IELTS Reading: Matching Information (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. The trade in used goods was once local by necessity. Furniture moved between neighbours, clothes passed down streets, and everything else went to the pawnshop, an institution that in 1870s London held more pledges per head than banks held accounts. What broke the local pattern was not sentiment but logistics: cheap parcel post and later the internet let a jumper travel five hundred miles to a stranger.

B. The scale today is difficult to overstate. Online resale platforms report combined merchandise volumes that rival mid-sized retailers, and in several clothing categories second-hand is the fastest growing segment, expanding while fast-fashion sales flatten. Analysts attribute the shift partly to price, partly to inventory technology that made searching a continent of wardrobes as easy as searching a shop.

C. Not every category thrives. Electronics resale is hampered by locked software and missing repair parts, and several manufacturers have been accused of designing products that are deliberately awkward to resell. Furniture, heavy and fragile, still moves mostly within cities. The second-hand economy is strongest where goods are light, standardised and slow to date.

D. There is an environmental argument, and it is less tidy than advertised. Extending a garment's life displaces some new production, but only if the buyer would otherwise have bought new, and survey evidence suggests many second-hand purchases are additional rather than substitutive. Shipping returns and re-deliveries add miles that a shop purchase never spent.

E. Whatever the accounting, resale has begun to change how things are made. Brands now advertise resale value as a feature, some have launched their own buy-back programmes to keep customers inside the brand, and designers talk about durability as a selling point in categories where it used to be invisible. The used market, long an afterthought, has started writing specs.

A. Before containers, a cargo ship spent as long in port as at sea. Longshoremen loaded barrels, sacks and crates by hand, a process so slow and theft-prone that shipping a product across an ocean could add a fifth to its price. Docklands employed armies whose unions, reasonably, defended jobs the new technology would erase.

B. The container itself was trivial: a steel box of standard dimensions. The revolution was agreement on the standard. Malcolm McLean, a trucking entrepreneur, launched the first container service in 1956, but the format only conquered trade when shipping lines, railways and governments settled on shared corner fittings and sizes, an agreement driven as much by the US military's logistics in Vietnam as by commerce.

C. The economics were violent. Port employment in London and New York collapsed within two decades, and the docks themselves moved, abandoning city-centre sites for deep-water complexes with crane gantries and rail connections. Cities that had grown around their harbours inherited miles of derelict waterfront, decades before anyone thought to convert them into flats.

D. Manufacture followed the box. A factory could now ship to another continent for a small fraction of previous cost, and the arithmetic that had kept production near consumers dissolved. The first relocations were simple, toys and textiles, but the logic extended up the value chain until components routinely crossed oceans several times before assembly, a pattern trade economists call the second unbundling.

E. The container's second-order effects still surface. Just-in-time manufacturing assumes ships that arrive on schedule, so a single grounded vessel can idle car plants on another continent, as the 2021 canal blockage demonstrated. Pandemic-era shortages, the empty-shipping-container mountains in the wrong ports, and the freight rate spikes all traced back to the same source: a system optimised for reliability, with almost no capacity to bend.