IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 36

Text A — WHISKERS & WAGS PET-SITTING: SERVICE MENU

Whiskers & Wags has been caring for the pets of north Bristol for over fifteen years. We are fully insured and DBS-checked, and we have served more than 2,000 local households. Our pet-sitters have been argued to be among the best-trained in the local market.

Our services: - Dog walking — solo walks (£18 for 60 minutes) or small group walks of up to three dogs (£12 for 60 minutes). All dogs are walked from a list of approved off-lead and on-lead routes; please indicate your preference. - Daily home visits for cats, rabbits, and other small pets — £10 per 30-minute visit, including feeding, fresh water, and litter or hutch cleaning. Two visits per day are normally recommended for cats with health conditions. - Overnight pet-sitting in your home — £55 per night (one pet), plus £10 per night for each additional pet. The sitter sleeps at your address and provides at least two longer walks for dogs. - Live-in pet-sitting (minimum three nights) — £65 per night, with all meals and care included; broadly suitable for households with multiple pets or special needs. - Puppy and kitten socialisation packs — six 45-minute visits across two weeks for £150, available for animals between 9 and 20 weeks of age.

What we do not offer: grooming, veterinary services, training for behavioural issues, or care for reptiles, amphibians, or exotic birds. We are happy to recommend specialists for any of these.

Initial consultation: We always carry out a free 30-minute meet-and-greet visit before the first booking. During this visit we typically learn your pet's routine, allergies, and emergency contacts, and we collect a spare set of keys.

Text B — WHISKERS & WAGS: BOOKING TERMS AND CONDITIONS

To book any of our services, please complete the online booking form on our website. A booking is only confirmed when you receive a written confirmation by email from a member of our team. The booking system has been argued to be the smoothest part of the process by our regulars.

Payment: - A deposit of 25% is payable at the time of booking for any service over £100. - The remaining balance is due no later than 48 hours before the start of the booked service. - For dog walks and home visits, we typically offer 10-visit booklets at a 10% discount. Booklets are valid for 90 days.

Cancellations: - Cancellations more than 14 days before the start of the service typically receive a full refund. - Cancellations between 7 and 14 days receive a 50% refund. - Cancellations less than 7 days before the service are non-refundable, but bookings may be rescheduled at no extra cost if notice is given more than 48 hours in advance.

Key and home access: We normally provide each sitter with a single set of keys, securely tagged with a reference number rather than your address. Keys are stored in a locked safe at our office between visits.

Emergency veterinary care: You authorise Whiskers & Wags to seek emergency veterinary care for your pet if necessary, up to a limit of £350. Any costs above this limit will normally be discussed with you before further treatment, except where delay would risk the animal's life.

Holiday surcharges: A 25% surcharge applies to all services on the following dates: 24-26 December, 31 December, 1 January, and bank holidays. This is to recognise the time of our sitters at these times.

Text C — HARBOUR ANIMAL CARE: NEW STAFF TRAINING PACK

This training pack is for new staff joining Harbour Animal Care, a busy boarding and daycare facility with kennels for sixty dogs and a separate cattery with capacity for thirty cats. All staff typically complete two weeks of induction before working unsupervised with animals. The induction has been argued to be the most important investment the facility makes in its team.

Daily routine — kennels: - 07:00 - 08:30 First morning walks (groups of no more than four dogs of compatible size and temperament) - 08:30 - 09:30 Kennel cleaning. Each kennel is normally fully cleaned and disinfected daily. - 09:30 - 10:30 Breakfast (food types and quantities are recorded in the individual care log for each dog) - 10:30 - 12:30 Group play in fenced outdoor paddocks, weather permitting; otherwise enrichment activities indoors - 12:30 - 14:00 Quiet rest period — staff typically use this time for laundry, equipment checks, and individual one-to-one care - 14:00 - 16:30 Afternoon walks (smaller groups, allowing more time for older or anxious dogs) - 16:30 - 17:30 Dinner and final cleaning - 17:30 - 19:00 Settle-down period and individual visits before the night shift takes over at 19:00

Staff responsibilities: - Daily completion of each animal's care log, including food eaten, water intake, exercise taken, and any unusual behaviour or medical concerns - Reporting any sign of illness — particularly vomiting, persistent coughing, lameness, or refusal to eat — to the duty manager immediately - Following individual diet sheets exactly; do not provide additional food or treats unless authorised in writing by the duty manager - Securing all gates and doors behind you. Two staff must always be present whenever a dog is being moved between an outdoor paddock and the indoor area.

Text D — HARBOUR ANIMAL CARE: HEALTH, SAFETY AND CLIENT COMMUNICATION

Health and safety: - All staff must wear closed-toe boots and the issued Harbour Animal Care work shirt. Loose hair must be tied back. - Bites and scratches, however minor, must be reported to the duty manager within thirty minutes and recorded in the incident log. - A first-aid kit and an animal first-aid kit are normally located in the front office. Staff must complete the basic animal first-aid module during induction. - Disinfectant must be diluted strictly according to the instructions printed on the label. Concentrated disinfectant can irritate animal paws and respiratory systems.

Client communication: - The customer-facing reception is the main point of contact for clients. Kennel staff should refer specific booking queries to the reception team rather than attempting to answer them. - A short daily update message and one photograph per animal are sent to each client during boarding stays of three nights or longer. These are written from a standard template and sent by the duty manager. - Any concern raised by a client about the welfare or care of their animal must be escalated to a senior manager within 24 hours.

Confidentiality: Staff must not discuss other clients' animals on social media or in public. Photographs and videos taken during the course of work generally belong to Harbour Animal Care and must not be posted on personal social-media accounts without written permission from the facility manager. The confidentiality rule has been argued to be especially important during busy school-holiday periods.

A The keeping of animals primarily for companionship rather than for food, labour, or protection is sometimes described as a quintessentially modern phenomenon. In some respects this is true: the global pet industry of the early twenty-first century, with its specialised foods, veterinary products, and accessories, is plainly of recent origin. But the underlying human practice of forming affectionate bonds with non-working animals is much older, and the history of pet-keeping is in fact a long, uneven story spanning at least ten thousand years.

B The earliest evidence for animal companionship comes from burial sites. A grave excavated at Ein Mallaha in northern Israel, dating to roughly 12,000 years ago, contains the skeleton of an elderly person with one hand resting on the body of a puppy. The presence of a puppy in a deliberately arranged human burial strongly suggests an emotional rather than utilitarian relationship. Similar burials of dogs alongside humans, sometimes with grave goods, have been found across Eurasia and the Americas from prehistoric periods. By the time of ancient Egypt, dogs, cats, monkeys, and birds were all kept in elite households as companions, with the most beloved animals receiving mummification and burial in dedicated necropolises.

C Pet-keeping in classical antiquity was widespread but limited to those with the means to feed and house non-working animals. Greek and Roman authors describe lap dogs kept by wealthy women, songbirds in elaborate cages, and, in some Roman cities, exotic animals including parrots, monkeys, and small wild cats kept as status symbols. The historian Suetonius records the emperor Domitian as having a great fondness for his pet eel and writing a poem on its death. The relationship of ordinary people in this period to non-working animals is much harder to reconstruct, but the keeping of small dogs and household cats was probably more widespread than the surviving sources suggest.

D The medieval European church regarded affection for pets with some suspicion. Excessive love of an animal was occasionally described as misdirected love that should have been given to God or to other people; certain religious orders forbade the keeping of pets. Yet practical pet-keeping continued, particularly among the aristocracy. Falcons and hunting dogs of course had a working purpose, but lap dogs, particularly the small spaniels carried in fine ladies' sleeves, were kept purely for companionship. The cat, treated with suspicion in some periods because of its supposed association with witchcraft, nonetheless remained a fixture of medieval households for its practical role in controlling vermin and, increasingly, as a household companion.

E A transformation in attitudes occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and continental Europe. The growing urban middle class, with its emphasis on domestic life and the moral education of children, found in pets a means of teaching kindness, responsibility, and emotional restraint. Pet-keeping was promoted in didactic books for children, and the first societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals were founded in this period — the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Britain in 1824, and its American counterpart in 1866. Veterinary medicine, hitherto largely concerned with farm animals, began to take pets seriously, and the first specialised pet hospitals were established in the second half of the nineteenth century. The change has often been argued to mark the real beginning of modern attitudes to companion animals.

F The twentieth century saw the industrialisation of pet care. Commercial dog and cat food, originating in the late nineteenth century with the work of James Spratt and others, became near-universal in middle-class households by the 1950s. Veterinary practice professionalised through the establishment of formal university degrees and licensing bodies. By the late twentieth century the global pet industry was estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars annually, with goods ranging from premium foods and bedding to insurance products. The cat overtook the dog as the most numerous pet in some countries, including the United States, where cats are estimated to outnumber dogs by a small margin.

G Recent decades have seen further changes in the role and treatment of pets. In many wealthy societies pets are now treated less as quasi-children and more as legitimate dependents with their own rights and welfare. Legislation in several countries explicitly recognises the sentience of pets; courts in a small but growing number of jurisdictions consider the welfare of pets in disputes between separating couples. Pet ownership is also implicated in mental-health debates: the supposed benefits of companion animals for stress, isolation, and recovery from illness have been the subject of an expanding scientific literature, though the strength of the evidence varies by study.

H The history of pet-keeping is therefore neither a simple ascent into modern sentimentality nor a recent invention. It is, rather, a long story of changing relationships between human beings and the animals with whom they share their daily lives — a story shaped by economic, religious, and cultural conditions that vary from place to place. The companion at the foot of someone's bed today is in this sense the latest in a line stretching back, plausibly, to the puppy buried with a person at Ein Mallaha twelve thousand years ago.