English (as an Additional Language) 0472 | Paper 2 Mock 01 | Reading

Read the texts. For each question, choose the correct answer.

RIVERBEND CAMPSITE. Showers are open from six in the morning until ten at night. The washing machines take coins and are in the same building. Please do not wash plates or pans in the shower block. There is a sink for that beside the shop. Fires are allowed only in the metal rings. Quiet is asked for after eleven.

MESSAGE. Your parcel could not be left today because nobody answered the door. It is now at the newsagent on Mill Street, not at the post office. Please bring this card and something with your name on it. The shop closes at half past five on Saturday and does not open on Sunday.

NOTE. Ravi, I have taken your bike to the repair shop because the back brake was loose. They said it will be ready on Thursday, not Wednesday as I first thought. I have left the lock key in the blue jar by the kettle. Do not use my bike, the tyre is flat. Mum.

Read the email. For each question, choose the correct answer.

Hi Ines,

We have been here three weeks now and I am starting to know my way around. The flat is smaller than our old one, but it looks over a courtyard with three lemon trees in it, so I am not complaining. Mum was worried I would miss the garden. I do, a little, but not as much as I expected.

The best thing so far is the market. It sets up on the square every morning except Monday, and by nine it is packed. I went on the first Saturday and could hardly move. Now I go early, before school, and it is much calmer. There is a woman on the corner stall who has started keeping the bread I like.

School is fine. I was dreading it, honestly, because everyone already knew each other. What helped was the choir. I only joined because the music teacher asked me directly and I could not think of a way to say no. Now it is the part of the week I look forward to most. Two of the girls from choir walk the same way home as me.

The one thing I cannot get used to is the noise. Our old street was so quiet you could hear the church clock. Here there are buses until well after midnight. Dad says I will stop noticing in a month. I am not convinced.

Come and stay at half term. There is a sofa bed and I would love to show you the market before it gets busy.

Amara

Read the text. For each gap, type the correct word from the four given.

Desert plants

Deserts get very little rain, so the plants that live there have to be good at ...(a)... water. Some of them store it in thick stems that swell after a storm and shrink slowly over the months that follow. Others send roots a long way down until they ...(b)... water that is held deep underground.

Leaves are a problem in a hot place, because water escapes through them. Many desert plants have solved this by growing leaves that are very small, or none at all. The spines on a cactus are really leaves, and they ...(c)... the plant in two ways: they lose almost no water, and they keep animals away.

Timing matters as much as shape. Certain seeds can lie in the sand for years without growing. They wait until enough rain has fallen, and then the whole desert seems to ...(d)... colour within days. The plants flower, make new seeds and die, all in a few weeks.

Not everything about a desert is ...(e)... for plants. The nights are cool, and some species take in most of their air after dark, when less water will be lost. Scientists who study these plants say there is still a great deal we do not ...(f)... about how they survive. What is ...(g)... is that they manage it in conditions that would kill almost anything else.

Read the text and answer the questions.

Hi Tomas,

You asked how the treehouse ended up, so here is the whole story.

It started because my sister broke her ankle in June and could not do the sailing course she had been saving for. She was miserable for about a week. Then she announced that we were going to build something instead, and that it had better be the treehouse we had talked about for years.

We chose the old apple tree at the bottom of the garden. Dad wanted us to use the big oak by the gate, because it is stronger, but the oak is right beside the road and Mum said no. The apple tree turned out to be the better choice anyway, because its branches come out low and flat.

Almost all the wood came from a neighbour who was taking down a fence. We paid him nothing for it, though we did spend eleven pounds on screws, which felt like a lot at the time. The only tool we had to borrow was a saw.

Neither of us had built anything before. We watched a lot of videos in the first week and understood almost none of them, so in the end we copied a drawing my sister found in an old library book and changed the measurements to fit our tree.

The floor took four days and went up without any trouble. The roof was a different matter. We put it on twice. The first time we did not slope it, and after the storm in the middle of July there was water standing on it and the whole thing sagged. My sister worked out that it needed a slope of about ten degrees, and the second attempt has not leaked once.

We finished on the last Sunday of August, two days before school started. The thing I am proudest of is not the treehouse itself but the ladder, which I designed on my own after three failed drawings.

Come and see it. Bring your camera, because the light in there in the late afternoon is worth photographing.

Yusuf

Read about five people and the eight advertisements, then answer the questions.

1 LAKESIDE MASTERS. Open water only, from May to September. Sessions at six in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Members must already be able to swim one kilometre without stopping. No coaching for beginners. Wetsuits provided.

2 THE OLD BATHS CLUB. A small indoor pool in the town centre, open all year. Two lanes are kept for slow swimmers at every session. There is no fixed timetable: come whenever the doors are open. Twelve pounds a month.

3 HARBOUR DOLPHINS. For swimmers aged eight to sixteen who want to race. Training four evenings a week and competitions most weekends. Coaches will not accept a swimmer who cannot manage all four strokes. Fees are paid termly and include entry to all competitions, though families are asked to help with transport.

4 QUIET WATERS. An adults-only pool with the lights kept low and no music. Sessions on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Popular with people who find busy pools difficult. Booking is required and places go quickly.

5 RIVERSIDE LEARNERS. Lessons for adults who have never swum before, in water that is shallow throughout. Small groups of no more than five. Saturday mornings only, and the course runs for ten weeks from January.

6 THE LONG COURSE. A fifty metre pool, open from five in the morning until ten at night, every day of the year. Suitable for serious training. There are no lessons and no lifeguard outside busy hours, so swimmers must be confident.

7 SEAL CLUB. Family sessions on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, with floats and toys in the water. Children under eight must have an adult with them in the pool. There is a cafe beside the changing rooms.

8 NORTHGATE FITNESS. A pool inside a large gym. Entry includes the machines and the sauna. Open six until nine on weekdays but closed at weekends for maintenance until the spring.

(a) Priya has swum since she was small and trains for competitions all year, indoors through the winter. She wants a pool she can use very early on a weekday before work, and she does not need a coach.

(b) Karl is sixty and has never learned to swim. He would like proper lessons in a small group, and he can only manage Saturday mornings.

(c) Mira finds crowded pools stressful and does not like loud music. She is looking for a calm adult session and is happy to book in advance.

(d) The Okonkwo family want somewhere to take their two young children at the weekend, with something to do afterwards without leaving the building.

(e) Deniz swims slowly and irregularly, and cannot promise to come at the same time each week. He wants a lane where he will not be in anybody's way, all year round.

Read the article and answer the questions.

The keeper of a light that went out

The lighthouse at Skerry Point stopped working in 1974. For nearly fifty years it stood empty at the end of a shingle spit, its windows broken and its stair rusting, while the town behind it slowly forgot it was there. Farid Novak did not forget. He grew up in a house from which, on a clear evening, you could see the tower against the sky, and he says he assumed for most of his childhood that somebody official was looking after it.

He found out otherwise at twenty-three, when he walked out along the spit for the first time and discovered that the door was not locked but simply gone. Inside, the lower floor was full of sand. There were gulls nesting on the third landing. What surprised him most was not the damage but the lamp itself, which was still in place at the top, complete and unbroken, under a thick layer of salt.

Novak was working as a plumber at the time and had no experience of building work. His first move was not to pick up a tool but to spend eleven months finding out who owned the tower. It turned out to belong to a company that had gone out of business, and the paperwork took another year to untangle. He describes that period as harder than any of the physical work that came afterwards.

The restoration began in 2011 with four volunteers and a wheelbarrow. They cleared the sand first, which took six weekends. The stair was the real problem. Novak had assumed it would need replacing, but a retired engineer who came out to look told him that the iron was sound and only the fixings had failed. Replacing the fixings cost a fraction of what a new stair would have done, and the money saved paid for the windows. Novak says that single conversation changed the shape of the whole project, and that he has since made a habit of asking somebody who knows before assuming a thing is beyond repair.

Money has come from a mixture of sources. The town council gave nothing at first and has since become the project's largest single supporter. Most of the early funding came from people who had never seen the lighthouse, after a photograph of the salt covered lamp was shared widely online.

The light was lit again in 2019. It is not a working navigation light and never will be, because that role belongs to a buoy half a mile out. It burns for one hour on the first evening of each month, which Novak insists is the point rather than a compromise. He is now training two people to take over the maintenance, and says the thing he most wants is for the tower to outlast his own involvement in it.

Asked what he would tell somebody starting a project like this, he does not mention money or tools. He says: find out who owns it before you fall in love with it.