IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 482

Anyone who picks up a red Michelin guide today, with its dense columns of hotels and restaurants and its scattering of stars, may find it hard to believe that the book began as a piece of advertising. In 1900 the French tyre company Michelin, founded eleven years earlier by two brothers, André and Édouard Michelin, in the industrial town of Clermont-Ferrand, printed about 35,000 copies of a small red booklet and gave them away to motorists. France then had only a few thousand cars, and the brothers calculated that anything which made driving easier and more attractive would eventually sell more tyres.

The first guide was entirely practical. It listed where a driver could buy petrol or have a tyre repaired, and where to eat and sleep, and it included maps, a table of distances between towns and instructions for changing a wheel. There were no stars, and no judgements about cooking. The book was small enough to fit in a pocket, which mattered when a motor car offered little protection against rain and dust, and it was revised every year.

The guide had a companion that was already famous. Bibendum, the figure made of stacked white tyres, had been drawn in 1898 by the illustrator Marius Rossillon, who worked under the name O'Galop, after Édouard Michelin observed a pile of tyres at an exhibition and remarked on its resemblance to a man. The mascot appeared on posters and in advertisements, and made the company's name familiar long before the guide existed.

For two decades the guide remained free. Its distribution stopped in 1920, when the company began selling it for seven francs. The decision is usually explained by an anecdote about André Michelin, who is said to have visited a garage and found a copy of the guide being used to prop up a workbench. A book that could be treated so casually, he concluded, could hardly persuade anyone of the thoroughness of its recommendations; if readers had to pay, they would value it more.

No stars appeared in the guide until the 1920s. Restaurants were first marked with a single star in 1926, and in 1931 the company introduced the hierarchy of one, two and three stars that survives, in essence, today. The meanings were set down in 1936. One star indicated a good restaurant in its category, worth a stop on a journey; two stars meant excellent cooking worth a detour; three stars stood for exceptional food worth a journey made for its own sake. The wording mattered, because it shifted attention away from luxury and towards the quality of the cooking itself.

The reputation of the guide rests on a small team of inspectors. They are recruited from the hotel and restaurant trade, are expected to judge a meal without revealing who they are, and are paid a salary rather than by results, so that they have no interest in promoting one establishment over another.

Inspectors eat anonymously. They book tables under assumed names, order without asking questions, pay the bill in full and never identify themselves while they are assessing a restaurant. A place that seems promising is visited several times, in different seasons and at different meal times, before any recommendation is made. Back at the office, the inspector writes a report and discusses it with colleagues, and a decision about stars is taken collectively rather than by one person. Awards are reviewed every year, so a kitchen can lose a star as well as gain one, and the loss of a third star has sometimes been treated by the press as a national event.

Publication was interrupted by the Second World War, and the 1939 edition was the last to appear for several years. When Allied forces landed in Normandy in 1944, officers are reported to have been issued with a reprint of that guide, on the grounds that its maps and its lists of hotels might be useful in a country whose roads and bridges had been destroyed. In the post-war decades the guide's authority grew steadily, and by the 1970s a star had become, for many French chefs, the most valuable decoration a restaurant could hold. A new star could fill a dining room for months.

Expansion abroad was slow at first. Michelin published its first guide to New York in 2005 and its first to Tokyo in 2007; the Japanese capital was awarded more stars than Paris, and has rarely been far from the top since. Guides to Hong Kong and Macau, Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and California followed, each new city provoking argument about whether the inspectors understood its food. In 2020 the company added a green star, given to restaurants that it regards as leaders in sustainable gastronomy, a distinction that says nothing about the quality of the food.

Not everyone is grateful for the attention. Chefs have long complained that the system rewards a narrow idea of French classical cooking, and that a single anonymous judgement can determine whether a small restaurant survives. Others point out that a star brings not only customers but also rent, staff costs and the burden of expectation, and that losing one can be devastating for a proprietor who has built a career on it. The guide's defenders reply that it has changed its habits, that its inspectors now cover dozens of cuisines, and that no other publication has done as much to persuade ordinary travellers to take food seriously. Both claims can be true at once.

Every farmer knows that nitrogen is what makes a crop grow. It is a component of chlorophyll, the pigment that captures sunlight, and of every protein in the plant, so a shortage shows immediately as pale, stunted leaves. The air above a field is almost four-fifths nitrogen gas, yet that nitrogen is unavailable: its two atoms are joined by one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. Only a few kinds of organism possess the machinery to break it. Some live free in the soil, but the most important are bacteria that have evolved to live inside plant tissue, where they receive shelter and food in return for the nitrogen compounds they make. The soil beneath the crop is just as remarkable: a single gram of it can contain thousands of different kinds of bacteria, most of which have never been named.

A plant's roots are not passive. As they grow they release a mixture of sugars, amino acids and organic acids into the surrounding soil, and this leakage, known as root exudation, creates a narrow zone — the rhizosphere — in which bacteria multiply far faster than in the soil beyond. In some crop plants a substantial share of the carbon captured by photosynthesis is released in this way. The plant is not being careless. The exudates feed microbes that, in return, make nutrients available, produce growth-promoting substances and occupy space that might otherwise be taken by disease-causing organisms. The term itself was coined in 1904 by the German agronomist Lorenz Hiltner, who noticed that soil close to roots supported far more microorganisms than soil a short distance away.

The best-studied partnership is between rhizobia, a group of soil bacteria, and legumes such as peas, beans and clover. When a legume's roots grow in soil containing the right bacteria, substances in the exudates attract them to the root hairs, which curl around the bacteria and allow them to enter. The plant then builds a new organ, the root nodule, in which the bacteria are housed. Inside the nodule the bacteria are supplied with carbon compounds from the plant's own photosynthesis, and in exchange they use an enzyme, nitrogenase, to break the strong triple bond that holds the two atoms of a nitrogen molecule together, converting the gas into ammonia that the plant can absorb. This process is known as biological nitrogen fixation.

Nitrogenase is a remarkable enzyme, but it is also fragile: oxygen destroys it irreversibly. The nodule therefore has to solve a puzzle, since the bacteria need oxygen to release the energy that fixation demands. The solution is a protein called leghemoglobin, which is closely related to the haemoglobin in human blood and binds oxygen tightly, keeping the concentration around the bacteria low enough to protect the enzyme while still allowing it to be delivered. Leghemoglobin gives the inside of an active nodule its pink or red colour, and a nodule that has turned green or brown has usually stopped working. A farmer can therefore judge the health of a legume crop simply by cutting open a root.

Nitrogen is not the only requirement that bacteria help to meet. Phosphorus, which plants need for energy transfer and for building DNA, is often present in soil but locked up in compounds that roots cannot dissolve. Certain bacteria release organic acids that make phosphate soluble, and others produce siderophores, molecules that bind iron and deliver it to the plant. Some soil bacteria also manufacture hormones such as auxin, which alter the way roots branch, or trigger a general hardening of the plant's defences that makes it harder for pathogens to establish themselves. All these effects appear to operate at once in real soil, which is one reason why they are so difficult to measure separately. These services may also explain why some soils suppress disease while others, apparently similar, do not.

The agricultural promise is obvious. Farmers have inoculated legume seed with rhizobia for over a century, and in Brazil, where soybean is grown on a vast scale, inoculation supplies most of the nitrogen the crop needs, saving the country large quantities of expensive fertiliser. Products that mix several kinds of beneficial bacteria are now marketed as biofertilisers and soil conditioners, and the market for them is growing. Field results, however, are inconsistent. An inoculant that works in a greenhouse may fail completely in a field, because the strains supplied have to compete with bacteria already adapted to that soil, and because drought, acidity or the wrong temperature can prevent nodules from forming at all. Legumes are also valued in rotations, although how much nitrogen they leave behind for the next crop is disputed.

The largest uncertainty lies in what has not been seen. Only a small fraction of the bacteria in a gram of soil has ever been grown in a laboratory, and the rest are known mainly from fragments of their DNA. New sequencing methods have shown how varied these communities are, and how quickly they change when a field is ploughed, limed or sown with a different crop, but they have not yet revealed which combinations of species matter most. Some researchers argue that a handful of well-chosen strains will be enough, pointing to the success of rhizobial inoculants; others suspect that the durable benefits come only from complex communities that nobody has learned to assemble. Given how much of the soil's population remains unstudied, both positions are, for the moment, statements of faith.

The idea returns whenever governments are anxious about the young. In several countries proposals for a year of compulsory service — military for some, civilian for others — have been debated in parliaments and tested in pilot schemes. Supporters describe a generation that would be mixed, trained and made useful; opponents describe a year taken from people who never agreed to give it. The argument is often conducted with anecdotes, but the questions behind it are empirical: what does such a year actually produce, for whom, and at what cost?

Compulsory service has a long history, though rarely the one its admirers imagine. The United Kingdom conscripted men for the armed forces between 1949 and 1963, and some two million passed through the system; France kept a form of military service until 2001; Germany suspended its own in 2011. Historians of conscription point out that these schemes were designed to supply manpower, whether for cold-war armies or for colonial campaigns, and that the language of citizenship and character was largely added afterwards. Judged as a method of producing soldiers, they worked; judged as a method of producing citizens, they were never seriously tested.

Senior military officers are, on the whole, unenthusiastic. Modern forces depend on expensive specialists — technicians, cyber analysts, drone operators — who need years of training, and a twelve-month conscript is barely trained before leaving. Officers also note that a large intake of short-serving personnel consumes the time of exactly the people whose skills are hardest to replace. When a country faces a recruitment shortfall, as several do, the case for conscription seems obvious to politicians; the case, seen from inside the armed forces, is much weaker. Officers tend to add that recruitment difficulties are better addressed through pay and conditions than through compulsion.

Labour economists approach the question with arithmetic. A year of service takes a young person out of education or employment, and the output lost during that year is a real cost, even if it is invisible in a budget. Against it must be set whatever the year produces: work that would otherwise not be done, in care homes or environmental projects, and skills that the participant would not otherwise acquire. The difficulty is that most of these effects are hard to value, and that participants are not a random sample, since those who volunteer for a scheme are usually those who would have done well anyway.

Youth-work charities make a different objection. They argue that the debate is conducted almost entirely among adults, and that the views of the young people who would be required to take part are treated as a public-relations problem rather than as evidence. They report that the teenagers they work with tend to support voluntary schemes and to resent compulsory ones, even when the compulsory version would be better funded.

A scheme that has to persuade young people to join, they suggest, will be designed better than one that can order them to attend. The charities add that a residential placement far from home is much harder for a young carer, or for someone with a disability, to accept.

The people who run existing programmes raise a practical worry. A national scheme of any size would need hundreds of thousands of supervised placements a year, in hospitals, schools, charities and environmental bodies, and the organisations able to provide them are precisely those already short of staff and money. Pilot schemes in several countries have struggled to find enough suitable placements, and a poor placement — young people filing paperwork, or, worse, displacing paid staff — does more damage than no placement at all. Running a scheme well is expensive, and the expense is the part that legislatures are most tempted to cut.

What, then, of the claims about character and citizenship? The evidence is thinner than the rhetoric. Most evaluations rely on self-reports gathered soon after a programme ends, when enthusiasm is at its highest, and few follow participants for long enough to see whether habits of volunteering survive the return to ordinary life. Where comparison groups have been used, differences in civic engagement tend to shrink or disappear within a few years. It is possible that a year of service changes people; it has simply not been shown that it does so reliably, or that compulsion is what makes the difference.

My own view is that compulsion is the wrong instrument. A year is a substantial part of a young life, and taking it by law, on the argument that the experience is good for the person compelled, is a form of paternalism that would not be tolerated in any other area of education or employment. A voluntary scheme, properly paid and generously funded, with placements in care, education and environmental work, would attract those who want to serve and would have to earn its reputation. If such a scheme were a success, that would be a better argument for expanding it than any statute.

There is a final uncertainty. Few, if any, countries have run a large compulsory scheme designed from the outset to be evaluated, with a comparison group and a decade of follow-up, so the evidence for and against is assembled from programmes that were doing several things at once. That is a reason for humility on both sides, and a reason to insist that any new scheme, voluntary or not, should be built so that its effects can be measured rather than merely asserted.