IELTS Reading 練習問題 — Set 5

A When an old warehouse, school or row of houses is demolished, its timber is commonly treated as mixed construction waste. Beams may be crushed with plaster, nails and insulation, then burned for energy or sent to landfill. Yet many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings contain slow-grown wood of a size and quality that is now difficult to obtain. A small but expanding salvage industry argues that demolition should be regarded as a form of harvesting: cities are temporary forests in which usable material is stored inside structures rather than standing as trees.

B Recovering that material is more complicated than pulling out attractive boards. Conventional demolition is organised around speed. Machines can reduce a building to a sortable pile in days, whereas deconstruction proceeds in reverse order, with workers removing fittings, panels and structural members selectively. Labour costs rise, and a site may remain occupied for longer. Advocates answer that the comparison is incomplete if disposal charges, the sale of recovered components and the carbon retained in reused wood are ignored. Even so, the financial case varies sharply with local wages, landfill prices and demand.

C Identification is the first technical challenge. A beam may carry no reliable record of its species, age, previous loading or chemical treatment. Paint can contain lead; preservatives used in industrial buildings may make timber unsuitable for interiors; concealed metal can damage cutting machinery. Salvage yards therefore combine visual grading with moisture measurements, metal detection and, for demanding structural uses, machine tests that estimate stiffness. These procedures do not remove every uncertainty, but they convert an anonymous waste object into a product whose limitations can be stated.

D Design standards create a second obstacle. Building codes were written mainly for new, uniform products supplied with certificates. Reclaimed pieces are variable: one joist may be exceptionally strong while the next contains an old notch. Engineers can compensate by assigning conservative strength values, testing representative samples or using recovered timber where failure would have limited consequences. However, approval still depends heavily on the confidence of individual inspectors. A method accepted in one municipality may be rejected across the boundary, making it hard for suppliers to promise a consistent market.

E Some architects have responded by designing around available stocks rather than specifying exact dimensions in advance. They may create a family of interchangeable details, allowing a floor to use several beam widths, or expose patched surfaces instead of hiding them. This reverses the usual procurement sequence: the material is surveyed before the final design is fixed. Digital inventories make the process easier by recording dimensions and photographs, but databases quickly become inaccurate if pieces are sold, cut or damaged without the record being updated.

F The environmental argument also needs care. Reuse generally requires less processing than converting logs into new boards, and it delays the release of carbon stored in wood. Nevertheless, transporting a few heavy beams over a great distance can erase part of that advantage. Cleaning, drying and re-machining consume energy, while material that is unsuitable for reuse may still need disposal. Life-cycle studies consequently favour local networks in which buildings, yards, designers and new projects are geographically close. Their conclusions are less certain when recovered material crosses continents to serve a luxury market.

G Social benefits are sometimes overlooked. Deconstruction can create more jobs than mechanised demolition and can provide entry-level training in tool use, assessment and repair. Historic wood may also preserve traces of local industry, from saw marks to carpenters’ numbering systems. Yet romantic language about heritage can conceal poor working conditions. Dust, unstable structures and sharp fixings make careful safety planning essential, and employment is valuable only if workers receive adequate protection and progression.

H Insurance and ownership rules influence recovery before work begins. Contractors may be required to guarantee materials whose previous service they did not supervise, while owners may hesitate to transfer liability with a beam. Standard warranties designed for new products fit badly. Pilot projects have addressed this through shared testing protocols and limited guarantees tied to a declared use, shifting discussion from whether reclaimed timber is universally safe to whether a particular piece is sufficiently characterised for a particular task.

I Urban timber will not replace plantation forestry, nor should every board be saved. The more realistic objective is to develop a hierarchy: retain buildings when possible, recover high-value components when retention fails, recycle the remainder and burn material only as a final option. For that hierarchy to function, demolition schedules, codes and procurement practices must change together. The limiting resource is not the wood itself but the coordination required to make its next use visible before the excavator arrives.

A For most of their history, maps represented relatively stable things: coastlines, roads, borders and settlements. Movement appeared only indirectly, perhaps as a route marked between two ports. During the nineteenth century, however, administrators and scientists increasingly wanted to see flows of people, goods, disease and weather. Their problem was not simply collecting numbers. They needed a graphic language capable of showing direction, volume and change without turning the page into an unreadable tangle.

B One influential solution was the flow line, whose width varied according to quantity. A narrow line might represent a small shipment of coal, while a broad band showed a major trade route. The device seems obvious today, but it required readers to treat the mark not as a physical road but as a measured relationship. Early designers sometimes added arrows for direction and colour for category. Each addition increased information, yet also raised the risk that decorative impact would outrun numerical clarity.

C Public-health mapping developed along a partly separate path. Officials plotted deaths or cases at residential addresses, looking for clusters that might reveal a local source. Such maps did not prove causation; a dense cluster could merely reflect a densely populated district. Their value lay in organising observations spatially and directing investigation. When combined with street-level inquiry, water records or knowledge of prevailing winds, the map became one element in an argument rather than a self-sufficient verdict.

D Meteorology posed different difficulties because the atmosphere changes continuously. Observations arrived from scattered stations at different times and with varying reliability. To draw a front or pressure system, analysts had to infer conditions between measurement points. Standard symbols allowed maps to be transmitted and compared quickly, but apparent precision could hide judgement. Two skilled analysts might connect the same observations differently, especially over oceans where stations were scarce.

E In the twentieth century, transport planners began mapping daily journeys through cities. Surveys asked residents where trips began, where they ended and why they travelled. The resulting origin–destination tables could contain millions of possible pairs, far too many for a single paper map. Planners aggregated zones, selected major flows and omitted minor ones. These choices made patterns visible but could erase short local journeys, particularly walking trips that respondents themselves often forgot to report.

F Computer animation later offered an escape from the static page. Dots could move through a network, and a time slider could reveal the morning peak spreading across a city. Yet animation introduced new limitations. Viewers have difficulty comparing moments that are no longer visible, and speed can be mistaken for quantity. A spectacular display may be memorable while leaving users unable to answer a basic question. Interactive controls help only when labels, scales and starting views make the underlying measures explicit.

G Real-time maps are now routine in navigation and delivery services. They combine position reports with models that estimate conditions where no sensor exists. Users tend to experience the output as current fact, although it is a blend of observations, delayed messages and predictions. A traffic map may colour a road red because a few phones slowed down, because an incident was reported or because the system expects congestion based on earlier Tuesdays. Commercial providers rarely reveal the precise weighting.

H Scale and projection further shape interpretation. A line that doubles in width appears more than twice as visually dominant, and a route drawn across a familiar city may seem more concrete than an equally large flow in an unfamiliar region. Responsible designers test maps with the intended audience rather than assuming that a mathematically proportional symbol will be perceived proportionally. They also preserve access to the underlying table, allowing readers to check cases that the graphic compresses.

I The history of mapping movement is therefore a history of selective translation. Every map converts events into marks, and every conversion privileges some questions over others. The best maps do not eliminate this selectivity; they make it inspectable. Legends, uncertainty ranges, access to earlier frames and explanations of missing data allow readers to judge what a moving line or pulsing dot can genuinely support.

A Memory is usually discussed as if improvement meant retaining more. Students seek techniques for storing facts, institutions build archives, and digital services promise that no photograph or message need disappear. Forgetting, in this account, is a defect: evidence that the mind or organisation has failed. Cognitive research presents a less comfortable possibility. A system that preserved every detail with equal strength might be less capable of abstraction, updating and choice than one that allows some information to fade.

B Human memory is reconstructive rather than a perfect recording. Each retrieval brings together fragments of the event, later knowledge and expectations about what normally happens. This makes recollection vulnerable to error, but it also permits old knowledge to be used in new settings. Remembering the exact appearance of every chair one has encountered would be less useful than developing a general concept of a chair. Some loss of detail is therefore inseparable from categorisation.

C Interference provides one mechanism of forgetting. Similar memories compete, so learning a new password can make an old one harder to retrieve and vice versa. The competition is often inconvenient, yet an inability to weaken outdated responses would be worse. People who move to a country where traffic travels on the opposite side must suppress well-practised habits. Successful adaptation depends not only on acquiring a new rule but on reducing the automatic pull of the old one.

D Experiments on intentional forgetting ask participants to study lists and then signal that some items will not be tested. Later, the “forget” items are often recalled less well than items marked for retention. Researchers disagree about whether people directly inhibit those memories or simply devote more rehearsal to the others. Either way, the result shows that remembering is partly regulated by goals. Attention and retrieval practice distribute access unevenly rather than protecting all experiences alike.

E Emotional memory complicates the positive account. Gradual fading can reduce the disruptive force of ordinary embarrassment or disappointment, allowing people to reinterpret an episode. Traumatic memories, however, may remain vivid and intrusive even when a person desperately wishes to forget. It would be misleading to claim that forgetting is always voluntary or beneficial. Clinical treatment generally aims to alter the response to a memory and integrate it safely, not to erase a factual record on command.

F Groups also forget. Organisations lose practical knowledge when experienced employees leave, records are discarded or software formats become unreadable. Such losses can repeat costly mistakes. At the same time, rigid institutional memory may preserve procedures long after their original purpose has vanished. New staff sometimes ask basic questions that insiders stopped noticing. The challenge is to distinguish knowledge that provides accountability from routines that survive merely because they are familiar.

G Digital storage changes the balance between retention and access. Search engines and cloud archives can preserve immense quantities, but preservation does not guarantee useful recall. When thousands of near-identical files remain, finding the authoritative version becomes difficult. Automated reminders may repeatedly return an old event to attention, preventing the natural decline produced by infrequent retrieval. Designers increasingly offer deletion controls and time limits, although business models based on accumulating data create contrary incentives.

H The law sometimes imposes a duty to remember. Medical records, contracts and evidence of public decisions must remain available for defined periods, even when individuals would prefer deletion. Conversely, privacy rules can require organisations to remove data that no longer serves a legitimate purpose. These demands show that institutional forgetting is not simply technical decay. It is governed by competing rights: continuity, accountability, correction and the possibility of moving beyond an old identity.

I A productive theory of forgetting does not celebrate ignorance. It treats memory as a selective system whose value lies in guiding present action. What should fade depends on context: a scientific anomaly may be vital, while the exact wording of an everyday conversation may not be. The goal is neither total retention nor careless loss, but a flexible relationship between detail and generalisation, continuity and revision. Forgetting earns a positive role only when the processes deciding what remains are themselves open to scrutiny.