English Placement Test

When Lan finished secondary school, she wanted to become a doctor, like the aunt she had admired since childhood. Her family could not afford the fees, however, so she took a job in a small pharmacy in her home town instead. She told herself it would only be for a year.

The year turned into four. In that time she served hundreds of customers, and she noticed something that surprised her: a great many of them did not understand the instructions printed on their own medicine. Some took twice the correct dose; others stopped the moment they felt better. Lan began writing simple notes in large letters and slipping them into the bags.

Word spread. Older customers started coming to her shop from villages further away — not because it was cheaper, but because someone there would sit down and explain things to them. By the time Lan had finally saved enough to study, she had changed her mind about which course to take. She applied for nursing rather than medicine.

“A doctor sees you for ten minutes,” she says. “A nurse is the one who is still there afterwards.”

Elena Rossi opened her first bakery fifteen years ago in a small town in the north of Italy. At the beginning, business was painfully slow. She had borrowed money from the bank to buy her ovens, and some months she could barely pay the loan back. After the first year, she seriously considered closing the shop and returning to her old job in a factory.

But Elena did not give up. One winter evening, while looking through her late grandmother's notebooks, she found an old family recipe for bread made with olive oil, honey, and wild herbs. She began baking it the next morning, mostly out of curiosity. Within a few months, word had spread, and soon people were travelling from other towns just to buy the bread before it sold out.

Today, Elena owns four bakeries and employs more than thirty people, many of whom are young bakers that she has trained herself. She believes that passing on her skills is just as important as making a profit. Elena says the most important thing is quality, not speed. “Good bread takes time,” she explains. “We make everything fresh every morning, and we never use cheap ingredients, even when prices go up.”

Although several larger companies have offered to buy her business — some of them offering very generous sums — Elena has always refused, often without even reading the full proposal. She wants the bakeries to stay in her family. Her daughter now manages one of the shops, and Elena hopes that one day her grandchildren will continue the business. “Money comes and goes,” she says, “but a family name on a shop window — that is something you cannot buy.”