Reading 3 — the allotment
Section 3 of General Training Reading is one long piece of continuous prose, and it is where the paper stops being about finding information and starts being about following an argument. This passage — 661 words on why British towns still keep land aside for people to grow vegetables on — is written to that length and that register: a general-interest article of the kind a weekend broadsheet section would run, with a case being made rather than facts being listed.
The twelve questions are the ones Section 3 really uses. Four ask you to fit a heading to a paragraph, which means holding the whole of that paragraph in mind rather than matching a word. Several ask for detail you have to locate — what the 1908 Act obliges a council to do, how big the standard plot is. Two ask why the writer put something where they did: why mention a retired bus driver and a software engineer at all? One asks what a word means where it stands, in its sentence, rather than in a dictionary. And three are the inverted True / False / Not Given used throughout this category: four statements, and the stem tells you which verdict you are hunting for — the one the writer never makes, the one the writer contradicts, the one the writer actually says. Reading the stem first is half the work.
The passage is our own, but the history in it is not invented. The Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908 is real and still in force, including the provision that six local electors can put the question of demand to their council in writing. The ten-rod plot is described here as what it is — a convention that has outlived the reason for it, not a legal entitlement. Where a figure would have been convenient we have left it out: the post-war collapse is described as a fall to a small fraction of the wartime number, because that is what the record supports, and a precise-sounding invented statistic is worse than no statistic at all.
Eight vocabulary cards cover the phrases the passage turns on — to set land aside, to be obliged to do something, unglamorous, a fraction of, to draw a conclusion — the kind of mid-register English that Section 3 assumes and that also earns marks in Writing Task 2.
- Match a heading to a paragraph of continuous prose by what the paragraph argues, not by a word it repeats
- Locate a specific legal or numerical detail inside a long text under time pressure
- Read a question stem for the verdict it asks for — never made, contradicted, or actually said — before hunting for the statement
- Tell what a writer states from what a writer implies, and both from what the text simply does not cover
- Work out the meaning of a phrase from the sentence it sits in rather than from a dictionary
- Recognise why a writer includes an example, and what work it is doing in the argument
- Use mid-register English — set aside, obliged to, draw a conclusion — that Section 3 assumes and Writing Task 2 rewards
What turned a patchwork of local arrangements into something more solid was an Act of Parliament in 1908. Under it, a council that considers there to be a demand for allotments must provide them; and if six local electors write to the council saying that it has such a duty, the council is obliged to consider what they say. The mechanism is unglamorous, and it is still in force. A group of neighbours who want ground to grow on has a legal route that begins with a letter and six signatures.
Sample question
Reading Section 3 — Ten rods of England A On the edge of almost every British town there is a piece of ground divided into narrow strips, each with its shed, its water butt and its arrangement of canes. Allotments look improvised and in one sense they are: no two plots are alike, and the fences between them are made of whatever came to hand. But the land underneath is not improvised at all. Much of it has been set aside for this purpose for more than a century, and the right to ask for it is written into law. B The idea has its origins in loss. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, common land across England was enclosed into private fields, and families who had grazed an animal or gathered fuel on it found that they could no longer do either. Allotments were one of the answers offered — small parcels let cheaply to labouring families so that they could grow food. The motives of those who provided them were mixed, and some of them were frankly disciplinary: a man digging his own potatoes was thought less likely to be in the public house. C What turned a patchwork of local arrangements into something more solid was an Act of Parliament in 1908. Under it, a council that considers there to be a demand for allotments must provide them; and if six local electors write to the council saying that it has such a duty, the council is obliged to consider what they say. The mechanism is unglamorous, and it is still in force. A group of neighbours who want ground to grow on has a legal route that begins with a letter and six signatures. D The plot most often offered is ten rods — an old measure of a little over 250 square metres, roughly the size of a doubles tennis court. It is a strange unit to survive into the twenty-first century, and it survives because it was a useful one: ten rods is about what a family could work in the evenings after a day's paid labour, and about what it took to feed them through a winter. E The high point came with a war. From 1939 the government urged the country to Dig for Victory, and lawns, parks, tennis courts and railway embankments were turned over to vegetables. The number of plots reached a level never approached before or since, and what had been a provision for the poor briefly became a patriotic duty performed by everyone. The campaign was extraordinarily effective, and it left a generation who knew how to grow things. F Then, for forty years, the plots emptied. Food became cheap and reliable in a way it had never been; a supermarket sold better vegetables than most people could grow, in February, at a price that made the effort look eccentric. Councils under pressure for housing land looked at half-derelict sites and drew the obvious conclusion, and a great many allotments were built on. By the end of the 1970s the number of plots had fallen to a small fraction of the wartime figure, and the sites that remained were worked mostly by men over sixty. G The return, when it came, had little to do with the price of vegetables. Waiting lists at many sites now run to years, and the people on them are younger, and more likely to be women, than at any point since the war. What they say they want is rarely cheap food. It is a reason to be outside, a piece of ground that is theirs to decide about, and the company of people they would otherwise never meet — an allotment site is one of the few places left where a retired bus driver and a software engineer have the same problem with slugs. The economics have never been worse and the demand has never been higher, which suggests that whatever an allotment is for, it was never only about the food. — Which heading best fits Paragraph F?
- The letter and the six signatures
- What people on the waiting lists actually want
- Forty years of decline
- A measure that outlived its century
See the answer
Forty years of decline
Paragraph F is entirely about the emptying of the plots: cheap supermarket food, councils building on the sites, and a fall "to a small fraction of the wartime figure". The other three headings summarise Paragraphs D, C and G — all of them true of this text, none of them true of Paragraph F.