I.
LISTENING
Part 1.
It was June 2010. Inside the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contestants between 8 and
15 years old (1)______________ like brachydactylop and legulean. Outside, a crowd
protested the complexity of English spelling conventions. The English language is
(2)_____________. So, how did English get like this? English arose from old Germanic
tribes that invaded the British Isles more than 1,500 years ago. Their languages
(3)___________ and evolved into Old English. When Roman missionaries arrived around
600 CE, they devised ways to write it down using the Latin alphabet, supplementing it
with (4)_____________ for sound they didn't have letters for. French became the language
of authority and high society, but English remained the dominant spoken language. By
the mid-1400s, people were writing in English again, but it was unstandardized. So,
things were already pretty messy. Then, in 1476, the printing press arrived in England.
Some of the people working the presses may have mainly spoken Flemish, not English.
And they were given (5)__________ that varied widely in their spelling. Without
standardization, different writers went with various spellings based in part on what they
happened to encounter while reading. The (6)____________ sound it ended with was one
the Latin alphabet didn't cover. It eventually came to be represented with G-H. For others,
they ended up pronouncing it as F instead, as exemplified in(7)_________________. Some
letters, in other words, also fell silent. Words like and wrong all contained the
(8)__________ of past pronunciations. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, the way
English speakers pronounced many vowels changed significantly. For instance, bot
became boat. As with so many linguistic matters, there's no clear reason why this
happened, but it did. And how the vowel shift affected a word depended on various
things. Including the other sounds in the word. The word tough was once toch, among
other variations. Through was once fruch. And do, dach. These words all started with
different vowel sounds that were then affected differently by the vowel shift. The OU
spelling they all adopted was a (9)___________ French influence. So eventually, they
wound up with stills, still distinct vowel sounds, but similar spellings that don't really
make much sense. All this means English can be a difficult language for non-native
speakers to learn. And it reveals the many ways history, in all its (10)_____________, acted
upon English, making it especially tough. So, where did the thousands of languages
spoken today actually come from? Dig in to how languages evolved, and the mysterious,
higher-level relationships between them, Or learn the surprising truth separating
languages from dialects with this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhY4Vy3IHc
Part 2.
Part 3.
LEXICAL & GRAMMAR
READING PART 1
READING 2
READING 3
READING 4. Matching headings
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A–F from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 14–19 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. A legacy is established
ii. Formal education unhelpful
iii. An education in two parts
iv. Branching out in new directions
v. Childhood and family life
vi. Change necessary to stay creative
vii. Conflicted opinions over Davis’ earlier work
viii. Davis’ unique style of trumpet playing
ix. Personal and professional struggles
14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph E
19. Paragraph F
Miles Davis - Icon and iconoclast
An iconoclast is somebody who challenges traditional beliefs or customs
A At the age of thirteen, Miles Davis was given his first trumpet, lessons were
arranged with a local trumpet player, and a musical odyssey began. These early
lessons, paid for and supported by his father, had a profound effect on shaping
Davis’ signature sound. Whereas most trumpeters of the era favoured the use of
vibrato (a wobbly quiver in pitch inflected in the instrument’s tone), Davis was taught
to play with a long, straight tone, a preference his instructor reportedly drilled into the
young trumpeter with a rap on the knuckles every time Davis began using vibrato.
This clear, distinctive style never left Davis. He continued playing with it for the rest
of his career, once remarking, ‘If I can’t get that sound, I can’t play anything.’
B Having graduated from high school in 1944, Davis moved to New York City, where
he continued his musical education both in the clubs and in the classroom. His
enrolment in the prestigious Julliard School of Music was short-lived, however – he
soon dropped out, criticising what he perceived as an over-emphasis on the classical
European repertoire and a neglect of jazz. Davis did later acknowledge, however,
that this time at the school was invaluable in terms of developing his trumpet-playing
technique and giving him a solid grounding in music theory. Much of his early training
took place in the form of jam sessions and performances in the clubs of 52nd Street,
where he played alongside both up-and-coming and established members of the
jazz pantheon such as Coleman Hawkins, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, and Thelonious
Monk.
C In the late 1940s, Davis collaborated with nine other instrumentalists, including a
French horn and a tuba player, to produce The Birth of Cool, an album now
renowned for the inchoate sounds of what would later become known as ‘cool’ jazz.
In contrast to popular jazz styles of the day, which featured rapid, rollicking beats,
shrieking vocals, and short, sharp horn blasts, Davis’ album was the forerunner of a
different kind of sound – thin, light horn-playing, hushed drums and a more
restrained, formal arrangement. Although it received little acclaim at the time (the
liner notes to one of Davis’ later recordings call it a ‘spectacular failure’), in hindsight
The Birth of Cool has become recognised as a pivotal moment in jazz history,
cementing – alongside his 1958 recording, Kind of Blue – Davis’ legacy as one of the
most innovative musicians of his era.
D Though Davis’ trumpet playing may have sounded effortless and breezy, this ease
rarely carried over into the rest of his life. The early 1950s, in particular, were a time
of great personal turmoil. After returning from a stint in Paris, Davis suffered from
prolonged depression, which he attributed to the unravelling of a number of
relationships, including his romance with a French actress and some musical
partnerships that ruptured as a result of creative disputes. Davis was also frustrated
by his perception that he had been overlooked by the music critics, who were hailing
the success of his collaborators and descendants in the ‘cool’ tradition, such as
Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck, but who afforded him little credit for introducing
the cool sound in the first place.
E In the latter decades of his career, Davis broke out of exclusive jazz settings and
began to diversify his output across a range of musical styles. In the 1960s, he was
influenced by early funk performers such as Sly and the Family Stone, which then
expanded into the jazz-rock fusion genre – of which he was a frontrunner – in the
1970s. Electronic recording effects and electric instruments were incorporated into
his sound. By the 1980s, Davis was pushing the boundaries further, covering pop
anthems such as Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time and Michael Jackson’s Human
Nature, dabbling in hip hop, and even appearing in some movies.
F Not everyone was supportive of Davis’ change of tune. Compared to the
recordings of his early career, universally applauded as linchpins of the jazz oeuvre,
trumpeter Wynston Marsalis derided his fusion work as being ‘not true jazz’, and
pianist Bill Evans denounced the ‘corrupting influence’ of record companies, noting
that rock and pop ‘draw wider audiences’. In the face of this criticism Davis remained
defiant, commenting that his earlier recordings were part of a moment in time that he
had no ‘feel’ for any more. He firmly believed that remaining stylistically inert would
have hampered his ability to develop new ways of producing music. From this
perspective, Davis’ continual revamping of genre was not merely a rebellion, but an
evolution, a necessary path that allowed him to release his full musical potential.
Questions 20–26
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage
2?
In boxes 20–26 on your answer sheet, write
Yes - if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
No - if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
Not Given - if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
20. Davis’ trumpet teacher wanted him to play with vibrato.
21. According to Davis, studying at Julliard helped him to improve his musical
abilities.
22. Playing in jazz clubs in New York was the best way to become famous.
23. The Birth of Cool featured music that was faster and louder than most
jazz at the time.
24. Davis’ personal troubles had a negative effect on his trumpet playing.
25. Davis felt that his contribution to cool jazz had not been acknowledged.
26. Davis was a traditionalist who wanted to keep the jazz sound pure.
READING 5.
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
2. a comparison Paoletti made to illustrate his approach to the JLE
project
3. the immediate and massive effect that one of the stations had on its
surroundings
4. a description that Paoletti considered not to be wholly accurate
5. a fundamental question concerning the function of stations in
underground systems
6. an explanation Paoletti gave for why certain comments about the new
buildings were incorrect
7. Paoletti’s desire to unite elements that had previously been seen as
wholly different from each other
8. personal qualities that enabled Paoletti to tackle the JLE project
successfully
9. parts of a station architects were not responsible for in the past
10. Paoletti’s opinion of those previously responsible for designing
stations
WRITING
REWRITE .
Part 1
part 2:
