Read the text and answer the question.
The arm of Liberty
Anonymous
The Statue of Liberty is probably the ______ icon of the
USA.
( ...) When the American Civil war ended, Édouard de
Laboulaye wanted to commemorate the end of the slave trade
with a gift. He and other people who opposed slavery raised
money and hired a sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, to
design the Statue. Bartholdi later employed the French
engineer, Gustave Eiffel, to devise its structure.
Eiffel designed the Statue to be built around a massive
metal skeleton, similar to the Eiffel Tower. In 2018, a map
dealer bought some historic papers at an auction in Paris,
which included original plans. After special treatment, the
papers clearly showed that Eiffel’s plans had been changed by
Bartholdi.
(...) We don’t know what Eiffel thought of Bartholdi’s
changes. By then, Eiffel was working on other projects, and
only his assistants were working with Bartholdi.
(...) At first, visitors could climb a ladder to the torch in
Liberty’s arm, but in 1916, there was an explosion on a
nearby island. It damaged the Statue and made it unsafe, and
the stairway to the torch has been closed ever since. During
restoration work in the 1980s, engineers noticed that the
structure inside Liberty’s head, shoulders, and arm were
different from how they were shown on Eiffel’s plans. They
thought that the builders had made mistakes, but some
historians believed that Bartholdi had changed Eiffel’s design.
The newly discovered papers confirm those theories.
Adapted from https://test-english.com/reading