IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 501

In July 1908, on a low hill above the Messara plain in southern Crete, an excavation directed by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier uncovered a room in the ruins of the palace of Phaistos. The palace had been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, and its ruins were already well known to scholars. In a deposit of burnt debris lay a small disc of clay, marked on both faces. Pernier realised that the object was unlike anything previously found on the island, and he published a description of it the following year. Nothing else of the kind was found in the room.

The disc is made of clay, fired hard, and it measures about 16 centimetres across and two centimetres thick. Roughly the size of a saucer, it is light enough to be held comfortably in one hand. Both faces carry a dense inscription, and the surface is otherwise plain: no trace of pigment has survived. The clay has been analysed, but the analysis has not established where it was dug, and no debris from a workshop was recovered with the object, so it remains unclear whether it was made where it was found. It survives almost complete, which is itself unusual for a piece of fired clay of this age.

Dating the disc has proved unexpectedly difficult. The excavation records of 1908 are not precise by modern standards, and the objects found in the same deposit give conflicting signals. Estimates have ranged from about 1850 BC to about 1600 BC. Many scholars favour a date in the seventeenth century BC, in the period of the first palace, but others place the disc considerably later. The palace itself was destroyed and rebuilt on a grander scale during this period, which complicates the picture further, and no agreement has been reached.

The inscription is composed of 45 different signs, repeated to give a total of 241 impressions; because one edge is damaged, some counts differ by one or two. A few signs are recognisable pictures: a fish, a bird, a ship, a plumed head, a double axe. Others are abstract, and a small number resemble signs in Linear A, the script used on Crete at the time. That resemblance has encouraged the view that the disc records a Minoan language, but it is too slight to settle the question.

What makes the disc unique is the way it was made. Each sign was impressed into the soft clay with a carved stamp rather than scratched with a stylus. Every stamp produced an identical mark, and close study reveals small differences between the stamps used for the same sign, as though a number of them had been cut in one session. The maker therefore worked from a prepared set of tools, a technology otherwise unknown in the Bronze Age Aegean, and no comparable set of stamps has been found anywhere in the region.

Decipherment has defeated every serious attempt. The central obstacle is that the disc is a single document, whereas a script can usually be read only when there are hundreds of examples to compare. Linear B, the script of the Mycenaean palaces, was deciphered in 1952 by the architect Michael Ventris, who had thousands of tablets from Knossos and Pylos at his disposal. With 241 signs the Phaistos text is simply too short for such methods, and no bilingual inscription pairs it with a known language, as the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Even the direction of reading is uncertain, although the signs appear to run in a spiral, from the outside inwards. Short groups are separated by incised lines, and one group of three signs recurs several times with only its final sign changed. That pattern may point to a list of commodities, a formula containing names, or a set of grammatical endings; without a second text, nobody can choose between these possibilities. Some scholars have also tried to match the shapes of the signs with objects in the palace storerooms, but this has produced no agreement.

A handful of other objects hint that the script was not confined to a single disc. In 1934 excavators working in a cave near Arkalochori, in central Crete, recovered a bronze axe bearing 15 signs, several of them close to signs on the disc. The two objects are not versions of the same text, however, and the few similar marks scratched on other small items are too few to help.

Claims to have deciphered the disc have appeared regularly for more than a century, proposing languages as different as Greek, Semitic and Luwian. None has won general acceptance, largely because a reading that fits 241 signs cannot be tested against anything else. In 2008 a suggestion that the disc was a modern forgery attracted considerable publicity, but archaeologists rejected it: the excavation was carefully recorded, and the condition of the object is consistent with a long burial.

The disc is now among the prize exhibits of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. In recent years it has been recorded by three-dimensional scanning and other imaging techniques, so that the impressions can be studied in minute detail without handling the object. Such work may narrow the range of possibilities, but it cannot supply the missing context on which any decipherment depends. What would transform the subject is a second text in the same script, and so far none has been found.

Cats are among the most popular pets in the world, yet they are also the least changed by people. A dog's body, behaviour and digestion have been reshaped over centuries by deliberate breeding; a cat, by contrast, would manage perfectly well without human company. Explaining how such an independent animal came to live in human households has occupied archaeologists and geneticists for decades, and the story their work has revealed is more surprising than the one most people assume.

The account most widely accepted begins about ten thousand years ago in the Near East, where farming first appeared. Stored grain attracted mice, and mice attracted the wildcat Felis silvestris lybica, a solitary hunter about the size of a large domestic cat. Wildcats that tolerated people gained access to a rich and dependable supply of food and could raise more young, while the farmers gained protection for their stores. Over many generations, the argument runs, animals that stayed close to settlements became steadily tamer. In this sense cats domesticated themselves rather than being captured, tamed and bred.

The earliest direct evidence comes from an island rather than the mainland. At Shillourokambos in Cyprus, excavated in the 1990s, archaeologists found a human grave about 9,500 years old which also contained the skeleton of a cat. Wildcats have never lived on Cyprus, so the animal must have been carried there by boat. The burial therefore shows not only that people were keeping cats at this very early date, but also that the animals were being moved across water, presumably on purpose.

A second and apparently separate tradition appears in China. At Quanhucun in Shaanxi province, excavators recovered cat bones about 5,300 years old from a farming village. Chemical analysis of the bones indicated that the cats had eaten small animals which had themselves fed on millet, the local crop, and one cat had survived to old age with badly worn teeth. The relationship was evidently commensal: the cats gained a reliable living without any effort from the villagers, who in turn lost little to the rodents.

In Egypt cats enter the visual record from about 2000 BC and eventually became sacred to the goddess Bastet. According to Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, the members of a household shaved off their eyebrows when the family cat died. In the later periods cats were mummified in enormous numbers and sold to pilgrims, and killing one was a serious offence. Whether this devotion represented a further stage of domestication or merely a religious development is debated, but it certainly encouraged the keeping of cats in temples and their care by ordinary families.

From Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, cats spread steadily westwards. A ship carrying grain needed a cat, and sailors seem to have taken them aboard as a matter of course. Bones from ports around the Mediterranean, and eventually from northern Europe, show the animal's progress. Whether the Romans played a part in this expansion is uncertain, since cats may have travelled along trade routes quite independently of any army. Written sources are almost silent, so the case rests largely on bones, and by the end of the first millennium AD the animals were established across most of the continent.

Genetics has added a decisive piece to the puzzle. In 2007 a team that analysed DNA from nearly a thousand wildcats and domestic cats concluded that all domestic cats descend from the Near Eastern wildcat, one of five recognised subspecies. The researchers also found that the genetic distance between a household cat and a wildcat of that region is remarkably small. Domestication, in other words, has altered very little: a handful of genes, concerned chiefly with coat pattern and tameness, distinguish the two.

Cats are also unusual among domestic animals in what they cannot do. They are obligate carnivores, unable to make certain nutrients for themselves, and they lack a working gene for the sweet-taste receptor, so sugary foods have no appeal for them. Domestication has not changed this. A cat's digestive system remains that of a hunter, and its need for an amino acid called taurine means that it cannot simply be fed like a dog. In physiological terms, the animal asleep on a sofa is still the animal of the Near Eastern scrub.

Changes did occur, but late and modest. The blotched tabby, whose dark stripes widen into broad swirls, is now one of the commonest coat patterns, yet researchers who have examined DNA from cats buried at European archaeological sites report that the variant responsible is absent from the earliest material and becomes frequent only from the Middle Ages onwards. Nobody supposes that anyone set out to create a tabby; the pattern simply spread as cats came to live in larger numbers alongside people.

What remains uncertain is how far cats were ever domesticated in the sense that word carries for dogs or cattle. Feral cats, those living without people, thrive in cities and on islands, and many pet cats would revert without much difficulty. Some biologists therefore prefer to call the cat semi-domesticated. It is also unclear whether cats spread through the Classical world as a single population or repeatedly from different regions, and how much the Egyptian temples contributed to the gene pool of modern pets. On one point the evidence is consistent: the cat chose the relationship at least as much as people did.

Every summer the same argument returns. A photographer launches a small drone above a canyon, captures footage that would once have required a helicopter, and within hours the park authority has received complaints from walkers who came to the area precisely because it is quiet. The dispute is usually presented as a contest between two familiar principles: the freedom of the public to enjoy its own land, and the duty of those who manage that land to protect wildlife. Framed in that way, the argument goes nowhere, because both sides are right about something. The more useful question is not whether drones should be allowed but which uses, in which places, at which times of year.

The case for drones rests on work that would otherwise be costly, slow or dangerous. Ecologists use them to count animals that are hard to see from the ground, to map fires and floods, and to follow the movement of species across country that people cannot easily cross. In parts of Africa they are flown over reserves at night, and some reserve managers report that patrols guided by drones have intercepted poachers who would otherwise have gone unseen. Search-and-rescue teams use them to look for missing walkers when a helicopter would be too slow or too expensive to deploy. A drone can survey in an hour ground that would take a field team a week to cover.

Against these benefits must be set the evidence of disturbance. Animals do not have to run away to be affected. In one study, black bears were fitted with instruments that recorded their heart rate, and the passage of a drone raised it sharply even when the bears gave no visible sign of alarm. Birds nesting on cliffs and on the ground react to drones at considerable distances, sometimes leaving eggs or chicks exposed to cold and to predators. Repeated disturbance can drive animals away from the places where they feed or breed, which matters far more in a protected area than elsewhere.

The human costs are equally real, though harder to quantify. National parks were created partly to preserve places that feel unspoiled, and the whine of a small aircraft overhead is difficult to ignore. Walkers describe the sense of being watched. Photographers who have climbed for hours object to a machine arriving at the summit in two minutes. For many visitors silence is part of what they have come for, and it is not restored by moving the drone a hundred metres away. There is also a genuine safety problem: drones have been flown close to rescue helicopters and to firefighting aircraft, and in at least one case in the United States a drone forced a firefighting plane to land.

Regulation has struggled to keep pace. Several park agencies responded by banning the launching of drones from their land altogether, which is simple to state and difficult to enforce. A drone weighs little, fits in a rucksack, and can be airborne in a minute; rangers are few, and their other duties do not disappear. Fines, where they exist, are modest. Even where a prosecution is brought, proving who was holding the controls is not always straightforward. In practice most flights over protected land are probably never noticed by anyone in authority, and the rules are obeyed mainly by people who did not need persuading in the first place.

Researchers argue that blanket prohibition is a blunt instrument. A permit system, they point out, would allow a handful of licensed flights for conservation while keeping the casual flyer outside the gate. A system of this kind already operates for scientific work in several countries, though its details differ. The objection is that permits create their own bureaucracy and that the distinction between research and recreation is easily blurred: a photographer with a popular video channel may claim to be documenting the landscape, and there is no obvious line between a drone used to film a nesting site for scientific purposes and one used to film it for a documentary.

A different argument, heard from those who sell and fly drones, is that the technology broadens access. People who cannot hike to a remote valley can see it from the air, and images of a fragile place may persuade more people to protect it. This is not persuasive. The photographs are already abundant, and the ability to fly a camera over a wilderness does not require the right to do so; the same pictures can be obtained from satellite data or from an aircraft flown with permission at a height where it disturbs nothing at all.

In my judgement, the line worth drawing separates flying that serves the protection of a place from flying that merely uses it. Licensed research, monitoring and rescue should be permitted, subject to seasonal limits around breeding sites and to a requirement that the results be shared with the park. Recreational flights should not be, and the burden of proof should lie with anyone who wants to make an exception. That position will disappoint some photographers, but a national park is one of the few places where the interests of an animal may reasonably be placed above those of a person with a new toy. Restriction here is not hostility to technology; it is a recognition that some places are worth more than the convenience of seeing them from above.