IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 26

A For nearly a century, the typewriter was among the most visible objects in the office, the newsroom, and the writer's study. Today it survives only as a museum piece, yet for those who first encountered it the machine represented something genuinely revolutionary: a way of producing crisp, legible text reportedly faster than the most accomplished penman could manage. It changed how letters were written, how journalism was practised, and, in ways that are still debated, who was allowed to work in an office. Its history is also widely held to be a useful reminder that technologies which seem inevitable in hindsight were rarely so at the time. Dozens of inventors stumbled towards a workable design, and the version that ultimately prevailed is said to have done so as much by accident as by superior engineering.

B The earliest device that can reasonably be called a typewriter was patented in England in 1714 by Henry Mill, an engineer at the New River Company. Mill's patent describes a machine for impressing letters "so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print," but no surviving example of the device exists, and it is unclear whether Mill ever built one. The following century produced a string of inventive but commercially hopeless prototypes, including Pellegrino Turri's 1808 device, built so that his blind friend the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano could write letters that could be read. Turri's machine survives only in the form of a handful of letters preserved in an Italian archive; the device itself appears to have been lost.

C The breakthrough that opened the way to mass production came in 1867 in the workshop of Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper editor working with the printer Samuel Soulé and the inventor Carlos Glidden. Their machine could write only in capital letters and was, by Sholes's own admission, ugly and slow, but it was reliable enough to attract the attention of the firearm manufacturer E. Remington and Sons, which was said to be looking for new products in the lean years that followed the American Civil War. Remington bought the design in 1873, refined the mechanism, and in 1874 launched the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer. Mark Twain reportedly bought one almost at once, becoming the first major author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher.

D The Remington machine introduced a feature that has shaped the way the world writes ever since. Its keyboard arranged the letters in what we now call the QWERTY layout. Standard accounts broadly hold that Sholes designed the layout to slow typists down, on the grounds that rapid typing on the early mechanism caused the typebars to jam. Recent research, particularly that of the Kyoto University historians Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, has complicated this story. They argue that the layout was largely the result of repeated revisions made in response to feedback from telegraph operators, who were among the earliest customers and who needed letter pairs occurring together in Morse-encoded news copy to be reachable from different hands. Whatever its origins, the layout proved so durable that no rival arrangement, including the ergonomically more efficient Dvorak keyboard introduced in 1936, has ever displaced it.

E The social consequences of the typewriter were unexpected and far-reaching. In the 1880s, secretarial and clerical work in Britain and the United States was almost exclusively male. By 1900, however, the so-called "typewriter girl" had become a familiar figure in offices on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1930 women made up the great majority of typists in both countries. The machine itself was not the only cause of this shift, which was also reportedly driven by expanding bureaucracies, falling fertility rates, and growing female literacy, but contemporaries were in no doubt that the new technology had created an opening. Wages for typewriting were initially good by the standards of female employment, although they reportedly largely declined relative to other clerical roles as the supply of trained typists grew.

F The typewriter's commercial peak arrived in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with manufacturers such as Underwood, Olivetti, IBM, and Hermes producing machines of remarkable mechanical sophistication. IBM's Selectric, introduced in 1961, replaced the conventional swinging typebar with a rotating type ball, eliminating jams and allowing typists to reach speeds of more than 90 words per minute. Yet even as the Selectric and its successors reached new heights of refinement, the decisive challenger was already in the laboratory. The first commercially successful word-processing systems appeared in the early 1970s, and by the mid-1980s the personal computer had largely begun to displace the typewriter in earnest. Olivetti closed its last European typewriter factory in 1995. A small but persistent revival in the 2010s saw young writers buying second-hand machines for the focus and tactile pleasure they offered, but in the office and the newsroom the typewriter is now firmly history.

A Almost everything that is currently known about how the Earth's climate has shifted over the past eight hundred thousand years has been learnt from the ice of Antarctica. Snow that fell on the continent during the last glaciation, the rise of the great civilisations, and even the lifetime of the most recent generation has been preserved layer upon layer, trapping samples of the ancient atmosphere in tiny bubbles within it. By drilling vertical cores out of this ice and analysing them, scientists can read a remarkably detailed account of past temperatures, atmospheric chemistry, volcanic activity, and even the fall-out from distant industrial pollution.

B The technique was pioneered in Greenland in the 1960s but appears to have reached its full power in Antarctica in the 1990s. The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, known as EPICA, drilled a continuous core 3,260 metres long at Dome C between 1996 and 2004, reaching ice that fell as snow some 800,000 years ago. The Russian-led Vostok project, working at a different inland location, had earlier reached 420,000-year-old ice. In 2017 a joint American-Australian-European team is reported to have identified a region known as Allan Hills where older ice has been brought close to the surface by glacier flow; in 2020 they recovered fragments dated to 2.7 million years, which are widely held to be the oldest direct atmospheric samples ever measured.

C Reading an ice core requires several quite different techniques. The first is dating. In the upper sections, individual annual layers can often be counted, broadly like tree rings, by detecting seasonal variations in dust, acidity, and isotopic composition. Deeper down, the layers tend to be too compressed and the seasonal signal too weak for visual counting. Here, scientists typically use a combination of glaciological flow models, distinctive volcanic horizons such as the eruption of Toba some 74,000 years ago, and matching of long-term isotope curves against independent records in order to assign ages. The deepest layers reportedly carry an uncertainty of several thousand years, but the overall chronology has held up well against other paleoclimate archives such as marine sediment cores.

D Temperature reconstruction is one of the most striking applications. The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in the ice, and similarly the ratio of deuterium to ordinary hydrogen, depends on the temperature of the air mass from which the snow originally fell. Once these ratios have been calibrated against modern measurements, they apparently provide a thermometer that reaches back across geological time. The temperature record obtained at Dome C is widely held to show a clear and repeating pattern: long, cold glacial intervals lasting roughly 100,000 years, punctuated by brief warm "interglacials" of about 10,000 to 15,000 years, with the present interglacial, the Holocene, having begun around 11,700 years ago.

E Equally important, in the view of most researchers, is the analysis of trapped air. As snow falls, accumulates, and is eventually compressed into ice, pockets of atmosphere reportedly become permanently enclosed within bubbles. By melting carefully extracted core sections under vacuum, researchers can release these gases and measure their composition. The results are unambiguous. Carbon dioxide concentrations oscillated between roughly 180 parts per million during the depths of glacial periods and around 280 parts per million during interglacials throughout the 800,000-year record. Pre-industrial Holocene values are reported to sit at the higher end of this range. By 2023, atmospheric concentrations had risen to 420 parts per million, a level reportedly not seen in the ice core record and, according to indirect proxies, believed not to have been seen for several million years.

F Ice cores have also revealed how rapidly the climate system can change. Records from Greenland, where snowfall is higher and dating more precise, appear to show that during the most recent glacial period the regional climate underwent a series of abrupt warming events known as Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, each raising local temperatures by 8 to 15 degrees Celsius within a few decades. Although the Antarctic response was muted and reversed in sign, the broader lesson is widely held to be sobering: large climate shifts can occur on timescales relevant to a single human lifetime.

G The cores reportedly carry traces of human activity as well. Lead from Roman silver smelting, fallout from the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s and 1960s, and trace lead from petrol additives are all broadly readable in modern Antarctic ice. Microscopic ash particles generally allow individual major volcanic eruptions to be pinpointed and dated. Combined, the records arguably sketch a picture of an atmosphere that, although vast, has registered the marks of even comparatively small-scale human activity for the past two thousand years.

H Future drilling programmes appear to aim at pushing the record further still. The Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice project, supported by ten European nations, began drilling at Little Dome C in 2021 with the goal of recovering a continuous core stretching back 1.5 million years. The information it produces is widely held likely to help resolve a long-standing puzzle: namely, why, around 900,000 years ago, the rhythm of ice ages shifted from a 41,000-year cycle to the 100,000-year pattern that has prevailed ever since. The answer, presumably embedded in trapped bubbles smaller than a grain of rice, should refine our understanding of how the Earth's climate works and how much it might be expected to change as carbon dioxide continues to rise.

A The idea behind the "15-minute city" is deceptively simple. Every resident, the proposition goes, should be able to reach the essentials of daily life — work, school, food, healthcare, parks, and culture — within a fifteen-minute walk or bicycle ride of their home. Its most prominent advocate, the Colombian-French urbanist Carlos Moreno, has largely argued since 2016 that this single design principle could simultaneously cut traffic, lower carbon emissions, strengthen local economies, and improve the physical and mental health of urban populations. The concept has now been adopted in policy documents in Paris, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Buenos Aires, and several dozen other cities, and is championed by the global C40 Cities network.

B Moreno did not invent the idea from nothing. It draws together threads from earlier traditions including the New Urbanism of the 1990s, Jane Jacobs's 1961 attack on functional zoning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and even nineteenth-century garden city movements. What distinguishes Moreno's formulation is a quantitative target — fifteen minutes — and an explicit set of six urban functions that he argues every neighbourhood should support: living, working, supplying, caring, learning, and enjoying. Cities that wish to claim 15-minute status are encouraged to measure how many of these functions a typical resident can reach on foot or by bicycle.

C Paris has largely gone furthest in turning the idea into policy. Re-elected in 2020, Mayor Anne Hidalgo made the "ville du quart d'heure" the central organising principle of her programme, committing to remove 70,000 parking spaces, add 180 kilometres of permanent cycle lanes, convert schoolyards into shaded "oasis" spaces, and require new commercial leases to favour small, locally rooted retailers. By 2024, automobile traffic in the centre of Paris had fallen by 53 percent compared with 2002, while cycling had risen tenfold. Pollution levels in the central arrondissements largely declined sharply, and surveys reported a significant increase in residents' sense of attachment to their neighbourhood.

D The Paris example, however, has not been universally welcomed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the United Kingdom and parts of North America, the 15-minute city became entangled with conspiracy theories alleging that planners intended to confine citizens to their neighbourhoods or impose "climate lockdowns." Although the original concept has nothing to do with restricting movement and explicitly may emphasis freedom and convenience, public consultations in cities such as Oxford were disrupted by protests reflecting these anxieties. Urban planners have responded by emphasising that the policy is about increasing options, not removing them.

E Beyond the political controversies, the concept faces deeper structural challenges. Many cities, particularly those built around the automobile in the second half of the twentieth century, were designed on principles almost diametrically opposed to fifteen-minute thinking. Phoenix, Houston, and most Australian state capitals have low residential densities, segregated land uses, and a road geometry that makes walking and cycling impractical over the distances involved. Retrofitting such cities is not a matter of policy change alone but of physical reconstruction over decades. A 2023 analysis by the OECD estimated that the average European city could approach genuine 15-minute status within roughly twenty years of sustained investment, while typical North American sun-belt cities would need closer to fifty.

F Equity is a further concern. The historical reality is that wealthier neighbourhoods in most cities are already close to 15-minute status. They tend to have parks, good schools, grocery stores, and cafés within easy walking distance, and they often resist the additional housing that would be needed to extend such amenities elsewhere. Conversely, lower-income areas frequently lack basic services, and improvements have a tendency to drive up rents, displacing the very residents the policy was meant to help. The OECD's Inclusive Growth in Cities programme has therefore argued that 15-minute strategies must be paired with explicit anti-displacement measures, including rent stabilisation, community land trusts, and proactive housing supply.

G A related issue is the role of work. Moreno's original framework assumes that many residents will work locally, an assumption complicated by the pandemic-era growth of remote and hybrid working. Some commentators argue that widespread teleworking effectively brings work within fifteen minutes of home for those who can take advantage of it. Others note that this benefit is concentrated among knowledge workers, while shift workers, care workers, and most service-sector employees still commute to fixed locations. Cities that take the 15-minute idea seriously, the argument runs, must invest in genuinely distributed economic centres rather than treating residential proximity to a laptop as a substitute.

H For all these challenges, the underlying evidence base is encouraging. A meta-analysis published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2022 found that neighbourhoods with high "walk scores" were associated with measurably lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and depression, even after adjusting for income and education. Carbon emissions modelling by the C40 Cities network suggests that comprehensive implementation of 15-minute principles in the world's largest cities could reduce urban transport emissions by roughly a third by 2050. Cities that have already begun the transition report that the changes are politically self-reinforcing: once residents have lived with calmer, greener, more pedestrian-friendly streets, surveys show they are unwilling to give them up.

I None of this means that the 15-minute city is a panacea or that it can be imposed identically everywhere. The most thoughtful proponents have moved toward describing it as a flexible framework rather than a fixed prescription, adaptable to suburban, low-density, and informal contexts as well as the dense European core for which it was originally conceived. Whether the model proves transformative or remains, in cooler critical assessments, an evocative slogan will depend in large part on how well planners, policymakers, and citizens negotiate the tensions of housing, mobility, work, and equity that the concept inevitably brings to the surface.