IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 10

Text A — ELMBRIDGE PRIMARY SCHOOL: NOTICES FOR THE AUTUMN TERM

Welcome back to Elmbridge Primary. Please look through the following notices carefully and broadly keep this sheet to hand for reference.

Drop-off and pick-up The school gate opens at 08:35 for the morning drop-off. The bell rings at 08:50 and the register is usually taken at 08:55. Pupils arriving after 09:00 must enter via the main reception and will normally be recorded as late. The school day finishes at 15:15 for Reception and Year 1, and at 15:25 for Years 2 to 6. We broadly ask that parents wait in the playground rather than congregating at the classroom doors themselves.

Lunch and snacks Hot school dinners are charged at £2.65 per day and must be ordered by Friday of the preceding week through the ParentPay system. Please note that we operate as a nut-free school: peanut butter is not permitted, nor is chocolate or biscuits containing nuts, and similarly any products labelled "may contain traces of nuts" should be avoided. Water bottles are required daily; juice and fizzy drinks are not permitted on the premises.

After-school clubs Bookings for autumn-term clubs generally open on Monday 9 September at 19:00 and close on Friday 13 September at 17:00. Clubs typically run from 15:30 to 16:30 and cost £4.50 per session, with payment due by half-term. New this term: a coding club for Years 4 to 6, run by a volunteer parent who happens to be a professional software engineer; it is offered free of charge.

Parents' evening The autumn parents' evening will normally be held on Thursday 17 October. Appointments may be booked online from 1 October at 09:00 onwards.

Uniform and PE kit Reminder that the school uniform colours are navy blue and pale grey. PE kits are normally needed every Tuesday and Friday and should be kept on the child's coat peg throughout the week.

Text B — ELMBRIDGE PRIMARY: PARENT NEWSLETTER, OCTOBER ISSUE

A message from the head teacher: Dear families, what a wonderful start to the year! I am delighted to share some news and a few gentle reminders.

Harvest festival: This year's harvest festival assembly will take place in the school hall on Friday 4 October at 09:30. Parents are warmly invited to attend. We are gathering non-perishable food donations for the Elmbridge Food Bank — tinned goods, pasta, rice, and long-life milk are the most useful. Please refrain from sending fresh produce.

Library renovation: The school library will be closed from 14 to 28 October while new shelving is installed and the carpet is replaced. During this period, classes will visit the mobile library service, which will normally park in the staff car park each Wednesday. Children may still borrow up to two books per visit.

School photographs: Individual and sibling portraits will be taken on Tuesday 8 October. Please send your child to school in full uniform — no PE kit or own clothes that day, even if it is normally a PE day. Sibling appointment slips will be sent home on 1 October; please return them by 4 October.

Lost property: A reminder that all clothing items should be clearly labelled with the child's name. Unnamed items left in the lost-property basket at the close of each half-term are donated to a local charity shop. The basket sits in the corridor outside the school office and may be searched at any reasonable time.

Online safety workshop: We are running a free workshop for parents on Wednesday 23 October at 18:30 in the school hall. Topics will include managing screen time, parental controls, and understanding age-appropriate apps. A crèche will be provided for siblings aged 3 and over; please book a crèche place by 18 October.

Text C — TEACHING ASSISTANT INDUCTION: FIRST FOUR WEEKS

Welcome to Westgate Primary Academy. As a newly appointed teaching assistant (TA), you will follow a structured induction programme intended to make you confident in your role within roughly one month.

Week 1: Shadowing and observation During your opening week, you will accompany two experienced TAs across different year groups. You are not expected to engage directly with pupils this week. Please bring a notebook so that you can record observations on classroom routines, behaviour-management techniques, and the daily timetable. Towards the end of the week, you will normally have a one-hour meeting with the SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator) to talk through what you have observed.

Week 2: Supervised support From Monday of Week 2, you will be assigned to a specific class alongside a designated mentor teacher. You may begin to work with small clusters of three to four pupils under direct supervision, focusing largely on reading and number activities. You will not yet be left unaccompanied with a group. Daily de-brief sessions with your mentor will take place during afternoon break.

Week 3: Independent small-group work You may now generally lead small-group work without direct supervision, although always within sight of the class teacher. You will also begin to support one or two named pupils with specific learning plans. Read the relevant Individual Education Plans (IEPs) before your first session; these are normally stored in the locked SEN cupboard in the staffroom and may not be removed from the building under any circumstances.

Week 4: Full role You take on the complete set of TA duties. You will also attend your first formal review meeting with the deputy head, who oversees support staff. Probation runs for six months in total, with reviews at months one, three, and six.

Across all four weeks, please make use of the staff intranet, which contains the up-to-date timetable, our behaviour-management protocols, and downloadable copies of all forms you may need. New TAs are invited to a fortnightly "induction lunch" with the headteacher, where any questions can be raised in an informal setting.

Text D — TA STAFF HANDBOOK: KEY POLICIES

Confidentiality All information concerning pupils — academic progress, family circumstances, medical conditions, SEN status — is treated as strictly confidential. You may discuss a child only with colleagues directly involved in that child's education, and never outside school premises. Breach of confidentiality is treated as a serious disciplinary matter.

Behaviour and physical contact The academy's behaviour policy is positive and graduated in nature. Routine de-escalation, calm voices, and clear expectations are expected of all staff. Physical restraint may only be used to prevent immediate harm and only by staff who have completed the accredited Team-Teach training; TAs are not initially trained in restraint techniques and should call for a trained colleague.

Allergies and medication A register of pupils with allergies, asthma, or other medical conditions is held in the staffroom and updated weekly. TAs assigned to a particular class ought to know the medical needs of their pupils. Administering prescription medication requires a signed parental consent form and must be witnessed and recorded by two members of staff.

Absence reporting If you are unwell, please telephone the school office before 07:30 so that there is time for cover to be arranged. Email and text notifications are not acceptable. Self-certification is available for up to three consecutive working days; thereafter, a doctor's note is required.

Professional development The academy encourages TAs to undertake further qualifications. Subsidised places on accredited Level 3 TA courses are advertised twice a year, with priority given to staff who have completed at least one full school year in post.

A The harnessing of wind to perform mechanical work is one of the oldest applications of non-animal energy in human history, and the windmill in its mature form is a remarkable feat of engineering. The earliest references to wind-driven machines come from Persia and Central Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries, where vertical-axis mills with vanes of reed matting were used to grind grain and lift water. These Persian mills bear little resemblance to the structures most readers will picture when they hear the word "windmill": they had a vertical shaft and the sails rotated horizontally, like a revolving door turned by the wind.

B The horizontal-axis windmill — the design with sails arranged on a horizontal shaft, rotating like a giant pinwheel facing the wind — appeared in north-western Europe in the late twelfth century. The exact place of origin is disputed; written records exist for windmills in Yorkshire in 1185 and in the Low Countries within a few years thereafter. The early European mill was called a "post mill" because its entire wooden body, including the millstones, was mounted on a single massive vertical post. To work the mill, the miller had to push a long horizontal beam called a tailpole until the whole body of the mill swung round to face the wind. A skilled miller could turn a post mill in under ten minutes.

C The post mill was a labour-intensive design with a serious limitation: only the body of the mill, not just the cap, rotated with the wind. By the sixteenth century a more sophisticated design, the "tower mill," had emerged in the Low Countries. The tower mill consisted of a tall, fixed brick or stone tower topped with a rotating wooden cap to which the sails were attached. Only the cap, not the entire structure, needed to be turned to face the wind. The result was a much larger, more stable machine that could carry heavier and more powerful sails. A variant known as the "smock mill" used a timber rather than brick tower, often in places where suitable building stone was unavailable.

D The Dutch in particular elevated the windmill from a grain-grinding machine to a tool of land reclamation. The reclamation of the polders — areas of low-lying land that had been drained from lake or sea — was the central engineering achievement of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and it depended on networks of windmills used not to grind grain but to lift water. A typical drainage windmill turned an enormous Archimedes screw or a scoop wheel that lifted water from a lower polder ditch into a higher canal, which in turn drained to the sea. The Beemster polder, completed in 1612, was drained by a coordinated network of forty-three such mills. Without windmill technology, the modern map of the Netherlands would look very different.

E The sailing of a windmill is itself a small engineering art. The miller had to balance four factors: the speed of the sails (too fast and they would shake the mill apart), the load on the millstones (too heavy and the sails would stop), the direction of the wind, and the prevailing weather. Early sails were simple wooden frames over which the miller would spread canvas cloths by hand; in heavy wind he would reduce the cloth, and in light wind he would spread more. From the late eighteenth century, mechanical innovations such as Andrew Meikle's "spring sail" and William Cubitt's "patent sail" allowed sails to adjust their effective area automatically, and an attached "fantail" mechanism turned the cap into the wind without any human intervention. Mature European windmills of the early nineteenth century were therefore largely self-regulating machines.

F The arrival of the steam engine in the nineteenth century, and especially the steam-driven roller mill in the second half of the century, doomed the working windmill. Steam could produce flour more cheaply, more consistently, and regardless of the weather. By 1900 the European countryside was full of decaying mill towers with collapsed caps, broken sails, and abandoned millstones. In the Netherlands, where windmills had been a tool of survival rather than mere convenience, a serious preservation movement began in the early twentieth century. The Vereniging De Hollandsche Molen, founded in 1923, has saved many hundreds of historic mills, several of which still operate today on ceremonial or working days.

G The windmill has, of course, had an unexpected modern descendant: the wind turbine. The vertical-axis Persian mill, the post mill, and the modern three-bladed turbine are different solutions to the same problem of converting moving air into useful work. Modern turbines are vastly larger than any historic mill — a single modern offshore turbine can be more than two hundred metres tall — and they produce electricity rather than mechanical motion. Yet they continue a thousand-year tradition. Today, the silhouette of a wind farm on a hillside is, in a long historical sense, simply the latest chapter of a very old idea.