IELTS CAM Inspired 17 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online CAM Inspired 17 - Reading Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 17 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.
IELTS Mock Test 17 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 5
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The reska
Appearance and behaviour
• resembled a dog in its general build
• bore a series of dark bands along its back and tail
• its diet consisted of
1.
alone
• when running down its quarry, it is thought to have trusted its
2.
more than its eyesight
• once a reska had left its pouch, the animal sheltered in a
3.
, such as a hollow tree or a rock crevice
Decline and extinction
• the most recent mainland find is a
4.
from a cave, dated to about 2,800 years ago
• a drop in its
5.
, together with the loss of habitat, helped drive the decline on Vellamo
Question 6 - 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
6
Most authorities hold that disease, more than human hunting, was what chiefly wiped out the reska on Vellamo.
7
There was a single instance of a reska producing young in a zoo.
8
Halloway's bleak forecast met with disagreement from certain other naturalists.
9
In the decades after its decline, the reska was a source of serious worry to the scientific community.
10
Marsh's idea of relocating some reskas to an island was never carried out.
11
By the time the single-month protection was granted, the reska had become exceedingly scarce.
12
Living reskas could still be found beyond the zoos in the years immediately after 1932.
13
As yet, no search has yielded firm confirmation that living reskas remain.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
Reading Passage 2 has 8 sections, A-H.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
14
an outline of several possible ecological benefits that growing the crop could bring
15
an account of a body that oversees how the industry affects the natural world
16
instances showing how commonly the oil turns up in everyday goods
17
mention of a single plant that might improve conditions for life on plantations
18
statistics showing how fast the growing of oil palm has increased
19
a financial argument against turning away from the crop
20
cases of animals that have suffered as plantations have been set up
Question 21 - 22
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following claims does the passage make about the Alliance for Responsible Palm Cultivation (ARPC)?
A
It expects producers seeking its approval to be open about how they operate.
B
Its sustainability requirements are tougher than those applied in comparable industries.
C
It was brought into being because of pressure from conservation groups.
D
The number of members belonging to it has risen year after year over the past decade.
E
Reaching agreement on its certification standards was a process that took several years.
Question 23 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
23
Manufacturers find palm oil useful partly because it keeps a
texture at everyday temperatures.
24
In campaigns opposing the crop's expansion, the creature shown more than any other is the
.
25
The Alliance's rules require producers to measure the
in their area on a routine basis.
26
Researchers are exploring whether the fern might bring
back to land under oil palm.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the first paragraph, what point does Devlin make about Renner's book?
A
Rival histories of the city have taken a broadly similar path.
B
Renner's own research articles are reproduced unchanged in the later chapters.
C
The book weighs up a range of forces that shaped the city's growth.
D
The explanation it offers for the city's rise is a strikingly new one.
28
What is Devlin's response to the book's material on tenements?
A
She explains what drew Renner to the subject.
B
She sets Renner's view alongside that of other historians.
C
She lists the sources Renner relied on for this section.
D
She points to an apparent contradiction in Renner's reasoning.
29
Which of these does Devlin say about chapter six?
A
It leans on data that is no longer current.
B
It is likely to be too specialised for the average reader.
C
It contains figures that are at odds with one another.
D
It gives too much weight to future patterns.
30
What does Devlin imply about the chapters that deal with the 1920s building boom?
A
The material would have been better set out in another way.
B
More detail is needed about how the building work was funded.
C
Some of it will appeal to only certain kinds of reader.
D
The explanation offered for the boom is unconvincing.
31
What aspect of the chapter on land values most impresses Devlin?
A
the long stretch of time it deals with
B
the great quantity of work that the estimates demanded
C
the thought-provoking questions Renner raises
D
the policy proposals Renner sets out for the future
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
Readers are likely to find Renner's picture of the city viewed from the sky in 1609 an engaging one.
33
In chapter three, Renner concentrates on the uses of land in the years following the Civil War.
34
Renner finds that most of the immigrant areas he identifies occupied land of little worth.
35
The immigrant districts grew larger in extent as the nineteenth century went on.
Question 36 - 40
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The bedrock myth
In chapter seven, Renner argues that the shortage of bedrock near the surface is not the reason why skyscrapers fail to appear in . He points out that, although foundations grow dearer where the bedrock lies far down, this added cost should not be seen as , particularly once it is set beside .
One of the most enjoyable sections describes how foundations are built. Renner explains how caissons make possible, and then goes on to weigh that come with them. The chapter is carefully researched yet remains easy to follow.
A
the overall building cost
B
formal planning rules
C
an unreasonable expense
D
the depth of the water table
E
particular parts of the city
F
impossibly hard tasks
G
digging to great depths
H
the dangers involved
I
long horizontal distances
J
detailed cost estimates
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The thylacine
Now vanished, the reska - or Auren wolf, as it was once known - was a marsupial whose form recalled that of a dog. Its clearest mark was the row of 15 to 20 dark bands running across its hindquarters and onto the tail. Males averaged about 158 centimetres from nose to tail; females were smaller, at roughly 149 centimetres.
Almost every kind of country suited the reska apart from thick rainforest, and naturalists take open woodland to have been where it did best. Its diet was made up of nothing but meat. Since the muscular stomach could stretch to hold a great deal at one sitting, the animal could gorge whenever a kill was made - an adaptation, most likely, to the long stretches when prey proved scarce. Outright speed it lacked; rather than overtake its quarry, the reska seems to have worn it down over a drawn-out chase. On these long pursuits it is thought to have leaned on its hearing more than on sight or any other sense. Hunting fell between dusk and first light, and by day the creature drew back into hills and timber to rest. Whatever menace the name 'wolf' implies, this was a timid, easily startled animal. Though it kept to the dark, it was now and then abroad in daylight, and a few were even seen stretched out in the sun.
Breeding ran across a long season from the cold months into spring, though a few births could come at any time of year. Like every marsupial, the reska was born tiny, bare and helpless. The newborn dragged itself into the pouch on its mother's underside, fastened onto one of her two teats, and clung there for as much as four months. Having outgrown the pouch, the young reska waited in a lair - a hollow log, a hidden nest, or a deep crack in the rocks - while its mother hunted.
Roughly 5,000 years ago the reska ranged widely - over Corran to the north, across most of the Auren mainland, and on the island of Vellamo. Its last securely dated mainland record is a carbon-dated skeleton lifted from Harrow Cave, in the west of Auren, and reckoned to be about 2,800 years old. Its disappearance from the mainland followed closely upon the coming of wild dogs, known as korrs, to Auren, and of a like hunter to Corran. Because no korr ever reached Vellamo, most researchers treat that as the chief reason the reska endured on the island.
On Vellamo the reska's sharp fall set in during the 1840s and dragged on for the best part of a century; blame is usually laid on the tireless work of sheep farmers and bounty hunters carrying guns. A major cause that surely was, yet several other pressures probably fed into the animal's decline and final disappearance. Among these were rivalry with the wild dogs the European settlers had brought, a shrinking of the ground it could live on as the prey it hunted grew fewer, and a distemper-like sickness that may have taken its own toll.
Just once was the reska bred successfully in captivity - at Rennick Zoo in 1902 - and this despite the sizeable numbers passing through certain collections, chiefly Carrow Zoo and Vellamo's Ardent Zoo. The animal's end had already been foreseen by the naturalist Edmund Halloway. Writing in The Wild Mammals of the South, issued in parts between 1852 and 1868, he declared: 'This strange creature will dwindle fast; extermination will run its course, and it will then pass, like the wild ox of the old forests, into the roll of animals we know only from record.'
In the years that came after, little public feeling was roused on the reska's behalf, and among scientists too hardly any concern was voiced at the animal's retreat. One plain exception was Lena Marsh, Professor of Zoology at the University of Vellamo. By 1916, troubled by how few reskas were left, she pressed for a number to be caught and settled on a small offshore island. It was only in 1931, however, with the species poised at the very brink of extinction, that the Vellamo Wildlife Protection Committee carried a motion - and even that guarded the reska during August alone, the month reckoned to be the core of its breeding season. In 1932 a farmer in the south of Vellamo shot the last reska known to have been taken from the wild, and thereafter only captive animals were left. Formal protection under the Vellamo government arrived on 12 August 1938, a mere 47 days before the last known individual died, at Ardent Zoo on 28 September 1938.
Many an expedition and search has been mounted down the years, not one of them turning up firm proof that the reska lives on. In 1991 the species was formally declared extinct by the government of Vellamo.
A. Pressed from the fruit of the African oil palm, palm oil is the vegetable oil that the world now eats more of than any other. The chances are it is in the soap you reached for this morning, the loaf you bought at lunchtime and the packet of biscuits in the cupboard. So why do food companies find it so useful? The main reason lies in a handful of unusual qualities — chief among them the fact that it does not melt but stays firm at ordinary room temperature. That firmness makes it well suited to keeping processed food edible over long stretches, which is why so many items on supermarket shelves can carry 'best before' dates that run months, and sometimes years, ahead.
B
Conservationists, however, point to several reasons for alarm at how quickly the crop has spread. Report after report describes forests felled, habitats wrecked and animal numbers falling, all traceable to the clearing of land for vast single-crop plantations, above all in Indonesia and Malaysia. A long list of threatened creatures — rhinos, elephants, orangutans and many more — has paid the price as the plantations advance, but it is the Sumatran tiger that has become the animal most often pictured in campaigns against their spread.
C
Plenty of farmers have rushed to plant as many oil palms as they can. Between 1995 and 2018 the area given over to the crop worldwide swelled from roughly five million hectares to almost twenty million, until it made up close to a tenth of all the cropland on Earth. Fifty years ago the annual global harvest amounted to barely three million tonnes; the yearly figure today sits near seventy million tonnes, and some projections have it doubling again before 2060.
D
'Few things now endanger the planet's variety of life as gravely as this crop does,' warns Dr Katarina Molnár of Ashfield Metropolitan University. 'Where rainforest once stood, oil palm is taking over — and rainforest is precisely where the species are. That is the heart of the problem.' Views like hers have prompted some campaigners to raise a drastic possibility: that shoppers ought to refuse palm oil altogether. Professor Idris Bello, an economist at the Centre for Development Studies in Accra, is wary of that instinct. 'It is tempting to cast palm oil as the villain and line up against it,' he says. 'That version is more dramatic and it feels obvious. But once you take in how tangled the issue really is, a more careful, less clear-cut account comes nearer the truth.'
E
Bello's caution is borne out even by the charge of deforestation, which turns out to be less clear-cut than it first appears. A hectare of oil palm yields at least four times — and possibly as much as ten times — the oil that the same area of soya, rapeseed or sunflower would give. That remarkable productivity, the very thing that makes the crop so profitable, may also count in its favour ecologically: if a plot of oil palm delivers ten times the oil of a rival crop, then ten times the land would have to be stripped bare to match its output using that rival. The carbon question, too, hangs on what the oil palm has replaced. Plants differ in how much carbon they lock away from the air and hold in their tissue, and the more a crop stores, the more it blunts the warming of the climate. 'In certain respects,' Bello notes, 'growing oil palm actually captures more carbon than some of the alternatives. Clear virgin forest for it, as has been allowed to happen unchecked in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the result is disastrous. But put it where rice once grew, and it may well store more carbon than before.'
F
A further answer to the boycott campaigners rests on the part palm oil plays in uplifting the lives of millions across the developing world. Would it truly be wise to drive the oil out of global supply chains, given how many people on low incomes in poorer countries make their living from it? Finding a fair way to weigh that human benefit against the environmental costs has turned into a genuinely contested matter.
G
There is even a prospect that oil palm estates need not stay the lifeless single-crop expanses — 'green deserts,' as Molnár calls them — that they so often are. Work in her laboratory has fastened on one modest plant that might change everything. The canopy basket fern, which perches on trees purely for support rather than drawing any nourishment from them, grows wild across many tropical regions, where it does the job of a keystone species. Reintroduce it to the plantations, Molnár believes, and these barren tracts could slowly win back their wildlife, offering shelter to everything from fungi and bacteria to insects, frogs, lizards and even small mammals.
H
The trade is now watched over by a body known as the Alliance for Responsible Palm Cultivation (ARPC), whose ranks take in growers, processors, retail chains and conservation groups alike. After nearly a decade of negotiation, its members eventually settled on a common set of rules that a producer must satisfy before its oil can count as officially 'responsible.' Among the conditions, the Alliance bars the clearing of untouched forest, obliges certified members to be open about the way they operate, and requires them to check local water tables at regular intervals. Only when every requirement has been met may the oil be marketed as verified responsible palm oil. On recent counts the Alliance certifies around fourteen million tonnes each year — roughly a fifth of everything the world produces.
Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers
Carmen Devlin reviews a book by Elias Renner about how New York City's skyline came to be
Elias Renner's Building the Skyline walks readers through a close history of New York City, pulling together geology, the historical record, economic reasoning and a great deal of data to account for why clusters of business took root where they did, and how choices made early on by firms and workers left their imprint on today's skyline. Renner splits the book into two clearly separate halves. The opening half is largely history, tracing the city's founding and its expansion from 1609 to 1900; the closing half turns mainly to the twentieth century, gathering chapters that each comment on some facet of the city's development. The voice and structure shift a little between the two, since the later chapters lean on material drawn from Renner's own research articles.
The opening chapter begins with what Renner calls a 'helicopter time-machine' journey, an absorbing description of how the New York terrain might have looked from overhead in 1609. He then leads the reader beneath the streets, mapping where rock and water sit under the topsoil, before bringing everyone back to ground level. His affection for the place is unmistakable as he recounts assorted curiosities, among them where the early nineteenth-century mayor DeWitt Clinton once kept his New York home, along with several of the myths that have gathered around the city.
The following two chapters carry the reader up to the Civil War (1861-1865). Chapter two dwells on how land first came to be developed and on the grid plan brought in during 1811, whereas chapter three examines the ways land was put to use in the years leading up to the war. Both are well researched and rich in detail, and together they prepare the ground for the economic argument the book builds later on. One assertion I wished Renner had pursued further is his contention that the tenements* already standing in some districts kept skyscrapers away, since no builder of tall towers would have wished to undertake the 'slum clearance' that would first be needed. Yet elsewhere he holds that how deep the bedrock** lay set no genuine limit on developers, foundations being only a slender share of a project's total cost. Why clearing slums should count as a barrier when pricier foundations do not is not, at first sight, easy to see.
Chapter four shifts to immigration and to where neighbourhoods and tenements were situated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Renner singles out three principal immigrant districts and looks at where each sat in relation to the amenities close at hand. In the main these districts took up the least valuable ground, hemmed in between the industry strung along the waterfront and the well-to-do streets that fringed Central Park.
The book's second half opens by weighing the economics that decide how tall a skyscraper ends up being. Renner, in chapter five, separates out three ideas of height. Engineering height is the greatest a structure can rise to in safety given the technology of the day; economic height is whatever height serves society most efficiently; and developer height is the figure a developer settles on while trying to wring the most from the money invested.
That same chapter also offers an engaging look at the technical breakthroughs behind the rise of skyscrapers. Frames of iron and steel, for one, removed the need for thick load-bearing walls, which both opened up usable floor area and let in far more windows and daylight. Chapter six then sets out figures on the height of buildings across the twentieth century and turns to regression analysis to forecast construction. Pitched though it is at a gentler technical level than the research paper it grows out of, it is still likely to strike the ordinary reader as rather too technical.
Chapter seven confronts the so-called bedrock myth: the belief that no skyscrapers went up in the corridor separating Downtown from Midtown because the bedrock there lies too deep below the surface. Renner's reply is that deeper bedrock certainly raises the price of foundations, yet that price was neither ruinously steep nor sizeable when weighed against the total cost of erecting the skyscraper. The portion I most enjoyed was his account of the way foundations really get put in. He sets out how caissons let workers dig steadily downward across long stretches, often well beneath the water table, until they reach bedrock. His careful technical narrative covers not merely how a caisson works but the perils that go with it. Resting though it does on empirical research papers, the chapter still makes for a fairly easy read.
Chapters eight and nine dwell on the coming of Midtown and the construction surge of the 1920s. Chapter eight runs to long stretches of urban economic theory that anyone whose chief concern is New York itself might treat as a detour, though those passages would suit undergraduates taking up the economics of cities rather well. In the chapter after it, Renner sets the two explanations most often advanced for the 1920s surge side by side, the first a mood of exuberance and the second the ready supply of finance. Testing each against the data, he judges that supply and demand explain much of what was put up in that decade; cheap credit, to his mind, opened the door to the boom but was not the force chiefly behind it.
The book's last chapter draws on a further empirical paper of Renner's, one that puts a value on Manhattan land from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. What is especially striking is the sheer amount of effort that produced these figures. As the chapter nears its close, Renner turns to whether tall buildings bring about high land values or merely follow from them, concluding that movements in land value can foretell the height of buildings still to come while the reverse cannot be shown. A closing epilogue rounds things off, with Renner considering how a changing climate will press on the city and laying out policy suggestions for the New York of the future.
* tenements: apartment buildings, especially ones that are overcrowded or in poor condition ** bedrock: the solid rock lying beneath the surface soil
Now vanished, the reska - or Auren wolf, as it was once known - was a marsupial whose form recalled that of a dog. Its clearest mark was the row of 15 to 20 dark bands running across its hindquarters and onto the tail. Males averaged about 158 centimetres from nose to tail; females were smaller, at roughly 149 centimetres.
Almost every kind of country suited the reska apart from thick rainforest, and naturalists take open woodland to have been where it did best. Its diet was made up of nothing but meat. Since the muscular stomach could stretch to hold a great deal at one sitting, the animal could gorge whenever a kill was made - an adaptation, most likely, to the long stretches when prey proved scarce. Outright speed it lacked; rather than overtake its quarry, the reska seems to have worn it down over a drawn-out chase. On these long pursuits it is thought to have leaned on its hearing more than on sight or any other sense. Hunting fell between dusk and first light, and by day the creature drew back into hills and timber to rest. Whatever menace the name 'wolf' implies, this was a timid, easily startled animal. Though it kept to the dark, it was now and then abroad in daylight, and a few were even seen stretched out in the sun.
Breeding ran across a long season from the cold months into spring, though a few births could come at any time of year. Like every marsupial, the reska was born tiny, bare and helpless. The newborn dragged itself into the pouch on its mother's underside, fastened onto one of her two teats, and clung there for as much as four months. Having outgrown the pouch, the young reska waited in a lair - a hollow log, a hidden nest, or a deep crack in the rocks - while its mother hunted.
Roughly 5,000 years ago the reska ranged widely - over Corran to the north, across most of the Auren mainland, and on the island of Vellamo. Its last securely dated mainland record is a carbon-dated skeleton lifted from Harrow Cave, in the west of Auren, and reckoned to be about 2,800 years old. Its disappearance from the mainland followed closely upon the coming of wild dogs, known as korrs, to Auren, and of a like hunter to Corran. Because no korr ever reached Vellamo, most researchers treat that as the chief reason the reska endured on the island.
On Vellamo the reska's sharp fall set in during the 1840s and dragged on for the best part of a century; blame is usually laid on the tireless work of sheep farmers and bounty hunters carrying guns. A major cause that surely was, yet several other pressures probably fed into the animal's decline and final disappearance. Among these were rivalry with the wild dogs the European settlers had brought, a shrinking of the ground it could live on as the prey it hunted grew fewer, and a distemper-like sickness that may have taken its own toll.
Just once was the reska bred successfully in captivity - at Rennick Zoo in 1902 - and this despite the sizeable numbers passing through certain collections, chiefly Carrow Zoo and Vellamo's Ardent Zoo. The animal's end had already been foreseen by the naturalist Edmund Halloway. Writing in The Wild Mammals of the South, issued in parts between 1852 and 1868, he declared: 'This strange creature will dwindle fast; extermination will run its course, and it will then pass, like the wild ox of the old forests, into the roll of animals we know only from record.'
In the years that came after, little public feeling was roused on the reska's behalf, and among scientists too hardly any concern was voiced at the animal's retreat. One plain exception was Lena Marsh, Professor of Zoology at the University of Vellamo. By 1916, troubled by how few reskas were left, she pressed for a number to be caught and settled on a small offshore island. It was only in 1931, however, with the species poised at the very brink of extinction, that the Vellamo Wildlife Protection Committee carried a motion - and even that guarded the reska during August alone, the month reckoned to be the core of its breeding season. In 1932 a farmer in the south of Vellamo shot the last reska known to have been taken from the wild, and thereafter only captive animals were left. Formal protection under the Vellamo government arrived on 12 August 1938, a mere 47 days before the last known individual died, at Ardent Zoo on 28 September 1938.
Many an expedition and search has been mounted down the years, not one of them turning up firm proof that the reska lives on. In 1991 the species was formally declared extinct by the government of Vellamo.
B. Conservationists, however, point to several reasons for alarm at how quickly the crop has spread. Report after report describes forests felled, habitats wrecked and animal numbers falling, all traceable to the clearing of land for vast single-crop plantations, above all in Indonesia and Malaysia. A long list of threatened creatures — rhinos, elephants, orangutans and many more — has paid the price as the plantations advance, but it is the Sumatran tiger that has become the animal most often pictured in campaigns against their spread.
C. Plenty of farmers have rushed to plant as many oil palms as they can. Between 1995 and 2018 the area given over to the crop worldwide swelled from roughly five million hectares to almost twenty million, until it made up close to a tenth of all the cropland on Earth. Fifty years ago the annual global harvest amounted to barely three million tonnes; the yearly figure today sits near seventy million tonnes, and some projections have it doubling again before 2060.
D. 'Few things now endanger the planet's variety of life as gravely as this crop does,' warns Dr Katarina Molnár of Ashfield Metropolitan University. 'Where rainforest once stood, oil palm is taking over — and rainforest is precisely where the species are. That is the heart of the problem.' Views like hers have prompted some campaigners to raise a drastic possibility: that shoppers ought to refuse palm oil altogether. Professor Idris Bello, an economist at the Centre for Development Studies in Accra, is wary of that instinct. 'It is tempting to cast palm oil as the villain and line up against it,' he says. 'That version is more dramatic and it feels obvious. But once you take in how tangled the issue really is, a more careful, less clear-cut account comes nearer the truth.'
E. Bello's caution is borne out even by the charge of deforestation, which turns out to be less clear-cut than it first appears. A hectare of oil palm yields at least four times — and possibly as much as ten times — the oil that the same area of soya, rapeseed or sunflower would give. That remarkable productivity, the very thing that makes the crop so profitable, may also count in its favour ecologically: if a plot of oil palm delivers ten times the oil of a rival crop, then ten times the land would have to be stripped bare to match its output using that rival. The carbon question, too, hangs on what the oil palm has replaced. Plants differ in how much carbon they lock away from the air and hold in their tissue, and the more a crop stores, the more it blunts the warming of the climate. 'In certain respects,' Bello notes, 'growing oil palm actually captures more carbon than some of the alternatives. Clear virgin forest for it, as has been allowed to happen unchecked in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the result is disastrous. But put it where rice once grew, and it may well store more carbon than before.'
F. A further answer to the boycott campaigners rests on the part palm oil plays in uplifting the lives of millions across the developing world. Would it truly be wise to drive the oil out of global supply chains, given how many people on low incomes in poorer countries make their living from it? Finding a fair way to weigh that human benefit against the environmental costs has turned into a genuinely contested matter.
G. There is even a prospect that oil palm estates need not stay the lifeless single-crop expanses — 'green deserts,' as Molnár calls them — that they so often are. Work in her laboratory has fastened on one modest plant that might change everything. The canopy basket fern, which perches on trees purely for support rather than drawing any nourishment from them, grows wild across many tropical regions, where it does the job of a keystone species. Reintroduce it to the plantations, Molnár believes, and these barren tracts could slowly win back their wildlife, offering shelter to everything from fungi and bacteria to insects, frogs, lizards and even small mammals.
H. The trade is now watched over by a body known as the Alliance for Responsible Palm Cultivation (ARPC), whose ranks take in growers, processors, retail chains and conservation groups alike. After nearly a decade of negotiation, its members eventually settled on a common set of rules that a producer must satisfy before its oil can count as officially 'responsible.' Among the conditions, the Alliance bars the clearing of untouched forest, obliges certified members to be open about the way they operate, and requires them to check local water tables at regular intervals. Only when every requirement has been met may the oil be marketed as verified responsible palm oil. On recent counts the Alliance certifies around fourteen million tonnes each year — roughly a fifth of everything the world produces.
Elias Renner's Building the Skyline walks readers through a close history of New York City, pulling together geology, the historical record, economic reasoning and a great deal of data to account for why clusters of business took root where they did, and how choices made early on by firms and workers left their imprint on today's skyline. Renner splits the book into two clearly separate halves. The opening half is largely history, tracing the city's founding and its expansion from 1609 to 1900; the closing half turns mainly to the twentieth century, gathering chapters that each comment on some facet of the city's development. The voice and structure shift a little between the two, since the later chapters lean on material drawn from Renner's own research articles.
The opening chapter begins with what Renner calls a 'helicopter time-machine' journey, an absorbing description of how the New York terrain might have looked from overhead in 1609. He then leads the reader beneath the streets, mapping where rock and water sit under the topsoil, before bringing everyone back to ground level. His affection for the place is unmistakable as he recounts assorted curiosities, among them where the early nineteenth-century mayor DeWitt Clinton once kept his New York home, along with several of the myths that have gathered around the city.
The following two chapters carry the reader up to the Civil War (1861-1865). Chapter two dwells on how land first came to be developed and on the grid plan brought in during 1811, whereas chapter three examines the ways land was put to use in the years leading up to the war. Both are well researched and rich in detail, and together they prepare the ground for the economic argument the book builds later on. One assertion I wished Renner had pursued further is his contention that the tenements* already standing in some districts kept skyscrapers away, since no builder of tall towers would have wished to undertake the 'slum clearance' that would first be needed. Yet elsewhere he holds that how deep the bedrock** lay set no genuine limit on developers, foundations being only a slender share of a project's total cost. Why clearing slums should count as a barrier when pricier foundations do not is not, at first sight, easy to see.
Chapter four shifts to immigration and to where neighbourhoods and tenements were situated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Renner singles out three principal immigrant districts and looks at where each sat in relation to the amenities close at hand. In the main these districts took up the least valuable ground, hemmed in between the industry strung along the waterfront and the well-to-do streets that fringed Central Park.
The book's second half opens by weighing the economics that decide how tall a skyscraper ends up being. Renner, in chapter five, separates out three ideas of height. Engineering height is the greatest a structure can rise to in safety given the technology of the day; economic height is whatever height serves society most efficiently; and developer height is the figure a developer settles on while trying to wring the most from the money invested.
That same chapter also offers an engaging look at the technical breakthroughs behind the rise of skyscrapers. Frames of iron and steel, for one, removed the need for thick load-bearing walls, which both opened up usable floor area and let in far more windows and daylight. Chapter six then sets out figures on the height of buildings across the twentieth century and turns to regression analysis to forecast construction. Pitched though it is at a gentler technical level than the research paper it grows out of, it is still likely to strike the ordinary reader as rather too technical.
Chapter seven confronts the so-called bedrock myth: the belief that no skyscrapers went up in the corridor separating Downtown from Midtown because the bedrock there lies too deep below the surface. Renner's reply is that deeper bedrock certainly raises the price of foundations, yet that price was neither ruinously steep nor sizeable when weighed against the total cost of erecting the skyscraper. The portion I most enjoyed was his account of the way foundations really get put in. He sets out how caissons let workers dig steadily downward across long stretches, often well beneath the water table, until they reach bedrock. His careful technical narrative covers not merely how a caisson works but the perils that go with it. Resting though it does on empirical research papers, the chapter still makes for a fairly easy read.
Chapters eight and nine dwell on the coming of Midtown and the construction surge of the 1920s. Chapter eight runs to long stretches of urban economic theory that anyone whose chief concern is New York itself might treat as a detour, though those passages would suit undergraduates taking up the economics of cities rather well. In the chapter after it, Renner sets the two explanations most often advanced for the 1920s surge side by side, the first a mood of exuberance and the second the ready supply of finance. Testing each against the data, he judges that supply and demand explain much of what was put up in that decade; cheap credit, to his mind, opened the door to the boom but was not the force chiefly behind it.
The book's last chapter draws on a further empirical paper of Renner's, one that puts a value on Manhattan land from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. What is especially striking is the sheer amount of effort that produced these figures. As the chapter nears its close, Renner turns to whether tall buildings bring about high land values or merely follow from them, concluding that movements in land value can foretell the height of buildings still to come while the reverse cannot be shown. A closing epilogue rounds things off, with Renner considering how a changing climate will press on the city and laying out policy suggestions for the New York of the future.
* tenements: apartment buildings, especially ones that are overcrowded or in poor condition ** bedrock: the solid rock lying beneath the surface soil
Elias Renner's Building the Skyline walks readers through a close history of New York City, pulling together geology, the historical record, economic reasoning and a great deal of data to account for why clusters of business took root where they did, and how choices made early on by firms and workers left their imprint on today's skyline. Renner splits the book into two clearly separate halves. The opening half is largely history, tracing the city's founding and its expansion from 1609 to 1900; the closing half turns mainly to the twentieth century, gathering chapters that each comment on some facet of the city's development. The voice and structure shift a little between the two, since the later chapters lean on material drawn from Renner's own research articles.
The opening chapter begins with what Renner calls a 'helicopter time-machine' journey, an absorbing description of how the New York terrain might have looked from overhead in 1609. He then leads the reader beneath the streets, mapping where rock and water sit under the topsoil, before bringing everyone back to ground level. His affection for the place is unmistakable as he recounts assorted curiosities, among them where the early nineteenth-century mayor DeWitt Clinton once kept his New York home, along with several of the myths that have gathered around the city.
The following two chapters carry the reader up to the Civil War (1861-1865). Chapter two dwells on how land first came to be developed and on the grid plan brought in during 1811, whereas chapter three examines the ways land was put to use in the years leading up to the war. Both are well researched and rich in detail, and together they prepare the ground for the economic argument the book builds later on. One assertion I wished Renner had pursued further is his contention that the tenements* already standing in some districts kept skyscrapers away, since no builder of tall towers would have wished to undertake the 'slum clearance' that would first be needed. Yet elsewhere he holds that how deep the bedrock** lay set no genuine limit on developers, foundations being only a slender share of a project's total cost. Why clearing slums should count as a barrier when pricier foundations do not is not, at first sight, easy to see.
Chapter four shifts to immigration and to where neighbourhoods and tenements were situated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Renner singles out three principal immigrant districts and looks at where each sat in relation to the amenities close at hand. In the main these districts took up the least valuable ground, hemmed in between the industry strung along the waterfront and the well-to-do streets that fringed Central Park.
The book's second half opens by weighing the economics that decide how tall a skyscraper ends up being. Renner, in chapter five, separates out three ideas of height. Engineering height is the greatest a structure can rise to in safety given the technology of the day; economic height is whatever height serves society most efficiently; and developer height is the figure a developer settles on while trying to wring the most from the money invested.
That same chapter also offers an engaging look at the technical breakthroughs behind the rise of skyscrapers. Frames of iron and steel, for one, removed the need for thick load-bearing walls, which both opened up usable floor area and let in far more windows and daylight. Chapter six then sets out figures on the height of buildings across the twentieth century and turns to regression analysis to forecast construction. Pitched though it is at a gentler technical level than the research paper it grows out of, it is still likely to strike the ordinary reader as rather too technical.
Chapter seven confronts the so-called bedrock myth: the belief that no skyscrapers went up in the corridor separating Downtown from Midtown because the bedrock there lies too deep below the surface. Renner's reply is that deeper bedrock certainly raises the price of foundations, yet that price was neither ruinously steep nor sizeable when weighed against the total cost of erecting the skyscraper. The portion I most enjoyed was his account of the way foundations really get put in. He sets out how caissons let workers dig steadily downward across long stretches, often well beneath the water table, until they reach bedrock. His careful technical narrative covers not merely how a caisson works but the perils that go with it. Resting though it does on empirical research papers, the chapter still makes for a fairly easy read.
Chapters eight and nine dwell on the coming of Midtown and the construction surge of the 1920s. Chapter eight runs to long stretches of urban economic theory that anyone whose chief concern is New York itself might treat as a detour, though those passages would suit undergraduates taking up the economics of cities rather well. In the chapter after it, Renner sets the two explanations most often advanced for the 1920s surge side by side, the first a mood of exuberance and the second the ready supply of finance. Testing each against the data, he judges that supply and demand explain much of what was put up in that decade; cheap credit, to his mind, opened the door to the boom but was not the force chiefly behind it.
The book's last chapter draws on a further empirical paper of Renner's, one that puts a value on Manhattan land from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. What is especially striking is the sheer amount of effort that produced these figures. As the chapter nears its close, Renner turns to whether tall buildings bring about high land values or merely follow from them, concluding that movements in land value can foretell the height of buildings still to come while the reverse cannot be shown. A closing epilogue rounds things off, with Renner considering how a changing climate will press on the city and laying out policy suggestions for the New York of the future.
* tenements: apartment buildings, especially ones that are overcrowded or in poor condition ** bedrock: the solid rock lying beneath the surface soil
