C2 Reading Practice Test 4

From a satellite, a coral reef is barely perceptible: a pale smudge of turquoise on the edge of a tropical coast, easily mistaken for shallow sand. Together, reefs occupy well under one percent of the ocean floor. Yet they are home to roughly a quarter of all marine species, a concentration of life so disproportionate that biologists frequently compare reefs to cities, the crowded, noisy places where an unlikely number of creatures have found ways to live alongside one another. The foundation of this metropolis is, curiously, a partnership. Corals are animals, not plants or rocks, and each reef is built from the accumulated limestone skeletons of countless tiny polyps. But a polyp can hardly be called self-sufficient. Embedded in its tissue live microscopic algae that capture sunlight and pass on much of the energy they produce, in return for shelter and a steady supply of nutrients. It is this arrangement that gives corals their colour, and it explains why reefs thrive only in clear, sunlit, shallow water, where the algae can do their work. The arrangement is also precarious. When the sea becomes unusually warm, the algae begin to malfunction and the coral expels them, leaving its tissue transparent and its white skeleton visible, a phenomenon known as bleaching. A bleached coral has not given up; if temperatures fall quickly enough, the algae can return and the colony recover. If the heat persists, however, the coral loses its principal source of food and cannot long survive. Marine heatwaves of the kind that have affected stretches of the Great Barrier Reef, which extends for some two thousand three hundred kilometres along the Australian coast, have therefore caused widespread alarm. Reefs matter well beyond the aquarium-friendly appeal of their inhabitants. They shelter fish that millions of people rely on for food, they attract tourists whose spending supports coastal economies, and their solid structures soften the force of waves before they reach the shore. To lose a reef is therefore to lose a kind of natural infrastructure. Responses are, accordingly, becoming more imaginative. In so-called coral gardening, fragments are grown in underwater nurseries and attached to damaged reefs, while researchers examine why some corals tolerate heat better than others, in the hope of propagating the more resilient varieties. Such work is encouraging but cannot, by itself, change the fundamental problem. Most specialists agree that the most effective intervention is also the least glamorous: reducing the emissions that warm the ocean, and curbing the pollution and overfishing that leave reefs less able to cope. Restoration, in other words, can buy time; it cannot replace a change in habits.

The Datça Autumn Regatta had been held, with a regularity that bordered on stubbornness, every October for forty-three years, and in all that time its organiser, Commodore Rıza Bey, had never once been satisfied with the wind. He considered it a personal failing of the Aegean that it should be either too strong, which was dangerous, or too weak, which was embarrassing, and he spoke of it in tones normally reserved for a disappointing relative. This year, the problem was the latter. By eleven o'clock the sea in the bay had acquired the texture of poured glass, and the thirty-odd dinghies assembled at the start line hung motionless, like insects trapped in amber. On the committee boat, Commodore Rıza Bey consulted his barometer, tapped it with the air of a man who no longer trusts his friends, and announced that the race would begin "as soon as circumstances permitted". Circumstances declined to cooperate. Parents on the quay began to unwrap sandwiches. Somebody's grandmother produced a flask of tea and, in the spirit of the occasion, offered it to the Commodore, who accepted it without a word of thanks. Among the competitors was a twelve-year-old named Ece, sailing a battered, faded-blue dinghy that her uncle had bought for the price of a good second-hand bicycle. She had never won anything, and nobody expected her to; the more experienced sailors, with their sleek boats and their serious expressions, were already positioning themselves for the first puff of wind, jostling with a politeness that did not entirely conceal their intentions. Ece did the opposite. She sat still, her hand loose on the tiller, and watched the water. After a long while she noticed what the others had missed: a dark line far on the left of the bay, crossing the surface so lightly that it looked like a pencil mark. She let the dinghy drift, an inch at a time, towards it, resisting the temptation to hurry. When the breeze finally came, shortly after half past one, it arrived on the left of the course, exactly where she was waiting. By the time the other boats had worked out what was happening, her little blue sail was already filling, and she was a hundred metres ahead. She won by an easy margin, a fact that Commodore Rıza Bey recorded in the logbook with the expression of a man signing a document under protest. At the prize-giving, he handed her the small silver cup and, after some visible internal struggle, said, "Patience is a form of skill." "So is knowing where to look," said Ece, and he pretended not to have heard. The wind, as if embarrassed by its earlier behaviour, stayed until dusk.

A modern traveller who stops for the night expects, as a matter of course, a bed, a meal and a locked door. Seven or eight centuries ago, a merchant crossing Anatolia with a string of heavily laden camels had rather different priorities: fodder for the animals, a wall between the goods and the highway robbers, and a roof under which he did not need to sleep with one eye open. The institution that supplied all three was the caravanserai, and the Seljuk sultans who ruled much of Anatolia in the thirteenth century built a remarkable network of them. The best known of these, Sultanhanı near Aksaray, was completed in 1229 during the reign of Alaeddin Keykubad. It is easily recognisable from a distance: a high, fortress-like enclosure of pale stone, relieved by a monumental entrance portal whose geometric carving has the intricacy of lace. Passing through that doorway, a visitor entered not an inn in the modern sense but a self-contained walled settlement, with a courtyard for unloading, covered halls for livestock, rooms for travellers and, at the centre, a small mosque raised above the ground. The logic of the arrangement was commercial as well as charitable. Caravanserais were spaced along the principal routes at intervals of roughly a day's journey, so that a caravan could always reach shelter before nightfall. According to tradition, travellers were typically offered food and lodging for a limited period without charge, a service paid for by the endowments of the ruler. Whatever the exact terms, the policy made sense for the state: secure and predictable trade routes meant a steady flow of merchants, and merchants meant taxes, new goods and the wealth that kept the sultanate prosperous. Equally striking is the investment in architecture. Why, one might ask, would a ruler spend so lavishly on a building intended for strangers, many of whom would stay only a single night? Part of the answer is probably prestige. A magnificent inn on a lonely road announced, to every merchant who passed through, that this was a land whose government could be relied upon, and that its rulers wished to be remembered as generous. Today, the caravanserais of Anatolia occupy a curious place in the landscape. Some stand roofless in fields, visited chiefly by shepherds and the occasional photographer; others have been carefully restored and serve as museums, concert venues or, with a certain pleasing symmetry, hotels. Their grandeur, though, is not merely picturesque. It is a reminder that the movement of people and goods has always depended on someone taking trouble over what lies between one city and the next.