C1 Reading Practice Test 2

Few people have left a deeper mark on a city's skyline than Mimar Sinan, whose domes and slender minarets still define the profile of Istanbul. Yet his career began far from the capital and, for many years, far from architecture. He was born around 1490 in the village of Ağırnas, near Kayseri in central Anatolia, and as a young man was taken into the service of the Ottoman state, where he was trained in the palace system and then joined the army. It was in the army that his talents became apparent. Attached to the Janissary corps as an engineer, Sinan followed military campaigns for the better part of three decades, building bridges to cross rivers, constructing fortifications and devising solutions to the problems that arose along the way. Those years taught him practical lessons that no classroom could have provided: how materials behaved under stress, how structures could be built quickly and how they could be built to last. In 1539, by which time he was nearly fifty, he was appointed chief imperial architect. It was a post he would hold for almost half a century, and the volume of work produced during that period is astonishing. More than three hundred structures are attributed to him, including mosques, schools, hospitals, public baths, aqueducts and bridges. Among them is the long stone bridge at Büyükçekmece, west of Istanbul, which still stands today. Sinan himself judged his career in three stages. The Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul, completed in 1548, he regarded as the work of an apprentice. The Süleymaniye Mosque, finished in 1557 and now one of the city's most admired monuments, represented, in his own view, the work of a qualified craftsman. Only the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, completed in 1574, did he consider his masterpiece. Its great central dome, supported by eight massive piers, creates an airy, uncluttered interior that architects still study with admiration. What distinguishes Sinan is not only the scale of his output but its consistency. He worked with a large team of assistants, many of whom became distinguished builders in their own right, and he paid close attention to harmony between structure and surroundings, so that his buildings seem to rest naturally on the hills where they stand. His modesty is also striking. A man who built so much might be forgiven for boasting; he preferred the humble word "apprentice". He remained active to a remarkable age, serving as chief architect until around 1588, and almost five centuries later his reputation shows no sign of fading.

Before 2020, working from home was a privilege granted to a minority of employees. A few years later, millions had tried it, and the question of whether to continue has become one of the most contested issues in modern employment. Employers and workers alike are divided, and the evidence, as so often, is more nuanced than either side admits. Advocates of remote work begin with the most tangible benefit: time. Without a daily journey, the average employee can recover an hour or more each day, to be devoted to family, exercise or sleep. Supporters also stress flexibility; a parent can collect a child from school, and a person living in a small town can take a job once available only in a distant city. Research seems to support some of these claims. One often-cited study of employees at a large travel company in China found that those allowed to work at home several days a week were as productive as their office-based colleagues, and that fewer of them resigned. Sceptics, however, point to what is lost. Spontaneous conversations, they argue, are the lifeblood of a team: the quick question across a desk, the idea sparked over lunch, the colleague who notices that someone is struggling. These exchanges rarely occur on a scheduled video call. Younger employees, in particular, may suffer, since they learn their craft largely by watching more experienced people at work. There is also a human dimension. Some people find that without the structure of an office, their days blur together, and the boundary between work and home becomes dangerously thin. Each argument contains truth, but each also depends on circumstances. A programmer concentrating on a complicated problem may well be more productive in a quiet room at home than in an open-plan office, while a designer who needs rapid feedback from colleagues might be frustrated. Likewise, the experience differs enormously between a person with a spare room and a person sharing a small flat with several others. Many organisations are therefore settling on a hybrid model, with employees working in the office on certain days and from home on others. Whether this compromise will prove stable remains to be seen. What does seem clear is that the most successful arrangements are those in which the rules are set openly and revisited regularly, rather than imposed by one party on the other. The debate, in short, is less about where work takes place than about trust.

It was the sound that Anouk noticed first, a soft hissing like a disappointed sigh, and then the unmistakable lurch of a rear wheel giving up. She had been cycling for six weeks, from Rotterdam towards the Black Sea, and had so far prided herself on having avoided every mechanical misfortune. That the first real puncture should occur on a hot afternoon, in a town whose name she could not yet pronounce with confidence, struck her as a form of cosmic humour. She wheeled the bicycle down a cobbled street lined with wooden houses and, on the corner, found a small repair shop. Outside it, a boy of about nineteen was bent over a motorbike engine. He looked up, took in the flat tyre, the dusty luggage and the red face, and said in careful English, "Good afternoon. You have a problem. I think it is a small problem." "It's a very small problem," Anouk agreed, "which I am unable to solve with the tools I have." His name was Hasan, and he was studying mechanical engineering in Ankara but spending the summer helping his uncle. Within a minute he had removed the wheel, and within ten he had found the culprit, a tiny shard of glass, almost invisible against the rubber. What fascinated Anouk was not the speed of the repair but the way he narrated it, pausing every few sentences to check a word. "This is called… how do you say… the inner tube?" "The inner tube. Yes." "I learn English from videos," he admitted. "Nobody to speak with. If you have time, maybe I practise a little?" It was an offer too appealing to refuse. When the tyre was mended, his uncle appeared with tea in small tulip-shaped glasses, and the afternoon drifted into a long and agreeably muddled conversation. Hasan corrected her pronunciation of the town's name; she corrected his habit of saying "I am agree". He asked whether it was true that everybody in the Netherlands owned a bicycle, and she explained, with some embarrassment, that the number of bicycles in her country did indeed exceed the number of people. By the time she stood to leave, the shadows had lengthened across the street. She reached for her wallet, but Hasan shook his head. "No. The English lesson was enough payment." "Then it was the cheapest repair of my life," she said, "and the most useful." Pedalling out of town, she realised that she had forgotten to be annoyed. It was no longer the puncture she would remember from this journey, but the quiet pleasure of an afternoon that had gone entirely against her plans, and which she would not have exchanged for any smooth road in Europe.