Mock 2 — Reading and Use of English

The Lost Property Office

Every year, passengers leave something in the region of a third of a million objects on London's buses, trains and taxis. Almost all of them 1 ______ up in a windowless building near Baker Street, where a small team spends its days trying to 2 ______ umbrellas with their owners.

The staff are no longer easily surprised. A stuffed eagle, a wedding dress and, on one memorable occasion, a lawnmower have all 3 ______ on the shelves. What they find harder to explain is the ordinary stuff: the sheer 4 ______ of keys, glasses and single gloves that nobody ever comes back for.

Only about a fifth of what comes in is ever claimed. In part this is because people have no idea the office exists; in part it is because they 5 ______ up hope far too quickly. Telephone within a day or two and the odds are surprisingly good, 6 ______ that you can offer a reasonable description of what you lost.

Anything nobody collects is 7 ______ on to for three months. After that it is sold, given to charity or, in the case of the lawnmower, quietly 8 ______ of. The money raised goes back into running the office, which more or less pays for itself.

The right to walk across a field

Britain is unusual in the number of paths that cross private land. There are some 140,000 miles of public footpath in England and Wales, and a good many of them run straight through fields, farmyards and, occasionally, other people's gardens.

The right to walk them was not so 9 ______ given as taken. In the 1930s, walkers from the northern industrial cities began deliberately crossing moorland that was closed to them, and in 1932 several hundred of them climbed a hill called Kinder Scout 10 ______ order to be arrested. Five of them were, and in a fortnight the publicity achieved exactly 11 ______ fifty years of polite letters had not.

A path survives only if it is used. 12 ______ a route is walked regularly it can quietly disappear from the map, and every council in England is required by law to keep a record of each path 13 ______ crosses the land it looks after. A landowner may not block a right of way, 14 ______ may he plough it up without putting it back afterwards, although a surprising number try.

None of this applies in Scotland, where the law took a different turn altogether: there, walkers may cross almost 15 ______ open ground they like, 16 ______ long as they behave responsibly and shut the gates behind them.

The Shipping Forecast

Twice a day, Radio 4 reads out a list of sea areas — Dogger, Fisher, German Bight — with the wind, the weather and the 17 ______ (VISIBLE) expected in each. The broadcast lasts under ten minutes and is, in theory, entirely 18 ______ (RELEVANT) to the several million people who listen to it in bed.

It has been going out since 1924, and its 19 ______ (SURVIVE) is something of a puzzle. Any vessel at sea can now obtain forecasts of a 20 ______ (PRECISE) that would have been unimaginable then. Yet when the BBC once proposed moving the late-night reading to a different hour, listeners reacted so 21 ______ (FURY) that the plan was dropped inside a fortnight.

Part of the explanation is the language. Every area is described in the same order and the same clipped phrases, with an 22 ______ (ORDINARY) economy: “Fair Isle, southwesterly five, occasionally six, rain later, moderate becoming poor.” To most of the audience the words are very nearly 23 ______ (MEAN), and that is precisely the point. What the forecast offers is not information but 24 ______ (REASSURE): the country is still out there, still being measured, while you sleep.

Sixteen volunteers and a rota

When the county council announced that our village library would close, the meeting in the hall was full for the first time since the flood. I went expecting anger, and there was some. What struck me was how quickly the anger turned into arithmetic. Within forty minutes one man had worked out what the building cost to heat, a woman at the back had counted the hours a week it would need to be staffed, and a retired accountant was explaining, quite cheerfully, that the numbers were not impossible. I left with a rota in my hand and the sinking feeling that I had somehow volunteered.

Fifteen years on, the library opens five days a week and is run entirely by people who are not librarians. The local paper calls this a triumph of community spirit, which is true in the way most compliments are true: accurate, and not quite the whole story. What actually keeps the door open is not spirit but the rota — a shared spreadsheet, updated obsessively by a woman called Pat, which tells sixteen of us exactly where we are supposed to be on Thursday. Spirit gets you through the first year. Administration gets you through the fourteenth.

I had assumed the hard part would be the books. It isn't. The stock more or less looks after itself and the county still supplies us through the van. The hard part is that a library turns out not to be about books at all. On a wet Tuesday in February our regulars include two teenagers with nowhere warm to do their homework, a man who reads three newspapers in a strict order and speaks to nobody, and Mrs Okafor, who comes in to use the printer and stays two hours. None of them is here for the fiction shelves. We are, whether we intended it or not, the only indoor place in the village where nobody expects you to buy anything.

That has its costs. Volunteers are not trained for everything that walks through the door, and there have been afternoons when I have wished very much for a professional — someone with a job description, and a manager to ring. The library service that was cut was not, whatever we shouted at the time, staffed by people who did nothing. It was staffed by people who knew what to do when a regular stopped coming in.

So I am never sure what to say when another village writes to ask how we did it. The honest answer is that we did it because we had to, that it works, and that it should not have been necessary. People generally want the first two thirds of that sentence and not the last. But I have watched the arithmetic of one evening turn into fifteen years of Thursdays, and I would rather be accurate than encouraging.

The nine hundred names on London's walls

There are more than nine hundred blue plaques on the walls of London, and most people walk past them without ever looking up. The scheme began in 1866, when the Society of Arts fixed a disc to the house in which Lord Byron had been born. 37 ______ The idea was simple enough to travel: a person, a house, a name where you could see it.

Getting one, however, is harder than it looks. The subject must have been dead for at least twenty years, must be regarded as eminent by their own profession, and — the rule that ends most applications — the actual building they lived in must still be standing. 38 ______ That is why so many of the names are Victorian, and why whole generations of Londoners are missing from the walls.

The panel that decides also has to judge what “eminent” is going to mean, and its idea of the word has changed. For the first hundred years the plaques went almost entirely to politicians, soldiers and men of letters. 39 ______ Since then the balance has shifted, though slowly, and the committee now goes looking for names instead of waiting for them.

The plaques are also, quietly, a record of who could afford to live where. 40 ______ A blue plaque therefore tends to mark not simply where somebody lived, but where they lived once they were doing well.

None of this stops them working. 41 ______ Something about the ordinariness of the house does the work: this is a front door, with a bell and a bin, and somebody who changed the language used to come home to it.

There have been proposals to modernise the scheme — a code on each disc leading to a recording, a map on a phone, a voice in your ear. 42 ______ The plaque gives a name, a trade and two dates, and leaves the rest of the work to the person standing on the pavement.

Four people who show visitors round Britain

A · Priya — Blue Badge guide, Oxford
I did the training for eighteen months while working nights, which I would not recommend to anybody. The examination is genuinely hard: architecture, three centuries of politics, and enough about the colleges to survive a party of American academics. What nobody tells you is that the knowledge is the easy half. A tour is thirty strangers standing in the rain, and if you cannot read a group inside the first four minutes — who is cold, who is bored, who has only come because their daughter made them — the facts will not save you. These days I spend more time deciding the order I say things in than deciding what to say. My worst tours were the ones where I knew the most.

B · Michael — volunteer guide, the British Museum
I retired at sixty-one, could not think what to do with the mornings, and signed up. Nine of us were taken on and four are still here. The Museum trains you, which I had honestly not expected — six weeks of it, and a proper assessment at the end. My tour is forty minutes and covers eleven objects, and I am not permitted to change it, which irritated me for about a year until I understood why. Visitors ask about the Marbles, of course. We are given a form of words and I use it, but I add that reasonable people disagree about them, because they do, and because a visitor who has been told what to think stops asking questions.

C · Sofia — punt guide, Cambridge
Everyone assumes the punting is the difficult part. It takes a fortnight to learn and after that your arms do it without you. The hard part is talking for fifty minutes to eight people who are sitting behind you, facing the other way, while a stag party overtakes you singing. You cannot see a single face, so you learn to listen instead: the quality of the silence tells you everything. I get about four months of real work a year and I make nearly all my money in eleven weeks of summer, so I teach through the winter. Every guide on this river tells the same six stories. I have decided that mine are going to be true, which puts me in a minority.

D · Alan — hill-walking guide, the Highlands
I take people up mountains, so my first job is the one nobody books me for: standing outside at seven in the morning deciding whether we are going at all. I turn back roughly one walk in eight, and I have learned to do it early and cheerfully, because a group arguing about the weather at nine hundred metres is a group in trouble. The history goes in as we walk — the shielings, the clearances, what those piles of stone used to be. I do not lecture; there is no point when everybody is breathing hard. I earn considerably less than I did in the office and I have not once, in eleven years, wanted to go back.