rm 3 4 @ a) o £ a ) a 18) SEES questions 31-36 ‘You are going to read an extract from an article. For questions 31-36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. Taming the Wildcat Now, | have had, at one time or another, 2 fair amount of experience in trying to get frightened, iritated or just plain stupid arimals to feed from a bottle, and | thought that | knew most of the tricks. The wildcat kt ten | had proceeded to show me that, as far as it was ‘concerned, | was a mere tyro at the game. It was so lithe, quick and strong for its size that after half an hour struggling, | felt 2 total fale. | was covered in ‘ik and blood and thoroughly exhausted, whereas the kitten regarded me with blazing eyes and seemed quite ready to continue the fight for the next few days if necessary. The thing that really ritated me was that the kitten had — as | knew to my cost — very wel-devel ‘ped teeth, and there seemed no reason why it should ot eat and drink of its own accord, but, in this stub- born mood, | knew that it was capable of quite literally starving itself to death. | decided to try another tack. Perhaps it would eat i | had a comparion to show it how. I chose a fat, placid female tabby cat and carried it back to the garage. ‘Now most wild animals have a very strong sense of territory. inthe wild state, they have their own particu- lar bit of forest or grassiand which they consider ‘the’ preserve, and which they will defend against any other member of their own species that tres to encroach. When you put wid anmas into cages, cages become, as far as they are concerned, ther territory, to0. So i you introduce another animal into the cage, the frst inmate wil, a al probability, defend it vigorously, and you may easy have a fight to the death on your hands, So you generally have to employ low cunting. ‘Suppose, for example, you have a large sprited crea- ture and you get a second animal of the same species, and you want to confine them together. The best thing to do is build an entirely new cage, and into this you introduce the weaker ofthe two animals. When it has settled down, you then put the stronger one in as wel. ‘The stronger one wil, of course, stil remain the dom- nant anima, but as far 2s it is concerned it has been introduced into someone else's territory, and this takes the edge off any potential vciousness. In this case | was sure that the baby wildcat was quite capable of filing the domestic kitten, if | introduced the kitten to it instead of the other way round. So, once the tabby had settled down, | seized the wildcat and Dushed i, snaring and raving. into the cage, and stood back to see what would happen. The tabby was delight: ed. It came forward to the angry intruder and started to ub itself against its neck, purring loudly. The wild: ‘at, taken aback by this greeting, merely spat rudely ‘and retreated to corner. I covered the front of the ‘cage with 2 piece of sacking and left them to settle own, ‘That evering, when | lifted the sacking | found them side by side, and the wildcat, instead of spitting at me a it had done up until now, contented itself with mere- ly iting its lips in a warning manner. | carefuly insert- ed a large bow! of milk into the cage, and a plate of finely chopped meat and raw egg, which | wanted the wildcat to eat. This was the crucial test. tine 60 The tabby, purring like an ancient outboard engine, ‘lung itself at the bow! of milk, took a long drink, then settled down to the meat and egg. To begin with, the wildcat took no interest at all, lying there with hal closed eyes. But eventually the noise the tabby was ‘making over the meat and egg ~ it was rather messy feeder — attracted its attention It rose cau- ‘ously and approached the plate, as | watched with bated breath. Deicately, it sniffed around the edge of the plate, while the tabby lifted a face that was drip- ping with raw egg and gave a mew of encouragement, slightly matted by the portion of meat it had in its ‘mouth. The wildcat stood pondering for a moment and then, to my delight, sank down by the plate and started to eat. In spite of the fact that it must have been ‘extremely hungry, it ate dainty, lapping a litle raw ‘egg, and then picking up a morsel of meat, which it ‘chewed thoroughly before swallowing. | knew my battle with the wildcat was won.Cambridge PROFICIENCY CPE Practice Test 1 Reading aw 12. “4 16, How did the wildeat make the writer feel? AL anxious 8. inadequate © cunning D. stubborn ‘The wildcat As was injured, 1. couldn't eat because it had problems with its teeth. ©. was dying of starvation. . was capable of starving but wasn’t yet in a state of starvation, | 3SQL 99192e4g 3dD Why did the writer put the tabby cat in the cage first? A to make it aggressive 5. the stronger animal will still remain dominant C. to give ita chance to eat b. to make it the dominant animal How did the wildcat originally react to the tabby? A. it welcomed it 1. it attacked it viciously C. itmmade contented noises D. it rejected it in line 60? Why was the test “crucial” |A. Because the tabby might have prevented the wifdcat from eating. 1B. The wildcat might have attacked the tabby. G. Itwas the moment that would determine the outcome of the attempt. ‘The wildcat might have attacked the writer. ‘What can be assumed from the fact that the wildcat ate “daintily"? AA. It wasn’t as hungry as the writer had thought. 1B, It didn’t lke the food. © tet at ease. b. It felt self-consciousCPE Practice Test | PROFICIENCY You are going to read an article about media coverage of the weather. Seven paragraphs have been removet from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (37-43). There is one extra para graph you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. How popular are weather reports? Getting up early on the morning of January 24th, | thoughe the city seemed oddly quier, bur it wasn't until | looked out the window that | saw the snow. The “Surprise Storm” that had hit the East Coast of the United States that morning was making earnest headway. having dumped as much as twenty inches of snow on Raleigh, eight and a half on Philadelphia, and sic on New York. This was a big shock considering the unusually mild ‘weather that had been settled over New York as recent- ty as just a day ago. ee Forecasters had seen a low-pressure system moving toward the southeast on the National Weather Service's satellice pictures, but all the major computer models indicated the storm would head back outro sea. As Eliot ‘Abrams, the chief forecaster and senior vice-president of the State College, Pennsylvania, forecasting company ‘AccuWeather, told me later, “Who am | to say the ‘numerical guidance is wrong?” aL Ever since widespread weather-data collection began, shortly after the invention of the telegraph, in the 1840s, accurate forecasting has been the goal of the weather report. But in recent years TV weather has given increas- ing time and emphasis to live pictures of weather. usually in the viewing area, but sometimes elsewhere if the ‘weather is atrocious and the pictures dramatic enough ~ and this is transforming the modern-day weather report. “The Weather Channel acknowledged this in a recent ad ‘created by ChiaDay which depicted weather enthusi- sts in the guise of sports fanatics, their faces painted like ‘weather maps, rooting for lows and highs in a fictional “weather bar” known as the Front. At the same time, the news, which once stuck to human affairs, now includes an ‘ever-growing number of weather-related stories a ‘And the weather's upward climb in the newsworthiness snakes has abo coinoded with another trend: wd weather Is aso now a sandard component of reality-based pro- ‘gramming on Fox and the Discovery Channel. And in book publishing recent bestsellers like “The Perfect Storm”, “Into Thin Ai", and “Isaac's Storm” have helped ‘create a hot market for weather-related disaster stores gg This newsier approach to weather, with its focus on weather events to help boost ratings, means certain kinds ‘of weather get overblown while less telegenic but no less significant weather is overlooked. Take heat, for exam- ple. Eight out of the ten warmest years on record ‘occurred in the nineteen-nineties, the two others in the ‘eighties, (Ifthe planet continues to warm at the present rate, some climatologists predict an increase in global surface temperatures of between 2.5 and 6 degrees by the year 2100.) heard here in New York at least as far back as when the ‘over-hyped Hurricane Gloria struck in 1985. ge —_— However grateful we may be for this lack of danger, through war and bloodshed, it creates a psychological need for some kind of real-life drama on our TV sereers. So, when a big storm comes along, you can almost fee! the nation girding its loins as people gratefully turn their attention away from “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”PROFICIENCY CPE Practice Test 1 Readi A But heat doesn't do particularly well on television. You can track down a blizzard on Doppler radar 38 ‘itmoves up a map of the East coast, but you cat watch heat. And drought, as Robert Henson, a writer at the University Corporation for ‘Acmospheric Research and the author of a book about TV weather-casting, told me recently, “is the ‘ulimate non-event. You usually hear about drought conly when some rain event comes along to end i.” B From 1989 to 1995, according to the Centre for Media and Public Affairs, weather coverage wasn't among the top-ten topics on the nightly network news. In 1996, it was eighth, and in 1998 it was fourth - more than eleven hundred weather-related ‘stories ran altogether. c For the previous three weeks, unreasonably balmy conditions had been the topic of small talk every- ‘where: Why was it so warm? Wasn't it weird that there was no snow? Was it another sign of global ‘warming? Then, wouldn't you know, the frst big storm of the season comes along, and the National ‘Weather Service, the federal government's agency, doesn't put out an advisory until ten o'clock the right before. (The N.WS. had been on the network ‘news just a week earlier, announcing new weather super computers, which are supposed to make fore- ‘asts even more accurate) D ‘Opinions concerning the causes of global warming ‘remain highly contentious. But many climatologists ‘now believe that rising temperatures produce more ‘extreme weather - not just more frequent heanwaves and droughts but also more storms and floods. E Butit’s not only the broadcasters doing: the public's fascination with wild weather is apparently inexhaustible. We live in peaceful, prosperous times, when the only tangible external threat t0 home and hearth is weather. F This is not so much anew market, though, as a revival of one of the oldest genres in publishing. This increased in Mather's 1684 book “Remarkable Providences”, which includes several chapters on ‘extreme weather around New England and was cone of the early thrillers of the New World. G In some respects, these broadcasts seem more like news than like “weather” in the traditional sense. ‘Weather “events” are hyped, covered, and analysed, just like politics and sports, H I turned on the Weather Channel, as | always do for big storms. The forecast may have been inadequate, bur the live coverage was superb. In New York City, ‘the Weather Channel was out in force, filming cars driving through slushy puddles and reporters stck- ing rulers into the snow in Central Park. | settled in {for a little voyeuristic weather-watching, an experi- ‘ence that has become a condition of modern life. fo} a] m 7 a ay ia] g. fa) [) my 24 oaCPE Practice Test | 40 Cambridge PROFICIENCY CPE Practice Test 1 Readit ‘You are going to read an extract from an article on two books. For questions 44-53, choose from the sections (A-E). The sections may be chosen more than once. ‘Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. in which section are the following mentioned? the feeling of being responsible for a death the problem of putting literature into categories another novel referred to in the novel using language in different ways Characters who don't easily accept change the refusal to embrace the way of life of either of two elders different types of colonies ‘one of the novels being made into a film death playing a role to help a community the difficulty in defining the sub-genre of certain publications | a a a a a) a) i) a a)CPE Practice Test 1 Readin; An article on two books Voth Purple Hibiscus and Once Were Warriors se post-colonial novels, in the sense that they \were written, and deal with subjects of the posi- 1ion of independence as opposed to the colonial state of being in both a universalising sense and personal one. Purple Hibiscus was published (04 and is set in Nigeria, the author ‘Cinamanada Ngo7i Adichie’s homeland. Once Were Warriors was written by a Maori New Zealander, Alan Duff, in 1990 and has since met with international acclaim through the silver teen, But, what has contributed to making this ‘another lengthy tale. Both books sit happil ‘on the shelf labelled “postcolonial literature,” bout such careless sweeps of the categorising \ongue are exactly what such authors are ipting to avoid. Their works don’t reinforce ‘he boundaries, leaving readers feeling warm snd cosy. Colonialism, precolonialism and a \whole set of other blunt “isms” can be argued 1s being explored by these authors That remnants of colonialism and pre-colonial- ‘sin are present in each text indicates the Jhoundaries between pre-colonial and colonial slates of being are not as established, in a post- colonial existence, as the frame of the words denote, What are the implications of depicting, potential pre-colonial situations within the colo- nial tongue? Both Once Were Warriors and Purple Hibiscus, potentially present colonial and pte-colonial notions of history or histories, but Irom different post-colonial positions. With Nigeria having been a colony of occupation, as ‘opposed to the settler colony of New Zealand, relations between the coloniser and the colonised differ greatly between the two cultural ies. With the coloniser, potentially, obscur- ing and abstracting the area between pre-colo- nial and! postcolonial existences, any pre-colo- notions must always be partly located with- ina colonial perspective. Nonetheless, the pre- colonial uttered in the colonial tongue renders that colonial tongue as being somewhat altered in the process. The colonial tongue both makes and unmakes itself by using the same tools for different ends. The dragging of heels back and forth over the hot coals of second-hand lan- ‘guages renders the happy branding of “post- Colonial” of those who dare to make the colo- nial tongue their own seem like an unrefined broad-brushes attempt to depict the hairline cracks in a china doll c Both texts deal with the uncertainties of the formation and reformation of identities. Working with, yet at the ‘same time questioning and unsettling, the bildungsro- man format, Once Were Warriors and Purple Hibiscus present identities snaking through notions of pre-colo- nial identities alongside colonial and postcolonial ones. The certainty of the very survival of Kambili and Beth in Once Were Warriors seems, lo an extent, to be staked (on pre-colonial notions of identity formation. The chief at Beth's funeral articulates this in sorrow for the young, girs death; ‘we are what we are only because of our past [..] we should never forget our past or our future is lost’. The death of Grace directly influences Beth to address her situation and that of the individuals in Pine Block. Although Grace's death is linked to the rape, Beth, who is unaware of this, questions her involvement in the death of her daughter. ‘Could | have prevented it?” echoes out from every movernent Beth makes after this. Why does the young girl have to die? Is it to highlight injustices in the Maori community, to make the commu nity, to an extent, stand up and demand to be heard? Indeed, itis death that stalks the corridors of these two novels. itis the death of Eugene, the ‘colonial product’ in Purple Hibiscus alongside the death of Papa-Nnukwu the ‘pre-colonial product’ that lead to questions of where to tur in terms of identity formation. The colonial figure is dead; he doesn’t present ways of being to his children that seem acceptable to them; he is t00 violent, too dominating for their generation. But, as well, Papa Nnukwu, who is adored by his grandchildren, seems like an inadequate role model to wholly guide the younger ‘generation into futures that are still in the making. By troducing Purple Hibiscus with the sentence “Things fall apart’, Adichie is immediately paying homage to Chinua Achebe's same-named novel published in the mid-twentieth century, which depicted a hamlet in Africa fon the eve of nineteenth-century colonialism. Everyday lives and everyday disputes fill page after page. The reader i with the hamlet when its inhabitants are devastated. We are invited to sit in another seat. To see how it might have felt to be utterly subjugated by foreigners. The beauty of comparing the two Nigerian novels s in their dealings with Christianity. Indeed, in Things Fall Apart, church mis- sionaries come to the hamlet to ‘save them from hell and damnation’ and Okonkwo, the head of the hamlet, immediately distrustful. He is closed to change as isthe Catholic ‘colonial product’ of Eugene in Purple Hibiscus. The stubbornness each character shows, but towards dif ferent ends, demonstrates the meaninglessness of asser- tions of power for the sake of assertions of power. fe] ba} m 2 » 2 a 0 ey &