IELTS Reading Practice Test 1: Free, with Answers

AFor most of history, loading and unloading a ship was slow, dangerous and expensive work. Cargo arrived at the docks in sacks, barrels, crates and bales of every shape and size, and each item had to be lifted separately into the ship's hold by teams of dock workers, who then packed it carefully so that nothing would move during the voyage. A typical cargo ship of the early 1950s carried many thousands of separate items, and loading it could take a week or more. As a result, a ship might spend as much time in port as it did at sea, and the cost of handling goods at each end of the journey made up a large share of the total cost of transport. Theft was also common, since goods passed through many hands on their way from the factory to the customer.

BThe solution came from outside the shipping industry. Malcolm McLean owned one of the largest trucking companies in the United States, and according to a story he often told, the idea first came to him in 1937, when he spent most of a day at a New Jersey port waiting for his cargo of cotton to be loaded onto a ship by hand. Why, he wondered, could the whole trailer not simply be lifted on board? Almost twenty years later, he put the idea into practice. In April 1956, a converted wartime oil tanker named the Ideal X sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, carrying 58 metal boxes on its deck. McLean later calculated that loading the ship had cost just 16 cents per ton, compared with $5.83 per ton for conventional cargo.

COther shipping companies soon began to use containers as well, but each chose its own design, and a box belonging to one firm often could not be carried on another firm's ships or trucks. During the 1960s, after long and sometimes bitter negotiations, international standards were agreed for the size of containers and for the fittings at their corners, by which they are lifted and fastened. An important contribution came from Keith Tantlinger, an engineer who had designed a twist-lock mechanism that allowed containers to be stacked and locked together quickly and securely. McLean's company, which owned the patents for this design, agreed to release them free of charge so that the whole industry could adopt it. Boxes 20 and 40 feet long soon became the norm, and container capacity is still measured today in 'twenty-foot equivalent units', or TEU.

DFor dock workers, the container was a disaster. A single crane driver could now do work that had previously required dozens of men, and dockers' unions feared, correctly, that most of their members' jobs would disappear. In some ports, strikes delayed the new system for years. On the west coast of the United States, however, the union took a different approach, agreeing in 1960 to allow machines and containers in return for a fund that guaranteed its members' incomes and paid for early retirement. Port cities suffered too. Their old docks were crowded and had little room for the huge cranes and storage areas that container ships required. Rather than modernise the piers of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the authority that ran the port of New York built an entirely new terminal across the harbour at Elizabeth, New Jersey, while in Britain the London docks closed one after another and the small port of Felixstowe grew into the busiest in the country.

EIronically, one of the biggest boosts to container shipping came from war. In the mid-1960s, the United States military was struggling to supply its forces in Vietnam, where the ports were small and badly congested. McLean persuaded the government to let his company carry supplies in containers, and the system proved so efficient that the backlog of cargo was quickly cleared. His ships, however, faced a problem: they had to return across the Pacific empty. McLean's solution was to stop in Japan on the way back and fill them with goods for American customers, such as electronics and clothing. In doing so, he helped to establish the transpacific trade routes that would later carry the products of China and other Asian economies to markets around the world.

FToday, most manufactured goods spend at least part of their journey in a container, and transport costs have fallen so far that it often makes sense to produce the parts of a single product in several different countries. Some economists have even concluded that the container did more to increase international trade than all the trade agreements signed during the same period. Yet the system's efficiency depends on everything running smoothly. During the Covid-19 pandemic, empty containers piled up in the wrong places and the price of shipping a box from Asia to Europe rose several times over. Then, in 2021, a single ship, the Ever Given, ran aground in the Suez Canal and blocked it for six days, holding up hundreds of other vessels and goods worth billions of dollars.

For most of the twentieth century, boredom attracted little interest from researchers. It was regarded either as a trivial state, a mild discomfort of no real importance, or as a personal failing: the mark of a dull mind that was unable to entertain itself. Over the past twenty years, however, this attitude has changed considerably. Boredom is now the subject of specialist conferences and laboratory experiments, and psychologists debate its nature with an intensity that would once have seemed absurd. The reason is not simply curiosity. A tendency to become bored easily has been linked to a surprising range of problems, from depression and overeating to dangerous driving and gambling, and understanding boredom may therefore help to explain a good deal of human behaviour.

One of the first tasks has been to agree on what boredom actually is. An influential definition, proposed in 2012 by the Canadian psychologist John Eastwood and his colleagues, describes it as the unpleasant experience of wanting to engage in satisfying activity but being unable to do so. The importance of this definition is that it separates boredom from simply having nothing to do. A person lying on a beach may be perfectly content; boredom arises only when the mind is searching for something to engage with and fails to find it. On this view, the feeling is caused less by our surroundings than by a mismatch between what our attention needs and what a situation offers, which explains why a lecture can be boring both when it is too easy and when it is too difficult to follow.

Just how unpleasant this state can be was shown by a much-discussed series of experiments led by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia and published in 2014. Participants were asked to sit alone in a bare room for between six and fifteen minutes with nothing to do except think. Most said afterwards that they had found the experience unpleasant and that it had been hard to concentrate. In one version of the study, participants were first given a mild electric shock and asked whether they would pay money to avoid another one. Among those who said they would, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women later chose to give themselves a shock at least once while they were alone, apparently preferring pain to an absence of stimulation.

Findings like these have led some researchers to treat boredom not as a defect but as a signal, comparable to pain or hunger. James Danckert, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, argues that boredom tells us that what we are doing is no longer worth the effort and pushes us to look for something more rewarding. In this sense it is a useful emotion: an animal that never felt bored might continue indefinitely with an activity that brought it no benefit. This seems a far more convincing account than the older view of boredom as a weakness of character. As Danckert points out, however, the signal tells us only that a change is needed, not what that change should be. A bored person may respond by learning a new skill, but may equally reach for a snack, a phone or a bet.

A more popular claim is that boredom makes people more creative. Much of the support for this idea comes from a study published in 2014 by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire in England. Some of their participants spent fifteen minutes copying numbers from a telephone directory before being asked to think of as many uses as possible for a pair of plastic cups. They produced more ideas than a group who went straight to the creative task, and in a second experiment, participants who simply read the numbers, rather than copying them out, did better still. The researchers suggested that a dull task encourages the mind to wander, and that daydreaming allows unusual connections to form.

Studies of this kind have been widely reported, but the evidence they provide is more limited than the headlines suggest. The samples were small, the tasks were artificial, and later attempts to reproduce such effects have produced mixed results. More importantly, perhaps, being able to list more uses for a plastic cup is a long way from the kind of creativity that produces a novel or a scientific theory. It would be more accurate to say that boredom creates an opportunity for creative thought than that it causes it.

What concerns many researchers today is not that we are too often bored but that we are rarely allowed to be. Smartphones offer an instant escape from even a few seconds of empty time. Because the phone removes the discomfort so quickly, it may also remove the push that boredom is supposed to provide, so that people never reach the point of choosing a more meaningful activity. Some studies have found that people who use their phones most heavily also report feeling bored more often, not less. This fits Danckert's view: scrolling through short pieces of content relieves the feeling briefly without dealing with its cause.

None of this means that we should seek out boredom for its own sake, or that children should be deliberately left with nothing to do in the hope that they will become artists. Chronic boredom, of the kind experienced by people in highly repetitive jobs or during long periods of isolation, is associated with real harm and should be taken seriously. But the occasional experience of having nothing to do may be worth tolerating rather than escaping at once. If boredom is a message, the sensible response is neither to ignore it nor to silence it immediately, but to listen to what it is telling us.