IELTS Practice Test 13

Reading Passage: Hands On — The Case for Touching the Past

A For most of the twentieth century, the unwritten rule of the great public museums was simple: look, but do not touch. Glass cases, rope barriers and watchful attendants made it plain that the objects on display belonged to posterity rather than to the people standing in front of them. Today the most a visitor can usually hope for is a touchscreen showing an object turning slowly on its axis, a technology that is impressive in its way but tells the hand nothing. It is easy to forget how recent the rule is. Visitors to some of the earliest collections, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were routinely invited to lift items, weigh them in the hand and, in at least one recorded case, to sniff a preserved specimen. The hands-off culture arrived gradually, driven by rising visitor numbers and by a growing scientific understanding of how quickly many materials decay. My argument here is not that museums should return to the free-for-all of those early cabinets. It is that the pendulum has swung too far, and that visitors are now denied a kind of understanding that no label or screen can supply.

B Consider what is lost when an object can only be looked at. A medieval iron key seems unremarkable behind glass; held in the palm, its sheer weight announces that it was made to resist force, and that its owner had something worth guarding. A carved wooden bowl reveals under the fingertips the faint grooves left by the chisel that shaped it, marks that all but vanish under gallery lighting. Even temperature carries information: stone and metal feel cool against the skin in a way that wood and bone do not. None of these qualities can be captured in a photograph, however sharp. There is also some evidence that this kind of contact aids memory. In a trial run by the Calderwick Museum Learning Unit, visitors who handled replica tools recalled, a week later, roughly twice as many details about them as visitors who had only looked. I would not want to build a policy on a single trial with a few hundred participants. But the finding fits what teachers have long observed: people remember what they have done far better than what they have merely seen.

C The objections to handling are serious, and the most persuasive concerns conservation. Skin carries oils, salts and moisture, and repeated contact can tarnish metal, stain paper and gradually wear away surface detail. One conservator I spoke to compared a much-handled object to a stone step: no single footfall does visible harm, yet a few centuries of them leave a hollow. Light, damp and insects pose threats of their own, of course, but these can be controlled by the building; hands are harder to manage, because they belong to the visitors. This concern is well founded, and it would be irresponsible to wave it away. Yet it applies with very different force to different materials. A flint hand axe that has already survived hundreds of thousands of years is unlikely to suffer from a few thousand careful hands; a silk banner from the same museum's stores almost certainly would. A blanket ban treats these two objects as if they presented the same problem, and in doing so it protects the banner at the cost of locking away the axe.

D Fortunately, the choice is not between touching everything and touching nothing. A growing number of museums now maintain handling collections: sets of objects, often duplicates or items of uncertain origin, set aside specifically to be touched under supervision. Others offer replicas made by three-dimensional scanning and printing, which can reproduce an object's shape and surface texture with impressive accuracy, though not, as yet, its weight or temperature. These are welcome developments, but replicas have a limitation that no improvement in printing is likely to remove. In my experience, visitors are rarely moved by learning that the thing in their hands is a copy; much of the power of handling comes from knowing that someone in the distant past held the very same object. Gloves, often assumed to be the safe compromise, are less straightforward than they appear. Staff at several of the museums I visited now discourage cotton gloves for sturdy objects, because the fabric reduces grip and makes a dropped object more likely.

E What, then, would a sensible policy look like? To begin with, decisions about handling should be made object by object, on the basis of what each item is made of and how fragile it is, rather than by a single rule for the whole collection. Equally important, museums should tell visitors why particular objects must remain behind glass; an explanation turns a prohibition into part of the lesson. Some institutions have already shown what is possible: one regional museum I visited runs short handling sessions at the entrance to each gallery, so that a visitor meets a real object before seeing the rest behind glass. None of this will be cheap. Supervised sessions need trained staff or volunteers, and smaller museums in particular may find them hard to recruit. But the cost of doing nothing is real too: generation after generation of visitors who leave knowing what the past looked like, but with no idea of what it felt like.