Academic Reading — All-Types Test 17

Reading passage

The History of the Umbrella A. The umbrella is so familiar an object in modern streets that few pause to consider its extraordinary age. Long before it became a shield against rain, the device was conceived as a defence against the sun, and its earliest surviving depictions come from the sculpture and painting of the ancient world. In the palaces of Mesopotamia and along the Nile, carved reliefs show attendants holding a wide canopy above the head of a king or a god. The object was not a convenience but a symbol: to walk beneath a raised circle of cloth was to be marked out as a person of consequence, someone whose skin was too precious to be touched by ordinary light. B. From these ceremonial beginnings the parasol spread eastward, and it was in the courts of the Far East that it acquired much of the form we would recognise today. Craftsmen there fixed thin ribs of split bamboo to a central pole and stretched over them a covering of oiled paper, treated so that water ran off it rather than soaking through. This modest technical step, the waterproofing of the canopy, quietly transformed the instrument's purpose. What had been a sunshade for the privileged could now keep the rain from an ordinary traveller, and in humid regions where sudden downpours were a fact of daily life the device passed slowly out of the palace and into the marketplace. A collapsible version, in which the ribs could slide along the shaft so that the whole thing folded flat, is recorded in the East many centuries before it appeared in the West, a reminder that the object's development was neither steady nor confined to a single culture. C. In Europe the story took a different course. Greek and Roman women had carried sunshades, but the object all but vanished from the continent for centuries and returned only as an import from the warm south. For a long time it was regarded as an unmistakably feminine accessory, a thing a respectable man would be embarrassed to be seen carrying. That prejudice was overturned largely through the persistence of a single eccentric. A traveller and philanthropist, having grown used to the umbrellas of hotter countries, took to walking the wet streets of London beneath one and endured the jeers of coachmen, who correctly saw the habit as a threat to their trade. His stubbornness won out, and within a generation the umbrella had become an ordinary piece of a gentleman's equipment. D. The Victorian appetite for the object drove a wave of invention. Early umbrellas had been heavy and awkward, their frames made of whalebone or cane that warped in damp weather and snapped in a strong wind. The decisive improvement came with the introduction of a light steel frame, whose slender curved ribs were both stronger and far lighter than anything that had gone before. Around this innovation grew a considerable manufacturing industry, concentrated in a handful of towns whose workshops turned out frames, handles and covers by the thousand, and the umbrella settled into the folding, portable shape that has changed remarkably little since. Later refinements were matters of convenience rather than principle: a catch to hold the canopy open, a telescopic shaft that collapsed the whole thing to the length of a hand, synthetic fabrics that dried more quickly than silk or cotton, and springs that flung the canopy open at the press of a button. E. It is worth pausing over how little the essential design has altered. A modern commuter sheltering at a bus stop holds an object whose working principle, a fabric canopy stretched over radiating ribs from a central stem, would be perfectly intelligible to a courtier of two thousand years ago. Few everyday artefacts can claim so long and so continuous a lineage. The umbrella has outlasted the empires that first raised it over the heads of kings, shedding its associations with rank and gender to become one of the most democratic possessions imaginable, owned by almost everyone and treated with almost universal carelessness, left behind on trains and in cafes in their millions every year.