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Reading Test 55
When Maps were Made for the Public
Since the art of map-making began, maps have largely been made for explorers, academics, and rulers. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the general public began to demand maps for themselves. More than anything else, it was the appeal of travel to ordinary people that encouraged companies to begin creating and printing more maps than ever before, in order to meet the demands of their new market.
In the years after the American Civil War (1861–65), the rapidly growing US railroad system had so many independent rail companies, schedules, and destinations that maps were critical for planning a person’s journey. One publisher, Rand McNally, made a fortune from producing railway maps for different parts of the USA, combined with a timetable and many descriptions of scenery and towns in the same booklet.
When safety improvements in the 1880s helped to make the bicycle popular, cycling maps quickly appeared, showing roads in good condition even if they were rarely used. Later, in 1896, one of the first cycling guides appeared in print: George Blum’s Cycler’s Guide and Map of Road for California. Each cycle road was highlighted in red and labelled with not only the type of surface riders could expect to find, but also an indication of how steep it was.
The advent of the car brought a need for road maps and travel information. In 1900, André Michelin published a guide about France, with maps that showed the location of different kinds of reasonably priced accommodation and also car assistance for any mechanical problems. However, it was due primarily to its recommendations regarding which was the best restaurant to go to that the guide quickly became something a huge number of tourists and travellers bought and relied on. Nowhere was the need for road maps greater than in the United States. In 1902, the American Automobile Association was founded in Chicago, and three years later it published its first road maps for long-distance drivers. In 1917, Rand McNally began to publish Auto Trails Maps, a series of maps that each focused in detail on a different region that people might want to visit within North America. The same publisher also helped to establish the US’s use of identifiers to identify previously nameless roads. Following the European tradition, roads were given names, but now, thanks in part to Rand McNally, they were allocated numbers instead.
The companies did not take long to realize the profit to be made from Americans exploring the open road, so service stations soon began to distribute free maps to encourage this. Free road maps became part of the fabric of American life, and it has been estimated that more than ten billion were distributed before the 1970s. It was then that the rising costs of oil and subsequent falling consumption led to the oil companies investigating where savings could be made. The maps were one of the first things to go. Another map product was the aeronautical chart for pilots. The first examples were produced in France and England around 1911. Techniques progressed greatly during World War I, and during the 1920s there was continual development of maps for air navigation.
New maps also became available for those who only wanted to cross town by train. Some of the early maps of the London Underground were based on the city above ground; therefore, although they were accurate in terms of distance and direction, the maps were confusing because the stations in central London were so crowded together. In 1931, Harry Beck produced a map that looked rather like an electrical circuit, with straight lines and symbols. It included only one feature above ground: the River Thames. The stations were also spaced relatively equally, making the map much easier to read. Although Beck’s map was initially rejected as too radical, it was approved in 1933. He continued to refine it for the next 25 years.
Shortly after Beck’s contribution to the mapping of subterranean London, an equally significant achievement was performed above ground. Phyllis Pearsall was a painter who, in 1935, became lost on her way to a party in London, due to a lack of a good map. This inspired her to plot all of London, and the next year she started and catalogued its 23,000 streets. With map-maker James Duncan, Pearsall then produced an atlas and a comprehensive street index. Unable to interest any of the major publishers, the two founded their own company, the Geographer’s Map Company Ltd, and produced what was then called the A–Z, Atlas and Guide to London. The company still exists and now publishes more than 300 different A–Z maps and atlases.
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Preserving Antarctic History
Protecting early buildings in Antarctica
A.
Few people coming up to the most comfortable dwelling place imaginable are likely to picture wooden huts on an island off the coldest continent on Earth. But that’s where the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott described the hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island that he chose for his 1910–13 expedition. The hut is nestled below the cliffs on a flat, long stretch of sand. In 2011, a bottle of Mackinlay’s whisky, the only one, was to be seen in front of the newly restored structure and sun reflects off the cliffs of the nearby glacier.
B.
The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZHAT) and its accompanying workers recently announced the completion of 10 years of intensive work to save two historic buildings on Ross Island as well as the hut at Cape Evans, but the Cape Royds on Discovery Hut from Scott’s 1901–04 expedition at Hut Point, and the hut at Cape Royds, built for Ernest Shackleton’s 1907–09 expedition. When work began, many of the artefacts were temporarily removed while carpenters from the team of conservation workers repaired walls, floors and roof. In Scott’s ‘command hut’ was the table where team member Edward Wilson had once incubated his moulds and parasites. Of particular interest is the small wooden box of sample tubes, sample jars and Bunsen burners standing on the biologist Edward Nelson, by its shape through a dusty window. This was where the young scientist preserved Antarctic specimens as part of his search for new species and an understanding of the Antarctic food chain.
C.
The NZHAT executive director Nigel Watson describes these restored huts as fantastic remnants of humans’ first contact with the continent. The idea for the birth of the conservation project, he says, was the fact that we were in great danger of losing them. ‘When the site work began in 2004, snow and ice were building up around, under and sometimes inside the huts, damaging the structures and threatening their contents. Now we have three buildings that are structurally sound and watertight with a very different feel – they are drier and lighter and the humidity is reduced. It’s a much better environment for the collection.’
D.
As well as heritage carpenters, the NZHAT team on Ross Island has included experts in textile, paper and metal conservation: in total, 62 experts from 11 countries have visited Antarctica to work on the project, often spending a whole summer on-site, sleeping in tents about 25km back to Scott Base for the occasional shower. The team is now known as the most exciting conservation project in the world, says Watson. ‘So it attracted top heritage conservation talent. Some of the most exciting discoveries were the intact cases of MacKinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky found in good condition inside Ernest Shackleton’s hut, a paper notebook that belonged to surgeon, zoologist and photographer George Murray Levick found buried in dirt at Cape Evans and a small box of 22 cellulose nitrate negatives waiting to be developed into photographs found in Herbert Ponting’s darkroom. But most of the 18,202 items catalogued and conserved are more mundane: food, tools, clothing and other personal items that the crews found no purpose to take home on the return voyages.
E.
The NZHAT team’s conservation treatments involved thorough cleaning, followed by meticulous treatment to help slow or, even reverse, the deterioration. Metal items would go through a chemical process, followed by a chemical stabilization treatment, then repackaged and preserved in airtight containers for future conservation. Treatment of paper items often involved washing to remove harmful acids and to repair the fractured parts so that in some cases the paper was even stronger than before.
F.
As a result of the project, the NZHAT has become the world leader in cold-climate heritage conservation and its methods have been widely used by numerous New Zealand charities and historic reports. ‘The Ross Island huts are the jewels in the crown,’ says Watson, but there are other historic buildings needing attention. With logistics support from Antarctica New Zealand, programme managers Al Fastier and Lizzie Meek will be part of a small team heading to Cape Adare, an exposed site more than 700km north of Scott Base. The two Cape Adare huts, remnants of an 1898–1900 British expedition, are not only the first buildings on the continent,’ says Watson, but also the only example of humanity’s first buildings on any continent on Earth.
G.
The three-year restoration effort will involve construction repairs and the removal, conservation and return of about 11,000 objects. Compared with the huts on Ross Island, which are relatively sheltered, Cape Adare is ‘a very remote and challenging place to work in,’ says Watson. It’s set among the world’s biggest colony of Adelie penguins on an exposed spit of land, and it is important that they do not interrupt the functioning of the colony in any way while they are there. Lizzie Meek looks forward to the challenge. But ‘I’m also looking forward to going back to Ross Island huts and seeing them with fresh eyes. After so many years of working on them, to be able to step inside and look around to see what we have accomplished will be amazing.’
H.
If you can find your way to Antarctica, you’ll need a permit to visit any of these huts, which each are in an Antarctic Specially Protected Area. But there’s an easier way to see them without making the long journey: the Trust has partnered with Google to offer Street View walkthroughs of each of the dwellings, available via Google Earth or through the NZHAT’s website.
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Flower Power
Why do people give flowers?
To offer condolence to those who are grieving. To express gratitude. To ask for forgiveness. There is something undeniably powerful about giving flowers; in fact, few objects provoke such a universal response. In the US alone, the flower industry is now worth about $5bn a year—suggesting, at the very least, that they service a compelling human need.
Paragraph A
Research at the Department of Psychology at Rutgers State University in New Jersey confirms that flowers are unique among living organisms in their ability to induce changes in our emotional state. As the first part of their research, the Rutgers psychologists studied women in their homes. Each was presented with a variety of gifts such as flowers, fruit, or sweets. The women were unaware that the study was about the effect of gifts on their emotions. They were told that it was a study about their daily moods, and that they would receive a gift in return for taking part. Following the presentation of the gifts, women receiving flowers were assessed as displaying a much more positive mood than those who received other gifts, and this effect lasted for several days. After receiving flowers, participants were more willing to answer questions concerning their social circle and intimate relationships with friends and family. The results suggest that flowers influence our emotional behaviours, as well as having a strong effect on our immediate expression.
Paragraph B
In the second study, the psychologists observed participants being handed single flowers, or no gift at all, in a constrained and stressful situation—inside an elevator. Contrary to expectations regarding gender differences, both men and women responded with flowers were more likely to smile, to stand closer to the initiator of the exchange. Several subjects who were initially skeptical about the experiment’s purpose then learnt that flowers were also being handed out, and returned to the elevator and demanded a flower. The scientists used elevators for this study precisely because typical behaviour in sparsely occupied elevators is for people to retreat to opposite corners. The subjects who received flowers, however, closed up that space to a considerable extent—indicating that flowers not only induced a strong positive mood but brought a significant affiliation among people who had never previously met.
Paragraph C
The third study involved regularly sending flowers to a selected sample of men and women. The researchers found not only a profound elevation of mood but also reliable improvements in other measures of cognitive function, like memory. In this series of experiments, some participants produced such extraordinary emotional displays that the psychologists were totally unprepared for them. Subjects gave spontaneous hugs and kisses to the people who delivered the flowers, and sent invitations to psychologists to come to their homes for refreshments.
Paragraph D
Various evolutionary hypotheses attempt to explain the remarkably powerful psychological effect of flowers. One is that our aesthetic preferences for fertile locations and growing things stem from prehistory, when these cues in our environment could mean the difference between starvation and survival. We may have been hardwired to respond positively to flowers because, for early man, finding them in a particular location predicted future food supplies and possibly a better place to rear children. The flaw in this argument is that the showy flowers which humans seem to find most visually attractive are generally found on those plants which yield no edible products.
Paragraph E
The Rutgers psychologists’ findings show that the various physical attributes of flowers combine to directly affect our emotions through multi-channel interactions. We have evolved preferences for the particular colours, textures, patterned symmetries, and specific floral odours which influence our moods. Indeed, previous research has established that popular perfumes, which often have a floral ‘top-note’, will actually reduce depression. The origins of these inclinations may well be as the evolutionary theories suggest: the patterned symmetries of flowers can be detected easily as a recognisable signal within a wide variety of visual arrays, and a response to certain colour tones is important in finding ripe fruit against a leafy background. But, claim the Rutgers team, these preferences have long been separated from their primary evolutionary usage, and become rewarding to us more generally. Thus, plants with preferred colours, shapes and odours—despite having no other products—would therefore be protected and dispersed.
Paragraph F
The Rutgers study suggests that flowers may have actually evolved to exploit their peculiar impact on humans. The team’s theory proposes a plant-human co-evolution, or even domestication, based on the intense emotional rewards that flowers provide. The idea that flowering plants, with no known food or other basic survival value to man, have co-evolved with us by exploiting an emotional niche instead, is very much like the scenario presented for the evolution of dogs. Flowers may be the plant equivalent of ‘companion animals’. If this is true, then there is a very real sense in which, when you next give flowers, they are using you just as much as you are using them.
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