IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 56

On the steep slopes of the Philippine Cordillera, generations of farmers have shaped the land into a series of level terraces that follow the contours of the mountains. These terraced fields, often described as giant staircases climbing from valley floor to ridge, have allowed the Ifugao people and their neighbours to grow rice in terrain that would otherwise be unsuitable for farming. Similar terraced landscapes exist elsewhere in Asia, but the Cordillera terraces are among the most extensive systems of their kind.

The best-known examples are often called the Banaue Rice Terraces, although the name is sometimes loosely applied to terrace systems across Ifugao province. They form part of a wider pattern of terracing that can also be seen in the mountains of southern China, northern Vietnam and the island of Bali, where farmers have adapted the same basic method to local climate and soil. What distinguishes the Cordillera terraces is their very high altitude, their great number and the fact that they are still farmed today.

The terraces have traditionally been described as around two thousand years old, but recent archaeological research suggests that many of them were built much more recently, perhaps within the last few centuries. The work was carried out almost entirely by hand, using wooden tools and the careful placement of stones and earth. The terrace walls, which can rise several metres, were built without mortar; their slight inward lean and their ability to drain water have helped them survive centuries of rain, earthquakes and the constant pressure of saturated soil.

The essential principle behind a rice terrace is water control. Each terrace is a shallow, level basin surrounded by an earth or stone embankment, and the basins are arranged one above another down the slope. Water is held in the upper terrace until the soil is thoroughly flooded, after which it is released through an opening in the rim and flows into the next level. This downward movement reuses the same water many times, carrying dissolved nutrients and tiny suspended particles from the highest fields to the lowest.

The water comes from mountain streams and springs high above the terraces. Farmers have built an intricate network of channels, sluices and hollow bamboo pipes to direct it from the forested catchment areas to the top of each terrace system. The forests that cover the watershed above the fields are therefore regarded as an essential part of the farming system, because they absorb rainfall and release it gradually. Without this natural reservoir, the terraces would dry out during periods without rain.

The management of the terraces is closely tied to community organisation. Because water must be shared fairly, farmers follow customary rules that determine when each plot may receive water and how much it is allowed to take. This collective system reduces disputes and ensures that even the lowest terraces, which depend on water that has already passed through many fields, continue to receive enough. The maintenance of walls and channels is also performed cooperatively, often at times of year when the fields are dry.

The terraces are not only an agricultural achievement but also a cultural one. The Ifugao people traditionally associate the terraces with their ancestors and with a spirit world that must be respected if the harvest is to succeed. Rituals mark the stages of the farming year, from the opening of the irrigation channels to the final harvest, and some of these ceremonies involve the sacrifice of chickens or pigs. Although many farmers now follow modern religions, these older practices still shape the timing of agricultural tasks.

Rice cultivation on the terraces follows a rhythm tied to seasonal rainfall. Farmers prepare small seedbeds in one corner of the terrace, and when the seedlings are old enough they are transplanted into the flooded basins. During the growing period the water is kept moving slowly through the system, which helps to control weeds and maintain an even temperature around the young plants. At harvest, the terraces turn from green to gold, and the rice is cut by hand and carried to the village for threshing and storage.

In recent decades the terraces have faced serious problems. Many young Ifugao people have left the mountains to seek work in towns and in other countries, so fewer hands are available for the heavy labour of building and repairing walls. Some farmers have replaced traditional rice varieties with cash crops that require less maintenance but do not support the same soil structure. Heavy rainfall and earth tremors have caused sections of wall to collapse, and some terraces have been abandoned.

The terraces have nevertheless received growing recognition. In 1995, several clusters of rice terraces in the Cordillera were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural landscape. Since then, government agencies and local communities have worked together to repair damaged walls, restore irrigation channels and encourage young people to continue farming. Visitors now travel to the region to see the terraces, and entrance fees from tourism help to fund conservation.

What makes the rice terraces remarkable is not simply their age or their beauty, but the fact that they are still a functioning agricultural system. They demonstrate how a society can shape a difficult environment without machinery and without fuel, relying instead on detailed knowledge of water, soil and slope. Their future depends on whether this knowledge can be passed to the next generation before the labour-intensive system declines beyond repair.

The European eel is one of the most unusual fish in the world, not because of its appearance but because of its life cycle. It is born in the sea, grows up in fresh water and returns to the sea to reproduce, a journey that may cover thousands of kilometres. For centuries, naturalists were puzzled by the absence of eel eggs and by the sudden appearance of young eels in rivers each spring. Aristotle suggested that eels emerged from mud; later scholars proposed other explanations, but none was correct. The true story began to emerge only in the early twentieth century.

The key discovery was made by Johannes Schmidt, a Danish biologist. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Schmidt spent years collecting tiny, transparent eel larvae from the Atlantic. He noticed that the smallest larvae were found in a region of the western Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea, a calm area of floating seaweed north-east of the Caribbean. Larger larvae were caught farther from this area, suggesting that the eels spawned somewhere in the Sargasso Sea and that the young were then carried away by ocean currents. Schmidt published his conclusions in the 1920s, and the Sargasso Sea has been accepted as the breeding ground of both the European eel and its close relative, the American eel.

After hatching, the European eel begins life as a flat, transparent larva known as a leptocephalus. The larva looks nothing like an adult eel; it resembles a small willow leaf, and its thin body is almost invisible in the water. For a year or more, the leptocephalus drifts with the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic Ocean towards Europe. During this time it feeds on tiny organic particles, and it grows slowly. By the time it reaches the edge of the continental shelf, it has travelled perhaps six thousand kilometres, although the exact distance depends on the route taken.

As the larva approaches the coast, it changes into a glass eel, a small transparent eel that is now shaped like the adult. Glass eels gather in estuaries and river mouths, sometimes in enormous numbers. They then begin to move inland, often swimming against the current. Some remain near the coast, while others navigate far upstream, overcoming small waterfalls and wet rock faces with remarkable persistence. Once they settle in freshwater habitats such as rivers, lakes and marshes, they gradually acquire pigment and become known as yellow eels.

Yellow eels may remain in fresh water for years, sometimes for more than a decade. They are nocturnal hunters, feeding on insects, worms, fish and other small creatures. Eventually, a change begins: the eel's back darkens, its sides turn silver, and its eyes enlarge. At this stage, called the silver eel, the animal stops feeding and begins the final migration back to the sea. Silver eels gather in rivers and then move downstream in autumn, often during dark, rainy nights. Their return journey to the Sargasso Sea has never been observed in full, but they are believed to reproduce once and then die.

How eels navigate across the open ocean remains uncertain, but researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Silver eels may use the Earth's magnetic field to sense direction, since laboratory experiments have shown that eels can respond to magnetic cues in the same way that some birds and sea turtles do. They may also use their sense of smell to recognise water masses with particular chemical signatures, and they may orient themselves by following ocean currents. None of these explanations is complete on its own, and the navigational abilities of the eel are still an active area of research.

The European eel is not alone in making such a journey. The American eel spawns in the same part of the Sargasso Sea, although its larvae travel to the eastern coast of North America. Other species have different migration routes: the Japanese eel, for example, breeds near an underwater ridge in the western Pacific called the West Mariana Ridge, and its larvae drift back to Japan and China. Australia and New Zealand have their own eel species, some of which travel to deep ocean basins to reproduce. The details differ, but all of these species share a similar pattern of sea breeding and freshwater growth.

Most eel populations are now in serious decline. Among the main threats are physical barriers such as dams and weirs, which block the upstream movement of glass eels and yellow eels. At the downstream stage, turbines at hydroelectric stations can kill or injure silver eels as they pass through. Pollution is a further danger, because eels are fatty fish and can accumulate harmful substances from the water. In response, conservationists have built eel ladders, transported glass eels past dams and introduced fishing limits, but numbers remain low, and the European eel is now listed as a critically endangered species.

Modern consumer societies are built on the assumption that more choice is better. Supermarkets stock dozens of breakfast cereals, streaming services offer libraries of tens of thousands of programmes, and online retailers present thousands of near-identical products. The language of advertising reinforces the idea that the power to choose is a form of freedom. For most of the twentieth century, economists also assumed that a wider range of options could only make consumers better off, because they could always ignore the extra alternatives if they wished. In recent years, however, psychologists have shown that this assumption can fail in surprising ways.

The most famous demonstration of choice overload is a study carried out in a grocery store in California and published in 2000 by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. The researchers set up a tasting table in two conditions. In one, they displayed twenty-four varieties of jam; in the other, six. The larger display attracted more shoppers, with about three-fifths stopping to taste, compared with two-fifths at the smaller table. When it came to buying, the pattern reversed. Roughly one in three visitors at the six-jam table made a purchase, whereas almost nobody who had seen the larger display bought anything.

The jam study has become a popular symbol of the costs of too much choice, but its findings are not as simple as they first appear. Several later analyses that combine the results of many experiments have found that choice overload is not a universal effect; in some settings large assortments increase both interest and sales. The negative effect of having many alternatives seems to depend on the situation. It is more likely to appear when people have no strong prior preference, when the options are difficult to tell apart, when they must decide quickly, or when they will be asked to explain or justify the choice.

So why does an abundance of choices sometimes make a decision harder? One reason is that consumers try to compare every alternative, even when the differences are trivial. Each comparison carries a cognitive cost, and the effort grows rapidly as the number of options increases. A second reason is that a larger set raises the possibility that some unchosen option might have been better. People anticipate this regret before they have even made a decision, and they delay the choice. A third factor is the sense of responsibility: when we have selected one item from many, we feel more responsible if the outcome is disappointing.

Choice overload is therefore not an argument against choice itself. People who already know what they like, or who have detailed knowledge of a product category, often benefit from a wider selection because they can ignore irrelevant alternatives. A wine expert in a store with hundreds of bottles may quickly locate the region and vintage she wants, whereas a novice may stand in confusion. Similarly, when consumers have learned their preferences through experience, a larger range allows them to match those preferences more exactly. The problem arises mainly among those who are uncertain and among decisions that are unfamiliar or highly complex.

Cultural and individual differences also matter. Researchers have suggested that people from cultures that place a high value on autonomy and individual decision-making may experience choice overload more strongly than people from cultures in which choices are more commonly made with or by others. Personality plays a part as well: some individuals are maximisers, who search for the best possible option, while others are satisficers, who are content once they have found something good enough. Maximisers tend to spend more time comparing and to report less satisfaction with their final choice.

There is also evidence that a large choice set can reduce satisfaction after the decision. If a person compares twenty-five possible mobile phones, the chosen phone may be very good, but the person can still imagine a different phone that might have been slightly better in some respect. In addition, the more alternatives a person considers, the more attractive the rejected ones may appear in memory. The chosen option can come to feel flawed not because it is inadequate, but because the decision process has drawn attention to all the ways in which it could have been different.

Many organisations have begun to respond by changing the way they present choices. Instead of simply offering the largest possible selection, they use default settings, recommendation systems and simplified categories to guide users towards a smaller set of relevant options. The aim is not to remove choice but to structure it, so that consumers can still select from a wide range without being overwhelmed by the full range at once. This approach has been called choice architecture, and it is now common in online shops and public services.

My own view is that the lesson of this research is not that choice is bad, nor that regulators should decide which products people may buy. Choice is valuable because it allows people to express their preferences and to find solutions that fit their circumstances. But unlimited choice is not an obvious good in every situation. The usefulness of choice depends on how it is organised, how much information accompanies it and how confident the decision-maker feels. The goal, then, should be better choice rather than simply more choice.