IELTS CAM Inspired 17 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 17 - Reading Test 1 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The Valdheim underground railway
The problem
• Between the early 1800s and mid-century, ever more people crowded into Valdheim and its old centre became badly overcrowded
• The old core's roads were clogged with
1.
drawn by horses
The proposed solution
• Emil Sandhåg, a lawyer, put forward the idea of building an underground line
• Such a railway would allow poorer residents to be moved to better homes on the
2.
• Several
3.
supported Sandhåg's proposal
• At first the company struggled to obtain the
4.
that the project demanded
• Unfavourable reports about the venture were carried by the
5.
The construction
• The route that was selected meant few buildings had to be pulled down
• The tunnels were dug using the 'cut and cover' technique
• Once the brick arch was finished, a covering of
6.
was placed over the tunnel
Question 7 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
7
No underground railway had been constructed anywhere else before the Central Valdheim line began operating.
8
On the line's first day of operation, travelling from one end to the other took under fifteen minutes.
9
The steam engines first intended for the line were eventually adopted.
10
Tunnelling deep below ground was more costly than the 'cut and cover' method.
11
On the Valdheim & Southern, the carriage windows were placed high up, near the ceiling.
12
Running the Valdheim & Southern proved to be a profitable enterprise.
13
Riding the Cross-City Railway cost passengers more than the Valdheim & Southern had.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has 7 sections, A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
a reference to stadiums that are no longer used once a major event has finished
15
figures indicating how much power a particular stadium produces
16
examples of facilities at some new stadiums that are unrelated to sporting events
17
an account of an amphitheatre that was turned into a place for trade
Question 18 - 22
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Roman amphitheatres
Europe's Roman arenas have shown remarkable flexibility. At Aurenca, the amphitheatre first became a , was later filled with housing, and finally returned to its original purpose as a place where the public could watch . The arena of Malvento, among the earliest to be built, is renowned today for the staged within it. The amphitheatre at Castelbruno likewise filled many roles across the centuries — among them holding stocks of — before being made over into an open marketplace, where and dwellings now stand among the Roman remains.
Question 23 - 24
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Section D contrasts the stadiums of the early 1900s with the amphitheatres of antiquity. Which TWO shortcomings of the modern stadiums does the writer point to?
A
They were capable of hosting only one kind of activity.
B
They stood in spots that were harder for people to get to.
C
They were made from materials that proved less durable.
D
They were designed with less imagination.
E
They offered space for fewer spectators.
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
The writer describes two strategies for modern stadium design. Which TWO benefits of these strategies does the writer mention?
A
creating a setting well suited to installing renewable-energy equipment
B
improving the amenities on offer to sports spectators
C
restoring a sense of community to urban life
D
providing researchers with a base for clean-energy studies
E
helping local residents lower their power consumption
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The story behind the hunt for King Aldwin
Aldwin's father was put to death by the Estates in 1648. Aldwin then entered into with the Marchlanders, and to win the crown of the Marches he gave up his father had died defending. The two armies eventually met outside Haldmere in 1650, an encounter that ended in for the Estates and left Aldwin running for his life. was promised to whoever could seize him, but after six weeks in hiding he at last reached of Valland, across the water.
A
a calculated partnership
B
an overwhelming win
C
a broad conspiracy
D
a fresh administration
E
a matter of faith
F
a public dispute
G
a substantial bounty
H
comparative security
I
a military breakthrough
J
a widely-backed remedy
Question 32 - 35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
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
32
The king wanted his experiences written down so that they would not be forgotten.
33
The king's recollection of his time as a fugitive was brief and short on detail.
34
The king found revisiting his weeks in hiding a painful experience.
35
In the reviewer's view, Ashworth dwells on the amusing episodes at the expense of the more serious ones.
Question 36 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
36
What is the reviewer's main purpose in the first paragraph?
A
to describe the fighting at the Battle of Haldmere in detail
B
to contrast the king's religious views with those of his father
C
to explain the sequence of events that led to the king going into hiding
D
to set out the political aims of the Estates
37
Why does the reviewer mention examples of the fugitives' behaviour in the third paragraph?
A
to show how close the king came to being captured
B
to demonstrate how vividly the events of the six weeks are recreated
C
to suggest that the king's supporters were poorly prepared
D
to point out that some details deserve to be better known
38
What point does the reviewer make about the king in the fourth paragraph?
A
He hoped to win back public trust in the crown.
B
He misjudged why his opponents were against him.
C
He treated the worst period of his life as something worth celebrating.
D
He was driven above all by a wish to be liked.
39
What does the reviewer say about Ashworth in the fifth paragraph?
A
He is equally fair to the runaway king and to the government pursuing him.
B
His decision to take on the book is a surprise.
C
His descriptions of events would be improved by more detail.
D
He writes in a style aimed at a present-day readership.
40
When the reviewer says the book 'doesn't quite hit the mark', she is making the point that
A
it ignores the effect of events on ordinary people.
B
it does not consider whether the king's ordeal left a permanent mark on him.
C
it leaves out the deceptions the king used while in hiding.
D
it provides no analysis of contemporary attitudes to monarchy.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The development of the London underground railway
Valdheim expanded with remarkable speed in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and its old core grew steadily more crowded. Matters were worsened by the spreading overground railway network, which poured ever-larger crowds into the city. When a government commission ruled in 1851 that trains must be kept out of the Kvarter — the ancient commercial district at the city's heart — the overground termini were left strung in a ring around it rather than reaching inside. Within that ring lay a maze of flimsy, overcrowded tenements, and its streets were choked with horse-drawn traffic. Crossing the Kvarter was a misery: eight kilometres by carriage or omnibus might swallow up an hour and a half. Plenty of remedies were proposed, yet hardly any came to anything.
One of the loudest voices calling for action was that of Emil Sandhåg, a lawyer employed by the Valdheim city council. To his mind, an underground line tying the scattered overground termini into a single network would bring benefits at once social and economic, since the same works could sweep away the worst slums. He proposed to resettle the poorer labourers packed into the central tenements in housing newly built on the city's outskirts, and to run trains cheap enough for them to reach their work. A number of merchants came round to Sandhåg's thinking, and in 1856 he laid a scheme before the assembly. It was thrown out, but happened to arrive alongside a rival group's proposal for an underground link between the termini, and that second plan won approval.
The two camps joined forces, and in August 1859 the Central Valdheim Railway Company came into being. Its aim was to build an underground line from the Nordhavn terminus of the Nordhavn & Western Railway to Kolstad, on the fringe of the Kvarter — a stretch of not quite five kilometres. Money for so bold and costly a venture proved hard to come by, and the hostile pieces filling the newspapers did nothing to help. Opponents warned that the tunnels were bound to cave in beneath the weight of traffic overhead, that nearby buildings would be shaken loose, and that fumes from the engines would poison anyone riding below. Sandhåg and his associates pressed on regardless.
For the Nordhavn & Western, the attraction was obvious — the line would let its trains run at last into the very centre of Valdheim — and it put close to 250,000 kroner into the project; the full million kroner needed came only gradually, over five years. To hold down the cost of demolition, the planners traced the route below roads that already existed. Work expected to take twenty-one months in the end ran on for nearly four years. The line was laid just beneath the surface by the method called 'cut and cover': labourers opened a trench roughly ten metres across and six deep, its walls braced for the time being with timber; masons then raised brick side-walls and closed the top with a brick arch to form the tunnel; over this a layer of earth about two metres thick was spread, and the roadway above was put back.
When it opened, on 12 March 1868, the Central Valdheim line became the first underground railway anywhere in the world. Some 35,000 people were carried between Nordhavn and Kolstad on that opening day, each trip lasting around twenty minutes, and by the close of the line's first twelve months close to ten million journeys had been recorded.
Approval for the earliest extensions came through even as the line was opening, and over the following five years these were carried out, pushing east to Bergsli and west as far as Vestport. Steam locomotives heated by firebricks in their boilers had been the original intention, but engines of that kind were never put into service; in their place ran specially built locomotives whose water tanks allowed the steam to be condensed. Smoke and foul air nonetheless remained a nuisance, notwithstanding the ventilation shafts sunk into the tunnels.
For all this new mileage underground, the congestion in Valdheim's streets was by the 1890s worse than before. Part of the trouble lay in the network's shape: the existing lines circled the middle of the city and reached out to the outskirts, but none actually ran across the centre itself. There 'cut and cover' could not be attempted, and the only way left was to drive tunnels far below ground.
The means of boring such tunnels already existed, yet steam engines were useless in so cramped a space. Only once a dependable electric motor had been devised, along with a way of carrying power from the generator to a moving train, did the world's first deep-level electric railway become feasible: the Valdheim & Southern, which opened in 1894 and ran from the centre out to Myrdal, on the far side of the River Glåma. Its trains, each of three carriages, were worked by electric engines. So narrow were the carriages that their windows sat as mere slits just under the roof, on the assumption that no passenger would care to gaze out at bare tunnel wall. An unreliable power supply caused most of its troubles; and for all its engineering merit, the Valdheim & Southern never turned a profit. Matters changed in 1903, when the Cross-City Railway — soon nicknamed the 'Ten-Øre Line' after its flat fare — opened with electric locomotives of a new design. Its popularity was immediate, and before long further lines and extensions joined the growing network; by 1910 the core of the system Valdheimers ride today was in place.
A. Few types of city building are as ancient as the stadium. Long before medieval cathedrals rose or the grand railway termini of the 1800s and 1900s came to define the urban skyline, huge arenas where crowds gathered to watch sport already stood at the heart of civic life in the Greek and Roman worlds. In our own time, though, the stadium is increasingly viewed with doubt. Building one can cost well over €1 billion, and more than a few arenas raised for showpiece occasions — an Olympic Games, say, or a World Cup — have since been left to decay, unused. Yet nothing makes this inevitable. The past shows that a stadium can spur a city's growth and reshape itself to suit each era, and even now designers are devising fresh uses for the single-purpose sporting venues that came to stand for progress in the twentieth century.
B
Perhaps no structure illustrates the adaptability of the stadium better than the amphitheatre at Aurenca, in south-western France, which once held 22,000 onlookers. Raised by the Romans in 85 AD, it was fortified into a towered citadel some time after the fifth century, and later still its interior filled up with dwellings until a village of roughly 180 houses occupied the site. When the preservation movement gathered pace in the nineteenth century, the building was cleared and given back its earliest role, being brought back into use as a venue for public races. A comparable survivor is the great arena of Malvento in northern Italy. Seating 28,000 and built several decades earlier than the one at Aurenca, it has come through the centuries intact and now ranks among the finest places anywhere to hear concerts, a reputation owed to its remarkable acoustics.
C
At the heart of the Italian town of Castelbruno lies another striking case of an amphitheatre swallowed up by the streets that grew around it. As at Aurenca, buildings gradually encroached on the arena between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, the space serving in turn as housing, as a store for grain and even as a prison. This time, however, the ruin was never turned back into an arena; instead the Romantic architect Emilio Vandelli reshaped it into a market square. The remains of the old Roman amphitheatre can still be seen today, folded into the cafés and homes that ring the open piazza.
D
In many respects the stadiums of today resemble the old amphitheatres put up for the games of antiquity. Something was lost, though, in the early twentieth century, when the newly available materials of steel and reinforced concrete, together with floodlights that allowed play after dark, produced arenas that could do only one thing. Built for sport alone, a great many of these were placed on the edges of cities and encircled by car parks — a setting that puts them beyond easy reach of ordinary residents, drives up the energy they consume, and adds to the warming of the surrounding streets.
E
Yet a good number of the boldest architects now working see in the stadium a chance to make the city better, and two approaches in particular are proving their worth: treating the arena as a hub for the wider community, and treating it as a generator of power. It is becoming common to fit stadiums with amenities that have nothing to do with sport — hotels and conference halls, retail units, bars and restaurants, play areas for children and patches of greenery. Bundling such uses together strengthens density and mixed use, squeezes more value from the land, and breathes new life into rundown districts. A stadium of this kind belongs not only to athletes and their fans but to families and the public at large. Britain offers several instances: the mixed-use schemes at Ashcombe and Northgate have set a pattern that stadiums across the globe have since copied.
F
The notion of the stadium as a power station grew out of the realisation that clusters of connected buildings can be linked through a smart grid — an electricity network that relies on digital communications to sense shifts in local demand and respond to them, so that little energy is wasted. Arenas suit this role especially well: the broad canopies over their stands present a wide surface for mounting solar panels, and they stand tall enough — over 45 metres — to carry small wind turbines. The Aldberg Solar Stadium led this new generation of power-producing arenas, and others such as the Rijnstad Arena and the Baihe Stadium have followed. Opened in 2011, the last of these carries 9,200 solar panels that generate as much as 1.2 GWh of electricity each year; in doing so it cuts carbon dioxide emissions by around 690 tonnes and, when no event is being held, feeds up to 75 percent of the power used by the neighbouring district. This shows that an arena can serve its city and make a real dent in CO2 emissions.
G
From the earliest times, arenas have sat at the centre of a city's life and culture. In each age it has taken on fresh meaning — a military stronghold, a place to live, an open public space, a stage for performance and, most recently, a proving ground for advanced engineering. Today's stadium draws all these roles together at once, and so helps cities build towards a sustainable future.
Helena Marsh reviews Julian Ashworth's book about the pursuit of King Aldwin during the civil war of the seventeenth century
Julian Ashworth's new book, To Catch a King, sets out the story of the pursuit of King Aldwin during the six weeks that followed his crushing defeat at the Battle of Haldmere in the autumn of 1650. And what a story it is. His father having been put to death by the Estates in 1648, the young Aldwin gave up one of the very principles for which that father had died, striking a bargain with the Marchlanders whereby he embraced the Severine faith as the state religion in exchange for the crown of the Marches. Word of his coronation in the northern capital drove the Estates' army to march north in a pre-emptive strike, and a Marchlander invasion of the south duly followed. The two forces came face to face at last outside Haldmere, in the country's west, in 1650. Beaten decisively on the fields beyond the city walls, the 21-year-old king became the quarry in a nationwide manhunt, an enormous sum being offered to whoever should take him. Across the next six weeks, by way of a string of hair's-breadth escapes, he slipped through the Estates' fingers and reached sanctuary in Valland. Then, for nine years, a penniless and beaten Aldwin drifted about the continent, attended only by a handful of faithful followers.
Long afterwards, once he had been restored to the throne, the 50-year-old Aldwin sought out the writer and diarist Nathaniel Croft. In asking Croft to set the tale down on paper, his aim was to see that so remarkable an episode should never fade from memory. Across two sittings of three hours each, the king gave him a minutely detailed account of everything he could recall of his six weeks as a hunted man. Once king and writer had settled to their task — a scene a future dramatist would surely relish — Aldwin began: 'After the field was so wholly lost that no hope of recovery remained, I set my mind to the surest means of preserving myself.'
Part of what makes Ashworth's book such a pleasure — and here its use of Aldwin's own words, and those of his followers, counts for a great deal — is how near it brings the reader to the action. Set down almost day by day, the doings of the fugitives throw up one choice detail after another: the royal hair shorn with sheep-shears, walnut husks crushed to stain the king's fair skin, an afternoon passed lying along a branch of the great elm at Harrowden Wood as the Estates' men searched the ground below. Comedy is there for the taking, and Ashworth takes it — the king's friend Sir Marcus Vane absurdly refusing to disguise himself, since disguise was beneath him — but so is the nerve-racking suspense of each occasion on which the king's identity had to be revealed, warily, to those he hoped would hide him.
There is an awkward truth that Aldwin's post-Haldmere adventures tend to obscure. His father's execution had horrified almost the whole kingdom, yet the son's reappearance — at the head of a Marchlander army — met with no welcome at all; doors were barred against him instead. Two things lay behind this: to many he resembled the leader of a foreign invasion, and, with the best part of a decade of civil war behind them, people dreaded nothing more than its resumption. Stranger still, then, that the story should have become so dear to Aldwin ever after. He would recount it to any listener, his courtiers quietly despairing, and he set in motion scheme after scheme to enshrine it. One was a brand-new order of chivalry, the Knights of the Royal Elm. Huge canvases of the episode were commissioned as well — a picture of Harrowden Wood a full two metres wide, together with six equally enormous paintings of the fugitive king. On his bedchamber ceiling, in 1660, the painter Cornelius Vos was set to work depicting a squadron of cherubs that bore an elm tree up to the heavens. That any monarch should so relish the lowest ebb of his life is remarkable enough; that he should first have engineered so extraordinary an escape is more remarkable still.
To carry a story like this to fresh readers, one could hardly ask for a better guide than Ashworth. There is real elegance in the way his brisk, highly readable prose avoids anything that sounds too modern and still calls up the fine detail of the tale. Neither side is favoured — the hunted king and the merciless republicans who chased him being treated with the same even-handed sympathy — and the wider background, which he had set out to open up far more fully than any earlier study, is exactly what he delivers. Much of the first third goes to explaining how Aldwin ended up at Haldmere in the first place, and that alone, for certain readers, will justify picking the book up.
What did it all amount to, in the end? That is the tantalising question the book leaves hanging. Had those six weeks never occurred, would Aldwin have turned out a different king? Time spent hiding, night and day, can hardly have left him untouched. Being forced into disguises, thrown back on wit and charm alone, talking and tricking his way clear of one tight spot after another — did all that go into making the man? It is on this single point that the book doesn't quite hit the mark. The feeble, pleasure-seeking ruler of its closing pages is untrue to Aldwin — inaccurate, besides — and untrue to how intricate his character actually was. That one quibble apart, though, To Catch a King makes a splendid read, and readers who arrive knowing next to nothing of the celebrated story are in for a treat.
Valdheim expanded with remarkable speed in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and its old core grew steadily more crowded. Matters were worsened by the spreading overground railway network, which poured ever-larger crowds into the city. When a government commission ruled in 1851 that trains must be kept out of the Kvarter — the ancient commercial district at the city's heart — the overground termini were left strung in a ring around it rather than reaching inside. Within that ring lay a maze of flimsy, overcrowded tenements, and its streets were choked with horse-drawn traffic. Crossing the Kvarter was a misery: eight kilometres by carriage or omnibus might swallow up an hour and a half. Plenty of remedies were proposed, yet hardly any came to anything.
One of the loudest voices calling for action was that of Emil Sandhåg, a lawyer employed by the Valdheim city council. To his mind, an underground line tying the scattered overground termini into a single network would bring benefits at once social and economic, since the same works could sweep away the worst slums. He proposed to resettle the poorer labourers packed into the central tenements in housing newly built on the city's outskirts, and to run trains cheap enough for them to reach their work. A number of merchants came round to Sandhåg's thinking, and in 1856 he laid a scheme before the assembly. It was thrown out, but happened to arrive alongside a rival group's proposal for an underground link between the termini, and that second plan won approval.
The two camps joined forces, and in August 1859 the Central Valdheim Railway Company came into being. Its aim was to build an underground line from the Nordhavn terminus of the Nordhavn & Western Railway to Kolstad, on the fringe of the Kvarter — a stretch of not quite five kilometres. Money for so bold and costly a venture proved hard to come by, and the hostile pieces filling the newspapers did nothing to help. Opponents warned that the tunnels were bound to cave in beneath the weight of traffic overhead, that nearby buildings would be shaken loose, and that fumes from the engines would poison anyone riding below. Sandhåg and his associates pressed on regardless.
For the Nordhavn & Western, the attraction was obvious — the line would let its trains run at last into the very centre of Valdheim — and it put close to 250,000 kroner into the project; the full million kroner needed came only gradually, over five years. To hold down the cost of demolition, the planners traced the route below roads that already existed. Work expected to take twenty-one months in the end ran on for nearly four years. The line was laid just beneath the surface by the method called 'cut and cover': labourers opened a trench roughly ten metres across and six deep, its walls braced for the time being with timber; masons then raised brick side-walls and closed the top with a brick arch to form the tunnel; over this a layer of earth about two metres thick was spread, and the roadway above was put back.
When it opened, on 12 March 1868, the Central Valdheim line became the first underground railway anywhere in the world. Some 35,000 people were carried between Nordhavn and Kolstad on that opening day, each trip lasting around twenty minutes, and by the close of the line's first twelve months close to ten million journeys had been recorded.
Approval for the earliest extensions came through even as the line was opening, and over the following five years these were carried out, pushing east to Bergsli and west as far as Vestport. Steam locomotives heated by firebricks in their boilers had been the original intention, but engines of that kind were never put into service; in their place ran specially built locomotives whose water tanks allowed the steam to be condensed. Smoke and foul air nonetheless remained a nuisance, notwithstanding the ventilation shafts sunk into the tunnels.
For all this new mileage underground, the congestion in Valdheim's streets was by the 1890s worse than before. Part of the trouble lay in the network's shape: the existing lines circled the middle of the city and reached out to the outskirts, but none actually ran across the centre itself. There 'cut and cover' could not be attempted, and the only way left was to drive tunnels far below ground.
The means of boring such tunnels already existed, yet steam engines were useless in so cramped a space. Only once a dependable electric motor had been devised, along with a way of carrying power from the generator to a moving train, did the world's first deep-level electric railway become feasible: the Valdheim & Southern, which opened in 1894 and ran from the centre out to Myrdal, on the far side of the River Glåma. Its trains, each of three carriages, were worked by electric engines. So narrow were the carriages that their windows sat as mere slits just under the roof, on the assumption that no passenger would care to gaze out at bare tunnel wall. An unreliable power supply caused most of its troubles; and for all its engineering merit, the Valdheim & Southern never turned a profit. Matters changed in 1903, when the Cross-City Railway — soon nicknamed the 'Ten-Øre Line' after its flat fare — opened with electric locomotives of a new design. Its popularity was immediate, and before long further lines and extensions joined the growing network; by 1910 the core of the system Valdheimers ride today was in place.
B. Perhaps no structure illustrates the adaptability of the stadium better than the amphitheatre at Aurenca, in south-western France, which once held 22,000 onlookers. Raised by the Romans in 85 AD, it was fortified into a towered citadel some time after the fifth century, and later still its interior filled up with dwellings until a village of roughly 180 houses occupied the site. When the preservation movement gathered pace in the nineteenth century, the building was cleared and given back its earliest role, being brought back into use as a venue for public races. A comparable survivor is the great arena of Malvento in northern Italy. Seating 28,000 and built several decades earlier than the one at Aurenca, it has come through the centuries intact and now ranks among the finest places anywhere to hear concerts, a reputation owed to its remarkable acoustics.
C. At the heart of the Italian town of Castelbruno lies another striking case of an amphitheatre swallowed up by the streets that grew around it. As at Aurenca, buildings gradually encroached on the arena between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, the space serving in turn as housing, as a store for grain and even as a prison. This time, however, the ruin was never turned back into an arena; instead the Romantic architect Emilio Vandelli reshaped it into a market square. The remains of the old Roman amphitheatre can still be seen today, folded into the cafés and homes that ring the open piazza.
D. In many respects the stadiums of today resemble the old amphitheatres put up for the games of antiquity. Something was lost, though, in the early twentieth century, when the newly available materials of steel and reinforced concrete, together with floodlights that allowed play after dark, produced arenas that could do only one thing. Built for sport alone, a great many of these were placed on the edges of cities and encircled by car parks — a setting that puts them beyond easy reach of ordinary residents, drives up the energy they consume, and adds to the warming of the surrounding streets.
E. Yet a good number of the boldest architects now working see in the stadium a chance to make the city better, and two approaches in particular are proving their worth: treating the arena as a hub for the wider community, and treating it as a generator of power. It is becoming common to fit stadiums with amenities that have nothing to do with sport — hotels and conference halls, retail units, bars and restaurants, play areas for children and patches of greenery. Bundling such uses together strengthens density and mixed use, squeezes more value from the land, and breathes new life into rundown districts. A stadium of this kind belongs not only to athletes and their fans but to families and the public at large. Britain offers several instances: the mixed-use schemes at Ashcombe and Northgate have set a pattern that stadiums across the globe have since copied.
F. The notion of the stadium as a power station grew out of the realisation that clusters of connected buildings can be linked through a smart grid — an electricity network that relies on digital communications to sense shifts in local demand and respond to them, so that little energy is wasted. Arenas suit this role especially well: the broad canopies over their stands present a wide surface for mounting solar panels, and they stand tall enough — over 45 metres — to carry small wind turbines. The Aldberg Solar Stadium led this new generation of power-producing arenas, and others such as the Rijnstad Arena and the Baihe Stadium have followed. Opened in 2011, the last of these carries 9,200 solar panels that generate as much as 1.2 GWh of electricity each year; in doing so it cuts carbon dioxide emissions by around 690 tonnes and, when no event is being held, feeds up to 75 percent of the power used by the neighbouring district. This shows that an arena can serve its city and make a real dent in CO2 emissions.
G. From the earliest times, arenas have sat at the centre of a city's life and culture. In each age it has taken on fresh meaning — a military stronghold, a place to live, an open public space, a stage for performance and, most recently, a proving ground for advanced engineering. Today's stadium draws all these roles together at once, and so helps cities build towards a sustainable future.
Julian Ashworth's new book, To Catch a King, sets out the story of the pursuit of King Aldwin during the six weeks that followed his crushing defeat at the Battle of Haldmere in the autumn of 1650. And what a story it is. His father having been put to death by the Estates in 1648, the young Aldwin gave up one of the very principles for which that father had died, striking a bargain with the Marchlanders whereby he embraced the Severine faith as the state religion in exchange for the crown of the Marches. Word of his coronation in the northern capital drove the Estates' army to march north in a pre-emptive strike, and a Marchlander invasion of the south duly followed. The two forces came face to face at last outside Haldmere, in the country's west, in 1650. Beaten decisively on the fields beyond the city walls, the 21-year-old king became the quarry in a nationwide manhunt, an enormous sum being offered to whoever should take him. Across the next six weeks, by way of a string of hair's-breadth escapes, he slipped through the Estates' fingers and reached sanctuary in Valland. Then, for nine years, a penniless and beaten Aldwin drifted about the continent, attended only by a handful of faithful followers.
Long afterwards, once he had been restored to the throne, the 50-year-old Aldwin sought out the writer and diarist Nathaniel Croft. In asking Croft to set the tale down on paper, his aim was to see that so remarkable an episode should never fade from memory. Across two sittings of three hours each, the king gave him a minutely detailed account of everything he could recall of his six weeks as a hunted man. Once king and writer had settled to their task — a scene a future dramatist would surely relish — Aldwin began: 'After the field was so wholly lost that no hope of recovery remained, I set my mind to the surest means of preserving myself.'
Part of what makes Ashworth's book such a pleasure — and here its use of Aldwin's own words, and those of his followers, counts for a great deal — is how near it brings the reader to the action. Set down almost day by day, the doings of the fugitives throw up one choice detail after another: the royal hair shorn with sheep-shears, walnut husks crushed to stain the king's fair skin, an afternoon passed lying along a branch of the great elm at Harrowden Wood as the Estates' men searched the ground below. Comedy is there for the taking, and Ashworth takes it — the king's friend Sir Marcus Vane absurdly refusing to disguise himself, since disguise was beneath him — but so is the nerve-racking suspense of each occasion on which the king's identity had to be revealed, warily, to those he hoped would hide him.
There is an awkward truth that Aldwin's post-Haldmere adventures tend to obscure. His father's execution had horrified almost the whole kingdom, yet the son's reappearance — at the head of a Marchlander army — met with no welcome at all; doors were barred against him instead. Two things lay behind this: to many he resembled the leader of a foreign invasion, and, with the best part of a decade of civil war behind them, people dreaded nothing more than its resumption. Stranger still, then, that the story should have become so dear to Aldwin ever after. He would recount it to any listener, his courtiers quietly despairing, and he set in motion scheme after scheme to enshrine it. One was a brand-new order of chivalry, the Knights of the Royal Elm. Huge canvases of the episode were commissioned as well — a picture of Harrowden Wood a full two metres wide, together with six equally enormous paintings of the fugitive king. On his bedchamber ceiling, in 1660, the painter Cornelius Vos was set to work depicting a squadron of cherubs that bore an elm tree up to the heavens. That any monarch should so relish the lowest ebb of his life is remarkable enough; that he should first have engineered so extraordinary an escape is more remarkable still.
To carry a story like this to fresh readers, one could hardly ask for a better guide than Ashworth. There is real elegance in the way his brisk, highly readable prose avoids anything that sounds too modern and still calls up the fine detail of the tale. Neither side is favoured — the hunted king and the merciless republicans who chased him being treated with the same even-handed sympathy — and the wider background, which he had set out to open up far more fully than any earlier study, is exactly what he delivers. Much of the first third goes to explaining how Aldwin ended up at Haldmere in the first place, and that alone, for certain readers, will justify picking the book up.
What did it all amount to, in the end? That is the tantalising question the book leaves hanging. Had those six weeks never occurred, would Aldwin have turned out a different king? Time spent hiding, night and day, can hardly have left him untouched. Being forced into disguises, thrown back on wit and charm alone, talking and tricking his way clear of one tight spot after another — did all that go into making the man? It is on this single point that the book doesn't quite hit the mark. The feeble, pleasure-seeking ruler of its closing pages is untrue to Aldwin — inaccurate, besides — and untrue to how intricate his character actually was. That one quibble apart, though, To Catch a King makes a splendid read, and readers who arrive knowing next to nothing of the celebrated story are in for a treat.
