IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The History of Glass
• The first humans shaped a naturally occurring glass known as
1.
into the sharp
2.
they used for cutting.
• 3500 BC: clay
3.
were given a coating of hand-made glass.
• First century BC: glass took on colour, owing to the
4.
that had entered its raw ingredients.
• Until 410 AD: the
5.
were the only people able to produce glass.
• From the ninth century: the workshops of Aldene became known for making glass bottles.
• 1600s: Tobias Ehrlich worked out a method that used
6.
to keep
7.
from forming in blown glass.
• Mid-1800s: glassmaking in Bohemia grew once the
8.
charged on melted glass were removed.
Question 9 - 13
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
9
The bottle-making machine introduced by Reinhardt Sölle was faster than any machine that came after it.
10
Aldous Frayne set up the company whose factory was the first to run his new bottle-making machine.
11
A company's ability to keep its share of the market rests on the standards it maintains.
12
In recent years, demand for glass jars has grown more quickly than demand for plastic containers.
13
Producing glass from recycled material uses more energy than making it from new materials.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
14
What did the 2009 find tell researchers about the karn?
A
It had survived in the region far more recently than experts had assumed.
B
Its disappearance was tied to the arrival of farming.
C
It had died out long before the poem was written.
D
Its physical features set it clearly apart from other cats.
15
In the third paragraph, what does the writer say about the role of large predators?
A
Predators are mainly a danger to the species living around them.
B
The loss of predators has little lasting effect on an ecosystem.
C
The presence of top predators can allow many other species to flourish.
D
Predators behave differently depending on their surroundings.
16
In the fourth paragraph, how does the writer characterise the way conservation has been practised in Varestia?
A
It has largely met the goals it set for itself.
B
It has rested on a mistaken understanding of how nature works.
C
It is starting to move in a new direction.
D
It has paid attention mainly to the commonest species.
17
If broad stretches of sea were closed to the fishing fleets, the outcome would be
A
a temporary fall in the industry's earnings.
B
strong resistance from within the industry.
C
changes to the methods the industry relies on.
D
real gains for the fishing industry itself.
18
According to the writer, what makes rewilding unlike other campaigns to protect the environment?
A
It puts forward a more hopeful and inspiring vision.
B
Its aims are easier to accomplish.
C
Its campaigners express themselves more clearly.
D
It rests on firmer scientific foundations.
Question 19 - 22
Complete the summary using the list of words and phrases, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Reintroducing the karn to Varestia
Bringing the karn back to Varestia would carry a number of benefits. Although nothing suggests the animal has ever placed at risk, it would help reduce the populations of certain that have swollen dramatically over the past few decades. The threat it would pose to would be slight, as long as they stay well away from the dense cover the cat relies on. On top of this, the reintroduction scheme would fit well with attempts to bring native back to certain parts of the country.
A
bare slopes
B
woodland
C
people
D
rare species
E
livestock
F
grazing animals
Question 23 - 26
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
23
The speed of the karn's recovery across the mainland took specialists by surprise.
24
As farmland in the uplands has been given up, the karn has found new ground to occupy.
25
Varestia has moved as quickly as other parts of the mainland in bringing back its lost predators.
26
A new organisation has already been set up to drive rewilding across the whole of Varestia.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 33
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-viii
List of Headings
I
Responsibility for the crisis falling on a wide range of outside institutions
II
Directors giving too little thought to the long term
III
How closer examination has affected firms
IV
A shortage of directors with sufficiently wide experience
V
A suggestion for running the board differently
VI
Why every part of a business may have to be rethought
VII
Conflicts about the rewards given to top executives
VIII
The danger that some directors are left out of key decisions
27
Paragraph A
28
Paragraph B
29
Paragraph C
30
Paragraph D
31
Paragraph E
32
Paragraph F
33
Paragraph G
Question 34 - 37
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
34
Boards generally make certain that every item on the agenda is given as much discussion time as it needs.
35
A committee's meeting can sometimes run on for longer than a meeting of the entire board.
36
Automated trading systems now account for the greater part of all share dealing.
37
Shareholders became better able to reject executive pay policies once such votes were given legal force.
Question 38 - 40
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
38
Ahead of the crash, the part-time non-executives were handicapped by having far less
than the executives did.
39
Directors give too much weight to
that matters only in the near term.
40
The person heading the
committee can find the role isolating and highly visible.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The History of Glass
Human beings have relied on glass since the very beginning. Long before anyone could manufacture it, a natural form was already in use: fulmenite — a dark, glassy rock formed when lightning strikes desert sand and fuses the grains — was chipped by early peoples into the cutting blades they used each day. Glass made on purpose came far later. The oldest deliberately produced pieces to survive are not objects but glazes, thin glassy films spread over the surface of clay amulets from roughly 3500 BC. Two thousand years more passed before the first hollow vessel appeared, made around 1400 BC by wrapping a core of packed clay in a skin of molten glass.
From roughly the first century BC, blowing became the usual way of shaping glass containers. Early blown glass carried strong tints, an effect of the ash that found its way into the raw materials. Colourless glass came only in the following century, after which makers could add substances to give it whatever hue they wished. Knowledge of the craft was carried across the region by the Serrans, a trading people who guarded their methods so jealously that the skill spread no further until their network of colonies collapsed in 410 AD; only then did glassmaking pass into common use across Europe and lands to the east. From the ninth century, the workshops of Aldene won fame for technical mastery and artistic flair in shaping glass bottles, and many of their craftsmen left to found glassworks elsewhere.
A significant advance came when a new type of glass was created by the glassmaker Tobias Ehrlich (1641–1702). The blown glass of his day was frequently spoiled by a want of clarity, so, to put this right, Ehrlich introduced potash into the raw materials, a measure that did away with the small bubbles which would otherwise appear as the glass was worked. What he produced was softer, easier to decorate and more sharply refractive, qualities that gave it exceptional brilliance and, before long, made it prized by those who ground lenses. It is to Ehrlich's discovery that we owe the later development of spectacles, telescopes and microscopes.
In Bohemia, the modern glass industry only began to grow after 1849, when a burden that had weighed on the trade for a hundred years was finally lifted. Heavy duties had been imposed on every measure of glass melted in a workshop, and were collected without a break from 1749 to 1849. It was Emil Roth's Palace of Light, built for the Leustadt Exposition of 1855, that first presented glass as a material fit for construction; the building encouraged its use in public halls, private houses and greenhouses. Meanwhile, steady progress in science and the arrival of better equipment refined the methods by which glass was made.
After 1889, glassmaking moved on from the age-old practice of mouth-blowing to a semi-automatic system, once the factory owner Reinhardt Sölle put into service, at Hasenthal, a machine that turned out 300 bottles an hour — four times the rate of any earlier method. A fully automatic machine followed in 1911, the work of Aldous Frayne in the United States, who had founded the Frayne Glassworks Company (later the well-known Frayne–Baumann) and installed it in his own factory; it managed an impressive 3,000 bottles an hour. Further advances came quickly, yet glass did not become a matter for science until the First World War, when the country was cut off from the suppliers it relied on. Until then it had been treated as a craft rather than an exact science.
Glass manufacture is now a major commercial activity. In a global market where firms compete fiercely, it is the standards they set for quality, design and service that determine whether they hold on to their share. A single modern plant may turn out containers by the million each day, and among the many colours available, the three that stay in greatest demand are amber, green and clear. Life without glass is almost impossible to imagine. Our homes and vehicles contain it, and it is there at every meal and drink we sit down to. Countless goods are packaged in it, from drinks and a wide range of foods to medicines and cosmetics.
Glass lends itself perfectly to recycling, and as shoppers grow more mindful of environmental questions, glass bottles and jars are winning back favour. For the environment, recycling glass is welcome news. It keeps used containers out of landfill sites. Because melting recycled glass calls for less energy than melting raw materials from scratch, it also cuts spending on fuel and on production generally. On top of that, recycling eases the demand for fresh raw materials to be dug from the ground, preserving resources that would otherwise be lost.
It's time to start returning vanished native animals to Varestia, says Rowan Aldrich
A poem composed around 610 AD tells of a hunt for a puzzling creature the writer calls a vessom, though for a long time no one could say what the word meant. The mystery held until 2009, when a bone of roughly the same age came to light in Deller Cave, in the north of Varestia. Before that find, scholars assumed the karn — a large, spotted cat with tufted ears — had vanished from Varestia at least 6,500 years ago, before the islanders took up farming. Yet the Deller bone, with three more recovered in the Harlow Fells and the Cadan valley, makes a strong case that the vessom of the old poem and the karn were one and the same. If so, the cat's presumed extinction date leaps forward by some 5,000 years.
That, as it happens, is not the animal's final appearance in Varestian culture. On an eighth-century carved pillar from the island of Sorna, a speckled, tuft-eared cat sits among the deer, boar and aurochs being chased by a mounted hunter. Had the carving's rear portion not worn away over time, identification would be beyond doubt, for the karn's stubby tail is impossible to mistake. Even without that detail, it is hard to imagine what else the figure might be. Today the karn is fast becoming the emblem of a movement now reshaping Varestian environmentalism: rewilding.
At its heart, rewilding is the large-scale repair of ecosystems that human activity has damaged. Forests are allowed back onto stripped land, stretches of seabed are left to recover from trawling and dredging, and rivers are freed to run their natural course. Above all, the approach seeks to restore species that have gone missing. Among the more remarkable lessons of recent ecology is that an ecosystem stripped of its large predators functions in an entirely different way from one where those hunters remain. Predators can set in motion far-reaching processes that ripple along the whole food chain, opening room for hundreds of species that would otherwise struggle to survive. In the end, the killers prove to be givers of life.
Findings of this kind pose a serious problem for conservation in Varestia, a field that has repeatedly picked out some arbitrary grouping of plants and animals and then laboured, at great cost, to hold it exactly as it was. The living world has been treated rather like preserved fruit sealed in a jar — nothing admitted, nothing released, nature frozen at one stage of its development. But an ecosystem is far more than a list of its species; it is equally the shifting web of relationships binding them together, and that restlessness very often hinges on large predators.
Out at sea the promise is greater still. Were broad zones closed to commercial fishing, the scenes recorded in old accounts might return — great shoals of fish driven along by fin and sperm whales, all within view of the Varestian coast. Such a measure would also do much to raise catches in the surrounding waters. By picking over every last patch of seabed and sparing no ground where fish might breed, the industry acts against its own future in the plainest way.
Among environmental movements, rewilding is a rarity: its supporters say plainly what they want, not merely what they reject. One reason the notion is taking hold so quickly in Varestia is the hopefulness it offers, something brighter than the usual environmental vow, which comes down to little more than 'Come with us, and the world will turn out a touch less grim than it might have.'
To people the karn poses no danger whatever; not a single case is on record of the cat hunting a human being. Its preferred prey is the copper deer, whose numbers have shot up across Varestia in recent decades and whose relentless browsing keeps thwarting efforts to bring the forests back. The karn will also seek out the ghost deer — an introduced species so good at hiding in dense stands of young trees that people find it nearly impossible to keep in check. Reintroducing such a hunter sits well with the goal of returning woodland to the stripped, empty uplands. Because the cat needs thick cover, it poses scarcely any threat to sheep and other farm animals, which the terms of farm subsidies already require to be kept clear of the woods.
Conservationists I met on a recent visit to the Vardan Mountains reckoned the karn could return to that range within fifteen years, and once trees reclaim the bare hills elsewhere in Varestia, the cats may not be far behind. Judged against the rest of the continent, none of this is remarkable. Elsewhere the karn has already been resettled in the Kessel range, the Ombrian Alps, the western Duvray hills and the Astel mountains, and found its own way back into many districts more. Its mainland numbers have trebled since 1975, to something near 9,000. Much as the wolf, bear, beaver, boar, bison and elk did earlier, the cat has spread as farming withdrew from the hills and as people grasp that protecting eye-catching wildlife earns more than hunting it, tourists being willing to pay for a sighting. Rewilding on a grand scale is happening almost everywhere, save Varestia.
At home, opinion is only now starting to shift. A growing number of conservationists concede that the old sealed-jar approach is failing even by its own measure. Ventures like Forest Return, at work in the northern uplands, already hint at what may lie ahead. Plans are afoot for a body to spur the rewilding of land and sea throughout Varestia, its ultimate aim being to restore to the country's ecosystems the scarcest species of all: hope.
UK companies need more effective boards of directors
A
A. A run of serious governance failures — governance being the way a company is steered at its most senior level — has left firms in Britain, and in other countries too, with good reason to contemplate a drastic rethink of what their directors do. Nobody would pretend that sitting on a board is straightforward these days. When the financial system collapsed in 2008, the downturn that followed proved deeper and longer-lasting than almost anyone had predicted, and the many autopsies of the episode cast blame in every direction. Regulators, central banks, auditors and governments alike found themselves under suspicion. As for the directors and managers of the banks, their much-publicised shortcomings were raked over at length in one report, inquiry and commentary after another.
B
One consequence of all this attention is that the running of companies generally has turned into a matter of fierce public argument, and the burden carried by directors has grown heavier along with it. Consider the most basic point of all: the sheer number of hours a directorship now demands has climbed steeply, which throws doubt on the familiar arrangement whereby part-time, independent non-executives oversee a firm. A board that used to gather perhaps eight to ten times a year may now face a schedule in which the occasions calling for its attention and its decisions have multiplied. On top of that, each meeting brings more to read and to prepare. When agendas swell in this way, the room left for genuine debate has to be squeezed so that the day's business can be got through.
C
To manage the load, much of a board's work is frequently handed down to committees. That may well be the more efficient route, yet it can leave the full board only loosely engaged with several of the questions that matter most. Indeed, a meeting of the audit committee not infrequently outlasts the gathering of the main board. Procedure ends up standing in for genuine exchange, and true collaboration is the casualty, so that boxes get ticked while the underlying problems are left untackled.
D
A bolder answer, suited perhaps to a handful of very large firms whose operations are sprawling and intricate, is the professional board, on which members might serve three or four days a week and enjoy the backing of their own dedicated staff and advisers. A structure of that sort carries obvious dangers, and firm ground rules would be needed to stop it from treading on management's territory by involving itself in the daily conduct of the business. Questions of how to recruit such directors, how to reward them and how to preserve their independence might well surface, and the arrangement would hardly suit every company. Even so, boards that were more professional and far better briefed would have served the banks especially well, for there the salaried executives commanded a depth of inside knowledge their part-time colleagues could never match — a gulf that left those non-executives unable to grasp or foresee the 2008 crash.
E
A charge levelled again and again at boards is that too little of their attention goes to the long view — to strategy, to sustainability, to governance — while far too much is fixed on immediate profit. Both the rules they work under and the very shape of the market push them in this direction. The relentless rhythm of quarterly reporting can warp the choices a board reaches, since every four months its directors must 'hit the numbers' to feed a market forever hungry for fresh data. Such pressure rewards one particular breed of investor, the sort who slips in and out of a holding purely for a quick return and never troubles to discuss strategy or performance with the company. The tendency has sharpened as capital has gone global and as automated trading systems have come into ever wider use. Corporate culture bends to fit, and management, by and large, is paid to meet its commercial goals.
F
Pay for chief executives has turned into a battlefield on which investors, managers and board members wage set-piece struggles — sometimes out of sight, though more and more often under the bright lights of press coverage. To many observers that openness is precisely what transparency and sound governance demand, since shareholders bring their weight to bear on pay so as to force boards into dismissing chief executives who fail to deliver. Once such votes had been made legally binding, their capacity to strike down a company's pay policies grew stronger still. Chairing the remuneration committee can prove a lonely and badly exposed post, as Margery Thorne discovered at Kestrel Bank: she was obliged to step down after weathering a storm of criticism for defending a huge bonus destined for the chief executive — the irony being that, behind the committee's closed doors, she was widely believed to have argued against it.
G
Out of the financial crisis grew a broader conversation about what a company is actually for, together with a sharpened concern for corporate ethics. Faith in the corporation has worn thin, and thinkers such as Adrian Feld — whose bestseller The Limits of the Market has found a wide readership — now press hard questions about the morality of capitalism and of the market economy itself. In every sector, boards will have to broaden their outlook so as to take such matters in, and doing so may mean recasting the very goals a company sets for itself. These are demanding times.
Human beings have relied on glass since the very beginning. Long before anyone could manufacture it, a natural form was already in use: fulmenite — a dark, glassy rock formed when lightning strikes desert sand and fuses the grains — was chipped by early peoples into the cutting blades they used each day. Glass made on purpose came far later. The oldest deliberately produced pieces to survive are not objects but glazes, thin glassy films spread over the surface of clay amulets from roughly 3500 BC. Two thousand years more passed before the first hollow vessel appeared, made around 1400 BC by wrapping a core of packed clay in a skin of molten glass.
From roughly the first century BC, blowing became the usual way of shaping glass containers. Early blown glass carried strong tints, an effect of the ash that found its way into the raw materials. Colourless glass came only in the following century, after which makers could add substances to give it whatever hue they wished. Knowledge of the craft was carried across the region by the Serrans, a trading people who guarded their methods so jealously that the skill spread no further until their network of colonies collapsed in 410 AD; only then did glassmaking pass into common use across Europe and lands to the east. From the ninth century, the workshops of Aldene won fame for technical mastery and artistic flair in shaping glass bottles, and many of their craftsmen left to found glassworks elsewhere.
A significant advance came when a new type of glass was created by the glassmaker Tobias Ehrlich (1641–1702). The blown glass of his day was frequently spoiled by a want of clarity, so, to put this right, Ehrlich introduced potash into the raw materials, a measure that did away with the small bubbles which would otherwise appear as the glass was worked. What he produced was softer, easier to decorate and more sharply refractive, qualities that gave it exceptional brilliance and, before long, made it prized by those who ground lenses. It is to Ehrlich's discovery that we owe the later development of spectacles, telescopes and microscopes.
In Bohemia, the modern glass industry only began to grow after 1849, when a burden that had weighed on the trade for a hundred years was finally lifted. Heavy duties had been imposed on every measure of glass melted in a workshop, and were collected without a break from 1749 to 1849. It was Emil Roth's Palace of Light, built for the Leustadt Exposition of 1855, that first presented glass as a material fit for construction; the building encouraged its use in public halls, private houses and greenhouses. Meanwhile, steady progress in science and the arrival of better equipment refined the methods by which glass was made.
After 1889, glassmaking moved on from the age-old practice of mouth-blowing to a semi-automatic system, once the factory owner Reinhardt Sölle put into service, at Hasenthal, a machine that turned out 300 bottles an hour — four times the rate of any earlier method. A fully automatic machine followed in 1911, the work of Aldous Frayne in the United States, who had founded the Frayne Glassworks Company (later the well-known Frayne–Baumann) and installed it in his own factory; it managed an impressive 3,000 bottles an hour. Further advances came quickly, yet glass did not become a matter for science until the First World War, when the country was cut off from the suppliers it relied on. Until then it had been treated as a craft rather than an exact science.
Glass manufacture is now a major commercial activity. In a global market where firms compete fiercely, it is the standards they set for quality, design and service that determine whether they hold on to their share. A single modern plant may turn out containers by the million each day, and among the many colours available, the three that stay in greatest demand are amber, green and clear. Life without glass is almost impossible to imagine. Our homes and vehicles contain it, and it is there at every meal and drink we sit down to. Countless goods are packaged in it, from drinks and a wide range of foods to medicines and cosmetics.
Glass lends itself perfectly to recycling, and as shoppers grow more mindful of environmental questions, glass bottles and jars are winning back favour. For the environment, recycling glass is welcome news. It keeps used containers out of landfill sites. Because melting recycled glass calls for less energy than melting raw materials from scratch, it also cuts spending on fuel and on production generally. On top of that, recycling eases the demand for fresh raw materials to be dug from the ground, preserving resources that would otherwise be lost.
A poem composed around 610 AD tells of a hunt for a puzzling creature the writer calls a vessom, though for a long time no one could say what the word meant. The mystery held until 2009, when a bone of roughly the same age came to light in Deller Cave, in the north of Varestia. Before that find, scholars assumed the karn — a large, spotted cat with tufted ears — had vanished from Varestia at least 6,500 years ago, before the islanders took up farming. Yet the Deller bone, with three more recovered in the Harlow Fells and the Cadan valley, makes a strong case that the vessom of the old poem and the karn were one and the same. If so, the cat's presumed extinction date leaps forward by some 5,000 years.
That, as it happens, is not the animal's final appearance in Varestian culture. On an eighth-century carved pillar from the island of Sorna, a speckled, tuft-eared cat sits among the deer, boar and aurochs being chased by a mounted hunter. Had the carving's rear portion not worn away over time, identification would be beyond doubt, for the karn's stubby tail is impossible to mistake. Even without that detail, it is hard to imagine what else the figure might be. Today the karn is fast becoming the emblem of a movement now reshaping Varestian environmentalism: rewilding.
At its heart, rewilding is the large-scale repair of ecosystems that human activity has damaged. Forests are allowed back onto stripped land, stretches of seabed are left to recover from trawling and dredging, and rivers are freed to run their natural course. Above all, the approach seeks to restore species that have gone missing. Among the more remarkable lessons of recent ecology is that an ecosystem stripped of its large predators functions in an entirely different way from one where those hunters remain. Predators can set in motion far-reaching processes that ripple along the whole food chain, opening room for hundreds of species that would otherwise struggle to survive. In the end, the killers prove to be givers of life.
Findings of this kind pose a serious problem for conservation in Varestia, a field that has repeatedly picked out some arbitrary grouping of plants and animals and then laboured, at great cost, to hold it exactly as it was. The living world has been treated rather like preserved fruit sealed in a jar — nothing admitted, nothing released, nature frozen at one stage of its development. But an ecosystem is far more than a list of its species; it is equally the shifting web of relationships binding them together, and that restlessness very often hinges on large predators.
Out at sea the promise is greater still. Were broad zones closed to commercial fishing, the scenes recorded in old accounts might return — great shoals of fish driven along by fin and sperm whales, all within view of the Varestian coast. Such a measure would also do much to raise catches in the surrounding waters. By picking over every last patch of seabed and sparing no ground where fish might breed, the industry acts against its own future in the plainest way.
Among environmental movements, rewilding is a rarity: its supporters say plainly what they want, not merely what they reject. One reason the notion is taking hold so quickly in Varestia is the hopefulness it offers, something brighter than the usual environmental vow, which comes down to little more than 'Come with us, and the world will turn out a touch less grim than it might have.'
To people the karn poses no danger whatever; not a single case is on record of the cat hunting a human being. Its preferred prey is the copper deer, whose numbers have shot up across Varestia in recent decades and whose relentless browsing keeps thwarting efforts to bring the forests back. The karn will also seek out the ghost deer — an introduced species so good at hiding in dense stands of young trees that people find it nearly impossible to keep in check. Reintroducing such a hunter sits well with the goal of returning woodland to the stripped, empty uplands. Because the cat needs thick cover, it poses scarcely any threat to sheep and other farm animals, which the terms of farm subsidies already require to be kept clear of the woods.
Conservationists I met on a recent visit to the Vardan Mountains reckoned the karn could return to that range within fifteen years, and once trees reclaim the bare hills elsewhere in Varestia, the cats may not be far behind. Judged against the rest of the continent, none of this is remarkable. Elsewhere the karn has already been resettled in the Kessel range, the Ombrian Alps, the western Duvray hills and the Astel mountains, and found its own way back into many districts more. Its mainland numbers have trebled since 1975, to something near 9,000. Much as the wolf, bear, beaver, boar, bison and elk did earlier, the cat has spread as farming withdrew from the hills and as people grasp that protecting eye-catching wildlife earns more than hunting it, tourists being willing to pay for a sighting. Rewilding on a grand scale is happening almost everywhere, save Varestia.
At home, opinion is only now starting to shift. A growing number of conservationists concede that the old sealed-jar approach is failing even by its own measure. Ventures like Forest Return, at work in the northern uplands, already hint at what may lie ahead. Plans are afoot for a body to spur the rewilding of land and sea throughout Varestia, its ultimate aim being to restore to the country's ecosystems the scarcest species of all: hope.
B. One consequence of all this attention is that the running of companies generally has turned into a matter of fierce public argument, and the burden carried by directors has grown heavier along with it. Consider the most basic point of all: the sheer number of hours a directorship now demands has climbed steeply, which throws doubt on the familiar arrangement whereby part-time, independent non-executives oversee a firm. A board that used to gather perhaps eight to ten times a year may now face a schedule in which the occasions calling for its attention and its decisions have multiplied. On top of that, each meeting brings more to read and to prepare. When agendas swell in this way, the room left for genuine debate has to be squeezed so that the day's business can be got through.
C. To manage the load, much of a board's work is frequently handed down to committees. That may well be the more efficient route, yet it can leave the full board only loosely engaged with several of the questions that matter most. Indeed, a meeting of the audit committee not infrequently outlasts the gathering of the main board. Procedure ends up standing in for genuine exchange, and true collaboration is the casualty, so that boxes get ticked while the underlying problems are left untackled.
D. A bolder answer, suited perhaps to a handful of very large firms whose operations are sprawling and intricate, is the professional board, on which members might serve three or four days a week and enjoy the backing of their own dedicated staff and advisers. A structure of that sort carries obvious dangers, and firm ground rules would be needed to stop it from treading on management's territory by involving itself in the daily conduct of the business. Questions of how to recruit such directors, how to reward them and how to preserve their independence might well surface, and the arrangement would hardly suit every company. Even so, boards that were more professional and far better briefed would have served the banks especially well, for there the salaried executives commanded a depth of inside knowledge their part-time colleagues could never match — a gulf that left those non-executives unable to grasp or foresee the 2008 crash.
E. A charge levelled again and again at boards is that too little of their attention goes to the long view — to strategy, to sustainability, to governance — while far too much is fixed on immediate profit. Both the rules they work under and the very shape of the market push them in this direction. The relentless rhythm of quarterly reporting can warp the choices a board reaches, since every four months its directors must 'hit the numbers' to feed a market forever hungry for fresh data. Such pressure rewards one particular breed of investor, the sort who slips in and out of a holding purely for a quick return and never troubles to discuss strategy or performance with the company. The tendency has sharpened as capital has gone global and as automated trading systems have come into ever wider use. Corporate culture bends to fit, and management, by and large, is paid to meet its commercial goals.
F. Pay for chief executives has turned into a battlefield on which investors, managers and board members wage set-piece struggles — sometimes out of sight, though more and more often under the bright lights of press coverage. To many observers that openness is precisely what transparency and sound governance demand, since shareholders bring their weight to bear on pay so as to force boards into dismissing chief executives who fail to deliver. Once such votes had been made legally binding, their capacity to strike down a company's pay policies grew stronger still. Chairing the remuneration committee can prove a lonely and badly exposed post, as Margery Thorne discovered at Kestrel Bank: she was obliged to step down after weathering a storm of criticism for defending a huge bonus destined for the chief executive — the irony being that, behind the committee's closed doors, she was widely believed to have argued against it.
G. Out of the financial crisis grew a broader conversation about what a company is actually for, together with a sharpened concern for corporate ethics. Faith in the corporation has worn thin, and thinkers such as Adrian Feld — whose bestseller The Limits of the Market has found a wide readership — now press hard questions about the morality of capitalism and of the market economy itself. In every sector, boards will have to broaden their outlook so as to take such matters in, and doing so may mean recasting the very goals a company sets for itself. These are demanding times.
