Cambridge IELTS 07

Why pagodas don't fall down?

In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, how have Japan's tallest and seemingly flimsiest old buildings - 500 or so wooden pagodas - remained standing for centuries? Records show that only two have collapsed during the past 1400 years ...
Sep 28,2017

Pulling strings to build pyramids

No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be 'hanging in the air'. The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how...
Sep 28,2017

Let's go bats

Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles...
Sep 28,2017

Ant intelligence

When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence...
Sep 28,2017

Endless harvest

More than two hundred years ago, Russian explorers and fur hunters landed on the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the North Pacific, and learned of a land mass that lay farther to the north. The islands’ native inhabitants called this land mass Aleyska, the ‘Great Land’; today, we k..
Sep 27,2017

Population movements and genetics

Study of the origins and distribution of human populations used to be based on archaeological and fossil evidence. A number of techniques developed since the 1950s, however, have placed the study of these subjects on a sounder and more objective footing...
Sep 27,2017

Plans to protect the forests of Europe

Forests are one of the main elements of our natural heritage. The decline of Europe's forests over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing awareness and understanding of the serious imbalances which threaten them...
Sep 27,2017

Effects of noise

In general, it is plausible to suppose that we should prefer peace and quiet to noise. And yet most of us have had the experience of having to adjust to sleeping in the mountains or the countryside because it was initially ‘too quiet’, an experience that suggests that humans are capable ofadapti..
Sep 27,2017

Making every drop count

The history of human civilisation is entwined with the history of the ways we have learned to manipulate water resources. As towns gradually expanded, water was brought from increasingly remote sources, leading to sophisticated engineering efforts such as dams and aqueducts...
Sep 27,2017

The true cost of food

For more than forty years the cost of food has been rising. It has now reached a point where a growing number of people believe that it is far too high, and that bringing it down will be one of the great challenges of the twenty first century...
Sep 26,2017