IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 30: Passage 1

On 21 December 1913, readers of the New York World found something new in the newspaper's Sunday supplement. Among the usual riddles and word games was a diamond-shaped grid of empty squares, accompanied by a list of clues. The puzzle had been devised by Arthur Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool who had emigrated to the United States as a young man, and he called it a 'word-cross'. A few weeks later, as the result of a typesetting error, the name appeared as 'cross-word', and it stuck.

Wynne's invention was not entirely without ancestors. Word squares, in which the same words can be read both across and down, had been popular in nineteenth-century Britain, and a famous Latin example was found scratched on a column in the ruins of Pompeii. Wynne's grid, however, differed in an important respect: the words reading across were not the same as those reading down, so solvers had to find two different sets of answers that fitted together. His first puzzle contained no black squares; these, which separate one answer from the next and allow larger and more varied grids, became standard only later.

For about a decade, the crossword remained a modest newspaper feature, although other papers gradually began to copy it. Then, in 1924, two young publishers, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, chose a collection of crosswords as the first book of their new company. According to a well-known story, the idea came from Simon's aunt, who had asked him where she could buy such a book and discovered that none existed. Each copy was sold with a pencil attached, and the book was an enormous success. Within months, the crossword had become a national craze: further collections followed, popular songs were written about it, and newspapers across the country hurried to add puzzles of their own.

Not everyone approved. Critics complained that the craze wasted time that might be better spent on serious reading, and The New York Times dismissed the puzzle as a primitive form of mental exercise. The Times itself held out for almost two decades: its first crossword did not appear until February 1942, about two months after the United States entered the Second World War. Its editors reasoned that readers facing long evenings during wartime blackouts might welcome something to occupy their minds. The paper's first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, is credited with establishing many of the conventions that American puzzles still follow.

In Britain, the crossword developed in a different direction. The first British example appeared in Pearson's Magazine in 1922, and The Times of London published its first in 1930. By then, a distinctively British form, the cryptic crossword, was emerging. From 1926, The Observer published puzzles by Edward Powys Mathers, who wrote under the name Torquemada and whose clues depended on wordplay rather than straightforward definition. In a cryptic clue, the answer is usually indicated twice: once by a plain definition and once by some form of wordplay, such as an anagram or a word hidden inside a phrase. A later Observer compiler, Derrick Macnutt, known as Ximenes, set out strict principles to ensure that such clues were fair to the solver. Cryptic grids also differ in structure. In an American puzzle, every letter belongs to both an across and a down answer, whereas in a typical cryptic grid many letters belong to only one, giving the solver fewer letters to check against.

During the Second World War, crosswords took on an unexpected significance in Britain. In January 1942, following a debate in its letters page about how difficult its puzzle really was, The Daily Telegraph organised a contest in which entrants attempted one of its crosswords against the clock. Several of those who finished in under twelve minutes were later approached by the War Office and recruited to the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. Two years later, the newspaper's crossword caused alarm of a different kind. In the weeks before the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, its puzzles contained a series of answers, including 'Utah', 'Omaha' and 'Overlord', that were secret code names connected with the operation. The compiler, a headmaster named Leonard Dawe, was questioned by intelligence officers, who concluded that the appearance of the words was innocent. Many years later, a former pupil claimed that he had heard the words from soldiers camped near the school and had suggested them to Dawe without knowing their meaning.

Today, crosswords are published in many languages and are often constructed with the help of software that suggests words to fill a grid. Will Shortz, who became editor of the New York Times puzzle in 1993, had earlier designed his own degree at Indiana University in what he called enigmatology, the study of puzzles. Researchers, meanwhile, have investigated whether solving crosswords can help to protect the brain in old age. Some studies have found that older people who do word puzzles regularly perform better on tests of memory and reasoning, but it remains unclear whether the puzzles produce the benefit or whether people with sharper minds are simply more likely to enjoy them.