IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 487

The kea is the only parrot species in the world that habitually inhabits the zone above the snow line. It occurs exclusively on the South Island of New Zealand, where it lives in mountain beech forest and in the open alpine country above it. It stays in the mountains through the winter, when much of its range lies under deep snow. Comparatively few parrots have adapted to such an inhospitable, mountainous environment. Visitors are especially likely to encounter the bird, because it is conspicuously bold, inquisitive and quick to investigate anything unfamiliar, including boots, backpacks and the rubber seals around car windows. Its name is thought to imitate its distinctive call, a long descending whistle that carries across the valleys.

Adults are predominantly olive-green, with a flash of orange-red beneath the wings that becomes visible only when the bird opens them. The beak is elongated, narrow and strongly curved, and the upper mandible is considerably longer than the lower, which allows the bird to employ it like a chisel or a pair of forceps. Males are noticeably heavier than females, weighing up to approximately a kilogram, and the two sexes are otherwise so similar in appearance that observers usually need to see a pair side by side before they can distinguish them.

The kea is an omnivore and an opportunist. Its diet incorporates roots, leaves, buds, berries and nectar, together with insects and their larvae, which it excavates from rotting wood and soil. It also consumes carrion, and it will search rubbish tips and the refuse bins at ski fields for discarded scraps. This dietary flexibility assists the bird in surviving a harsh environment, but it is simultaneously the principal reason why the species comes into conflict with people.

That conflict has a lengthy history. During the second half of the nineteenth century, sheep farmers in the high country reported that kea attacked their flocks, pecking at the backs of sheep and occasionally killing them, and a bird that had been little known outside the mountains became notorious.

Historians have disputed how much damage was genuinely inflicted, since kea are also attracted to the wounds of animals that have died from other causes, but the reports were sufficient to make the bird a target. From the 1860s, governments paid a bounty for every beak handed in, and killing continued in various forms for approximately a century, until legal protection was finally extended to the species.

By then the population had declined sharply. The kea is unusual among parrots in nesting on the ground, in a burrow excavated beneath the roots of a tree or in a crevice between rocks, and this renders its eggs and chicks easy prey for introduced mammals. Stoats, rats and possums, all transported to New Zealand by European settlers, take eggs and nestlings, and in some regions few chicks survive. A second threat is less conspicuous: kea are strongly attracted to the lead flashing and lead-headed nails on older buildings, and birds that chew them can die of lead poisoning.

What impresses scientists most about the kea is its intellect. A bird will examine an unfamiliar object for minutes at a time, turning it over, probing it and pulling it apart. In one well-known sequence of experiments, kea were presented with a series of puzzles that required them to perform several steps in the correct order before they could reach food; most of the birds solved the sequence rapidly, and some appeared to acquire the solution by observing others. Kea have also been observed using sticks to reach food, a skill that is rare among birds and is widely regarded as evidence of flexible intelligence.

Young kea are playfully destructive. Birds that are not yet breeding congregate in loose groups, and a group may spend hours sliding down a snow-covered roof, rolling in the snow, wrestling and chasing one another. Play of this kind is commonplace in young mammals but is reported less often in parrots, and it is one of the reasons visitors find the bird so entertaining. It is also one of the reasons campsite managers dread it, since a group of kea will investigate tents, boots and cooking equipment and may leave them in pieces.

Breeding is slow. The female lays two to four white eggs in a nest at the end of a burrow, and she alone incubates them for about three weeks while the male brings food. The chicks remain in the nest for many weeks after hatching. In years when beech trees produce a heavy crop of seed, rats and mice become abundant, stoats and other predators breed well, and nests in such years are unusually vulnerable; in poor years many pairs do not breed at all.

Today the species is fully protected and the total population is estimated at a few thousand birds, although the figure is uncertain because kea inhabit remote country and move widely. Conservation work concentrates on controlling predators around nests and on reducing the hazards that people create: lead is being replaced on buildings in kea country, rubbish bins are being fitted with lids the birds cannot open, and visitors are asked not to feed them. Researchers also attach coloured leg bands and small radio transmitters, which allow them to follow individual birds through the mountains and to discover how far young kea disperse.

A small child stands in the kitchen with chocolate around the mouth and denies eating the last biscuit. Parents often find this moment alarming, but developmental psychologists see it differently: the ability to tell a deliberate lie is a milestone, and a fairly demanding one. To lie, a child must know what really happened, understand that another person does not know it, and keep the two versions of events apart long enough to say the false one aloud. Most children tell their first lie somewhere between the ages of two and four, and by the time they start school almost all of them lie occasionally.

Researchers generally define a lie as a statement that the speaker intends to be believed and knows to be untrue. On that definition, the lies of very young children come in recognisable stages. The first, sometimes called primary lies, appear at around two or three and are usually flat denials, offered with no supporting detail. At about four, children begin to produce secondary lies, which require them to hold the true account in memory while inventing another. By seven or eight they can tell tertiary lies, adapted to what the listener already knows, and these are considerably harder to detect.

The best-known method for studying this behaviour is simple. A child is shown a toy and told not to look at it while the adult leaves the room; a hidden camera records what happens. When the adult returns and asks whether the child peeked, most three-year-olds confess at once, apparently unable to imagine that the adult could be misled. Most four-year-olds deny it, even though the video shows them looking. The proportion who lie rises with age in most studies, and the lies themselves become more elaborate.

Two families of ability seem to matter. The first is theory of mind, the understanding that other people have beliefs, and that those beliefs can be wrong. Children who pass tests of false belief — who can say where a character will look for an object that has been moved without the character seeing — tend to start lying earlier and more convincingly. The second is executive function: children must hold the truth in mind, suppress the urge to blurt it out and construct a plausible alternative. Studies consistently find that children who score well on measures of working memory and inhibitory control tell more convincing lies.

Not all lies are selfish. By the age of three or four, many children can produce a polite lie, pretending to be pleased with a disappointing present or praising a drawing they do not like. This is not deception for gain but a social rule, and parents in most cultures actively teach it. Young children are not good at it: they may say the right words while their face shows disgust, or add an honest remark a moment later that cancels the compliment. Older children are better at controlling their faces and voices, so their lies are harder to see.

Adults are poor at spotting children's lies. In study after study, when teachers, parents and police officers are shown recordings of children answering questions and are asked to say who is lying, their accuracy is close to chance. Parents are among the worst, because they trust their own children. Adults also tend to rely on the wrong signals, such as a child's confidence or willingness to make eye contact, and confident children are not more likely to be telling the truth. Training programmes for professionals have produced only modest improvements in accuracy.

What makes children confess? Two findings are robust. The first is that asking a child to promise to tell the truth before the question is put increases honesty, even in very young children. The second concerns stories. In one experiment, children who heard a story about a boy who confessed to damaging a tree were more likely to admit their own misdeed than children who heard a story about a puppet whose nose grew whenever he lied; the second story had no such effect.

Much remains unsettled. Researchers cannot yet explain why some children lie far more often than others, or whether early lying predicts dishonesty later in life; most studies follow children for only a few years. The effect of parents' own behaviour is also unclear. Some studies suggest that children whose parents tell them white lies are more likely to lie themselves, but the evidence is mixed and other explanations are possible. Nor is it clear how far the findings apply beyond North America and Europe, where most of the published experiments have been carried out.

Parents can make honesty easier. Asking a child whether they did something, when the answer is already known, invites a lie; it is better to state what happened and ask what should be done about it. Acknowledging an admission calmly, and praising the courage it took, is more effective than punishment, which gives a child a strong reason to lie next time. It also helps to remember that a four-year-old's denial is not evidence of a bad character; it is evidence of a mind that is learning what other people can and cannot know. Children who are trusted to tell the truth have less to gain from a lie.

When a large employer announces that it may close, governments come under intense pressure to act. The arguments are familiar: thousands of jobs, a regional economy built around a single plant, suppliers who depend on its orders, and a political cost that is easy to measure. Yet the same arguments have been used for decades, and economists remain divided both about whether rescues succeed and about whether they are equitable.

Free-market economists make the standard objection, which is moral hazard. If managers know that losses will be covered, they have less incentive to avoid risk; if lenders know that a government will step in, they have less incentive to monitor their borrowers. Economists describe the result as a soft budget constraint: a firm that can expect assistance when it runs short of money will keep going longer than it should. The danger is not only that public money is wasted but that it is wasted in a way which rewards the behaviour that caused the problem.

There is historical evidence for this. Several studies of Japan in the 1990s concluded that banks kept insolvent companies alive rather than writing off their loans. This, they argued, weakened the productivity of the wider economy: capital and workers remained in businesses that had no future while healthier firms struggled to obtain credit. The label 'zombie firms' was coined for such companies, and the same anxiety has been raised about every later period of cheap credit.

Industrial-policy specialists, by contrast, emphasise the costs of sudden failure. A company that closes overnight does not release its workers smoothly into new jobs; it destroys skills, routines and relationships between suppliers that took years to build. Failure can also spread: unpaid suppliers may themselves collapse, and creditors may call in loans to firms that are perfectly sound. Contagion of this kind is the strongest argument for intervening quickly.

Trade union representatives put the case in simpler terms. They point out that the first cost of a closure falls on people who had no part in the decisions that caused it, and that the jobs disappear within weeks rather than years. In their view, a company that took the profits in good years should not hand the losses to its employees and to the state. Critics reply that protecting jobs in a doomed business merely delays the moment when workers must find new ones.

Insolvency practitioners make a related point: failure in law is not the same as closure. Bankruptcy systems in many countries are designed to keep a business trading while its debts are restructured, allowing it to shed obligations it cannot meet and continue with the parts that are viable. Chapter 11 in the United States is the best-known example. The process is imperfect and expensive, and it does not save every firm, but it is a good deal more orderly than the word 'bankruptcy' suggests to most people.

Competition authorities add a further concern. A rescue that keeps a large firm alive may discourage new entrants and leave customers with fewer choices; if the weakened firm is later sold to a rival, the result can be even greater concentration. They argue that state aid should therefore carry conditions intended to preserve competition, such as requiring the sale of parts of the business or guaranteeing rivals access to essential facilities.

The more useful question, therefore, is not whether governments should rescue firms but on what terms. A loan is different from a grant, and equity is different again: if taxpayers take a share of ownership, they share in any recovery. Money can be tied to a credible plan for restructuring, to limits on executive pay, to safeguards for workers or to environmental targets. Speed matters as well, because a rescue that arrives after the customers have gone is merely a subsidy to the creditors.

There are also alternatives that are frequently overlooked. Governments can support workers rather than companies, through wage subsidies and short-time working schemes that pay part of the wages of employees whose hours are reduced. Short-time working was used on a large scale in Germany after 2008. Governments can also buy goods and services from firms in difficulty, or guarantee loans to small suppliers. None of these instruments is free, but they direct help towards the people who need it and leave the decisions about the business with the business.

What is not known is how much any of this achieves. Assessing a rescue means comparing what happened with what would have happened otherwise, and that alternative cannot be observed. Governments count the jobs that were saved, rarely the jobs that would have been created if the money had been used differently. Studies that try to correct for this find effects that are modest and vary widely, which is one reason the academic literature has not settled the argument.

My own view is that rescue should be exceptional rather than routine. It is justified when a failure would be systemic, threatening the wider economy, or when a viable business is caught by a temporary shortage of credit that no private lender will supply. Where help is given it should be time-limited, so that it ends on a stated date, and it should be priced so that taxpayers are compensated for the risk they carry. Payments should depend on reforms that attack the cause of the difficulty. Where the aim is simply to protect jobs, subsidising wages is better than keeping an unviable company alive.