C2 Multiple-choice Reading Practice (Free)

Original, independent teaching material. No account needed. The result counts correct answers in this sample, not exam marks.

Visitors to the city museum often stop before a wooden chair whose damaged seat has deliberately been left unrepaired. Its label describes the marks of ordinary use as evidence of a life beyond the museum. Nearby, a much older ceremonial chair gleams beneath carefully adjusted lighting, its missing ornament replaced by a modern craftsperson. Neither treatment is concealed. Yet people frequently assume that the first object is more authentic because less appears to have been done to it. The contrast reveals an attractive but troublesome conviction: that an object speaks most truthfully when we leave it alone.

I once shared that conviction. As a trainee conservator, I associated restraint with intellectual honesty and an immaculate surface with institutional vanity. Experience complicated the opposition. A layer of grime can obscure marks that would tell us how a tool was held; removing it may recover evidence rather than erase it. Conversely, polishing a vessel to match a curator’s idea of its original splendour may eliminate traces of later ownership. The decisive question is not whether intervention occurs, but which history the intervention makes legible and which it renders harder to investigate. There is no neutral quantity called ‘less’ that settles that question in advance.

The chair’s unrepaired seat makes a persuasive exhibit because visitors can recognise the significance of wear. With an unfamiliar object, however, an equally restrained treatment may communicate almost nothing. A cracked fragment accompanied only by its date can make the past seem remote rather than richly ambiguous. Interpretation is then essential, but it too selects. A diagram showing how fragments once formed a vessel directs attention towards original design; an account of their excavation directs it towards a much later encounter. Both may be accurate. The difficulty lies in presenting one route into the object as though it were the object’s entire story.

This is not an argument for overwhelming every display with competing accounts. When we redesigned a small exhibition of domestic metalwork, we tried precisely that approach, appending every plausible interpretation to every label. Visitors read diligently for a few minutes and then stopped reading altogether. Our conscientious accumulation of qualifications had become another obstacle to understanding. We eventually chose one clearly stated account for each object, with a visible indication of uncertainty and access to the evidence behind it. The account was necessarily selective; unlike the earlier abundance, it allowed readers to see where its boundaries lay and decide whether to look further.

Some colleagues worry that making uncertainty conspicuous undermines a museum’s authority. I suspect the greater danger is authority that cannot survive a sensible question. During the metalwork exhibition, a visitor challenged our identification of a device as a kitchen tool. Her alternative was not ultimately convincing, but explaining why required us to articulate assumptions that had remained implicit in our internal discussions. We changed the label, not because her identification had won, but because our reasoning had become clearer. Public challenge can improve an account without displacing its conclusion; a correction to the argument is not always a reversal of the finding.

Resources inevitably constrain these ambitions. Recording every conservation decision, preserving removed material and explaining uncertainty take time, and small institutions cannot pursue all three without limits. Nonetheless, scarcity is not a reason to describe an unrecorded decision as non-intervention. Even choosing to leave a chair exposed in a gallery changes its future: light, dust and visitors’ expectations become part of its history. A modest record of what was considered and why one course was chosen may be more valuable to a future researcher than an ambitious declaration that the object has been kept untouched. Honesty need not require an exhaustive archive, but it does require acknowledging choice.

What, then, should we ask of the apparently untouched chair? Not that it grant direct access to a vanished household, unmediated by the institution that displays it. Its power lies in a more demanding relationship: it offers material evidence while inviting scrutiny of the decisions through which that evidence reaches us. The polished ceremonial chair can sustain the same relationship if its reconstruction is explained. Authenticity, in this sense, is neither a surface finish nor a reward for doing the least. It is a commitment to making our dealings with inherited objects sufficiently accountable that another person can question them.

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