# Lighthouses and the Age of Sail IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Diagram labelling, True / False / Not Given, Short-answer questions Source: Written by Testmigo. ## The passage You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the passage below. For more than two thousand years, people have built towers to guide ships into port and warn them away from danger. The most famous early example stood on Pharos, a small island on the western edge of the Nile Delta, close to Alexandria. Built in the reign of Ptolemy II, who ruled Egypt from 280 to 247 BC, it is thought to have been at least 100 metres tall, and a fire burned at its top at night. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder named a man called Sostratus as its architect, although this claim is disputed. The tower was so well known that its name passed into other languages: a lighthouse is a phare in French and a faro in Italian and Spanish. For many centuries afterwards, lighthouses were lit by open fires and, later, by candles. They were hardest to build where they were most needed, on bare rocks out at sea. The Eddystone Rocks, about 13 miles south-west of Plymouth in England, show the difficulty. Henry Winstanley's tower there, first lit in 1698, was the first lighthouse to be built on a small rock in the open sea. The great storm of December 1703 destroyed it, and no trace was ever found of Winstanley or the five other men inside. A second tower, made of wood, was finished in 1709. It survived the waves for almost fifty years, until one night in December 1755 the top of its lantern caught fire and the building burned. The third tower, designed by the engineer John Smeaton, was made of stone. Smeaton modelled its shape on an oak tree, a form chosen for its strength. The foundations and outer walls were built of local Cornish granite, while lighter Portland limestone was used inside. The blocks were cut with dovetail joints so that they locked together, and Smeaton used hydraulic lime, a kind of cement that could set under water. On 16 October 1759 the tower's 24 candles were lit for the first time, and it guided ships for over a century. When the rock beneath it began to wear away, a replacement was built, and in 1882 the upper part of Smeaton's tower was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe. Meanwhile, the light itself was improving. From the late eighteenth century the Argand lamp, with its steady, smokeless flame, took the place of candles, and lamps were often set in front of curved mirrors called reflectors. Yet these reflectors sent out only about half of the light that fell on them. The answer came from Augustin Fresnel, a French engineer and physicist. Rather than use one thick, heavy piece of glass, he divided his lens into rings of glass prisms arranged around a single lamp. The prisms bent the light into one strong beam. The result was much thinner and lighter than an ordinary lens of the same size. In 1822 a test in Paris showed that it could be seen from 32 kilometres away, and on 25 July 1823 the first lighthouse Fresnel lens was lit at Cordouan, near the mouth of the Gironde estuary. The keepers' main duty was to keep the light and the fog signal in perfect working order. At night they took turns to keep watch, and in the United States they were nicknamed 'wickies' because they trimmed the wicks of the lamps. Many lenses rotated, so the keepers also had to wind the clockwork that turned them. By day they cleaned the lens and the windows of the lantern, the glass-walled room at the top of the tower that held the lamp and lens. The outside of the windows was cleaned from the gallery, an open platform running round the tower. Life was especially demanding at Scottish rock stations such as the Bell Rock. Each had six keepers, who spent four weeks at the lighthouse followed by four weeks on land, where their families lived. As more lighthouses appeared, sailors needed to know which light they were looking at. The solution was to give each light its own characteristic: all of the properties that make it identifiable, including its colour, its pattern of flashes or periods of darkness, and the time the pattern takes to repeat. These details are printed on nautical charts and in light lists, so a navigator who counts the flashes can tell which lighthouse is in sight. By day, towers are recognised by painted patterns called daymarks, such as the black and white spiral of Cape Hatteras in the United States. In the twentieth century, machines took over much of the keepers' work. On 31 March 1998 Fair Isle South became Scotland's last lighthouse to lose its keepers, and later that year the six keepers at North Foreland in Kent, the last in England, left too. North Foreland is now monitored and controlled from Trinity House's Planning Centre in Harwich, Essex. Thanks to satellite navigation, ships depend far less on lighthouses than they once did, but many towers still shine, often powered by batteries charged by the sun. ## Questions ### Questions 1-5: Diagram labelling Label the diagram below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. 1. Glazed chamber housing the lamp and lens 2. Rings of glass that make up the lens 3. Railed walkway outside the top of the tower 4. Mechanism that turned the lens 5. Stone used for the outer walls and foundations ### Questions 6-10: True / False / Not Given Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Choose TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this. 6. Everyone accepts that Sostratus was the architect of the Pharos. 7. The second lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks was destroyed by fire rather than by the sea. 8. The design of Smeaton's lighthouse was based on the form of a tree. 9. Fresnel's lens was more expensive to produce than the reflectors it replaced. 10. Keepers at Scottish rock stations spent more time on the rock than on land. ### Questions 11-13: Short-answer questions Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. 11. What is the term for all the features that allow sailors to identify a particular light? 12. Apart from nautical charts, where are the details of each light published? 13. In which town is the centre that now controls North Foreland lighthouse? [Practice online with a timer and instant marking](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/lighthouses-and-the-age-of-sail) - [Answers and explanations](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/lighthouses-and-the-age-of-sail/answers)