IELTS Reading: Sentence Completion (Practice with Answers)

A. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, linguists expect half to disappear by the end of this century. Some fall silent with their last elderly speaker; others vanish quietly as children shift to a regional majority tongue before they start school. The rate of loss, by most estimates, now exceeds the rate of species extinction, yet it rarely makes the news.

B. The forces behind this are largely economic. Parents in small speech communities want their children employed, and employment speaks the larger language. Schools, television and labour migration all push in one direction. Very few languages die because speakers are forbidden to use them; most die because each family makes what feels like a sensible private choice, repeated a million times.

C. What disappears with a language is not only grammar. Ethnobotanists have recorded plant medicines known only in the vocabulary of the community that used them, and navigational knowledge held in the verbs of Pacific sailing cultures. When the language goes, the classification system encoded in it goes too, and with it a working model of a landscape built up over hundreds of generations.

D. Revival is possible but rare. Hebrew moved from liturgical use to a first language for millions in under a century. Welsh recovered ground through schooling and a television channel. The most copied model may be the Maori language nests of New Zealand, where elders care for infants entirely in the ancestral tongue, rebuilding the transmission chain at its weakest link: the family home.

E. Digital tools cut both ways. Recording projects and phone keyboards for minority scripts have preserved more linguistic data than any previous generation possessed. Yet the same phones stream a single global culture into every pocket, and spellcheckers quietly train writers toward standard forms. The archive is growing even as the living speech shrinks.

For most of the twentieth century, sleeping cars were the polite way to cross Europe. They declined not because passengers left but because airlines took the profitable long routes and railways, losing money on each sleeper, cut them one by one. By 2010 a traveller could cross the continent by night in barely a handful of carriages.

The revival came from an unexpected alliance of Swedish pension funds and Austrian state railways. Austria kept its sleepers through the lean years on the argument that the trains served Alpine tourism and mountain communities that flights could not. When climate concerns revived demand, the Austrian operator found itself holding rare expertise: staff who knew how to make beds on a moving train, and workshops that still maintained the cars.

New entrants discovered that the expertise was the easy part. Sleeper services lose money slowly rather than fast, but they lose it: each carriage must be cleaned, turned down and staffed overnight for a dozen fares, and the costs survive every fuel-price swing. The operators that endure share a structure: they run mixed trains, seating cars by day and berths by night, and they treat the sleeper less as transport than as a moving hotel whose guests board late and leave early.

Governments have noticed the publicity. Several now co-fund sleeper routes as visible climate policy, though the accounting is loose, and one transport economist has pointed out that the same subsidy spent on daytime high-speed rail would carry four times the passengers. The night train's future, he argues, will be decided not by nostalgia but by whether travellers genuinely prefer arriving rested to arriving fast.

Astronomers measure the damage in magnitudes. From a truly dark site the unaided eye can see several thousand stars; from the suburbs of a major city, a few hundred. The cause is not light itself but wasted light, the fraction beamed sideways and upward by badly designed fittings, which scatters off air molecules and aerosols to hang as skyglow above settlements.

Skyglow is the visible symptom of an invisible one. Freshly installed white LED streetlighting, beloved of councils for its energy savings, emits strongly in the blue part of the spectrum, the wavelengths that scatter most and that most strongly suppress melatonin in living things. Ecologists have documented birds migrating early into fatal cold, insects swarming fixtures to exhaustion, and trees holding leaves past the season, all timed to artificial dawn.

The remedy is unglamorous and known: full cutoff fixtures that force light down, warmer colour temperatures, dimming after midnight, and controls that illuminate only while people are present. Cities that have applied the recipe, Tucson most studied, cut skyglow measurably while saving money, and the International Dark-Sky Association's certification has turned remnant darkness into an asset that rural parks market.

What is scarce is not technology but continuity. Lighting decisions are made street by street, budget by budget, and the cheap white fixture wins each individual tender while collectively erasing a resource nobody's spreadsheet prices. The night sky, advocates concede, is losing to a thousand reasonable decisions, which is precisely how the loudest losses happen.