Cambridge 13 — Test 1 đến Test 4

New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country's gross domestic product, and is the country's largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas, tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself — the people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on New Zealand's scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture, and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world.

A key feature of the campaign was the website www.newzealand.com, which provided potential visitors with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer. The heart of the website was a database of tourism services operators. Any tourism-related business could be listed by filling in a simple form — even the smallest bed and breakfast or specialist activity provider could gain a web presence. Participating businesses could update their details regularly, keeping information accurate. Tourism New Zealand also organised an independent evaluation scheme for listed organisations, including assessment of each business's environmental impact.

To communicate the New Zealand experience, the site carried features relating to famous people and places. One popular feature was an interview with former All Blacks rugby captain Tana Umaga. Another was an interactive journey through film locations used as backdrops for blockbuster movies. As the site developed, additional features helped independent travellers devise customised itineraries, including catalogued driving routes organised by season with distances and times indicated.

Later, a Travel Planner feature was added, allowing visitors to bookmark places of interest and view them on a map with suggested routes and public transport options. Registered users could save their Travel Plan and return to it, or print it out. The website also had a 'Your Words' section where anyone could submit a blog of their New Zealand travels for possible inclusion on the site.

The Tourism New Zealand website won two Webby awards for online achievement and innovation. More importantly, growth in tourism was impressive. Overall tourism expenditure increased by an average of 6.9% per year between 1999 and 2004. Visits from Britain grew at an average annual rate of 13% between 2002 and 2006, compared to a rate of 4% for British visits abroad overall.

Research shows that activities are the key driver of visitor satisfaction, contributing 74%, while transport and accommodation account for the remaining 26%. The more activities that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. Visitors also enjoy cultural activities most when they are interactive, prefer small-group experiences, and often want to feel individual rather than part of a crowd. Though New Zealand may not be a typical destination, the underlying lessons apply anywhere: the effectiveness of a strong brand, a strategy based on unique experiences, and a comprehensive, user-friendly website.

A. We all know how it feels — it's impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. It can include many other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. In his book Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary compares it to disgust — an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. "If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from 'infectious' social situations," he suggests.

B. By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz have identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. They can be plotted on two axes — one measuring low to high arousal, the other measuring how positive or negative the feeling is. While people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. The most damaging is 'reactant' boredom, with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is 'indifferent' boredom, where someone isn't engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm.

C. Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire goes further. "All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom," she says. Mann found that being bored makes us more creative. In experiments, people made to feel bored by copying numbers from the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. She goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

D. Psychologist John Eastwood at York University isn't convinced. "If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored," he says. "By definition, boredom is an undesirable state." For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our 'attention system' into gear. This creates an inability to focus on anything, making time seem to go painfully slowly. Worse, efforts to improve the situation can make things feel even more frustrating. Repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we no longer know what to do — or care.

E. Eastwood's team is exploring why the attention system fails. They think at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with various traits: people motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly, while curiosity is associated with a high boredom threshold. Those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, career, and life generally. But boredom itself cannot kill — it's what we do to escape it that may be dangerous. Goetz's group found that teenagers who 'approach' a boring situation rather than avoiding it with snacks, TV or social media actually report less boredom.

F. Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might be a new source of boredom. "In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning," she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score. Artworks painted by a robot have sold for thousands of dollars and been hung in prestigious galleries. And software has been built which creates art that could not have been imagined by the programmer.

Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? "This is a question at the very core of humanity," says Geraint Wiggins, a computational creativity researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. "It scares a lot of people. They are worried that it is taking something special away from what it means to be human."

Consider Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in London's Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron can pick up a paintbrush and paint on canvas on its own. Impressive, perhaps, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer's own creative ideas. Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to avoid the same criticism. Unlike earlier 'artists', the Painting Fool needs minimal direction, runs its own web searches, trawls social media for material, and can create pictures from scratch — including a series of fuzzy landscapes depicting trees and sky.

Composer David Cope invented a program called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). Not only did EMI create compositions in Cope's style, but also in the style of the most revered classical composers, including Bach, Chopin and Mozart. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts. Not everyone was impressed, however. Some blasted the work as pseudoscience, while Douglas Hofstadter said EMI created replicas that relied completely on the original artist's creative impulses. When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged, and Cope ultimately destroyed EMI's vital databases.

A study by David Moffat of Glasgow Caledonian University asked both expert musicians and non-experts to rate six compositions without being told whether they were composed by humans or computers. People who thought the composer was a computer tended to dislike the piece more. Paul Bloom of Yale University suggests part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind it. Justin Kruger of New York University found that enjoyment of an artwork increases if people think more time and effort was needed to create it. Colton believes that as technology grows more complex, greater depths in computer art will become discoverable.

Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, native to the Indian sub-continent. Known in biblical times, it was used as an ingredient mixed with oils for anointing people's bodies and as a token of friendship. In ancient Rome, mourners at funerals burnt cinnamon to create a pleasant scent. Most often, however, the spice found its primary use as an additive to food and drink. In the Middle Ages, Europeans who could afford it used cinnamon to flavour food — particularly meat — and to impress those around them with their ability to purchase an expensive condiment from the 'exotic' East.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the European middle classes began to desire the lifestyle of the elite, leading to greater demand for cinnamon. Arab merchants controlled the trade and closely guarded the secret of the spice's source. They transported it from India overland to Alexandria, where European traders purchased it and brought it back to Venice. Because the overland route allowed only small quantities to reach Europe, and Venice held a virtual monopoly, the Venetians could set exorbitantly high prices. These prices, coupled with increasing demand, spurred the search for new routes to Asia.

Portuguese traders arrived on the island of Ceylon toward the end of the 15th century. Before Europeans arrived, the Salagama ethnic group peeled bark from young cinnamon shoots in the rainy season and curled it into the 'stick' shape still recognised today, presenting the finished product to the king as tribute. When the Portuguese arrived, they dramatically increased production by enslaving much of the native population. In 1518, they built a fort on Ceylon, establishing a monopoly in the cinnamon trade and generating very high profits.

When the Dutch arrived at the very beginning of the 17th century, they allied with Kandy, an inland kingdom on Ceylon, protecting its king in exchange for payments of elephants and cinnamon. By 1640, the Dutch broke the 150-year Portuguese monopoly when they overran their factories. By 1658, they had permanently expelled the Portuguese from the island, gaining control of the lucrative trade.

To protect their hold on the market, the Dutch also treated the native inhabitants harshly, altering harvesting practices to boost production. Over time, the supply of cinnamon trees on the island became nearly exhausted due to systematic bark stripping. The Dutch then began cultivating their own cinnamon trees. In 1796, the English arrived and displaced the Dutch. By the mid-19th century, cinnamon was grown across the Indian Ocean region, West Indies, Brazil and Guyana. A monopoly became impossible, and the spice trade was eventually superseded by the rise of coffee, tea, chocolate and sugar.

A. Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the pituitary gland. Scientists first became aware of its influence through animal studies — it helps reinforce bonds between prairie voles, triggers motherly behaviour in sheep, and is released by women in childbirth. Few chemicals have as positive a reputation as oxytocin, the so-called 'love hormone': one sniff, it is claimed, can make a person more trusting, empathetic, generous and cooperative. It is time, however, to revise this wholly optimistic view. New research shows its effects vary greatly depending on the person and the circumstances, and it can impact social interactions for worse as well as for better.

B. Oxytocin's role in human behaviour first emerged in 2005. Markus Heinrichs and colleagues at the University of Freiburg found that volunteers who sniffed oxytocin via a nasal spray invested more money with an anonymous, untrustworthy partner than those given a placebo. Follow-up studies showed that after a sniff of the hormone, people become more charitable, better at reading emotions on others' faces, and better at communicating constructively in arguments. These results fuelled the view that oxytocin universally enhanced the positive aspects of our social nature.

C. Then, after a few years, contrasting findings began to emerge. Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa found that when volunteers played a competitive game, those who inhaled oxytocin showed more pleasure when they beat other players and more envy when others won. Jennifer Bartz from Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that oxytocin improves people's ability to read emotions, but only if they are not very socially adept to begin with. Her research also shows that oxytocin reduces cooperation in subjects who are particularly anxious or sensitive to rejection.

D. Another discovery is that oxytocin's effects vary depending on who we are interacting with. Studies by Carolyn DeClerck of the University of Antwerp revealed that people who received oxytocin actually became less cooperative when dealing with complete strangers. Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam discovered that volunteers given oxytocin showed favouritism — Dutch men associated positive words with Dutch names faster than foreign ones. According to De Dreu, oxytocin drives people to care for those in their social circles and defend them from outside dangers — it strengthens biases rather than promoting general goodwill.

E. There were signs of these subtleties from the start. Bartz has shown that in almost half of existing research results, oxytocin influenced only certain individuals or in certain circumstances. A more nuanced understanding is now propelling investigations down new lines. To Bartz, understanding the hormone's core function is key. She believes it acts as a chemical spotlight that shines on social cues — a shift in posture, a flicker of the eyes, a dip in the voice — making people more attuned to their social environment. This explains why it improves eye contact and emotion recognition, but could also make things worse for those prone to interpreting social cues negatively.

F. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the oxytocin story has become more perplexing. The hormone is found in everything from octopuses to sheep, and its evolutionary roots stretch back half a billion years. "It's a very simple and ancient molecule that has been co-opted for many different functions," says Sue Carter at the University of Illinois. "It affects primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala, so it's going to have many effects on just about everything." Bartz agrees: "Oxytocin probably does some very basic things, but once you add our higher-order thinking and social situations, these basic processes could manifest in different ways depending on individual differences and context."

Most managers can identify the major trends of the day. But in the course of conducting research in a number of industries, we have discovered that managers often fail to recognise the less obvious but profound ways these trends are influencing consumers' aspirations, attitudes and behaviours. This is especially true of trends viewed as peripheral to their core markets. Many ignore trends in their innovation strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach. At a minimum, such responses mean missed profit opportunities. At the extreme, they can jeopardise a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry.

One strategy, known as 'infuse and augment', is to design a product or service that retains most attributes of existing products but adds others that address the needs unleashed by a major trend. A case in point is Coach's Poppy range of handbags, created in response to the economic downturn of 2008. Rather than cheapening their brand image with lower prices, consumer research revealed customers were eager to lift themselves out of tough times. Coach launched the lower-priced Poppy bags in vibrant, youthful colours — and creating this sub-brand allowed them to avoid an across-the-board price cut, turning a difficult moment into an opportunity for innovation and renewal.

A further example is Tesco's response to consumers' growing environmental concerns. Tesco introduced its Greener Living programme, in which customers can accumulate points for activities such as reusing bags, recycling cans and cartridges, and buying home-insulation materials. Like points earned on regular purchases, green points can be redeemed for cash. Tesco augmented its core retail business with these innovations, infusing its value proposition with a 'green streak'.

A more radical strategy is 'combine and transcend'. Consider Nike's move to integrate the digital revolution into its reputation for high-performance athletic footwear. In 2006, they teamed with Apple to launch Nike+, a digital sports kit comprising a sensor that attaches to the running shoe and a wireless receiver connecting to the user's iPod. By combining Nike's original value proposition for amateur athletes with one for digital consumers, Nike+ moved the company from athletic apparel to a new plane of engagement with customers.

A third approach, 'counteract and reaffirm', involves developing products that stress the values traditionally associated with the category in ways that let consumers oppose the aspects of trends they view as undesirable. The ME2, a video game created by Canada's iToys, reaffirmed the toy category's association with physical play by featuring a built-in pedometer that tracked and awarded points for physical activity — walking, running, biking, skateboarding. The child could use those points to enhance virtual skills in the game, catering to kids' desire to play video games while countering associations with lack of exercise and obesity.

For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual. Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are clichés used to sell holidays, chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and even romance. We typically envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs that provide sweet white flesh when opened. But we see only part of the fruit and none of the plant. The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk up to 30 metres tall — an important source of timber for building houses and increasingly used as a replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture industry. The leaves, up to six metres long, have hard veins used as brushes in many parts of the world. Immature coconut flowers can be tapped for their sap to produce a drink or reduced by boiling to a cooking sugar.

Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard, inner layer. The fibrous middle layer produces 'coir', with numerous uses, particularly in manufacturing ropes. The woody inner shell, with its three prominent 'eyes', surrounds the seed. An important product from the shell is charcoal, widely used in industry and as a cooking fuel. When broken in half, the shells are also used as bowls across much of Asia.

Inside the shell are the nutrients needed by the developing seed. Initially, the endosperm is a sweetish liquid — coconut water — enjoyed as a drink and providing hormones that encourage other plants to grow more rapidly. As the fruit matures, coconut water gradually solidifies to form brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh. Dried coconut flesh, 'copra', is made into coconut oil and milk, widely used in cooking and cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, gained strategic importance when Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

The biology of coconuts makes them the great maritime voyagers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits can float in water and tolerate salt, though studies suggest they can remain viable for only about 110 days at sea before losing the ability to germinate. Cast onto desert island shores with little more than sand to grow in, coconut seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket created as the endosperm solidifies protects the embryo, and the fibrous fruit wall stores moisture that can be taken up by the seedling as it starts to grow.

There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americas before the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Columbus. 16th century trade patterns reveal that Arab traders and European sailors likely moved coconuts from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic. But the origin of coconuts along the west coast of America has been debated for centuries. In Asia, there is great coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human use, but no wild relatives. In America, there are close relatives but no evidence of indigenous coconuts. These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral islands in the Pacific.

A. The typical way of talking to a baby — high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious — is a source of fascination for linguists hoping to understand how 'baby talk' impacts on learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family's native tongue.

B. Early language exposure seems to have benefits for the brain — studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritise information. So how does infant-directed speech influence a baby's development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.

C. Fathers don't use baby talk as often or in the same ways as mothers — and that's perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark VanDam of Washington State University found that while mothers raised their pitch when speaking to babies, fathers did not. Their role may be rooted in the bridge hypothesis (1975): fathers use less familial language to provide children with a bridge to the kind of speech they'll hear in public. "The idea is that a kid gets to practise a certain kind of speech with mum and another kind with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practise," says VanDam.

D. Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. "Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk," says Nairan Ramirez-Esparza. "It really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context — the more parents use it one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life."

E. Another study suggests that parents might want to pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind. Researchers from McGill University found that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults. They played repeating vowel sounds mimicking either an adult woman or another baby. The 'infant' sounds held babies' attention nearly 40% longer and also induced more reactions like smiling or lip moving. The team theorises that this attraction to other infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech.

F. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 57 babies from two age groups — seven months and eleven-and-a-half months — were played syllables from both their native language (English) and a non-native tongue (Spanish), while a brain scanner recorded activity in a region known to guide the motor movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk prompts infant brains to start practising language skills. "Finding activation in motor areas when infants are simply listening is significant," says Patricia Kuhl, "because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start." Notably, the brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of non-native sounds, suggesting an early process of distinguishing native from foreign speech.

A. The Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were abandoned. It was a sophisticated Bronze Age society that built 'megacities' and traded internationally in luxury craft products, and yet seemed to have left almost no depictions of themselves — a stark contrast to the Egyptians, who carved and painted representations everywhere.

B. "There is plenty of archaeological evidence to tell us about the rise of the Harappan Civilisation, but relatively little about its fall," explains Dr Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge. "As populations increased, cities were built that had great baths, craft workshops, palaces and halls. Houses were arranged in blocks, with wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own wells and drainage systems. It was very much a 'thriving' civilisation." Then around 2100 BC, a transformation began. Streets went uncleaned, buildings started to be abandoned, and ritual structures fell out of use. After their final demise, a millennium passed before large-scale cities appeared once more in South Asia.

C. Some have claimed that major glacier-fed rivers changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply; or that cities couldn't cope with an increasing population; or that climate change caused an environmental shift affecting food and water provision. "It is unlikely that there was a single cause for the decline," said Petrie. "But the fact is, until now, we have had little solid evidence from the area. A lot of the archaeological debate has really only been well-argued speculation."

D. A research team led by Petrie and Dr Ravindanath Singh found that many archaeological sites were not where they were supposed to be. When they surveyed how the larger area was settled in relation to water sources, they found inaccuracies in published geographic locations ranging from several hundred metres to many kilometres. They realised that any attempts to use the existing data would be fundamentally flawed. Over several seasons of fieldwork, they carried out new surveys, finding an astonishing 198 previously unknown settlement sites.

E. Research published by Dr Yama Dixit and Professor David Hodell from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences provided the first definitive evidence for climate change affecting the plains of north-western India, where hundreds of Harappan sites are situated. The researchers gathered shells of Melanoides tuberculata snails from sediments of an ancient lake and used geochemical analysis to trace the climate history of the region. "We observed an abrupt change about 4,100 years ago, when the amount of evaporation from the lake exceeded the rainfall — indicative of a drought," says Dixit. Hodell adds: "We estimate the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon lasted about 200 years before recovering to previous conditions."

F. It has long been thought that other great Bronze Age civilisations also declined at a similar time, with a global-scale climate event as the cause. While it is possible that these local-scale processes were linked, the real archaeological interest lies in understanding the impact of these larger-scale events on different environments and different populations. "Considering the vast area of the Harappan Civilisation with its variable weather systems," explains Singh, "it is essential that we obtain more climate data from areas close to the two great cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and also from the Indian Punjab."

G. Petrie and Singh's team is now examining archaeological records to understand how people led their lives in the region five millennia ago. They are analysing grains cultivated at the time, trying to determine whether they were grown under extreme conditions of water stress, and whether crop combinations were adjusted to cope with different weather systems. They are also looking at whether pottery types and other aspects of material culture were distinctive to specific regions or more similar across larger areas — giving insight into the types of interactive networks that the population was involved in, and whether those networks changed.

H. Petrie believes that archaeologists are in a unique position to investigate how past societies responded to environmental and climatic change. "By investigating responses to environmental pressures and threats, we can learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant governmental and administrative bodies, to be more proactive in issues such as the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and rural development, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the future."

The nineteenth century was a period of great technological development in Britain, and for shipping the major changes were from wind to steam power, and from wood to iron and steel. The fastest commercial sailing vessels of all time were clippers — three-masted ships built to transport goods around the world. From the 1840s until 1869, when the Suez Canal opened and steam propulsion was replacing sail, clippers dominated world trade. Although many were built, only one has survived more or less intact: Cutty Sark, now on display in Greenwich, southeast London.

Cutty Sark's unusual name comes from the poem "Tam O'Shanter" by Robert Burns. Tam, a farmer, is chased by a witch called Nannie, who is wearing a 'cutty sark' — an old Scottish name for a short nightdress. The witch is depicted in Cutty Sark's figurehead. In legend, witches cannot cross water — which made this a rather strange choice of name for a ship. Cutty Sark was built in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1869, for a shipping company owned by John Willis. Willis chose a new shipbuilding firm, Scott & Linton, ensuring the contract put him in a very strong position — so much so that the firm was forced out of business, and the ship was finished by a competitor.

Willis's company was active in the tea trade between China and Britain, where speed could bring both profits and prestige. On Cutty Sark's maiden voyage in 1870, she set sail from London carrying goods to China, returning laden with tea in four months. However, she never fully lived up to expectations. In 1872, the ship and rival clipper Thermopylae left port in China on the same day. Crossing the Indian Ocean, Cutty Sark gained a lead of over 400 miles — but her rudder was severely damaged in stormy seas. After two attempts, the crew succeeded in repairing it at sea, but Cutty Sark arrived in London a week after Thermopylae.

Steam ships posed a growing threat to clippers as their speed and cargo capacity increased. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had a serious additional impact: while steam ships could use the direct route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, sailing ships needed the much stronger winds of the oceans and had to sail a far greater distance. Steam ships reduced the journey time between Britain and China by approximately two months. By 1878, tea traders weren't interested in Cutty Sark, and she took on the less prestigious work of carrying any cargo between any two ports in the world.

In 1880, violence aboard the ship led to the replacement of the captain with an incompetent drunkard who stole the crew's wages. He was suspended and a new captain appointed — marking a turnaround and the beginning of the most successful period in Cutty Sark's working life, transporting wool from Australia to Britain. One such journey took just under 12 weeks, beating every other ship that year by around a month. The ship's next captain, Richard Woodget, took her further south than any previous captain, dangerously close to icebergs off South America's southern tip. His gamble paid off, and Cutty Sark was the fastest vessel in the wool trade for ten years.

As competition from steam ships increased in the 1890s, Cutty Sark became less profitable and was sold to a Portuguese firm, renamed Ferreira. For the next 25 years, she again carried miscellaneous cargoes around the world. Badly damaged in a gale in 1922, she put into Falmouth harbour for repairs. Retired sea captain Wilfred Dowman recognised her and eventually bought her after persistent efforts. The ship returned to Falmouth with her original name restored, and was used as a training ship until 1954, when she was transferred to dry dock at Greenwich for public display. The ship suffered fires in 2007 and again in 2014, but now attracts a quarter of a million visitors a year.

A. More than a third of the world's soil is endangered, according to a recent UN report. If we don't slow the decline, all farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Since soil grows 95% of our food and sustains human life in other more surprising ways, that is a huge problem.

B. Peter Groffman from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies points out that soil scientists have been warning about the degradation of the world's soil for decades. A single gram of healthy soil might contain 100 million bacteria, as well as viruses and fungi, living amid decomposing plants and various minerals. Soils don't just grow our food — they are the source of nearly all our existing antibiotics, and could be our best hope in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Soil is also an ally against climate change: microorganisms within soil lock in the carbon content of dead animals and plants, holding three times the carbon of the entire atmosphere. Soils also store water, preventing flood damage.

C. If the soil loses its ability to perform these functions, the human race could be in big trouble. The danger is not that the soil will disappear completely, but that the microorganisms that give it its special properties will be lost. Once this happens, it may take thousands of years for the soil to recover. Agriculture is by far the biggest problem. In the wild, when plants die and decay, their nutrients are returned directly to the soil. Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil, so it gradually becomes less fertile. In the past we developed strategies to get around this — rotating crops or leaving fields uncultivated for a season.

D. But these practices became inconvenient as populations grew and agriculture had to be run on more commercial lines. A solution came in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing ammonium nitrate. Farmers have been applying this synthetic fertiliser ever since. But over recent decades it has become clear this wasn't such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, and excess is often washed into rivers. More recently, indiscriminate use of fertilisers has been found to hurt the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty and degrading the very ground they were meant to nourish.

E. One of the people looking for a solution is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the Netherlands and now advises some of the world's top soil scientists. He developed a cocktail of beneficial bacteria, fungi and humus. Researchers at the University of Valladolid recently used this cocktail on soils destroyed by years of fertiliser overuse. When applied to the desert-like test plots, a good crop of plants emerged — not just healthy at the surface, but with roots strong enough to pierce dirt as hard as rock. The few plants that grew in the control plots, fed with traditional fertilisers, were small and weak.

F. However, measures like this are not enough to solve the global soil degradation problem. We first need an accurate picture of what types of soil exist and the problems they face. That's not easy: there is no agreed international system for classifying soil. In an attempt to unify different approaches, the UN has created the Global Soil Map project. Researchers from nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that can incorporate measurements from field surveys, drone surveys, satellite imagery, and lab analyses to provide real-time data on the state of the soil. Within the next four years, they aim to have mapped soils worldwide to a depth of 100 metres, with results freely accessible to all.

G. But this is only a first step. We need ways of presenting the problem that bring it home to governments and the wider public, says Pamela Chasek at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. "Most scientists don't speak language that policy-makers can understand, and vice versa." Chasek and colleagues have proposed the goal of 'zero net land degradation'. Like the idea of carbon neutrality, it is an easily understood target that can shape expectations and encourage action. For soils on the brink, that may be too late. Several researchers are calling for the immediate creation of protected zones for endangered soils. Whatever we do, if we want our soils to survive, we need to take action now.

"Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter." This pronouncement by economist Richard Layard summarises the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, the purpose of government is to promote collective well-being. The only question is how to achieve it, and here 'positive psychology' — a supposed science that identifies what makes people happy and allows happiness to be measured — can show the way. Equipped with this science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they never could before.

It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way of thinking, increasingly popular for that very reason. Those who think this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned. It was Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) who was most responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For Bentham, the human good consists simply of pleasure and the absence of pain. Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Our modern advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks, rejecting as outmoded and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human happiness to date.

But as William Davies notes in The Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich, lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a well-defined historical framework. Davies begins with Bentham, noting that he was far more than a philosopher — his activities resemble those of a modern management consultant. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting that government departments be linked by 'conversation tubes', and to the Bank of England with a design for printing unforgeable banknotes. His celebrated design for a prison — the 'Panopticon', where prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while visible at all times to guards — very nearly came to pass.

Bentham was also a pioneer of the 'science of happiness'. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it must be measured. He suggested two methods: quantifying pleasure by measuring the human pulse rate, or using money as the standard — if two goods have the same price, they produce the same quantity of pleasure. Bentham was more attracted by the latter. By associating money so closely with inner experience, Davies writes, Bentham "set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century." The Happiness Industry describes how this project has become integral to capitalism itself — and how the tendency to see human beings as objects to be shaped by policymakers and managers has proliferated into 'behaviour change' programmes in governments across the world today.