IELTS General Training Reading Test 10: Free, with Answers

If you are unable to come to work because of illness or injury, you must follow the procedure below. This allows managers to arrange cover for your duties and makes sure that you receive the correct sick pay.

On the first day

Telephone your line manager as early as possible, and no later than one hour after the time you were due to start work. Text messages and emails are not acceptable, except in an emergency or if you are unable to speak. Explain the nature of your illness and, if you can, say when you expect to return. If your manager is not available, ask to speak to the duty supervisor. If you become ill while you are at work, tell your manager before you leave.

If you are absent for more than one day

Keep your manager informed about your progress, as agreed during your first call. For absences of up to seven calendar days, you will need to complete a self-certification form on the staff website when you return. If you are ill for longer than this, you must obtain a fit note from your doctor and send a copy to your manager.

Returning to work

On your first day back, your manager will arrange a short return-to-work interview. This is not a disciplinary meeting: its purpose is to make sure that you are well enough to work and to discuss whether any support or changes to your duties are needed, for example a temporary reduction in your hours.

Long-term absence

If you are absent for more than four weeks, or if you have frequent short absences, your manager may refer you to our occupational health service. An adviser will discuss your health with you and suggest ways of helping you to return to work. Any information you give the adviser will be treated as confidential, although a summary of their recommendations will be shared with your manager.

Medical appointments

Wherever possible, routine appointments with doctors, dentists and other health professionals should be made outside working hours. If this is not possible, please give your manager as much notice as you can.

Holidays and sickness

If you fall ill while you are on annual leave, the days of illness can be treated as sick leave rather than holiday, provided you follow the normal reporting procedure. You will also need medical evidence.

Our grounds maintenance teams spend most of the day outdoors, and during the summer months they may be exposed to high temperatures and strong sunlight for long periods. Heat can cause tiredness, poor concentration and, in serious cases, heat exhaustion or heatstroke. The following guidance applies whenever the temperature is expected to exceed 25°C.

Planning the work

Supervisors should check the weather forecast each morning and plan the day accordingly. They should arrange for the heaviest tasks, such as digging and lifting, to be carried out early in the morning, when it is cooler. Where possible, staff should rotate between tasks in the sun and tasks in the shade. During very hot spells, the working day may start an hour earlier than usual and finish at 2 pm.

Clothing and protection

Long-sleeved shirts made of a light material, together with wide-brimmed hats, will be provided for all outdoor staff. Sunscreen is available from every depot and should be applied before going out and again every two hours. Safety equipment such as helmets and boots must still be worn, even in hot weather.

Water and rest

Drink water regularly throughout the day, even if you do not feel thirsty, as thirst is a late sign of dehydration. Every vehicle carries a supply of bottled water, and staff are entitled to take additional short breaks in the shade whenever they need to. During hot spells, nobody should work alone in remote parts of a park, so that help is always available if someone becomes unwell.

Warning signs

Staff should watch out for signs of heat exhaustion in themselves and in their colleagues, including headaches, dizziness, heavy sweating and confusion. Anyone showing these signs should stop work, move to a cool place and drink water. If symptoms do not improve within thirty minutes, or if the person becomes confused or stops sweating, call an ambulance immediately, as this may be heatstroke.

AInventors had been trying to take the effort out of washing dishes for several decades before the first truly successful machine appeared. In 1850, an American named Joel Houghton patented a wooden device that sprayed water onto the dishes while its user turned a handle. It was slow and unreliable, however, and an improved version with a rack for the dishes, patented by L. A. Alexander in 1865, fared little better. Neither machine was practical enough to be widely adopted, and in most households dishes continued to be washed by hand, just as they always had been. It was a time-consuming chore that had to be repeated several times a day, and in wealthier homes it was usually left to servants.

BThe person who finally solved the problem was not an engineer but a wealthy woman with a passion for entertaining. Josephine Cochrane was born in Ohio in 1839, the daughter of a civil engineer and the granddaughter of an innovator, and in 1858 she married William Cochran, a prosperous merchant and politician in Shelbyville, Illinois; she chose to add an 'e' to the end of her married name. The couple often gave dinner parties, using a set of china that had been in the family for generations. To Cochrane's frustration, the servants who washed the dishes afterwards frequently chipped or broke them, and she began to wonder whether a machine could do the job more carefully.

CWhat turned an idea into a business was misfortune. When her husband died in 1883, Cochrane discovered that he had left her little more than 1,500 dollars and a considerable amount of debt. In need of an income, she decided to develop the dishwasher properly, a bold step at a time when very few women ran businesses of their own, and at the end of 1885 she applied for a patent. She is said to have declared that if nobody else was going to invent a dishwashing machine, she would do it herself.

DWorking in a shed behind her house with a young mechanic named George Butters, Cochrane began by measuring her plates, cups and saucers. She then made a set of wire compartments, each one shaped to hold a particular kind of dish. The compartments were fitted into a wheel that lay flat inside a copper boiler, and as the wheel turned, hot soapy water was forced up from the bottom of the boiler and rained down on the dishes. Unlike earlier inventions, which had relied on scrubbing, her machine cleaned the dishes by the pressure of the water alone. The patent was granted in December 1886, and she set up a company to manufacture the machines.

ESelling them to ordinary families proved extremely difficult. The machines were expensive, and most homes at that time lacked a supply of hot water large enough to run one. Few houses had electricity either, so any machine had to be operated by hand. There may have been other reasons, too. Some historians have argued that housework was valued for the effort that it demanded rather than for the results, so that a machine that made the work easier could seem to reduce the worth of the woman who did it. Whatever the explanation, few households were willing to buy.

FThe breakthrough came at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where nine of Cochrane's machines were installed in the restaurants and pavilions of the fair. They were awarded a prize for the best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to their purpose, which gave them a reputation for reliability that no advertisement could have bought, and they attracted the attention of hotel and restaurant owners, for whom washing large quantities of dishes was a constant problem and who already had plenty of hot water. Orders followed, and in 1897 the business was renamed Cochran's Crescent Washing Machine Company. Hospitals and colleges became customers too, although more slowly, because they first had to be satisfied that the machines met their standards of hygiene.

GCochrane died in 1913, and her company later became part of the firm that produced the KitchenAid brand. Yet for decades after her death, the dishwasher remained largely a commercial machine. In Britain, an engineer named William Howard Livens designed a small dishwasher for the home in 1924, with a door, a wire rack and a rotating sprayer, but although it included many features that are still found in dishwashers today, and appeared at a time when running water was becoming common in British homes, it was not a commercial success. It was only in the 1950s that domestic dishwashers began to sell in significant numbers, and even then mainly to wealthy households; they did not become commonplace in North America and Western Europe until the 1970s. In 2006, more than ninety years after her death, Cochrane was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the United States. By then her invention was an ordinary part of family life: by 2012, more than three-quarters of homes in the United States and Germany had a dishwasher.