CHUYÊN ĐỀ: GAPPED TEXT

FCE
TEST 1
You are going to read an article about a boxer. Six sentences have been removed from the
article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There is one extra
sentence which you do not need to use.

In defence of women’s boxing

Lucy O’Connor thinks that womens boxing is widely misunderstood

Womens boxing is a new addition to the list of sports included at the Olympic Games. But according
to Lucy O ’Connor, winner of various international competitions, it’s still widely misunderstood – a
situation that Lucy’s hoping to change. After graduating, Lucy took up boxing on the advice of a
sports coach, who thought it would improve her general fitness. But Lucy soon set her sights on
competitions and it wasn’t long before she was boxing at the National Championships, which she
eventually went on to win.

As a result of her success, Lucy was accepted on to what the navy calls its ‘elite sportsman’s
programme’. 37 . Every day now starts with a run at 7 a.m., followed by a skill and
technique session or a strength and conditioning circuit. Come the afternoon, there are more aerobic
workouts, before Lucy gets into the ring and practises with other elite boxers.
As with all competitors, diet is a huge part of Lucy’s life. Since she first started boxing, she’s had to
shed twenty-eight kilos. Losing the last six, which took her into the flyweight category, required great
determination. 38 . As she explains: ‘I don’t go out to party anymore. Thankfully, I’m
married to my boxing coach, so at least I’ve got some sort of social life!’ Lucy’s husband boxed as a
heavyweight himself and he’s in her corner for all her domestic competitions.
Lucy’s mum works as a buyer at a big department store, and Lucy has been testing out products for
the store’s sports division. Whilst preparing for a recent international championship, Lucy wore a new
titanium-based sports clothing range designed to improve circulation and aid recovery. 39 .
But how does her family react to her taking part in competitions? ‘Mum tends to admire me boxing
from afar, but Dad just loves it!’
Lucy has clearly answered questions about safety concerns before and cites all the protective gear
boxers strap on before a fight such as hand bandages, head guards, gum shields and much more.
‘Amateur boxing is not dangerous,’ she says definitively. ‘It’s so safety-orientated and the rules are so
stringent it’s actually difficult to get hurt. We approach it more as a skill and point-scoring exercise,
rather than as a fight. 40 . ’ Boxers win points by landing the white knuckle part of their
gloves on the opponent’s scoring area – essentially the upper body and head – cleanly and with
sufficient force. In five years of competitive boxing, Lucy’s suffered only a few bruises and a broken
thumb.
And in response to those who think it’s ‘inappropriate’ to see women boxing at the Olympics, Lucy is
quick to point out that women have been competing in martial arts such as taekwondo and judo for
years. 41 .
Her biggest concern is that people confuse amateur boxing competitions with professional fights,
where the focus is more on aggression and hurting your opponents. ‘Female amateur boxing is about
showing skill, speed and stamina,’ she says.42 . ‘I find it so satisfying to be changing
people’s opinion.’
A All that hard work certainly paid off and the competition itself brought out the best in Lucy.
В That’s because in order to reach that target, she had to totally rethink her lifestyle.
C Having access to this space-age training kit was certainly an advantage.
D If the sport was more in the public eye, then fewer people would make that mistake.
E Nobody complained about women taking part in those events when it was introduced.
F That’s why I’ve always regarded it as a thinking girl’s sport really.
G What this meant, in effect, was that she was able to train full-time

TEST 2
You are going to read an article about jobs that involve international travel. Six sentences have been
removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There
is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

WANT TO JOIN THE JET SET?

You could be jetting off to exotic locations, staying in five star hotels, eating in top-class restaurants,
and it’s all paid for by your employer. Who wouldn’t want a job that involves foreign
travel? 37 . The number of jobs requiring international travel is growing significantly. And
citing business travel experience on your CV can bring enormous professional benefits.
But it’s not always as exciting as it sounds. There is a big difference between travelling to Milan as a
tourist and travelling there to spend a day in the type of hotel meeting room that can be found
anywhere in Europe. It can be very exciting, but you need to keep your feet firmly on the ground.
Speak to seasoned international business travellers to get an idea of what you will face. Flights can be
delayed, things can go wrong and it’s easy to get exhausted. Many jobs mean travelling alone, so you
can be lonely.

Simply targeting any job that involves foreign travel is not the way to start. 38 . It’s as
illogical as saying you want a job that involves wearing smart clothes. Instead, you should consider
all the usual factors, such as qualifications and experience, and only then choose a sector or company
that offers opportunities for international travel.
The travel and hotel trades are obvious areas, but the commercial sector also offers good prospects for
travel. In the retail sector, buyers often travel, especially if they work in fresh produce, where they
have to check the suitability of crops. 39 . Jobs in the engineering and environment sector
can involve travel, too. Almost any career can mean international travel, if you choose the right
company and role. The number of jobs involving travel, especially at middle-management level, is
growing.
So what will help you secure a role with an international flavour? 40 . A second language
is a good indication of how well someone will adapt. You need to show you are flexible and willing
to learn. I f your company has a sister company in the Czech Republic, for instance, learning some
Czech will boost your chances.
Find out what the company offers as a support package. Many now guarantee that you can return
home at the weekends, or they will limit the amount that people travel each year. 41 . One
company asked graduates fresh out of university to move to another country over a weekend, alone,
and to find their own accommodation.
And it’s as well to remember that international travel can be stressful. People can get burned out by
international business travel. You need to be in control of your schedule, rather than leaving it to the
company. You must ensure you get time to rest and talk to your employer all the time about how you
are coping. Don’t wait for formal appraisals or until they ask for your views. 42 . Most
sensible companies ask people to commit to two to three years. This increases the likelihood of
success. And most people who travel on business remember it fondly.
A On the other hand, it does bring personal benefits, and it also has a dramatic effect on promotion
prospects.
В Making travel your first requirement is not the way to choose a career.
C And realize you might not want to travel for ever.
D Employers look for candidates with an international outlook.
E And there are plenty of opportunities.
F But not all employers are like this.
G Employment in communications, banking and finance, and property management is also worth
looking at.

TEST 3
You are going to read an article about a man who takes photos of celebrities. Six sentences have been
removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There
is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

The airport photographer

I’m a photographer based at Heathrow Airport in London. Airlines often commission me to take
photos of aircraft or their staff. But mostly I concentrate on getting shots of celebrities as they come
through the arrivals hall. I sell some photos direct to the daily newspapers and celebrity magazines,
and the rest go to a picture agency.

On a typical day I look out for the flights arriving from Los Angeles on the major
airlines. 37 . Most of them fly either with British Airways because it’s such an established
company, or with Virgin Atlantic because the owner, Richard Branson, moves in those celebrity
circles.
You’ve got to cover all the incoming flights though – Victoria Beckham took to flying with Air New
Zealand at one time. I know the ground and security staff here very well. 38 . That can
really make all the difference to being in the right place at the right time. I’ve been working here for
many years now, so I’ve seen thousands of celebrities throughout the decades. In my experience, the
old stars are the best. Joan Collins is my favourite — she sends me a Christmas card every year. Mick
Jagger also knows me and always says hello. People like Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart are lots of
fun, too. 39 . I guess that’s because they can see the value of it.
Today’s big stars are generally okay and give you a polite smile. I won’t mention names, but there are
some who wave me away rudely, whilst others even have their managers popping up from nowhere,
saying ‘no pictures’ to the waiting photographers. 40 . You’ve probably seen
photographers leaping around in this manner on TV footage of celebrities arriving at airports and
wondered why they do it – well often that’s why.
41 . One time, Naomi Campbell refused to come out from behind a pillar. She called up for
a buggy and hopped on the back, so there I was chasing it, trying to get a shot of her. But the next
time I saw her she’d just got engaged and came up to me to show me the ring.
But if today’s stars don’t make my job as easy as it was, today’s technology more than makes up for
it. When I started out it was much less sophisticated. I remember when the British queen’s
granddaughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, were just babies. I heard that their mother, the
Duchess of York, was coming through Heathrow with them. She was carrying both babies in her
arms. 42 . I realised I had a good chance of getting one of them onto the front page of the
newspaper, which is always the photographer’s aim.
So I called my editor to warn him, took the shots, then rolled up the film, labelled it, put it in an
envelope and organised for a motorbike dispatch rider to pick it up, take it back to the newspaper
offices and have it developed. It had taken three hours. Today, using digital cameras and a laptop, the
office gets images in three minutes.

A You get the impression that they enjoy the attention.

В I was lucky enough to get some lovely shots of them.
C Often it’s one of them who tips me off that a big star has just come through passport control.
D That’s where you generally find the celebrities.
E They could be appearing in the arrivals hall at any time, night or day, of course.
F When that happens, they have to do what we call ‘duck and dive’ to get a shot.
G With some stars, however, you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get.
TEST 4
You are going to read a magazine article about one person’s experiences of learning to skydive. Six
sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each
gap (37-42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

The Skydiving Experience

The thrill of skydiving is beyond any possible description. Falling at 120 mph with the wind
screaming past your body is an unbelievable experience of total freedom. The sport is not without an
element of danger; indeed, it is this fear that makes it so addictive. Yet there are relatively few serious
injuries in this activity because of the tight regulations and safety requirements mandated for
skydiving and parachuting organisations.

I still recall my first jump from 2,500 feet using what is called a static line. 37 . The static
line system is often used for those new to the sport. It is a means of helping them to deal with the
sensation of falling, while ensuring that they will not actually hit anything.
38 . Still, there seems to be a little slice of missing time from the point where I let go of the
aircraft to the parachute canopy actually opening. Pure terror sometimes does that! It was a moment
where time ceased to exist, not quite a total blackout but still quite strange. Two days of training on
the ground, the ceaseless drill of counting out “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand” and
about all I seem to recall when I let go is something like “aaaaahhhhhh”. After a second and many
subsequent jumps, this sensation soon faded to a dim recollection as I became accustomed to falling.
The first real free fall commenced at about the fifth jump. This simply involved letting go of the
aircraft and immediately deploying the canopy. 39 . Starting from three seconds (let go and
pull the ripcord) to five seconds (let go, count to three then pull the ripcord) increasing to seven
seconds and so on. Once I made it to ten seconds and beyond, it became important to use an altimeter.
Free fall became really interesting at the 15-second mark because that is when the real training
started. Turning, tumbling and rocketing forward by using different body positions put a completely
new challenge before me. I learned it was possible to put my body in a position where forward ground
speed was around 80 mph with an increase of downward velocity close to 200 mph – the ears tend to
get a little warm! It is also quite important to flare out, slow and adopt a more stable position before
deploying the canopy. Doing so at really high velocity really hurts, and I suspect everyone does this at
least once. It is quite a lot of stress on your body when pulling up from 120 mph to 10 mph in about
two or three seconds. 40 .
One of my most fearful experiences occurred when I made a complete mess of trying to do a reverse
tumble and became wildly unstable. Nothing I did seemed to correct the spinning and rolling, I was
still at 5,000 feet and in desperation I deployed the canopy. 41 . The bag wrapped around
one of my legs. Luckily, by this time had enough free fall experience to have the presence of mind to
see what was happening and it was not too difficult to reach down and disentangle the risers. I also
knew there was plenty of time to correct the problem because I was far higher than the standard 2,500
deployment altitude. It turned out fine in the end.
I would say one of my most memorable free falling experiences was above the Mornington Peninsula
in Victoria, Australia. 42 . From this altitude, I did some nice slow turns and drank in the
scenery of Port Phillip Bay, out to sea, across the length of the peninsula to the city of Melbourne, all
in an orange-red glow of the most amazing sunset I can ever remember. It was incredible.
A. There are few other ways to experience the total and utter freedom of flight.
B. This is a strong nylon tape that is attached to the aircraft on one end, and to the release pin of the
jumper’s canopy on the other.
C. I think my ears are still ringing from that mistake.
D. Altitudes increased gradually, as did time in free-fall.
E. It was a 40-second fall from 14,000 feet, right at sunset.
F. What happened next was not good at all.
G. My first experience is still very sharp in my memory.

TEST 5
You are going to read a magazine article about a volcano in New Zealand, now a nature reserve, and
the experience of the native people in the past when it erupted. Six sentences have been removed from
the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There is one extra
sentence which you do not need to use.

Rangitoto
By Alastair Jamieson
Off-track the ground is menacing. Lava, like angry waves frozen in mid-chop only moments ago,
claws at the soles of my boots and threatens to shred my knees if I place a foot wrong. The surface is
so uneven that progress is extraordinarily difficult. Occasional smooth stone channels course like
petrified streams through the rougher ground, their solid surfaces a welcome pathway amid teetering
plates of broken lava and treacherous bouldery rubble. Out of the shade of the dense thickets of bush,
it’s as hot as a furnace. All that black rock absorbs and radiates enough heat to melt Antarctica. It’s as
hostile a spot as you could find anywhere in New Zealand, yet when I turn around, there is downtown
Auckland in plain view just a few kilometres away.

37 . Its symmetrical cone is a relaxed cousin of those higher and steeper volcanoes
Taranaki and Ngauruhoe but Rangitoto is a truly astonishing wilderness right on the doorstep of the
city. Landing on the island, the graceful sweeping curves seen from a distance quickly give way to a
magnificent mosaic of the tortuous lava I’ve been scrambling through and scrubby, impenetrable
pohutukawa forest.
Of course, it was not always like this. 38 . However, the emergence of the youngest and
largest of the fifty-odd volcanoes in Auckland’s volcanic field was witnessed by Maori living on
adjacent Motutapu Island.
The persistent yelping of dogs might first have awoken them. Soon afterwards there would have been
a thundering roar. The vibration of the sandy ground beneath them would surely have Jolted them
from their homes. 39 . A wind shift and the familiar smells of the camp – wood smoke, the
sea, and even the penetrating stench of shark flesh drying on frames – were soon overpowered by the
pungent, suffocating odour of sulphur dioxide.
Running across the beach and dragging boats into the sea, shoals of dead fish bumped against their
legs as they waded into the cold shallows. 40 . Looking behind them, the cataclysm was
becoming clearer in the first light of day. Black clouds were blasting out from the base of a roiling
column of steam, flying boulders were arcing white streamers through the sky and splashing into the
sea.
41 .The footprints of a small group of adults and children were found sandwiched between
layers of Rangitoto ash. Markings show where the ground was prodded with sticks and that one of the
dogs with the group paused to drink from a puddle. 42 . Whether these people were
foolhardy or brave, lured by curiosity, or a desire to retrieve their treasured possessions, we’ll never
know
A. The familiar form of Rangitoto did not exist for generations of Maori who first inhabited the
surrounding lands.
B. The low black cliffs of Rangitoto are just 1500m away, the centre of the eruption only 3 km
further.
C. The impressions were so well preserved that the next blanket of ash must have spewed from
Rangitoto soon after they were made.
D. Paddling hard towards safety, the first wet ash began to fall, sticky and abrasive.
E. Outside, the familiar stars above and the scatter of bright campfires along the shore to the west was
hidden by a pall of steam, strobed by lightning and lit by a ferocious fiery glow from beneath.
F. No landform is more familiar to Aucklanders than Rangitoto Island and yet how many of them
ever go there?
G. Proof exists that in the weeks or months following the onset of the eruption, people came back to
their campsite on Motutapu Island.
TEST 6
You are going to read a magazine article about one person’s experience of being aware while she is
dreaming, called lucid dreaming. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the
sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need
to use. 37 __.

Lucid Dreaming
The other night I experienced a lucid dream. In the dream I was sitting gazing into our fish aquarium.
I peered in closely, examining our spotted suckerfish. I often gaze at him because he never moves
much in the daytime. I watch him to see if he is OK. As I stared at him, suddenly I noticed there were
two more suckerfish! They were identical to the original.

37 . Then I wondered where they could have come from. As I pondered this I abruptly
realised that I must be dreaming! 38 . I jumped up and looked around. There were other
people in this dream with me. I had a husband, a son and a dog. Before looking at the fish, I had been
going along, living my daily life in a mundane fashion. The last thing I had remembered doing was
feeding the dog and kissing my little boy on the head while he played on the kitchen floor.
As i looked at these people, I realised it wasn’t my real husband or either of my real children – I
excitedly blurted out at them that we were all dreaming. 39 . I yelled again “We are
dreaming!” As I became even more self-conscious, I announced that I could test my theory by flying.
If this really was a dream, I should be able to fly! So I jumped up and flew to the ceiling. I can still
see the look on the man’s face as he watched me float up to the ceiling. Unfortunately, as I watched
the fear and doubt on his face, I began to fall. I sank all the way back down and landed with a hard
thud on the floor. When that happened, I began to doubt my own perception and lost my awareness as
I fell back into a regular dream state.

The above is an example of lucid dreaming. 40 . You are aware that you are dreaming,
while dreaming. If you have ever had it happen to you spontaneously, you understand how exciting it
is, the heart races with excitement at your prospects.
Gazing at something in your home or on your body, such as your hands during your regular workday
is a technique used by dream researchers to induce lucid dreaming. Another technique is to
continually ask yourself throughout the day if you are dreaming. 41 . On another occasion
just before becoming lucid in a dream, I noticed that my kitchen cupboards were the wrong colour,
which alerted me. The duplicated fish are another example.
Stephen LaBerge, the pioneer of lucid dreaming research, suggests that once you can become lucid,
there is no limit to what your imagination can create in a dream. 42 . You can even try out
things you’ve always wanted to try and see what it is like. It has been discovered, and my experience
supports this, that when you do become lucid, it is extremely difficult to stay that way. Research has
shown though that the more you do it, the better at it you get and the better your control is. Often a
few seconds of lucidity is all that is manageable. It is still a thrilling experience.
A. “Of course!” I said; that explains this.
B. At first I was startled and shocked, surprised that there were more.
C. It truly is amazing, from flying, to inventing, to art.
D. After waking from the dream and becoming lucid, I remember gazing at my hands and noticing
that they were an odd shape.
E. My husband looked at me, perplexed.
F. If you develop these habits – if you happen to be in a dream state while looking at your hands –
you will be tipped off when your hands look odd.
G. Lucid dreaming is the state of being conscious in your dreams.

TEST 7
You are going to read an article about the new headquarters of the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF). Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one
which fits each gap (37-42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

The ultimate green home: the WWF’s new

headquarters
Sandwiched between an incredibly ugly shopping centre and a busy main road, the environmentalist
Sir David Attenborough, no less, is planting a tree and declaring: ‘Today is a historic day.’ He really
means it.

Maybe our children’s future will be an overheated, desert-like world, but if it’s not, it will probably
look a lot like this. The new, highly environmentally-friendly home of the World Wide Fund for
Nature, a hemispherical glass tube standing above a council car park, was officially opened today,
watched by a small but enthusiastic crowd. 37 .
Known as the ‘Living Planet Centre’, it has jumping panda animations that greet visitors to its WWF
Experience, where schoolchildren can interact with Ocean, River, Forest and Wildlife Zones. Since
the mid-20th century, many of the ideas behind humanity’s attempts to protect animals and the
natural world have been started by the WWF. 38 .
The World Wide Fund for Nature is one of the great hopes for the world,’ Sir David Attenborough
said. ‘This building enshrines that, and advertises it to the world.’ The concrete is all recycled, as is
the carpet and even most of the computer equipment, and there are many solar energy
panels. 39 . In addition, new habitats and plant species have been installed around the
gardens, while indoors a home has been found for three tall trees.
The sense of total calm inside, from the high curved ceilings to the plants and trees, is all the more
remarkable for the building’s urban location. It has been built between a canal and a small area of
woods listed as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. 40 . The contrast gives us an idea of
what might just be possible in the future.
The WWF was set up in 1961. The organisation originally fought to protect individual species, such
as the Arabian oryx, from extinction. Eventually, the focus moved from individual species to
ecosystems: all the living things in one area and the way they affect each other. Sir David, who is an
ambassador for the WWF, said: ‘Now, it’s not just individual ecosystems. Now the change is to a
global approach. 41 . That is because the planet is one vast ecosystem. The WWF has been
the leader in changing everyone’s attitudes towards nature.’
Sir David is clear about the task ahead, and more importantly, unlike many environmentalists, he
believes it is not too late to make a difference. ‘You can’t turn the clock back, of
course. 42 . But we can slow down the rate at which the numbers are increasing, we can cut
down the carbon we put in the atmosphere,’ he said. ‘It’s never happened before that the whole world
has come together and made a decision. To go as far as we have done to reduce carbon is an
impressive achievement. But you cannot have unlimited growth in a limited situation. You can’t
expand infinitely in a finite planet.
A. Even so, it remains in an ugly corner of a fairly unattractive town centre.
В. So even if you aren’t particularly concerned about the environment, as energy costs rise you’ll
want to save money on fuel bills.
C. Other such features include extensive glass to increase natural light, natural ventilation, rainwater
in the toilets, and heat pumps that bring warm air up from 200 metres below.
D. It is hoped their new home will be a living example of that.
E. That means you can’t put back forests that are gone, not for a century, and the population size is
not going to shrink.
F. If you want to do something, you have to persuade people of the world not to pollute.
G. If humanity is to survive, they must have been thinking, it will do so living in buildings of this
kind.

TEST 8
You are going to read an article in which a television news producer talks about his work. Six
sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each
gap (37-42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Working as a TV news producer

Rob Cole has produced TV news for decades now, working on anything from international celebrities
to global conflicts. He shares the benefit of his considerable experience in the industry
Rob’s time behind the cameras has coincided with huge changes in the way news is reported – from a
time when everyone bought local newspapers, through the birth of 24-hour rolling news, and now the
Internet. But what is the work like on a day-to-day basis?
Rob’s always worked in foreign news, so his focus is obviously on news from around the world. As
you can imagine, there’s a lot of that. Rob comes in early, having checked his phone, social media,
and listened to as many news programmes as he could. 37 . Running the foreign section is
like a never-ending contest – constantly trying to get his journalists’ news presented ahead of the TV
station’s other sections.
Once you have a story it’s then a matter of making sure that wherever the journalist is, the report
comes into the building – through satellite, Internet or other routes – and it is ready to run on air on
time. 38 . There’s nothing like getting a note from the producer at another network
congratulating on a job well done. The low points, on the other hand, are much less pleasant: ‘I’ve
had colleagues badly injured.’
So how can you become a news producer? Says Rob: ‘We get loads of applications. 39
.Don’t be put off; people in this business admire people who don’t give up.
You need to be keen to learn and, of course, take a real interest in current affairs. ‘You have to be
obsessed with news, constantly following it. Even if you’re a creative producer, doing graphics, you
still have to care about what’s going on in the world. Also, some people think about going into the
media just because it sounds exciting. That would be a mistake; you have to really want to do the job.
Luck’s involved too, of course. 40 .
In some ways, Rob’s job should remain fairly constant for the next few years. ‘They will always need
someone to make decisions and take responsibility for newsgathering. However, what will change is
the way in which news is delivered. When I started in TV, the crew used to consist of a reporter,
producer, a camera operator, a sound person, and sometimes even a separate lighting
person. 41 . Now there’s just the reporter and a multitasking camera operator who also
edits and supplies the written material – if you’re lucky!’
‘Before long there will be a crew of just one, shooting all their own material on a smartphone, then
editing and voicing that material, before sending it to head office, where it ends up going straight on
air. 42 . Actually, this has already started to happen. The technology will just get quicker
and quicker and smaller and smaller.’
A. You might write to just the right person at the right time.
В. Turning the device around and pressing the live app button also enables live broadcasting into the
same programme.
C. They would be loaded down with equipment and some of them would be linked by cable.
D. With this information, before any stories actually come in, he then decides on the news priorities
of the day.
E. In those days it was possible to start a career in news without even going to university: you went
straight into training on a local paper.
F. Making sure it does so matters, especially given the friendly competition with other TV networks:
‘beating the other networks’ is a real highlight.
G. I always endeavour to reply, but from my own experience too many people don’t get back to you,
so it’s best to keep trying.
TEST 9
You are going to read a magazine article about outdoor ice skating. Six sentences have been removed
from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There is one
extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Go skating in Sweden this winter

Forget crowded indoor ice rinks. Once you’ve skated on natural ice, there’s no going back.
It was the question on all of our minds, but I asked it: ‘How do you know when the ice isn’t safe to
skate on?’ Niklas, our calm Swedish guide, rubbed his chin, thought for a moment, then offered up
the wisdom of a lifetime spent playing around on frozen water. ‘When it breaks,’ he said with a broad
smile.

The comment wasn’t exactly reassuring, but his easy confidence was. As long as it was just jokes
being cracked, maybe we’d be all right after all. Niklas, a maths teacher when having breaks from
pursuing hobby, was not entirely joking about his attitude to ice. 37 . The fact that strong
ice makes a deeper sound under one’s feet than thin ice does is a useful clue.
Our group of beginners was feeling rather nervous as we stood at the edge of a vast frozen bay that
first day. Niklas tried his best to persuade us to move forward but, like hesitating penguins on an
iceberg, no-one wanted to take the first step. 38 . ‘Look at your faces,’ shouted Niklas to
the happily smiling group, racing along behind him.
Our expressions had been far less joyful the previous evening on being told that a five-hour drive
would follow our flights into Sweden’s Arlanda airport. That hadn’t been the plan; but then, in the
world of natural ice skating, no-one expects very much from plans. With its 100,000 lakes and
continuous sub zero winter temperatures, Sweden has no shortage of ice. 39 . For instance,
too much overlying snow and you get a bumpy, uncomfortable ride; a sudden thaw and vast areas
become unusable.
Perfect conditions must be sought out, and don’t last. 40 . Niklas had received a message
via social media about Stigfjorden, a shallow, island-studded bay around 50 kilometres north of
Gothenburg on the west coast.
There we quickly discovered skating in the open air is a wonderfully leisurely activity. Push off with
one skate and you can go 10 metres with ease. Two or three quick kicks at the surface and you
accelerate like a top-class sprinter. 41 . We weren’t yet ready to skate that kind of distance,
but we certainly had a wonderful sense of freedom.
Our best day was at Vattern, one of Europe’s biggest lakes and also one of its clearest. In ideal
conditions, this clarity creates a phenomenon known as ‘glass ice’. The rocky lake bottom stretched
beneath us, three metres below a surface so perfect it was unseen. My tentative first steps left
scratches; it felt like vandalising a classical sculpture. As my confidence grew, so did my speed. The
sensation as I raced across the invisible ice was astonishing, somewhere between floating, falling and
flying. Then there was a sharp noise from all around us. 42 . No one had to say it. We were
skating on very thin ice.
A. That was the reason for our unscheduled journey from one side of the country to the other.
В. Ten minutes later we laughed at our earlier caution as we slid across the smooth surface, our joy as
limitless as our surroundings.
C. The skates consisted of removable blades that fastened to the toes of our specialist boots like
cross-country skis.
D. At first I ignored it, but when thin cracks began to appear I thought it wise to return to solid
ground.
E. After our first session on the ice had ended, we were not surprised to be told that covering 250
kilometres in a single day is quite possible.
F. The Swedes adopt a common-sense approach: they are cautious, they test as they go, and they use
ears – as well as eyes – to check it.
G. This is not always suited to skating, however.
TEST 10
You are going to read a newspaper article in which a former ballet dancer talks about the physical
demands of the job. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-
G the one which fits each gap (37-42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Good preparation leads to success in ballet dancing

A former classical ballet dancer explains what ballet training actually involves.
What we ballet dancers do is instinctive, but instinct learnt through a decade of training. A dancer’s
life is hard to understand, and easy to misinterpret. Many a poet and novelist has tried to do so, but
even they have chosen to interpret all the hard work and physical discipline as obsessive. And so the
idea persists that dancers spend every waking hour in pain, bodies at breaking point, their smiles a
pretence.

As a former dancer in the Royal Ballet Company here in Britain, I would beg to question
this. 37 . With expert teaching and daily practice, its various demands are easily within the
capacity of the healthy human body. Contrary to popular belief, there is no need to break bones or
tear muscles to achieve ballet positions. It is simply a question of sufficient conditioning of the
muscular system.
Over the course of my dancing life I worked my way through at least 10,000 ballet classes. I took my
first at a school of dance at the age of seven and my last 36 years later at the Royal Opera House in
London. In the years between, ballet class was the first thing I did every day. It starts at an early age,
this daily ritual, because it has to. 38 . But for a ballet dancer in particular, this lengthy
period has to come before the effects of adolescence set in, while maximum flexibility can still be
achieved.
Those first classes I took were remarkably similar to the last. In fact, taking into account the
occasional new idea, ballet classes have changed little since 1820, when the details of ballet technique
were first written down, and are easily recognised in any country. Starting with the left hand on the
barre, the routine unrolls over some 75 minutes. 39 . Even the leading dancers have to do
it.
These classes serve two distinct purposes: they are the way we warm our bodies and the mechanism
by which we improve basic technique. In class after class, we prove the old saying that ‘practice
makes perfect’. 40 . And it is also this daily repetition which enables us to strengthen the
muscles required in jumping, spinning or lifting our legs to angles impossible to the average person.
The human body is designed to adapt to the demands we make of it, provided we make them carefully
and over time. 41 . In the same way, all those years of classes add up to a fit-for-purpose
dancing machine. This level of physical fluency doesn’t hurt; it feels good.
42 . But they should not be misled: there is a difference between hard work and hardship.
Dancers have an everyday familiarity with the first. Hardship it isn’t.
A. Through endless tries at the usual exercises and frequent failures, ballet dancers develop the neural
pathways in the brain necessary to control accurate, fast and smooth movement.
В. The ballet shoe offers some support, but the real strength is in the muscles, built up through
training.
C. As technology takes away activity from the lives of many, perhaps the ballet dancer’s physicality
is ever more difficult for most people to imagine.
D. Ballet technique is certainly extreme but it is not, in itself, dangerous.
E. The principle is identical in the gym – pushing yourself to the limit, but not beyond, will
eventually bring the desired result.
F. No one avoids this: it is ballet’s great democratiser, the well established members of the company
working alongside the newest recruits.
G. It takes at least a decade of high-quality, regular practice to become an expert in any physical
discipline.

CAE
TEST 1
You are going to read a newspaper article about a ship carrying goods across the Atlantic ocean. Six
paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphsA – G the one which fits
each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
The wind-lashed workers who battle the Atlantic in winter
Even at this stormy time of year in Britain there are thousands of oil workers and fishermen offshore,
as well as a scattering of seafarers manning the container ships and tankers that bring us almost
everything we need. So it was that in the depths of bitter winter, hoping to learn what modern sailors’
lives are like, I joined the Maersk Pembroke, a container freighter, on her regular run from Europe to
Montreal. She looked so dreadful when I found her in Antwerp that I hoped I had the wrong ship.
41
Trade between Europe and North America is a footnote to the great west-east and north-south runs:
companies leave it to older vessels. Pembroke is battered and rusty, reeking of diesel and fishy
chemicals. She is noisy, her bridge and stairwells patrolled by whistling drafts which rise to howls at
sea. Her paintwork is wretched. The Atlantic has stripped her bow back to a rusted steel snarl.
42
It felt like a desperate enterprise on a winter night, as the tide raced us down the Scheldt estuary and
spat us out into the North Sea. According to the weather satellites, the Atlantic was storms from coast
to coast, two systems meeting in the middle of our course. On the far side, ice awaited. We were
behind schedule, the captain desperate for speed. “Six-metre waves are OK; any bigger you have to
slow down or you kill your ship” he said. “Maybe we’ll be lucky!”

43
Soon enough, we were in the midst of those feared storms. A nightmare in darkness, a north Atlantic
storm is like a wild dream by day, a region of racing elements and livid colour, bursting turquoise
foam, violent sunlight, and darkening magenta waves. There is little you can do once committed
except lash everything down and enjoy what sleep you can before it becomes
impossible. Pembroke is more than 200 m long and weighs more than 38,000 tons, but the swells
threw her about like a tin toy.
44
When they hit us squarely, the whole ship reared, groaning and staggering, shuddered by shocking
force. We plunged and tottered for three days before there was a lull. But even then, an ordinary day
involved unpleasant jobs in extreme conditions. I joined a welding party that descended to the hold: a
dripping, tilting cathedral composed of vast tanks of toxins and organophosphates, where a rusted
hatch cover defied a cheap grinder blade in a fountain of sparks. As we continued west, the wind
thickened with sleet, then snow as the next storm arrived.

45
All was well in that regard and, after the storms, we were relieved to enter the St Lawrence River.
The ice was not thick enough to hinder us; we passed Quebec City in a glittering blue dawn and made
Montreal after sunset, its downtown towers rising out of the tundra night. Huge trucks came for our
containers.

46
But without them and their combined defiance of the elements there could be nothing like what we
call ‘life’ at all. Seafarers are not sentimental, but some are quite romantic. They would like to think
we thought of them, particularly when the forecast says storms at sea.

A Others felt the same. We were ‘the only idiots out here’, as several men remarked. We felt our
isolation like vulnerability; proof that we had chosen obscure, quixotic lives.
В Going out on deck in such conditions tempted death. Nevertheless, the ship’s electrician climbed a
ladder out there every four hours to check that the milk, cheese and well-travelled Argentine beef we
carried were still frozen in refrigerated containers.
C But it does not take long to develop affection for a ship, even the Pembroke — the time it takes her
to carry you beyond swimming distance from land, in fact. When I learnt what was waiting for us
mid-ocean I became her ardent fan, despite all those deficiencies.
D There were Dutch bulbs, seaweed fertilizer from Tanzania, Iranian dates for Colombia, Sri Lankan
tea bags, Polish glue, Hungarian tyres, Indian seeds, and much besides. The sailors are not told what
they carry. They just keep the ships going.
E Hoping so, we slipped down the Channel in darkness, with the Dover coastguard wishing us,
“Good watch, and a safe passage to your destination.” The following evening we left the light of
Bishop Rock on the Scilly Isles behind. “When we see that again we know we’re home” said the
second mate.
F Huge black monsters marched at us out of the north-west, striped with white streaks of foam
running out of the wind’s mouth. The ocean moved in all directions at once and the waves became
enormous, charging giants of liquid emerald, each demanding its own reckoning.
G That feeling must have been obvious to the Captain. “She’s been all over the world”, proud Captain
Koop, a grey-bristled Dutchman, as quick and confident as a Master Mariner must be, told me. “She
was designed for the South Pacific” he said, wistfully.

TEST 2
You are going to read a review about an art exhibition. Six paragraphs have been removed from the
article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra
paragraph which you do not need to use.

An exhibition of works by the artist John Craxton

‘A World of Private Mystery: John Craxton RA’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum is a small show, but it
does full justice to an artist whose career divides into two parts: the years before and during the
Second World War, and the work he did afterwards, when for long periods he lived outside England.

It begins with his small-scale landscapes in pen and ink, pastel, gouache and watercolour. His subject
is arcadia, but a distinctly English one in which poets and shepherds sleep and dream amid blasted
landscapes under darkening skies. Suffused with longing and foreboding, these works reflect the
reality of living in a rain-sodden country under constant threat of foreign invasion.

41
Most of the early work is monochrome. In many landscapes, writhing branches and gnarled tree
trunks fill our field of vision. Beneath the surface of the self-consciously ‘poetic’ motifs, the country
he shows in these pictures feels claustrophobic and joyless.

42
As this exhibition makes clear, by the age of 25 Craxton’s artistic identity had matured. With his
style, subject matter and working method all fully formed, it is hard to imagine how he would have
developed had he remained in England after the war.

43
On his first visit to Greece in 1946, Craxton was swept away by the light, colour, landscape, food and
people. The dark cloud that hung over the work he did in England lifts and overnight his palette
changes to clear blue, green and white.

44
Goats, fish, cats or a frieze of sailors dancing on the edge of the sea: in the Greek paintings beautiful
creatures move naturally across bare rocks and blue waters. The compressed joy you find in these
pictures doesn’t exist elsewhere in British post-war art. With a few interruptions, Craxton would
spend the rest of his life in Crete.

45
But if there is little exploration or discovery in Craxton’s later work, you find instead a sense of
fullness and completion, a feeling that in accepting his limitations, he remained true to himself. As he
once said, it can work best in an atmosphere where life is considered more important than art; then I
find it’s possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all.
In a life of reality, my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed flat.’

46
It’s most noticeable in the works on canvas, especially in formal portraits like his 1946 ‘Girl with a
Cock’ and it’s there too in the faceted geometric planes of Greek landscapes like his panoramic view
of Hydra of 1960-61.

Craxton wasn’t an artist of the first rank but he was inimitable. This show is just the right scale and it
comes with a beautifully illustrated book about his life and work.

A
It comes across this way even when he uses strong colour, as in one sunlit landscape in particular,
where the yellow is harsh and the red murky. It’s as though he’s painting something he’d heard about
but never actually seen: sunlight.
В
It was not only London that oppressed his spirit, I think, but the overwhelming power of the new art
being made in Paris by Picasso, Miro and Leger. In assessing Craxton’s work, you have to accept his
debt to these artists, and particularly Picasso.
C
And though he would paint large scale murals and design stage sets and tapestries, neither his subject
matter nor his style changed in any fundamental way during that period. It may sound harsh, but when
he decided to live there permanently, he elected to write himself out of the history of art.
D
Indeed, I well remember how I’d step into a large gallery, hung floor to ceiling with paintings, and
out of the visual cacophony a single picture would leap off the wall. It was always by John Craxton.
E
My guess is he’d have responded blindly to market forces and critical pressure to do new things.
What he needed was to develop at his own pace – even if at times that meant standing still. But to do
that he had to leave the country.
F
They do so through tightly hatched lines and expressive distortion which ratchet up the emotional
intensity, as in his illustrations for an anthology of poetry. In these, a single male figure waits and
watches in a dark wood by moonlight.
G
Gone are his melancholy self-portraits in the guise of a shepherd or poet – and in their place we find
real shepherds (or rather goat-herd) tending living animals. Now Craxton is painting a world outside
himself, not one that existed largely in his imagination.

TEST 3
You are going to read a newspaper article about singing in choirs. Six paragraphs have been removed
from the article. Choose from the paragraphsA – Gthe one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Introducing choral music to children is like opening a

door to a magical world
Here’s an important question. What’s calming, therapeutic, healthier than drugs, and could well
prolong your life? Answer: singing in a choir.

41
In fairness, there was a specific angle to this study, which compared the collective experience of
choral singing to that of taking part in team sports. Choirs apparently win hands down, because there
is ‘a stronger sense of being part of a meaningful group’, related to ‘the synchronicity of moving and
breathing with other people’. And as someone who since childhood has used singing as a refuge from
the sports field, I take no issue with that.
42
I know there are occasional initiatives. From time to time I get invited as a music critic to the launch
of some scheme or other to encourage more collective singing among school-age children. There are
smiles and brave words. Then, six months later, everything goes quiet – until the next launch of the
next initiative.

43
I know a woman who’s been trying hard to organize a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s
Fludde – perhaps the greatest work ever devised for young children to sing together – as a tribute to
the composer’s centenary this year. But has she found her local schools responsive? Sadly not: it was
all too much trouble.

44
We sang Herbert Howells’s Like as the Hart. And whatever it did or didn’t do for my cardiovascular
system, my emotional health, or any of the other things that turn up in research papers, it was the
most significant experience of my childhood. It opened a world to which 11-year-olds from
unfashionable parts of east London don’t generally get access. It was magical, transcendent. It spoke
possibilities.

45
The other weekend I was in Suffolk, celebrating Britten, where in fact there were a lot of children
privileged enough to be pulled into the centenary events. There was a great Noye’s Fludde in
Lowestoft. And on the actual birthday countless hordes of infant voices piled into Snape Maltings to
sing Britten’s school songs, Friday Afternoons, part of a project that involved 100,000 others,
internationally, doing likewise.

46
Just think: if we could finally get Britain’s children singing, it would filter upwards. And we wouldn’t
need university researchers. We’d just do it, and be all the better for it.

A
It was an extraordinary experience that many of those children will carry with them all their lives, like
my experience all those years ago. There is a plan for it to be repeated every year on Britten’s
birthday. But that will only happen if there are resources and sustained commitment (for a change).
В
In fact, I have no argument with any of these piles of research – bring them on, the more the better –
because what they have to say is true. The only thing I find annoying is that such an endlessly
repeated truth results in relatively little action from the kind of people who could put it to good use.
C
One of my enduring life regrets is that I never got the chance to take part in such an event as a child. I
guess I went to schools where it was also too much trouble. But I did, just once, aged 11, get the
chance to go with a choir and sing at Chelmsford Cathedral.
D
But being there was even better. And as I was sitting near the choir – who were magnificent – I saw
the faces of the boys and thought how fabulously privileged they were to have this opportunity given
to them.
E
And that, for me, is what a choir can offer. All the physical and mental pluses are a happy bonus. But
the joy and thrill of access to that world of music is what counts.
F
It’s not a new discovery: there are endless dissertations on the subject, libraries of research, and
celebrity endorsements. But people have short memories. So every time another academic paper is
published, it gets into the news – which was what happened this week when Oxford Brookes
University came up with the latest ‘singing is good for you’ revelation.
G
The hard fact is that most state schools don’t bother much with singing, unless someone in the
hierarchies of government steps in to make it worth their while. They say they don’t have the
resources or the time. And even when a worthwhile singing project drops into their lap, they turn it
down.

TEST 4
You are going to read a newspaper article about a space programme. Six paragraphs have been
removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46).
There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

How I Became a British Astronaut

May 18, 2009 was a sunny evening – a night that I have good cause to remember. I had recently
retired from the Army Air Corps after an extremely rewarding career of nearly 18 years as a
helicopter pilot and the future looked good – I’d been fortunate to secure a dream job working as a
senior test pilot for a private firm. I had also just completed a year-long selection process for the
European Astronaut Corps – an incredible experience that had opened my eyes to the world of human
spaceflight.

41
A privately funded multi-million dollar seat as a ‘spaceflight participant’ was unattainable for most.
And opportunities such as the commercially sponsored Project Juno, which launched the first Briton,
Helen Sharman, into space in 1989, were extremely rare.
42
This was designed to identify natural ability in various cognitive skills. In reality, this meant around
eight hours of individual computer-based exercises, becoming progressively harder and with only
short breaks in between. Skills such as memory retention, concentration, spatial awareness and
coordination were evaluated, alongside psychological questionnaires that were to become the
benchmark of this selection process – hundreds of repetitive questions, aimed at ensuring consistency
of answers over a long duration.

43
Historically, around 50 per cent of candidates fail the exacting medical requirements. Although good
physical fitness is a strong attribute, the medical selection was not looking for potential Olympians.
Instead, it was intended to select those individuals who pose the least risk of having a medical
occurrence during their career. Space is no place to become ill.

44
As it happens, the medical selection caused exactly 50 per cent attrition, with failure to meet
cardiovascular and eyesight requirements being the two main causes. Having endured the most
gruelling week of my life, I was delighted to be among the 22 remaining candidates.

45
The remainder of the selection process consisted of formal interviews, culminating in the final 10
being invited to meet ESA’s Director General, Jean Jacques Dordain. That was one month before that
sunny evening in 2009, and I wondered who the lucky few would be. I suspected that I would not be
one of them: an ESA press release had already announced that the new candidates would be presented
at ESA headquarters in Paris on Wednesday. It was Monday night, I had not been contacted and time
was getting tight.

46
This was a decision that would affect not just me but also my family. Thankfully, there was no time to
dwell – I had to book a flight to Paris for the following day.

A
It was also good to find that there were five British people in the group. Considering that, at the time,
the UK was still in the shadow of a historical government policy not to participate in human
spaceflight, it was encouraging to see the high level of interest regarding this astronaut selection.
В
Other skills include being trained to perform spacewalks for external science and maintenance tasks
and to manipulate the robotic arm in order to capture and berth visiting resupply vehicles. Then there
is the medical training, communications skills training, emergency training – the list goes on.
C
So when the phone rang and I was offered an opportunity to join the European Astronaut Corps, there
was what can only be described as a wild mix of emotions – elation, excitement, shock and
trepidation, due to an overwhelming realization that I was about to take my first steps down one of
life’s major forks in the road.
D
It was interesting to meet the other candidates from all over Europe and to acknowledge the plethora
of diverse career paths that had led us to this common goal. While it is fair to say that the best
chances of success are to have a solid foundation in the core sciences or experience as a pilot, there
really is no single route to becoming an astronaut – it has more to do with being passionate about
what you do and being as good as you can be.
E
Yet that situation changed when the European Space Agency (ESA) announced a selection for a new
class of astronauts in 2008, and UK citizens were eligible to apply. My application joined the pile of
nearly 10,000 others, and soon there followed an invitation to Hamburg to begin the testing process.
F
During the previous five years working as a military test pilot, I had become much more involved in
the space sector – aviation and space are intrinsically linked and share many similar technologies.
However, I had not seriously contemplated a career as an astronaut, since the options to do so were
extremely limited.
G
Although the Soyuz spacecraft offers an emergency return to Earth in less than 12 hours from the
International Space Station, this is an absolute last resort. Also, it is not available once a spacecraft
has reached out beyond low Earth orbit.

TEST 5
You are going to read an article about the making of a popular television detective series. Six
paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits
each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Scott and Bailey

On Silver Street in Bury, Manchester, an old Barclays Bank building has been turned into the
headquarters of the Major Incident Team of the Manchester Metropolitan Police. They don’t actually
exist, the Manchester Metropolitan Police, but you would never know that if you looked around the
building.

41
This rigorous authenticity is one of the things that makes Scott and Bailey different from other police
dramas and extends further than office ephemera. This is largely down to the involvement of Di
Taylor, a retired CID detective inspector and co-creator of the series. And it helped it attract an
audience of 9.4 million viewers last year.

42
It’s clever and it’s funny: Wainwright has a remarkable way of creating sprightly dialogue. The plots
are convincing and the characters are credible: it’s particularly good on the way women relate to each
other. There is the friendship between two female detectives and the more complicated friendship
between Scott and Murray, who is her contemporary and long-standing friend but also her boss.

43
The original idea belonged to Suranne Jonesand actress friend Sally Lindsay. It was given to
Wainwright to write. Wainwright had met Di Taylor through a mutual friend and wanted to take the
female heroes out of the regular police and put them onto the major incident team (MIT), ‘which is
much more interesting than burglaries and car theft’.

44
‘I find them very masculine and there’s little that entertains me.’ Wainwright is particularly bored
with the stereotype of the lone male detective who is brilliant but troubled. ‘I like to take people into
dark areas but I also like to make them laugh. Di is a born detective but she has a robust personality
and she’s deeply human as well. And very funny. I wanted to reflect that in the series.’

45
‘When I got talking to her, the penny began to drop,’ the actress says. ‘The Detective Chief Inspector
I play is a brilliantly shifting character, which is really good going on TV. She’s imperious, funny,
larky, annoying, beady, entertaining – it’s very unusual to get so many flavours.’

46
This is indicative of the feedback Scott and Bailey has received. Taylor says, ‘I’ve had people
phoning me whom I haven’t spoken to for years – people who’ve been really high up on murder
cases, who absolutely love it. The police all talk about it on their shifts the next day, which to me is
the biggest compliment anyone could pay.’

A
Why is it so popular? Well, the thing that resonates most strongly with its actors, creators and critics
is the script. Written by the acclaimed Sally Wainwright, the series concerns two female detective
constables, Janet Scott (Lesley Sharp) and Rachel Bailey (Suranne Jones), their DCI, Gill Murray
(Amelia Bullmore), their intriguing personal lives and quite a lot of gruesome murder.
В
The director of this episode is Morag Fullarton. He is aware of striking a balance between what is
authentic and interesting and what is authentic and dull. ‘Are we going to do what is procedurally
correct and will be boring, or are we going to dispense with that and make it more interesting for the
viewer?’
C
As well as creating very believable people, authenticity is achieved in others ways, too. For one
episode they were allowed to shoot in a real prison. ‘I’ve been refused access there before, for another
programme,’ the locations manager says, ‘but the lady from the prison service loves Scott and Bailey
because it’s very true to life.’
D
Rachel Bailey is bright but rather chaotic, an instinctive detective who takes risks, both personally
and professionally; Janet Scott is her older colleague, with two daughters, a husband she’s bored with
and a colleague who’s in love with her. There’s a lot of chat and some very serious issues discussed
in the cafeteria. Alongside that are the crimes. This is television drama at its best: fresh and intriguing
and very compelling.
E
Posters urging the report of domestic abuse adorn the walls of the reception area and in the detectives’
office there is a scruffy, studenty atmosphere – jars of Coffee-mate on top of the fridge, Pot Noodles
and a notice urging ‘Brew fund due. You know who you are – pay up!’ The desks are strewn with
cold and flu medicine; the walls of the DCI’s office are hung with framed certificates.
F
So Wainwright created Gill Murray. When Amanda Bullmore was cast in the role, she had no idea
that her character was based on a real person. She read the script and then went up to Manchester to
meet Wainwright, who said, ‘We’re taking you out to dinner to meet Di who’s been very instrumental
in all this – just sit next to her and soak it all up.’
G
Talking to Taylor made Wainwright realise that she could write a cop show that was exciting and
different. Wainwright is not a fan of most police dramas. She doesn’t even like The Wire.

TEST 6
You are going to read an article about facial expressions. Six paragraphs have been removed from the
article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra
paragraph which you do not need to use.

Do fleeting changes of facial expression show whether

someone is telling lies?
Forty years ago, research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists
in training when he was asked a question whose answer has kept him busy pretty much ever since.
Suppose you are working in a psychiatric hospital like this one and a patient who has previously been
aggressive comes to you. ‘I’m feeling much better now,’ the patient says. ‘Can I have a pass out for
the weekend?’

41
It set Ekman thinking. As part of his research, he had already recorded a series of twelve-minute
interviews with patients at the hospital. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that
she had lied to him. So Ekman sat and looked at the film. Nothing. He slowed it down and looked
again. Slowed it further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames, he saw it: a vivid, intense
expression of extreme anguish.

42
Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first
suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express anger, disgust, contempt, fear,
surprise, happiness and sadness are both innate and universal.

43
However, particularly when we are lying, ‘micro expressions’ of powerfully felt emotions will
invariably flit across our faces before we get a chance to stop them. Fortunately for liars, as many as
ninety-nine percent of people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. But given a bit
of training, Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill.

44
The psychologist’s techniques, he concedes, can only be a starting point for criminal investigators
applying them. ‘All they show is that someone’s lying,’ he says. ‘You have to question very carefully
because what you really want to know is why they are lying. No expression of emotion, micro or
macro, reveals exactly what is triggering it.’ He gives an example.

45
Plus there are lies and lies. Ekman defines a lie as being a deliberate choice and intent to mislead, and
with no notification that this is what is occurring. ‘An actor or a poker player isn’t a liar,’ he says.
‘They’re supposed to be deceiving you – it’s part of the game. I focus on serious lies: where the
consequences for the liar are grave if they’re found out.’

46
Just read micro expressions and subtle expressions correctly, however, and Ekman reckons your
accuracy in detecting an attempt at deception will increase dramatically. However, when it comes to
spotting really serious lies – those that could, for example, affect national security – he says simply
that he ‘does not believe we have solid evidence that anything else works better than chance.’ Is he
lying? I couldn’t tell.
A
But once he had spotted the first one, he soon found three more examples in that same interview.
‘And that,’ says Ekman, ‘was the discovery of microexpressions; very fast, intense
expressions of concealed emotion.’
В
Ekman, incidentally, professes to be ‘a terrible liar’ and observes that although some people
are plainly more accomplished liars than others, he cannot teach anyone how to lie. ‘The ability to
detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated,’ he says. But how can what he
has learned help crime-solving?
C
But how reliable are Ekman’s methods? ‘Microexpressions,’ he says, ‘are only part of a whole set of
possible deception indicators. There are also what we call subtle expressions. A very slight tightening
of the lips, for example, is the most reliable sign of anger. You need to study a person’s whole
demeanour: gesture, voice, posture, gaze and also, of course, the words themselves.’
D
You also know, of course, that psychiatric patients routinely make such claims and that
some, if they are granted temporary leave, will cause harm to themselves or others. But this particular
patient swears they are telling the truth. They look, and sound, sincere. So here’s the question; is there
any way you can be sure they are telling the truth?
E
Generally, though, the lies that interest Ekman are those in which ‘the threat of loss or punishment to
the liar is severe: loss of job, loss of reputation, loss of spouse, loss of freedom’.
Also those where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.
F
‘Suppose,’ Ekman posits, ‘my wife has been found murdered in our hotel. How would I react when
the police questioned me? My demeanour might well be consistent with a concealed emotion. That
could be because I was guilty or because I was extremely angry at being a suspect, yet frightened of
showing anger because I knew it might make the police think I was guilty.’
G
The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially the same,
regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan, Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more,
expressions of emotion are involuntary; they are almost impossible to suppress or conceal. We can
try, of course.
TEST 7
You are going to read an article about an advertising technique. Six paragraphs have been removed
from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Windows of opportunity
Retail street theatre was all the rage in the 1920s. ‘Audiences’ would throng the pavement outside
Selfridge’s store in London just to gawp at the display beyond acres of plate glass. As a show, it made
any production of Chekhov seem action-packed by comparison. Yet Gordon Selfridge, who came to
these shores from the US and opened on Oxford Street exactly 100 years ago, was at the cutting edge
of what Dr Rebecca Scragg from the history of art department at Warwick University calls ‘a mini-
revolution’ in the art of window dressing.

41
“As Britain struggled to regain economic stability after the war, the importance of the new mass
commerce to the country’s recovery was recognised,” says Rebecca. “Finally understood was the
need to use the display windows to full advantage as an advertising medium to attract trade. The new
style of window dressing that came into its own after the armistice took inspiration from the theatre
and the fine and decorative arts. It involved flamboyant design and drew huge crowds.”

42
In the course of her research, Scragg spent some time in the British Library studying the growing
number of trade journals that sprang up between 1921 and 1924 to meet the market made up from this
new breed of professional. “I saw a picture in one of them of the Annual General Meeting of the
British Association of Display Men,” she says, “and there were only two women there”. The 1920s
saw a big growth in major department stores in the main cities and they would all have had a budget
for window dressing.

43
An elegant mannequin is positioned at the centre of a huge garland, sporting an off-the-shoulder
number and an enormous headdress that might have been worn by an empress in ancient Egypt. At
her feet are swathes of ruffled material and positioned around her any number of adornments.

44
Over eighty years on, and the economy is once again in recession. Retailers complain about falling
sales. But are they doing enough to seduce the passing customer? Scragg thinks not. “There are many
high street chains and independent shops whose windows are, by the standards of the 1920s,
unimaginative,” she maintains. “They’re passed over for more profitable but often less aesthetically
pleasing forms of advertising, such as the Internet.”
45
“I’m not making any claims that this is great or fine art” Scragg says. “My interest is in Britain
finding new ways of creating visual expression.” Scragg is about to submit a paper on her research
into the aesthetics of window dressing to one of the leading journals in her field.

46
So, although retail theatre may have been in its infancy, retail as leisure or therapy for a mass market
was still a long way in the future.

A
Some of the photographic evidence unearthed by Scragg after her trawl through the trade journals is
quite spectacular. One EJ Labussier, an employee of Selfridge’s, won the Drapers Record trophy for
his imaginative use of organdie, a slightly stiff fabric that was particularly popular with the
dressmakers of the day.
В
“Selfridge’s remains an exception,” she concedes, “even if it’s difficult today to imagine the store
coming up with a spectacular Rococo setting to display something as mundane as a collection of
white handkerchiefs.” No doubt it brought sighs, even gasps, from those with their noses almost
pressed up against the window but could it really be taken too seriously?
C
Scragg describes herself as “a historian of art and visual culture with an interest in the reception of
art”. “This interest in window displays evolved from my PhD on British art in the 1920s,” she says. “I
started by looking at exhibitions in shops and that led on to the way that the shops themselves were
moving into new forms of design.”
D
One of the illustrations she will include is a 1920s photograph of a bus proceeding towards
Selfridge’s with an advertisement for ‘self-denial week’ on the side. For many of those in the crowds
on the pavement, self-denial was a given. They couldn’t afford to spend.
E
The big department store continues to uphold the tradition of presenting lavish and eye-catching
window displays today and uses the best artists and designers to create and dress them. Advances in
technology have meant that the displays grow ever more spectacular.
F
“He was trying to aestheticise retailing,” she explains. “The Brits were so far behind the Americans,
the French and the Germans in this respect that it was another decade before they fully realised its
importance.”
G
“There was always a great concern for symmetry and harmony,” Scragg observes. “And a whole
industry grew up around the stands and backdrops, the ironmongery and architecture, needed to
display these things.” The displays were extravagant and bold, taking a great deal of time and
imagination to perfect. The glamour attracted attention and lifted people’s spirits at a difficult time.

TEST 8
You are going to read an article about the impact of the Internet on our lives. Six paragraphs have
been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-
46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

How the Internet is altering your mind

Like most newspapers’ content, what you are about to read was written using a computer connected
to the Internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my
research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to
read.

41
It often feels as if all this frantic activity creates a constant state of twitchy anxiety. Moreover, having
read a hotly controversial book about the effect of digital media on the human mind, I may have very
good reason to feel scared. Its thesis is simple enough: not only that the modern world’s relentless
informational overload is killing our capacity for reflection, contemplation and patience but that our
online habits are also altering the very structure of our brains.

42
The writer then argues that the Internet’s ‘cacophony of stimuli’ and ‘crazy quilt’ of information have
given rise to ‘cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning’ – in contrast
to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and
imaginative.

43
Dr Small, the director of the Memory and Ageing Research Centre at the University of California,
Los Angeles, is a specialist in the effects on the brain of the ageing process. ‘Even an old brain can be
quite malleable and responsive to what’s going on with technology,’ he tells me.

44
When I ask him how I might stop the Internet’s more malign effects on my own brain, he sounds
slightly more optimistic than Carr: ‘Try to balance online time with offline time,’ he tells me. ‘What’s
happening is, we’re losing the circadian rhythms we’re used to; you go to work, you come home, you
spend time talking with your kids.’
45
‘His argument privileges activities of the skimming and browsing kind. But if you look at research on
kids doing this, or exploring virtual worlds such as Second Life,the argument there is about
immersion and engagement.’

46
This all sounds both comforting and convincing, until I return to The Shallows and read a particularly
sobering sentence: ‘We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.’ There’s something chilling
about those words and even twenty stupid minutes on YouTube and an impulse buy from Amazon
cannot quite remove them from my brain.

A
But here is the really important thing. Carr writes: ‘If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s
plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and
thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot
like the Internet.’
В
The Shallows is a book by Nicholas Carr. It is an elegantly written cry of anguish about what one
admirer calls ‘the uneducating of Homo sapiens’ and a rewiring of neural pathways and networks that
may yet deprive the human race of the talents that, ironically enough, drove our journey from caves to
PC terminals.
C
‘The point is, to play successfully, you have to pay an incredible amount of attention to what your
team-mates are doing, to the mechanics of the game. You can set up a thesis for The Depths, just as
much as The Shallows. And it seems to me that to say that some neural pathways are good and some
are bad – well, how can you possibly say that?’
D
‘It’s a basic principle that the brain is very sensitive to any kind of stimulation. If you have repeated
stimuli, your neural circuits will be excited. But if you neglect other stimuli, other neural circuits will
be weakened.’ Carr argues that the online world so taxes the parts of the brain that deal with fleeting
and temporary stuff that deep thinking becomes increasingly impossible. As he sees it: ‘Our ability to
learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow.’
E
Among the people with walk-on roles in The Shallows is Scott Karp, the editor of a renowned
American digital media blog called Publish2, whose reading habits are held up as proof of the fact
that plenty of people’s brains have long since been rewired by their enthusiastic use of the Internet.
F
I get a more convincing antidote to the Carr thesis from Professor Andrew Burn of the University of
London’s Institute of Education. Equating the Internet with distraction and shallowness, he tells me,
is a fundamental mistake, possibly bound up with Carr’s age (he is fifty). ‘Is there anything in his
book about online role-playing games?’
G
But then there is the downside. The tool I use to write can also double as many other things. Thus,
while writing this, I was entertained by no end of distractions. I watched YouTube videos, bought
something on Amazon and at downright stupid hours of the day – 6 a.m. or almost midnight – I once
again checked my email on either my phone or computer.

TEST 9
You are going to read an article about an outstanding individual. Six paragraphs have been removed
from the article. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A –
G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Jonah Lehrer: the prodigy who lights up your brain

There is a moment familiar to anyone who has ever frittered away innocent hours watching old
cartoons. It occurs when Wile E Coyote, Elmer Fudd, Popeye or any of dozens of animated characters
gets a sudden moment of insight. With a flash, a light bulb appears above their heads, shining brightly
to illuminate the darkness of whatever dilemma they faced. Aha!

41
That little nugget of information – blending culture and science – is the essence of the remarkable rise
of Jonah Lehrer. He is a contributing editor at Wired, has published three books, is a prolific blogger
and counts publications from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post as home. The New York
Times has called him a ‘popular science prodigy’ and the Los Angeles Times once hailed him ‘an
important new thinker’.

42
Lehrer’s own ‘aha moment’ came while he worked in the laboratory of acclaimed neuropsychiatrist
Eric Kandel. As Lehrer helped in Kandel’s lab on a project to study the molecular links between
smell and memory, he was well on his way to one important discovery. ‘What I discovered was that I
was a terrible scientist,’ he later told one interviewer.

43
That was the end of Lehrer’s prospects as a scientist but the beginning of a writing career acting as an
interpreter between two worlds: the sciences and the humanities. After he graduated from Columbia
in 2003, he became a Rhodes scholar, travelling to Oxford. He arrived with a plan to study science
but rapidly changed it to literature and theology.
44
There is no doubt Lehrer is very smart. He was born on 25 June 1981 in the Los Angeles
neighbourhood of Los Feliz. His father, David, is a civil rights lawyer and his mother, Ariella,
developed educational software. It was a happy, middle-class home under sunny Californian skies
with parents that encouraged their son’s manic curiosity.

45
Prompted by a baffling moment trying to pick out a box of Cheerios on an aisle crowded with scores
of different cereal brands, Lehrer looked at human decision-making. He took dramatic individual
decisions – a pilot landing a stricken plane, a Superbowl pass, a poker playing physicist – and looked
at the neurology behind them. He examined how different parts of the brain took on different
decisions and how that made an impact on the world.

46
Art and human emotions — all our failures, foibles and triumphs – may just be chemicals and firing
neurons but Lehrer’s words make them sing all the same.

A
That tome was followed up by a third offering in the shape of Imagine, which looks at how neurology
and creativity interact. Far from showing how innovations come to one-off geniuses, he reveals how
solid science lies behind the creative process, which can be understood neurologically and thus
nurtured.
В
But no matter. For Lehrer had started reading Marcel Proust on his way to work; in particular, he
became engrossed with Proust’s explorations of how smell could trigger memory. Lehrer once
described the moment thus: “I realised that Proust and modern neuroscience shared a vision of how
our memory works.”
C
“I remember Mom patiently listening as I prattled on about my latest interests” Lehrer told me. An
interest in science was always there. He recalled stepping into a lab for the first time. “It seemed like
a magician’s lair” he said. He followed up on Proust by diving further into the borderland between
neurology and human experience in 2009’s How We Decide.
D
After shining at school, Lehrer went to Columbia, where he met his wife-to-be, Sarah Liebowitz, in a
Shakespeare class. She went with him to Britain, where she worked for the Boston Globe’s London
bureau. They have an eleven-month daughter called Rose and the family lives in the Hollywood Hills.
E
All of which is not bad for someone who is only thirty. Lehrer’s stock-in-trade is the boundary
between science and the humanities. He strives to link art and neurology: how chemical reactions
within three pounds of squidgy grey matter inside our skulls actually make us love, laugh and lead
our lives.
F
He also ended up living in London. It was here he began to work on his first book, Proust was a
neuroscientist, which was published in 2007, and began a successful journalism career. Lehrer took a
look at numerous cultural figures and studied how their work foreshadowed the research of
neuroscience.
G
It is harmless fun. But, according to popular science wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, also literally true.
There is indeed a part of the brain associated with a sudden ‘aha moment’ of the type linked to key
breakthroughs of luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Archimedes. When you get a sudden insight, it
registers a huge spike in activity, just like that light bulb.

TEST 10
You are going to read a newspaper article about a very young artist. Six paragraphs have been
removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46).
There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Is Kieron Britain’s most exciting artist?
Peter Stanford watches an amazing seven-year-old artist at work.
All the time we are talking, Kieron Williamson is busy sketching on the pad in front of him with
quick, fluid movements of his pencil. He is copying from a book of pen and ink illustrations by
Edward Seago, the twentieth-century British artist, before he adds touches of his own to the sketches.

41

Kieron is clearly caught up in what he is doing, his blonde head a study in concentration as he kneels
in the from room of his family home. But he’s not so distracted that he doesn’t sometimes look me in
the eye and put me right. ‘You’ve added a bit more detail here,’ I say, as he is reproducing Seago’s
sketch of an old man in an overcoat. ‘Seago’s’, I explain, ‘is lighter.’ ‘Not lighter,’ Kieron corrects
me. ‘You call it looser. Loose and tight. They’re the words.’ Seven-year-olds don’t often give adults
lessons in the terminology of fine art.

42

Kieron actually can and does, and has been hailed as a ‘mini-Monet’, on account of his neo-
impressionist style, or the next Picasso. Recently, buyers from as far afield as South Africa and
America queued up outside his modest local art gallery – some of them camping out all night — to
snap up 33 paintings in just 27 minutes, leaving Kieron ?150,000 better off. How did it feel? ‘Very
nice,’ he replies politely. ‘Did you talk to any of the buyers?’ ‘Yes, they kept asking me what else I
do.’ And what did you tell them? ‘That I go to school, that I play football for my school and that I am
the best defender in the team .’
43

His exhibition, the second to sell out so quickly — has brought him a lot of attention. Several
American TV networks have filmed him in the family flat already and today a camera crew is
squeezed into the front room with me, Kieron’s mum, Michelle, his younger sister, Billie-Jo and two
sleeping cats

44

“These are ones I did last night when I was watching the television with Billie-Jo,” he says, handing
me a sketchbook. It falls open on a vibrant fairground scene. Kieron finds the page in the Seago book
that inspired him. There is the same carousel, but he has added figures, buildings and trees in his
drawing in the sketchbook.

45

As accomplished as Kieron’s paintings are, part of their appeal is undoubtedly the story of precocious
talent that goes with them. If he’s doing similar work when he’s 28, it may prompt a different
reaction.

46

But Kieron is having none of it. He looks up sharply from his sketching. “If I want to paint,” he says,
“I’ll paint.”

A An example is his pastel Figures at Holkham, an accomplished composition with big blues skies, a
line of sand dunes framing to either side and two figures, one with a splash of red in the centre to
draw the eye in. There is such an adult quality to his work that you can’t help wondering if someone
older has been helping him.

В Standard seven-year-old boy stuff there. Kieron, however, is being hailed as a child prodigy. ‘They
only come along once in a generation,’ artist Carol Pennington tells me later, as she explains how she
helped nurture this early-blooming talent, ‘and Kieron is that one.’
C Michelle Williamson is aware of this. ‘I fully expect Kieron in a few years’ time to focus on
something else as closely as he is focusing on art right now,’ she says. ‘Football or motor racing.
There may well be a lot more ahead for him than art.’

D Yet, in the centre of the melee, Kieron seems utterly oblivious and just gets on with what he does
every day, often rising at 6 a.m. to get on to paper a picture that is bursting to get out of his head. He
will be painting every day of the school holidays, relishing the freedom denied him during term time.

E Each one takes him only a few minutes – horses, figures huddling in a tent, men and women in
unusual costumes. ‘I’m going to do this one, then this one, then this one,’ he tells me, ‘but not this
one – the eves aren’t looking at anyone – or this one – it’s too messy.’

F This, it is clear, is no mechanical exercise in reproduction. To underline the point, Kieron takes it
back off me and adds a smudge of dark under one of the groups of people.

G But then Kieron Williamson is not your average boy. Aside from his precocious articulacy, he is
singlehandedly illustrating that familiar remark, made by many a parent when confronted with a
prize-winning work of modern art, that ‘my seven-year-old could do better than that’

TEST 11
You are going to read a magazine article about rock climbing. Six paragraphs have been removed
from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Impossible Rock
On the northern coast of Oman, climbers test themselves against knife-edge cliffs
We’re standing on a pebble beach in northern Oman with a group of local men who are fishing.
Behind us rises a sheer 1,000-metre cliff that shimmers under a blistering midday sun. ‘Do you mind
if I look around?’ Alex asks. ‘You can do as you please’, says the elder. As Alex wanders off, we
explain to the Althouri fishermen that we’re professional rock climbers on an exploratory visit.

41
There are six of us in our team, including Alex, one of the best young climbers in the world. Suddenly
one of the men stops in his tracks, points up at the towering cliff, and starts shouting. A thousand feet
above us Alex is climbing, antlike, up the rock wall. The Althouris are beside themselves with a mix
of excitement and incredulity

42
In 28 years of climbing I’ve never seen rock formations as magical. In places the land rises straight
from the ocean in knife-edged fins. Proximity to the sea makes these cliffs perfect for deepwater
soloing, a specialized type of climbing in which you push up as far a wall as you can, then simply
tumble into the water. It sounds harmless enough, but an out-of-control fall can result in serious
injury or even death.

43
Wasting no time, Alex laces up his climbing shoes, dives from the boat, and swims to a cliff where
the ocean has carved out a cavern with a five-metre overhang. Within minutes he has reached the
cavern’s ceiling, where he finds a series of tiny hand holds along a protruding rib of dark grey
limestone. It’s exactly the kind of challenge he has been looking for, with every move more difficult
than the one before.

44
‘Come on!’ I scream, urging him to finish his new route. Alex lunges over the lip, but his legs swing
out, and he peels off the rock and leaps into the water. That night we anchor in the bay at the base of a
150-metre Gothic tower we dub the ‘sandcastle: Before joining Alex for the climb the next morning, I
suggest we take along safety gear. The young climber scoffs, saying that it’s nothing more than a
hike. I think of myself as a young 44-year-old, but trying to keep up with him makes me realise how
old I’m getting .

45
And now I’m slightly annoyed again about his disregard for whether I’m comfortable. The rock here
is badly shattered, what climbers call choss. Clinging to the dead-vertical wall, I test the integrity of
each hold by banging it with the heel of my hand. Sometimes the rock sounds hollow or even moves.
Staring down between my legs, I see the boat bobbing in the bay far beneath us. By the time I plop
down on the ledge beside him, my nerves are frazzled.

46
As I turn to my youthful partner for his thoughts, I see he’s already packed up. For him the moment
of wonder has passed. ‘Let’s go’, Alex says impatiently. ‘If we hurry, we can get in another climb
before dark’.

A From there we sail toward the ‘Lion’s Mouth’, a narrow strait named for the fang-like red and
orange limestone pillars that jut from an overhang at its entrance. Alex spends the day working on a
60-metre route up one of the pillars.
B ‘What are they saying?’ I ask our translator. ‘It’s hard to explain’, he replies. ‘But essentially, they
think Alex is a witch’. I can understand why. Even for me, Alex’s skills are hard to grasp. But so is
this landscape.
C The claw-like fingers of the Musandam Peninsula below glow orange with the setting sun. Looking
down at the tortuous shoreline, which fans out in every direction, we’re gazing at a lifetime’s worth of
climbing.
D One of the other places we thought would be perfect for visiting by boat is As Salamah, an island in
the Strait of Hormuz. We arrive in early afternoon and discover a giant rock rising from the sea. Since
there is nowhere to anchor, we drop the sails and use the engines to park the boat just offshore.
E I’d already had a similar moment of awareness earlier in the trip when Alex had scampered up a
500-metre wall with our rope in his pack. ‘Hold on a second!’ I’d yelled. What if the rest of us needed
it? ‘Don’t worry’, he’d replied. ‘I’ll stop when I think we need to start using the ropes.
F The men puff on the pipes and nod. The mountainous peninsula on which they live is an intricate
maze of bays and fjords. Few climbers have ever touched its sheer limestone cliffs. We had learned of
the area’s potential from some British climbers who visited ten years ago.
G Some defy belief. Hanging upside down, holding on to bumps in the rock no bigger than
matchboxes, Alex hooks the heels of his sticky-soled shoes over a small protrusion. Defying gravity,
he lets go with one hand and snatches for the next hold. Then the rock becomes too slick for a heel
hook so he dangles his legs and swings like a chimpanzee from one tiny ledge to the next.
TEST 12
You are going to read a magazine article about ways of reusing escaped heat. Six paragraphs have
been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-
46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
City of Heat
Escaped heat costs us money and affects our climate. Chelsea Wald reports on a grand plan to
capture it and put it to good use.
Deep in the tunnels of London’s underground railway, as in many around the world, it’s so hot it can
feel very uncomfortable. And yet in the basement of a building only a few metres away from the
station a boiler is firing to heat water for someone’s shower.

41
Recapturing it wouldn’t just benefit our wallets. It would reverse some of the damaging effects on the
climate. The good news is that several cities have found a way to hunt down their surplus heat in
some unexpected places. These cities are building systems that deliver heat in much the same way
that suppliers handle electricity and water. Could they point the way to the next energy revolution?

42
It was also estimated that given the right technologies, we could reclaim nearly half of that energy,
although that’s easier said than done. ‘We often talk about the quantity of waste heat’, says David
MacKay, chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘but not the
quality’. Most of what we think of as ‘waste heat’ isn’t actually all that hot; about sixty percent is
below 230°C. While that may sound pretty hot, it is too cold to turn a turbine to generate electricity.

43
There, buildings tap into the system to warm their water supplies or air for central heating. Many
countries are encouraging such cogeneration, as it is called. A US initiative, for example, might save
the country $10 billion per year. And cogeneration allows power plants to bump up their efficiencies
from thirty percent to almost ninety percent.

44
As it happens, there is an existing technology that can siphon energy from such temperatures,
although applying it on a large scale to capture waste heat is as yet unachievable. Ground source heat
pumps have been helping homeowners save on heating bills since the 1940s, when US inventor
Robert Webber realised he could invert the refrigeration process to extract heat from the ground.

45
The mechanism for this is simple. A network of pipes makes a circuit between the inside of the
dwelling and a coil buried underground. These pipes contain a mix of water and fluid refrigerant. As
the fluid mixture travels through the pipes buried underground, it absorbs the heat from the 10°C soil.

46
This system is powerful enough to efficiently provide heat even in places as cold as Norway and
Alaska. It is also cheap. Scientists around the world are now working on the idea that the way ahead
is to develop city-wide grids using source-heat pumps to recycle waste on a grander scale, from
sources such as subways and sewers.

A But that’s not all it can do. Reverse the process and it can cool a home in summer. If the ground is
cold enough, it simply absorbs the heat from inside the building instead of from the ground.
B It’s an attractive proposition. A report in 2008 found that the energy lost as heat each year by US
industry equalled the annual energy use of five million citizens. Power generation is a major culprit;
the heat lost from that sector alone dwarfs the total energy use of Japan. The situation in other
industrialised countries is similar.
C Yet even this is just a drop in the ocean compared with the heat lost from our homes, offices, road
vehicles and trains. However, waste heat from these myriad sources is much harder to harness than
the waste heat from single, concentrated sources like power plants. What’s more, it’s barely warm
enough to merit its name. Reclaiming that would be an altogether more difficult proposition.
D A more successful way of using the heat is to move the heat directly to where it is needed. A
number of power plants now do exactly that. They capture some or all of their waste heat and send it
– as steam or hot water – through a network of pipes to nearby cities.
E The system takes advantage of the fact that in temperate regions – regardless of surface temperature
– a few metres underground, the soil always remains lukewarm and stable. These pumps can tap into
that consistent temperature to heat a house in the winter.
F While this is not what you might consider hot, it nonetheless causes the liquid to evaporate into a
gas. When this gas circulates back into the building, it is fed through a compressor, which vastly
intensifies the heat. That heat can then be used by a heat exchanger to warm up hot water or air ducts.
G Rather than stewing in that excess heat, what if we could make it work for us? Throughout our
energy system – from electricity generation in power plants to powering a car – more than fifty
percent of the energy we use leaks into the surroundings.

TEST 13
You are going to read a magazine article about watching wildlife. Six paragraphs have been removed
from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Close encounters of the wild kind
The rise of wildlife-watching experiences.
Wildlife observation has always proved inspirational for humans, it led Charles Darwin to provide us
with a better understanding of how we evolved and it has inspired such everyday innovations as
Velcro. US author Peter Matthiessen wrote: ‘The variety of life in nature can be compared to a vast
library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable to the random discarding of
whole volumes without having opened them and learned from them’.

41
‘What is interesting is how much people are willing to pay to be in a wilderness environment’, says
Julian Matthews, director of Discovery Initiatives, a company which takes people on small-group
trips to more than 35 countries. It’s still a small part of the tourism industry but it’s undoubtedly
expanding. There are definitely more and more people seeking wildlife experiences now’.

42
Matthews recognises the contribution that television has made to our knowledge of nature, but he
says ‘there’s no way to compare seeing an animal in the wild with watching one on TV. While a
filmmaker may spend six months shooting an animal and will get closer to it than you ever will,
there’s no greater pleasure than seeing an animal in its own environment. On film, you’re only getting
the visuals and the sound. As impressive as they may be, it’s not the real thing.’ And the good thing is
that tourists can now watch wildlife ‘live’ while helping to protect it – a concept that comes under the
broad label of ‘ecotourism’.

43
In practice, this means that many tour operators, guided by ethical policies, now use the services of
local communities, train local guides and have close ties to conservation projects. Tour operator
Rekero, for example, has established its own school – the Koyiaki Guide School and Wilderness
Camp – for Maasai people in Kenya.
44
Conservation organisations have also realised that tourism can help educate people and provide a
valuable source of revenue and even manpower. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, runs trips
that give donors the chance to see for themselves how their financial aid is assisting conservation
projects in the field, and some organisations even allow tourists to take part in research and
conservation.

45
Similarly, Biosphere Expeditions takes about 200 people every year on what its field operations
director, Dr Matthias Hammer, calls an ‘adventure with a conscience’. Volunteers can visit six
destinations around the world and take part in various activities including snow leopard, wolf and
bear surveys and whale and dolphin research.

46
Of course, going in search of wildlife doesn’t always mean you will find it. That sightings of animals
in large wild areas don’t come automatically is a fact of life. Although potentially frustrating, it
makes sightings all the more rewarding when they are made. And the opportunity to do something to
help both the environment and local people can only add to the experience.

A He is confident that, if done properly, this combination of tourism and conservation can be ‘a win-
win situation’, ‘People have a unique experience while contributing to conservation directly. Local
people and habitats benefit through job creation, research and an alternative income. Local wildlife
benefits from our work.’
B While there is indeed much to learn from many species not yet known to science, it’s the already
opened texts that attract the majority of us, however. And we are attracted in ever increasing numbers.
C As people are able to travel to more extreme places in search of the ultimate wildlife experience,
it’s worth remembering that you don’t have to go to the ends of the earth to catch rewarding glimpses
of animals. Indeed, some of the best wildlife-watching opportunities are on our doorstep.
D This growth has been stimulated by the efforts of conservation groups and natural history
documentaries. Greater awareness of the planet has led to an increased demand for wildlife tours or
the addition of a wildlife-watching component to traditional holidays. People want to discover nature
at first-hand for themselves – not just on a screen.
E Despite being an important part of the population there, they have largely been excluded from the
benefits brought to the region by tourism. This initiative is a concerted effort to enable them to take
up jobs and run programmes themselves.
F Earthwatch is a non-profit international environmental group that does just that. ‘Participation in an
Earthwatch project is a positive alternative to wildlife-watching expeditions, as we offer members of
the public the opportunity to be on the front line of conservation,’ says Claudia Eckardt, Earthwatch
programme manager.
G It is a term which is overused, but the principle behind it undoubtedly offers hope for the future of
many endangered species, as money from tourism directly funds conservation work. It also extends to
the consideration of the interests of people living in the places that tourists visit.

TEST 14
You are going to read a newspaper article in which a zoology student talks about her experience of
doing practical research in an area of rainforest. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article.
Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph
which you do not need to use.
Fieldwork in the rainforest of Ecuador – the experiences of a zoology student
When I was at school, I was a huge fan of TV wildlife programmes, and at a certain point I realised
that somehow the natural world would have to be part of my life. So here I am a few years later, in
the tropical rainforest of eastern Ecuador, a novice field scientist. The word scientist evokes various
images, typically perhaps ones of laboratories and white coats, test tubes and lab rats. But what does
it mean to be a field scientist?

41
I am currently spending a year at a small scientific research station in a remote patch of the
Ecuadorian rainforest belonging to the Kichwa community of San Jose de Payamino. It is glorious –
everything you would expect a tropical rainforest location to be, and a world away from my
university in the UK. The air is hot and thick, the trees are densely packed, and everywhere is teeming
with life.

42
The local people own the land and govern themselves, but the Ecuadorian government also provides
for them: a school complete with computer room and satellite internet, for instance. Each year, they
vote for a new president and vice-president, who organise the democratic community meetings. Each
family has a finca in the forest: a wooden home on stilts.

43
But my normal life here as a work experience student revolves mainly around my personal research,
which is a biodiversity study of frogs. I am trying to establish exactly which species are here, where
and when I can find them, and what condition they are in.

44
For most of the time, I am just crawling along looking at leaves. Much of field research is like this. It
isn’t all finding new species and being transfixed by exotic wildlife behaviour. Have you ever seen
the behind-the-scenes footage at the end of many nature documentaries, where it turns out a
cameraman has been sitting in a tree for three days waiting for a bird to dance? Research is like this –
laborious and monotonous – but it can be rewarding too.

45
Being a field scientist basically means being an academic, collecting data and publishing scientific
papers. It’s interesting but it doesn’t pay well, and getting started can be tough. When I was looking
for work experience, there were plenty of openings with pharmaceutical companies, but very few
matching my desire to explore and investigate wildlife.

46
This is one reason I count myself lucky to be involved in this project. It’s largely funded by my
university, so I can afford it. Then, by the end of this year, I will have acquired valuable skills, and I
am hopeful that the experience will facilitate my progression into postgraduate study.

A To do this, I walk slowly along several paths in the forest, accompanied by a local guide, and at
night equipped with a torch. When I spot what I’m looking for, I feel an intense adrenaline rush. Will
I manage to capture it? Have I collected this particular species yet?
В Because of this, and having experienced fieldwork, I’ve decided it’s definitely something I would
like to do as a career. Once this year is over, I will ask my lecturers to advise me what to do next.
C This morning, for example, a half metre square of mushrooms sprouted on the dirt floor of my
kitchen. My favourite time here is in the early evenings. It’s finally cool enough to be comfortable,
and the nocturnal creatures begin their nightly cacophony, while the setting sun paints the trees
orange.
D The reality is, however, that to make your way you need to build up a range of contacts and a
portfolio of work. Many of the initial work opportunities that do exist are voluntary – in fact, you
often have to pay to join a scheme. A student job where you are paid expenses, let alone a basic
salary, is quite rare.
E By and large, they work outdoors, and are interested in pretty much everything from discovering
new species to the effect of obscure parasites on ecosystems. They explore and investigate, aiming to
understand what they observe. Just two years into my undergraduate zoology degree, I don’t quite
qualify as one yet, but hopefully I’m heading that way.
F They have their own traditions, too. One day, a local lady was bitten by a lethal snake; whilst I
administered shots of anti-venom to her, the local traditional healer, was applying plant remedies to
the wound and attempting to suck the venom from it. At least one of the treatments must have worked
because she recovered.
G And the thing is to imagine being the person that has made a discovery – the person who first
questions something, investigates and then contributes to the vast catalogue of information that is
science. I find this concept inspirational.
TEST 15
You are going to read a newspaper article about a project at a natural history museum. Six paragraphs
have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap
(41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Taking Dinosaurs Apart
Pulling apart limbs, sawing through ribs and separating skull bones are activities usually associated
with surgeons rather than museum staff. However, that is exactly what is going on at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, USA. Renovations to the
museum’s dinosaur hall, which started recently, have necessitated the dismantling and removal of its
collection of dinosaur and extinct mammal skeletons, some of which weigh as much as five tons.

41
One particular specimen which curator Matthew Carrano can’t wait to get hold of is a meat-eating
Jurassic dinosaur called Allosaurus, which has been on display for 30 years. ‘Scientifically, this
particular Allosaurus is well-known,’ he explains, because ‘for a long time, it was one of the only
Allosaurus specimens that represented a single individual animal’.

42
The Smithsonian’s five-meter-long Allosaurus, however, is definitely one unique individual. So once
crystallized glue holding it together is removed, researchers and conservators can get a better sense of
how the creature’s joints actually fitted together in life

43
Another modification in the museum plans to make to its Allosaurus is removing a couple of
centimeters from its tail, which is not original fossil but casts of vertebrae. ‘The tail on the
Smithsonian’s specimen is too long’, says Peter May, owner and president of the company in charge
of dismantling, conserving, and remounting the 58 specimens in the museum’s dinosaur hall. He
explains that the skeleton on display has over 50 vertebrae, when it should have something closer to
45.

44
Slicing a thin cross-section out of a leg or rib bone can help with that. By placing a slice under a
microscope, researchers will be able to count growth rings on the bone, the number of which would
have increased throughout the creature’s life, very much like the rings on a cross-section of a tree
trunk.

45
One example which Carrano wishes to investigate further is an apparent blow to the Allosaurus’s left
side. ‘The shoulder blade looks like it has healed improperly,’ he explains. If the damaged shoulder
blade can be fitted together with the ribs which are held in storage, paleontologists might be able to
determine the severity and cause of the damage.

Finally, Carrano hopes to be able to compare the Allosaurus with another dinosaur in the collection
called Labrosaurus. Labrosaurus is known only from a single bone – a lower jaw with a distortion
which is believed to have been caused by disease or injury. ‘The two front teeth are missing and
there’s an abscess there’, Carrano explains.

46
But in order to confirm their suspicion, Carrano and his colleagues will have to wait a while. ‘A lot of
what we hope to learn won’t be accessible to us until the exhibits have been taken down and we can
have a good look at them’, he says. So he won’t be able to get his hands on the Allosaurus quite yet.

A Dismantling the Allosaurus and removing the plaster and glue covering it can also reveal whether
the animal suffered any injuries when alive.
B The Smithsonian’s team should be able to take it apart in large chunks in a single day, but even
once they’ve dismantled it they’ll still have hours of work ahead of them, breaking the skeleton down
further into individual bones and cleaning them.
C These endeavors will modernize a space which has never seen a major overhaul. It will also give
researchers a chance to make detailed studies of the exhibits – some of which haven’t been touched in
decades.
D There are also plans to slim it down a little. When the museum first displayed the Allosaurus,
preparators decided to use plaster casts of the ribs instead of the actual specimens, which resulted in a
heavier-looking skeleton. Curators hope that the final, remounted skeleton will more closely resemble
the dinosaur’s natural shape.
E However, this dinosaur, previously classified as a separate species is now thought to be a type of
Allosaurus. Both of the specimens come from the same quarry, and what’s more the Allosaurus is
missing the exact same bone, so it’s entirely possible that it actually belongs to the Smithsonian
Allosaurus.
F In addition to correcting mistakes such as this, made when the specimens were first displayed,
Carrano would also like to determine the age of the Allosaurus.
G There are Allosaurus skeletons in museum collections across the world, but most consist of bones
from a number of different examples of the species. This has made it difficult for scientists to work
out how the entire skeleton fits together.

CPE
TEST 1
In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

Disposable Buildings?
Look at a building, any building. What can it tell you? Few would dispute that architecture reflects the
taste and style of the period that gave rise to it.

119.

Today’s architectural landmarks tend to be secular rather than religious. For the present purpose,
however, it is less important to acknowledge a building’s patronage than it is to carefully scrutinize its
form. So, observe a contemporary building. What stands out? Discord? A hodgepodge of odd shapes
and garish colours that jar? What about the next? The same? Seeing one modern building does little to
prepare the viewer for the next one; uniformity is negligible.

120.

In the larger scheme of things, these differences are minor and it is safe to say that uniformity of
appearance is a major factor that differentiates between the buildings of the past and those of the
present. Another important distinction and one so obvious that it may seem to go without saying, is that
modern buildings do not look like old buildings, (unless they are built in imitation, like neoclassical
architecture, for example).

121.
This is more than a comment on the quality of the respective building materials. The pyramids were
built to last; the Millennium Dome most assuredly was not. This is not to say that the intention for
modern structures is that they should last a certain amount of time and then fall down – as a kind of
disposable building. Nevertheless, they are undeniably designed and built with only the most immediate
future in mind.

122.

The people of the past, on the other hand, looked ahead. It is clear that they intended a building to be
there for future generations. This is corroborated by the fact that, in countries where the climate allows
it, they planted trees. Consider this: planting a tree, especially one that will someday grow to be very
big, is the ultimate in altruistic behaviour. When a man plants an oak sapling, he knows very well that
he will not see the tree that it will become.

123.

There is a third element particularly relevant to contemporary architecture – the aesthetic element.
Aesthetics pose a challenge because they are inherently subjective. Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the
beholder; we all have likes and dislikes, and they are not the same. Even allowing for this, however,
most would probably agree that ‘beautiful’ is not the most apt way to describe the majority of modern
buildings.

124.

With most modern buildings, we certainly are. Without interventions, these words inevitably take on a
negative connotation, yet it can be constructive to be confronted with something completely different,
something a bit shocking. A reaction is provoked. We think. All art evolves with time, and architecture,
in all its varied manifestations, is, after all, a form of art.
 125.

As a result, we have been left with much material for study from past eras. What will we leave behind
us, in turn? If our culture still places a value on the past and its lessons or a belief that we carry our
history with us, in continuity, to the future, then this view has not been reflected in our architecture.
The generations of the future may not be able to benefit from us as we have benefited from the
generations of the past.

A The fact remains, though, that until the present day, art forms have been made to last. Countless
paintings and sculptures, as well as buildings, bear witness to this. The artists and architects of the past
strove to impart their creations with attributes that would stand the test of time. It was part and parcel
of the successful execution. It was an expression of pride; a boast. It was the drive to send something
of themselves to live on into the future, for reasons selfless and selfish both.

B For architecture, patronage has always been important. While this method of financing a work of art
is as old as the idea of art itself, it gathered huge momentum during the Renaissance. During this period,
wealthy and powerful families vied with each other in a competition for the creation of the
breathtakingly beautiful and the surprisingly different. It was a way of buying into their own
immortality, and that of the artist or the architect to boot.

C Indeed, it is rare to see a modern building that has worn well, that is free from leaks or rising damp,
that is without bits of its outer structure falling off. It is hard to call to mind an edifice built in the last
fifty years which is not like this or will not soon be. These days, we are not interested in posterity: if a
building serves our purpose and that of our children, that seems to be enough.

D However, neither of these distinctions reveal much about the builders, apart from their aesthetic and
their fondness for visual conformity. Now, take a look at some old buildings. The fact that you can see
them at all, that they are intact and relevant, is what opens up the chasm between the present and the
past. We do not know how long today’s architectural heritage will last, but the chances are that it will
not stand the test of time.

E Why is this? Do we not require our buildings to be beautiful any longer? Perhaps beauty has become
architecturally superfluous, or just plain old-fashioned. It could be that the idea of beauty is too
sentimental and sugary for the contemporary taste. Maybe the modern psyche demands something more
stimulating and less easy than beauty. Perhaps we yearn to be challenged.
 F Historic buildings from a common era, on the other hand, resemble each other. Take the example of
the Gothic cathedral. To the non-specialist, one Gothic cathedral looks much like the next; if you’ve
seen one, you’ve seen them all. This view, while extreme, is correct in the sense that there is a
uniformity of style in every Gothic cathedral ever built. Anyone can see it. It takes an enthusiast,
however, to spot and appreciate the myriad subtleties and differences.

G In contrast, any tree-planting that takes place today is largely commercial, motivated by the quest
for immediate gain. Trees are planted that will grow quickly and can be cut down in a relatively short
space of time. The analogy between tree planting and the construction of buildings is a good one; both
activities today show thinking that is essentially short-term and goal driven; we want an instantaneous
result and, on top of that, we want it to be profitable.

H Buildings, however, can reveal considerably more than that. They give us a unique insight into the
collective mind and culture of those responsible for their construction. Every building was conceived
with an objective in mind, to serve some purpose or assuage some deficiency, and someone was
responsible for commissioning them. Throughout the course of history, buildings have generally been
constructed at the instigation of the rich and powerful – products of politics, religion or both. This is
what makes them so revealing.

TEST 2

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 24-30, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

MERGING ART&SCIENCE: A FALSE PREMISE

The current vogue is for believing that art and science should be brought together. This obsession for
showing that art - particularly the visual arts - is similar to science in content and the creative processes
is bemusing. I detect in it an element of social snobbery - artists are envious of scientists and scientists
want to be thought of as artists.

24.
If Watson and Crick had not got the structure of DNA we know that Franklin and Klug would soon
have had it. Indeed simultaneous discovery is a common feature of science. If one could rerun the
history of science and start again it would have a different history but the end results would be the same:
water would be H2O and genes would code for proteins but the names would be different.

25.

Whatever the feelings of the scientist these are absent from the final understanding of a process. while
art is a personal creation and contains the personal views of the artist. And since science is a communal
process a scientist has to be very aware of what is known about the problem being investigated. There
are strict criteria about lack of contradiction and, of course, correspondence with reality. Science makes
progress, we build on the work of our current and earlier colleagues. To talk about progress in art makes
no sense, there is change but not progress.

26.

Thus, I cannot understand what is being referred to when there is reference to critical thinking in art. In
what sense can a painting be right or wrong? Anyone can have views about a painting and engage in
art discussions. Non-scientists can thrill to scientific ideas but to make meaningful comments about
them, and I exclude their application to technology, one actually has to have detailed knowledge;
science needs a much greater, and quite different, intellectual effort.

27.

It is very rare for referees to recommend acceptance without changes. This can be a complex procedure
but in general authors are grateful for the careful reading and criticism of their paper. Even so we reject
about half of all papers we receive. Paintings, however, are neither revised nor can be shown to be
wrong.
 28.

The idea of creativity makes scientists want to be thought of as artists and vice versa and there may
well be something similar in all human creativity, but that it is particularly similar in scientists and
artists is without foundation. The similarity between art and science is even less than that between
billiards and rugby, both of which at least use a ball.

29.

It seems just poetic licence to suggest that this picture did much to convince European scientists that
the great mystery of life might be explained in terms of electrochemical forces. (Although it may be
that Jan Vermeer did indeed discover that more compelling illusions can be achieved through a kind of
optical illusion that makes special use of the perceptual system inside our brains, rather than through
the details that reach our eyes).

30.

Art does not explain, but it broadens our experience in ways that are not clearly understood. I value it
in its own terms, but it has nothing to do with understanding how the world works. To pretend that it
does is to trivialise science and do nothing for art. We should stop pretending that the two disciplines
are similar, and instead rejoice in the very different ways that they enrich our culture..

The missing paragraphs:

A. What are the criteria used by the director of a gallery and his or her advisers when selecting for
exhibition? Is he or she like the editor of a science journal? No, for there is nothing in art like the peer
review so fundamental to science; there are no art critics, just art writers. As the editor of a scientific
journal, it is extremely rare that my personal view determines whether or not a paper gets published.
My role is to choose a good editorial board and to know to whom the papers to be reviewed should be
sent.
B. Bringing visual artists and scientists together merely makes them feel elevated: it is not a scientific
experience. Although it must be said that science has had a strong influence on certain artists - in the
efforts to imitate nature and thus to develop perspective or in the area of new technologies - art has
contributed virtually nothing to science.

C. Then of the hundreds of thousands of papers published each year, few have a lifetime of more than
a few years. Most disappear with little if any trace. The original papers, with very rare exceptions, like
those of Einstein, are never part of scientific culture and they are not for sale. Science, unlike art, is not
entertainment.

D. What intrigued me at the opening was how the exhibits were chosen. There is less of a problem
with well established artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon or Matisse. It is the very modern
works that present the problem.

E. How different from this are all the arts. No Shakespeare - no Hamlet; no Picasso - no Guernica.
Moreover a work of art is capable of many interpretations and has moral content. There is but one
correct scientific explanation for any set of observations and reliable scientific understanding has no
moral or ethical content; that is to say that the scientist does not allow his own reactions to come into
play.

F. The Oxford University art historian Martin Kemp takes a very different view from mine here. He
claims that during the 'Scientific Revolution' some artists were able to play an active role in the dialogue
between seeing and knowing. He gives the fiery emissions of Joseph Wright's volcanoes painted in the
late eighteenth century as an example. Wright's painting of Vesuvius erupting may be dramatic but it
owes nothing to geology.

G. Art is not constrained by reality. It cannot be shown to be wrong. And of all the arts, painting is the
one least related to science as it does not deal with complex ideas or explanations, is the easiest to
appreciate, and the response is often an emotional one. Ideas in the visual arts come from art critics and
historians, not the works themselves.
H. Science is about understanding how the world works, there being only one right description of any
observed phenomenon. Unlike the arts it is a collective endeavour in which the individual is ultimately
irrelevant - geniuses merely speed up discovery.

Your answers
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

TEST 3

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

Rainmaker with his Head in the Clouds

Critics dismissed Craeme Mather' s attempts to make clouds rain. But now recent experiments appear
to have vindicated him. Anjana Ahuya reports.

Dr. Craeme Mather lived his life with his head in the clouds, as a documentary film to be shown this
week shows. Against the advice of almost everybody else in the meteorological community, the
Canadian scientist devoted his professional life to trying to make clouds rain.

119.

Before Dr. Mather became involved, the science of weather modification had already claimed many
reputations. The idea that clouds could be manipulated first circulated in the 1940s, and efforts gathered
pace soon after the Second World War.

120.
However, the entire discipline fell into disrepute when commercial companies hijacked the idea, took
it around the world, and then failed to deliver on their promises. Cloud-seeding, as the process was
known, became the preserve of crackpots and charlatans.

121.

Scientists theorized that if they could inject the cloud with similarly shaped crystals, these imposter
crystals would also act as frames around which droplets would clump. The cloud would then be tricked
into raining. Silver iodide, whose crystals resemble those of ice, seemed the best bet. Sadly, none of
the experiments, including Dr. Mather's, which had been going for more than five years, seemed to
work. Dr. Mather was about to admit defeat when serendipity intervened.

122.

Dr. Mather was convinced that something that the place was spewing into the atmosphere was
encouraging the downpour. Subsequent experiments confirmed that hygroscopic salts pouring into the
sky from them were responsible. Hygroscopic salts attract water - once in the atmosphere, the particles
act as magnets around which raindrops can form.

123.

He was wary; Dr. Mather was known to be a smooth-talking salesman. 'He was charming and
charismatic, and many scientists don't trust that; he says. 'He was also not well-published because he
had been working in the commercial sector. Overall, he was regarded as a maverick. On that occasion,
he presented results that I was convinced were impossible. Yet the statistical evidence was
overwhelming, which I couldn't understand.

124.
'If those findings can be reproduced there, it will be the most exciting thing to have happened in the
field for 20 years. It will be remarkable because some of the results are not scientifically explainable.’
He adds, however, that scientists must exercise caution because cloud-seeding is still mired in
controversy. He also points out that, with water being such a precious resource, success will push the
research into the political arena.

125.

Dr. Cooper says: 'With the paper mill, he saw something that other people wouldn't have seen. I am
still uncomfortable with his idea because it throws up major puzzles in cloud physics. But if Dr. Mather
was right, it will demonstrate that humans can change clouds in ways that were once thought
impossible.'

A Dr. Mather refused to be daunted by this image. After all, the principle seemed perfectly plausible.
Water droplets are swept up to the top of the clouds on updrafts, where they become supercooled (i.e.,
although the temperature is below freezing, the water remains liquid). When a supercooled droplet
collides with an ice crystal, it freezes on contact and sticks. Successive collisions cause each ice crystal
to accumulate more water droplets; the crystals grow until they become too heavy to remain suspended
in the atmosphere. As the crystals fall through the cloud, they become raindrops. The ice crystals,
therefore, act as frames to 'grow' raindrops.

B Dr. Mather, unfortunately, will not be involved in the debate about such matters. He died aged 63,
shortly before the documentary was completed. It will ensure that this smooth-talking maverick is given
the recognition he deserves.

C He and a colleague decided to collect a last batch of data when they flew into a tiny but ferocious
storm. That storm, Dr. Mather says in the film, changed his life. Huge droplets were spattering on the
tiny plane's windscreen. No such storm had been forecast. Back on the ground, they discovered the
storm was located directly above a paper mill.

D A trial in Mexico has been running for two years, and the signs are promising. 'We were sufficiently
encouraged in the first year to continue the seeding research. But the results are preliminary because
we have only a very small sample of clouds at the moment. We need to work over two more summers
to reach a proper conclusion.
E He arranged to fly to South Africa 'with the full intention of explaining what was wrong with the
experiment'. Instead, he came back convinced that Dr. Mather was on to something. He is now running
two experiments, one in Arizona and one in northern Mexico to try to verify the South African results.
The experiments use potassium chloride, which is similar to table salt (sodium chloride) and, it is
claimed, non-polluting.

F The scientific community remained sniffy in the face of this apparent proof. Foremost among the
skeptics was Dr. William Cooper, of the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR). Dr. Cooper, regarded as one of the world's finest cloud scientists, saw Dr. Mather present his
astonishing claims at a cloud physics conference in Montreal.

G They involved weather experts firing rockets into clouds to stop them from producing hail, which
damages crops. The clouds, it was hoped, would dissolve into a harmless shower.

H The desire to do so led him to set up a project in South Africa, which was ultimately to convince
him that it was possible. As the program reveals, experiments around the world appear to prove his
faith was justified.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 4
In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 24-30, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE
extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding
numbered box provided.

Mathematical Games
The majority of video games designed to provide mathematics learning fail educationally for one
of two reasons. One of these is that the designers know how to design and create video games but
know little about mathematics education (in particular, how people learn mathematics) and in
many cases don't seem to know what maths really is. The second is that they have a reasonable
sense of mathematics and have some familiarity with the basic principles of mathematics
education, but do not have sufficient education in video game design.
 To create an engaging game that also supports good mathematics learning requires a great deal
more: a complete understanding of what mathematics is, how and why people learn and do
mathematics, how to get and keep them engaged in their learning and how to represent the
mathematics on the platform on which the game will be played. That too demands much more than
just superficial knowledge.

Following the tradition of textbook publishing, that figure does not include any payment to the
authors who essentially create the entire pedagogic framework and content. Nor does it take into
account the money required for the fees payable to the project's academic advisory board, without
whom the project is unlikely to succeed.

Though this term is specific to this context, its concept has been well known in maths education
circles for over twenty years and is recognised as the biggest obstacle to practical mastery of
middle school mathematics. To understand the precise implication of what the term entails and
appreciate how pervasive it is, it is necessary to examine the role symbolic expressions play in
mathematics.

But just how essential are those symbols? Perhaps this question can best be answered through a
comparison with music. Until the invention of recording devices, symbolic musical notation was
the only way to store and distribute music, yet no one ever confuses music with a musical score.
In the same way as music is created and enjoyed within the mind, mathematics is created and
carried out in the mind. At its heart, mathematics is a mental activity and one that throughout
human history has proved to be highly beneficial to life and society.
So, why is it that many people believe mathematics itself is symbolic manipulation? And if the
answer is that it results from our classroom experiences, why is mathematics taught that way? The
answer to that second question is that mathematics is taught symbolically because for many
centuries symbolic representation has been the most effective way to record mathematics and pass
on mathematical knowledge to others.

While it is true to say that people sometimes scribble down symbols when they do everyday maths
in a real-life context, for the most part, what they write down are the facts needed to start with,
perhaps the intermediate results along the way and, if they get far enough, the final answer at the
end. But the actual mathematical part is primarily a thinking process as even when people are
asked to 'show all their work', the collection of symbolic expressions they write down is not
necessarily the same as the process that goes on in their minds when they do the maths correctly.
In fact, people can become highly skilled at doing mental mathematics and yet be hopeless at its
symbolic representations.
 It is simply not the case that ordinary people cannot do everyday maths. Rather, they cannot do
symbolic everyday maths. From this observation, it can be concluded that the symbol barrier is
huge and pervasive. For the entire history of organised mathematics instruction, where there has
been no alternative to using static, symbolic expressions on flat surfaces to store and distribute
mathematical knowledge, that barrier has prevented millions of people from becoming proficient
in a cognitive skill set on a par in importance with the ability to read and write.

A. So, given the effort and expense to make a maths game, is it worth pursuing? From an educational
perspective, it certainly is. That being said, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of maths
video games on the market essentially capitalise on just one educationally important aspect of
video games - their power to fully engage players in a single activity for long periods of time. Only
a fraction of them take advantage of another educationally powerful feature of the medium - their
ability to overcome the 'symbol barrier'.

B. With routine mathematics, the symbolic barrier emerges. In their 1993 book Street Mathematics
and School Mathematics Terezinha Nunes, David William Carraher and Analucia Dias
Schliemann describe research conducted in the street markets of Recife, Brazil. This and other
studies have shown that when people are regularly faced with everyday mathematics in their daily
lives, they master it to an astonishing 98 per cent accuracy. Yet when faced with the very same
problems (from a mathematical perspective) presented in the traditional symbols, their
performance drops to a mere 35 to 40 per cent accuracy.

C. In both these subjects, the symbols are merely static representations on a flat surface of dynamic
mental processes. Just as the trained musician can look at a musical score and hear the music come
alive in his or her head, the trained mathematician can look at a page of symbolic mathematics and
have that mathematics come alive in the mind.

D. In other words, designing and building a good mathematics educational video game, whether it is
a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) or a single smartphone app, requires a team of
 experts from several different disciplines. That means it takes a lot of time and a substantial
budget. For a simple-looking, casual game that runs on an iPad, it can take about nine months from
start to finish and cost upwards of a quarter of a million.

E. Yet tens of thousands of years of evolution have produced the most adaptive device on the planet:
the human brain. Trying to design a computer system to adapt to human cognitive activity is like
trying to build a cart that will draw a horse. It can be done, but it will not work nearly as well as
building a cart that a horse can pull.

F. To build a successful video game requires an understanding, at a deep level, of what constitutes a
game, how and why people play games, what holds their attention, and how they interact with the
different platforms on which the game will be played. That is a lot of deep knowledge.

G. By and large, the public identifies doing maths with writing symbols, often obscure symbols. Why
do people readily make this identification? A large part of the explanation is that much of the time
they spent in the school mathematics classroom was devoted to the development of correct
symbolic manipulation skills, and symbol-filled books are the standard way to store and distribute
mathematical knowledge. So we have become used to the fact that mathematics is presented by
way of symbolic expressions.

H. Still, given the comparison with music, is it possible to break free of that historical legacy? It
would appear that it is, as long as a distinction is made between the advanced mathematics used
by scientists and engineers and the kind of maths important to ordinary people. Advanced
mathematics, on the other hand, is intrinsically symbolic, whereas everyday maths is not and such
activities as counting, proportional reasoning and problem solving can be done mentally.

Your answers
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

TEST 5
In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

GANGS: the new tribes

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ a class of fresh-faced 12-year-olds were asked upon
commencing secondary school. Their new English teacher – Mrs Marcus – asked this question every
year and it seemed to fire the imagination of every child. Usually, there was a smattering of professions,
vocations and trades, along with some interesting surprises. This lot did not disappoint.

119.

It turns out they were a highly varied lot: doctor, nurse, lawyer, judge, electrician, archaeologist,
businesswoman, vet, police officer, hairdresser, actor, shop assistant. There was trouble containing their
enthusiasm, with some throwing out more than one idea. A few had non-specific ambitions, ‘I don’t
know. I want to travel’, and ‘ I just want to go to university.’ All of them had opinions, some stronger
than others, but opinions nonetheless.

120.

I’m particularly interested in the differences between that generation and the current one. ‘Hopes and
dreams,’ she replies immediately. ‘Whether your classmates achieved those things or not is irrelevant.
The important thing is you had ideas about your future; you had aspirations. When I have asked that
question in recent years, instead of setting their sights on becoming a scientist, a lawyer or an artist, the
best some children could think of was going on the dole, being famous, or being the boss of a gang,’
she says.

121.

It is a vicious circle that becomes increasingly difficult to break. It was crucial for my peers and me
that we knew people who worked and we could make decisions about our ambitions based on some
knowledge. We had the benefit of seeing our parents, relatives, and neighbors going to work, returning
from work, talking about their jobs, or their time at university. These experiences informed our ideas,
ambitions and, let’s face it, our expectations, too. We wouldn’t have dreamt of alternative. After all,
work and study were our means to get ahead and make our way in life.

122.

This lies at the very core of a gang’s appeal. The aimlessness of some youths’ experience is replaced
by the rigid system of rules, rituals, and codes of behavior that members follow, and which gives them
a purpose and adds much – needed structure to their lives. In many cases, the gang becomes a surrogate
family, providing security, camaraderie and a sense of belonging. These powerful inducements exert a
strange power over vulnerable teenagers.

123.

I ask Margaret what it is that can drive such a change. ‘I’ve known many young boys who have turned
over a new leaf,’ she says. ‘The key is intervention at the grassroots level. Community programs that
keep kids off the streets and involve them in pro-social activities are great deterrents. Strong after-
school programs that meet children’s needs for supervision are also successful in reducing attraction to
gang-related activities. These cost money, though, and authorities are often not willing to spend,’ she
explains, ‘and sadly, some kids fall through the cracks.’

124.

What chance for rehabilitation do they have, I wonder, when they cling to their gangs even in these
circumstances? Admittedly, the need for survival plays a role since those in prison rely on their fellow
gang members for protection. After all, prison is no picnic and is possibly more dangerous in an
environment than the outside world. But even in here, there is hope.

125.
‘You can’t make anyone succeed, but you can help them to see that success in life is possible outside
of the narrow confines of the gang,’ says Margaret. ‘If we give young people opportunities to bring
about a change in their circumstances, they can build a happy future.’ Let’s hope that the next time
Margaret asks 'the questions', there will be some scientists, entrepreneurs, and plumbers in the group.

A. Success, however, can be measured in a myriad of ways, and for those without traditional role
models, gang culture becomes increasingly alluring as a way to make something of themselves.
‘They’re not inherently bad kids,’ says Marcus, ‘they just have no direction and no one to look up to.
Were they to attach value to work and education, their whole outlook on life would change and they
wouldn’t need what gang membership provides.’

B. Though there is no conclusive evidence, many critics of popular media believe exposure to violent
films and song lyrics, particularly rap music, has a negative influence; glamorizing gang life and
encouraging at-risk youths to join gangs or to participate in gang-related crime as a means of gaining a
sense of belonging and empowerment.

C. Those who do join a gang inevitably end up in a downward spiral, losing any moral foundation they
had and hurtling headlong into a life of violence and crime. And yet, even when they are placed in
juvenile detention centers, or worse – in adult prisons – some maintain their allegiance to the gang and
look upon their membership as a badge of honor; a mark of success, not failure.

D. Thick and fast came the replies. ‘Teacher,’ said a bespectacled girl in the front row. Mrs Marcus
smiled to herself. The prospective teachers always sat as close as possible to the board, eager and
serious. ‘Football player!’ shouted a tall lad from the back, raising his arms in victory as though he’d
just scored a winning goal against Argentina at the World Cup. Mrs Marcus knew he’d be a live wire
in class. ‘Prime Minister’, said another, garnering a round of applause as well as ridicule from his
classmates.

E. How has it come to this? A recent report has found that children in some areas of the country have
so little contact with working people that the concept of employment is almost foreign. They live in the
so-called ‘welfare ghettos’ where more than half of the working-age population depends on out-of-
work benefits. In many families, unemployment is intergenerational with grandparents and parents
living on the dole.

F. Thankfully, in many cases the lure is temporary. It becomes nothing more than a phase that plays to
their fantasies of rebellion and desire for high drama, in part fueled by pop culture through music and
films that glamorize thug life. In time, these wannabe gangsters find other interests and reject the values
of the gang.
G. Fast forward twenty years and Mrs Margaret Marcus is now teaching at an inner-city school in a
large metropolis. Hoping to get some insight from this forty-year veteran of the education system, I’m
interviewing her about the challenges faced by young people today. ‘So you became a journalist instead
of a teacher,’ she says with a twinkle in her eye. Yes, I was that child in the specs long ago. Before
getting down to business, we reminisce for a few moments about my classmates.

H. There are many organizations that are working positively with young people in gangs, both inside
and outside of detention, and helping them through some very difficult times in their lives. With this
help, they can stop their slide into crime and violence, and make the tough transition of evolving into
productive, responsible and law-abiding members of society.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 6
You are going to read a magazine article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the
article. Choose from the paragraphs A - H the one which fits each gap (24 - 30). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

SOCIAL CHANGE DOWN IN BLACK AND WHITE

We are increasingly being led to believe that advances in communications technology have
brought us to the threshold of the paperless society, one in which the book may be seen as a
museum piece. However, for many of us, our progress down this path may involve much dragging
of heels..

As soon as people discovered the secrets of paper-making, the communication of ideas and values
really took off in an unprecedented way. Scientific theories could be explained to a wider audience,
knowledge could be more readily accumulated by scholars, and literature, which had relied on oral
tradition, gained a new lease of life in an ever- expanding role.
 Within a thousand years, China well outstripped Europe in wealth. This was not only achieved
through paper-making, but also by virtue of other Chinese scientific achievements like gunpowder
and developments in astronomy and navigation, which helped the Chinese become the leading
military and trading power.

Such was the importance of paper to the wealth and power of the Chinese emperors that they were
determined to keep the process of paper-making a closely guarded secret. But, as with other profitable
knowledge, it was just a matter of time before the secret became known, and other countries were
then empowered to flourish through the spread of knowledge and ideas that paper could facilitate.

The principles of printing had, in fact, been known in China for several hundred years before the
European 'invention' of printing. The Chinese had been working with clay, but found that this wore
down, so printers constantly had to make new type. From there, they went on to wooden type. In fact,
they did proceed to metal type, but were at a
 disadvantage, due to the complexity of their language, which required many different types for
the characters.

It did not take long for this invention to catch on as the modern means to spread knowledge and
ideas. By the end of the fifteenth century there were sixty paper mills in Germany to satisfy the
demands of the printing presses and printing had been introduced to other European countries.

As a result, books and knowledge were more accessible to the less well off and, accordingly, the
importance of literacy was more widely recognised. This became the impetus for a virtuous cycle:
with the availability of cheaper books, education and literacy grew, and with the increase in the
literate population there was a further rise in the demand for books.

None of the social or intellectual revolutions of the past few hundred years would have taken place
with such rapid success had it not been for paper. Likewise, paper and cheap printed material are
responsible for the increasing growth of education and the ascendancy of democratic principles. It
is therefore no exaggeration to state that paper has played a major role in shaping the modern
world.

A. No sooner did this cultural advantage find its way into western hands than its exploitation began
to be realised. The first paper mill in Germany was set up towards the end of the fourteenth century,
and it didn't take long for the church to appreciate the potential role of paper in the expansion of
its activities and teaching. From producing paper, it didn't take long for Europeans to make the
next great leap that would open the floodgates to advances in civilisation.
B. The next consequence was the use of paper and printing to fuel revolution and social upheaval.
The availability of cheap printing technology enabled the Protestant Reformation to take off, with
the publication of hundreds of thousands of copies of Martin Luther's writings. Recognising the
power of the printed word, the Catholic church resorted to desperate retaliatory action by attacking
 booksellers and destroying works that they did not approve of.
C. This should come as no surprise. After all, we have had over a thousand years to form a strong
emotional attachment to paper, which has, along with writing and printing, comprised the basis for
the development and progress of society.
D. It was not long afterwards that William Caxton, an English merchant, retired from his business
and went to Germany to learn about printing. He took part in producing the first book to be printed
in English, which was printed on a Flemish press, and he went on, in 1477, to publish the first book
printed in England.
E. However, such inventions and discoveries can not, in themselves, account for the phenomenal
growth of Chinese power and influence. Credit for this progress must go to those tools at the
disposal of the Chinese which enabled them to exploit their discoveries and build on them: writing
paper and another Chinese invention, block printing.
F. The massive surge in the production of books which followed as a result of the change from writing
books by hand to printing them enabled Europe to overtake China as the most advanced
civilisation. Knowledge which had previously been in the hands of the church, rulers and a handful
of scholars soon became more widely available.
G. At the forefront of this great step towards civilisation were the Chinese. Around 105 AD, they
invented paper and, from the time of that crucial achievement, their civilisation developed in leaps
and bounds. With the secret of paper-making in their hands, the Chinese soon had the most
advanced civilisation and China enjoyed hundreds of years of prosperity.
H. This lost knowledge was not only rediscovered when Johannes Gutenberg invented the type mould
in the middle of the fifteenth century, but vastly improved upon. His press used metal type, and
was not only a revolutionary invention, but was also one of the earliest precision instruments. The
letters were of a uniform shape and size and could be locked together in neat, even lines of text. It
was a fairly straightforward matter to set up and print a few pages then rearrange the type and use
it again for other pages.

TEST 7

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

The Rise of Silicon Valley

On January 11, 1971, an article was published in the trade newspaper Electronic News about the
companies involved in the semiconductor and computer industries in Santa Clara Valley at the southern
end of San Francisco Bay Area in California, USA. The article was entitled 'Silicon Valley USA', a
reference to the fact that silicon is the most important substance used in commercial semiconductors
and their applications. The name stuck, and in light of the commercial success of the companies there,
'Silicon Valley' is now used as a metonym for the high-tech sector.

119.

One such new business was the one founded by two graduates of the nearby Stanford University called
Bill Hewlett and David Packard. In 1938 the pair had $538, and along with Dave's wife Lucile, decided
to rent a property at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto. For $45 a month they got a ground floor apartment
for Dave and Lucile, a garden shed where Bill slept, and a garage from which to run the business, a
garage which has more recently been dubbed 'The birthplace of Silicon Valley'.

120.

As time passed, the 200A was improved and developed, resulting in the 200B. Eight of these improved
oscillators were bought by The Walt Disney Company, for use in testing and certifying the Fantasound
surround-sound systems installed in cinemas for the 1940 movie Fantasia. Success was beginning to
come.

121.

Although they are often considered to be the symbolic founders of Silicon Valley, they did not deal in
semiconductor devices until the 1960s. From then onwards, the semiconductor devices they made were
mostly intended for internal use, for such products as measuring instruments and calculators. Today,
however, Hewlett-Packard is the largest manufacturer of personal computers in the world.

122.
Terman also had a more direct influence through his role at Stanford University. The University had
been established in 1891 in the north-western part of the Santa Clara Valley, and from the start, its
leaders aimed to support the local region. The result was that the University played an important part
in establishing and developing local businesses, and indeed its alumni went on to found some major
companies, not just Hewlett-Packard, but such household names as Yahoo! and Google.

123.

Terman's proposal was taken up by Stanford University, and in 1951 Stanford Industrial Park was
created. The first tenant in the Park was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s
to make components for military radars. Hewlett-Packard moved in two years later. The Park still
flourishes to this day, although it is now known as Stanford Research Park. Current tenants include
Eastman Kodak, General Electric and Lockheed Corporation.

124.

The 1950s were also a time of great development in electronics technology. Most importantly, the
development of the transistor continued. Research scientist William Shockley moved to the Santa Clara
Valley region in 1956, when he formed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. There his research team
started constructing semiconductors from silicon, rather than germanium, as did most other researchers.
The silicon transistors proved to perform much better, and started to be used in radios and the early
computers.

125.

Since the 1970s, however, the most important developments pioneered in Silicon Valley have been in
software and Internet services rather than hardware. So even though Hewlett-Packard remains the
largest producers of computers in the world, the future of Silicon Valley might well lie elsewhere.

A. Throughout their early years, Hewlett and Packard were mentored by one of their university
professors, Frederick Terman. Terman was Stanford University's dean of engineering and provost
during the 1940s and 1950s, and had a positive influence on many of the successful companies in
Silicon Valley. Indeed, his influence was such that he has been dubbed 'the father of Silicon Valley'.
Terman encouraged his students to form their own companies and personally invested in many of them,
and in this way nurtured many highly successful companies, including not just Hewlett-Packard, but
others such as Varian Associates and Litton Industries.

B. Hewlett-Packard was arguably the first company to offer a mass-produced personal computer,
namely the 9100A. For marketing reasons, however, the 9100A was sold as a 'desktop calculator'. It
simply did not resemble what was then considered a 'computer', namely the large machines being sold
by IBM. The 9100A fitted comfortably on a desk, and possessed a small screen and a keyboard. In fact,
it was more like an oversized and over-expensive precursor of a pocket calculator than a modern PC,
since its keyboard lacked letter keys.

C. Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, universities in the United States were
experiencing enormous enrolment demands from the returning military personnel. Terman proposed
launching a scheme which would kill two birds with one stone. The idea was to lease out land owned
by Stanford University to high-technology companies for their offices. This scheme would firstly
finance the University's growth requirements and thereby facilitate a larger student intake, and secondly
provide local employment opportunities for graduating students.

D. The beginnings of Silicon Valley can be traced back to the early twentieth century. At that time,
Santa Clara Valley was known for its orchards which flourished in California's balmy climate. There
were nevertheless a number of experimenters and innovators in such fields as radio, television and
military electronics, and several people were trying to take advantage of any business opportunities that
might arise.

E. It was also in Silicon Valley that other revolutionary electronic components were developed. The
silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor and the microcomputer were all invented by
companies there, as well as such electronic devices as the mouse and the ink-jet printer. Indeed, Silicon
Valley has been the world's most important site of electronic innovation over the past 50 years.

F. In those early years, Hewlett-Packard was a company without a focused direction. They made a
whole range of electronic products, with diverse customers in industry and agriculture. In the 1940s,
their principal products were test equipment, including such devices as voltmeters, oscilloscopes and
thermometers. They aimed to provide better quality products than their competitors, and made a big
effort to make their products more sensitive and accurate than their rivals.

G. Another bond between the University and the local high-technology businesses was established in
1954, with the creation of the Honors Cooperative Program. This programme allowed employees of
the businesses to pursue part-time graduate degrees at the University whilst continuing to work full-
time in their jobs. In this way, key workers in the electronics industry were able to hone their skills and
knowledge, creating the foundation for the development of Silicon Valley.

H. Of the many products Hewlett and Packard worked on, the first financially successful one was a
precision audio oscillator, a device for testing sound equipment. This product, the 200A, featured the
innovative use of a small light bulb as a temperature-dependent resistor in a critical section of the
circuit, which allowed them to sell it for $54.40, only a quarter of the price of their competitors' audio
oscillators.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 8

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the passage
and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph
which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered box provided.

HELP GUIDE US THROUGH THE UNIVERSE

Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, launches this year's Young Science Writer competition

If you ask scientists what they're doing, the answer won't be 'Finding the origin of the universe', 'Seeking
the cure for cancer' or suchlike. It will involve something very specialised, a small piece of the jigsaw
that builds up the big picture.

119.

So, unless they are cranks or geniuses, scientists don't shoot directly for a grand goal - they focus on
bite-sized problems that seem timely and tractable. But this strategy (though prudent) carries an
occupational risk: they may forget they're wearing blinkers and fail to see their own work in its proper
perspective.
 120.

I would personally derive far less satisfaction from my research if it interested only a few other
academics. But presenting one's work to non-specialists isn't easy. We scientists often do it badly,
although the experience helps us to see our work in a broader context. Journalists can do it better, and
their efforts can put a key discovery in perspective, converting an arcane paper published in an obscure
journal into a tale that can inspire others.

121.

On such occasions, people often raise general concerns about the way science is going and the impact
it may have; they wonder whether taxpayers get value for money from the research they support. More
intellectual audiences wonder about the basic nature of science: how objective can we be? And how
creative? Is science genuinely a progressive enterprise? What are its limits and are we anywhere near
them? It is hard to explain, in simple language, even a scientific concept that you understand well. My
own (not always effective) attempts have deepened my respect for science reporters, who have to
assimilate quickly, with a looming deadline, a topic they may be quite unfamiliar with.

122.

It's unusual for science to earn newspaper headlines. Coverage that has to be restricted to crisp
newsworthy breakthroughs in any case distorts the way science develops. Scientific advances are
usually gradual and cumulative, and better suited to feature articles, or documentaries - or even books,
• for which the latent demand is surprisingly strong. For example, millions bought A Brief History of
Time, which caught the public imagination.

123.

Nevertheless, serious hooks do find a ready market. That's the good news for anyone who wants to
enter this competition. But books on pyramidology, visitations by aliens, and suchlike do even better:
a symptom of a fascination with the paranormal and 'New Age' concepts. It is depressing that these are
often featured uncritically in the media, distracting attention from more genuine advances.

124.

Most scientists are quite ordinary, and their lives unremarkable. But occasionally they exemplify the
link between genius and madness; these 'eccentrics' are more enticing biographees.

125.

There seems, gratifyingly, to be no single 'formula' for science writing - many themes are still under-
exploited. Turning out even 700 words seems a daunting task if you're faced with a clean sheet of paper
or a blank screen, but less so if you have done enough reading and interviewing on a subject to become
inspired. For research students who enter the competition, science (and how you do it) is probably more
interesting than personal autobiography. But if, in later life, you become both brilliant and crazy, you
can hope that someone else writes a best-seller about you.

A. However, over-sensational claims are a hazard for them. Some researchers themselves 'hype up'
new discoveries to attract press interest. Maybe it matters little what people believe about Darwinism
or cosmology. But we should be more concerned that misleading or over-confident claims on any topic
of practical import don't gain wide currency. Hopes of miracle cures can be raised; risks can be either
exaggerated, or else glossed over for commercial pressures. Science popularisers perhaps even those
who enter this competition - have to be as skeptical of some scientific claims as journalists routinely
are of politicians.

B. Despite this there's a tendency in recent science waiting to be chatty, laced with gossip and
biographical detail. But are scientists as interesting as their science? The lives of Albert Einstein and
Richard Feyman are of interest, but is that true of the routine practitioner?

C. Two mathematicians have been treated as such in recent books: Paul Erdos, the obsessive itinerant
Hungarian (who described himself as 'a machine for turning coffee into theorems') and John Nash, a
pioneer of game theory, who resurfaced in his sixties, after 30 years of insanity, to receive a Nobel
prize.
D. For example, the American physicist Robert Wilson spent months carrying out meticulous
measurements with a microwave antenna which eventually revealed the 'afterglow of creation' - the
'echo' of the Big Bang with which our universe began. Wilson was one of the rare scientists with the
luck and talent to make a really great discovery, but afterwards he acknowledged that its importance
didn't sink in until he read a 'popular' description of it in the New York Times.

E. More surprising was the commercial success of Sir Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. This
is a fascinating romp through Penrose's eclectic enthusiasms - enjoyable and enlightening. But it was a
surprising best seller, as much of it is heavy going. The sates pitch 'great scientist says mind is more
than a mere machine' was plainly alluring. Many who bought it must have got a nasty surprise when
they opened it.

F. But if they have judged right, it won't be a trivial problem - indeed it will be the most difficult that
they are likely to make progress on. The great zoologist Sir Peter Medawar famously described
scientific work as 'the art of the soluble'. 'Scientists,' he wrote, 'get no credit for failing to solve a
problem beyond their capacities. They earn at best the kindly contempt reserved for utopian politicians.'

G. This may be because, for non-specialists, it is tricky to demarcate well-based ideas from flaky
speculation. But its crucially important not to blur this distinction when writing articles for a general
readership. Otherwise credulous readers may take too much on trust, whereas hard-nosed skeptics may
reject all scientific claims, without appreciating that some have firm empirical support.

H. Such a possibility is one reason why this competition to encourage young people to take up science
writing is so important and why I am helping to launch it today. Another is that popular science writing
can address wider issues. When I give talks about astronomy and cosmology, the questions that interest
people most are the truly `fundamental' ones that I can't answer: 'Is there life in space?', Is the universe
infinite?' or 'Why didn't the Big Bang happen sooner?'

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 9

You are going to read a magazine article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the
article. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (24 - 30). There is one
extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

THE UNKNOWN AMAZON

The Amazonian Rainforest is one of the most significant and largely intact ecosystems left on
Earth. It is often characterised as an essentially untouched natural environment in which the human
presence is merely incidental. However, the vast reaches of the rainforest have been lived in and
shaped by human hands for thousands of years. The Amazon Basin boasts the largest river system
on Earth and harbours an ecosystem of unrivalled complexity.
Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied him, wrote a memorable account of their adventures,
including mention of the great signal drums that sounded from village to village far in advance of
their arrival, warning of the incursion by bearded and helmeted strangers.

Such reports have intrigued anthropologists ever since, for they describe dense populations and
sizeable confederations which, if substantiated, would be entirely at odds with modern stereotypes
of hidden, thinly scattered tribes eking out a precarious existence.

This population collapse and displacement along the principal watercourses has contributed to a
distorted impression of the cultural achievements of tropical forest societies. in the 1950s, North
American investigators argued that the sophisticated archaeological styles they were discovering
on Marajo Island could not have originated in the Amazon Basin itself, but must have been derived
from more advanced cultures in the Andean highlands. They supposed the tropical forest to be a
'counterfeit paradise' incapable of supporting much beyond a simple hunting-and-gathering way
of life. This misnomer has exerted a pervasive influence ever since.

The Amazon Polychrome Tradition appears to have its origins on Marajo Island, where the
Amazon meets the Atlantic, and later spread across much of the Upper Amazon and the coast of
Brazil and the Guianas. Even if all the reasons for this surge in cultural complexity are still not
well understood, we do know that important changes took place then in the social and political
organisation of native Amazonian societies. The style transcends local and regional cultures and
points to the exchange of ideas and technology along the vast riverine network.

More recent archaeological research has focused on a phenomenon barely noticed before:
extensive patches of rich black soils found along the banks and bliiffs of all major rivers in the
Amazon. Some cover an area of many acres and are up to two metres deep. They are thought to
have formed over many centuries as the accumulated byproduct of organic remains left by native
settlements.

Among the most exciting discoveries are funerary urns dating to AD 1400-1700 in caves and rock
shelters along the Maraca River near the mouth of the Amazon. The bones — from men, women
and children — were preserved in individually dedicated vessels. It seems that the sites were
visited regularly over the years and new urns added. The community of ancestors reflects the
kinship ties and lineages of ancient Maraca settlements and their nurturing of links between the
living and the dead.

The future of the Amazon Basin is now hotly debated. Knowledge about the past has a vital role
to play in planning and decision-making for the future. Archaeology points to successful,
sustainable adaptations grounded in practical expertise and born of a familiarity with the
limitations and possibilities of this environment. Its wise management is becoming a matter of
global concern.
A. Secondly, there is a truly impressive linguistic diversity, with several hundred distinct
languages and dialects. This complexity must have evolved over thousands of years and implies
an occupation of the Amazon basin for at least 14,000 years, a figure supported by archaeological
evidence. The rock art in the Amazon Basin may be as old as human occupation itself. Images are
engraved and painted on exposed bedrock near rapids and
waterfalls where fishing is most productive, and in caves and rock shelters close to archaeological
sites.

B. From' the late seventeenth century a succession of naturalists and explorers recorded and
collected many of the everyday objects fashioned from wood and other organic materials that
rarely survive the vicissitudes of climate in the tropical lowlands. Among the first to assemble a
collection was the Portuguese scholar Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Then, from 1820 to 1834 the
Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer amassed an amazing collection of natural history specimens
and cultural objects. Such collections housed in European museums preserve a 'window' into
cultures that were soon to experience irreversible changes brought about by extraneous diseases
and merciless exploitation.
C. There are also, of course, numerous trading links between the different tribes and extended
family groups, though the diversity of languages can, at times, impede the smooth settlement" of
commercial transactions. It should be noted, however, that much of the trading dynamic has been
nurtured through the business education opportunities that have been available to riverside
Amazonians since the days of the Spanish explorers.
D. Taking into account the wider relevance of these connections, Amazonian indigenous groups
can no longer be seen as isolated communities in the depths of the forest or dispersed along rivers.
We still have much to learn about their internal dynamics and social formations, but the rainforest
should no longer be seen as an untouched 'paradise', leaving the way open to informed discussion.
E. He recounts seeing a multitude of settlements along the river: on one day they passed more
than twenty villages in succession, and some of these are said to have stretched for six miles or
more.
F. These soils are usually laden with ancient pottery and are now being studied for clues to the
rise of tropical forest civilization in the Amazon Basin. Local farmers regard the black soils as a
'gift from the past' because of their natural fertility and ability to support a wide range of crops.
G. Two factors have been instrumental in overturning this paradigm. First is a surprisingly
diverse range of pottery styles, not only within the Marajoara Tradition (AD 500-1500) on Marajo
Island at the mouth of the Amazon, but also many hundreds of miles upriver. Excavations in the
furthest reaches of the Upper Amazon in Peru and Ecuador have demonstrated the existence of a
widespread style of painting large urns in
 bold black, red and cream designs that has come to be known as the Polychrome Tradition.
Together with recent research at the mouth of the Amazon, this seems to confirm that a
creative explosion of styles occurred about 2,000 years ago.

H. Early European travellers were awed by their first encounters. In 1531, Francisco Pizarro
overthrew the Inca emperor Atahualpa, and a decade later his younger brother Gonzalo
ventured east from Quito in the Andean highlands. Forging downriver along the Rio Napo,
the expedition soon exhausted its supplies and, at Pizarro's behest, his second- in-command
Francisco de Orellana led a group sent ahead to reconnoitre for food. Eight months later
Orellana emerged at the mouth of the Amazon, having made what would prove to be the first
descent of the length of the river.

TEST 10

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra
paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered
box provided.

Where to next?
Are travelers selfish?

Travel, when you think about it, is largely a selfish pursuit. It’s all about me, me, me. Places I can
go to, people I can meet, things I can see, food I can try, my bucket list, my experiences. Are you
a self-absorbed traveler? Let’s look at some common scenarios, starting with the plight of traveler
seeking to discover something unique.

119.

Your first reaction is to blame the guide book, regardless of the fact that it’s probably the way you
found out about it, too. And it’s true, that book in your hand has a bit to answer for. But that’s a
simplistic notion. In an age of mass tourism, of backpacker grapevines, of internet and travel blogs,
it’s inevitable that what was once a pristine paradise will be seething with tourists before long.

120.
You can direct a little blame at the locals, too. Without their efforts, that which seems to offend
you would not exist. They like the money and they want more – although it’s a bit hard to blame
them for that. If tourist cash spent at beach bars and souvenir shops can ease poverty and raise
living standards it would be selfish to begrudge the locals their chance at a better life.

121.

Honestly, either accept a place as it is, even if it doesn't live up to your expectations or go elsewhere
if the trappings of the progress are too offensive for your sensibilities. Don’t blame the guide
books, the internet, the Trip Advisor. Don’t blame your fellow tourists. And definitely don’t blame
the locals for trying to improve their lives – that would be the height of selfishness.

122.

They say money makes the world go round. So how do you spend your hard-earned cash on
holiday? Do you shop locally? If you stay, eat and shop in places owned by locals, your money
will stay in the community and help generate jobs. Foreign-owned resorts or hotel chains may
offer a higher level of comfort and extra facilities, but very little of what you pay actually trickles
down into the local economy. If there’s a beach nearby, do you really need a swimming pool?

123.

And last but not least where money’s concerned, bargain fairly. Saving an extra dollar on that T-
shirt or souvenir will hardly make a dent in your budget, but it can make a huge difference to the
seller. Once, I was disgusted to witness a shameful exchange in which a well-fed foreigner haggled
hard to get a novelty toy for less than half price. The saving? Fifty measly cents. Adding insults to
injury, he boasted about it to his companions. He felt great because he’d put one over on the locals.
Don’t be that person!

124.
People say there’s something about lending a hand that lifts voluntourism above the average travel
experience. But I think there's still an element of selfishness even to the noble volunteers who help
build homes or teach art to children. You do these things because it downsizes to all this goodwill,
however, is that voluntourism is actually quite expensive. Most companies that organize volunteer
trips will charge you plenty for the experience – often far more than it would cost you to just visit
those countries on your own.

125.

Well, that’s it. Some of you will disagree with my views, but I’m up for a good debate. Are you a
selfish traveler?

A. Maybe you’re not the kind of travelers who thinks hell is other people. Maybe you’re happy to
discover and share the world with others. That’s commendable. But while you’re roaming the
planet, think about your personal impact on the people and the places around you. Are you
contributing in positive ways that can be of benefit to others, or are you exacerbating problems?
Are you causing harm to satisfy selfish needs?

B. You get to an exotic destination expecting to find an untouched and unspoiled paradise, a
secluded fantasyland just for you, far from the well-worn tourist path….and the place is crawling
with other travelers. There are loud and obnoxious backpackers, huge speakers thumping out the
most awful dance music, and tour buses spewing their human cargo.

C. One last thing before I get off my soapbox: voluntourism. It’s a novel concept, and, to those
whose idea of travel is a secluded resort and a day spa, a somewhat frightening one. The idea is
simple: as a traveler from the first world, you’re usually in a far more privileged position than
those who live in the countries you’re visiting. But, rather than just comfort yourself with the
knowledge that your money is helping their economy, why not do something tangible to help out,
even for just a few days?

D. There is something imperialistic about not allowing – or wanting – less developed countries to
develop along the lines of our own cultures. After a recent trip to Nepal, a member of our group
was complaining about locals in a village, and how the place was spoilt because there was an
internet café. I couldn’t believe in my ears. Why can’t these Nepalese people enjoy the web if they
so choose?

E. Stay calm and don’t get angry if you think you’ve been charged a bit more for your transport,
hotel or food. Perhaps it’s just an honest mistake. Try to point out the discrepancy in a polite and
respectful way, and don’t accuse anyone of dishonesty. Yes, it’s your hard-earned cash, but don’t
assume that people want to rob you of it just because they have less.

F. Be careful about what you’re buying, too. In countries with lax environmental regulations, or
where authorities turn a blind eye to illegal trade, it’s not difficult to find products made from
endangered species such as shell, coral and certain woods. It never fails to shock me when I hear
of anyone buying ivory products, like carving or jewellery. And then there’s medicine made from
parts of endangered animals. Don’t even think about it! The tiger population in Asia has been
drastically reduced, and for what? Some crackpot cure that doesn’t work.

G. Isn’t this concept of an exclusive paradise selfish? Not only that, but the arrogance implicit in
it is astonishing too. Without wishing to state the obvious, the second you decide to go to a place
because it is paradise, you are part of the problem. The blaring speakers, international sport on big
screen TVs, karaoke, fish and chips – it’s all there because it’s what the tourists want.

H. Yes, that’s right – you pay the organization to go and work for free. The money is supposed to
go into the community, but often, shady operators pocket the profits. As if that wasn’t bad enough
volunteers could be taking jobs from locals. Think about it. If there’s free labor, i.e. you, why
would anyone employ a local? That’s probably what I find most disturbing about the whole
concept. It’s not ethical or responsible, and in my humble opinion, best avoided.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 11

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 24-30, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE
extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding
numbered box provided.

Non-Verbal communication

Sociological research points to the theory that certain ways of positioning or moving the body have
a direct correlation with how one is perceived. People emit an aura of strength or power dependent
on posture, gestures and eye movement. Quick, enthusiastic, meaningful movements and gestures
suggest a dynamic, alert person. People who look at, and maintain eye contact with their audience
while conversing with them exude confidence and fearlessness.
 24.

Being conscious of one's posture and gestures when sitting is also conducive to creating the right
impression on the beholder. When one wishes to appear self-assured and knowledgeable in an
important interpersonal situation where sitting is required, a high, straight-backed chair should be
chosen when possible. Placing and clasping the hands behind the head, with elbows stretched to
the sides, adds to the impression of comfortable assertiveness. It also keeps the hands under control
and out of danger of unwanted fidgeting.
25.

The appropriate placing of the hands depends on the situation. When one is in an upright position,
standing face to face with another person, the palms of the hands should not be evident. Hands
open in a palm-revealing gesture can connote a begging or submissive attitude,
26.

Research shows that people in business have adopted a standard routine. Many professionals
assume a hand-to-chin position when seated and when engaged in discussion, they will sit erectly
in their chair with one leg crossed casually over the other, seemingly calm and cool. The moment
the discussion begins to take on a more serious note, the professional will uncross the legs, place
both feet squarely on the floor and lean forward to indicate assertiveness and strength. It does not
do, though, to be too defensive.
27.

Staring or glaring eyes flash "threat or warning" to both humans and animals, How often have we
observed a dog with hackles raised, staring down an opponent? Just as beasts send signals of
dominance in this fashion, so do humans. The eyes can communicate other emotions as well. Eyes
that blink rapidly and shift from side to side give the illusion of nervousness or untrustworthiness.
28.
In some situations, staring, as opposed to maintaining eye contact, can have a negative effect. In
addition to being regarded as rude, staring et someone can indeed make them back down or
surrender. Adversely, it could antagonise them into accepting the suggested challenge.
29.

This phenomenon proves to be even more evident when a person takes on the role of listener. In
almost all social scenarios, people demonstrate a heightened sense of attentiveness when a
perceived person of power speaks. Whether one is discussing a teacher in a classroom or a
company president in the boardroom, all eyes seem to be riveted on the sage, advice-giving, more
dominant speaker.
30.

It is said that we form impressions of people within the first thirty seconds of meeting them. Within
this time period, the beholder is strongly influenced by a person's stance, gestures and physical
actions. When someone is aware of this, they are far more prepared to consciously use the tools of
impression management to control the overall impression they make on those around them.

The missing paragraphs

A. In the instances where a speaker wishes to present and reinforce an impression of honesty and
powerfulness on his audience, body language may speak more loudly and more effectively than
the actual spoken words.

B. Just as staring can be offensive at times, looking at someone too frequently or for too long a
duration can also suggest something negative; namely submissiveness. With regard to the higher
primates and humans, both occupy themselves for longer periods of time observing their superiors
as opposed to their inferiors.

C. Just as posture plays a role in impression management, so too do the eyes. The eyes can
communicate a million words without the owner consciously knowing they are doing so. The eyes
are the 'mirror of the soul" and by moving them, or using them in certain ways, diverse messages
can be relayed to an observer.

D. There are times when one's hands seem to have a 'mind of their own'. Unconsciously, one might
tap their fingers on the arms of a chair, fidget with jewellery, or even crack one's knuckles. All of
these actions are very clear signs of boredom, nervousness or inattentiveness.
E. A flatterer is a person who controls his impression management in such a way that the message
being sent is one of a likeable, friendly person. The flatterer's aim is to be seen only in a positive
light and will tell an audience exactly what they want to hear to create this aura.

F. Somebody who is relaxed enough to stand before his audience without any visual signs of stress
exudes self-assuredness and honesty. Even though these people are comfortable in their stance,
they hold themselves erect and avoid looking round-shouldered or hunched over. Being lazy with
one's posture could be indicative of defeat, while standing tall and proud paints a picture of one
who is in charge.

G. It is said that many politicians are very aware of this impression that the eyes can make on an
audience. Many insist that there be no movement in a television studio where they are being taped,
for fear that their eyes may automatically flit to the sudden movement. Obviously, no politician
wants to appear to be lying or feeling uncomfortable about what he is saying during a live taping
of a political debate or speech.

H. When sitting, many people make the mistake of folding their arms across their chests. This
gives the impression of being closed off or inaccessible to the audience. By rights, the hands should
be clasped loosely, with fingers interlaced, and placed in the lap. This gesture indicates an open,
friendly attitude to the audience.

TEST 12

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 24-30, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE
extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding
numbered box provided.

MERGING ART&SCIENCE: A FALSE PREMISE

The current vogue is for believing that art and science should be brought together. This obsession
for showing that art - particularly the visual arts - is similar to science in content and the creative
processes is bemusing. I detect in it an element of social snobbery - artists are envious of scientists
and scientists want to be thought of as artists.

24.
If Watson and Crick had not got the structure of DNA we know that Franklin and Klug would soon
have had it. Indeed simultaneous discovery is a common feature of science. If one could rerun the
history of science and start again it would have a different history but the end results would be the
same: water would be H2O and genes would code for proteins but the names would be different.

25.

Whatever the feelings of the scientist these are absent from the final understanding of a process.
while art is a personal creation and contains the personal views of the artist. And since science is
a communal process a scientist has to be very aware of what is known about the problem being
investigated. There are strict criteria about lack of contradiction and, of course, correspondence
with reality. Science makes progress, we build on the work of our current and earlier colleagues.
To talk about progress in art makes no sense, there is change but not progress.

26.

Thus, I cannot understand what is being referred to when there is reference to critical thinking in
art. In what sense can a painting be right or wrong? Anyone can have views about a painting and
engage in art discussions. Non-scientists can thrill to scientific ideas but to make meaningful
comments about them, and I exclude their application to technology, one actually has to have
detailed knowledge; science needs a much greater, and quite different, intellectual effort.

27.

It is very rare for referees to recommend acceptance without changes. This can be a complex
procedure but in general authors are grateful for the careful reading and criticism of their paper.
Even so we reject about half of all papers we receive. Paintings, however, are neither revised nor
can be shown to be wrong.

28.
The idea of creativity makes scientists want to be thought of as artists and vice versa and there
may well be something similar in all human creativity, but that it is particularly similar in scientists
and artists is without foundation. The similarity between art and science is even less than that
between billiards and rugby, both of which at least use a ball.

29.

It seems just poetic licence to suggest that this picture did much to convince European scientists
that the great mystery of life might be explained in terms of electrochemical forces. (Although it
may be that Jan Vermeer did indeed discover that more compelling illusions can be achieved
through a kind of optical illusion that makes special use of the perceptual system inside our brains,
rather than through the details that reach our eyes).

30.

Art does not explain, but it broadens our experience in ways that are not clearly understood. I value
it in its own terms, but it has nothing to do with understanding how the world works. To pretend
that it does is to trivialise science and do nothing for art. We should stop pretending that the two
disciplines are similar, and instead rejoice in the very different ways that they enrich our culture..

The missing paragraphs:

A. What are the criteria used by the director of a gallery and his or her advisers when selecting for
exhibition? Is he or she like the editor of a science journal? No, for there is nothing in art like the
peer review so fundamental to science; there are no art critics, just art writers. As the editor of a
scientific journal, it is extremely rare that my personal view determines whether or not a paper gets
published. My role is to choose a good editorial board and to know to whom the papers to be
reviewed should be sent.
B. Bringing visual artists and scientists together merely makes them feel elevated: it is not a
scientific experience. Although it must be said that science has had a strong influence on certain
artists - in the efforts to imitate nature and thus to develop perspective or in the area of new
technologies - art has contributed virtually nothing to science.

C. Then of the hundreds of thousands of papers published each year, few have a lifetime of more
than a few years. Most disappear with little if any trace. The original papers, with very rare
exceptions, like those of Einstein, are never part of scientific culture and they are not for sale.
Science, unlike art, is not entertainment.

D. What intrigued me at the opening was how the exhibits were chosen. There is less of a problem
with well established artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon or Matisse. It is the very modern
works that present the problem.

E. How different from this are all the arts. No Shakespeare - no Hamlet; no Picasso - no Guernica.
Moreover a work of art is capable of many interpretations and has moral content. There is but one
correct scientific explanation for any set of observations and reliable scientific understanding has
no moral or ethical content; that is to say that the scientist does not allow his own reactions to
come into play.

F. The Oxford University art historian Martin Kemp takes a very different view from mine here.
He claims that during the 'Scientific Revolution' some artists were able to play an active role in the
dialogue between seeing and knowing. He gives the fiery emissions of Joseph Wright's volcanoes
painted in the late eighteenth century as an example. Wright's painting of Vesuvius erupting may
be dramatic but it owes nothing to geology.

G. Art is not constrained by reality. It cannot be shown to be wrong. And of all the arts, painting
is the one least related to science as it does not deal with complex ideas or explanations, is the
easiest to appreciate, and the response is often an emotional one. Ideas in the visual arts come from
art critics and historians, not the works themselves.
H. Science is about understanding how the world works, there being only one right description of
any observed phenomenon. Unlike the arts it is a collective endeavour in which the individual is
ultimately irrelevant - geniuses merely speed up discovery.

Your answers
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

TEST 13

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra
paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered
box provided.

WELCOME TO ECO-CITY
The world has quietly undergone a major shift in balance. According to UN estimates, 2008
marked the first year in history when more than half of the world's population lived in cities. There
are now around 3.4bn human beings stuffed into every available corner of urban space, and more
are set to follow. At a time when humanity has woken up to its responsibility to the environment,
the continuing urban swell presents an immense challenge. In response, cities all over the world
are setting themselves high targets to reduce carbon emissions and produce clean energy. But if
they don't succeed, there is another option: building new eco-cities entirely from scratch.

119.

`Rather than just design a city in the same way we'd done it before, we can focus on how to
minimise the use of resources to show that there is a different way of doing it', says Roger Wood,
associate director at Arup. Wood is one of hundreds of people at Arup, the engineering and
architecture giant, hired by Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation to set out a master plan
for the Dongtan eco-city.

120.
When the first demonstrator phase is complete, Dongtan will be a modest community of 5000. By
2020, that will balloon to 80,000 and in 2050, the 30km2 site will be home to 500,000. Arup says
that every one of those people will be no more than seven minutes' walk from public transport.
Only electric vehicles will be allowed in the city and residents will be discouraged from using even
those because each village is planned so that the need for motorised transport is minimal.

121.

That's a big cornerstone of Arup's design for Dongtan. The aim is that the city will require 66
percent less energy than a conventional development, with wind turbines and solar panels
complementing some 40 percent that comes from biological sources. These include human sewage
and municipal waste, both of which will be controlled for energy recovery and composting.
Meanwhile, a combined heat and power plant will burn waste rice husks.

122.

Work on Dongtan had been scheduled to begin in late 2008 with the first demonstration phase
completed by 2010. Unfortunately, problems resulting from the complicated planning procedures
in China have led to setbacks. Dongtan's rival project in Abu Dhabi has suffered no such hold-ups.
Engineers broke ground on the Masdar eco-city in March 2008. Although it will take a different
approach in terms of design, like Dongtan, the city is planned to be a zero-carbon, uber-efficient
showcase for sustainable living.

123.

In the blistering desert of the Gulf state, where it's almost too hot to venture outdoors for three or
four months of the year, the big question for Masdar is how to keep cool without turning on the
air-conditioning. In this equation, insulation and ventilation suddenly become more important than
the performance of solar panels. To maximise shade, I the city's streets are packed closely together,
with limits of four or five storeys set on the height of most buildings.

124.
The other major design feature for Masdar is that the whole city is raised on a deck. The pedestrian
level will be free of vehicles and much of the noisy maintenance that you see in modern cities.
Cars are banned from Masdar entirely, while an underground network of `podcars' ferries people
around the city.

125.

Given that this concern is legitimate, developers of both cities would do well to incorporate both
a range of housing and jobs to make them inclusive to everyone. This will be difficult, obviously,
but then just about everything is difficult when you're completely reinventing the way we build
and live in a metropolis. And supposing these sustainable and super-efficient cities are successful,
could they even usher in a new world order?

A. The city will be built on a corner of Chongming Island in the mouth of the Yangtze River. It
will be made up of three interlinked, mixed-use villages, built one after the other. Each will
combine homes, businesses and recreation, and a bridge and tunnel link will connect the population
with Shanghai on the mainland.

B. The skin of each building will be crucial. Thick concrete would only soak up heat and release
it slowly, so instead engineers will use thin walls that react quickly to the sun. A thin metal layer
on the outside will help to reflect heat and stop it from penetrating the building. Density is also
critical for Masdar. The city is arranged in a definite square with a walled border. Beyond this
perimeter, fields of solar panels, a wind farm and a desalination plant will provide clean energy
and water, and act as a barrier to prevent further sprawl.

C. 'If you plan your development so people can live, work and shop very locally, you can quite
significantly reduce the amount of energy that's being used', Wood says. `Then, not only have you
made the situation easier because you've reduced the energy demand, but it also means that
producing it from renewable sources becomes easier because you don't have to produce quite as
much'.

D. Arup's integrated, holistic approach to city planning goes further still. Leftover heat from the
power plant will be channelled to homes and businesses. Buildings can be made of thinner
materials because the electric cars on the road will be quiet, so there's less noise to drown out.
Dongtan will initially see an 83 per cent reduction in waste sent to landfill compared to other cities,
with the aim to reduce that to nothing over time. And more than 60 per cent of the whole site will
be parks and farmland, where food is grown to feed the population.

E. Developers at Masdar and Dongtan are adamant that each city will be somewhere that people
want to live. Critics do not question this but they do, nevertheless, wonder if these cities will be
realistic places for people on a low income. They say that it would be easy for places like these to
become a St Tropez or a Hamptons, where only rich people live.

F. Funded by a 12bn (euro) investment from the government in Abu Dhabi, it has not passed the
attention of many observers that Masdar is being built by one of the world's largest and most
profitable producers of oil. Even so, under the guidance of architects as Foster and Partners, the
city is just as ambitious as its Chinese counterpart and also hinges on being able to run on low
power.

G. Since cars and other petrol-based vehicles are banned from the city, occupants will share a
network of ‘podcars' to get around. The 'personal rapid transit system' will comprise 2500
driverless, electric vehicles that make 150,000 trips a day by following sensors along a track
beneath the pedestrian deck. Up to six passengers will ride in each pod: they just hop in at one of
83 stations around the city and tap in their destination.

H. Incredibly, this is already happening. Two rival developments, one in China and one in the
United Arab Emirates, are progressing in tandem. Work on Masdar, 17km from Abu Dhabi, began
in 2008, while Dongtan, near Shanghai, will eventually be home to half a million people. The aim
for both is to build sustainable, zero-carbon communities that showcase green technology and
demonstrate what smart urban planning can achieve in the 21st century.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

TEST 14

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 24-30, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE
extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding
numbered box provided.

VALUES FOR A GODLESS AGE

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989 so did the plaster cast which had kept the idea
of human rights in limbo. It was now free to evolve in response to the changing conditions of the
late twentieth century.

24.

Of course, in one sense, the quest for universal human rights standards after the Second World
War was an early attempt to communicate across national boundaries, albeit a rather faltering
endeavour, with its claims to universality challenged both in terms of authorship and content. More
recently, a loosening of the reins of the human rights dialogue has ushered in wider debate.

25.

Perhaps the best known of these is Amnesty International, established in 1961. Before Amnesty,
there were very few organizations like it, yet now there are thousands operating all over the world.
Whether campaigning for the protection of the environment or third-world debt relief, any such
organization is engaged in the debate about fundamental human rights. And it is no longer just a
soft sideshow.

26.

The fact that strangers from different countries can communicate with each other through the
worldwide web is having a similar effect in dealing a blow to misinformation. During one recent
major human rights trial over sixty websites sprang up to cover the proceedings, while sales of the
government-controlled newspaper in that country plummeted.

27.
The effect of increased responsibility at this highest level has been to continually extend the
consideration of who is legally liable, directly or indirectly, under international human rights law.
In part, this is an acknowledgement that even individuals need to be held responsible for flagrant
breaches of others ‘rights, whether these are preventing protesters from peacefully demonstrating
or abusing the rights of children.

28..

It has been noted that paradoxically, in such circumstances, it may be in the interests of human
rights organizations to seek to reinforce the legitimacy and authority of the state, within a regulated
global framework.

29.

Part of the new trend in human rights thinking is therefore to include powerful private bodies
within its remit. The International Commission of Jurists has recently explored ways in which
international human rights standards could be directly applied to transnational corporations.

30.

Whatever the way ahead, the lessons of the past must be learnt. Any world view or set of values
which is presented as self-evident is ultimately doomed to failure. The case for human rights
always needs to be made and remade. In a world where globalization too often seems like a
modernized version of old-fashioned cultural imperialism, it is important to query the claim that
human rights are universally accepted.

The missing paragraphs:

A. The problem is that the growth of globalization makes the protection of nation states a pointless
goal in certain circumstances. Transnational corporations with multiple subsidiaries operating in a
number of countries simultaneously wield significant economic and political power and it is often
extremely difficult for the state - both home and host governments - to exercise effective legal
control over them.

B. If the proliferation of pressure groups has raised the profile of the human rights debate, satellite
television has reinforced much of the content of their campaigns. The fact that from our armchairs
we can all see live what is happening to others around the world has had an enormous impact on
the way the struggle for human rights is viewed. It would not be remotely believable to plead
ignorance nowadays, for 24-hour news coverage from the world's hotspots reaches us all.

C. This is, after all, a uniquely propitious time, as the values and language of human rights are
becoming familiar to more and more people, who judge the merits or otherwise of political and
economic decisions increasingly in human rights terms. Arguments seem fresh and appealing in
many quarters where once they sounded weak and stale.

D. On a global scale, it is not strong states that are the problem here but weak ones, as they fail to
protect their citizens from private power - whether it is paramilitaries committing murder and
torture or transnational corporations spreading contamination and pollution.

E. One of the most significant of these is what has come to be called 'globalization', the collapsing
of national boundaries in economic, political and cultural life. From the expanding role of the
world's financial markets and the spread of transnational corporations to the revolution in
communications and information technology, more and more areas of people's lives are affected
by regional, international or transnational developments, whether they are aware of this or not.

F. Not only must states not infringe rights, and enforce those rights which fall within their direct
sphere (like providing a criminal justice system or holding fair elections), but they also have
'positive obligations' to uphold rights enshrined in human rights treaties, even when it is private
parties which have violated them.

G. The results of its investigations were published in 1999 in a unique pamphlet on Globalization,
Human Rights and the Rule of Law. The issue to be faced is whether to treat these and other
corporations as 'large para-state entities to be held accountable under the same sort of regime as
states', or whether to look for different approaches to accountability 'that are promulgated by
consumer groups and the corporations themselves.'

H. No longer the preserve of representatives of nation states meeting under the auspices of the
United Nations, a developing conversation is taking place on a global scale and involving a
growing cast of people - for an increasing range of pressure groups now frame their aspirations in
human rights terms.

TEST 15

In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 119-125, read the
passage and choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra
paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered
box provided.

THE ORIGIN OF ADVERTISING

Advertising has become a major force in our modern world. Through our airwaves, up in the skies,
on walls, streets and along motorways, almost nowhere can we go and not be bombarded by
adverts. It has become so prevalent that scientists and researchers have analyzed its sociological
effect extensively – how it influences buying habits, desensitizes consumers and in some cases
even repels them.

119.

Such rudimentary content is also believed to be present in the first printed adverts, used by ancient
Egyptians to communicate sales messages through the use of papyrus. In contrast with the
ephemeral nature of today’s advertising, they would also carve messages of commerce into stone
or on steel plates, which would remain visible for a lifetime.

120.
Naturally, we cannot know for sure, but one would guess that the power of persuasion was present
in the spoken adverts of ancient times. You could suppose that the loudest, most colorful, most
entertaining crier garnered the most business. Although we do not experience this form of
advertisement often today, sellers in public markets in Europe and the Middle East still employ
this method.

121.

The specific message on the printing plate was ‘We buy high-quality steel rods and make fine-
quality needles to be ready for use at home in no time', and the seller also placed a rabbit logo and
the name of his shop in the center. The plate, made of copper and dating back to the Song dynasty
of the 10th-century China, was used to print posters the dimensions of which were nearly perfect
squares roughly the size of a window frame.

122.

It was not until the rise of newspapers did advertising makes its next big leap. During this time,
targeted slogans and catchphrases became popular. The first such instance of a paid newspaper
advert appeared in the French newspaper La Presse in 1836 and what was so revolutionary about
it was that the seller paid for its placement, allowing the newspaper to charge its readers less.

123.

Known as quackery, such messages boasted cures for common ailments that went above and
beyond what traditional remedies could provide. Naturally, an unsuspecting and undereducated
public was particularly susceptible to such fabrications. Much as how quackery would be dispelled
today, doctors went out of their way to publish medical journals debunking the claims made by
these adverts.

124.

In the advert, a painting of a child blowing bubbles – a work of art literally entitled Bubbles, by
English artist Sir John Everett Millais – was used as the background of a poster, with the product
visible in the foreground. The visual immediately linked the product with high – class society and
it is a tactic that is undeniably still very much used today.
 125.

Along with the staggering investment is the use of a broad range of tactics to maximize impact,
such as focus groups, evocative imagery, storytelling, and seemingly boundless product placement.
So psychological is the effect that it has given rise to the belief that companies know everything
about you. Nevertheless, with such creativity poured into the field, one can still appreciate its art
form and its place in history.

A. One need look no further than failed advertising campaigns. Some went too far in their shock
value, had to be apologized for and hurt the brand more than they helped. In one example, a game
manufacturer, in order to promote the carnal violence visible in the game, held an event which
showcased an actual deceased goat.

B. For better or worse, there was no stopping the budding advertising industry. Agencies started
to spring up and with that came campaigns. The first successful campaign was for the British soap
manufacturer Pears. With the help of chairman Thomas James Barratt, the company successfully
linked a catchy slogan with high culture.

C. In contrast to the adverts being produced for the literate populace of this region, text was largely
absent from adverts that proliferated in the towns and cities of medieval Europe. To circumvent
this obstacle, adverts used commonly recognizable imagery such a boot for a cobbler or a diamond
for a carver to promote products and services. And still, criers remained the go-to medium for
relaying the sellers’ messages to the public.

D. Also entering the industry was the vast sums of money that companies would splash out on
campaigns. A little over one hundred American companies in 1893 spent 50,000 US dollars on
advertising campaigns. That equates to over one million US dollars today, still a fraction of what
today’s companies spend at nearly 500 billion pounds globally.

E. In this era, though, the medium with the greatest prevalence was oral. Public criers would
circulate messages in urban centers to passers-by advertising various products. There is evidence
of written adverts and for more than just selling wares. In one such advert found at the ruins of
Thebes dated 1,000 BC, a man was offering a reward for a runaway slave. But oral messages were
the main method of delivery until the invention of the printing press in 1450.

F. But there was a time when an advert was a rare occurrence and its effect on society amounted
to no more than its core function; that is, to connect seller and buyer. We know that the written
word began around 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, in the Sumerian civilization that existed in
modern-day southern Iraq. The make – up of this early scrawling consisted of grain inventories,
from what historians and linguists can make of it.

G. Adverts in ancient times did contain an element of sophistication which essentially lured
buyers, albeit less obviously. On the other side of the world, in ancient China, the language of
adverts contained selling points and friendly imagery, such as in an advert to coax people into
using a craftsman’s services. This particular advertising medium is considered the oldest example
of printed advertising.

H. That formula was soon copied by other publishers looking to increase their profits while
expanding their circulation. British newspapers, which had been using newspaper advertising since
the 18th century, used adverts to promote books and newspapers themselves. The printing press
had made their production much more affordable and advertising content expanded to include
medicines, in what would prove to be the first instances of false advertising.

Your answers
119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.