IELTS General Training Reading — Test 01

Bramley Community Centre: Autumn Short Courses

A. Bread from Scratch

This course is for people who have already followed a recipe or two and now want to understand what is actually happening inside the dough. We look at how flour, water and time work together, and by the final session you will be shaping loaves without measuring anything at all. Every ingredient you will need is included in the fee.

B. Cooking for a Crowd

Feeding twelve people is not the same as feeding two. This course is built around the practical problems of scale — timing, oven space, and deciding what can safely be made the day before. Sessions are relaxed, and at the end of each one we sit down and eat together what we have just made.

C. Food Your Children Will Eat

Designed for parents and carers who are tired of cooking the same three meals. We concentrate on quick dishes with vegetables hidden in plain sight, and on simple recipes that children can help with. Several people who took this course have gone on to run cooking sessions at their own children's schools.

D. Silver Ring Making

Over four evenings you will make a ring from raw metal. No previous experience is assumed. Base metal is supplied, but anyone who wants to work in silver should expect to buy it separately at the desk. Please wear closed shoes.

E. Photographing People

This course covers portraits, groups and working in low light. The sessions move quickly, so attendees should make sure they have time to read the handouts we send out before the first evening.

F. Writing Short Fiction

Six evenings on structure, voice and the difficult business of finishing something. Writers who did not attend our introductory course are welcome to join, provided they already write regularly.

G. Watercolour Outdoors

We paint outside in all but the worst weather. Each week the group meets somewhere different — a canal path, a churchyard, the edge of the woods — and the exact place is sent out by text the evening before.

Northgate Climbing Centre

About us

Northgate wants to get more people off the sofa and onto the wall. We believe climbing suits almost anyone in town, whether that is a child, a parent with an hour to spare, or an older member looking for something gentler than the gym.

Our equipment

Every harness and every pair of shoes we lend out is checked and cleaned before it goes back on the shelf. We hire equipment in a full range of sizes, and the daily rate is the same whichever size you take. We are always glad to take in good-quality shoes you no longer use.

Courses

We run courses both here at the centre and at the schools and clubs that invite us to visit.

First Holds — a two-hour course covering how to tie in, how to move on easy ground and how to come down safely. Once you finish, you should have the basic skills needed to join an open session with greater confidence.

Moving Up — this six-hour course covers overhangs, resting positions and reading a route before you leave the ground. It suits climbers who have done First Holds or who already feel steady on the wall.

Groups are limited to eight learners. We use well-maintained hire equipment and thick landing mats, and the floor is swept every morning. There is a warm seating area with lockers where you can leave your own bags and coats. The building has step-free access throughout, with a gentle ramp at the entrance and a lift to the upper floor.

Membership

For £18 a month you can join the Northgate Club. Members may use the wall during one quiet weekday morning each week. If you love to climb but would rather practise away from the crowds, this is the club for you. Spare parts and reference manuals are available on hand, and a coach is usually around to give advice.

Getting the most from your first month in a new job

Before you start

Read everything the company sends you, then go further and look through its public announcements from the past year. Note the words the organisation uses about itself. Arriving with a rough map of the place already in your head will save you a fortnight of confusion.

The first week

Resist the urge to prove yourself immediately. Your first week is for listening, and the notes you take now will be worth more than any suggestion you could make in the first few days. Write down names, of course, but also write down the small routines that nobody ever thinks to explain.

Building relationships

Ask a colleague or your manager to introduce you to someone outside your own team within the first fortnight. People are far more willing to help a face they have met than a name at the bottom of an email.

Asking questions

There is a narrow window in which every question is acceptable, and it closes faster than most people expect. Ask now, and where you can, ask in writing — a written answer can be read again in six weeks, when you have forgotten it.

Knowing what success looks like

Before the end of your first month, ask your manager to describe what a good first six months would look like. Managers rarely volunteer this, and two people can work hard for a year on entirely different assumptions.

When something goes wrong

You will get something wrong. Say so early, say what you have already done about it, and move on. A mistake reported on the day it happens is an inconvenience; the same mistake found by somebody else three weeks later is a problem.

Asking how you are doing

Do not wait for a formal review. Ask for a short conversation at the end of week four, and ask one specific question rather than a general one.

Looking after yourself

A new job is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with the hours. Protect your sleep, keep one evening a week free, and do not agree to extra work in the first month simply because you feel you ought to.

How to become a freelance translator

A degree in languages is useful, but agencies want proof that you can deliver a usable text on time. There is no substitute for real work. Translate a newsletter for a local charity, subtitle a short film for a friend, or take on a menu for the restaurant at the end of your road. These small jobs are invaluable because they build the practical habits every working translator relies on — file formats, glossaries, and the discipline of a deadline.

Once those foundations are in place, you can begin looking for placements at agencies. These are generally short and often unpaid, but they are one of the very few ways to see how professional work is checked before it reaches a client.

Applying means putting together a three-part package: a portfolio, a CV and a covering letter. Your portfolio is the undisputed king of that package. Because you are only as good as your weakest piece, gather a small number of your best and most recent translations rather than everything you have ever produced.

Before you write anything, spend time on research into the agency. Being thorough helps you decide whether the work would suit you, and, more importantly, it tells you what to emphasise when you write.

Your CV should be short — a single page does the job — and it must be correct. A single error in a translator's CV is read as a statement about the quality of the work itself.

Finally, the covering letter. Adapt your tone to the agency's own, and above all make sure your enthusiasm for the job is visible.

The Pencil: A Short History of a Simple Tool

Sometime in the 1560s a storm brought down a large tree at Borrowdale, in the north-west of England, and exposed a black mineral underneath. Local shepherds found that it left a strong mark and began using lumps of it to identify their animals. The material was graphite, and the Borrowdale seam was remarkable for being pure enough to be sawn straight into sticks. No other deposit of the same quality was ever found anywhere in Europe.

The sticks were soft and left black fingers, so they were first wrapped in string or in strips of sheepskin, which were unwound as the point wore down. Italian makers later hollowed out lengths of juniper wood to hold them. Shortly afterwards came the method still in use today: two grooved halves of wood glued around a core, so that every modern pencil is in effect a sandwich.

England guarded the Borrowdale supply closely. Taking graphite out of the country was made a criminal offence, and between periods of working the mine was deliberately flooded so that nothing could be removed from it. Makers elsewhere in Europe had to manage with powdered graphite held together by gums and resins, which crumbled under any pressure.

The wars of the 1790s cut France off from English supplies altogether. In 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté mixed powdered graphite with clay and fired the mixture in a kiln. The discovery that mattered was the proportion: the more clay in the mixture, the harder the finished core and the paler the line it left behind. The H and B grades printed on pencils today descend directly from that experiment.

Large-scale production in the United States began considerably later. Red cedar from the southern states proved close to ideal, since it was straight-grained, sharpened cleanly and did not splinter. When those supplies ran short in the twentieth century, manufacturers turned to incense cedar from California, which has been the standard ever since.

The six-sided shape was not a decorative choice. A round pencil rolls off a sloping desk, and a hexagonal one can be cut from a block of wood with far less waste — three hexagonal pencils come out of the timber that would yield only two round ones. Carpenters' pencils are flat for exactly the same reason.

The rubber tip fixed to the end of a pencil was patented in the United States in 1858. The patent was later overturned on the grounds that it merely combined two existing objects without inventing anything new. It has remained largely an American habit; across much of Europe the eraser is still a separate object that lives somewhere at the bottom of the bag.

The Pencil: A Short History of a Simple Tool

Sometime in the 1560s a storm brought down a large tree at Borrowdale, in the north-west of England, and exposed a black mineral underneath. Local shepherds found that it left a strong mark and began using lumps of it to identify their animals. The material was graphite, and the Borrowdale seam was remarkable for being pure enough to be sawn straight into sticks. No other deposit of the same quality was ever found anywhere in Europe.

The sticks were soft and left black fingers, so they were first wrapped in string or in strips of sheepskin, which were unwound as the point wore down. Italian makers later hollowed out lengths of juniper wood to hold them. Shortly afterwards came the method still in use today: two grooved halves of wood glued around a core, so that every modern pencil is in effect a sandwich.

England guarded the Borrowdale supply closely. Taking graphite out of the country was made a criminal offence, and between periods of working the mine was deliberately flooded so that nothing could be removed from it. Makers elsewhere in Europe had to manage with powdered graphite held together by gums and resins, which crumbled under any pressure.

The wars of the 1790s cut France off from English supplies altogether. In 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté mixed powdered graphite with clay and fired the mixture in a kiln. The discovery that mattered was the proportion: the more clay in the mixture, the harder the finished core and the paler the line it left behind. The H and B grades printed on pencils today descend directly from that experiment.

Large-scale production in the United States began considerably later. Red cedar from the southern states proved close to ideal, since it was straight-grained, sharpened cleanly and did not splinter. When those supplies ran short in the twentieth century, manufacturers turned to incense cedar from California, which has been the standard ever since.

The six-sided shape was not a decorative choice. A round pencil rolls off a sloping desk, and a hexagonal one can be cut from a block of wood with far less waste — three hexagonal pencils come out of the timber that would yield only two round ones. Carpenters' pencils are flat for exactly the same reason.

The rubber tip fixed to the end of a pencil was patented in the United States in 1858. The patent was later overturned on the grounds that it merely combined two existing objects without inventing anything new. It has remained largely an American habit; across much of Europe the eraser is still a separate object that lives somewhere at the bottom of the bag.