PRACTICE TEST 2

(2024-2025)
SECTION A: LISTENING
Part 1. A new business owner enquires about courses. Listen to the conversation and
complete each gap with no more than THREE words/number. (10 points)

West Bay Hotel – details of job

(Example) • Newspaper advert for temporary staff
• Vacancies for (1) ______
• Two shifts
• Can choose your (2) ______ (must be the same each week)
• Pay: £5.50 per hour, including a (3) ______
• A (4) ______ is provided in the hotel
• Total weekly pay: £231
• Dress: (5) ______ and dark trousers (not supplied); a jacket (supplied)
• Starting date: 28th June
• Call Jane Urwin (Service Manager) before mid-day tomorrow (Tel: 832009)
She’ll require a reference
Part 2: Listen to a lecture about the artist Franz Marc. Write Yes or No in the answer
box. (10 pts)
Yes if the statement agrees with the information in the passage
No if the statement contradicts the information in the passage
6. A few years ago in London, some paintings by Franz Marc were sold at record prices.
7. Almost all of Marc’s paintings feature a purple and blue horse standing in a landscape of
primary colors.
8. In The Fate of the Animals Marc seems to offer a warning of the impending Great War.
9. The art group The Blue Rider were aiming to capture the purity of style often found in
paintings by children.
10. Marc’s life ended tragically in the war in 1960 when he was killed by a grenade in France.
Your answers

6 7 8 9 10

Part 3. Listen to a piece of news and fill in the gaps using no more than FOUR WORDS OR
NUMBER for each blank. (20 pts)

Recently in the Great Pyramids, a 100-feet long space, which is called a (1) ____________, has been
discovered lately. According to “The Nature”, this is a significant discovery to archaeology because
since the 1800s, there has been no other significant discovery like this (2) ______________ . However,
whether this can help to unravel the ancient mysteries is (3) ______________. There is no proof that a/an
4) ______________ or burial chamber can be found from this space. There may be more others like this in
the pyramid and this discovery is expected to help the researchers find out how it was built. To identify
this space, not allowed to (5) ______________ or use cameras, they had to take use of some appliances
to track (6) ______________ inside the structure. That’s not the only way the modern technology is
helping archaeologists.

Adam Low, an archaeologist, admitted to being a man with (7) _______________ the tomb of a Pharaoh,
Seti I. It can be learnt from the tomb how ancient people have different thoughts, different values and
(8) _____________. He can read the way they thought through the (9) ______________ on the walls. With
the help of technology, a dialogue crossing time can be built and become one of the most exciting
moment. “The Hall of Beauties” is, in fact, only a (10) ________________ built in a museum in
Switzerland.

Part 4: You will hear an interview with someone who consulted a ‘life coach’ to improve her
life. For questions 11–15, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which best fits according to what
you hear. (10 points)
11. Brigid says that she consulted a life coach because ______.
A. she had read a great deal about them.
B. both her work and home life were getting worse.
C. other efforts to improve her life had failed.
D. the changes she wanted to make were only small ones.
12. What did Brigid’s coach tell her about money?
A. It would be very easy for Brigid to get a lot of it.
B. Brigid’s attitude towards it was uncharacteristic of her.
C. Brigid placed too much emphasis on it in her life.
D. Few people have the right attitude towards it.
13. What does Brigid say about her reaction to her coach’s advice on money?
A. She felt silly repeating the words her coach gave her.
B. She tried to hide the fact that she found it ridiculous.
C. She felt a lot better as a result of following it.
D. She found it difficult to understand at first.
14. What does Brigid say happened during the other sessions?
A. She was told that most people’s problems had the same causes.
B. Her powers of concentration improved.
C. Some things she was told to do proved harder than others.
D. She began to wonder why her problems had arisen in the first place.
15. What has Brigid concluded?
A. The benefits of coaching do not compensate for the effort required.
B. She was too unselfish before she had coaching.
C. She came to expect too much of her coach.
D. It is best to limit the number of coaching sessions you have.

SECTION B. LEXICO-GRAMMAR

Part 1: Choose the answer that best completes each sentence.

1. I’ve heard that argument before and quite frankly it jusst doesn’t ...................! = unreasonable
 A. face the music B. hit the roof C. carry weight D. hold water
2. Unlike most of the old people in here, he ______ the town to the country.
A. ‘d prefer B. much prefer C. ‘d rather D. prefer
3. Unsalted butter is best for this recipe, but ............... that , margarine will do.
A. except B. failing C. for all of D. given
4. In spite of working their fingers to the ................, all the staff were made redundant.
A. nail B. edge C. flesh D. bone
5. Instead of defending traditional values, the church frequently seems _______ and irresolute.= hesistate/uncertain
A. far-fetched B. strong-willed C. weak-kneed D. long-awaited
6. The more expensive carpet is a good choice _______ it will last longer.
A. by means of B. due to C. in that D. in view of
7. She got a bit hot _______ the collar when a colleague started criticizing her work.
A. under B. on C. beyond D. from
8. Employees of the company are forbidden to ________ information about the secret formula.
A. betray B. divulge C. portray D. unveil
9. Jack _______and can usually let us know what the boss’s mood is.
A. turns a blind eye B. plays it by ear
C. keeps his ear to the ground D. is all ears
10. It sounds like you let people take advantage of you ________, you need to learn to be more assertive.
A. Otherwise B. If only C. What if D. If so

Part 2. Give the correct form of the word in the brackets.

1. The building looks a bit ___futuristic______ from the outside but it’s quite traditional inside. (FUTURE)
2. She was charged with being disorderly and _____intoxicated_______. (INTOXICANT)
3. The damage caused by the terrible storm two days ago was_____underestimated______ by the
government. The real figures go up every minute. (ESTIMATE)
4. They exchanged _____ pleasantries______ for a few minutes before saying goodbye. (PLEASANT)
5. There is a decline in the ___prevalence_______ of cigarette smoking among young men. (PREVAIL)
6. Many teachers expressed serious _____misgivings_____ about the new tests. (GIVE) apprehension
= worry
7. The new policy only serves to ____accentuate______ the inadequacy of help for the homeless.
(ACCENT)
8. The unresponsive audience made the lecturer somewhat ____disheartened____ .What a shame.
(HEART)
9. They paid little attention to the ___fragmentariness____ of the pieces. (FRAGMENT)

10. Chrissy tossed the junk mail in the bin and in doing so, she ___unwittingly____ made a joke of the
lives of people she would. (WIT)

SECTION B: READING
Part 2: Fill each blank with ONE suitable word.

In most art museums, the paintings on the wall just look flat, (1) _but_ sometimes visitors come across
an image that appears to be three-dimensional. The artist has cleverly used colors, lines, and shading
to give the painting some depth, making it more (2) __lively____. The artistic technique of creating
three-dimensional images of something on a flat surface is called trompe l'oeil, a French phrase
meaning tricking the eye. Today, some artists are adapting the idea of tricking the eye to make things
become invisible. A new (3) __term____ for this is camouflage art. In nature, there are major benefits to
using camouflage to blend (4) __in____ with the surroundings. Becoming invisible, or at (5) __least____
being harder to see on the ground or in a tree allows insects and animals to hide from things that might
eat them. It also allows them to get close (6) ___enough___ to surprise other insects or smaller animals
that they want to catch and eat. Artists are not hiding or preparing to attack. (7) __Instead ____, they
are using the idea of camouflage to make urban spaces look nicer or to make statements with their art.
Sometimes they just do it (8) ___for___ fun. Artists can make these things more interesting and in some
cases make them (9) __less____ visible. In many urban areas, large buildings have been painted with
amazing murals that trick our eyes. Thus, ordinary brick walls are transformed into interesting (10)
___pieces___ of art. Temporary walls put up to keep people out of a construction site can be painted like
the finished building to camouflage the site.
Part 3: Read the text and do the following tasks.

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING - OR ARE THEY?

What is the current state of play in Artificial Intelligence?

A. Can robots advance so far that they become the ultimate threat to our existence? Some scientists
say no, and dismiss the very idea of Artificial Intelligence. The human brain, they argue, is the most
complicated system ever created, and any machine designed to reproduce human thought is
bound to fail. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University and others believe that machines are
physically incapable of human thought. Colin McGinn of Rutgers University backs this up when he
says that Artificial Intelligence is like sheep trying to do complicated psychoanalysis. They just
don't have the conceptual equipment they need in their limited brains'.
B. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is different from most technologies in that scientists still understand
very little about how intelligence works. Physicists have a good understanding of Newtonian
mechanics and the quantum theory of atoms and molecules, whereas the basic laws of intelligence
remain a mystery. But a sizeable number of mathematicians and computer scientists, who are
specialists in the area, are optimistic about the possibilities. To them it is only a matter of time
before a thinking machine walks out of the laboratory. Over the years, various problems have
impeded all efforts to create robots. To attack these difficulties, researchers tried to use the 'top-
down approach', using a computer in an attempt to program all the essential rules onto a single
disc. By inserting this into a machine, it would then become self-aware and attain human-like
intelligence.
C. In the 1950s and 1960s great progress was made, but the shortcomings of these prototype robots
soon became clear. They were huge and took hours to navigate across a room. Meanwhile, a fruit
fly, with a brain containing only a fraction of the computing power, can effortlessly navigate in
three dimensions. Our brains, like the fruit fly's, unconsciously recognise what we see by
performing countless calculations. This unconscious awareness of patterns is exactly what
computers are missing. The second problem is robots' lack of common sense. Humans know that
water is wet and that mothers are older than their daughters. But there is no mathematics that can
express these truths. Children learn the intuitive laws of biology and physics by interacting with the
real world. Robots know only what has been programmed into them.
D. Because of the limitations of the top-down approach to Artificial Intelligence, attempts have been
made to use a 'bottom-up' approach instead - that is, to try to imitate evolution and the way a
baby learns. Rodney Brooks was the director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory, famous for
its lumbering 'topdown' walking robots. He changed the course of research when he explored the
unorthodox idea of tiny 'insectoid' robots that learned to walk by bumping into things instead of
computing mathematically the precise position of their feet. Today many of the descendants of
Brooks' insectoid robots are on Mars gathering data for NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration), running across the dusty landscape of the planet. For all their successes in
mimicking the behaviour of insects, however, robots using neural networks have performed
miserably when their programmers have tried to duplicate in them the behaviour of higher
organisms such as mammals. MIT's Marvin Minsky summarises the problems of AI: 'The history of
AI is sort of funny because the first real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a machine that
 could do well in a maths course. But then we started to try to make machines that could answer
questions about simple children's stories. There's no machine today that can do that.'
E. There are people who believe that eventually there will be a combination between the top-down
and bottom-up, which may provide the key to Artificial Intelligence. As adults, we blend the two
approaches. It has been suggested that our emotions represent the quality that most distinguishes
us as human, that it is impossible for machines ever to have emotions. Computer expert Hans
Moravec thinks that in the future robots will be programmed with emotions such as fear to protect
themselves so that they can signal to humans when their batteries are running low, for example.
Emotions are vital in decision-making. People who have suffered a certain kind of brain injury lose
the ability to experience emotions and become unable to make decisions. Without emotions to
guide them, they debate endlessly over their options. Moravec points out that as robots become
more intelligent and are able to make choices, they could likewise become paralysed with
indecision. To aid them, robots of the future might need to have emotions hardwired into their
brains.
F. There is no universal consensus as to whether machines can be conscious, or even, in human
terms, what consciousness means. Minsky suggests the thinking process in our brain is not
localised but spread out, with different centres competing with one another at any given time.
Consciousness may then be viewed as a sequence of thoughts and images issuing from these
different, smaller 'minds', each one competing for our attention. Robots might eventually attain a
'silicon consciousness', Robots, in fact, might one day embody an architecture for thinking and
processing information that is different from ours - but also indistinguishable. If that happens, the
question of whether they really 'understand' becomes largely irrelevant. A robot that has perfect
mastery of syntax, for all practical purposes, understands what is being said.

Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F.

1. an insect that proves the superiority of natural intelligence over Artificial Intelligence C

2. robots being able to benefit from their mistakes D

3. many researchers not being put off believing that Artificial Intelligence will eventually be developed
B

4. the possibility of creating Artificial Intelligence being doubted by some academics A

5. no generally accepted agreement of what our brains do F consensus = agreement

Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

When will we have a thinking machine?

Despite some advances, the early robots had certain (6) __shortcomings = weaknesses____. They were
given the information they needed on a (7) __disc____. This was known as the 'top-down' approach and
enabled them to do certain tasks but they were unable to recognise (8) _patterns_____. Nor did they
have any intuition or ability to make decisions based on experience. Rodney Brooks tried a different ( 9)
__approach____. Robots similar to those invented by Brooks are to be found on (10) __Mars____where
they are collecting information.

Part 5. The passage below consists of five sections marked A-E. Read the passage and do
the task that follows. Write your answers (A-E) in the corresponding numbered boxes
provided.
Roland Paoletti - An architect who revolutionized the lives of London’s commuters.
A. Roland Paoletti was the driving force behind the dramatic, award-winning stations on the £3 billion
Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) to the London Underground system, the most ambitious building
programme on the Tube for many decades. An irascible Anglo-Italian, Paoletti possessed the
persuasiveness and tenacity to take on the vested political interests at play in the planning of the 10-
mile Jubilee Line Extension to ensure good design and innovation. Historically, architects employed on
Tube projects had been restricted to ‘fitting out’ the designs of railway and civil engineers with few or
no aesthetic concerns, and whom Paoletti dismissed as visionless ‘trench-diggers. The Jubilee line
would be unique in that for the first time the architects would be responsible for designing entire
underground stations.
B. As the commissioning architect in overall charge, Paoletti’s approach was to let light flood down into
the stations along the line. The project’s centrepiece was the extraordinary huge new station at Canary
Wharf, designed by Norman Foster and Partners to handle up to 40,000 passengers an hour at peak
times. ‘Everybody keeps saying that it’s like a cathedral; complained Paoletti.‘They’re wrong. It actually
is a cathedral: Explaining his approach to designing underground stations, Paoletti likened the Jubilee
line to architectural free-form jazz, the stations responding to their different contexts as dramatic
variations on a theme. Instead of uniformity, Paoletti envisaged variety achieved in the beauty of raw
materials like concrete, and the architectural power of simple, large spaces for robust and practical
stations.
C. He procured the most talented individual architects he could find to design 11 new stations along
the line, creating a unique variety of architectural statement pieces – notably different but all beautiful
- in what had been a largely desolate stretch of urban east London.‘For the price of an underground
ticket; he promised, ‘you will see some of the greatest contributions to engineering and architecture
worldwide’ Paoletti’s sweeping vision did not disappoint. With their swagger and individualism, the
stations have been widely acclaimed as a tour de force in public transport architecture.
D. In pressing for a seamless marriage between architecture and engineering, Paoletti was concerned
to make the stations pleasing to the eye, and the daily grind of commuters using them as uplifting an
experience as possible. The result was generally reckoned to be the finest set of stations since the
classic designs for the Piccadilly line by Charles Holden in the 1930s. In Holden’s day, design stopped at
the top of the escalators leading down to the platforms, a symptom of the Tube’s tradition of treating
architecture and engineering as separate disciplines. From the start, Paoletti promised ‘a symbiosis of
architecture and engineering’ throughout. This is particularly evident at Westminster station, where
Michael Hopkins solved structural difficulties by designing fantastic supporting structures redolent of
science-fiction – what Paoletti called ‘engineering that expresses itself as architecture… in which
people can delight.’
E. He wanted the designs of the JLE stations to have a uniformity of voice, or, as he put it, ‘a
philosophical uniformity’. Paoletti contrasted the drama of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard’s design for
Southwark station with the vast glass drum of Ron Herron’s Canada Water station, intended as a
response to the area’s bleakness, ‘a big, splendid beacon that has transformed the area from a
wasteland almost overnight’ To critics who complained about the expense of these grand designs,
Paoletti pointed out that the same cut-and-cover, box-station design that allowed his architects a free
hand with their various structures also saved London Underground millions in tunnelling costs. ‘In any
case, he noted, ‘you have to decide at the beginning whether you’re going to see an underground
station as a kind of vehicular underpass that happens to have people in it, or whether it’s a building; a
building with some other kind of job to do, like making people comfortable.’
In which section of the article are the following mentioned?
1. the previously unattractive nature of the locations of most of the stations C
2. a comparison Paoletti made to illustrate his approach to the JLE project B
3. the immediate and massive effect that one of the stations had on its surroundings E
4. a description that Paoletti considered not to be wholly accurate B
5. a fundamental question concerning the function of stations in underground systems E
6. an explanation Paoletti gave for why certain comments about the new buildings were incorrect E
7. Paoletti’s desire to unite elements that had previously been seen as wholly different from each other
D
8. personal qualities that enabled Paoletti to tackle the JLE project successfully A
9. parts of a station architects were not responsible for in the past D
10. Paoletti’s opinion of those previously responsible for designing stations A

SECTION D: WRITING

Part 1: Read the following extract and use your own words to summarise it. Your sum mary
should be about 80 words long.
In an attempt to find out a relevant approach to express their individuality, quite a few artists
made use of modern dance to liberate their creative spirit. At the beginning there was no exacting
technique, no foundation from which to build. In later years, trial, error, and genius founded the
techniques and the principles of the movement. Eventually, innovators even drew from what they
considered the dread ballet, but first they had to discard all that was academic so that the new could
be discovered. The beginnings of modern dance were happening before Isadora Duncan, but she was
the first person to bring the new dance to general audiences and see it accepted and acclaimed.
Her search for a natural movement form sent her to nature. She believed movement should be as
natural as the swaying of the trees and the rolling waves of the sea, and should be in harmony with the
movements of the Earth. Her great contributions are in three areas.
First, she began the expansion of the kinds of movements that could be used in dance. Before
Duncan danced, ballet was the only type of dance performed in concert. In the ballet the feet and legs
were emphasized, with virtuosity shown by complicated, codified positions and movements. Duncan
performed dance by using all her body in the freest possible way. Her dance stemmed from her soul
and spirit. She was one of the pioneers who broke tradition so others might be able to develop the art.
Her second contribution lies in dance costume. She discarded corset, ballet shoes and stiff
costumes. These were replaced with flowing Grecian tunics, bare feet, and unbound hair. She believed
in the natural body being allowed to move freely, and her dress displayed this ideal.
Her third contribution was in the use of music. In her performances she used the symphonies of
great masters, including Beethoven and Wagner, which was not the usual custom. She was as exciting
and eccentric in her personal life as in her dance.
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