Sample Test Reading Test B2.

• The test consists of two texts. Read them and complete the questions.

TEXT 1                  The city that looks and smells like a landfill site

By Richard Osley in Leeds
The rats are having a field day. The scavengers have been pigging out on the rich
pickings of the refuse collectors‘ strike in the suburbs of Leeds. For two months
the rodents have been fattening themselves up for the coming winter. They are the
only ones who are anything like content.
With wheelie bins overflowing, particularly in student districts such as Headingley
and Hyde Park, the rats have been helping themselves to a rich banquet of
September’s soggy pizza crusts, and mouldy lasagne thrown out weeks ago.
The fat rats have been the beneficiaries of a bitter industrial dispute and strike
action by the city’s refuse collectors. The unrelenting nature of the protest – the
length of the stand-off has inevitably drawn parallels with militant walkouts in the
1980s – has left Headingley shrouded in the whiff of landfill.
The root cause of the dispute also seems to be a throwback to another generation:
the Liberal Democrat and Conservative-run council is attempting to equalise pay
between male and female workers. But instead of raising the pay of female staffers,
it wants to cut the salaries of male workers. The first proposal was a £4,000 drop
for some. What’s more, the council thinks the workers need to increase their work
rate.
The strike, which has gone some way to forcing the council to scale back demands
for wage cuts in recent days, could soon be mirrored elsewhere in the country: bin
collectors in Brighton are also due to walk out this week with similar grievances.
Other local authorities are still working out how to meet new regulations to balance
inequality in pay between the sexes.
Postal workers are newly back on the streets after walking out in the national strike
over pay and conditions. Firefighters across South Yorkshire are also locking horns
with management. So far, everyone in Leeds is assiduously avoiding phrases that
begin with the words “winter of”. But walkouts last week in Doncaster and
Sheffield are concentrating people’s minds. More discontent and more strike action
are expected.
Few of the students in Headingley were alive in 1979. The term “all-out strike” is
just the stuff of political history textbooks. And so, unknowingly, they sit at the

centre of what future books may call a new wave of industrial action. They’re not
enjoying it.
Jess Johnson, a 20-year-old music student, has “flipped”, to use her own phrase.
Looking out of her bedroom window on to the back alley of Headingley Mount,
she is so angry at the sight of giants slabs of mouldy food that she is bagging it up
herself. “If I don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s gone on so long that if
something isn’t done right now, the problem will just get too big for anyone,” she
says. “It’s disgusting”.
She knows her efforts may be for naught: bin bags that don’t fit in the wheelie bins
risk being ripped apart by foxes or, as the most recent street craze has it, blown up
with fireworks. And so she struggles outside the redbrick terraces, where university
students cram in six to a house, to hold back a waste tide of pizza.
“We’ve bagged our stuff up so it’s not our rubbish,” says Layla-Jane Gabriel who
lives in the next street. “I know it might not be the right attitude but I don’t want to
be picking up other people’s rubbish. Some people have just come along and
dumped it, didn’t even put it in a bag”
Other areas of the city have fared better, cleansed by small cadres of refuse
workers who were finally talked back into work at the end of the week and a
hastily arranged substitute team of new recruits hired by the council to break the
strike.
Some areas are heading towards sanity but the patched-up patrol has clearly not
reached all corners. It’s not obvious why some areas have been left out. The
students are muttering that the area they have colonised has been shifted to the
bottom of the list because they don’t pay council tax.
Adapted from © THE INDEPENDENT

Choose the correct variant:
1. The council wants all of its workers to ...
a. ? ... accept a more equitable pay scale between the sexes.
b. ? ... allow women to earn more than men.
c. ? ... work longer for less salary.

2. The term “all-out strike” ...

a. ? ... belongs to a distant past.
b. ? ... is familiar to students in Headingley.
c. ? ... is a new way of social action against unpleasant political measures.
3. Jess Johnson ...
a. ? ... admits that students are partially responsible for the situation.
b. ? ... is horrified by the state of the street around where she lives.
c. ? ... lives with five other students.
4. Students from Headingley ...
a.? ... are responsible for most of the rubbish left in the streets.
b.? ... have taken no action against the state of their neighbourhood.
c.? ... moan about the behaviour of other people.
5. Some areas of Leeds ...
a. ? ... are being discriminated against due to the type of resident.
b. ? ... have sorted the problem with private teams of refuse workers.
c.? ... struggle to keep the streets clean because they have students living in the
area. 

TEXT 2:                Iraqi interpreters left without help because of rigid guidelines

By Deborah Haynes

The Government’s policy for helping interpreters and others in Iraq who worked
for Britain has undoubtedly saved lives, but a failure to make the scheme more
responsive to individual cases has left scores without assistance. It also sets a
worrying precedent for interpreters working for the British in Afghanistan.
As with the much-criticised Gurkhas resettlement scheme, the Government drew
up strict guidelines for Iraqi candidates that remain resolutely rigid barring anyone
who did not work for 12 consecutive months, even if he clearly risked his life.
Anyone forced to quit before the end of 2005 would also fail to make the grade
even though the killings and threats had started before then.

Mark Brockway, a former Army warrant officer, hired 18 interpreters after he
arrived in Iraq in 2003. Of them, 12 are dead and the other six are living overseas,
including three in Britain. He has been campaigning for the assistance scheme to
become more flexible.
The Prime Minister introduced the initiative only after The Times highlighted the
plight of interpreters in 2007. The majority of about 20,000 Iraqis who worked for
the British in Iraq over the past six years were labourers who experienced minimal
risk. The number of additional people who would benefit if the rules were relaxed
is thus not huge, probably a few dozen at most, and their families. Most do not
want to move to Britain as Basra becomes calm. They simply want compensation
for the pain and trauma they have suffered.
Patrick Mercer MP, the Conservative chairman of the Commons counter-terrorism
subcommittee, said the policy was devised in a narrow way. “The interpreters in
Iraq and Afghanistan are as much a weapon or a resource as any other soldier,
sailor or airman”, he said. “Many of them have been killed or injured. We cannot
afford at this stage not to treat them properly. The legacy we leave in Iraq has got
to be a good one”.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “The Locally Engaged Staff
Assistance Scheme is for people with a substantial employment relationship with
the British Government. This is defined as working in a professional and public
role alongside us for a year or more. Those who have worked for shorter periods
are not eligible. We think this is reasonable”. Both the
Foreign Office and the Home Office said that there were no plans to review its
policy. Hundreds were rejected and received nothing. All appeals must be heard by
June 30. A decision has yet to be made on how long to keep the scheme open for
Iraqis still working for the British mission as it winds down.
Adapted from © THE TIMES

Read the following text and choose the FIVE sentences which are correct
according to what you read. Mark the corresponding box. Do not mark more
than five sentences.
1. The British scheme has shown that all interpreters have benefited from this
new policy.
2. The violence against interpreters helping the British started in 2005.
3. Mark Brockway states that the Government should make its assistance
policy less severe.
4. The British Government did not propose the scheme on its own initiative.
5. Now that the conditions are not so strict, many people will benefit from the
assistance policy.
6. The majority of the Iraqis who work for the British are keen on beginning
new lives in Britain.
7. Patrick Mercer, MP, supports the scheme as it is, since it represents a
powerful measure against terrorism.
8. Mr Mercer, declared that British soldiers should not be reckoned as more
necessary than any interpreter.
9. The Locally Engaged Staff Assistance Scheme is not likely to be changed.
10. Although assistance has been largely denied, some cases are still under
consideration.