IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 34

Text A — LOTUS RIVER YOGA STUDIO: AUTUMN TIMETABLE & STUDIO INFORMATION

Lotus River Yoga Studio is currently pleased to publish its autumn timetable, generally valid from 1 September to 30 November. All classes are held at our main studio at 14 Elm Lane, unless otherwise stated. Weekly classes: - Monday 07:00 - 08:00 Sunrise Vinyasa Flow (£12 drop-in; suitable for all levels) - Monday 18:30 - 20:00 Restorative Yin (£15 drop-in; bolsters and blankets provided) - Tuesday 09:30 - 10:45 Gentle Hatha for Over-60s (£8 concession rate; advance booking required) - Tuesday 19:00 - 20:30 Ashtanga Led Primary (£15 drop-in; intermediate experience expected) - Wednesday 12:30 - 13:15 Lunchtime Express Flow (£8 drop-in; no shower facilities during this slot) - Thursday 18:00 - 19:30 Prenatal Yoga (£14 drop-in; doctor's clearance from 12 weeks required) - Friday 18:30 - 20:00 Candlelit Slow Flow (£15 drop-in; mats provided) - Saturday 08:30 - 10:00 Strong Vinyasa (£15 drop-in; pre-booking recommended) - Sunday 16:00 - 17:30 Family Yoga, ages 5 and up (£18 for one adult + one child)

Studio passes: A 10-class pass is available for £120, valid for 90 days from first use. An unlimited monthly pass is £95.

Please note: the Tuesday Ashtanga Led Primary class would normally not run during the second half of November while our lead teacher is overseas. Replacement classes will be added on Thursday lunchtimes from 7 November onwards. Latecomers cannot generally be admitted after the opening meditation; please arrive ten minutes before class. Mats are available to hire for £1 per session. Showers are available on the ground floor; lockers require a £2 returnable coin. Lost-and-found items are normally kept for 21 days.

Text B — STILL WATERS WEEKEND RETREAT: ADVERTISEMENT

Join us at Stillwater Farmhouse in the Welsh hills for a three-day yoga retreat from Friday 17 to Sunday 19 October. Stillwater Farmhouse is a converted barn surrounded by woodland, with twelve guest rooms and a custom-built yoga shala overlooking a small lake. Daily schedule: - 07:00 - 08:30 Morning Vinyasa practice - 09:00 - 10:00 Vegetarian breakfast - 10:30 - 12:00 Workshop on breathing techniques or alignment (varies by day) - 12:30 - 13:30 Lunch - 13:30 - 16:00 Free time for walking, swimming, or rest - 16:30 - 18:00 Restorative practice and yoga nidra - 18:30 - 20:00 Dinner and quiet conversation

Pricing (per person, all meals and classes included): - Shared twin room: £395 - Single occupancy: £495 - Camping in the orchard (your own tent): £245

A deposit of £100 is normally required to secure your booking, payable at the time of booking. The balance is due no later than four weeks before arrival. Cancellations more than 28 days before the retreat typically receive a full refund minus a £25 administration fee; cancellations within 28 days are non-refundable, but bookings may be transferred to another person at no charge.

Stillwater Farmhouse is reached by a fifteen-minute drive from the nearest railway station, Llanfair. A shared minibus pick-up from the station is offered on Friday at 15:30 only, at £8 per person each way. Mobile phone signal at the farmhouse is limited; Wi-Fi is available only in the main farmhouse lounge. The retreat is unsuitable for children under 16. Please bring your own mat, although we have a small number available for hire.

Text C — RIVERWAY YOGA TEACHER TRAINING: TRAINEE HANDBOOK INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Riverway 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training programme. This handbook outlines what you can expect during the next six months and what we typically expect of you as a trainee teacher.

Course structure: - 200 contact hours, delivered across twelve weekend modules (Saturday and Sunday, 09:00 - 17:00) - An additional 60 hours of supervised self-study, including reading, journaling, and personal practice logs - Two in-person assessment days at the end of months three and six - Twenty hours of observed teaching at our main studio, scheduled in agreement with the lead trainer

Attendance and absence: - You must attend at least 90% of contact hours to be eligible for certification. - If you must miss a weekend module, you should normally notify the course coordinator at least two weeks in advance whenever possible. - Missed hours may be made up by attending the equivalent module in our parallel cohort, subject to space. - Any trainee absent for more than three weekend modules in total would normally be required to repeat those modules in the next intake, at half the standard rate.

Assignments: - A 3,000-word essay on the philosophical foundations of yoga, generally due by the end of month four - A detailed lesson plan for a 60-minute mixed-level class, due by the start of month five - Observation reports on three teachers other than your trainer, totalling at least 1,500 words - A reflective journal kept throughout the course (assessed at the end of month six only)

Insurance and ethics: You are not permitted to teach paying students under the Riverway name until you have been certified. Once certified, you must take out your own professional indemnity insurance before teaching. You must abide by the Riverway code of ethics, which includes a strict prohibition on dual relationships (for example, providing one-to-one yoga therapy to a person with whom you have a separate personal or commercial relationship).

Text D — RIVERWAY POST-CERTIFICATION CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

After certification, Riverway graduates generally remain part of our teacher community and are expected to maintain Continuing Professional Development (CPD). Annual CPD requirements: - A minimum of 30 hours per year of approved CPD, of which at least 10 hours must be in-person. - CPD activities typically include attending workshops, online courses with verified attendance, mentoring sessions with senior teachers, and structured peer-teaching observation. Personal yoga practice is not counted towards CPD hours. - Records must normally be submitted to the Riverway office by 31 December each year using the online CPD log.

Mentoring scheme: Newly certified graduates are paired with a senior mentor for the first twelve months after qualification. Mentor pairings typically include four 90-minute sessions, normally held online. Topics discussed in mentoring sessions generally include lesson planning, student care, business and ethics. Mentoring is included in the cost of the training programme; subsequent mentoring is normally charged at £55 per session.

Recertification: Riverway certification must be renewed every three years. To renew, teachers typically submit their CPD log and pay the recertification fee of £85. Failure to renew within three months of the due date will normally result in suspension from the Riverway teacher register. Teachers suspended for more than twelve months must complete a 20-hour bridging course in order to be reinstated.

A Yoga today is widely regarded as a global phenomenon, practised by an estimated three hundred million people across every continent and offered in gyms, community centres, and dedicated studios from Sao Paulo to Stockholm. For many of those practitioners, yoga means a sequence of physical postures held or flowed through in a heated room — a form less than a hundred years old. The path by which yoga largely reached the West, and the much older Indian tradition from which it emerged, are widely regarded as far more complicated than the contemporary image suggests.

B The textual roots of yoga in India generally go back at least two and a half thousand years, with passages on the discipline appearing in the Upanishads from around the sixth century BCE. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, compiled in their present form roughly two thousand years ago, are widely regarded as the canonical philosophical text of classical yoga. Patanjali described an eight-limbed path in which the physical postures, or asanas, occupied only one limb. The other seven concerned ethics, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and absorption. For most of yoga's long history, the postural element was a relatively small part of the practice — a way to prepare the body for long periods of seated meditation.

C Yoga first entered Western awareness apparently through scholarly orientalism in the early nineteenth century, when European Sanskrit scholars translated Indian philosophical texts into European languages. Henry Thomas Colebrooke's essays from 1816 onwards introduced English-speaking readers to the broad outlines of Indian thought, and translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads followed. These translations attracted American transcendentalist writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who absorbed Indian ideas into their essays on self-reliance and contemplation. But the yoga known to these readers was almost entirely a meditative philosophy; the postures were rarely discussed at any length and not practised.

D The figure who is conventionally credited with bringing yoga to mass Western audiences is Swami Vivekananda, an Indian monk who travelled to the United States in 1893 to address the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. His speeches there were widely reported, and his subsequent lecture tours of the United States and Britain drew large crowds. Vivekananda's yoga, however, was emphatically philosophical and meditative; he was sceptical of an emphasis on the physical postures, which he associated with marginalised wandering ascetics rather than with the educated Indian tradition. The book he produced in 1896, Raja Yoga, dealt almost exclusively with meditative practice and breath control.

E The development of the postural yoga that dominates Western practice today came significantly later and from a more specific source. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, working at the Mysore Palace in the 1930s under the patronage of the Maharaja, designed a vigorous, gymnastic practice that combined elements from classical yoga texts with may influence from Indian wrestling, British military physical culture, and gymnastics. Krishnamacharya's students went on to teach an enormous proportion of all yoga taught in the world today. They include B.K.S. Iyengar, who emphasised alignment and the use of props; Pattabhi Jois, who codified the Ashtanga Vinyasa system; T.K.V. Desikachar; and Indra Devi, regarded as the first significant Western female teacher and one of the earliest popularisers of yoga in the United States.

F Yoga's expansion in the second half of the twentieth century was driven by the cultural openness of the 1960s and 1970s. The Beatles' 1968 visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh produced a wave of public interest, although the Maharishi's specific practice — transcendental meditation — is distinct from the postural traditions. Iyengar yoga was introduced to Britain through a sustained programme of teacher training from the 1960s onwards. By the 1980s, yoga had spread well beyond hippy enclaves into mainstream health and fitness publishing, and by the 1990s the success of Bikram Choudhury's hot yoga in Los Angeles signalled yoga's full integration into the commercial fitness economy.

G The transformation of yoga from a religious practice into a fitness practice has been criticised in two distinct directions. On one side, scholars of Indian religion generally argue that contemporary postural yoga has been stripped of its philosophical and ethical content and so misrepresents the tradition from which it claims descent. On the other, contemporary commentators have raised questions about commercial appropriation and the often-unequal economic relationships between Indian source communities and globalised yoga brands. Several of the most successful figures associated with modern postural yoga — Choudhury most prominently — have also faced serious allegations of personal misconduct, leading the wider industry to reconsider questions of teacher accountability and student protection.

H What yoga becomes in the next stage of its global history is widely regarded as unsettled. Some commentators generally predict a continued professionalisation and integration with mainstream healthcare, with yoga offered on insurance plans for conditions ranging from chronic pain to anxiety. Others apparently foresee a return to yoga's older, slower, more contemplative forms, away from the heated studio and back towards the cushion. What is clear is that the form of yoga most familiar to twenty-first-century Western practitioners is the product of a particular twentieth-century encounter — and that any future form will likewise be shaped by the cultural conditions of the people taking it up.