IETLS Academic Reading Test 3

A bicycle is a lightweight, two-wheeled vehicle propelled by the rider's own muscular effort, usually transmitted to the rear wheel through a chain and pedals. Although the machines produced today bear little resemblance to their earliest ancestors, the fundamental idea — a frame balanced on two wheels — has remained unchanged for more than two centuries. The bicycle's evolution was neither sudden nor the work of a single inventor; rather, it progressed through a series of incremental improvements, each one addressing a specific shortcoming of the design that came before it.

The first documented forerunner of the bicycle was built in the German city of Mannheim in 1817 by Karl von Drais, a civil servant with an interest in mechanics. His invention, which he called the Laufmaschine, or 'running machine', consisted of two wooden wheels connected by a wooden frame, with a padded seat and a steerable front wheel, but it had no pedals at all. Riders propelled the machine by pushing their feet against the ground, rather like walking or running while seated, and used it to coast down hills or move faster than they could on foot. The device became briefly fashionable among the wealthy in parts of Europe, where it was nicknamed the 'hobby horse', but its impracticality on rough or muddy roads meant that its popularity soon faded.

For more than two decades afterwards, little progress was made in solving the machine's most obvious limitation: the absence of pedals. According to a long-standing but disputed account, a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick Macmillan modified a two-wheeled machine in 1839 by attaching pedals to the rear wheel by means of connecting rods, though no verified example of his machine survives today, and many historians treat the claim with caution. It was not until the early 1860s that a design employing pedals gained wide recognition. In Paris, the coachbuilder Pierre Michaux, working together with a mechanic named Pierre Lallement, produced in 1861 a machine known as the vélocipède, in which pedals and cranks were attached directly to the front wheel. Constructed with an iron frame and wooden wheels bound in iron, the vélocipède offered a distinctly uncomfortable ride over cobbled streets, earning it the enduring nickname 'boneshaker'. Nevertheless, it was manufactured in considerable numbers and exported across Europe and to the United States, marking the point at which cycling first became a genuine commercial industry.

Because the front wheel of the vélocipède directly drove the pedals, a rider's speed was limited by the size of that wheel; a single push of the pedal could only carry the machine as far as the wheel's circumference allowed. In 1870, James Starley, an engineer based in Coventry, England, addressed this limitation with a machine he named the Ariel, which featured a dramatically enlarged front wheel — sometimes exceeding a metre and a half in diameter — paired with a much smaller rear wheel. Lighter wire spokes replaced the old wooden ones, considerably reducing the vehicle's weight. Though capable of impressive speeds, the design, later nicknamed the 'penny-farthing' after two coins of very different sizes, placed the rider dangerously high above the ground and was notoriously prone to tipping the rider forward over the handlebars. It was James Starley's nephew, John Kemp Starley, who resolved this danger in 1885 with the Rover Safety Bicycle. His design returned to two wheels of equal size and, crucially, connected the pedals to the rear wheel by means of a chain and sprocket, allowing the wheel size to be chosen independently of the gearing. The safety bicycle proved far more stable and far easier to mount, and its layout has changed remarkably little in the century and a half since.

One further innovation transformed the comfort of cycling almost overnight. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinary surgeon living in Belfast, patented a pneumatic tyre — a rubber tube filled with air — after experimenting with a version to ease the jolting his son experienced while riding a tricycle over cobbled streets. Compared with the solid rubber tyres then in common use, Dunlop's pneumatic tyre absorbed shocks far more effectively, and it was quickly adopted throughout the cycling industry, contributing enormously to the comfort and consequent popularity of the safety bicycle.

By the final decade of the nineteenth century, manufacturers had begun applying the mass-production techniques earlier developed for sewing machines and firearms to bicycle manufacturing. Standardised, interchangeable parts and assembly-line methods brought about a sharp fall in the price of bicycles, placing them, for the first time, within the reach of ordinary factory and office workers rather than only the wealthy. The bicycle also had a considerable, if unexpected, social effect: for many women of the period, it offered an unprecedented degree of independent mobility, and its popularity is widely credited with hastening the redesign of women's clothing towards looser, more practical garments suited to an active lifestyle. During the First World War, bicycles were issued to messengers and to specially formed infantry units in several armies, valued for their silence and their independence from fuel supplies.

In recent decades, growing concern over urban air pollution and traffic congestion has prompted a renewed interest in cycling as a practical means of everyday transport rather than merely a form of recreation or sport. Many cities have responded by installing dedicated cycling lanes and public bicycle-hire schemes, while manufacturers have continued to refine the basic design first perfected in the 1880s, most recently through the introduction of lightweight aluminium and carbon-fibre frames and, within the past fifteen years, electric-assist motors.

In October 2003, Dr Helena Voss, a palaeontologist from the University of Toronto, led a small expedition across a remote stretch of the Kalahari Basin in southern Africa known locally as the Kholo Desert. The team had travelled there in search of dinosaur fossils, drawn by earlier reports of fossilised bone fragments eroding out of the dunes. The Kholo is among the most inhospitable regions on the continent: a vast, wind-scoured expanse of red sand where daytime temperatures regularly exceed 45 degrees Celsius and rainfall is measured in single millimetres over the course of a year. Vegetation is almost entirely absent, and the nearest permanent water source lies more than 150 kilometres away.

One afternoon, Daniel Okafor, a photographer accompanying the team, wandered away from the vehicles to photograph the sweeping lines of a large dune, hoping to capture the low evening light. Climbing to its crest, he noticed that the slope beneath him was littered with pale, weathered fragments. On closer inspection, he realised with some alarm that many of them were not the dinosaur bones the team had been hoping to find, but unmistakably human. He had come across the bones purely by chance, while looking for nothing more than a good photograph.

Voss photographed the site extensively but lacked the archaeological training to investigate further, and it was not until the spring of 2007 that she contacted Dr Amara Ndlovu, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town who had spent nearly two decades studying early human communities elsewhere in southern Africa. The two women had never previously met, still less worked together, and some of Ndlovu's colleagues were initially sceptical of a discovery reported by a palaeontologist rather than an archaeologist. Nonetheless, Ndlovu agreed to join Voss on a return visit to the site. Over three weeks, the two researchers, together with a small team of excavators and local guides, produced a detailed map of the area, which they named Kholo Flats, before any digging began. They subsequently excavated a number of burial sites and recovered a range of artefacts pointing to two distinct ancient communities.

Among the recovered material were harpoon points and the remains of large fish, including catfish weighing an estimated 40 kilograms, alongside the bones of hippopotamus and crocodile, all found close to the older burials — clear evidence that this earlier community had relied heavily on fishing, despite the extreme aridity of the region today.

Voss returned to Toronto with a selection of bones and artefacts and, in preparation for a further expedition, carefully removed several teeth from the recovered skeletons and sent them to a laboratory for radiocarbon dating. The results distinguished two clearly separate periods of use. The more loosely arranged burials, in which the skeletons lay in a relaxed, sleeping-like position, dated to around 5,000 years ago. By contrast, the older burials, in which the bodies had been tightly bound and bundled before interment, were estimated to be 8,500 years old. On the strength of these results, the researchers could now confidently separate the site's two cultures, which they named the Tsholo, for the earlier community, and the Molo, for the later one.

In the autumn of 2009, a larger expedition returned to Kholo Flats to excavate a further sixty burials, this time accompanied by several additional specialists, including Dr Ravi Patel, a bio-archaeologist from the University of the Witwatersrand. Working directly at the site, Patel began piecing together clues about the daily lives of the two communities from their skeletal remains. The Tsholo, he concluded, were likely to have been a peaceful and hard-working people: he found no injuries to their heads or forearms, the kind of damage typically associated with hand-to-hand combat. Pointing to an unusually long, robust thigh bone, he explained that the pronounced ridge where muscle had once attached indicated exceptionally powerful leg muscles, suggesting that this individual had led a physically strenuous life and consumed a diet rich in protein — both entirely consistent with a community that depended heavily on fishing. By contrast, when Patel displayed a thigh bone belonging to a Molo man, the same ridge was barely visible at all. 'This individual led a considerably less strenuous existence,' he noted, 'the kind of life you might expect of someone who herded animals rather than pursued them.'

Patel's conclusion — that the Molo had turned away from hunting and fishing towards herding — matched the prevailing view among regional archaeologists, who have long argued that a shift towards a drier climate around five thousand years ago would have favoured herding over hunting and fishing across much of southern Africa. Voss, however, raised an awkward objection: of the many thousands of animal bones recovered from the site, only a handful belonged to cattle, and none at all to goats or sheep. 'If the Molo were herders, where were their herds?' she asked. Ndlovu offered a partial explanation, pointing out that herding communities are often reluctant to slaughter their own cattle, particularly for burial in a cemetery, much as some present-day pastoralist groups in the region still keep their herds largely intact. Voss remained unconvinced that this fully accounted for the near-total absence of livestock remains, and suggested instead that the Molo community buried at Kholo Flats may have been a transitional group — one that still relied substantially on hunting and fishing and had not yet fully adopted a herding way of life.

ANot long ago, a television shopping channel seeking a young audience needed little more than a toll-free telephone number and a good deal of patience. Today, across much of Asia and increasingly in Europe and North America, that same audience is more likely to be found inside a livestream shopping app, watching a host present products in real time and tapping to buy without ever leaving the broadcast. According to research by Vantix, a market-analysis firm, livestream shopping now accounts for a larger share of mobile users' shopping time in several East Asian markets than conventional e-commerce browsing does, and the format is expanding rapidly elsewhere. Among the many uses to which livestreaming is put, selling products directly to a watching audience has become one of its fastest-growing applications.

BThis growth can be attributed largely to the runaway success of a handful of flagship livestream shopping events, staged around major sales dates such as national shopping festivals, during which a single host may sell tens of millions of dollars' worth of goods within a few hours. But livestream shopping is not only about flash sales. Beauty brands use live demonstrations to answer viewers' questions about a product in real time; furniture retailers walk audiences through a showroom via camera; and small independent sellers, who could never have afforded a television advertising slot, now reach thousands of potential customers directly from a bedroom or workshop. Some hosts also run live polls asking viewers to vote for which colour or style should be restocked next, with the winning option added to the broadcast within minutes. Viewers tend to keep their phones within easy reach while watching, and, in the words of one Vantix analyst, tapping to buy mid-broadcast has become 'a remarkably natural way to shop'.

CLivestream shopping platforms typically take a commission of between fifteen and twenty-five per cent on every sale made during a broadcast, and for popular hosts this can translate into very substantial sums indeed. During a single flagship sales event last year, one of the leading platforms recorded over eighty million dollars in commission revenue in a single day. A rival platform's signature beauty-and-fashion event generated more than thirty thousand individual purchases per hour at its peak, according to figures from Delta Insights, a Singapore-based consultancy. In August, CellNet, a mobile network operator, reported unexpectedly strong quarterly earnings, a result that analysts linked to the sheer volume of in-app payments processed during a single record-breaking livestream shopping festival that month. Commission revenue from livestream shopping has become an increasingly important part of the business model for hosts, platforms and brands alike, though hosts have not been shy about complaining that platforms retain too great a share. StreamCart, a production company responsible for training and managing many of the region's most successful hosts, has begun building its own in-app payment system, with the stated aim of dealing with buyers directly and bypassing platform commissions altogether.

DWhat has made the marriage of video and shopping so effective? One key development has been the emergence of the 'tap-to-buy tag': a small, unobtrusive icon that appears on screen beside a product as the host holds it up, allowing a viewer to purchase the item with a single tap, without pausing the broadcast or leaving the app. Early livestream sellers relied on viewers typing product codes into a separate chat window, a clumsy process that caused many potential buyers to abandon their purchase before completing it. According to Priya Anand of Loop Labs, a mobile-marketing company, the tap-to-buy tag was a genuine turning point, since a viewer glancing at the screen can now complete a purchase in seconds without ever breaking their attention away from the presenter.

EThe willingness of platforms to cooperate on growing the wider market, rather than jealously guarding their own share of it, reflects a broader trend, observes Meera Osei of Delta Insights. Faced with a choice between protecting narrow short-term margins and allowing a promising new format to flourish, platforms in this sector have, on the whole, chosen the latter path. An earlier generation of video-shopping technology, built around dedicated in-app browsers, largely failed because operators were unwilling to share advertising revenue with the retailers whose products appeared on screen. Having learned from that experience, several major platforms have since published standard commission-sharing agreements, offering sellers a transparency that would once have been unthinkable.

FAt a recent industry conference, Tomás Rivera of PixelPay, a company that supplies the underlying payment infrastructure for many livestream platforms, observed that retailing itself is changing in a quiet but fundamental way. Rather than the traditional model of a store passively waiting for customers to arrive, an increasing number of retailers now actively broadcast to their audience and respond to their reactions in real time. Genuinely engaging shoppers in this way has always been the promise of interactive retail. Early attempts relied on elaborate smart-television shopping channels, which required viewers to own a compatible television and navigate a clumsy on-screen menu using a remote control. As Rivera points out, this approach was flawed on several counts: developing software for numerous incompatible television models proved expensive, and smart-television ownership, even now, lags well behind smartphone ownership, which exceeds ninety per cent in most of the markets concerned. It is also considerably faster to develop and launch an app for smartphones than to negotiate access to a television manufacturer's platform. 'You can reach the market far more quickly, and with fewer demanding gatekeepers standing in your way,' Rivera says. Several smart-television manufacturers have since begun adding livestream shopping features directly into their own products.

GThe success of mobile livestream shopping is a reminder to everyone in the retail industry of how quickly an elaborate piece of technology can be overtaken by a simpler, more accessible alternative. That is not to say that smart-television shopping channels are necessarily finished; if anything, their persistence shows that demand for genuinely interactive retail remains strong. It seems that shoppers would rather do more than simply watch a screen and wait for an advertisement to end — and, for many of them, tapping their phone a few times turns out to be no trouble at all.