IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 19

Text A — BLUE HARBOUR AQUARIUM: VISITOR RULES

We hope you generally enjoy your visit to Blue Harbour Aquarium. To protect our animals and other visitors, please read the following rules before entering the galleries. Visitor compliance has been argued to make the experience better for everyone.

1. Quiet voices. Loud shouts and running typically frighten the fish, especially in the Coral Reef and Deep Ocean galleries, where the lighting is low. Please walk and speak quietly.

2. No flash photography. Camera flashes can damage the eyes of fish and reptiles. You are welcome to take photographs without flash anywhere in the aquarium except inside the Behind-the-Scenes tour route, where photography is not permitted at all.

3. No tapping on the glass. The vibrations distress the animals. Please keep small hands away from the glass and do not let children climb the rails around the tanks.

4. Food and drink in cafe only. Food and drink are not allowed in the galleries. Bottled water is permitted; please use the recycling bins provided.

5. Strollers and wheelchairs. Strollers and standard wheelchairs may be used throughout the aquarium. We can lend manual wheelchairs free of charge from the entrance desk; please return them before you leave.

6. Lost children. If you become separated from a child, please go to the nearest staff member or the information desk by the gift shop. We will make an announcement and check the building.

The Touch Pool is staffed at all times. Please wash your hands at the basin provided before and after using it. Children under five must be accompanied by an adult.

Text B — DAILY FEEDING SCHEDULE: WHAT TO SEE AND WHEN

Watching the keepers feed our animals is widely considered one of the most popular experiences at the aquarium. Feedings are short talks (about 10 minutes) given by a keeper at the side of the tank. They generally take place daily unless otherwise noted; arrive a few minutes early as the talk areas fill up quickly. Sign-language interpretation has occasionally been available at advertised feedings; details are posted at the entrance.

10:30 — Penguins (outdoor exhibit) The keepers throw small fish to our gentoo penguins and explain how they generally recognise each bird by the unique pattern on its chest.

11:30 — Seahorses (Coral Reef gallery) Seahorses are fed twice a day with very small frozen shrimp. The keeper will explain why seahorse fathers, not mothers, carry the eggs.

12:30 — Sharks (Deep Ocean gallery, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays only) Three diver-keepers enter the main tank in protective suits. The sharks are fed by hand to ensure that all the smaller fish in the tank also receive food.

14:00 — Otters (River exhibit) The keepers normally hide pieces of trout around the rocks; otters search them out. The talk covers the role of otters in keeping rivers healthy.

15:00 — Octopus (Cephalopod corner) Octopuses are fed inside a sealed jar with a screw-on lid; they unscrew it themselves. The keeper will explain why octopuses are widely considered some of the most intelligent invertebrates.

Please note: feeding times are sometimes adjusted if an animal is unwell or in training. The day's confirmed times are shown on the digital board by the entrance and updated by 09:30 each morning. The board has been argued to be the most reliable source of same-day timing information. A short printed leaflet with the same daily schedule is available at the welcome desk and is updated at the same time as the board.

Text C — INTERNSHIP PROGRAMME: ROLES AND EXPECTATIONS

Welcome to the Blue Harbour Aquarium internship programme. Our internships generally last six months and are designed for graduates and final-year students intending to pursue a career in marine biology, aquaculture, or aquarium management. There are three streams, each normally supervised by a senior keeper. The programme has been argued to combine substantive professional experience with a structured early-career pathway.

Stream 1 — Husbandry Internship Day-to-day animal care: feeding, water-quality testing, tank cleaning, health observation, and minor veterinary support. Interns typically rotate through three galleries (Coral Reef, Deep Ocean, and River Exhibit), spending two months in each. A driving licence is not required.

Stream 2 — Research Internship Supports the science team in monitoring breeding programmes, tagging studies, and behavioural research. Interns must be confident with spreadsheets and statistical packages such as R or SPSS, and have completed at least one undergraduate module in statistics. Some fieldwork at our coastal field station is included, so a clean driving licence is highly desirable but not essential.

Stream 3 — Public Engagement Internship Supports the education and communications teams in delivering talks, writing exhibit labels, producing social-media content, and running family activities. A background in biology is required, plus demonstrable experience of public speaking or science communication (for example, school outreach, university science clubs, or popular-science writing).

All interns generally receive a stipend of £1,150 per month, free meals on shift, free use of the staff dive locker, and free admission to twelve partner aquariums and zoos across the country. The stipend is paid on the 25th of each month. Holidays are 12 days during the six-month placement, to be agreed in advance with the supervising keeper. Interns may not take holiday during the first two weeks or the final week of the placement. Additional unpaid leave has occasionally been argued to be acceptable in exceptional family circumstances, by prior arrangement.

Text D — SAFETY AND CONDUCT IN AQUARIUM WORK

All interns must complete the following modules within their first week: - Aquarium Health and Safety - Manual Handling - Working at Height (for ladder access to upper tanks) - Safeguarding Visitors - Lone Working in Quarantine

Interns are not permitted to enter the shark tank, the giant octopus enclosure, or the quarantine isolation room without direct supervision by a qualified senior keeper. Interns may carry out water-quality testing in any other tank unsupervised after completing the relevant accreditation in week three.

Photography: Interns must not post photographs taken on shift to personal social-media accounts without prior approval from the communications team. Photographs of animals receiving veterinary treatment must never be shared externally. The aquarium's own social-media channels are normally managed by the communications team; interns on the Public Engagement stream may be invited to contribute posts under supervision.

Reporting incidents: Any injury to an animal or person, however minor, must be entered into the digital incident log on the same day. The duty manager must be informed verbally as well. Failure to log an incident is treated as a serious matter and may result in termination of the internship.

Mobile phones may not be used on the gallery floor during opening hours, except for work-related calls. Interns are welcome to use phones in the staff room during their break. Personal headphones have been argued to be unsuitable while interns are on shift in any animal area.

A For nearly five thousand years, the natural pearl was widely regarded as among the most valuable objects on earth. Until the early twentieth century, every pearl in every necklace, every pendant, and every royal crown had been retrieved by a human diver, holding their breath and descending into warm seas with no equipment beyond a weighted rope and a basket. Pearl diving was one of the oldest organised industries in human history, and for the cultures that practised it — across the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Mannar between India and Sri Lanka, and the seas of north-western Australia — it was, in the author's view, both a source of immense wealth and a cause of immense human cost.

B The earliest archaeological evidence of pearl diving comes from a site at Umm al-Quwain, on the coast of the modern United Arab Emirates, where the remains of pearl-bearing oysters were excavated alongside human remains dated to around 5500 BC. By the Roman period, pearls from the Gulf were being traded across the entire Mediterranean. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, recorded that pearls were the most valuable of all goods imported into Rome. Most came from the Gulf and the Red Sea; some came from the Indian Ocean.

C The work itself was brutal. A traditional Gulf pearl diver — called a ghawwas — would dive without breathing equipment to depths of between ten and forty metres, sometimes up to fifty times in a day, in dives lasting between one and two minutes each. Divers held a heavy stone, the hajar, attached to a rope; the stone normally pulled them quickly to the seabed. Once there, they filled a small basket, the diyyin, with oysters, and gave a tug on the rope to signal the haulier above to pull them up. Pressure damage to the eardrums was, according to most accounts, almost universal, and most divers were partially deaf by middle age. Sharks, jellyfish, and stingrays added immediate physical danger; many divers also developed long-term lung and joint injuries.

D The pearling industry was structured around an exploitative system of credit. Most divers did not own their boats. They worked for a boat captain, the nakhuda, who paid them an advance against the season's catch. If the catch was poor, the diver remained in debt and was bound to dive again the following season; many divers were trapped in debt for their entire working lives. Children of indebted divers normally inherited the debt. In the Gulf, the diving season ran from June to September, when the seas were calmest and the water warmest; a single season required between forty and seventy days at sea, far from land, in boats that carried no refrigeration and limited fresh water.

E The Gulf pearl industry reached its peak in the years immediately before the First World War. In 1905 there were said to be around 1,200 pearling boats and over 75,000 divers working out of Gulf ports, and the trade was the single largest source of income for what are today Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Indian and British buyers travelled to the Gulf in the months after the season to grade and purchase the pearls, which were then re-exported to Paris, London, and New York. The peak years have often been argued to mark the high point of pre-oil Gulf prosperity.

F The collapse of the natural pearl industry, when it came, was sudden and total. Two developments destroyed it within a single generation. The first was the perfection of the cultured pearl by the Japanese inventor Kokichi Mikimoto, who in 1916 received a patent for a technique to induce oysters to produce round pearls indistinguishable from the natural variety. By the late 1920s, Japanese cultured pearls were flooding the international market at a fraction of the price of natural pearls; demand for Gulf pearls collapsed. The second was the global economic depression of 1929 onwards, which destroyed luxury markets generally. Within a decade, the centuries-old Gulf pearl industry was effectively dead. In Bahrain, the pearling fleet reportedly shrank from over 500 boats in 1925 to fewer than fifty by 1945.

G The communities that had depended on pearling fell into severe poverty in the 1930s and 1940s. Many ghawwas migrated inland, took up other trades, or emigrated to Iraq and Iran. In Bahrain alone, an estimated 20,000 divers were out of work by 1932. Pearling families were rescued only by the discovery of oil, which from the late 1930s onwards reportedly brought a different kind of wealth to the same coasts. Today, the natural pearl industry survives only on a tiny scale: a few licensed boats operate from Bahrain, Sri Lanka, and Western Australia, and most pearls sold worldwide are cultured. Yet pearling, in the author's view, remains a powerful symbol in the cultural memory of the Gulf — recorded in songs, museums, and television dramas as the dangerous, defining work of a now-vanished era.