IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 6: Passage 1

Until the middle of the twentieth century, loading a cargo ship was slow, costly and labour-intensive. Goods arrived at the docks in an enormous variety of packages, from sacks of coffee and barrels of oil to crates of machinery and bales of cotton, and each item had to be lifted individually into the ship's hold and then stacked by hand so that the load would not shift at sea. At the end of the voyage, the whole process was repeated in reverse. A typical ocean-going vessel might spend as much time tied up in port as it did sailing. Theft was a further problem: with so many items passing through so many hands, part of almost every shipment tended to disappear.

Containers of various kinds had been used before, on railways and by a few shipping lines, but the man usually credited with transforming the system was not a sailor. Malcom McLean had built up one of the largest trucking companies in the United States, and in the early 1950s, frustrated by congested roads, he began to consider whether his trailers could be carried along the coast by ship. His first idea was to load complete trailers, but he soon realised that their wheels would waste valuable space on board. The solution was to separate the body of each trailer from its chassis and wheels, and to carry the boxes on their own. In April 1956, a converted tanker named the Ideal X sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, with fifty-eight such boxes on a platform built over its deck. McLean later calculated that loading the ship had cost less than twenty cents per ton of cargo, compared with almost six dollars for conventional loading.

Early containers came in many sizes, which limited their usefulness: a box belonging to one company could not necessarily be carried on another company's ships, lifted by its cranes or loaded onto its trucks. During the 1960s, after years of negotiation, international standards were agreed for the dimensions of containers and for the fittings at their corners. These fittings are the key to the whole system. Each corner of a container has a strong steel casting with an opening into which a device called a twistlock can be inserted and turned, locking the box firmly to another container, to the deck of a ship or to a truck. Standard containers are eight feet wide and usually either twenty or forty feet long, and the capacity of a ship is still measured in 'twenty-foot equivalent units', or TEU.

Container shipping grew slowly at first, partly because ports had to invest heavily in giant cranes and in large open areas where boxes could be stored. One important boost came from the Vietnam War. From the late 1960s, McLean's company carried supplies for the United States military across the Pacific, and containers helped to bring order to supply lines that had been badly congested. Rather than send the ships home empty, the company arranged for them to call in Japan on the return journey to collect goods for American customers, and trade across the Pacific began to grow rapidly.

The effects on ports were dramatic. Container ships needed deep water, plenty of space and good road and rail connections, and many traditional city-centre docks had none of these. In New York, shipping moved from the piers of Manhattan and Brooklyn to new terminals across the harbour in New Jersey; in London, the old docks close to the city centre closed one after another, while container traffic moved to Tilbury, further down the Thames, and to Felixstowe on the east coast. Because a crane could now lift a container in a couple of minutes, far fewer dock workers were needed, and in many countries the arrival of containers led to bitter disputes between unions and employers.

Today, the largest container ships can carry more than twenty thousand TEU, and the cost of moving a single item across an ocean is often so small that it barely affects its price in the shops. Some economists have argued that the container did more to increase international trade than many trade agreements, because it allowed manufacturers to spread production across several countries, moving components from one factory to another with little cost or delay. The system has its weaknesses. Because trade is unbalanced, huge numbers of empty containers have to be shipped back to exporting countries, and every year some boxes are lost overboard in storms. Yet the basic design has barely changed since the 1960s, and even a container that is no longer fit for the sea often finds a second life as a storage unit, a workshop or even a home.