IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 499

The hill is not especially high. Rising perhaps thirty metres above the surrounding bushveld, it is a flat-topped outcrop of sandstone whose slopes are broken by cliffs of bare rock. Yet for about eighty years, from roughly 1220 to 1300, this modest landmark in the Limpopo valley was the centre of the most powerful state in southern Africa. The site is known today as Mapungubwe, and it lies in the far north of South Africa, close to the point where the Limpopo and Shashe rivers meet and where the borders of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe converge.

People had lived in the valley for centuries before the kingdom emerged. From about the tenth century, farming communities settled along the rivers, growing sorghum and millet, keeping cattle and hunting elephants for their ivory. For some two hundred years before the hilltop was occupied, the most important settlement in the region lay a few kilometres to the south, at a place archaeologists now call K2. It was a large and prosperous village, and it grew rich on trade with the east coast of Africa, more than five hundred kilometres away.

Around 1220 the character of the settlement changed. The elite moved up onto the hill, which could be reached only through a narrow gap in the cliffs, and ordinary people remained in the valley below. Excavation has shown that the summit was crowded with densely built houses, courtyards and grain bins, arranged in a way that suggests a carefully ordered hierarchy rather than a casual scattering of dwellings. The population of the whole settlement has been estimated at around five thousand, and the hill itself seems to have supported only a small ruling group, perhaps a few hundred people.

These rulers commanded a network that reached far beyond the valley. Objects excavated at Mapungubwe include thousands of glass beads, some of them made in India, fragments of Chinese celadon and ceramics from the Persian Gulf, and traces of cotton cloth. In exchange, ivory, gold and other products travelled down the rivers to the Indian Ocean. The trade of the interior seems to have passed through a coastal settlement at Chibuene, in what is now southern Mozambique, and from there northwards to the ports of the Swahili coast and across the sea.

Gold was worked in a manner found nowhere else in the region. Smiths hammered the metal into sheets thinner than a fingernail, then fastened them, using tiny gold tacks, over carved wooden cores to make three-dimensional objects. The most famous of these is a small rhinoceros, some fifteen centimetres long, found in a grave on the hilltop in the 1930s. Its wooden body has long since decayed, leaving only the thin gold skin, which was carefully pressed back into shape. Other finds include a sceptre, a shallow bowl and thousands of small beads.

For archaeologists, these objects raise as many questions as they answer. The wooden cores were certainly carved before being covered, but the wood has vanished, so only the shape of the metal survives. The sheets are so thin that they can be bent between the fingers. Whether the rhinoceros represented a real animal, a sacred creature or the authority of a particular ruler cannot be settled from the object itself. What can be said is that the labour required to produce such fragile and decorative pieces implies a society with skilled specialists who were supported by the work of others.

The hilltop was also a place of burial. Several graves have been excavated, and the bodies were placed in a sitting position, wrapped closely and accompanied by ornaments. Rain-making appears to have been central to the ruler's role. Because the Limpopo valley is a dry environment where a single failed season can mean hunger, a leader who could intercede with the ancestors for rain held a very practical kind of power. Some archaeologists argue that the physical separation of the elite on the hill expressed this sacred authority: ordinary people might see the king rarely, if at all.

The kingdom did not last. By about 1300 the hilltop had been abandoned, and the centre of power had shifted northwards to the site now known as Great Zimbabwe, where trade and wealth grew on a much larger scale. The reasons for the move are debated. The climate of the region became cooler and drier in the fourteenth century, and the valley may have suffered long periods of drought. Cattle, kept in large numbers, may have damaged the grazing. The simplest explanation is that the route by which gold reached the coast had moved.

For a long time the significance of Mapungubwe was obscured. Gold objects were found on the hilltop in 1933, and archaeologists from the University of Pretoria began systematic excavation shortly afterwards. Yet the evidence of a large, wealthy and highly organised African state sat awkwardly with the racial theories that underpinned apartheid, and for decades the site attracted little public attention. Only after 1994 did Mapungubwe become a national symbol. The golden rhinoceros now appears on the insignia of the Order of Mapungubwe, the country's highest honour, established in 2002.

Today the hill and its surroundings form a national park and, since 2003, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors can walk to the base of the summit, though the hilltop itself is protected and access is limited. The wider landscape supports elephants and other wildlife, and conservation must be balanced against the interests of local farmers.

Misinformation and disinformation are not the same thing. The first describes information that is false but not necessarily intended to deceive: a poorly remembered statistic, a genuine misunderstanding, a headline read too quickly. The second is deliberately manufactured and spread in the knowledge that it is false. Both have always existed. What has changed is the speed at which a claim can travel and the ease with which it can be produced, copied and dressed up to look like reporting. A rumour that once took weeks to cross a country can now reach millions of people before anyone has had time to check it.

The largest study of the question was published in the journal Science in 2018. Three researchers, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral, examined roughly 126,000 stories that had been shared on Twitter over eleven years, and classified each as true, false or mixed using independent fact-checking organisations. False stories, they found, travelled significantly further and faster than true ones. The difference was not small: the false items were about 70 per cent more likely to be reposted, and it took them roughly a sixth of the time to reach 1,500 people. The researchers then asked whether automated accounts were responsible, and concluded that they were not. Robots spread true and false stories at similar rates. It was people who made the difference.

Why should falsehood travel faster? One explanation concerns novelty. In the same study, the team found that false stories were more novel than true ones and drew more replies expressing surprise, and that the emotion they aroused was more often disgust than sadness, joy or trust. A claim that contradicts what we expect is, by its nature, more interesting to share than a claim that confirms it. News organisations have long understood this, which is why so much reporting is framed around the unexpected. The trouble is that surprise and truth are quite independent of each other: an astonishing story may be perfectly accurate, and an astonishing story may be entirely invented.

A second line of research looks at the reader rather than the story. The psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David Rand have argued that people are not, on the whole, hopelessly biased by their political beliefs. In a series of experiments, they showed volunteers true and false headlines and asked how accurate each seemed. Participants were consistently better than chance at telling them apart, and those who performed best scored higher on a short test of reasoning. The problem, on this account, is not that people cannot think clearly but that they often do not bother. Judging a headline by whether it feels right is quick; checking it is effortful, and social media offers little encouragement to do so.

Repetition matters as much as novelty. Psychologists have documented what they call the illusory truth effect: a statement that has been seen before is judged more likely to be true, even when it contradicts what the reader already knows. Familiarity is mistaken for evidence. The effect is strong enough to appear in people who ought to know better, and it does not require the statement to be believed on first hearing. This is one reason why a false claim that is repeated in order to be criticised may still do damage, since every repetition makes the claim a little more familiar.

The architecture of the platforms is the third piece of the puzzle. Ranking systems are designed to predict what will hold attention, and material that provokes a strong reaction tends to do exactly that. A post that angers or alarms people attracts replies, shares and long arguments, and the system interprets this activity as a sign that the post is worth showing to more people. A claim that is easy to grasp and emotionally charged therefore enjoys an advantage over one that is complicated and dull, however well founded the latter may be. It is often said that this produces sealed 'echo chambers' in which users hear only views they already hold, though the evidence for this is more mixed than campaigners sometimes suggest.

The fourth puzzle is the messaging app, which researchers find almost impossible to observe. A great deal of sharing now takes place in private groups on services such as WhatsApp, where messages are encrypted and cannot be collected by outsiders. Studies that rely on public posts therefore see only part of what is happening. Surveys in several countries have found that people are more likely to trust a message forwarded by a relative than a link to a news website, and that false claims circulating in this way are often already well known to journalists by the time anyone measures them. What happens in these closed groups remains, by design, largely invisible.

What can be done? Fact-checking is valuable but slow, and corrections rarely reach the people who saw the original claim. Debunking a false story can reduce belief in it, but the effect fades and does not spread to related misconceptions. A more promising approach is to warn people before they encounter a claim. In studies of what has been called prebunking, the psychologist Sander van der Linden and his colleagues have shown volunteers short explanations of the techniques used in misleading campaigns, such as the selective use of evidence or the vilification of a group. Warned in advance, people become notably more resistant. Small prompts that simply ask readers to consider accuracy before sharing have also been found to improve the quality of what they pass on.

Every year, according to the World Health Organization, well over 200,000 people drown. It is among the leading causes of accidental death worldwide, and children are disproportionately among the victims. In England, swimming and water safety appear in the national curriculum for primary schools, which requires pupils to swim twenty-five metres unaided and to perform a safe self-rescue by the time they leave at eleven. Similar requirements exist in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Canada. The question, then, is not whether children should learn to swim. It is whether schools are the right institution to guarantee that they do.

The case for compulsion rests on two arguments. The first is safety. A child who can swim is far less likely to drown, and the skill, once acquired, lasts a lifetime; unlike almost everything else taught at school, it may one day save the pupil's life. The second is health. Swimming is exercise that can be taken up at any age, and unlike team games it requires neither a pitch nor fine weather nor a group of other people. Public health researchers tend to support compulsory lessons for a further reason. They treat drowning as a public health problem rather than a private misfortune, and they point out that the children most at risk are often those least likely to be taken to a pool by their parents.

Yet the policy has not worked as intended. Surveys by swimming organisations in England have repeatedly found that a substantial minority of children reach the end of primary school unable to swim the required distance, and that the proportion is much higher among the poorest. The reasons are practical. A school needs a pool, a bus and a timetable slot. A lesson that involves forty minutes of travelling for thirty minutes in the water is expensive, and school budgets are under pressure. Public pools have closed in large numbers over the past two decades. Some education economists argue that the money spent on transporting whole classes to distant pools would achieve more if it were given directly to families.

There is also the question of who the lessons reach. Children whose parents swim are usually taken to pools long before any school programme begins, and they arrive at lessons already confident in deep water. Children whose parents are frightened of water, or who cannot afford the entry fee, may have had no experience of a pool at all. In several countries, research has found that children from some minority ethnic groups are considerably less likely to be able to swim than their classmates, a pattern that appears to reflect access, cost and the anxieties of adults rather than any lack of interest among the children themselves.

If lessons are to be compulsory, what should they contain? Swimming instructors increasingly distinguish between stroke technique and what they call water competence. A child who can complete a tidy front crawl in a heated pool may still panic in cold, rough water, and most drownings do not happen in pools. The skills that matter in an emergency are less elegant: floating, treading water, keeping calm when clothes become heavy, recognising a rip current and swimming parallel to the shore in order to escape it, and calling for help without swallowing water. Several instructors have argued that these abilities should come first, with style refined later.

The objections are not trivial. Curriculum time is finite, and every hour given to swimming is an hour not given to something else; some economists therefore question whether a compulsory national requirement is the most efficient use of scarce school hours. Others argue that teaching children to be safe near water is a job for parents, and that schools which take it on encourage families to abdicate the responsibility. There is also a subtler worry. A child who has passed a school test may believe themselves competent and take risks in the sea that their training never prepared them for. Confidence, in water as elsewhere, can easily outrun competence.

Alternatives exist, and some of them are cheaper. Intensive courses during school holidays, subsidised entry to public pools and free lessons for the children of the poorest families have all been tried. In parts of South and South-East Asia, community programmes teach children to swim in ponds and rivers, where most drownings actually occur, rather than in pools that few of them will ever visit. Coastal rescue organisations, for their part, maintain that the most effective single measure is not teaching children to swim but teaching adults to supervise them, and providing lifeguards on the beaches where people swim. In Australia, the long fall in drowning deaths is usually credited to a combination of school lessons, public campaigns and beach patrols.

My own view is that every child should indeed be taught, but that the target should be survival rather than style. A child who can float, keep calm and reach the side is safer than one who can complete twenty-five metres of formal strokes and no more. Schools are the only institution that can reach every child, which is a powerful argument for compulsion; but they cannot conjure up pools that have been closed. The sensible policy is therefore a modest school requirement, focused on water competence, backed by public money for pools and free access for those who cannot pay. Schools should not be asked to do it alone.