IELTS Academic Reading practice test

<p>The bicycle is so familiar today that it is easy to forget how recently it was invented, and how uncertain its early development was. The first machine that is generally accepted as an ancestor of the modern bicycle appeared in 1817, when the German inventor Karl Drais demonstrated what he called a 'running machine'. It had two wheels in line, a frame of wood and a steerable front wheel, but no pedals: the rider sat astride it and pushed against the ground with his feet. Drais's machine attracted a brief period of fashionable interest in several European cities, but it was expensive, heavy and difficult to use on the poor roads of the time, and the craze had faded within a few years.</p>
<p>Almost half a century passed before the next significant step. In the 1860s, mechanics in Paris began attaching pedals directly to the front wheel. The resulting machine, known in France as the vélocipède and in Britain, less kindly, as the 'boneshaker', allowed riders to keep their feet off the ground for the first time. Its nickname came from the combination of a rigid iron frame and wooden wheels with iron tyres, which transmitted every bump in the road to the rider. Even so, it sold in considerable numbers, and the first organised bicycle races took place in this period.</p>
<p>Because the pedals were fixed to the front wheel, the only way to make a velocipede go faster was to make that wheel larger: each turn of the pedals then carried the machine further. This logic produced the 'high-wheeler' of the 1870s, often called the penny-farthing in Britain, after the contrast between a large and a small coin. Front wheels grew to as much as one and a half metres in diameter. The machines were genuinely fast and their solid rubber tyres made them more comfortable than the boneshaker, but they were also dangerous. The rider sat high above the front wheel, and any sudden stop could throw him forward over the handlebars. Riding a high-wheeler was therefore largely an activity for athletic young men with money to spare.</p>
<p>The design that changed this was the 'safety bicycle', which became commercially successful in the mid-1880s. Its key feature was a chain that connected the pedals to the rear wheel. Using gears of different sizes at each end of the chain, designers could make the rear wheel turn faster than the pedals, so there was no longer any need for an enormous front wheel. Both wheels could now be the same moderate size, and the rider sat between them, much closer to the ground. The final element arrived in 1888, when John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet living in Ireland, developed a practical air-filled tyre, reportedly to make his son's tricycle more comfortable. Pneumatic tyres reduced vibration dramatically and made cycling noticeably faster.</p>
<p>The safety bicycle with pneumatic tyres is, in all its essentials, the machine we ride today, and its arrival led to the cycling boom of the 1890s. Mass production reduced prices, and for the first time a cheap means of independent transport was available to millions of ordinary people. Historians have pointed to its effect on women in particular. Cycling required practical clothing, and the long skirts of the period gave way, for many women cyclists, to shorter skirts or loose trousers. Some campaigners for women's rights described the bicycle as an important symbol of independence.</p>
<p>The boom did not last. By the early twentieth century the motor car had become the object of fashionable interest, and in wealthy countries the bicycle was increasingly seen as a vehicle for those who could not afford anything better. In recent decades, however, concerns about traffic, health and pollution have brought it back into favour, and many cities now build dedicated cycle lanes. Two centuries after Drais pushed his running machine through the streets, the bicycle may be entering a second golden age.</p>