IELTS General Training Reading Test 6: Free, with Answers

Fairway Housing recognises that many employees use social media in their personal lives, and we have no wish to prevent this. However, what you post online can affect the reputation of the organisation and the trust that our tenants place in us. This guidance explains what we expect of you.

Personal accounts

You are free to use personal social media accounts outside working hours. During working hours, personal use should be limited to your breaks. If you mention on your profile that you work for Fairway Housing, you should make it clear that the views you express are your own and not those of the organisation.

Confidentiality

Never post information about tenants, even if you do not use their names, as they may still be identifiable from the details you give. Photographs taken inside tenants' homes must not be shared on any platform. Likewise, information about the organisation's plans, such as proposed building projects, must not be shared until it has been officially announced.

Contact with tenants

Staff should not accept friend requests from tenants on personal accounts. If a tenant contacts you through social media about a repair or any other matter, politely ask them to use our official channels instead, such as the tenant phone line or website.

Complaints and criticism

If you see a complaint about Fairway Housing online, do not respond to it yourself, however unfair it may seem. Instead, pass the details to the communications team, who will deal with it. The communications team is the only department authorised to post on the organisation's official accounts.

Using social media for work

Some staff, such as members of the communications team, use social media as part of their job. If you would like to use an account for work purposes, for example to promote a community event, you must first discuss this with your manager and complete additional training.

Breaches of this policy

Failure to follow this guidance may lead to disciplinary action, and in serious cases, such as sharing confidential information, this could result in dismissal. If you are unsure whether something is appropriate to post, ask yourself whether you would be happy for your manager or a tenant to read it. If the answer is no, don't post it.

Training

All new staff complete a short online course on the safe use of social media during their first month, and refresher training is offered every two years.

Every new member of staff at Fairway Housing is offered a mentor: an experienced colleague from a different department who can offer advice and support during their first year.

Why have a mentor?

Starting a new job can be overwhelming, and there may be many things that new staff do not feel comfortable asking their line manager about. A mentor can explain how things work in practice, introduce you to useful contacts and help you to think about the direction of your career.

How it works

Mentors and their mentees (the new members of staff) are matched by the human resources team, who take into account each person's interests and career plans. They should meet at least once a month, either in person or online, for about an hour. Meetings are confidential, and mentors do not report on their mentees to their line managers.

Before the first meeting, mentees are asked to write down three goals for their first year, such as learning a new skill or finding out how another department works. These goals are discussed at the first meeting and reviewed every three months. Other topics might include dealing with a heavy workload, preparing for a presentation or finding suitable training courses.

Becoming a mentor

Staff who have worked for Fairway Housing for at least three years can apply to become mentors. All mentors attend a one-day training course and are given a handbook with advice on running successful meetings. Many mentors say that the experience has improved their own communication skills.

Ending the arrangement

The formal arrangement ends after twelve months, although many pairs choose to stay in touch. Either person can end it earlier if it is not working, by contacting the human resources team.

Every day, millions of passengers find their way around London with the help of a map that bears remarkably little relation to the real geography of the city. Stations that are several kilometres apart appear side by side, winding routes are straightened out, and every line runs horizontally, vertically or at an angle of 45 degrees. Yet the design has been so successful that it has been copied by transport systems around the world, and in 2006, when the public was asked to name the finest British design of the twentieth century, the map came second, behind only the Concorde aircraft. Three years later, it appeared on a set of postage stamps celebrating classic British designs.

Early maps of the Underground were very different. They showed the lines geographically, often printed on top of an ordinary map of the streets. Because most stations in central London are close together while those in the suburbs are widely spaced, the centre of these maps was crowded and difficult to read, and the outer stations had to be squeezed in or left off altogether. F. H. Stingemore, who designed the maps between 1926 and 1932, tried to solve the problem by enlarging the central area, but the result was still a compromise. Meanwhile, inside the trains, passengers were shown simple diagrams of individual lines, in which the stations were spaced evenly along a straight line. Some writers have suggested that diagrams of this kind, many of them drawn by George Dow for a mainline railway company, may have helped to inspire what followed.

Harry Beck was an engineering draughtsman who had spent several years drawing electrical circuit diagrams for the Underground's signals office. In 1931, having been laid off from his job, he began working on a new kind of map in his spare time. Beck reasoned that because the trains ran mostly in tunnels, passengers had no need to know exactly where each station was. What they wanted to know was how to get from one station to another, and where to change trains. Borrowing the logic of the circuit diagrams he knew so well, he spaced the stations more or less evenly, drew every line straight, horizontal, vertical or diagonal, and gave each line its own colour. Stations where passengers could change from one line to another were marked with a special symbol, at first a diamond and later a circle.

When Beck submitted his design, it was turned down as too radical, chiefly because it gave no idea of the real distances between stations. Beck persisted, however, and in 1932 a trial run of 500 copies was handed out at a few stations. The reaction from passengers was so favourable that in January 1933 the map was issued as a pocket edition, and within a month a large reprint was required.

Beck went on to revise the map for more than twenty years, adding new lines and stations and constantly refining the details, but the arrangement was never an entirely happy one. Accounts differ as to how much he was paid for the original design: some sources say five or ten guineas, while others claim that he received nothing at all. By 1960 he had fallen out with the Underground's publicity officer, Harold Hutchison, who was not a designer but produced a version of his own that year, with sharper corners, less regular lines and some badly crowded areas. Four years later it was taken over by Paul Garbutt, who, like Beck before him, had drawn a map of his own in his spare time because he disapproved of the official one. Beck tried for several years to regain control of his creation, but in 1965 he finally gave up, reportedly feeling bitter and betrayed by the organisation he had served. From 1947 he also taught typography and colour design at a London printing college.

Recognition came only after his death in 1974. Since 1997, every Underground map has carried a statement acknowledging that the diagram is an evolution of the design he conceived in 1931, and a blue plaque was placed on the house where he was born to mark the map's eightieth anniversary. A modified version of his first map can still be seen on a platform at Finchley Central, the station closest to the home where he lived for many years.

Modern designers continue to admire his work. 'Beck understood that the value of a map depends as much on what it leaves out as on what it includes,' says Dr Laura Kemp, who researches information design. 'He removed everything that passengers did not need. Even now, designers who are asked to draw a transport map tend to begin by asking themselves what Beck would have done.' Others point out that the approach has its drawbacks. Rafael Ortiz, a cartographer who has designed transport maps for several cities, notes that visitors sometimes take a train between two stations that are only a few minutes' walk apart, simply because the map makes them look distant. 'A diagram can make a city easier to use,' he says, 'but it can also give people a false idea of how far apart places really are.'