IELTS Reading Practice Test: One Passage, Thirteen Questions

There is an object that almost every manufactured thing in the world has stood on, and almost nobody can describe. It is a flat wooden platform, roughly the size of a door laid down, with gaps in the top so that the forks of a lift truck can slide underneath. It is called a pallet. Estimates of how many are in circulation vary enormously, but the number is measured in billions, and a substantial proportion of them are moving at any given moment. The pallet is the least glamorous piece of infrastructure in modern trade and, arguably, one of the most consequential.

To understand why, it helps to consider how goods were loaded before it existed. A ship was filled by hand, item by item, in a practice known as break-bulk. Sacks, barrels, crates and bales were carried aboard by gangs of dockworkers and stacked into the hold in whatever arrangement the shape of the cargo and the shape of the vessel allowed. It was skilled work and it was extraordinarily slow. A vessel could spend as long in port being loaded and unloaded as it spent at sea, and the labour of moving cargo across the dock accounted for a large share of what it cost to ship anything anywhere. The bottleneck in world trade was not the ocean. It was the quayside.

The pallet and the forklift truck arrived together, and neither is much use without the other. Both spread rapidly during the Second World War, when armies discovered that the ability to move a tonne of supplies in a single lift, rather than in forty separate carries, was worth a great deal. Loading times fell by figures that seem implausible until the arithmetic is done: a job that had occupied a gang for most of a day could be finished by two people in under an hour. The military kept the practice after the war, and the industries that had supplied the military kept it too. Nothing about the idea was patented in any meaningful sense, which is one reason it spread as fast as it did.

What did not spread was agreement about size. A pallet is only efficient if it fits the thing above it and the thing below it — the lorry bed, the shipping container, the warehouse racking, the doorway — and different countries had standardised those things first, in different dimensions. The result is that several incompatible pallet sizes are in wide use today, each perfectly rational within the system that produced it, and each an obstacle at the boundary between systems. Attempts to impose a single global standard have been made repeatedly and have failed every time, for a reason that has nothing to do with engineering: the cost of changing falls entirely on whoever changes, and the benefit is shared by everyone.

A second problem is subtler and more interesting. A pallet is worth something, and once it has been unloaded it is in the wrong place. Somebody has to get it back. If the manufacturer buys pallets and ships them out with the goods, the pallets accumulate at the retailer, who has no use for them and no incentive to return them. The industry’s answer was pooling: a third company owns the pallets, hires them to whoever needs one, and takes responsibility for collecting them again. It sounds like an administrative detail and it is in fact the whole economics of the object, because it converts a disposable cost into a rented asset — and, more importantly, it gives one organisation a reason to care about where every pallet is. The empty return journey does not disappear. It becomes somebody's business rather than nobody's problem.

The current argument is about materials. Wooden pallets are cheap, repairable and made from a renewable resource, but they absorb moisture, they can carry pests across borders, and they are heavy. Plastic pallets are lighter, washable and consistent to within a few millimetres, which matters a great deal to automated warehouses that cannot see. They are also considerably more expensive, harder to repair, and — the point on which the argument usually turns — worth stealing. A wooden pallet that goes missing is a nuisance. A plastic one that goes missing is a theft, and the systems built to prevent it cost more than the difference in the pallets. Neither material has won, and the likeliest outcome is that neither will.