IELTS Beat Reading Test 1-GT

Read the text below and answer Questions 1-8.

Visit these historic houses in Northern Ireland

Ardress House

House tours of this elegant 17th-century farmhouse include the impressive drawing-room, fine furniture and paintings. The farmyard, complete with traditional farm implements, is very popular with children. A new programme of family events is arranged each year.

The Argory

This handsome 1820 house has remained unchanged since 1900. It demonstrates the decorative taste of the family who lived here at that time, and also includes a barrel organ that plays traditional Irish tunes once a month during house tours. There are horse carriages, a harness room, and a laundry in the imposing stable yard. As the house has no electric light, visitors wishing to make a close study of the interior and paintings should avoid dull days early and late in the season.

Castle Coole

Castle Coole is one of the finest late 186-century houses in Ireland. The guided tour shows the rich interior decoration, furnishings and furniture of the time, the state bedroom prepared for the visit of King George IV in 1821, and the elegant hall, where evening concerts of classical music are often held.

Castle Ward

This mid-18th-century mansion is an architectural oddity of its time, the inside and outside having been built in two distinct architectural styles. In the surrounding estate there are many holiday cottages available for private lets as well as a caravan site.

Hezlett House

One of the few buildings in Northern Ireland surviving from before the 18th century, this it-century thatched house is simply furnished in late 19th-century style. There is a small museum of farm implements. There are picnic tables outside the house, and for younger visitors a landscaped play area is provided.

Springhill

An atmospheric 17th-century home, in a most attractive setting. The house tour takes in the exceptional library, family furniture from the 19th century, the nursery, and the unusual and colourful exhibition of costumes, which has some fine 17th-century Irish pieces.

Read the text below and answer Questions 9-14.

ANGLIAN WATER

This leaflet sets out our service pledges, with details on special care and new facilities for customers. We have other leaflets giving you further information on some subjects. Let us know which ones you would like by completing and posting the reply-paid section at the back of this leaflet.

We are committed to giving you the best customer service.

This means:

Being easy to contact

We have a freephone number for billing matters and a local charge 24-hour number for any service queries.

Keeping appointments

For written appointments, we will specify morning or afternoon to suit you (but cannot guarantee a precise time). If we have to change the arrangement, we will give you 24 hours’ notice.

Answering your letters promptly

Within 10 working days for a complaint about water or sewerage services and within 20 working days if you have a billing query. If we can, we’ll get back to you sooner.

No-quibble compensation if we get it wrong

We will pay £10 compensation if we fail to meet any of our guaranteed standards.

We care for every customer but we recognise that there are some who need that bit of extra help.

For our elderly or disabled customers we have a range of additional services, including your bill in Braille, help with reading your meter, or special care if for any reason you lose your water supply.

If English is not your first language and you need help understanding your bill, Language Line is a confidential telephone service which gives you information in your own language, at no extra cost.

Ring our freephone number (0800-919155) and ask for Language Line. Please tell us which language you need.

Part 1 Questions (1-14)

Questions 1-8

Look at the following statements and the list of houses below.

Match each statement with the correct house, A-F.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-8.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Houses

A Ardress House

B The Argory

C Castle Coole

D Castle Ward

E Hezlett House

F Springhill

Questions 9 – 14

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text? Select

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Customers can request leaflets on certain topics without paying for postage.

10. Phone calls to ask about service are free.

11. Appointments can be arranged for an exact time.

12. Anglian Water has deadlines for replying to some categories of letters.

13. Customers will receive payment if Anglian Water doesn’t fulfil its service commitments

14. Anglian Water provides help for customers with physical disabilities.

Read the text below and answer Questions 15-20.

What is WorkWise?

WorkWise is a three-year programme which we are about to introduce throughout the company, to give staff different working choices, while at the same time allowing us to reduce expenditure.

WorkWise will become our usual way of working, helping us to make better use of our time, space and technology.

Time

WorkWise provides a range of alternatives. Opportunities for home working, for example, help employees to improve their work/life balance and reduce their travel time and costs.

Space

By making sure all our desks are fully used, through flexi-desking (shared desks), and designing workspaces to support different workstyles, we can rationalise the office accommodation we require and reduce its cost by 20%.

Technology

We will develop our existing technology and implement solutions to enable staff to work flexibly at any of our offices around the country.

WorkWise — what it means for you

You and your team will have a space where you generally work, where visitors can find you, where your post comes to and is collected from and where your possessions are located.

Your team’s workspace will reflect realistic desk occupancy levels and how flexibly your team can work. WorkWise is looking to achieve an average team space of seven desks for every ten employees. Understandably some teams will require more, but we know others can work effectively with fewer.

Once your team has been ‘WorkWised’, you might not have a specific desk allocated to you, and so you will work flexibly by using any available desk. This could be in your team workspace or in another team space. It really will be that flexible. People who no longer have a specific desk will be provided with a portable container to keep their belongings in.

Training

There will be a number of WorkWise training sessions in May:

Venues                             Dates

Carter House   9 May 9.30am — 12.30pm

MacDougall House   10 May 1.30pm — 4.30pm

If you would like to attend one of these courses, prior booking is essential. Please use the eForm which can be accessed below, complete it and email it to the helpdesk. You will require approval from your manager, and a budget code, which can be obtained by going to the Finance Office.

Once the helpdesk has all the relevant information, you will receive confirmation by email. Please print that out and take it with you to the training session.

Read the text below and answer Questions 21-27.

Ottawa City Council

Employee Code of Conduct

Conflict of interest: definition

A conflict of interest occurs when, while carrying out his/her duties, an employee of the City is required to deal with a matter in which he/she has a direct or indirect interest.

A direct interest can occur when an employee may gain, or appear to gain, some financial or personal benefit, or avoid financial or personal loss.

An indirect interest may arise when the potential benefit or loss would be experienced by another person or organisation having a relationship with the employee. This could be a friend or family member, or a business in which the employee has acquired shares.

These benefits, losses, interests and relationships are generally – but not necessarily—financial in nature. A conflict of interest arises when an employee’s activities could benefit a personal interest to the disadvantage of the City’s interests. Any behaviour which is, or could be seen as, a conflict of interest is prohibited, and the employee will face disciplinary proceedings.

Examples of conflicts of interest

Examples of potential conflicts of interest include the following:

• Buying property or goods from the City

An employee may only submit an offer to purchase City property or goods when these are being sold at public auction. However, employees are not permitted to take part in the public auction of vehicles sold by the City.

• Choice of suppliers

The choice of suppliers of goods and services to the City must be based on competitive considerations of quality, price, service and benefit to the City. Contracts will be awarded in a fair and legal manner. The City’s policies and established procedure for selecting suppliers must be followed. It is forbidden for an employee to use his/her knowledge to influence this process for direct or indirect personal gain.

Breach of the Code of Conduct

Any employee who believes he/she or another employee is not acting in accordance with this Code of Conduct must report the matter. The procedure for disclosing a breach (or potential breach) is described in the relevant section of the Code.

Post-employment conflict of interest

After ceasing to be employed by the City, employees are not permitted to act in such a way as to benefit improperly from their previous employment.

Part 2 Questions (15-27)

Questions 15-20

Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 15-20.

Questions 21-27

Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the text for each answer.

Meet the Organoleptics

People who sip, taste and sniff for a living.

A Paul Fisher sits at a circular table. Before him are two dozen cups of Java coffee of various hues and tastes. The president of Tristao Trading, coffee importers in New York, is preparing to ‘cup’.

He raises a spoon to his lips and tastes. He will rank each sample for body, flavour, grade, colour, degree of moisture and acidity. He gives high marks for the soft fruitiness of one, rejects the oily smell and taste of another. After each sampling, he avails himself of the spit sink attached to the table. He decides whether the Kenyan AA batch ordered by one of America’s top coffee companies gets a high enough grade to make it to the market.

Fisher is an organoleptic, a person who uses his senses of smell and taste to make a living. Organoleptics sip soft drinks, taste teas, taste wines and test perfume performance.

B Where do companies find these skilled workers? You might imagine huge recruitment campaigns on university campuses, seeking students with large nostrils and sensitive palates. Not even close. Most firms hire tasters and smellers based simply on the fact that these people like the work; anyone with a normal sense of taste and smell can learn to do the job.

According to John Monsell at the Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, virtually all humans are born with an ability to detect sweet, sour, bitter and salty compounds. However, Monsell finds there is a genetic component to having an excellent sense of taste.

C Most of what we call taste involves smelling from the back of the throat and up into the top of the nose. Smell contributes so much to our appreciation of food that most of us could not recognise our favourite dishes relying on taste alone. For example, if you hold your nose and eat an apple and an onion, they taste the same (although an onion might make your tongue sting).

The average person can detect at least 10,000 odours. Being able to identify those smells is another story. If blindfolded, most people can put a name (‘roses’, ‘fish’, ‘oak’) to fewer than a hundred scents.

D Organoleptics come from all sorts of backgrounds. Peter Goggi, president of Royal Estates, the tea-buying arm of Lipton, began his career as a research chemist.

‘I used to bring samples down to the tea-tasters and listen to their comments,’ he recalls. ‘I started tasting with them, and thought it might be a good job.’ To get some training, he moved to England, then to Kenya. ‘The best way to learn,’ says Goggi, ‘is to taste and taste and taste. I would do about a thousand teas a day.’

 ‘We sip the tea and spit it out,’ Goggi explains. One good turn around the mouth will tell an expert taster all he or she needs to know. ‘The important thing is to evaluate tea in the same way from cup to cup,’ he says. ‘We brew the tea for six minutes and taste it with a teaspoon of skimmed milk to bring out the colour.’

E Jack Wild’s job isn’t quite so refreshing. He had a degree in biochemistry when he went to work at Hill Top Research in 1958. The consumer-products market was taking off then, thanks to postwar technology and increased disposable income. People were beginning to worry about odours.

Hill Top Research tests products for eliminating bad odours. People who volunteer to take part in a test are paid not to use soaps or perfumes for ten days. After each participant has been sprayed with deodorant, the researchers start the ranking process. According to Wild, descriptive ability is not important, since being able to say an odour reminds you of one thing or another is not necessary.

F James Bell started as a clerk at Givaudan Roure, leaders in the creation and manufacture of perfume. Put through a smelling test, Bell did well and was sent to a special school in France. ‘I had to learn to identify about 2800 synthetic and 140 natural materials,’ Bell says.

Today, Bell is vice-president and senior perfumer of Givaudan Roure. He recognises as many as 5000 scents and must be able to devise special orders requested by leading perfume companies. They want something ‘beautiful’ or ‘fresh’, and Bell takes it from there.

When the experts at Givaudan Roure were asked to develop a men’s fragrance named after Michael Jordan, the famous basketballer, Bell’s perfumery team went to work and identified four core themes -Cool (in honour of Jordan’s boyhood home in North Carolina), Fairway (for his love of golf), Home run (a leather note to represent Jordan’s interest in baseball) and Rare Air (celebrating his basketball achievements). The resulting fragrance has become a top-selling men’s brand.

G Bell is one of the few in his field who believe natural ability is a pre-requisite for maximising one’s sensibilities. ‘You start with a superior sense of smell, but then you must train it, like a concert pianist.’

 ‘Perfume,’ he continues, ‘is like writing music. It has a base note, a midnote and a top note. You smell the top note initially, the midnotes enhance the top note, and the base note brings it all together.’

We owe a real debt to all those organoleptics out there. They make our world smell a little better and taste a little fresher. And just what do they ask of you? Not much. Just that once in a while, we take the time to stop and smell the rose-scented room freshener.

Part 3 Questions (28-40)

Questions 28-32

The text has seven sections, A-G.

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Questions 33 – 37

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text? Choose

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

33. Oiliness is considered a good flavour in coffee.

34. The average person can name thousands of smells.

35. Participants in smell tests at Hill Top Research are required to avoid using certain products.

36. Most perfumes are made from natural materials.

37. Perfume designers must be able to write clear descriptions of fragrances.

Questions 38-40

Look at the following views expressed in the text (Questions 38-40) and the list of people below.

Match each view with the correct person, A-E.

Write the correct letter, A-E in the blanks.

List of People

A James Bell

B Peter Goggi

C John Monsell

D Jack Wild

E Paul Fisher