaeologists to date timbers to the exact year, show that the late thirteenth century was a period of severe and prolonged drought. Several dry years followed one another, and the harvests on which the communities depended failed. Pollen and soil studies indicate that the mesa top had also been heavily cleared of its original woodland, so that thin soil was exposed to erosion.

Drought alone, however, probably does not explain everything. The thirteenth century was also a period of social stress. The population appears to have grown beyond what the land could comfortably support, and evidence of violence has been found at some sites in the wider area: a few skeletons show injuries, and some settlements were apparently burned. Oral traditions of the Pueblo peoples describe migrations rather than a single catastrophe. The most widely accepted interpretation today is that a combination of factors — failing rainfall, exhausted soils, conflict and perhaps religious or political change — persuaded people that their future lay elsewhere.

The departure was not sudden in the sense of a single night. It seems to have taken place over a few decades, with families and then whole communities drifting away, mostly southwards and eastwards towards the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico and the Hopi mesas of Arizona. The descendants of the cliff dwellers are the Pueblo peoples of today, who regard Mesa Verde as an ancestral home and who have objected, at times successfully, to the excavation and display of ancestral remains.

For centuries the cliff dwellings were known to local Ute, Navajo and Pueblo peoples, whose oral histories record the ruins, but they were unknown to European settlers until the late nineteenth century. According to a well-known account, in December 1888 a rancher named Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law, Charles Mason, were riding along the rim of a canyon in search of stray cattle when a snowstorm cleared and they saw the great settlement below. Whether or not the story is exact, Wetherill soon began digging at the site and selling what he found, a practice that modern archaeologists deplore.

Concern about the destruction of the ruins grew, and in 1906 the United States Congress passed legislation protecting the site, and Mesa Verde was made a national park. It was the first park in the country created specifically to preserve archaeological remains. In 1978 it was among the first places in the United States to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Today visitors reach Cliff Palace by a steep stone staircase and are shown around in small groups by rangers, since the fragile plaster and the narrow passages cannot withstand unrestricted numbers.

Some of the most interesting questions remain open. Archaeologists still argue about how many people lived in the alcoves at any one time and precisely when each building was occupied. Modern techniques are helping: microscopic analysis of residues in cooking pots has revealed what was boiled and stored, and the study of roof timbers continues to refine the chronology year by year.

Many parents are startled when their four-year-old begins to hold long, serious conversations with someone who is not there. The companion may have a name, a family and firm preferences; it may be blamed for broken toys and consulted about supper. Surveys suggest that a majority of children, in many different countries, create such companions at some point, though estimates vary widely because the boundary between an imaginary friend and a pretend character in a game is not always clear. What was once regarded as a worrying sign of loneliness is now generally considered an ordinary feature of growing up.

The change in attitude owes much to research that began in the 1990s. Psychologists who studied children with imaginary companions found, to their surprise, that these children were not noticeably lonelier than their peers and were not more likely to be shy or withdrawn. On several measures they appeared more sociable. They tended to talk more, to be more fluent in conversation with adults, and to have richer vocabularies. Parents often described them as imaginative and articulate, though psychologists are careful to point out that this does not prove that imaginary friends cause these qualities. It may simply be that verbal, imaginative children are the ones who invent them.

A crucial distinction in the research is between invisible friends and personified objects. Some children invent a friend who has no physical presence at all; others talk to a doll, a stuffed animal or even a blanket as though it had thoughts and feelings, sometimes for years. Personified objects seem to be more common among children who are in some way under stress, and they can serve as a source of comfort in the way that a favoured toy does. Invisible friends, by contrast, are more often associated with play and storytelling.

What are these companions actually for? The most widely supported explanation is that they provide a private space in which children can rehearse the social world. Adults have friends with whom they can discuss worries and try out opinions; children rarely do. By inventing a partner, a child can practise negotiation, persuasion and apology, and can safely experiment with being bossy, kind or angry. Several studies have found that children with imaginary companions are also more likely to engage in complex pretend play with other children, in which roles are discussed and agreed rather than simply acted out.

Imaginary friends also seem to help with self-regulation. A child who is frightened of the dark can explain to a companion why there is nothing to fear, and in doing so may calm their own anxiety. Speech addressed to an invented listener looks like a step between speaking aloud to oneself and the silent inner speech of adults. This has led some researchers to suggest that such companions may assist the development of an internal voice, though the evidence is indirect and the theory is not universally accepted.

Not everything about the phenomenon is well understood. One puzzle is the range of forms these companions take. Some are ordinary children; others are animals, giants or creatures from television. Some are consistently friendly and helpful, while others are difficult, demanding or unkind, yet there is no strong evidence that an unkind imaginary friend indicates a problem at home. Another puzzle is the question of belief: interviews with children suggest that most understand perfectly well that the companion is not real, even while protesting that it is, and some seem to switch between the two attitudes depending on who is asking.

Parents often ask what they should do, and the general advice from researchers is: not much. Joining in occasionally at the child's invitation is usually welcomed, particularly if the adult follows the child's lead. Asking too many questions about the friend, on the other hand, can make the child self-conscious and cause the game to be abandoned. Disapproval is likely to be counterproductive, and a ban on an imaginary friend risks teaching a child that imagination is something to be ashamed of. In the great majority of cases the companion simply fades away, usually between the ages of six and nine, as other interests and real friendships take up more of the child's attention.

The research has limits. Most studies involve relatively small samples from Western, educated families who volunteer for university research, and it is not clear how far the findings apply to children elsewhere. Parents are often the source of information, and their memories may be reshaped by the diary they were asked to keep. There is also a shortage of long-term studies following the same children into adulthood, so the popular claim that children with imaginary friends grow up to be more creative adults remains largely untested; the few follow-ups that exist do not settle the matter.

Nevertheless, the broad conclusion is reassuring. An imaginary friend is best understood not as a symptom to be treated but as a tool that a child has made and put to use. It allows practice at being another person, and at being oneself in company. Whether or not it leaves a permanent mark on character, it provides a window, for those who observe carefully, into what a small child already knows about conversation, conflict and care. For most children the companion is eventually forgotten, leaving only the faintest of memories.

Few subjects attract as much rhetorical warmth and as little timetabled space as art. Ministers of education regularly praise creativity as an essential attribute of the modern workforce; the timetable, meanwhile, tends to treat art as filling that can be removed whenever something else needs room. In response to cuts, advocates of the arts argue forcefully that a child who is never taught to draw or paint, play an instrument, act or design is being denied something fundamental. I am sympathetic to much of this, but I want to examine what the evidence can actually support, because the question is harder than either side usually admits.

The most common argument for compulsory art is that it improves attainment in other subjects. This claim has a long history, and it faded for a while when an influential analysis in the late 1990s examined a large body of studies and reported that the transfer of artistic training to academic achievement was, at best, slight. The finding was uncomfortable for advocates, and it was sometimes misdescribed as proof that the arts had no value. But this, in my view, was a misreading: it showed only that the arts do not have an easily measured side effect on test scores, not that they are worthless in themselves.

More recent research has been more encouraging about specific skills. Several studies have found that training in music is associated with modest improvements in phonological awareness — the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds within words — and some have reported small links with spatial reasoning. Programmes in which children learn to act have been associated with improvements in vocabulary and in understanding other people's mental states. These results are genuinely interesting, but they are inconsistent, often come from small samples, and tend to show only short-term effects. Whether a few weeks of rhythm games leaves a permanent advantage is unknown.

A second argument holds that the arts are valuable because they build character and confidence. Critics from outside education often dismiss this as sentimentality, but there is more to it than that. A school that stages a production or mounts an exhibition is asking pupils to work towards a public standard, to accept criticism and to persist at a difficult skill for months. These are precisely the qualities that employers claim to want. The weakness of the argument is that participation is rarely compulsory in practice: the pupils who choose drama or music are often already confident and self-directed, so it is hard to know how much the activity contributed.

There is also a case for regarding art not as a collection of separate subjects but as a form of attention. When young people learn to look closely at a painting or listen analytically to a piece of music, they are being taught to perceive rather than merely to consume. This matters in a world saturated with images and sounds designed to persuade. A pupil who has tried to make a short film understands why certain shots are chosen; a pupil who has never attempted one is more easily manipulated by them. Crucially, this applies at every age, not only in the early years.

This is where the case for compulsion becomes difficult. In a weekly art lesson, quality of teaching is everything, and teachers of genuine skill are scarce and expensive to train. A course squeezed into a crowded timetable and led by a reluctant adult who has been told to put a photograph on the wall and hand out pencils does more harm than good. Where a school cannot staff the subject properly, a rule that every pupil must study it achieves nothing.

Some critics go further and complain that making art compulsory has perverse effects, turning play into assessment and destroying what made it attractive. I am not persuaded. The experience of physical education, which is compulsory in most systems, suggests that structure does not kill enjoyment; whether pupils enjoy a subject depends chiefly on how it is taught. The risk is real but manageable, and abandoning the subject altogether is not the remedy.

A third argument concerns equity, and it strikes me as the most important of all. Parents with money already buy the art their children cannot get at school, whether through private lessons, instruments or trips. Research on out-of-school arts participation consistently shows far higher rates among advantaged pupils. In art, as elsewhere, the school can do more for equality than any other institution, because it is the only one that reaches every child. Removing it from later years would widen a gap that already exists, since the children who lost access would be disproportionately those whose homes could not compensate.

I would therefore make art compulsory throughout school, with two qualifications. First, the curriculum must be defensible: not a vague invitation to be creative, but a demanding introduction to drawing, design, performance and critical looking, assessed in ways that reward improvement rather than raw talent. Second, schools must be given the teachers to deliver it; a legal requirement without trained staff is merely a cruelty. Done properly, art education is not a luxury, nor a driver of higher scores in other subjects, nor mainly a vocational training. It is the study of how things are made and meant, and a child who leaves school without some knowledge of it will be less able to understand the world.