IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 496

Tea reached Japan from China in the ninth century, carried by Buddhist monks who had travelled there to study. For several centuries it remained a drink of monasteries and of the nobility, valued as much for its medicinal properties as for its flavour. The monk Eisai, who returned from a second visit to China in 1191, is credited with encouraging the cultivation of the plant in Japan and with writing a treatise arguing that the drink strengthened the body and prolonged life. Powdered green tea, whisked into hot water, came to Japan with the same Zen tradition.

In medieval monasteries, tea was drunk during long periods of meditation and offered before images of the Buddha. Because the leaf was expensive and the ritual of preparing it elaborate, a room was eventually set aside for the purpose, and the rules governing how monks served one another from a single bowl became the foundation of later etiquette. The earliest such rooms were part of a larger hall, screened off with sliding partitions; only gradually did the tea room become a separate building in a garden.

The change is usually associated with the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who gave up the office of shogun in 1473 and some years later retired to a villa in the hills of eastern Kyoto. There he built the pavilion now known as Ginkaku-ji, and within its grounds a small hall called the Togudo. Its rooms are often described as the oldest surviving example of the style that the ceremony adopted: a rectangular space floored with tatami mats, with a recessed alcove for a hanging scroll and built-in shelves for utensils. Four and a half mats became the standard size of a tea room, a space of only about eight square metres.

The man who gave the ceremony its enduring form was Sen no Rikyu, a merchant's son from Sakai who served two successive military rulers. Rikyu rejected the costly Chinese ceramics that earlier tea masters had admired, preferring bowls made by unknown Japanese potters, whose irregular shapes and rough glazes embodied the aesthetic he called wabi. He also shrank the tea room and lowered its entrance to a small opening, the nijiriguchi, less than a metre high, through which every guest, whatever their rank, had to crawl. Rikyu was ordered to take his own life in 1591, but his teaching passed to his grandson, and from his grandson's sons to the three Sen schools that still teach the ceremony.

A formal gathering begins in the garden. Guests pass through a gate and follow a path of irregular stepping stones before rinsing their hands and mouths at a low stone basin. They then enter the tea room through the small opening, bowing as they do so, and take their places on the mats. They first examine the hanging scroll in the alcove, chosen by the host to suit the season.

The host then prepares thick tea in front of them, measuring powdered tea into a bowl, adding hot water and stirring the mixture with a bamboo whisk until it forms a froth. The bowl is passed from guest to guest, each drinking from the same side and turning it so that the decorated front faces away from the mouth.

The building itself is deliberately modest. Walls are made of clay mixed with straw and finished in muted earth colours; the roof is thatched or covered with bark; the timbers are left unsquared, with their natural curves visible, and the grain of the wood is polished rather than painted. Windows are small and set low, so that light falls on the mats and leaves the upper part of the room in shadow. Behind a screen at one end is a service room where the host washes the utensils and lays out the equipment before the guests arrive.

Etiquette governs every movement. In earlier centuries samurai guests left their swords on a rack outside the room and removed their shoes at the threshold. Once seated, they turn their attention to the alcove, where the host has hung a scroll and placed a single flower in a plain vase; both have been chosen to reflect the season. When the bowl is offered, the guest lifts it with both hands, drinks, wipes the rim and passes it on. Conversation is quiet and is expected to touch on the scroll or the flower rather than on business or politics.

A quite different institution flourished in the Edo period, between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Tea houses appeared at post stations on the great highways, where weary travellers could rest, drink tea and buy a simple meal of rice and pickles. Some employed young women to serve customers, a practice that officials repeatedly tried to regulate, and a few establishments acquired a reputation for something closer to entertainment than refreshment. In the cities, tea houses in the pleasure districts entertained guests with music and dance.

The ceremonial tea house survived the upheavals of the nineteenth century, though it lost much of its aristocratic patronage and was taken up in large numbers by women, for whom lessons in the ceremony became part of a genteel education. Fewer Japanese homes now contain a tatami room of the right kind, so much teaching takes place in purpose-built rooms in schools and community centres. In Kyoto, the old tea houses of Gion still open their doors to guests, and the gardens of temples such as Daitoku-ji contain tea rooms that visitors can see.

An aerial cable car, more formally an aerial ropeway, carries passengers in enclosed cabins suspended from a steel rope slung between stations. In the commonest arrangement the rope forms a continuous loop: it climbs from the valley station, passes over a series of towers, turns around a large wheel at the top station and returns on the other side, so that cabins travelling upwards pass those coming down. Because the cabins hang from the rope rather than running on it, the structure of the line can be comparatively light, and the route can cross rivers, roads and steep ground without bridges or tunnels. The cabins themselves are unpowered, since the only motors in the system stand in the stations. Most installations carry people to a mountain viewpoint or across a river, though the same machinery serves ski resorts and, in a few cities, commuters.

The line is held up by towers, which stand on concrete foundations and are built either as a steel lattice or as a steel tube. Their height is set by the need to keep the cabins clear of buildings, trees and traffic, and by the shape of the ground beneath. At the top of each tower the rope rests on a train of small rollers, mounted on an assembly that curves gently so that the rope is not bent sharply as it passes. Because a rope always sags between two supports in a shallow curve, the towers cannot be placed very far apart; the spacing is therefore a compromise between cost and the sag that passengers will accept. Where the line crosses a road or a railway, the rope is carried over it in a single span, with no support in between.

The haul rope is a remarkable piece of engineering in its own right. It is made from hundreds of steel wires, each galvanised to resist corrosion, twisted into strands around a central core; the finished rope may be several centimetres thick and many kilometres long. Wire is chosen because it is strong in tension and can pass around a wheel thousands of times without cracking. In most systems a single rope both carries the weight of the cabins and pulls them along, though on the largest installations two fixed track ropes support the load while a third rope does the hauling. Ropes are inspected regularly, and instruments that measure changes in the magnetic field around a rope can reveal broken wires hidden inside it, long before any damage becomes visible on the surface.

Each cabin is attached to the rope by a grip, a clamp whose jaws close on the rope under heavy spring pressure. In the simplest and oldest systems the grip is fixed: the cabin stays clamped to the moving rope all the way through the station, so that passengers must board while it is still travelling, slowly and without stopping. In a detachable system the grip is opened by a mechanism as the cabin enters the station, and the cabin then runs on a short length of rail, slowing to a halt so that people can step on and off in their own time. Detachable grips allow the rope to run faster and the cabins to be spaced more closely, but they add moving parts that must be checked daily.

The rope is driven by a bullwheel, a large horizontal wheel lined with a friction material, which an electric motor turns through a gearbox. Tension is maintained by a counterweight, a heavy block of concrete or steel hanging in a shaft, which pulls the rope tight and takes up the small changes in length that occur as the system warms and cools. Two braking systems are fitted. A service brake slows the line in normal operation, while a separate emergency brake, held open by hydraulic pressure and closed by heavy springs, clamps the rope if the power fails or if any safety circuit is broken.

Control systems watch the installation continuously. Sensors confirm that every cabin door is shut, that the cabins are the correct distance apart and that the rope is running at the intended speed. Instruments at the stations also measure wind speed, and the system stops automatically once a gust exceeds the limit set for that particular line, because a cabin swinging in the wind can strike a tower. If a stoppage cannot be corrected quickly, trained teams take the passengers off: they reach a cabin either from a ladder on a tower or from a rescue car lowered along the rope towards it. Staff in the control room can speak to the people inside a cabin and, if necessary, move the line slowly to bring them closer to a tower.

Not everything about these machines can be calculated in advance. The wear on a haul rope depends on the loads it carries, on the number of times it bends over each set of rollers and on the conditions in which it operates, and engineers cannot yet predict from the outside of a rope how much strength remains inside it. The swaying of cabins in gusty wind is also difficult to model, since it depends on the interaction of the rope, the towers and the shape of the cabins themselves. For both reasons, replacement and inspection are scheduled according to conservative rules laid down by regulators rather than decided from measurements alone.

For much of the twentieth century, the tram was regarded as a relic. British and French cities tore up their tracks in the 1950s and 1960s and replaced the trams with buses, which were thought to be cheaper, quieter and free of the overhead wires that disfigured the streets. A handful of cities, including Zurich, Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam and Melbourne, kept their networks and quietly improved them. Since the 1980s, dozens of others have spent large sums putting trams back. The question for a city considering a new line is no longer whether trams are old-fashioned, but whether they are worth the money.

The arguments have barely changed. A modern tram carries far more passengers than a bus and does so on electricity, with no exhaust fumes at street level. Its ride is smooth and its route is easy to understand, and supporters claim that drivers who would never abandon their cars for a bus will use a tram, because a reserved track looks permanent and feels like a railway. Permanence has a second effect: developers, it is said, will build beside a line they know will still be there in thirty years. Research on new rail lines has generally found that property values rise close to stations, although separating the effect of the railway from everything else happening in a growing city is difficult.

Against this must be set the cost. Laying track in a busy street means digging up the road, diverting pipes and cables and keeping traffic moving while the work proceeds, and the bill per kilometre is many times that of a bus lane. Shops along the route often lose custom while the work is under way, which makes the politics of construction as difficult as the engineering. Edinburgh's first line opened in 2014, years behind schedule and well over its original budget, and the argument that followed coloured subsequent debates in Britain. Where a city wants rails but not wires, the bill rises further: Bordeaux, which opened its first line in the early 2000s, uses a power supply buried in the road in its historic centre, so that the squares of the old town are not crossed by overhead cables.

Critics add three further objections. The first is inflexibility: a route fixed in steel cannot be adjusted when demand moves to a new suburb, whereas a bus route can be changed in a week. The second is safety, since rails are a trap for bicycle wheels and a hazard for anyone who steps into the road without looking. The third is that the environmental case has weakened. Electric buses, which need no track and no overhead line, now produce no exhaust emissions either, and each generation of batteries extends their range.

Evidence on patronage is mixed, and the debate is often distorted here. Forecasts prepared for new lines have in some cases proved optimistic, and a few systems have carried fewer passengers than promised, while in other cities demand has outstripped the predictions and lines have been extended. A tramway does not create demand by itself: it carries people who already need to travel along that corridor, and it attracts them only if the service is frequent, reliable and faster than sitting in traffic. A line should therefore be judged by the journeys it replaces, not by the hopes of the politicians who opened it.

There is, however, an argument that is rarely made clearly. A tramway is not simply a vehicle for moving people; it is a means of deciding where the city will grow. A line with fixed stops creates concentrations of homes, shops and offices around those stops, and a city that plans for denser development along the route can obtain benefits that the railway alone could never deliver. Where a municipality is prepared to permit that development, the case for rails is strong; where it is not, and the line merely replaces a bus route through low-rise suburbs, the money would be better spent elsewhere.

This, then, is the test I would apply. Trams are justified where large numbers of people already travel along a corridor and where the city is willing to concentrate new building around the stops. Where those conditions are absent, a frequent bus service running on lanes reserved for it offers most of the benefits at a fraction of the price, and can be introduced in months rather than years. Buses also carry fewer risks: if the demand does not appear, the route can be changed or withdrawn without leaving a line to be maintained.

The question, in short, should not be whether trams are good or bad in themselves, but where a city expects large numbers of people to be travelling for the next fifty years. If that question can be answered confidently, and if the answer follows a corridor rather than a scatter of minor roads, the tram may well be worth its cost. If it cannot, a cheaper vehicle on the same street is the more honest choice.