IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 35

Text A — KINGSFORD VINTAGE CAR SHOW: VISITOR INFORMATION

The 47th annual Kingsford Vintage Car Show will, it is expected, be staged at Kingsford Showground over the weekend of 12-13 September, with gates generally open from 09:00 to 17:00 each day. The event is widely regarded as one of the largest gatherings of pre-1985 motor vehicles in the country, and around 600 cars are expected on display.

Admission: - Adult single day: £14 in advance, £18 on the gate - Concession (over-65 or under-18): £9 in advance, £11 on the gate - Family ticket (2 adults + up to 3 children): £35 in advance, £45 on the gate - Children under 5: free of charge - Two-day pass for adults: £24, available in advance only

Tickets bought online by 5 September generally include a free souvenir programme. Tickets purchased at the gate do not, on the whole, include the programme; programmes are then ordinarily sold separately at £5.

Show areas: - Pre-1940 vehicles (Marquee A) - Post-war classics 1945-1965 (Marquee B) - 1970s and 1980s classics (Marquee C) - Vintage commercial and military vehicles (open ground east of car park) - Trade stalls and autojumble (Marquee D) - Family activity area, including face painting, soft play, and miniature electric cars (typically free for children under 12)

A range of food stalls is distributed throughout the showground. Sunday's programme is likely to feature the annual parade lap of the show ring at 14:00, when judged vehicles take a circuit of the arena. The 2025 Best in Show trophy is scheduled to be presented at 16:00 on Sunday.

Dogs on leads are welcome, although they are not allowed inside the marquees or within the food court. Disabled parking is provided in the inner car park; visitors should bring proof of their blue badge.

Text B — ENTRY RULES FOR EXHIBITORS

Owners wishing to display a vehicle at the Kingsford Vintage Car Show must register in advance. Entries are scheduled to close at midnight on 31 July; late applications will not generally be considered.

Eligibility: - Vehicles must have been manufactured before 1 January 1985. - Vehicles ought to be in roadworthy condition, with a current MOT certificate (where required) and a valid insurance policy covering display at public events. - Replicas of historic vehicles are admitted only to a separate "Replica Class" and must be clearly flagged as such on entry.

Exhibitor fees: - £25 per vehicle for show-only entry - £45 per vehicle for show-and-judging entry (the additional £20 covers judging administration) - Exhibitors generally receive free admission for themselves and one passenger.

On the day: - All exhibiting vehicles should arrive at the showground between 06:30 and 08:30 on Saturday. Vehicle movements are largely prohibited after 08:45, when public entry begins. - Vehicles ought not to be driven out of the showground before 17:00 on Sunday, even where their owners have already left the site, except in genuine emergencies and with the explicit permission of a show steward. - A modest amount of fuel must remain in each vehicle's tank, although bringing additional fuel onto the site is strictly forbidden. - Exhibitors should bring their own dust covers, polishing materials, and a small folding chair. Power points are not provided.

Insurance and conduct: Kingsford Showground accepts no liability for damage to vehicles or theft of personal property. Exhibitors are largely responsible for their own insurance. Any exhibitor whose behaviour falls below the expected standard, including any case of intoxication on site, will likely be asked to leave and may be barred from future shows.

Text C — RIDGEWELL MOTOR MUSEUM: NEW DOCENT HANDBOOK

Welcome to the Ridgewell Motor Museum volunteer team. As a docent, you are the public face of the museum and the principal interpreter of our collection of around two hundred motor vehicles and several thousand smaller exhibits.

Working pattern: - Docents typically commit to a minimum of one four-hour shift per fortnight during the museum's open season (March to October) and one shift per month during winter (November to February). - Shifts generally run 09:30 - 13:30 or 13:30 - 17:30. A 20-minute paid break is included in each shift. - A rota is normally published two months in advance via the volunteer portal. You are responsible for arranging cover with another docent if you cannot make your scheduled shift.

Floor duties: - Stand in your assigned gallery and approach visitors who appear to want information, while remaining unobtrusive with those who do not. - Answer questions about the vehicles in your gallery using the gallery briefing notes, which are updated quarterly. - Politely but firmly stop visitors from touching the vehicles or stepping over the rope barriers. Most exhibits include irreplaceable original paintwork or trim. - Report any safety concerns, spillages, or unaccompanied children immediately to the duty supervisor on the curatorial radio channel.

Restricted areas and conservation: - Docents must never open vehicle doors or boots, lift bonnets, or move barriers without explicit permission from a curator. - Photography by visitors is normally permitted in all galleries except the Royal Carriage Hall. Tripods, drones, and flash photography are not permitted anywhere. - Eating, drinking, and chewing gum are forbidden in all galleries, including for staff and docents. You may have water from a sealed bottle in the back-of-house corridors only.

Text D — RIDGEWELL MOTOR MUSEUM: TRAINING AND PROGRESSION FOR DOCENTS

All docents must complete an initial six-week induction before being scheduled on the public floor.

Induction modules: - Week 1: Museum history, mission, and floor plan - Week 2: Vehicle history overview, from horse-drawn carriages to early electric cars - Week 3: Conservation principles and the "do-not-touch" rule - Week 4: Visitor engagement, including managing difficult conversations - Week 5: Safeguarding (children and vulnerable adults) and first-aid awareness - Week 6: Shadowed shifts with a senior docent, with a written sign-off at the end

Progression: After twelve months of regular service, docents may apply to specialise as Gallery Leads. A Gallery Lead is responsible for the day-to-day running of a single gallery and the briefing of other docents working in it. Gallery Leads also help to write briefing notes and may, with curatorial approval, typically deliver short public talks of up to fifteen minutes.

After three years of regular service, docents may apply for the role of Senior Docent. Senior Docents broadly help to run induction courses for new volunteers, sit on the volunteer advisory committee, and may represent the museum at outreach events. Senior Docents reportedly receive an annual book voucher of £75 in recognition of their contribution.

Recognition and gifts: The museum holds an annual volunteer party each February at which long-serving docents are recognised. Engraved gifts are presented at five, ten, and twenty years of service. Any docent who has volunteered for more than ten years receives lifetime free entry to the museum for themselves and one guest.

A The automobile is, one of the defining inventions of the modern world. Within little more than a century, it has reshaped cities, recast the daily lives of women and men, and become the leading source of carbon emissions in transport. Yet the early evolution of the car was, on the whole, anything but inevitable. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, three competing power sources — steam, electricity, and the internal combustion engine — vied for dominance, and the eventual victor was not, it should be stressed, obvious to anyone at the time.

B Steam-powered road vehicles had been around since the late eighteenth century. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's military steam tractor, constructed in Paris in 1769 to haul artillery, is conventionally regarded as the first self-propelled road vehicle. By the 1830s, scheduled steam-coach services were operating on a number of English routes, including London to Cheltenham. These coaches tended to be noisy, fuel-hungry, and unfortunately prone to alarming boiler explosions; they were ultimately killed off by punitive tolls on the new turnpike roads and a series of restrictive Acts of Parliament, which limited their speed to 4 mph on the open road and 2 mph through towns, with a man required to walk ahead of the vehicle waving a red flag.

C The first vehicle that historians broadly accept as a true automobile — a self-propelled road vehicle suitable for personal use — is widely held to be the three-wheeled motor carriage built by Karl Benz in Mannheim in 1885 and patented in early 1886. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen used a single-cylinder four-stroke petrol engine producing less than one horsepower. Its first long-distance demonstration appears to have come in 1888, when Bertha Benz — the inventor's wife — is widely thought to have droved the third prototype 106 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim, accompanied by her two sons. Bertha Benz's drive, and the publicity it generated, appears to have convinced sceptics that the automobile was practical.

D Within a decade, automobile manufacture had largely spread to France and the United States. French firms including Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot pioneered what would become the now-standard layout of a front-mounted engine driving the rear wheels via a clutch and gearbox. In the United States, the Duryea brothers built their first car in 1893, and Henry Ford produced his first vehicle, the Quadricycle, in 1896. The dominant American firm of the very early twentieth century, however, is taken to be the Olds Motor Vehicle Company, whose Curved Dash Oldsmobile is widely regarded as the first car to be produced in significant series quantities, with around 4,000 built between 1901 and 1904.

E The development that transformed the automobile from a luxury item into a mass-market product was Henry Ford's introduction of the moving assembly line. Ford's Highland Park factory in Detroit began assembling the Model T on a moving line in 1913. Prior to the assembly line, building a Model T took about twelve hours; afterwards, it required around ninety minutes. The price of a Model T fell from $850 in 1908 to $260 in 1925. By the early 1920s, around half of all cars on the world's roads are widely held to have been Model Ts, and ownership of an automobile had largely ceased to be exotic across much of North America. Other manufacturers, most notably General Motors and the European mass producers, adopted versions of Ford's methods through the 1920s.

F The dominance of petrol over its early competitors was not, on the whole, simply a matter of technical superiority. Electric vehicles were quieter, cleaner, and easier to start than early petrol cars, and they remained popular for urban use until the 1910s. Their decline, it appears, was due to a combination of factors: the discovery of large oil reserves in Texas around 1901 made petrol cheap; the electric starter motor, introduced by Cadillac in 1912, eliminated the unpleasant hand-cranking required by early petrol cars; and the network of petrol stations developed much faster than any electric charging infrastructure. By the 1920s, electric cars had largely been pushed off the public road, surviving only in niche commercial applications such as urban milk floats.

G The post-war period is widely regarded as the great age of mass automobile ownership in the West. American manufacturers produced ever larger and more powerful vehicles through the 1950s and 1960s; European and Japanese manufacturers, by contrast, focused on smaller, more efficient cars, with iconic models including the Volkswagen Beetle, the Mini, the Citroen 2CV, and the Honda Civic. By the 1970s, automobile manufacture had spread to South Korea and was already taking root in newer industrial economies. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 prompted a partial reorientation of design priorities towards fuel economy, although mass ownership continued to expand globally.

H The early twenty-first century has, it seems, brought a return of the electric vehicle. Tesla launched its Roadster in 2008 and its mass-market Model 3 in 2017, with incumbent manufacturers subsequently following with their own electric ranges. Several governments have announced plans to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by the 2030s or 2040s. Whether this transition succeeds, and how it ultimately reshapes the social and environmental impact of personal transport, is one of the defining questions of the present century. The automobile's history is far from over; it is, on the whole, simply entering a new and rather more uncertain chapter.