IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 92

The pipe organ has been called the king of instruments. Even a moderate church organ may contain several hundred pipes, while the largest instruments occupy entire walls and speak with a power that can shake stone. Unlike a piano, however, the organ does not simply produce a note when a key is struck. A player must cause air to enter a pipe, and this requires a carefully designed system of wind supply, valves and pipework. The instrument's history extends back more than two thousand years.

That history begins in ancient Alexandria. In the third century BC an engineer named Ctesibius built a machine called the hydraulis, the first known keyboard instrument. Water was not used to generate the sound; instead it helped to maintain a steady pressure in the reservoir of air beneath the pipes. When a player depressed one of the keys, wind entered a row of pipes and produced a clear tone. The hydraulis soon became popular across the Greek and Roman worlds, where it was heard at public games, banquets and other entertainments.

Roman writers and artists left a rich record of the instrument. The architect Vitruvius described its construction in careful detail, and images survive on coins, mosaics and small bronze figures. With the collapse of the western Roman Empire, however, the organ largely vanished from Western Europe. It did not disappear everywhere, for the instrument survived in the eastern Byzantine Empire, where it continued to be played during imperial ceremonies and on public occasions. There its sound was associated with the authority of the emperor, and it was sometimes used to impress foreign visitors.

The organ returned to Western Europe through a famous diplomatic gift. In 757 the Byzantine emperor Constantine V sent an organ to Pepin the Short, king of the Franks. According to Frankish chronicles, the instrument attracted the attention of the whole court, and Pepin's son Charlemagne later sought another from Byzantium. From that time organs began to be built in European monasteries and churches, although they were initially small. Keys were large levers that had to be struck with the fist, and several assistants were often needed to work the bellows that supplied the wind.

During the medieval period the organ gradually became a permanent feature of many large churches. By the thirteenth century some cathedral instruments used a single undivided chorus known as the blockwerk. In such an organ all the pipes associated with each key sounded together, producing an enormous but rather coarse mass of sound. There was no way to select one rank while silencing others. Over time builders developed mechanisms that allowed the player to choose particular sets of pipes, and the word stop appeared for the control that performed this function, because it stopped or allowed the passage of wind.

The Renaissance and Baroque periods brought the decisive invention of the slider chest. This mechanism enabled each rank of pipes to be switched on or off independently, so that a musician could combine flutes, principals and reed stops in a great variety of colours. Distinct national schools developed, especially in the Netherlands and northern Germany, where builders such as Arp Schnitger constructed instruments admired throughout Europe. The organ became central to Protestant church music and to the compositions of figures such as Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Organs also began to move beyond the church. From the late seventeenth century instruments were installed in concert rooms and aristocratic residences, and composers such as George Frideric Handel wrote organ concertos intended for public theatres. Builders responded with organs that could accompany orchestras as well as lead congregational singing.

In the nineteenth century industrial techniques and a taste for sonic power transformed the organ once again. The Parisian builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll developed a new symphonic instrument, using higher wind pressures, new stop designs and expressive enclosed divisions. Pneumatic and later electro-pneumatic actions allowed keys to be connected to distant valves with much less effort, making enormous organs possible in concert halls and churches.

A further shift began in the early twentieth century, when the organ reform movement called for a return to mechanical, or tracker, action. In a tracker organ a direct system of rods and levers links each key to its valves, giving the player subtle control over the initial attack of a note. Reformers also favoured lower wind pressures and brighter, more transparent voicing. As a result many modern instruments deliberately look back to Baroque principles, and organ builders today often combine mechanical action with modern aids such as electronic registration systems.

Whatever the period, the basic production of sound has remained remarkably stable. An organ contains two principal families of pipes. In a flue pipe air passes across a mouth and sets up vibrations, just as in a recorder. In a reed pipe a metal tongue vibrates against a shallot. Large instruments may have five manuals, a pedalboard and several thousand pipes arranged in dozens of ranks, supplied with wind by electric blowers and reservoirs. The largest instrument, the Atlantic City Convention Hall organ in the United States, completed in 1932, contains more than 30,000 pipes. Even with digital samplers available, the physical impact of such an instrument remains unique.

Laughter is one of the first social signals that human beings produce. Babies begin to laugh at around three or four months of age, long before they can speak, and the capacity appears in children who are born deaf and blind. Across every known culture people laugh, and they do so in strikingly similar situations. But laughter is only partly a response to humour. Everyday observation suggests that it is above all a social act, and researchers have found that people are far more likely to laugh when they are with others than when they are alone. Indeed, some scholars have described laughter as a kind of social glue, a way of signalling that we are safe, friendly and willing to cooperate. This social dimension is so strong that laughter can spread rapidly through a group, sometimes within fractions of a second. Laughter also occurs during play, sometimes before any words are exchanged.

The oldest sustained theory of laughter is usually called the superiority theory. Plato and Aristotle thought laughter could arise from the faults of others, and both worried about its power to disturb self-control. The idea was developed most influentially by the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that laughter expresses a sudden sense of our own superiority over someone else's failing. On this view, humour often targets the clumsy, the ignorant or the unfortunate, and a joke works because it lets us feel above its victim. The theory explains a good deal of cruel or mocking humour, though it struggles to account for innocent wordplay, baby laughter or the quiet chuckles that accompany friendly conversation.

A second major tradition stresses surprise and contradiction. The incongruity theory maintains that laughter occurs when we notice an unexpected mismatch between what we anticipate and what actually happens. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed that laughter follows from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing, while Arthur Schopenhauer placed the emphasis on a clash between a concept and an object. For example, when a solemn statement is suddenly undermined by a trivial detail, the collision of serious and silly produces amusement. The theory has been extended to visual jokes, puns and the absurd humour of modern comedians, and it remains popular among psychologists who study how the brain processes unexpected information. It also helps to explain why a familiar joke loses its force when the punchline is already known.

A third approach interprets laughter as a release of nervous energy. Herbert Spencer argued that emotions such as anger or fear build up energy that must be discharged, and that laughter is one of the channels through which this excess escapes. Sigmund Freud adopted a similar view, suggesting that humour allows forbidden thoughts or aggressive impulses to be expressed in a socially acceptable form, and that the energy saved from suppressing them is let out in laughter. For Freud the joke is a kind of safety valve, and the pleasure comes from the relief of not having to maintain a mental barrier. Although the theory has been criticised for being difficult to test, it captures the sense of release that many people feel after a good laugh.

None of the three classical theories fully explains the everyday texture of laughter. In a series of studies carried out in public places, the American psychologist Robert Provine recorded many hundreds of episodes of spontaneous laughter and found that only a small minority followed anything resembling a joke. Most laughter occurred after perfectly ordinary comments, such as a routine farewell or the remark that it had been pleasant to meet someone. Provine concluded that laughter is less about humour than about managing relationships: it reassures, invites agreement, softens criticism and helps people to negotiate ordinary conversation. He suggested that laughter acts as a form of social punctuation, marking the boundaries and the friendly intentions of an exchange rather than expressing the amusement of a solitary mind.

Physiologically, laughter involves a widely distributed network in the brain, including regions concerned with emotion, movement and social understanding. The act itself consists of a series of short, repeated exhalations and vocalisations, often so intense that the body becomes temporarily less capable of controlled movement. Some studies report that vigorous laughter raises heart rate and breathing, and there is evidence that it can increase the body's tolerance for pain, perhaps by triggering the release of endorphins, the brain's natural painkillers. However, these effects are generally brief, and researchers caution against claiming that laughter alone can prevent or cure disease. Brain imaging studies show increased activity in areas linked to reward when people find something funny, although the precise pattern varies between individuals.

The evolutionary history of laughter is now a lively field. Many scientists believe that human laughter arose from the breathy play signals of other primates, which accompany chasing, wrestling and tickling. In human infants, tickling produces the same rhythmic vocalisation, and adult laughter often keeps this playful, non-threatening quality. It may be that, early in human evolution, groups that laughed together cooperated better and formed stronger bonds, which gave them an advantage. Such claims are hard to test, but they suggest that humour, however sophisticated it later became, grew from a very basic social behaviour. The question of exactly why we laugh is therefore far from closed, and in a sense the laughter itself remains a reminder of our animal beginnings. This does not mean that adult jokes are only disguised play, but it does place the origin of laughter in a much older form of social signalling.

Few issues in education generate as much concern among parents, teachers and politicians as the stress associated with examinations. News reports speak of anxious teenagers, disrupted sleep and panic attacks, and in many countries surveys consistently find that exams are among the leading sources of stress in young people's lives. My own view is that this alarm is partly justified. While a degree of pressure can sharpen attention, the anxiety now attached to school examinations frequently becomes excessive, and it is most damaging for those students who already have the fewest social and educational advantages.

Stress itself is not automatically harmful. The body's stress response, which raises heart rate and releases adrenaline and cortisol, evolved to prepare a person for immediate action. In the short term this response can improve alertness and concentration. The inverted-U relationship between arousal and performance, usually associated with the early twentieth-century psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, captures this idea: as arousal rises, performance improves up to a point, but beyond that point further arousal causes performance to decline. Students, in other words, need enough adrenaline to care, but not so much that they cannot think.

Examination stress becomes a problem when the sympathetic nervous system remains switched on too long or is activated too strongly. The effects are both physical and mental. Many students report headaches, stomach aches, fatigue and disturbed sleep in the weeks before important tests. Mentally, high anxiety narrows attention and makes it harder to ignore distracting thoughts. Cognitive psychologists have shown that anxiety consumes the limited capacity of working memory, the system that holds information temporarily while it is used. A student who is busy worrying about failure has less working memory available for reading a question or planning an answer.

Test anxiety, the specific fear of evaluation, is not the same as general stress. A student may be highly motivated and well prepared, yet still perform poorly in an exam because the fear of being judged interferes with recall. Psychologists use the term retrieval to describe the process of bringing stored information back to mind, and this process is especially vulnerable to anxiety. Under pressure, knowledge that a student could easily produce at home can become temporarily inaccessible. The problem is thus not always a lack of study; it is often a failure of retrieval under threat.

Schools and education systems can unintentionally intensify these reactions. When examinations are used to rank pupils, to judge schools or to determine entry to the next stage of education, the stakes attached to a single performance rise sharply. Pupils quickly learn that a bad afternoon can overshadow years of work. Some pressure is unavoidable in any assessment, but poorly designed exams, narrow feedback and constant messages about how much a grade matters can turn a manageable challenge into a source of dread. Moreover, the burden is not spread evenly: students who have quiet places to study, supportive adults and access to extra help are generally better able to prepare, while those without these resources enter the exam room carrying additional strain.

Yet the answer is not the abolition of examinations altogether. Tests, when they are well constructed, can provide useful information about what students understand, identify gaps in teaching and motivate learners to consolidate knowledge. Research on the testing effect has shown that trying to recall information from memory, as an exam requires, is itself a powerful way of strengthening learning. Without any form of assessment, students may not consolidate what they have learned, and teachers lose a check on their own effectiveness. The problem is not the existence of examinations but the conditions under which they are taken.

A more sensible approach is to reduce needless anxiety while preserving the benefits of assessment. Schools can ensure that pupils have repeated, low-stakes opportunities to practise retrieval before a final test, so that the exam format is familiar and less threatening. Teachers can teach students how to plan their revision, and can give feedback that focuses on what a pupil can improve rather than on a fixed label. Simple measures such as allowing enough time, explaining the marks scheme and avoiding last-minute changes to the syllabus also help. For some students, instruction in relaxation techniques and help in challenging negative thoughts can make a meaningful difference. However, individual coping strategies can only go so far if the system itself continues to signal that a single examination defines a young person's future.

In the end, we should treat examination stress neither as a normal rite of passage to be ignored nor as a reason to abandon assessment. A fair examination system should measure what students can do, not how well they endure fear. By designing assessments that are clear, fair and supported by early practice, schools can lower avoidable anxiety while still asking students to show what they have learned. That, I believe, is the standard by which school examinations should be judged. Pressure may be useful; fear is not. The distinction is not merely semantic, because it points towards practical changes that schools can make without lowering expectations.