IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 489

Among the most remarkable objects made in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans were the books of the Maya, the civilisation whose cities spread across the Yucatán peninsula and the lowlands to its south. The Maya called such a book a huun. It consisted of a long strip of paper made from the inner bark of trees, folded backwards and forwards like a concertina so that it could be opened a few pages at a time, and its pages were painted by scribes, usually nobles, who recorded calendars, rituals and the movements of the heavens in a script of several hundred signs.

The paper itself was laboriously made from the inner bark of the fig tree, which was stripped and soaked. The fibres were then laid in layers, crossing one another, and beaten flat with a wooden tool until they fused into a sheet. After the sheets had dried in the sun they were coated with a thin layer of white clay and polished with a stone. Only then were the figures and glyphs painted on, using a brush and pigments that included a red made from iron oxide and a vivid blue produced from indigo and a clay mineral. The finished strips were sometimes given covers of jaguar skin.

Books served several purposes. Most of those that survive are almanacs: tables of days on which priests based their predictions and decided the timing of ceremonies, agricultural work and warfare. Others are astronomical, and a few seem to record genealogies and tribute. Books were also placed in tombs and carried in processions. Because they were handled constantly, they were easily damaged, and the fact that any have survived is due partly to the dry conditions of a few caves and partly to the accident of their having been taken to Europe.

The greatest single blow came in 1562, when the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa, conducting an inquiry into idolatry in the town of Maní, ordered the seizure and burning of a large number of Maya books. Landa wrote afterwards that the books had seemed to him to contain nothing but superstition and the lies of the devil, and that the burning caused the Maya great distress. It is often said that thousands of manuscripts were lost; whatever the true figure, almost nothing remained, and the hot, humid climate of the peninsula would in any case have destroyed any book left in the ground. Landa's action has been condemned ever since, yet his account of Maya customs, compiled later, preserved knowledge that would otherwise have vanished.

Four books are known to have survived. The most celebrated is the Dresden Codex, which has been in the library of the Saxon court since the eighteenth century and is now kept in the state library of that city; it suffered water damage during the second world war. Its pages include tables that follow the planet Venus through its cycles as morning and evening star, a table of eclipses, and almanacs used for divination. The astronomical tables are remarkably accurate, and they show that Maya priests had observed the sky systematically for centuries.

The Madrid Codex is the longest, running to more than a hundred pages, and it is concerned less with the heavens than with daily life: its almanacs show gods and humans hunting, keeping bees, weaving and making offerings. It reached Spain in two separate parts, which were recognised as belonging to the same book only in the late nineteenth century. The Paris Codex survives as a damaged fragment of about twenty pages, its edges crumbling, and includes a sequence of figures that some scholars interpret as constellations, a kind of zodiac.

The fourth, the Grolier Codex, is short — eleven pages — and was said to have been found in a cave in Chiapas in the 1960s. For decades many specialists dismissed it as a modern forgery, partly because its painting seemed coarse and because its ownership could not be traced; a few eminent scholars defended it. The argument was largely settled when radiocarbon dating of the bark paper placed its manufacture in the thirteenth century, and most authorities now accept it as genuine. Its acceptance makes the corpus of surviving Maya books complete at four.

For centuries nobody could read the script, and the key came from an unlikely source. Landa had recorded a list of signs beside the letters of the Spanish alphabet, supposing it to be a Maya alphabet; his list was misunderstood for generations but eventually proved decisive. In the 1950s a Soviet scholar, Yuri Knorozov, argued that the signs were not purely pictorial, as most Western experts then assumed, but stood for the sounds of spoken language as well as for whole words. His claim was resisted for years, partly because the leading authority of the day had insisted that the script was ideographic. Once the phonetic principle was accepted, in the 1970s and 1980s, the texts began to be read.

Today the four books are examined alongside the thousands of inscriptions carved on stone monuments and painted on pottery, and they have been digitised so that scholars everywhere can consult them. The Dresden Codex can be viewed page by page on the internet, and the fragile Paris fragment has been photographed in high resolution. Yet the books remain objects of great reverence for Maya communities, for whom they are not merely historical documents but a link with a tradition that survived five centuries of suppression.

The first unsupported steps are among the most eagerly awaited events of a child's life, and among the most variable. In industrialised countries most children walk somewhere between nine and eighteen months, with the average a little after the first birthday; a few walk considerably later and develop perfectly normally. A baby is generally said to be walking once they can cross a room without holding on, even if they still drop to the floor after a few paces and prefer crawling when they are in a hurry.

Older child-care manuals presented development as a ladder: a baby sits, then crawls, then pulls itself up, then cruises along the furniture, and at last walks. The chart on the clinic wall, with its boxes and averages, encourages the same impression. Yet many babies never crawl at all, and some shuffle on their bottoms or roll across the floor instead; almost all of them walk at much the same age as their crawling contemporaries. Milestones are useful as a rough guide and misleading as a schedule, and a child who skips a stage is not thereby behind.

Newborns offer a curious clue to how walking develops. If a baby of a few days old is held upright with the feet touching a surface, it will often make alternating stepping movements, as though walking. This reflex usually fades at around two months, and paediatricians once assumed that it vanished because the brain was maturing and suppressing a primitive response. Experiments in the 1980s suggested a simpler explanation: as the legs grow heavier, the baby can no longer lift them. Babies who had long since stopped stepping would produce the movement again when their legs were supported in warm water.

That observation encouraged a different way of thinking about motor development, associated above all with the American psychologist Esther Thelen. In one much-cited experiment, babies of about seven months who could not yet walk were placed on a small treadmill, held upright with their feet on the belt; within minutes they produced coordinated alternating steps that closely resembled walking. Thelen argued that walking is not a programme switched on in the brain but an emergent property of many parts — muscles, joints, balance, body proportions and the baby's own motivation — interacting with the surroundings. The treadmill did not teach the babies to walk; it revealed that the pattern was already available to them.

The proportions of a baby's body make the task harder than it looks. An infant's head is large and heavy in relation to the rest of the body, which raises the centre of gravity and makes balance precarious; the legs are short and the feet flat, without the arch that will later act as a spring. Walking is, in a sense, a controlled fall: the body tips forward and the swinging leg must arrive in time to catch it. Strength in the hips and trunk, information from the balance organs of the inner ear, and constant practice all have to come together. A toddler's first steps are consequently short and wide, with the arms held high.

Practices vary widely around the world. In some communities a newborn is massaged and its limbs gently exercised every day, and adults spend long sessions teaching it to sit, stand and step. In others, babies are carried on someone's back for most of their first year and are rarely placed on a floor at all. Reviews of such comparisons report differences of only a few weeks in the age at which children walk, which suggests that handling can shift the timetable slightly but does not determine it.

Much of the advice that surrounds this subject concerns equipment. Baby walkers, which suspend an infant in a wheeled seat so that the feet reach the floor, remain popular, yet studies suggest that infants who use them for long periods may walk slightly later than others, perhaps because they practise moving without having to balance; injuries have led hospitals to warn against them, and Canada prohibited their sale in 2004. Since the 1990s parents have been advised that a baby should sleep lying on its back, which lowers the risk of cot death, and paediatricians therefore recommend supervised time on the stomach while the baby is awake, since lying face down strengthens the neck and shoulders. Footwear matters as well: a hard sole deadens the feedback from the ground, and indoors a bare foot is generally best. A thick carpet, too, absorbs the small adjustments of balance that a firm floor rewards.

Whether any of this has lasting consequences is not yet settled. The age at which a child walks does not appear to predict later coordination or academic success, and the gap between a child who walks at ten months and one who walks at fifteen is probably not worth worrying about. Nor is it clear that structured exercises achieve more than hastening a milestone that would have been reached anyway; the evidence for a lasting advantage is thin. What does seem clear is that babies need time, space and freedom to move, and that a child who is never put down will find it harder to practise.

Public money flows into opera houses, museums, theatres and orchestras in every wealthy country, and those who provide it now ask, quite reasonably, what they are buying. The answer is increasingly expressed as a number: how many people came, how many were young, how many had never been before. It is easy to see why. A figure is cheap to collect and easy to defend in a committee room. Yet the assumption beneath the figures — that the value of a work of art can be measured by the number of people who choose it — deserves closer attention than it usually receives.

There is a strong democratic argument for counting. Subsidy is taken from everyone, including those who never set foot in a gallery, and if a theatre serves only a small and well-educated minority the case for taxing a bus driver to pay for it becomes harder to make. Grant-giving bodies now require applicants to report the size and composition of their audiences, and some publish comparisons between institutions. The result has been a genuine improvement in accountability, together with an incentive to count what is easy to count and to neglect what is not.

The economics of live performance make the numbers especially treacherous. In the 1960s the economists William Baumol and William Bowen described a problem that they believed was built into the art forms themselves. A string quartet cannot become more efficient: it takes four players the same time to perform a late Beethoven quartet as it did a century ago, whereas a factory can produce more with fewer workers. Wages in the arts must nevertheless keep pace with wages elsewhere, so costs rise while productivity stands still. The consequence is that, however much tickets cost, sales can never cover the full expense of a live performance; public support is therefore structural rather than a reward for success.

Objections from sociology cut deeper. Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is not innate but learned, and that children who grow up in households where concerts and galleries are routine acquire a familiarity that later looks like natural discernment. What counts as good art, on this account, tends to be what such people already admire, so that the canon and the concert programme reproduce an existing distribution of advantage. On this view attendance figures do not measure merit at all; they record who has been taught to feel entitled to attend. The argument is powerful, though it does not follow that the works themselves are worthless.

A third tradition is more sceptical still. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that mass-produced entertainment is standardised and formulaic, and that its popularity reflects marketing and repetition rather than any judgement of quality: a song becomes familiar because it is played everywhere, not because listeners have tested it. Culture, on this view, is manufactured like any other commodity. The claim is not mere snobbery — it rightly points out that demand can be created — but it leaves little room for the possibility that large audiences might be right.

A different objection comes from philosophy. Philosophers in the Kantian tradition insist that a judgement of beauty must be disinterested: to say that a work is good is not to report a preference of one's own, still less to count the preferences of others. On this view a poll tells us nothing about art. The difficulty is that the position can be used to protect the tastes of those who already hold power, and history offers ammunition to both sides. The first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, in Paris in 1913, ended in uproar, yet the work is now central to the concert repertoire; Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime. Against that, Dickens and Shakespeare were immensely popular in their own day.

Economists add an argument that has nothing to do with snobbery. Works of art are what they call experience goods: their quality can be discovered only by consuming them, and nobody can say in advance whether they will value an unfamiliar piece before hearing it. Asked what they would pay for a new work, most people can do little better; the answers they give are little better than guesses. A public that has never had the chance to encounter something cannot register a preference for it, so what audiences ask for is an unreliable indication of what they should be offered.

None of this means that numbers should be abandoned. A theatre that nobody attends may be failing, and access matters: a public institution that reaches only one section of the population has a case to answer. But the judgement cannot be handed over to a single figure. A defensible assessment draws on several kinds of evidence at once — attendance, the response of critics and of other artists, the opportunities a work creates for people who would not otherwise have encountered it, and its survival over time. Choices between the popular and the difficult have to be made openly, and pretending that a spreadsheet can make them is a way of avoiding responsibility.