Mock 3 — Reading

Where to stay — eight places in the Lake District

A · Fell View Hostel — bunk rooms of six with a shared kitchen, £22 a night. A bus stops outside every hour. Groups welcome; other guests will be in the building. No dogs.

B · Low Farm — a working farm with two bed-and-breakfast rooms. Eggs from the yard at breakfast, and in spring children can help feed the lambs. Three miles from the nearest bus. Dogs can sleep in the barn.

C · The Old Post Office — a cottage for four with its own kitchen and a wood fire, in the middle of the village, next door to the shop. No parking at the house. Well-behaved dogs welcome.

D · Lakeside Campsite — tents and camper vans, showers, a small shop on site, and boats to hire from the jetty. Open April to October. Very lively at weekends.

E · The Swan Hotel — a hotel in the town centre with a restaurant and a pool. Rooms from £140. Quiet; no children under twelve.

F · Birch Cabin — a wooden cabin for two on a hillside, reached by a twenty-minute walk from the car park. No road, no phone signal, no wifi. A stove, and a lake to swim in.

G · Beckside Guest House — family-run, five minutes on foot from the railway station. Breakfast included, £70 a room. The owner will drive guests to the start of walks. No dogs.

H · Crag House Bunkhouse — a converted barn that groups of up to sixteen take over completely: nobody else in the building. Self-catering, £15 a person. At the foot of a mountain, a long way from any shop, so bring everything.

A year without anything new

Zara Bennett was sixteen when she counted the clothes in her wardrobe and found she had worn fewer than half of them in a year. She had not been trying to prove anything; she was looking for a jumper. But the number stayed with her, and by the end of the week she had made a rule that she has now kept for fourteen months: she would not buy anything new. Not clothes, not shoes, not a phone case. If she needed it, it had to have belonged to someone else first.

Britain is a good country for that kind of rule. Nearly every high street has a row of charity shops — shops run by charities, selling things people have given away, with the money going to hospitals or animal rescue or research. Zara's town has nine. She knows which one gets the best coats, which one puts new stock out on a Wednesday, and which one is run by a woman who will keep things aside for her if she asks. “It's slower than a normal shop,” she says. “You don't go in wanting a blue jacket and come out with one. You go in wanting nothing and come out with something you'd never have looked at.”

Her friends were less sure at first. Second-hand clothes, one of them said, were what you wore when your family could not afford anything else, and Zara admits the comment bothered her more than she let on. What changed their minds was not an argument. It was a jacket — a heavy wool one, thirty years old, four pounds — that three different people asked her about in a single day. “After that they stopped asking why and started asking where.”

The rule has had effects she did not expect. She has repaired things, because there is no replacing them: she has learnt to sew on a button and, more recently, a zip. She has had far more money at the end of each month, and less idea what to do with it. And she has become, she says, much slower to want things. “A new thing is exciting for about a day. A thing you searched for, for six weeks, and finally found — that stays exciting.”

She does not think everyone should do what she did, and she is careful not to say so. The year ends in March. She has already decided not to stop.

Why British schoolchildren wear uniform

Almost every school in Britain has a uniform, and almost every British teenager has, at some point, hated it. 16 ______ The answer goes back further than most people think.

The first uniforms were not for the rich. In the sixteenth century, charity schools for poor children dressed their pupils in long blue coats, so that everyone could see the school was looking after them. 17 ______ By the nineteenth century, expensive private schools had copied the idea, and a uniform had come to mean the opposite of what it started as.

Today, schools give three main reasons for keeping it. The first is that a uniform removes the daily competition about clothes. 18 ______ The second is safety: on a trip, a teacher can count twenty green jumpers in a crowd much faster than twenty different coats. The third is simply that it saves parents money, though anyone who has bought a school blazer may disagree.

The arguments against are just as old. 19 ______ Others point out that uniform is not actually cheaper if the school insists on one particular shop. And some students say, quietly, that they would work just as hard in their own clothes.

Whatever the truth, the uniform is not going anywhere. 20 ______ Most of them would still rather not wear it. Most of them, thirty years later, still have the photograph.

Pancake Day

Every year, on a Tuesday in February or March, the British eat pancakes. The day has a religious origin — it was the last chance to use up eggs and butter before the weeks of Lent, when people 21 ______ up rich food — but for most families today it is simply a good excuse.

The pancakes are thin, more like the French kind than the thick American ones, and the traditional way to eat them could hardly be simpler: sugar and lemon juice. Children 22 ______ turns to toss them — to flip the pancake into the air and catch it in the pan — and at least one usually 23 ______ up on the floor.

Some towns take it further. In Olney, a small town north of London, women have run through the streets carrying a frying pan every Pancake Day since 1445, tossing the pancake as they go. The race 24 ______ less than a minute, and it is one of the oldest events of its kind in the world. Hundreds of people 25 ______ up to watch.

Nobody knows exactly why the tradition has never 26 ______ out, when so many others have. Perhaps it is because it costs almost nothing. Or perhaps it is that, once a year, adults are allowed to throw food in the kitchen.

The village fête

Every summer, on a Saturday in July, the village of Little Barford holds its fête — an afternoon of games, cake and rain on the field behind the church. Nobody is quite sure 27 ______ long it has been going, but there are photographs from before the war, and the tea tent in them looks exactly the same.

The fête is organised by a committee of six, most of 28 ______ have been doing it for years. There is a competition for the biggest vegetable, a race for dogs and their owners, and a stall where you can throw wet sponges 29 ______ the head teacher for fifty pence. Everything costs less 30 ______ a pound, and all the money goes to the village hall, 31 ______ roof has needed repairing since 1998.

It usually rains. It has rained 32 ______ often, in fact, that the committee no longer looks at the forecast. People bring umbrellas, buy another cup of tea, and wait. By four o'clock the sun is often out, and by five the field is empty: everyone has gone home wet, poorer, and pleased.