IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 10

SECTION 1 — Questions 1–14

Read the text below and answer Questions 1–7.

Rexley Tool Library: How It Works

What is the Tool Library?
Most people only use a drill for a few minutes a year, so why buy one? The Rexley Tool Library lends out more than 600 tools and other useful items, from hammers and ladders to carpet cleaners and tents. All our items have been donated by local people.

Joining
Membership is open to anyone aged 18 or over who lives in Rexley or the surrounding villages. To join, come to the library with photo ID and proof of your address. Membership costs £30 a year, or £15 for students and people receiving certain benefits. Members can borrow up to three items at a time.

Borrowing
You can reserve items on our website up to two weeks in advance, but please remember that items can only be collected in person from the library. We do not offer a delivery service. Most items can be borrowed for one week. Very popular items, such as pressure washers, can only be borrowed for three days.

Returning items
Please return items clean and in good condition. If an item is returned late, you will not be able to borrow anything else until it has been returned, but we do not charge fines. If an item is damaged while you have it, please tell us. We will not ask you to pay for normal wear and tear, but we may ask for a contribution towards repairs if an item has been misused.

Safety
Before you can borrow certain power tools, such as electric saws, you will need to attend a free half-hour safety session with one of our volunteers. These sessions take place every Saturday morning. You only need to attend once for each type of tool.

Opening hours
Thursday and Friday: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday: 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Can you help?
We are always looking for volunteers to help with lending and repairs. No experience is needed, as full training is given. Volunteers can also borrow items free of charge.

Questions 1–7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text above?

Write

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Read the text below and answer Questions 8–14.

Hotels near Exley Airport

A The Runway Lodge
Our budget hotel is a ten-minute walk from the terminal, along a well-lit footpath. All rooms have a kettle and a television, and breakfast is available from 4 a.m. for early travellers. There is no restaurant, but snacks and drinks can be bought at reception at any time. Guests who stay one night can leave their car in our car park for up to fifteen days at no extra charge.

B Exley Park Hotel
Set in its own gardens, three kilometres from the airport, this traditional country house hotel has a highly rated restaurant and a spa with an indoor pool. A free minibus to the terminal runs every half hour between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. Pets are welcome in our ground-floor garden rooms. Evening meals in the restaurant must be booked in advance, as it is often full.

C The Skyline
The only hotel inside the airport itself, The Skyline is connected directly to the departures hall. Every room has soundproofed windows, so guests can sleep undisturbed despite the aircraft. Rooms can also be booked by the hour for travellers who need a rest between flights.

D Brookhurst Inn
This family-run inn is in the village of Brookhurst, eight kilometres from the airport, and it has a garden with a children's play area. Our family rooms sleep up to five people. We do not run our own transport to the airport, but taxis can be booked at reception, and a local bus stops outside every hour.

E The Meridian Exley
Popular with business travellers, the Meridian has twelve meeting rooms, which can be booked by guests and non-guests alike. A shuttle bus to the terminal runs every fifteen minutes, day and night. Parking costs £12 a day. Please note that, as the hotel is directly under the flight path, rooms on the upper floors may be noisy at times.

Questions 8–14

Look at the five hotels, A–E, above.

For which hotel are the following statements true?

Write the correct letter, A–E. You may use any letter more than once.

SECTION 2 — Questions 15–27

Read the text below and answer Questions 15–20.

Brennan Building Supplies: The Buddy Scheme for New Employees

Starting a new job can be stressful, and there is a lot to learn. To help you settle in, every new member of staff at Brennan Building Supplies is given a "buddy" for their first three months.

Who is my buddy?
Your buddy is an experienced colleague who works in the same branch as you, but not usually in your own team. All buddies are volunteers, and they have been with the company for at least a year. Your buddy is not your manager, and they will not be involved in assessing your work. This means that you can ask them questions that you might not feel comfortable asking your manager.

What does a buddy do?
On your first day, your buddy will meet you at reception and show you around the branch, including the staff room, the first-aid room and the fire exits. They will introduce you to colleagues and explain the everyday things that new staff often find confusing, such as how to order work clothing and how to book a parking space. During your first month, you should meet your buddy at least once a week, usually over a coffee or lunch. After that, you can arrange to meet as often as you both find useful.

What a buddy does not do
Your buddy is not responsible for training you to do your job. Your manager will arrange this. If you have a problem with your pay, your hours or your contract, you should speak to the Human Resources (HR) team.

What if it isn't working?
Occasionally, a new employee and their buddy do not get on well. If this happens, please contact the HR team, who will find you a different buddy. Nobody else will be told why the change was made.

Becoming a buddy
Once you have worked for Brennan for a year, you may like to become a buddy yourself. All new buddies attend a two-hour workshop, and they receive a £50 shopping voucher for each new employee they support.

Questions 15–20

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text for each answer.

Read the text below and answer Questions 21–27.

Brennan Building Supplies: Keeping Information Safe

Every day, we handle information about our customers, our suppliers and our staff. If this information is lost or stolen, it can cause serious harm, and it could also lead to the company receiving a fine. Every employee is responsible for keeping information safe.

Passwords
Your password must be at least twelve characters long. A good way to create a strong password that is easy to remember is to join three random words together, for example "lemon-bicycle-river". You will not be asked to change your password regularly, but you must change it immediately if you think someone else may know it. Never write your password down, and never share it, even with a colleague or a manager.

Emails
Criminals often send emails that appear to come from a well-known company, or even from a colleague, in order to persuade people to reveal information or to click on harmful links. These are known as "phishing" emails. Be especially careful with any email that asks you to act urgently, or that asks for payment details. If you are not sure whether an email is genuine, do not reply to it. Instead, use the "Report" button at the top of your screen, and the IT team will check it for you.

Working away from the office
If you work at home or while travelling, make sure that no one can see your screen, and lock your computer whenever you leave it, even for a moment. Do not use public Wi-Fi in places such as cafés and hotels unless you are connected to the company's secure network. Never store company information on your own computer or phone.

Paper documents
Documents containing personal information must not be put in ordinary waste bins. Instead, place them in the locked grey boxes that are found on every floor. The contents are collected each week by a specialist company and destroyed.

If something goes wrong
If you lose a company laptop or phone, or if you think information may have been seen by someone who should not have seen it, report it to the IT team straight away, at any time of day or night. Do not worry that you will get into trouble: the sooner we know, the more we can do to limit the damage.

Questions 21–27

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.

Information security at Brennan

• Poor security could result in the company receiving a 211 word .
• A strong password can be made by joining three 221 word words.
• A password must be changed at once if staff think that someone else may 231 word it.
• If an email seems to come from a colleague but staff are not sure it is genuine, they should use the 241 word button.
• Staff working away from the office must 251 word their computer whenever they leave it.
• Paper documents with personal details should be put in locked boxes, which are emptied every 261 word .
• If a company phone goes missing outside office hours, staff should contact the 271 word team immediately.

SECTION 3 — Questions 28–40

Read the text below and answer Questions 28–40.

The hedgerows of Britain

A Anyone who has travelled through the British countryside will be familiar with hedgerows: the long lines of shrubs and small trees that separate one field from another and run along the sides of country lanes. They are found in almost every part of lowland Britain, although they are much less common in mountain areas, where fields are more often divided by stone walls. To many people, they are simply part of the scenery. Yet hedgerows are among the oldest human-made features of the landscape, and they tell a story of how the countryside has been farmed, divided and owned over thousands of years.

B Some hedgerows are extremely old. Historians and archaeologists have found that a number of field boundaries in parts of southern and western England date back to the Bronze Age, more than three thousand years ago. Many others were created in the Middle Ages, and some are mentioned in documents from the Anglo-Saxon period, which describe the boundaries of pieces of land by referring to particular hedges, streams and trees. A few hedgerows did not begin as hedges at all. When woodland was cleared to create farmland, a strip of trees was sometimes left standing at the edge of a field, and this gradually developed into a hedge. Many of these ancient hedges can still be recognised today by the banks and ditches that run beside them and by the wide variety of shrubs they contain, such as hazel, holly and field maple.

C The greatest period of hedge planting, however, came much later. For centuries, many villages in central England had farmed large, open fields, which were divided into narrow strips worked by different families. Between around 1750 and 1850, a series of laws known as the Enclosure Acts allowed landowners to divide this land into smaller fields, each owned by a single person, and the new boundaries were marked by hedges. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of hedgerow were planted in this period, mostly of hawthorn, which grows quickly and whose sharp thorns keep sheep and cattle from escaping. These straight, regular hedges are still easy to recognise on maps today, and they look quite different from the winding, irregular boundaries of older hedgerows.

D In the second half of the twentieth century, the trend was reversed. After the Second World War, farmers were encouraged to produce as much food as possible, and the new tractors and combine harvesters worked most efficiently in large fields. Farmers were even given government grants to remove hedges. Hedges take up land that could otherwise be used for crops, and they need regular work to keep them in good order, so to many farmers at the time, removing them seemed only sensible. By some estimates, around half of Britain's hedgerows disappeared in the fifty years after the war. Others were damaged by poor management, as hedges that had once been carefully maintained by hand were cut hard every year by machines.

E By the 1990s, concern about this loss had grown, and in 1997, new regulations were introduced in England and Wales. Under these rules, a landowner who wishes to remove a countryside hedgerow must usually notify the local council first, and the council can refuse if the hedgerow is classed as important. To qualify as important, a hedgerow must be at least thirty years old and must also meet at least one further condition: for example, it may mark an ancient boundary, or it may support rare wildlife. Establishing the age of a hedge is not always easy, but a well-known rule of thumb, developed by the scientist Max Hooper in the 1970s, suggests counting the number of different species of tree and shrub in a thirty-metre length of hedge, with each species representing roughly a hundred years. Hooper himself pointed out, though, that his rule is only a rough guide, and that it does not work well in every region.

F One traditional way of looking after a hedge is known as hedge laying. In this skilled craft, the main stems of the hedge are cut almost all the way through near the ground, so that they can be bent over at an angle without breaking. The stems are then woven between wooden stakes, which hold them in place. Because the stems have not been completely cut, they stay alive, and new shoots grow from the base, making the hedge thick and strong once again. Hedge layers usually work in winter, when the shrubs are dormant, although they still check for active nests before cutting. There are many regional styles, each developed to suit the local type of farming, and competitions are held every year in which hedge layers are judged on the quality of their work.

G Today, hedgerows are valued for much more than their role as boundaries. They provide food and shelter for many kinds of wildlife, including birds, insects and small mammals such as the dormouse, and they act as corridors that allow animals to move safely between areas of woodland. Bats are believed to use them as landmarks when finding their way at night. Hedgerows also store carbon, protect soil from being blown away by the wind, and provide shelter for farm animals. As a result, official advisers have recommended that the total length of hedgerows in the UK should be increased by 40% by 2050. Wildlife experts also argue that, instead of cutting hedges every year, farmers should cut them only every two or three years, in late winter, so that they can produce more flowers and berries.

Questions 28–34

The text has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–G, next to Questions 28–34.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Questions 35–38

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.

Hedge laying

In hedge laying, the stems of the hedge are cut almost completely through, close to the 351 word , and then bent over. They are held in place by weaving them between 361 word made of wood. The stems remain alive, and fresh 371 word appear at the bottom, so the hedge becomes thick again. The work is usually done in 381 word , while the shrubs are dormant.

Questions 39 and 40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

• A They were mainly found in southern and western England.
• B They replaced boundaries made of stone.
• C They divided land that had previously been shared.
• D They were planted by the families who farmed the land.

• A It is the method that councils are required to use.
• B Its creator accepted that it has limitations.
• C It has been shown to work in every part of the country.
• D A longer hedge is automatically classed as older.