Instructions

Read the passage and choose appropriate answer for the questions that follow.
Passage:

As rough sleeping rises nationally, the exact scale of the crisis remains hare to capture. The official data shows that in England, rough sleeping has risen for six years in a row, The latest figures estimated that 4,134 people bedded down outside in 2016, up 16%on the previous year. Though London remains the centre of rough sleeping, accounting for 23% of the national total (and in Westminster, with 260 rough sleepers, the highest numberof cases), the rate is increasing much faster outside the capital, in faces such as Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham.

Each winter across the country, council’send teamsof volunteers to conduct night-time counts of all the rough sleepers in the borough to assess how acute the problem is, Recent counts in the homelessness hotspots of Cambridge and Hackney, east London, reveal.how the problem is evolving.

“This is their bedroom yasare entering. Be respectful of tha warned the organiser of the Cambridge count, before teams set out to count rough sleepers in the historic centre in early Friday. For bedroom, read shop doorway, church graveyard, or multi-storey car park - anywherein the cold night air where a street sleeper might hopeto find a yard or two of dry shelter and, if they are lucky, a degree of privacy.

At 3 am, as the last of the evening's city-centre revellers are going home, the teams set out. This is the time when rough sleepers considerit safe enough and sufficiently quiet to bed down. Dotted alonga line of shops on a main shopping street were several people in brightly coloured sleeping bags in doorways, surrounded by the paraphernalia of street life: plastic bags stuffed with belongings, cardboard under sheets to insulate them from the cold, the odd halfempty wine bottle.

There are strict definitions of what constitutes a rough sleeper for the purposes people must hp sleeping, about to bed down or bedded down on the of mount:doorways, parks, tents, bus shelters, cars, barns, sheds and other street' i" not designed for habitation. Homeless people who are resident in hostels Or sheers on places the night in question are not counted. The count is not a precise science: bad weather can depress the figures; counters can miss rough sleepers if they are well hidden; regular sleepers may by chance spend the night elsewhere. Good housing support services, too, can have a positive effect in reducing the numbers.

As the main city within a large rural area, and one with good homelessness provision such as hostels, Cambridge has always acted as a magnet for rough sleepers. Relationship breakdown and substance abuse remain important triggers of homelessness. But increasingly other factors have come into play, not least poverty: the lack of affordable housing, high rents and unstable tenancies, housing benefit cuts, and precarious incomes caused by the rise of zero-hours working.

Exactly how bad the problem has got is a matter for debate. Between October and the end of November each year, every English local authority is required to submit snapshot estimates of the number of people sleeping out on a specified night.

Question 12

The scale of rough sleeping is difficult to capture because


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