Full reading practice test

Few objects are as ordinary as the pencil, and few have a more surprising history. Although we still talk about pencil 'lead', the core of a pencil has never contained the metal of that name. It is made of graphite, a soft, dark form of carbon, usually mixed with clay. The confusion dates back to the sixteenth century, when the people who first came across graphite mistook it for a type of lead ore and named it accordingly. Even the word 'pencil' has changed its meaning: it originally referred to a fine artist's brush and comes from a Latin word meaning 'little tail'.

The most famous early source of graphite was a deposit discovered in the sixteenth century at Borrowdale, in the north-west of England. According to local tradition, shepherds used the substance to mark their sheep. Borrowdale graphite was unusually pure and solid, which meant that it could be sawn into thin sticks and used for writing without any further processing. It soon became so valuable that the mines were guarded, and in the eighteenth century the British Parliament made stealing graphite a serious crime.

The earliest pencils were simply sticks of graphite wrapped in string or sheepskin to keep the user's fingers clean. The practice of enclosing the graphite in wood developed later. Wood made pencils stronger and more comfortable to hold, and cedar, which is soft and easy to sharpen, eventually became the preferred material. By the eighteenth century pencil-making was an established craft, particularly in and around the German city of Nuremberg. German makers, however, had no access to pure graphite and had to mix graphite powder with other substances, such as sulphur, which produced pencils of a lower quality than those made from English graphite.

The decisive breakthrough came in France in the 1790s. At war with Britain, France could no longer import graphite from Borrowdale, and the government asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a scientist and inventor, to find an alternative. Conté's solution was to mix powdered graphite with clay, shape the mixture into rods and heat them in a kiln. By changing the proportion of clay, he could control the hardness of the result: more clay produced a harder, lighter line, while more graphite produced a softer, darker one. His method, patented in 1795, remains the basis of pencil manufacture today.

Other improvements followed during the nineteenth century. Machines for cutting and grooving wood made mass production possible, and the price of pencils fell sharply, so that they became affordable for ordinary schoolchildren. Manufacturers also began to paint pencils in bright colours, partly so that customers could recognise their brand at a glance. In 1858 an American, Hymen Lipman, patented a pencil with an eraser attached to one end, a design that remains far more common in North America than in Europe, where pencils are often sold without one.

Despite the arrival of the ballpoint pen and, later, the computer, the pencil has proved remarkably durable. Billions are still produced every year. Artists value the range of tones that different grades provide, carpenters and engineers appreciate a mark that can easily be removed, and field scientists rely on the fact that, unlike ink, pencil marks do not run when paper gets wet. And many writers, from students to novelists, simply find that it is easier to think with a pencil in their hand.

Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists estimate that around 40 per cent are endangered, meaning that they are no longer being passed reliably from parents to children. Many have only a few hundred speakers, most of them elderly. When the last fluent speaker of such a language dies, an entire system of grammar, vocabulary and oral tradition may disappear, often before it has been fully recorded. Linguists sometimes compare the situation to the extinction of plant and animal species, although they admit that the comparison has its limits.

Languages rarely disappear because their speakers simply choose a 'better' one. The causes are usually social and economic. Speakers of a minority language may move to cities in search of work, where a dominant language is needed for employment and education. In many countries, governments once actively discouraged or even punished the use of minority languages in schools, and the sense of shame this created could last for generations. Parents who had been punished for speaking their first language as children were often reluctant to pass it on to their own children.

Yet language loss is not always permanent. The most frequently cited example of revival is Hebrew. For centuries it was used mainly in religious and scholarly writing rather than in everyday conversation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a movement to adopt it as a spoken language of daily life gained momentum, and it is now the native language of millions of people. Linguists point out, however, that the circumstances were unusual: Hebrew had a large written literature, and its revival was closely linked to the creation of a new state.

Other revival movements have focused on the youngest speakers. In New Zealand in the early 1980s, Māori communities established 'language nests', pre-school centres in which young children are cared for entirely in Māori, often by fluent older speakers. The idea spread to Hawaii and elsewhere, and in several places it was followed by schools teaching the full curriculum in the minority language. In some communities, parents have begun learning the language alongside their children so that it can also be spoken at home. Such programmes have produced a new generation of speakers, although many children still use the dominant language outside the classroom.

Technology has added new tools. Modern recording equipment allows linguists to document languages in far greater detail than before, and communities themselves have produced dictionaries, apps and social media content in their languages. Some revival projects have even made use of old wax-cylinder recordings and handwritten notes made by researchers a century ago. Recording a language, however, is not the same as keeping it alive. A language survives only if people use it to talk to one another about ordinary things.

This is why many linguists now emphasise status and opportunity. When a minority language is used in government, broadcasting and business, young people are more likely to see it as useful rather than old-fashioned. Road signs, official forms and television channels in the language all send the message that it belongs to the present, not only to the past. In Wales, for instance, laws giving Welsh equal status with English in public life, together with schools that teach in Welsh, have helped to slow a long decline in the number of speakers. Revival is slow, expensive and never guaranteed; but the evidence suggests it is far from hopeless.

Boredom has a poor reputation. It is associated with idleness, restlessness and, in children, with bad behaviour; few people would list 'being bored' among the experiences they hope to have. Modern technology has made it easier than ever to avoid. Waiting rooms now have television screens, and even some petrol pumps play advertisements. A smartphone offers an endless supply of distraction, and studies of phone use suggest that many people reach for their devices within seconds of having nothing to do: in a queue, on a train or during a pause in conversation. Boredom, it seems, has become something to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

I want to suggest that this is a mistake. Boredom is unpleasant, certainly, but so are hunger and pain, and we do not conclude from this that they serve no purpose. Psychologists increasingly describe boredom as a signal: a message from the mind that our current activity is failing to engage us and that we should look for something more meaningful. Like any signal, it can be ignored or misread, but suppressing it entirely may leave us less able to recognise when our lives need to change.

There is also some evidence that boredom can encourage creative thinking. In one frequently cited experiment, participants who first completed a deliberately dull task, copying numbers from a telephone directory, went on to produce more ideas in a creativity test than those who had not. The researchers suggested that a mind with nothing to occupy it begins to wander, and that this wandering can lead to unexpected connections. The findings should not be overstated: the study was small, and later attempts to repeat similar experiments have produced mixed results. But the idea that an under-stimulated mind turns inward is consistent with research on daydreaming, which has been linked to planning and problem-solving.

What is more troubling is how poorly many of us tolerate even brief periods without stimulation. In a widely discussed study published in 2014, participants were asked to sit alone in a plain room for up to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. Beforehand they had been given a mild electric shock, and many had said they would pay money to avoid experiencing it again. Yet when left alone with the option of shocking themselves, a substantial proportion chose to do so, apparently preferring physical discomfort to the company of their own thoughts.

None of this means that we should seek out boredom for its own sake, or that a child complaining of having nothing to do should simply be left alone indefinitely. Chronic boredom, the kind experienced by people trapped in monotonous jobs or isolated by illness, is associated with poor mental health and should not be romanticised. My argument is a narrower one. The occasional, ordinary boredom of a slow afternoon or a long journey is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity, and our habit of filling every empty moment may be costing us more than we realise.

In practice, this might mean resisting the urge to check a phone while waiting for a bus, or allowing children some unstructured time rather than filling every hour with organised activities. These are small changes, and their benefits are difficult to measure. But if boredom is indeed a signal, it seems unwise to keep switching it off before we have heard what it is trying to tell us.