IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 21: Passage 1

For centuries, the narrow strip of land joining North and South America was one of the great obstacles to world trade. At its narrowest point, the Isthmus of Panama is only about 50 kilometres wide, yet ships travelling between the Atlantic and the Pacific had to sail all the way around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, a long and often dangerous voyage. The idea of a canal had been discussed since the sixteenth century, when Spanish rulers ordered surveys of possible routes, but the technology needed to build one did not exist. In the 1850s, a railway was built across the isthmus, and it was soon carrying large numbers of passengers on their way to the goldfields of California. A waterway, however, remained a dream.

The first serious attempt was made by the French. In 1881, a company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the diplomat who had created the Suez Canal in Egypt, began work. De Lesseps was determined to build a canal at sea level, without locks, just as he had done at Suez. But Panama was very different from the flat, dry Egyptian desert. The route crossed a range of hills covered in dense rainforest, the rainfall was extremely heavy, and the Chagres River regularly flooded, washing away equipment and earthworks. Again and again, the sides of the excavations collapsed in landslides, burying months of work.

Worse still was disease. Yellow fever and malaria killed thousands of workers, and estimates of the total number of deaths during the French period run as high as 22,000. At the time, nobody knew that both diseases were spread by mosquitoes. In fact, the French unknowingly helped the insects to multiply: in hospitals, the legs of beds were placed in bowls of water to stop ants from climbing up them, providing ideal breeding sites for mosquitoes. By 1889, the company had run out of money and collapsed, ruining thousands of French investors.

The United States now saw its chance. When Colombia, which then controlled Panama, refused to approve a treaty allowing the Americans to build there, a movement for independence in Panama received American support, and in 1903 a new republic was declared. Within weeks, it had granted the United States control of a strip of land across the isthmus, and in 1904 the Americans bought the equipment and excavations left behind by the French and began work.

This time, the problem of disease was tackled first. Recent research had shown that mosquitoes carried yellow fever, and the army doctor William Gorgas, who had helped to rid the Cuban city of Havana of the disease, was put in charge of health. His teams drained areas of standing water, and pools that could not be drained were covered with a thin layer of oil, which killed the young insects developing in them. Buildings were fitted with wire screens over their doors and windows, and a supply of piped water meant that residents no longer needed to store water in open containers. By 1906, yellow fever had been eliminated from the area, and although malaria was never completely defeated, cases fell dramatically.

Engineering decisions followed. The first American chief engineer resigned after only a year, and his successor, John Stevens, an experienced railway builder, concentrated at first on preparation: he rebuilt the railway, which would be needed to carry away vast quantities of earth, and constructed housing for the workforce. Stevens also persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt that a sea-level canal was impractical. Instead, a huge earth dam would be built across the Chagres River at Gatun, controlling its floods and creating an artificial lake, at the time the largest in the world. Ships would be raised about 26 metres by a series of locks to the level of the lake, cross it, and then be lowered again on the other side. When Stevens resigned unexpectedly in 1907, Roosevelt appointed an army engineer, George Goethals, who directed the project until it was completed.

The most difficult section was the Culebra Cut, where the canal had to pass through the hills that form the continental divide. Here, giant steam shovels dug out rock and soil, which was loaded onto trains and carried away. Landslides repeatedly undid the work, and the cut had to be made far wider than originally planned. At its peak, the workforce numbered more than 40,000, and the largest group came from the islands of the Caribbean, particularly Barbados. They were paid in silver coins, whereas most white American employees were paid in gold, a division that also determined where workers lived and ate.

The canal finally opened on 15 August 1914. Its arrival attracted less attention than it might have done, since the First World War had broken out in Europe only days earlier. Nevertheless, its effect on shipping was immediate: the sea journey from New York to San Francisco was shortened by around 13,000 kilometres. The canal remained under American control for most of the twentieth century, until it was handed over to Panama at the end of 1999.