IELTS Reading 2 — Work It Out: Lesson 6

Section A

The market for tourism in remote areas is booming as never before. Countries all across the world are actively promoting their ‘wilderness’ regions — such as mountains, Arctic lands, deserts, small islands and wetlands — to high-spending tourists. The attraction of these areas is obvious: by definition, wilderness tourism requires little or no initial investment. But that does not mean that there is no cost. As the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development recognized, these regions are fragile not just in terms of their ecology, but also in terms of the culture of their inhabitants. The three most significant types of fragile environment in these respects are deserts, mountains and Arctic areas. An important characteristic is their marked seasonality, with harsh conditions prevailing for many months each year.

Tourists are drawn to these regions by their natural landscape beauty and the unique cultures of their indigenous people. And poor governments in these isolated areas have welcomed the new breed of ‘adventure tourist’, grateful for the hard currency they bring. For several years now, tourism has been the prime source of foreign exchange in Nepal and Bhutan.

Section B

Once a location is established as a main tourist destination, the effects on the local community are profound. When hill-farmers can make more money in a few weeks working as porters for foreign trekkers than they can in a year working in their fields, many of them give up their farm-work. In some hill-regions, this has led to a serious decline in farm output and a change in the local diet, because there is insufficient labour to maintain terraces and irrigation systems.

In Arctic and desert societies, year-round survival has traditionally depended on hunting and collecting fruit over a relatively short season. However, as some inhabitants become involved in tourism, they no longer have time to collect wild food. The physical impact of visitors is another serious problem: erosion along major trails, deforestation and impacts on water supplies arising from the need to provide tourists with cooked food and hot showers.

Section C

Stories about the problems of tourism have become legion in the last few years. Yet it does not have to be a problem. Although tourism inevitably affects the region in which it takes place, the costs to these fragile environments and their local cultures can be minimized. In the Swiss Alps, communities have decided that their future depends on integrating tourism more effectively with the local economy. Some Arctic communities are now operating tour businesses themselves, thereby ensuring that the benefits accrue locally.

Too many people living in fragile environments have lost control over their economies, their culture and their environment when tourism has penetrated their homelands. Merely restricting tourism cannot be the solution. Instead, communities in fragile environments must achieve greater control over tourism ventures in their regions, in order to balance their needs and aspirations with the demands of tourism.

A

They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), finances programmes of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and women. Both provide intensive coaching, training facilities and nutritional advice.

B

Inside the academies, science takes centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and doctors, and collaborates with scores of others in universities and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of sports, applying skills learned in one — such as building muscle strength in golfers — to others, such as swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning. “We can't waste our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don't help the coach work with an athlete and improve performance,” says Peter Fricker, chief of science at AIS.

C

A lot of their work comes down to measurement — everything from the exact angle of a swimmer's dive to the second-by-second power output of a cyclist. This data is used to wring improvements out of athletes. No gain is too slight to bother with. To demonstrate how the system works, Bruce Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 3D analysis tool for studying swimmers. A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water, her arms moving in slow motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels. Mason's contribution also includes the SWAN (SWimming ANalysis) system now used in Australian national competitions. It collects images from digital cameras running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer's performance into factors that can be analysed individually.

D

“Take a look,” says Mason, pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the swimmers in second and third place, which shows that the one who finished third actually swam faster. “His turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy. If he can improve on his turns, he can do much better.” With the Cooperative Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne, they are developing unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete's clothes or running shoes to monitor heart rate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have an impact on an athlete's ability to run. There's more to it than simply measuring performance. Fricker gives the example of athletes who may be down with coughs and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation, AIS and the University of Newcastle developed a test that measures how much of the immune-system protein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes' saliva. If IgA levels suddenly fall below a certain level, training is eased or dropped altogether.

E

Using data is a complex business. Well before a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a ‘competition model’, based on what they expect will be the winning times. “You design the model to make ‘that’ time,” says Mason. “A start of ‘this’ much, each free-swimming period has to be ‘this’ fast, with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in ‘these’ times.” All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets.

F

Of course, there's nothing to stop other countries copying — and many have tried. Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant-lined jackets for endurance athletes. At the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, these sliced as much as two per cent off cyclists' and rowers' times. Now everyone uses them. The same has happened to the ‘altitude tent’, developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level. But Australia's success story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now no nation has replicated its all-encompassing system.

On 2nd August 1999, a large pane of toughened glass in the roof of a shopping centre at Bishops Walk shattered without warning and fell from its frame. When fragments were analysed by experts at the giant glass manufacturer Pilkington, they found that minute crystals of nickel sulphide trapped inside the glass had almost certainly caused the failure.

“The glass industry is aware of the issue,” says Brian Waldron, chairman of the standards committee at the Glass and Glazing Federation. But he insists that cases are few and far between. “It's a very rare phenomenon,” he says.

Others disagree. “On average I see about one or two buildings a month suffering from nickel sulphide related failures,” says Barrie Josie, a consultant engineer. Tony Wilmott of London-based consulting engineers Sandberg, and Simon Armstrong at CladTech Associates both say they know of hundreds of cases. “What you hear is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Trevor Ford, a glass expert at Resolve Engineering in Brisbane. He believes the reason is simple: “No-one wants bad press.”

Toughened glass has five times the strength of standard glass, and when it does break it shatters into tiny cubes rather than large, razor-sharp shards. The problem starts when glass contains nickel sulphide impurities. As the glass is heated, these atoms react to form tiny crystals, which are left unstable by the rapid cooling of the toughening process, ready to expand without warning.

The time that elapses before failure occurs is unpredictable. It could happen just months after manufacture, or decades later. Ironically, says Graham Dodd, of consulting engineers Arup in London, the oldest pane of toughened glass known to have failed due to nickel sulphide inclusions was in Pilkington's glass research building in Lathom, Lancashire. The pane was 27 years old.

One of the worst examples is Waterfront Place, completed in 1990. Eighty panes of its toughened glass shattered due to inclusions before experts were finally called in. John Barry, an expert in nickel sulphide contamination at the University of Queensland, analysed every glass pane in the building. A photographer went up in a cradle to take photos of every pane, which were scanned for signs of nickel sulphide crystals. “We discovered at least another 120 panes with potentially dangerous inclusions which were then replaced,” says Barry. Though the project cost A$1.6 million, the alternative — re-cladding the entire building — would have cost ten times as much.

The survey also assessed how independent people over 65 were. Almost 80% of those in the 1994 survey could complete everyday activities ranging from eating and dressing unaided to complex tasks such as cooking and managing their finances. If the trends apparent in the United States 14 years ago had continued, researchers calculate there would be an additional one million disabled elderly people in today's population. According to Manton, slowing the trend has saved the United States government's Medicare system more than $200 billion.

The increasing self-reliance of many elderly people is probably linked to a massive increase in the use of simple home medical aids. For instance, the use of raised toilet seats has more than doubled since the start of the study, and the use of bath seats has grown by more than 50%. The MacArthur Foundation's research group found that those elderly people who were able to retain a sense of independence were more likely to stay healthy in old age.

Maintaining a level of daily physical activity may help mental functioning, says Carl Cotman, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine. He found that rats that exercise on a treadmill have raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor coursing through their brains. Cotman believes this hormone, which keeps neurons functioning, may prevent the brains of active humans from deteriorating.

Teresa Seeman, a social epidemiologist, found a connection between self-esteem and stress in people over 70. In laboratory simulations of challenging activities such as driving, those who felt in control of their lives pumped out lower levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Chronically high levels of these hormones have been linked to heart disease.

But independence can have drawbacks. Seeman found that elderly people who felt emotionally isolated maintained higher levels of stress hormones even when asleep. The research suggests that older people fare best when they feel independent but know they can get help when they need it.

For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out; that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat; that species are becoming extinct in vast numbers, and that the planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

But a quick look at the facts shows a different picture. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so, since 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient — associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it.

Yet opinion polls suggest that many people nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining, and four factors seem to cause this disjunction between perception and reality.

One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.

Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes overstate their arguments. In 1997, for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled: “Two thirds of the world's forests lost forever”. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.

Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as they do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if an impartial view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.

A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception.

The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.

A

The fertile land of the Nile delta is being eroded along Egypt's Mediterranean coast at an astounding rate, in some parts estimated at 100 metres per year. In the past, land scoured away from the coastline by the currents of the Mediterranean Sea used to be replaced by sediment brought down to the delta by the River Nile, but this is no longer happening.

B

Up to now, people have blamed this loss of delta land on the two large dams at Aswan in the south of Egypt, which hold back virtually all of the sediment that used to flow down the river. Before the dams were built, the Nile flowed freely, carrying huge quantities of sediment north from Africa's interior to be deposited on the Nile delta. This continued for 7,000 years, eventually covering a region of over 22,000 square kilometres with layers of fertile silt. Annual flooding brought in new, nutrient-rich soil to the delta region, replacing what had been washed away by the sea, and dispensing with the need for fertilizers in Egypt's richest food-growing area. But when the Aswan dams were constructed in the 20th century to provide electricity and irrigation, and to protect the huge population centre of Cairo and its surrounding areas from annual flooding and drought, most of the sediment with its natural fertilizer accumulated up above the dam in the southern, upstream half of Lake Nasser, instead of passing down to the delta.

C

Now, however, there turns out to be more to the story. It appears that the sediment-free water emerging from the Aswan dams picks up silt and sand as it erodes the river bed and banks on the 800-kilometre trip to Cairo. Daniel Jean Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute noticed that water samples taken in Cairo, just before the river enters the delta, indicated that the river sometimes carries more than 850 grams of sediment per cubic metre of water — almost half of what it carried before the dams were built. “There is still a lot of sediment coming into the delta, but virtually no sediment comes out into the Mediterranean to replenish the coastline. So this sediment must be trapped on the delta itself.”

D

Once north of Cairo, most of the Nile water is diverted into more than 10,000 kilometres of irrigation canals and only a small proportion reaches the sea directly through the rivers in the delta. The water in the irrigation canals is still or very slow-moving and thus cannot carry sediment, Stanley explains. The sediment sinks to the bottom of the canals and then is added to fields by farmers or pumped with the water into the four large freshwater lagoons that are located near the outer edges of the delta. So very little of it actually reaches the coastline to replace what is being washed away by the Mediterranean currents.

E

The farms on the delta plains and fishing and aquaculture in the lagoons account for much of Egypt's food supply. But by the time the sediment has come to rest in the fields and lagoons it is laden with municipal, industrial and agricultural waste from the Cairo region, which is home to more than 40 million people. “Pollutants are building up faster and faster,” says Stanley. Frederic Siegel of George Washington University concurs: in Manzalah Lagoon the increase in mercury, lead, copper and zinc coincided with the building of the High Dam at Aswan and the development of major power-based industries. These poisons can easily enter the food chain, affecting the productivity of fishing and farming. Another problem is that agricultural wastes include fertilizers which stimulate increases in plant growth in the lagoons and upset the ecology of the area, with serious effects on the fishing industry.

F

According to Siegel, international environmental organisations are beginning to pay closer attention to the region, partly because of the problems of erosion and pollution of the Nile delta, but principally because they fear the impact this situation could have on the whole Mediterranean coastal ecosystem. But there are no easy solutions. In the immediate future, Stanley believes that one solution would be to make artificial floods to flush out the delta waterways, in the same way that natural floods did before the construction of the dams. He says, however, that in the long term an alternative process such as desalination may have to be used to increase the amount of water available. “In my view, Egypt must devise a way to have more water running through the river and the delta,” says Stanley.