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Reading Booklet 01, Test 01
Nutmeg – a valuable spice
The nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, is a large evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia. Until the late eighteenth century, it grew in only one place in the world: a small group of islands in the Banda Sea, part of the Moluccas, also known as the Spice Islands, in northeastern Indonesia. The tree is thickly branched, with dense foliage of tough, dark green oval leaves. It produces small, yellow, bell-shaped flowers and pale yellow, pear-shaped fruits.
The fruit is encased in a fleshy husk. When ripe, the husk splits into two halves along a ridge running the length of the fruit. Inside is a shiny purple-brown seed measuring about two to three centimetres long and two centimetres across. This seed is surrounded by a lacy red or crimson covering known as an aril. These two components are the sources of the spices nutmeg and mace: nutmeg is produced from the dried seed, while mace is made from the aril.
During the Middle Ages, nutmeg was a highly prized and costly ingredient in European cuisine. It was used as a flavouring, a medicinal remedy, and a preservative. Throughout this period, Arab traders were the exclusive importers of nutmeg into Europe. They sold it at high prices to merchants in Venice but never revealed the exact location of its source. This Arab-Venetian dominance of the nutmeg trade ended in 1512, when Portuguese explorers reached the Banda Islands and began exploiting their valuable resources.
Constantly threatened by competition from neighbouring Spain, the Portuguese began subcontracting spice distribution to Dutch traders. As profits flowed into the Netherlands, the Dutch commercial fleet expanded rapidly and became one of the largest in the world. The Dutch gradually took control of much of the spice shipping and trade in Northern Europe. However, in 1580, Portugal came under Spanish rule, and by the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were excluded from the spice market. As prices of pepper, nutmeg, and other spices soared across Europe, the Dutch decided to take action.
In 1602, Dutch merchants founded the VOC, also known as the Dutch East India Company. By 1617, it had become the richest commercial enterprise in the world. The company employed 50,000 people globally, maintained a private army of 30,000 men, and operated a fleet of 200 ships. At the same time, Europe was ravaged by outbreaks of the plague, a deadly and highly contagious disease. Doctors believed nutmeg could cure the illness, increasing demand dramatically. Nutmeg purchased cheaply in Indonesia could be sold for up to 68,000 times its original cost in London. However, supply was extremely limited, creating a major opportunity for the Dutch.
The Banda Islands were governed by local sultans who insisted on a neutral trading policy with foreign powers. While this prevented Portuguese or Spanish military presence, it left the islands vulnerable. In 1621, Dutch forces invaded and took control. Once established, the Dutch strictly regulated nutmeg production by concentrating it into guarded plantations and destroying any trees grown outside these areas. Severe punishment was imposed on anyone caught growing nutmeg seedlings or possessing seeds without permission. To prevent cultivation elsewhere, exported nutmeg was coated with lime to ensure the seeds were infertile.
The only remaining obstacle to Dutch control was the island of Run, a small Banda island under British authority. After decades of conflict, the two powers reached an agreement in 1667 known as the Treaty of Breda. The Dutch offered Britain a trade: in exchange for Run, Britain would receive a distant and less valuable island in North America. Britain accepted the deal. That island was Manhattan, which later became New York. This agreement secured Dutch dominance over the nutmeg trade for the next century.
The monopoly began to collapse in the late eighteenth century. In 1770, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre successfully smuggled nutmeg plants to Mauritius. Some were later transported to the Caribbean, where they flourished, particularly on the island of Grenada. In 1778, a volcanic eruption in the Banda region triggered a tsunami that destroyed half of the nutmeg groves. Finally, in 1809, British forces seized the Banda Islands. Although the islands were returned to the Dutch in 1817, the British had already transplanted hundreds of nutmeg seedlings to plantations across southern Asia, effectively ending Dutch control.
Today, nutmeg is grown in Indonesia, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. Global nutmeg production is estimated to average between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes per year.
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Driverless cars
A
The automotive sector is well used to adapting to automation in manufacturing. The implementation of robotic car manufacture from the 1970s onwards led to significant cost savings and improvements in the reliability and flexibility of vehicle mass production. A new challenge to vehicle production is now on the horizon and, again, it comes from automation. However, this time it is not related to the manufacturing process, but to the vehicles themselves.
Research projects on vehicle automation are not new. Vehicles with limited self-driving capabilities have existed for more than 50 years, contributing significantly to the development of driver assistance systems. However, since Google announced in 2010 that it had been trialling self-driving cars on the streets of California, progress in this field has accelerated rapidly.
B
There are many reasons why this technology is advancing so quickly. One commonly cited motive is safety. Research conducted by the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory has shown that more than 90 percent of road collisions involve human error as a contributing factor, and in the majority of cases it is the primary cause. Automation may therefore help to reduce the frequency of accidents.
Another objective is to free up the time people spend driving for other activities. If vehicles are capable of handling some or all driving tasks, occupants may be able to work, socialise, or relax while automated systems take responsibility for safe vehicle control. Furthermore, individuals who are challenged by current mobility models, such as older or disabled travellers, could gain significantly greater independence.
C
Beyond these immediate benefits, automated vehicles may have wider implications for transport systems and society, as well as for manufacturing processes. At present, the average car spends more than 90 percent of its lifespan parked. Automation could make car-sharing initiatives far more viable, particularly in densely populated urban areas with high travel demand. If a substantial proportion of people use shared automated vehicles, mobility needs could be met with far fewer cars.
D
Research conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into automated mobility in Singapore found that fewer than 30 percent of the vehicles currently in use would be required if fully automated car-sharing systems were introduced. This suggests that far fewer vehicles might need to be manufactured to meet demand. However, the total number of trips would likely increase, partly because empty vehicles would need to travel between customers.
Further modelling by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute indicates that automated vehicles could reduce vehicle ownership by 43 percent, while average annual mileage per vehicle could double. As a result, vehicles would be used more intensively and might need to be replaced more frequently. This increased turnover rate suggests that overall vehicle production may not necessarily decline.
E
Automation may also lead to changes in vehicle design and production. If consumers shift away from owning a single car and instead purchase access to a range of vehicles through a mobility service provider, they could select vehicles that best suit specific journeys rather than compromising on one vehicle for all needs.
Since most seats in most cars are unoccupied for much of the time, this trend could encourage the production of smaller, more efficient vehicles designed for individual use. More specialised vehicles could then be available for less frequent journeys, such as family holidays or moving a child to university.
F
Despite the potential benefits, several challenges must be overcome before automated vehicles can be widely adopted. These include technical difficulties in ensuring vehicles operate reliably across the vast range of traffic, weather, and road conditions they may encounter. Regulatory challenges also exist, particularly in determining liability and enforcement when drivers are no longer essential to vehicle operation. In addition, societal changes may be required for communities to trust and accept automated vehicles as a valuable part of the transport system.
G
It is clear that many challenges remain, but through robust and targeted research, they are likely to be addressed within the next decade. Mobility may change in profound ways and alongside other technological developments such as telepresence and virtual reality, making precise predictions difficult. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: change is inevitable, and flexibility will be essential for those involved in manufacturing the vehicles that will shape future mobility.
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What is exploration?
We are all explores. Our desire to discover, and then share that new-found knowledge, is part of what makes us human – indeed, this has played an important part in our success as a species. Long before the first caveman slumped down beside the fire and grunted news that there were plenty of wildebeest over yonder, our ancestors had learnt the value of sending out
scouts to investigate the unknown. This questing nature of ours undoubtedly helped our species spread around the globe, just as it nowadays no doubt helps
the last nomadic Penan maintain their existence in the depleted forests of Borneo, and a visitor negotiate the subways of New York.
Over the years, we’ve come to think of explorers as a peculiar breed – different from the rest of us, different from those of us who are merely ‘well travelled’, even; and perhaps there is a type of person more suited to seeking out the new, a type of caveman more inclined to risk venturing out. That, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that we all have this enquiring instinct, even
today; and that in all sorts of professions – whether artist, marine biologist or astronomer – borders of the unknown are being tested each day.
Thomas Hardy set some of his novels in Egdon Heath, a fictional area of uncultivated land, and used the landscape to suggest the desires and fears of
his characters. He is delving into matters we all recognise because they are common to humanity. This is surely an act of exploration, and into a world as remote as the author chooses. Explorer and travel writer Peter Fleming talks of the moment when the explorer returns to the existence he has left behind with his loved ones. The traveller ‘who has for weeks or months seen himself only as a puny and irrelevant alien crawling laboriously over a country in which he has no roots and no background, suddenly encounters his other self, a relatively solid figure, with a place in the minds of certain people’.
In this book about the exploration of the earth’s surface, I have confined myself to those whose travels were real and who also aimed at more than personal discovery. But that still left me with another problem: the word ‘explorer’ has become associated with a past era. We think back to a golden age, as if exploration peaked somehow in the 19th century – as if the process of discovery is now on the decline, though the truth is that we have named only
one and a half million of this planet’s species, and there may be more than 10 million – and that’s not including bacteria. We have studied only 5 per cent of the species we know. We have scarcely mapped the ocean floors, and know even less about ourselves; we fully understand the workings of only 10 per cent of our brains.
Here is how some of today’s ‘explorers’ define the word. Ran Fiennes, dubbed the ‘greatest living explorer’, said, ‘An explorer is someone who has done something that no human has done before – and also done something scientifically useful.’ Chris Bonington, a leading mountaineer, felt exploration was to be found in the act of physically touching the unknown: ‘You have to have gone somewhere new.’ Then Robin Hanbury-Tenison, a campaigner on behalf of remote so-called ‘tribal’ peoples, said, ‘A traveller simply records information about some far-off world, and reports back; but an explorer changes
the world.’ Wilfred Thesiger, who crossed Arabia’s Empty Quarter in 1946, and belongs to an era of unmechanised travel now lost to the rest of us, told me, ‘If I’d gone across by camel when I could have gone by car, it would have been a stunt.’ To him, exploration meant bringing back information from a remote place regardless of any great self-discovery.
Each definition is slightly different – and tends to reflect the field of endeavour of each pioneer. It was the same whoever I asked: the prominent historian would say exploration was a thing of the past, the cutting-edge scientist would say it was of the present. And so on. They each set their own particular criteria; the common factor in their approach being that they all had, unlike many of us who simply enjoy travel or discovering new things, both a very definite objective from the outset and also a desire to record their findings.
I’d best declare my own bias. As a writer, I’m interested in the exploration of ideas. I’ve done a great many expeditions and each one was unique. I’ve lived for months alone with isolated groups of people all around the world, even two ‘uncontacted tribes’. But none of these things is of the slightest interest to anyone unless, through my books, I’ve found a new slant, explored a new idea. Why? Because the world has moved on. The time has long passed for the great continental voyages – another walk to the poles, another crossing of the Empty Quarter. We know how the land surface of our planet lies; exploration of it is now down to the details – the habits of microbes, say, or the grazing behaviour
of buffalo. Aside from the deep sea and deep underground, it’s the era of
specialists. However, this is to disregard the role the human mind has in conveying remote places; and this is what interests me: how a fresh interpretation, even of a well-travelled route, can give its readers new insights.
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