Reading Test 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The roads of Rome

At its height in the second century AD, the Roman Empire was held together by a network of roads that included around 80,000 kilometres of paved highway, stretching from northern Britain to the deserts of Syria. Many of these roads were originally built for military purposes. A legion that could march quickly along a firm, well-drained surface could respond to a rebellion or an invasion far more effectively than one struggling through mud and forest, and the roads allowed Rome to control a vast territory with a relatively small army.

The roads also carried the cursus publicus, the state's official transport and messenger service, established by the emperor Augustus. Along the main routes, the state maintained a system of stations. Some offered overnight accommodation, while others, placed at shorter intervals, were simply places where messengers could change their tired horses for fresh ones. Using this system, an official message could travel around 75 kilometres a day, and considerably further in an emergency. Permission to use the service was strictly controlled, and the cost of feeding the animals and running the stations was often a heavy burden on the local communities that were required to provide them.

Roman roads are famous for their straightness, and over flat ground they often ran for many kilometres without any change of direction. Surveyors laid out the route by setting up sighting poles on high ground and using an instrument called a groma, which allowed them to mark straight lines and right angles. However, the popular belief that Roman roads never deviated from a straight line is a myth. In hilly country, engineers were quite prepared to follow the contours of the land, using gentle curves or zigzags to keep slopes at a manageable gradient, and a typical road was in fact a series of straight sections that changed direction at the points where the surveyors had placed their markers.

The best-known description of how a road was constructed is based on the writings of the architect Vitruvius, although he was in fact describing the construction of floors rather than roads. According to this account, builders first dug a trench down to solid ground and laid a base of large stones. On top of this came a layer of rubble mixed with lime, followed by a layer of fine gravel or sand, also mixed with lime and pressed down hard. The surface consisted of closely fitted stone blocks, which were laid so that the road was higher in the middle than at the edges. This allowed rainwater to run off into ditches dug along each side. Archaeologists have found, however, that real roads varied enormously. Many, especially in the provinces, had no stone surface at all and were simply made of layers of gravel, while the depth and number of layers depended on the local ground and on the materials available.

Distances along the major roads were marked by milestones, placed at intervals of one Roman mile, or a thousand paces, which is roughly one and a half kilometres. These were usually cylindrical stone columns, often more than two metres tall, and many carried an inscription giving not only the distance to the nearest town but also the name of the emperor under whose rule the road had been built or repaired. They were, in other words, a form of political advertising as well as a practical aid to travellers. In Rome itself, Augustus erected a 'golden milestone' in the Forum, which symbolically marked the point from which all distances were measured.

The labour for road building came from a variety of sources. In the provinces, much of the work was carried out by soldiers, who were skilled in construction and needed to be kept occupied in peacetime. Elsewhere, slaves and local workers were employed. Major roads were paid for by the state, but responsibility for maintaining them was often passed on to the towns and landowners through whose territory they ran, and inscriptions record complaints about the expense.

The legacy of the Roman roads is still visible today. In Britain, several major modern roads follow the routes of their Roman predecessors, and the Via Appia, begun in 312 BC to connect Rome with southern Italy, can still be walked for much of its length. A study published in 2022 even suggested that the roads may have had long-term economic effects. Using satellite images of light at night as a measure of economic activity, researchers found that areas of Europe that had been well served by Roman roads tend to be more prosperous today. Interestingly, no such link was found in North Africa and the Middle East, where wheeled transport largely gave way to camels after the end of Roman rule and the roads fell out of use.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Working less, achieving more?

A The idea that people might one day work far fewer hours is not new. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, thanks to technological progress, his grandchildren's generation would need to work only around fifteen hours a week. A few years earlier, the car manufacturer Henry Ford had introduced a five-day week in his factories, arguing that workers with more free time would be more productive and would also have more time to spend their wages. For most of the twentieth century, however, the standard working week remained stubbornly fixed at five days, and in recent years it is the idea of a four-day week that has attracted attention.

B Some of the earliest large-scale evidence came from Iceland. Between 2015 and 2019, the city council of Reykjavik and the national government ran trials in which around 2,500 public-sector workers, about one per cent of the country's working population, reduced their hours from 40 to 35 or 36 a week without any loss of pay. The workplaces involved included offices, preschools and hospitals. According to the researchers who analysed the results, productivity and the quality of services remained the same or improved in most workplaces, while workers reported less stress and a better balance between work and home life. Following the trials, unions negotiated agreements giving a large majority of Icelandic workers the right to shorter hours.

C In 2022, a trial involving 61 companies took place in the United Kingdom. Employees worked four days a week for six months while receiving their full salaries, on the understanding that they would maintain their usual level of output. The results were striking. Of the companies that took part, 56 decided to continue with the four-day week after the trial had ended, and eighteen made the change permanent. Company revenues stayed broadly the same, while the number of sick days taken by employees fell by around two-thirds, and the number of staff leaving their jobs dropped by more than half.

D How can people do the same amount of work in fewer hours? Part of the answer appears to be that a great deal of time in a typical working week is not used productively. Companies in the trials often reduced the number and length of meetings, set aside periods when employees could work without interruption, and cut back on unnecessary tasks. Supporters of the four-day week also point to what is known as Parkinson's law, an observation first made in 1955 that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'. If people have less time, the argument goes, they will find ways of using it more efficiently.

E Critics, however, are cautious about drawing general conclusions. The companies that took part in these trials chose to do so, and were therefore likely to be those that expected the change to succeed. Many of them were small businesses in sectors such as marketing and technology, where work can be measured by results rather than hours. In hospitals, shops, factories and schools, where staff need to be physically present for a set number of hours, reducing working time may mean employing more people, which raises costs considerably.

F In practice, the 'four-day week' can take several different forms. In some companies, everyone takes the same day off, often a Friday. In others, days off are staggered so that the business can remain open five days a week. Some employers have chosen to compress the usual number of hours into four longer days, rather than reducing them. In 2022, Belgium gave workers the legal right to request this arrangement, allowing them to compress a full-time job into four days, although critics point out that longer days may simply lead to greater tiredness.

G Perhaps the most important question is whether the benefits will last. The trials so far have run for months or a few years, and it is possible that their positive results were partly due to a novelty effect, with employees working harder because they were enthusiastic about the experiment and eager for it to succeed. It is also unclear how the four-day week would affect a country's economy if it were adopted widely. As more countries and companies experiment with shorter hours, the answers to these questions should gradually become clearer.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Can dying languages be saved?

Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, around 40 per cent are considered to be endangered, many of them with fewer than a thousand speakers. Estimates of how quickly languages are disappearing vary widely, but there is little doubt that the world is losing its linguistic diversity at a rate without precedent in human history. At the same time, the distribution of speakers is extraordinarily unequal: more than half of the world's population speaks one of just 23 languages, while thousands of others survive only in small communities.

Languages rarely die because all of their speakers die. Far more often, they disappear because parents stop passing them on to their children. This usually happens when another language offers better access to education, employment and social status. The process tends to follow a familiar pattern over three generations. The grandparents speak only the traditional language; their children grow up speaking both it and the dominant language; and the grandchildren, who hear the traditional language less and less at home, speak only the dominant one. Once a language is no longer being learned by children, its future is in serious danger, however many adults still speak it.

Some people argue that this is simply the natural course of history, and that a world with fewer languages would make communication easier. I find this view unpersuasive. A language is not merely a means of communication; it contains a store of knowledge built up over generations. Many indigenous languages, for example, have detailed vocabularies for local plants, animals and weather patterns that reflect knowledge not recorded anywhere else. Languages also reveal the remarkable range of ways in which the human mind can organise experience. Speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, for instance, do not use words for 'left' and 'right' to describe the position of objects; instead, they use compass directions, saying that a cup is to the north of a plate, even when they are indoors. Every language that disappears takes with it part of our understanding of what human language can be.

Can the process be reversed? The most famous example of a language being brought back into everyday use is Hebrew. For centuries it had been used mainly for religious purposes and written texts, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was revived as a spoken language, and today it has millions of native speakers. This case, however, was in many ways unique. The revival was driven by a powerful political and cultural movement, and Hebrew became the shared language of immigrants from many different countries who needed a common means of communication. Few endangered languages are likely to find themselves in similar circumstances.

More relevant, perhaps, are the efforts of smaller communities. In New Zealand in the early 1980s, the Māori community, concerned that very few children were growing up speaking Māori, established preschools known as 'language nests', in which young children were cared for entirely in Māori, often with the help of elderly native speakers. The idea was soon adopted in Hawaii, where, by the early 1980s, fewer than fifty children were thought to be able to speak Hawaiian. Today, thousands of children have been educated through Hawaiian, from preschool to secondary level, and the language can be studied at university.

Perhaps the most surprising case is that of Manx, the traditional language of the Isle of Man. The last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974, and the language was widely considered to be extinct. Fortunately, recordings of the last native speakers had been made some decades earlier, and enthusiasts were able to use them, along with written sources, to learn the language. Since 2001 there has been a primary school in which children are taught entirely in Manx, and a small number of children are once again growing up with it as one of their first languages.

Technology has a mixed role to play. On the one hand, the internet allows scattered speakers to communicate with one another, and recordings, online dictionaries and language-learning applications can make materials available to anyone who wants them. On the other hand, the digital world is dominated by a small number of major languages, and voice assistants and translation tools work well in only a fraction of the world's languages. For young people whose online lives take place almost entirely in English or another dominant language, the pressure to abandon a minority language may be even greater than before.

What all successful revival efforts have in common is the determination of the community itself. Governments can provide funding and recognition, and linguists can provide expertise, but no language can be saved by outsiders if its speakers do not want to use it. Where a community does not have the resources or the will to revive its language, there is still great value in documenting it, by recording its speakers and describing its grammar and vocabulary in detail, so that the knowledge it contains is not entirely lost. A language that has been carefully documented can, as the case of Manx shows, be given a second chance.