Mock 1 — Reading and Use of English

The queue

Nothing marks a visitor 1 ______ more quickly than a failure to notice a queue. The British do not, as a rule, form one deliberately; it assembles of its own 2 ______ the moment two people want the same thing, and it is policed with a severity that 3 ______ no relation to what is at stake. A bus stop, a bakery counter, a single cash machine: the principle is identical, and so is the 4 ______ of anybody who breaks it.

What is striking to an outsider is how little of this is spoken. Nobody is told where to stand. A newcomer is simply expected to take their 5 ______ in the order of arrival, and the one thing that will be said aloud — “I think you'll find there's a queue” — is delivered so mildly that it 6 ______ for a piece of helpful information rather than the reprimand it is.

Sociologists have 7 ______ the habit to wartime rationing, to the railways, to a national preference for rules that nobody has to enforce. The rule is never written down, and it is all the more 8 ______ for that. The ticket machine that issues numbers is tolerated; the crowd that ignores it is not.

The allotment

An allotment is a plot of public land, usually about the size of a tennis court, 9 ______ a town rents to one of its residents for a nominal sum so that they can grow vegetables on it. The idea is Victorian, the waiting lists are now measured in years, and 10 ______ has ever been able to explain to a foreign visitor why a country with so many gardens should want more.

The answer, 11 ______ far as there is one, is that an allotment is not a garden at all. A garden is attached to a house and is there to be looked 12 ______; an allotment is half a mile away, is entirely for use, and belongs to a community of people who have 13 ______ in common except a fence. Advice passes over that fence whether or 14 ______ it was asked for. Nobody on an allotment has ever been left alone with a mistake.

15 ______ is more, the plot is never really yours. Let it go to weed for a season and the committee will write; let it go for two and someone else will be digging it by spring. The arrangement rewards persistence rather than ownership — 16 ______ is perhaps why the British, who are supposed to care so much about property, find it so satisfying.

The pub quiz

The pub quiz is a 17 ______ recent invention — the first were held in the 1970s — (COMPARE) but it has spread with a 18 ______ that few older traditions can match. (THOROUGH) On a Tuesday night roughly a quarter of the country's pubs are running one, and the 19 ______ treat the result (PARTICIPATE) with a seriousness that many visitors find 20 ______. (EXPLAIN)

Teams of four or five, most of them 21 ______, answer forty questions (REGULAR) on subjects ranging from the capitals of Africa to the 22 ______ of the Atlantic. (DEEP)

The prize is rarely worth having. What is at stake is 23 ______ over the table by the window, (SUPERIOR) and the pleasure — a very British one — of being 24 ______ about something entirely useless. (KNOWLEDGE) The quizmaster, usually a volunteer, is obeyed without question, and any dispute over an answer is settled by an appeal to a rule nobody has ever seen written down.

The freedom of the footpath

There are a hundred and forty thousand miles of public footpath in England and Wales, and I have spent a good part of my adult life on them, which is why I am so often asked by visitors what the point is. They mean the walking, not the paths — walking that begins and ends in the same car park, passes no monument, and achieves nothing except itself. I have never found the question easy, and I have come to think that the difficulty is the answer.

The paths came first. Long before anybody walked for pleasure, these were the routes by which people went to church, to market, to the next village and to work, and the law that protects them is older than the idea of leisure. A right of way, once established, cannot be extinguished by a landowner, whatever he builds across it; the public may walk through his farmyard and, in a number of cases I could name, through his garden. The arrangement makes no sense as policy. It makes perfect sense as history, and the British have generally preferred the second.

What the paths give a walker is not the countryside — you can see that from a car — but a particular relationship to it. To walk a right of way is to be somewhere on terms that nobody granted you and nobody can withdraw. You are not a guest and not a customer. The farmer whose field you are crossing may not like it, and you may not like being disliked, and the two of you will nod at each other with the wary civility of people who both know the law. I have come to treasure that nod. It is the most honest transaction in rural England.

The recent campaign for a broader right to roam — for access to woods, rivers and moorland rather than to a line across them — has my sympathy and not, on balance, my support. Its advocates argue, correctly, that the line is arbitrary: why may I walk this side of the wall and not that? But the arbitrariness is doing something. A path is a claim so narrow that it cannot reasonably be refused, and the narrowness is what has kept it intact through two centuries of enclosure, agriculture and development. A general right is a broad claim, and broad claims can be argued down. I would rather hold a small thing that cannot be taken than a large thing that may be.

There is a further point, which I make with some hesitation because it sounds like an argument for the status quo, and it is. A path teaches restraint. Everything about it — the stile, the gate you must close, the strip of trodden earth through a crop — says that you are permitted here on condition that you take nothing and leave nothing, and people who learn that lesson on a footpath tend to carry it elsewhere. A right to be anywhere teaches a different lesson, and I am not sure it is one the countryside can afford to teach at present.

None of which answers the visitor's question. Why walk a circle that goes nowhere? Because the going is not the point and neither is the arriving. The point is the right — exercised, quietly, in company with ten thousand other people doing the same thing that afternoon, none of whom will ever know that they were part of a demonstration. Every footpath in the country stays open only because somebody walked it this year. That is the whole of my answer, and I concede that it makes a poor reply in a car park.

Four writers on compulsory Shakespeare

A · A secondary-school English teacher
I have taught Macbeth to fourteen-year-olds for twenty-two years and I would not want to be told to stop. Yes, the language is a wall — I say so in the first lesson, because pretending otherwise insults them — but it is a wall with footholds, and the job is to show them where the footholds are. Ten lines, on their feet, said aloud, with the desks pushed back: within a fortnight the class that could not read a speech is arguing about how to say it, and that argument is the reading. I am impatient with colleagues who want the requirement lifted. Remove it and the plays go to the children whose parents take them to the theatre, and to nobody else. Shakespeare is on the syllabus because the plays are the best things written in the language, and the best things should be handed to everybody, not only to the ones who would find them anyway.

B · A theatre director
Every argument about Shakespeare in schools starts from the assumption that the language is the difficulty, and I think that assumption is exactly wrong. The language is the pleasure; the difficulty is the classroom. A twelve-year-old who has never seen a play sits with a text designed to be heard and is asked to read it silently, alone, and then to write about it, and we are surprised that the result is boredom. Put the same child in a rehearsal room and the words do what they were built to do. So I would keep Shakespeare compulsory — I would fight for it — but I would make the compulsion a compulsion to perform, not to annotate. What the plays are for, in a school as in a theatre, is the experience of them. Everything else is a by-product.

C · An education researcher
The case for compulsory Shakespeare is made by people who love the plays, and I understand it, but love is not a curriculum policy. The evidence is that for a large proportion of fifteen-year-olds the language is a genuine barrier — not an imagined one — and that the standard remedy, getting them on their feet to act it out, produces enthusiasm in the lesson and no measurable gain in understanding afterwards. I would not remove Shakespeare from schools; I would remove the requirement, and let departments choose from a wider list of demanding texts. What keeps him compulsory is not the quality of the plays, which nobody disputes, but a feeling that a British education ought to contain him. That is an argument about national identity, and we should have it as one, rather than pretending it is an argument about literature.

D · A novelist
I did not enjoy Shakespeare at school and I am grateful that nobody asked whether I did. The plays are hard. The language is four hundred years old, the jokes have died, and a good deal of every scene is spoken by people whose reasons you cannot follow. That is the point of teaching them. Everything else a child meets is designed to be easy to like, and a school is the one place that can insist on something that is not — that can say: this will not come to you, you must go to it. Whether it is read at a desk or shouted in a hall matters much less than people think; either way the child is being asked to do something difficult for no immediate reward. I would keep the requirement for that reason alone, and I would be suspicious of any teaching that promised to take the difficulty away.

The return of the lido

Between 1930 and 1939 Britain built about a hundred and seventy open-air swimming pools, most of them in a hurry and nearly all of them in the same style: white concrete, a fountain, a café with a flat roof, and terraces on which several hundred people could lie down at once. They were called lidos, after the beach at Venice, and for two decades they were the most popular buildings in the country.

41 ______

By 1990 fewer than forty were left. The rest had been filled in, built over or simply locked, and the ones that survived did so largely because nobody could agree what to do with the site. A lido is a very large hole in the middle of a park, and the cost of removing it turned out, in several towns, to be the only thing that saved it.

42 ______

That is roughly what happened at Saltdean, at Tooting, at Brockwell and at a dozen other places whose names now appear in the same magazine articles. A committee forms, the council is embarrassed, a grant is found, and one hot Saturday in June a pool that was condemned in 1988 opens again with a queue down the road.

43 ______

The explanation usually offered is climate: British summers are warmer than they were, and a pool that was too cold in 1975 is merely bracing in 2025. There is something in this, and not much. The water at Tooting is heated by nothing but the sun and was seventeen degrees on the morning I swam in it, which is the temperature at which most people stop pretending to enjoy themselves.

44 ______

It is, rather, a building type that turned out to be waiting for its moment. The lido was designed for a Britain that took its holidays at home and its exercise in public, and both of those habits went out of fashion together and have quietly come back together. Cheap flights made the first unnecessary; the gym made the second private. Neither now looks as permanent as it did.

45 ______

What they have found, whether or not they would put it that way, is a place. A lido is not a facility in the way that a leisure centre is; it has a season, a regular crowd, an early-morning shift of the same forty people who know one another's names and nothing else about each other. It is, in other words, a small institution, and the towns that lost theirs have discovered that they lost more than a pool.

46 ______

Whether the revival lasts is another question. The buildings are ninety years old and concrete does not forgive neglect. But the case for them has changed, and that may matter more than the weather. In 1988 a lido was an expensive way of getting cold. It is now understood as something a town does for itself, and that is a much harder thing to close.

While the country sleeps

A · Ruth, a baker in Leeds
I start at two. For the first year I thought of it as being awake when everybody else was asleep, which is the wrong way round: at three in the morning the town belongs to a small, fixed population — the newspaper van, the two policemen, the woman who cleans the bank — and we nod to each other with the particular warmth of people who are not supposed to exist. The bread does not care what time it is, and I find that restful. What is not restful is the rest of my life. Friends stopped inviting me out at about the eighteen-month mark, not unkindly; they had simply worked out that I would say no. I keep the same hours on my days off, which is the only way it works, and I no longer explain that to anybody. People imagine there is something poetic about it. There is flour, and there is a clock, and by nine I have done a day's work and the day has not started.

B · Kwame, a nurse in Glasgow
I asked for nights and I would ask again. There are fewer managers on a night ward, fewer visitors and fewer interruptions, and the decisions are yours in a way they are not at eleven in the morning. But the hours have taught me one thing about myself that I did not want to know, which is that at four o'clock my judgement is worse than I think it is. So I have a rule: any drug calculation done between three and five I do twice, on paper, and I have kept it for nine years without exception. What I resent is the assumption that the night shift is the day shift with the lights off — a lesser version of the job, done by people who could not get the other one. It is the same job under harder conditions, and the people we look after are not asleep either. Patients tell you things at four in the morning that they would never say in daylight, and you have to be awake enough to deserve them.

C · Sofia, a track engineer on the London Underground
We have about four hours between the last train and the first, and every minute of it is planned weeks in advance. The tunnels are warm, oddly, and silent in a way that nowhere above ground ever is. What nobody expects is the dust — a century of it — and the things you find in it: a tile from the 1890s, a ticket, once a spanner with somebody's initials cut into the handle. The pressure is not the work; the work is the same as daytime engineering anywhere. The pressure is that at five fifteen the first train has to run over the rail we replaced and nobody on it must ever know we were there. If the city notices us, something has gone wrong. I used to try to describe this at parties. I have given up; I say I work for the Tube and let them assume I sell tickets.

D · Ahmed, an astronomer in Northumberland
My nights are not mine to arrange. If the sky is clear I work, whatever else was planned, because a clear night in the north of England is not something you decline; my family have learned to expect me at breakfast rather than at dinner and have stopped asking which. What the job actually consists of surprised me. I had imagined looking. Most of it is waiting — for a cloud to move, for an instrument to cool, for the one object I need to rise above the hill — and I have come to think that patience is the only real qualification. It is lonely, and I will not pretend otherwise; I keep the radio on for the sound of a voice. But the thing I am looking at is the one thing in my life that has not changed since I was a child, and on a good night that seems like a fair exchange.

E · Jess, a radio presenter in Manchester
My programme goes out between one and five, and for six years I have been trying to get used to that and failing. My body has simply never accepted it; every week is the first week. What I have learned is not about sleep but about who is listening. At three in the morning it is lorry drivers, new parents, people in pain and people who cannot say why they are awake, and they are not listening as a crowd. Early on I used to address “everyone out there”, and it sounded like shouting into a field. Now I speak to one person — I have a particular one in mind, though I have never met her — and the programme changed the week I started doing it. People phone in, but not to say much; they phone to hear another voice answer, and then they thank you and go. I have never had a daytime slot and I am not sure I could do it. I would not know who I was talking to.