Mock 3 — Reading and Use of English

Sorry

Ask a visitor what they noticed first about the British and the answer, more often than not, is the apologising. People say sorry when somebody bumps into them, sorry before asking a question, sorry to a chair they have walked into. It is, 1 ______ any standard, a great deal of apologising, and one survey 2 ______ the average at eight a day — a figure that is widely 3 ______ as an underestimate.

What confuses visitors is that very little of this is an apology 4 ______ such. A British “sorry” can mean “excuse me”, “I didn't hear you”, “you are in my way”, or — said in a particular tone — “I am not sorry in the slightest”. It is 5 ______ as likely to be a warning as an expression of regret. Learning to tell the versions 6 ______ takes years, and the British themselves are not always certain which one they have just used.

None of this means the country is unusually polite. It means it is unusually 7 ______ on avoiding a scene, and “sorry” is the quickest way to make one go away before it has started. Understood like that, the habit makes perfect 8 ______: it is not humility, it is efficiency.

The invention in the road

On a foggy night in 1933, a man called Percy Shaw was driving home to Halifax along a road he knew well 9 ______ he realised he could not see it. The tram lines that had guided him for years had been taken up, and the only thing that saved him, 10 ______ he later said, was a cat sitting on a fence, whose eyes caught his headlights and showed him where the edge was.

He had, 11 ______ course, seen nothing more than a reflection, and within a year he had worked out how to make one on purpose. His road stud — two glass beads set in a rubber pad, sunk 12 ______ that its top sat level with the surface — was patented in 1934. Its cleverest feature is one most drivers have never noticed: every time a wheel runs 13 ______ it, the pad is pressed down and the glass is wiped clean.

For several years hardly 14 ______ bought them. It took the wartime blackout, when street lights were switched off and the roads became lethal, to make the idea 15 ______ into its own. By the 1950s they were on every main road in the country, and Shaw, who never left the house he had grown up in, was a very rich man 16 ______ front room still had no carpet.

He is usually described as a man with one idea. It was, by any measure, enough.

The bank holiday

Britain has fewer public holidays than almost any country in Europe, and it treats the ones it has with a 17 ______ (MIX) of hope and resignation. Most fall on a Monday, which makes a long weekend, and the 18 ______ (TRADITION) way to spend it is in a car, in a queue, heading for a coast that is 19 ______ (VARY) colder than the forecast promised.

The name is 20 ______ (LEAD). The holidays were created in 1871 so that banks could close without breaking the law, and the 21 ______ (ASSUME) was that everybody else would carry on working. Within a few years the opposite was true. The 22 ______ (ORIGIN) purpose of the phrase has been forgotten by almost everyone who uses it.

There is a 23 ______ (PERSIST) belief that it always rains on a bank holiday. The records do not quite support it, but they do not contradict it either, and the belief may be doing useful work: a nation that expects 24 ______ (APPOINT) is rarely let down, and is occasionally, gloriously, surprised.

Out of season

We moved to the coast in September, which everybody told us was the wrong month, and which turned out to be the only honest one. In August the town had been a performance: bunting, queues for ice cream, a brass band on the front every Sunday. By the second week of October the band had gone, the ice-cream kiosk had a padlock on it, and the woman in the bakery, who had served me a hundred times without a word, asked where I was from. The town, it turned out, had simply been busy.

I had expected the winter to be bleak and had prepared for it in the way that people from cities prepare for things, by buying equipment. What I had not expected was that the sea would become interesting. In summer it is a backdrop; in January it is the main event, and the whole town watches it the way other places watch television. Storms are announced days ahead, discussed in the shop, and on the day itself a line of people in coats stands on the promenade at a respectful distance, saying nothing. I have joined them. I could not tell you why.

There is a version of this story in which the newcomer discovers the true community that the tourists never see, and I am wary of it, because it is mostly what newcomers want to believe. The truth is more mixed. The town is friendlier in winter because it has time to be, not because it has been waiting for me. And a good deal of what passes for community is simply the fact that there are only four hundred of us and one pub. You do not choose your neighbours here. You are issued with them.

The economics are the part nobody mentions in the brochure. Half the houses on our street are empty from October to Easter, and the people who own them are not villains — they are teachers in Reading who saved for twenty years — but a street that is half dark is a different street. The school has lost a class since we arrived. The bus now runs twice a day. Whatever the town is in winter, it is also a place quietly being hollowed out by the summer that pays for it.

I still would not go back. When I say that to friends from the city they hear a boast, and it is not one; it is closer to an admission. I have become somebody who knows the tide times and has an opinion about the harbour wall. In August, when the bunting goes up and the queues come back, I feel the thing I suppose the woman in the bakery felt about me for the first two years — not hostility, exactly. Just a wish that they would all go home, so that the place could get on with being itself.

The box on the corner

There are around a hundred thousand postboxes in Britain, and very few people could tell you when they stopped noticing them. They arrived in 1852, on the island of Jersey, at the suggestion of a post office official who was better known for something else. 37 ______ The idea worked, and within a year the first boxes had appeared on the mainland.

They were not, at first, red. 38 ______ The result was a box that blended so successfully with hedges and railings that people complained they could not find it, and in 1874 the Post Office gave in and chose the colour it has used ever since. Repainting every box in the country took ten years.

Look closely at one and you will find a set of initials cast into the front. 39 ______ It means the box was made in that reign, and because boxes are almost never taken out of service, a walk through an old town is a walk through a century and a half of monarchs. Boxes from Queen Victoria's time are still emptied every day.

Some are rarer than others. 40 ______ Collectors — there are collectors — will travel a long way to photograph one, and the Post Office has been known to move them quietly when a road is widened, rather than lose them.

What is surprising is how little the design has changed. 41 ______ The pillar on the pavement is essentially the object a Victorian would recognise, with a slot, a door and a plate giving the time of the last collection.

That plate is the part people still read. 42 ______ For everything else, the box is a piece of furniture: noticed by visitors, photographed by them, and to everybody who lives here entirely, comfortably invisible.

Four people who work while Britain sleeps

A · Dawn — night-bus driver, London
I drive the N29 out of Trafalgar Square, midnight till six, four nights a week. I have done days. Never again — days are traffic and complaints, and the night is a different city with the same buildings. My favourite moment is the ten past four — the last drunks are off, and the cleaners and the hospital shift get on, and the whole bus wakes up and starts talking. I could sell tickets for it. The cost is at home. My daughter, who is nine, once described me to a teacher as “a person who is usually asleep”, and she was not being unkind. She was being accurate. I am trying to fix that, but I am not trying to fix it by changing shift.

B · Kieran — baker, a Yorkshire market town
I start at two. The shop opens at seven and by then I have made everything in it, alone, with the radio off. I was never any good with people — I say that in the kindest way; I just find them tiring — and dough does not ask how your weekend was. That is why the job fits me and why my brother, who could talk to a lamp-post, lasted a month in the same trade. The one month I would cheerfully delete from the calendar is December. Everybody wants everything, they want it iced, and they want it by nine on Christmas Eve, and by the time the shop shuts I have not seen daylight in three weeks.

C · Ros — night shift at a newspaper printing plant
I took the job because the shift fitted round the children — ten till six, and I could be home for breakfast. I did not care what was being printed. Twenty years on I care a great deal, and the job is harder than it was, not easier: the presses are quicker and smarter, and that sounds like help, but it means one of us now watches what four of us used to watch, and when something goes wrong it goes wrong at eighty miles an hour. The children are grown. My husband works days and we meet, most weeks, on the landing. People ask whether the paper has a future. I tell them it has one tonight, and tonight is the shift I am on.

D · Malik — milk round, rural Cheshire
Four o'clock, an electric van, two hundred houses. The first thing anyone says when I tell them what I do is “I didn't know they still did that”, and the second is “in glass?” — yes, in glass. What nobody expects is how much you learn from doorsteps. If a house that always leaves two bottles out leaves none, I knock, and twice in eleven years the knock has mattered. I have also learned the weather from the inside: I can smell rain an hour off now, which is not a skill I asked for. I would not swap the round for a warm office. Every season has its hour, and I get to see all of them while the rest of the county is asleep.