IELTS CAM Inspired 18 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 18 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
Reading Passage 1 has 8 sections, A-H.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
1
a prediction of the future size of the world's population
2
a point that some proposed materials cannot be obtained in large quantities
3
a description of the industrial by-products that can take the place of some cement
4
a comment on how cheaply and easily the basic ingredients of concrete can be obtained
Question 5 - 8
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Making buildings with wood
Wood has long served as a building material, but today's environmental worries are encouraging to choose it for modern construction. Working with wood does bring difficulties, however. As in the atmosphere enters the wood, the timber swells; it is also prone to insect damage and carries a greater fire risk. Such drawbacks can be reduced by treating the wood and combining it with other materials. In one method, of solid wood are glued together to form building blocks that weigh less than concrete and steel yet equal them in strength. Builders say that timber structures are better than those of concrete and steel both in the at which they can be put up and in how little noise the work creates.
Question 9 - 13
Match each statement with the correct person or people, A, B, C or D.
List of Findings
A
Henrik Sallinen
B
Ilkka Ravn
C
Marta Óskarsdóttir
D
Cormac Delaney and Beatrix Lindqvist
9
Devising a substitute for concrete that offers a comparably wide range of useful qualities would be very hard.
10
Expense has been one reason why newly developed cements have not been widely taken up.
11
The carbon savings from cement substitutes can be cancelled out by the distances the materials must travel.
12
Environmental concern has driven a growing appetite for building in timber.
13
The environmental harm concrete does is a consequence of the vast quantities in which it is produced.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
I
Buyers are let down
II
Testing begins after a spell in the cold
III
A superior alternative emerges
IV
Sales and promotion failings cause the collapse
V
A conceivable answer to modern problems
VI
Both benefits and drawbacks are carried over
VII
Favourable press for a silent, clean and rapid machine
VIII
Refinements bring in paying customers
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 23
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
21
In Paragraph B, what does the writer suggest about steam-powered cars?
A
Manufacturers struggled to find buyers for them.
B
They were difficult for owners to control.
C
Their popularity lasted only a short time.
D
Too few of them were ever built.
22
In the course of creating their earliest steam car, the Reyburn brothers
A
made all the components from scratch.
B
kept written records of each stage of the work.
C
consulted seasoned figures from the motor trade.
D
needed several tries before they had a car able to compete.
23
To get the Mark III into production, the Reyburn brothers
A
obtained funding for the venture.
B
relocated their operation to another city.
C
took on an extra member of staff.
D
discarded the designs they had used before.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
The Mark V
The National Motoring Club tested the Mark V on the road in 1921 and judged it easy to handle despite its weight, to the admiration of those watching. On a later version, engineers coaxed the car to more than miles an hour without letting its pollution rise. Because it cost so much and its design was forever being altered, few were sold: under had been built by the time the company shut down. Even today, however, Mark Vs can be seen on British roads. They give little trouble to look after, and they are clean enough to pass the controls on exhaust gases that London now applies. Perhaps modern materials and computing could bring the steam car back.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
The writer's account of the Of Mice and Men lesson is intended to illustrate
A
how unsuitable classic novels are for most teenagers.
B
how disruptive less able students can be to the rest of the class.
C
how little enthusiasm teenagers tend to have for literature.
D
how a single teacher copes with widely differing needs in one room.
28
In the paragraph about streaming, the writer makes the point that the practice
A
is fairly straightforward to put into practice.
B
strikes almost everyone concerned as an attractive idea.
C
tends to work in favour of the more able pupils.
D
succeeds in some schools far more than in others.
29
The reference to the peak of Mont Blanc is used to suggest
A
learners falling short of what they are capable of.
B
learners taking on tasks that genuinely interest them.
C
learners following routes that are not right for them.
D
learners being unaware of their own limitations.
30
In the paragraph on Varga's theory, the term 'propping' refers to
A
the targets that are set to match a learner's ability.
B
the surroundings in which most learning takes place.
C
the obstacles that stop a learner from making progress.
D
the temporary support a learner is given in the early stages.
Question 31 - 35
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-I, below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Does streaming work?
According to Professor Ingrid Solberg of the Bergen Institute for Educational Research, there is very little sign that streaming produces . She observes that, in schools that stream, the greatest effect is felt by the pupils put into , particularly when many of these pupils come from . By contrast, gain only a slight advantage. A further problem is that teachers are inclined to hold of pupils who have been streamed.
A
reduced expectations
B
the most able pupils
C
selective schools
D
stronger results
E
the weakest groups
F
pupils of average ability
G
poorer households
H
wrongly placed learners
I
favourable impressions
Question 36 - 40
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
36
Taken at face value, Varga's theory points towards grouping pupils by ability rather than mixing them.
37
Pupils from less well-off homes are found more often in the highest sets.
38
Some teachers are unwilling to let capable pupils take on the role of more-capable companion.
39
Peer explanation can work partly because a pupil who has only recently grasped an idea thinks in a way similar to a classmate who is still struggling.
40
The writer believes schools should give priority to the success of their highest achievers.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Materials to take us beyond concrete
Concrete is used almost everywhere, yet its production releases enormous quantities of carbon dioxide — and researchers are now searching for greener substitutes.
A
A. After water, concrete is the most heavily consumed material on Earth, and it also ranks among the largest single contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. That is because manufacturing cement — the ingredient that makes concrete work — involves a chemical reaction that gives off carbon dioxide in bulk. According to United Nations projections, the world's population will reach around 9.8 billion by the middle of this century, and all those people will have to be housed somewhere. Should concrete remain the sole means of building the cities they need, emissions will climb steeply and global warming will worsen. It is for this reason that researchers have begun experimenting with other materials, hunting for substitutes to a material that has quietly supported modern life for generations.
B
What makes concrete so hard to displace is simply how well it performs. For Henrik Sallinen, a materials engineering professor at the Aurland Institute of Technology, the decisive factor is just how much concrete the world already relies on — and will go on relying on. 'Concrete itself is not a high-carbon material,' he explains. 'The cement is; the concrete isn't. What pushes its carbon footprint up is the scale on which we use it. Manufacturing happens on such an enormous scale — that is where the problem lies.'
C
Its raw ingredients, moreover, are inexpensive and easy to find almost anywhere, and the material has remarkable qualities of its own. Portland cement, concrete's essential component, can be shaped and poured freely yet hardens rapidly once set. Sallinen points to a further benefit: because concrete and steel expand and contract at comparable rates when heated, steel rods can be embedded to reinforce concrete, yielding a building material far stronger and more adaptable than concrete alone. Taken together, he argues, these qualities leave concrete almost impossible to rival. 'It really is an extraordinary material. Producing anything that behaves the same way will be enormously hard.'
D
One candidate to stand in for concrete is wood. Constructing buildings out of timber might sound distinctly medieval, yet the pressures of climate change are prompting designers to look again at treated wood as a serious option. Over the past few years, towers built almost wholly from timber have started to appear. Tall wooden buildings now stand in cities as far apart as Bergen, Melbourne and the Austrian town of Klagenfurt.
E
Building with wood, however, is far from straightforward. Timber swells as it draws in water from the surrounding air, and it remains vulnerable to insects and, naturally, to fire. Treating the wood and pairing it with other substances can nonetheless improve how it behaves. Cross-laminated timber is an engineered product: a strong adhesive bonds boards of solid-sawn wood together in alternating directions to build up structural blocks. Light though it is, this material can match concrete and steel for strength. Builders note that a timber structure goes up at a quicker pace than one of concrete and steel, and that the work is, by all accounts, considerably quieter.
F
Europe's largest producer of cross-laminated timber is a firm called Nordvirke, whose vice-president, Ilkka Ravn, says the company is fielding rising demand for timber construction from around the globe, with anxiety about climate change the main force behind it. The lead has been taken by Finland — home to Nordvirke and to vast forests — but orders for its timber products are climbing worldwide, Asia included. Timber has a further advantage, too: a wooden building keeps locked away all the carbon the tree stored up as it grew. Even so, treated wood has its limits, and only once a broader range of projects has proved itself in practice will it be reasonable to regard wood as a genuine substitute for concrete in tall construction.
G
Another route is to swap some of the cement in a concrete mix for fly ash or iron-ore slag. Fly ash, left over when coal-fired power stations burn their fuel, can stand in for anywhere between 15 and 30 percent of the cement in a mix without weakening its strength or durability. Slag, a residue of the process that smelts iron ore, works in much the same fashion. Blending either into concrete could, in principle, bring greenhouse gas emissions down. Yet Marta Óskarsdóttir, of the Sustainable Construction Council, warns that saving carbon this way is not as simple as it sounds. 'You can certainly cut a building's overall carbon impact by substituting waste products for cement,' she says. 'But you have to run the sums across the structure's whole life cycle, and that includes asking where those materials are shipped from. Haul them a long way on fossil fuels and the switch may make no sense at all in terms of cutting carbon overall.'
H
Promising though all these ideas are, each is either still unproven or dependent on materials that are in short supply. Surveying the state of innovation in the concrete industry, Cormac Delaney and Beatrix Lindqvist of the Institute for Global Resource Studies concluded that 'certain new types of cement have been talked about within research circles for over ten years and have yet to make a breakthrough. For now these substitutes seldom match ordinary cement on cost, and they run up against shortages of raw materials as well as reluctance on the part of buyers.'
How the Reyburn brothers rose and fell with their steam-powered motor cars
A
A. The earliest motor cars, which took to the roads during the nineteenth century, drew their power from steam. Steam had already proved itself over decades on the railways, so shrinking that technology into a road-going machine, detached from any train, seemed a logical next step. What the new vehicles gained from steam, though, came bundled with its drawbacks. A driver had to light the boiler by hand and then wait roughly twenty minutes while pressure built up, and even once the car was moving, its water tanks ran dry after about thirty miles and needed topping up. Even so, the cars caught on: they carried people at a decent pace, and by the opening years of the twentieth century the sight of one ferrying a well-to-do passenger through the streets was hardly unusual.
B
Yet steam's moment in the sun did not last. Before long a rival had arrived, the internal combustion engine, whose great advantage was that a car fitted with one could be driven away within seconds of starting. Petrol cars did not win people over at once: they were loud, fiddlier to handle, and the hand cranks used to start them were known to snap drivers' arms whenever an engine backfired. That objection fell away around 1911, when a leading manufacturer brought out the electric self-starter, and from then on steam was slowly squeezed out of the market.
C
With the industry already in retreat, four brothers set out to breathe life back into steam. Cornelius Reyburn and his three siblings, still schoolboys, put together their first steam car between 1903 and 1906 in the cellar of the family home in Yorkshire. It was assembled from parts salvaged from a scrapped early steamer, rebuilt to power an engine of the brothers' own design. This first attempt ran poorly, but the Reyburns pressed on, producing a second and then a third prototype over the next few years. That third car, which they called the Mark II, still could not match the convenience of a petrol engine; even so, the many advances it showed over earlier steam vehicles earned it write-ups in the motoring trade press. In several respects it simply outdid its petrol-driven rivals. Where combustion engines rattled and gave off the smell of burnt fuel, the Reyburns' high-pressure steam turned the pistons almost soundlessly. Most striking was its speed: from a standstill it could reach fifty miles an hour in roughly eighteen seconds, described as 'acceleration of a remarkable order' by The Carriage and Motor Gazette in 1911.
D
A year later, Cornelius Reyburn drove the Mark II the length of the country, from Yorkshire down to Coventry, hoping to attract backers; the money he raised there let him set up the Pennine Engineering Company. Work on a successor, the Mark III, began at once, the aim being to build further on everything the Mark II had introduced. Among the additions was a key-operated ignition in the cabin, which did away with the old chore of lighting the boiler by hand. On the strength of such refinements, the young firm pledged a steam car as convenient as any petrol model, yet far faster, far easier to control and near enough silent. Orders poured in: by the following April the company was holding 4,720 deposits for the Reyburn Meteor, with first deliveries promised for early 1915.
E
The good news did not hold. Before the year was out, Reyburn had to disappoint the many customers waiting for their sleek new vehicles. The few who took delivery of a finished car found it slow and unpredictable, for it would now and then lurch backwards just when it was meant to go forward. Inventive though the new engine was, it remained dogged by serious faults.
F
One last effort was made to bring a workable steam car to market. Early in 1921 a Mark V was sent north to Glasgow, where the National Motoring Club had agreed to road-test it. Left out overnight in freezing conditions, it was rolled onto the road the next morning and allowed to stand for more than an hour in the icy air. When the key was turned, the boiler caught and reached its working pressure in under fifty seconds. Once it was moving, the testers were struck by how well such a heavy machine held the road, the credit going to the even spread of its weight. With further development, the Mark V's top speed was eventually driven beyond 110 miles per hour, while it returned around eighteen miles to the gallon of paraffin and gave off almost no emissions.
G
For all its brilliance, the Reyburns' steam car never made money. At something like 3,200 pounds in 1921 it lay within reach only of the very rich. Nor did it help that no two examples of the Mark V were ever quite alike, since Cornelius Reyburn could never stop adjusting the design. Fewer than forty of these remarkable cars had left the works by the time the firm closed in 1928. Reyburn himself never wavered: right up to his death in 1958 he insisted that steam was every bit the equal of petrol, and quite possibly better. The evidence rather supports him. Many of the surviving Mark Vs still run perfectly well, a few having covered more than half a million miles on nothing but routine servicing. Remarkably, an unaltered Mark V burns cleanly enough to meet the emission limits now enforced in London, rules with a reputation for being rigorous. The technology is not without its awkward problems, yet it is hard not to wonder what a steam car might achieve with modern materials and computers. With so much pressure nowadays to make vehicles perform better and pollute less, the return of the steam car is not so far-fetched an idea.
Imagine the following. In a UK secondary school, an English teacher has just finished reading his class of fifteen-year-olds a passage from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Some students have been handed a simplified edition that trims the language down, yet even that is too much for three of them, and one girl, unable to settle at all, is given paper and told she may draw. From the simplified-edition group the teacher can ask little more than the names of the main characters and a rough outline of the plot. Most of the class he can question about how the characters develop, and around five will back up what they say by pointing to the text. Two especially engaged students, meanwhile, have begun to ask whether Steinbeck means that dreams keep people going or that they end up destroying them.
Speaking as a teacher, I would count a lesson that unfolded like that as a fairly successful one. And yet, wouldn't a class of this sort run more smoothly if the distance between the strongest and the weakest were not so vast? What if every pupil who needed help with literacy were gathered into one room, and everyone eager to debate whether dreams sustain or ruin us into another?
Streaming, or tracking as it is also called, means dividing pupils into classes according to the level of attainment they are judged to have reached. On the largest scale it produces academically selective schools for the most able and comprehensive schools for everyone else. Inside a school it means sorting pupils into a general-ability stream, or into subject-by-subject sets. To almost everyone with a stake in the matter, the idea feels instinctively right. I have heard the mixed-ability approach attacked with a comparison: a group setting off on a hike. The fittest push to the front and set a smart pace, only to halt and wait every twenty minutes; it is maddening, and their eagerness drains away. The slowest, meanwhile, are both mortified and physically at their limit, and the pauses are never long enough. What they secretly want is to give up. Walking, they conclude, is simply not for them.
Classes of mixed ability, so the argument runs, leave pupils bored, parents exasperated and teachers worn out. The brightest will never stand on the peak of Mont Blanc, while the stragglers miss the gentle walk in the park that might have suited them better. The individual is sacrificed to the group, and mediocrity wins out. So: is learning really like hiking?
The prevailing way of thinking about teaching is probably guided-construction theory, which grew out of the work of the psychologist Tomas Varga. In the 1930s, Varga stressed the importance of aiming at each pupil's particular zone of assisted growth, or ZAG, the space between what a learner can manage only with help (from teachers, textbooks, worked examples, parents and the like) and what they can manage alone. Teaching, on this view, exists to supply that support and then withdraw it by degrees, this propping, until the learner stands unaided. Accept the theory, and grouping pupils whose ZAGs are alike seems only logical, while marching everyone up the same slope, whatever their fitness, looks like folly.
For all that, the hard evidence that streaming delivers better results is thin. Professor Ingrid Solberg, who heads the Bergen Institute for Educational Research, remarks that tracking has minimal effects on learning outcomes. Worse still, streaming seems to do real harm to the pupils dropped into the bottom sets, and those pupils are disproportionately drawn from low-income families. Set against that, the modest gain enjoyed by the fortunate few in the top sets counts for little. The upshot is that the able remain able while the rest fall further back, and the gap across society is driven deeper.
In the most recent revision of Solberg's much-cited meta-analysis of what shapes pupil achievement, one of the weightiest factors turns out to be the teacher's own estimate of what a pupil can do. Sort children by measured attainment and you automatically cap how far a teacher believes they can go; keep the room mixed, and those estimates must stay broader and more open.
Streaming may look like a neat way of hitting each pupil's ZAG, but it plays down how much pupils learn from one another. One key strand of guided-construction theory is the part played in building knowledge by the more-capable companion, or MCC. The teacher is the classroom's usual MCC, yet the worth of a well-informed fellow pupil ought not to be dismissed.
It never ceases to impress me how students put an idea across to their classmates in ways that would never have occurred to me. The language and the social signals they use are not a teacher's, and, having grasped the material only moments earlier, they share much the same mental framework as the classmates who are still wrestling with it. There is, besides, a real thrill in handing on something you have only just conquered yourself, a pride, an energy, a freshness in the exchange that the expert, to whom every step is obvious and the delight of discovery long faded, can no longer supply.
A spread of abilities working together in one room is, in short, a rich store of help for meeting everyone's learning needs, and it sharpens communication and social skills too. Now more than ever, it is the many we need to see thrive, rather than have them go under so a handful of shining stars can rise. Once a year I take my mixed class out on a hike. It is hard going. The fittest find they must coax the reluctant along; some scout ahead and report back, and others carry extra loads. And we get there, together.
B. What makes concrete so hard to displace is simply how well it performs. For Henrik Sallinen, a materials engineering professor at the Aurland Institute of Technology, the decisive factor is just how much concrete the world already relies on — and will go on relying on. 'Concrete itself is not a high-carbon material,' he explains. 'The cement is; the concrete isn't. What pushes its carbon footprint up is the scale on which we use it. Manufacturing happens on such an enormous scale — that is where the problem lies.'
C. Its raw ingredients, moreover, are inexpensive and easy to find almost anywhere, and the material has remarkable qualities of its own. Portland cement, concrete's essential component, can be shaped and poured freely yet hardens rapidly once set. Sallinen points to a further benefit: because concrete and steel expand and contract at comparable rates when heated, steel rods can be embedded to reinforce concrete, yielding a building material far stronger and more adaptable than concrete alone. Taken together, he argues, these qualities leave concrete almost impossible to rival. 'It really is an extraordinary material. Producing anything that behaves the same way will be enormously hard.'
D. One candidate to stand in for concrete is wood. Constructing buildings out of timber might sound distinctly medieval, yet the pressures of climate change are prompting designers to look again at treated wood as a serious option. Over the past few years, towers built almost wholly from timber have started to appear. Tall wooden buildings now stand in cities as far apart as Bergen, Melbourne and the Austrian town of Klagenfurt.
E. Building with wood, however, is far from straightforward. Timber swells as it draws in water from the surrounding air, and it remains vulnerable to insects and, naturally, to fire. Treating the wood and pairing it with other substances can nonetheless improve how it behaves. Cross-laminated timber is an engineered product: a strong adhesive bonds boards of solid-sawn wood together in alternating directions to build up structural blocks. Light though it is, this material can match concrete and steel for strength. Builders note that a timber structure goes up at a quicker pace than one of concrete and steel, and that the work is, by all accounts, considerably quieter.
F. Europe's largest producer of cross-laminated timber is a firm called Nordvirke, whose vice-president, Ilkka Ravn, says the company is fielding rising demand for timber construction from around the globe, with anxiety about climate change the main force behind it. The lead has been taken by Finland — home to Nordvirke and to vast forests — but orders for its timber products are climbing worldwide, Asia included. Timber has a further advantage, too: a wooden building keeps locked away all the carbon the tree stored up as it grew. Even so, treated wood has its limits, and only once a broader range of projects has proved itself in practice will it be reasonable to regard wood as a genuine substitute for concrete in tall construction.
G. Another route is to swap some of the cement in a concrete mix for fly ash or iron-ore slag. Fly ash, left over when coal-fired power stations burn their fuel, can stand in for anywhere between 15 and 30 percent of the cement in a mix without weakening its strength or durability. Slag, a residue of the process that smelts iron ore, works in much the same fashion. Blending either into concrete could, in principle, bring greenhouse gas emissions down. Yet Marta Óskarsdóttir, of the Sustainable Construction Council, warns that saving carbon this way is not as simple as it sounds. 'You can certainly cut a building's overall carbon impact by substituting waste products for cement,' she says. 'But you have to run the sums across the structure's whole life cycle, and that includes asking where those materials are shipped from. Haul them a long way on fossil fuels and the switch may make no sense at all in terms of cutting carbon overall.'
H. Promising though all these ideas are, each is either still unproven or dependent on materials that are in short supply. Surveying the state of innovation in the concrete industry, Cormac Delaney and Beatrix Lindqvist of the Institute for Global Resource Studies concluded that 'certain new types of cement have been talked about within research circles for over ten years and have yet to make a breakthrough. For now these substitutes seldom match ordinary cement on cost, and they run up against shortages of raw materials as well as reluctance on the part of buyers.'
B. Yet steam's moment in the sun did not last. Before long a rival had arrived, the internal combustion engine, whose great advantage was that a car fitted with one could be driven away within seconds of starting. Petrol cars did not win people over at once: they were loud, fiddlier to handle, and the hand cranks used to start them were known to snap drivers' arms whenever an engine backfired. That objection fell away around 1911, when a leading manufacturer brought out the electric self-starter, and from then on steam was slowly squeezed out of the market.
C. With the industry already in retreat, four brothers set out to breathe life back into steam. Cornelius Reyburn and his three siblings, still schoolboys, put together their first steam car between 1903 and 1906 in the cellar of the family home in Yorkshire. It was assembled from parts salvaged from a scrapped early steamer, rebuilt to power an engine of the brothers' own design. This first attempt ran poorly, but the Reyburns pressed on, producing a second and then a third prototype over the next few years. That third car, which they called the Mark II, still could not match the convenience of a petrol engine; even so, the many advances it showed over earlier steam vehicles earned it write-ups in the motoring trade press. In several respects it simply outdid its petrol-driven rivals. Where combustion engines rattled and gave off the smell of burnt fuel, the Reyburns' high-pressure steam turned the pistons almost soundlessly. Most striking was its speed: from a standstill it could reach fifty miles an hour in roughly eighteen seconds, described as 'acceleration of a remarkable order' by The Carriage and Motor Gazette in 1911.
D. A year later, Cornelius Reyburn drove the Mark II the length of the country, from Yorkshire down to Coventry, hoping to attract backers; the money he raised there let him set up the Pennine Engineering Company. Work on a successor, the Mark III, began at once, the aim being to build further on everything the Mark II had introduced. Among the additions was a key-operated ignition in the cabin, which did away with the old chore of lighting the boiler by hand. On the strength of such refinements, the young firm pledged a steam car as convenient as any petrol model, yet far faster, far easier to control and near enough silent. Orders poured in: by the following April the company was holding 4,720 deposits for the Reyburn Meteor, with first deliveries promised for early 1915.
E. The good news did not hold. Before the year was out, Reyburn had to disappoint the many customers waiting for their sleek new vehicles. The few who took delivery of a finished car found it slow and unpredictable, for it would now and then lurch backwards just when it was meant to go forward. Inventive though the new engine was, it remained dogged by serious faults.
F. One last effort was made to bring a workable steam car to market. Early in 1921 a Mark V was sent north to Glasgow, where the National Motoring Club had agreed to road-test it. Left out overnight in freezing conditions, it was rolled onto the road the next morning and allowed to stand for more than an hour in the icy air. When the key was turned, the boiler caught and reached its working pressure in under fifty seconds. Once it was moving, the testers were struck by how well such a heavy machine held the road, the credit going to the even spread of its weight. With further development, the Mark V's top speed was eventually driven beyond 110 miles per hour, while it returned around eighteen miles to the gallon of paraffin and gave off almost no emissions.
G. For all its brilliance, the Reyburns' steam car never made money. At something like 3,200 pounds in 1921 it lay within reach only of the very rich. Nor did it help that no two examples of the Mark V were ever quite alike, since Cornelius Reyburn could never stop adjusting the design. Fewer than forty of these remarkable cars had left the works by the time the firm closed in 1928. Reyburn himself never wavered: right up to his death in 1958 he insisted that steam was every bit the equal of petrol, and quite possibly better. The evidence rather supports him. Many of the surviving Mark Vs still run perfectly well, a few having covered more than half a million miles on nothing but routine servicing. Remarkably, an unaltered Mark V burns cleanly enough to meet the emission limits now enforced in London, rules with a reputation for being rigorous. The technology is not without its awkward problems, yet it is hard not to wonder what a steam car might achieve with modern materials and computers. With so much pressure nowadays to make vehicles perform better and pollute less, the return of the steam car is not so far-fetched an idea.
Imagine the following. In a UK secondary school, an English teacher has just finished reading his class of fifteen-year-olds a passage from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Some students have been handed a simplified edition that trims the language down, yet even that is too much for three of them, and one girl, unable to settle at all, is given paper and told she may draw. From the simplified-edition group the teacher can ask little more than the names of the main characters and a rough outline of the plot. Most of the class he can question about how the characters develop, and around five will back up what they say by pointing to the text. Two especially engaged students, meanwhile, have begun to ask whether Steinbeck means that dreams keep people going or that they end up destroying them.
Speaking as a teacher, I would count a lesson that unfolded like that as a fairly successful one. And yet, wouldn't a class of this sort run more smoothly if the distance between the strongest and the weakest were not so vast? What if every pupil who needed help with literacy were gathered into one room, and everyone eager to debate whether dreams sustain or ruin us into another?
Streaming, or tracking as it is also called, means dividing pupils into classes according to the level of attainment they are judged to have reached. On the largest scale it produces academically selective schools for the most able and comprehensive schools for everyone else. Inside a school it means sorting pupils into a general-ability stream, or into subject-by-subject sets. To almost everyone with a stake in the matter, the idea feels instinctively right. I have heard the mixed-ability approach attacked with a comparison: a group setting off on a hike. The fittest push to the front and set a smart pace, only to halt and wait every twenty minutes; it is maddening, and their eagerness drains away. The slowest, meanwhile, are both mortified and physically at their limit, and the pauses are never long enough. What they secretly want is to give up. Walking, they conclude, is simply not for them.
Classes of mixed ability, so the argument runs, leave pupils bored, parents exasperated and teachers worn out. The brightest will never stand on the peak of Mont Blanc, while the stragglers miss the gentle walk in the park that might have suited them better. The individual is sacrificed to the group, and mediocrity wins out. So: is learning really like hiking?
The prevailing way of thinking about teaching is probably guided-construction theory, which grew out of the work of the psychologist Tomas Varga. In the 1930s, Varga stressed the importance of aiming at each pupil's particular zone of assisted growth, or ZAG, the space between what a learner can manage only with help (from teachers, textbooks, worked examples, parents and the like) and what they can manage alone. Teaching, on this view, exists to supply that support and then withdraw it by degrees, this propping, until the learner stands unaided. Accept the theory, and grouping pupils whose ZAGs are alike seems only logical, while marching everyone up the same slope, whatever their fitness, looks like folly.
For all that, the hard evidence that streaming delivers better results is thin. Professor Ingrid Solberg, who heads the Bergen Institute for Educational Research, remarks that tracking has minimal effects on learning outcomes. Worse still, streaming seems to do real harm to the pupils dropped into the bottom sets, and those pupils are disproportionately drawn from low-income families. Set against that, the modest gain enjoyed by the fortunate few in the top sets counts for little. The upshot is that the able remain able while the rest fall further back, and the gap across society is driven deeper.
In the most recent revision of Solberg's much-cited meta-analysis of what shapes pupil achievement, one of the weightiest factors turns out to be the teacher's own estimate of what a pupil can do. Sort children by measured attainment and you automatically cap how far a teacher believes they can go; keep the room mixed, and those estimates must stay broader and more open.
Streaming may look like a neat way of hitting each pupil's ZAG, but it plays down how much pupils learn from one another. One key strand of guided-construction theory is the part played in building knowledge by the more-capable companion, or MCC. The teacher is the classroom's usual MCC, yet the worth of a well-informed fellow pupil ought not to be dismissed.
It never ceases to impress me how students put an idea across to their classmates in ways that would never have occurred to me. The language and the social signals they use are not a teacher's, and, having grasped the material only moments earlier, they share much the same mental framework as the classmates who are still wrestling with it. There is, besides, a real thrill in handing on something you have only just conquered yourself, a pride, an energy, a freshness in the exchange that the expert, to whom every step is obvious and the delight of discovery long faded, can no longer supply.
A spread of abilities working together in one room is, in short, a rich store of help for meeting everyone's learning needs, and it sharpens communication and social skills too. Now more than ever, it is the many we need to see thrive, rather than have them go under so a handful of shining stars can rise. Once a year I take my mixed class out on a hike. It is hard going. The fittest find they must coax the reluctant along; some scout ahead and report back, and others carry extra loads. And we get there, together.
