IELTS Reading: Short Answer (Practice with Answers)

The race to the South Pole compressed into fifteen months a story that began decades earlier. Shackleton's Nimrod expedition of 1908 came within 97 geographical miles of the pole before he made the decision his party survived to praise: he turned back, planting a flag and a note claiming the record for the farthest south yet reached.

Amundsen, three years later, approached the pole from the Bay of Whales with dogs, skis and a plan refined over seasons in the Arctic. His team of five crossed the barrier in fifty-three days, and on 14 December 1911 stood at what their observations gave as ninety degrees south. Scott's party, hauling their own sledges man-harness style after his motor sledges and ponies failed, reached the pole thirty-four days later to find the Norwegian flag and a tent left for the weather.

The two expeditions are usually cast as a fable of efficiency against heroism, but the record resists simple moralising. Amundsen shot his dogs for meat as planned, a strategy his men accepted and his contemporaries found cold-blooded. Scott's science programme, which dragged thirty-five pounds of rock samples even in the final march, added to the geological map of the continent while contributing nothing to speed. Both leaders died in the polar years that followed, Amundsen in an airship rescue mission and Scott in the tent his diary made famous, and the pole itself waited another forty-five years for a crossing on foot.

Before 1840, posting a letter in Britain was a transaction between sender and carrier conducted at the recipient's door. Postage was charged by distance and sheets, and it was collected on delivery, which meant the recipient decided, letter in hand, whether to pay. The price kept pace with suspicion: a single sheet from Edinburgh to London cost more than a labourer's day wage, and correspondents developed a private code of crossed lines and pinpricks that carried the message on the outside, leaving the paid letter blank.

Rowland Hill's 1837 pamphlet attacked the system's economics rather than its cruelty. Handling, he argued, not distance, drove postal costs: a letter carried five hundred miles cost the service barely more than one carried five, and the complicated charging employed an army of clerks who calculated, recorded and chased payments. A uniform low rate, prepaid by a stamped adhesive label, would slash the clerks, multiply the traffic, and, he calculated, raise more money than the old tariff.

The Treasury ran the arithmetic twice, disbelieved it twice, and then opened the question to competition with a prize for the best scheme. Hill won his own competition with the Penny Black's launch in May 1840: a flat penny for any distance, prepaid. Letters more than doubled in a decade, the postal service's revenue recovered past its old level within three years, exactly as the pamphlet predicted, and the concept crossed borders so fast that by 1850 a dozen countries had copied the flat rate. The recipient-paid letter, and the blank envelopes posted to signal refusal without cost, disappeared within a generation.

Until the 1840s, noon was local wherever you stood, set by the sun and kept by the town clock, and neighbouring cities cheerfully disagreed by minutes that nobody minded. Railways minded. A train running between towns keeping different noons needed timetables in local variants, and every junction multiplied the arithmetic of connection. British companies solved it unilaterally, adopting London time for their networks, and the public clocks, synced to railway time by telegraph, dragged the towns with them.

The American problem was continental and harder. Several thousand local times existed; a timetable from Buffalo listed two columns, town time and railroad time, five minutes apart. In 1883 the railroads imposed Standard Time, four zones across the continent, without a law, the switch coordinated to the minute and accepted within a year by a public that mostly had not known it was voting. Congress legalised the arrangement only in 1918, an afterthought thirty-five years late.

The global system followed the same improvisation. An 1884 conference in Washington fixed the prime meridian at Greenwich by diplomatic vote, over French objection, and sliced the planet into twenty-four nominal zones. Geography has been bending the grid ever since, zones adopting political borders, countries shifting theirs for daylight saving or for symbolic alignment, one skipping a day to join the other side of the line, so that the clean mathematics of 1884 survives mainly on maps that no one lives by.