IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 2: Passage 1

Few machines have changed so little in their basic form, or so much in their social meaning, as the bicycle. A rider from the 1890s would have no difficulty recognising a modern bicycle, with its two wheels of equal size and its pedals driving the rear wheel by means of a chain. Yet the route to this familiar design was a long one, and it passed through several machines that now seem awkward and even dangerous.

The story is usually said to begin in 1817 in the German city of Mannheim, where an inventor named Karl von Drais demonstrated what he called a 'running machine'. It consisted of two wheels placed one behind the other and joined by a wooden frame, with a bar for steering the front wheel. There were no pedals: the rider sat astride the frame and pushed against the ground with his feet, moving forward in a series of long, gliding strides. Some historians have suggested that Drais was looking for an alternative to the horse, since a run of failed harvests had made animal feed scarce and expensive, although there is no direct evidence of his motives.

Drais's invention was soon copied elsewhere, and in 1819 the 'hobby horse', as it became known in Britain, enjoyed a brief period of popularity among fashionable young men. The craze faded almost as quickly as it had begun. The machines were costly and hard work to ride uphill, and because the roads of the time were rough and deeply rutted, many riders took to the smoother pavements, where they collided with people on foot. Several cities responded by banning them, and within a year or two the hobby horse had been all but forgotten.

For more than forty years, little further progress was made. Then, in the 1860s, mechanics in Paris began fitting cranks and pedals directly to the hub of the front wheel, so that riders could at last propel themselves without touching the ground. Exactly who deserves the credit for this step is still disputed, but by the end of the decade the workshop of Pierre Michaux was producing these pedal-driven 'velocipedes' in large numbers. In Britain they earned the nickname 'boneshakers', and with good reason: their wooden wheels were fitted with iron tyres, which passed every bump of the cobbled streets directly to the rider.

Since the pedals turned the front wheel directly, a larger wheel meant greater speed, and during the 1870s front wheels grew until diameters of around one and a half metres were not unusual. The result was the high-wheeler, known at the time simply as the 'ordinary' and only later nicknamed the 'penny-farthing', after a large British coin and a much smaller one. With its light, wire-spoked wheels and solid rubber tyres, it was far quicker than the boneshaker, but it was difficult to mount and dangerous to ride. The rider sat high above the front wheel, and if this struck a stone or a hole, he could be thrown head first over the handlebars. It was ridden mostly by athletic young men.

The solution came from Coventry, an English city that had become a centre of bicycle manufacture. In 1885, John Kemp Starley introduced the Rover, a 'safety bicycle' with two wheels of similar size and a chain linking the pedals to the rear wheel. Because the chain and gears allowed a small wheel to turn rapidly, speed no longer depended on the size of the wheel, and since the rider sat lower down, the risk of serious falls was greatly reduced. The smaller wheels did give a harsher ride, but this problem was soon overcome. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet living in Belfast, patented an air-filled tyre that he had originally made for his young son's tricycle, and it was quickly adopted by bicycle manufacturers.

What followed was a boom. Mass production brought prices down, and during the 1890s cycling became hugely popular in Europe and North America among both men and women. Its effects reached well beyond transport. For many women, the bicycle offered a freedom of movement that had previously been hard to obtain, and it encouraged a move towards more practical clothing. In both Britain and the United States, cyclists' organisations campaigned for better road surfaces, years before cars were common. Bicycle makers also refined techniques, such as the use of ball bearings and lightweight steel tubing, that were later taken up by the motor and aircraft industries.

In the twentieth century, as car ownership spread, cycling declined steeply in many wealthy countries, while in others, notably China, the bicycle remained the main form of personal transport for decades. More recently, concerns about congestion, pollution and health have brought about a revival. The Netherlands and Denmark are often held up as models, but their extensive networks of separate cycle paths owe less to tradition than is sometimes assumed: they were largely the result of policy decisions taken from the 1970s onwards, when public protests about road deaths and the oil crisis of 1973 persuaded governments to rethink their approach to transport.