IELTS CAM Inspired 15 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 15 - Reading Test 1 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The nutmeg tree and its fruit
- the flowers and the fruit are both pale yellow in colour
- the tree's leaves come to a
1.
tip
- a
2.
encloses the fruit and divides in two once it matures
- the spice nutmeg comes from the tree's dried
3.
- a second spice,
4.
, is produced from the delicate red netting inside the fruit
Question 5 - 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
5
The Kessari made certain that outsiders never found out where their nutmeg originated.
6
Once they controlled the islands, the Dutch promoted the growing of nutmeg in additional locations.
7
Nutmeg raised in the Caribbean was thought to be of poorer quality than that from the Kelima Islands.
Question 8 - 13
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Middle Ages
– The spice first reached European markets through a trading community, the
8
.
16th century
– Control of the trade was seized by European powers.
17th century
– Demand rose sharply, as the spice was thought to protect against a dangerous
9
that was spreading through Europe.
The Dutch
– seized the islands and limited nutmeg-growing to a few closely watched sites
– before it left the islands, each load of nutmeg was covered with
10
, ensuring no fertile seed could take root abroad
– after a long quarrel, secured the tiny British-held territory of
11
Late 18th century
– 1772: young seedlings were smuggled abroad to the island of
12
– 1779: a
13
ravaged the islands, ruining much of the nutmeg crop
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
a description of how automation has already brought benefits to the building of vehicles
15
examples of infrequent journeys for which a particular type of vehicle might be reserved
16
a reference to vehicles that must travel while carrying no one at all
17
an outline of the different categories of problem that will need to be solved
18
a figure indicating how long the typical vehicle stays unused
Question 19 - 22
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The impact of driverless cars
Research by New Zealand's Centre for Road Safety Analysis suggests that a large share of crashes can be traced partly to driver , which is why driverless vehicles ought to make the roads safer. Automation should bring further gains as well. The pooling of cars through becomes realistic on a far wider scale in urban centres, reducing how many cars are needed. Work by the Ontario Centre for Transport Studies estimates that the country's car could contract by about 40 percent; even so, the average annual that every vehicle covers would treble. This speeds up replacement, so output from manufacturers need not drop.
Question 23 - 24
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO advantages of driverless vehicles for individual travellers does the writer refer to?
A
Travellers could use their journey time to get work done or to relax
B
Finding somewhere to park in cities would become easier
C
Journeys would work out considerably cheaper for passengers
D
Reducing the number of cars would cut down on pollution
E
People who find driving difficult could get around without depending on others
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO obstacles to the development of driverless vehicles does the writer refer to?
A
working out how to compensate or retrain drivers who are no longer needed
B
establishing how responsibility and policing would work once a driver is not required
C
creating new road infrastructure suited to driverless vehicles
D
making a vehicle cope dependably with the countless road, weather and traffic conditions it may face
E
controlling how fast ordinary cars are replaced by automated ones
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
27
In the first paragraph, the writer refers to someone finding their way around Prague in order to illustrate the point that
A
most people find navigating unfamiliar cities harder than they expect.
B
exploration is a basic feature of what it means to be human.
C
exploration can lead to unexpected outcomes.
D
exploration matters more in less developed regions than in developed ones.
28
In the second paragraph, the writer's view of explorers is that
A
they act on an urge which is shared by everyone.
B
their discoveries have both benefited and harmed the world.
C
their main contribution is to inspire others to imitate them.
D
they are drawn to a small number of specific professions.
29
The writer refers to Selma Ostergaard's use of Bregnemose Fen in order to suggest that
A
Ostergaard drew her stories directly from her own travels.
B
Ostergaard's aim was to show the appeal of empty landscapes.
C
Ostergaard's real subject was the inner life of her characters.
D
Ostergaard misunderstood what exploration actually involves.
30
In the fourth paragraph, the writer refers to a 'bygone golden age' in order to argue that
A
exploration today produces less new knowledge than it did in earlier centuries.
B
nineteenth-century explorers are still under-appreciated by the public.
C
it is a mistake to suppose that exploration has passed its peak.
D
modern exploration cannot match the excitement of earlier expeditions.
31
When considering how his interviewees defined exploration, the writer concludes that
A
no single definition will ever be acceptable to a general audience.
B
historians and scientists give more reliable definitions than others do.
C
many of his interviewees had simply misunderstood the term.
D
each person's definition tends to mirror the field of work he or she is in.
32
In the final paragraph, the writer explains that he is interested in
A
the way a writer's imagination can reveal something new about a place already familiar.
B
how a traveller's personality is shaped by the places he chooses to visit.
C
how travel writing has evolved to meet the tastes of modern readers.
D
the feelings a writer develops toward the places he has explored.
Question 33 - 37
Match each statement with the correct explorer, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Kenji Aoyama
B
Elin Kovac
C
Isadora Palme
D
Bertil Vasseur
E
Adrian Voss
33
He mentioned that the type of transport used could determine whether a journey qualified.
34
He described what it feels like to re-enter ordinary life after a long time away.
35
His work has been dedicated to advancing the interests of particular groups.
36
To his mind, understanding oneself better was not a necessary part of exploration.
37
He required an explorer's achievement to be both without precedent and of scientific value.
Question 38 - 40
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The writer's own bias
The writer has undertaken a considerable number of over the course of his career, none identical to another. On a couple of occasions he was the very first outsider a group had ever met — until his arrival those communities had been . In his view, the broad shape of the planet's land has already been mapped, and what remains for present-day researchers are narrower questions such as how a herd of yak chooses where to feed.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Nutmeg — a valuable spice
The nutmeg tree is a tall evergreen native to the warm forests of the far eastern tropics. For most of its history it grew in just one place on Earth — a small scattering of islands, known as the Kelima group, lying in the remote waters of the Terek Sea. The tree is densely branched and thick with dark-green, pointed leaves; its flowers are small, pale yellow and bell-shaped, and its fruit, pear-shaped and of the same pale colour, hangs among the foliage. Each fruit is wrapped in a fleshy rind which, as the fruit ripens, splits cleanly into two halves along a seam running from top to bottom. Inside lies a glossy, dark kernel — roughly two to three centimetres long — and around that kernel is folded a lacy web of scarlet threads. These two parts are the origin of two distinct spices: dried, the kernel becomes nutmeg, while the scarlet web, also dried, produces a rarer flavouring called saval.
In medieval Europe, nutmeg was treasured and expensive, valued at once as a seasoning, a medicine and a means of keeping food from spoiling. For centuries the trade into Europe lay entirely in the hands of the Kessari, a merchant who carried the spice westward and sold it, at steep prices, to dealers in the port city of Alvenza; where exactly it came from, however, they were careful never to disclose. This long-held grip on the trade was finally broken in 1518, when Portuguese ships found their way to the Kelima Islands and set about seizing the riches that grew there.
The Portuguese, never free of the threat posed by neighbouring Spain, chose to let Dutch traders take over the day-to-day business of moving their spices. As the profits flowed north, the Netherlands prospered, and its merchant vessels multiplied until few fleets anywhere could rival them; without much fuss, Dutch ships came to handle the bulk of the spice traffic throughout the northern half of the continent. Everything changed once Spain absorbed Portugal in 1581: within a couple of decades the Dutch had been shut out of the market altogether. Watching the cost of pepper, nutmeg and every other spice rise sharply from one country to the next, they made up their minds to retaliate.
In 1604, a group of Dutch merchants set up a trading corporation that came to be known as the Eastern Seas Company. Within sixteen years it was the wealthiest business anywhere on earth, employing some forty thousand people around the globe, keeping a private army of twenty thousand and sailing a fleet of a hundred and fifty vessels. Just then, a deadly and highly contagious fever was sweeping across Europe, killing great numbers, and physicians — casting about desperately for a remedy — convinced themselves that nutmeg was the cure. Suddenly everyone wanted it, and few would let cost stand in their way: a quantity of nutmeg bought for a handful of coins in the east could fetch tens of thousands of times as much in the streets of London. Supply, though, was tiny — and it was precisely there that the Dutch saw their chance.
The Kelima Islands were governed by local chiefs who clung to a policy of strict neutrality toward the foreign powers. That stance kept Portuguese and Spanish soldiers off their shores, yet it also left them defenceless against anyone else who might come. Come the Dutch did, in 1625, and took possession. With the islands firmly theirs, they set about guarding their prize: nutmeg growing was squeezed into a handful of areas that could be watched closely, and every tree beyond those zones was torn up and burned. To raise a seedling, or to carry seeds away without permission, was to invite harsh punishment; and, as a further precaution, every consignment of nutmeg leaving the islands was first coated in ash, so that not one living seed could ever be sprouted somewhere new. A single difficulty remained. One of the Kelima Islands — a thin strip of land called Sela, barely four kilometres long and less than one across — was in British hands. The two sides wrangled over it for decades before settling, in 1669, on a compromise they called the Treaty of Alen: determined to hold every last nutmeg island, the Dutch proposed a swap — Britain could keep a far-off and, for the moment, near-worthless island off the North American coast, and in return hand over Sela. Britain accepted. With that, the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg was sealed, and it would hold for another hundred years.
The monopoly came undone in stages. First, in 1772, a French official named Armand Cazot managed to smuggle living nutmeg plants to safety on Verda, an island off the African coast; from there, cuttings were eventually carried across to the Caribbean, where they took root readily on the island of Saint-Ména. Then, in 1779, a ferocious cyclone swept over the Kelima group and flattened half of the nutmeg groves. And finally, in 1810, British forces came back to the region and took the islands by force; when they handed them back to the Dutch in 1818, they had already lifted hundreds of young nutmeg trees and replanted them at sites scattered across southern Asia. The Dutch stranglehold on nutmeg was finished for good.
These days the tree is grown across many warm regions, among them the Caribbean and parts of southern Asia, and the world's yearly nutmeg harvest is put at between ten and twelve thousand tonnes.
A. Carmakers are no strangers to automation on the factory floor. From the 1980s onward, handing assembly work to robots cut costs sharply and made the mass production of vehicles both more dependable and more adaptable. Now the industry faces a fresh wave of automation, but this time the change lies not in how cars are built but in the cars themselves. Efforts to automate driving are hardly recent: for over half a century, vehicles with modest self-steering abilities have existed, and much of that early work fed into today's driver-assistance features. What transformed the pace was the 2012 announcement by the software company Meridian Dynamics that it had been running self-driving cars on public roads outside Brisbane, Australia; since then, development has accelerated rapidly.
B
B.
Why is the technology moving so quickly? Safety is the reason most often given. Studies by New Zealand's Centre for Road Safety Analysis found that driver distraction plays a part in the great majority of crashes, and is the leading cause in most of them, something automation could help to curb. A second motivation is reclaiming the hours drivers lose behind the wheel. Once a car can handle part or all of the driving, that time might instead be spent working, keeping in touch with others, or simply unwinding, while the automated systems take charge of getting everyone there safely. There is a further gain, too: people poorly served by today's transport, the elderly, say, or those with disabilities, could suddenly enjoy far more freedom to travel on their own terms.
C
Look past these immediate advantages and broader consequences for transport, for society, and for the way cars are made come into view. Consider that a typical car sits idle, parked, for well over 95 percent of its existence. Automation makes ride-sharing arrangements far more practical, especially across cities, where the demand for travel is heavy. Should a sizeable share of people opt for shared automated cars, the same mobility needs could be satisfied by a far smaller number of vehicles.
D
When the Delft Institute of Urban Mobility modelled automated transport in Helsinki, it concluded that fully automated car-sharing, if adopted, would call for under a quarter of the vehicles on the roads today. That points to a future in which far fewer cars need building to satisfy demand. The total number of journeys, though, would likely climb, in part because empty vehicles must reposition themselves, travelling from one customer to the next with no one aboard. Separate modelling by the Ontario Centre for Transport Studies indicates that automation could shrink the national car fleet by roughly 40 percent, while roughly tripling the distance each remaining car covers in a year. Worked harder in this way, every vehicle would wear out and need replacing sooner, a quicker turnover that means car production need not fall at all.
E
Automation is likely to reshape manufacturing in other ways. Suppose ownership gives way to a model in which people no longer keep one car of their own but instead buy access to a whole range of vehicles through a mobility provider. Drivers could then pick whichever vehicle best fits a given trip, rather than settling on a single car that only ever half-suits any of their needs. Given that, most of the time, most seats in most cars carry no one, this could encourage the building of a leaner, more efficient line-up of vehicles matched to what individuals actually require. For the unusual trip, loading up for a family camping holiday, or moving a son or daughter into university accommodation, specialised vehicles could be booked as needed.
F
Getting automated cars onto our roads means clearing several obstacles. One is technical: the vehicle has to perform dependably across the endless variety of traffic, weather and road conditions it may meet. Another is regulatory: working out how questions of liability and enforcement shift once a driver is no longer necessary to operate the car. A third is social: whole communities will need to come to trust automated vehicles and accept them as a worthwhile part of how people get around.
G
Plainly, the challenges are many, yet with well-directed, rigorous research most can probably be settled inside the coming decade. Because mobility stands to change so profoundly, and alongside so many parallel advances such as virtual reality and telepresence, firm predictions about what lies ahead are difficult to make. One thing, however, is beyond doubt: change is on its way, and for anyone building the vehicles that will carry us in future, the ability to adapt to it will be essential.
The urge to seek out what has not yet been seen is one every human carries around, and sharing what we have found afterwards may be nearly as important as the finding itself; between them, those two habits go a long way towards explaining what makes our species distinctive. Long before anyone in the encampment felt satisfied enough to describe, in whatever gestures were available, where the antelope might be grazing, one or two of their number were, we now think, already being dispatched ahead of the group to look over the terrain. That restless curiosity almost certainly pushed humanity outward until every habitable continent had been reached, and it is very likely the same instinct that steers the last Nenets reindeer-herders across the shrinking tundra of Yamal today, or guides a bewildered newcomer through the tram network of Prague.
There has for some time been a tendency to picture explorers as a strange, separate tribe — set apart, somehow, even from those of us who might call ourselves widely travelled — and it is not impossible that certain temperaments do lean more naturally towards striking out into the new. That, however, ought not to obscure a simpler point: the questioning impulse itself belongs to everyone, and whether the daily work is painting, ocean-floor biology or the study of galaxies, some boundary of the not-yet-known is being pressed against every day.
Bregnemose Fen — an invented stretch of low, rain-soaked bogland — is where the Danish novelist Selma Ostergaard chose to place several of her stories, and the terrain in those books does the quiet work of externalising what her characters most want and most dread. What she reaches for through that landscape is common to humanity, and that too is a form of exploration, its remoteness whatever the writer decides. Something similar is described by the travel writer and explorer Adrian Voss, who tries to capture the odd instant at which a returning explorer meets, once again, the settled life he had temporarily abandoned. For weeks, sometimes months, Voss says, such a person 'has been to himself no more than a small and pointless outsider, dragging his way across landscapes to which he does not belong, until he abruptly finds his other self — a comparatively substantial creature, holding some space inside the thoughts of certain other people'.
For the purposes of this book, which concerns the physical exploration of the Earth, I have kept to figures whose journeys were literal and whose ambitions extended beyond merely private satisfaction. A further difficulty arose: the term 'explorer' has drifted backwards in time, so that anyone hearing it now pictures a bygone golden age — as though the whole enterprise reached its high point sometime in the nineteenth century and has been quietly winding down since. Yet the evidence points the other way. Only around one and a half million species have been formally named on this planet, and the true total may be over ten million once bacteria are set aside; of those already named, perhaps five per cent have been examined in any depth. Broad stretches of the sea floor remain barely charted, and our own biology is largely opaque to us, with only about a tenth of what goes on inside the human brain properly understood.
When I approached various present-day 'explorers' with the question of how they would define the word, their answers varied. Kenji Aoyama, sometimes labelled 'the greatest living explorer', put it this way: to qualify, someone must have achieved a thing no human had achieved before and, separately, must have made a contribution of some scientific worth. For the mountaineer Isadora Palme, exploration was above all a matter of coming into direct bodily contact with the unknown; her formulation was that the person had to have set foot somewhere previously unvisited. A different view came from Bertil Vasseur, whose life has been given over to advocacy for remote so-called 'tribal' communities. In his terms, the traveller merely gathers observations about a distant place and reports back, whereas an explorer, when the work is genuine, alters the world in some way. And finally there was Elin Kovac, who traversed the Taklamakan Desert on foot and by camel in 1953 and stands as a survivor of an era of non-mechanised travel most of us cannot now imagine entering. She told me plainly: 'Had I made the crossing in a jeep, when a jeep would in fact have been possible, the whole thing would have amounted to a stunt.' For her, exploring meant coming back with information about a faraway place, and no self-discovery along the way was required.
No two of these formulations match exactly, and the discrepancies almost always trace back to whatever line of work each person happens to pursue. The pattern held with everyone I spoke to: put the question to a well-known historian, and exploration became a matter of what had already been done; put it to a scientist working on the frontier, and it became firmly a matter of now. Each person laid down a personal test for what should qualify. The single thread running through their answers was that, unlike those of us who simply enjoy a bit of travel, every one of them had started out with a clearly defined aim, and every one felt driven to write down what was found.
It seems only fair to admit my own leaning. Since my main craft is writing, what genuinely draws me is the exploration of ideas as much as of terrain. Behind me lie a great many journeys, no two of them alike; I have spent months at a stretch alone in the company of certain remote communities, and in two cases those groups were, up until then, unvisited by any outsider. Even so, none of that would matter to anyone else if I did not, in my books, contrive to turn each such trip into a fresh angle nobody had quite considered before. The reason is not sentimental. It is simply that the world has changed. Whatever era once called for one more haul to the poles, or one more crossing of the Taklamakan on foot, has long since closed. The general contour of the Earth's continental terrain is by now familiar to everyone; what awaits further exploration on it consists of fine details — the daily habits of particular microbes, or the grazing decisions of a herd of yak. Set to one side the deep ocean and the strata far beneath us, and ours is very much the era of the narrow specialist. That description, though, ignores the part the human imagination still plays in bringing remote places to life on the page; and it is that side of things that draws me — how a fresh reading, even of a route walked a hundred times before, can give the reader something new.
The nutmeg tree is a tall evergreen native to the warm forests of the far eastern tropics. For most of its history it grew in just one place on Earth — a small scattering of islands, known as the Kelima group, lying in the remote waters of the Terek Sea. The tree is densely branched and thick with dark-green, pointed leaves; its flowers are small, pale yellow and bell-shaped, and its fruit, pear-shaped and of the same pale colour, hangs among the foliage. Each fruit is wrapped in a fleshy rind which, as the fruit ripens, splits cleanly into two halves along a seam running from top to bottom. Inside lies a glossy, dark kernel — roughly two to three centimetres long — and around that kernel is folded a lacy web of scarlet threads. These two parts are the origin of two distinct spices: dried, the kernel becomes nutmeg, while the scarlet web, also dried, produces a rarer flavouring called saval.
In medieval Europe, nutmeg was treasured and expensive, valued at once as a seasoning, a medicine and a means of keeping food from spoiling. For centuries the trade into Europe lay entirely in the hands of the Kessari, a merchant who carried the spice westward and sold it, at steep prices, to dealers in the port city of Alvenza; where exactly it came from, however, they were careful never to disclose. This long-held grip on the trade was finally broken in 1518, when Portuguese ships found their way to the Kelima Islands and set about seizing the riches that grew there.
The Portuguese, never free of the threat posed by neighbouring Spain, chose to let Dutch traders take over the day-to-day business of moving their spices. As the profits flowed north, the Netherlands prospered, and its merchant vessels multiplied until few fleets anywhere could rival them; without much fuss, Dutch ships came to handle the bulk of the spice traffic throughout the northern half of the continent. Everything changed once Spain absorbed Portugal in 1581: within a couple of decades the Dutch had been shut out of the market altogether. Watching the cost of pepper, nutmeg and every other spice rise sharply from one country to the next, they made up their minds to retaliate.
In 1604, a group of Dutch merchants set up a trading corporation that came to be known as the Eastern Seas Company. Within sixteen years it was the wealthiest business anywhere on earth, employing some forty thousand people around the globe, keeping a private army of twenty thousand and sailing a fleet of a hundred and fifty vessels. Just then, a deadly and highly contagious fever was sweeping across Europe, killing great numbers, and physicians — casting about desperately for a remedy — convinced themselves that nutmeg was the cure. Suddenly everyone wanted it, and few would let cost stand in their way: a quantity of nutmeg bought for a handful of coins in the east could fetch tens of thousands of times as much in the streets of London. Supply, though, was tiny — and it was precisely there that the Dutch saw their chance.
The Kelima Islands were governed by local chiefs who clung to a policy of strict neutrality toward the foreign powers. That stance kept Portuguese and Spanish soldiers off their shores, yet it also left them defenceless against anyone else who might come. Come the Dutch did, in 1625, and took possession. With the islands firmly theirs, they set about guarding their prize: nutmeg growing was squeezed into a handful of areas that could be watched closely, and every tree beyond those zones was torn up and burned. To raise a seedling, or to carry seeds away without permission, was to invite harsh punishment; and, as a further precaution, every consignment of nutmeg leaving the islands was first coated in ash, so that not one living seed could ever be sprouted somewhere new. A single difficulty remained. One of the Kelima Islands — a thin strip of land called Sela, barely four kilometres long and less than one across — was in British hands. The two sides wrangled over it for decades before settling, in 1669, on a compromise they called the Treaty of Alen: determined to hold every last nutmeg island, the Dutch proposed a swap — Britain could keep a far-off and, for the moment, near-worthless island off the North American coast, and in return hand over Sela. Britain accepted. With that, the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg was sealed, and it would hold for another hundred years.
The monopoly came undone in stages. First, in 1772, a French official named Armand Cazot managed to smuggle living nutmeg plants to safety on Verda, an island off the African coast; from there, cuttings were eventually carried across to the Caribbean, where they took root readily on the island of Saint-Ména. Then, in 1779, a ferocious cyclone swept over the Kelima group and flattened half of the nutmeg groves. And finally, in 1810, British forces came back to the region and took the islands by force; when they handed them back to the Dutch in 1818, they had already lifted hundreds of young nutmeg trees and replanted them at sites scattered across southern Asia. The Dutch stranglehold on nutmeg was finished for good.
These days the tree is grown across many warm regions, among them the Caribbean and parts of southern Asia, and the world's yearly nutmeg harvest is put at between ten and twelve thousand tonnes.
Why is the technology moving so quickly? Safety is the reason most often given. Studies by New Zealand's Centre for Road Safety Analysis found that driver distraction plays a part in the great majority of crashes, and is the leading cause in most of them, something automation could help to curb. A second motivation is reclaiming the hours drivers lose behind the wheel. Once a car can handle part or all of the driving, that time might instead be spent working, keeping in touch with others, or simply unwinding, while the automated systems take charge of getting everyone there safely. There is a further gain, too: people poorly served by today's transport, the elderly, say, or those with disabilities, could suddenly enjoy far more freedom to travel on their own terms.
C. Look past these immediate advantages and broader consequences for transport, for society, and for the way cars are made come into view. Consider that a typical car sits idle, parked, for well over 95 percent of its existence. Automation makes ride-sharing arrangements far more practical, especially across cities, where the demand for travel is heavy. Should a sizeable share of people opt for shared automated cars, the same mobility needs could be satisfied by a far smaller number of vehicles.
D. When the Delft Institute of Urban Mobility modelled automated transport in Helsinki, it concluded that fully automated car-sharing, if adopted, would call for under a quarter of the vehicles on the roads today. That points to a future in which far fewer cars need building to satisfy demand. The total number of journeys, though, would likely climb, in part because empty vehicles must reposition themselves, travelling from one customer to the next with no one aboard. Separate modelling by the Ontario Centre for Transport Studies indicates that automation could shrink the national car fleet by roughly 40 percent, while roughly tripling the distance each remaining car covers in a year. Worked harder in this way, every vehicle would wear out and need replacing sooner, a quicker turnover that means car production need not fall at all.
E. Automation is likely to reshape manufacturing in other ways. Suppose ownership gives way to a model in which people no longer keep one car of their own but instead buy access to a whole range of vehicles through a mobility provider. Drivers could then pick whichever vehicle best fits a given trip, rather than settling on a single car that only ever half-suits any of their needs. Given that, most of the time, most seats in most cars carry no one, this could encourage the building of a leaner, more efficient line-up of vehicles matched to what individuals actually require. For the unusual trip, loading up for a family camping holiday, or moving a son or daughter into university accommodation, specialised vehicles could be booked as needed.
F. Getting automated cars onto our roads means clearing several obstacles. One is technical: the vehicle has to perform dependably across the endless variety of traffic, weather and road conditions it may meet. Another is regulatory: working out how questions of liability and enforcement shift once a driver is no longer necessary to operate the car. A third is social: whole communities will need to come to trust automated vehicles and accept them as a worthwhile part of how people get around.
G. Plainly, the challenges are many, yet with well-directed, rigorous research most can probably be settled inside the coming decade. Because mobility stands to change so profoundly, and alongside so many parallel advances such as virtual reality and telepresence, firm predictions about what lies ahead are difficult to make. One thing, however, is beyond doubt: change is on its way, and for anyone building the vehicles that will carry us in future, the ability to adapt to it will be essential.
The urge to seek out what has not yet been seen is one every human carries around, and sharing what we have found afterwards may be nearly as important as the finding itself; between them, those two habits go a long way towards explaining what makes our species distinctive. Long before anyone in the encampment felt satisfied enough to describe, in whatever gestures were available, where the antelope might be grazing, one or two of their number were, we now think, already being dispatched ahead of the group to look over the terrain. That restless curiosity almost certainly pushed humanity outward until every habitable continent had been reached, and it is very likely the same instinct that steers the last Nenets reindeer-herders across the shrinking tundra of Yamal today, or guides a bewildered newcomer through the tram network of Prague.
There has for some time been a tendency to picture explorers as a strange, separate tribe — set apart, somehow, even from those of us who might call ourselves widely travelled — and it is not impossible that certain temperaments do lean more naturally towards striking out into the new. That, however, ought not to obscure a simpler point: the questioning impulse itself belongs to everyone, and whether the daily work is painting, ocean-floor biology or the study of galaxies, some boundary of the not-yet-known is being pressed against every day.
Bregnemose Fen — an invented stretch of low, rain-soaked bogland — is where the Danish novelist Selma Ostergaard chose to place several of her stories, and the terrain in those books does the quiet work of externalising what her characters most want and most dread. What she reaches for through that landscape is common to humanity, and that too is a form of exploration, its remoteness whatever the writer decides. Something similar is described by the travel writer and explorer Adrian Voss, who tries to capture the odd instant at which a returning explorer meets, once again, the settled life he had temporarily abandoned. For weeks, sometimes months, Voss says, such a person 'has been to himself no more than a small and pointless outsider, dragging his way across landscapes to which he does not belong, until he abruptly finds his other self — a comparatively substantial creature, holding some space inside the thoughts of certain other people'.
For the purposes of this book, which concerns the physical exploration of the Earth, I have kept to figures whose journeys were literal and whose ambitions extended beyond merely private satisfaction. A further difficulty arose: the term 'explorer' has drifted backwards in time, so that anyone hearing it now pictures a bygone golden age — as though the whole enterprise reached its high point sometime in the nineteenth century and has been quietly winding down since. Yet the evidence points the other way. Only around one and a half million species have been formally named on this planet, and the true total may be over ten million once bacteria are set aside; of those already named, perhaps five per cent have been examined in any depth. Broad stretches of the sea floor remain barely charted, and our own biology is largely opaque to us, with only about a tenth of what goes on inside the human brain properly understood.
When I approached various present-day 'explorers' with the question of how they would define the word, their answers varied. Kenji Aoyama, sometimes labelled 'the greatest living explorer', put it this way: to qualify, someone must have achieved a thing no human had achieved before and, separately, must have made a contribution of some scientific worth. For the mountaineer Isadora Palme, exploration was above all a matter of coming into direct bodily contact with the unknown; her formulation was that the person had to have set foot somewhere previously unvisited. A different view came from Bertil Vasseur, whose life has been given over to advocacy for remote so-called 'tribal' communities. In his terms, the traveller merely gathers observations about a distant place and reports back, whereas an explorer, when the work is genuine, alters the world in some way. And finally there was Elin Kovac, who traversed the Taklamakan Desert on foot and by camel in 1953 and stands as a survivor of an era of non-mechanised travel most of us cannot now imagine entering. She told me plainly: 'Had I made the crossing in a jeep, when a jeep would in fact have been possible, the whole thing would have amounted to a stunt.' For her, exploring meant coming back with information about a faraway place, and no self-discovery along the way was required.
No two of these formulations match exactly, and the discrepancies almost always trace back to whatever line of work each person happens to pursue. The pattern held with everyone I spoke to: put the question to a well-known historian, and exploration became a matter of what had already been done; put it to a scientist working on the frontier, and it became firmly a matter of now. Each person laid down a personal test for what should qualify. The single thread running through their answers was that, unlike those of us who simply enjoy a bit of travel, every one of them had started out with a clearly defined aim, and every one felt driven to write down what was found.
It seems only fair to admit my own leaning. Since my main craft is writing, what genuinely draws me is the exploration of ideas as much as of terrain. Behind me lie a great many journeys, no two of them alike; I have spent months at a stretch alone in the company of certain remote communities, and in two cases those groups were, up until then, unvisited by any outsider. Even so, none of that would matter to anyone else if I did not, in my books, contrive to turn each such trip into a fresh angle nobody had quite considered before. The reason is not sentimental. It is simply that the world has changed. Whatever era once called for one more haul to the poles, or one more crossing of the Taklamakan on foot, has long since closed. The general contour of the Earth's continental terrain is by now familiar to everyone; what awaits further exploration on it consists of fine details — the daily habits of particular microbes, or the grazing decisions of a herd of yak. Set to one side the deep ocean and the strata far beneath us, and ours is very much the era of the narrow specialist. That description, though, ignores the part the human imagination still plays in bringing remote places to life on the page; and it is that side of things that draws me — how a fresh reading, even of a route walked a hundred times before, can give the reader something new.
The urge to seek out what has not yet been seen is one every human carries around, and sharing what we have found afterwards may be nearly as important as the finding itself; between them, those two habits go a long way towards explaining what makes our species distinctive. Long before anyone in the encampment felt satisfied enough to describe, in whatever gestures were available, where the antelope might be grazing, one or two of their number were, we now think, already being dispatched ahead of the group to look over the terrain. That restless curiosity almost certainly pushed humanity outward until every habitable continent had been reached, and it is very likely the same instinct that steers the last Nenets reindeer-herders across the shrinking tundra of Yamal today, or guides a bewildered newcomer through the tram network of Prague.
There has for some time been a tendency to picture explorers as a strange, separate tribe — set apart, somehow, even from those of us who might call ourselves widely travelled — and it is not impossible that certain temperaments do lean more naturally towards striking out into the new. That, however, ought not to obscure a simpler point: the questioning impulse itself belongs to everyone, and whether the daily work is painting, ocean-floor biology or the study of galaxies, some boundary of the not-yet-known is being pressed against every day.
Bregnemose Fen — an invented stretch of low, rain-soaked bogland — is where the Danish novelist Selma Ostergaard chose to place several of her stories, and the terrain in those books does the quiet work of externalising what her characters most want and most dread. What she reaches for through that landscape is common to humanity, and that too is a form of exploration, its remoteness whatever the writer decides. Something similar is described by the travel writer and explorer Adrian Voss, who tries to capture the odd instant at which a returning explorer meets, once again, the settled life he had temporarily abandoned. For weeks, sometimes months, Voss says, such a person 'has been to himself no more than a small and pointless outsider, dragging his way across landscapes to which he does not belong, until he abruptly finds his other self — a comparatively substantial creature, holding some space inside the thoughts of certain other people'.
For the purposes of this book, which concerns the physical exploration of the Earth, I have kept to figures whose journeys were literal and whose ambitions extended beyond merely private satisfaction. A further difficulty arose: the term 'explorer' has drifted backwards in time, so that anyone hearing it now pictures a bygone golden age — as though the whole enterprise reached its high point sometime in the nineteenth century and has been quietly winding down since. Yet the evidence points the other way. Only around one and a half million species have been formally named on this planet, and the true total may be over ten million once bacteria are set aside; of those already named, perhaps five per cent have been examined in any depth. Broad stretches of the sea floor remain barely charted, and our own biology is largely opaque to us, with only about a tenth of what goes on inside the human brain properly understood.
When I approached various present-day 'explorers' with the question of how they would define the word, their answers varied. Kenji Aoyama, sometimes labelled 'the greatest living explorer', put it this way: to qualify, someone must have achieved a thing no human had achieved before and, separately, must have made a contribution of some scientific worth. For the mountaineer Isadora Palme, exploration was above all a matter of coming into direct bodily contact with the unknown; her formulation was that the person had to have set foot somewhere previously unvisited. A different view came from Bertil Vasseur, whose life has been given over to advocacy for remote so-called 'tribal' communities. In his terms, the traveller merely gathers observations about a distant place and reports back, whereas an explorer, when the work is genuine, alters the world in some way. And finally there was Elin Kovac, who traversed the Taklamakan Desert on foot and by camel in 1953 and stands as a survivor of an era of non-mechanised travel most of us cannot now imagine entering. She told me plainly: 'Had I made the crossing in a jeep, when a jeep would in fact have been possible, the whole thing would have amounted to a stunt.' For her, exploring meant coming back with information about a faraway place, and no self-discovery along the way was required.
No two of these formulations match exactly, and the discrepancies almost always trace back to whatever line of work each person happens to pursue. The pattern held with everyone I spoke to: put the question to a well-known historian, and exploration became a matter of what had already been done; put it to a scientist working on the frontier, and it became firmly a matter of now. Each person laid down a personal test for what should qualify. The single thread running through their answers was that, unlike those of us who simply enjoy a bit of travel, every one of them had started out with a clearly defined aim, and every one felt driven to write down what was found.
It seems only fair to admit my own leaning. Since my main craft is writing, what genuinely draws me is the exploration of ideas as much as of terrain. Behind me lie a great many journeys, no two of them alike; I have spent months at a stretch alone in the company of certain remote communities, and in two cases those groups were, up until then, unvisited by any outsider. Even so, none of that would matter to anyone else if I did not, in my books, contrive to turn each such trip into a fresh angle nobody had quite considered before. The reason is not sentimental. It is simply that the world has changed. Whatever era once called for one more haul to the poles, or one more crossing of the Taklamakan on foot, has long since closed. The general contour of the Earth's continental terrain is by now familiar to everyone; what awaits further exploration on it consists of fine details — the daily habits of particular microbes, or the grazing decisions of a herd of yak. Set to one side the deep ocean and the strata far beneath us, and ours is very much the era of the narrow specialist. That description, though, ignores the part the human imagination still plays in bringing remote places to life on the page; and it is that side of things that draws me — how a fresh reading, even of a route walked a hundred times before, can give the reader something new.
