Reading 3 — the journey that stopped
Section 3 of the General Training paper is one long text on a topic of general interest, and it is where the paper stops being about finding information and starts being about following a writer. This passage — about 640 words in seven paragraphs — is a magazine article on what happened when millions of office workers stopped travelling to work every day: to the high streets near stations and in residential streets, to employers, and to the workers themselves. It is descriptive, as Section 3 texts generally are, but the writer also has a point of view, and several of the thirteen questions are about separating that view from the facts around it.
Two questions ask for the heading that fits a paragraph, which means holding the whole paragraph in mind — including the last sentence, where this writer often turns the argument. Three use the inverted True/False/Not Given layout of this category. The Not Given statement here is a tempting inference: a baker who has taken on staff and moved her busiest hour may or may not sell more bread, and the text never says which. The False statement reverses a "not … but" sentence.
The rest of the bank reads for the writer. What does the writer think of the two-or-three-days-in-the-office compromise, as opposed to what others call it? Why are a nurse, a bus driver and a shelf-stacker mentioned? What exactly does the writer object to in Paragraph E, and what is the conclusion of the last paragraph? One question asks what a phrase means where it stands ("a habit rather than a law"), and one asks for two answers from five.
On test day, Section 3 may also set sentence or summary completion, where you write words from the passage, and it gives you the questions after the text rather than inside each question. Here the whole article is repeated with every question, so you can read it as often as you need; in the real paper, budget your time so that this section gets the largest share of the hour.
The article is written by Zestly. The background it relies on — the railway suburb, the sudden move to home working in 2020 — is general knowledge; the bakery, its owner and the town are invented, and the text makes no claims based on statistics. The ten flashcards cover the mid-register English Section 3 assumes — an assumption, to turn out to be, the best of both worlds, straightforward, evenly shared, deliberately, "it is tempting to…" — phrases that are also useful in the Writing Task 2 essay.
IELTS® is a registered trade mark of the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and Cambridge University Press & Assessment. This material is written by Zestly and is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
- Match a heading to a paragraph by what the whole paragraph argues, including its last sentence
- Separate a writer's own view from a view the writer reports and then qualifies
- Recognise why a writer gives a particular example
- Tell a tempting inference (Not Given) from a statement the text actually makes
- Use mid-register phrases from the article — an assumption, to turn out to be, straightforward, deliberately
Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ielts.org description of General Training Reading Section 3 (one longer text on a topic of general interest, generally descriptive and narrative).
Sample question
Reading Section 3 — The journey that stopped A For most of the last century and a half, the working day in Britain began with a journey. The railways made it possible to live in one place and work in another, and the suburbs that grew up along the lines were built on the assumption that someone in every household would leave in the morning and come back at night. The commute was so ordinary that it was hardly noticed: it was simply the price of having a job in the city and a house with a garden. B That assumption broke with unusual speed. Within a few weeks in 2020, millions of office workers discovered that much of what they did could be done from a kitchen table, and many of them never went back full-time. What had been presented for decades as impossible — "we need to see people to manage them" — turned out to be a habit rather than a law. C The first effects were felt not in offices but in the places around them. Sandwich shops near city stations lost the customers they had been built for, while cafés in residential streets found themselves full on weekday mornings. Hana Okafor, who runs a bakery in a small commuter town forty minutes from London, describes the change plainly. "I used to sell most of my bread before eight, to people rushing for the train. Now the busiest hour is eleven, and people sit down." She has taken on two extra staff. The shop opposite the station, which sold newspapers and coffee to the same early crowd, has closed. D For employers, the arrangement has proved more complicated than either its supporters or its critics predicted. Some firms have given up whole floors of office space and spent the savings on other things. Others have found that new employees in particular learn more slowly when they cannot overhear how an experienced colleague handles a difficult telephone call or a difficult client. The compromise that most have reached — two or three days in the office, the rest at home — is sometimes described as the best of both worlds. It is at least as often a way of avoiding a decision. E It is tempting to treat all this as a straightforward gain for workers, and for many it has been. The hours once spent on trains are now spent with children, in bed or at the desk. But the benefits have not been evenly shared. Working from home is available mainly to people whose jobs happen on a screen; the nurse, the bus driver and the shelf-stacker still travel, and some of them now travel in order to serve people who no longer do. It would be a mistake, I think, to describe a change that suits one part of the workforce as a revolution in how "we" work. F Nor is the home office free. The cost of heating, lighting and a reliable internet connection has moved from the employer to the employee, usually without anyone saying so. A young worker sharing a flat may have no room to work in except the one they sleep in, and for them the end of the commute has also meant the end of the one clear line between work and the rest of life. G What seems clear is that the question was never really about location. The office did several jobs at once: it was a place to work, but also a place to learn, to be noticed and to belong to something. Remote working has shown that the first of these can be done anywhere. The others still have to be done somewhere, and the organisations that manage the change well will be the ones that decide deliberately where that is, rather than waiting to see what happens. — Which heading best fits Paragraph C?
- A shop owner decides to retire
- Winners and losers near home and near the station
- Why commuters prefer cafés to sandwich shops
- The end of the railway suburb
See the answer
Winners and losers near home and near the station
Paragraph C contrasts businesses that lost out (sandwich shops near city stations, the shop opposite the station, which closed) with those that gained (cafés in residential streets, a bakery that has taken on staff). Nobody retires; the paragraph does not say commuters prefer cafés — it is people who no longer commute who fill them; and the railway suburb is the subject of Paragraph A.