IELTS General Training Reading Test 1: Free, with Answers

All employees at Carrow Foods receive a payslip on the last working day of each month. Payslips are no longer printed. Instead, they can be viewed and downloaded through the staff portal, using the password you were given when you joined the company. If you have forgotten your password, please contact the payroll team rather than your line manager.

The top section of the payslip shows your personal details, including your employee number and your tax code. The tax code is set by the government's tax office, not by the company, and it determines how much you can earn before tax is taken from your pay. If you think your code is wrong, you should contact the tax office directly, as payroll staff are not able to change it.

The main part of the payslip is divided into two columns. On the left are your payments. As well as your basic pay, this column lists any overtime, which is paid at one and a half times the normal rate, and any bonus you have received. Extra payments for working night shifts are shown separately as an allowance.

On the right are your deductions. Income tax and national insurance are taken from every payment automatically. Your pension contribution is also shown here; you can choose to increase it at any time, but you must give one month's notice. Other deductions may include repayments of a season ticket loan, which the company offers to staff who travel to work by train or bus, and the cost of any meals bought in the staff restaurant with your staff card.

At the bottom of the payslip you will find your net pay. This is the amount that is paid into your bank account after all deductions have been made. The totals for the tax year so far are shown underneath it, which is useful if you wish to check that the correct amount of tax has been deducted over the year.

Please keep your payslips, as you may need them as evidence of your income, for example when you apply for a loan or rent a flat. If any figure on your payslip looks incorrect, report it within ten days so that the error can be corrected in the following month's pay.

Full-time employees are entitled to 25 days of paid holiday a year, in addition to public holidays. Part-time staff receive the same entitlement, calculated in proportion to the hours they work. The holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.

Requests for leave should be submitted through the online booking system at least four weeks in advance for periods of a week or more, and at least three days in advance for single days. Your manager will normally reply within five working days. Please do not book travel until your request has been approved, as the company cannot accept responsibility for any costs if leave is refused.

Requests are generally approved in the order in which they are received. However, managers must make sure that there are enough staff on duty at all times, so no more than two people from the same team may be on leave at once. In December, when the warehouse is at its busiest, leave is limited to three days per person, except in exceptional circumstances such as a family emergency, which must be approved in writing by a senior manager.

You may carry over up to five days of unused leave into the next holiday year, but these days must be taken by the end of June; any days not used by then will be lost. Unused leave cannot normally be exchanged for payment, except when an employee leaves the company.

If you become ill while you are on holiday, you may be able to take the days again at a later date. To do this, you must tell your manager on the first day of your illness and provide a doctor's note when you return to work.

Staff who have worked for the company for more than five years receive one extra day of leave for every further two years of service, up to a maximum of five extra days a year.

AOn 21 December 1913, readers who turned to the 'Fun' section of the New York World's Sunday edition were presented with something entirely unfamiliar. Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool-born journalist who had emigrated to the United States as a young man, was responsible for the paper's weekly page of puzzles, and for the edition published just before Christmas he had decided to experiment. His puzzle consisted of a diamond-shaped grid of empty squares accompanied by a list of clues, and readers were invited to fill in the words that matched them. To help them get started, the letters F, U and N had already been written in at the top. Wynne called his invention a 'Word-Cross', but a few weeks later, as the result of a typesetting error, the title appeared as 'Cross-Word', and the puzzle has been known by that name ever since.

BFor roughly a decade, the crossword remained a modest weekly feature that only a handful of other American newspapers chose to imitate. In 1924, however, it was suddenly transformed into a national obsession. That year, two young publishers, Richard Simon and Lincoln Schuster, who were launching a company but had not yet found a single book to publish, asked three editors from the New York World to compile a collection of puzzles. So anxious were they that the venture would fail that they issued the book under a different name. Nevertheless, it became a best-seller, and three further collections followed within the same year. Commuters were soon to be seen solving puzzles on their way to work, while the New York Public Library complained that crowds of enthusiasts were gathering round its dictionaries and preventing other readers from consulting them. Not everyone welcomed the new fashion. The New York Times dismissed crosswords as a 'sinful waste' of time and confidently predicted that the craze would soon be forgotten.

CIn Britain, the first newspaper crossword was printed in the Sunday Express in November 1924, and other titles quickly followed, The Times among them from 1930. Early British puzzles closely resembled their American models, with clues that were straightforward definitions. Over time, however, British setters developed a new type of clue that operated on two levels simultaneously. Each one contained a definition of the answer together with a small piece of wordplay, such as an anagram or a hidden word, which led the solver to the same answer by a different route. The most celebrated of these early setters was Edward Powys Mathers, who compiled puzzles for The Observer from 1926 under the name 'Torquemada'. His clues were notoriously demanding, and completing his puzzle became a weekly challenge for many readers. Following his death in 1939, he was succeeded by Derrick Macnutt, who adopted the name 'Ximenes'. In 1966, Macnutt published a book setting out the principles of a fair cryptic clue, and many setters still observe them today.

DThe Second World War gave the crossword several unexpected roles. In January 1942, after readers had written to complain that its puzzles had become too easy, The Daily Telegraph organised a competition in which entrants were required to complete one of its crosswords in under twelve minutes. Some weeks later, a number of the participants received letters from the War Office inviting them to attend an interview. Those who accepted were sent to Bletchley Park, the secret centre where British code-breakers were attempting to read enemy messages. The authorities evidently believed that the patience and imagination needed to solve a difficult crossword were precisely the qualities that a code-breaker required. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, The New York Times finally relented. In February 1942, only weeks after the United States had entered the war, it published its first crossword, in the belief that readers would appreciate something to take their minds off the news.

EThe newspaper appointed as its first crossword editor Margaret Farrar, who had been one of the compilers of that first book of puzzles in 1924. Farrar remained in the post for more than 25 years, and she introduced many of the conventions that American setters still follow. Every answer had to contain at least three letters, the number of black squares in a grid was limited, and every letter had to form part of two answers, one across and one down. Grids also had to be symmetrical, so that they looked identical when turned upside down. When asked why this rule was necessary, she is said to have replied simply: 'Because it is prettier.' Farrar also encouraged and trained many younger setters, several of whom later became crossword editors themselves.

FToday, crosswords are as likely to be solved on a phone as on paper, and digital versions allow solvers to check their answers instantly, compare their times with friends or request a hint when they are stuck. Yet the basic form of the puzzle has scarcely changed since Wynne's time. Helen Marsh, who has set crosswords for a regional newspaper for almost thirty years, believes that its appeal is easy to explain. 'People enjoy the feeling of filling every square,' she says. 'It's one of the few problems in life that you know has a solution.' Many solvers are also convinced that puzzles keep the mind sharp, and some studies have found that older people who do crosswords regularly perform better in memory tests. Marsh, however, is cautious about such claims. 'It may simply be that people with good memories enjoy puzzles in the first place,' she says. 'I'd rather people did them for fun.'