IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1
Water hyacinth is a species that grew naturally in Africa before spreading elsewhere.
2
Water hyacinth was originally brought to Kenya by people who admired its appearance.
3
Water hyacinth spread through Lake Achora faster than it had through other lakes in Africa.
4
Since the water hyacinth arrived, the women who cure fish for sale have become better off.
5
A larger proportion of rural households than urban ones rely on wood or charcoal for cooking.
6
Scientists first became interested in water hyacinth as a fuel before the year 2000.
7
The studies into turning water hyacinth into fuel were paid for mostly by governments.
Question 8 - 10
Complete the flow-chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Generating biogas for domestic use in Nyakoi
STEP 01
First, place water hyacinth together with some into a digester
STEP 02
Leave the mixture until the has run its course
STEP 03
Collect the gas the digester gives off and move it to individual homes through
STEP 04
After that, use the gas both for cooking and for treating water to make it drinkable
Question 11 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Cooking with biogas in Nyakoi
Benefits for the women in the village of cooking with biogas
• no need for them to give up so many
11.
each day collecting fuel
• they gain the chance to earn
12.
through other kinds of work
• they run a lower risk of certain illnesses linked to burning wood
Drawbacks of switching to biogas
• for most villages, the
13.
of a digester is simply too high
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Multilingualism in Delhi
Delhi is home to a , and walking through its streets you catch a range of tongues being spoken. A number of residents have lived there all their lives, whereas others count as . Regardless of whether they have travelled in from a or crossed the length of the country, every one of them arrived hoping for things such as better .
A team headed by Professor Renata Halloran of Wexcombe University is assembling data on primary-age pupils in Delhi and two further Indian cities. The study's is to work out why multilingual pupils in India miss out on the sort of that their multilingual counterparts in Europe enjoy.
A
neighbouring area
B
comparable benefits
C
crowded population
D
main goal
E
faraway nation
F
foreign tourists
G
recent arrivals
H
booming trade
I
basic attitude
J
career prospects
Question 20 - 23
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
20
Halloran's group believe that weak results among some pupils stem from being taught in a language other than their home one.
21
The team have ruled out looking at how teachers conduct their lessons.
22
Families in the slums have responded warmly to the suggestion of teaching in home languages.
23
In certain exercises, children from the slums do better than other poor children living in the city.
Question 24 - 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
24
In the sixth paragraph, what point does the writer make about the language used to teach in India's primary schools?
A
Contact with English outside the classroom is of little real use.
B
Being taught through English can put children from poor backgrounds at an even greater disadvantage.
C
Well-motivated children pick up English more readily than others.
D
Schools differ widely in the way they deliver English lessons.
25
What is Halloran implying when she uses the phrase 'that ship has sailed'?
A
Doing away with English as a teaching medium altogether is no longer a realistic option.
B
English teaching could be shaped more closely around what pupils actually need.
C
Efforts to teach English as a subject in its own right have mostly fallen short.
D
The study's conclusions will be of little use to certain pupils.
26
In the eighth paragraph, which result is described as having taken the researchers by surprise?
A
Poor boys and girls turn out to have much the same level of general intelligence.
B
The age at which a child moves into a slum has no bearing on their results.
C
At reading and number work, slum children do no worse than other poor city children.
D
Slum children and other poor city children turn out to live much the same kind of life.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
A birthday gift
What Casimir Brandt had pictured as a simple present for his mother proved instead to be a surprisingly , one that obliged him to work through before it was done. Acquiring the globe by means of an ordinary , he soon realised, was not going to be possible. The examples he did track down came in two kinds: meant for , and costly antique pieces that lay well outside his budget. He even made trips to countries where the for such work might still have survived, only to return without success.
A
overseas buyers
B
demanding undertaking
C
returns policy
D
specialist know-how
E
persistent hurdles
F
treasured keepsake
G
internet order
H
unusual materials
I
low-grade versions
J
classroom use
Question 33 - 36
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
33
The writer rejects the idea that people long ago had little understanding of geography.
34
The first globe that we know of is attributed to Demarchos.
35
Straton is thought to have created his globe as a teaching aid.
36
Brandt eventually located a suitable globe while travelling abroad.
Question 37 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
37
When Brandt came to fix the gores onto the surface of the globe,
A
he realised that speed was essential.
B
he began to doubt the quality of his materials.
C
a problem he had not foreseen came to light.
D
he came close to abandoning the whole project.
38
The reviewer brings in globemakers of earlier times mainly to show that
A
their accomplishments deserve to be far better known.
B
Brandt resembled each of them in some way.
C
Brandt drew particular inspiration from them.
D
their struggles need not have happened at all.
39
What point does the writer make about Brandt in the seventh paragraph?
A
He places a high value on careful planning.
B
He laments how much traditional expertise is being lost.
C
He kept up lasting relationships with many craftsmen.
D
He understands why traditional crafts attract so little interest.
40
In the final paragraph, what does the reviewer say about Brandt's book?
A
It gives too little detail about individual customers.
B
It overlooks several important mapmakers.
C
It offers no guidance on running a money-making enterprise.
D
It says nothing about where globe-making is heading.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The problems and benefits created by the spread of the water hyacinth in Kenya
Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is a floating plant that grew originally in the wetlands of South America. It reached Africa in the early years of the twentieth century, and within a few decades scientists were calling it the region's most troublesome water weed. After taking hold near the southern tip of the continent, it pushed steadily northwards, clogging large reservoirs and choking the flow of major rivers.
Its arrival in Kenya owed a good deal to admiration for the way it looked. Gardeners in the colonial era, charmed by its glossy leaves and pale violet flowers, set it out in the ornamental pools of their estates. From there it escaped, drifting down the Nyando channel until, by the 1990s, it reached the waters of Lake Achora. The lake gave it steady warmth and contained nothing that would feed on it, so the weed spread across the surface unchecked, closing off the routes that fishing crews relied on and creating fresh breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that spread disease.
The heaviest burden fell on the women who buy each day's catch and preserve it by smoking. Boats that had formerly landed fish by the hundred now forced their way through dense rafts of vegetation, and earnings dropped. Nor did the trouble stop at the water's edge. Smoking fish calls for a great deal of firewood, and fetching it can mean a walk of up to fourteen kilometres there and back; while the fires burn, the women stand for long stretches in grey smoke. Across Kenya, the latest health and demographic survey reports, nearly four in five households still cook over wood or charcoal, and the share is higher still beyond the towns. Fuels of this sort pollute the air inside the home, and the World Health Organization sets the yearly Kenyan death toll from such pollution, most of it traced to cooking and heating, at close to nineteen thousand.
Until recently the shore of Lake Achora was regularly heaped with piles of hyacinth that residents had dragged from the water hoping to clear it. Few of them recognised that those decaying, waxy leaves were in fact a reserve of renewable energy. The very plant that spreads so easily also stores carbon and nitrogen in a ratio that, from about 2005 onwards, began to interest energy researchers around the world, who regarded it as a promising material for fuel. As little as five kilograms of the dried weed, some of the first studies calculated, would cover the daily energy needs of a sizeable family.
A team in Tanzania reported in 2016 that the volume of burnable gas climbed sharply when the weed was processed together with poultry droppings. Kenyan researchers, coming to the question somewhat later, reached the same verdict that others had before them: mixing in animal waste made the job of turning the plant into gas considerably more efficient.
The approach reached a lakeside village named Nyakoi in 2019, offering a single cure for two distinct ills, the smothering weed and the dependence on firewood. A pair of biogas digesters, both of them donated, were set up for the community, each designed to convert a blend of water hyacinth and goat dung into gas for the kitchen.
A digester works in much the way a stomach does. Material is put in through one opening, and across roughly the following three weeks it is broken down by microbes in a process known as digestion, which releases a steady stream of gas at the other end. Burning cleanly, that gas is then carried through slim tubes to wherever it is wanted, just as ordinary household gas is supplied. The two units at Nyakoi make enough to cover close to two-thirds of the village, running cooking stoves and handling other domestic jobs such as treating water to make it drinkable and keeping newly hatched chicks warm.
What the project is really putting to the test is whether biogas can take the place of firewood and charcoal throughout rural Kenya, and the early indications are promising. The women who smoke fish say they now fall ill less often. Released from the daily task of gathering wood, which had swallowed long hours of each day, they can turn that freed effort to other work that brings in extra income for their households.
Dr Amara Otieno, an epidemiologist studying air quality at the Nairobi Institute for Public Health, expects that households giving up smoky stoves will suffer fewer diseases of the lungs. The people most at risk, she points out, are women, girls and young children, since it is they who tend the fire indoors or in the yard.
How far the new stoves will improve the community's health is something only further study can settle, says Joseph Mwangi, who directs the social enterprise Rift Biogas. Yet one point is already clear: at around 90,000 shillings each, the digesters remain out of reach for most villages unless their cost can be lowered.
For Otieno, bringing that cost down is a challenge well worth taking on. Fuels branded 'dirty', among them kerosene, charcoal and wood, carry grave risks to health and the environment, and she is convinced that cheap biogas on a wide scale 'would transform the lives of millions across Africa and beyond'.
How could multilingualism benefit India's poorest schoolchildren?
Life spills across every corner of Delhi's packed, restless streets. Pause amid the noise of buses and rickshaws and what reaches your ears is not one language but dozens, spoken by the roughly 24 million residents who fill the city each day. A good many of them were born locally; millions of others, though, are relative newcomers who have settled in the capital after leaving nearby districts, distant towns or far-off states, drawn by the promise of steadier work and an easier life. A few arrive fluent in Hindi — the tongue that predominates in Delhi and serves as the language of officialdom — yet plenty more speak instead one or another of the country's 23 constitutionally listed languages, to say nothing of the several hundred regional varieties heard across a nation of some 1.4 billion people.
One such effort is being led by Professor Renata Halloran of Wexcombe University, whose team has been gathering figures on 1,200 children of primary-school age in Delhi and in the cities of Kolkata and Nagpur. Running over five years and given the name 'Home Tongues, School Futures', the study sets itself a single overriding question: why is it that, in a land where knowing several languages is entirely ordinary — upwards of 270 million Indians handle at least two, and close to 100 million manage three or more — the advantages that come with speaking more than one language, familiar enough from classrooms in Europe, so often fail to reach India's own pupils?
'Testing reaches around 700,000 pupils nationwide every year, and the pattern barely shifts: more than half of those in Standard 5 — ten-year-olds — cannot read a Standard 2 passage, meant for seven-year-olds, with any fluency, while nearly half stumble over a Standard 2 subtraction sum,' Halloran notes. Poor results, she adds, push a large number of these children to abandon their education altogether, and it is girls who bear the brunt of this.
What Halloran's group wants to establish is whether the weak outcomes trace back to a schooling system in which the language of the classroom frequently is not the one spoken at home. Centred on children aged eight to eleven in both country and city settings, the project records whether each pupil lives in a slum* or somewhere better served. A large share have come to the cities from isolated rural districts; poverty leaves them no option but the slums, and because they have migrated, the language they speak is often at odds with the regional one around them.
* slum: a very densely populated area in which the infrastructure is incomplete and services inadequate or non-existent
With the first round of testing on all 1,200 children complete, a second round now lies ahead. This time the team will weigh more than the scores alone, taking in factors such as the quality of the school, the surroundings a child grows up in, and the classroom methods teachers actually use. One suspected culprit behind the poor showing is a shortage of teaching built around the pupil: across many of India's primary schools it is the teacher who holds centre stage, and openings for children to learn on their own are few.
Early though the results still are, one thing has already emerged: the language chosen to teach in — English above all — can set back any child who arrives at school having barely met it, whether in the classroom or in the world beyond. On Halloran's reading, the weight of evidence, from her own work and from other studies, points to English-medium teaching being a poor fit for youngsters from the lowest income brackets, certainly for the opening three years of primary school.
'Our advice, and not only for the poorest, would be that a child should begin in whatever language feels most natural to them ... English need not disappear, but in primary schools it ought not to be the vehicle of instruction. It might sit instead among the subjects on the timetable, taught in its own right. Nobody is proposing that English be dropped — that ship has sailed — the point is rather that we should pay closer heed to what learners require. As things stand there is arguably too much sameness in how children are taught, and too little that is fitted to their particular language needs and abilities,' says Halloran.
The early data reveal no gap in general intelligence between boys and girls, nor between those from the slums and those from other hard-up city households — but a genuine surprise lay elsewhere. Far from trailing their peers from other poor urban homes, slum children keep pace with them and, on occasion, come out ahead, in numeracy and literacy exercises alike. The team suspect the explanation lies in what growing up in a slum entails: such children tend to grow up quickly and to rub shoulders daily with the counting skills survival there demands.
Word of the work has already reached ministers in government, who would like its conclusions to shape and refine school policy across Delhi and the surrounding state. 'Their eagerness matches ours — they too want to see how the hard circumstances of poverty might be softened once attention turns to the languages children meet and use in school. Being poor, our results suggest, need not seal a child's fate. Quite possibly these feeble outcomes stem from how schooling in India is delivered, with its heavy leaning on Hindi and English as the languages of instruction, which can work against any child unacquainted with either,' Halloran explains.
'Knowledge is passed on through language above all, so which language does the teaching plainly counts for a great deal. What we hope to demonstrate is that reasoning, arithmetic and reading all climb when a child is schooled in a language they already command. The knack, perhaps, is to join what school teaches to what life teaches, drawing on the sheer richness of a child's own experience so that learning happens in the surest way it can,' says Halloran.
The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft
(A review of Casimir Brandt's book The Globemakers)
A model globe for his mother's seventy-fifth birthday: that was all Casimir Brandt, then living in Edinburgh, set out to buy in 2010. Yet this modest idea, straightforward as it first appeared, grew into a near-obsession that consumed the best part of ten years and threw up enough setbacks to have discouraged a less stubborn person. By the time it was over, Brandt had founded what remains the only made-to-order globemaking firm in the world.
What The Globemakers, Brandt's record of this on-a-whim project, reveals first is that picking up such an object involved far more than clicking 'buy' online and wincing at the delivery charge. The notion that our forebears were hopelessly ignorant about geography is remarkably persistent, yet in truth the spherical shape of the Earth has been understood for more than two and a half thousand years. A stitched leather ball was the comparison drawn by the philosopher Demarchos in one of his surviving dialogues, and the earliest globe on record is generally credited to Straton of Assos, thought to have fashioned one somewhere around 160 BCE. A well-made globe, Brandt assumed, could hardly be hard to come by.
Roughly two thousand years on, though, the craft of making globes appeared to have slipped almost entirely out of memory. In the auction rooms Brandt found true antiques priced well beyond what he could afford, and elsewhere only crude mass-produced models meant for the schoolroom. Journeys as far afield as Turkey and Japan, where he had hoped the expertise of traditional cartographers* might have survived, led nowhere.
Undaunted, Brandt resolved to build a quality globe himself, whereupon virtually every step that could go wrong duly did. The Earth's form was a difficulty in itself: rather than a true sphere it is oblate, flattened a little at each pole. He settled on a compromise, two half-spheres joined together, but then could find nobody able to cast the moulds precisely enough to guarantee that the two halves would end up with matching circumferences. And once that had finally been sorted out, prising the pieces free of the moulds left the workshop behind his house strewn with broken plaster of Paris* and thick with a dust that caught in the throat.
* cartographer: someone involved in the science or practice of drawing maps * plaster of Paris: a quick-setting plaster consisting of a fine white powder that hardens when moistened and allowed to dry
What all these failed trials taught him about the difficulties of the craft, Brandt passes on to his readers. Working out how to ease the globes cleanly from their moulds — the answer, in the end, was a top-of-the-range air compressor — and tracking down paper and inks that would form the gores (the flat map segments glued onto the sphere) without the colour bleeding into an illegible smear, cost him many months and a startling sum of money. You can feel his exasperation as he describes the delicate business of fixing the gores in place, a stage reached only after he had hunted down a glue with exactly the right stickiness. And then, almost at the finish, came the discovery that the paper had stretched a fraction, leaving the last segment lapping over the first by a single centimetre — trivial-sounding, perhaps, until you realise that one centimetre stands for two per cent of the planet's diameter, enough to erase the Himalayas or rub out Chile.
Running alongside Brandt's account of these technical trials is a set of digressions on the master globemakers of earlier centuries and on the history of cartography more broadly. Those after fuller cartographic detail may feel a little short-changed, and yet in Joos van Dael the author plainly recognised a kindred spirit. It was van Dael, a craftsman of Bruges, who in 1489 produced the Wereldbol — the oldest globe still in existence — its surface exquisitely finished by a team of painters and other artisans, only for news to arrive that a westbound expedition had blundered upon unknown lands that very year, leaving his creation obsolete on the day it was done. A comparable, if still grander, single-mindedness marks the labours of the Venetian mapmaker Ludovico Farsetti, who in the eighteenth century built a pair of globes for an Austrian archduke. The colossal twins, each close to three and a half metres across, took him twenty-five years and survive today in the Imperial Library in Vienna.
For all that it celebrates the rebirth of an old craft, Brandt's book is at the same time an elegy for skills that are quietly disappearing. Setting out on his globemaking adventure, he found it hard to track down either artisans able to make the moulds correctly or foundries that could form the meridians — the metal hoops that encircle a globe — to the necessary standard. The right craftsmen did turn up in the end, a few of them simply wandering by chance into his workshop, which by then occupied rather better premises than his old back room, but a good number have since retired or died.
Brandt's mother did get her seventy-fifth birthday globe in the end, though a full two years behind schedule. Her son went on to establish a firm that today produces more than five hundred globes annually, making them for clients who might ask for their own small village to be marked or for stranger requests besides. Richly illustrated with photographs charting each phase of his undertaking, together with a handful of pictures of old globes and maps, the book is anything but a manual for turning a profit. What it does do, and amply, is kindle admiration — for the artistry of the great mapmakers of former times, and for the dogged obstinacy of the modern-day heir who brought their all-but-dead craft back to life.
Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is a floating plant that grew originally in the wetlands of South America. It reached Africa in the early years of the twentieth century, and within a few decades scientists were calling it the region's most troublesome water weed. After taking hold near the southern tip of the continent, it pushed steadily northwards, clogging large reservoirs and choking the flow of major rivers.
Its arrival in Kenya owed a good deal to admiration for the way it looked. Gardeners in the colonial era, charmed by its glossy leaves and pale violet flowers, set it out in the ornamental pools of their estates. From there it escaped, drifting down the Nyando channel until, by the 1990s, it reached the waters of Lake Achora. The lake gave it steady warmth and contained nothing that would feed on it, so the weed spread across the surface unchecked, closing off the routes that fishing crews relied on and creating fresh breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that spread disease.
The heaviest burden fell on the women who buy each day's catch and preserve it by smoking. Boats that had formerly landed fish by the hundred now forced their way through dense rafts of vegetation, and earnings dropped. Nor did the trouble stop at the water's edge. Smoking fish calls for a great deal of firewood, and fetching it can mean a walk of up to fourteen kilometres there and back; while the fires burn, the women stand for long stretches in grey smoke. Across Kenya, the latest health and demographic survey reports, nearly four in five households still cook over wood or charcoal, and the share is higher still beyond the towns. Fuels of this sort pollute the air inside the home, and the World Health Organization sets the yearly Kenyan death toll from such pollution, most of it traced to cooking and heating, at close to nineteen thousand.
Until recently the shore of Lake Achora was regularly heaped with piles of hyacinth that residents had dragged from the water hoping to clear it. Few of them recognised that those decaying, waxy leaves were in fact a reserve of renewable energy. The very plant that spreads so easily also stores carbon and nitrogen in a ratio that, from about 2005 onwards, began to interest energy researchers around the world, who regarded it as a promising material for fuel. As little as five kilograms of the dried weed, some of the first studies calculated, would cover the daily energy needs of a sizeable family.
A team in Tanzania reported in 2016 that the volume of burnable gas climbed sharply when the weed was processed together with poultry droppings. Kenyan researchers, coming to the question somewhat later, reached the same verdict that others had before them: mixing in animal waste made the job of turning the plant into gas considerably more efficient.
The approach reached a lakeside village named Nyakoi in 2019, offering a single cure for two distinct ills, the smothering weed and the dependence on firewood. A pair of biogas digesters, both of them donated, were set up for the community, each designed to convert a blend of water hyacinth and goat dung into gas for the kitchen.
A digester works in much the way a stomach does. Material is put in through one opening, and across roughly the following three weeks it is broken down by microbes in a process known as digestion, which releases a steady stream of gas at the other end. Burning cleanly, that gas is then carried through slim tubes to wherever it is wanted, just as ordinary household gas is supplied. The two units at Nyakoi make enough to cover close to two-thirds of the village, running cooking stoves and handling other domestic jobs such as treating water to make it drinkable and keeping newly hatched chicks warm.
What the project is really putting to the test is whether biogas can take the place of firewood and charcoal throughout rural Kenya, and the early indications are promising. The women who smoke fish say they now fall ill less often. Released from the daily task of gathering wood, which had swallowed long hours of each day, they can turn that freed effort to other work that brings in extra income for their households.
Dr Amara Otieno, an epidemiologist studying air quality at the Nairobi Institute for Public Health, expects that households giving up smoky stoves will suffer fewer diseases of the lungs. The people most at risk, she points out, are women, girls and young children, since it is they who tend the fire indoors or in the yard.
How far the new stoves will improve the community's health is something only further study can settle, says Joseph Mwangi, who directs the social enterprise Rift Biogas. Yet one point is already clear: at around 90,000 shillings each, the digesters remain out of reach for most villages unless their cost can be lowered.
For Otieno, bringing that cost down is a challenge well worth taking on. Fuels branded 'dirty', among them kerosene, charcoal and wood, carry grave risks to health and the environment, and she is convinced that cheap biogas on a wide scale 'would transform the lives of millions across Africa and beyond'.
Life spills across every corner of Delhi's packed, restless streets. Pause amid the noise of buses and rickshaws and what reaches your ears is not one language but dozens, spoken by the roughly 24 million residents who fill the city each day. A good many of them were born locally; millions of others, though, are relative newcomers who have settled in the capital after leaving nearby districts, distant towns or far-off states, drawn by the promise of steadier work and an easier life. A few arrive fluent in Hindi — the tongue that predominates in Delhi and serves as the language of officialdom — yet plenty more speak instead one or another of the country's 23 constitutionally listed languages, to say nothing of the several hundred regional varieties heard across a nation of some 1.4 billion people.
One such effort is being led by Professor Renata Halloran of Wexcombe University, whose team has been gathering figures on 1,200 children of primary-school age in Delhi and in the cities of Kolkata and Nagpur. Running over five years and given the name 'Home Tongues, School Futures', the study sets itself a single overriding question: why is it that, in a land where knowing several languages is entirely ordinary — upwards of 270 million Indians handle at least two, and close to 100 million manage three or more — the advantages that come with speaking more than one language, familiar enough from classrooms in Europe, so often fail to reach India's own pupils?
'Testing reaches around 700,000 pupils nationwide every year, and the pattern barely shifts: more than half of those in Standard 5 — ten-year-olds — cannot read a Standard 2 passage, meant for seven-year-olds, with any fluency, while nearly half stumble over a Standard 2 subtraction sum,' Halloran notes. Poor results, she adds, push a large number of these children to abandon their education altogether, and it is girls who bear the brunt of this.
What Halloran's group wants to establish is whether the weak outcomes trace back to a schooling system in which the language of the classroom frequently is not the one spoken at home. Centred on children aged eight to eleven in both country and city settings, the project records whether each pupil lives in a slum* or somewhere better served. A large share have come to the cities from isolated rural districts; poverty leaves them no option but the slums, and because they have migrated, the language they speak is often at odds with the regional one around them.
* slum: a very densely populated area in which the infrastructure is incomplete and services inadequate or non-existent
With the first round of testing on all 1,200 children complete, a second round now lies ahead. This time the team will weigh more than the scores alone, taking in factors such as the quality of the school, the surroundings a child grows up in, and the classroom methods teachers actually use. One suspected culprit behind the poor showing is a shortage of teaching built around the pupil: across many of India's primary schools it is the teacher who holds centre stage, and openings for children to learn on their own are few.
Early though the results still are, one thing has already emerged: the language chosen to teach in — English above all — can set back any child who arrives at school having barely met it, whether in the classroom or in the world beyond. On Halloran's reading, the weight of evidence, from her own work and from other studies, points to English-medium teaching being a poor fit for youngsters from the lowest income brackets, certainly for the opening three years of primary school.
'Our advice, and not only for the poorest, would be that a child should begin in whatever language feels most natural to them ... English need not disappear, but in primary schools it ought not to be the vehicle of instruction. It might sit instead among the subjects on the timetable, taught in its own right. Nobody is proposing that English be dropped — that ship has sailed — the point is rather that we should pay closer heed to what learners require. As things stand there is arguably too much sameness in how children are taught, and too little that is fitted to their particular language needs and abilities,' says Halloran.
The early data reveal no gap in general intelligence between boys and girls, nor between those from the slums and those from other hard-up city households — but a genuine surprise lay elsewhere. Far from trailing their peers from other poor urban homes, slum children keep pace with them and, on occasion, come out ahead, in numeracy and literacy exercises alike. The team suspect the explanation lies in what growing up in a slum entails: such children tend to grow up quickly and to rub shoulders daily with the counting skills survival there demands.
Word of the work has already reached ministers in government, who would like its conclusions to shape and refine school policy across Delhi and the surrounding state. 'Their eagerness matches ours — they too want to see how the hard circumstances of poverty might be softened once attention turns to the languages children meet and use in school. Being poor, our results suggest, need not seal a child's fate. Quite possibly these feeble outcomes stem from how schooling in India is delivered, with its heavy leaning on Hindi and English as the languages of instruction, which can work against any child unacquainted with either,' Halloran explains.
'Knowledge is passed on through language above all, so which language does the teaching plainly counts for a great deal. What we hope to demonstrate is that reasoning, arithmetic and reading all climb when a child is schooled in a language they already command. The knack, perhaps, is to join what school teaches to what life teaches, drawing on the sheer richness of a child's own experience so that learning happens in the surest way it can,' says Halloran.
A model globe for his mother's seventy-fifth birthday: that was all Casimir Brandt, then living in Edinburgh, set out to buy in 2010. Yet this modest idea, straightforward as it first appeared, grew into a near-obsession that consumed the best part of ten years and threw up enough setbacks to have discouraged a less stubborn person. By the time it was over, Brandt had founded what remains the only made-to-order globemaking firm in the world.
What The Globemakers, Brandt's record of this on-a-whim project, reveals first is that picking up such an object involved far more than clicking 'buy' online and wincing at the delivery charge. The notion that our forebears were hopelessly ignorant about geography is remarkably persistent, yet in truth the spherical shape of the Earth has been understood for more than two and a half thousand years. A stitched leather ball was the comparison drawn by the philosopher Demarchos in one of his surviving dialogues, and the earliest globe on record is generally credited to Straton of Assos, thought to have fashioned one somewhere around 160 BCE. A well-made globe, Brandt assumed, could hardly be hard to come by.
Roughly two thousand years on, though, the craft of making globes appeared to have slipped almost entirely out of memory. In the auction rooms Brandt found true antiques priced well beyond what he could afford, and elsewhere only crude mass-produced models meant for the schoolroom. Journeys as far afield as Turkey and Japan, where he had hoped the expertise of traditional cartographers* might have survived, led nowhere.
Undaunted, Brandt resolved to build a quality globe himself, whereupon virtually every step that could go wrong duly did. The Earth's form was a difficulty in itself: rather than a true sphere it is oblate, flattened a little at each pole. He settled on a compromise, two half-spheres joined together, but then could find nobody able to cast the moulds precisely enough to guarantee that the two halves would end up with matching circumferences. And once that had finally been sorted out, prising the pieces free of the moulds left the workshop behind his house strewn with broken plaster of Paris* and thick with a dust that caught in the throat.
* cartographer: someone involved in the science or practice of drawing maps * plaster of Paris: a quick-setting plaster consisting of a fine white powder that hardens when moistened and allowed to dry
What all these failed trials taught him about the difficulties of the craft, Brandt passes on to his readers. Working out how to ease the globes cleanly from their moulds — the answer, in the end, was a top-of-the-range air compressor — and tracking down paper and inks that would form the gores (the flat map segments glued onto the sphere) without the colour bleeding into an illegible smear, cost him many months and a startling sum of money. You can feel his exasperation as he describes the delicate business of fixing the gores in place, a stage reached only after he had hunted down a glue with exactly the right stickiness. And then, almost at the finish, came the discovery that the paper had stretched a fraction, leaving the last segment lapping over the first by a single centimetre — trivial-sounding, perhaps, until you realise that one centimetre stands for two per cent of the planet's diameter, enough to erase the Himalayas or rub out Chile.
Running alongside Brandt's account of these technical trials is a set of digressions on the master globemakers of earlier centuries and on the history of cartography more broadly. Those after fuller cartographic detail may feel a little short-changed, and yet in Joos van Dael the author plainly recognised a kindred spirit. It was van Dael, a craftsman of Bruges, who in 1489 produced the Wereldbol — the oldest globe still in existence — its surface exquisitely finished by a team of painters and other artisans, only for news to arrive that a westbound expedition had blundered upon unknown lands that very year, leaving his creation obsolete on the day it was done. A comparable, if still grander, single-mindedness marks the labours of the Venetian mapmaker Ludovico Farsetti, who in the eighteenth century built a pair of globes for an Austrian archduke. The colossal twins, each close to three and a half metres across, took him twenty-five years and survive today in the Imperial Library in Vienna.
For all that it celebrates the rebirth of an old craft, Brandt's book is at the same time an elegy for skills that are quietly disappearing. Setting out on his globemaking adventure, he found it hard to track down either artisans able to make the moulds correctly or foundries that could form the meridians — the metal hoops that encircle a globe — to the necessary standard. The right craftsmen did turn up in the end, a few of them simply wandering by chance into his workshop, which by then occupied rather better premises than his old back room, but a good number have since retired or died.
Brandt's mother did get her seventy-fifth birthday globe in the end, though a full two years behind schedule. Her son went on to establish a firm that today produces more than five hundred globes annually, making them for clients who might ask for their own small village to be marked or for stranger requests besides. Richly illustrated with photographs charting each phase of his undertaking, together with a handful of pictures of old globes and maps, the book is anything but a manual for turning a profit. What it does do, and amply, is kindle admiration — for the artistry of the great mapmakers of former times, and for the dogged obstinacy of the modern-day heir who brought their all-but-dead craft back to life.
Life spills across every corner of Delhi's packed, restless streets. Pause amid the noise of buses and rickshaws and what reaches your ears is not one language but dozens, spoken by the roughly 24 million residents who fill the city each day. A good many of them were born locally; millions of others, though, are relative newcomers who have settled in the capital after leaving nearby districts, distant towns or far-off states, drawn by the promise of steadier work and an easier life. A few arrive fluent in Hindi — the tongue that predominates in Delhi and serves as the language of officialdom — yet plenty more speak instead one or another of the country's 23 constitutionally listed languages, to say nothing of the several hundred regional varieties heard across a nation of some 1.4 billion people.
One such effort is being led by Professor Renata Halloran of Wexcombe University, whose team has been gathering figures on 1,200 children of primary-school age in Delhi and in the cities of Kolkata and Nagpur. Running over five years and given the name 'Home Tongues, School Futures', the study sets itself a single overriding question: why is it that, in a land where knowing several languages is entirely ordinary — upwards of 270 million Indians handle at least two, and close to 100 million manage three or more — the advantages that come with speaking more than one language, familiar enough from classrooms in Europe, so often fail to reach India's own pupils?
'Testing reaches around 700,000 pupils nationwide every year, and the pattern barely shifts: more than half of those in Standard 5 — ten-year-olds — cannot read a Standard 2 passage, meant for seven-year-olds, with any fluency, while nearly half stumble over a Standard 2 subtraction sum,' Halloran notes. Poor results, she adds, push a large number of these children to abandon their education altogether, and it is girls who bear the brunt of this.
What Halloran's group wants to establish is whether the weak outcomes trace back to a schooling system in which the language of the classroom frequently is not the one spoken at home. Centred on children aged eight to eleven in both country and city settings, the project records whether each pupil lives in a slum* or somewhere better served. A large share have come to the cities from isolated rural districts; poverty leaves them no option but the slums, and because they have migrated, the language they speak is often at odds with the regional one around them.
* slum: a very densely populated area in which the infrastructure is incomplete and services inadequate or non-existent
With the first round of testing on all 1,200 children complete, a second round now lies ahead. This time the team will weigh more than the scores alone, taking in factors such as the quality of the school, the surroundings a child grows up in, and the classroom methods teachers actually use. One suspected culprit behind the poor showing is a shortage of teaching built around the pupil: across many of India's primary schools it is the teacher who holds centre stage, and openings for children to learn on their own are few.
Early though the results still are, one thing has already emerged: the language chosen to teach in — English above all — can set back any child who arrives at school having barely met it, whether in the classroom or in the world beyond. On Halloran's reading, the weight of evidence, from her own work and from other studies, points to English-medium teaching being a poor fit for youngsters from the lowest income brackets, certainly for the opening three years of primary school.
'Our advice, and not only for the poorest, would be that a child should begin in whatever language feels most natural to them ... English need not disappear, but in primary schools it ought not to be the vehicle of instruction. It might sit instead among the subjects on the timetable, taught in its own right. Nobody is proposing that English be dropped — that ship has sailed — the point is rather that we should pay closer heed to what learners require. As things stand there is arguably too much sameness in how children are taught, and too little that is fitted to their particular language needs and abilities,' says Halloran.
The early data reveal no gap in general intelligence between boys and girls, nor between those from the slums and those from other hard-up city households — but a genuine surprise lay elsewhere. Far from trailing their peers from other poor urban homes, slum children keep pace with them and, on occasion, come out ahead, in numeracy and literacy exercises alike. The team suspect the explanation lies in what growing up in a slum entails: such children tend to grow up quickly and to rub shoulders daily with the counting skills survival there demands.
Word of the work has already reached ministers in government, who would like its conclusions to shape and refine school policy across Delhi and the surrounding state. 'Their eagerness matches ours — they too want to see how the hard circumstances of poverty might be softened once attention turns to the languages children meet and use in school. Being poor, our results suggest, need not seal a child's fate. Quite possibly these feeble outcomes stem from how schooling in India is delivered, with its heavy leaning on Hindi and English as the languages of instruction, which can work against any child unacquainted with either,' Halloran explains.
'Knowledge is passed on through language above all, so which language does the teaching plainly counts for a great deal. What we hope to demonstrate is that reasoning, arithmetic and reading all climb when a child is schooled in a language they already command. The knack, perhaps, is to join what school teaches to what life teaches, drawing on the sheer richness of a child's own experience so that learning happens in the surest way it can,' says Halloran.
