C2 Reading Practice Test 1

The auction house had chosen to describe Lot 114 as "a Bosphorus view, oil on canvas, signed lower left, slightly foxed", a phrase that Nermin Hanım, seated in the third row with her handbag clamped on her knees, considered a masterpiece of understatement. The painting was not slightly foxed. It had spent four decades in a damp basement in Moda, in the company of a broken sewing machine and several cartons of her husband's magazines, and it looked it. The sky had acquired brown freckles; the water had faded to the colour of weak tea. Nobody in the room, she suspected, would want it. That was the point. Her granddaughter, who had arranged the sale after a ruthless afternoon of clearing out the flat, had assured her that the estimate of three hundred lira was "optimistic, if anything", and had advised her to stay at home. Nermin Hanım had thanked her, nodded and promptly bought a ticket for the viewing. The bidding began at fifty. A young man in a very good coat, who had been consulting his phone with the air of someone attending a meeting for which he had not been properly briefed, raised his paddle. At a hundred, a woman at the back joined in. At two hundred, to the visible astonishment of the auctioneer, a third bidder entered the contest from the telephone bank, and Nermin Hanım felt, for the first time in an hour, a sensation not unlike alarm. She had known precisely what the painting was worth to her: nothing at all, financially, and a considerable amount otherwise. Her father had painted it from the window of a rented room in Kandilli, on a Sunday in a summer so distant that she could no longer recall whether it had been hot. He had been a bank clerk by profession and a painter in every way that mattered to nobody but himself. He had never sold a canvas. He had never, to her knowledge, expected to. The price reached six hundred. Then eight. Then, with a gesture of suspicious lightness, the man in the good coat nodded at a thousand and the telephone fell silent. "Going once," said the auctioneer, in the voice of a man reluctant to interrupt a miracle. "Going twice." She could have raised her paddle. She had, in a purse she rarely opened, just enough to reach a thousand and fifty, and the temptation was considerable. But as the hammer hovered, she found herself looking at the young man, who was staring at the painting with a bewildered, almost reverent frown, as though it had started to speak to him in a language he had forgotten he knew. The hammer fell. Nermin Hanım lowered her handbag from her lap, and for the first time that afternoon smiled. "Slightly foxed," she murmured to nobody in particular, rising with the care of the elderly. "Well, the fox is in good hands."

It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which two neighbouring towns might disagree about what time it was, and yet, until the nineteenth century, that was simply the way things were. Time was local. Noon occurred when the sun stood highest in the sky, which meant that clocks in Bristol ran roughly ten minutes behind those in London, and nobody except the occasional astronomer thought this worth remarking. When travel was limited to the speed of a horse, such discrepancies were of no practical significance. The railways changed that. A train that left one city at a time determined by the local clock and arrived in another with a different notion of the hour created confusion on a grand scale. Timetables had to be accompanied by conversion tables, and passengers missed connections through no fault of their own. In Britain, the Great Western Railway adopted London time for its entire network in 1840, and other companies followed over the next decade, so that "railway time" gradually came to dominate daily life; it was not until 1880, however, that Greenwich Mean Time was made the legal standard throughout the country. The challenge was greater in North America, where the sheer width of the continent meant that the sun's position varied dramatically from coast to coast. By the early 1880s, railroads were operating on dozens of local times. In November 1883, they replaced them with five standard zones, an arrangement implemented on a single day that became known, with some exaggeration, as "the day of two noons", since in the cities where clocks were set back to align with the new system, noon was effectively repeated. Several communities protested at being told what time it was by railway companies; the government did not formally endorse the zones until 1918. Meanwhile, the question of global coordination remained unresolved. In 1884, delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington for the International Meridian Conference, where, after considerable debate, a large majority voted to adopt the meridian passing through Greenwich as the prime meridian, with France abstaining. The decision did not create a binding worldwide system overnight, and countries adopted standard time at different speeds, but it established the framework on which modern time zones rest. Even today, the system retains its quirks. China, despite spanning the width of five geographical zones, officially keeps a single time. India observes a half-hour offset, and Nepal, in a gesture of independence, keeps its clocks a quarter of an hour ahead of its neighbour's. These oddities remind us that time, which feels like a fact of nature, is in reality an agreement, negotiated and renegotiated by people who needed to arrive at the same station at the same hour.

ZAMBAK APARTMENTS, KARŞIYAKA, İZMİR Quarterly Notice to Residents Dear neighbours, It has come to the attention of the management, through the usual channels (principally the stairwell, at an hour when one would prefer not to be informed), that a number of matters require our collective consideration. I shall endeavour to be brief, an aspiration that previous notices have not always fulfilled. The lift. We are pleased to report that the lift has been repaired and, for the time being, appears to be in good spirits. The technician, a patient young man whose acquaintance many of us have now made, has requested that residents refrain from pressing all the buttons at once, a practice he describes as "unhelpful to its character". Likewise, the maximum capacity of six persons is a limit, not a challenge. Anyone who wishes to transport a wardrobe is asked to employ the stairs and, ideally, a friend. The ground-floor bicycles. Since the previous notice, the number of bicycles stored in the entrance hall has risen from three to seven, and a scooter of undetermined ownership has taken up residence beside the letterboxes. While the management has nothing against cycling, it is bound to observe that the fire regulations draw a line at obstacles that visitors cannot see in the dark. Owners are respectfully invited to move their vehicles to the courtyard shelter by the end of the month. Unclaimed items will be tagged and, after a decent interval, politely relocated. The fig tree. The matter of the fig tree in the courtyard, which has now been discussed at three meetings, has produced two opposing parties and a petition. The management wishes to make clear that it has no intention of removing a tree that has outlived several of its critics. It does, however, ask that the fruit should be harvested before it becomes a hazard on the steps, and that those who enjoy the shade should show some restraint in the matter of jam, which has begun to arrive uninvited at the doors of the less fortunate. The roof terrace. After repeated enquiries, we confirm that the terrace will reopen on the first of May. Gatherings should end by eleven in the evening, in consideration of residents who rise early. Singing is permitted, within reason, and subject to the judgement of those who must listen. Finally, the annual meeting will be held in the courtyard on Saturday, 26 April, at six o'clock. Refreshments will be provided; attendance, in the opinion of the management, is the price of the right to complain afterwards. With kind regards and cautious optimism, Mehmet Özdemir Building Manager, Flat 1