IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 22

Text A — VOLUNTEER WITH ST. MAUREEN'S CHARITY SHOPS

St. Maureen's Hospice runs eleven charity shops across the county, and we typically rely on more than 400 volunteers each week to keep them open. Whether you can spare two hours or two full days, we would love to hear from you.

Roles available: - Shop floor assistant: greeting customers, operating the till, tidying displays. Minimum age 16. Training is normally provided in the first week. - Sorter / pricer: working in the back room, assessing donations, pricing items, and preparing stock for the shop floor. Minimum age 18 due to use of steam cleaners. - Window dresser: changing the seasonal window displays once a fortnight on Tuesday mornings. Some retail experience preferred. - Online lister: photographing higher-value donations and listing them on our eBay shop from home. Requires your own smartphone and reliable internet connection. - Donation-van crew: collecting larger donations from supporters' homes on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. A clean driving licence is essential; we provide the vehicle.

What we offer in return: - A full induction in your first session, plus the chance to attend our monthly evening training workshops free of charge. - A 20% volunteer discount on shop purchases (excluding designer items priced above £40, jewellery, and electrical goods). - Travel-expense reimbursement up to £6.00 per shift on production of a bus, train, or fuel receipt. - A reference for future employment after a minimum of three months of regular volunteering. - Invitation to our annual thank-you tea, held each May at the Hospice gardens.

To apply, please complete the form at stmaureens.org.uk/volunteer or call 01632 555 040 (Mondays to Fridays, 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.). We do not accept walk-in applications at the shops themselves, as the managers cannot typically leave the till to process paperwork.

Text B — WHAT WE CAN AND CANNOT ACCEPT: DONATION GUIDELINES

St. Maureen's Charity Shops are grateful for your donations, but to keep our sorters safe and our shoppers happy, we must apply the following rules. Items that do not meet these rules will be passed to our textile-recycling partner, not largely displayed in the shop.

CLOTHING We accept: clean adult and children's clothing in saleable condition, paired shoes, accessories, handbags, and unworn underwear with original tags. We cannot accept: school uniforms with sewn-on name labels, motorcycle helmets (safety regulations), wedding dresses (separate Bridal Shop service available — see below), and any garments with significant staining or pet hair.

ELECTRICALS All donated electrical items must be tested by a qualified PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) technician before resale. We can test small appliances on-site every second Thursday. Items awaiting testing may be held for up to four weeks. Donations of microwaves, fridges, and freezers are not accepted at any shop.

BOOKS, DVDS AND MEDIA We accept paperbacks, hardbacks, children's books, and DVDs with original cases. Encyclopaedia sets older than 15 years and VHS tapes are no longer saleable and will not be accepted.

FURNITURE Furniture donations are accepted only at the Lakeside Road branch, which has the storage space. All upholstered items must carry the original fire-safety label; without it we cannot resell them by law.

BRIDAL SERVICE Donated wedding dresses and formal eveningwear are handled exclusively by our specialist Bridal Shop in the High Street. Please ring 01632 555 067 to arrange a drop-off appointment. We are unable to store wedding dresses at our standard shops as the steam from busy sorting rooms can damage delicate fabrics.

Text C — WELCOME TO THE CHARITY BOOKSHOP: VOLUNTEER INDUCTION

Greetings, and welcome to the team at Re-Read, the charity bookshop arm of St. Maureen's Hospice. The bookshop occupies the upper floor of our Castle Street premises and operates slightly differently from our general charity shops. This handbook should answer your first-week questions.

OPENING HOURS AND SHIFTS Re-Read is normally open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. The shop closes for one hour between 12.30 and 1.30 p.m. on Wednesdays for stock rotation. Volunteer shifts are four hours long, with a fifteen-minute paid tea break taken in the staff room on the ground floor. You may take a longer unpaid lunch break by prior arrangement with the duty manager.

SORTING DONATED BOOKS Donated books generally arrive in the back room each morning. Your first task on a sorting shift is to triage each box into four piles: - Shop floor: books in clean, saleable condition, largely published within the last 20 years - Specialist: vintage, antiquarian, first editions, and books with original dust jackets in good order — these typically go upstairs to the locked specialist case - Online: titles with an estimated value over £15, identified using the AbeBooks lookup app on the shop tablet - Recycling: water-damaged books, books with broken spines, ex-textbooks with marked pages, and any book with mould

A condition note must be attached to every shop-floor book using a coloured sticker: green (excellent), yellow (good), or red (acceptable). Books cannot be priced until they have been stickered.

PRICING GUIDELINES We generally use a simple banded system. Mass-market paperbacks are £1.50 to £3.00. Hardbacks are normally £3.00 to £6.00. Children's picture books are usually £1.00 unless they are part of a recognised series. Cookery, art, and reference books are priced individually by the duty manager. Never use felt-tip pen on book pages — always price using a removable sticker on the back cover.

GIFT AID AND CUSTOMER CONFIDENTIALITY If a donor is a UK taxpayer, we can claim 25p in Gift Aid for every £1 we eventually receive when their donation sells. Volunteers must invite each donor to complete a Gift Aid form, but they must never pressure a donor and must never share a donor's identity with another customer. Breach of donor confidentiality is treated as a serious matter under our volunteer code of conduct.

Text D — DEALING WITH UNUSUAL DONATIONS: ESCALATION GUIDE

From time to time, Re-Read receives donations that need a manager's decision. Use this guide to decide what to do.

VINTAGE AND ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS Any book printed before 1950, or any book in a slipcase with gold leaf lettering, must be referred to the duty manager. The duty manager will normally assess whether to send the item to our specialist auction partner, Halford & Sons, who hold a quarterly book sale in March, June, September, and December.

SIGNED COPIES Where a book is signed by the author, please flag it with a small yellow tag and place it on the duty manager's desk. Only signatures verified by reference to the author's known signature database may carry a premium price. Unverified signatures may still typically be sold but only at the standard rate, with a note 'signature unverified' on the inside cover.

POTENTIALLY SENSITIVE MATERIAL Books promoting hatred or violence against any group are never put on display. They must be removed from the donation immediately and disposed of by the duty manager. If you are unsure whether a book falls into this category, set it aside and ask. Never make this decision alone, and never engage in debate with a donor about the content of their donation.

PERSONAL ITEMS LEFT INSIDE BOOKS You will sometimes find letters, photographs, banknotes, train tickets, or other personal items inside donated books. All such items must be placed in the blue tray on the manager's desk. The duty manager will attempt to return identifiable items to the donor; unidentifiable items are kept for 28 days and then disposed of according to a documented procedure. Volunteers must not keep found items, regardless of value.

A The idea of a library — a curated collection of texts assembled for use by readers — is much older than the idea of a public library. The great library at Alexandria in the third century BC and the imperial library of Han China both gathered tens of thousands of scrolls, but they were not in any meaningful sense open to the general population. Their users were scholars, court officials, and the religious elite. For most of recorded history, libraries were the privilege of the powerful, and the right to read in them was tied to one's birth, profession, or willingness to pay a substantial subscription. The notion that an ordinary citizen, simply because they were a citizen, should be able to borrow a book from a free library is, in the author's view, a modern invention, and a surprisingly recent one.

B Medieval European monasteries kept the technology of the library alive during the centuries when most other forms of public infrastructure collapsed. The monastic library, however, was emphatically not a public space: its purpose was to preserve sacred texts for the use of the order, and outsiders were rarely admitted. The Renaissance saw the development of private princely libraries, generally accessible only with personal introduction, and the so-called subscription libraries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which charged annual fees that effectively excluded the working classes. The world's first national library open to credentialed researchers, the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris, dates only from 1692, and even then admission required a written application.

C The decisive shift toward truly public, free, lending libraries took place in the English-speaking world in the middle of the nineteenth century. The combination of rapid urbanisation, mass literacy, and a reforming Liberal politics produced the political will to legislate. In Britain, the Public Libraries Act of 1850 empowered local councils to fund libraries from the rates — a power they could use only if a public vote in the town agreed. The Act, though widely admired in retrospect, was at first cautiously written: only towns with populations above ten thousand were permitted to use it, and they could spend no more than a halfpenny in the pound on it. Manchester was among the first cities to do so, opening its free reference library in 1852.

D The American story unfolded along parallel lines. The state of New Hampshire passed enabling legislation in 1849, slightly ahead of Britain, and Boston Public Library, the first large free municipal library in the United States, opened in 1854. What distinguished the American development from the British, however, was the role of private philanthropy. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist, funded more than 2,500 library buildings between 1883 and 1929, in the United States, Britain, and across the English-speaking world. Carnegie's condition was characteristic: he would pay for the building, but the local authority must commit to paying for the books and the staff thereafter, and must do so out of public money. His libraries were therefore, in the author's view, catalysts for the public-library habit rather than substitutes for it.

E The early public libraries faced fierce opposition. The argument against them was partly fiscal — why should ratepayers fund a service for the benefit of those who did not pay rates? — and partly cultural. Library opponents worried that working-class readers, given free access to popular novels, would neglect their duties and that the libraries would become noisy, frivolous places. The early librarians worked hard to counter these arguments. They restricted opening hours, banned conversation, enforced silence with bell-ringing duty staff, and curated their collections heavily toward improving non-fiction. Borrowing rules were often elaborate: in some libraries, a reader had to consult a printed catalogue, write the title on a slip, hand it to a librarian, and wait while the book was fetched from a closed stack. The idea of open shelves on which readers might browse freely was a twentieth-century innovation.

F Public libraries changed dramatically in the twentieth century, both in their architecture and in their function. The closed-stack model gradually gave way to open access. Children's rooms, study areas, and reference desks were added. Mobile libraries reached rural areas. After the Second World War, libraries became hubs of free adult education, with literacy classes, language courses, and lecture series. By the 1970s, recordings, films, and microfilm archives sat beside the books. The arrival of personal computing pushed libraries further: the typical British library by 2000 offered free internet access, a function that became extraordinarily important as government services moved online and as the digital divide widened.

G The twenty-first century has, in the author's view, been the most difficult period in the history of the public library since its foundation. In Britain, a decade of fiscal restraint after 2010 saw more than 800 libraries closed. The story has been similar in other developed countries: in the United States, library hours have been cut and book budgets reduced; in Australia, branch libraries have been merged; in Canada, library workers have struck against staffing levels. Defenders generally argue that the library is more needed now than ever, both as an information service in an age of misinformation and as one of the few remaining indoor public spaces where citizens may go without spending money. Recent research has begun to support these claims, showing that closures correlate with measurable reductions in reading among children in poorer neighbourhoods. The future of the public library will depend, as always, on a society's willingness to fund it from the public purse.