IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 498

The Sydney Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, a small peninsula jutting into Sydney Harbour. The point is named after Bennelong, an Aboriginal man from the Sydney region who travelled to England in the 1790s. For decades the site was occupied by a tram depot, but the government of New South Wales wanted a cultural centre worthy of the city. In 1956 it launched an international competition for the design of an opera house, and architects around the world were invited to submit schemes. The response was remarkable: 233 entries arrived from 32 countries. In January 1957 the judges met in Sydney to choose between them.

The winning scheme came from Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect then in his late thirties who had built little outside his own country and had never visited Australia. His design placed a vast podium, or base, on the peninsula and set above it a series of soaring shells that appeared to rise out of the harbour like sails. The drawings were so bold that no engineer could say at first how the building might be constructed. The assessors nevertheless admired the scheme, and the government was attracted by the promise of a landmark that would advertise Sydney to the world.

Construction began in 1959, and the project immediately fell behind schedule. The difficulty lay in the roof. Utzon's early sketches showed shells that were free in form and had no obvious geometry, which meant that each shell would need its own method of construction and its own mould. Building such shapes in reinforced concrete on site would have demanded vast scaffolding, and the curved timber formwork, which could be used only once, was ruinously expensive. For nearly three years the architect and his engineers produced one scheme after another and discarded them all.

The breakthrough came in 1961, when Utzon realised that every shell could be generated from the surface of a single sphere. Each shell would be a section cut from the same imaginary ball, with a radius of about 75 metres, so that a small number of reusable moulds could produce every rib and panel. The segments were cast in a yard beside the site and lifted into position by cranes. The solution was chosen for reasons of engineering and cost, yet it gave the roof an underlying consistency of which most visitors are entirely unaware.

The shells are clad in more than a million tiles — 1,056,006 of them — laid in a chevron pattern of glossy white and matt cream. Manufactured in Sweden, the tiles were selected partly because they shed dirt in the rain, so that the curved surfaces would keep themselves clean. The tiles are fixed to the concrete shells below, and repairs are slow and costly. From a distance the roof appears uniformly white, but in strong sunlight the mixture of finishes gives it a faint variation in tone that photographs rarely capture.

As the years passed and the costs mounted, the state government lost patience. From 1965 the responsible minister, Davis Hughes, withheld payments to Utzon's office and transferred decisions to other consultants. Utzon protested that he was being asked to complete a complicated building without the resources to do so properly, and in February 1966 he resigned and left Australia. There were public demonstrations in his support, and several of his senior staff resigned with him, but the government appointed a team of younger architects to finish the work.

The interiors were redesigned after Utzon's departure, and the result satisfied few of those who had admired his intentions. The two main halls — a concert hall seating about 2,700 people and a smaller theatre for opera — were completed to different designs, and the acoustics of the concert hall in particular have been altered several times since. The smaller auditorium, which seats about 1,500, was renamed in 2012 in honour of the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland. The Grand Organ, among the largest mechanical-action organs ever built, was not finished until 1979, six years after the building opened.

Queen Elizabeth II opened the building on 20 October 1973. The opening season included a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. By then the final cost had reached A$102 million, roughly fourteen times the original estimate, and the overrun became a byword for the dangers of ambitious public projects. Most of the money came not from taxes but from a state lottery, which ran for nearly two decades and was promoted as a way for the public to pay for the building themselves.

Utzon never returned to Australia and did not see the completed building in person. The breach was repaired only in 1999, when he was invited to act as a design consultant to the trust that manages the site, and he later contributed to alterations, including a small room that bears his name. He died in 2008, the year after the Opera House was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Engineers still study the building for the way it resolved an apparently impossible structural problem, and architects cite it as an example of a design that could not be drawn in advance and had to be invented during construction. A long renovation of the concert hall was completed in 2022. Its silhouette is used to identify Sydney as readily as the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, and it remains one of the most photographed structures in the southern hemisphere.

Stories of animals behaving strangely before an earthquake are very old. Ancient writers recorded that in 373 BC, days before an earthquake destroyed the Greek city of Helike, rats, snakes and other creatures were seen leaving it in large numbers. Chinese chronicles contain similar reports, and in many parts of the world a sudden change in the behaviour of dogs, birds or fish is still taken by local people as a sign that the ground is about to move. Such stories are repeated because they are memorable, but they are also difficult to test. Nobody can say in advance when an earthquake will happen, so the observations can only be collected afterwards.

The best-known attempt to use such signs came in China. On 4 February 1975, seismologists in Liaoning province warned that a strong earthquake was likely near the city of Haicheng, and the authorities ordered an evacuation. When a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck that evening, many buildings collapsed but comparatively few people died, and the episode was widely reported as a success for prediction. The warning had rested on a swarm of small tremors, known as foreshocks, together with reports of unusual animal behaviour and changes in well water. Later analysis suggested that the decision had been helped by luck as well as judgement. The following year the far more destructive Tangshan earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people, came without any warning at all.

Systematic observations are rarer. One much-cited case was reported by a team from the Open University in Britain, which was studying toads breeding at a lake near L'Aquila in central Italy. In the days before a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the city in April 2009, the number of toads at the pond fell sharply and breeding stopped. The animals returned only after the aftershocks had subsided. The researchers could find no ordinary explanation, such as weather or the phase of the moon, that accounted for the change. Toads are sensitive to the chemistry of the water around them, and the team suggested that the ground itself had altered it.

Several mechanisms have been proposed. Rock under increasing stress may release electrically charged particles, which can react with air and water near the surface and change the chemistry of springs and wells. Groundwater levels are known to rise and fall before some earthquakes, and the gases dissolved in it, including radon, may vary as cracks open. Other suggestions involve low-frequency electromagnetic signals generated by stressed minerals. None of these effects has been shown to occur reliably before every earthquake, and each is small enough to be difficult to separate from ordinary variation.

Animals might, in principle, detect such changes. Many species perceive vibrations that lie far below the threshold of human feeling. Elephants communicate with low-frequency sound that carries over long distances, fish respond to minute movements in water, and birds may be sensitive to small changes in air pressure. A tremor that no person notices could therefore be obvious to a catfish. Yet sensitivity of this kind would give an animal seconds, not days, of notice, and it cannot explain reports of creatures abandoning an area long before the ground began to shake.

Some scepticism about reports of this kind is entirely warranted. Most of them are retrospective: they are gathered after the event, from people who already know what happened and who may remember behaviour that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Animals also behave oddly for reasons unconnected with the ground, such as changes in the weather, hunger or the presence of a predator, so a single strange observation proves nothing. A review published in 2018 examined several hundred reports from around the world and found that most were anecdotal. Few had been tested statistically, and hardly any described a change observed repeatedly at the same place. No instrument has yet identified a precursor that reliably precedes a large earthquake.

What would persuade seismologists is not more stories but continuous recording. A team that fits cattle or wild animals with tracking collars, or leaves automatic cameras running for months, can compare behaviour before a quake with behaviour during ordinary weeks. Only then can researchers ask whether a change is genuinely unusual, and whether it occurs before every earthquake or only some. A few long-running projects of this kind are now under way, but the results are not yet decisive.

Even if a signal were found, its practical value would be limited. Japan, Mexico and parts of the United States already operate early-warning systems that detect the fast, harmless waves from an earthquake and send a message ahead of the damaging ones, giving people between a few seconds and about a minute. A warning that arrived hours earlier would obviously be more useful, but it would also be wrong far more often. An unnecessary evacuation is expensive and dangerous, and repeated alarms that come to nothing erode public trust, so a warning system that cries wolf quickly becomes useless.

The most reasonable conclusion is that some animals probably detect physical changes that precede an earthquake, but that those changes are neither universal nor well understood. Nobody has shown that animal behaviour forecasts a quake more reliably than instruments do. Observations of animals may yet guide scientists towards a genuine precursor, but for the moment they are a clue to be investigated rather than a warning to be trusted.

Universities have taught creative writing for the best part of a century. The graduate programme of the kind now familiar began at the University of Iowa in 1936, and the first master's degree in the subject in Britain was established at the University of East Anglia in 1970. Courses of this kind have multiplied since then, and the question of whether writing can be taught is therefore not merely academic. Thousands of students each year commit a year or more, and often a large sum of money, to studying it, and many do so in the belief that the qualification will help them to become writers.

Those who defend the programmes argue that most of what a writer needs is craft, and craft can be broken down and practised. A student can be shown how a scene is built, how point of view governs what a reader is allowed to know, how dialogue can carry information that would be clumsy if stated directly, and how a draft improves when it is cut. Workshops also supply what solitary writers lack: readers who will say plainly where a story loses them. Deadlines impose the habit of finishing, which many beginners never acquire on their own.

The objection is that none of this touches the essential thing. Originality, an ear for language, an obsession with a particular subject — these are not skills, and no timetable can produce them. Some critics go further and maintain that the workshop harms young writers, because its central ritual, the group discussion of a draft, rewards the kind of story that can be admired quickly and discourages writing that takes risks. Students, on this view, learn to write like their teachers, and the result is fiction that is technically competent and emotionally cautious.

A more careful version of the argument separates technique from temperament. Technique can certainly be taught, and it is worth teaching, because it saves years of trial and error. Temperament cannot; but temperament cannot be taught in music either, and nobody concludes that conservatoires are worthless. What a good course can do is place a talented student in the way of a tradition, so that the student discovers what has already been done and what remains open, and learns to read the work of others with the attention that writing demands.

The evidence used on both sides is weaker than it appears. It is often said that fiction has become more uniform since writing programmes spread through the universities, and the claim is plausible. Yet it rests mainly on the impressions of editors and reviewers, and although the number of published novels is very large, no one has made a systematic comparison of work by graduates and non-graduates. Programmes also select ambitious and able applicants, so a graduate's later success cannot simply be credited to the course.

What the programmes undeniably provide is support of a kind that writers once found elsewhere. Writing is done alone, and a community of other writers, however imperfect, offers encouragement and a standard of comparison. Universities also pay writers to teach, and in many countries this has replaced patronage and journalism as the main way in which literary authors earn a living. That arrangement has costs as well as benefits, since teaching consumes the time and attention that writing requires, but it has kept serious writing alive at a time when few other institutions were willing to pay for it.

Nor are all programmes alike, although the argument often treats them as if they were. The American model is usually a degree of two or three years, in which students take workshops and teach undergraduates; the British master's is typically a single intensive year; and low-residency courses, conducted largely online with brief periods on campus, now attract students who cannot move house for a degree. Whether these differences matter has scarcely been studied, which is one reason general claims about creative writing programmes should be treated with caution.

The benefits are harder to measure than the costs. Assessment is the obvious difficulty: a grade rewards work that satisfies a marker, and markers differ. Some teachers avoid grading drafts altogether and assess only the reading and the revision, which is more defensible but less convenient for the administration. More troubling is the expectation that students bring with them. A degree in creative writing does not, and cannot, promise publication, and programmes that advertise themselves as routes to a career are misleading the people they admit.

My own conclusion is that the question, in the form it usually takes, is badly put. Writing can be taught in the sense that craft, discipline, judgement and the habit of revision can all be improved by instruction, and that a well-run course compresses years of isolated experiment into a shorter period. What cannot be taught is the wish to write, and the particular angle on the world that makes the writing worth reading. A programme that is honest about this, and that teaches reading as seriously as it teaches writing, is worth having. What a university can offer is time, readers and a tradition; what it cannot offer is talent, and it should say so at the beginning.