IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 7

Text A — OAKBRIDGE LEISURE CENTRE: WEEKLY GROUP-EXERCISE TIMETABLE

Oakbridge Leisure Centre runs the timetabled group classes listed below. Members are permitted to book up to seven days ahead via the smartphone app. Non-members may pay-as-you-go (the rate is £8.50 per class), although this option is largely restricted to a window beginning twenty-four hours before the class starts.

Monday: - 06:30 - 07:15 HIIT Express (Studio 1) - 09:30 - 10:30 Pilates (Studio 2) - 12:30 - 13:00 Lunchtime Yoga (Studio 1) - 18:00 - 18:45 Spin (Cycling Suite) - 19:00 - 20:00 Beginners' Strength (Gym Floor)

Tuesday: - 07:00 - 07:45 Boxing Conditioning (Studio 1) - 10:00 - 11:00 Aqua Aerobics (Pool) - 17:30 - 18:30 Body Pump (Studio 2) - 18:45 - 19:30 Spin (Cycling Suite)

Wednesday: - 06:30 - 07:15 HIIT Express (Studio 1) - 09:30 - 10:30 Beginners' Yoga (Studio 2) - 17:30 - 18:15 Tabata (Studio 1) - 19:00 - 20:00 Combat (Studio 2)

Thursday: - 07:00 - 07:45 Pilates (Studio 1) - 12:30 - 13:00 Lunchtime Yoga (Studio 2) - 17:30 - 18:30 Spin (Cycling Suite) - 19:00 - 20:00 Functional Fitness (Gym Floor)

Friday: - 06:30 - 07:15 HIIT Express (Studio 1) - 09:30 - 10:30 Pilates (Studio 2) - 17:30 - 18:30 Body Pump (Studio 1)

Weekends: - Saturday 09:00 Family Splash session (Pool, £6 family ticket) - Sunday 10:00 Long-form Yoga (90 minutes, Studio 1, with an additional £10 charge for members)

Participants are expected to arrive at least five minutes ahead of the start. Latecomers may, on the whole, be turned away once a class is under way. It is advisable to bring a clean indoor pair of trainers and a water bottle; class kit is provided. Cancellations ought to be made at least two hours ahead to avoid a £4 no-show fee.

Text B — FITNESS-CLASS ADVERTISEMENTS FROM LOCAL INSTRUCTORS

Notice 1 — Calm Currents Yoga (community-hall classes) Hatha and restorative practice in a small, welcoming community hall on Beech Avenue. All levels are welcome; no prior background is required. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 19:30 - 20:45. £10 drop-in or £36 for a block of five. Participants are asked to bring their own mat; blocks and straps are supplied. Run by Priya Shah, a qualified yoga therapist registered with the British Wheel of Yoga. Notice 2 — Park-Run Boot Camp Outdoor circuit work in Riverbank Park, typically every Saturday at 08:30. An hour of running, bodyweight movement, and games designed to build all-round fitness — no kit required. The class normally goes ahead in rain or shine; it tends only to be called off in lightning. The first session is free, with a £7 charge applying thereafter. Children aged twelve and above may join free of charge when with a paying adult. Look for the blue gazebo near the bandstand.

Notice 3 — Senior Strength A friendly small-group programme aimed at adults aged 60 and above, focusing primarily on balance, mobility, and gentle resistance work. Wednesday afternoons, 14:00 - 15:00, at the Methodist Hall on King Street. £6 per session, although the first month is free for new joiners arriving on referral from a GP or physiotherapist. Tea and biscuits typically follow. Instructor: Tom Brennan (Level 3 personal trainer, with additional postural-stability training).

Text C — KESTREL CONSULTING: ACCEPTABLE-USE POLICY FOR IT SYSTEMS

This policy applies to all permanent and contract staff at Kestrel Consulting and covers the use of company-provided IT systems including desktops, laptops, mobile telephones, tablets, email accounts, and the corporate network.

1. Acceptable use Company IT systems are provided primarily for legitimate business purposes. Reasonable personal use is permitted, provided it does not interfere with work, generate significant cost to the company, or breach any other part of this policy. Streaming entertainment media on the corporate network during working hours is not permitted.

2. Unacceptable use The following activities are prohibited at all times and may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal: - Accessing, downloading, or distributing material that is illegal, obscene, harassing, or discriminatory. - Sending unsolicited bulk email (spam) using a company address. - Attempting to bypass the company's security controls, including firewalls and content filters. - Installing software, browser extensions, or system utilities that have not been approved by the IT team. - Using company resources to run a personal business or to undertake paid freelance work.

3. Passwords and authentication Passwords must be at least fourteen characters long and contain a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. The same password must not be reused across systems. Multi-factor authentication is mandatory on all email, file-sharing, and remote-access services. Compromised credentials must be reset within four hours of discovery.

4. Working remotely Remote workers must use the company-issued VPN at all times when accessing internal systems. Connections from public Wi-Fi networks (e.g. cafés, hotels, airports) require the VPN to be active before any work is undertaken. Documents marked "Confidential" or "Restricted" must not be opened on screens visible to the public.

5. Data handling Client data may be stored only in approved locations: the corporate file server, the approved cloud storage platform, or the company's customer-relationship-management system. Storing client information on personal devices, in personal email accounts, or on consumer cloud services (e.g. personal Dropbox or Google Drive accounts) is prohibited.

Text D — KESTREL CONSULTING: BRING-YOUR-OWN-DEVICE (BYOD) AND PRINTING

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) Staff who wish to use their personal smartphone or tablet to access company email or calendar may do so only after enrolling the device in the company's mobile-device-management (MDM) system. Enrolment may require that: - the device runs an operating system released within the last three years; - a six-digit (minimum) device passcode is set; - the company is able to remotely wipe the device if it is lost, stolen, or the employee leaves the company.

Voluntary enrolment may be withdrawn at any time, in which case all company data will be removed from the device. Devices that fail to meet the minimum security requirements will be locked out of all company systems automatically.

Printing The office uses a "follow-me" print system: documents sent to the queue are released only when the user authenticates at any printer using their swipe card. Print jobs are deleted automatically after 24 hours if not collected. Default print settings are double-sided, monochrome, and four-pages-per-sheet for internal drafts. Colour and single-sided printing are reserved for client deliverables and may be enabled via the print driver. Monthly print volumes per team are monitored and reported to line managers.

Incident reporting Any actual or suspected breach of this policy — including phishing emails, malware infections, and lost devices — must be reported to the IT helpdesk on extension 555 as soon as possible, and in any event within four hours of discovery. Late reporting itself may be treated as a separate breach.

A The story of the wristwatch is often told as a story of technology — better springs, smaller gears, more accurate oscillators. Less often is it told as a story about work. Yet the wristwatch was, more than almost any other small object, arguably an instrument of industrial discipline. Its spread tracks the spread of the modern working day, in which time is divided into countable units, sold to an employer, and audited from above. To understand why almost everyone wore a wristwatch by the middle of the twentieth century, we typically have to look not at the watchmaker's workbench but at the factory floor, the railway timetable, and the office clock.

B Before the industrial era, work in agricultural and craft economies was largely paced by the sun, the seasons, and the rhythms of the body. Tasks were defined by completion — milking the cows, finishing a piece of pottery — rather than by hours. Time was experienced as something fluid and shared, told by church bells and town clocks rather than by personal instruments. Even where mechanical timepieces existed, they were rare and expensive: the property of monasteries, town councils, and a few wealthy individuals. The idea of an ordinary person carrying their own clock would have seemed strange and largely pointless.

C The change began with the railways. From the 1830s onwards, the spread of rail travel made it suddenly important that two distant cities should agree on the time of day. A train timetable assumed that "ten o'clock in London" meant the same instant as "ten o'clock in Bristol," which had largely never been quite true under purely solar reckoning. Britain standardised on Greenwich Mean Time for railway purposes in 1847; other countries followed, and time-zone systems were agreed internationally in 1884. Railway workers — drivers, signalmen, guards, ticket clerks — had to consult accurate timepieces constantly, and they were among the first occupational groups to be issued with personal watches as part of their professional kit.

D The factory completed what the railway had begun. Industrial production demanded that large numbers of workers arrived at the same moment, performed coordinated tasks, and broke for the same span of minutes at the same time of day. Wages were paid by the hour, and the factory clock — typically a large, prominently mounted dial near the entrance — was the instrument of that arrangement. Workers who arrived even a few minutes late faced fines or were locked out. Initially the factory clock was the only one that mattered; over time, employees began to acquire their own watches, at first to check the factory clock against — and protect themselves from disputed deductions — and later as a matter of professional identity.

E For most of the nineteenth century, the personal watch was a pocket watch: chained to a waistcoat or hung on a fob. Pocket watches were considered fitting for adult men; women, who in middle-class families were not typically in paid employment, wore watches as jewellery, sometimes on a chain around the neck or pinned to a brooch. The wristwatch as such did exist but was a curiosity, treated by gentlemen with mild contempt as a feminine ornament. As we shall see, this attitude collapsed rapidly during the First World War.

F Soldiers in the trenches of 1914-1918 needed timepieces they could consult while holding a rifle, in mud, in low light. Pocket watches were largely impossible: a soldier under fire could not safely fish a watch from a tunic pocket. Officers improvised by strapping pocket watches to their wrists with leather straps and metal cups, and watch manufacturers responded with purpose-built military wristwatches incorporating luminous dials, robust crystals, and protective grilles. By 1918 the wristwatch had been worn by a whole generation of demobilised men and had largely acquired a thoroughly masculine association. The pocket watch never recovered.

G Between the wars, the wristwatch became the standard timepiece of the modern office worker. Office life in the 1920s and 1930s was, by the standards of factory work, less obviously regimented: people sat at desks rather than at machines. Yet the underlying discipline of arrival and departure times, lunch hours, meeting punctuality, and deadlines for typed reports was if anything intensified. The wristwatch — affordable now thanks to mass-produced movements, robust thanks to wartime innovation — was the instrument by which the new white-collar workforce navigated this softer but more pervasive timekeeping. It was on the wrist precisely because it had to be consulted constantly and unobtrusively, in the middle of a meeting, during a telephone call, while writing at a typewriter.

H The wristwatch in the twenty-first century is, paradoxically, both more and less important than it has ever been. The smartphone has largely displaced it as a basic timekeeping device: anyone who simply needs to know the time looks at a screen. But the wristwatch has returned, in two new forms. The first is the luxury mechanical watch, increasingly bought as a statement of identity or as an investment, far more expensive in real terms than nineteenth-century pocket watches ever were. The second is the connected smartwatch, which records heart rate, paces, sleep, and exercise minutes, and which has, in many workplaces, arguably become the device by which employers measure not just attendance but biological readiness. The wristwatch remains an instrument of work, even when its dial no longer shows a single hand.