IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Family and early life
the grandfather built his wealth on two things:
1.
and the carrying of cargo by ship
their
2.
was arranged so that they would take up interests like art collecting
while touring galleries, they wrote thorough
3.
describing the works on show
The sisters as art collectors
although their
4.
revealed a preference for Dutch Golden Age works, such pictures were rather costly to acquire
the earliest Symbolist works they acquired showed scenes from the
5.
region
Impact of First World War
in wartime the sisters devoted their time to a
6.
caring for injured troops in France
How the sisters were viewed
regarded as unusual collectors – reportedly, they formed no
7.
within artistic or gallery circles
Question 8 - 13
Choose TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN
8
What the sisters chose to do with their money had little to do with the religious way they were raised.
9
The sort of art the sisters bought early on was unlikely to upset anyone.
10
The sisters acquired their Kristoffer Lund pictures by dealing with the painter personally.
11
Barely any visitors came to see Solvik's work while it hung in Trondheim.
12
Nia abandoned collecting as a result of the economic strain the war produced.
13
Few others were interested in Nordic Symbolist art while the sisters were building their collection.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has seven sections, A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
examples of actions designed to lower what the public hears
15
figures showing how common damaging sound exposure is
16
the immediate physical effects of hearing something unexpectedly loud
17
a finding that some background sound can be better than none at all
Question 18 - 21
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Flotation Tanks
A flotation tank blocks ordinary visual and auditory stimulation while a person remains supported by highly saline water. Without normal sensory signals, the brain creates sensations to occupy the . A group of 50 people answered a twice, once prior to the treatment and once following it. The treatment also left them feeling better overall, with an improvement in .
In a later study, 48 people either used the tank or rested in a reclining chair for three 90-minute periods. Scans later showed that only the tank group had reduced activity in neural areas related to .
Question 22 - 26
Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D.
List of Findings
A
Petra Ansell
B
Luka Boone
C
Diego Castellano
D
Nadia Dupont
22
Being placed somewhere with no noise can be very upsetting if this is not voluntary.
23
The move towards quieter urban areas is likely to spread.
24
When the senses receive nothing, the brain may produce experiences that feel real.
25
Several brief periods without noise can help more than one long period.
26
Less noise outside and less mental activity can improve awareness of what is going on and lead to a suitable reaction.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
What does the reviewer suggest, in the first paragraph, about how coffee is grown and traded?
A
Coffee has come to occupy a central place in relations between countries.
B
Cultivating coffee in new districts has raised the amount produced.
C
Robusta is now thought to be of higher quality than arabica.
D
One kind of coffee has been priced low so as to compete on world markets.
28
When he turns to the coffee trade in the Netherlands (paragraph two), the reviewer emphasises
A
the way demand for coffee grew as the years passed.
B
the way changes in farming influenced the trade.
C
the way the regions supplying the coffee altered over time.
D
the way backing increased for more ethical growing practices.
29
In the third paragraph, the reviewer is
A
correcting a widely held but mistaken idea about coffee-growing.
B
accounting for the decline of large coffee estates.
C
setting out an especially efficient method of growing coffee.
D
weighing rival approaches to cultivating coffee against one another.
30
In the final paragraph, what does the reviewer present as the book's overall message?
A
The aggressive promotion of coffee has had ruinous effects.
B
The lot of those who labour in coffee ought to be improved.
C
Financial pressure is needed to rein in coffee production.
D
Coffee is something the world could perfectly well do without.
Question 31 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Coffee cultivation and production
Van der Molen’s The Bean and the World draws attention to how alike the growing of coffee has been from one region to the next. Inside the biggest operations in both Ceylon and Brazil, production leaned heavily on . Across other regions, though — much of Africa and Latin America among them — carried on as before.
Coffee has also drawn in , every one of them anxious to guard the markets they had secured. In countries such as Brazil, the trade came to weigh heavily on . So as to defend the standing of growers, were brought in, and the upshot was that were left worse off.
A
market safeguards
B
imported labour
C
modern machinery
D
smallholder farming
E
casual labourers
F
rich firms and investors
G
low-income producers
H
state authorities
I
traditional tools
Question 37 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
37
From the very start, coffee was a cheap and everyday drink.
38
Coffee was at one time regarded as a treat for the well-to-do.
39
The reviewer regards the arrival of instant coffee as a welcome step forward.
40
The reviewer expects instant coffee to take the place of freshly made coffee before long.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The Davies sisters
Over almost two decades, from 1908 to 1927, two sisters, Elin and Nia Davies, built what became one of Norway’s largest collections of Nordic Symbolist paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A Welsh shipping magnate named Rhys Davies had settled in Norway and made his fortune there in the timber and shipping trades; his granddaughters, Elin (1878–1948) and Nia (1880 1961) Davies, would later become known as collectors. Elin’s inheritance came first, in 1906, with N a’s following two years later, in 1908, and by then people considered the sisters the wealthiest unmarried women in Norway. Growing up in a devout household in rural Norway had instilled in them a strong sense of civic duty, and it was this that led them to spend their inheritance on cultural and philanthropic causes.
No one else in the family had ever collected art, yet the sisters’ schooling was deliberately shaped to cultivate exactly that interest. Cultural pursuits, rather than academic subjects, formed the core of their studies at a school in Kristiania, and their tutor, Ingrid Fjeld, regularly took them travelling to art galleries, where they kept detailed diaries recording what they saw.
From 1908 onward — around the same time their inheritances arrived — the sisters started buying art on a regular basis. Among those whose advice they sought were two dealers: Sigurd Fjeld of the Kristiania Kunstforening, who happened to be Ingrid Fjeld’s brother, and Anton Wexelsen. For years it was assumed that these two men had largely dictated the collection’s direction, but scholars now recognise that Elin and Nia themselves played a considerably more active part in shaping it.
A fondness for Dutch Golden Age painting comes through clearly in the sisters’ letters, though in practice they rarely pursued such works in their early years. Wealthy as they were by ordinary standards, their means were modest next to those of American collectors of the era, Henry Clay Frick among them, and top-tier Dutch Golden Age paintings simply cost more than the sisters were prepared to spend. What they bought instead were safer, uncontroversial choices that had already won broad admiration — paintings by the Norwegian artist Kristoffer Lund, for instance.
Within a few years, though, their collecting had shifted decisively toward the Nordic Symbolists. Sigurd Fjeld, a vocal champion of contemporary Nordic art, is thought to have played some part in that shift, and the sisters would in any case have come across such work on their trips to Copenhagen. Whatever drove the change, the first Symbolist paintings they bought, in March 1913, depicted the Lofoten islands and were the work of the Norwegian artist Halvard Eide. Over the following fourteen years, the collection grew to include six more paintings by Eide, two by Ellen Tofte, and three by Nils Aarum — among them his celebrated The Northern Gate.
The collection’s development was not untouched by the First World War (1914–1918). At first, the sisters responded by funding the safe passage of artists out of occupied Belgium and into Norway — partly a humanitarian gesture, partly in hopes of seeding an artists’ community there. As the war went on, both sisters chose to volunteer at a hospital treating wounded soldiers near Rouen in northern France, Elin arriving in 1916 and Nia a year later, in 1917.
The work proved exhausting and often distressing, leaving a lasting mark on Nia’s health. Even so, during one of her many visits to nearby Paris, she called at the Galerie Aubert and came away with two paintings by Mathias Solvik, Winter Harbour and The Reindeer Herd. Sent directly to Trondheim, these became the first works by Solvik to appear in a Norwegian public gallery, and large crowds turned out during their opening weeks.
Writers on the subject have often cast the sisters as unlikely pioneers of collecting. Much is made of how isolated they were in rural Norway, and of their apparent lack of acquaintances among artists or gallery owners. That same distance from artistic circles, though, meant they answered to no fashionable consensus and could follow their own taste freely. They did lean on a small, trusted circle of advisers, and travelled often between Kristiania and Paris, with paintings regularly sent to their home for them to consider.
By the early 1920s, the poverty and social disruption left by the First World War had made Elin increasingly reluctant to spend money on art. She redirected her philanthropic energy almost entirely toward social causes and toward turning the sisters’ estate, Plas Davies, into a folk high school and the home of the Davies Festival of Music and Literature. March 1927 saw her last art purchase. Nia, too, largely stopped collecting around this point, though she took it up again in the 1930s, buying — on a more modest scale — works by contemporary Norwegian artists.
At the time the sisters were collecting Nordic Symbolist paintings, this kind of art was, for the most part, overlooked by collectors and institutions alike. Bequeathed to the National Gallery of Norway in 1948 and 1961 respectively, the Elin and Nia Davies collection today holds important works by the leading Symbolists of the period. Because they collected simply what they loved, the sisters left behind a cultural legacy that continues to matter, in Norway and well beyond it.
What too much noise does to us — and how quietness can help
A
A. Excessive noise has lately been labelled an ‘underestimated threat’ to public health by a leading international health agency, which warns that residents of cities like Delhi, Cairo and São Paulo endure night-time noise well above the 40 decibels it recommends. Widespread and persistent, the problem is by no means confined to such places: one European study estimated that close to a quarter of the continent’s population is regularly subjected to levels reckoned harmful. As Diego Castellano, an acoustics consultant who helped shape several national noise standards, puts it, the brain has no ‘earlids’ with which to shut unwanted sound out, whether we happen to be awake or asleep.
B
There are sound evolutionary reasons why we are so sensitive to sound. Noises carry information that once helped our ancestors find their way and steer clear of threats, and the body is built so that a sudden or loud one is never ignored: on hearing it, we undergo an automatic chemical shift. The heart drives blood pressure upward, the muscles tighten, and hormones pour out to ready us to fight or flee — all of it useful in the moment. Sustained exposure is another matter. Over months and years that same alarm response has been tied to a range of complaints, running from broken sleep to disorders of the heart and circulation.
C
Luka Boone, who researches psychotherapy, accepts that silence does not suit everyone — least of all those already wound up by stress. ‘Someone in that state often cannot settle or unwind in a silent setting,’ he notes, adding that a guide can help such people ease into silence by degrees until its rewards begin to show. All the same, Boone is sure that silence is far easier to come by in ordinary life than most of us assume. For one thing, it need not be total: in a study of his, people who sat outdoors in a quiet garden reported feeling noticeably calmer and less bored than others who were left alone in a room of complete silence. For another, a little goes a long way. ‘Hours of it are not the point,’ he says. ‘Short spells of quiet, taken often, do more good than one long stretch once a week. Simply tracking down the corners of your day where a bit of silence is available can make a real difference.’
D
The neuroscientist Petra Ansell likewise champions silence as a form of treatment. ‘Finding ways to grow quiet calms not merely our surroundings but something within us,’ she says. ‘With that inner stillness we take in more of our situation, and sense what a given moment asks of us, so that our response can be a fitting one.’ Silence, she cautions, does not reward everyone equally, and the decisive factor is desire: the person has to genuinely wish to take part. ‘Studies of animals and of people alike show that willingness and intent matter,’ Ansell observes. ‘Forced on someone who does not want it, silence can be deeply distressing rather than restful.’
E
Scientists are equally keen to pin down which features of silence do us the most good. Among the most closely studied is the flotation tank — a sealed pod of heavily salted water, sound- and light-proof, in which the body floats in deep repose. A few floaters report their senses playing tricks, a faint humming or flickers of light, but these are harmless and take nothing away from the experience, says the clinical neuropsychologist Nadia Dupont. ‘Deprived of input from outside, the mind sets about filling the void it perceives, trying to make sense of the dark, silent space,’ she explains — so vividly that some floaters catch the sound of their own eyelids closing. What ushers people into calm or meditation, though, is the chance to fix their attention on the slow, steady rhythm of the breath.
F
To test the tanks as therapy, Dupont’s group enrolled 50 volunteers troubled by stress and its associated complaints, asking each to complete a survey both shortly before and shortly after a single hour-long float. Once the hour was up, they described less pain, looser muscles and milder symptoms, along with a greater sense of calm and a general lift in their mood. How sensory deprivation acts on the brain itself is harder to say. For a closer look, the team assigned 48 participants to one of two routines — three 90-minute floats, or three 90-minute rests in a reclining chair — and scanned everyone’s brain with functional MRI at the study’s start and finish. Floating, and floating alone, damped down the default mode network, a cluster of regions repeatedly tied to rumination. To Dupont this is a thrilling result, hinting that the tanks may ‘reset’ a nervous system that has drifted out of balance.
G
There is encouraging news, too: a number of cities have set about lowering the volume. Among the earliest was London. Diego Castellano credits a mix of measures — advice on running quieter buses, curbs on traffic noise and tighter limits on aircraft — with making the capital a markedly more peaceful place to live. Elsewhere, authorities have laid noise-absorbing road surfaces and planted belts of greenery to soak up sound; others have gone after particular culprits, from Washington DC’s recent outlawing of petrol leaf blowers to a New York rule that penalises drivers who tinker with their cars to make them louder. ‘Residents can feel the difference these calmer surroundings make,’ Castellano says, ‘and I would expect a good deal more of it in the years ahead.’
Book review: The Bean and the World by Rutger van der Molen
Rutger van der Molen's The Bean and the World sets out to be a genuinely worldwide account. Instead of settling on one region, van der Molen moves through every important coffee-growing zone, opening with Brazil and Java, the two territories that between them supplied most of the coffee traded in the early 1900s. His subject, though, is not the familiar arabica bean alone. Robusta — hardier, cheaper to raise and for a long time thought unworthy of serious attention — is treated as its equal, and the author traces how, across the past hundred years, it has been produced on an industrial scale in fast-growing lowland districts and sold at such low prices that the smallholders who grow arabica have watched their earnings collapse again and again.
The book's range shows in van der Molen's account of the coffee trade in the Netherlands. Dutch consumers were at first supplied from plantations in the East Indies, which the country itself governed and ran on forced labour. Once that compulsion was scaled back within its own possessions, merchants looked instead to beans raised under still harsher conditions abroad, bringing them in from Brazil and other producers where coerced work continued. Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did cheaper African robusta begin reaching Dutch harbours, and it was not until the twentieth that roasters set about building their blends around it.
Van der Molen's book is also a global history of labour, examining the many forms of work that coffee has required. People often imagine that the crop came chiefly from sprawling estates in the hands of the rich; the author shows how misleading that picture is. In the highlands of Java, for example — among the leading exporters of the early twentieth century — coffee bushes were tended beside food crops by peasant families, in a fashion that consumed a staggering quantity of hand labour.
Resemblance and continuity run all through his account of coffee-growing. The larger operations, he points out, have long depended on workers fetched from elsewhere: estates in Ceylon relied on indentured hands shipped over from South Asia, while those in Brazil pulled in labourers from distant places. Harvesting coffee, he reminds the reader, remains punishing and poorly paid across much of the globe even now. Yet the book gives just as much weight to the survival of older, small-scale ways of working, which as recently as the middle of the twentieth century still yielded most of the coffee grown in parts of Africa and Latin America.
It is, besides, a history of financiers and coffee dynasties, and of companies whose hold lasted across generations. Powerful business interests, van der Molen argues, have again and again turned the policies of states to their own ends. In Brazil most of all, though in Colombia and the Dutch East Indies as well, a commanding class of planters and exporters moulded national politics, and governments duly protected them, buying up unsold stock to keep prices high and raising barriers against foreign rivals. In every struggle over who would control the trade, it was nearly always the poorer producing countries that came off worst. The whole tangle is unravelled by van der Molen with remarkable delicacy.
Coffee, even so, was never a purely agricultural affair. As soon as the cherries were gathered, the beans inside had to be drawn out near the place they were grown, work that demanded machinery turned by hand, by animals, by water or by steam. After this came drying and hulling, and — from the nineteenth century — the sorting and grading of the beans, before the final roasting, which was carried out for the most part in the countries that consumed the coffee. From early on, then, coffee was an energy-hungry industrial business, pursued both in the countryside and in the roasteries of far-off cities. As it grew, it carried methods and machinery quickly from one country to another: railway lines were laid to shift pickers and beans, steam-driven mills multiplied, and prized varieties spread across the world wherever soil and taste would have them.
Where coffee had once been scarce and dear, new varieties, fertilisers, irrigation and better processing turned it in time into an ordinary drink to be had almost anywhere. The amount consumed rose sharply. A drink formerly held to be a luxury came to be commended as a harmless stimulant that quickened the wits. But as more of it was swallowed, worries mounted — over adulteration, over what caffeine might do, over the conditions in which the crop was raised. Whenever critics raised such matters, the trade was inclined to pay for soothing research and to pin the fault on other habits. The recent past, van der Molen notes, has brought a further, unwelcome twist: soluble or ‘instant’ coffee, made cheaply and mostly from robusta by a drying method perfected in the mid-twentieth century, now stocks vending machines and a host of packaged goods, and its spread the author judges to be a coarsening of what people drink.
The outcome is a book of genuine richness — a model for the writing of global history, and of the history of industry and of capitalism together. Van der Molen holds his emotions back, in praise as in blame, even where a little more warmth might have driven home his account of the many wrongs bound up with coffee. Human beings, he remarks, could always have got by without it, and there is today no want of other comforts to reach for instead. And still, for a great many of the world's poorest people, coffee is the very thing that puts food on the table.
A Welsh shipping magnate named Rhys Davies had settled in Norway and made his fortune there in the timber and shipping trades; his granddaughters, Elin (1878–1948) and Nia (1880 1961) Davies, would later become known as collectors. Elin’s inheritance came first, in 1906, with N a’s following two years later, in 1908, and by then people considered the sisters the wealthiest unmarried women in Norway. Growing up in a devout household in rural Norway had instilled in them a strong sense of civic duty, and it was this that led them to spend their inheritance on cultural and philanthropic causes.
No one else in the family had ever collected art, yet the sisters’ schooling was deliberately shaped to cultivate exactly that interest. Cultural pursuits, rather than academic subjects, formed the core of their studies at a school in Kristiania, and their tutor, Ingrid Fjeld, regularly took them travelling to art galleries, where they kept detailed diaries recording what they saw.
From 1908 onward — around the same time their inheritances arrived — the sisters started buying art on a regular basis. Among those whose advice they sought were two dealers: Sigurd Fjeld of the Kristiania Kunstforening, who happened to be Ingrid Fjeld’s brother, and Anton Wexelsen. For years it was assumed that these two men had largely dictated the collection’s direction, but scholars now recognise that Elin and Nia themselves played a considerably more active part in shaping it.
A fondness for Dutch Golden Age painting comes through clearly in the sisters’ letters, though in practice they rarely pursued such works in their early years. Wealthy as they were by ordinary standards, their means were modest next to those of American collectors of the era, Henry Clay Frick among them, and top-tier Dutch Golden Age paintings simply cost more than the sisters were prepared to spend. What they bought instead were safer, uncontroversial choices that had already won broad admiration — paintings by the Norwegian artist Kristoffer Lund, for instance.
Within a few years, though, their collecting had shifted decisively toward the Nordic Symbolists. Sigurd Fjeld, a vocal champion of contemporary Nordic art, is thought to have played some part in that shift, and the sisters would in any case have come across such work on their trips to Copenhagen. Whatever drove the change, the first Symbolist paintings they bought, in March 1913, depicted the Lofoten islands and were the work of the Norwegian artist Halvard Eide. Over the following fourteen years, the collection grew to include six more paintings by Eide, two by Ellen Tofte, and three by Nils Aarum — among them his celebrated The Northern Gate.
The collection’s development was not untouched by the First World War (1914–1918). At first, the sisters responded by funding the safe passage of artists out of occupied Belgium and into Norway — partly a humanitarian gesture, partly in hopes of seeding an artists’ community there. As the war went on, both sisters chose to volunteer at a hospital treating wounded soldiers near Rouen in northern France, Elin arriving in 1916 and Nia a year later, in 1917.
The work proved exhausting and often distressing, leaving a lasting mark on Nia’s health. Even so, during one of her many visits to nearby Paris, she called at the Galerie Aubert and came away with two paintings by Mathias Solvik, Winter Harbour and The Reindeer Herd. Sent directly to Trondheim, these became the first works by Solvik to appear in a Norwegian public gallery, and large crowds turned out during their opening weeks.
Writers on the subject have often cast the sisters as unlikely pioneers of collecting. Much is made of how isolated they were in rural Norway, and of their apparent lack of acquaintances among artists or gallery owners. That same distance from artistic circles, though, meant they answered to no fashionable consensus and could follow their own taste freely. They did lean on a small, trusted circle of advisers, and travelled often between Kristiania and Paris, with paintings regularly sent to their home for them to consider.
By the early 1920s, the poverty and social disruption left by the First World War had made Elin increasingly reluctant to spend money on art. She redirected her philanthropic energy almost entirely toward social causes and toward turning the sisters’ estate, Plas Davies, into a folk high school and the home of the Davies Festival of Music and Literature. March 1927 saw her last art purchase. Nia, too, largely stopped collecting around this point, though she took it up again in the 1930s, buying — on a more modest scale — works by contemporary Norwegian artists.
At the time the sisters were collecting Nordic Symbolist paintings, this kind of art was, for the most part, overlooked by collectors and institutions alike. Bequeathed to the National Gallery of Norway in 1948 and 1961 respectively, the Elin and Nia Davies collection today holds important works by the leading Symbolists of the period. Because they collected simply what they loved, the sisters left behind a cultural legacy that continues to matter, in Norway and well beyond it.
B. There are sound evolutionary reasons why we are so sensitive to sound. Noises carry information that once helped our ancestors find their way and steer clear of threats, and the body is built so that a sudden or loud one is never ignored: on hearing it, we undergo an automatic chemical shift. The heart drives blood pressure upward, the muscles tighten, and hormones pour out to ready us to fight or flee — all of it useful in the moment. Sustained exposure is another matter. Over months and years that same alarm response has been tied to a range of complaints, running from broken sleep to disorders of the heart and circulation.
C. Luka Boone, who researches psychotherapy, accepts that silence does not suit everyone — least of all those already wound up by stress. ‘Someone in that state often cannot settle or unwind in a silent setting,’ he notes, adding that a guide can help such people ease into silence by degrees until its rewards begin to show. All the same, Boone is sure that silence is far easier to come by in ordinary life than most of us assume. For one thing, it need not be total: in a study of his, people who sat outdoors in a quiet garden reported feeling noticeably calmer and less bored than others who were left alone in a room of complete silence. For another, a little goes a long way. ‘Hours of it are not the point,’ he says. ‘Short spells of quiet, taken often, do more good than one long stretch once a week. Simply tracking down the corners of your day where a bit of silence is available can make a real difference.’
D. The neuroscientist Petra Ansell likewise champions silence as a form of treatment. ‘Finding ways to grow quiet calms not merely our surroundings but something within us,’ she says. ‘With that inner stillness we take in more of our situation, and sense what a given moment asks of us, so that our response can be a fitting one.’ Silence, she cautions, does not reward everyone equally, and the decisive factor is desire: the person has to genuinely wish to take part. ‘Studies of animals and of people alike show that willingness and intent matter,’ Ansell observes. ‘Forced on someone who does not want it, silence can be deeply distressing rather than restful.’
E. Scientists are equally keen to pin down which features of silence do us the most good. Among the most closely studied is the flotation tank — a sealed pod of heavily salted water, sound- and light-proof, in which the body floats in deep repose. A few floaters report their senses playing tricks, a faint humming or flickers of light, but these are harmless and take nothing away from the experience, says the clinical neuropsychologist Nadia Dupont. ‘Deprived of input from outside, the mind sets about filling the void it perceives, trying to make sense of the dark, silent space,’ she explains — so vividly that some floaters catch the sound of their own eyelids closing. What ushers people into calm or meditation, though, is the chance to fix their attention on the slow, steady rhythm of the breath.
F. To test the tanks as therapy, Dupont’s group enrolled 50 volunteers troubled by stress and its associated complaints, asking each to complete a survey both shortly before and shortly after a single hour-long float. Once the hour was up, they described less pain, looser muscles and milder symptoms, along with a greater sense of calm and a general lift in their mood. How sensory deprivation acts on the brain itself is harder to say. For a closer look, the team assigned 48 participants to one of two routines — three 90-minute floats, or three 90-minute rests in a reclining chair — and scanned everyone’s brain with functional MRI at the study’s start and finish. Floating, and floating alone, damped down the default mode network, a cluster of regions repeatedly tied to rumination. To Dupont this is a thrilling result, hinting that the tanks may ‘reset’ a nervous system that has drifted out of balance.
G. There is encouraging news, too: a number of cities have set about lowering the volume. Among the earliest was London. Diego Castellano credits a mix of measures — advice on running quieter buses, curbs on traffic noise and tighter limits on aircraft — with making the capital a markedly more peaceful place to live. Elsewhere, authorities have laid noise-absorbing road surfaces and planted belts of greenery to soak up sound; others have gone after particular culprits, from Washington DC’s recent outlawing of petrol leaf blowers to a New York rule that penalises drivers who tinker with their cars to make them louder. ‘Residents can feel the difference these calmer surroundings make,’ Castellano says, ‘and I would expect a good deal more of it in the years ahead.’
Rutger van der Molen's The Bean and the World sets out to be a genuinely worldwide account. Instead of settling on one region, van der Molen moves through every important coffee-growing zone, opening with Brazil and Java, the two territories that between them supplied most of the coffee traded in the early 1900s. His subject, though, is not the familiar arabica bean alone. Robusta — hardier, cheaper to raise and for a long time thought unworthy of serious attention — is treated as its equal, and the author traces how, across the past hundred years, it has been produced on an industrial scale in fast-growing lowland districts and sold at such low prices that the smallholders who grow arabica have watched their earnings collapse again and again.
The book's range shows in van der Molen's account of the coffee trade in the Netherlands. Dutch consumers were at first supplied from plantations in the East Indies, which the country itself governed and ran on forced labour. Once that compulsion was scaled back within its own possessions, merchants looked instead to beans raised under still harsher conditions abroad, bringing them in from Brazil and other producers where coerced work continued. Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did cheaper African robusta begin reaching Dutch harbours, and it was not until the twentieth that roasters set about building their blends around it.
Van der Molen's book is also a global history of labour, examining the many forms of work that coffee has required. People often imagine that the crop came chiefly from sprawling estates in the hands of the rich; the author shows how misleading that picture is. In the highlands of Java, for example — among the leading exporters of the early twentieth century — coffee bushes were tended beside food crops by peasant families, in a fashion that consumed a staggering quantity of hand labour.
Resemblance and continuity run all through his account of coffee-growing. The larger operations, he points out, have long depended on workers fetched from elsewhere: estates in Ceylon relied on indentured hands shipped over from South Asia, while those in Brazil pulled in labourers from distant places. Harvesting coffee, he reminds the reader, remains punishing and poorly paid across much of the globe even now. Yet the book gives just as much weight to the survival of older, small-scale ways of working, which as recently as the middle of the twentieth century still yielded most of the coffee grown in parts of Africa and Latin America.
It is, besides, a history of financiers and coffee dynasties, and of companies whose hold lasted across generations. Powerful business interests, van der Molen argues, have again and again turned the policies of states to their own ends. In Brazil most of all, though in Colombia and the Dutch East Indies as well, a commanding class of planters and exporters moulded national politics, and governments duly protected them, buying up unsold stock to keep prices high and raising barriers against foreign rivals. In every struggle over who would control the trade, it was nearly always the poorer producing countries that came off worst. The whole tangle is unravelled by van der Molen with remarkable delicacy.
Coffee, even so, was never a purely agricultural affair. As soon as the cherries were gathered, the beans inside had to be drawn out near the place they were grown, work that demanded machinery turned by hand, by animals, by water or by steam. After this came drying and hulling, and — from the nineteenth century — the sorting and grading of the beans, before the final roasting, which was carried out for the most part in the countries that consumed the coffee. From early on, then, coffee was an energy-hungry industrial business, pursued both in the countryside and in the roasteries of far-off cities. As it grew, it carried methods and machinery quickly from one country to another: railway lines were laid to shift pickers and beans, steam-driven mills multiplied, and prized varieties spread across the world wherever soil and taste would have them.
Where coffee had once been scarce and dear, new varieties, fertilisers, irrigation and better processing turned it in time into an ordinary drink to be had almost anywhere. The amount consumed rose sharply. A drink formerly held to be a luxury came to be commended as a harmless stimulant that quickened the wits. But as more of it was swallowed, worries mounted — over adulteration, over what caffeine might do, over the conditions in which the crop was raised. Whenever critics raised such matters, the trade was inclined to pay for soothing research and to pin the fault on other habits. The recent past, van der Molen notes, has brought a further, unwelcome twist: soluble or ‘instant’ coffee, made cheaply and mostly from robusta by a drying method perfected in the mid-twentieth century, now stocks vending machines and a host of packaged goods, and its spread the author judges to be a coarsening of what people drink.
The outcome is a book of genuine richness — a model for the writing of global history, and of the history of industry and of capitalism together. Van der Molen holds his emotions back, in praise as in blame, even where a little more warmth might have driven home his account of the many wrongs bound up with coffee. Human beings, he remarks, could always have got by without it, and there is today no want of other comforts to reach for instead. And still, for a great many of the world's poorest people, coffee is the very thing that puts food on the table.
