Reading Practice Test 1 [C2]

Part 1

– 8 questions –

For questions 1 – 8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.

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Soap operas

It is surely beyond dispute that soap opera is the most consistently popular type of television programme in the world. It has succeeded in (1)…………….. the imagination of millions since it first (2) ……………….. as a genre back in the 1930s. The word ‛soap’ alludes to the role originally played by detergent manufacturers, who promoted their products during commercial breaks. Soap operas have been (3) ………………. as mindless entertainment, with viewers only (4) ………………. to these programmes in order to escape from reality.

Soaps are often set in friendly, tightly-knit neighbourhoods, evoking nostalgic feelings in some viewers, since such communities may no longer exist in many areas. The subject matter of soaps also (5) ………………….. great appeal for viewers since the stories (6) ………………. focus on domestic problems they may have experienced themselves.

There has been a significant shift in attitudes with many soaps now (7) ……………….. moral and social issues. The characters and situations (8) …………………. are complex and ambiguous, providing much food for thought and no easy answers.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Part 2

– 8 questions –

For questions 9 – 16, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each space. Use only one word in each space. There is an example at the beginning (0).

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MOBILE COMMUNICATION

Part 3

– 8 questions –

For questions 17 – 24, read the text below. Use the word given in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the space in the same line.

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The migration of birds

Part 4

-6 questions-

For questions 25 – 30, complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence, using the word given.

Do not change the word given. You must use between three and eight words, including the word given. Here is an example (0)

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Part 5

-6 questions-

You are going to read an extract from a novel. For questions 31 – 36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

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A History of the World in 100 Objects

In this book we travel back in time and across the globe, to see how we have shaped our world and been shaped by it over the last two million years. The book tries to tell a history of the world in a way that has not been attempted before, by deciphering the messages which objects communicate across time – messages about peoples and places, environments and interactions, about different moments in history and about our own time as we reflect upon it. These signals from the past – some reliable, some conjectural, many still to be retrieved – are unlike other evidence we are likely to encounter. They speak of whole societies and complex processes rather than individual events, and tell of the world for which they were made.

The history that emerges from these objects will seem unfamiliar to many. There are few well-known dates, famous battles or celebrated incidents. Canonical events – the making of the Roman Empire, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, the European Renaissance – are not centre stage. They are, however, present, refracted through individual objects. Thus, in my chapter on the ancient inscribed tablet known as the Rosetta Stone, for example, I show that it has played a starring role in three fascinating stories: as a legal document in ancient Egyptian times; as a trophy during the rivalry between the French and the British; and finally as a key to the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian writing system at the end of the nineteenth century.

If you want to tell the history of the whole world, a history that does not unduly privilege one part of humanity, you cannot do it through texts alone, because only some of the world has ever had written records, while most of the world, for most of the time, has not. The clearest example of this asymmetry between literate and non-literate history is perhaps the first encounter between Europeans and Australian aboriginals. From the European side we have eye-witness accounts and scientific reports. From the Australian side, we have only a wooden shield dropped by a man in flight after his first experience of gunshot. If we want to reconstruct what was actually going on that day, the shield must be interrogated and interpreted as deeply and as rigorously as the written reports.

All so much easier said than done. Writing history from the study of texts is a familiar process, and we have centuries of critical apparatus to assist our assessment of written records. We have learnt how to judge their frankness, their distortions, their ploys. With objects, we do of course have structures of expertise – archaeological, scientific, anthropological – which allow us to ask critical questions. But we have to add to that a considerable leap of imagination, returning the artefact to its former life, engaging with it as generously, as poetically, as we can in the hope of winning the insights it may deliver.

One of the characteristics of things is that they change – or are changed – long after they have been created, taking on new meanings that could never have been imagined at the outset. A startlingly large number of our objects bear on them the marks of later events. Sometimes this is merely the damage that comes with time, or from clumsy excavation or forceful removal. But frequently, later interventions were designed deliberately to change meaning or to reflect the pride or pleasures of new ownership. The object becomes a document not just of the world for which it was made, but of the later periods which altered it.

History looks different depending on who you are and where you are looking from. So although all these objects in the book are now in museums, it deliberately includes many different voices and perspectives. It draws on the museums’ own experts, but it also presents research and analysis by leading scholars from all over the world, as well as comments by people who deal professionally with objects similar to those discussed. This book also includes voices from the communities or countries where the objects were made, as only they can explain what meanings these things still carry in their homeland. Countries and communities around the world are increasingly defining themselves through new readings of their history, and that history is frequently anchored in such things. So a museum is not just a collection of objects: it is an arena where such issues can be debated and contested on a global scale.

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31. What claim does the author make about his book in the first paragraph?

32. The Rosetta Stone serves as an example of an object………………..

33. The author believes that basing a history of the world on texts alone………………

34. The author says that compared to the interpretation of texts, the interpretation of objects calls for…………………..

35. What is the author’s attitude to the fact that objects often change over time?

36. Why does the author include comments from people who live in the area where the object was made?

Part 6

-7 questions-

You are going to read an extract from an article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A – H the one which fits each gap (37 – 43). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

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A

This more ambitious scheme could be managed in one of two ways, he says. Either the hilltops could be covered with nets to grow new forests all at the same time, or this could be done in stages with a smaller number of nets being moved around to reforest each area in turn. After perhaps two years of water from the fog collectors, saplings would be tall enough to collect the fog water themselves.

B

The results look promising. A litre a day should be enough to support one seedling, and Riebold has found that on some sites, a square metre of net catches an average of two litres of water each day. One site averaged five litres a day even at the hottest time of year.

C

Centuries ago, the island’s inhabitants carved tunnels up the mountainside and into underground aquifers. These drained into collecting areas lower down. Once the island’s main source of water, they could be brought back to life by reinstating the cloud forest.

D

In times gone by, all seven of the islands had rich cloud forests that trapped moisture from the trade winds and quenched an otherwise dry region. More recently, though, much of the islands’ forest has been lost – removed for firewood, construction and to make way for farmland. Most of the islands still have some degree of forest cover, but one, Lanzarote, is all but bare.

E

Marciano Acuna, the local town councillor in charge of the environment, says he hopes the trees will trigger a more widespread greening of northern Lanzarote and have an impact on the whole ecology of the region. Once the trees are back, the quality of the soil will improve, and a long-lost forest ecosystem will have a chance to return, providing habitat for species long since confined to other islands in the Canaries.

F

Even in the hottest months, clouds form over the mountains of northern Lanzarote. As the trade winds blow over the island the mountains
force moisture-rich vapour into droplets. The surface of the mountain is too hot for this to happen at ground level, so the fog rarely touches the ground. ‘That’s why the saplings died,’ says Riebold. ‘They never got tall enough to touch the fog and capture the moisture on their leaves.’

G

Farmers would certainly benefit, as water in Lanzarote has become very expensive, and there are tight restrictions on the irrigation of farmland. This has made agriculture increasingly difficult and, combined with the rise of tourism as a source of revenue, has turned it into a weekend occupation at best for many residents.

H

The bare hills in this region have been of increasing concern to the island’s authorities. Despite numerous attempts in the past decade, all replanting schemes have so far been unsuccessful. With limited water supplies on the island, the newly planted trees dried out and died, leaving the hilltops littered with hundreds of dead saplings.

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Part 7

-10 questions-

For questions 44 – 53, choose from the sections (A – D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

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Is the internet changing our lives?

A – Sarah

The internet often tells us what we think we know, spreading misinformation and nonsense while it’s at it. It can substitute surface for depth, imitation for authenticity, and its passion for recycling would surpass the most committed environmentalist. In 10 years, I’ve seen thinking habits change dramatically: if information is not immediately available via a Google search, people are often completely at a loss. And of course a Google search merely provides the most popular answer, not necessarily the most accurate. Nevertheless, there is no question, to my mind, that the access to raw information provided by the internet is unparalleled. We’ve all read that the internet sounds the death knell of reading, but people read online constantly – we just call it surfing now. What’s being read is changing, often for the worse; but it is also true that the internet increasingly provides a treasure trove of rare documents and images, and as long as we have free access to it, then the internet can certainly be a force for education and wisdom.

B – Geoff

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn’t much to do. Now you sit down and there’s a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, while I’m in Swedish mode, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about the jazz musician Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again). Then there’s another thing. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of poetry and drama. So if there was a quote I needed for an assignment, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now I just google key words.

C – Colin

It’s curious that some of the most vociferous critics of the internet – those who predict that it will produce generations of couch potatoes – are the very sorts of people who are benefiting most from this wonderful, liberating, organic extension of the human mind. They are academics, scientists, scholars and writers, who fear that the extraordinary technology they use every day is a danger to the unsophisticated. They underestimate the capacity of the human mind to capture and capitalise on new ways of storing and transmitting information. When I was at school I learned by heart great swathes of science textbooks. What a waste of my neurons, all clogged up with knowledge and rules that I can now obtain with the click of a mouse. At its best, the internet is no threat to our minds. It is another liberating extension of them, as significant as books, the abacus or the pocket calculator.

D – Ian

The evidence that the internet has a deleterious effect on the brain is zero. In fact, by looking at the way human beings gain knowledge in general, you would probably argue the opposite. The opportunity to have multiple sources of information or opinion at your fingertips, and to dip into these rather than trawl laboriously through a whole book, is highly conducive to the acquisition of knowledge. It is being argued by some that the information coming into the brain from the internet is the wrong kind of information. It’s too short, it doesn’t have enough depth, so there is a qualitative loss. It’s an interesting point, but the only way you could argue it is to say that people are misusing the internet. It’s a bit like saying to someone who’s never seen a car before and has no idea what it is: “Why don’t you take it for a drive and you’ll find out?” If you seek information on the internet like that, there’s a good chance you’ll have a crash. But that’s because your experience has yet to grasp what a car is.