IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 30

Text A — RIVERBANK DANCE ACADEMY: AUTUMN TERM ADVERTISEMENT

Riverbank Dance Academy is currently opening enrolment for the autumn term, running from 5 September to 16 December. We typically offer classes for all ages and levels in the heart of the city, just two minutes' walk from Marlow Street station. Class types and weekly fees: - Ballet (children aged 4-6, beginners): Monday 16:00-16:45, £8 per class - Ballet (children aged 7-11, grade 1-3): Monday 17:00-18:00, £10 per class - Tap (all ages, beginner): Tuesday 18:00-19:00, £10 per class - Contemporary (teens 12-16): Wednesday 17:30-18:45, £11 per class - Hip-hop (teens 13-17): Wednesday 19:00-20:00, £11 per class - Adult ballroom (couples or singles): Thursday 19:30-21:00, £15 per class - Adult Latin (beginner): Friday 19:00-20:30, £15 per class - Adult tap (improver): Saturday 11:00-12:00, £12 per class

Please note: the Wednesday hip-hop class is currently full and a waiting list is in operation. The Saturday adult tap improver class normally requires at least six months of previous tap experience; an audition is not required, but you should speak to the principal before enrolling.

Enrolment fees: £25 registration (non-refundable, one-off) plus the first month's tuition paid in advance. Family discounts of 10% generally apply when two or more siblings enrol in any combination of children's classes. We do not offer discounts on adult classes.

Trial lessons: a single trial lesson in any class is available at half the normal rate. Trial lessons must be booked at least 48 hours in advance through reception (01632 555 218) or our website.

Performance opportunity: all ballet, tap and contemporary students aged 7 and over are normally invited to take part in our annual end-of-year show, held at the Marlow Civic Theatre on the second Saturday of December. Costume hire fees generally apply.

Text B — THE STUDIO ON BREWER STREET: BEGINNER CLASS SCHEDULE & VENUE INFORMATION

The Studio on Brewer Street is a small, friendly dance space focusing exclusively on adult beginners. We do not run children's classes.

Weekly beginner schedule: - Monday 19:00-20:00 Salsa (no partner needed, drop-in welcome) £14 - Tuesday 19:00-20:30 Argentine tango (no partner needed) £18 - Wednesday 18:30-19:30 Lindy hop swing (partner rotation) £14 - Thursday 19:00-20:00 Beginner ballroom — waltz, foxtrot, quickstep £16 - Friday 19:30-21:00 Social dance practice (any style, supervised) £10 - Saturday 10:30-11:30 Stretch and conditioning for dancers £8

Booking and payment: Salsa, swing and Friday social practice can be paid for on the door in cash or by card. Tango and ballroom must be booked online in advance because numbers are strictly capped at 18 dancers.

Venue rules: - No street shoes on the sprung floor. Please bring clean, soft-soled dance shoes or change into thin socks. - The studio is on the second floor and there is no lift. Please contact us before booking if access is a concern. - Bags and coats must be left in the cloakroom, not on the studio floor. - Mobile phones must be silenced during classes. - Filming during classes is not permitted; you may film yourself during the Friday social practice with the agreement of anyone visible in shot.

Refund policy: we generally offer a full refund up to 24 hours before any booked class; after that no refund is given, but you may transfer your place to another dancer or move your booking to a class of equal price within the following four weeks.

Text C — RIVERBANK DANCE ACADEMY: TEACHER HANDBOOK, SECTION 4 — DAILY RESPONSIBILITIES

Welcome to Riverbank. This section of the handbook sets out the responsibilities that all teaching staff are expected to meet during a normal working day in the studios.

Before the class: - Arrive at least 15 minutes before your class is scheduled to begin. Use this time to check the studio, set up sound equipment, and confirm the class register on the wall tablet. - Tape any loose flooring, mark spike-tape positions for performance rehearsals, and report any damage to the sprung floor immediately to the principal. - Greet students and parents at the studio door. For under-elevens, you must positively identify the named collecting adult on arrival, even where the child is known to you.

During the class: - Begin every class with a warm-up of at least eight minutes for adults and ten minutes for children. The warm-up must include light cardiovascular work and joint mobility before any stretching. - Do not use loud counting in classes that contain children under the age of seven. Use clapping or musical cues instead. - Keep one teacher's eye on the door at all times. Children should not leave the studio unaccompanied during a class for any reason, including water and the toilet.

After the class: - Run a cool-down for at least four minutes, ending with breathing exercises. - Do not release children to anyone except the named collecting adult listed on the registration form unless you have written or verbal authorisation from a registered parent or guardian, recorded in the day-book. - Complete the after-class entry on the tablet, including any minor incidents, near-misses, or behavioural concerns. A minor injury report must be filed even where no first aid was given.

A reminder: under no circumstances should you administer over-the-counter pain medication to a child, even where a parent has previously given general permission. Only the appointed first-aid officer may apply ice, plasters, or wraps. Any suspected fracture or head injury must trigger an immediate 999 call followed by the parent.

Text D — TEACHER PERFORMANCE REVIEWS, CPD AND PAY PROGRESSION

All teaching staff at Riverbank are normally subject to an annual performance review, conducted by the principal in May or early June. The review covers four areas: teaching quality (observed lesson), student progress (exam pass rate and recital readiness), parent and student feedback, and contribution to the wider life of the academy.

The review meeting is normally 45 minutes. It includes the teacher's own self-assessment, which must be submitted in writing one week before the meeting. Outcomes are graded from 1 (outstanding) to 4 (requires improvement). Teachers graded 4 will normally be re-observed within three months and provided with a written development plan; a second consecutive grade 4 may lead to a formal capability process.

Continuing professional development (CPD) is mandatory. Each teacher must complete at least 25 CPD hours per academic year. Up to 15 hours may be in-house (faculty meetings, peer observation, internal workshops); the remainder must be external (Royal Academy of Dance courses, ISTD seminars, accredited child-protection refreshers, etc.). All CPD must be logged on the academy's online portal within fourteen days of completion.

Pay progression: teachers typically move up the pay scale annually subject to a satisfactory review (grade 1, 2 or 3) and completion of the CPD requirement. Exceptional grade 1 performance may trigger a one-off discretionary bonus, normally awarded at the principal's discretion and limited to 5% of the academy's annual surplus across all staff. Teachers on probation are not eligible for discretionary bonuses.

A What we now call ballroom dancing — couples moving together in held position around a smooth floor to music in a series of named, codified dances — has a longer and more tangled history than its smooth modern surface suggests. The very word "ballroom" comes from the Latin ballare, meaning to dance, by way of the Italian ballo and the French bal. The earliest "balls" in the European sense were aristocratic social events held in the great halls of late-medieval and Renaissance courts, gatherings where dancing was one element of an elaborate evening of food, music and political display. The dances performed there bore little resemblance to anything a present-day dancer would recognise.

B For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, court dance was dominated by sequences in which couples moved through fixed patterns under the watchful eyes of dancing masters who policed every gesture. The pavane, the galliard, the courante, and later the minuet were essentially set dances: a couple's role was to execute prescribed steps correctly, not to improvise or to lead and follow in any modern sense. The minuet became so dominant in the eighteenth century that an entire grammar of bow, advance and retreat had to be mastered before a young aristocrat could appear in society. The whole point was visibility: who you danced with, in what order, signalled your standing.

C The first dance that resembled the modern ballroom couple-hold appeared at the very end of the eighteenth century, and is widely thought to have caused a scandal. The waltz, originating in folk dances of Bavaria and Bohemia, brought a man and a woman together in a closed embrace, turning continuously around the floor in three-quarter time. To a society used to the formal distances of the minuet, this was shocking. Diaries of the 1810s describe respectable observers refusing to look at couples waltzing in case they were corrupted. Yet within a generation the waltz had conquered Vienna, Paris and London, partly because of the genius of composers like Johann Strauss the elder and his son, whose melodies made resistance impossible.

D The nineteenth century is widely regarded as the period in which most of what we now call the "standard" ballroom dances either appeared or matured. The polka arrived from Bohemia in the 1840s as a high-energy escape from the slow elegance of the waltz, and reportedly swept Europe in a craze that contemporaries compared to mania. The mazurka, also of central European origin, became popular through Chopin's compositions. By the late Victorian period, the rules of the dance floor had been formalised in dance manuals: the partner's hands must be held just so; the gentleman's right hand at a precise position on the lady's back; the floor was traversed only in an anti-clockwise direction. The dance hall had become a place of strict written etiquette.

E The decisive transformation of ballroom into its modern form took place in the early twentieth century, and the unlikely catalyst was the United States. From around 1910, a wave of dances of African American origin — the foxtrot, the one-step, and shortly afterwards the Charleston — crossed the Atlantic and disrupted European dance halls. They were syncopated, looser in hold, and travelled across the floor in patterns that the old waltz manuals had no rules for. The response of European teachers, particularly in Britain, was not to reject these dances but to codify them. The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in London held a series of conferences in 1924 and 1929 at which what we now call the English Style of ballroom — slow foxtrot, quickstep, waltz, tango — was officially standardised. The competitive ballroom we see on television descends directly from those decisions.

F The second half of the twentieth century reportedly brought the Latin-American suite. Dances such as the rumba, the samba, the paso doble, the cha-cha-cha and the jive emerged from quite different roots — Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Spanish and African American — and entered the international competitive system in stages between the 1930s and the 1960s. They are sometimes treated as a single tradition, but in fact they share little except being grouped together for competition purposes. The codification of Latin-American dances was not without controversy: some practitioners argued that the standardisation imposed by European federations stripped these dances of their original character.

G Today, ballroom dancing exists in three quite distinct worlds. There is the competitive world, where rules of hold, posture, costume and footwork are policed by international federations and televised through programmes whose audiences are larger than the sport has ever known. There is the social world, in which amateurs of all ages typically meet in halls and studios to dance for pleasure, often combining many of the dances under the loose name "social dance". And there is the heritage world, in which dance scholars and re-enactors recover the minuet and the pavane from old manuscripts, normally dancing them in costume at historical events. All three are descendants of the same long tradition, though they speak very different dialects of it.