IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 486

The first Olympic Games of the modern era opened in Athens on 6 April 1896, less than two years after a congress in Paris had voted to revive them. Some 240 athletes, all of them men, took part, representing fourteen countries and competing in forty-three events across nine sports. Everything was on a modest scale, and much of what now seems essential to an Olympic Games — a village to house the competitors, a torch relay, gold medals — did not yet exist. Yet the ten days of competition established a pattern that later organisers have rarely departed from.

The revival was largely the work of Pierre de Coubertin, a French educationalist who believed that organised sport could strengthen character and encourage cooperation between nations. He had visited the ancient site at Olympia and was convinced that fair competition could serve modern society. At an international congress held at the Sorbonne in June 1894, delegates from a dozen countries agreed to establish an International Olympic Committee and to hold the first Games in Athens. Because the host city was Greek, a Greek scholar, Demetrios Vikelas, was elected the committee's first president; Coubertin became secretary and took the presidency two years later.

The Panathenaic Stadium, where most of the events were held, had first been laid out in the fourth century BC and rebuilt in marble several centuries later under Roman rule, but it had long been disused and part of the site lay buried under earth. Excavation exposed the ancient structure, and the restored stadium, with a long, narrow track whose straights measured about 200 metres and seating for tens of thousands, was ready in time for the opening ceremony. Estimates of the crowd that day vary, but contemporary accounts describe a full stadium.

Competition took place in nine sports: athletics, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, swimming, tennis, weightlifting and wrestling. There was no purpose-built pool. The swimming races were held in the open sea at the Bay of Zea, near Piraeus, where competitors were taken by boat; the water was cold and the races were judged from the shore. Cycling used a newly built velodrome and the shooting events a range at Kallithea. Rowing and sailing had been planned but were abandoned because of bad weather.

The most celebrated novelty was the marathon, proposed by the French scholar Michel Bréal, who wanted a long-distance race that would recall the legendary run of a messenger from Marathon to Athens. The tale that the messenger covered the distance and then died after announcing victory belongs to legend rather than to verified history, but it provided an appealing basis for an event. The course followed the route from the village of Marathon to the stadium, a distance of roughly forty kilometres; the modern figure of 42.195 kilometres was not fixed until decades later. The winner, Spyridon Louis, was a Greek water carrier, and his victory delighted the home crowd.

A few athletes dominated the results. Carl Schuhmann of Germany won four events, three in gymnastics and one in wrestling, while his compatriot Hermann Weingärtner collected six medals. James Connolly of the United States won the triple jump on the first afternoon and is generally regarded as the first champion of the modern Games. Robert Garrett, another American, won the shot put and the discus; he had practised with a heavy home-made discus before leaving and found the one used in Athens lighter than he had expected.

Money was a persistent anxiety. The prime minister had doubted that a country with a struggling economy could bear the cost of a major international event. The organising committee repeatedly ran short of funds. The project was rescued by Georgios Averoff, a wealthy Greek businessman living in Egypt, who paid for the stadium to be restored in marble. A national lottery, the sale of commemorative stamps and private donations covered the remaining expenses, and the Games went ahead.

Winners received a silver medal and a branch of olive. Those placed second received a bronze medal and a branch of laurel, and there were no gold medals. The prizes were presented by King George I at the closing ceremony on 15 April. Music had a part to play as well: a new Olympic Hymn, composed by Spyridon Samaras to words by the poet Kostis Palamas, was performed at the opening ceremony, although it was not formally adopted as the Olympic anthem until many decades later.

Women were not allowed to compete in 1896; the first female Olympians appeared four years later in Paris. Nor was there any system of national teams. Some competitors were already living in Athens, others were in Europe for other reasons, and one Australian, Edwin Flack, entered the athletics while on leave from a bank in London, winning both the 800 and the 1,500 metres.

At the closing ceremony several Greeks, including the king, argued that Athens should become the permanent home of the Games, and there were suggestions of a separate competition in Athens between the official Games. Coubertin resisted, and the second Games were awarded to Paris, where they were staged alongside a world fair and spread over several months — a format now widely regarded as a failure. The importance of 1896 lies elsewhere: it showed that a revived international competition was practicable, and it gave the movement a store of ceremonies, venues and stories on which it has drawn ever since.

Travellers through flat country in Europe and North America often notice a slender column of concrete topped by a cylinder or a flattened sphere, usually carrying the name of the town in large letters. A water tower looks like a piece of industrial decoration, but it performs a simple job that would otherwise need a pump in every street. It stores water at a height, and gravity does the rest. The height matters because the pressure that forces water out of a tap is created by the weight of water standing above it.

The rule is easy to state: in a connected body of water, the pressure at any point depends on how far that point lies below the surface. Every additional metre of height adds about 10 kilopascals, so a tank whose surface is 40 metres above the street delivers roughly 400 kilopascals, or four bar, at ground level. That is enough for houses of two or three storeys and for sprinkler systems and hydrants. It is not enough for a tall apartment block, which must have booster pumps of its own; this is one reason why the tallest towers are found in low-rise suburbs rather than city centres.

The visible parts are few. At the top sits the tank, welded from steel or built of prestressed concrete, and often painted white or insulated to keep the water cool. Down the centre of the supporting column runs the riser, a single large pipe through which pumps raise water and through which the same water later descends to the mains. The column, which engineers call the pedestal, is generally of reinforced concrete and is sometimes widened at the foot. At ground level a broad foundation spreads the load, since a full tank may weigh several thousand tonnes.

Two openings prevent trouble. The vent, a screened aperture at the highest point of the tank, lets air in as water is drawn down and out as the tank fills; without it the structure would suffer damaging changes of pressure. The overflow pipe is set at the maximum permitted water level and carries surplus water safely to the ground if a valve sticks or a pump fails to stop. Most tanks also have an access hatch for inspectors and a level indicator, often a float or a pressure sensor, that tells the control system when to start and stop pumping.

In ordinary operation a water tower is a buffer between supply and demand. Pumps at the treatment works run most efficiently at a steady rate, whereas demand in a town is anything but steady. Consumption falls to a minimum late at night and rises sharply in the early morning as bathrooms and kitchens come into use. Overnight the pumps refill the tank; during the peak the tank empties, supplementing what the pumps can deliver. Because storage carries part of the load, pumps can be sized for average rather than maximum demand, which reduces both construction costs and electricity use.

There is a second purpose, seldom mentioned but often decisive. Fire services need large quantities of water at high pressure for short periods, and a tank that keeps a reserve at its base can supply hydrants at full pressure even when the electricity supply has failed and the pumps are silent. Many building codes therefore require a minimum reserve that ordinary users cannot draw on.

Stored water is not static in any simple sense. Warm water is less dense than cold, so a large tank may separate into layers that hardly mix, and water lingering in the outer parts of the tank loses its chlorine and may pick up material from the walls. Engineers sample and clean tanks at intervals, but how water moves inside a full tank is surprisingly hard to predict. Computer models of mixing give different answers according to assumptions that are difficult to check, and the growth of biofilm on internal surfaces remains an active research question.

Alternatives exist. Variable-speed pumps can follow demand closely, and pressure-reducing valves allow a high-pressure main to serve older districts; where the ground is hilly, a tank on a hilltop does the same work as a tower. The choice is largely economic. A tower is expensive to build and maintain, takes land that neighbours may object to, and needs periodic inspection by divers or by remote-controlled devices, yet over several decades it is often cheaper than running pumps hard to meet every peak.

Construction has changed little in principle. The pedestal is usually slipformed — poured continuously in a moving mould — and the tank is then built on top or lifted into place. In the composite design common in North America, a concrete shaft carries a steel tank. Heights are typically between 30 and 50 metres, chosen to give the pressure the network requires rather than to reach any particular altitude. The shape of the tank, whether cylinder, sphere or cone, affects mixing and cost more than it affects the pressure delivered.

The tower, then, is a device for storing energy as well as water: electricity used to lift the water is recovered as pressure when it flows back down. Nobody claims that towers are beautiful, and in a hilly city they are hardly needed. In a flat town, however, they remain the simplest way of holding a reserve, smoothing the work of the pumps and keeping taps running when the power fails.

Few planning disputes generate as much heat as the question of building upwards. Cities are growing, land within reach of a railway station is scarce, and every proposal for a tall block of flats attracts objections that are as much about a way of life as about architecture. The argument is often conducted as if height were a single choice: either a city builds towers or it does not. In reality, height is a tool with costs and benefits, and the sensible question is when it is the right one.

The economic case is the easiest to state. Where land is expensive, the price of the site has to be spread over as many homes as possible, and building upwards is the obvious response. Some economists argue that tight limits on height function as an invisible tax on housing supply: in cities where such limits are strict, flats cost more and fewer homes are built than demand would justify. On this view, allowing more floors near public transport is one of the few policies that can increase supply quickly, because tall buildings add many homes to land that is already served by roads and railways.

Environmentalists are divided. Density reduces the need to drive, makes a frequent bus or train service viable and lowers the energy needed to heat each home, because flats share walls and roofs. Against this, tall buildings require more concrete, steel and glass per square metre than low ones, so the carbon emitted in constructing them is greater, and the savings from lower heating may take decades to repay that debt. Some engineers add that the structure of a very tall block is difficult to alter later, which makes it harder to adapt as households and workplaces change.

Critics of high-rise living point to evidence that is difficult to ignore. Surveys in several countries have found that residents of flats, particularly families with young children, report less satisfaction with their homes than residents of houses with gardens, and that children in flats spend less time outdoors unsupervised. The mid-century estates built on the edges of many European cities are often cited: tower blocks set in open grass, with few shops and no streets, that became unpopular and were, in some cases, later demolished.

Yet the conclusion that height itself is to blame does not follow. Those estates failed for reasons that could have been corrected: entrances that were hard to supervise, communal lifts that broke down, and management that ignored repairs. Cities that have handled tall housing well — Vienna, with its large stock of subsidised flats, and Singapore, where the great majority of households live in public high-rise housing — show that the building type is compatible with popularity, provided that maintenance and allocation are taken seriously.

There is a more practical objection. Height does not guarantee homes of the kind a city needs. Many new towers consist mainly of studios and one-bedroom flats, bought by investors and let to single people; a district can gain hundreds of dwellings and still lose the family homes that were demolished to make way for them. Several cities now require a proportion of two- and three-bedroom flats, or larger units on lower floors, in schemes above a certain size. Without such rules, building up can increase the number of homes while reducing the number that families can actually use.

What happens at ground level matters as much as what happens above it. A tall building whose entrance opens onto a pavement with shops, doors and windows overlooking it contributes more to a neighbourhood than a lower block surrounded by car parks. The quality of the street — whether there are places to walk to, and whether people can see and be seen — has a stronger effect on how a district feels than the number of storeys. This is where many schemes, tall or short, are judged and found wanting.

Height also has a price that is often underestimated. Above about thirty storeys, the structure must resist greater wind loads, lifts take up more floor area, and fire safety requires extra stairs and refuges, so the cost of each square metre rises sharply. Tall buildings are not a cheap way of adding homes; they are a way of adding homes where land is so valuable that the extra cost is worth paying.

My own view is that cities should permit far more high-rise housing than most currently allow, especially within walking distance of stations and in suburbs of detached houses that are already served by good transport. But height should be permitted as a means, not celebrated as an end. A proposal should be judged on whether it produces homes of a usable size, whether its lower floors make a street worth walking along, and whether the building will be maintained in twenty years' time. Where mid-rise blocks can deliver similar density, they will often be the better answer.

The evidence base is thinner than the confidence of the participants suggests. Researchers cannot easily separate the effect of a building's height from the effect of its design, its tenants and its management, and studies that follow families over many years are rare. Until such work exists, the strongest conclusion available is also the least dramatic: build up where land is scarce and transport is good, and build well.