Mock Test 6.2 | Academic Reading

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Making Copies

A.  Copying in the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. [Crack IELTS with Rob] The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians firstly transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, they hugely extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made ideas permanent, portable and endlessly reproducible.

B.  Until Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s producing a book in an edition of more than one generally meant writing it out again. Printing with moveable type was not copying, however. Gutenberg couldn’t take a document that already existed, feed it into his printing press and run off facsimiles. [Crack IELTS with Rob] The first true mechanical copier was manufactured in 1780, when James Watt, who is better known as the inventor of the modern steam engine, created the copying press. Few people today know what a copying press was, but you may have seen one in an antiques store, where it was perhaps called a book press. A user took a document freshly written in special ink, placed a moistened sheet of translucent paper against the inked surface and squeezed the two sheets together in the press, causing some of the ink from the original to penetrate the second sheet, which could then be read by turning it over and looking through its back.

C.   Copying presses were standard equipment in offices for nearly a century and a half.  (Thomas Jefferson used one, and the last president whose official correspondence was copied on one was Calvin Coolidge.) The machines were displaced, beginning in the late 1800s, by a combination of two 19^th century inventions: the typewriter and carbon paper.

D.   Among the first modern copying machines, introduced in 1950 by 3M, was the Thermo-Fax, and it made a copy by shining infrared light through an original document and a sheet of paper that had been coated with heat-sensitive chemicals. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Competing manufacturers soon introduced other copying technologies and marketed machines called Dupliton, Dial-A-Matic Autostat, Verifax, Copease and Copymation. These machines and their successors were welcomed by secretaries, who had no other means of reproducing documents in hand, but each had serious drawbacks. All required expensive chemically treated papers. And all made copies that smelled bad, were hard to read, didn’t last long, and tended to curl up into tubes.

E.  Success was not immediate. Haloid, with considerable help from Battelle, introduced its first xerographic copier, which is called the Model A, in1949, but the machine was almost comically difficult to operate, and all the Haloid Xerox 914, a machine that, unlike its numerous competitors, made sharp, permanent copies on ordinary paper- a huge breakthrough. [Crack IELTS with Rob] The process, which Haloid called xerography, was so unusual and nonintuitive that physicists who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes expressed doubt that it was even theoretically feasible.

F.   Remarkably, xerography was conceived by one person – Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. He made his discovery in solitude in 1937 and offered it to more than 20 major corporations, among them IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. [Crack IELTS with Rob] All of them turned him down, expressing what he later called  “ an enthusiastic lack of interest” and thereby passing up the opportunity to manufacture what Fortune magazine would describe as  “ the most successful product ever marketed in America.”  Carlson’s invention was indeed a commercial triumph. Essentially overnight, people began making copies at a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than anyone had believed possible. This year, the world will produce more than three trillion xerographic copies and laser-printed pages-about 500 for every human on earth.

G.   At 15, Chester began jotting down ideas for inventions and making other notes in a pocket diary, a practice he maintained for the rest of his life. He sketched concepts for a rotating billboard, a machine for cleaning shoes, and a trick safety pin (which could be made to look as though it had pierced a finger). He was fascinated by printing and the graphic arts. [Crack IELTS with Rob] When he was 10, his favorite possession was a toy typewriter. Later, he worked in a print shop and published a magazine, the Amateur Chemists’ Press, for science-minded classmates. He graduated in 1930 and was hired by Bell Labs, in New York City, as a research engineer. After a year, he transferred to the company’s patent department, believing the skills he would learn there might be useful to him when he became an inventor. Carlson came to terms with his wealth by divesting himself of most of it. His charities business during the final decade of his life was prodigious. It was also entirely anonymous. When he gave the money to build a building, he did not permit his name to be revealed publicly, never mind be engraved in stone above the door.