IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 90

For centuries before the modern university appeared, advanced education in Europe was provided mainly by monasteries and the cathedral schools attached to major churches. These institutions trained boys and young men for clerical careers, teaching them Latin, the Bible and the basic skills needed to administer church business. They were, however, small and local in character, and they awarded no formal degrees. From the late eleventh century onwards, a different kind of institution began to take shape in a few European cities, particularly in Italy and France. Its development was gradual, and it owed as much to the ambitions of students and teachers as to any deliberate plan.

The earliest of these new institutions was at Bologna in northern Italy. From around the end of the eleventh century, teachers of Roman law began to attract students from many parts of Europe, and the city became famous above all for legal studies. The students were often mature men who already held positions in the church or in secular administration, and they came to Bologna because practical knowledge of Roman law was increasingly useful to rulers and church courts. Medicine and the arts were added to the curriculum only later, so that for much of the twelfth century law remained the city's core discipline.

Because most of these students were foreigners with no local rights, they banded together into associations known as universitates, a Latin term meaning corporations or guilds. These student guilds could negotiate with landowners over rents, regulate the prices of books and lodgings, and exact penalties from lecturers who arrived late or failed to cover the required material. In this model, unusual by later standards, authority lay largely with the organised body of students rather than with the teachers.

A different structure emerged in Paris, where the cathedral school of Notre-Dame had long attracted able scholars. By the twelfth century, masters teaching the arts, canon law and theology had formed their own corporation, and in the early thirteenth century the institution received privileges from both the French king and the pope. Paris became the leading centre of theological study in Europe. Students normally entered at a young age and began with the arts before moving on to the higher faculties of law, medicine or theology. The masters, not the students, governed the university, and their regulations set the pattern for many later foundations in northern Europe.

Oxford had schools at least as early as 1096, but the town's academic community expanded rapidly after 1167, when King Henry II forbade English students to attend the University of Paris. Scholars gathered in Oxford in growing numbers, and by the end of the twelfth century the schools there had begun to resemble a corporation of masters. The town's first colleges, however, came later. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, students usually lodged in private houses or halls, and residential colleges were created gradually from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards as permanent communities with their own rules.

Cambridge arose from a dispute. In 1209 a group of scholars left Oxford after conflict with townspeople and settled in the small market town of Cambridge, where they formed a new academic community. Teaching there soon attracted students and masters, and the institution developed along lines similar to Oxford's. The two English universities were to remain for centuries the only degree-granting institutions in the country.

The curriculum of medieval universities rested on the seven liberal arts, which were divided into two stages. The trivium consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric, the skills of expression and argument. The more advanced quadrivium comprised arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. A student who completed the course in arts might receive the degree of bachelor, the first formal qualification, and could then choose whether to continue into one of the higher disciplines.

Beyond the arts lay the senior degrees of master and doctor, terms that had originally been associated with membership of a craft guild. A teacher who had proved his fitness might be granted a licence to teach, a formal permission known as the licentia docendi. The final degree, the doctorate, marked full admission into the university guild and entitled its holder to teach, first within the local institution and eventually, by custom, in other universities as well. All teaching and formal debate took place in Latin, the shared language of learning.

The university model proved highly adaptable. By the end of the Middle Ages, institutions inspired by Paris and Bologna could be found across much of Europe, from Scotland to the Mediterranean and from Spain to central Europe. Some were established by rulers who wanted trained administrators; others grew out of religious houses or were funded by wealthy patrons. Each new foundation adapted the basic structure of faculties, degrees and lectures to local needs, but the core identity of the university as a self-governing community of scholars endured.

Life for a medieval student was rigorous and far from comfortable. Lectures were given in unheated rooms, often by masters who dictated texts slowly so that students could copy them by hand, and formal disputations required students to defend arguments in public. Books were scarce and expensive, and many scholars survived on limited allowances from family or patrons. Despite these hardships, the universities attracted ambitious young men because they offered a route to employment in the church, the law and royal administration. A university education was therefore valued less for its scholarly content alone than for the career opportunities it opened.

Vaccines teach the immune system to fight a pathogen without causing serious disease. Traditional vaccines do this by introducing a weakened or inactivated form of a virus or bacterium, or a piece of the pathogen such as a surface protein. The immune system treats the foreign material as a threat and produces antibodies and memory cells that can be mobilised later. These well-established methods have controlled many infections, but they are often slow to develop because the virus must be grown in laboratories or in eggs under tightly controlled conditions, and the final product must then be purified and tested in large batches.

Messenger RNA vaccines work differently. Rather than injecting any part of the pathogen itself, they deliver a set of temporary genetic instructions to a person's cells. These instructions are written in messenger RNA, a molecule that normally carries information from DNA to the parts of the cell where proteins are built. The vaccine tells the cells to manufacture one harmless piece of the virus, usually a protein on its outer surface. The immune system then notices that protein, identifies it as foreign and begins to develop a defence. The mRNA itself does not enter the cell nucleus and is soon broken down by natural processes, leaving no permanent change to a person's DNA.

The underlying idea is older than the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 1990s, researchers showed that synthetic mRNA injected into laboratory animals could prompt cells to make a target protein, but numerous obstacles prevented clinical use. Natural mRNA is short-lived and fragile, and the immune system often reacted to injected RNA as if it were an invading virus, causing inflammation that could make vaccines too dangerous or ineffective. A major breakthrough came from the work of biochemists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who discovered that chemically modifying one of the RNA building blocks reduced this unwanted immune reaction. Their work, later recognised with a Nobel Prize, made mRNA medicines considerably more practical.

A further problem was transport into cells. Because RNA is a large molecule with a negative electric charge, it cannot easily cross the fatty membrane that surrounds each cell. To overcome this barrier, scientists enclosed the RNA in tiny spheres composed of lipids, known as lipid nanoparticles. These particles shield the fragile RNA from enzymes in the blood and help it enter cells. Once inside, the RNA is released and used briefly by the cell's own machinery to manufacture the required protein before being degraded.

The first widely deployed mRNA vaccines were produced against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They contain mRNA that encodes the spike protein, the prominent structure that allows the coronavirus to attach to and enter human cells. After injection, cells close to the injection site take up the lipid nanoparticles and begin making copies of this spike protein. The immune system learns to recognise the protein and builds a response that includes antibodies and virus-specific cells. If a vaccinated person is later exposed to the actual coronavirus, the defence can act quickly, often preventing serious illness.

A central advantage of mRNA technology is speed. Because manufacturing is synthetic and does not depend on growing live viruses, a new vaccine candidate can be designed and produced in the laboratory within days of obtaining the virus's genetic sequence. This was critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the first mRNA vaccines entered large-scale use within about a year of the virus being identified. The technique is also flexible: the same production platform can be used for different diseases simply by altering the RNA sequence, and vaccines can be revised relatively quickly when new variants of a virus appear.

Distribution has demonstrated that scientific success does not automatically guarantee global use. Some of the first approved mRNA vaccines required storage at around -70°C, while others had to be kept at roughly -20°C, which demanded specialised freezers and a reliable cold chain. In many low-income countries such facilities were scarce, and early vaccine supplies were concentrated in wealthier regions. More recent formulations can be kept in ordinary refrigerators for a limited period, but transport difficulties and the short shelf-life of the vaccines continue to cause problems in remote and hotter parts of the world.

Researchers are now studying mRNA vaccines for other infections, including influenza, HIV and malaria, and for personalised cancer vaccines in which the RNA sequence is designed to match mutations found in an individual patient's tumour. Several clinical trials are under way, but success is by no means certain. The technology is still relatively young, and questions about the durability of protection, rare side effects and effectiveness in different age groups remain to be answered. Nevertheless, many immunologists believe that mRNA vaccines will become a broader class of medicines, rather than a one-off response to a single pandemic.

For all its promise, mRNA technology is not a magic solution to every infectious disease. Some viruses change so rapidly that a single vaccine may need frequent updating, and protecting against pathogens that hide inside cells, such as some parasitic infections, may require a stronger cellular immune response than mRNA alone can trigger. Costs and intellectual property rules also influence who benefits from new vaccines. These challenges do not diminish the achievement of the first mRNA vaccines, but they help explain why future applications will require sustained scientific and political effort, as well as public confidence in the technology.

Few school issues cause as much argument as class size. Parents often believe that small classes mean teachers can give more individual attention, and so pupils will learn more. Governments, however, must consider the cost: class size reductions require more teachers and more classrooms, so any benefits must be compared with other ways of spending money. I believe the research shows a small effect, but only in some conditions, and that the effect is much weaker than many people think.

The best-known study is the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio project, usually called Project STAR. In the late 1980s, several thousand pupils in the US state of Tennessee were randomly assigned to small classes, regular classes, or regular classes with a teaching assistant, and were followed from kindergarten through third grade. Pupils in small classes did better in reading and mathematics, with the largest gains among pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Because assignment was random, the results were widely seen as strong evidence of a causal link.

Later research, however, weakened this conclusion. Some researchers found that the early gains faded after pupils returned to regular classes, while others noted that the measured advantage was small when expressed as an effect size. A further problem is that Project STAR was done under particular conditions, and schools that try to repeat it may not get the same results if they lack enough trained teachers or enough classrooms. The Project STAR study therefore showed that class size can matter, but not that every class size reduction will produce benefits.

International comparisons are often cited in this debate, but they are hard to interpret. Some high-performing school systems in East Asia have large classes, while several rich Western countries have reduced class sizes without clear gains in average scores. Such comparisons are affected by differences in culture, curriculum, teacher training and private tutoring. A country's average class size tells us very little about whether reducing class size would improve learning, because the effects of class size cannot be separated from the rest of the system.

Teachers themselves usually support small classes. Surveys repeatedly find that teachers believe they can give more feedback, manage behaviour better and build stronger relationships when they teach small classes. What is striking is that observations of classrooms do not always show much change in how teachers actually teach. When class sizes fall, many teachers continue to lecture in much the same way, using the extra time to set more written work rather than to change their methods.

Cost studies provide a sobering perspective. Recruiting, training and paying many more teachers is among the most expensive actions a government can choose. The money spent on class size reductions might otherwise fund early literacy programmes, teaching assistants in the early years, or individual tutoring for struggling pupils, several of which have shown larger effects per pound spent. This does not make small classes worthless, but it means that class size reductions should be compared with other possible uses of the same money.

The benefits of small classes seem to be greatest in the first years of schooling. Young pupils are still learning to control their attention and to work independently, and they depend heavily on direct interaction with adults. For older pupils, the relationship is weaker; some reviews of research in secondary schools find little or no link between class size and achievement once other factors are controlled. Expert tutoring, in contrast, appears to help pupils of most ages, which suggests that the quality and intensity of interaction matter more than class size.

Meta-analyses, which combine the results of many studies, typically report small average effects, often around one-tenth of a standard deviation. This effect is not zero, but it is small when set beside the very large effects of factors such as teacher quality and prior achievement. It also hides variation within the average. A policy that reduces class size across an entire school system may produce little measurable gain, because the money is spread thinly, whereas a targeted reduction for disadvantaged young pupils may be more detectable.

Given this evidence, I would argue that blanket promises to cut class sizes in every year group are a poor use of public money. A better policy is to target small classes at the start of school and in communities where pupils arrive with the fewest educational advantages at home. Schools might also combine moderate class size reductions with training that helps teachers use the new freedom to include more discussion, feedback and individual questioning. Without changes in classroom practice, a small class may simply mean a quieter version of the same lesson.

Class size, then, is neither a false hope nor a cure. It can be one useful tool among many, but its power depends on age, context and teaching. The debate would be more useful if it moved away from the simple slogan 'smaller is always better' and towards a sharper question: in which classrooms, for which pupils, and with which forms of teaching does a small class genuinely improve learning?