IELTS Mock Test 13 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
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
Clippers were the fastest sailing ships ever built for trade.
2
Several clippers still exist today in more or less their original state.
3
The figurehead of Cutty Sark represents a spirit that features in Craill's poem.
4
Rennie & Hart was an experienced shipbuilder at the time Manson engaged them.
5
Manson had owned other clipper ships before Cutty Sark was built.
6
Cutty Sark came back from her first voyage to China carrying a cargo of tea.
7
Cutty Sark arrived back in London before the Aurelian did.
8
The rise of steam power drove down the price of shipping tea.
Question 9 - 13
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
9
The ship's peculiar name was drawn from a
by a poet from Scotland.
10
During the 1872 race, Cutty Sark's rudder was wrecked by a
.
11
In her most successful years, the ship transported wool away from
.
12
Captain Traill steered the ship perilously close to
off the southern end of South America.
13
In its current role on display, the ship attracts some 250,000
a year.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Why soil degradation could be a disaster for humans
Fertile soil teems with microorganisms: besides bacteria, it holds viruses and , all of them among decomposing vegetation and minerals. Soil does much more than feed us — it provides nearly all our , and could prove crucial in resisting bacteria that drugs can no longer kill. By absorbing rainfall it shields buildings and roads from flooding, and by trapping it helps to slow climate change. Should these microorganisms disappear, the soil's special qualities may be lost with them; the greatest single cause of such decline is the that humans practise.
Question 18 - 21
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-F from the box below.
List of Endings
A
can harm several different parts of the natural environment.
B
may never be returned to the ground.
C
could make policy-makers more aware of the dangers facing soil.
D
might rely on data gathered in several different nations.
E
can lead to more and healthier plants growing in the soil.
F
is better suited to being applied on a worldwide scale.
The nutrients locked in crop remains that farmers do not reuse
18
The synthetic fertiliser made using the Brandt–Kessler process
19
Applying Joren Maes's mixture of organisms to the soil
20
The target known as 'zero net land degradation'
21
Question 22 - 26
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
22
a prediction of when the world's farmable soil could run out
23
a figure for the yearly cost of flood damage connected to soil degradation
24
an estimate of how long ruined soil takes to recover
25
a list of the various methods used to gather information about soil
26
an explanation of why it is hard to form a global picture of soil
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 29
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
How does the reviewer regard those who champion applied well-being science?
A
They are ignorant of the intellectual tradition they ought to engage with.
B
They rely too heavily on Roth's moral theory.
C
They offer a genuinely fresh account of what makes people happy.
D
They are mistaken to dismiss Roth's ideas.
28
The reviewer brings in Kaldes of Vetra, a philosopher from the distant past, to imply that happiness
A
ought not to be people's chief aim.
B
is not merely an abstract notion.
C
might amount to more than pleasure and the absence of suffering.
D
is not worth pursuing for its own sake.
29
In Verhoeven's view, Roth's idea of using the prices people pay as a yardstick for happiness was important because
A
it was the first dependable way of gauging happiness.
B
it took proper account of consumers' interests.
C
it was an early instance of research into the mind.
D
it connected the study of the mind with commercial activity.
Question 30 - 34
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Anselm Roth
Philosophy was only one of the fields in which Anselm Roth was busy. During the 1780s he proposed a form of technology intended to make between the different departments of the state easier. To make banknotes more difficult to copy, he devised a new printing technique that would improve their , and he also worked out a method for the of food. His prison design was meant to permit the constant of those held inside, and he thought the same plan would suit other kinds of institution too. In his work on happiness, he looked into ways of achieving its , proposing several techniques for the purpose.
A
conservation
B
contact
C
enforcement
D
protection
E
quantification
F
revenue
G
surveillance
Question 35 - 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
35
In the reviewer's view, The Contentment Trade does little to set the present enthusiasm for happiness in a historical context.
36
Roth was born into a family with a tradition of public service.
37
Harlow came to head a national psychological organisation without ever having examined a human subject.
38
Harlow's thinking has shaped governments abroad more than those in his own country.
39
The writer suggests that industrial economies could keep their workforce hard at work even without promising them steadily rising happiness.
40
The writer holds that making happiness a government responsibility puts individual liberty at risk.
IELTS Mock Test Vol 13 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online Mock Test Vol 13 - Reading Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 13 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
Across the nineteenth century, Britain saw great technological progress, and in shipping it appeared in two shifts: sails gave way to steam, and timber hulls to iron and, later, steel.
Clippers were the swiftest trading ships ever to sail: three-masted craft designed to move cargo worldwide, and a few carried passengers too. For roughly three decades up to 1869 - when the Suez Canal opened and steam was overtaking sail - world trade lay in their hands. Of the many that were launched, a single one endures in reasonably whole condition: Cutty Sark, today on view at Leith, on the coast beside Edinburgh.
The ship owes her curious name to a poem, The Ferryman's Bride, by the Scottish writer Angus Craill. In it a miller named Rab is chased by a spirit called Maisie, who wears only a 'cutty sark' - once a Scottish term for a brief undergarment. Maisie is the figure carved at Cutty Sark's bows, where old ships usually set a female form. Since tradition, and Craill's poem, holds that spirits cannot cross water, the name was an odd choice.
Cutty Sark was constructed at Greenock, in Scotland, in 1869, on behalf of a shipping company belonging to Hector Manson. For the work Manson selected a newly established yard, Rennie & Hart, and made certain that the terms of the agreement left him in a commanding position over them. The firm eventually collapsed, and it fell to a rival business to complete the vessel.
Trading tea between China and Britain was the business of Manson's company, and on that route a fast ship could earn its owner both money and reputation; Cutty Sark was accordingly built to outrun every competitor. She first put to sea in 1870, sailing from London with a substantial cargo bound for China, and came home loaded with tea after a passage of four months. Bad winds and a string of mishaps, however, meant she never fulfilled the hopes her owner had placed in her. In 1872, for instance, she and a rival clipper, the Aurelian, departed a Chinese port on the very same day. Over the Indian Ocean a lead of more than 300 miles opened up in Cutty Sark's favour, only for her rudder to be badly damaged by a violent storm, leaving her unsteerable. Mending it out on the open ocean proved a formidable job for the crew, who managed the task only at their second attempt. She reached London, in the end, a week behind the Aurelian.
As steam ships grew faster and gained in carrying capacity, the threat they posed steadily increased. Matters were made worse still by the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, the very year Cutty Sark took to the water. The short and direct passage linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea was available to a steam vessel, yet the canal did nothing for a sailing ship, which depended on the far stronger winds of the open ocean and therefore faced a much longer voyage. For the run between Britain and China, steamers trimmed roughly two months from the journey.
The tea merchants had lost interest in Cutty Sark by 1878, and she was reduced to the humbler work of moving whatever cargo was going between one port and another. Trouble broke out on board in 1880, and the captain was in time replaced by a hopeless drunk who stole the crew's pay; removed from duty, he gave way to another master. That low point brought a reversal of fortune and the finest chapter of the ship's career - carrying wool from Australia back to Britain. One such passage took under twelve weeks, putting her a month or so ahead of every other ship at sea that year.
A real gift for navigation belonged to Cutty Sark's following captain, Ewan Traill, who drew the best from vessel and crew alike. Since she moved under sail, the ship leaned on the powerful trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and Traill drove her further south than any master before him, taking her dangerously near the icebergs at the bottom of the South American continent. The gamble came off, and for a decade no ship in the wool trade could outpace her.
Through the 1890s, with steam competition mounting and her expected working life almost over, the ship's profits fell away. A Portuguese company bought her and gave her the new name Estrela. Assorted cargoes were once again hers to carry from port to port over the following twenty-five years.
In 1922 a gale inflicted serious damage, and she was taken into Falmouth harbour, in southwest England, to be mended. A former sea captain, Oliver Prewitt, who ran a training vessel of his own, recognised her and sought to purchase her, without success at first. After she had sailed back to Portugal and passed to a second firm there, the persistent Prewitt offered a high price, which was accepted; the following year she was back at Falmouth with her original name restored.
Under Prewitt the ship served for training, a role she kept even after his death. Once there was no further need for her, in 1954, she was moved to a dry dock at Leith and put on public display. Fire harmed her in 2007 and struck again, though less badly, in 2014; even so, some 250,000 visitors are drawn to Cutty Sark each year.
Almost half of the Earth's uppermost layer is now under threat. Can anything be done to save the planet's most valuable resource?
A
A. Nearly half the world's soil is in danger, a recent United Nations report warns, and unless the decline is slowed every scrap of farmable land could vanish within 50 years. Because roughly 90% of what we eat is grown in soil, which also supports human life in a range of less obvious ways, the implications are enormous.
B
B.
Soil scientists, notes Teodor Vaska of the Lindgren Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, have been sounding the alarm about soil degradation for decades, even as our appreciation of how much soil matters has deepened. Pack a single gram of healthy soil under a microscope and you may find several billion bacteria, along with viruses, fungi and other microorganisms, all of them at work among decaying plants and an assortment of minerals. Soil, in other words, does far more than feed us. It is the origin of almost all the antibiotics we currently rely on, and it may yet prove our strongest weapon against bacteria that no longer respond to drugs. It is also an ally in the struggle with climate change: as the microorganisms inside it break down dead plants and animals, the carbon those organisms contain is locked away, so that soil stores well over twice as much carbon as the whole of the atmosphere. On top of this, soil soaks up water and so limits flooding; in Germany, repairing the damage that soil-degradation floods do to buildings, roads and bridges costs around €280 million a year.
C
Should soil lose the capacity to do all this, humanity would face serious difficulty. The threat is not that soil will vanish altogether, but that it will be stripped of the microorganisms responsible for its remarkable properties, and once they are gone, restoring them can take thousands of years. Farming is overwhelmingly the chief culprit. Where plants grow wild, the nutrients they draw from the ground are handed straight back when they die and rot; but humans rarely return the leftover parts of a harvest to the earth, so the soil steadily loses its fertility. Earlier generations found ways round this, rotating the crops they planted from one year to the next, for instance, or letting a field lie idle for a season.
D
Such methods, though, grew awkward as populations expanded and farming grew more commercial. The answer arrived early in the twentieth century, when the Brandt–Kessler process made it possible to manufacture synthetic nitrate fertiliser, and ever since farmers have been spreading it across their fields. Yet the wisdom of this has come into question over the last few decades. Applied to excess, chemical fertilisers can send polluting nitrous oxide into the air, while the surplus is frequently carried off by rain, washing nitrogen into rivers. More troubling still, we now know that using them without restraint damages the very soil they are meant to feed, leaving it acidic and salty.
E
Among those hunting for an alternative is Joren Maes, who began by running an orchard-care company in Flanders, Belgium, and today advises some of the leading soil scientists in the world. What he came to understand was that the surest way to keep his trees thriving was to look after the soil beneath them, and to that end he devised a mixture of helpful bacteria, fungi and humus*. When researchers at the Coelho Institute of Agronomy in Portugal spread this blend over plots ruined by years of over-fertilisation, plants sprang up that were vigorous not only above ground but below it, sending down roots tough enough to break through earth as hard as stone. In the control plots, by contrast, where only conventional fertiliser had been used, the handful of plants that appeared were feeble and stunted.
F
Interventions of this kind, however, cannot on their own reverse soil degradation across the globe. Weighing up the choices worldwide first demands a reliable picture of which soils exist and what ails them, and that is no simple matter, not least because no international system for classifying soil has ever been agreed. Hoping to reconcile the competing approaches, the UN has launched the Global Soil Map project, in which researchers from eleven countries are jointly building a map tied to a database. Fed with readings from field surveys, drone flights, satellite images, laboratory analyses and much else, it is meant to deliver real-time information on soil condition. The team hopes that within five years it will have charted the world's soils down to a depth of 80 metres, and that the findings will be free for anyone to consult.
G
Even this, though, is merely a beginning. What is still missing, argues Nadia Fournier of the Institute for Sustainable Land Use in Dunedin, New Zealand, are ways of framing the problem that make it register with governments and ordinary citizens alike. 'Scientists, on the whole, don't talk in a language policy-makers grasp — and the reverse is just as true.' The remedy she and her colleagues put forward is a target they call 'zero net land degradation'; much like the notion of carbon neutrality, it is simple enough to grasp that it can steer expectations and prompt action. For soils already at the edge, that may come too late, and a number of researchers are pressing for endangered soils to be placed at once inside protected zones. Yet even here there is a puzzle: should such reserves safeguard the places where soil is most diverse, or the stretches of untouched soil that might one day serve as a yardstick of quality? Whatever course we choose, saving our soils means acting without delay.
The Contentment Trade: How the State and Corporations Sold Us Well-Being
'Why does happiness matter? The question answers itself: happiness is good in and of itself, and no reason beyond that need be offered.' When the economist Gerald Prewitt, a leading champion of what he calls applied well-being science, writes in these terms, he speaks for a great many of his contemporaries. Government, on this view, exists to raise the collective contentment of the population, and the single remaining puzzle is one of method. That is where applied well-being science claims to help, presenting itself as a discipline able both to pinpoint the sources of human happiness and to put them into numbers. Armed with such a tool, its supporters insist, the state can now deliver happiness as no earlier government could.
Crude and simplistic though this outlook is, that is exactly what has made it spread so widely. Its adherents ignore the enormous body of philosophy that has for centuries examined, and cast doubt on, what happiness means and whether it is worth having; they proceed as though nothing worth remembering had been said on the matter before they took it up. The figure who did most to set this thinking in motion was Anselm Roth (1749–1831), a philosopher for whom all human good plainly came down to pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. Centuries earlier, in the fourth century BC, the ancient thinker Kaldes of Vetra had instead tied happiness to the fulfilment of one's own nature, and later generations wrestled with how its pursuit might be squared with other values people hold — yet to Roth such efforts were mere metaphysics or invention. Knowing little of Roth or of the moral tradition he founded, today's advocates of well-being science, schooled to be strangers to the history of ideas, walk the same path, dismissing almost the whole of ethical thought about happiness as antiquated and beside the point.
Yet, as Adrian Verhoeven observes in his recent study The Contentment Trade, treating happiness as the one obvious good is really a way of narrowing what we allow ourselves to ask about morality. Among the book's merits is how this absorbing, sharply written study locates today's obsession with happiness within a firmly drawn historical setting. Verhoeven rightly opens with Roth, whom he presents as far more than a philosopher; in his words, 'the sort of work Roth busied himself with is what we would now hand to a management consultant in the public sector.' During the 1780s Roth urged the Ministry of the Interior to join up its departments with a network of 'speaking pipes', and sent the national mint a scheme for a press that could turn out banknotes no forger could reproduce. He also sketched a cold-store — a 'frigidary', he called it — meant to stop meat, fish, fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Best known was his prison, the 'Speculary', where inmates were held apart yet stayed permanently within sight of their warders; it came remarkably close to being built. (Oddly, Verhoeven says nothing of Roth's intention that the Speculary should serve not just as a model gaol but as a mechanism of control extendable to schools and workplaces.)
Roth was also an early practitioner of what might be called the 'science of happiness'. Treating happiness as a science means finding a way to measure it, and here Roth put forward two possibilities. Understanding happiness as a bundle of agreeable sensations, he thought it might be gauged physically, by taking a person's pulse. The other option was to let money serve as the yardstick: where two unlike goods carry the same price, each may be said to yield the buyer an equal measure of pleasure. It was this second measure that Roth found the more appealing. By tying money so tightly to inner experience, Verhoeven remarks, Roth 'laid the groundwork for the tangle of psychological enquiry and commerce that would define twentieth-century business.'
In The Contentment Trade Verhoeven traces how this pursuit of a science of happiness has grown inseparable from capitalism. There is much to learn about how difficulties that are really economic come to be recast as disorders of the mind. He shows, too, that once people accepted that inner feelings of pleasure and displeasure could be pinned down objectively, that assumption began to shape both management studies and advertising. Thinkers of the stamp of Edmund Harlow, who founded the school known as reactionism*, held that human beings are raw material to be moulded, or steered, by managers and policymakers. For his own picture of human conduct Harlow could offer no evidence at all: by the time he was elected president of the Continental Psychological Society in 1911, he had, in his own words, 'never once observed a single human being', his work going no further than experiments on pigeons. Reductive though it is, Harlow's model is now in wide use, and 'changing behaviour' has become a governmental aim — in Finland, for instance, the state has set up a 'Conduct Guidance Office' to work out how citizens might be nudged, at the least possible cost to the public finances, into living in ways officially judged desirable.
It seems that modern industrial societies cannot spur their members to work without dangling before them the prospect of ever-growing happiness. But wherever the notion comes from, and however respectable its ancestry, making governments answerable for promoting happiness will always endanger human freedom.
Across the nineteenth century, Britain saw great technological progress, and in shipping it appeared in two shifts: sails gave way to steam, and timber hulls to iron and, later, steel.
Clippers were the swiftest trading ships ever to sail: three-masted craft designed to move cargo worldwide, and a few carried passengers too. For roughly three decades up to 1869 - when the Suez Canal opened and steam was overtaking sail - world trade lay in their hands. Of the many that were launched, a single one endures in reasonably whole condition: Cutty Sark, today on view at Leith, on the coast beside Edinburgh.
The ship owes her curious name to a poem, The Ferryman's Bride, by the Scottish writer Angus Craill. In it a miller named Rab is chased by a spirit called Maisie, who wears only a 'cutty sark' - once a Scottish term for a brief undergarment. Maisie is the figure carved at Cutty Sark's bows, where old ships usually set a female form. Since tradition, and Craill's poem, holds that spirits cannot cross water, the name was an odd choice.
Cutty Sark was constructed at Greenock, in Scotland, in 1869, on behalf of a shipping company belonging to Hector Manson. For the work Manson selected a newly established yard, Rennie & Hart, and made certain that the terms of the agreement left him in a commanding position over them. The firm eventually collapsed, and it fell to a rival business to complete the vessel.
Trading tea between China and Britain was the business of Manson's company, and on that route a fast ship could earn its owner both money and reputation; Cutty Sark was accordingly built to outrun every competitor. She first put to sea in 1870, sailing from London with a substantial cargo bound for China, and came home loaded with tea after a passage of four months. Bad winds and a string of mishaps, however, meant she never fulfilled the hopes her owner had placed in her. In 1872, for instance, she and a rival clipper, the Aurelian, departed a Chinese port on the very same day. Over the Indian Ocean a lead of more than 300 miles opened up in Cutty Sark's favour, only for her rudder to be badly damaged by a violent storm, leaving her unsteerable. Mending it out on the open ocean proved a formidable job for the crew, who managed the task only at their second attempt. She reached London, in the end, a week behind the Aurelian.
As steam ships grew faster and gained in carrying capacity, the threat they posed steadily increased. Matters were made worse still by the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, the very year Cutty Sark took to the water. The short and direct passage linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea was available to a steam vessel, yet the canal did nothing for a sailing ship, which depended on the far stronger winds of the open ocean and therefore faced a much longer voyage. For the run between Britain and China, steamers trimmed roughly two months from the journey.
The tea merchants had lost interest in Cutty Sark by 1878, and she was reduced to the humbler work of moving whatever cargo was going between one port and another. Trouble broke out on board in 1880, and the captain was in time replaced by a hopeless drunk who stole the crew's pay; removed from duty, he gave way to another master. That low point brought a reversal of fortune and the finest chapter of the ship's career - carrying wool from Australia back to Britain. One such passage took under twelve weeks, putting her a month or so ahead of every other ship at sea that year.
A real gift for navigation belonged to Cutty Sark's following captain, Ewan Traill, who drew the best from vessel and crew alike. Since she moved under sail, the ship leaned on the powerful trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and Traill drove her further south than any master before him, taking her dangerously near the icebergs at the bottom of the South American continent. The gamble came off, and for a decade no ship in the wool trade could outpace her.
Through the 1890s, with steam competition mounting and her expected working life almost over, the ship's profits fell away. A Portuguese company bought her and gave her the new name Estrela. Assorted cargoes were once again hers to carry from port to port over the following twenty-five years.
In 1922 a gale inflicted serious damage, and she was taken into Falmouth harbour, in southwest England, to be mended. A former sea captain, Oliver Prewitt, who ran a training vessel of his own, recognised her and sought to purchase her, without success at first. After she had sailed back to Portugal and passed to a second firm there, the persistent Prewitt offered a high price, which was accepted; the following year she was back at Falmouth with her original name restored.
Under Prewitt the ship served for training, a role she kept even after his death. Once there was no further need for her, in 1954, she was moved to a dry dock at Leith and put on public display. Fire harmed her in 2007 and struck again, though less badly, in 2014; even so, some 250,000 visitors are drawn to Cutty Sark each year.
Soil scientists, notes Teodor Vaska of the Lindgren Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, have been sounding the alarm about soil degradation for decades, even as our appreciation of how much soil matters has deepened. Pack a single gram of healthy soil under a microscope and you may find several billion bacteria, along with viruses, fungi and other microorganisms, all of them at work among decaying plants and an assortment of minerals. Soil, in other words, does far more than feed us. It is the origin of almost all the antibiotics we currently rely on, and it may yet prove our strongest weapon against bacteria that no longer respond to drugs. It is also an ally in the struggle with climate change: as the microorganisms inside it break down dead plants and animals, the carbon those organisms contain is locked away, so that soil stores well over twice as much carbon as the whole of the atmosphere. On top of this, soil soaks up water and so limits flooding; in Germany, repairing the damage that soil-degradation floods do to buildings, roads and bridges costs around €280 million a year.
C. Should soil lose the capacity to do all this, humanity would face serious difficulty. The threat is not that soil will vanish altogether, but that it will be stripped of the microorganisms responsible for its remarkable properties, and once they are gone, restoring them can take thousands of years. Farming is overwhelmingly the chief culprit. Where plants grow wild, the nutrients they draw from the ground are handed straight back when they die and rot; but humans rarely return the leftover parts of a harvest to the earth, so the soil steadily loses its fertility. Earlier generations found ways round this, rotating the crops they planted from one year to the next, for instance, or letting a field lie idle for a season.
Should soil lose the capacity to do all this, humanity would face serious difficulty. The threat is not that soil will vanish altogether, but that it will be stripped of the microorganisms responsible for its remarkable properties, and once they are gone, restoring them can take thousands of years. Farming is overwhelmingly the chief culprit. Where plants grow wild, the nutrients they draw from the ground are handed straight back when they die and rot; but humans rarely return the leftover parts of a harvest to the earth, so the soil steadily loses its fertility. Earlier generations found ways round this, rotating the crops they planted from one year to the next, for instance, or letting a field lie idle for a season.
D. Such methods, though, grew awkward as populations expanded and farming grew more commercial. The answer arrived early in the twentieth century, when the Brandt–Kessler process made it possible to manufacture synthetic nitrate fertiliser, and ever since farmers have been spreading it across their fields. Yet the wisdom of this has come into question over the last few decades. Applied to excess, chemical fertilisers can send polluting nitrous oxide into the air, while the surplus is frequently carried off by rain, washing nitrogen into rivers. More troubling still, we now know that using them without restraint damages the very soil they are meant to feed, leaving it acidic and salty.
Such methods, though, grew awkward as populations expanded and farming grew more commercial. The answer arrived early in the twentieth century, when the Brandt–Kessler process made it possible to manufacture synthetic nitrate fertiliser, and ever since farmers have been spreading it across their fields. Yet the wisdom of this has come into question over the last few decades. Applied to excess, chemical fertilisers can send polluting nitrous oxide into the air, while the surplus is frequently carried off by rain, washing nitrogen into rivers. More troubling still, we now know that using them without restraint damages the very soil they are meant to feed, leaving it acidic and salty.
E. Among those hunting for an alternative is Joren Maes, who began by running an orchard-care company in Flanders, Belgium, and today advises some of the leading soil scientists in the world. What he came to understand was that the surest way to keep his trees thriving was to look after the soil beneath them, and to that end he devised a mixture of helpful bacteria, fungi and humus*. When researchers at the Coelho Institute of Agronomy in Portugal spread this blend over plots ruined by years of over-fertilisation, plants sprang up that were vigorous not only above ground but below it, sending down roots tough enough to break through earth as hard as stone. In the control plots, by contrast, where only conventional fertiliser had been used, the handful of plants that appeared were feeble and stunted.
Among those hunting for an alternative is Joren Maes, who began by running an orchard-care company in Flanders, Belgium, and today advises some of the leading soil scientists in the world. What he came to understand was that the surest way to keep his trees thriving was to look after the soil beneath them, and to that end he devised a mixture of helpful bacteria, fungi and humus*. When researchers at the Coelho Institute of Agronomy in Portugal spread this blend over plots ruined by years of over-fertilisation, plants sprang up that were vigorous not only above ground but below it, sending down roots tough enough to break through earth as hard as stone. In the control plots, by contrast, where only conventional fertiliser had been used, the handful of plants that appeared were feeble and stunted.
F. Interventions of this kind, however, cannot on their own reverse soil degradation across the globe. Weighing up the choices worldwide first demands a reliable picture of which soils exist and what ails them, and that is no simple matter, not least because no international system for classifying soil has ever been agreed. Hoping to reconcile the competing approaches, the UN has launched the Global Soil Map project, in which researchers from eleven countries are jointly building a map tied to a database. Fed with readings from field surveys, drone flights, satellite images, laboratory analyses and much else, it is meant to deliver real-time information on soil condition. The team hopes that within five years it will have charted the world's soils down to a depth of 80 metres, and that the findings will be free for anyone to consult.
Interventions of this kind, however, cannot on their own reverse soil degradation across the globe. Weighing up the choices worldwide first demands a reliable picture of which soils exist and what ails them, and that is no simple matter, not least because no international system for classifying soil has ever been agreed. Hoping to reconcile the competing approaches, the UN has launched the Global Soil Map project, in which researchers from eleven countries are jointly building a map tied to a database. Fed with readings from field surveys, drone flights, satellite images, laboratory analyses and much else, it is meant to deliver real-time information on soil condition. The team hopes that within five years it will have charted the world's soils down to a depth of 80 metres, and that the findings will be free for anyone to consult.
G. Even this, though, is merely a beginning. What is still missing, argues Nadia Fournier of the Institute for Sustainable Land Use in Dunedin, New Zealand, are ways of framing the problem that make it register with governments and ordinary citizens alike. 'Scientists, on the whole, don't talk in a language policy-makers grasp — and the reverse is just as true.' The remedy she and her colleagues put forward is a target they call 'zero net land degradation'; much like the notion of carbon neutrality, it is simple enough to grasp that it can steer expectations and prompt action. For soils already at the edge, that may come too late, and a number of researchers are pressing for endangered soils to be placed at once inside protected zones. Yet even here there is a puzzle: should such reserves safeguard the places where soil is most diverse, or the stretches of untouched soil that might one day serve as a yardstick of quality? Whatever course we choose, saving our soils means acting without delay.
Even this, though, is merely a beginning. What is still missing, argues Nadia Fournier of the Institute for Sustainable Land Use in Dunedin, New Zealand, are ways of framing the problem that make it register with governments and ordinary citizens alike. 'Scientists, on the whole, don't talk in a language policy-makers grasp — and the reverse is just as true.' The remedy she and her colleagues put forward is a target they call 'zero net land degradation'; much like the notion of carbon neutrality, it is simple enough to grasp that it can steer expectations and prompt action. For soils already at the edge, that may come too late, and a number of researchers are pressing for endangered soils to be placed at once inside protected zones. Yet even here there is a puzzle: should such reserves safeguard the places where soil is most diverse, or the stretches of untouched soil that might one day serve as a yardstick of quality? Whatever course we choose, saving our soils means acting without delay.
'Why does happiness matter? The question answers itself: happiness is good in and of itself, and no reason beyond that need be offered.' When the economist Gerald Prewitt, a leading champion of what he calls applied well-being science, writes in these terms, he speaks for a great many of his contemporaries. Government, on this view, exists to raise the collective contentment of the population, and the single remaining puzzle is one of method. That is where applied well-being science claims to help, presenting itself as a discipline able both to pinpoint the sources of human happiness and to put them into numbers. Armed with such a tool, its supporters insist, the state can now deliver happiness as no earlier government could.
Crude and simplistic though this outlook is, that is exactly what has made it spread so widely. Its adherents ignore the enormous body of philosophy that has for centuries examined, and cast doubt on, what happiness means and whether it is worth having; they proceed as though nothing worth remembering had been said on the matter before they took it up. The figure who did most to set this thinking in motion was Anselm Roth (1749–1831), a philosopher for whom all human good plainly came down to pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. Centuries earlier, in the fourth century BC, the ancient thinker Kaldes of Vetra had instead tied happiness to the fulfilment of one's own nature, and later generations wrestled with how its pursuit might be squared with other values people hold — yet to Roth such efforts were mere metaphysics or invention. Knowing little of Roth or of the moral tradition he founded, today's advocates of well-being science, schooled to be strangers to the history of ideas, walk the same path, dismissing almost the whole of ethical thought about happiness as antiquated and beside the point.
Yet, as Adrian Verhoeven observes in his recent study The Contentment Trade, treating happiness as the one obvious good is really a way of narrowing what we allow ourselves to ask about morality. Among the book's merits is how this absorbing, sharply written study locates today's obsession with happiness within a firmly drawn historical setting. Verhoeven rightly opens with Roth, whom he presents as far more than a philosopher; in his words, 'the sort of work Roth busied himself with is what we would now hand to a management consultant in the public sector.' During the 1780s Roth urged the Ministry of the Interior to join up its departments with a network of 'speaking pipes', and sent the national mint a scheme for a press that could turn out banknotes no forger could reproduce. He also sketched a cold-store — a 'frigidary', he called it — meant to stop meat, fish, fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Best known was his prison, the 'Speculary', where inmates were held apart yet stayed permanently within sight of their warders; it came remarkably close to being built. (Oddly, Verhoeven says nothing of Roth's intention that the Speculary should serve not just as a model gaol but as a mechanism of control extendable to schools and workplaces.)
Roth was also an early practitioner of what might be called the 'science of happiness'. Treating happiness as a science means finding a way to measure it, and here Roth put forward two possibilities. Understanding happiness as a bundle of agreeable sensations, he thought it might be gauged physically, by taking a person's pulse. The other option was to let money serve as the yardstick: where two unlike goods carry the same price, each may be said to yield the buyer an equal measure of pleasure. It was this second measure that Roth found the more appealing. By tying money so tightly to inner experience, Verhoeven remarks, Roth 'laid the groundwork for the tangle of psychological enquiry and commerce that would define twentieth-century business.'
In The Contentment Trade Verhoeven traces how this pursuit of a science of happiness has grown inseparable from capitalism. There is much to learn about how difficulties that are really economic come to be recast as disorders of the mind. He shows, too, that once people accepted that inner feelings of pleasure and displeasure could be pinned down objectively, that assumption began to shape both management studies and advertising. Thinkers of the stamp of Edmund Harlow, who founded the school known as reactionism*, held that human beings are raw material to be moulded, or steered, by managers and policymakers. For his own picture of human conduct Harlow could offer no evidence at all: by the time he was elected president of the Continental Psychological Society in 1911, he had, in his own words, 'never once observed a single human being', his work going no further than experiments on pigeons. Reductive though it is, Harlow's model is now in wide use, and 'changing behaviour' has become a governmental aim — in Finland, for instance, the state has set up a 'Conduct Guidance Office' to work out how citizens might be nudged, at the least possible cost to the public finances, into living in ways officially judged desirable.
It seems that modern industrial societies cannot spur their members to work without dangling before them the prospect of ever-growing happiness. But wherever the notion comes from, and however respectable its ancestry, making governments answerable for promoting happiness will always endanger human freedom.
'Why does happiness matter? The question answers itself: happiness is good in and of itself, and no reason beyond that need be offered.' When the economist Gerald Prewitt, a leading champion of what he calls applied well-being science, writes in these terms, he speaks for a great many of his contemporaries. Government, on this view, exists to raise the collective contentment of the population, and the single remaining puzzle is one of method. That is where applied well-being science claims to help, presenting itself as a discipline able both to pinpoint the sources of human happiness and to put them into numbers. Armed with such a tool, its supporters insist, the state can now deliver happiness as no earlier government could.
Crude and simplistic though this outlook is, that is exactly what has made it spread so widely. Its adherents ignore the enormous body of philosophy that has for centuries examined, and cast doubt on, what happiness means and whether it is worth having; they proceed as though nothing worth remembering had been said on the matter before they took it up. The figure who did most to set this thinking in motion was Anselm Roth (1749–1831), a philosopher for whom all human good plainly came down to pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. Centuries earlier, in the fourth century BC, the ancient thinker Kaldes of Vetra had instead tied happiness to the fulfilment of one's own nature, and later generations wrestled with how its pursuit might be squared with other values people hold — yet to Roth such efforts were mere metaphysics or invention. Knowing little of Roth or of the moral tradition he founded, today's advocates of well-being science, schooled to be strangers to the history of ideas, walk the same path, dismissing almost the whole of ethical thought about happiness as antiquated and beside the point.
Yet, as Adrian Verhoeven observes in his recent study The Contentment Trade, treating happiness as the one obvious good is really a way of narrowing what we allow ourselves to ask about morality. Among the book's merits is how this absorbing, sharply written study locates today's obsession with happiness within a firmly drawn historical setting. Verhoeven rightly opens with Roth, whom he presents as far more than a philosopher; in his words, 'the sort of work Roth busied himself with is what we would now hand to a management consultant in the public sector.' During the 1780s Roth urged the Ministry of the Interior to join up its departments with a network of 'speaking pipes', and sent the national mint a scheme for a press that could turn out banknotes no forger could reproduce. He also sketched a cold-store — a 'frigidary', he called it — meant to stop meat, fish, fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Best known was his prison, the 'Speculary', where inmates were held apart yet stayed permanently within sight of their warders; it came remarkably close to being built. (Oddly, Verhoeven says nothing of Roth's intention that the Speculary should serve not just as a model gaol but as a mechanism of control extendable to schools and workplaces.)
Roth was also an early practitioner of what might be called the 'science of happiness'. Treating happiness as a science means finding a way to measure it, and here Roth put forward two possibilities. Understanding happiness as a bundle of agreeable sensations, he thought it might be gauged physically, by taking a person's pulse. The other option was to let money serve as the yardstick: where two unlike goods carry the same price, each may be said to yield the buyer an equal measure of pleasure. It was this second measure that Roth found the more appealing. By tying money so tightly to inner experience, Verhoeven remarks, Roth 'laid the groundwork for the tangle of psychological enquiry and commerce that would define twentieth-century business.'
In The Contentment Trade Verhoeven traces how this pursuit of a science of happiness has grown inseparable from capitalism. There is much to learn about how difficulties that are really economic come to be recast as disorders of the mind. He shows, too, that once people accepted that inner feelings of pleasure and displeasure could be pinned down objectively, that assumption began to shape both management studies and advertising. Thinkers of the stamp of Edmund Harlow, who founded the school known as reactionism*, held that human beings are raw material to be moulded, or steered, by managers and policymakers. For his own picture of human conduct Harlow could offer no evidence at all: by the time he was elected president of the Continental Psychological Society in 1911, he had, in his own words, 'never once observed a single human being', his work going no further than experiments on pigeons. Reductive though it is, Harlow's model is now in wide use, and 'changing behaviour' has become a governmental aim — in Finland, for instance, the state has set up a 'Conduct Guidance Office' to work out how citizens might be nudged, at the least possible cost to the public finances, into living in ways officially judged desirable.
It seems that modern industrial societies cannot spur their members to work without dangling before them the prospect of ever-growing happiness. But wherever the notion comes from, and however respectable its ancestry, making governments answerable for promoting happiness will always endanger human freedom.
