Mock 1 — Reading and Use of English

The waiting list

An allotment is a small plot of land, rented from the council for a few pounds a year, on which a family can grow its own vegetables. The idea 1 ______ back to the nineteenth century, when factory workers with no garden were given a strip of ground to feed themselves, and for most of the twentieth century plots were in plentiful 2 ______. Councils could not 3 ______ them away.

That has changed. In many towns the waiting list is now measured in years — eight in parts of London — and the plots that do 4 ______ up go to people who applied before their children were born. Nobody is entirely sure why. Part of it is the price of vegetables; part of it is that a generation which grew up in flats has 5 ______ an interest in soil that nobody predicted.

Whatever the reason, the rules have not 6 ______ up with the demand. A plot-holder who lets the weeds 7 ______ over can still be given notice after a single warning, and the committees that run the sites take the job seriously. On one site in Bristol the inspection is announced a fortnight in 8 ______, and that fortnight is the busiest of the year.

The end of the pier

Almost every English seaside town of any size has a pier, and almost every pier has, at some point in its life, caught fire. There were once more than a hundred; fewer than sixty remain, and the story of 9 ______ they were built for is not quite the one the postcards tell.

The first piers were not for pleasure 10 ______ all. They were landing stages, built so that steamers could set passengers down 11 ______ matter what the tide was doing. Only later did somebody notice that people were paying to walk along them 12 ______ no intention of boarding anything, and the theatres, the arcades and the tea rooms followed.

By the 1950s the pier 13 ______ become the whole point of the holiday. A family would spend a fortnight in Blackpool and see the same show twice. 14 ______ the cheap flight arrived, the audiences went with it, and a wooden structure standing in salt water is expensive to keep up even when it is earning.

That is partly why so many burned. An empty pier is an uninsurable one, and the fires — Brighton's West Pier went up twice in 2003 — were, 15 ______ the most part, not investigated very hard. The ones that survive are mostly owned by trusts now, run by volunteers, and busier than they 16 ______ been for fifty years.

The Tuesday night quiz

Nobody knows who held the first pub quiz, but by the 1980s it had become one of the most 17 ______ (RELY) features of British life: a Tuesday night, a landlord with a microphone, and forty people arguing about the capital of Peru.

The 18 ______ (POPULAR) of the quiz is not hard to explain. It gives strangers something to do with a table between them, and it rewards the kind of 19 ______ (KNOW) that nobody is ever paid for — the name of a 1970s footballer, the year a bridge opened. Teams are 20 ______ (TYPE) made up of people who would never otherwise be in the same room.

There are rules, though most of them are 21 ______ (WRITE). Phones stay in pockets. A team of ten is 22 ______ (CONSIDER) larger than the spirit of the thing allows, and will be told so. And the quizmaster's decision is final, even when it is 23 ______ (OBVIOUS) wrong — the 24 ______ (AGREE) that follow are, for a lot of regulars, the best part of the evening.

A year of Sundays

It started as a joke. My sister, who cannot pass a skip without looking in it, bet me that I could not go to a car boot sale every Sunday for a year without buying something I actually wanted. I took the bet for the pleasure of winning it, and because Sunday mornings in our house had become an argument about whose turn it was to do nothing. Fifty-two Sundays later I have a shed full of things, one of which I would run into a burning house for, and a completely different idea of what a field full of parked cars is for.

The first thing you learn is that the sellers are not there for the money. A pitch costs ten pounds and most of them will not make it back; they will spend four hours in a cold field being offered fifty pence for a lamp and go home lighter, which turns out to be the point. Nobody sells a box of their children's books because they need three pounds. They sell it because the box has been in the hall for two years and somebody else's child is going to read the books, and that is a better ending than the tip. I did not understand this until I stood behind a table myself, in March, and watched a woman pick up a jug my mother had given me. I let her have it for a pound and felt, for the rest of the day, absurdly light.

The buyers I understood more slowly. There are the professionals — the men who arrive at six with torches and go through the boxes before the seller has finished unloading — and everyone else pretends to disapprove of them, but the sale would not exist without them. They are the ones who know that the ugly vase is worth a week's wages, and it is the possibility of that knowledge, more than the vase, that gets four hundred people out of bed at seven on a Sunday. Nobody goes to a car boot sale for what is there. They go for what might be.

What I had not expected was the talking. I am not a person who speaks to strangers, and by June I had had more conversations with people I will never see again than in the previous five years put together. A car boot sale is one of the last places in Britain where it is normal to ask somebody a question — what is this, where did you get it, does it work — and get a story back instead of an answer. Half of what I bought I bought because I liked the person selling it.

So my sister won, in the end, though she disputes it. The thing I would rescue from the fire is a wooden box of hand tools, most of them older than me, bought in October from a man who was clearing his father's garage and could not bring himself to sell them separately. I gave him twenty pounds and he gave me an hour of his father. I have not used most of the tools. That was never what I was paying for.

The half-time kettle

Britain has a name for something that happens nowhere else in quite the same way. Engineers at the National Grid call it the television pickup, and it is what happens when several million people stand up at the same moment and switch on the kettle. 37 ______ Here, where the answer to almost anything is a cup of tea, the effect is large enough to need planning for.

The numbers are startling. A kettle draws about three kilowatts, and at the end of a popular programme the grid can see demand jump by the output of a power station inside a minute. 38 ______ It remains the largest surge ever recorded, and it was not caused by the goals: it was caused by the half-time break and, later, by the penalties.

Predicting it is somebody's job. A small team watches the television schedules with the seriousness other people reserve for the weather, marking the end of every soap opera and the likely length of every football match. 39 ______ Their most difficult evening, they will tell you, is extra time, because nobody knows when it will end.

Meeting the surge is a separate problem, and the answer is a mountain in Wales. 40 ______ When the signal comes, the gates open and the water falls through the turbines, and the station is at full power in under twenty seconds. It then pumps the water back up overnight, when electricity is cheap, and waits for the next cup of tea.

The pickup is smaller than it was. 41 ______ People record programmes, watch them a day later, or stream them on a phone on the train, and the great synchronised switching-on of the 1990s has become a scatter of small ones.

Even so, the engineers keep watching. 42 ______ For as long as that is true, somebody in a control room will be counting kettles.

Four people who holiday at home

A · Fiona — a caravan on the Pembrokeshire coast
We have had the same pitch on the same site for twenty-one years. The caravan has changed twice; the view has not. For the first ten years it was me, my husband and two children who complained about the lack of a pool, and now it is me, my husband and the same two children arriving with children of their own, who do not complain about anything because they have never known a holiday with a pool. It has rained on more of those Augusts than it has not, and we have never once packed up early or gone somewhere else — the rain is part of the furniture. What has changed is the cooking. I used to do all of it. These days my daughter-in-law does Tuesdays, and I sit on the step with a book and pretend not to supervise.

B · Dev — a long-distance path, one week at a time
I am walking the coast of Wales in one-week pieces. I started in 2019 at Chester and I will finish, at this rate, somewhere around my sixtieth birthday. I go on my own. My colleagues think this is either very brave or slightly worrying, and they ask, every year, whether I would not rather go somewhere hot, and I have given up explaining. Seven days of nobody needing me is the holiday; the scenery is a bonus. I do look at the forecast — if a week looks like solid rain I will shift it — but I have walked through plenty. What I spend is almost nothing: a bed in a pub each night and whatever the pub is serving. The last evening, when I can see next year's stretch of coast from the window, is the best hour of the year.

C · Karen — a holiday camp on the east coast
Every year, the same week in July, three generations of us go to the same camp near Skegness. People assume it is the cheap option, and I let them, but once you have paid for eleven people to eat for a week it is not far off what my sister pays for Tenerife. We are not there for the price. We are there because for seven days nobody has to think about a meal — you walk into the restaurant, you sit down, it arrives — and that, when you are the person who does the thinking the other fifty-one weeks, is worth every penny. We tried Spain once. It was beautiful and hot and I spent the whole fortnight organising it, and came home needing a holiday. We have not been abroad since.

D · Rob — a cottage on a Scottish island
Two trains, a ferry, and a bus that runs when it feels like it: that is how you reach the house we rent, and the difficulty is the point. There is no phone signal, which means the first two days are genuinely awful — everybody twitchy, nobody sleeping, my son asking whether we can go home — and the next twelve are the best of the year. I should say I did not choose this. I had a fortnight in Portugal priced and half-booked, and my wife and the children voted it down, three to one, in favour of an island we had been to once, in the rain. I sulked for a week. The sea is twelve degrees and I swim in it every morning, and I have stopped explaining that to anyone.