Mock 2 — Reading

Evening courses at Camden Adult Education

A · Photography for Beginners — Saturday mornings, ten weeks. No camera needed; phones welcome. Ends with a small exhibition in the library.

B · Conversation Spanish — Tuesdays 7–9pm. For people who studied Spanish at school and have forgotten most of it. Speaking only; no written homework.

C · Cooking on a Budget — Thursdays 6–8pm, six weeks. Every class cooks one meal for under £3 a head and eats it together. Bring a container for leftovers.

D · Introduction to Bookkeeping — Mondays 6.30–8.30pm, twelve weeks. Leads to a recognised certificate. Useful if you run a small business or want office work.

E · Choir for All — Wednesdays 7–8.30pm. You do not need to read music. The choir sings at the winter fair; attendance in December is expected.

F · Creative Writing — Tuesdays 7–9pm, eight weeks. Short exercises in class and one piece of writing a week at home, read aloud to the group.

G · Woodwork Basics — Saturdays 10am–1pm. All tools provided. You take home a small table you have made yourself.

H · Digital Skills for Work — Mondays and Thursdays 6–8pm, four weeks. Email, spreadsheets and online forms, at your own pace, with a tutor in the room.

The woman who mapped the sea floor

When Marie Tharp arrived in New York in 1948 with two degrees and a job offer from Columbia University, she was told she could not go to sea. Women were not allowed on the research ships, and so the ocean she spent her life describing was one she almost never saw. Her colleague Bruce Heezen sailed; Marie stayed in a room on the ninth floor with the numbers he sent back.

Those numbers were depth readings, thousands of them, taken as a ship crossed the Atlantic and bounced sound off the bottom. On their own they were columns of figures. Marie's work was to turn them into a picture, drawing the sea floor line by line as though she were walking it. It took months for a single crossing, and nobody had ever seen the result before, because until then nobody had drawn one.

In 1952 she noticed something in the middle of the Atlantic that she had not expected: a valley, running down the centre of an underwater mountain range, appearing in crossing after crossing. She thought it might mean the sea floor was splitting apart. When she said so, Heezen called it “girl talk” and asked her to check the work again. She checked it. It was still there.

What changed his mind was not her argument but a second map. A colleague had been plotting earthquakes in the Atlantic, and when the two sheets were laid over one another the earthquakes sat inside Marie's valley, along its whole length. Two people working on different problems had drawn the same line without knowing it, and a line drawn twice from different evidence is very hard to explain away.

The maps she made were published under both their names and became, for a generation of geologists, the picture in their heads when they thought about the ocean. Her own name took much longer to arrive. She was in her seventies before the honours started, and she used to say that the best part had never been the recognition anyway: it was the ten years when she knew something about the planet that almost nobody else did.

Why British houses are cold

Visitors from warmer countries often arrive in Britain expecting the weather to be the problem and find that the houses are worse. 16 ______ It is a fair question, and the answer is mostly about when the houses were built.

A very large share of British homes went up before 1919, when coal was cheap and a fire in each room was normal. 17 ______ Solid walls, single windows and a chimney in every room made perfect sense when the heat was coming from inside that room.

The trouble started when central heating arrived and the fires went out. 18 ______ The chimneys stayed, though, pulling warm air up and out of buildings that were never designed to hold it in.

Governments have spent forty years trying to fix this from the outside in — grants for loft insulation, for double glazing, for filling the gaps inside walls. 19 ______ Older solid walls have no gap to fill, and doing them properly means rebuilding the inside or the outside of the house.

So the British habit of wearing a jumper indoors is not really a habit at all. 20 ______ It is the sensible response to a housing stock that was built for a different way of keeping warm.

The Sunday roast

The Sunday roast is one of the few British meals that still 21 ______ a whole family to sit down together. It is not a complicated dish. A joint of meat goes in the oven, potatoes are roasted around it, and whatever vegetables are in 22 ______ are boiled or steamed alongside.

What 23 ______ it apart from an ordinary dinner is the timing. Everything has to arrive on the table at once, which means the cook spends the morning 24 ______ track of four or five things at different stages. Pubs make a good living out of people who would rather not.

The meal is losing ground — fewer households 25 ______ it out every week than did twenty years ago — but it has not disappeared. It has simply moved. On any Sunday afternoon a British pub will be full of families doing exactly what their grandparents did at home, and 26 ______ someone else with the washing up.

A letter to a new neighbour

Dear Nadia,

Welcome to number 14! I live next door 27 ______ 16, so if you need anything at all in the first few weeks, just knock.

A few things it took me a year to find 28 ______. The bins go out on Tuesday nights, not Wednesday mornings — the lorry comes early. The corner shop looks closed from outside 29 ______ it is almost always open until ten. And there is a doctor's surgery two streets away that takes new patients, 30 ______ is more than can be said for the big one on the main road.

We usually have a street party in July. Nobody organises it exactly; it just 31 ______ to happen, and everyone brings something. You will get a note through the door nearer the time.

Anyway — I hope the move went well and that you are not still living 32 ______ of boxes.

Best wishes,
Ellen