Reading Practice

Learning lessons from the past

Many past societies collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those
that the poet Shelley imagined in his sonnet, Ozymandias. By collapse, I mean a drastic
decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a
considerable area, for an extended time. By those standards, most people would consider
the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather
than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern
US, the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America,
Norse Greenland, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in
Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the
Pacific Ocean.

The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a fascination for all of us.
We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow
up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience them at first hand. We feel drawn to
their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The
scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders. Yet these
builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort.
How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing?

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least
partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental
resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological
suicide (ecocide) has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by
archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen
scientists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by
damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs
from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management
problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human
population growth, and increased impact of people.

Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on
a theme. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between the course of human societies
and the course of individual human lives - to talk of a society’s birth, growth, peak, old age
and eventual death. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies: they
declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must
have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. Obviously, too, this trajectory is not
one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed
to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies did not collapse
at all.

Today many people feel that environmental problems overshadow all the other threats to
global civilisation. These environmental problems include the same eight that undermined
past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, build up of toxic
chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilisation of the Earth’s
photosynthetic capacity. But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is
vigorously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they
underestimated? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems

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faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g. wood, oil, or ocean
fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (e.g. plastics, wind and
solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn’t the rate of human population growth declining, such that
we’re already on course for the world’s population to level off at some manageable number
of people?

Questions like this illustrate why those famous collapses of past civilisations have taken on
more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical
lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. But there are also differences
between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems.
We shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions,
directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects
that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our
powerful technology (i.e. its beneficial effects), globalisation, modern medicine, and greater
knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past
societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: again, our potent
technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalisation (such that now a problem
in one part of the world affects all the rest), the dependence of millions of us on modern
medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still
learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.

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Questions 1-3
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1 When the writer describes the impact of monumental ruins today, he emphasises

A the income they generate from tourism.

B the area of land they occupy.

C their archaeological value.

D their romantic appeal.

2 Recent findings concerning vanished civilisations have

A overturned long-held beliefs.

B caused controversy amongst scientists.

C come from a variety of disciplines.

D identified one main cause of environmental damage.

3 What does the writer say about ways in which former societies collapsed?

A The pace of decline was usually similar.

B The likelihood of collapse would have been foreseeable.

C Deterioration invariably led to total collapse.

D Individual citizens could sometimes influence the course of events.

Questions 4-8
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

Write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

4..................... It is widely believed that environmental problems represent the main

danger faced by the modern world.

5..................... The accumulation of poisonous substances is a relatively modern problem.

6..................... There is general agreement that the threats posed by environmental

problems are very serious.

7..................... Some past societies resembled present-day societies more closely than
others.

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8..................... We should be careful when drawing comparisons between past and
present.

Questions 9-13
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.

Write the correct letter, A-F.

9..................... Evidence of the greatness of some former civilisations

10..................... The parallel between an individual’s life and the life of a society

11..................... The number of environmental problems that societies face

12..................... The power of technology

13..................... A consideration of historical events and trends

A is not necessarily valid.

B provides grounds for an optimistic outlook.

C exists in the form of physical structures.

D is potentially both positive and negative.

E will not provide direct solutions for present problems.

F is greater now than in the past.

Questions 14
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

14 What is the main argument of Reading Passage 3?

A There are differences as well as similarities between past and present societies.

B More should be done to preserve the physical remains of earlier civilisations.

C Some historical accounts of great civilisations are inaccurate.

D Modern societies are dependent on each other for their continuing survival.

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Solution:
1. C 8. YES
2. D 9. C
3. A 10. A
4. YES 11. F
5. YES 12. D
6. NO 13. E
7. NOT GIVEN 14. A

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