IELTS Reading Practice Test 4: Free, with Answers

AFor most of the last hundred years, the standard working week in industrialised countries has been five days long. One of the first large employers to adopt it was the American car manufacturer Henry Ford, who cut the working week in his factories from six days to five in 1926, arguing that workers with more free time would also buy more products. Since then, productivity has risen enormously, yet the number of hours that most people work has hardly changed. In recent years, however, a growing movement has argued that the time has come for the next step: a four-day week. Its supporters usually promote what they call the '100-80-100' model, in which employees receive 100 per cent of their pay for working 80 per cent of their previous hours, on condition that they maintain 100 per cent of their productivity.

BThe idea gained international attention in 2018, when Andrew Barnes, the founder of a New Zealand company called Perpetual Guardian, which manages wills and trusts, tried it with his 240 staff. Researchers from two New Zealand universities who studied the trial found that employees reported lower stress and a better balance between work and home life, while their performance did not fall. The company made the change permanent, and Barnes went on to set up an organisation to help other employers run similar trials.

CEven larger experiments had already been taking place in Iceland. Between 2015 and 2019, the city council of Reykjavik and the national government reduced the working hours of around 2,500 employees, about one per cent of the country's workforce, from 40 hours a week to 35 or 36, without any reduction in pay. In most workplaces the same amount of work was done, and in some it increased, while staff reported feeling less stressed. Following the trials, trade unions negotiated new agreements, and today about 86 per cent of Iceland's workforce either work shorter hours or have the right to request them. It is worth noting, though, that in Iceland the change was usually a reduction in hours spread across the week rather than a complete day off.

DPerhaps the most widely reported result came from Microsoft Japan, which closed its offices every Friday in August 2019 and gave its staff the day off without reducing their pay. The company reported that sales per employee were almost 40 per cent higher than in the same month a year earlier. It also used 23 per cent less electricity, and staff were encouraged to limit meetings to thirty minutes. Critics, however, pointed out that the experiment lasted only one month, in the middle of summer, and that a single figure compared with the previous year may say little about what would happen over a longer period.

EThe largest coordinated trial so far took place in the United Kingdom in the second half of 2022. Sixty-one companies, employing around 2,900 people, took part for six months, while researchers from several universities collected data before, during and after the trial. The results were striking. Fifty-six of the companies decided to continue with the four-day week once the trial had ended, eighteen of them permanently. On average, revenue rose slightly, the number of sick days fell by around two-thirds, and the number of employees leaving their jobs fell by more than half. Sceptics argue, however, that the companies were not chosen at random: they volunteered to take part, and were therefore likely to be those most enthusiastic about the idea and best suited to it.

FHow did companies manage to do the same work in less time? In most cases, the answer lay in removing wasted time rather than working harder. Meetings were shortened or cancelled altogether, long chains of emails were replaced by quicker forms of communication, and some firms introduced periods of 'focus time', during which staff could not be interrupted. Businesses that needed to serve customers five days a week organised their staff in rotas, so that different people took different days off.

GNot everyone is convinced. Some employees in the trials reported that their working days had become more intense, with less time for informal conversation with colleagues, and the pressure to complete five days of work in four left some feeling more tired, not less. In many sectors, such as hospitals, schools and shops, it is far from clear how the model could work without employing more staff. Some governments have also chosen a different approach. In 2022, Belgium passed a law giving employees the right to request a four-day week, but with the same total number of hours, which means working longer days rather than fewer hours.

HSo far, then, the evidence is encouraging but incomplete. Almost all of the trials have involved organisations that chose to take part, and few have lasted long enough to show whether the benefits continue once the novelty has worn off. The four-day week may well spread, but it is more likely to do so gradually, sector by sector, than in a single sudden change.

In February 1897, a British military expedition attacked Benin City, the capital of a powerful West African kingdom in what is now southern Nigeria, in retaliation for the killing of a British delegation several weeks earlier. In the days that followed, soldiers systematically removed thousands of objects from the royal palace, including the brass plaques and sculptures now collectively known as the Benin Bronzes, some of which had been cast as early as the sixteenth century. Many were auctioned to recover the cost of the expedition, and they were subsequently dispersed among museums and private collections throughout Europe and North America. For most of the twentieth century, requests for their return were politely but consistently refused; within the last decade, however, the situation has changed dramatically.

The turning point came in 2018, when a report commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, recommended that objects removed from Africa without the consent of their owners during the colonial period should be returned. Three years later, France returned twenty-six treasures to the Republic of Benin, a neighbouring country that shares the kingdom's name but not its territory, and in 2022 Germany transferred the ownership of more than 1,100 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. In the same year, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington agreed to return most of the bronzes in its collection, a decision that would have been almost unthinkable a generation earlier.

Opponents of restitution advance several arguments. The most serious is that of the 'universal museum': the claim that institutions such as the British Museum, by displaying the achievements of many different civilisations side by side, often free of charge, enable millions of visitors to appreciate how cultures have influenced one another over thousands of years. There is something in this argument. It is genuinely valuable to see a Benin plaque in the same building as a Greek sculpture or a Chinese vase. Yet it is fundamentally an argument for sharing collections rather than for retaining them, and it is invariably advanced by precisely those institutions that benefit from it.

A second objection, namely that returned objects would not be adequately conserved, deserves considerably less attention. It may once have been true in some cases, but it is now largely an excuse. Many of the countries requesting the return of their heritage possess modern museums and professionally trained conservators, and in any event, it is hardly the responsibility of a museum in London or Paris to determine how another nation should care for its own history.

In Britain, restitution faces an additional legal obstacle. The British Museum Act of 1963 permits the museum's trustees to remove objects from the collection only in very limited circumstances, for example if they are duplicates or have been badly damaged. This is one reason why the most celebrated dispute of all, concerning the Parthenon Marbles, remains unresolved. The sculptures were removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1812 on the orders of the British ambassador, Lord Elgin, who claimed that he had permission from the Ottoman authorities who then ruled Greece. Whether that permission was valid is still disputed by historians. In 1816 the sculptures were bought by the British government and transferred to the British Museum, where they have remained ever since. Greece has requested their return for decades, and when the Acropolis Museum opened in 2009, it included a gallery in which plaster copies stand in for the missing pieces, a deliberate reminder of their absence. In my view, the law should be changed so that the trustees themselves can decide such questions, as museum directors in many other countries already do.

This does not mean that every museum object should be sent back. Many items were purchased legitimately, presented as diplomatic gifts, or excavated under formal agreements with the governments of the time. What matters is the documented history of each individual object, and museums have an obligation to be transparent about it. Where an object was taken by force, as the Benin Bronzes were, the case for return seems to me overwhelming. The bronzes are not merely beautiful works of art; for the people of Benin, they are a record of their kings and their history. It is sometimes pointed out that most of the bronzes held in Western museums are kept in storage, but that observation is beside the point: the question is to whom they belong, not how frequently they are seen.

Nor does restitution necessarily leave museums with empty galleries. Objects can be returned and then lent back, as has happened with some of the bronzes in Germany, or held under shared ownership. Digital copies have also been suggested, but they are no substitute for the real thing, as the communities to whom they are offered rarely fail to point out.

In 2023, the Nigerian government announced that the returned bronzes would belong to the Oba, the traditional ruler of Benin, rather than to a national museum, and some Western museums were reported to have paused their own plans in response. I find this reaction difficult to justify. Once an object has been returned, decisions about where it is kept and who may see it belong to the country that receives it; that, after all, is the entire point of returning it. Ultimately, the question confronting museums is not how many objects they might lose, but whether they can be trusted to tell the truth about how they acquired them.