IELTS General Training Reading full test 3

Section 1: Places to stay around Lake Marrin

A. Lakeshore Holiday Park Powered and unpowered campsites from $35 a night, plus six cabins, each with its own bathroom. Shared camp kitchen with fridges and barbecues. Dogs are welcome on campsites (but not in cabins) and must be kept on a lead at all times. Office open 8 am to 6 pm; if you will arrive later, please phone ahead.

B. Marrin Backpackers Dormitory beds from $32 a night and private twin rooms from $85. Shared kitchen, laundry and games room. Free bicycles for guests to ride around the lake. Guests must be 18 or over.

C. Willow Cottage A two-bedroom stone cottage sleeping up to five, $240 a night. Minimum stay two nights; book seven nights and pay for only six. Fully equipped kitchen and a wood fire, with firewood supplied from May to August. Sorry, no pets.

D. Bridge Street Motel Twenty rooms, all with parking at the door. Rooms from $140 a night. Continental breakfast can be delivered to your room for an extra $15 per person. Reception is open 24 hours a day.

E. The Old Post Office B&B Three guest rooms in a restored building from the 1890s, with a cooked breakfast included in the price. Not suitable for children under 12. Guests receive 10% off at the owners' café next door.

Section 1: Harbour Ferries service changes

From Monday 3 March to Friday 28 March, Northpoint Wharf will be closed while a new waiting area and ramp are built. During this time, Blue Line ferries will not stop at Northpoint.

A free shuttle bus will run between Northpoint and Ellis Bay wharf every 15 minutes from 6 am to 9 pm. The trip takes about 12 minutes, but please allow extra time in peak hours. Ferry tickets cannot be bought on the shuttle bus, so please buy yours at the Ellis Bay ticket office or on the Harbour Ferries app.

Bicycles cannot be carried on the shuttle bus. Secure bicycle parking is available at both Northpoint and Ellis Bay.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Blue Line ferries will run every 40 minutes instead of every 20 minutes. Green Line services are not affected by the work.

Items found on ferries or shuttle buses are kept at the Ellis Bay ticket office for 30 days. Items that have not been collected after this time are given to charity.

Section 2: Working from home at Kestrel Insurance

A Staff who have completed their six-month probation period, and whose role does not require them to be in the office every day, may work from home for up to two days a week. Before applying, talk to your manager about which days would suit your team. Then complete the request form on the staff intranet.

B The company will provide you with a laptop, a headset and a second screen. You are responsible for your own desk and chair, although an office chair can be borrowed from the equipment store if needed. Personal computers must not be used for work under any circumstances.

C Our core hours are 10 am to 3 pm. During these hours you must be available by phone and on the team chat, just as you would be in the office. Outside core hours you may arrange your work flexibly, as long as you complete your usual total hours.

D Before your first day at home, complete the online workspace checklist and upload photos of your work area, so that we can check your desk, lighting and cables are set up correctly. If you are injured while working at home, report it within 24 hours, exactly as you would in the office.

E Always lock your screen when you leave your desk, even for a few minutes. Customer documents must never be printed at home, and you must connect to company systems only through the secure network software installed on your laptop. Never work on public Wi-Fi, for example in a café.

F Every arrangement is reviewed by you and your manager every six months. Either of you may end the arrangement by giving two weeks' notice, and you may occasionally be asked to come into the office on a home day for training or an important team meeting.

Section 2: Job description: Assistant Manager, Fernhill Garden Centre

About us. Fernhill Garden Centre is a family-owned business selling plants, garden tools and outdoor furniture. We have 25 staff, and our busiest time of year is spring.

The role. The Assistant Manager supports the Store Manager and is in charge of the centre whenever the Store Manager is away. This is a full-time position of 38 hours a week, including one weekend day. Working hours are set out on a roster that covers four weeks at a time.

Main duties. Supervising the sales floor and checkout staff; placing weekly orders with suppliers; making sure plants are watered and displays are kept tidy; dealing with customer complaints that other staff cannot resolve; and preparing the monthly sales report.

What you'll need. At least three years' experience in retail, including at least one year in a supervisory role. Knowledge of plants is an advantage but not essential, as full training will be given. You must be able to lift bags of soil weighing up to 20 kg.

What we offer. A 25% staff discount, two days of paid plant-care training each year, and free on-site parking.

How to apply. Send your résumé and the names of two referees through the Careers page of our website by 30 June. Interviews will be held in the first week of July.

Section 3: Keepers of the light: the story of lighthouses

A For as long as people have sailed, they have needed warnings of dangerous coasts and guidance into safe harbours. The earliest aids were simply fires lit on hills and headlands. The most famous early lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria in Egypt, was completed in the third century BC and is thought to have been more than 100 metres tall, which made it one of the tallest structures of the ancient world. It was counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and stood for well over a thousand years before it was destroyed by a series of earthquakes. Its name lives on: the words for 'lighthouse' in French, Italian and Spanish (phare and faro) come from it.

B For many centuries after that, lighthouse lights remained weak. Keepers burned wood or coal in open fires and later used candles and oil lamps. These were expensive to keep burning and often difficult to see in bad weather. Worse, much of the light they produced was wasted, because it shone in every direction, up into the sky and back towards the land, rather than out to sea where it was needed.

C The breakthrough came in the 1820s, when the French physicist Augustin Fresnel designed a new kind of lens. Instead of a single thick and heavy piece of glass, his lens was made of many rings of glass prisms arranged around a central lamp. Together, these bent and gathered the light into a powerful horizontal beam that could be seen much further out to sea than earlier lights. The first Fresnel lens was installed in 1823 at the Cordouan lighthouse, near the mouth of the Gironde river in south-west France, and the design was soon adopted around the world.

D A bright light on its own was not enough, however. At night, sailors needed to know not only that there was land nearby but exactly which lighthouse they were looking at. Each light was therefore given its own 'characteristic': a particular pattern of flashes, a colour, or a steady light. One lighthouse might give a single white flash every five seconds, for example, while its nearest neighbour gave two flashes every ten seconds. Sailors could look up these patterns in official lists and on their charts. In daylight, many towers could also be recognised by the coloured stripes or bands painted on them.

E For most of their history, lighthouses could not work without keepers. The lamp had to be lit every evening and watched all night, the glass of the lens had to be cleaned, and in many lighthouses the machinery that turned the lens had to be wound by hand at regular intervals. Keepers also recorded the weather and any passing ships. On lighthouses built on remote rocks, keepers worked in teams and might spend weeks at a time cut off from their families, and storms could delay the boats that brought supplies and replacement staff.

F During the twentieth century, electric lamps and automatic equipment gradually made keepers unnecessary. Lamps could be switched on and off by light sensors, and faults could be reported to a control centre far away. One by one, lighthouses were automated and their keepers withdrawn. In the United Kingdom, the last lighthouse to be automated was North Foreland in Kent, in 1998.

G Today, most ships find their way using satellite navigation, and in some countries lights that are no longer considered necessary have been switched off. Many lighthouses, however, are still in use, partly as a back-up in case electronic systems fail and partly to help the crews of smaller boats. Others have found new lives as museums, holiday accommodation or protected heritage sites, attracting visitors who are fascinated by the history of these lonely towers.