Southwell: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Rotas are published a fortnight in advance and are not changed once published except by agreement or where at least forty-eight hours' notice can be given. If you wish to exchange a shift with a colleague, the exchange must be agreed with the duty manager beforehand and written on the rota. An arrangement made between two members of staff and not recorded does not count, and the person originally rostered remains responsible for the shift.

The optional service charge added to bills is distributed in full to staff on a points basis determined by hours worked, and nobody in management receives any part of it. The distribution is published each month on the noticeboard so that anybody can check it. Cash tips handed directly to a member of staff belong to that person and do not go into the pool.

A shift of more than six hours carries an unpaid break of twenty minutes, and a shift of more than ten hours a break of forty-five. Breaks are taken away from the bar and restaurant, not at a quiet table. A break may not be given up in exchange for finishing early or for extra pay; this is a legal requirement rather than a house rule, and a manager who agrees to it is also in the wrong.

One meal is provided without charge on any shift of more than five hours and is eaten in the staff room rather than in the kitchen. No alcohol may be consumed before or during a shift, and this includes the gap in a split shift. Anybody who has had a drink may not return to work that day, whatever they feel about it, and the duty manager is required to send them home without argument.

Aprons and shirts are issued by the hotel and laundered here. Footwear is not: you must provide your own black shoes with a closed toe and a non-slip sole, which are a condition of entering the kitchen. After three months of continuous service the hotel will contribute £50 towards the cost of a pair, once, on production of a receipt.

Under no circumstances confirm to a caller or a visitor at the desk whether a particular person is staying, or which room they are in. Offer to take a message or to connect the caller to the room without saying whether it is occupied. Nothing about a guest, including a photograph of the building with a guest visible in it, may be posted online, and this applies equally to a private group that you believe only friends can see.

A spillage is signed with a wet floor marker and cleared by whoever sees it, not reported for somebody else to deal with. Every accident, including one in which nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, goes in the book kept at the end of the bar before the end of the shift. Breakages are recorded for stock purposes and are not charged to the member of staff unless there is a repeated pattern that has already been discussed.

Before 1840 sending a letter in Britain was an expensive and complicated business. The charge depended on the distance carried and on the number of sheets of paper, an enclosure doubled it, and the money was collected from the person receiving the letter rather than the person sending it. Recipients accordingly refused letters they could not afford, and a well-known dodge was to agree a code in advance, write it on the outside, and let the recipient inspect the cover at the door and decline to pay. The system produced enormous quantities of unpaid labour for the Post Office and a good deal of inventive fraud.

The reform that followed came from a schoolmaster with no connection to the service. In a pamphlet published in 1837, Rowland Hill worked out that the cost of carrying a letter from London to Edinburgh was a tiny fraction of a penny, and that virtually the entire expense lay in the handling: the sorting, the accounting, the collection of money at the door. If the accounting could be abolished, the price could be cut and made uniform regardless of distance. His proposal was a single low rate, the same everywhere in the country, paid in advance by the sender, and a small piece of gummed paper to show that it had been paid.

The effect was immediate and very large. The number of letters carried in Britain roughly doubled in the first year and had more than quadrupled within a decade. Other countries copied the arrangement within a few years, and the adhesive stamp, which had been the least discussed part of the scheme, became the emblem of the whole thing. One further innovation arrived in 1852, when a Post Office surveyor who wrote novels in his spare time suggested placing iron boxes in the street so that letters could be posted without going to an office at all.

What grew from that was not really a letter service. Over the following century the post office became the general-purpose network of the state: it carried parcels, sold licences, paid pensions, issued money orders, operated a savings bank that held the accounts of millions of people with no access to a commercial one, and in many countries absorbed the telegraph and then the telephone. In rural districts the post office was frequently the only permanent government building, and the postal service was for a long period the largest civilian employer in a number of countries.

The letter began to disappear in the 1990s and the decline accelerated sharply after 2005. Electronic mail took the correspondence, online banking took the statement, and the mobile telephone took the greetings card. Letter volumes in most developed countries have fallen by at least half from their peak and in several by considerably more, and the fall is continuing at a few per cent a year. What is left is heavily weighted towards mail that people do not want and legal documents that must be served on paper.

Parcels have grown at the same time, and it is tempting to conclude that one business has simply replaced the other. It has not, because the two have almost nothing in common operationally. Letters are light, uniform and can be pushed through a door by a walking postman covering several hundred addresses in a morning. Parcels are heavy, vary enormously in size, frequently require a signature or a safe place, and are delivered to a small and unpredictable subset of the addresses on a round, which means a van, a driver and a great deal of time spent not delivering anything. A network optimised for the first is close to the worst possible shape for the second.

That leaves the obligation which defines a postal service and which no other delivery company accepts: to deliver to every address in the country, however remote, at the same price. It is precisely this that cannot pay for itself, and it was affordable only while a large and profitable letter business was there to carry it. The available answers are a direct subsidy, a reduction in how often remote addresses are served, or allowing universal delivery to become a premium product that people in the countryside pay more for. Every country with a postal service is choosing among those three, and none of them is choosing to say so plainly.