English Reading Level Test

In Japan, children usually clean their school every day. This is a normal part of the school day. After lunch, the children take brooms and cloths. They clean the floor, the desks and the windows. Some children clean the garden too. They work in small groups, and the teacher helps them. Children learn to look after their school. They also learn to work together.

Last July, Elif visited her grandmother in Malatya. The town is famous for its apricots, and Grandma has three big trees in her garden. This year Elif wanted to learn how to make apricot jam. First, they picked the fruit early in the morning because it was not so hot. Then they washed it and cut every apricot in half. Grandma put the fruit in a large pot with sugar and a little lemon juice. Elif had to stir it for an hour. Her arm was very tired! At last the jam was ready. They put it in clean jars. Elif took two jars home to Istanbul, and she ate the jam on bread every morning.

The International Space Station, or ISS, travels around the Earth at about twenty-eight thousand kilometres an hour. It is so fast that it goes round the planet roughly every ninety minutes. As a result, the astronauts on board see around sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day. Living in space is very different from life on Earth. Because everything floats, astronauts have to fix their belongings to the walls with straps or tape. They sleep in small cabins, attached to the wall in sleeping bags so that they do not drift around. Eating is another challenge. Food comes in sealed packages, and drinks are sipped from bags with straws, because liquid would escape from an open cup. Astronauts also have to work out for about two hours every day. Without gravity, muscles and bones become weaker, so they use special exercise machines to keep their bodies in good condition. The rest of the day is filled with experiments, repairs and talks to students on Earth. Scientists are learning a great deal from the station. For example, studies about how plants grow without gravity may one day help to produce food on long space journeys. Several countries have worked together to build and run the ISS, and it has been visited by astronauts from more than twenty nations.

The rule had been announced in a school letter three weeks earlier, and Callum had read it with growing alarm. During the residential trip to a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland, all phones would be locked in a plastic box in the teachers' room. "A weekend of real life," the letter had called it. Callum, who could not remember the last time he had spent an hour without checking his messages, called it a punishment. He handed over his phone on the ferry with the expression of someone surrendering a passport. For the first few hours he behaved like a man suffering from a mysterious illness. He kept patting his pocket, reaching for something that was no longer there. When the group stopped to look at seals resting on the rocks, he found himself wishing he could photograph them, and was annoyed to realise that he was actually looking at them instead. By evening he was bored, and by ten o'clock he was desperate enough to join a conversation at the fireside between the ferryman, Mr Gillies, and two of the teachers. They were talking about the sky. "You'll see more stars tonight than you've seen in your whole life," Mr Gillies promised. "There's not a streetlight for miles." Callum had expected this to be an exaggeration. It was not. When they walked out onto the beach later, the sky seemed to be overflowing; there were so many stars that the familiar patterns he had seen on his phone's astronomy app were almost lost among them. Nobody spoke for several minutes. Then a girl from his class, Priya, whom he had barely noticed before, quietly began naming the constellations she knew. The next morning, when the box was opened, Callum was surprised to find that he felt no relief. He had forty-two new messages, but not one of them was as interesting as the night before. On the ferry home he took out his phone, then put it back in his pocket and watched the island shrink behind them. He did not become a different person overnight. But the following week, he asked Priya if she could lend him her star chart.

Subject: Volunteers' briefing: Sea and Stories Weekend, 9 to 11 May Dear volunteers, First of all, thank you. When we advertised for forty helpers, we were privately hoping for thirty, so the fact that sixty-three of you applied has been a pleasant surprise, and a slightly alarming one for our spreadsheet. I have therefore tried to make sure that everyone has a role that suits them. Please read the following carefully, since I shall not repeat myself on the day, however much I may be tempted. Where and when. All volunteers should report to the old customs building on the harbour by 7:30 on Friday morning, not a minute later. Coffee and simit will be provided, though I cannot promise that they will still be there at 7:45. Your name badges and a schedule will be waiting for you at the entrance. Your roles. If your confirmation letter says "Stage", you will be helping the technicians to set up chairs and cables and guiding authors to the right tent. Those marked "Children" will assist in the storytelling corner, which, as experience has shown, is both the most rewarding and the noisiest place at the festival. Anybody assigned to "Information" is, in effect, the face of the whole event; I would be grateful if you could learn where the toilets are before you learn anything else, since that is overwhelmingly what people ask. What to wear. Everyone will receive a blue festival shirt. Comfortable shoes are strongly advised, bearing in mind that you will be on your feet for most of the day. Although the forecast is promising, the wind off the sea has a habit of changing its mind, so a light jacket is sensible. Please note. Volunteers who have not told us of food allergies are asked to do so by this Friday. Should you find it impossible to attend for any reason, I would appreciate as much notice as you can give, since a gap in the rota is far easier to fill on Tuesday than on Friday morning. Finally, a word on the spirit of the weekend. Visitors will remember very little about the programme itself. What they will recall is whether someone smiled at them when they were lost. That, I believe, is where you come in. With warm thanks and considerable optimism, Defne Arslan Volunteer Coordinator

The Datça Autumn Regatta had been held, with a regularity that bordered on stubbornness, every October for forty-three years, and in all that time its organiser, Commodore Rıza Bey, had never once been satisfied with the wind. He considered it a personal failing of the Aegean that it should be either too strong, which was dangerous, or too weak, which was embarrassing, and he spoke of it in tones normally reserved for a disappointing relative. This year, the problem was the latter. By eleven o'clock the sea in the bay had acquired the texture of poured glass, and the thirty-odd dinghies assembled at the start line hung motionless, like insects trapped in amber. On the committee boat, Commodore Rıza Bey consulted his barometer, tapped it with the air of a man who no longer trusts his friends, and announced that the race would begin "as soon as circumstances permitted". Circumstances declined to cooperate. Parents on the quay began to unwrap sandwiches. Somebody's grandmother produced a flask of tea and, in the spirit of the occasion, offered it to the Commodore, who accepted it without a word of thanks. Among the competitors was a twelve-year-old named Ece, sailing a battered, faded-blue dinghy that her uncle had bought for the price of a good second-hand bicycle. She had never won anything, and nobody expected her to; the more experienced sailors, with their sleek boats and their serious expressions, were already positioning themselves for the first puff of wind, jostling with a politeness that did not entirely conceal their intentions. Ece did the opposite. She sat still, her hand loose on the tiller, and watched the water. After a long while she noticed what the others had missed: a dark line far on the left of the bay, crossing the surface so lightly that it looked like a pencil mark. She let the dinghy drift, an inch at a time, towards it, resisting the temptation to hurry. When the breeze finally came, shortly after half past one, it arrived on the left of the course, exactly where she was waiting. By the time the other boats had worked out what was happening, her little blue sail was already filling, and she was a hundred metres ahead. She won by an easy margin, a fact that Commodore Rıza Bey recorded in the logbook with the expression of a man signing a document under protest. At the prize-giving, he handed her the small silver cup and, after some visible internal struggle, said, "Patience is a form of skill." "So is knowing where to look," said Ece, and he pretended not to have heard. The wind, as if embarrassed by its earlier behaviour, stayed until dusk.