GT IELTS Collection 1 Reading Test 17

Heritage and community gardens in Elderbrook

A. Wendle Heritage Plot

This carefully recreated Victorian kitchen garden lets visitors step back into the past. Wander among the beds and take in the old-fashioned atmosphere of a garden cultivated in Victorian times. Here you can see the kinds of vegetables local gardeners would have grown in that period. Freshly baked cakes are sold from a converted potting shed.

B. Marsh Lane Garden

There is something to enjoy at Marsh Lane in every season. In spring, for instance, visitors can watch bees flying between the flowers from the warmth of the glasshouse. Friendly volunteer guides give short talks or lead tours around the garden. The meeting room may also be booked for gardening workshops, local group meetings or small private events.

C. Old Rectory Garden

Old Rectory Garden is a large walled garden, maintained much as it would have been two hundred years ago. Take time to admire the herb borders and visit the original glasshouse, where a collection of period gardening tools is displayed. Pruning demonstrations are given in a separate demonstration area at weekends. Younger visitors can enjoy the lawn, where families are welcome to have picnics.

D. Pickett Allotment

Pickett Allotment is the plot once cultivated by Martha Pickett, a well-known twentieth-century rose breeder. The garden contains one of the country’s largest collections of her rose varieties. Visitors can also see Pickett’s tool shed and some of the original gardening tools she used in her daily work.

E. Far Acre Glasshouse

At Far Acre, we have opened a new walk-through display called Warm Lands. Here visitors can look closely at many plants from the arid regions of southern Africa and read about conservation projects working to protect these threatened species.

F. Tadwell Children’s Garden

This is an ideal place for families. Children can visit the play barn and join in games led by staff dressed in the clothes worn by gardeners. They can also handle child-safe replicas of the simple gardening tools used a hundred years ago, and try the wooden toys children played with them.

Learning to scuba-dive

What is scuba diving?

Scuba diving is a way of staying underwater for extended periods, but instead of holding your breath as a snorkeller does at the surface, you breathe air stored in a metal cylinder. The cylinder sits on your back and feeds air to a mouthpiece through a regulator and hose. Divers say this arrangement feels surprisingly freeing, since you can move below the surface rather than diving down briefly and returning straight away.

Is it risky?

Like rock climbing and caving, scuba diving involves risks that can be reduced through proper training and careful practice. One reassuring point is that you are taught to descend and ascend slowly, so when something feels wrong, there is usually time to stop, signal your buddy and follow the correct procedure calmly.

Where do I train?

Plenty of centres run courses, mostly at inland lakes or flooded quarries, and others on the coast near attractive reefs. Coastal sites draw people in, although unfamiliar currents and changing conditions can make nervous beginners cautious! Over a few days, instructors teach you to clear your mask, equalise the pressure in your ears and maintain your buoyancy at a steady depth. They mix calm pool sessions, supervised dives in open water and classroom theory so you develop the skills properly. Reaching your entry-level certificate may take several days; after that you may dive with a buddy at suitable sites within the limits of your training.

What kit do I need?

Divers usually wear a wetsuit to stay warm, plus fins to move easily through the water. For the rest, centres often provide or hire out masks, regulators and cylinders during training. Even so, you may want to buy some of your own gear later, and you can judge it far better once the course has let you try a few types out.

Who can take it up?

There is generally no fixed upper age if you are medically fit to dive, but the youngest age at which anyone may begin varies between training organisations. People who are comfortable in the water and medically fit tend to take to it well. It can feel like a fairly gentle pursuit in calm conditions, because you move along slowly rather than rushing about. You may ache afterwards in places you rarely notice, though much of that can come from carrying heavy kit on land before you reach the water. Diving opens up a quiet world few people ever see. We look forward to welcoming you below the surface!

Riverside Media Group: Marketing Manager

Riverside Media Group provides a wide range of marketing and communications services for clients across the retail and hospitality sectors in and around the region. It delivers digital advertising campaigns and social media management, and it maintains a portfolio of long-standing client accounts, some of which are available for junior team members to co-manage. The Group also arranges a number of promotional events, including product launches bringing together clients and press from both the local area and further afield. Riverside provides creative and analytical support for the in-house design studio, which collaborates with freelance artists and produces client materials.

Riverside Media Group is seeking to recruit a Marketing Manager to manage the marketing function and build on the success of the agency. We are looking for an individual with a passion for delivering the best possible results for the benefit of our clients.

As the Marketing Manager, you will be responsible for managing the marketing and financial systems of the agency, ensuring it does not exceed its targets, which are currently around £1.5m a year. You will take the lead on business development and ensuring the generation of new revenue. The Group is involved in several partnerships with clients and with retail, hospitality, and media organisations in the region, and you will be expected to increase the number and scope of these, as well as take the lead in pitching for new accounts. The agency recently embarked on a programme to refine its campaign approach across digital and traditional channels, and you will be required to further develop the emphasis on analytics in this project.

You will need to improve systems for ensuring that the records of the agency's campaigns are accurate and maintain a database of all clients, campaigns, and creative assets belonging to the Group.

The person appointed will have experience of a supervisory role and the skills to motivate members of a team. You will have an understanding of budgeting, at a non-specialist level, and of standard financial procedures. High-level digital and analytics skills and excellent verbal and written communication skills are essential. Although experience in a media agency is not crucial, good knowledge of the field, or of other areas of marketing management, would be an advantage.

Health and safety in the construction industry

The rate of serious accidents and fatalities in the construction industry is among the highest of any sector. One possible reason is the inherently high-risk nature of the work, made worse by inconsistent safety practices across different sites and projects.

A lot of construction workers say their jobs are made tougher by constant pressure to save time and money. When deadlines are tight and funds are stretched, safety tends to slip down the priority list, since the main goal becomes getting the work done fast and on the cheap.

A further problem is that many workers are simply not aware of the hazards of their work. A large proportion of the workforce is temporary, subcontracted, or employed only for the duration of a single project. Combined with language barriers and high staff turnover, this makes it difficult to deliver consistent training and to build up shared safe habits.

The Health and Safety Executive argues that the transient, project-based nature of construction work should be recognised, with an emphasis on education and building a genuine safety culture, rather than simply on penalties. For instance, inspectors could make site managers aware of the key hazards that really matter, rather than overwhelming them with generic paperwork that may not apply to their particular site.

Improvements are being made, however. The Health and Safety Executive has issued free guidance on the most important construction safety laws. All sites must have their own health and safety plan and, for projects lasting longer than 30 working days (or involving more than 500 person-days of work), this must be in writing. It should be specific to the site and clear about the arrangements for and organisation of health and safety on the project.

The plan should state a safety strategy, detail how it will be implemented and by whom, and say when it will be reviewed and updated as the project progresses. It is advisable to involve workers in this process, as they have direct experience of the hazards on site.

Assessing and identifying site risks is the starting point. But to comply with the law, firms must train their workers about the hazards and safe procedures, and provide information to others who need to know, such as the subcontractors working for them. These are often smaller firms that carry out most of the dangerous tasks. Helping them to get into good safety habits makes it easier for them to win contracts from larger firms.

Other advice from the Health and Safety Executive for the construction industry tackles specific issues, such as helping companies deal with construction dust by following three main steps: suppressing dust at the source, capturing it in the air, and containing it on the site.

Golden textile headings

A. Experimenting with an old idea

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after reading about French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them; the spiders were briefly restrained, their silk collected, then released. Peers built a replica of this 24-spider ‘silking’ machine, said co-leader Nicholas Godley. As a test, the pair collected about 20 spiders. ‘When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-coloured silk started coming out,’ Godley recalled.

B. Resources needed to meet the project's demands

To make a textile of any significant size, the scale had to increase dramatically. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the finished textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. By the end, handlers had worked with more than one million female golden-orb spiders—abundant in Madagascar and famed for their golden thread. Because the spiders produce silk only in the rainy season, all were collected between October and June. An additional 12 workers used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and twist it into 96-filament yarn. After ‘silking’, the spiders were released; within a week they regenerated their silk, allowing the same individuals to be used again—‘the gift that never stops giving,’ said Godley.

C. The physical properties of spider silk

Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric, chemically related to nylon, that is used in bullet-proof vests. Kevlar is resistant to wear, tear and heat and has virtually no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar’s aramid filaments and higher than that of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). It is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 percent of its length without breaking and to retain its strength below -40 °C, giving it toughness equal to that of leading commercial fibres.

D. Why artificial spider silk remains out of reach

Spending four years to produce a single piece of cloth is hardly practical for scientists or companies hoping to exploit spider silk in biomedicine or as a Kevlar alternative. Several groups have inserted spider genes into bacteria and even goats to make silk, but results have been only partly successful. One reason is that spider silk begins as a liquid protein produced in a special gland in the abdomen. Using the spinneret, the spider applies force that rearranges the protein’s molecular structure, transforming it into solid fibre. ‘When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how it applies forces to convert liquid to solid,’ explained spider-silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in the project. ‘Every year we get closer to mass production, but we’re not there yet.’ For now, we must be content with one extraordinarily beautiful cloth—courtesy of more than a million spiders.

E. A unique work of art

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce this golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden-orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot-by-4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk in the world today.

F. Difficulties of raising spiders in captivity

Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass-produce. Unlike silkworms—easy to raise in captivity—spiders have a habit of biting off each other’s heads when housed together. According to Peers, there is intensive research worldwide aimed at replicating spider-silk tensile properties for use in medicine and industry, but no one has yet reproduced all the qualities of natural silk.

Researchers

A. Simon Peers

B. Nicholas Godley

C. Todd Blackledge

A unique golden textile

A two-man project to use spider silk is achieved after 4 years

A.

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce this golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden-orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot-by-4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk in the world today.

B.

Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric, chemically related to nylon, that is used in bullet-proof vests. Kevlar is resistant to wear, tear and heat and has virtually no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar’s aramid filaments and higher than that of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). It is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 percent of its length without breaking and to retain its strength below -40 °C, giving it toughness equal to that of leading commercial fibres.

C.

Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass-produce. Unlike silkworms—easy to raise in captivity—spiders have a habit of biting off each other’s heads when housed together. According to Peers, there is intensive research worldwide aimed at replicating spider-silk tensile properties for use in medicine and industry, but no one has yet reproduced all the qualities of natural silk.

D.

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after reading about French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them; the spiders were briefly restrained, their silk collected, then released. Peers built a replica of this 24-spider ‘silking’ machine, said co-leader Nicholas Godley. As a test, the pair collected about 20 spiders. ‘When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-coloured silk started coming out,’ Godley recalled.

E.

To make a textile of any significant size, the scale had to increase dramatically. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the finished textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. By the end, handlers had worked with more than one million female golden-orb spiders—abundant in Madagascar and famed for their golden thread. Because the spiders produce silk only in the rainy season, all were collected between October and June. An additional 12 workers used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and twist it into 96-filament yarn. After ‘silking’, the spiders were released; within a week they regenerated their silk, allowing the same individuals to be used again—‘the gift that never stops giving,’ said Godley.

F.

Spending four years to produce a single piece of cloth is hardly practical for scientists or companies hoping to exploit spider silk in biomedicine or as a Kevlar alternative. Several groups have inserted spider genes into bacteria and even goats to make silk, but results have been only partly successful. One reason is that spider silk begins as a liquid protein produced in a special gland in the abdomen. Using the spinneret, the spider applies force that rearranges the protein’s molecular structure, transforming it into solid fibre. ‘When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how it applies forces to convert liquid to solid,’ explained spider-silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in the project. ‘Every year we get closer to mass production, but we’re not there yet.’ For now, we must be content with one extraordinarily beautiful cloth—courtesy of more than a million spiders.