IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 1 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 5
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 it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1
Stepwells gave people a way to obtain water in the driest months of the year.
2
Stepwells of this kind were built in many different parts of the world.
3
In some seasons a visitor had much further to climb down to the water than in others.
4
The stepwells were constructed without the support of pillars.
5
Repairing a stepwell has become more expensive in recent years.
Question 6 - 8
Answer the questions below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
6
Which part of a stepwell gave people shelter from the strong sun?
7
Which yearly rains, by failing again and again, are said to have made the wells' condition worse?
8
Who visits stepwells frequently at the present time?
Question 9 - 13
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Stepwells
Stepwell
Date
Features
Other notes
Rani Amba Vav
Early 12th century
About 400 carvings decorate the monument
Restored by the ASI; still in fine condition despite the
9
of 2001
Aditya Kund
1032
Its steps form
10
that create a geometrical layout
Has carved shrines; closer to a
11
than to a well
Rajni Ki Baori
1710
Finely worked monument
One of 18 baoris in the area commissioned by Queen Vasundhara
Chandra Baori
Around 800 AD
Steps lead down 14 storeys to the bottom
Old, deep and very dramatic; has
12
that give a view over the steps
Neelkanth Ki Baori
1720
Has two
13
levels
Still used by the public today
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 21
The Reading Passage has nine paragraphs A-I.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-xi
List of Headings
I
Relying on pricing alone to limit road transport
II
The surge in privately owned vehicles
III
The rising expense of moving goods by rail
IV
Combining road charges with better alternative services
V
An important new aim for the years ahead
VI
Proposals for building large new road systems
VII
Transport patterns in states hoping to join the Union
VIII
The pollution caused by traffic on roads
IX
Adopting every measure needed to redirect transport
X
How production changes have altered the movement of freight
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph G
20
Paragraph H
21
Paragraph I
Question 22 - 26
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 it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
22
The number of cars on EU roads is expected to drop over the next ten years.
23
Some industries have relocated their factories far from the places where their products are finally put together or consumed.
24
Since the 1990s, freight transport in the countries seeking to join the EU has moved markedly towards roads.
25
Environmental concerns play only a minor part in the new transport strategy.
26
Switching to greener fuels would be too costly for most transport operators.
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
The example of the "golden four" is used to underline the importance of
A
recognising individual talent.
B
belief in a common goal.
C
the strength of working as a group.
D
providing clear leadership.
28
Lars Ostrem suggests that he and Fenella Wray beat their rivals to the answer because they
A
urged each other on toward a shared ambition.
B
combined different areas of expertise.
C
recognised the limits of their own ability.
D
were set on outdoing cleverer competitors.
29
The writer refers to the cereal-box competitions as an illustration of how to
A
deepen people's attachment to an idea.
B
encourage brief, economical writing.
C
foster loyalty to a group.
D
prompt imaginative thinking.
30
In the final paragraph, the writer implies that employees find it important to
A
know what their organisation is aiming for.
B
admire what their colleagues have achieved.
C
understand the thinking behind decisions.
D
feel that what they offer is valued.
Question 31 - 35
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-G from the box below.
List of Endings
A
neglect the duties expected of them.
B
stay on with the organisation.
C
take risks.
D
become more competitive with one another.
E
put forward their own ideas.
F
win promotion.
G
steer clear of risk.
Staff whose personal outlook matches their employer's tend to
31
Faced with a period of upheaval, workers generally
32
Once people grasp what they stand to lose, they often
33
Those working under an overbearing manager are apt to
34
Employees in organisations with hardly any rules are more likely to
35
Question 36 - 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
36
Even without much funding or space, some people still innovate successfully.
37
A manager can drive innovation successfully simply by telling staff the direction and expecting them to follow.
38
A team of three will outperform a lone individual only when that individual is not the ablest in the field.
39
Support voiced by a colleague of equal standing carries more influence than a talk given by the boss.
40
Producing a physical prototype does more to deepen someone's involvement in a project than writing does.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Stepwells
In the arid heart of India a thousand years ago, life would have been almost impossible without the stepwell. Many were left to decay, yet recent repair work has restored much of their splendour. To record these relics of a vanished age, Adrian Mowbray travelled to the country's north-west.
It was in the sixth and seventh centuries that people in what are now Gujarat and Rajasthan first worked out how to reach clean underground water once the rains had gone — water they needed for drinking, washing, their livestock and their fields. Yet to see the stepwell merely as a practical device is to miss much of what made it important.
Found nowhere else in the world, these structures could be highly elaborate and differed greatly in scale and form. At the height of their use they doubled as social hubs — spots for meeting, resting and prayer, open to villagers of every rank except the very lowest castes. The desert districts of Gujarat, where the wells are called vav, and Rajasthan, where they are known as baori, hold most surviving examples, though a handful remain in Delhi. Some stood within or close to settlements to serve local people; others stood beside routes as resting spots for travellers.
The name itself hints at the design: from the surface, flights of stone steps drop away towards the water — usually an aquifer below ground — which sinks lower as the wet season passes. A visitor arriving when the water stood high had only a short way to go down, but in drier months a whole succession of levels had to be descended before the surface could be reached.
A number of the wells are enormous open pits, their sloping walls faced with hundreds of steps arranged in tiers, while others are subtler affairs in which long stepped corridors lead down through storey after storey to the water. All were raised in stone and held up by pillars, and many had shaded canopies where visitors could escape the merciless sun. Their finest touch, though, lies in the delicate carvings that cover so many of them, portraying everything from combat and dance to the small routines of daily life, such as combing hair or grinding grain.
Over the following centuries the north-west acquired thousands of such wells, yet most have since been abandoned; many now stand ruined and waterless, their aquifers drained off to feed industry so that the steps no longer reach any water. Matters have been made worse by the repeated failure of the monsoon in recent years, which left much of the region parched.
Even so, several major wells in Gujarat have lately been given careful repairs, and its state authorities have declared their intention to bring the region's stepwells as a whole back to good order.
The old Gujarati capital of Kharoda holds what may be the most beautiful of all the wells still standing, Rani Amba Vav, or the Queen's Stepwell. Commissioned by Queen Sunayana early in the twelfth century, it was choked with silt after a flood two hundred years later, and recovered only when the Archaeological Survey of India restored it so thoroughly that it now looks almost new. The monument runs to sixty metres long, eighteen across and twenty-four deep, and set into recesses along its walls are some four hundred carvings of deities such as Shiva and Lakshmi. Remarkably, when a powerful cyclone tore across the area in 2001, the centuries-old structure came through unharmed.
Further north in Gujarat, beside a temple to the sun in the town of Velapur, stands the Aditya Kund, raised by King Devraj in 1032 as an offering to the sun. Strictly speaking it is a kund (an open pool rather than a true well) but it wears all the marks of stepwell design, its steps dropping to the floor in a sequence of terraces that form a striking geometric pattern. Between these flights sit ninety-six shrines, each finely carved.
Rajasthan, too, is rich in such structures. Some 200 kilometres south of Jaipur lies the old city of Sohal, long admired for its buildings, the stepwells among them. A particularly large one, Rajni Ki Baori, was put up in 1710 by the local queen, Vasundhara; forty-two metres deep, twenty-two wide and thirty-eight long, this finely worked monument was one of eighteen baoris she ordered built around Sohal.
Roughly 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, in the crumbling town of Amroli, is Chandra Baori, among the most ancient and deepest wells in India and, to the eye, perhaps the most striking. It was raised around 800 AD beside the temple of Ambika Mata; hundreds of steps zigzag down three of its walls, plunging through fourteen storeys and, from a distance, making a bold geometric shape. Along the remaining wall, roofed balconies on richly decorated pillars look out across the steps.
One well people still use stands a little way off the Jaipur–Delhi highway: Neelkanth Ki Baori. Built around 1720, it goes down nine storeys, of which the two lowest remain permanently submerged. Ninety-two colonnaded openings ring it at ground level, and from there a flight of a hundred and sixty steps takes the visitor to the lowest water.
After long years of neglect, many of these feats of medieval building have been rescued by the Archaeological Survey of India, which sees their upkeep as part of safeguarding the nation's heritage. To the remotest corners of the north-west, sightseers now travel to marvel at architecture put up a thousand years ago — structures that testify both to the cleverness and craft of early societies and to how precious water has always been to human life.
What have been the trends and what are the prospects for European transport systems?
A
A. Strong economic expansion is hard to imagine without transport that works efficiently. Today's information technologies, by enabling teleworking and online services, can trim the need to move people and goods physically; even so, demand for transport keeps climbing. Two forces drive this. For passengers, what matters most is the extraordinary rise in private car use: across the roads of the European Union (EU), the fleet grew by close to four million vehicles a year between 1990 and 2010, and a further sizeable rise is expected over the coming decade.
B
When it comes to freight, much of the increase traces to shifts in Europe's economy and in the way goods are produced. Over the past two decades the removal of internal borders has carried the EU from a 'stock' model towards a 'flow' one. Reinforcing this, certain industries — labour-intensive ones above all — have moved production elsewhere in search of lower costs, often leaving the manufacturing site hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres from where final assembly happens or from the people who will use the product.
C
Robust growth is also forecast in the states now applying to join the EU, adding further to transport flows, road freight most of all. By 1996 several were already exporting almost three times their 1990 volumes, while their imports had climbed beyond six times the 1990 figure. Many applicant states inherited networks built around the railways, yet since the early 1990s the split between modes has swung heavily towards the road. Road haulage grew by 22.6 per cent between 1990 and 1996, whereas rail freight fell by 39.8 per cent, though rail there still runs, on average, well above the levels seen in current member states.
D
A fresh priority — sustainable development — now opens the way to reshaping the EU's common transport policy. Endorsed at the Aveiro European Council, the aim is to be reached by weaving environmental thinking into Community policy, with altering the balance among transport modes at its centre. Full delivery of so ambitious an aim will not be possible before 2025; even so, the proposed measures mark a necessary first move toward a sustainable transport system that ought, a generation from now — by 2045 — to be running.
E
Back in 1996 the energy burned in transport was responsible for 31 per cent of emissions of CO2, the foremost greenhouse gas. Recent projections suggest that, if the upward trend in traffic goes unchecked, transport's CO2 output will swell by roughly 45 per cent, reaching 1,038 billion tonnes by 2025 against the 716 billion tonnes logged in 1990. Here again the chief offender is road transport, generating on its own 86 per cent of the CO2 that transport releases. Turning to alternative fuels and raising energy efficiency is therefore at once an environmental obligation and a technological challenge.
F
Why the transport balance must be corrected.
Alongside this, much more must be done to bring about a shift between modes. No such change can happen from one day to the next, least of all after more than fifty years in which the balance has slid steadily the way of the road. Matters have gone so far that rail freight is now pushed to the margins, holding a mere 9 per cent of the market, while cross-border goods trains crawl at an average of just 16 kilometres an hour. From this, three broad options have taken shape.
G
Under the first option, road transport alone would be tackled, purely through pricing, with nothing done in parallel to strengthen the other modes. For a while this might hold back road traffic's rise, since dearer transport tends to raise how fully lorries are loaded and how many passengers each car carries. The problem is that, without any accompanying effort to revive the other modes, the more sustainable alternatives would have no way to step in and take over.
H
The second option likewise leans on charging for road use, but this time alongside steps to make the other modes work better — through improved service quality, smarter logistics and new technology. What it omits is any spending on fresh infrastructure, and it gives no assurance of stronger cohesion between regions. It could loosen the tie between road growth and economic growth rather more than the first, yet the road would still hold the largest share of traffic and keep clustering along overloaded routes, for all that it pollutes more than any other mode. On its own, then, it cannot secure the change of balance needed.
I
The third option is not a novelty. It brings together a whole range of measures, from pricing at one end to reviving the alternative modes and channelling investment into the trans-European network of railways and waterways at the other. Integrated in this way, it would let the other modes recover the market shares they held in 1996 and so tip the balance back. Given fifty years of built-in bias toward the road, it is far bolder than it looks; even so, it would sharply break the link between growth in road traffic and economic growth, without curbing the freedom of people and goods to move.
If a business is to survive, it must keep innovating, and firms pour money into coaxing fresh ideas from their staff. Yet plenty of employees sit in lavish, purpose-built facilities meant to spark invention and feel no more creative for it, while others, given neither funding nor much space, still manage to produce genuinely new things.
Ivo Marnix, who teaches social psychology at Rijnstad University, traces one source of that failure to hiring. When a recruit's values line up with the organisation's, he notes, it shapes both how much they contribute and whether they remain on the payroll two years on — a link the research bears out. Work at the Fenwick Business School points the same way: creativity comes more readily to some than to others, but in the right conditions almost anyone can produce it.
A celebrated image from the early days of soul music captures exactly what Marnix means. Taken in 1961, it shows four singers — Eddie Colefax, Ray Sutton, Hank Delano and Junior Pace — around a piano at Tidewater Sound in Baltimore, and behind it lies a story easy to miss. What became the studio's "golden four" might just as well have been five. The singer absent from the frame, Otis Rand, had a finer natural voice than any of them. But Merle Vance, who ran Tidewater, was set on remaking popular music by welding gospel to country blues — an aim Colefax, Sutton, Delano and Pace grasped at once and embraced. Rand felt no such pull, and managed only one hit while signed to the label.
Why does that alignment of values matter so much? Because innovating always involves change, Marnix explains, and change is something our species handles warily: "The moment things start to shift, our instinct is to keep safe." His advice to managers therefore runs against the grain: Rather than dangling a reward, they should spell out exactly what the firm will forfeit by letting an opportunity slip. People, the evidence suggests, gamble far more readily to avoid a loss than to chase a gain.
Steering innovation calls for a delicate touch. Because the marketing, product-development and finance teams each hear from different constituencies, a company can easily find itself tugged three ways at once. Small "pockets of innovation", too, tend to vanish unless some mechanism keeps the different parts of the firm talking to one another. This is a hands-on business: it will not do to announce, "Here is where we are heading, and you are all coming with me."
To Marnix, this "follow-the-leader" habit is hazardous, above all because it tempts those in charge to strike out alone. "We have solid evidence that three heads beat one at solving problems — even when that one head belongs to the ablest person in the field." By way of illustration he recalls a conversation with the biochemist Lars Ostrem, who, with his colleague Fenella Wray, had worked out the molecular structure of photerin, a protein that lets certain deep-sea creatures glow. "I asked how the two of them had reached the answer before a field of formidable competitors, and his reply floored me. They had got there, he said, precisely because they knew they were not the cleverest researchers chasing it. The cleverest was a woman named Corinne Adler, who — in Ostrem's words — 'was so brilliant she almost never asked anyone's opinion'."
Working in teams draws on one of the deepest springs of human conduct. "So much of what we do rests on peer validation that its pull usually escapes our notice," Marnix observes. "Suppose long-serving staff are digging in against your project — the answer is to get another veteran to argue its case." He is far from the tactic's only advocate. When influence travels sideways rather than down from above, studies find, it carries far more weight than any speech from the boss.
Jotting things down, sketching them out and building rough prototypes can all get ideas flowing. Marnix points to many studies and past episodes showing that an act as ordinary as writing pulls each person more deeply into a project. That, he argues, is why the competitions once printed on cereal boxes invited shoppers to finish, in ten words at most, a line such as "I like Harvest Gold flakes because…". Committing the words to paper is itself what nudges us toward believing them.
Authority need not stifle innovation, though it often does. Leadership of the wrong sort produces what Marnix calls "the co-pilot reflex — the unfortunate way team members back away from duties that ought to be theirs". The name comes, he explains, from how "on aircraft flown by more than one pilot the rest of the crew can lapse into a passivity that occasionally proves fatal when the captain settles on a plainly mistaken course". Nothing about this is peculiar to flying, he adds; it can surface in any workplace ruled by a domineering figure.
At the opposite extreme stands the Anvil design collective of the 1980s, a band of young designers who held that "the sole rule was that no rules applied". In such an atmosphere ideas passed freely between people, and the result was a burst of inventiveness with shape, purpose, colour and material that transformed how furniture was viewed.
Many theorists hold that the finest managers lead from the rear, taking their satisfaction in what the group achieves and handing credit wherever it is owed. As Marnix puts it: "A leader's task is to draw a contribution from everyone, while making plain to all that every suggestion counts toward getting the decision right and will be weighed carefully." What makes innovation so maddening is that the routes to it are many and the formula non-existent. Even so, any manager bent on building a genuinely inventive culture will find the work far easier once these facts of human psychology are taken on board.
It was in the sixth and seventh centuries that people in what are now Gujarat and Rajasthan first worked out how to reach clean underground water once the rains had gone — water they needed for drinking, washing, their livestock and their fields. Yet to see the stepwell merely as a practical device is to miss much of what made it important.
Found nowhere else in the world, these structures could be highly elaborate and differed greatly in scale and form. At the height of their use they doubled as social hubs — spots for meeting, resting and prayer, open to villagers of every rank except the very lowest castes. The desert districts of Gujarat, where the wells are called vav, and Rajasthan, where they are known as baori, hold most surviving examples, though a handful remain in Delhi. Some stood within or close to settlements to serve local people; others stood beside routes as resting spots for travellers.
The name itself hints at the design: from the surface, flights of stone steps drop away towards the water — usually an aquifer below ground — which sinks lower as the wet season passes. A visitor arriving when the water stood high had only a short way to go down, but in drier months a whole succession of levels had to be descended before the surface could be reached.
A number of the wells are enormous open pits, their sloping walls faced with hundreds of steps arranged in tiers, while others are subtler affairs in which long stepped corridors lead down through storey after storey to the water. All were raised in stone and held up by pillars, and many had shaded canopies where visitors could escape the merciless sun. Their finest touch, though, lies in the delicate carvings that cover so many of them, portraying everything from combat and dance to the small routines of daily life, such as combing hair or grinding grain.
Over the following centuries the north-west acquired thousands of such wells, yet most have since been abandoned; many now stand ruined and waterless, their aquifers drained off to feed industry so that the steps no longer reach any water. Matters have been made worse by the repeated failure of the monsoon in recent years, which left much of the region parched.
Even so, several major wells in Gujarat have lately been given careful repairs, and its state authorities have declared their intention to bring the region's stepwells as a whole back to good order.
The old Gujarati capital of Kharoda holds what may be the most beautiful of all the wells still standing, Rani Amba Vav, or the Queen's Stepwell. Commissioned by Queen Sunayana early in the twelfth century, it was choked with silt after a flood two hundred years later, and recovered only when the Archaeological Survey of India restored it so thoroughly that it now looks almost new. The monument runs to sixty metres long, eighteen across and twenty-four deep, and set into recesses along its walls are some four hundred carvings of deities such as Shiva and Lakshmi. Remarkably, when a powerful cyclone tore across the area in 2001, the centuries-old structure came through unharmed.
Further north in Gujarat, beside a temple to the sun in the town of Velapur, stands the Aditya Kund, raised by King Devraj in 1032 as an offering to the sun. Strictly speaking it is a kund (an open pool rather than a true well) but it wears all the marks of stepwell design, its steps dropping to the floor in a sequence of terraces that form a striking geometric pattern. Between these flights sit ninety-six shrines, each finely carved.
Rajasthan, too, is rich in such structures. Some 200 kilometres south of Jaipur lies the old city of Sohal, long admired for its buildings, the stepwells among them. A particularly large one, Rajni Ki Baori, was put up in 1710 by the local queen, Vasundhara; forty-two metres deep, twenty-two wide and thirty-eight long, this finely worked monument was one of eighteen baoris she ordered built around Sohal.
Roughly 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, in the crumbling town of Amroli, is Chandra Baori, among the most ancient and deepest wells in India and, to the eye, perhaps the most striking. It was raised around 800 AD beside the temple of Ambika Mata; hundreds of steps zigzag down three of its walls, plunging through fourteen storeys and, from a distance, making a bold geometric shape. Along the remaining wall, roofed balconies on richly decorated pillars look out across the steps.
One well people still use stands a little way off the Jaipur–Delhi highway: Neelkanth Ki Baori. Built around 1720, it goes down nine storeys, of which the two lowest remain permanently submerged. Ninety-two colonnaded openings ring it at ground level, and from there a flight of a hundred and sixty steps takes the visitor to the lowest water.
After long years of neglect, many of these feats of medieval building have been rescued by the Archaeological Survey of India, which sees their upkeep as part of safeguarding the nation's heritage. To the remotest corners of the north-west, sightseers now travel to marvel at architecture put up a thousand years ago — structures that testify both to the cleverness and craft of early societies and to how precious water has always been to human life.
B. When it comes to freight, much of the increase traces to shifts in Europe's economy and in the way goods are produced. Over the past two decades the removal of internal borders has carried the EU from a 'stock' model towards a 'flow' one. Reinforcing this, certain industries — labour-intensive ones above all — have moved production elsewhere in search of lower costs, often leaving the manufacturing site hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres from where final assembly happens or from the people who will use the product.
C. Robust growth is also forecast in the states now applying to join the EU, adding further to transport flows, road freight most of all. By 1996 several were already exporting almost three times their 1990 volumes, while their imports had climbed beyond six times the 1990 figure. Many applicant states inherited networks built around the railways, yet since the early 1990s the split between modes has swung heavily towards the road. Road haulage grew by 22.6 per cent between 1990 and 1996, whereas rail freight fell by 39.8 per cent, though rail there still runs, on average, well above the levels seen in current member states.
D. A fresh priority — sustainable development — now opens the way to reshaping the EU's common transport policy. Endorsed at the Aveiro European Council, the aim is to be reached by weaving environmental thinking into Community policy, with altering the balance among transport modes at its centre. Full delivery of so ambitious an aim will not be possible before 2025; even so, the proposed measures mark a necessary first move toward a sustainable transport system that ought, a generation from now — by 2045 — to be running.
E. Back in 1996 the energy burned in transport was responsible for 31 per cent of emissions of CO2, the foremost greenhouse gas. Recent projections suggest that, if the upward trend in traffic goes unchecked, transport's CO2 output will swell by roughly 45 per cent, reaching 1,038 billion tonnes by 2025 against the 716 billion tonnes logged in 1990. Here again the chief offender is road transport, generating on its own 86 per cent of the CO2 that transport releases. Turning to alternative fuels and raising energy efficiency is therefore at once an environmental obligation and a technological challenge.
F. Why the transport balance must be corrected.
Alongside this, much more must be done to bring about a shift between modes. No such change can happen from one day to the next, least of all after more than fifty years in which the balance has slid steadily the way of the road. Matters have gone so far that rail freight is now pushed to the margins, holding a mere 9 per cent of the market, while cross-border goods trains crawl at an average of just 16 kilometres an hour. From this, three broad options have taken shape.
G. Under the first option, road transport alone would be tackled, purely through pricing, with nothing done in parallel to strengthen the other modes. For a while this might hold back road traffic's rise, since dearer transport tends to raise how fully lorries are loaded and how many passengers each car carries. The problem is that, without any accompanying effort to revive the other modes, the more sustainable alternatives would have no way to step in and take over.
H. The second option likewise leans on charging for road use, but this time alongside steps to make the other modes work better — through improved service quality, smarter logistics and new technology. What it omits is any spending on fresh infrastructure, and it gives no assurance of stronger cohesion between regions. It could loosen the tie between road growth and economic growth rather more than the first, yet the road would still hold the largest share of traffic and keep clustering along overloaded routes, for all that it pollutes more than any other mode. On its own, then, it cannot secure the change of balance needed.
I. The third option is not a novelty. It brings together a whole range of measures, from pricing at one end to reviving the alternative modes and channelling investment into the trans-European network of railways and waterways at the other. Integrated in this way, it would let the other modes recover the market shares they held in 1996 and so tip the balance back. Given fifty years of built-in bias toward the road, it is far bolder than it looks; even so, it would sharply break the link between growth in road traffic and economic growth, without curbing the freedom of people and goods to move.
If a business is to survive, it must keep innovating, and firms pour money into coaxing fresh ideas from their staff. Yet plenty of employees sit in lavish, purpose-built facilities meant to spark invention and feel no more creative for it, while others, given neither funding nor much space, still manage to produce genuinely new things.
Ivo Marnix, who teaches social psychology at Rijnstad University, traces one source of that failure to hiring. When a recruit's values line up with the organisation's, he notes, it shapes both how much they contribute and whether they remain on the payroll two years on — a link the research bears out. Work at the Fenwick Business School points the same way: creativity comes more readily to some than to others, but in the right conditions almost anyone can produce it.
A celebrated image from the early days of soul music captures exactly what Marnix means. Taken in 1961, it shows four singers — Eddie Colefax, Ray Sutton, Hank Delano and Junior Pace — around a piano at Tidewater Sound in Baltimore, and behind it lies a story easy to miss. What became the studio's "golden four" might just as well have been five. The singer absent from the frame, Otis Rand, had a finer natural voice than any of them. But Merle Vance, who ran Tidewater, was set on remaking popular music by welding gospel to country blues — an aim Colefax, Sutton, Delano and Pace grasped at once and embraced. Rand felt no such pull, and managed only one hit while signed to the label.
Why does that alignment of values matter so much? Because innovating always involves change, Marnix explains, and change is something our species handles warily: "The moment things start to shift, our instinct is to keep safe." His advice to managers therefore runs against the grain: Rather than dangling a reward, they should spell out exactly what the firm will forfeit by letting an opportunity slip. People, the evidence suggests, gamble far more readily to avoid a loss than to chase a gain.
Steering innovation calls for a delicate touch. Because the marketing, product-development and finance teams each hear from different constituencies, a company can easily find itself tugged three ways at once. Small "pockets of innovation", too, tend to vanish unless some mechanism keeps the different parts of the firm talking to one another. This is a hands-on business: it will not do to announce, "Here is where we are heading, and you are all coming with me."
To Marnix, this "follow-the-leader" habit is hazardous, above all because it tempts those in charge to strike out alone. "We have solid evidence that three heads beat one at solving problems — even when that one head belongs to the ablest person in the field." By way of illustration he recalls a conversation with the biochemist Lars Ostrem, who, with his colleague Fenella Wray, had worked out the molecular structure of photerin, a protein that lets certain deep-sea creatures glow. "I asked how the two of them had reached the answer before a field of formidable competitors, and his reply floored me. They had got there, he said, precisely because they knew they were not the cleverest researchers chasing it. The cleverest was a woman named Corinne Adler, who — in Ostrem's words — 'was so brilliant she almost never asked anyone's opinion'."
Working in teams draws on one of the deepest springs of human conduct. "So much of what we do rests on peer validation that its pull usually escapes our notice," Marnix observes. "Suppose long-serving staff are digging in against your project — the answer is to get another veteran to argue its case." He is far from the tactic's only advocate. When influence travels sideways rather than down from above, studies find, it carries far more weight than any speech from the boss.
Jotting things down, sketching them out and building rough prototypes can all get ideas flowing. Marnix points to many studies and past episodes showing that an act as ordinary as writing pulls each person more deeply into a project. That, he argues, is why the competitions once printed on cereal boxes invited shoppers to finish, in ten words at most, a line such as "I like Harvest Gold flakes because…". Committing the words to paper is itself what nudges us toward believing them.
Authority need not stifle innovation, though it often does. Leadership of the wrong sort produces what Marnix calls "the co-pilot reflex — the unfortunate way team members back away from duties that ought to be theirs". The name comes, he explains, from how "on aircraft flown by more than one pilot the rest of the crew can lapse into a passivity that occasionally proves fatal when the captain settles on a plainly mistaken course". Nothing about this is peculiar to flying, he adds; it can surface in any workplace ruled by a domineering figure.
At the opposite extreme stands the Anvil design collective of the 1980s, a band of young designers who held that "the sole rule was that no rules applied". In such an atmosphere ideas passed freely between people, and the result was a burst of inventiveness with shape, purpose, colour and material that transformed how furniture was viewed.
Many theorists hold that the finest managers lead from the rear, taking their satisfaction in what the group achieves and handing credit wherever it is owed. As Marnix puts it: "A leader's task is to draw a contribution from everyone, while making plain to all that every suggestion counts toward getting the decision right and will be weighed carefully." What makes innovation so maddening is that the routes to it are many and the formula non-existent. Even so, any manager bent on building a genuinely inventive culture will find the work far easier once these facts of human psychology are taken on board.
