General Training Reading 2025-05 Test 10

A. Guided walk in the Poltesco Valley, now a wooded haven for wildlife, but once the centre of a successful stone-polishing industry. Comfortable footwear is recommended. Meet at Poltesco car park. £2 per person. B. Enjoy a film at the floating cinema, surrounded by the beauty of the Helford River, and from the comfort of your own rowing boat as you tie up at the quay. Weather-dependent. £6.50 per adult. C. Rare chance to visit the only Cold War early warning bunker in the area, equipped as it was when it was operational. Tours led by ex-members of the military unit which once manned the bunker. Park at Kilbrick Cove and walk to Nare Head. Restricted access via a vertical ladder is unsuitable for some. Booking is essential. Donations welcome. D. The chance to camp in a wooded creek on the Fowey River. Activities and talks, e.g. trekking preparation, search and rescue, and camping skills. Singing around the campfire after dark. £15 per person. E. Jazz picnic in the grounds of Buckland Abbey featuring the Roger Mark jazz band. Bring your own picnic (and umbrella). £10 per person F. Have a go at 'putting on the style' and come dancing in the large Drawing Room of historic Knightshayes Court. £12.50 includes tea and cakes. No high heels, please! G. Family fun-day on the beach. Arts and crafts, face painting, kite making, juggling, races, coconut shy, tractor rides and more! Some activities £1, lots for free. Meet at Llansallos Cove. H. Barbecue and a talk on bats, followed by a chance to see Greater Horseshoe bats emerging from their cliff-top roost as it gets dark. Meet at the park near Pentireglaze Farm. Bring barbecue food. Best to arrive early as places are limited. £2 per person.

SAVE MONEY: With the cost of electricity soaring, it is vital for households to keep track of how much electricity they are using and how much it is costing them. Smart meters allow consumers to understand which appliances use the most power and use them sparingly. SAVE WORK: With a smart meter, there is no need to take regular meter readings and upload them to your supplier's website. Smart meters do the work for you by automatically sending regular readings to your supplier. SAVE THE PLANET: Smart meters help you reduce your carbon footprint by reducing the amount of energy you use at home or at work. Your smart meter will let you know if any of your appliances are on standby, using up energy while not in use. The energy saved through the use of smart meters will help the UK become less reliant on energy from overseas. The rollout of smart meters is predicted to save £6 billion for the country, money which can be used to develop sustainable energy sources. SO HOW CAN I GET ONE? Go to your energy supplier's website. Locate the 'contact us' section and send a message directly from the website. You will also find an email address and phone number for your supplier here. Arrange an appointment to have the smart meter installed. Most suppliers are flexible about times and have some evening and weekend appointments. However, some energy providers have waiting lists of up to two months, so you may need to be patient. Make sure you are home to let the engineer in. The installation process takes about two hours and you will need to be at home during the entire period.

As an employee, you are entitled to protection from hazardous manual handling in the workplace. It is your employer's responsibility to make manual handling as safe as possible for all workers. Manual handling means transporting or supporting a load by hand or bodily force. It includes lifting, putting down, pushing, pulling, carrying, or moving loads. It is the employer's duty to assess the risk of injury from any hazardous manual handling operations that cannot be avoided. The first option should be to avoid this kind of handling. This can be done by redesigning the task to avoid moving the load or automating or mechanising the process. If your employer has not designed the work process to avoid hazardous manual handling, you may offer suggestions for the use of mechanical aids, for example, a conveyor, a chute, a pallet truck, an electric or hand-powered hoist, or a lift truck to reduce the risk of harm. If your employer fails to take reasonable measures to prevent the need for risky handling, you should talk to your representative. Although your employer is ultimately liable for your safety at work, you should also take appropriate measures to ensure your own safety when manual lifting cannot be avoided. You should consider: THE POSTURE ADOPTED: Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Bend your knees and lower yourself slowly, keeping your back straight. Bending from the waist can cause damage to the back. THE WEIGHT OF THE LOAD: Where possible, find out the exact weight before beginning the task. If the information is not available, kneel down and attempt to lift a corner of the load to get an idea of how heavy it is. THE ENVIRONMENT: Cramped work areas, poor floor surfaces, poor lighting and extremes of temperature can all affect your ability to safely carry loads. YOUR OWN ABILITY: Consider your strength, fitness and any underlying medical conditions (especially a history of back problems). If you find yourself breathing heavily or sweating while lifting, you should speak to your company's health and safety officer. THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE REQUIRED: Employers may try to save money by getting one person to do a job requiring two or more. This is a breach of government regulations on employee well-being and must be reported to your union. Remember that all employees - whether their job requires them to undertake manual handling or not - must complete the online training programme every year.

When considering your company's packaging and logo, picking the right colour could be essential. For example, in an experiment to test customers' use of green and red buttons, it was expected that green would perform better as it's linked with 'go' and movement such as with traffic lights. However, red outperformed green by 21%, probably because it's more of an urgent, attention-seeking colour. The way you feel about colours can be influenced by your age and gender. One study showed that, on average, men dislike the colour purple, whilst women feel the opposite, but both dislike the colour brown. Blue is the safest colour with all ages, especially those over 70, as most people are able to see the colour blue more clearly than any other colour, even those with colour-vision deficiencies. Colour can be powerful, evoking particular emotions. This is why it's important to choose a colour that reflects your brand. The restaurant and hospitality industry have shown that orange makes people agitated, so they won't stay long (useful in fast food restaurants). Browns are soothing, so people will stay (useful in bars). This is a bit of a tricky topic as colours do affect people differently, especially in different cultures, although there are some colours, such as gold, that are more universally understood. Other colours invite more subjective interpretations. In the UK, for example, white signifies peace and purity and is often used at weddings. In other cultures, white is seen to be synonymous with death. It's clear to see that colour can have a profound impact on bringing a brand, product, or design to life, in addition to its possible uses as a behavioural tool. It's imperative to test colours thoroughly and not to make any assumptions about their impact. The way you interpret colours may not be the same as the way in which your customers see them.

A. The first public swimming pool in the UK opened in 1828. After that, the number of pools developed rapidly, but they were segregated by social class, and women rarely had the opportunity to learn to swim. The catastrophic sinking of the Princess Alice on the river Thames in 1878 highlighted the dangers of not being able to swim. It also drew attention to the inequality between the sexes. Most of the deaths, when the ship sank, were of female non-swimmers dragged down by their long skirts. Changes in swimming habits went hand in hand with changes to social attitudes. Gradually, it became more acceptable for the sexes to mix while wearing swimsuits and more and more swimming pools were constructed. The 1930s are considered the 'golden age of lidos' when 169 of them were built across the UK. Lidos are outdoor swimming pools, which were at the height of their popularity in the twentieth century before foreign holidays became affordable. B. Lidos typically had sunbeds and lawns around them for sunbathing and the emphasis was more on recreation than serious swimming. Visits to the local lido would last all day. Families would bring a picnic and it was a relatively affordable way to spend a day during the summer holidays. Most people over 50 have happy memories of splashing around at their local lido. Today there are only about 80 lidos in the country. It was not only the possibility of travelling abroad which led to the closure of so many outdoor pools. The British climate means that there are only a few months of the year when open-air swimming is attractive to the majority of people. Maintaining a facility used so little became unfeasible in times of cuts in public spending. C. However, it is not just lidos that have shut down. In the three years to March 2022, Britain lost over 65 public pools, including indoor pools. The number of children not learning to swim has increased, which has been called an 'absolute health and welfare disaster'. While most can still access a pool if they are willing to travel, not all pools are suitable for activities such as synchronised swimming, diving and water polo. The pools that remain have changed dramatically from the pools of the 20th century. People who were young then remember nearly every pool had diving boards and deep ends. From the end of the last century, pool renovations often involved reducing the depth of pools and replacing diving boards with flumes (long tunnel-like slides) and wave machines. The two main reasons for these changes were cost and safety. A 5-foot (1.5 metre) deep pool is easier and cheaper to heat and maintain than a 12-foot (3.6 metre) deep pool. Diving accidents are the fourth most common cause of spinal injury leading to paralysis. It became apparent that the best way to avoid lawsuits was to remove the diving boards. D. Unfortunately, both regular swimming and other pool-based activities have become less accessible to those with lower incomes. It could also mean that those who want to swim will turn to less safe options, such as rivers, lakes and the sea, leading to an increase in accidents. Although there are now fewer diving pools, new technology has brought some hope to divers. The adjustable swimming pool floor enables the same pool to change depth from as shallow as 2 feet (0.5 metres) to as deep as 13 feet (4 metres). This mechanism has been adopted by many sports centres keen to offer a wide range of activities to customers, while only needing to maintain one pool. Such pools offer a 'depth timetable', which lets swimmers know when it will be shallow enough for children and non-swimmers and when it will be deep enough to use the diving boards. For facilities very limited in space, the adjustable floor can be moved to maximum height to turn the pool into a dance floor or meeting space. E. Another innovation in swimming technology is the 'endless pool'. Ideal for those who want to swim regularly, but don't have the space for a full-sized pool, the endless pool is to swimming what a treadmill is to running. The current in the water is controlled by a propeller, which enables you to keep swimming without turning in a very small pool. Not only is it a space-saver, it is also a good choice for athletes, who can adjust the current to increase resistance and give them a better work-out. Many professional swimmers choose these mini pools in preference to a regular pool. There is no doubt that swimming will remain a popular pastime with all ages, and that swimming pools will continue to develop with changes in technology and lifestyles.

When the first swimming pools were built, it was not common for 36____________ to have access to them. Awareness of the value of being able to swim grew after the 37____________ of a famous boat in London. Many of the people who drowned did so because of the weight of their 38____________. As time went by, men and women were allowed to swim together dressed in 39 ____________, which had not been permissible before. Lidos were the most popular in the 40 ____________.