Practice Test 26: The Shipping Container and Why Words Disappear

A Until the middle of the twentieth century, loading a cargo ship was slow and expensive work. Goods arrived at the dock in sacks, barrels and crates of every size, and teams of dockworkers carried them on board piece by piece. A ship could spend as long in port being loaded and unloaded as it spent at sea, and theft and damage were common.

B The change came from an idea that now seems obvious: pack goods into large steel boxes of a standard size, and move the boxes rather than the goods. In 1956 an American trucking businessman, Malcolm McLean, sent a converted tanker carrying containers from New Jersey to Texas. The boxes could be lifted straight from a lorry onto the ship by crane, and the cost of loading fell dramatically.

C The idea spread only when the boxes became standard. At first, different companies used containers of different sizes, which could not be stacked together or handled by the same cranes. Agreement on a few standard sizes during the 1960s allowed any container to travel on any ship, train or lorry, and ports around the world invested in the cranes and storage yards needed to handle them.

D The effects reached far beyond the docks. Because moving goods became cheap and reliable, manufacturers could build parts in one country, assemble them in another and sell them in a third. Some economists argue that the container did more to expand world trade than many trade agreements. Port cities changed too: old docks near city centres were abandoned, and new container terminals were built on open land with deep water.

A Languages are always changing, and one of the clearest signs is the disappearance of words. Terms for tools and jobs that no longer exist fall out of use, while new words appear for new technology. But words also disappear for less obvious reasons, and linguists have found patterns in which ones survive.

B Frequency is one of the strongest influences. Words that people use often are remembered and repeated, so they resist change. This explains a curious feature of English verbs. The most common verbs, such as be, have and go, keep irregular past forms, while many rarer irregular verbs have gradually become regular. A speaker who seldom uses a verb is more likely to apply the usual rule and add an ending.

C Social factors matter as well. A word linked to a group that loses prestige may be dropped by speakers who want to sound modern, and a word that becomes associated with an unpleasant meaning may be avoided. Contact between languages also plays a part: when two languages meet, speakers often borrow words for things the other language describes well, and older native words may fade.

D Written records make it possible to track these changes over centuries. Large collections of digitised books allow researchers to count how often a word appears in each decade and to see when it began to decline. Such studies cannot explain every case, but they turn questions that once depended on impression into questions that can be measured.