IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 507

The Arctic fox is one of the few land mammals that live permanently north of the tree line, and it is found right around the northern hemisphere — in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Svalbard, Russia and Iceland — wherever there is tundra or pack ice to hunt on. It belongs to the dog family, and although its body is smaller than that of a domestic cat, its thick coat makes it look considerably larger. Few mammals of its size can survive the temperatures it endures, and none is more widely distributed in the far north.

Its shape is a study in heat conservation. The body is compact and rounded, the legs and muzzle are short, and the ears are small and fur-covered, all features that reduce the surface through which warmth escapes. The tail is bushy, and when the animal curls up in the open it is wrapped over the face and feet. The soles of the feet carry dense fur in winter, which insulates them from the snow and gives a better grip on ice. An adult weighs between roughly three and nine kilograms.

The winter coat is the fox's most remarkable adaptation. Several layers of fine underfur trap air close to the skin, while longer guard hairs keep out the wind and shed water. Physiologists who have measured captive animals in sealed chambers report that an Arctic fox can hold its body temperature steady, without increasing its rate of metabolism, until the air around it falls to about minus forty degrees Celsius; below that point it must burn more energy to stay warm. The coat is so effective that a fox may overheat in mild weather, and it sheds the fur rapidly in spring.

Two colour forms exist. Most Arctic foxes turn white in winter and brownish-grey in summer, so that they blend first with snow and then with bare ground; in the northernmost parts of the range a few stay white throughout the year. A second form, known as the blue morph, is dark brown or slate-grey in winter and remains dark in summer. Blue foxes are rare in the interior of continents but common in coastal districts and on islands, where dark rocks and open water make dark fur less conspicuous than white.

Arctic foxes hunt largely by ear. In winter, when lemmings and voles live beneath the snow, the fox walks across the tundra listening, and its hearing is acute enough to detect movement under a layer of snow. Having located a victim, it leaps into the air and dives nose-first, breaking through the crust. Observers have noticed that foxes hunting over fresh, soft snow succeed more often than those working on older, harder snow, and that a single family may take dozens of rodents in a day when lemmings are abundant.

Their diet is more varied than this suggests. Arctic foxes eat birds and their eggs, insects, berries and carrion, and animals living near the coast feed on mussels and crabs left by the tide. On sea ice they follow polar bears and feed on the remains of seal kills, and they will eat the droppings of the bears themselves. Surplus food is buried in shallow caches, particularly during the brief summer, and a fox may dig up a cache months later; the habit helps a family survive periods when hunting fails.

Breeding begins in early spring. Pairs are often monogamous and both parents may raise the young, though in some populations a female will mate with more than one male. The den is usually dug into a raised mound or a sandy bank and may be used for decades; large ones have been found with dozens of entrances and many chambers, the result of generations of digging. Litter size is tied to food supply: in years when lemmings are scarce a female may produce four or five pups, while in peak years a litter can exceed ten.

Arctic foxes are nomadic rather than strictly territorial animals. In winter many leave their summer ground and wander over the sea ice, travelling hundreds of kilometres in search of food, and satellite tags have shown that a few cross from one land mass to another. In 2018 a young female fitted with a transmitter on Svalbard was tracked across the ice to Canada, covering several thousand kilometres in a few months. Such journeys help to explain how populations on separate islands remain connected.

Not all populations are so mobile. Where food is reliable, an adult may stay within a few square kilometres for years, and the same den may be occupied by successive generations. In Iceland, where the Arctic fox is the only native land mammal, such resident populations have been studied for many years. Dispersal is largely a matter for the young, which is how vacant territories are gradually recolonised.

The species as a whole is not considered threatened, but several populations are. The spread of the red fox northwards, possibly encouraged by milder winters and by human settlement, has brought a larger competitor into the tundra, and red foxes sometimes kill Arctic fox pups at the den. Hunting for fur reduced numbers in Iceland and Scandinavia, and in Norway, Sweden and Finland the population is small enough to be treated as endangered. Conservation work there now concentrates on protecting dens and on supplementary feeding, which allows cubs to survive years when rodents are scarce.

Almost anyone who has worked in an office will recognise the pattern. A task that a colleague attacks with energy when working alone becomes a chore when it is handed to a committee, and a meeting meant to combine the strengths of several people produces a result that none of them would have accepted from themselves. The explanation is not laziness. Motivation in teams is shaped by the design of the work — by whether effort is visible, by how credit is shared and by whether people feel safe enough to disagree — and modest changes to that design can alter how hard a group works.

The classic demonstration dates from the late nineteenth century. Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, asked men to pull on a rope, first alone and then in groups, and measured the force they produced. As the group grew, the force exerted per person fell: two men together produced less than twice the force of one. Ringelmann attributed the fall to failures of coordination, but later researchers suspected that motivation was also involved. People who know that their own contribution cannot be identified tend to reduce it, a phenomenon now called social loafing, and the reduction is greatest when the task is dull and the group large.

The effect largely disappears when contributions can be seen. Experiments in which each participant's output is labelled, or in which each person works on a distinct part of the task, typically find effort close to that of working alone. The lesson for managers is straightforward: if a team's output is pooled so completely that nobody can tell who did what, some members will take advantage of the anonymity. Making work visible need not require constant monitoring; assigning named responsibilities, or asking each member to report on their own part, is usually sufficient.

Effort is also lost through coordination. Groups must spend time deciding who does what, exchanging information and repairing misunderstandings, and this overhead grows faster than the group itself. The psychologist Ivan Steiner described the gap between what a group is capable of producing and what it actually produces as a process loss, and it is the combination of wasted effort and coordination cost that is now generally meant by the Ringelmann effect. It explains why adding people to a late project often makes it later.

Expectancy theory offers a more individual account. Developed in the 1960s by the psychologist Victor Vroom, it holds that people invest effort when they expect that effort to produce good performance, that good performance to be recognised and rewarded, and that the reward to be something they value. Any break in the chain weakens motivation. A team member who has not been given the training to complete a task will not try harder simply because the deadline is closer.

Fairness matters as much as expectations. Equity theory, associated with the workplace researcher J. Stacy Adams, proposes that people compare the ratio of what they put in to what they get out with the ratios of those around them, and adjust their effort to restore the balance. In teams the comparison is unusually easy to make, because colleagues can see one another's hours and rewards. A member who suspects that a colleague is contributing little but receiving an equal share may quietly slow down, and the resentment can outlast the project.

A further influence is whether people feel able to speak up. The Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, studying hospital teams, expected to find that the strongest units made the fewest mistakes. Instead she found that units whose members reported more errors were those with a stronger climate of what she called psychological safety — an atmosphere in which people can raise doubts or admit uncertainty without fear of embarrassment. They were not making more mistakes; they were more willing to discuss them.

Goals shape effort as well. A long tradition of research, associated with the psychologist Edwin Locke, shows that specific and demanding goals produce better performance than vague encouragement to do one's best, provided that people accept the goal and receive feedback on their progress. Teamwork adds a twist. In tasks where a group can succeed only if every member completes a part, weaker members tend to work harder than they would alone, apparently because they do not want to let the others down. This is known as the Köhler effect, and it is strongest when the task is difficult and the group small.

Reward systems bring these findings into conflict. Paying people as a team encourages cooperation but rewards the free rider; paying individuals sharpens effort but can discourage helping a colleague. Most organisations settle on a mixture, with a team bonus alongside individual appraisal. There is no strong agreement among researchers about the best balance, partly because organisations differ so much and partly because the effects of a pay scheme take years to appear. What is clear is that a poorly designed scheme can undo the work of a good team.

The practical conclusion is encouraging. Motivation in a team is not a fixed quality that people bring to work, like a personality trait; it responds to how the work is arranged. Visible contributions, clear goals, a fair share of credit and the freedom to disagree cost little to provide, and they do more for a group's energy than any amount of exhortation.

Every October a handful of researchers learn that their lives have changed. The Nobel Prizes are the most famous awards in science, and the names of the new laureates dominate the news for a week. Yet the prizes rest on a rule that looks increasingly awkward. A Nobel Prize may be shared by no more than three people, a restriction contained in the Foundation's statutes. When a single experiment involves a thousand researchers, three names cannot represent them all, and the choice of those three can appear arbitrary to everyone else involved.

The rule was not designed with such projects in mind. Alfred Nobel's will, drawn up in 1895, said nothing about how many people might share a prize; the limit of three was written later into the statutes that govern how the will is applied. In Nobel's lifetime, and for decades afterwards, a significant discovery could plausibly be attributed to one or two people working in a single laboratory. The founders of the prizes could not have imagined an instrument built by physicists, engineers, software developers and technicians spread across several continents.

Prizes themselves are a recent invention. The first Nobel awards were made in 1901, and at that time the number of professional scientists in the world was a small fraction of what it is today. Since then the number of awards has multiplied, as universities, learned societies, foundations and technology companies have all created their own, so that a successful researcher may now hold a dozen. The multiplication has done little to settle the question of who should be honoured.

Yet collaborations of exactly that kind are how much of modern science is now done. Gravitational waves, first detected in 2015 and announced the following year, were recorded by detectors of extraordinary sensitivity operated by a collaboration of more than a thousand people. The physics prize awarded in 2017 went to three senior scientists associated with the project, all of whom had made essential contributions, but the instruments they designed would have detected nothing without the many others who built, tested and analysed them. Particle physics and genomics tell a similar story: a single detector may involve thousands of researchers, and a major genetic study can list more authors than pages.

Advocates of awards for teams argue that the present system misrepresents how discoveries are made. The sociologist Robert Merton coined the term 'Matthew effect' to describe the tendency of credit to accumulate to those who are already eminent, while the contributions of less visible participants fade from the record. Prizes, on this view, reinforce a hierarchy that the evidence of the laboratory does not support; the technician who solved the problem that made a measurement possible is rarely named.

Those who defend individual prizes make three arguments. The first is that a prize recognises an idea rather than a workforce: it is the insight that deserves honour, and ideas usually have identifiable authors. The second is that dilution destroys the value of an award, since a prize divided among three hundred people changes nobody's career and attracts little attention. The third is practical. Committees must choose somebody, and a system that names no one would satisfy no one.

Some awarding bodies have already adapted. The peace prize may be given to an organisation, and has been, several times, to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Breakthrough Prizes, established in 2012 with money from technology entrepreneurs, have on occasion divided a single award of three million dollars among the hundreds of members of a collaboration, each receiving an equal share.

Critics of team awards reply that the practical problems are greater than they appear. Who would travel to the ceremony on behalf of three hundred people, and what would a citation listing every contributor look like? A prize shared so widely also loses the quality that made prizes attractive in the first place, the power to transform one person's career and to draw public attention to a field. Teams, they point out, already share grants, facilities and the credit that comes with publication, and most members of a large collaboration expect the prize to go to a few senior figures.

My own view is that both sides overstate what is at stake. There is remarkably little evidence that prizes accelerate discovery; honours are handed out far faster than anyone can evaluate their effects. But prizes do shape how the public pictures research, and a system that can name only three people encourages the comforting fiction of the lone genius. The answer is not to abolish individual awards, which rightly honour particular contributions, but to add to them: every citation should name the collaboration concerned, and major funders should establish separate awards for teams.

Such a change would cost very little. It would not settle the argument about who deserves what, which is probably unresolvable, but it would make the record a little more honest, and it would allow the many people who built the instrument to be mentioned alongside the three who explained what it had found.