IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 493

In the arid north-western provinces of India, where almost the entire annual rainfall arrives during a few weeks of the monsoon and the rest of the year is hot and dusty, builders developed a highly distinctive architectural form: the stepwell. In Hindi it is generally termed a baoli; in Gujarat it is known as a vav. A stepwell is far more than an excavated shaft with a rope suspended above it. It is a monumental structure that people descend, terrace by terrace, until they arrive at the water itself. Some are modest constructions beside a village square; others rank among the most ambitious achievements in the subcontinent.

The principle is simple. Groundwater does not remain permanently at one elevation: it declines gradually through the dry months and recovers when the monsoon arrives. A conventional well, with a fixed circular opening at ground level, therefore becomes inconvenient during the weeks preceding the rains, because the surface of the water may lie too far below to be reached with a rope. By converting the opening into an extended staircase, builders guaranteed access at whatever depth the water occupied. In the wet season a villager might descend four or five steps; in the driest weeks, more than a hundred.

At the centre of the structure lies a vertical shaft, open to the sky, which penetrates downwards to the water table. Along three of its sides, narrow flights of stone steps descend in successive tiers, and at the foot of every flight there is a broad landing where a visitor could deposit a water pot or pause to rest.

The walls behind the steps are cut with numerous niches, each containing a carved representation of a deity, a dancer or an animal. Above these, in the more elaborate examples, run extensive galleries: long shaded chambers cut into the sides of the excavation. On the fourth side of many square stepwells stands a tall pavilion, its storeys carried on carved pillars.

The most celebrated of the square stepwells is Chand Baori, in the village of Abhaneri in eastern Rajasthan. It is dated to the ninth century and attributed to a local ruler of the Nikumbha dynasty. Its walls subdivide into more than a dozen tiers, lined with several thousand narrow steps arranged in a pattern so mathematically regular that, viewed from the rim, the whole resembles a honeycomb. Steps cover three sides; the fourth is closed by a pavilion of several storeys. Almost the entire structure lies below ground, so a visitor approaching across the plain has no conception of its scale until reaching the edge.

Further west, in Gujarat, stepwells assume a different configuration. The most renowned is Rani ki Vav, the Queen's stepwell, at Patan, constructed in the eleventh century and traditionally attributed to Queen Udayamati as a commemorative monument to her husband, King Bhimdev I. Instead of a square shaft it takes the form of an elongated corridor, some sixty metres from end to end, descending westward through seven successive stages to a circular well. The walls incorporate hundreds of sculptures, among them a sequence of large panels depicting the avatars of Vishnu, and the impression is less that of a well than of a submerged temple.

Rani ki Vav owes both its survival and its present condition to a catastrophe. At some point after its completion the neighbouring Saraswati river altered course and inundated it, and the structure filled with silt and vanished beneath cultivated fields. Local inhabitants were aware of the site, but the building itself remained invisible. The Archaeological Survey of India began clearing it in the middle of the twentieth century, and most of the sculpture visible today was recovered during that excavation. In 2014 the stepwell was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Stepwells were public works, and surviving inscriptions identify who financed them. Some were commissioned by rulers, but many were the gift of merchants or court officials, who endowed agricultural land in order to fund maintenance. Their shade and the movement of air made them the coolest locations in a village during the hot season, and people assembled there to converse and to escape the afternoon heat. For women in parts of northern India, who were expected to remain close to the household, the daily errand of collecting water was one of the few respectable reasons for leaving it, and the stepwell acquired a recognised social function.

Their decline was gradual. From the nineteenth century onwards, piped supplies, hand pumps and eventually electric pumps eliminated the necessity of carrying water up a staircase, and the wells were abandoned by the communities that had maintained them. Some collapsed; others accumulated rubbish and were fenced off; a few were built over. In congested urban areas the open shafts came to be regarded as dangerous, and several were sealed with concrete. By the 1980s many of the finest surviving examples were in poor condition, and it was far from obvious that they would endure.

Since the 1990s, however, there has been a substantial revival of interest. Conservation organisations, local charitable trusts and the Archaeological Survey have cleaned and repaired numerous stepwells, and several have acquired an entirely new function. In Delhi and elsewhere, restored baolis now capture rainwater and assist in recharging the groundwater upon which surrounding neighbourhoods depend. Others have become popular tourist attractions. The stepwell, it appears, was never an obsolete technology: it was an ingenious solution to a problem that has returned.

A two-year-old who offers half a biscuit to a parent and then takes it back is doing something that psychologists have spent decades trying to explain. Sharing is costly: whatever is handed over cannot be eaten. Yet almost every child learns to do it, and by the time they start school most can divide a small pile of sweets fairly when an adult asks them to. How that change comes about — whether it depends on instruction, on growing reasoning power or on something more emotional — remains one of the liveliest arguments in developmental psychology.

The standard method is simple. A child sits at a table with a researcher and is given a set of desirable items, such as stickers or sweets. The child is told that another child, who cannot be seen, will receive whatever is placed in a second bowl, and then decides how many items to keep and how many to give away. Because the recipient is absent and the decision is private, the task measures generosity rather than politeness. Variations of this distributive task, using different resources and different recipients, have now been run with thousands of children in many countries.

The broad pattern is consistent. Three- and four-year-olds are, on average, strikingly selfish: most keep the greater part of the resources for themselves, and some keep everything. Between the ages of about four and eight, sharing rises steeply. By seven or eight, most children in these studies choose an equal split, and a fair number will give away more than they keep rather than accept an outcome that favours them. Children of this age are often harsher about inequality than adults are, apparently because the rule matters more to them than the reward.

Generosity is sensitive to an audience. In several experiments, children of five and six shared more generously when they believed that another child could see them, or when the researcher had earlier mentioned that the recipient would know who had given. Children as young as five also give more after being reminded of a rule — for instance, that children usually share — although the effect fades quickly when nobody is watching. Such findings have been read in two ways. Either children learn to manage their reputations surprisingly early, or, more kindly, they are learning what their community expects of them.

Who receives the gift matters as much as who gives it. By the age of about six, children reliably favour members of their own group — the same class, the same team, the same nationality — and are less generous towards outsiders. The effect is usually small but extremely robust, appearing in many countries and across social classes. Comparisons between societies show wide variation in how much children give, and studies of children in communities where sharing food is a daily necessity have sometimes found more generosity than in wealthy cities. Whether that reflects upbringing, the demands of the local economy, or both, is not settled.

Family life provides the first training ground, though the evidence is not tidy. Children who see their parents share do tend to share more, but it is hard to separate imitation from inheritance, since parents pass on both their habits and their temperaments. The arrival of a younger sibling produces no consistent result: some studies report that older children become more generous once a baby appears, while others find a period of increased conflict followed by a slow return to the previous level. What does seem to matter is the household's ordinary practice — whether food is divided and passed round at meals, for example — rather than anything parents say about generosity.

What makes one child more generous than another is less clear. Measures of empathy taken in the preschool years predict later sharing only weakly, and the link between intelligence and generosity is inconsistent. One finding that does hold up concerns cost: when the resources become more valuable, or the number of recipients increases, generosity falls, and it falls further when a child is tired or hungry. Some researchers argue that the crucial skill is the ability to hold two sets of interests in mind at once — one's own and another person's — and that this develops alongside language.

There are two large uncertainties. The first concerns the laboratory itself. A child who divides stickers fairly in a quiet room may behave quite differently in a noisy playground, and the correlation between behaviour in the two settings is weaker than researchers would like, which is a problem for any theory built on laboratory evidence. The second concerns long-term effects. Nobody knows whether a child who shares at four becomes an adult who gives to charity at forty, because the studies that would answer the question have not been running long enough.

The practical advice that follows is modest but not trivial. Adults who explain their reasons — pointing out, for example, that another child has none — produce more sharing than adults who simply issue instructions, and children imitate the sharing they see far more reliably than the sharing they are told about. Praise appears to work best when it is aimed at the act rather than at the child's character, and rewards can backfire, turning a generous act into a transaction. The lesson, perhaps, is that generosity is not a single trait that children either have or lack. It is a set of habits, and habits can be taught.

In November 2024 Australia passed legislation that will require social media companies to keep anyone under sixteen from holding an account, with the rules due to take effect at the end of 2025. The vote was not close. Parents' groups welcomed it, several child-safety charities did too, and governments elsewhere announced that they were watching closely. The law has been described as the first of its kind, and whether or not that is precisely true, it has changed the terms of a debate that had been going round in circles for a decade.

The case for a minimum age rests on three claims. The first is displacement: time spent scrolling is time not spent sleeping, moving or sitting opposite another person, and sleep in particular is not negotiable for a teenager. The second is comparison: platforms built around images of faces and bodies give adolescent girls an endless supply of material against which to measure themselves. The third is design: the endless feed, the notification and the autoplay are not accidental features but deliberate attempts to keep attention, and children are less able than adults to resist them.

The difficulty is that the evidence for harm is thinner than the confidence of the campaigners. Most studies of screen time and adolescent wellbeing are correlational: they cannot show whether social media causes distress or distressed teenagers retreat into social media. When researchers analyse large datasets with more careful statistics, the associations shrink. One much-discussed analysis concluded that the link between social media use and the wellbeing of adolescents was about as strong as the link between wellbeing and eating potatoes or wearing glasses — detectable, but tiny. That result has been contested, but it has not been overturned, and it sits awkwardly with the language of emergency.

Defenders of the ban reply that a small average effect is not a small problem. A risk that raises distress by a fraction of a percentage point across an entire generation produces a great deal of distress in absolute terms, and averages conceal the children who are badly affected. The argument is familiar from public health: not everyone who smokes develops cancer, but nobody concludes that cigarettes are harmless. The analogy is imperfect, because a cigarette has no benefits and a social network does; but the underlying point, that population-level harms cannot be read off individual statistics, is sound.

Enforcement is the awkward part. Verifying a user's age means collecting evidence of identity, and the simplest methods — a passport, a driving licence, a face — require everyone, adults included, to hand personal data to companies that have a poor record of keeping it safe. Australia's law allows several methods and leaves the detail to regulators, but all of them involve a trade-off between privacy and protection. Teenagers are also resourceful. A rule that is easy to evade will be evaded, and the children most likely to slip through are those whose parents are least able to supervise them.

There is a further cost. For some young people, online communities are not an indulgence but a lifeline. The teenager in a small town who is the only gay person in the school, the child with a rare illness, the young carer who cannot go out — for such people a network of strangers can supply what the neighbourhood cannot, and the friendships formed there are often the only ones available. Several organisations representing them have warned that a strict age limit would remove support from those who need it most, at the age when isolation is dangerous.

This points to the weakness in the whole debate. 'Social media' is not one thing. A messaging app used to keep in touch with grandparents and a short-video feed engineered to autoplay the next clip have almost nothing in common except that both run on a phone. What worries parents is rarely the ability to send a message; it is the machinery of recommendation and reward that sits behind it. A law that asks how old a user is leaves all of that machinery untouched for the seventeen-year-old, and does nothing to explain which features were the problem in the first place.

A narrower rule would therefore be more defensible, and easier to justify to the public. Instead of banning a category of product for an age group, regulators could require that certain designs — autoplay, infinite scroll, notifications at night, recommendations to minors — be switched off by default below a stated age, and that platforms demonstrate that their products do not exploit the impulsiveness of the young. Such rules apply to the design rather than to the user, and do not require anyone to upload a passport.

None of this means that the status quo is acceptable. The argument that the evidence is not yet conclusive has been used for a decade by companies that have no interest in better evidence, and the burden of proof should not lie entirely with worried parents. If the choice were between a blunt ban that is difficult to enforce and doing nothing, a ban would be the lesser evil. But the choice is not that simple. The right instrument is a restriction aimed at the features that make these products hard to put down, applied to everyone below a stated age.