Cambridge 19 · Academic Reading Test 2

The Industrial Revolution in Britain The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s had spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries. The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the ‘atmospheric steam engine’, Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more efficient. Watt later worked with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to invent a new steam engine driven by both the forward and backward strokes of the piston, while the gear mechanism it was connected to produced rotary motion. It was a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries. The demand for coal, which was a relatively cheap energy source, grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as it was needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also steam-powered transportation. In the early 1800s, the English engineer…

Athletes and stress It isn’t easy being a professional athlete. Not only are the physical demands greater than most people could handle, athletes also face intense psychological pressure during competition. This is something that British tennis player Emma Raducanu wrote about on social media following her withdrawal from the 2021 Wimbledon tournament. Though the young player had been doing well in the tournament, she began having difficulty regulating her breathing and heart rate during a match, which she later attributed to ’the accumulation of the excitement and the buzz’. For athletes, some level of performance stress is almost unavoidable. But there are many different factors that dictate just how people’s minds and bodies respond to stressful events. Typically, stress is the result of an exchange between two factors: demands and resources. An athlete may feel stressed about an event if they feel the demands on them are greater than they can handle. These demands include the high level of physical and mental effort required to succeed, and also the athlete’s concerns about the difficulty of the event, their chance of succeeding, and any potential dangers such as injury. Resources, on the other hand, are a person’s ability to cope with these demands. These include factors such as the competitor’s degree of confidence, how much they believe they can control the situation’s outcome, and whether they’re looking forward to the event or not. Each new demand or change in circumstances affects whether a person responds positively or negatively to stress. Typically, the more…

An inquiry into the existence of the gifted child Let us start by looking at a modern ‘genius’, Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those ‘gifted’ children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest – reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her and she was hooked. In adult life it is clear that she was curious, excited by what she did and also resolute in the face of setbacks. One of her comments sums it up. ‘Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Alia” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new … But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.’ That trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics. Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel prize winners were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk as a baby. He failed the general part of the entry test to…