IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 495

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a journey from Paris to Constantinople — modern Istanbul — meant several changes of train, long waits at frontiers and nights spent in uncomfortable hotels. Passengers hauled their own luggage between railway companies that used different tickets and timetables and, in places, different track gauges. It was this chaos that Georges Nagelmackers set out to solve. A Belgian businessman who had examined the sleeping cars then running in the United States, he founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, whose purpose was to attach luxury sleeping and dining cars to the ordinary trains of many different railways, so that a traveller could stay in the same coach across national borders.

The first train to carry the name Orient Express left Paris on 4 October 1883. It departed from the Gare de l'Est in the evening and ran through Munich, Vienna and Budapest towards the Romanian border. At Giurgiu on the Danube, passengers were taken across the river by ferry, continued by train to the Black Sea port of Varna, and finished the journey to Constantinople by steamship. The whole trip took several days, and among the travellers were journalists invited to describe the new service to a curious public.

At first the train ran only once a week, and in its early years it was as much an exercise in diplomacy as in transport. Each country's railway administration had to agree to the passage of foreign carriages, and the company negotiated separately with each government. In the later 1880s a more direct route was completed through Serbia and Bulgaria, which allowed passengers to remain in their seats as far as Constantinople, and the service became a regular fixture for merchants, diplomats and wealthy tourists. Rival trains soon appeared, but the name Orient Express had already become shorthand for comfortable long-distance travel.

The interior of the carriages was designed to impress. Panels of polished mahogany and teak were inlaid with patterns of flowers and scrolling leaves, lamps were made of brass, and armchairs were upholstered in velvet. During the day a sleeping compartment served as a small sitting room; in the evening an attendant folded away the seats and made up the beds. In the dining car, passengers ate at tables laid with white linen and silver cutlery, choosing from a menu that changed with the country the train was crossing.

The train's fame owed something to fiction. In 1934 Agatha Christie published Murder on the Orient Express, a detective story set almost entirely on board, and the novel fixed the train in the public imagination as a place of intrigue and quiet luxury. Christie knew the service well, and the plot is often said to have been suggested by an occasion in the winter of 1929 when the train was held up by snow in Turkey for days. Whatever the truth of that, the book's success made the name recognisable to people who had never bought a ticket.

The First World War interrupted the service, which was suspended in 1914 and did not resume properly until 1919. In the years that followed, the political map of Europe changed and so did the train. A route through the Simplon Tunnel, opened in 1906 between Switzerland and Italy, allowed a service that ran through Milan, Venice and Trieste to Belgrade and on to Istanbul, and this became known as the Simplon Orient Express. By the 1930s three separate trains carried the name, each following a different line across the continent, and the carriages of that decade are the ones most often seen in films and museum collections today.

Decline came from several directions at once. Air travel took the passengers who valued speed, and the Second World War closed the service again. After 1945 the Cold War cut across the route: borders that had been simple to cross became obstacles, and the through carriages that had made the train famous were withdrawn one by one. For a while the name survived on national sections, but the long journey from Paris to Istanbul lost its purpose. The direct service came to an end in 1977.

The name was revived in 1982, when an American businessman, James Sherwood, began running restored carriages of the 1920s and 1930s as a luxury cruise on rails. Sherwood bought the coaches at auction and had them repaired by craftsmen using original drawings, and his Venice-Simplon Orient Express now carries passengers from London and Paris to Venice. It is a private excursion rather than a scheduled transport service, and its fares are far beyond the reach of most travellers.

Ordinary overnight trains also kept the name alive for a while. A service between Paris and Vienna, run by the French and Austrian railways, still called itself the Orient Express until it was withdrawn in 2009, and sleeping-car trains in eastern Europe have borrowed similar names since. These services had little in common with the trains of 1883 except their route, yet the word continued to promise something more than transport.

The train's real importance, however, lay less in its luxury than in its method. The idea that a single company could operate sleeping cars across many national networks, selling one ticket and one standard of service, was copied across Europe and beyond. It prepared the ground for the international timetables and through carriages that later made rail travel across borders unremarkable, and for that reason the Orient Express deserves its place in the history of travel rather than only in the history of style.

Anyone who has watched a wave cross a bay may assume that the water itself is travelling towards the shore. In fact a wave is a way in which energy moves through water, not a body of water on its way somewhere. Far out at sea, each particle of water moves in a small circle, rising and falling and drifting slightly forward and back, while the shape of the wave passes on. A floating bottle will rise and fall as the swell goes by yet stay roughly in the same place. Only when the water becomes shallow, and the circles are interrupted by the seabed, does the water itself begin to move towards the land.

Most ocean waves begin with wind. As air moves over the sea, friction and differences in pressure disturb the surface, and the disturbance grows. The first ripples are tiny capillary waves, held together by surface tension; they give the wind something to push against and, once the wind is strong enough, larger gravity waves develop, their restoring force being gravity. Three things determine how big these waves become: the speed of the wind, the length of time it blows, and the stretch of open water over which it blows, a distance known as the fetch. A gale that blows for days across thousands of kilometres of ocean raises a very different sea from a gust in a sheltered bay.

Oceanographers describe a sea by its wave height, its wavelength and its period, the time between one crest passing and the next. Period matters more than is often realised. Waves of different periods travel at different speeds, so a storm does not produce a single wave but a confusing mixture of them. As the mixture leaves the storm area, the faster waves move ahead and the sea sorts itself out. What reaches a distant coast, therefore, is not a jumble but a regular train of waves of similar period, known as swell, and the process by which a sea becomes orderly in this way is called dispersion.

Swell can cross an ocean. Waves generated by a storm in the North Atlantic may arrive in the Caribbean days later, having travelled thousands of kilometres while the weather at their birthplace has long since cleared. This is why a calm beach on a fine day can be pounded by surf: the energy was created elsewhere, sometimes a week earlier, and has been travelling ever since. Longer waves lose less energy along the way, which is why swell reaching a distant shore is usually smoother and better organised than the choppy sea near the storm.

The change from travelling wave to breaking wave happens in shallow water. As the depth falls to about half the wavelength, the wave begins to feel the bottom: friction slows its lower part, the crests move closer together and grow taller, and the front of the wave steepens. Eventually the crest becomes unstable and topples forward. The way it breaks depends on the slope of the seabed. A gently shelving beach produces spilling breakers, which crumble gradually over a long distance; a steep beach or a sudden reef produces plunging breakers, in which the whole crest curls over at once.

For a long time sailors' accounts of gigantic single waves were dismissed as exaggeration. That changed on 1 January 1995, when an instrument on the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea recorded a wave about twenty-six metres high among surrounding waves of perhaps twelve metres. The measurement confirmed what some models had suggested was possible and turned the study of so-called rogue waves into a serious field. Researchers now explain them in several ways: as the result of waves of different lengths briefly reinforcing one another, as the effect of currents concentrating wave energy, and as a feature of particular weather systems.

Forecasting is now done largely by computer. Global wave models divide the ocean into a grid and calculate, for each cell, how the wind is likely to transfer energy to the water and how the resulting waves will travel and decay. The models are driven by wind forecasts and checked against measurements from buoys and from satellites that use radar to measure the roughness of the surface. Shipping companies and coastal engineers depend on their output, and the same models are used to estimate how wave conditions may change in the coming decades. Even here, however, the forecast is only as good as the wind forecast that feeds it.

Much remains uncertain. Rogue waves are rare and short-lived, so no model predicts an individual freak wave; researchers can estimate where conditions may allow one but not when it will appear. Close to the shore the details depend on the seabed and the shape of the coast, which global models cannot resolve, and the engineers who design wave-energy devices must work with conditions that are difficult to measure. There is also argument about long-term trends. Records from buoys suggest that wave heights have increased in some ocean regions over recent decades, but the records are uneven, and separating a genuine change from natural variation is not straightforward.

When the French Open and Wimbledon announced in 2007 that they would pay men and women the same prize money, the decision was reported as the end of a long argument. In fact two of the four major tournaments had settled it years earlier: the US Open has offered equal prize money since 1973, and the Australian Open since 2001. Wimbledon and the French Open were the last of the four to fall into line. The principle they accepted — that at a single tournament the two sexes should compete for the same reward — now looks secure. Beyond tennis it is not secure at all.

Football shows how far there is to go. The total prize fund for the women's World Cup has risen sharply, yet it remains a small fraction of the men's. Football's world governing body has said that it intends to equalise the two prize funds by the later 2020s, but the promise depends partly on television and sponsorship income that has not yet been sold. At national level progress has been faster: several associations, including Norway's, now pay their men's and women's teams the same match fees.

Two positions dominate the discussion. The first treats prize money as a price set by the market. On this view a competition is a product like any other: its prize fund is a share of the money it earns from tickets, broadcasts and sponsors, and it earns that money because people are willing to pay for it. If fewer people watch women's football than men's, the prize fund will be smaller, and there is nothing unjust about that. Some economists add that ordering organisers to pay equally is simply a transfer from one set of players to another, dressed up as principle.

The second position holds that the market for women's sport has never been free. Historians of the game point out how recently the obstacles were removed. The Football Association in England imposed a ban on women's clubs using its grounds from 1921 until 1971, and other countries restricted the women's game in their own ways. A sport that was officially closed for half a century cannot be judged by the audiences it attracts a generation later. Coverage followed the same pattern: newspapers and broadcasters gave women's competitions little of the space and airtime that men's received, and sponsorship came slowly.

Critics of the market model argue, therefore, that present demand cannot be measured in a market that was distorted for decades by decisions taken elsewhere. What looks like a preference is partly the residue of policy, and the figures do not speak for themselves: a competition shown at an inconvenient hour on a minor channel will attract a small audience, and the small audience will then be used to justify the modest coverage.

Broadcasters take a different view. They maintain that payments reflect the audiences that each competition actually attracts, and that they cannot pay for viewers who do not appear. Their case has force so long as audiences are the only measure of value. But at combined events the measurement collapses. At the four major tennis tournaments one ticket admits spectators to men's and women's matches alike, the courts and stadiums are shared, and the tournament sells a single broadcast package to the world. Men play the best of five sets and women the best of three, a difference that some commentators use to justify unequal prizes, but spectators buy a session rather than a particular match.

The awkward case is the separate competition. A women's World Cup and a men's World Cup are held in different years, in different countries, under contracts sold separately. Here equal prize money does require a transfer: money earned by the men's tournament must be allocated to the women's. Some economists regard that as a distortion, and others reply that every sport subsidises its less profitable parts, from youth teams to stadium maintenance. The question is not whether money moves but whether the movement is justified.

The best argument for moving it is that the returns are not fixed. Prize money buys preparation: full-time contracts, medical staff, coaching, and the security that allows players to train rather than take second jobs. A modest prize fund produces a weaker tournament, which attracts smaller audiences, which in turn justifies a modest prize fund. Audiences respond to investment made years earlier, not to merit measured now, and where organisers have broken that circle the level of play and the size of the audience have risen together.

None of this means that every difference in earnings is an injustice. Endorsement income, which lies outside organisers' control, follows fame, and fame is unevenly distributed in every walk of life.

My own view is that the two situations should be judged by different standards. Where men and women compete at the same event, in the same stadium and before the same ticket-holding audience, unequal prizes cannot be defended, and the professional tour has shown that an equal share can be absorbed. Where the competitions are genuinely separate, equal prizes have to be built, through a deliberate allocation of money and a sustained commitment over many years, and organisers should say plainly that this is what they are doing. What they should not do is present the present distribution as though it were the verdict of nature.