IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 1

Text A — RIVERSIDE COMMUNITY POOL: SUMMER OPENING TIMES

Riverside Community Pool will operate the following hours from 1 May to 31 August.

Monday to Friday: - 06:00 - 08:30 Adult lane swimming (£4.50 / session) - 09:00 - 11:00 Mothers & Toddlers (£3.00 / family) - 11:30 - 14:00 Open swimming (£5.50 adults, £3.00 children under 16) - 14:30 - 16:00 Aqua-aerobics class (£6.50 / class, booking required) - 16:30 - 19:30 Open swimming - 19:30 - 21:00 Lane swimming for advanced swimmers only

Weekends: - 08:00 - 18:00 Family open swimming (£14.00 family ticket for 2 adults + 2 children) - 18:00 - 20:00 Adults-only lane swimming

Please note: the Tuesday morning Mothers & Toddlers session is fully booked for the entire summer. The wave machine operates every hour on the hour during weekend open-swimming sessions; flotation devices are not permitted during these times. Family swim passes (10 visits, £45) are available from reception.

Lockers typically require a £1 returnable coin. Lost-and-found items are kept for 14 days. Towels and basic swimming kit are usually available to buy from the reception desk if you have forgotten yours; goggles cost £6 and a basic swim cap is £4. The pool deck is cleaned during a 30-minute changeover between sessions, so please respect these breaks even if the previous session has ended slightly early.

Reduced fees apply for residents over 65 and full-time students with ID; please ask at reception for the relevant proof-of-status form. Group hire of the lane area is possible on weekday evenings between 21:00 and 22:30 by separate booking.

Text B — CYCLING IN THE CITY: A LEAFLET FOR NEW CYCLISTS

Welcome to cycling! Whether you are starting to commute or simply riding for pleasure, the following advice will, in the council's view, help you stay safe.

Helmet: It is not currently a legal requirement to wear a cycle helmet in this country, but every cycling organisation recommends one. Look for the CE EN 1078 safety marking. Replace your helmet after any impact, even if you cannot see damage.

Lights: Front white and rear red lights are legally required between sunset and sunrise. Reflectors on pedals and wheels are also strongly recommended.

Brakes: Both front and rear brakes must work effectively at all times. Test them before every ride by lifting each wheel and turning it while squeezing the relevant brake.

Visibility: Wear bright clothing during daylight and high-visibility or reflective clothing at night. Add reflective strips to your bicycle frame and bag.

Locking your bicycle: Use two different types of lock (e.g. a D-lock for the frame and a cable lock for the wheels). Always lock to a fixed object. Theft is most common during daylight hours in busy public locations.

Free training: The council offers free cycle-skills training for adults, typically available on the first Saturday of each month from May to October. Booking is required via the council website at least one week in advance. The sessions cover starting and stopping in traffic, signalling, and how to position yourself confidently on busy roads. Bicycles are available to borrow on the day if you do not yet own one.

If you commute by bicycle, please note that your employer may participate in the national cycle-to-work scheme, which allows you to buy a new bike through monthly salary deductions. The council also runs a free Dr Bike maintenance clinic in the central square on the second Saturday of each month from April to October.

Text C — JOB ADVERTISEMENT: LIBRARY ASSISTANT, NORTHERN DISTRICT LIBRARIES

Position: Library Assistant (part-time, 25 hours/week) Location: Three branches — Eastfield (main library), Cranleigh (community library), Bramwell (mobile-library service) Salary: £24,800 pro rata, with annual incremental increases Contract: Initially fixed-term for 12 months, with the possibility of becoming permanent

Duties typically include: - Assisting members of the public with finding and borrowing materials - Operating self-service kiosks and resolving common faults - Cataloguing new acquisitions according to Dewey decimal classification - Running children's storytime sessions on Saturday mornings - Providing basic IT support to library users - Shelving returned books and maintaining order on the shelves

Essential requirements: - Five GCSEs at grade 4 or higher, including English and Mathematics - Confident with desktop computers and basic Microsoft Office tools - Good interpersonal communication, particularly with older adults and children - Willingness to work some Saturdays (at minimum one per month, paid at standard rate)

Desirable: - Previous customer-service experience - A second language relevant to our community (Polish, Urdu, Tamil) - A clean driving licence (for occasional mobile-library service)

About the service: Northern District Libraries operates seven branches across the borough and provides a mobile library to outlying villages. The service welcomes around 320,000 visits per year and runs roughly 1,800 free events for the community, including author talks, language cafes, and reading groups for children and adults. Library assistants are central to delivering this programme. The role is varied; in a typical week you might shelve returned items, help a pensioner set up an email account, run a Saturday storytime for thirty children, and process a delivery of new books for cataloguing.

Application: Submit a CV and a 500-word covering letter to recruitment@northerndistrict.gov.uk by 31st of next month. Interviews will be held in the week beginning 18th. Please note that we cannot accept telephone enquiries about applications. Shortlisted candidates will normally be invited to a 30-minute interview followed by a short practical task at the desk.

Text D — NEW STAFF HANDBOOK: PROBATIONARY PERIOD GUIDANCE

All new staff at Northern District Libraries generally begin with a six-month probationary period.

During probation: - Your line manager will review your performance at the end of months two, four, and six. - You are entitled to two days of paid sick leave per month accrued, with carry-forward at the end of the probation. - You must complete the mandatory training modules listed below within the first eight weeks. These generally include: Customer Service Foundations, Safeguarding Children and Vulnerable Adults, Manual Handling, GDPR Basics, and Fire Safety. - Pay is reviewed only at the end of probation. Annual increments take effect from the first day of the month following the anniversary.

Annual leave during probation is calculated pro rata on the basis of an annual entitlement of 28 days (including bank holidays). You may take up to seven days during the first six months, with line-manager approval. Any leave already booked at the date of joining will be honoured.

If at any point during the probation we have concerns about your performance, your line manager will arrange a formal review meeting. The probation may, in management's view, be extended by up to three months if additional training or development is required. Termination during probation requires only one week's notice on either side.

Once probation is successfully completed, you will be invited to a confirmation meeting with the deputy head of service to talk through your interests and any longer-term development opportunities open to permanent staff.

A The wristwatch as we know it — a small, accurate timekeeper worn on the arm — is widely regarded as essentially a twentieth-century invention. Before its rise, portable timekeeping was the domain of the pocket watch, carried on a chain in a waistcoat pocket and consulted only occasionally. The first known wrist-worn timepieces were ornamental objects made in the late sixteenth century, including a small clock-on-a-bracelet given by the watchmaker Conrad Dasypodius of Strasbourg to Queen Elizabeth I in 1571. These were widely said to be not practical timekeepers. The wristwatch as a precise, daily instrument is said to have not really existed before the late 1800s. The disappearance of these early curiosities is widely treated as a reminder that the technology of timekeeping has, throughout its history, always advanced unevenly, with periods of rapid change interspersed with long pauses.

B The development that made the wristwatch practical was the manufacture of small, accurate, mass-produced mechanical movements. Swiss workshops are widely said to have led the field, with houses including Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Longines all producing wrist-watches in commercial quantities by the 1880s and 1890s. The early customers were almost entirely women, for whom the wristwatch was treated as a piece of jewellery; men continued to consider pocket watches the only respectable option. Watchmaking in this period was widely seen as an extension of the Swiss watch industry's traditional excellence in miniature mechanical engineering rather than as a separate craft.

C The transformation of the wristwatch from a feminine accessory into a universal instrument is widely said to have begun in earnest during the First World War. Soldiers in the trenches needed to coordinate manoeuvres precisely, and pocket watches were regarded as impractical: removing them from a pocket while under fire was, in officers' view, both slow and unsafe. Officers strapped pocket watches to their wrists with leather straps, and watchmakers responded by manufacturing purpose-built "trench watches" with luminous radium-painted dials and protective metal grilles over the glass. Returning soldiers reportedly brought the habit home, and by the 1920s wristwatches had become socially acceptable for men.

D The interwar decades saw rapid technical advance. Self-winding wristwatches, developed by John Harwood in 1923 and refined by Rolex in the 1930s, freed wearers from the need to wind their watches by hand. Waterproof cases, first commercialised by Rolex with the Oyster model in 1926, are widely said to have made wristwatches genuinely robust. Anti-magnetic movements, anti-shock systems, and luminous lume materials all reached maturity in this period. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the wristwatch was, in researchers' view, a precision instrument used by aviators, submariners, and military officers as a piece of essential equipment.

E The post-war decades produced both the high point of mechanical watchmaking and the technology that would nearly destroy it. Swiss precision movements are widely said to have reached extraordinary levels of accuracy in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, the Japanese firm Seiko was investing heavily in a fundamentally different technology: the quartz movement, which uses the vibrations of a small quartz crystal to drive an electric motor with accuracy a hundred times higher than mechanical movements. Seiko launched the first commercial quartz wristwatch, the Astron, on Christmas Day 1969. The price was approximately equivalent to a small family car — but it was vastly more accurate than any mechanical watch.

F The quartz crisis of the 1970s and 1980s is widely said to have nearly destroyed the Swiss watch industry. Cheap, accurate quartz wristwatches from Japan and Hong Kong reportedly undercut mechanical watches at every price point below the luxury segment. Swiss watch exports halved between 1970 and 1983; many famous houses went bankrupt or were absorbed into conglomerates. The industry is widely said to have been rescued in part by the establishment of the Swatch Group in 1983, which produced inexpensive but stylish Swiss-made quartz watches, and in part by the rediscovery of mechanical watchmaking as a luxury craft rather than a mass market.

G Today, the wristwatch faces, in many analysts' view, a different kind of challenge: it has been functionally displaced by the smartphone for the basic purpose of knowing the time. Sales of inexpensive wristwatches are widely said to have fallen dramatically since 2010. At the high end, however, the mechanical wristwatch has thrived as a luxury item, increasingly bought as an investment or a heritage piece rather than a daily tool. Sales of mechanical watches priced above ten thousand pounds have, in industry analysts' view, grown rapidly. The wristwatch's twenty-first-century identity is therefore widely described as split: a high-end craft object on one hand, and on the other a connected health-tracking smartwatch barely related to its mechanical ancestor. The story of the wristwatch is, in either form, generally said to remain one of the more striking examples of how a small mechanical object can repeatedly reinvent itself in response to changing technology and changing taste.