A For roughly four centuries, a portable timepiece was something carried rather than worn. The first spring-driven clocks small enough to be taken out of the house appeared in southern Germany early in the sixteenth century. These early pieces were bulky, drum-shaped objects, typically hung from a belt or from a cord around the neck, and they were so imprecise that many had only an hour hand. It was not until the late seventeenth century, when the balance spring was introduced and men's fashion adopted the waistcoat, that the slim pocket watch on a chain became the standard form. For the next two hundred years it remained a predominantly masculine possession and, at the upper end of the market, as much a declaration of social standing as a means of keeping appointments.
B Watches fastened to the wrist were not unknown in this period, but they occupied an entirely different cultural niche. In 1810 the Paris-based watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet accepted a commission from Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples and a sister of Napoleon, for a timepiece mounted on a bracelet woven from hair and gold thread, and later in the century the Geneva firm Patek Philippe produced a comparable piece for a Hungarian countess. Such objects were essentially jewellery. Small, ornate and expensive, they were bought by, or for, aristocratic women, and their value lay far more in their decoration than in their reliability. The association became so firmly fixed that well into the twentieth century many men regarded a wristwatch as faintly ridiculous, an accessory that no self-respecting gentleman would consider wearing.
C The decisive push came not from fashion houses but from people whose work left them no hand to spare. Soldiers serving in British colonial campaigns towards the end of the nineteenth century are reported to have fitted pocket watches into leather cuffs so that they could check the time while holding a rifle or the reins of a horse, and around 1880 the German navy is said to have ordered a batch of wrist-mounted watches for its officers. Aviation provided another early convert. In 1904 the Brazilian pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont, frustrated at having to let go of his controls to consult a pocket watch in mid-flight, asked his friend Louis Cartier for a solution; the resulting design, with a flat square case and a leather strap, was later sold to the public. What united these early adopters was a practical rather than an aesthetic motive: the wrist made it possible to read the time at a glance while both hands were occupied.
D It was the First World War, however, that turned the wristwatch from a specialist's tool into an everyday accessory for men. Co-ordinated artillery bombardments and infantry advances depended on precise timing, and officers in the trenches could not afford to fumble for a watch buried beneath layers of uniform. Manufacturers responded with robust 'trench watches', whose glass was often shielded by a pierced metal guard and whose numerals were painted with luminous radium compounds so that they could be read in darkness. That innovation came at a terrible price: in the United States, many of the young women employed to paint the dials, who habitually shaped their brushes between their lips, later developed severe illnesses caused by radiation. By the time the war ended, the old prejudice had largely collapsed. Former servicemen kept wearing the watches they had depended on at the front, and the wristwatch came to be associated with courage rather than frivolity.
E The interwar decades brought refinements that made the wristwatch more practical still. In 1923 the English watch repairer John Harwood patented a self-winding mechanism in which a pivoted weight, swinging with the movement of the wearer's arm, kept the mainspring wound, and in 1926 Rolex introduced the Oyster, a case sealed tightly enough to keep out water and dust. Yet the mechanical watch's most serious challenge still lay ahead. On Christmas Day 1969 the Japanese company Seiko launched the Astron, the world's first commercially available quartz wristwatch. Instead of a balance wheel, it relied on a tiny crystal which, when supplied with current from a battery, vibrates 8,192 times a second, an oscillation so regular that the watch lost or gained only a few seconds a month. The Astron initially cost as much as a small car, but as electronic components became cheaper during the 1970s, quartz watches of comparable accuracy could soon be bought for a fraction of that price.
F For the Swiss industry, which had dominated world watchmaking for generations, the consequences were severe. Many firms had dismissed electronic timekeeping as a passing novelty, and as inexpensive quartz watches from Asia flooded the market, Swiss manufacturers lost much of their share; employment in the sector is estimated to have fallen by around two-thirds between 1970 and the mid-1980s. Recovery came from two directions. One was the Swatch, launched in 1983, a cheap plastic quartz watch with far fewer components than its rivals, marketed as a fashion item that customers might buy in several colours. The other, more unexpected, was the revival of the traditional mechanical watch as a luxury product, prized precisely because it is crafted by hand and, by modern standards, less accurate than a battery-powered one. Today, when the time is displayed on almost every phone and computer screen, the expensive mechanical wristwatch survives less as an instrument than as a statement, returning, in a sense, to the role the pocket watch played centuries ago.
1Paragraph A
2Paragraph B
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4Paragraph D
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7Chained timepieces grew commonplace only after a new internal part had been added and the male wardrobe came to include the ______.
8The earliest wrist-worn pieces were prized more for their ______ than for how dependably they kept time.
9One military force believed to have equipped those in command with arm-worn timepieces around 1880 was the ______.
10Santos-Dumont disliked having to take his hands off the ______ to find out the hour when airborne.
11Night-time legibility was achieved by coating the figures on wartime watches with substances based on ______.
12In Harwood's system, the ordinary motion of the wrist rocked a ______ to and fro, keeping the spring tensioned automatically.
13The regularity of the Astron came from a quartz element pulsing at a rate of ______ cycles each second.
A In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the London chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard noticed something curious in the temperature records he had been keeping: the capital was consistently warmer than the surrounding countryside, and the gap was widest not at midday but at night. Howard attributed the difference largely to the heat given off by the city's countless fires and chimneys, an explanation that was reasonable for its time but captured only part of the story. Two centuries later, the phenomenon he described, now known as the urban heat island, has been documented in cities on every inhabited continent, and under calm, clear conditions the night-time difference between a large city centre and its rural fringe can exceed 10°C.
B The modern explanation is considerably more complex. Materials such as concrete, brick and asphalt absorb a large proportion of incoming sunlight during the day, store it and release it slowly after sunset. Dark roofs and roads reflect relatively little radiation, a property scientists quantify as albedo, while the replacement of vegetation and bare soil with sealed surfaces removes one of nature's most effective cooling mechanisms: the evaporation of water. In the 1970s and 1980s the climatologist Tim Oke, working at the University of British Columbia, demonstrated that the geometry of a city matters as much as what it is made of. In narrow streets flanked by tall buildings, so-called urban canyons, heat radiated by walls and pavements is intercepted by the facing structures instead of escaping to the sky. Oke also found that the maximum intensity of the heat island tends to rise with the size of a city's population, although the precise relationship differed between North American and European settlements.
C Excess warmth is far more than an inconvenience. Heat is among the deadliest of natural hazards, and its effects fall unevenly: older people, those with chronic illnesses and residents of poorly ventilated housing are most at risk. In May 2010, an intense heatwave in the Indian city of Ahmedabad was followed by more than 1,300 deaths above the normal level for the season, prompting the city in 2013 to adopt South Asia's first formal heat action plan, which combines early warnings with measures such as opening cool shelters and training health workers. Rising temperatures can also set off a self-reinforcing cycle. As streets heat up, residents switch on air conditioners, and demand for electricity surges. Much of that power is still generated by stations burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the units themselves expel the heat they extract from rooms into the street outside, adding further to the warmth that drove people indoors in the first place.
D The most widely adopted remedies involve altering surfaces. Since 2009, New York City's CoolRoofs programme has coated more than ten million square feet of rooftop with reflective white paint, and measurements suggest that such roofs can be dramatically cooler than black ones on a summer afternoon. Planted 'green roofs' offer additional benefits, absorbing rainwater and providing habitat for insects, but they are heavier and considerably more expensive to install and maintain. Reflective treatments for roads have proved more contentious. In 2017 Los Angeles began applying a grey, light-reflecting coating to selected streets, which lowered their surface temperature by several degrees. However, research led by Ariane Middel at Arizona State University found that on the treated streets, sunlight bouncing back off the pavement noticeably increased the radiant heat experienced by pedestrians in the afternoon, even though the air temperature barely changed. A road that stays cool, in other words, does not necessarily make for a cooler walk.
E Vegetation, by contrast, cools in two ways at once. Trees cast shade, and through transpiration they release water vapour, a process that consumes energy and so lowers the temperature of the surrounding air. The effect depends heavily on moisture, since a drought-stressed tree transpires far less, and on the extent of the canopy, which is why many municipalities now set explicit targets for tree cover. Singapore, which promotes itself as a 'City in Nature', obliges developers to replace greenery lost at ground level with planting on facades, terraces and rooftops. Medellín in Colombia took a different route: from 2016 the city converted roadsides and the banks of streams into a network of some thirty interconnected 'green corridors', planted largely with native species and maintained by gardeners recruited from disadvantaged backgrounds. Officials have reported that average temperatures along the corridors fell by around 2°C.
F Despite such successes, climatologists caution against treating any single intervention as a cure. Cooling measures interact with one another and with the local climate: white roofs are most useful in sunny, low-latitude cities, whereas trees struggle where water is scarce. Some researchers also worry that greening projects can raise property values and push out the low-income residents they were meant to protect. The emerging consensus is that heat must be planned for in much the same way as floods, mapped street by street, with the most vulnerable neighbourhoods given priority. Howard, who blamed London's warmth on its chimneys, could hardly have imagined how much of a city's climate would one day be recognised as a matter of design.
14insisted that plants removed during construction be compensated for higher up on buildings
15showed that a measure intended to lower temperatures could leave people on foot feeling hotter
16explained how the layout of streets can prevent warmth from dispersing upwards
17put the extra warmth of an urban area down mainly to the combustion of fuel
18linked the number of inhabitants to how strong the effect could become
19Howard observed that London's extra warmth compared with rural areas peaked during daylight hours.
20Ahmedabad drew up its heat strategy after an earlier hot spell had caused a sharp rise in mortality.
21New York's roof-painting scheme has reduced the number of deaths caused by heat there.
22Trees provide less cooling when they are short of water.
23Medellín's corridors have achieved a greater cooling effect than Singapore's building regulations.
Temperatures in the street climb
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Households turn to mechanical cooling, causing a sudden jump in the need for (24)______
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A large share of this supply comes from plants that rely on (25)______ fuels
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Cooling machines discharge the warmth removed from interiors outdoors
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Hotter conditions send even more people (26)______, and the cycle begins again
24Answer 24
25Answer 25
26Answer 26
A Few institutions provoke such polarised opinion as the zoo. To its detractors, keeping wild animals behind bars or moats for public entertainment is an anachronism, a Victorian spectacle that has survived largely through commercial inertia. To its defenders, the modern zoo bears little resemblance to the menagerie of the past: it is, they insist, an indispensable 'ark' for species whose habitats are disappearing. The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums reports that its member institutions receive more than 700 million visits a year, a figure which ensures that the argument is far from merely academic. My own view is that both camps tend to overstate their case, and that the question 'Should zoos exist?' is, on its own, too crude to be useful.
B The conservationists' strongest evidence comes from a handful of genuine rescues. The Arabian oryx had been hunted to extinction in the wild by 1972, but a captive 'world herd', assembled largely at Phoenix Zoo in Arizona, allowed animals to be returned to Oman a decade later. The California condor had dwindled to just 27 individuals when the last wild birds were captured in 1987; thanks to breeding programmes at zoos in Los Angeles and San Diego, the population now exceeds 500, more than half of them flying free. Przewalski's horse and the golden lion tamarin tell similar stories. These cases are real, and I see no reason to belittle them: without captive populations, several animals now living in the wild would survive only in photographs.
C Yet critics are right to point out how unrepresentative these successes are. Only a minority of the species held in zoos are threatened, and fewer still belong to programmes that realistically aim to return animals to their natural surroundings. Reintroduction is slow, costly and frequently unsuccessful, because animals raised in captivity may lack the skills needed to find food or evade predators, and because the habitat that was lost in the first place is often still being destroyed. Moreover, the animals that attract the most visitors, such as elephants, big cats and great apes, are not necessarily those most in need of protection. Zoo managers reply that charismatic species generate the income that funds less glamorous work, from breeding frogs to supporting field projects. That argument has some force, but it is also conveniently impossible to test.
D Welfare presents a harder problem still. A landmark 2003 study by Ros Clubb and Georgia Mason of the University of Oxford found that carnivores which roam over large territories in nature, such as polar bears, were the most likely to show stereotypic behaviour in captivity (repetitive pacing or swaying with no apparent purpose) and to suffer high rates of infant mortality. A later analysis co-authored by the same two researchers, published in 2008, estimated that African elephants in European zoos had a median lifespan of under seventeen years, compared with fifty-six years for elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park. Defenders note, correctly, that enclosure design has improved enormously and that captive animals are protected from poaching and drought. But no enclosure, however generous, can recreate a home range of hundreds of square kilometres.
E The educational case is the one zoos make most confidently and support least convincingly. A widely publicised 2007 study commissioned by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in the United States concluded that visits strengthened people's commitment to conservation, but it was criticised by the psychologist Lori Marino and colleagues, who argued that its methods could not demonstrate any lasting change. A larger international survey published in 2015, covering more than 5,000 visitors to zoos in nearly twenty countries, did find a modest improvement in visitors' understanding of biodiversity; however, understanding is not the same as action, and few studies have followed visitors for longer than a few months. My impression is that many people come primarily for a pleasant family day out, which is no crime, but which should not be confused with a lesson in ecology.
F What follows from all this? Not, I think, abolition. Closing every zoo would remove the expertise, the funding and the populations on which several recovery programmes depend, and it would do nothing for animals already in captivity, most of which could not survive release. But neither should the status quo simply be accepted. Zoos ought to be judged individually, against demanding standards: whether the species they keep are genuinely threatened or play a defined role in a breeding programme; whether those animals can live well within the space available; and whether a meaningful share of their income goes to protecting habitats in the wild. On that basis, the keeping of the widest-ranging species, elephants above all, should be phased out over time, as several European zoos have already chosen to do.
G The word 'zoo' currently covers everything from internationally respected research institutions to roadside attractions where visitors pay to be photographed with tiger cubs. Treating these as a single category flatters the worst and unfairly tarnishes the best. The real question is not whether zoos should exist, but which of them have earned the right to.
27Why does the writer refer to the annual attendance figure for zoos?
28According to the writer, releasing zoo-bred animals into the wild often ends in failure because
29What is the writer's opinion of the claim that popular animals pay for other conservation work?
30What did Clubb and Mason's 2003 study reveal?
31Both supporters and opponents of zoos are inclined to exaggerate.
32Zoos have made a real contribution to the survival of certain species.
33Elephants born in zoos tend to live longer than those taken from the wild.
34The research involving zoo-goers in many countries was financed by bodies that represent zoos.
35Visiting a zoo chiefly for pleasure is something to be ashamed of.
The writer's proposal
The writer rejects the idea of shutting every zoo. Doing so would mean the loss of the (36)______ and money that certain efforts to restore species rely on, nor would it benefit creatures already in enclosures, which mostly could not cope if (37)______. Instead, each zoo should be assessed (38)______, using strict tests such as whether its animals are truly endangered and if a fair proportion of its revenue supports natural ecosystems. The writer also favours a (39)______ end to the housing of creatures that naturally cover the greatest distances. Grouping all zoos together, the writer concludes, is (40)______ to the most reputable ones.
36Answer 36
37Answer 37
38Answer 38
39Answer 39
40Answer 40