IELTS Academic Reading — Practice Test 21

The Italian city of Venice receives some thirty million visitors a year, yet fewer than fifty thousand people now live in its historic centre. On the busiest days the narrow streets are so crowded that residents struggle to reach the shops or the doctor, and in 2024 the city began charging day-trippers an entry fee in an attempt to thin the crowds. Venice is only the most famous example of what has come to be called overtourism: the point at which the number of visitors to a place begins to damage the quality of life of those who live there, or the very things the visitors came to see. Similar complaints have been heard in Barcelona, Dubrovnik and Amsterdam, where residents have staged protests and local governments have scrambled to respond.

It would be easy, faced with such scenes, to forget how much tourism gives. The industry accounts for roughly a tenth of the world's economic output and a similar share of its jobs, and for many countries it is the single largest earner of foreign currency. In parts of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and South-East Asia, whole regions depend on the money that visitors bring; hotels, restaurants, taxi drivers, guides and craft sellers all draw their living from it. For a developing economy with few other exports, a beach or an ancient ruin can be a more dependable source of income than any factory. Those who defend mass tourism argue, not unreasonably, that the jobs it creates lift families out of poverty in places where alternatives are scarce.

What changed in recent decades was the sheer scale and speed of travel. Budget airlines made a weekend in a distant city cheaper than a night out at home; cruise ships grew into floating towns that disgorge thousands of passengers into a small port within a single morning; and social media turned particular views and cafes into destinations in their own right, as travellers arrived chiefly to photograph a scene that others had already made famous. A place that had taken generations to build its reputation could now be overwhelmed within a few years of going 'viral'.

The costs of this influx fall unevenly. The most bitterly resented is the effect on housing: when flats can earn more as short-term holiday lets than as ordinary homes, landlords convert them, and long-standing residents find themselves priced out of the neighbourhoods their families have occupied for generations. Shops that once sold groceries give way to souvenir stalls, and a living city can start to feel like a stage set maintained for the benefit of outsiders — a process critics have labelled 'Disneyfication'. The people who bear these burdens are frequently not the same people who collect the profits, and this mismatch lies at the heart of local anger.

There is an environmental dimension too. Fragile historic pavements wear away under millions of feet; coral reefs are damaged by boats and sunscreen; and small islands with limited fresh water must divert it to hotels while local supplies run short. Rubbish piles up faster than it can be removed, and the emissions from the flights and ships that carry the visitors add to the wider problem of a warming climate. The very landscapes and monuments that draw the crowds are, in many cases, being slowly degraded by them.

Faced with mounting discontent, authorities have reached for a variety of remedies, and here opinions sharply divide. Some cities have imposed a tourist tax, charging each visitor a nightly fee; supporters say the revenue can repair the damage crowds cause, while sceptics counter that a small levy does nothing to reduce numbers and merely raises money. Others have tried firmer limits — capping the number of cruise ships, banning new hotels, or restricting short-term rentals — measures that residents' groups tend to welcome but that local businesses often resist, warning of lost income. Economists, for their part, frequently favour higher prices over outright bans, on the grounds that a cap wastes the value that eager visitors would willingly have paid; residents reply that some things should not simply go to whoever can pay the most.

Most observers now accept that the answer is not to end tourism but to manage it more thoughtfully. Spreading visitors across the calendar, so that the summer crush is eased by an autumn and winter trade, can help; so can steering them towards lesser-known towns that would welcome the custom the famous sites can no longer absorb. What almost everyone agrees on is that treating visitor numbers as a figure to be maximised, without regard to who benefits and who pays, is no longer tenable. Tourism, handled well, remains one of the surest ways for a community to prosper; handled badly, it can hollow out the very place that made it attractive in the first place.

Consider the person you were at the age of five. Almost nothing physical remains of that child: the body has replaced most of its cells many times over, grown to several times its former size, and will one day be older still. The child's beliefs, tastes and memories have likewise been overwritten, some beyond recovery. And yet you do not doubt that the five-year-old was you — the same individual, not merely a predecessor. What, if anything, justifies that conviction? The question is older than philosophy itself, and the ancient puzzle of a ship whose planks are replaced one by one, until none of the original timber remains, captures its difficulty: at what point, if any, does a thing that changes gradually become a different thing altogether?

One natural answer points to the body. You are the same person as the five-year-old, it says, because you are the same living organism, a single biological creature persisting through time even as its parts are exchanged, much as a river remains one river though no drop of water stays in it. This view has the merit of simplicity, and it fits the way we ordinarily identify people — by their faces and their physical presence. But it faces awkward cases. If a person's brain could be transplanted into a new body, most of us feel that the person would go where the brain went, not where the old body remained; and that intuition suggests it is not the organism as such that we truly care about, but something the brain carries with it.

That something, according to a tradition reaching back to the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, is psychological continuity, and in particular memory. What makes you identical to the five-year-old, on this account, is that you are linked to that child by an unbroken chain of overlapping mental states: you can remember experiences from later childhood, which connected in turn to earlier ones, and so on back. A person, Locke suggested, is not fundamentally a body or even a soul but a continuous consciousness, capable of reflecting on itself and of recalling its own past. Where such continuity is present, he held, personal identity follows; where it is wholly absent, so is the person.

Locke's theory is elegant, but critics soon exposed its weaknesses. The philosopher Thomas Reid offered a famous objection. Imagine an elderly general who remembers, as a young officer, being flogged for stealing apples as a boy; the officer in turn remembers the theft, but the general has entirely forgotten it. By Locke's rule the general is the same person as the officer, and the officer the same as the boy, and yet the general is not the same person as the boy — a contradiction, since identity ought to be a relation that carries all the way through. Others pointed to a deeper circularity: to say that identity consists in genuine memory seems to assume the very thing it sets out to explain, for a genuine memory just is a memory of one's own past experience.

Later philosophers, most influentially Derek Parfit, sought to repair the theory rather than abandon it. Memory, they argued, is only one strand of a broader psychological continuity that also includes persisting beliefs, intentions, desires and traits of character. Identity need not require that any single memory reach all the way back; it is enough that there be overlapping chains of such connections, each link short but the whole rope continuous, in the way the fibres of a thread overlap without any one fibre running its entire length. Reid's general is thus tied to the boy not by a single direct memory but by a series of intermediate stages, each closely connected to the next.

Parfit, however, pressed the argument to a startling conclusion. Once identity has been analysed into degrees of psychological connectedness, he suggested, it begins to look less important than we had assumed. Consider a machine that could scan your body, destroy it, and construct an exact replica on Mars, complete with all your memories and intentions. Would the person on Mars be you, or merely a perfect copy of someone now dead? Parfit's provocative answer was that the question may have no determinate answer, and — more unsettling still — that it need not matter. What we rationally care about, he argued, is that someone in the future should carry on our projects and remember our lives; whether that someone is, strictly speaking, identical to us is a further question that, on reflection, loses its grip. Identity, he concluded, is 'not what matters'.

Not everyone is willing to follow him so far. Some philosophers insist that identity matters enormously, precisely because so much of ordinary life presupposes it. We hold people responsible for deeds committed years earlier; we keep promises made by an earlier self; we save for a retirement that only a later self will enjoy. All of this assumes a single continuing person to whom praise, blame and prudent concern properly attach, and a theory that dissolves the self into a sequence of loosely related stages threatens to make such practices unintelligible. A rival tradition, older in the East than in the West and echoed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, embraces exactly that dissolution: there is, on this view, no unchanging self to be found, only a bundle of fleeting experiences that the mind knits together into the convenient fiction of a person. Whether that fiction is an illusion to be seen through or an indispensable framework for a human life is, perhaps, the deepest form the question can take — and one on which the philosophers remain as divided as ever.