IELTS Reading: Matching Headings (Practice with Answers)

A. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, linguists expect half to disappear by the end of this century. Some fall silent with their last elderly speaker; others vanish quietly as children shift to a regional majority tongue before they start school. The rate of loss, by most estimates, now exceeds the rate of species extinction, yet it rarely makes the news.

B. The forces behind this are largely economic. Parents in small speech communities want their children employed, and employment speaks the larger language. Schools, television and labour migration all push in one direction. Very few languages die because speakers are forbidden to use them; most die because each family makes what feels like a sensible private choice, repeated a million times.

C. What disappears with a language is not only grammar. Ethnobotanists have recorded plant medicines known only in the vocabulary of the community that used them, and navigational knowledge held in the verbs of Pacific sailing cultures. When the language goes, the classification system encoded in it goes too, and with it a working model of a landscape built up over hundreds of generations.

D. Revival is possible but rare. Hebrew moved from liturgical use to a first language for millions in under a century. Welsh recovered ground through schooling and a television channel. The most copied model may be the Maori language nests of New Zealand, where elders care for infants entirely in the ancestral tongue, rebuilding the transmission chain at its weakest link: the family home.

E. Digital tools cut both ways. Recording projects and phone keyboards for minority scripts have preserved more linguistic data than any previous generation possessed. Yet the same phones stream a single global culture into every pocket, and spellcheckers quietly train writers toward standard forms. The archive is growing even as the living speech shrinks.

A. Tea began as medicine and became a drink by accident of habit. Legend assigns the discovery to a Chinese emperor who boiled water under a wild tree in 2737 BC and let the leaves fall in, but the verifiable story starts later, with boiled leaf infusions recommended in Chinese medical texts of the third century.

B. The drink crossed from medicine to daily life during the Tang dynasty, when Buddhist monasteries, forbidding sleep-inducing alternatives, served tea to keep monks awake through meditation. Monks carried the habit into the towns, and by the ninth century tea was taxed as an ordinary commodity.

C. Europe met tea through two doors at once. Dutch traders shipped the first cargoes from Java around 1610, marketing it as an exotic medicine at exotic prices, while Portuguese merchants moving through Macao introduced it to aristocratic courts. For a century it remained a luxury, its cost kept high by transport and monopoly.

D. The British transformation of tea into a national drink had less to do with taste than with politics and price. Tariffs on tea reached well over a hundred per cent in the eighteenth century, smuggling grew to meet legal trade in scale, and when the government slashed duties in 1784, legal imports quadrupled within a decade. Cheap tea arrived just as sugar from the Caribbean was also collapsing in price, and the two habits fused into the sweetened cup of the industrial working class.

E. The Opium Wars followed the leaf. When China restricted the trade, Britain answered by growing tea in its Indian colonies, and plantation-grown Assam broke the Chinese monopoly by the 1880s. The tea bush that had travelled as medicine returned to Asia as an industry, planted in hills that had never known it.

A. A runaway trolley will kill five people unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto a side track, where it will kill one. Most people say pull. Rephrase the same arithmetic, a surgeon harvesting one patient's organs to save five, and the same people refuse. The pair of cases has organised fifty years of moral psychology.

B. The inconsistency is the data. If saving five at the cost of one is right on a track, why wrong on an operating table? Candidate explanations divide along a line the field never quite escapes: either the difference between the cases is real, tracking something moral, or it is a bias, an accident of how human minds evolved to process harm.

C. The real-difference camp points to doctrine of double effect, a distinction medieval theologians drew that still does work: harming as a side effect of a good act differs from harming as the means. The lever redirects an existing threat, the surgeon makes the one patient the instrument. Ethics, on this view, need not be arithmetic.

D. The bias camp answers with scans and timing. Neuroimaging studies find that personal harm cases, the surgeon, the man pushed off the footbridge, recruit emotional circuitry that impersonal cases do not, and that decisions bucking this emotional signal take measurably longer. What feels like a principle may be the shadow of an alarm system calibrated for faces and pushes, not levers.

E. Practical stakes arrived with machines. An autonomous car must be programmed before any trolley arrives, converting a seminar puzzle into an engineering specification, and the early lesson of the applied literature is that nobody, asked to author the code rather than answer the question, wants arithmetic either. Manufacturers now route around the problem, optimising for rule-following and accident avoidance rather than counted lives, which may be the largest empirical result the trolley ever produced.