IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 12

Text A — DAISY'S DOG WALKING: SERVICE ADVERTISEMENT

Daisy's Dog Walking has served Hambleton and the surrounding villages since 2014. I am a fully insured, DBS-checked dog walker holding a Canine First Aid certificate (which is renewed each year). I work either alone or with my long-standing assistant Tom, and I never walk more than four dogs at one time.

Services and prices - One-hour group walk: £14 per dog (£12 for two or more dogs from the same household) - 45-minute solo walk (intended for dogs that cannot be socialised): £18 - Puppy 30-minute visit (for puppies aged 12-26 weeks): £10 - Drop-in feeding visit (no walk): £8

All walks generally take place on local woodland paths or across the open downs. Dogs are picked up and dropped off at your home; I keep a key safe and may hold a spare key for regular clients. I usually send a short photograph or video message during or after each walk.

Bookings and payment Regular slots may be booked by the term (twelve weeks at a time) and paid monthly by standing order. Occasional walks ought to be booked at least 48 hours in advance and are paid by card upon confirmation. I generally take a £10 deposit from first-time clients, which is offset against the first booking.

Holidays I normally take three weeks of holiday a year (typically one in summer, one in October, and one between Christmas and New Year). Clients are notified at least eight weeks in advance, and Tom largely continues to cover regular bookings during my absence.

I also offer optional add-ons: a basic post-walk towel-down (£2) and a brief 15-minute training reinforcement (£5) during the walk, broadly useful for puppies and rescue dogs who are still settling into a new home. Older clients sometimes ask for a longer settling-in chat at the start of the first walk, and there is no charge for this; I prefer to take the extra time to introduce myself to a new dog properly rather than rush the first outing.

Text B — HAPPY PAWS PROFESSIONAL DOG CARE: COMPARISON LEAFLET

Happy Paws is a small team of five professional dog walkers and home boarders, operating across Hambleton, Renford, and Boroughgate. We are fully insured, DBS-checked, and trained in canine behaviour. All staff have completed an OFQUAL-regulated Level 3 qualification in dog care.

Group walks Our standard offering is a one-hour pack walk involving up to six dogs at one time. Prices are £15 per dog, with no household discount available. We assess every dog before allowing it to join a group walk: aggressive or extremely nervous dogs are redirected to our solo-walk service.

Solo walks A 30-minute solo walk is £14, while a 60-minute solo walk is £20. Solo walks are recommended for puppies under six months, elderly or arthritic dogs, and dogs recovering from surgery.

Home boarding We also offer overnight home boarding in the homes of our staff. Each boarder takes only one dog (or one household) at a time, which ensures that your dog has the run of a quiet home. Boarding is £35 per night, or £55 per night across peak holiday weeks (broadly mid-July to August, December 18 to January 3, and Easter week). All boarders are licensed by the local council.

Membership We operate a paid membership scheme: £15 per month entitles you to a 10% discount on all services, priority booking, and a free Christmas treat box for your dog. Membership is offered monthly with one month's notice required for cancellation. Members may also nominate one annual free puppy visit for any new dog joining the household.

Text C — RIVERSIDE VETERINARY PRACTICE: STAFF HANDBOOK INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Riverside Veterinary Practice. We are a busy small-animal practice with two consulting vets, a senior veterinary nurse, and three part-time receptionists. This handbook applies to all employed and self-employed members of the team. Please read it carefully and sign the acknowledgement on the last page within one week of starting.

Hours of work The practice is open Monday to Friday 08:00 - 19:00, Saturday 09:00 - 13:00, and closed on Sundays and bank holidays. We share an out-of-hours service with two neighbouring practices on a rotation. You will be expected to take part in the on-call rota approximately once every six weeks; an out-of-hours allowance is paid in addition to your base salary.

Uniform and professional appearance A clean tunic top is provided each week. Long hair must be tied back, and only plain wedding rings or stud earrings are permitted on the floor. Closed-toe shoes are required at all times. Visible tattoos are acceptable provided they are not offensive.

Client interaction Every client is to be greeted by name where possible. The reception team is the face of the practice. Please introduce yourself by first name and offer water or tea to clients waiting more than ten minutes. Difficult conversations — such as end-of-life decisions, financial concerns, or aggressive clients — should be moved to the privacy of consulting room 3 wherever possible.

Practice priorities Our priorities, in order, are: clinical excellence, animal welfare, client communication, financial sustainability, staff well-being. When two of these come into conflict, more senior members of staff should be consulted before a decision is made.

Team meetings A full clinical-and-administrative meeting is held on the first Tuesday of each month at 08:00. Brief stand-up meetings are held every morning at 08:55 to share the day's surgical list and any client notes that the whole team should know about.

Text D — RIVERSIDE VETERINARY PRACTICE: ESSENTIAL PROCEDURES

Emergencies If a critically ill or injured animal is brought in, a designated triage nurse will assess the animal within five minutes of arrival. Reception staff should notify the triage nurse immediately and ask the owner to wait in the quiet room rather than the main waiting area. Reception staff must not attempt clinical assessment but should record vital information: species, age, presenting complaint, and any known medication.

Controlled drugs All controlled drugs are kept in the locked cabinet in the dispensary, with keys held only by the duty vet and the practice manager. The controlled drugs register must be completed in real time, in pen, by two members of staff. Errors must be ruled through with a single line and initialled — never erased.

Cleaning and infection control Each consulting room and surgical area must be cleaned between every client visit. The senior veterinary nurse maintains the cleaning rota. A deep clean of all surgical areas is undertaken on the last Friday of each month.

Confidentiality and social media Client information is strictly confidential, including the names of clients and their pets. No animal patient may be photographed or shared on social media without the owner's signed consent. Posts that identify a client without consent are treated as gross misconduct.

Continuing professional development All clinical staff are required to complete at least thirty-five hours of continuing professional development (CPD) per year. Six paid CPD days are provided for this purpose; staff may also use up to a further three unpaid days where reasonable notice is given.

A Organised firefighting is older than is often supposed. The Roman emperor Augustus is said to have established the vigiles urbani — a corps of seven thousand freedmen tasked with policing the streets at night and tackling fires — in 6 CE. The vigiles patrolled in cohorts and carried buckets, axes, sponges on poles, and primitive pumps; they were also equipped with vinegar-soaked blankets, which appear to have been used to smother flames. The corps endured, with various reorganisations, for roughly three centuries. After the collapse of the western Roman Empire, organised firefighting largely vanished in Europe for more than a thousand years.

B Medieval European cities, built mostly of timber and thatch, were extraordinarily vulnerable to fire. London is recorded to have suffered serious blazes repeatedly between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. Civic responses were limited: town watchmen were expected to raise the alarm by ringing church bells, citizens were required to keep buckets and ladders at home, and so-called fire hooks were normally stored at parish churches for pulling down burning thatch. None of this approached the organisation of the Roman vigiles. Firefighting in this period was a duty of all able-bodied men under the supervision of local officials, rather than a profession in its own right.

C The decisive catastrophe is widely held to have been the Great Fire of London in September 1666, which destroyed approximately thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven churches, and St Paul's Cathedral over the course of four days. The fire is credited with prompting the introduction of fire insurance. By 1680, the first insurance company, the Fire Office, was offering fire cover against an annual premium. Insurance gave the companies a financial incentive to extinguish fires in their own insured premises, and so the companies began to maintain their own fire brigades. Each insured building was marked with a "fire mark" — typically a brass or lead plaque — which indicated the insurer; when fire broke out, the relevant brigade would attend. Brigades belonging to other companies might watch but would not necessarily intervene.

D The eighteenth century saw considerable mechanical innovation. Hand-operated pumps, developed and refined by manufacturers such as Newsham, increased the throw of water from a few metres to roughly thirty or forty metres. Pumps were initially carried by hand and were later mounted on wheeled carriages. Leather hoses, invented in the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century, replaced fixed pipes and allowed water to be directed with greater precision. Riveted leather hoses, however, tended to be heavy, leaked at virtually every seam, and rotted relatively quickly; the introduction of rubber-lined hoses in the nineteenth century proved a decisive improvement.

E The shift from private insurance brigades to public, municipally funded fire services took place during the nineteenth century. The model city is agreed to have been Edinburgh, where in 1824 James Braidwood, then aged just twenty-four, established what is widely regarded as the first municipal fire brigade in Britain. Braidwood's brigade was unprecedented in three respects: it was funded by the city rather than by insurance companies; it employed full-time firefighters rather than volunteers or part-time labour; and it operated under a single command structure with strict training requirements. The brigade attended fires regardless of which insurance company had marked the building. Braidwood was subsequently invited to London, where he established the London Fire Engine Establishment in 1833 and was tragically killed in the line of duty during the Tooley Street Fire of 1861.

F Two technological revolutions transformed firefighting in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first was the arrival of high-pressure street hydrants connected to municipal water mains: brigades no longer had to draw water from rivers or wells, and a continuous supply at high pressure was available almost everywhere across built-up areas. The second was the replacement of horse-drawn engines with motor vehicles, which took place between 1900 and 1925. A motorised engine could reach a fire in minutes rather than tens of minutes, and the mortality rate from urban fires appears to have fallen sharply during those decades. Specialist equipment — turntable ladders, breathing apparatus, foam-spraying engines for chemical fires — also developed rapidly throughout the same period.

G The modern fire and rescue service in most developed countries has moved far beyond its original role of putting out fires. In the UK, statistics from the Home Office suggest that fewer than half of incidents attended by fire crews over the last decade have actually been fires; the remainder have largely been road traffic collisions, flooding incidents, medical emergencies, rescues from heights and confined spaces, and a broad range of so-called "special services." Fire-safety education and the inspection of commercial premises now typically form significant parts of the role. The historical journey from Roman buckets and vinegar-soaked blankets to a modern multi-skilled rescue service is one of the great unsung stories of urban civilisation.