IELTS Reading Practice Test 3: Free, with Answers

AOf the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, about 40 per cent are thought to be endangered, and many have only a handful of elderly speakers. The distribution of speakers is extremely uneven: more than half of the world's population speaks one of just 23 languages, while thousands of others are used by communities of a few hundred or a few thousand people. In 1992, the American linguist Michael Krauss warned that, if nothing changed, as many as 90 per cent of the world's languages could be dead or dying by the end of the twenty-first century. His prediction alarmed many of his colleagues and helped to turn the recording and revival of threatened languages into a major field of research.

BLanguages rarely disappear because all their speakers die at once, although this has happened. Far more often, a community gradually abandons its language in favour of another that seems to offer better opportunities. The process is known as language shift, and it usually follows a familiar pattern. Parents who speak a minority language decide that their children will have a better future if they grow up speaking the dominant language of the country, which is used in schools, in government and at work. The children may understand their parents' language but rarely speak it, and their own children never learn it at all. Within three generations, a language once spoken by everyone in a community can be left with only a few elderly speakers.

CWhy should this matter? One argument is scientific: each language represents a unique way of organising experience, and linguists who want to understand the full range of human language need as many examples as possible. Languages also contain knowledge that may be lost with them, such as detailed names for local plants, animals and places. For many communities, however, the most important reasons are personal and cultural. A language carries songs, stories and jokes that cannot be fully translated, and people whose ancestral language has disappeared often describe the loss as painful. A study in the Canadian province of British Columbia even found that rates of youth suicide were lower in Indigenous communities where more people had knowledge of their traditional language.

DThe most famous example of a language brought back into everyday use is Hebrew. For many centuries, Hebrew was used mainly for prayer, study and writing, but it was nobody's first language. In 1881, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem and decided that his family would speak only Hebrew at home; his son, Ben-Zion, is often described as the first native speaker of the language in modern times. Ben-Yehuda also worked tirelessly to create words for modern objects and ideas. His personal efforts, however, would have achieved little without schools in which Hebrew was the language of instruction, and without a population that came to see the language as a symbol of national identity, and today it is spoken by millions of people.

EOther communities have concentrated on the very young, often in response to evidence of rapid decline: by the 1970s, research showed that few Māori children in New Zealand could speak the language of their grandparents. In 1982, the first kōhanga reo, or 'language nests', were opened: preschools where small children spend their days with fluent older speakers, often grandparents, hearing and using nothing but Māori. The idea spread quickly, and in 1984 a group of Hawaiians, inspired by the Māori example, opened a similar preschool, the first Pūnana Leo. Hawaiian had been banned as a language of instruction in schools since 1896, and by the 1980s fewer than fifty children spoke it as their first language, but thousands of children have since been educated through it.

FWelsh offers a different model, based on official support. The language was never close to disappearing completely, but its share of speakers in Wales fell steadily through the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, campaigners have won a series of changes, including a Welsh-language television channel in 1982 and the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which required public bodies to treat Welsh and English equally. Schools that teach through Welsh have become popular, even among families who do not speak it, yet the results are mixed. The 2021 census recorded 538,300 Welsh speakers, 17.8 per cent of the population, fewer than ten years earlier, and the government's target of one million speakers by 2050 will require much faster growth.

GThe case of Manx, the language of the Isle of Man, shows that even a language without any native speakers can return. When Ned Maddrell, a fisherman, died in 1974, he was regarded as the last person to have grown up speaking Manx in a Manx-speaking community. Fortunately, the speech of some of the last native speakers had been recorded, and enthusiasts who had learned the language from them continued to teach it to others. In 2001 a primary school opened in which all lessons are given in Manx, and in the 2021 census more than 2,200 people said that they had some knowledge of the language.

HExperience from these and many other projects suggests several lessons. Most researchers agree that no single measure is enough: laws, schools and media are all valuable, but a language survives only if it is passed on in the home and used in everyday life. Revival is also a long process, measured in generations rather than years. Finally, decisions about whether and how to revive a language belong to the communities concerned. Linguists can record and analyse, but they cannot make anyone speak a language. Nevertheless, the growing number of successful projects shows that the loss of a language is not inevitable.

For most of the history of medicine, doctors had few treatments that actually worked, and much of their success probably depended on what we now call the placebo effect: the improvement that patients experience simply because they believe they are being treated. The term comes from the Latin for 'I shall please', and in the nineteenth century a placebo was a harmless preparation, often made of sugar or coloured water, given to satisfy a patient who demanded medicine. Today the placebo has a more respectable role. In clinical trials, new drugs are compared with dummy pills that look identical, and a drug is approved only if it performs better than the placebo. Yet the nature of the placebo effect itself remains surprisingly controversial.

Much of the popular belief in the power of placebos can be traced to a single article. In 1955, the American anaesthetist Henry Beecher published 'The Powerful Placebo', in which he reviewed fifteen studies and concluded that about 35 per cent of patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo. The figure was quoted for decades. However, researchers who later re-examined Beecher's sources found serious problems. Many of the patients who improved after receiving a placebo would probably have improved anyway, because many illnesses get better on their own, and symptoms that are unusually severe when a patient first seeks help tend to become less severe later, a statistical tendency known as regression to the mean. A trial that compares a drug only with a placebo cannot distinguish between these possibilities.

To measure the real effect of placebos, therefore, it is necessary to compare patients who receive a placebo with patients who receive no treatment at all. In 2001, two Danish researchers, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche, did exactly this, analysing 130 trials in which patients had been randomly given either a placebo or nothing. Their conclusion was striking. For outcomes that could be measured objectively, such as the results of laboratory tests, they found little evidence that placebos had any powerful clinical effect. The main exception was pain, along with other outcomes reported by patients themselves, where placebos did seem to produce a small benefit. Even this, the authors warned, might partly reflect patients' wish to please the researchers.

Other research suggests that, in the case of pain at least, the effect is real. In 1978, Jon Levine and his colleagues at the University of California gave patients who had just had teeth removed either a placebo or naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine and of the body's own natural painkillers, known as endorphins. Patients who received naloxone reported more pain, and the researchers concluded that placebo pain relief works, at least in part, by triggering the release of endorphins. More recently, the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti has shown that real painkillers are less effective when they are given secretly, through an automatic pump, than when patients can see that they are being given a dose. Part of the benefit of any treatment, it seems, comes from the patient's knowledge that he or she is being treated.

Expectations can be influenced in remarkable ways. In a study published in 2008, volunteers who received mild electric shocks reported more pain relief from a placebo pill when they were told that it cost $2.50 than when they were told that it cost ten cents. The effect also works in reverse: patients who are warned about the possible side effects of a drug sometimes experience them even when they have been given a placebo, a phenomenon known as the nocebo effect.

All of this raises an ethical difficulty. If placebos work because patients believe they are receiving an active treatment, it seems that doctors must deceive their patients in order to use them. Surveys suggest that many doctors nevertheless recommend treatments that they do not expect to have any direct effect, such as vitamins for patients who are not deficient in them. In my view, no benefit can justify deception of this kind, since it undermines the trust on which medicine depends.

An unexpected way out of this dilemma was suggested by a study led by Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School in 2010. Patients with irritable bowel syndrome were given pills which, they were told honestly, contained no active ingredient, together with an explanation that placebos had been shown to produce improvements. After three weeks, 59 per cent of them reported adequate relief of their symptoms, compared with 35 per cent of a group who received no pills. Later studies of these 'open-label' placebos have produced encouraging results, but most have been small, and many have dealt with conditions such as pain or tiredness, which are measured by asking patients how they feel, so it is too early to draw firm conclusions.

The evidence, I believe, points to a conclusion that is less exciting than the popular image of the placebo but more useful. Placebos cannot cure infections, shrink tumours or mend broken bones, and claims that they can are not only false but dangerous, since they may encourage people to abandon effective treatment. What the research does show is that the way in which treatment is delivered affects how patients feel, especially when the problem is pain or discomfort. The lesson for medicine is not that doctors should hand out sugar pills, but that time, attention and honest explanation are part of treatment, not an optional extra. The placebo effect is not a mysterious force but a reminder that patients are people, not simply bodies.