Reading test - Proficiency level

Complete the following text with one word in each gap.

Failure in basic school lessons haunts adult underclass for life

Low levels of literacy and numeracy have a damaging impact almost every aspect of adult , according to a survey published yesterday, which offers evidence of a developing underclass.
Tests and interviews with hundreds of people born in a week in 1958 graphically illustrated the handicap of educational underachievement. The effects seen in unemployment, family breakdown, low incomes, depression and social inactivity.
Those who school at 16 with poor basic skills had been employed for to four years less than good readers the time they reached 37. Professor John Bynner, of City University, who carried the research, said that today's unqualified teenagers would even greater problems because the supply of manual jobs had up.
Almost one five of the 1,700 people interviewed for yesterday's report had poor literacy and almost half struggled numeracy, a proportion line with other surveys for the Basic Skills Agency. Some could not read from a child's book, and most found difficulty following written instructions.
Poor readers were twice as likely to be a low wage and four times likely to live in a household where partner worked. Women in this position were five times as likely to be classified depressed, while both tended to feel they had no control their lives, and to be less trusting others.
Those low literacy and numeracy skills were seldom involved any community organisation and less likely than others to have voted in a general . There had been no improvement the level of interviewees reporting problems the sample was surveyed the age of 21.
Alan Wells, the agency's director, said: "The results emphasise the dangers face of developing an underclass excluded people, out of work, increasingly depressed and often labelled themselves as failures. There is a circle of marginalisation, with the dice against these people and their families."
Last year almost half of 11-year-olds primary school without reaching the expected level English and mathematics. Mr Wells welcomed ministers' commitment improving basic skills. He said, however, that imaginative programmes needed, possibly including incentives participating, if the problems not to persist the adult population.
Only 300,000 people of more than five million thought to have poor basic take remedial courses each year. Mr Wells said that a "major catch-up initiative" would society well as the individuals .
"It is not that 20 per cent have been getting nothing of education in the last five years, but maybe 50 years," he said. "The long tail of under-achievement is we have always had."
The survey is of the National Child Development Study, which has tracked 17,000 people at five-yearly since 1958. The current study eight reading and nine mathematical tests of varying difficulty. They included the ability to a Yellow Pages directory to find a plumber and the floorspace of a room.