IELTS practice test 16 reading academic test

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TEST 16

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Reading Academic Test 16

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SECTION 1 Questions 1 – 13

Social housing

Over the past 20 years in Britain, the proportion of social homes in the total stock has fallen from 31% to 21% and their number has declined from 6.8m to 5.3m Blame—or credit—Margaret Thatcher for this Her government forced local authorities to sell homes cheaply to existing tenants and stopped them building new ones New social homes were to be financed centrally and run by local housing associations

It now looks like the long squeeze is over Next week, the government is expected to announce a near-doubling of the Housing Corporation's £1.2 billion annual budget and plans to extend eligibility for social housing An extra £1 billion would build around 20,000 new homes each year at current rates This could be stretched further by reducing the amount of subsidy per house

The government is hoping that this move will help solve its housing difficulties Thanks to nimbyism, the supply of new houses in Britain falls well short of demand, by more than 50,000 a year according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research charity The result: surging housing costs which have priced modest earners out of the market, particularly in London and the south-east of England Chief among the victims are public-sector workers, such as nurses and teachers

The government will try to fulfil its ambitions in part through a phenomenon known as planning gain Councils are grabbing an increasing share of rising land prices by bumping up the amount of social housing developers must build as part of a new scheme and hand over to the local housing association Even before the government's fresh money arrives, some local authorities in southern England are relying on planning gain to help meet demanding targets In plush regency Cheltenham, the council wants 30% of new housing

to be social; the figure is 40% in comfortable Poole in Dorset, while the Greater London Authority is targeting 50% in the capital over the next twenty years

Will this policy just create new ghettos? Maybe not People have learnt from the mistakes of the post-war housing boom Providers have got better at design and building Everybody now knows that concrete blocks

do not work in rainy countries The stigma of social housing can often be eliminated by making it indistinguishable from neighbouring private housing Social housing developments are even winning awards in competition with private sector developments—the Peabody Trust's Bedzed development in Surrey won the Evening Standard Lifestyle Home of the Year award—though it is worth remembering that some of the most notorious 1960s and 1970s council housing estates also won design awards

Housing associations are generally better at getting repairs done than are councils They have also been more effective in tackling problems like drugs and prostitution through innovations such as estate offices and on-site caretakers Above all, planners have learned not to think too big “No one will ever build a big single tenure estate again,” says Richard McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Peabody Trust

Yet despite this encouraging news, the central flaw of social housing remains: it discourages mobility What happens to the teacher who lives in social housing in one borough, and is offered a job in a borough that cannot offer her new cheap housing? What happens to a nurse in cheap housing who wants to move into a new profession? A government so keen on enterprise and initiative should not be recreating a system that makes it difficult for people to change their lives If public-sector workers cannot afford to live in the south-east of England, then the government should be changing pay scales that currently discriminate in favour of public sector workers in cheap bits of the country and against those in expensive bits, rather than reintroducing something that once looked like a boon to the poor and turned out to be a shackle

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Questions 1 - 7

Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph

i Still difficult to move around

ii Councils give way to housing associations

iii Increased spending

iv The cost of moving home

v A shrinking supply

vi Learning from the past

vii Public-sector workers squeezed out

viii New demands on developers

1 Paragraph A

2 Paragraph B

3 Paragraph C

4 Paragraph D

5 Paragraph E

6 Paragraph F

7 Paragraph G

Questions 9 - 13

Write True, False or Not Given

8 During the Thatcher years, there was a block on building social homes

9 The housing problem in London is worse than in the rest of south-east England

10 Local authorities are starting to depend on the 'planning gain' scheme

11 One way to make social housing more successful is to make it similar to private housing

12 Local councils are unable to deal with crimes committed on social housing land

13 It would not be helpful to modify pubic workers salary depending on where they lived

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Tales of youth and age

It is a story as old as boy meets girl who become man and woman who (either before or after that step into adulthood) become father and mother who grow old and who become more and more puzzled, or even resentful, about the behaviour of the younger generation Yet that story, which is explored in numerous ways, direct or indirect, large or small, is bringing with it some new twists These twists arise from science, from economics and from society-all of which could later pop up in that eternal mirror of power and change, politics For, in the broadest sense of all, the clash or contrast between youth and age could prove to be one

of the defining issues of the 21st century

That is rather a bold claim to make In truth, the defining issues of the next 100 years cannot yet be defined, any more than for the 20th century they could securely have been outlined in 1900 But demography, at least,

is the most forecastable of trends, because it takes so long for the statistics of births and deaths to have an impact on the population structure of the living And it is worth recalling that even in 1900 one thing was,

or should have been, clear: that industrial and social change in the developed countries was shifting millions

of people into the cities and the factories The political and economic consequences of that were unpredictable, but the rise of urban working classes did indeed prove one of the century's defining issues

The twists and turns of youth and age are pushing in all sorts of different directions The difficulty lies in balancing those trends against each other For one thing science, combined with the better diet that comes with affluence, is making just about everyone outside the AIDS-afflicted areas of sub-Saharan Africa live longer With every decade that the age of death recedes and the fertility rate (largely for social and economic reasons, helped by technology) declines, so the developed countries' populations are leaning more and more towards the aged Hence the conventional worry that rich countries will, by 2025 or so, have too little youth and too much old age Those countries will be divided between taxpayers and benefit-consumers, just as they are already coming to be divided between those with children (who consume public services and make lots of noise) and the increasing number of those without (who think they pay for the services and endure the noise)

Even in the developing countries, at least those where AIDS has not reached plague proportions, a time looms, perhaps nearer 2050, when that same problem will arise of a large group of elderly needing pensions and health care, supported by a smaller group of younger workers, paying the taxes and earning the profits And, unless those countries are by then much richer, the pain imposed by this imbalance will be much nastier than for the wealthy West If all those demographic predictions come about, then battles between the young and the old could, in both the poor world and the rich, come to dominate politics in the same way as battles between workers and bosses, rich and poor, did in the past

Yet that conclusion is too glib For this ageing of the population structure is not the only change that science, economics and society are bringing In the rich world, led as so often by America, what has recently been happening has been rather paradoxical: that, even as the old have become more numerous, so opportunities for the young have been proliferating Companies, and even societies, have become less hierarchical, a trend which has been under way for decades but which seemed to accelerate in the 1990s Seniority counts for less, initiative and creativity for more; and when technology conspires, as it did during the Internet boom, to provide extra rewards to those with minds and fingers nimble enough to exploit it, the balance shifts especially sharply towards the young

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But who are the young? Another twist brought by science is that people now feel young and look young, for far longer than in the past, and social mores have altered to allow them to express that feeling, whether in dress or behaviour This year the top-selling disc in the pop music charts, in many countries around the world, is yet another compilation of the greatest hits of that trendy youth phenomenon the Beatles Whether that success is explained by the enduring desire of people in their 50s to relive the 1960s, or by a surprising interest in Lennon and McCartney among the conventionally young, is immaterial The line between youth and age has become blurred, and is likely to get even blurrier

If it is allowed to by governments, that trend ought in time to ease those conventional worries about too many pensioners and too few vigorous youthful workers, for the line between work and retirement ought also to fade, as more people choose to carry on working, either full- or part-time, well into their 70s or even 80s Pension schemes will certainly need to change if this is to occur But if that comes about, it will greatly ease the potentially divisive problem of an unequal tax burden, as well as providing a welcome freedom of choice to the soon-to-be numerous old

All these trends-except, possibly, for the recent revving up of youthful change by the Internet-are for the long term But as John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long run we are all dead The demographic trends of the 20th century were much altered, or interrupted, by other, more short-run forces such as war and economic depressions Is that not just as likely, once again?

The answer is that it is just as possible All the opportunities, or problems, caused by these great demographic trends, of ageing populations, or newly youthful 70-year-olds, or even of ageing Chinese, will come to pass (or at least to dominate) only in a world that develops in a fairly benign way They will, in other words, be problems of success: in generating economic growth, in maintaining peace, in avoiding other shocks of the sort that could alter birth or death rates

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Write Yes, No or Not Given

14 Predictions about the size of the human population can be made quite successfully

15 In 1900 it was difficult to see that many people would move to urban areas

16 Better food is helping to extend people's lives in sub-Saharan Africa

17 Many rich countries are concerned about a significant imbalance in old and young people by 2025

18 The consequences of an imbalance between the old and the young would be worse in developed countries than in developing countries

19 In most developed countries today the elderly are respected less than in the past

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer

20 The difference between the definition of an old person and a young one is more than in the past

21 If people work past today's retirement age, will need to be modified for sure

22 If work opportunities exist for the elderly, they will have more as to how to live during their 'retirement' years

Question 23 - 26

Complete the summary with ONE WORD from the text

These concerns over the 23 of the future may be uncalled for In fact they are of concern only if the 24 is a place where 25 is prevalent If war or disaster hits a region, it can, sadly, affect the population size considerably If such things can be avoided, the problems which exist on societies will be a result of 26

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Righting wrongs

A In Shaw's "Pygmalion", Colonel Pickering asks Alfred Doolittle whether he has no morals "Can't afford them, governor," the philanderer replies; "Neither could you if you was as poor as me." Morals are costly to maintain So are rights, especially the kind of "universal human rights" that become enshrined in United Nations' declarations

B International support for a core group of human rights, mainly civil and political, has been enshrined for more than half a century in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in the aftermath of the second world war and the Holocaust The declaration proved compelling as a statement

of principles, but too general and vague to be useful as a legal instrument So, during the 1960s, two more covenants were thrashed out in an effort to give the declaration some substance: the International Covenant

on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

C During the cold war, enthusiasm for these covenants split along the obvious divide: capitalists were keen

on civil and political rights, Communists on social and economic rights When Western lobbyists accused the Soviet Union of violating its citizens' civil rights, the Soviet government replied that the economic and social rights of its people were more important The division survives: today the Chinese make much the same argument

D In terms of publicity and promotion, the rights set out in the first covenant have had the benefit of human-rights advocates such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) They have publicised the plight of prisoners of conscience and victims of torture As a result, regimes that torture, unjustly imprison or disenfranchise their citizens have sometimes been pushed or shamed into changing their behaviour Until now, the second covenant has been used less widely to promote the rights that it enshrines-mainly to economic benefits such as housing, food, health care and fair wages Now, though, Western human-rights groups, which have traditionally focused only on civil and political violations, are looking again at economic rights, and hope eventually to persuade governments to place the right to a house

or a meal on an equal footing with the right to vote

E If this sounds foolish, human-rights veterans are used to scepticism "Twenty-five years ago, when Amnesty started talking about torture victims, everyone thought we were ridiculous, out of our minds," says Larry Cox, the senior programme officer for human rights at the Ford Foundation Few people then believed, he says, that mere letter-writing and lobbying could be such powerful weapons But a great deal more manoeuvring and persuasion will be needed to give meaning to social and economic rights than to fight torturers and censors

F Not surprisingly, the big battalions among human-rights campaigners approach the issue with some trepidation On August 16th, several hundred representatives of Amnesty International, the first and largest such group, met in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to discuss changes to its mandate

G At the moment, Amnesty's campaigners battle in support of civil and political rights They define their battleground with care, supporting only the rights of individuals If a journalist is thrown into prison, Amnesty will launch a campaign on his or her behalf If a government bans a newspaper, however, Amnesty will remain mute, because the action harms no single individual

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