IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 58

In May 1950, two brothers cutting peat for fuel in a bog near Silkeborg in central Denmark uncovered a man's face so well preserved that they assumed he was the victim of a recent murder and contacted the police. He lay on his side as though asleep, wearing a pointed skin cap and a belt, with a plaited leather noose drawn tightly around his neck. Radiocarbon dating later showed that the man, now known as Tollund Man, had died in the fourth century BCE, well over two thousand years before he was found. He is one of hundreds of so-called bog bodies recovered from the peatlands of northern Europe, chiefly in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and Ireland.

To understand why such bodies survive, it is necessary to understand the bogs themselves. Many of the raised bogs of northern Europe began as shallow lakes left behind by retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. As plants grew and died around their margins, the lakes gradually filled with vegetation and became fens, wetlands fed by mineral-rich groundwater.

In time, mosses of the genus Sphagnum colonised the surface, and the accumulating layers of dead moss lifted it above the reach of the groundwater. From then on, the bog received water only from rain and snow, which contain very few nutrients. Because dead plant matter decays extremely slowly in such conditions, it builds up as peat, typically at a rate of about a millimetre a year.

Several features of this environment work together to protect the dead. Below the living surface, the peat is permanently waterlogged, and the water contains almost no oxygen, so the bacteria that would normally break down a corpse cannot flourish. Sphagnum also makes its surroundings strongly acidic. In addition, as the moss decays it releases a carbohydrate known as sphagnan, which is thought to deprive bacteria of nitrogen they need while also reacting with the collagen in skin. The result resembles a natural form of tanning: the skin becomes dark brown and leathery, and hair often turns a reddish colour. Low temperatures slow decay still further, and some researchers believe that bodies placed in the water during the colder months were the most likely to survive.

The chemistry that protects soft tissue, however, damages other parts of the body. Acidic water gradually dissolves the calcium phosphate in bone, so that the skeletons of many bog bodies have become soft and rubbery, or have almost disappeared. Some bodies were also flattened by the weight of the peat that accumulated above them over the centuries. Such damage complicates interpretation, because injuries caused after death can be hard to distinguish from those that caused it. In the case of Grauballe Man, found in Denmark in 1952, a fracture of the skull was at first taken as evidence of a violent blow, but it is now generally attributed to the pressure of the peat.

Modern science has nevertheless drawn remarkable information from these remains. In a study published in 2021, researchers led by Nina Nielsen of Silkeborg Museum re-examined the contents of Tollund Man's intestines, which had first been analysed shortly after his discovery. They concluded that some twelve to twenty-four hours before his death he had eaten a porridge made mainly of barley, together with flax and the seeds of a weed called pale persicaria, and probably some fish. Charred crust among the remains indicated that the meal had been cooked in a clay pot. He was also carrying several kinds of intestinal parasite, suggesting that he had drunk contaminated water or eaten poorly cooked meat.

Finds from Ireland have been equally revealing. In 2003 a peat-cutting machine at Clonycavan, near Dublin, exposed the upper body of a young man whose hair had been gathered on top of his head and held in place with a mixture of plant oil and pine resin. The resin appears to have come from trees growing in south-western France or Spain, which suggests that luxury goods were being traded over long distances more than two thousand years ago. Like many Irish examples, Clonycavan Man had suffered several violent injuries, and his death was clearly not an accident.

Why were these people killed and placed in bogs? The Roman historian Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century CE, reported that some Germanic peoples drowned cowards and other offenders in marshes beneath wicker hurdles, and some scholars have accordingly interpreted bog bodies as executed criminals. Many researchers, however, now favour an explanation based on religious sacrifice, pointing out that bogs were also used for offerings of weapons, jewellery and food. In Ireland, the archaeologist Eamonn Kelly observed that a number of bodies lay close to ancient territorial boundaries, and he proposed that they had been sacrificed in rituals connected with kingship.

Today the bogs themselves are under pressure. Large areas of peatland have been drained for agriculture or forestry, or stripped for fuel and garden compost, and peat that dries out exposes whatever lies within it to oxygen and decay. Peatlands also store vast quantities of carbon, which is released when they are drained, giving conservationists a further reason to protect them. Museums, meanwhile, face difficult questions about how to display such remains respectfully, since bog bodies were once living people rather than simply archaeological objects.

Few large mammals are as difficult to study as the snow leopard. It inhabits the high mountains of twelve countries in Central and South Asia, from Afghanistan to Mongolia, usually at altitudes of several thousand metres, where it hunts wild sheep and goats such as the bharal and the Siberian ibex. Its smoky-grey coat, marked with dark rosettes, blends almost perfectly with rock and snow, and it is most active around dawn and dusk. Such is its reputation for invisibility that in his celebrated 1978 book The Snow Leopard, the American writer Peter Matthiessen described a long trek through the Himalayas of Nepal during which he never saw one.

For most of the twentieth century, biologists had to rely on indirect evidence. They searched for the scrapes that snow leopards make with their hind feet, for droppings, footprints and rocks sprayed with scent, and recorded how many such signs they found along a given length of trail. Sign surveys of this kind reveal where the animals are present, but they say little about how many there are, since a single cat may leave dozens of marks while several may share a path. Fitting radio collars, first attempted in western Nepal in the 1980s, provided detailed information about individual animals, but capturing a large predator in steep terrain is difficult and carries risks for both the cat and the researchers.

The camera trap has transformed this situation. The device is essentially a weatherproof digital camera linked to a passive infrared sensor, which responds when an object warmer than its surroundings moves across its field of view. When triggered, the camera takes a burst of photographs or a short video, using an infrared flash at night that the animal is unlikely to notice. Because batteries and memory cards can last for months, researchers can leave dozens of cameras across a study area through the harshest season, positioning them along ridgelines, at the bases of cliffs and beside the rocks that snow leopards habitually mark.

The real advantage of cameras, however, lies in the fact that individual snow leopards can be recognised. The pattern of rosettes on each animal's flanks, face and tail is unique, so that a photograph serves rather like a fingerprint. By noting which individuals appear at which cameras, and how often the same animals are photographed again, researchers can apply statistical techniques known as capture–recapture models. These estimate how many animals were never photographed at all and allow the density of the population to be calculated, an approach first applied to camera-trap photographs in studies of tigers in India during the 1990s.

The method is not infallible. In 2020 a team led by Örjan Johansson of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences tested how reliably people could identify individuals, using photographs of sixteen snow leopards living in zoos, whose identities were already known. Eight observers, half of them experienced in identifying snow leopards, misclassified 12.5 per cent of the images. Most of these errors involved treating one animal as two, and as a result the population estimates were inflated by around a third on average. Image quality adds to the difficulty: thick winter fur, awkward angles and poor light can all obscure the markings. A further problem is volume. A large share of camera-trap images show nothing but grass moving in the wind or passing livestock, and in 2019 the Snow Leopard Trust described working with Microsoft to build software that sorts pictures containing snow leopards from the rest, cutting a task that had once taken days to minutes.

Despite these limitations, camera trapping has made national surveys possible. In January 2024 India published the results of its first systematic assessment, carried out between 2019 and 2023 and coordinated by the Wildlife Institute of India. Cameras were installed at nearly 2,000 locations, and 241 individual snow leopards were photographed. Combining these images with sign surveys, the assessment estimated that India holds about 718 snow leopards, of which around 477 are in Ladakh. Significantly, most of the country's snow leopards were found to live outside protected areas, on land that is also used by herders and their animals.

At a global scale, uncertainty remains considerable. In 2017 the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the snow leopard from the Endangered category to the less serious status of Vulnerable. The decision was controversial. Critics pointed out that camera traps had covered only a tiny fraction of the species' range and that most of the figures behind the global estimate were based on expert opinion and sign surveys rather than direct counts. Since then, governments and conservation organisations have joined in an international effort to produce a more robust estimate, with camera-trap surveys at its core.

Counting is not the only benefit. The same cameras record the prey on which snow leopards depend, as well as threats to them, including herders' dogs and, occasionally, poachers. Such evidence helps conservationists to work with local communities, many of whom lose livestock to snow leopards. Programmes that compensate herders through livestock insurance, or help them to build predator-proof corrals in which animals can be shut at night, reduce the incentive to kill the cats in retaliation. In this way, a technology designed for counting has become a tool for coexistence.

On the night of 3 March 1991, a resident of an apartment building in Los Angeles picked up his new video camera and filmed police officers beating a motorist named Rodney King. The footage, broadcast around the world, is often cited as an early landmark in what came to be called citizen journalism: the gathering and sharing of news by people with no professional connection to the media. What was then a rare event is now commonplace.

Almost everyone carries a camera connected to the internet, and the first images of a disaster, a protest or a crime are now more likely to come from a bystander than from a reporter. Whether this represents a gain or a loss for public understanding is one of the central questions facing the news media, and I believe the answer is less simple than either enthusiasts or sceptics suggest.

Early enthusiasts saw a democratic revolution in the making. In 2000 the South Korean journalist Oh Yeon-ho founded OhmyNews, an online newspaper built on the principle that any citizen could be a reporter, which published contributions from thousands of members of the public alongside the work of a small professional staff. In 2004 the American writer Dan Gillmor argued in his book We the Media that news was ceasing to be something delivered to a passive audience and was becoming a conversation in which readers took part. The optimists had a point. Ordinary people can go where reporters cannot, and they are present at the moment events occur rather than arriving hours later.

The record since then has confirmed much of this promise. When a tsunami devastated the coasts of the Indian Ocean in December 2004, some of the most widely seen footage was recorded by tourists. In January 2009 a passenger on a ferry photographed the stricken US Airways aircraft that had come down on the Hudson River, and his picture spread online before professional photographers arrived. Most significantly, in May 2020 a seventeen-year-old, Darnella Frazier, used her phone to film the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Her video contradicted the initial police account of his death, prompted protests around the world, and was later honoured with a special citation by the Pulitzer Prize board.

Yet the same events also reveal the limits of the model. A bystander's video records what happened in front of the camera, but it rarely explains why it happened, what came before, or whether it was typical. Context, precisely what a single image lacks, is at the heart of what professional journalism provides. Moreover, the speed and volume of material shared during a crisis create opportunities for error and manipulation. After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, users of the online forum Reddit who were trying to identify the perpetrators from photographs wrongly named a missing student as a suspect; his family received abusive messages before the real suspects were identified, and the site's general manager later apologised. Images from earlier conflicts, or even from video games, are regularly recirculated as if they showed current events.

It would be easy to conclude from such episodes that citizen journalism is a dangerous fashion, but in my view this misidentifies the problem. The difficulty lies not in the fact that amateurs record events but in the assumption that recording an event is the same as reporting it. A witness provides raw material; a reporter checks that material, sets it in context and takes responsibility for the result. These are distinct functions, and confusion arises when the first is presented as though it were the second. Professional journalists are certainly capable of error, but they work within institutions that can be held to account for their mistakes through published corrections, editorial codes and, ultimately, the courts. An anonymous account that shares a misleading clip faces no comparable consequences.

The most productive developments of recent years have come from combining the two roles. Large news organisations have built specialist teams whose task is to verify material submitted by the public: they establish where a video was made by comparing its landscape with satellite imagery, analyse shadows to estimate the time of day, and contact the person who filmed it. The investigative group Bellingcat, founded by Eliot Higgins in 2014, has shown that volunteers trained in such open-source techniques can uncover information that governments would prefer to conceal. In this kind of work, the public is not a substitute for journalists but a partner whose contributions are tested before they are trusted.

This model depends, however, on audiences valuing verification, and here there are grounds for concern. Social media platforms tend to reward material that provokes strong emotion and spreads quickly, and a carefully checked report almost always arrives later than an unverified rumour. At the same time, many traditional news organisations, weakened by the loss of advertising revenue, have cut the very staff who once did the checking. If audiences come to regard footage from a phone as a complete account of events, the second, slower stage of journalism may be squeezed out altogether.

The rise of the citizen witness, then, deserves to be welcomed rather than feared. It has made it far harder for the powerful to deny events that would once have remained hidden, and it has given a voice to people whom the traditional media long overlooked. But a society that wants to understand what its witnesses have seen still needs people whose job is to ask questions about it. The danger is not that there are too many cameras, but that there may soon be too few people paid to investigate what those cameras capture.