IELTS General Training Reading practice test

From Monday 3 March, Glenmoor Library will open on different days and at different times while the upstairs reading room is repaired. The work is expected to take about ten weeks.

New opening hours
Monday: closed
Tuesday and Thursday: 9.30 am to 7 pm
Wednesday and Friday: 9.30 am to 5 pm
Saturday: 10 am to 4 pm
Sunday: closed

During the repairs, the reading room and the local history collection will not be open to the public. If you need to see an item from the local history collection, staff can arrange for it to be brought to the main hall, but please ask at least three working days in advance.

The children's corner on the ground floor is not affected, and Story Time will continue every Saturday at 11 am. Places are free but limited to fifteen children, so please book at the front desk.

Returning items
The outside return box will be closed for safety reasons while scaffolding is in place. Items can be returned at the front desk during opening hours or at Kelton Library, which is open seven days a week. No late fees will be charged for items due during the first week of the new timetable.

Computers and printing
The six public computers have moved to the main hall. Each person may use a computer for up to one hour per day; this can be extended if nobody is waiting. Printing costs 10p per page for black and white and 40p for colour.

We apologise for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Five places to hire a bicycle in and around Fernbridge.

• A
  Wheelhouse Cycles
  Right next to Fernbridge railway station, Wheelhouse has more than sixty comfortable hybrid bikes, ideal for town streets and gentle country lanes. Hire by the day or by the week. Every hire includes a helmet and a lock at no extra charge. Groups of four or more receive 15% off the total price. Open 8 am to 6 pm every day. Please bring photo ID.
• B
  Fernbridge Electric Rides
  Let the battery do the hard work! Our electric bikes can travel up to 80 km on a single charge, so you can explore the hills without getting tired. Riders must be at least 18. All bikes must be reserved on our website at least 24 hours before you want to ride, as we cannot offer walk-in hires. Helmets can be hired for £3 a day. Collect your bike from our stand in Market Square, or pay a small extra charge to have it delivered to your hotel.
• C
  Tandem & Co.
  Something for the whole family. As well as tandems for two adults, we hire bikes with child seats and covered trailers that can carry two small children. Every customer receives a free map of the riverside path, a flat, traffic-free route that is perfect for young riders. Open Tuesday to Sunday.
• D
  Hillside Bike Barn
  Five kilometres outside town at the foot of Castle Hill, we specialise in mountain bikes. Experienced riders can join our guided rides every Saturday and Sunday, led by a local guide who knows every trail. Brought your own bike? Our mechanics can carry out most repairs while you wait. On Saturdays, a free minibus runs every hour from the railway station to the Barn.
• E
  The Pedal Library
  A community project run by volunteers, who repair donated bikes and lend them to anyone who needs one. There is no fixed price: simply pay what you can afford. Bikes can be borrowed for up to one month, the longest hire period in town. First-time borrowers must attend a short safety talk, held every Wednesday evening.

Please read this guide before your induction session. Each section has a letter so that your supervisor can refer to it.

• A
  All new kitchen staff must complete our online food hygiene course before their first shift. The course takes about three hours and can be done at home or on one of the computers in the staff room. Print your certificate and bring it with you on your first day, together with your completed bank details form. Your supervisor will give you two sets of uniform, which you are responsible for keeping clean.
• B
  Wash your hands before you start work, after every break, after handling raw meat or rubbish, and after touching your face or your phone. Use the sinks marked 'hand wash only'; the other sinks are for food and equipment. Rings with stones, watches and bracelets must be removed before you enter the kitchen, although a plain wedding ring is acceptable. Long hair must be tied back and covered with the hat provided.
• C
  If you have had sickness or diarrhoea, you must not come to work. Phone your supervisor before the start of your shift rather than sending a text message, and do not return until you have been free of symptoms for 48 hours. Cuts and burns must be covered with a blue plaster, which is easy to see if it falls into food.
• D
  Raw meat and fish go on the bottom shelves of the fridge so that juices cannot drip onto other food. Everything that is opened or prepared must be labelled with the date and your initials. Prepared food is kept for a maximum of three days and then thrown away, even if it looks and smells fine. Fridge temperatures are checked twice a day and written on the sheet on the door.
• E
  Customers will often ask whether a dish contains nuts, milk or other ingredients that can cause allergic reactions. Never guess, and never tell a customer that a dish is 'probably fine'. Check the allergen folder kept next to the serving counter, or ask the chef on duty. If neither is available, explain to the customer that you cannot be sure.
• F
  Clean as you go rather than leaving everything until the end of service. Use the red cloths for raw meat areas and the green cloths for everything else, and put used cloths in the laundry bin, not back in the sink. At the end of each shift, the most senior person in the kitchen checks the work areas and signs the cleaning checklist.

At Hollis Bay Hotels we know that many of our employees have responsibilities outside work, and we try to offer flexible arrangements wherever the needs of the business allow.

Who can apply
Any employee who has completed their three-month probation period may make a request. Agency staff and employees on contracts of less than six months are not covered by this policy, but they are welcome to discuss their hours informally with their manager.

What you can ask for
Common arrangements include:
- working part-time or sharing a job with a colleague;
- compressed hours, for example working full-time hours over four days instead of five;
- changing your start and finish times;
- working from home on some days (office-based roles only; this is not possible for staff in housekeeping, kitchens or reception).

How to apply
Complete the flexible working request form, which is available from the staff room or from Human Resources, and give it to your line manager. Explain the change you would like and when you would like it to start, and say how you think any effects on your team could be managed. Your manager will arrange a meeting with you within ten working days to discuss the request. You may bring a colleague to this meeting if you wish.

The decision
You will receive a written decision within four weeks of the meeting. If your request is approved, the new arrangement may begin with a trial period, usually of eight weeks, after which it will be reviewed. A request may be refused for business reasons, such as an unreasonable extra cost or not having enough staff available at busy times. If your request is refused, you can appeal in writing to the Human Resources manager within seven days of receiving the decision.

Please note that you may make only one request in any twelve-month period.

How a lost noise in a grandfather's workshop led to a collection of thousands of recordings.

• A
  Most of us can picture the places where we grew up, but how many of us can remember what they sounded like? The rattle of a particular letterbox, the bell above the door of a corner shop, the hiss of a bus pulling away from the kerb: such sounds fill our days, yet they disappear without anyone noticing, replaced by new machines and new routines. For Hannah Moorcroft, a sound engineer from the northern town of Lindale, the moment of realisation came in the spring of 2014. Clearing out her late grandfather's workshop, she found the old wood lathe on which he had made chairs and toys for most of his life. The machine no longer worked, and as she stood looking at it, she understood that she could no longer recall the noise it had made, a noise that had been the background to every childhood visit. "I had photographs of the workshop, and even some of his tools," she says, "but the sound had simply gone. Nobody had thought to keep it."
• B
  Within a month, Moorcroft had begun recording. At first she worked alone, capturing the sounds of her own street, but she soon persuaded an old school friend, the librarian Owen Petrakis, to help her turn the hobby into something more organised. Together they founded the Lindale Sound Archive and invited local people to contribute. Their rules were few but strict. Every recording had to last at least thirty seconds and had to begin with a short spoken introduction giving the date, the time and the exact location. Contributors were asked not to record anyone's voice without that person's permission, and not to edit the sound in any way, so that listeners would hear exactly what the recorder had heard.
• C
  The response surprised them both. In the first year, around four hundred recordings arrived, most of them made on mobile phones. Petrakis, who catalogues every contribution, sorted them into four broad groups: transport, work, home and what he calls "the town's own noises", such as church bells, market traders and the wind in a particular alley. By the archive's tenth anniversary, the collection had grown to more than nine thousand recordings, and contributions were arriving from towns and villages well beyond Lindale. The website, which lets anyone listen free of charge, now has visitors from around the world, many of them former residents looking for the sounds of home.
• D
  Some of the most unexpected uses of the archive have come from outside the world of history. A theatre company borrowed dozens of recordings for a play set in a factory in the 1970s, and a primary school uses them in lessons about how the town has changed. Perhaps the most moving use, however, has been in care homes. Grace Adeyemi, who manages a home for elderly people in a nearby village, began playing recordings to residents during afternoon activities. She noticed that people who rarely joined in conversations would often respond to a familiar sound, such as a steam train or a school bell, by telling stories from their own lives. "It isn't a cure for anything," she says, "but for half an hour, people are talking to each other again."
• E
  Running the archive has not been without its difficulties. Many recordings arrive with so much wind or traffic noise that the main sound can hardly be heard, and these have to be returned to the contributor with advice on how to try again. Music causes another problem: if a radio is playing in the background, the recording may break copyright rules, so it must either be shortened to remove the music or rejected altogether. The biggest challenge, though, is money. Storing thousands of high-quality sound files is surprisingly expensive, and the archive relies on small grants and donations from listeners. Most of the work is still done by volunteers, many of whom are now in their seventies.
• F
  Not everyone is convinced that the project is valuable. The cultural historian Dr Felix Raine has argued that sound archives of this kind tend to be nostalgic, keeping the comforting noises of the past, such as birdsong and church bells, while ignoring the less pleasant ones. "We risk creating a soundtrack of a town that never really existed," he wrote in a recent article. Moorcroft accepts that the danger is real but insists that the archive tries hard to avoid it. Volunteers are actively encouraged to record roadworks, car alarms and rubbish lorries. "In a hundred years," she says, "people will want to know what a town really sounded like, not just the nice parts."
• G
  The founders now have ambitious plans. They are building an online map on which each recording will be pinned to the place where it was made, so that listeners can hear how a single street has changed over the years. A project with three local secondary schools will train pupils to record their own neighbourhoods, and Petrakis hopes that this will bring a new generation of volunteers into the archive. For Moorcroft, however, the aim remains the same as it was in her grandfather's workshop. "Every sound we record," she says, "is one that someone, someday, will be glad we kept."