IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 66

In the valley of Olympia in the western Peloponnese, a religious sanctuary dedicated to Zeus gave rise to the most famous athletic festival of the ancient world. According to tradition, the games began in 776 BC, although the site had been used for worship and perhaps for earlier contests long before that date. From the start they were held every four years, and this four-year period, known as an Olympiad, became a standard way for Greek historians to measure time. The games were Panhellenic in character: they were open to free Greek men from cities and colonies across the Mediterranean and beyond.

The earliest recorded festival consisted of a single running race, the stadion, held over the length of the stadium at Olympia. That distance was roughly 192 metres, and the name of the first recorded victor, a cook named Coroebus from the nearby city of Elis, has come down to us. Over the following centuries the programme expanded considerably. A second foot race, the diaulos, doubled the length of the stadium, and a long-distance race called the dolichos required athletes to complete many lengths of the track. Later came wrestling, boxing and the pankration, a brutal combination of the two in which almost anything except biting and eye-gouging was permitted.

By the fifth century BC the games had grown into a five-day festival. The first and last days were given over to religious ceremonies and sacrifices, while the middle days were filled with athletic events, horse and chariot races, and the pentathlon, a contest made up of five different disciplines: running, long jump, discus, javelin and wrestling. Chariot racing, held in the hippodrome, was spectacular and dangerous, and because the owners of the teams were declared the victors rather than the drivers, it offered one of the few ways in which a woman could gain an Olympic title without competing.

Participation was restricted to free-born Greek men. Athletes trained for ten months before the games, often at public gymnasia, and competed naked, their bodies coated with olive oil. Officials called Hellanodikai supervised the contests, and they had the power to fine or flog competitors who broke the rules. Although the games were amateur in the sense that no money was awarded at Olympia itself, many successful athletes were effectively professionals: they could spend years training, supported by wealthy patrons or by their home cities.

Women were barred from competing and, according to most sources, married women were not allowed even to watch the male events. Unmarried women and girls could attend, and a separate festival for girls, the Heraia, was held in honour of Zeus's wife Hera. The Spartan princess Kyniska became the first female Olympic champion in 396 BC, but she did so as the owner of a winning four-horse chariot team, not as a competitor. Her example was followed by several other wealthy women in later centuries.

The sanctuary at Olympia contained not only the temple of Zeus, with its colossal gold and ivory statue, but also a stadium that could hold large crowds, training areas, baths and a hippodrome. Visitors came from all over the Greek world, and the games provided an occasion for trade, political meetings and cultural display. The sacred truce, announced before each festival, was not a general peace, but it did forbid armies from attacking travellers on their way to or from Olympia, which allowed participants and spectators to move safely even during wartime.

A victor at Olympia received no money and no precious object from the organisers; the prize was a simple wreath cut from a wild olive tree that grew near the temple. In the short term, then, a champion's reward was largely symbolic.

In the longer term, however, success could bring enormous social and material benefits. City-states often honoured their Olympic victors with cash payments, free meals for life, front seats at public events and statues in the agora. Some victors even had poems written in their honour by celebrated authors.

The games continued to be held under Roman rule, but their character changed as emperors used them for political display. The emperor Nero, for example, competed in musical and chariot events in the first century AD and was declared a winner even after falling from his chariot. In 393 AD the Christian emperor Theodosius I ordered the closure of pagan sanctuaries and banned the Olympic festival as part of a wider campaign against traditional religion. After more than a thousand years, the ancient games came to an end.

Burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it traps heat and drives climate change. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a set of technologies designed to prevent this gas from reaching the air. The carbon dioxide is captured at its source, compressed, transported and then injected deep underground into suitable rock formations, where it is intended to remain for thousands of years. Interest in CCS has grown because modern societies still rely heavily on fossil fuels and are likely to do so for some time.

Most capture systems are installed at large industrial plants. In the most common approach, known as post-combustion capture, waste gases are passed through a liquid solvent, usually one of a family of chemicals called amines, which absorbs the carbon dioxide. A second method, pre-combustion capture, involves removing the carbon before the fuel is burned; the fuel is first converted into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and the hydrogen is then burned cleanly. A third technique, oxyfuel combustion, burns the fuel in almost pure oxygen so that the waste gas is mostly carbon dioxide and water, which can be separated fairly easily.

Once captured, the carbon dioxide is compressed until it reaches a dense, liquid-like state, which makes transport much easier. In many projects it is moved by pipeline, often for hundreds of kilometres, to an injection site; in others, particularly where storage is offshore, ships or small purpose-built vessels may be used. The choice of transport depends on the volume of gas, the distance involved and the availability of existing infrastructure. Because the carbon dioxide remains under high pressure, pipelines must be designed to resist corrosion and are monitored for leaks, but the engineering is already well established.

At the storage site, the carbon dioxide is injected into porous rock layers more than 800 metres below the surface, where high pressure keeps it in a dense form. Suitable formations include depleted oil and gas fields and saline aquifers, which are layers of porous rock whose pores are filled with salty water. Once injected, the gas is trapped by several mechanisms. These include structural trapping beneath an impermeable cap rock, residual trapping in tiny pore spaces, dissolution into the brine, and slow mineralisation, in which the carbon dioxide reacts with the rock to form solid minerals.

The world's first large offshore storage project began at the Sleipner field in the North Sea in 1996. Around one million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been separated from the natural gas produced there and injected into a sandstone formation called the Utsira sand every year since then. In 2014, a coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada, became the first such plant to use post-combustion capture at commercial scale, capturing roughly one million tonnes annually. A different approach, direct air capture, removes carbon dioxide directly from ordinary air; a plant opened in Iceland in 2021 removes about 4,000 tonnes per year, a small but symbolically important amount.

Some of the carbon dioxide captured today is not stored permanently but is used in enhanced oil recovery. In this process, the gas is injected into ageing oil fields to reduce the viscosity of the oil and force more of it to the surface. Although this can store carbon dioxide underground, the practice has been criticised because it enables the production of additional oil, which in turn produces new emissions when burned. Some proponents argue that enhanced oil recovery can nonetheless produce net climate benefits by replacing oil that would otherwise come from more carbon-intensive sources, but this remains contested.

The main obstacle to wider use of carbon capture is cost. Capture equipment is expensive, and because the process itself consumes energy, a power station fitted with capture must burn more fuel to produce the same amount of electricity. The extra energy demand can be as high as 20 to 30 per cent, which reduces the net benefit of the captured carbon and raises the cost of electricity. There are also concerns about long-term storage safety: the carbon dioxide must be monitored for signs of leakage, and responsibility for old storage sites must eventually be transferred, often to the state, once the operating company has closed the site.

Despite these difficulties, most organisations that model future energy systems, including the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expect carbon capture to play a significant role if global temperature limits are to be met. The technology is not a replacement for renewable energy or improved efficiency, but it is seen as necessary for industries such as cement and steel production, where emissions are otherwise difficult to eliminate. For the moment, however, the number of large projects remains far below what these models suggest is required, and progress depends on government support and a price on carbon emissions.

High-speed rail is one of the most appealing symbols of modern infrastructure. Trains gliding across the landscape at 300 kilometres an hour promise to shrink distances, reduce traffic and offer a cleaner alternative to flying. Politicians from almost every continent have eagerly promoted expensive new lines, often presenting them as proof of national ambition. Yet the record is less straightforward than the publicity suggests. High-speed rail can bring enormous public benefits, but only in certain conditions, and when those conditions are absent it can become a costly disappointment.

The modern high-speed era began in Japan in 1964, when the Shinkansen linked Tokyo and Osaka just before the Olympic Games. The line cut a journey of about six and a half hours to four hours, and later to two and a half. More importantly, it demonstrated that rail could compete with air travel over distances of several hundred kilometres. The Shinkansen has since carried billions of passengers and remains one of the most intensively used rail corridors in the world, a model that many later projects have tried to copy.

France followed with the TGV, which began operating between Paris and Lyon in 1981. The TGV showed that high-speed rail could succeed in a democratic European country and became the core of a network whose high-speed services now run from Paris to London, Brussels, Amsterdam and other cities. The TGV also cut the number of short-haul flights on several routes. Spain, Germany and Italy subsequently built extensive systems of their own. Europe's experience also offered a cautionary lesson: lines built through less densely populated regions often struggled to attract enough passengers to cover their costs.

China has since built the world's longest high-speed network, which by 2024 exceeded 45,000 kilometres. Construction began in earnest after 2004, and within two decades high-speed trains had transformed long-distance travel in a country of over 1.4 billion people. The scale of this achievement is undeniable, but it has come at a price. China's rail operator has accumulated very large debts, and some lines in sparsely populated areas carry far fewer passengers than the busiest coastal routes.

The most obvious benefit of high-speed rail is speed itself. By cutting door-to-door journey times, it attracts passengers who might otherwise drive or fly. This can relieve congestion on motorways and reduce pressure on airports. In addition, stations can become catalysts for redevelopment, and faster connections can enlarge labour markets, allowing people to live in one city and work in another. Supporters therefore argue that high-speed rail is not just transport policy but economic strategy.

The environmental case is more complicated. A high-speed train carrying a full load of passengers generally produces less carbon dioxide per person per kilometre than a car or a plane. However, that advantage depends heavily on how the electricity that powers the train is generated. If electricity comes from coal, the benefit shrinks, and it can disappear altogether if trains run with many empty seats. Moreover, building a new line consumes vast quantities of concrete and steel, and this construction phase releases its own emissions, which may take years of operation to offset.

There is also the question of opportunity cost. High-speed lines are extraordinarily expensive, and their budgets frequently overrun. In Britain, the planned HS2 line was repeatedly scaled back after costs rose sharply, while in California a project intended to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles has experienced long delays and severe financial problems. The same money could often be used to improve conventional rail, bus services or urban transit, benefiting far more people. High-speed rail tends to concentrate resources on the busiest corridors, where the most prosperous travellers are already concentrated.

Even the promised regional development does not always materialise. A new station may indeed attract investment, but it can also draw businesses and skilled workers toward the largest city and away from smaller towns along the route. Research on the effects of high-speed rail in Spain and Japan suggests that the main beneficiaries are often the biggest urban centres, while intermediate cities gain less than expected, and in some cases lose activity. High-speed connections can therefore reinforce existing inequalities between regions rather than reduce them.

Successful high-speed rail depends on high population density, a route length that suits rail rather than air travel, and excellent connections with local transport at both ends. City pairs between roughly 300 and 800 kilometres apart are usually cited as ideal. If passengers face a long and inconvenient journey just to reach the station, much of the speed advantage is lost. Feeder buses, subways and tram lines must be planned together with the new line from the start, and stations must be placed where people actually live and work.

My conclusion, then, is that high-speed rail is neither a universal good nor a pointless indulgence. It works where demand is high and where it is integrated into a wider transport system; it fails where it is built for reasons of prestige, with little regard for the passengers it will actually serve. Each corridor must be judged on its own merits, using honest projections of cost and ridership. The question should never be "How fast can the train go?" but "What will this line do for the travelling public?"