C1 Advanced Reading and Use of English practice test

Science for everyone

For most of history, scientific research was (1) ______ out by a small number of professionals working in universities and laboratories. In recent decades, however, a growing number of projects have (2) ______ the help of ordinary members of the public. Known as citizen science, this approach allows volunteers to contribute to genuine research, often without leaving their homes. Some projects ask participants to count the birds that visit their gardens over a single weekend; others invite them to classify galaxies in telescope images or to (3) ______ part in the transcription of handwritten historical records.

The benefits for researchers are considerable. Volunteers can collect data on a (4) ______ that no research team could hope to match, covering wide areas over long periods. Critics initially (5) ______ doubts about the reliability of data gathered by non-specialists, but careful project design, including clear instructions and checks in which several volunteers examine the same item, has gone a long way towards addressing these concerns.

For participants, the rewards are less tangible but no less real. Many say that taking part has (6) ______ their understanding of how science actually works, while others simply enjoy the sense of contributing to something larger than themselves. Organisers stress that no prior knowledge is required, and that even a few minutes of a volunteer's time can make a (7) ______ difference. As one project leader put it, the aim is not to turn everyone into a scientist, but to (8) ______ the gap between research and the communities it serves.

In praise of boredom

There was a time, not so long ago, when waiting for a bus meant staring into the middle distance. Today, the queue at any bus stop is a row of lowered heads, each lit by the glow of a screen. It would be easy to see this as just another complaint about technology, of the kind every generation makes about the habits of the next. But I want to make a narrower and, I hope, more interesting claim: that in filling every idle moment, we may have lost something we did not know we valued until it had gone, namely the experience of being properly bored.

Boredom has had a poor reputation for a long time. Moralists have treated it as a symptom of laziness, teachers as a sign that pupils were not trying hard enough, and parents as a problem to be solved, preferably before the car journey began. Even the researchers who study it have tended to focus on its costs: bored people, the studies tell us, are more likely to make careless mistakes, to eat when they are not hungry and to take unnecessary risks. None of this is wrong. But it is only half the picture, and the other half has received far less attention.

That other half concerns what boredom makes us do. Psychologists who see emotions as signals argue that boredom is the mind's way of telling us that our current activity is not meeting our needs. Like hunger, it is unpleasant precisely because it is meant to push us into action. Seen in this light, the restlessness of a bored child on a rainy afternoon is not a failure but the starting point of something: the moment before a den is built out of sofa cushions, or a game is invented with rules nobody else will ever understand.

There is also some evidence, though it is more modest than enthusiastic articles sometimes suggest, that a spell of boredom can make people more inventive. In one widely reported study, people who first spent a quarter of an hour on a deliberately dull task, copying out numbers from a telephone directory, went on to think of more uses for an everyday object than people who had skipped the dull task. The effects in studies like this are small, and not every attempt to repeat such findings has succeeded. Still, they are consistent with what many writers and artists have long reported: that their best ideas tend to arrive not at the desk but in the shower, on a long walk or while staring out of a train window.

If that is true, the smartphone poses a particular problem. It is not that our devices are harmful in themselves; much of what we do on them is useful, and some of it is genuinely enriching. The difficulty is that they offer an instant escape from the discomfort that boredom brings, and so they cut the process short. The signal is received, but it is answered with the nearest available distraction rather than with anything new. We scroll, the feeling fades, and the den is never built.

I am not suggesting that we should all throw away our phones, or that boredom should be prescribed like a medicine. Some boredom, such as that experienced by people trapped in repetitive work with no prospect of change, is corrosive, and nobody should romanticise it. My suggestion is more modest. It is that we might occasionally resist the reflex to reach for a screen, and allow ourselves a few minutes of doing nothing in particular, simply to see what the mind does with them. The answer, in my experience, is usually more interesting than anything I would have found online.

Working from home: four experts look ahead

Expert A The shift to remote work has brought clear gains for tasks that require sustained concentration: freed from interruptions and long commutes, many employees get more done, and the figures collected by firms themselves increasingly reflect this. What worries me more is the effect on people at the start of their careers. So much of what a newcomer learns is picked up informally, by overhearing how an experienced colleague handles a difficult phone call or by asking a quick question across a desk, and video calls do not replicate this. As for city centres, I expect them to recover. They have reinvented themselves before, and the offices and shops that stand empty now will find new uses. In the long run, most organisations will settle on a mixture of office and home working.

Expert B Claims about productivity should be treated with caution. Output is notoriously difficult to measure in many office jobs, and studies reach conflicting conclusions depending on what they count. I am also less convinced than many commentators that junior staff are bound to lose out. Informal learning matters, but it can be deliberately organised online, through structured mentoring and regular check-ins, and some firms report that newcomers now receive more attention than before, not less. Where I do see lasting damage is in city centres: businesses that relied on the daily flow of commuters, from sandwich bars to dry cleaners, are unlikely to see that trade return. Overall, though, a hybrid pattern seems the most likely outcome for most office workers.

Expert C From where I stand, the gains in productivity are beyond doubt: people who no longer spend two hours a day travelling have more time and energy for their work. But there is a cost, and it falls most heavily on younger employees, who miss out on the chance to learn simply by watching others at work. One welcome change has been in the suburbs, where local high streets have gained customers who once spent their money near the office. I suspect, however, that the present arrangements will not last. As managers grow anxious about how well their teams are working together, I expect a large number of employers to insist that staff return to the office full-time.

Expert D It is hard to say with confidence whether people working from home produce more; much depends on the job, and on how output is defined. Less uncertain is the price paid by graduates and new recruits, who lose the informal guidance that comes from simply being around experienced colleagues. The consequences extend beyond the workplace, too. Central business districts are unlikely ever to regain their former levels of activity, and many of the cafés and shops that served office workers will close for good. Most organisations, I believe, will end up combining office and home working in some form.

A second life for an old boat

The boat had been lying upside down in a corner of my neighbour's garden for as long as I had lived in the street. Every spring its pale blue hull disappeared a little further beneath the brambles, and every autumn I told myself that somebody ought to do something about it. When the house was finally sold and the new owners asked whether anyone wanted 'that old thing', I heard myself say yes before I had given the matter any real thought.

(41) ______

That turned out to be a generous estimate. Once the boat was in my own garden and I could see the underside properly, it became clear that several of the planks near the back had gone soft, and that the keel, the long timber running along the bottom, was cracked along part of its length. Anyone sensible would have taken it to the tip.

(42) ______

His name was Alan, and he had spent forty years building and repairing wooden boats. He walked around the hull twice without speaking, pressed a thumb into the worst of the planks, and then announced that it was 'not as bad as it looks, but not far off'. It was the most encouraging thing anyone had said to me in weeks.

(43) ______

This was harder than it sounds. My instinct, whenever I removed a damaged section, was to replace it as quickly as possible and move on. Alan's view was that every piece of new wood had to be shaped to fit exactly, which could take an entire weekend for a single plank. More than once I came close to giving up.

(44) ______

Those small victories added up. By the end of the second summer the hull was sound, a new keel was in place, and the boat had been given three coats of paint in the same pale blue it had once been. All that remained was to find out whether it would float.

(45) ______

It floated, although not without some anxious moments. For the first ten minutes a thin trickle of water seeped in between two of the planks, and I spent them bailing frantically while Alan watched from the shore with what I later realised was amusement. He had known all along what would happen: as the dry wood soaked up water, it swelled, and the gaps closed by themselves.

(46) ______

I still take it out most weekends in summer. It is slow, it leaks a little whenever it has been out of the water for a while, and it will never be as practical as a modern boat. But whenever I row it across the bay, I think of the brambles, and of how close it came to being thrown away.

The missing paragraphs

A What kept me going was the occasional moment when something went exactly right: a plank that slid into place with a satisfying click, or a joint so tight that I could barely see where the old wood ended and the new began.

B The new owners' son helped me wheel it round the corner on a borrowed trailer. As we lifted it off, he remarked cheerfully that it probably needed nothing more than 'a bit of sanding and a lick of paint'.

C Alan was not impressed. He pointed out that the paint I had bought was meant for garden furniture and would start peeling within a month in salt water, and he sent me straight back to the shop to exchange it.

D Since then, the boat has taken on a life of its own. Several children from the street have learnt to row in it, and Alan, who claims to have no interest whatsoever in going out on the water, has somehow been persuaded to come along more than once.

E I might have done exactly that if a friend had not mentioned a retired boatbuilder who lived in the next village and who, she said, could never resist a lost cause. I phoned him the same evening.

F We launched it on a calm morning in early September, from a slipway at the end of the bay. A handful of neighbours came down to watch, some of them, I suspected, hoping for a disaster.

G Over the following months, Alan came round most Saturday mornings. He never did the work for me, but he showed me how to do it, and he had one rule that he repeated so often it became a joke between us: never hurry the wood.

Starting again: four people who changed career after forty

A Maria, from accountant to primary school teacher I'd been an accountant for nearly twenty years when I started volunteering at a reading club at my children's school. I assumed it would be a pleasant break from spreadsheets; I didn't expect it to make me question everything. Retraining meant two years of study while still working part-time, and there were evenings when I wondered whether I'd made a terrible mistake. The financial side was harder than I'd anticipated, too: my salary is now considerably lower than it was. But I've never once regretted the move. My old colleagues sometimes ask whether I miss the certainty of numbers. Honestly, the skills carry over more than you'd think: planning a term's lessons isn't so different from managing a budget, and I'm still the one in the staffroom who sorts out the money for school excursions.

B David, from software engineer to furniture maker Furniture making had been a hobby of mine for years, so the change was less of a leap than it might seem. What pushed me was redundancy: when my company restructured, I was offered a payout, and it felt like now or never. What I underestimated was how much of running a small business has nothing to do with the craft itself. I spend at least half my time on quotes, invoices and emails, which is ironic given that I left a desk job to get away from exactly that. My family were supportive from the start, which mattered enormously, because the first year was very lean. These days I have a waiting list, but I'm careful not to take on too many orders, because rushing the work is the quickest way to ruin a reputation.

C Priya, from journalist to nurse People assume I left journalism because the industry was shrinking, but that wasn't really it. After covering health stories for a decade, I found I wanted to be on the other side of the hospital doors, doing something rather than describing it. I was the oldest student in my year by some distance, which felt awkward for about a week; after that, nobody cared. Shift work has been the hardest adjustment, especially nights. What surprised me most was how well my old job had prepared me. Interviewing people taught me how to listen, and how to get someone who is frightened to tell you what is really wrong.

D Tom, from bank manager to park ranger I'd always loved being outdoors, but it took a health scare to make me act on it. My doctor told me, in so many words, that if I didn't change the way I lived, I'd regret it. I took a pay cut of nearly half to join the parks service, starting at the bottom on a short-term contract. Some friends thought I was having a mid-life crisis, and perhaps they had a point, but it's been the best decision I've ever made. The work is physical in a way I wasn't ready for, and the first few months left me exhausted. I'd advise anyone thinking of a similar change to try the work first, as a volunteer, before giving anything up. I did, and it meant I knew what I was getting into.