IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 25

Text A — APPRENTICESHIP OPPORTUNITY: BENNETT'S CRAFT BAKERY

Bennett's Craft Bakery in Old Market Square has been baking bread, pastry, and cakes for the people of this town since 1924. We are now offering two craft-bakery apprenticeship places, starting in September.

ABOUT THE APPRENTICESHIP The apprenticeship is a two-year programme leading to a Level 3 Diploma in Craft Baking. It normally combines four days a week working in our bakery with one day a week at the regional college's bakery school. Apprentices typically rotate through every section of the bakery: bread, viennoiserie, cakes and pastries, and front-of-shop.

WHAT WE OFFER - Apprentice pay starting at £8.20 per hour in year one and rising to £10.10 per hour in year two - All college tuition paid by the bakery - A set of professional baker's tools (knives, scrapers, brushes, oven gloves) provided in your first week - Two clean uniforms per week, laundered by the bakery - A free loaf of bread to take home at the end of every shift - Twenty-eight days of annual leave per year (including bank holidays), rising to thirty after the second year for those staying on as junior bakers

WHAT WE EXPECT - Five GCSEs at grade 4 or higher, including English and Mathematics, or an equivalent - Genuine interest in craft baking — please tell us in your application about loaves or cakes you have largely baked - Willingness to start work at 04:30 most days; the bakery opens to customers at 07:00 and bread must be ready - Reliable transport for the early start; the bakery is roughly a 15-minute walk from the bus and rail stations - Strong personal hygiene and the ability to keep a tidy work station

HOW TO APPLY Send a one-page covering letter and a CV to apprentices@bennettsbakery.co.uk by Friday 12 June. We would normally invite up to twelve candidates to a "trade-test day" on Saturday 27 June, when each candidate would shape rolls, weigh ingredients, and meet the master baker. Successful candidates will be offered places by 10 July.

Text B — BENNETT'S BAKERY SCHOOL: SUMMER WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Bennett's Bakery School currently runs hands-on workshops for adult learners in our teaching kitchen at the rear of the bakery. The summer programme is below; book at bennettsbakery.co.uk/school.

SOURDOUGH SATURDAYS — every Saturday in June, 09:30 to 14:30 Price: £85 per person, including breakfast, lunch, and a starter to take home. Suitable for complete beginners; we generally cover the principles of natural fermentation, mixing, shaping, and baking. Each participant goes home with a sourdough loaf and a 200 g jar of mature starter.

CROISSANT MASTERCLASS — Friday 18 July and Friday 22 August, 09:00 to 16:00 Price: £140 per person. A long day for committed bakers. We laminate, fold, and shape butter croissants. Some baking experience is advisable. Each participant goes home with a dozen unbaked, frozen croissants for their own oven.

CHILDREN'S BAKING — every Wednesday in August, 10:00 to 13:00 Price: £35 per child (ages 8 to 14). Children must be accompanied to the door by a responsible adult, but the workshop itself is unaccompanied. We typically make pizza dough, white rolls, and a simple sweet pastry. Children take their bakes home and receive a small Bennett's apron.

GLUTEN-FREE BREAD — Sunday 6 July, 10:00 to 15:00 Price: £95 per person, including a gluten-free lunch. Our visiting tutor Dr Aisha Khan explores the science of gluten-free baking and the use of psyllium husk, buckwheat, and rice flour. The workshop kitchen is normally cleaned thoroughly the evening before to avoid cross-contamination.

CANCELLATIONS AND VOUCHERS Bookings cancelled more than 14 days before a workshop generally receive a full refund. Bookings cancelled later than that may be transferred to another workshop in the same season, but are not refundable. Gift vouchers are available in any value from £10 upwards and are valid for 12 months.

Text C — FOOD-HANDLER TRAINING: HYGIENE FOUNDATIONS FOR NEW STAFF

All food-handling staff at Bennett's Bakery must complete the in-house Hygiene Foundations programme during their first 28 days of employment. The programme is normally supported by a Level 2 Food Safety in Catering qualification, which is largely paid for by the bakery and delivered online by an accredited provider.

PERSONAL HYGIENE - Hair must be tied back and covered by the issued white cap. The cap must cover all hair, including the fringe. - Beards and moustaches must be covered by the issued beard snood. - Long-sleeved tops and aprons must be clean at the start of each shift. Soiled aprons must be exchanged at the laundry trolley before continuing. - Nails must be short, clean, and unvarnished. Acrylic nails are not permitted. - Jewellery must be removed before starting work. A plain wedding band is said to be the only exception. - Hands must be washed in the dedicated hand-wash sink (never the food-prep sink) for a minimum of 20 seconds, with the antibacterial soap provided, typically on arrival, before handling raw materials, after using the toilet, after taking out the bins, after handling raw eggs, and after every break.

REPORTING ILLNESS Staff with diarrhoea, vomiting, or any infectious skin condition must not enter the production area. You must telephone the duty manager before your shift; you may not return to work until 48 hours after the last symptom. Cuts and grazes must be covered with the issued blue, metal-detectable plaster.

CROSS-CONTAMINATION Bennett's currently runs two production lines: a wheat-flour line for general bread and a separate gluten-free line. Staff working on the gluten-free line must wear a yellow apron, must not touch wheat flour during the same shift, and must enter the line through the gluten-free changing room. Cross-contamination risks are widely taken extremely seriously: a single careless gesture can put a customer with coeliac disease into hospital.

Text D — FOOD-HANDLER TRAINING: ALLERGEN MANAGEMENT AND TRACEABILITY

This section covers the more detailed legal duties around allergens and product traceability. It must be completed before a new staff member is allowed to wrap or label any product for sale.

THE 14 NAMED ALLERGENS Under current law, every business selling food must declare the presence of the 14 named allergens, including: cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, peanuts, soybeans, milk, nuts (such as almonds and hazelnuts), celery, mustard, sesame, sulphur dioxide and sulphites above 10 mg/kg, lupin, and molluscs. The shop's printed allergen matrix is normally updated whenever a recipe changes and must be available to any customer who asks.

LABELLING PACKAGED PRODUCTS Products that are packaged on the premises and sold from the shop must carry a label showing: the product name, the ingredients in descending order of weight, the allergens emphasised (typically in bold), the use-by date, the storage instructions, and the bakery's name and address. Apprentices may print and apply labels but only under the supervision of a qualified team leader.

TRACEABILITY Every batch of flour, butter, eggs, and yeast that enters Bennett's is logged in the goods-in book with: supplier, lot number, delivery date, and storage location. If a customer reports an adverse reaction, the duty manager must be able to trace, within four hours, every batch of raw material that contributed to the product the customer ate.

WITHDRAWALS AND RECALLS If a problem is identified — for instance, a supplier reporting a possible contamination of a lot of flour — the bakery operates a withdrawal procedure. All affected products are removed from the shop and from any stockists. A notice is normally displayed at the front of the shop, posted on social media, and sent to the local council's environmental-health office. The duty manager records every step of the withdrawal in the recall log.

A Bread is widely held to be older than agriculture. The earliest evidence of bread-making yet discovered comes from a site in north-eastern Jordan called Shubayqa 1, where archaeologists in 2018 reported charred crumbs of a flatbread baked roughly 14,400 years ago — more than four thousand years before the conventional date for the domestication of wheat and barley. The bread had been made by hunter-gatherers from wild grains, ground into flour with grinding stones, mixed with water, and baked on a hot stone hearth. The discovery overturned the long-held assumption that bread was a product of settled agriculture, suggesting instead that the taste for bread may itself have been one of the reasons our ancestors began to settle and cultivate grain.

B From these prehistoric flatbreads, bread spread and diversified along the great river-valley civilisations. The Egyptians, working with emmer wheat from at least 6000 BC, were the first to exploit the leavening effect of wild yeast, baking the world's earliest known raised breads in pre-dynastic times. Wheat and bread became central to Egyptian economic and religious life: bakers were among the most numerous craftsmen at Karnak; loaves were offered to the gods; bread was used as currency, with workers paid a daily ration. The Greeks adopted and refined Egyptian bread-making, developing more than seventy named bread varieties by the classical period. The Romans industrialised the process, opening Rome's first commercial bakeries in the second century BC and eventually subsidising bread for the urban poor — the famous panem of the panem et circenses ("bread and circuses") usually attributed to the satirist Juvenal.

C Through the medieval centuries, bread became the principal calorific foundation of European life, often providing more than half of an ordinary person's daily energy intake. The medieval baker, however, worked in a tightly regulated trade. Bakeries in many cities were required to use the same communal oven, were subject to fixed price-and-weight ratios, and risked severe penalty for "short weight" — the deliberate sale of underweight loaves. The English Assize of Bread, first issued in 1266 and revised many times until its repeal in 1822, fixed the price and weight of the standard loaf relative to the price of wheat. The "baker's dozen" — thirteen loaves rather than twelve — entered English from the baker's habit of throwing in an extra loaf in case any of the twelve was undersized.

D The character of European bread varied sharply by region. In the south, where the climate supported good-quality wheat, white bread was the bread of the rich and dark bread of the poor; in the north, where wheat normally grew less well, rye, oats, and barley dominated, and dense dark loaves were eaten by almost everyone. Across the continent, however, bread was largely sourdough bread — leavened by the wild yeasts and bacteria that accumulated in a baker's starter culture. The use of commercial brewer's yeast for bread, largely introduced gradually from the seventeenth century onward, accelerated fermentation but at the cost of complexity of flavour.

E The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century transformed bread production. Mechanical mixers, gas ovens, and the steel roller mill — which appeared in the 1870s — made it possible to produce white flour cheaply and at scale. The roller mill changed the social meaning of bread profoundly: for the first time, white flour was within the reach of working-class households. By the end of the century, dark bread had become a marker of poverty across most of western Europe, the very opposite of its modern meaning. The price of this democratisation was nutritional: roller-milled white flour removed most of the wheatgerm and bran from the grain, stripping out vitamins, minerals, and fibre. The full nutritional consequences of this change were not understood for several decades.

F The twentieth century produced what is widely regarded as the most controversial development in the history of bread: the Chorleywood Bread Process, largely developed by the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, in 1961. The Chorleywood method uses intensive mechanical mixing, hard fats, additives, and a much larger quantity of yeast to produce a fully risen loaf in around three and a half hours, compared with the eight to twelve hours of traditional fermentation. The economic impact was enormous: by 1990 the Chorleywood method accounted for around 80 per cent of all bread sold in Britain. Critics argued that the process produced a softer, paler, less flavourful loaf, and that the rapid fermentation reduced the bread's digestibility. Defenders argued that the method made cheap, hygienic, consistent bread available to the entire population.

G The early twenty-first century has seen, in many wealthy countries, what amounts to a deliberate reversal of the long industrialisation of bread. Artisan bakeries using long fermentation, single-origin flours, traditional sourdough cultures, and recovered grain varieties have multiplied steadily. The 2020 pandemic accelerated the trend: lockdowns drove millions of people to bake their own sourdough loaves at home, often using starters they had created themselves from flour and water. Health research has begun to support what artisan bakers had long claimed: long-fermented sourdoughs appear to be more digestible, with lower blood-sugar impact and reduced acrylamide formation in baking. The future of bread, at least in the wealthier parts of the world, may belong less to the Chorleywood loaf than to the patient sourdough of fourteen millennia ago.