B2 Reading Practice Test 4

Anyone who has seen the valleys around Göreme at sunrise will understand why visitors so often describe Cappadocia as another planet. Tall cones of pale rock stand in clusters, some of them topped with a darker stone like a hat, and the whole landscape glows pink and orange in the early light. Local people call these formations "fairy chimneys". The story of how they appeared, however, involves nothing more magical than fire, wind and an enormous amount of time. The process began many millions of years ago, when volcanoes in central Anatolia, including Erciyes and Hasan Dağı, began to erupt repeatedly. Over millions of years they covered the region in thick layers of ash and lava. The ash, which settled into deep beds and gradually hardened, became a soft, light rock called tuff. The lava, by contrast, cooled into basalt, a much harder stone that formed a protective sheet across the top of the plateau. Once the volcanoes had quietened, erosion took over. Rain, melting snow and strong temperature changes between day and night cracked the surface, and streams cut deep valleys into it. Wherever a hard cap of basalt survived, it acted like an umbrella, shielding the soft tuff directly beneath it. The surrounding rock wore away much faster, so that over thousands of years, narrow towers were left standing. When the cap finally fell, the column below was exposed and began to shrink as well, which is why geologists consider the chimneys temporary features that are slowly disappearing. The softness of tuff has also shaped human history. Because it is easy to carve but hardens when exposed to the air, people dug homes, storerooms and chapels directly into the cliffs. Beneath the surface, communities expanded entire cities, such as Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, with several storeys of tunnels, ventilation shafts and rooms for animals. The temperature in these spaces stays cool in summer and mild in winter, a quality that residents still appreciate today; many local families store fruit and vegetables in underground rooms. Today, protecting the landscape requires careful management. Visitors are asked to stay on marked paths, since walking on fragile slopes accelerates erosion, and many buildings have been reinforced to prevent collapse. Perhaps the most striking lesson of Cappadocia is that dramatic beauty is rarely accidental: it is the result of a long contest between hard and soft materials, played out over millions of years.

The rule had been announced in a school letter three weeks earlier, and Callum had read it with growing alarm. During the residential trip to a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, all phones would be locked in a plastic box in the teachers' room. "A weekend of real life," the letter had called it. Callum, who could not remember the last time he had spent an hour without checking his messages, called it a punishment. He handed over his phone on the ferry with the expression of someone surrendering a passport. For the first few hours he behaved like a man suffering from a mysterious illness. He kept patting his pocket, reaching for something that was no longer there. When the group stopped to look at seals resting on the rocks, he found himself wishing he could photograph them, and was annoyed to realise that he was actually looking at them instead. By evening he was bored, and by ten o'clock he was desperate enough to join a conversation at the fireside between the ferryman, Mr Gillies, and two of the teachers. They were talking about the sky. "You'll see more stars tonight than you've seen in your whole life," Mr Gillies promised. "There's not a streetlight for miles." Callum had expected this to be an exaggeration. It was not. When they walked out onto the beach later, the sky seemed to be overflowing; there were so many stars that the familiar patterns he had seen on his phone's astronomy app were almost lost among them. Nobody spoke for several minutes. Then a girl from his class, Priya, whom he had barely noticed before, quietly began naming the constellations she knew. The next morning, when the box was opened, Callum was surprised to find that he felt no relief. He had forty-two new messages, but not one of them was as interesting as the night before. On the ferry home he took out his phone, then put it back in his pocket and watched the island shrink behind them. He did not become a different person overnight. But the following week, he asked Priya if she could lend him her star chart.

It is hard to think of an object more ordinary than the pencil, yet few everyday tools have a more interesting past. Its story begins in the sixteenth century, after a storm in the English county of Cumbria is said to have uprooted a tree, uncovering a dark, shiny mineral in the ground beneath. The local shepherds soon discovered that it left clear, black marks, and they began using lumps of it to label their sheep. The mineral turned out to be graphite, a form of carbon that was extraordinarily pure in that particular valley, Borrowdale. It was so valuable that the mine was guarded, and the graphite was taken out only at certain times of the year. Early users found it too soft and dirty to hold directly, so they wrapped it in string or sheepskin, and later set thin sticks of it into wooden holders. This is the origin of the modern pencil, although the confusing English word "lead" has never gone away. People used to believe that graphite was a kind of lead, and the old name has simply stuck. The next breakthrough came in 1795, when the French inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté devised a new method. Supplies of English graphite were difficult to obtain at the time, so he ground low-quality graphite into powder, mixed it with clay, shaped it into rods and baked them in a kiln. By adjusting the proportion of clay, he could control the hardness of the finished product, which is why we can choose between soft pencils for shading and hard pencils for fine lines. A similar system of hardness grades is still marked on pencils today. The pencil had already acquired its wooden coat by then, but the final addition was surprisingly late. In 1858, an American named Hymen Lipman received a patent for a pencil with a small piece of rubber fixed to one end. Not everyone welcomed the idea; some people felt that a writer who needed an eraser was admitting to carelessness. Nevertheless, the design proved so practical that it spread worldwide. The word "pencil" itself comes from the Latin for "little tail", a name originally given to a fine artist's paintbrush. It is a reminder that many things we take for granted have been shaped slowly, by accidents, shortages and a great deal of ingenuity.