IELTS Mock Test 1: Academic Reading

A short history of the pencil

Few objects are as ordinary as the pencil. It is cheap, it needs no electricity, and it keeps working upside down, underwater and in freezing temperatures, conditions in which many pens fail. Yet the simple pencil has a long and surprisingly eventful history, shaped by geology, war and the growth of modern industry.

The story begins in the sixteenth century in Borrowdale, a valley in the north-west of England. According to local accounts, a large deposit of an unusual black substance was exposed there after a storm brought down a number of trees. The material left a dark, shiny mark on anything it touched, and local farmers soon began using it to mark their sheep. Nobody knew exactly what it was. Because it looked rather like lead ore, people called it 'black lead' or 'plumbago', a name that comes from the Latin word for lead. In fact, it contained no lead at all. It was a form of carbon, which was much later given the name 'graphite', from a Greek word meaning 'to write'. Even today, people still talk about pencil 'lead', although pencils have never had a core made of that metal.

The Borrowdale graphite was unusually pure and solid. It could be sawn into thin sticks and used directly for writing, something that was not possible with the poorer, crumbly graphite found in other places. Because the sticks were soft and left marks on the hands, early users wrapped them in string or sheepskin. Later, craftsmen began to insert the sticks into hollowed-out pieces of wood, creating an object that looked much like the pencil we know today.

The mineral soon became extremely valuable. As well as being used for writing, graphite was found to be useful in the production of cannonballs, as it could line the moulds in which they were cast. The English Crown took control of the mine, and output was deliberately restricted so that supplies would last and prices would stay high. Theft and smuggling became so common that in the eighteenth century Parliament made stealing graphite a serious criminal offence.

For more than a century, pencil makers elsewhere in Europe were less fortunate. Without access to solid graphite, they had to work with graphite powder, which they mixed with substances such as sulphur or glue and then pressed into sticks. The results were generally disappointing: the pencils were scratchy, and the lines they produced were uneven.

The breakthrough came in France at the end of the eighteenth century. During the wars between Britain and France, the French could no longer obtain English graphite, and the government asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a scientist and inventor, to find an alternative. In 1795 he patented a process in which powdered graphite was mixed with clay, formed into rods and then fired in a kiln. Conté's method had a major advantage over the English sticks: by changing the proportion of clay to graphite, a manufacturer could control how hard the core was. More clay produced a harder pencil and a lighter line, while more graphite produced a softer pencil and a darker line. The same basic principle is still used today, and the letters printed on many pencils, such as H for 'hard' and B for 'black', describe where a pencil sits on this scale.

During the nineteenth century, pencil making became a large-scale industry, first in Germany and later in the United States. Instead of hollowing out a single piece of wood, manufacturers cut grooves into thin slats of wood, laid the cores in the grooves of one slat, glued a second slat on top and then cut this 'sandwich' into individual pencils. This is essentially how pencils are still made. Cedar became the preferred wood, as it is soft enough to sharpen easily but does not split.

The eraser came later. Pieces of rubber had been used to remove pencil marks since the late eighteenth century, but it was not until 1858 that an American, Hymen Lipman, received a patent for a pencil with an eraser attached to one end. The idea was not adopted everywhere with the same enthusiasm. In the United States, a pencil without an eraser now looks unusual, whereas in many parts of Europe pencils are still commonly sold without one.

For all the competition from pens, keyboards and touchscreens, the pencil has never disappeared. Artists value the range of tones it can produce, carpenters use it to mark wood, and millions of children still learn to write with one. Its basic design has changed remarkably little in more than two hundred years, which may be the best evidence of how well it was designed in the first place.

Cooler streets: how cities are fighting the heat

A On a hot summer afternoon, the centre of a large city is often noticeably warmer than the farmland around it. This difference, known as the urban heat island effect, is real, but it is not at its strongest in the middle of the day. It is after sunset that the gap tends to grow. Fields and forests cool down quickly once the sun has gone, but a city goes on releasing the heat it absorbed during the day, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. For people living in cities, this matters. A hot day can be uncomfortable, but it is a series of hot nights that prevents the body from recovering, and heatwaves in which night-time temperatures stay high are associated with a rise in illness and deaths, particularly among older people.

B Several factors combine to produce this extra heat. Dark surfaces such as asphalt roads and roofs absorb a large proportion of the sunlight that falls on them, and materials like concrete and brick store that heat and release it slowly. In the countryside, much of the sun's energy is used to evaporate water from soil and plants, but in cities, rainwater is quickly carried away into drains, so there is less moisture available for this natural cooling. On top of this, cars, factories and air-conditioning units all release waste heat, and tall buildings standing close together can trap warm air in the narrow streets between them.

C Of all the tools available to city planners, trees are perhaps the most widely recommended. They cool their surroundings in two ways. The first is obvious: their leaves block sunlight, keeping the ground, buildings and people beneath them in shade. The second is less visible. Trees draw water up from the soil and release it through their leaves as vapour, a process known as transpiration. Turning liquid water into vapour requires energy, and this energy is taken from the surrounding air, which therefore becomes cooler. On a hot day, the air under a group of large trees can feel dramatically cooler than the air over a nearby car park.

D However, the benefits of trees are not shared equally. Studies in a number of cities have found that wealthier neighbourhoods tend to have far more tree cover than lower-income areas, which often have more paved surfaces, busier roads and fewer parks. As a result, the residents who are least able to afford air conditioning or to escape to cooler places are frequently the ones living in the hottest parts of the city. For this reason, some cities now give priority to planting trees in the neighbourhoods with the least shade.

E Planting trees in a busy street is far more complicated than planting them in a park. The space beneath a pavement is usually crowded with water pipes, gas pipes and electricity cables, leaving little room for roots. The soil itself has often been pressed down so firmly during construction that roots struggle to grow through it, and water cannot easily soak in. Young trees also need regular watering for their first few years, which adds to the cost, and many trees planted in difficult urban conditions die before they are large enough to provide much shade.

F Trees are not the only option. Another approach is to change the surfaces that absorb heat in the first place. Roofs can be painted white or covered with special reflective materials, so that more sunlight is reflected back into the sky instead of being absorbed by the building. Some cities have also experimented with lighter-coloured road surfaces. These measures can lower the temperature of the surface itself considerably, and a cooler roof can reduce the need for air conditioning in the rooms below.

G Researchers increasingly agree that no single measure will solve the problem. Reflective roofs work well on large, flat buildings but do nothing to shade a pedestrian; trees provide excellent shade but take years to grow; and fountains and other water features can cool a public square but need careful maintenance. The cities that have had the most success tend to use a mixture of methods, choosing the right one for each street, roof and square. As summers become hotter, this kind of careful planning is likely to become an essential part of how cities are designed.

Is more choice always better?

For most of the twentieth century, economists and business leaders shared a simple assumption: the more options people have, the better off they are. If a customer can choose from twenty kinds of breakfast cereal rather than two, the reasoning went, they are more likely to find one that suits them exactly. This belief is visible in almost any modern shop. A large supermarket may stock tens of thousands of different products, and online retailers offer far more.

At the turn of the century, however, a now-famous experiment appeared to challenge this assumption. Two psychologists set up a tasting stall in an upmarket food shop in California. On some days the stall displayed twenty-four varieties of jam; on others it displayed only six. Shoppers who stopped could taste as many as they liked and were given a voucher towards the price of a jar. The larger display certainly attracted more attention: around 60 per cent of passing shoppers stopped to look, compared with 40 per cent when only six jams were shown. But when it came to actually buying, the picture was reversed. About 30 per cent of the people who stopped at the small display went on to buy a jar, while only 3 per cent of those who had seen the large display did so.

The same researchers found a similar pattern in a laboratory study. Students who chose a chocolate from a selection of thirty reported being less satisfied with their choice than students who chose from only six. Taken together, the results suggested something that went against common sense: beyond a certain point, extra choice might not only fail to help people but actually make them less likely to choose at all, and less happy when they did.

The idea, which became known as 'choice overload', spread rapidly. It featured in popular books and talks, and it was cited in business magazines as a reason for companies to simplify what they offered. Some firms reduced the number of products in their ranges. It is easy to see why the idea was so appealing. It was surprising, it was easy to explain, and it seemed to match many people's own experience of standing in front of a supermarket shelf, unable to decide.

Science, however, depends on findings being repeated, and here the story became more complicated. When other researchers ran similar experiments, they did not always find the same effect. In 2010, a team of psychologists combined the results of fifty experiments on choice overload. Their analysis showed that, on average, the number of options had almost no effect on whether people made a choice or how satisfied they felt. In some studies, a larger range did reduce people's willingness to choose; in others, it increased it; and in many, it made no measurable difference at all.

There is no suggestion that the original researchers did anything wrong. A more reasonable conclusion is that choice overload is real but occurs only under particular conditions. A later review of the research, published in 2015, identified several of these. Overload is more likely when the options are complicated and difficult to compare, when people have to decide under time pressure, and when they do not have a clear idea of what they want. It is also more likely when a person is trying to find the single best option rather than one that is simply good enough.

This last point reflects a difference between individuals that psychologists have studied for some years. Some people, sometimes described as 'maximisers', feel they must examine every possibility before deciding. Others, often called 'satisficers', stop as soon as they find an option that meets their needs. Research suggests that maximisers often end up with objectively good choices but tend to feel less satisfied with them, perhaps because they keep thinking about the options they rejected.

Equally, a wide range can be an advantage for people who know a product category well. An experienced cook choosing olive oil, or a keen cyclist buying a new bicycle, often welcomes a large selection, because they know which features matter to them and can quickly ignore the rest. For such customers, a reduced range may simply mean that the product they want is no longer available.

What, then, should businesses and governments learn from all this? The evidence does not support a simple rule that fewer options are always better. In my view, the real lesson is not that organisations should offer less, but that they should help people to choose. Grouping products into clear categories, giving simple comparisons and offering sensible default options can all make a large range easier to deal with. Choice in itself is rarely the problem; it is choice without guidance that tends to overwhelm us.