English Olympiad Practice Test 1 — IEO-style (Class 8) — Free Online Practice Test

The Rain Ledger

Every summer holiday, Anaya was sent to stay with her grandmother in Tamrang, a small town perched on a ridge in the eastern hills. For thirteen-year-old Anaya, who lived in a busy city flat, the town felt painfully slow. There was one bakery, one bus a day to the plains, and a mobile signal that vanished whenever the clouds rolled in — which, in July, was almost always.

On the third wet afternoon, bored of the rain drumming on the tin roof, she climbed into the attic in search of something, anything, to read. Behind a trunk of old woollens she found a stack of cloth-bound notebooks tied with string. Each page was ruled into neat columns: a date, a time, and a number followed by the letters "mm". The handwriting was her grandfather's. He had died when she was four, and she remembered him only as a tall man who smelt of cardamom tea.

"Ah, you've found the rain ledgers," said her grandmother, when Anaya carried them down. "Your grandfather measured the rain every morning at eight o'clock for thirty-one years. He used a copper funnel set into a tin can, out by the gate. People laughed at him. They said, 'What is the use of counting raindrops? The rain will fall whether you count it or not.'"

"So why did he do it?" asked Anaya.

Her grandmother smiled. "He used to say that a thing you do not measure is a thing you cannot understand. And he was stubborn. That helped."

The funnel was still there, green with age and half hidden by ferns. Anaya cleaned it, fitted a new can beneath it, and borrowed a measuring cylinder from the school laboratory where her aunt taught. For the rest of the holiday, she recorded the rain each morning at eight, exactly as her grandfather had done. In the evenings she copied his old figures into her laptop, whenever the electricity allowed.

Slowly a pattern appeared that no single notebook could have shown. In her grandfather's first ten years of records, July had brought steady rain on most days. In his last ten years, the total for the month was almost the same, but it fell on far fewer days, often in violent bursts that lasted only a few hours. Anaya's own readings, though they covered only five weeks, fitted the later pattern: long dry spells broken by sudden downpours.

When she showed her charts to Mr Lyngdoh, the headmaster of the local school, he frowned — not in disapproval, but in thought. "The farmers have been complaining that the rain doesn't soak in any more," he said. "It runs off the slopes and takes the soil with it. They thought they were imagining it. You may have just given them proof."

Anaya went back to the city at the end of August with a suitcase of notebooks and a promise to her grandmother. The funnel by the gate would not stand empty. Mr Lyngdoh had agreed that his students would take the eight o'clock reading every morning, and Anaya would add their numbers to the ledger from wherever she was.

On the train, she opened the last notebook and noticed something she had missed. On the inside cover, in her grandfather's careful hand, were six words: "For whoever comes next. Keep counting."

English Olympiad Practice Test 1 — IEO-style (Class 8)

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