IELTS General Training Reading Test 9: Free, with Answers

Many of our housing officers spend much of their working day alone, visiting tenants in their homes or inspecting empty properties. Although serious incidents are rare, working alone carries particular risks, and this guidance explains the steps that all lone workers must take to protect themselves.

Before a visit

Every visit must be entered in the shared online diary, with the address, the time you expect to arrive and the time you expect to leave. Before visiting a tenant for the first time, check their record on the housing system for any warning notes. If a warning note suggests that a visit could be risky, you must not go alone: arrange for a colleague to accompany you, or ask the tenant to meet you at the office instead.

During a visit

Keep your mobile phone switched on and fully charged at all times. When you arrive, think about how you would leave the property quickly if necessary, and if possible, sit near the door. If you feel uncomfortable for any reason, end the visit politely and leave; you will never be criticised for doing so. Do not enter a property if the person you have arranged to meet is not there, even if another member of the household invites you in.

Personal alarms

All lone workers are issued with a personal alarm, which is worn on a cord around the neck. If you press the button, the alarm connects you to a control centre, where trained staff can listen to what is happening and call the police if necessary. The alarm also records your location, so it must be charged every night.

Checking in

When your last visit of the day is finished, you must check in with the duty manager by phone or text message. If a member of staff has not checked in within thirty minutes of the end time shown in the diary, the duty manager will try to contact them. If there is still no response after a further thirty minutes, the police will be informed.

Reporting incidents

Any incident in which you felt threatened, however minor, must be reported on the incident form within 48 hours. Your report will be used to add warning notes to the housing system, which helps to protect your colleagues. All lone workers also attend a one-day personal safety course, which covers ways of calming difficult situations.

Harland House has six meeting rooms, which can be used by all members of staff. The rooms vary in size, from the Willow Room, which seats four people, to the Oak Suite, which can hold up to sixty and can be divided into two smaller rooms with a folding wall.

Booking a room

All rooms must be booked through the room booking system on the intranet. Rooms can be reserved up to three months ahead, but bookings for more than half a day require the approval of the facilities manager. If your meeting is cancelled, please cancel your booking as soon as possible so that the room can be used by others. Rooms that have not been occupied within fifteen minutes of the start of a booking are automatically released.

Equipment

Every room has a large screen and a video-conferencing camera. Laptops and microphones for larger events can be borrowed from the IT desk on the ground floor, but they must be requested at least two working days in advance. Please leave the room tidy at the end of your meeting and wipe the whiteboards clean.

Refreshments

Tea, coffee and water can be ordered for any meeting. Sandwich lunches are available for meetings of eight or more people and must be ordered from the catering team by noon on the previous working day. When ordering, please tell the team about any dietary requirements, such as vegetarian or gluten-free meals. The cost of refreshments is charged to your department's budget, so you will need a budget code when you place your order.

Visitors

If you are expecting visitors from outside the organisation, add their names to your booking so that reception can prepare their passes. Visitors must sign in at reception and be collected from there by a member of staff.

On a cold Saturday morning at the end of January, Sophie Turner sits at her kitchen window with a cup of tea, a notebook and a pair of binoculars. For exactly one hour, she records the greatest number of each kind of bird that she can see in her garden at any one time: four blackbirds, a robin, a pair of blue tits and, briefly, a sparrowhawk that sends everything else scattering into the hedge. Later that day, she will send her results to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), along with those of more than half a million other people taking part in the Big Garden Birdwatch, which the charity describes as the world's largest garden wildlife survey.

The idea of asking the public to count birds is much older than this. In the nineteenth century, many North Americans took part in Christmas 'side hunts', in which teams competed to shoot as many birds as possible in a single day. In December 1900, Frank Chapman, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History and the founder of a magazine called Bird-Lore, proposed a gentler alternative: counting birds instead of killing them. On Christmas Day that year, 27 observers in 25 places across the United States and Canada recorded 18,500 birds of 90 different species. Chapman was also a pioneer of bird photography, and he later designed a portable hide in the form of an umbrella with a large cloth 'skirt', which allowed photographers to get close to birds without being seen.

The Christmas Bird Count has been held every winter since, and it is now the longest-running survey of its kind anywhere in the world. Each count takes place in a circle with a diameter of 15 miles, where at least ten volunteers, led by an organiser known as a compiler, divide into small groups and follow routes that change little from year to year, so that the results from different years can be compared reliably. In most circles, some participants watch the feeders in their own gardens rather than following a route, and counts can be held on any day between 14 December and 5 January. In the winter of 2012 to 2013, more than 71,000 people took part, at nearly 2,400 locations.

Britain's survey had more modest beginnings. In 1979, the children's television programme Blue Peter asked its viewers to post in a list of the birds they had seen, and the count has been held every year since. Turner was one of the children who answered that first appeal, at the age of nine. 'I'd never really looked at the birds in our garden before,' she says. 'Suddenly I wanted to know the name of every one of them.' Today, the house sparrow is still the bird most frequently recorded, as it has been for more than twenty years, followed by the blue tit and the starling. In 2026, more than 650,000 people took part and counted 9.4 million birds, and since the survey began, participants have spent more than 13 million hours watching and recording.

Scientists are in no doubt about the value of such surveys. 'No research organisation could afford to send trained staff into hundreds of thousands of gardens on the same weekend,' says Dr Anita Rao, an ecologist who uses the data in her work. 'Volunteers give us information from a far wider area than we could ever cover ourselves, and because the surveys have run for so long, we can see changes that would be invisible over a few years.' Long-term records of this kind have helped to reveal the decline of several once-common species, and they have shown that the areas where some birds spend the winter are moving northwards as winters become milder. Government agencies and conservation charities now routinely use such data when deciding where to concentrate their efforts.

The surveys also have limitations. Volunteers vary considerably in skill, and some species are easily confused. 'Beginners often mistake one small brown bird for another,' says Colin Price, who has helped to organise counts for thirty years. Organisers try to reduce such errors by providing identification guides, and statisticians adjust the results to take account of differences in the time and effort that people put in. Professor Martin Hale, a statistician, points out another difficulty. 'Gardens with feeders attract certain species far more than others,' he says. 'So a garden survey tells you a great deal about gardens, but you have to be careful before drawing conclusions about the countryside as a whole.'

For many participants, however, the scientific value is only part of the appeal. Turner, who now takes part with her family, believes the hour she spends at the window each January has changed the way she sees her surroundings. She has noticed changes herself: species she rarely saw as a child, such as goldfinches, now visit her feeders almost every day. 'You start to notice what's around you all year,' she says. 'And you realise that what happens in your own garden really does matter.'