Oldgate: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

We are open Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00 to 17.00, with last admission at 16.15. The museum is closed on Mondays, except on bank holiday Mondays, when we open from 11.00 to 16.00. We are also closed on 24, 25 and 26 December and on 1 January. The gardens open half an hour before the building and close at the same time.

Entry to the permanent galleries is free. Temporary exhibitions cost £9, or £7 for students, over-60s and anyone receiving certain benefits; under-16s go free when accompanied by an adult. An annual pass costs £25 and covers every temporary exhibition for twelve months. If you decide to buy one on the day of your visit, the price of the ticket you have already bought will be taken off the cost of the pass.

We are a ten-minute walk from the railway station, signposted from the main entrance. There is no visitor parking at the museum. The nearest car park is the Castle Street multi-storey, where three hours costs £2.50 if your ticket is validated at our welcome desk. Two accessible bays are available at the rear of the building and must be reserved by telephone at least a day ahead.

The cloakroom is free, and large bags and rucksacks must be left there rather than carried through the galleries. Our café is on the first floor, open from 10.00 to 16.30, and is reached by the lift as well as the stairs. Baby-changing facilities are on the ground floor beside the shop. Assistance dogs are welcome throughout; other dogs may come into the courtyard but not into the building.

You are welcome to take photographs for your own use in the permanent galleries, provided you do not use flash. Photography is not permitted in temporary exhibitions, where the conditions set by the owners of the objects apply and we have no discretion. Tripods and lighting equipment require written permission, which must be arranged at least one week in advance.

Any group of ten or more must book in advance, whether or not they are paying for entry, so that we can manage numbers in the galleries. School visits are free, and a gallery session led by a member of our learning team can be included at no charge if it is booked three weeks ahead. We ask for one accompanying adult for every six pupils aged under eleven.

In a good many countries there are now more households containing a pet than households containing a child, and the sums involved are not small: food, veterinary care, insurance and equipment together make up a substantial industry. Viewed coldly, the arrangement is peculiar. A household takes on a creature that will cost money every week for a decade or more, restrict where its owners can go and what they can do, and return nothing that can be sold. Almost no other voluntary expense behaves like this, and any explanation has to account for how old the habit is as well as how widespread.

It is very old. The dog was the first domesticated animal by a long margin, present alongside human groups at least fifteen thousand years ago and probably a good deal earlier, which is to say thousands of years before anybody planted a crop or kept a herd. The most persuasive account of how it happened is that nobody did it on purpose. Wolves that could tolerate being near a camp got access to what people threw away; those that fled at the sight of a human did not; and over generations the tolerant ones bred with each other. A long-running Russian experiment in which silver foxes were selected for nothing except willingness to approach a person produced, within a few decades, animals with floppy ears, shortened muzzles, curled tails, patches of white fur and a longer period in which a young animal will accept something new. Nobody selected for any of that. It arrived attached to tameness.

The cat's history is different and, if anything, stranger. Cats seem to have attached themselves to people in the Near East around nine or ten thousand years ago, when stored grain began to attract rodents in numbers, and a cat buried beside a human on Cyprus about that long ago is the earliest good evidence of the relationship. What is striking is how little changed. A domestic cat differs from the wildcat it descends from by a very small number of genes, is fully capable of living without people, and has never been through the intensive shaping that produced the difference between a wolf and a spaniel. It is reasonable to say that cats moved in rather than that they were taken in.

For almost all of the time since, animals in the house had work to do. Dogs guarded, herded, hunted, hauled and killed vermin; cats controlled mice in barns and granaries; even a caged bird was often a practical instrument rather than a companion. Within about a century, in the wealthier parts of the world, nearly all of that disappeared. The great majority of dogs alive today are descended from working animals and have no work; the tasks that shaped their bodies and their temperaments are gone, while the bodies and the temperaments remain. What the animals do now is social, and the awkward fact is that they were not designed for it.

Ask people why they keep an animal and the answers are consistent: company, something to come home to, a reason to leave the house, a routine imposed from outside. Whether any of this shows up in measurements of health is a more difficult question than the popular literature suggests. Some careful studies find that pet owners are more physically active and report less loneliness. Others find the difference vanishes once income, household composition and prior health are taken into account, since the people most able to take on an animal are on average healthier and better off to begin with. Reviews of this field have repeatedly noted that positive results are far more likely to be published than null ones, which means the true effect is almost certainly smaller than the headline figure.

There are costs that are discussed less often than they should be. Feeding several hundred million carnivorous animals uses a quantity of meat that is not trivial in land or emissions, even allowing for the share of it that comes from parts of a carcass people do not eat. Breeding for appearance has produced dogs whose skulls are too short for them to breathe comfortably and whose popularity has risen precisely as the evidence of their suffering has accumulated. And domestic cats kill wild birds and small mammals in numbers that are genuinely hard to estimate and certainly large, a finding that is unwelcome to a great many people who are otherwise sympathetic to conservation.

It is worth noticing that almost every item on that list is an objection to how animals are bred and kept rather than to keeping them. A mongrel of moderate size, fed sensibly, exercised and kept indoors at night imposes a small fraction of the costs described above. The argument that condemns a flat-faced puppy bred by a dealer does not touch the rescued crossbreed asleep by the fire, and treating the two as the same case is the reason these discussions so often end with everybody feeling accused and nothing being decided.

What makes the relationship genuinely unusual is not its usefulness, since for most households it has none, and not its cost, which people evidently consider worth paying. It is that it is one of the very few arrangements in which a person accepts a serious, long-running obligation to something that cannot hold them to it. A dog cannot sue, complain to anybody or leave. The obligation is enforced by nothing except the person who took it on, which may be why the relationship is so revealing about the people in it, and why the failures are so much worse than an economic account of the arrangement would predict.