Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
138 
Exercise 74: Reading to get ideas 
You shouldn't think that reading practice is only useful for the reading test. Reading 
articles in newspapers, magazines or online is also a great way to improve your 
vocabulary knowledge and collect ideas for the writing and speaking tests. 
For example, a recent question in the writing test asked whether or not it's useful to 
study history. I did a quick search online and found this article: 
You don't need to read the full article, but it would be useful to note down some of the 
main ideas. Can you find 3 arguments against studying history, and 3 reasons why we 
should study it? 
(Why study history, Next Page) 
Why Study History? 
By Peter N. Stearns 
People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, 
is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present 
and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the 
desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American 
educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to 
study even more history than they are required to? 
Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth 
attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—
attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. 
But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why 
to bother need to know what the purpose is. 
Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest 
criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, 
the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or 
medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of 
historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem 
from some other disciplines. 
In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For 
instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because 
earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish 
the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the 

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